The Long Way South

The night the flock left, nobody rang a bell. The wind simply changed, and every duck on the water lifted their head at the same moment, as though someone had said their name.

Wren was the youngest, and the only one who did not feel it.

“How do you know where south is?” she asked her grandmother.

“You do not know it. You follow it.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only one there is,” said her grandmother, and stepped off the bank into the dark.

They flew. The pond fell away, then the reeds, then the whole shape of the only place Wren had ever known, until the land below was just a dark cloth with rivers stitched into it. Her wings hurt in a way that felt, oddly, like being good at something.

Somewhere past the second river, in the cold middle of the night, Wren stopped asking where south was — and noticed that she had been flying towards it for hours.