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He thinks he knows Miss Page's type as soon as he sees her daemon. It's a terrible cliche, of course - almost as bad as a swan. So common for a girl to have her demon settle as something graceful and think that makes her graceful. Boris Lermontov has had more than enough of beautiful souls whose owners have two left feet. The finest dancer he ever knew had a palm-sized tortoise that had to be sewn into the back of her costume before every performance. There is no correlation between form and functionality.
It's not until he sees Victoria dance Odette that he realises his mistake. She and the crane beside her move like one creature, the elegance of one mirrored in the other. They’re green and untried, yes, but there’s something special there. Nedola stirs from her usual resting place on his lapel, buzzing about his head in a way she hasn't since he was a youth. He doesn’t even wait for a break in the music before he leaves the theatre. He’s seen more than enough.
“You can’t let her go,” Nedola tells him as he stands against the wall waiting for her to calm down.
“We won’t,” he replies. “Did you ever know me not to apprehend my prey when it counted, dear?”
“No,” she says, but her wings still tremble with unease.
There’s no reason for it. His dragonfly soul is the soul of a hunter, and they always catch what they pursue.
***
At the time, Julian thinks of it as a night he’ll tell their grandchildren about. By the Mediterranean, freshly in love, his whole life spread out before him like an exquisitely illuminated map. Aëdon singing from pure joy, perched on top of the carriage like she’s actually a nightingale, Vicky’s daemon all folded up next to her.
“Was she always musical?” Vicky asks from where her head rests on his shoulder.
“I’m told that from my babyhood she wouldn't turn into anything that couldn’t sing. Which was very well when she was a canary, but not when she insisted upon being a kookaburra at my cousin’s wedding.”
Vicky laughs. “I had no idea about Hesperis. For the longest time I thought he was going to be a cat.”
“He suits you perfectly.”
“Isn’t that rather the point?”
Julian doesn’t know that it is, actually. He's met plenty of people whose daemons don’t seem the right shape for them, or at least not for the people they play at being. One of his fellow students had a tremendously inconvenient muskox that always had to stand in the aisle during rehearsals. But Vicky is the same inside and out, and he adores her soul like he adores her flesh. Her daemon towering over his feels only correct.
Often when Aëdon sings his hands itch for a pen, but he knows this is a song that will never be repeated, for the ears of the themselves, the dozing driver and the innocent horses alone.
***
It’s a game that every child plays - or, at least, everyone Vicky ever met. Getting your daemon to turn into a bird or some other winged creature and encouraging it to fly as high as you can stand. Most people never let themselves go so far that it really hurt, and of course most people had to stop altogether when their daemons settled.
Vicky is not most people. She wouldn’t be much of a dancer if she was afraid of pain, and Hesperis always agreed that it was useful to keep in practice. They can’t flinch if they get too far apart on stage. She’s always secretly wondered if it’s torture for a daemon to have wings and not be able to truly fly. If he secretly wanted to get away from her all along.
So at first when he goes over the balcony she doesn’t move, frozen in familiar agony. For a moment she feels his wings finally spread wide, before she plummets after him and he’s forced to follow, like a real crane diving after a fish.
When Julian comes, she wants to tell him it was just a mistake, that Heperis forgot she has no wings of her own, but she doesn’t want the last thing she says to be a lie. Instead she tells him to remove the accursed shoes from her broken feet, and has just enough time to wonder if Hesperis will be able to take to the sky now he’s free of her mortal gravity.