4
I didn’t sleep that night but waited, curled like a fawn at the edge of the woods. At dawn the knight set out, hawk in hand, and I followed.
Sir John moved well through the woods—slipping among the branches rather than breaking them, following the ridges rather than struggling up the slopes—but I had no difficulty tracking him. May and I used to disappear into these hills every chance we got, and we learned them as young lovers do: by heart.
Here was the old quarry where we’d swum naked at midsummer; here the stand of poplars where we’d puked afterward, sick with whatever toxins had leached into the water; here the gooseberry patch where we’d gorged ourselves. Her mouth had tasted like lightning, after, bright and urgent.
A creek—a sluggish trickle now, crusted with algae and fly ash—divided one slope from the next. The knight paused on the bank, and I crept along the slope above him, hidden by honeysuckle. He set the hawk, still hooded, on a low-slung sycamore branch and knelt to drink.
The stories said he didn’t kill the demons quickly. They said he trapped and tormented them first. They said, just before he finally killed them, he asked a question of them.
I thought of May. The morning I ran my fingers through her hair and felt antlers pressing up through her scalp, like teeth through gums. We’d stolen Nettle Smith’s hasp and filed them down, but she was already sick by then. There was only so long we could hide it.
I looked at the back of Sir John’s neck, right at the point where his straggling gray hair parted to reveal the knob of his spine. My hammer was heavy at my hip. It had been easier the first time, when I hadn’t had time to hesitate, when I hadn’t known the sound a skull makes as it breaks.
Now, I thought, do it now.
The hawk cried out suddenly—an eerie, human sound, like a woman’s distant scream.
“Yes, I know,” said Sir John, without turning. “But she hasn’t yet made up her mind.” I stopped breathing.
The knight scooped a little water, warm and green, and splashed it calmly over his face. “Who was the demon, to thee? Thy father? Little sister, perhaps? Boyfriend?”
I slipped down from the bank and landed barefoot on the dry shale. I did not bother, this time, to make my voice tremble. “Wife.”
He exhaled a little, as if I’d landed an unexpected blow, but his voice remained pleasant. “Young for marriage, are thee not?”
A stupid question, which I ignored. Perhaps in the enclaves—where the air was filtered and the water was clean, where there were storm shelters and levees and cancer screenings—it was different, but we count time differently in the outlands. We marry young; we die young. The wheel turns.
Sir John turned toward me, still kneeling. “Forgive an old knight. It’s only—thou art twenty? Two and twenty?” Barely seventeen; grief ages you. “The whole of thy life lies ahead of you. Do not waste it on me—or on her memory.”
I ignored this, too, having heard variations of it from most of Iron Hollow. To grieve as I have grieved is unseemly; the wheel turns, and we do not cling, howling, to the rim.
He tried again. “ Secretary they called thee. A position of great standing, out here.” A thread of exasperation in his voice, now. “Thy people need thee, surely.”
True: a town’s Secretary is their record keeper and storyteller, their historian and their haruspex. We remember every birth and death, every folktale and recipe. We learned, after the old world died, not to put our faith in wood pulp or motherboards; the only archive that survives is the one we carry with us.
Should we mine iron from the old cooling towers, Secretary? Once upon a time there was a greedy boy who took iron from towers like those, and found that the stone was cancerous, and caused the hair to fall from his head and lesions to appear on his skin. Should we offer shelter to this traveling priest, Secretary, although he is very annoying? Once upon a time there was a miserly town who refused a bowl of soup to a passing priest, and when the priest told his masters in the enclave, they were so angry they refused all trade for seven years, and the town had no antibiotics or opiates and was very sorry.
Laurel had consulted Finch at least twice a week; so far, I’d refused to tell her a single story.
“Yeah. My people need me,” I conceded, calmly. “Maybe they should’ve thought of that before they tried to kill my wife.”
I’d been hiding May in the old highway tunnel, shackled, her screams turning to howls, her eyes turning from sweet brown to demon red. If Finch hadn’t followed me that night—if the shackles hadn’t snapped—
Very gently, the knight said, “She is not thy wife any longer.”
“So long as we both shall live—isn’t that what your priests say? I’m not dead yet, and neither is she.”
“Lady Shrike— Widow Shrike.” His voice was not gentle any longer; it was sharp and brittle, like old plastic. “However well thou hast loved her—however beautiful or clever she was—thy wife is gone. And nothing— nothing —will bring her back to thee.”
It was easy then: the hammer was in my hand, singing downward. It would land at the point of his jaw, just below his missing ear. He might have been a Knight of the Enclaves, but Iron Hollow survived by chiseling rebar out of ancient concrete and floating it downriver to the enclaves, in trade for vaccines and painkillers; even a Secretary knew how to swing a hammer, and I had not always been a Secretary.
But somehow, though Sir John moved only the slimmest inch, I missed. I turned the bar in my hand and swung it upward—this time the claw would catch right beneath his cuirass, scooping into the meat of his belly—
I missed a second time. Swore, viciously. “But you’re old !”
Sir John lifted both his palms, affable, almost apologetic: “How dost thou think I became so?”
I raised my hammer again—but something sharp raked my scalp. Wings slapped my ears. The hammer was twisted out of my grip, and something popped, nastily, in my wrist. Gauntleted hands pinned my arms behind me, and cold gunmetal pressed into the hollow of my jaw.
“Settle down, now,” said Sir John.
All firearms, ammunition, and related accessories were the property of the enclaves, technically, but Finch had kept her great-great-grandmother’s pistol in her bedside table. I’d only seen her pull the trigger once, and still woke sometimes with the sound of that shot in my ears: like a hundred hammers, like a crack that divided the world into before and after .
I settled down. Asked, sullenly: “How can your stupid bird even see, with that thing on?” There was blood running from my scalp down my temple, thick and warm.
“It doesn’t blind her. I had it specially fashioned to protect her eyes when she hunts high, where the ozone is thin, and the sun is harsh.”
“Sweet of you. Now imagine what you’d do for your wife , if she was—” From up the creek there came the animal rustle of something moving in the undergrowth. It moved without caution, as only bears or big dogs did, ripping carelessly through grapevine and honeysuckle.
Above us, the hawk cried again. Sir John stopped speaking. I felt a hunter’s stillness fall over him, fixed and breathless.
I said, “No,” but I don’t know why; Mayapple Coal had never done a thing I told her to.