The Knight and the Butcherbird

5

She came to us as any apocalypse does: slowly at first, and then all at once.

A leg, emerging from the trees: many jointed, plated in scales, ending in a cloven hoof. An elk’s long, sloping throat. A vixen’s skull beneath a wild crown of antlers. Moss and torn vines hung from the antlers like the veil of some mad bride. Behind the veil, her eyes gleamed a wet, arterial red.

A patchwork monster. A nonsense of scales and fur which bore no resemblance to the girl I’d loved or the woman I’d married. Except, of course, that I loved her.

I said, on an aching breath, “May.”

Sir John pressed the rifle harder into my jaw and said, “Shut the hell up,” in perfectly ordinary commontongue. I wondered, suddenly, how long it had been since he’d returned to Cincinnati. If he was even a true enclaver any longer, or if all his years in the outlands had changed him into something else.

May shivered at the sound of my voice. No—she rippled , the whole shape of her shifting, rolling, remaking itself. The scales turned to dense hide and back again. A fifth leg sprouted from her belly. Feathers shingled up her throat, over her jaw. Her mouth ripened into a pair of girlish lips, pink and wet, full of fox teeth.

This was what a demon was—an endless churn, an infinite becoming—and this was what made them so damn hard to kill. Shoot them, and they might grow a second heart. Drown them, and they might sprout gills. Hunt them, and they might take flight.

May lowered her chin. Her face was vaguely human, now, but sleekly feathered. The feathers were bright silver, save for a black band across her eyes like the mask of a cardinal or—my heart stuttered—or—

She took a step toward us, hoof clattering on the creek bed. Another. She moved with a muscled, mesmeric grace, like some ancient god of the woods, back when gods were not dead men but living things, untrustworthy, changeful.

Sir John said, “Shit,” and the rifle disappeared from my jaw.

I saw him take aim, the barrel settling fluidly, pointing straight between May’s red eyes.

I shouted “Run!” and threw myself sideways, knocking into Sir John. The rifle swung upward and fired into the sky with a great slap of sound. The knight swore.

May shied and wheeled away, vanishing back into the woods. The last I saw of her was a flash of silver feathers.

I lay sprawled in the shallow water, panting, half expecting Sir John to point his rifle at me next. But he seemed to have forgotten me and the demon both; instead he stared at the sky, in the direction his bullet had flown.

“Come on, love.” His voice was constricted, as if there was a hand around his throat. “Come on.” He whistled again, that high, sweet note.

The hawk answered. It appeared above us, cutting a casual circle in the sky, and Sir John looked abruptly down. He shucked his gauntlets and ran his hands hard over his eyes.

Then he asked, very calmly, in commontongue, “What the fuck is wrong with you? What do you think would have happened if—why are you smiling.”

“Because,” I said, “she knew me.”

Sir John, apparently unable to decide between pity and fury, did not answer.

“Did you see the pattern of her feathers? The mask across her eyes?”

He decided on fury. “I saw a fresh-hatched demon heading straight for—”

“They’re the markings of a songbird—a common one around here, often mistaken for a catbird or a chickadee. You might not have noticed it at all. No one ever notices a shrike, she used to say.” I paused to swallow a wild laugh. “Until it’s too late.”

A shrike, you see, is no chickadee: she hunts anything smaller and weaker than her, and spears it—still wriggling, peeping in agony—on the tips of thorns or barbed wire. Brutal, maybe, but that’s survival for you.

I should know: For the first six years of my life, I was feral. The orphan of some unlucky scavengers, flea ridden, frostbitten, living on bone marrow and cattails. When I wandered into Iron Hollow, Finch Secretary took me in—she said I must have a brain under all that dirt, if I’d made it this far. Eleven years of square meals and soap have civilized me somewhat, but I still keep a pack beneath my bed, just in case: cornmeal, dried venison, a good knife, a jar of mead. Everything I need to survive.

May knew what I was; she’d found my pack when we were kids. But she hadn’t pitied me or mocked me. She’d only asked if I would take her with me when I ran. And I said yes—easily, honestly—because by then she had become one of the things I needed to survive.

She knew me then, at the beginning of ourselves, and she knew me now, here at the end, when she did not even know herself.

My wrist throbbed, steadily. The creek sludge stung my scalp. I couldn’t stop smiling—the euphoric, hysteric smile of a woman who has been lying on her lover’s grave and has just felt the earth move beneath her.

Boots splashed beside my head. Sir John, crossing the creek. Going after her.

I sat up. “Wait—you can’t—she knows me—”

Sir John neither paused nor turned, but only said, “Go home, Widow Shrike,” in a weary, gray-whiskered voice.

I spun to my knees, shaking pinkish water from my eyes, panicking now. “Wait— wait ! At least tell me what you ask them, at the end. I have to know.” I didn’t give a damn what he asked them, but every second he lingered was another second for May to run.

The boot steps faltered. He said, “What?”

“Before you kill them, you ask them a question. Finch Secretary had it from Warbler Secretary of Oil Town, who had it from Veery Secretary of the Salt Flats, who had it—”

“Jesus, enough.” Sir John had half turned to face me. I wondered, suddenly, how old he really was. He moved well, but his face was cracked and weathered, like hide left too long on the rack, and his hair was the color of concrete. Grief ages you, I thought, and wasn’t sure why I thought it.

He said, “I ask them how . How they changed from human into ... what they are now.” His jaw tightened, and the scar pulled oddly at his flesh, twisting his mouth. “They never answer, of course. But I can’t seem to stop asking, even after all these years.”

“Why?”

I must have sounded too curious, too much like a Secretary chasing a story, because he reverted to the formal language of the enclaves. “Such is my charge and duty. The King of Cincinnati himself asked me to discover the cause of these creatures, and so I shall.”

“And if you knew—if you got your answer”—I stood slowly, moving my wrist in careful circles—“would you hurry back to him? Would you leave Iron Hollow?”

“If I knew how a man became a demon, I would fly from here and never return,” he said, and I could see that he meant it, and also that he was humoring me. There was a wry tilt to his mouth now, as if he couldn’t imagine that an outlander girl could possibly know anything he didn’t.

I said, “Follow me.”