8
It was full dark before Sir John arrived at Trillium’s pigpen. I was tucked in the heart of a silverberry thicket, calves cramping, throat dry.
I watched through the leaves as he made camp. His armor, shucked and piled to one side. His horse, rubbed down and watered. His bedroll, laid beside a small solar lamp, which cast sharp, electric shadows across the ground.
I was gathering myself to slip out from under the silverberries when the knight began to speak. His voice was low and broken, so that the sentences arrived in pieces.
“—you want to go, I’ll understand. There’s no reason to stay, now that we know.”
I stopped moving, my view crosshatched by branches. I could see Sir John kneeling beside the lamp, head bowed, shoulders bent. I wondered if he was praying, or if he’d merely gone mad.
But a woman’s voice answered him, high and slightly hoarse. “Ah, John,” she said, and I could tell from those two syllables that she knew him as May knew me: inside and out, to the bone, to the end. “Fuck you.”
Sir John laughed. It sounded like gravel on glass. “Fuck you, too, my love.” He climbed wearily to his feet and faced the woman. She stood just at the edge of the lamplight, so that all I saw of her was the edge of a ragged skirt. “Will you stay fettered and hooded forever, then? Will you wander with me, hunted, hidden, knowing we’ll never—we’ll never be—”
There came a rush of air, and then Sir John’s words were muffled, as if something had covered his mouth. I pulled a branch aside and saw a tall woman beneath a long, feathered cloak. Her face was bent over Sir John’s, lips pressed hard over his.
The branch snapped in my hand. The woman turned—an eerie motion, too fast, like the flick of a bird’s head. As she turned I saw that it wasn’t a cloak draped over her shoulders but a pair of wings, and that she wasn’t a woman at all.
Or perhaps she was a woman made as Eve was: from the bones of something else. Her legs doubled back, doglike, and her ribs swept sleekly outward, like the breast of a dove. Only her face was human: handsome, sharp boned, clove colored. Old.
But then the face was gone, lost in a great wrench of flesh and feathers. In an instant there was only Sir John standing in the dark with his hawk perched on one arm. I understood now why the hawk always wore that strange smoked-glass hood; without it, I could see her eyes.
Red as rust, or a robin’s breast, or an organ, still steaming.
For a moment, I was every child in every demon tale, waiting in the dark for teeth to close around my throat. Then I stood slowly and said, without emotion, “Oh, you bastard.”
Sir John swallowed. “It’s not—”
“Who was the demon, to you?”
He swallowed a second time. Closed his eyes. “My wife.”
“Of course,” I said, and laughed a little. Finch always said every good tale repeats itself at least once; it made them easier to remember.
I fetched my pack from the silverberries and drew out a clay jar of mead. I handed the jar to Sir John and said, “Tell me.”
He did, although he hardly needed to; I’d been Secretary long enough to guess the beginning from the end. Once upon a time there was a young knight, fresh from the enclaves, eager to make his name slaying demons. Once upon a time there was a pretty outlander woman who liked the look of him.
He took her with him back to Cincinnati and they lived happily ever after, until they didn’t, because nothing does. He ought to have delivered her to his superiors when she began to change—fingernails curling into talons, eyes flashing red sometimes in low light—but instead, he’d asked to return to patrol. A year later he’d reported that his wife—yes, that poor outlander heathen—barely even literate!—was dead. Demon-slain, he told them. He lied.
The knight and his demon might have made a life out there in the wastes; no one would have gone looking for them. But instead, the knight returned to the hunt. Year after year, town after town—with his wife fettered and hooded—he chased down demons, and he asked them all the same question: How ?
“But you weren’t asking for your king, were you?” I thought of the day he rode into the holler, the band of bullets shining on his chest. A costume, it seemed to me now, a useful disguise for a desperate, driven man. “You were asking for yourself. You thought if you knew how it happened, maybe you could fix it. Change her back.”
Sir John took a long drink of mead, wincing a little. It was one of Finch’s worse batches, oversweet and syrupy. “I thought if I knew how, then I could—”
“But then I gave you your answer, and it didn’t fix anything. There’s no undoing it. All those years ...” There was a certain tragic romance to it—but how typical of an enclave man, to spend decades clinging to a dead dream. Nothing grows on a grave while you’re standing on it.
Sir John took another drink. “Thank you for telling me. At least now the hunt is over.” His eyes were on the hawk, perched now on the rail of Trillium’s pigpen. From the corner of my eye her form was fluid, chimeric.
“But,” I said, and I tried hard to keep my voice steady. “But she can speak with you. She can even take human form.”
“Sometimes, for a little while,” said the hawk, behind me. I swore, and she laughed. It was not quite a human laugh.
She was still a bird, mostly, with a woman’s throat and skull, like a harpy from some ancient text. I wondered then where all those shape-shifting stories had come from. If, every now and then, there was someone who changed, because they had to, and if we caught glimpses of them, every now and then, and named them as if they were fixed things. Siren, selkie, sphinx; angel, demon, mutant turtle.
Sir John had sagged bonelessly against his armor, wearier than I’d ever seen him. “But a demon is an ever-changing thing—holding a fixed form feels like burying yourself alive, she says. Breathing through a mouth full of dirt.”
Another laugh from his wife, even less human. “I’ve always been dramatic. It’s not so bad.” But I remembered how May had thrashed when I fixed that shackle around her ankle.
“After a hunt we spend weeks out in the wild,” said Sir John. His speech was beginning to soften at the edges, the words slurring into one another. “Sometimes she runs so fast and far I can’t follow.”
“I’m sorry, John—but it feels so good, you can’t know—”
“Sometimes she’s gone so long I think: Maybe she won’t come back, when I call. But she does, she always does, and then I force her to be one thing again instead of everything, and she hates me, I think, when I tie that hood over her eyes—God, Lily—”
Sir John choked, and his demon flew to him. Her wings were scaled, now, and her neck was long and sinuous, snakelike. She nestled against his breast and crooned, low and mournful.
“Should’ve stayed out there. Should’ve been grateful for what we had.” Sir John was running his hands reverently over the demon’s wings, and he was weeping. The tears vanished in the creases of his face, swallowed up by all those long years of wandering and hoping.
I might have felt guilty, then, except: “And how many other demons did you kill, while you looked for your answer? Even though you knew they weren’t sent up from hell—knew they could reason and speak and—”
“Too damn many. We tried to drive them away from towns, but sometimes they wouldn’t go. Mothers who wanted to stay near their children, young men who wouldn’t leave their husbands ... I did what I must. The enclaves would have heard, if I hadn’t. They might have asked questions, chased me down. Discovered ... her.” His sentences were listing badly now, half-sunk by the weight of ellipses, but he still managed to curl his lip. “Wouldn’t you do the same, for someone you loved?”
For a moment—just a moment—I saw Finch Secretary as I’d left her: dead on the floor of the old highway tunnel.
She must have known what she’d find when she followed me there. My wife had stopped taking her meals in the common house, and I had started spending a lot of time in the woods; change is always the first sign of a demon.
But she hadn’t known how far along May was. Neither had I. When I stepped into the tunnel that night I saw the broken shackle, the claw marks in the dirt—and then my demon wife was on me. Hide and hair. Wolf’s teeth in a woman’s face. And those eyes, pox red, demon red—
Finch had flung herself between us, pistol gripped in both hands, barrel aimed straight at May’s skull. Finch was old, but still fast.
I was faster. I swung my hammer without thinking, without hesitating, and Finch’s shot went wide. I’m sorry, I told her afterward, over and over, it was an accident. But the head of my hammer was buried neatly in her temple; good aim, for an accident.
Finch had never been very affectionate with me—I was her apprentice more than her daughter. But she’d been willing to kill for me, and so she must have loved me, after all. As I loved May, as Sir John loved his wife, as God loved the world: with blood on our hands.
May had hated blood.
I stood and kicked Sir John lightly with the toe of my boot. He started awake, having fallen into a stupor. “I’ve decided I won’t kill you tonight,” I told him.
His demon—mostly snake, now, twined around him—hissed at me.
“I said won’t .” She hissed again.
Suspicion settled slowly over Sir John’s slack face, far too late. “What—” He tried and failed to sit up, landing in the jumbled posture of a dropped doll.
The snake swelled, grew legs and claws. A dragon’s head with a lipless mouth, which said: “What the hell have you done to him?”
“Crushed a bunch of Finch’s sleeping pills into the mead. Figured it was sweet enough to cover the taste. I planned to smash in his skull while he slept, but I don’t think my wife would like it. And neither would his.” I gave her a small, respectful bow, and hoped she wouldn’t kill me. She must love Sir John very much, to stay prisoner to him. “Anyway, I owe him. I’d planned to cut and run, but now ...” I tipped my face toward the tangled black woods, where May was waiting. “Now I know I don’t have to run alone.”