9
It took longer than I’d hoped to find her.
The moon was thin and translucent as a clipped nail, and the woods were treacherous here. Three hundred years ago there had been a little village of tin boxes lined up in rows, but now the boxes were buried beneath dirt and ivy, where they waited as empty coffins do—for one wrong step.
It was after dawn when I found the remains of Trillium’s sow, rib cage cracked wide and licked clean, and nearly noon when I found the tracks: cloven, but far too big for a deer.
It was almost dusk when I found her. She was asleep, curled in a gooseberry patch. Maybe she remembered the taste of them; maybe she was dreaming of me.
She was antlered again, but more catlike, with a pelt the exact shade of May’s hair (sunlight through sap). She shifted gently in her sleep, antlers branching and dividing, pelt rippling. A row of eyes sprouted down her spine, all of them closed.
I hesitated at the edge of the berry patch and hated myself for hesitating. Had I not slain my own mother for her, and poisoned a Knight of the Enclaves? Had I not abandoned my people and broken my vows for her?
May’s transformation struck me suddenly as the lesser one. Would she still know me?
But Sir John’s wife still knew him, and he’d grown old! And murdered so many more people than me.
I stepped forward, opened my mouth—
And choked, as a black vambrace closed over my face. I yelled into his elbow as Sir John’s voice hissed in my ear, “Shut up, Shrike.”
He began to drag me backward, away from the berry patch. I tore at his arm, biting uselessly at his cracked rubber armor. The taste of asphalt and oil filled my mouth, a dead world on my tongue.
He pulled me around a poplar and shook me, hard, by the shoulders. “That thing will tear you apart. Didn’t you hear me calling after you?”
He’d done quite a bit of yelling as I left him, but his voice had been smeared into the dirt, and I hadn’t cared. I stamped my foot. “No, she won’t! You think your wife loves you so much better than mine?”
“My wife ate my left ear.” Sir John bent so that our eyes were dead level. “And a good piece of my face, as well. You could see my molars through my cheek.”
“But—she—”
“She’d changed, and I refused to admit it. I went to her unarmed, defenseless. Well, I was raised in the church, wasn’t I? That’s how a believer proves his love: blindly, on his knees.” I was trying very hard not to look at his missing ear, but he turned his face so that I could see it all: silvered flesh, pocked and pitted like the surface of the moon. I thought of the story where a bride must hold fast to her husband as he changes from lion to adder to burning coal; did she wear scars, afterward?
Sir John said, “They don’t know themselves, in the beginning. They’re not a person or an animal or a demon—they’re something new.”
I swallowed. “So—how long until she’s—”
“It took years, for Lily.” In his face I saw my own lonely, barren future. Not a life, really, but only a long wait. “Then once she could control her shape, I decided I would find the answer, no matter the cost. I was a knight, wasn’t I? That’s how a knight proves his love: on a pile of corpses.” He paused and regarded me, mouth slanted. “You’d have made a hell of a knight, butcherbird.” It was not a compliment, but only a grudging recognition: like for like. “Now, let’s get back to— fuck .” I heard it a second after he did: a heavy tread, coming nearer. “Run!”
I ran. I pelted down the mountainside, heedless, briar torn, Sir John at my heels. Behind us ran something on four legs, now six. Her breath heaved unevenly, from lungs that shrank and swelled.
“Don’t stop! Keep—”
But I lost the rest of Sir John’s sentence, because the ground gave way beneath me. It was one of those old metal houses, hidden beneath the kudzu. The tin had gone lacy red with age, and it swallowed my right leg past the knee.
I wrenched at it, twisting to look over my shoulder. The metal bit deeper. I screamed.
May’s red, red eyes fixed on me. With love maybe, or with hunger, or maybe she could no longer tell them apart. She stopped running and sank into a mountain-cat prowl, shoulder blades rolling.
Sir John swore and slid to a stop. He knelt between May and me, rifle already at his shoulder. A flash of gold at his mouth: two bullets clenched between his teeth.
I said “Don’t!” and he said, around the bullets, “Shut up.”
May didn’t slow. A pair of tusks pushed through the flesh of her jaw, sharp as snapped femurs.
But then, for the second time, I saw Sir John’s hawk stoop from the sky. She hit the ground hard, and when she rose she was no longer a hawk. She was a hulking, furred thing, ursine, but long legged. Ram’s horns spiraled at each ear; plates of hide lapped down her chest. This was what a demon would be if we let them live, I thought: change by choice. What could be more dangerous?
The bear-demon said, in a woman’s hoarse voice, “John, go.”
Sir John said, “Fuck you, my love,” and did not move.
May had paused, as one predator pauses when it meets another. The bear lowered her head. May lifted her tusks.
Then, abruptly, in a blur of whipping limbs and torn flesh, our wives collided. I saw horns buried in a soft white belly; teeth closed around a throat; bones cracked beneath hooves.
It was a fight without fixed form, a battle without end. They slashed, bit, clawed, rent. Every time they should have died they changed instead, slipping out of one form and into another, because they had to. Death, now, was the bride, who could not keep hold of her shape-shifting lover.
The enclaves were right, to fear demons. They were a new kind of creature, born for a new kind of world. And it would not be easily conquered.
I became aware of Sir John pulling hard beneath my elbows. My leg scraped free of the metal, leaving long strips of meat behind it.
“Can you run? Good, then—”
“John!”
A woman’s scream. I turned. May had grown a dozen equine legs and pinned her opponent to the earth. John’s wife was shifting fast—skin, scales, fur, feathers—but her limbs were tangled in the kudzu, crushed by massive hooves. May was crouched over her, watching her with mad red eyes. From her forehead, a single white horn began to grow.
Demons could be killed, of course—a quick decapitation, a shot through the brain before it could form a replacement. Sir John would know better than anyone.
He ran to his wife. His rifle would have been quicker, but perhaps he doubted his aim. Or perhaps he was through adding corpses to his pile.
He was fast—much faster than me, a little faster than May. But not fast enough.
He threw himself over his wife just as May struck. The point of her horn entered his back beneath his scapula and emerged between a pair of ribs. I heard the hollow mineral scrape of bone on bone as the horn withdrew.
A woman’s scream, high and hoarse. No, not a scream—a wild animal keen. A hawk’s cry, a vixen’s wail, a dog’s howl: a menagerie in mourning, from a single mouth.
May retreated from the sound, shaking her head from side to side, as if it bothered her. As if she knew, somewhere beneath the churning surface, what she’d done.
The keening went on and on, eerily constant, from a throat that tore and bled and remade itself. Sometimes there were words tucked inside the sound— John , mostly, and no , and I’ll fucking kill you —and sometimes not.
May was driven back, hissing, tossing her head. She was a great cat, back arched, and then a six-legged wolf, snarling, and then finally, the antlered elklike creature with a feathered face. She looked at me, and the feathers rippled across her eyes. Shrike black—because she knew me, still.
But I no longer knew her. She’d changed out of all recognition, shed her sick body like a skin and become something else. I could cling to her, like that loyal bride to her groom, until both of us were covered in blood—or I could let her run free. And hope that, one day, I could run after her.
I limped forward. May’s antlers lowered until I could rest my forehead against her brow. Her feathers rippled under my cheek, shifting to soft, warm skin.
I whispered, “Go, May.” She went, in a sudden thunder of hooves, leaving nothing behind but a slim black feather, drifting gently to earth.
Sir John’s wife tore herself free of the vines and gave chase, but I doubted she would find May. My wife and I had learned these hills as only young lovers can—by heart.
I went to Sir John’s side, trailing blood. There was pink foam at the corners of his mouth, and his breath made a swampish, whistling sound in his chest. He would die, but not quickly.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was an accident.” Every good tale repeats itself.
“S’alright,” he said. “Overdue, probably.”
There was something warm running down my face, dripping from my chin. “People live to be seventy, in the enclaves, sometimes eighty. Finch told me.” The wetness gathered in the crease of my lips, hot and salty. More blood, then.
“Aren’t I an outlander, by now? Isn’t this how an outlander proves his love—by dying young? God knows I’ve done enough killing. Should have tried this sooner. Ah, don’t cry, Lady Shrike.” The knight’s hand jerked a little, as if he would have liked to brush the tears from my cheeks. I wondered if he’d wanted children, once. “Not for me.”
But it wasn’t him I was crying for. It was Iron Hollow and Finch Secretary—God, Finch—and Mayapple Coal. It was the end of every future I’d ever imagined for myself; my own personal apocalypse. After a while I said, damply, “I’m sorry you couldn’t change her back.”
The knight made a sound that might have been a laugh, in a man with two working lungs. “It was never her I wanted to change.”
“What—”
“It’s not cancer, but perhaps any kind of death will do, in a pinch.” He looked past me, through the crosshatched branches, to the sky. He wet his lips and whistled once. It must have hurt like hell, but the sound rang sweet and clear. In the distance, a hawk cried an answer.
The knight smiled. It was the smile of a saint at the stake, unafraid, certain of what came next.
He said, “Run, Lady Shrike. Once more,” and the last of the light struck his eyes. I saw—or thought I saw—a flash of red.
I ran.
Once upon a time, a knight came riding into the holler, and never rode back out.
That’s the story I told them, when I limped back into Iron Hollow, leg crusted with dried lymph and blood. My first, as Secretary. I told them how Sir John of Cincinnati, Knight of the Enclaves, had charged bravely at the demon, and how he had fallen, pierced through the heart. How he’d told me with his dying breath not to cry for him.
Laurel Boss had looked at me for a long time when I finished. “And the demon?” she’d asked, and I’d told her that there were no demons in Iron Hollow. Demon is a church word; we’ll have to come up with a name of our own.
Her eyes had moved to my cheeks, where tears had cut tracks through the grime and sweat. She said, softening, “The wheel turns.”
“And so do we.”
“What does that—never mind.” Laurel had sighed, as a woman who has a headache that she is beginning to suspect will last for several decades, then bowed formally. “My gratitude for the story, Shrike Secretary. May it guide me true.”
I told many stories to Iron Hollow, over the years. Yes—years.
I’d decided, as I walked back down the mountain, alone, that Sir John had it wrong. An outlander doesn’t prove her love by dying young, but by living as long as she can. She eats berries grown in bad earth and licks the poison from her lips; she makes her wedding bed from barbed wire and cinder blocks; she falls in love at the end of the world. And when death comes for her—too soon, too fucking soon—she becomes something else. Something that survives.
May is still alive, and so am I—at least for a little while longer.
I haven’t wasted my time, like poor Sir John. I’ve spent every minute of it—nearly three decades, now—teaching Iron Hollow how to survive. For centuries the enclaves have taught us to mourn the old world and fear the new one. They told us Bible stories and demon tales, sent out knights and priests. There’s nothing more dangerous, they said, than change.
A single Secretary in the ass end of the outlands won’t undo all that—but I can pick at the seams, tell different stories. I can tell them of the shrike, who changed because she had to, and the sick bride, who did the same. I can tell them to mistrust the church and to leave their offerings in the hills, instead, for the strange new creatures that live there. If the kings come with their armies, we will have something better than hammers on our side.
I can tell them: Once upon a time there was a knight who married a demon. He loved her so much that he held tight to her even as she changed in his arms, even as her talons tore through muscle and cartilage. He held her so long that she fell in love with him, or remembered that she loved him already. And because she loved him, she kept herself to a single shape, though it chafed like the bars of a cage. So the knight and the demon walked the world, never together, never apart, waiting for the day one of them would cease to be what they were.
I haven’t told them how that story ends, yet, but I will soon. Already I wake sometimes to find the sheets sour, sweat-soaked; I cough so hard I have to clean blood from the creases of my teeth. Just last night I found something caught in my hair that popped strangely as I pulled it loose. A feather, drab and gray. I smiled, giddy as a girl again; she always said my name suited me.
I hope she didn’t run too far. I hope I’ll find her waiting for me, out in the wild, and then the two of us can run away as we always meant to: together.
Before I go, I’ll tell Iron Hollow how that story ends. I’ll tell them what I saw as I walked down the mountain that day.
The sun had slipped behind the ridge, and the sky was fevered, hectic red. I heard a strange cry and looked up. A pair of hawks circled above me. No, perhaps they were gulls or bats—angels or dragons, or every beast that has ever heralded the end of one world and the beginning of another. One of them was graceful, confident, slipping purposefully from one form to another, and the other was clumsy, as if unused to himself. I heard a woman’s laugh.
They chased and changed above me, knight and demon, husband and wife, shifting like clouds in strong wind, and then wheeled together, toward the horizon.