Chapter 7 #2
Even for those born gifted, magic had harsh limits.
A wellspring of set size existed in each person.
That power could be siphoned out, either in small trickles or roaring torrents, but once drained it did not replenish.
Hence the tendency toward magical miserliness.
When every good deed sucked you dry just that little bit more; when on some fearfully anticipated day, you’d speak a spell only for it to crumble on your lips, leaving you with fading memories of a power that once came like breathing .
. . well. It meant that finding someone with not only the magic to shift my form, but the willingness to expend that precious resource on me would be difficult, to say the least.
I myself had been drained as a child, in a standard Church tithe.
What scarce, pitiful magic existed in me had been extracted for the construction of a levitating cathedral.
And not just mine—they’d gathered a group of local children for the ritual.
An Elder gave us the words along with directions for how to void our power.
As a choir we’d chanted and been rewarded with an impossible sight: a heaping mass of stone becoming light, tearing free from the earth that still gripped us.
One girl fainted, and my nose had bled, but mostly I remembered the wash of relief at never having to memorize those strange words again. Magic was a burden that all but the most gifted or wealthy disposed of in childhood.
This, of course, was what made the mad sorcerer so terrifying.
He cast spells frivolously, wastefully, with less consideration than you’d give to preparing a pot of tea.
And the enormity of his magic. How it showed no signs of waning, after decades of expensively maintained warfare!
He drew from a colossal ocean of power, a single, scrawny man who could challenge God Himself.
He was an, uh, inadvisable enemy to have made for the sake of a mediocre scone.
No, I couldn’t lie to myself. It was a fantastic scone. All buttery and warm.
Glenda knew some magic-users, didn’t she? I flapped my wings idly, passing through the mist of a low-hanging cloud. She’d been bad-mouthing one last week, some ‘who does she think she is’ bog witch who’d made a hobby of calling forth undesirables and patching their scraped knees.
Well, I was plenty undesirable, and happy to wait in line!
Really, it was in Glenda’s best interest to facilitate my return to man-shape.
Merulo had acted with undeniable cunning: the prophecy clearly stipulated a golden-haired knight, not a vulture.
Regardless of how she felt about our less-than-ideal parting, the elf should be willing to fork over the address of this helpful witch—or at the very least scrape a map into the dirt.
And if, for whatever reason, she did react poorly, I had these lovely new wings to carry me away.
Still, I wavered in indecision until an incident at the bank of a stream.
Birds have little ability to suck or lap, so I drank by filling my beak with the cool flowing water, and then ducking my head back, and letting it trickle down my throat.
For all that it was an unnecessary amount of labour, I did find it relaxing.
So much so that I nearly missed the crunch of a dead leaf.
Animal instinct shot me forward, nearly spilling me into the stream before my wings managed a desperate downstroke.
Flapping wildly, I spun in midair to see a black shuck-hound, tilting its head as though attempting a difficult math problem.
It could almost be mistaken for an ordinary dog, if not for the vertebral ridges pushing through its wiry fur.
“That’s it, fuck this. Fuck the sorcerer. Fuck you,” I shouted, circling out of reach of the shuck. It sat back, watching me with lazy yellow eyes. “I’m finding Glenda. Fuck it! What’s a vegetarian going to do to me, anyway? She eats seaweed, for fuck’s sake. Fuck you!”
The hound yawned, giving me a generous view of its sharp white teeth, which just set me off again.
All this shouting proved tiring. Eventually, I ceased my wheeling and flinging of abuse, and set off to find my former friend.
I’d begun my quest rather late in the day, and the clouds soon darkened to a blood-soaked cotton. Before night fell completely, I found a tall tree to touch down on, and, with the sounds of nocturnal creatures scratching and snuffling in the woods below, I tried to sleep without fear.
The dawn song of smaller, lesser birds brought me back. With a great shuffling of feathered shoulders, I returned to the air.
It took me all morning to reach the outpost, and almost immediately I wished that I hadn’t.
It hurt, drifting over those familiar streets.
There’d be no more patrolling in my armour, collecting swooning glances.
No more drunken caroling. No more prying for information about upcoming battles to avoid.
I missed my old life, but couldn’t see any path to regain it.
Another problem: of all the people who milled through the town, haggling over fried rabbit haunches or edging their way past the dung of carriage-beasts, none had the blue skin and silver hair of an elf.
I perched on a church spire with a great puffing sigh, and tried to think.
What duties did Glenda favour, and where did they take her?
Not hunting—she couldn’t bear to harm an animal, and using her physical strength to gather resources would be beneath her.
Sentry duty, then, somewhere on the outskirts.
I resolved to fly diligently over the forest, until either hunger or fatigue took me down.
The sun shifted overhead, and I searched.
A patch of dark cloud threatened rain, and I searched.
A mean-spirited robin chased me for a time, chirping insults, and still, I searched.
Just as I’d convinced myself to give up for the day and find a nice carcass to tear into, a flash of silver caught my eye. I wheeled down for a look.
Glenda sat daintily by the edge of a brook, one foot tugged by the gentle current, the other folded beneath her. A sheath of arrows kept her spine straight, her long, meticulous braid falling in among them. She glanced up as I landed in a graceless splat of feathers, her face curiously blank.
I eyed the bow in her grip. ‘How’s the concussion?’ seemed a bad opener.
“First off,” I squawked. “I’d like to sincerely apologize. I acted poorly, and do not expect forgiveness.” Pure bullshit: this entire plan depended on me being forgiven immediately.
Glenda looked at me, unbothered to a degree that struck me as eerie. “I don’t know any vultures,” she said, cold and clipped.
“Well, it’s your lucky day!” I cried. “Here I am, a surprise vulture pal!”
With her lack of reaction, it felt like speaking to one of Merulo’s constructs. Slowly, she retrieved her foot from the brook, rising to her feet like a cat readying to pounce. It drove in how small I was, that even tiny Glenda could look down at me with menace.
“Promise not to get mad,” I hurried, in the alien screech of my new voice. “But it’s me, Cameron. And I am, again, so sorry for how we parted, violence is never justifiable, and—hey, hey, let’s put down the bow, eh?”
She pulled an arrow from her back and notched it at an unhurried pace. Where were the waterworks? The joys and sorrows of reunion?
“You must be wondering, ‘Hey, Cameron, how come you’re a bird?’ Well, completely against my will, I was kidnapped, or rather man-napped, by the mad sorcerer.
He cast some tricky magic, I fought back the best I could, blackened the bastard’s eye, even!
But uh, um . . . Anyway, he knows everything about the prophecy, and this,” I raised my wings, “is his solution. Kind of clever, right? Because it’s not a prophecy about a vulture. ”
“You . . . told that maniac about the prophecy. The enemy of humanity, the man who vowed to kill our God, the mad sorcerer?”
“Well yeah, I might have. The guy is a total asshole,” I confirmed. “Sadistic prick. Honestly, can’t stand him.”
The arrow flew. I snapped backward, pinned to the earth, my wing first numb, then hot with a pain that blazed out concentrically, lapping at my nerves and flesh. “Glenda, Glenda, Glenda,” I heard myself plead. “Come on, we’re friends, let’s talk this out. Glenda, NO!”
Glenda’s foot descended on my prone body, pressing too hard for my hollow ribs to handle. Almost lazily, she bent to grip the arrow’s shaft, and pulled.
Fiery pain erupted. I shrieked, my other wing beating uselessly against the soil. Without removing her foot, Glenda wiped the stone head on the grass, once, twice, before replacing the arrow in her quiver. Some vegetarian!
“These are expensive,” she said, her eyes glassy and lifeless. “Can’t waste one on trash like you.”
Trash?! What happened to ‘I love you’? She had said that, hadn’t she? Who was this person?
“You’re my friend,” I squawked, wetness spreading from my pierced wing. “I thought—”
“You thought.” She laughed, a passionless bark. “That’s a first.”
“What the fuck, Glenda?” The weight on my chest increased, accompanied by a crunch somewhere deep inside me. Words flew through my mind, but not the right ones. Nothing linked into a rope that could save me.
I had failed at being a man—but I was still a vulture.
My beak, long and cruel, a handy pick for opening deer hide and prying marrow from spinal cords, plunged with desperate force into Glenda’s leg.
She cried out, staggering backward. Elven blood in my nostrils, I shot to my talons and launched, up, up, branches whistling past. The next arrow caught me in the gut, punching through my back. I felt the impact, but didn’t stop.
The protruding arrow dragged in the air, and the motions of my injured wing felt wrong, but still I flew, panting wildly, trying to ignore the blood that fell from me like afternoon rain.
I didn’t have to make it to the castle, just to a construct.
The sorcerer would fix me, he’d healed my leg and magic was nothing to him. Why had I taken that scone?!
Either I blacked out or disassociated, because when I next came to, it was twilight.
My wings, locked into position, felt like taxidermy.
I tried a test flap, and found they no longer took instruction.
Another attempt, and my pierced wing crumpled.
The world rolled as I fell, spinning head over feathered ass.
It could all be over, no more struggle, if I just shut my eyes.
Instead, muscles shrieking, I forced my good wing out, righting myself into a half-glide as the ground rushed closer.
Branches broke my descent. Their leaves received me like groping hands, catching stomach-churningly at the arrow that impaled me, but I thumped into the muck-strewn ground both conscious and alive.
It didn’t feel like I lay there long, but when at last I struggled to my feet, darkness had stripped the forest of colour. No possibility of flight remained, with my bad wing now completely numb.
How, how could I save myself?
I raised my serpentine neck to sniff at the air, enlarged nostrils filtering out the smell of soil, animal dung, and rotting wood, until I found what I needed: death.
The gore of opened organs and smashed meat wafted from a distance.
It smelled substantial. Not a mere animal kill, then, but—hopefully—the result of constructs meeting men.
I shuffled, limped, and hopped across the brush and dirt, every movement a pulse of agony, each step leaving more of myself behind in puddled red.
I let that hot squeezing Fear spur me, as I dragged my body onward.
Ahead, light pricked the woodland murk. Stars fallen to the earth, twin fireflies. I approached them, or they approached me, I didn’t know which, but suddenly they burned close and large.
“Merulo, help,” I croaked as black swallowed my vision and construct claws descended upon me.