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 afternoonrain. 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.Whyhad 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.
CHAPTER 8
In Which I Might Be Warming Up to the Sorcerer despite Him Being an Absolute Bastard with Terrible Fashion Sense, because the Shittiness of His Behaviour Makes the Occasional Non-Shitty Action Stand Out in an Almost Heroic Light, and Also, I Definitely Had a Sexual Awakening in that Interrogation Chamber.
How you survived to adulthood is a mystery,” said the sharp-faced man, as the construct hand-delivered me to the castle gate. I didn’t have the energy to respond, instead choosing to black out again.
I awoke cradled in a soft material. Groggily, I snaked my head out. This room, lit by fog-dimmed light, and furnished only by the cot beneath me, looked familiar. I’d woken here before, on that first morning. And the nest of fabric . . . of course, the corpse clothing! Someone had washed them, thankfully, as they lacked the former bloodstain.
Shuffling my wings experimentally brought no pain, though extending the right one did produce a twinge. Tucking them back in, I gaped my beak in a yawn. Nothing demanded my immediate attention, so squirming furtherinto the nested clothes, I retracted my neck and closed my eyes.
Upon my next waking, the door was open, with a dead rat deposited on the floor. Something, likely a construct, had torn its head off.
“Now what’s with all this pampering?” I squawked in wonder, shaking my feathers and hopping off the cot to eat.
After hollowing the rat and preening thoroughly to remove the flecks of flung meat from my golden-brown feathers, I waddled out to find the sorcerer.
The click of my talons against the stone made for a lonely noise. Since the mad sorcerer was a creature of habit, I knew the route to take: right, left, left again, hopping down that spiral staircase, right, and here we go. The crackle of the fireplace from the wood-carving room confirmed my guess.
Gritting my beak, I pushed from the stone in a burst of noisy flapping, and swept through the doorway, flaring my wings to slow before touching down on a stack of wood.
“You’ve gotten better at landing,” the mad sorcerer noted. He sat weaving cut saplings around a bleached-white core, forming the messy approximation of a limb. Behind him, neatly piled, lay more of the smooth white branches—no, bones. He had a stack of bones.Humanbones, I corrected, spotting the cracked ruin of a skull. It was oddly poignant, watching the construction of an enemy I’d fought for years, their secrets bared to me so casually. All the constructs I’d seen hacked apart in the aftermath of battles had been wood throughout—but a fleshy, unnatural wood that flowed seamlessly into teeth and fingers. There must be a merging process between the bone and branch, one that imbuedthem with demonic half-life and connected their senses to Merulo’s eye.
Finishing one limb, the sorcerer moved to another. He reached behind him to pluck one, then two long bones from the stack, then twined a thin, flexible strip of wood around the joint, connecting them. I grew less content to watch.
Probably shouldn’t ask. It wouldn’t lead to anything good.
“Why did you save me?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure you hate me, so it doesn’t make much sense.”
