“We could not have guests if I could not serve confections.”
Wenthelen only sighed and clucked at my falcon—“Go on, then, Lucy, get us something for supper”—before turning to face Alice: “Try the stew.”
“Needs salt—” Alice started to say.
I hurried away.
According to a map, I own a piece of land. But a map is a symbol. It has no real connection to the soil—it serves as an artifact or an echo. A map is made and then the land changes and the map does not change with it. And yet we respect maps as if they are the law, treating their boundaries as finite, allowing them to determineyours,mine,ours,theirs,his. Rarelyhers.
But the map says: I do own some land. An aberration in the system: A man—my husband—died with no male heirs.Hisbecamehers. The map now draws a line around what is mine: a property that sits next to, but does not touch, a stream. On paper, it is a snaking blue line, thin and nearly invisible.
Because that snaking blue line does not cross my property, it is not good hunting land. The quail and the grouse and the pheasants stay closer to the streams and rivers that branch and fracture the landscape. So, for the purposes of my morning routine, I often choose to be liberal with the boundaries of the map.
Technically, this is illegal.
The hunt did not start well. By the time the sun hovered on the horizon, we’d still had no luck. No movement or missed chances. Lucy sat, high on a branch above me, waiting, and I moved slowly beneath her, poking at the brambles with a stick, hoping to flush a pheasant. The ground was soft and sucking. I watched the brambles and Lucy watched it all: the curls of water in the stream, the leaves quivering on the branches, the fog moving like breath along the forest floor.
Peregrines need room to hunt; they start high and dive low. Sky and space and speed are their best tools. Across the stream, the growth thinned, and the forest’s canopy gave way to large pockets of sky; the land had the open air that would yield us game. But the crossing of the water was as symbolic as water itself. On one side: dubiously legal hunting. On the other: punishable poaching on royal land.
As if sensing my intentions, Lucy pulled her feathers in tight, her body going slick.
“It’s fine,” I assured her.
She blinked slowly, hiding her eyes from me for half a moment.
“Quail and grouse do not abide by the rules of a map. Three hops and we’ll be back on the right side.”
I bent over, gathered my skirts in my hands, and tied a practiced knot between my legs. There were no logs or rocks to use, so, after a running start, I leapt across the water and landed in the soft mud on the other side. The jump soaked my hem and splattered my shins with black slurry. I looked around. The forest has eyes but cannot speak. It had no way of telling on me.
I did not believe in magic, nor did I think members of royalty were divine, but there was something to be said for their land. Working my way through the underbrush, I used the stick to poke and prod the growth. Blackthorn and ferns and holly. Tangled thickets of vine and clusters of orange-red hawthorn haws and the young green of early rose hips. The air was quiet, and I went still, inhaling. Here, with a little bit more space and a little bit of sun, the odor of damp—of decay and of turning leaves—had a life of its own, a quiet, dark fertility that calmedme. I squinted up at a patch of white sky as Lucy took flight and rose above.
A falcon is a murderous creature. There is destruction in its bones. Its body hums, faster than the fastest clock, priming itself for that quick moment.Tick.The click of an eyelid.Tick.The silent swivel of a head.Tick.A stoop so fast it is but a gray streak in your eye. Time runs out. The bird gives over all that is regal and becomes what it was meant to be, what it was born to be, and the hum becomes a roar. The sound of Lucy’s bell told me she had moved before I saw, and then she was in front of me, closed wings, head down, legs back, diving faster than I could watch her. A vicious entry into the brush, twigs breaking, wings flapping: The rabbit was dead before I’d known it was alive, the unpleasantness done in less than two heartbeats.
“A rabbit, Lucy!” I cried. Peregrines hunt other birds—pigeons and partridges and teal. A coney was a coup for a falcon of her size. “See?” I said to her, gesturing at the stream. “You only needed a bit more space.”
I went to her side. Plenty has been said about the dignity of a hunt, but it’s what comes after the kill that you must make peace with. Lucy had her talons buried in the bloody bowels of the mammal. It was not feminine. It was not pristine. But we needed the animal for supper—the very world in its essence.
A hungry raptor cannot resist blood, but there is a trick that will part a bird from its quarry. I removed a gizzard from the twist of cloth in my pocket and, kneeling, offered it to Lucy. Her eyes followed my fingers, distracted by the giblets. With my other hand, I gathered great fistfuls of wet leaves and piled them over the dead coney. When Lucy glanced back down to her kill, she saw only mulch from the forest floor. Up again, and there was the gizzard. She willingly went to my glove to eat it. And, after tying her jesses, I fastened the rabbit to my belt where she would not see it.
Back on the right side of the stream, I found the uneven path once more. “I’d wager the girls are still asleep,” I told Lucy, who ignored me, per her custom. As we moved forward, the trees began to thin, and the rutted road was visible in the distance. “Snug in their warm beds.” And I could see it: Rosamund’s and Mathilde’s dark hair fanned around their heads, in separate side-by-side rooms. Elin, upstairs. Wenthelen and Alice in the kitchens down below. Our small collection of bodies a last stand against nature’s takeover of the house. Sleeping or awake made no difference: Time was marching us forward, every day a new mishap, a brick that loosened or a wall that cracked. Slender wrists trying to uphold a falling roof.
Wrists that would have lace.
Alice might fuss and Wenthelen might stamp, but lace and sugar—and the maintenance of a proper carriage and a good set of gloves and so many other details—were necessities. One had to have a shell, or at least the projection of one, for protection. For the sake of presentability, all our lives were a performance. Our dresses as pleated and heavy as the curtains on a grand stage. Respectability was a lifeboat that would float the girls along the gentle tides of stability, straight onto the secure banks of marriage. A leaking roof would not be a bother if they lived beneath a new one.
Lucy blinked and then rapidly straightened, swiveling her head, leaning forward, the quick movement a warning to me. Her weight shifted on my fist. She knew just before it would happen and then it did: A crack—the sound you look out for, unmistakable, the snap of a twig, a boot in the brittle brush—came from ahead.
I stilled, hoping for cover in the shadows. In front of us on the path, alongside the stream, a dark-haired man stood, facing the road.
There was a reason I hunted at dawn. The hour was typically one of solitude. While the road ahead was used by many, few had any purpose to come down to the stream when the sky had not yet rid itself of night. There were never witnesses to connect the bedraggled huntress to the lady of the nearby estate. I was less alarmed by the bodilythreat of a strange man than I was by his capability to identify me. My circumstances—mud-spattered with a petulant bird on my arm and a dead rabbit tied to my belt—were not only ill fitting for a woman of my station; it would reflect poorly on everyone in my household.
He had not yet seen me. To my side, there was the stream, which, surely, I could no longer cross. To the other, a steep rise covered in thick vegetation. I could go forward along the path, or backward in the opposite direction, trapped between the imaginary dividing line of royal land and a briar-covered embankment. Real thorns, royal thorns, a stranger, or the wrong direction. But Lucy destroyed any chance of stealth. Attuned to my fear, she bated—leaping off the glove, a motion of fury and panic—molting into an explosion of feathers. The jesses kept her tethered and her bells rang.
Peregrine falcons are ruthless birds. Athletic and fast. Black heads and orange-ringed eyes and a body the color of armor. With Lucy on my arm, an unfamiliar person might have thought I had a weapon, or at least an ally. I had certainly encountered people who thought I could command her to attack, to dive for their throats, and the soft bits of their bodies. But, while Lucy was indeed designed to kill, her violence was only a steppingstone to her survival. If someone were to think she might have helped me when I was in danger, I would have to correct them: Lucy would eat my eyeballs if she needed to.
Carefully, I withdrew her hood from my pocket and slipped it over her head, touching, ever so briefly, her tiny skull. Unable to see, she quieted. When I looked up again, the stranger was watching us.
“Good morrow.” I nodded.
