If they’re quick enough, they take care of the demon themselves. It doesn’t matter who the demon once was—neighbor, lover, son—they don’t hesitate. They barely even mourn.The wheel turns,they say, which means:Sorry about your wife, kid.
But if they’re too slow—if they missed the signs, and the change is too far along—if the demon is already red eyed and slavering, a great beast which shifts unnaturally, continually, into whatever shape suits it—well.
That’s what knights are for.
I’d hoped whatever knight answered Laurel Boss’s call would be stupid, or at least arrogant, but Sir John was neither. For days, I couldn’t catch him alone.
In the early mornings, before the heat hit, he went out with the iron crews, watching the woods while they hammered rebar from the ruins. In the afternoons he retired with the rest of us to the old mines, where the air was cool and foul. After sundown he ate in the common house, talking in that gentle voice to Shepherds and Bakers, Hunters and Trashpickers. He was respectful to the elders, who were younger than him, and patient with the kids. How many demons have you killed? More than thee. Are you a giant? No. Can I pet your bird? No!
Then eventually he would retire, vanishing into the kudzu as quickly and as silently as any outlander. He’d refused a guest bed—stupid!—and wouldn’t accept a guard to keep watch—arrogant!!—but he made camp in a different place every night, and never lit a fire.
Eventually, though, he would go demon-hunting, on foot and alone, save for his hawk. And me.
On the third evening I heard Laurel Boss ask when he would begin the search, and he answered “Anon.” Laurel didn’t know what the word meant, but I did.
Finch Secretary, the woman who raised and named me, had visited the Knoxville enclave as a child. She said they lived like kings of old—in great walled compounds that glittered blackly, covered in solar panels, defended by minefields and moats—but that we needn’t fear them, because they were too obsessed with the past to think much of the future. They spoke a dead language and worshipped a dead god, a man suspended gruesomely on two sticks. They gave themselves antiquated names (Ashley, Charlemagne,John) and obscure titles (president, chief operating officer, knight). Finch had tsked her tongue:Nothing grows on a grave while you’re standing on it.
Still, she taught me their thees and thous and strange turns of phrase, just in case.Anonmeantvery soon.
I didn’t sleep that night but waited, curled like a fawn at the edge of the woods. At dawn the knight set out, hawk in hand, and I followed.
Sir John moved well through the woods—slipping among the branches rather than breaking them, following the ridges rather than struggling up the slopes—but I had no difficulty tracking him. May and I used to disappear into these hills every chance we got, and we learned them as young lovers do: by heart.
Here was the old quarry where we’d swum naked at midsummer; here the stand of poplars where we’d puked afterward, sick with whatever toxins had leached into the water; here the gooseberry patch where we’d gorged ourselves. Her mouth had tasted like lightning, after, bright and urgent.
A creek—a sluggish trickle now, crusted with algae and fly ash—divided one slope from the next. The knight paused on the bank, and I crept along the slope above him, hidden by honeysuckle. He set the hawk, still hooded, on a low-slung sycamore branch and knelt to drink.
The stories said he didn’t kill the demons quickly. They said he trapped and tormented them first. They said, just before he finally killed them, he asked a question of them.
I thought of May. The morning I ran my fingers through her hair and felt antlers pressing up through her scalp, like teeth through gums. We’d stolen Nettle Smith’s hasp and filed them down, but she was already sick by then. There was only so long we could hide it.
I looked at the back of Sir John’s neck, right at the point where his straggling gray hair parted to reveal the knob of his spine. My hammer was heavy at my hip. It had been easier the first time, when I hadn’t had time to hesitate, when I hadn’t known the sound a skull makes as it breaks.
Now,I thought,do it now.
The hawk cried out suddenly—an eerie, human sound, like a woman’s distant scream.
“Yes, I know,” said Sir John, without turning. “But she hasn’t yet made up her mind.” I stopped breathing.
The knight scooped a little water, warm and green, and splashed it calmly over his face. “Who was the demon, to thee? Thy father? Little sister, perhaps? Boyfriend?”
I slipped down from the bank and landed barefoot on the dry shale. I did not bother, this time, to make my voice tremble. “Wife.”
He exhaled a little, as if I’d landed an unexpected blow, but his voice remained pleasant. “Young for marriage, are thee not?”
A stupid question, which I ignored. Perhaps in the enclaves—where the air was filtered and the water was clean, where there were storm shelters and levees and cancer screenings—it was different, but we count time differently in the outlands. We marry young; we die young. The wheel turns.
Sir John turned toward me, still kneeling. “Forgive an old knight. It’s only—thou art twenty? Two and twenty?” Barely seventeen; grief ages you. “The whole of thy life lies ahead of you. Do not waste it on me—or on her memory.”
I ignored this, too, having heard variations of it from most of Iron Hollow. To grieve as I have grieved is unseemly; the wheel turns, and we do not cling, howling, to the rim.
He tried again. “Secretarythey called thee. A position of great standing, out here.” A thread of exasperation in his voice, now. “Thy people need thee, surely.”
True: a town’s Secretary is their record keeper and storyteller, their historian and their haruspex. We remember every birth and death, every folktale and recipe. We learned, after the old world died, not to put our faith in wood pulp or motherboards; the only archive that survives is the one we carry with us.
Should we mine iron from the old cooling towers, Secretary? Once upon a time there was a greedy boy who took iron from towers like those, and found that the stone was cancerous, and caused the hair to fall from his head and lesions to appear on his skin. Should we offer shelter to this traveling priest, Secretary, although he is very annoying? Once upon a time there was a miserly town who refused a bowl of soup to a passing priest, and when the priest told his masters in the enclave, they were so angry they refused all trade for seven years, and the town had no antibiotics or opiates and was very sorry.
Laurel had consulted Finch at least twice a week; so far, I’d refused to tell her a single story.
