I lay sprawled in the shallow water, panting, half expecting Sir John to point his rifle at me next. But he seemed to have forgotten me and the demon both; instead he stared at the sky, in the direction his bullet had flown.
“Come on, love.” His voice was constricted, as if there was a hand around his throat. “Come on.” He whistled again, that high, sweet note.
The hawk answered. It appeared above us, cutting a casual circle in the sky, and Sir John looked abruptly down. He shucked his gauntlets and ran his hands hard over his eyes.
Then he asked, very calmly, in commontongue, “What the fuck is wrong with you? What do you think would have happened if—why are you smiling.”
“Because,” I said, “she knew me.”
Sir John, apparently unable to decide between pity and fury, did not answer.
“Did you see the pattern of her feathers? The mask across her eyes?”
He decided on fury. “I saw a fresh-hatched demon heading straight for—”
“They’re the markings of a songbird—a common one around here, often mistaken for a catbird or a chickadee. You might not have noticed it at all. No one ever notices a shrike, she used to say.” I paused to swallow a wild laugh. “Until it’s too late.”
A shrike, you see, is no chickadee: she hunts anything smaller and weaker than her, and spears it—still wriggling, peeping in agony—on the tips of thorns or barbed wire. Brutal, maybe, but that’s survival for you.
I should know: For the first six years of my life, I was feral. The orphan of some unlucky scavengers, flea ridden, frostbitten, living on bone marrow and cattails. When I wandered into Iron Hollow, Finch Secretary took me in—she said I must have a brain under all that dirt, if I’d made it this far. Eleven years of square meals and soap have civilized me somewhat, but I still keep a pack beneath my bed, just in case: cornmeal, dried venison, a good knife, a jar of mead. Everything I need to survive.
May knew what I was; she’d found my pack when we were kids. But she hadn’t pitied me or mocked me. She’d only asked if I would take her with me when I ran. And I said yes—easily, honestly—because by then she had become one of the things I needed to survive.
She knew me then, at the beginning of ourselves, and she knew me now, here at the end, when she did not even know herself.
My wrist throbbed, steadily. The creek sludge stung my scalp. I couldn’t stop smiling—the euphoric, hysteric smile of a woman who has been lying on her lover’s grave and has just felt the earth move beneath her.
Boots splashed beside my head. Sir John, crossing the creek. Going after her.
I sat up. “Wait—you can’t—sheknowsme—”
Sir John neither paused nor turned, but only said, “Go home, Widow Shrike,” in a weary, gray-whiskered voice.
I spun to my knees, shaking pinkish water from my eyes, panicking now. “Wait—wait! At least tell me what you ask them, at the end. I have to know.” I didn’t give a damn what he asked them, but every second he lingered was another second for May to run.
The boot steps faltered. He said, “What?”
“Before you kill them, you ask them a question. Finch Secretary had it from Warbler Secretary of Oil Town, who had it from Veery Secretary of the Salt Flats, who had it—”
“Jesus, enough.” Sir John had half turned to face me. I wondered, suddenly, how old he really was. He moved well, but his face was cracked and weathered, like hide left too long on the rack, and his hair was the color of concrete.Grief ages you,I thought, and wasn’t sure why I thought it.
He said, “I ask themhow. How they changed from human into ... what they are now.” His jaw tightened, and the scar pulled oddly at his flesh, twisting his mouth. “They never answer, of course. But I can’t seem to stop asking, even after all these years.”
“Why?”
I must have sounded too curious, too much like a Secretary chasing a story, because he reverted to the formal language of the enclaves. “Such is my charge and duty. The King of Cincinnati himself asked me to discover the cause of these creatures, and so I shall.”
“And if you knew—if you got your answer”—I stood slowly, moving my wrist in careful circles—“would you hurry back to him? Would you leave Iron Hollow?”
“If I knew how a man became a demon, I would fly from here and never return,” he said, and I could see that he meant it, and also that he was humoring me. There was a wry tilt to his mouth now, as if he couldn’t imagine that an outlander girl could possibly know anything he didn’t.
I said, “Follow me.”
The day I found the antlers, I went to Finch.
Finch said, “What’s up, buttercup?” but I addressed her formally, as supplicant to Secretary, rather than child to parent.
I said, “Why do people change, Secretary? Why are they one thing, and then another?”
