“Demons,” I said; he didn’t bother to nod.
“The missions started six months after the first confirmed sighting. Priests, to call them demons, and knights, to slay them. The Bible and the gun—an old formula, well proved. But we’vefailed. Every year there are more of them, and fewer of us, and now the outlands are full of our failures: demons that survived and escaped and made their homes in the wastes and wild places. So the kings wait behind their walls, for now. But if they knew how to kill a demon before it was born—if they knew a blood test or a cheek swab could tell them which of you would turn ... Come with us, they might say, for chemotherapy in our fair city! I doubt they’d even bother to send back ashes.”
In the dusklight Sir John’s face was cold and colorless, like a stone angel looking down over his graveyard. “Do you have any idea how many people you’ve killed, to save your lady wife?”
Once, I might have been guilt stricken. I might even have wept, like a child who has discovered, too late, that knives are sharp. But I’d already committed one murder for May, and I hadn’t wept a single tear.
I stared back up at him, just as cold, and asked, “Wouldn’t you do the same, for someone you loved?”
“Yes,” he said, in a voice that made me aware, suddenly, of the rifle he still wore on his back. He took a step toward me—heavy, inevitable, the angel stepping down from his plinth—then stopped. Something cracked in his expression, human flesh visible beneath the stone. “For all the fucking good it’s done me.Cancer.Jesus.”
He turned and crooked his arm at his hawk. His vambraces were tied at his hip, so there was nothing but thin cotton to protect him from those long, curving talons. Bloodstains bloomed beneath the points of each claw as it alighted; he didn’t seem to notice.
He left then, pausing only to bow and offer a supplicant’s traditional thanks: “My gratitude for the story, Shrike Secretary. May it guide me true.”
“So long as it guides you the hell out of Iron Hollow,” I said, and didn’t regret what I’d done, not at all.
At six, I’d thought love was a full belly; at sixteen, I’d thought it was wildflowers and gooseberries and Mayapple’s mouth on mine.
At seventeen, I knew better: love is whatever you’re willing to kill for.
It would have ended there—or begun, I guess—if Sir John had left town like he said he would.
But he didn’t.
He walked into the common house each morning as if nothing had changed. He went out with the iron crews and ate with the townsfolk in the evenings, turning his good ear to listen. If he spoke less and frowned more—if he stared a little longer at our tumors and lesions, as if he was looking for scales or horns—I was the only one to notice.
But I wasn’t the only one who wanted him gone, now. There were mutterings, slantwise looks, unsubtle questions. For over a week, the great Sir John of Cincinnati had done nothing buteat our corn cakes and drink our beer. He kept his hawk hooded and his bullets in their bandolier; some hero!
They might have driven him out on their own, eventually, if Trillium Butcher hadn’t come screaming into the common house that a monster had snatched her best sow from the pen. I asked her if it could have been a regular predator that got it, a mountain cat or a wolf, and she wiped the tears and sweat from her face and said, dryly, that she wasn’t sure. Do regular mountain cats have bat wings, Secretary?
In the uproar that followed—it was suppertime, and half the town was ready to hunt May down with nothing but table knives—Laurel Boss turned once more to Sir John and asked, bluntly, “Are you going after it, or not?” There were bruised bags beneath her eyes; she’d buried a pair of twins today. Heatstroke.
The knight looked at her as if he were surfacing from deep water. “Yes,” he said, eventually. His eyes flicked to mine, then away. “Yes. Anon.”
He stood from the long table then, supper untouched, and asked Trillium Butcher where her pigs were penned. His voice—peaceful and formal, gently commanding—soothed the crowd instantly. I wondered, meanly, if they would even fight, when the enclave armies marched into our holler, or if they would fall willingly to their knees.
Or—would they be something else, by then? Something not easily conquered?
Sir John swept from the common house. I followed, unhurried; I knew where Trillium kept her pigs, and the game trail that would get me there well ahead of Sir John. I had time to go home and pull the pack out from under my bed, time to swipe a bottle of pills from Finch’s dresser. I even had time to pause on the hillside and look down at Iron Hollow.
A grand and prosperous place, I’d once thought, where everyone had enough to eat even in winter. But now I saw it as Finch and Sir John did: a dying place. A scrounging, desperate town full of sickly, short-lived people, where burials were more common than births.
They might go on as they were for another generation or two, but they would need to change, and keep changing, if they were to survive. They would need a good Boss and a clever Secretary, too—but Laurel was getting old and Finch was already dead, and I—I who owed them everything, who had sworn to serve them—was leaving.
I turned my back on Iron Hollow, and didn’t shed a single tear.
It was full dark before Sir John arrived at Trillium’s pigpen. I was tucked in the heart of a silverberry thicket, calves cramping, throat dry.
I watched through the leaves as he made camp. His armor, shucked and piled to one side. His horse, rubbed down and watered. His bedroll, laid beside a small solar lamp, which cast sharp, electric shadows across the ground.
I was gathering myself to slip out from under the silverberries when the knight began to speak. His voice was low and broken, so that the sentences arrived in pieces.
“—you want to go, I’ll understand. There’s no reason to stay, now that we know.”
I stopped moving, my view crosshatched by branches. I could see Sir John kneeling beside the lamp, head bowed, shoulders bent. I wondered if he was praying, or if he’d merely gone mad.
But a woman’s voice answered him, high and slightly hoarse. “Ah, John,” she said, and I could tell from those two syllables that she knew him as May knew me: inside and out, to the bone, to the end. “Fuck you.”
