Sir John laughed. It sounded like gravel on glass. “Fuck you, too, my love.” He climbed wearily to his feet and faced the woman. She stood just at the edge of the lamplight, so that all I saw of her was the edge of a ragged skirt. “Will you stay fettered and hooded forever, then? Will you wander with me, hunted, hidden, knowing we’ll never—we’ll never be—”
There came a rush of air, and then Sir John’s words were muffled, as if something had covered his mouth. I pulled a branch aside and saw a tall woman beneath a long, feathered cloak. Her face was bent over Sir John’s, lips pressed hard over his.
The branch snapped in my hand. The woman turned—an eerie motion, too fast, like the flick of a bird’s head. As she turned I saw that it wasn’t a cloak draped over her shoulders but a pair of wings, and that she wasn’t a woman at all.
Or perhaps she was a woman made as Eve was: from the bones of something else. Her legs doubled back, doglike, and her ribs swept sleekly outward, like the breast of a dove. Only her face was human: handsome, sharp boned, clove colored. Old.
But then the face was gone, lost in a great wrench of flesh and feathers. In an instant there was only Sir John standing in the dark with his hawk perched on one arm. I understood now why the hawk always wore that strange smoked-glass hood; without it, I could see her eyes.
Red as rust, or a robin’s breast, or an organ, still steaming.
For a moment, I was every child in every demon tale, waiting in the dark for teeth to close around my throat. Then I stood slowly and said, without emotion, “Oh, you bastard.”
Sir John swallowed. “It’s not—”
“Who was the demon, to you?”
He swallowed a second time. Closed his eyes. “My wife.”
“Of course,” I said, and laughed a little. Finch always said every good tale repeats itself at least once; it made them easier to remember.
I fetched my pack from the silverberries and drew out a clay jar of mead. I handed the jar to Sir John and said, “Tell me.”
He did, although he hardly needed to; I’d been Secretary long enough to guess the beginning from the end. Once upon a time there was a young knight, fresh from the enclaves, eager to make his name slaying demons. Once upon a time there was a pretty outlander woman who liked the look of him.
He took her with him back to Cincinnati and they lived happily ever after, until they didn’t, because nothing does. He ought to have delivered her to his superiors when she began to change—fingernails curling into talons, eyes flashing red sometimes in low light—but instead, he’d asked to return to patrol. A year later he’d reported that his wife—yes, that poor outlander heathen—barely even literate!—was dead. Demon-slain, he told them. He lied.
The knight and his demon might have made a life out there in the wastes; no one would have gone looking for them. But instead, the knight returned to the hunt. Year after year, town after town—with his wife fettered and hooded—he chased down demons, and he asked them all the same question:How?
“But you weren’t asking for your king, were you?” I thought of the day he rode into the holler, the band of bullets shining on his chest. A costume, it seemed to me now, a useful disguise for a desperate, driven man. “You were asking for yourself. You thought if you knew how it happened, maybe you could fix it. Change her back.”
Sir John took a long drink of mead, wincing a little. It was one of Finch’s worse batches, oversweet and syrupy. “I thought if I knew how, then I could—”
“But then I gave you your answer, and it didn’t fix anything. There’s no undoing it. All those years ...” There was a certain tragic romance to it—but how typical of an enclave man, to spend decades clinging to a dead dream.Nothing grows on a grave while you’re standing on it.
Sir John took another drink. “Thank you for telling me. At least now the hunt is over.” His eyes were on the hawk, perched now on the rail of Trillium’s pigpen. From the corner of my eye her form was fluid, chimeric.
“But,” I said, and I tried hard to keep my voice steady. “But she can speak with you. She can even take human form.”
“Sometimes, for a little while,” said the hawk, behind me. I swore, and she laughed. It was not quite a human laugh.
She was still a bird, mostly, with a woman’s throat and skull, like a harpy from some ancient text. I wondered then where all those shape-shifting stories had come from. If, every now and then, there was someone who changed, because they had to, and if we caught glimpses of them, every now and then, and named them as if they were fixed things. Siren, selkie, sphinx; angel, demon, mutant turtle.
Sir John had sagged bonelessly against his armor, wearier than I’d ever seen him. “But a demon is an ever-changing thing—holding a fixed form feels like burying yourself alive, she says. Breathing through a mouth full of dirt.”
Another laugh from his wife, even less human. “I’ve always been dramatic. It’s not so bad.” But I remembered how May had thrashed when I fixed that shackle around her ankle.
“After a hunt we spend weeks out in the wild,” said Sir John. His speech was beginning to soften at the edges, the words slurring into one another. “Sometimes she runs so fast and far I can’t follow.”
“I’m sorry, John—but it feels so good, you can’t know—”
“Sometimes she’s gone so long I think: Maybe she won’t come back, when I call. But she does, she always does, and then I force her to be one thing again instead of everything, and she hates me, I think, when I tie that hood over her eyes—God, Lily—”
Sir John choked, and his demon flew to him. Her wings were scaled, now, and her neck was long and sinuous, snakelike. She nestled against his breast and crooned, low and mournful.
“Should’ve stayed out there. Should’ve been grateful for what we had.” Sir John was running his hands reverently over the demon’s wings, and he was weeping. The tears vanished in the creases of his face, swallowed up by all those long years of wandering and hoping.
I might have felt guilty, then, except: “And how many other demons did you kill, while you looked for your answer? Even though you knew they weren’t sent up from hell—knew they could reason and speak and—”
