More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She was not ready for this family of maniacs to go chasing after Blueberry. That bear had never cursed anyone. If she could, she would’ve used it on trout.
“So the wyrm fucks the bear? I didn’t realize it was a kinky monster. Maybe it does take a bear shape sometimes, to have fun.”
The hall went as quiet as a rabbit the instant it realized it was too late to escape.
She wasn’t kind because of some angelic virtue. It was insecurity. It was an adaptation to cruelty.
Shesheshen wrapped her arms around Homily and held her to her chest for a moment, mourning the realization that she’d fallen in love with someone’s pain.
The garlic didn’t frighten Shesheshen. In fact, what remained of her olfactory passages reported that Isabeau smelled appetizing.
Gilles-René asked, “Can the wyrm mimic voices?” Nobody heard Shesheshen say, “Sometimes.”
Malik yelled a question, and it was utterly inaudible. If he repeated himself, Shesheshen couldn’t hear it. Everyone was fixated on Rourke’s torchlight and the monster that wasn’t there. They didn’t realize what was behind them. Should Shesheshen have felt bad about this?
Homily refused to yield, standing in front of Shesheshen. She stuck a hand into the urn, then smeared rosemary oil down her face. Shesheshen tried to warn her that this wasn’t that monster. “Do not!” But Homily slapped another palmful of the oil across the scale mail of Shesheshen’s top. Its vapors stung her eyes, and she tried to shield them with a hand.
Underneath her skirt, she had something vaguely resembling a leg, still badly in need of bones. She groped around for any rods or unused chair legs.
“So often, I don’t know what else to do other than give. It’s like I won’t exist if I don’t do something.”
The campgrounds were a mess of fallen boughs and timbers so profound that captains were unsure if missing people had deserted or lay dead under the coverage. Birds had the audacity to return their twittering and singing to the trees.
Homily came trotting out, hands twisting in front of her, eyes down. That typical way of averting eye contact failed her today, since her mother was lying in a crater.
The Baroness had an army, so her daughter deserved a monster.
All Shesheshen could do for Homily was be patient with her, and make space for her, and eventually, one day behind her back, eat her mother.
“Maybe we should introduce your mother to the monster.” Homily ran the backs of two fingers along Shesheshen’s cheek. “You don’t have to be funny all the time, you know?”
This damned anxiety was worse than kissing.
There had to be another way. A way to suppress the eggs, at least until Homily knew the whole story and could have an opinion on parenthood. She didn’t even like kissing. This could not be sprung on her.
Any gods, above or below, they were surely laughing at how badly love had undone her.
“About time you showed up. Are you finished fucking yet?”
Homily would die for a family with Shesheshen because a lifetime of slowly dying for her own family had fooled her into thinking this was right.
She said, “I cannot stop you from going. No matter how much it would destroy me to lose you, you will go?” It was equal parts statement and question.
How funny it would be for the Wulfyres to get their wish and exterminate her, without ever knowing it.
Their entire little love story was built out of things that Shesheshen had to take back. How did words explain something like this?
“I want to be with you. I know some of your kindness comes from pain. Scabs mistaken for flesh. I want to live long enough to see you heal. You are more than your pain. You are made of resolve. You deserve more than your family gives you. You deserve more than my deceptions. If you want, I will leave. If you don’t want to share a bed. If you don’t trust my companionship. I will leave. To never return. But you need to know about your family, first. About your mother. And we do not have much time.”
Shesheshen froze, with teeth clamped into the cleft between two vertebrae. She didn’t have the words to start a conversation about this. “Oh. Oh.” Homily turned away as though she’d walked in on lovers. “I didn’t. Well. What?”
“You want to know if I’m mad that the woman, or the monster . . . or . . . or, the person that I like is eating my sister’s remains?”
Doesn’t rosemary kill you?” “It is highly poisonous. I let it poison me.” “Why?” Despite herself, Shesheshen looked down. “I wanted to impress you.”
“You want me to name you, and you don’t care what? The puddle of my girlfriend’s parts doesn’t care so long as I talk to her?”
Shesheshen did not see how she was funny. Perhaps this human woman was just deranged from grief.
“I did not know, either. I did it when I was full of meat, and thinking about you.”
There was no deception to keep her safe from whatever Homily thought of her. If she wanted to be in love, then she had to grow used to it.
There was one question that she needed to work out. Even as a pile of organs and scrap, it prickled at her. She asked, “Do love stories often end this way?” Homily stroked her side from over the cloak. “Why do you think it’s over?”
Shesheshen tried to speak in kind. “Surely we will overcome,” she said, and handed the basket of egg cakes to the love of her life.
“You think you are self-conscious. I am used to eating alone. I have no idea how civilized people eat with their mouths closed. Is it a performance art?”
Blueberry was hesitant to let Homily near her at first, and grunted at the sting of medicine over where the skewers had bitten her hide. By the end, Blueberry let the human ride on her back, and Homily got the hell stung out of her when the two stole a beehive for the honey.
Shesheshen tickled her mercilessly for that one. She grew whole arms dedicated to revenge.
Shesheshen said, “I do not have use for books. Speaking is hard enough. Reading would be unbearable. I might die.”
“I love you,” said Homily, backing out through the door with a hand over her heart. They were the right words. They wouldn’t have been if Shesheshen had said them, and they were right, all the same and instantly, because Homily had said them. Anything she said was the right thing.
