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To grieve as I have grieved is unseemly; the wheel turns, and we do not cling, howling, to the rim.
I missed a second time. Swore, viciously. “But you’re old!” Sir John lifted both his palms, affable, almost apologetic: “How dost thou think I became so?”
A patchwork monster. A nonsense of scales and fur which bore no resemblance to the girl I’d loved or the woman I’d married. Except, of course, that I loved her.
“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.”
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.
O!!!!! O k
Why do people change, Sir John? Because they are cursed, pursued, poisoned, trapped, under siege. Because they have to.
Finch always said there were certain places where it was easier to tell stories, and to hear them: around a fire at night, in the mist at dawn, on a porch at dusk. In-between places, balanced on the border between familiar and strange.
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.
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.
Nothing grows on a grave while you’re standing on it.
But she’d been willing to kill for me, and so she must have loved me, after all. As I loved May, as Sir John loved his wife, as God loved the world: with blood on our hands.
Well, I was raised in the church, wasn’t I? That’s how a believer proves his love: blindly, on his knees.”
That’s how a knight proves his love: on a pile of corpses.”
Isn’t this how an outlander proves his love—by dying young?
“I’m sorry you couldn’t change her back.” The knight made a sound that might have been a laugh, in a man with two working lungs. “It was never her I wanted to change.”
Once upon a time there was a knight who married a demon. He loved her so much that he held tight to her even as she changed in his arms, even as her talons tore through muscle and cartilage. He held her so long that she fell in love with him, or remembered that she loved him already. And because she loved him, she kept herself to a single shape, though it chafed like the bars of a cage. So the knight and the demon walked the world, never together, never apart, waiting for the day one of them would cease to be what they were.
They chased and changed above me, knight and demon, husband and wife, shifting like clouds in strong wind, and then wheeled together, toward the horizon.
