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She moved with a muscled, mesmeric grace, like some ancient god of the woods, back when gods were not dead men but living things, untrustworthy, changeful.
Brutal, maybe, but that’s survival for you.
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.
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.
Why do people change, Sir John? Because they are cursed, pursued, poisoned, trapped, under siege. Because they have to.
Did he think we didn’t know how many people we lost every year to flash floods and heat waves, COVID and cancer?
“Consider the shrike, then. Maybe once, a long time ago, it was a different kind of creature altogether. Maybe it ate seeds and berries, as a good songbird should. But then came a drought or a flood or a famine—the end of the world, to the shrike. Some of them starved, probably, but some of them survived. Some of them changed.”
“Everyone thinks you get sick because you begin to change, but it’s the opposite: you change because you get sick. Because you have to.” I smiled, and knew it was my scavenger’s smile: wide, and full of teeth. “The wheel turns, Sir John, but so do we.”
The Bible and the gun—an old formula, well proved. But we’ve failed. 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.”
Eugenics.... yikes
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.
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.
“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—”
She was antlered again, but more catlike, with a pelt the exact shade of May’s hair (sunlight through sap). She shifted gently in her sleep, antlers branching and dividing, pelt rippling. A row of eyes sprouted down her spine, all of them closed.
I like this description
“She’d changed, and I refused to admit it. I went to her unarmed, defenseless. Well, I was raised in the church, wasn’t I? That’s how a believer proves his love: blindly, on his knees.”
The enclaves were right, to fear demons. They were a new kind of creature, born for a new kind of world. And it would not be easily conquered.
A woman’s scream, high and hoarse. No, not a scream—a wild animal keen. A hawk’s cry, a vixen’s wail, a dog’s howl: a menagerie in mourning, from a single mouth.
Harrow descriptions are wonderful
But I no longer knew her. She’d changed out of all recognition, shed her sick body like a skin and become something else. I could cling to her, like that loyal bride to her groom, until both of us were covered in blood—or I could let her run free. And hope that, one day, I could run after her.
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.
