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He was a Knight of the Enclaves! A legend! A hero, probably! He was tall, raised on multivitamins and clean meat, and he wore a band of ancient bullets across his chest! Even I felt a faint, stupid awe.
Once upon a time there was a brave knight who was set upon by a demon. In the battle he lost his left ear—and his young wife. The knight vowed on her grave to rid the world of demons.
Another underfed outlander girl, thin and brown in homespun coveralls. Pretty, in the way that anyone who isn’t sick is pretty, but not striking; clever, to be a Secretary at seventeen, but not remarkable.
no one ever notices a shrike.
“North, sir, not far from the dam,” I lied. And then—for one clumsy, careless second—I met Sir John’s eyes. He blinked. “North,” he repeated, mildly, but of course he didn’t believe me. In my eyes he’d seen the truth: that I hated him, and would kill him if I could.
Still, they say demons are spirits freed from hell by the fifth trumpet, along with cancer and microplastics, which slink into people’s souls and change them into monsters.
They hide it at first. So there are pinfeathers pressing out between your ribs: you pluck them. So there’s a second row of teeth coming up through your gums: you pull them. So you’re sick—terribly, mortally sick: you lie. Claws can be hidden in boots, gills beneath thick scarves. You can puke in private, with no one to hold back your hair.
They spoke a dead language and worshipped a dead god, a man suspended gruesomely on two sticks. They gave themselves antiquated names (Ashley, Charlemagne, John) and obscure titles (president, chief operating officer, knight). Finch had tsked her tongue: Nothing grows on a grave while you’re standing on it.
“Who was the demon, to thee? Thy father? Little sister, perhaps? Boyfriend?” I slipped down from the bank and landed barefoot on the dry shale. I did not bother, this time, to make my voice tremble. “Wife.”
“Forgive an old knight. It’s only—thou art twenty? Two and twenty?” Barely seventeen; grief ages you. “The whole of thy life lies ahead of you. Do not waste it on me—or on her memory.”
We learned, after the old world died, not to put our faith in wood pulp or motherboards; the only archive that survives is the one we carry with us.
She came to us as any apocalypse does: slowly at first, and then all at once.
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. I said, on an aching breath, “May.”
“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.” Sir John, apparently unable to decide between pity and fury, did not answer. “Did you see the pattern of her feathers? The mask across her eyes?”
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.
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.
Did he think we didn’t know how many people we lost every year to flash floods and heat waves, COVID and cancer?
“Do you know that shrikes once went by another name, in the Old World? Butcherbirds, they were called.” His voice roughened. “Your mother named you well.”
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.
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—”
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.
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.
“And how many other demons did you kill, while you looked for your answer?
Mothers who wanted to stay near their children, young men who wouldn’t leave their husbands . . .
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.
“Run, Lady Shrike. Once more,” and the last of the light struck his eyes. I saw—or thought I saw—a flash of red. I ran.
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.
