The Knight and the Butcherbird

by Alix E. Harrow

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.

To grieve as I have grieved is unseemly; the wheel turns, and we do not cling, howling, to the rim.

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.

I said, “No,” but I don’t know why; Mayapple Coal had never done a thing I told her to.

She came to us as any apocalypse does: slowly at first, and then all at once.

A leg, emerging from the trees: many jointed, plated in scales, ending in a cloven hoof. An elk’s long, sloping throat. A vixen’s skull beneath a wild crown of antlers. Moss and torn vines hung from the antlers like the veil of some mad bride. Behind the veil, her eyes gleamed a wet, arterial red. 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.

Sir John pressed the rifle harder into my jaw and said, “Shut the hell up,” in perfectly ordinary commontongue. I wondered, suddenly, how long it had been since he’d returned to Cincinnati. If he was even a true enclaver any longer, or if all his years in the outlands had changed him into something else.

Eleven years of square meals and soap have civilized me somewhat, but I still keep a pack beneath my bed, just in case: cornmeal, dried venison, a good knife, a jar of mead. Everything I need to survive. May knew what I was; she’d found my pack when we were kids. But she hadn’t pitied me or mocked me. She’d only asked if I would take her with me when I ran. And I said yes—easily, honestly—because by then she had become one of the things I needed to survive.

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...

Why do people change, Sir John? Because they are cursed, pursued, poisoned, trapped, under siege. Because they have to.

“Yes,” said Sir John, so harshly that he escaped the bounds of parentheses and entered the story proper.

Clever!!!!

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.

I wondered sometimes whether she’d really adopted me because I had brains, or just because I had a pulse.

“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.”

Priests, to call them demons, and knights, to slay them. The Bible and the gun—an old formula, well proved.

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.

A grand and prosperous place, I’d once thought, where everyone had enough to eat even in winter. But now I saw it as Finch and Sir John did: a dying place. A scrounging, desperate town full of sickly, short-lived people, where burials were more common than births.

But a woman’s voice answered him, high and slightly hoarse. “Ah, John,” she said, and I could tell from those two syllables that she knew him as May knew me: inside and out, to the bone, to the end. “Fuck you.” Sir John laughed. It sounded like gravel on glass. “Fuck you, too, my love.”

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.

Finch had flung herself between us, pistol gripped in both hands, barrel aimed straight at May’s skull. Finch was old, but still fast. I was faster. I swung my hammer without thinking, without hesitating, and Finch’s shot went wide. I’m sorry, I told her afterward, over and over, it was an accident. But the head of my hammer was buried neatly in her temple; good aim, for an accident.

Finch had never been very affectionate with me—I was her apprentice more than her daughter. 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.

The snake swelled, grew legs and claws. A dragon’s head with a lipless mouth, which said: “What the hell have you done to him?” “Crushed a bunch of Finch’s sleeping pills into the mead. Figured it was sweet enough to cover the taste. I planned to smash in his skull while he slept, but I don’t think my wife would like it. And neither would his.” I gave her a small, respectful bow, and hoped she wouldn’t kill me. She must love Sir John very much, to stay prisoner to him. “Anyway, I owe him. I’d planned to cut and run, but now . . .” I tipped my face toward the tangled black woods, where May was waiting. “Now I know I don’t have to run alone.”

Well, I was raised in the church, wasn’t I? That’s how a believer proves his love: blindly, on his knees.”

In his face I saw my own lonely, barren future. Not a life, really, but only a long wait.

“You’d have made a hell of a knight, butcherbird.” It was not a compliment, but only a grudging recognition: like for like.

The knight smiled. It was the smile of a saint at the stake, unafraid, certain of what came next.

He said, “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.

I’d decided, as I walked back down the mountain, alone, that Sir John had it wrong. An outlander doesn’t prove her love by dying young, but by living as long as she can. She eats berries grown in bad earth and licks the poison from her lips; she makes her wedding bed from barbed wire and cinder blocks; she falls in love at the end of the world. And when death comes for her—too soon, too fucking soon—she becomes something else. Something that survives.

For centuries the enclaves have taught us to mourn the old world and fear the new one. They told us Bible stories and demon tales, sent out knights and priests. There’s nothing more dangerous, they said, than change. A single Secretary in the ass end of the outlands won’t undo all that—but I can pick at the seams, tell different stories. I can tell them of the shrike, who changed because she had to, and the sick bride, who did the same. I can tell them to mistrust the church and to leave their offerings in the hills, instead, for the strange new creatures that live there. If the kings come with their armies, we will have something better than hammers on our side.

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.

Before I go, I’ll tell Iron Hollow how that story ends. I’ll tell them what I saw as I walked down the mountain that day. The sun had slipped behind the ridge, and the sky was fevered, hectic red. I heard a strange cry and looked up. A pair of hawks circled above me. No, perhaps they were gulls or bats—angels or dragons, or every beast that has ever heralded the end of one world and the beginning of another. One of them was graceful, confident, slipping purposefully from one form to another, and the other was clumsy, as if unused to himself. I heard a woman’s laugh.