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It didn’t matter that his armor—sewn of fine black tire treads, steel corded—was cracked with age, or that the lapped saw blades of his pauldrons were badly rusted. It didn’t even matter that he was old—crazy old, maybe even fifty.
In the battle he lost his left ear—and his young wife. The knight vowed on her grave to rid the world of demons. He never again returned to his enclave, but scoured the outlands ever after, a hawk on his arm and hate in his heart.
May had always said my name suited me: no one ever notices a shrike.
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?”
the markings of a songbird—a common one around here, often mistaken for a catbird or a chickadee. You might not have noticed it at all. No one ever notices a shrike, she used to say.” I paused to swallow a wild laugh. “Until it’s too late.”
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.
Then came the older stories, stranger and more fantastic, with no obvious moral. Once upon a time there was a doctor who was poisoned by radiation and became a great green-skinned giant.
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.
Finch always said every good tale repeats itself at least once; it made them easier to remember.
Nothing grows on a grave while you’re standing on it.
“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.”
