An Enchantment of Ravens

by Margaret Rogerson

I hunger for the shadow that falls diagonally across my subject’s collar, the fine lighter filaments in his hair ablaze like thread-of-gold. My mind and hand become possessed. I paint not because I want to, not because I’m good at it, but because it is what I must do, what I live and breathe, what I was made for.

When Rook wasn’t there, I thought about him. During our sessions, my heart pounded as though I’d just run a mile. I tossed and turned half the night, tortured by the cipher of his unpaintable eyes, driven restless and half-wild by the moonlight spilling through my window, which I swore was brighter than any moon preceding it. This must be what the awakening of spring was like, I thought. I was alive in a way I never had been before, in a world that no longer felt stale but instead crackled with breathless promise.

Walking along a blade’s edge was only fun until the blade stopped being a metaphor.

But isn’t absurdity part of being human? We aren’t ageless creatures who watch centuries pass from afar. Our worlds are small, our lives are short, and we can only bleed a little before we fall.

An autumn fragrance surrounded me, engulfed me, underlain with a wild, masculine but not-quite-human smell that at once comforted me and settled like molten gold deep in my body, melted and poured into a crucible.

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“Rook,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady, “before I get up, you have to promise to never touch me again without my permission.” “I can touch whomever I please.” “Have you ever stopped to think that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should?”

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And I knew that if I did nothing, in another moment he’d be gone. I would be free. I could escape—or at least try. But I thought of the forest cathedral, the scarlet leaves sifting down in silence. The look on his face when he’d transformed into a raven in my parlor. The smell of change on the wild wind, and the way he had let me turn his head, his eyes on mine full of sorrow. All those wonders crumbling to dust, without a trace of them left in the world.

Gadfly’s pale gaze flicked to me. “Make no mistake, it’s a small price to pay for the power and beauty of immortality. Yet it does make one wonder, doesn’t it? Why do we desire, above all other things, that which has the greatest power to destroy us?”

“You aren’t weak,” I said. I knew no one had ever told him that before in all the long centuries of his life. “The ability to feel is a strength, not a weakness.”

“There’s something running around in the field,” she announced in a would-be-casual voice. She turned around with an exaggerated shrug to show she wasn’t afraid, even though I could see her shaking from across the room. “I bet it’s the Alder King and he’s here to kill you and eat you because you’re stupid.”

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Our laughter carried across the darkened yard, past the chicken house full of sleeping hens, the red-leafed oak, and the autumn wheat whispering in the field, half cropped for harvest. The wild wind swept our voices all the way to the forest, where crickets sang a new song to the crescent moon.