Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

The next time went better for me, and the time after that. It became a great dance, a wild game, to see how close I could get to him, how little I could twist away and remain out of reach, just beyond his balance point. He was heavier than me, differently muscled: It taught me to go beyond strength and look instead for the instant of instability, the moment when I could make him overreach himself. It was exhilarating to enter into his dangerous space and to turn his weapons against him; it was delicious to be most safe when I was closest to my enemy. I didn’t notice my hurts anymore, except when parts of me stopped working. Then I would retreat to my corner by the cottage fire, sipping comfrey tea and reliving each moment, sucking whatever learning I could from the memory of each blow. My body and his became the whole of my world.

And the world was changing. I got those last two inches of growth and my body flung itself frantically into adulthood. I suppose it must have been happening all along underneath the sweat and the bruises and the grinding misery. But now that I was noticing it, it seemed to have come upon me all at once, and it was a different feeling from the days when Ad’s smile could make me feel impossibly clever. This was the lust I’d seen at the dark edges of the village common after the harvest celebration, the thing of skin and wordless noise. No one had told me it would feel like turning into an arrow from the inside out and wanting nothing more than something to sink myself into. Sometimes it was so strong that I would have thrown myself on the next person I met, if only there had been anyone who wouldn’t have thrown me right back. But there was no one. I could only burn and rage and stuff it all back into the whirlwind inside me: make myself a storm.

And so one day I finally won, and it was Tom who lay on one elbow, spitting blood. When the inside of his mouth had clotted, he said, “Well.” Then we were both silent for a while.

“Well,” he said later.

And: “You’ll be fine now. You’re a match for anyone, the way you fight. It’s okay to let you go now. You’ll be safe.”

And then he began to cry. When I bent over him to see if he was hurt more badly than I thought, he gripped my arm and kissed me. He did not stop me when I pulled away, and he did not try to hide his tears. I didn’t understand then what kind of love it is that kills itself to make the beloved safe: I only knew that my world had shaken itself apart and come back together in a way that did not include me anymore.

I told my mother that night that I would leave in a week. She did not speak, and all I could say over and over was “I have to go,” as if it were an apology or a plea. Later as I sat miserably in front of the fire, she touched the back of my head so softly that I wasn’t sure if I was meant to feel it. Her fingers on my hair told me that she grieved, and that her fear for me was like sour milk on the back of her tongue, and that in spite of it all she forgave me for becoming myself, for growing up into someone who could suddenly remind her of how she got me. I had traded scars and bruises with the village kids for years, but never before had I hurt someone I loved just by being myself; and in one day I had done it to the only two people left to me. I felt my world hitch and shake like a wet dog, and my choices fell over me like drops of dirty water: none of them clean.

I set off early, just past dawn. Over breakfast, my mother said, “Here’s a thing for you,” and handed me a long bundle. When I unwrapped it, the lamplight flickered across the blade inside and my mother’s sad and knowing eyes.

“Don’t look at me,” she said. “That Tom Homrun brought it around three days past and said I wasn’t to give it to you until you were leaving.”

There was no scabbard. I made a secure place for the sword in my belt, across my left hip.

“Feel like a proper soldier now, I expect,” my mother said quietly.

“I just feel all off balance,” I told her, and she smiled a little.

“You’ll be all right, then.” She nodded, then sighed, stood up, fussed with my slingbag. “I’ve put up some traveling food for you. And a flask of water as well, you never know when the next spring might be dry.”

I tried to smile.

“Which way are you heading?”

“East. In-country.”

She nodded again. “I thought you might head west.”

“Mum!” I was shocked. “Those are our enemies.”

“You’ve had more enemies here than ever came out of the west, child,” she said. “I just wondered.”