Rest now my children
For soon we'll away
Into the calm and the quiet
✧
I
t is so cold that the longer I stand here, buffeted by snow and ice and wind, the more I start to envy the little grey carcass.At least you don't feel cold, I think down towards it, as it lies still and sad at my hooves.
I know that dead things can't feel emotions, but since I was young I'd often imagined the animals Elder gave me to dissect as having various feelings, various protestations, as I rooted gingerly around its stomach or lungs or pink, shiny intestines.
I was always careful because of this—I couldn't cut open intestines to look inside, because the marmot would be sad; I couldn't peel apart a heart to count its ventricles, because the hare would be angered. I never told Elder or Ma about these practices of mine because I'd been raised wise enough to know that some things, even amongst blood, must stay secrets.
Carefully, I skirt around all thoughts of Rook, focusing instead on the carcass and the girl made of snow and blood.
I frown when I see that she's younger than me. Her limbs are knobbier, when I look at them closer, and her coat still wears traces of reddish foal-fuzz. I peer over her thin shoulders. Where is her mother?
When I was her age, Ma had never let me so much as step outside alone. She was always besides me, stroking my head, braiding my hair, asking me over and over and over: are you hungry, little bird? are you hungry? I would tell her yes, sometimes, even when I wasn't, just to see her break into a smile of relief. (Just to get her to leave me alone.)
But there are no shadows lingering between the snowcapped trees, because she is motherless, or maybe wandered too far away from one. Anyway I am not going to offer to help her look. I am not that type of a girl. I am preparing to open my mouth to tell her this until—
"All the dead belong to me."
The girl of snow and blood steps closer to me, and suddenly, I am chilled. It is not the bite of the bone-cold winter. It is not even the stink of the carcass below me. I can't tell what it is, at first, until I snake my nose forwards and look carefully inside her dark liquid eyes to see—
Nothing. There is nothing in them. They are like a doll's, with painted on irises.
I swallow. As empty as a shell, Ma had whispered to me once, when I was very small, when she had thought me incapable of understanding. But I had understood. All I can do, I know, is rattle.
But when I stare at the girl wearing my painted-on eyes, I am chilled.
My voice is hard and glinting like packed snow when I ask her, snidely, “All of them?” She steps forwards again and I clench my teeth when I hear the slice slice slice of her tail.
“That isn't true.” My eyes flick back, as much of a warning as I can give (because she is younger than me and doesn't know better) before I right them again. “The dead,” I say slowly, “are empty things. You cannot even eat them, like a wolf.” My eyes are dark beneath my flipped-up mask. What I don't say is that I am a dead thing, given back a patched-up soul.
What I don't say is that I surely do not belong to her.
If I had seen her make the carcass twist back its broken neck, and shift a snowy increment closer to her, I would've stamped my hoof down on the carcass's ribcage to ruin it before she could make it hers.
But I don't.
Instead, I am whispering very quietly in my head: Rook. (Somewhere in the forest, a black stag's head lifts, and branches crack to splintery pieces beneath his swift hooves.)
And then—
I lift my chin and flip my mask back over my head. “And who are you, to tend to them instead?” My breath steams the silent air in white, billowy clouds. Beneath the darkness of my mask, I smile. It is my turn now to press forwards, to tap-tap-tap my beak to her velvet nose.
Who am I? (I am Skyweaver's severed head Ma's shredded-up soul Elder's dead-eyed magic. A girl named Bird. More Bird than Girl; more girl than she would like to be.)
“Will you believe me,” I whisper to her, my voice like sparrows chuckling in an empty glen, “if I tell you that I am a dead thing come back to life?”
Beneath the mask, my breath is warm, and I am no longer chilled.
