Malice of Crows

by Lila Bowen

For once, Rhett didn’t mind that Sam’s bedroll was around the other side of the fire. Sam’s sleepy smile and wave across the flames were enough to tell Rhett that Sam was happy for him and glad to give him this time with his family. He would’ve stayed up all night talking with his mama, if Beans hadn’t started yawning his fool head off. The three of them were the last ones awake, and Rhett finally had a jaw-cracker of a yawn himself.

  “Go to bed, Fierce Rabbit,” his mother said through Beans with a fond smile. “You have fought enough for one day.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, settling down against his saddle as she likewise curled into her furs. It was getting cooler now, and he pulled his buffalo coat up to his chin.

  She started singing then, a sweet and liquid lullaby, and Rhett’s heart filled up with a rush of warmth and remembrance, with the strange new feeling of being loved. He was willing to bet this song was the same one Winifred had sung to him in the Cannibal Owl’s lair, the one that taught little children how to seek their second skin and turn. It was the rarest and strangest of gifts, and he went to sleep feeling complete and content.

  It was hard to say good-bye, but destiny was calling. Rhett kept finding excuses to stay around a little longer, fetching water and tying up buffalo meat and trying to give pretty much everything that wasn’t nailed down to his mama while his brother watched, half impressed and half annoyed.

  “His name is Puddin’,” Rhett said to Beans. “They got a word for that?”

  Beans shook his head as he watched the sleek black-and-white paint horse sniff Revenge and stamp a foot. “I guess they got something like Mush.”

  “Well, he won’t answer to that,” Rhett said. “His name ain’t Mush.” He stepped over to Revenge, who held the gelding’s reins, pointed at the horse, and said, “Puddin’. Puddin’. Say it.”

  With Beans’s help, Revenge was calling the horse Puttun, but Rhett figured it was close enough. He was gonna miss the hell out of the stout little paint, who’d carried him all over Durango when Ragdoll was having her day of rest.

  “Check his hooves regular. Make sure he gets some feed. He likes to have his withers scratched.”

  After Beans translated, Revenge barked something back and patted Puddin’s neck.

  “He says he could ride a horse before he was two, and he don’t need your help.”

  Rhett glared at the boy. “Have your people got any rules about brothers getting in a tussle?” he asked.

  Beans shook his head. “Not if it’s in good fun.”

  Rhett snatched the reins from Revenge.

  “Hold the horse,” Rhett said to Beans, and then he jumped on his brother and punched him in the ribs. Revenge shouted something angry, and they were soon rolling around in the dust, kicking and punching and scratching and shouting as the coydog barked and growled excitedly like it was the best thing he’d ever seen. The boy was smaller, but he might’ve been made from stone, he was so lithe and tough. Rhett didn’t want to hurt him, really; just wanted to get out some of their aggression and let the little turkey know he couldn’t sass an elder. He got in a couple of good punches and took one in his bad eye before his mother’s sharp voice broke in, and they both pulled away looking a little sheepish.

  Revenge shouted something that sounded very much like “He started it.”

  “I’ll finish it, too,” Rhett muttered.

  “She says to stop acting like children before you upset the horse,” Beans added.

  When Rhett stood up and dusted himself off, he found his mother holding Puddin’s reins, looking vexed.

  “Sorry, Ma,” he said, and Revenge said something similar.

  Winifred just chuckled. “Now you’re getting the hang of it,” she said.

  Dan just snorted. “If you were a man, Sister, we’d fight like that more often. I suspect your fists are less sharp than your tongue.” When Winifred punched his arm, he winced and chuckled, too.

  Rhett was surprised to find that in the short time they’d been talking horses and brawling, his mother had deconstructed the tent and bunched the wood and skin up into a travois. Now, as they watched, she led Puddin’ over to it, introduced him to the travois, and hooked leather straps around the horse like a harness. Rhett was gratified to see how competent his mama was with horses, and how well Puddin’ took to the strange new burden, and how bruised up his brother was from their tumble. Of course, as he was the same thing Rhett was, the boy would be all healed up within hours with no sign of the dark splotches now painting his arms, chest, and face.

  Soon they stood, two people, a horse, and a now-friendly coydog on one side, Rhett and his posse on the other side. It was a strange enough grouping, but Rhett reckoned it was a good one. Injuns, whites, Irish, Chine, all smiling. Such a scene could never happen in a town like Gloomy Bluebird, and in a place like Lamartine, where Haskell’s Rascals might catch wind of it, it could’ve started a riot. But here, it was just a bunch of folks Rhett liked, mostly respected, and would continue to fight for, even when he’d rather spend another night around the campfire, grinning and sharing buffalo stew.

  It was his turn to talk, so he went with the truth.

  “I’m worried about you-all,” he said, feeling like there wasn’t a damn useful thing to do with his hands.

  “We’re strong,” his mother said through Beans. “We got this far. We will survive.”

  Then Beans spoke for himself. “Me and Notch could stay with ’em. They need people, and we need people. I can teach Revenge some English. Right, Notch?”

  Notch nodded. “Rather stay out here than meet the Rangers, if I’m being honest.”

  Rhett looked them up and down and contemplated the pros and cons. “They got to agree to it. And we’ll give y’all a gun and some bullets. You can keep one of the ponies. But if either of you-all touch my mama, I’ll skin you alive and roll you around in an anthill.” He looked to his mother. “If that suits you.”

  His mother and Beans had a hurried and somewhat awkward discussion that ended up with shrugs. “She says she don’t mind, and she sleeps with a knife, anyway,” Beans said with his usual unflappableness.

  So that was one less thing to worry about. And further proof that when Rhett let the Shadow lead, problems tended to solve themselves one way or another. They’d taken in Beans and Notch, and Beans had served his purpose. The feller had earned his horse.

  Rhett sighed and looked at the dwindling pony herd. “So I guess that’s that.”

  “Be strong, my son,” Rhett’s mother said. She threw a stern look at his brother, urging him to say something.

  “I will find you,” his brother said in halting, practiced English, and Beans gave him a grin, which the boy returned.

  “I hope you will,” Rhett answered, holding out his hand, which his brother took for a punishing, bone-grinding sort of shake that ended in smiles.

  “I guess it’s west, then,” Rhett said, dashing at his eye and wishing the good-byes were already over.

  He gave Puddin’ one last pat and turned away. At the last minute, not really able to stop himself, he threw himself into his mother’s arms for a rough, tight hug that ended with a few hiccupping sobs into her shoulder. She rubbed his back and crooned to him, private quiet things that Beans didn’t need to translate. Rhett knew well enough what she meant. She’d lost him, and she’d found him again at last, and now they were losing each other all over again.

  “I love you, Ma,” he whispered, and he reckoned she said the same thing back in her way.

  And then he was swinging up on Ragdoll’s back and rolling with her walk. He knew damn well that if he turned around to look back, he’d start crying all over again.

  “Good-bye, Ned,” Beans called, and his mother echoed it.

  “Good-bye, you-all,” Rhett called back, a hand up in the air.

  The posse formed up around Rhett, Sam and Dan and Winifred up front and Cora behind with the wagon, silent and lost in her own thoughts. Earl trotted in their wake, more sour than ever.


  “She told me she’s changing her name,” Winifred said, once they were over the next ridge.

  “I never asked her name,” Rhett said, suddenly feeling like a complete ass.

  “It used to be I Will Find Her, but now she’s going to be I Found Him.”

  Rhett kicked his horse and galloped up ahead to cry in private, alone on his horse.

  Rhett glared at seven crows sitting on a skeletal tree, staring right at him with dead stone eyes. His stomach didn’t wobble, but had Trevisan’s birds ever made him feel anything? He couldn’t remember, but he didn’t like the way these smug bastards were staring, like they wished for nothing more than to peck out his remaining eye and swallow it. Had crows always been around, or was he just noticing them now? He pulled out his gun and shot it from his bedroll by the cold fire – not aiming to kill, just to annoy. The birds rose in a screeching clamor and winged up to a higher branch, resettling to fuss with their feathers. His friends sat up, grumbling.

  “It’s not wise to kill crows,” Winifred warned, already awake and returning from the wagon.

  “But it’s just fine to vex them, I reckon,” he shot back.

  He’d felt prickly and standoffish ever since they’d parted ways with his mother and brother and Beans and Notch. It wasn’t that he was sad, exactly. It had, after all, been his quest that had forced their parting. It was more that in as big and dangerous a place as Durango, there was no way to know for certain if he’d ever be able to find them again. Not like he could write up a letter and hand it off to a Pony Express rider and expect a letter back in a week, written out on creamy white paper. He could search his entire goddamn life and never see them again unless the Shadow decided that that was what was needed.

  Rhett sat up and stumbled off to deal with his private needs, and when he came back, Sam offered him a chunk of cold meat, and Winifred rolled a potato from the ashes with a stick, nudging it toward him with a sympathetic smile. Well, hell. If anybody knew what it was like to figure you’d never see your mother again, it was her and Dan. He turned to Sam.

  “Sam, you think you’ll ever go back to Tanasi?”

  Sam shrugged as he ate and looked off toward the rising sun in the east. “No, I don’t reckon I will. Tanasi was getting awful crowded, and the war was making everybody choose sides, and following my brother to Durango seemed like a good idea. It was lonely, for a while, but I guess there are always gonna be fellers to josh around with.” He grinned at Rhett. “It all worked out, far as I can see.”

  Rhett’s heart fluttered, and he felt a blush creeping up, so he rammed some cold meat and hot tater in his mouth to keep himself from saying something awkward. Dan appeared carrying a fat prairie bird by the feet, and Earl wandered up in nothing but his shirt, scratching himself.

  “What about you, Earl? You think you’ll ever go back home?”

  The look Earl gave him showed a level of suspicion Rhett thought they had long ago bypassed. “Of course I can’t go home, ye great idjit. Not only do I have no money nor prospects of making money, but what am I supposed to tell me mam? That I ran away and let wee Shaunie die? Oh, and she’d welcome me home with open arms, then.” He snatched the piece of buffalo Sam held out and added, for emphasis, “Idjit.”

  “You still mad at me, then, donkey-boy?”

  Earl stood, threw the bit of buffalo in the fire, and stomped away.

  “What the Sam Hill?” Rhett asked the group.

  “He’s mad at himself,” Dan said as he began stripping feathers from the bird, which Winifred gathered in an old sack. “But it’s easier to focus the anger on you. You’re stronger. You can take it.”

  “Well, I don’t appreciate that.”

  “He clearly doesn’t care what you appreciate, Rhett.”

  Rhett snorted and watched as Earl stripped, stuck his rust-colored shirt into his old bag, and turned into a donkey.

  “So not only do I have to be the Shadow and get yanked all over the damn place, but now I got to… what? Be the scapegoat? Accept everybody else’s anger? Guilt? Whatever?”

  Dan didn’t even look up from his work. “The weak rely on the strong. That’s the way it’s always been, and that’s the way it will always be.”

  “Gets like that with the Rangers sometimes,” Sam added. “Beg us for help, then get angry when we don’t help the way they wanted.”

  “Just like the dwarves,” Rhett muttered. “Just like Regina.”

  “You’ve never had power before.” Winifred gave him her cutting grin. “It’s easier to have no responsibility and receive no complaints. I was a governess to a town man in Nueva Orleans, and people rang our bell, day and night, with the most foolish requests and grievances.”

  Rhett looked at each of them in turn and wished he’d left Earl behind with Notch and Beans. A feller with a chip on his shoulder made himself a burden, that much was for certain. But he couldn’t forget the good turn Earl had done him when they’d first met, long before Earl had reason to speak against him. Without the Irishman’s help, Rhett might not’ve understood how to move between his skins, between man and bird, nor to accept for certain that he was a man and not the scared little girl he’d been born.

  “Then I reckon he’s my burden to carry,” he grumbled. “But I don’t know how long I can go being fussed at without punching a feller.”

  Winifred laughed at that. “Well, we wouldn’t complain if you punched him. He’s not the best trail companion. When he’s a donkey, he shits all over the place.” As she stood to take a potato to Cora, Rhett could see her travel dress starting to bulge around her belly. How far along was she now? Three months, maybe? Rhett knew plenty about birthing horses and cows and next to goddamn nothing about humans or demigods, so he didn’t have any idea when the critter inside Winifred would see the sun. And he wasn’t about to ask, neither. Seemed downright personal, asking such things. Perhaps he’d ask Dan in a private moment, when the feller wasn’t feeling too preachy.

  Cora next caught his eye, and he considered her. The girl had as much reason to hate him as Earl, but she either didn’t lay the blame at his feet, or she kept her cards closer to her chest. She didn’t seem to want to confide in him just now, he knew that much. And he wasn’t going to press her. The best thing he could do to help her was to move on, following the Shadow’s call back to Las Moras and then on to dealing with Trevisan.

  “You doing all right, Cora?” he asked.

  She looked up, smiled tightly, and said, “Yes, thank you, Ned.”

  And that was all. Whatever else she felt or thought, she didn’t say it, but she looked like a frayed rope, like her mind and heart were somewhere else, and it wasn’t someplace good.

  Rhett frowned and looked at Winifred. “How ’bout you?”

  “I didn’t like vomiting constantly, but it seems like that’s stopped, so I’m much better. I think we’re all ready to get on the road and move forward. Not that we minded yesterday’s stop. It’s just… well, hard to relax, isn’t it?”

  Rhett stood and sniffed the air. She was right, dang it. There was nothing in particular that he could put his finger on, nothing that made the morning peculiar, as it had been before the buffalo herd had arrived. But he’d woken up antsy and still felt that way, even with a good breakfast in his belly. High up in the dead tree, the crows laughed. There were more now, twice as many as before, glossy and black. When Rhett pulled out his gun and shot at them again, the cloud of birds exploded into the air, leaving a sinuous black shape behind.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked as the thing unwound from around the tree’s trunk.

  Even from far away, great yellow eyes bored into Rhett as claws unfurled and the thing stretched out along a branch.

  “We called ’em painters back in Tanasi, but they were brown,” Sam said, his gun cocking.

  “It’s not a shifter,” Winifred said.

  “Must be some kind of monster cat,” Dan confirmed.

  “Well, no shit, Dan,” Rhett snapped
before aiming right between the critter’s eyes and pulling the trigger.

  The giant cat shook its head in annoyance, as if the bullet did no damage. It recovered quickly and slunk down the tree headfirst, long tail curling around the trunk behind it. Rhett figured it had to be the size of a horse, but with shorter legs and much bigger teeth.

  “Winifred and Cora, I respectfully ask that you get the hell out of here, and Sam, please keep your distance while keeping your gun about you,” he said, and before waiting for an answer, he pulled his other gun and unloaded everything he had, hoping to hit the cat’s heart before its feet touched the ground. But again, it was like striking a cloud, like shooting at midnight. Nothing had any effect.

  “Ideas, Dan?”

  “I got nothing, but I’ll try.”

  Dan’s arrow should’ve hit the cat-thing right between the eyes, but it just slipped out the other side to clatter uselessly against some rocks. Dan’s next arrow, aimed perfectly at the thing’s chest, did likewise. As the beast stalked the fifty yards between its tree and the camp, Sam whipped out his Henry and pulled the trigger seventeen times. Seventeen bullets passed through the critter and pinged off the tree and ground behind it.

  “Sam, you go, too. Get out of here. Protect the women, if you can.”

  “I’m a Ranger, Rhett. I’ll stay and fight beside you.”

  As the thing crept closer and closer, haunches up and claws crumbling rocks, Rhett watched Sam standing there like a goddamn golden beacon and shouted, “You got to take care of yourself, Sam! You’re the only one of us who can get broken, and I can’t fight when I’m this worried for you.”

  “I’m not the only one who can get broken, Rhett.” Sam’s voice was ragged with feeling, but his feet were stepping backward, one after the other, as if he just couldn’t deny Rhett at all.

  “Then do it for me. Please.”

  Sam’s eyes met Rhett’s, and he nodded and spun and hotfooted it away, back behind Rhett and Dan, toward the wagon where Cora had already gone. Winifred, damn her, hadn’t budged.

  “Goddammit, Win —”

  The cat wiggled its tail and sprang right for Rhett, and time seemed to slow as it flew through the air, paws outstretched, black claws curled and murderous. Rhett grabbed his Bowie knife and slashed right up with it as the beast hit him, knocking him onto his back and slamming the air from his lungs. Perhaps it couldn’t be shot, but the creature’s weight was real, as was its rancid death breath. Its claws sunk into Rhett’s shoulders, its mouth open and teeth angling for his throat. He caught its face in his hands, digging his fingers into the soft fur and slashing for its eyes with his thumbs. It growled and spat and tucked its head against him.