He grinned at me, and I got the impression I hadn’t fooled him at all. “I’ll divvy it up while you ‘visit the woods.’” He didn’t do the falsetto mimic, but his tone still conveyed that he found my euphemism amusing.
When I returned, he handed me a bowl. He must’ve cleaned them at some point since last night, and I tried not to feel guilty for not doing it. The bowl held a pile of meat, some of it still on little bones. All right then. “What kind of animal is this?” I asked, not really wanting to know. Really it would be nicer if it didn’t look like an animal at all.
“Rabbit.” Zyr chewed his enthusiastically. “Nice fat one, too.”
Oh. What had he done with the rest of it? No, strike that question. I didn’t want to know.
“I’d give you crusts of bread, but we don’t have any,” Zyr commented while I stalled.
“If I’d known about this, I’d have brought more food,” I retorted.
“We need to save what we have, in case the hunting isn’t so easy next time.”
Steeling myself, I closed my eyes and plucked up a piece of it and chewed. It tasted quite good. Bright like sunshine and fresh like clover. If you forgot it had been a rabbit.
“It’s still a rabbit even if you don’t look at it,” Zyr observed.
“Yes, but I can pretend it’s roast something else.”
“Which was an animal first, too,” he pointed out with remorseless logic.
I opened my eyes to glare at him. “Why doesn’t it bother you? You’ve lived as animals like fish and rabbits—it seems like you’d be even more sympathetic.”
He shook his head, looking thoughtful. “Predator at heart, remember? And animals, herbivore or whatever, aren’t much given to sympathy. Eat or be eaten, so it’s better to eat.”
“Oh.” I chewed some more and swallowed. “What does the gríobhth eat?”
His eyes glinted and his face took on a sharper cant. “Anything I want to,” he said, and his voice almost hissed.
“Because that’s not terrifying,” I muttered, hastily looking at my bowl, which seemed much more soothing in contrast.
“I didn’t mean to scare you.” Zyr sounded contrite—and a little alarmed. “Did I scare you—really? Karyn?”
“Not like waking up with a panther in my face did, but it’s… unsettling when you start to look and sound like the gríobhth when you’re still a person.”
He stilled. “Did I do that?”
“Don’t you know?”
He shook his head. Then shrugged elaborately, as if shaking it off, but his eyes looked troubled. “It’s not always clear, from this side, no. Especially with the gríobhth. That form has a brain big enough that I still think like I do in human form. I don’t feel all that different between the two. Except for certain… instincts.”
I suppressed a shiver, remembering Andi’s cautions. Maybe this was part of what had them worried.
“That’s part of why I don’t eat as an animal, unless I’m desperate,” he added in a more conversational tone. “And why I teach the kids that. The more you give over to the animal form’s instincts—and eating is a core instinct—the more you think like the animal instead of a person.”
“Aren’t things like breathing, sleeping, and flying core instincts, too?”
“Aha.” He waggled a bone at me, then stripped meat off of it with teeth still too sharp to be human. “Yes, but those are necessary. Or you’d die.”
“If you don’t eat, you’d die, too. As you keep bothering me about.”
“True, but that’s why we don’t stay in animal form too long. Like with Zynda—she shifted into the hummingbird to live, but she stayed in that form too long. She slept and ate and healed as the bird for days. No one around her understood shapeshifters. That mossback lover of hers didn’t know better. We’re lucky she came back at all.” He sounded uncharacteristically bleak, a glimpse of those melancholy shadows under the trickster nature.
“You don’t like him?”
Zyr shrugged, staring at his bowl of little bones as if he’d like to eat those, too. “He’s all right for a mossback.”
“Which doesn’t mean much, since ‘mossback’ is an insult.”
He glanced up at me, a little surprised. “No, not really.”
But he didn’t sound certain, so I knew I had him. “And you called me ‘mossbackiest of mossbacks,’ so that was extra insulting.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he protested.
“When you call someone a ‘mossback,’ it’s because they’re so rooted to one form that moss could grow on them, like a rock, right?” I pressed on when he didn’t have an immediate reply. “So you meant that I’m rigid and unchanging, even more than a rock.”
He smiled weakly. “I meant Dasnarians, not you.”
“I am Dasnarian!” I flung out my hands, exasperated with him now.
“Aren’t Dasnarians people who live in Dasnaria?” he asked, cocking his head a little.
“Of course,” I snapped, not seeing the trap until too late.
“But you don’t live in Dasnaria,” he crowed in triumph. “Thus you are not Dasnarian. You are another thing entirely. You shapeshifted!”
I shook my head at his antics and handed him my bowl. “You can have the rest—really. I’m full.”
I watched him eat, wondering if I dared ask him what I wanted to. “Do you hate mossbacks because they imprisoned you?”
He looked up from the bowl, eyes dark, face set. “It didn’t help my opinion of the breed, no. And before you chastise me, as my king did, I’m well aware that those mossbacks—the ones led by mad tyrant Uorsin, murderer of Salena—are not the same as all mossbacks.”
“Your cousins’ father killed their mother?” I clarified.
Looking bemused, chewing his meat, he nodded, then swallowed. “You don’t sound shocked.”
I lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “It’s not that unusual for kings to murder their queens, especially the tyrants.”
“Dasnaria,” he muttered, “what a place it must be.”
“I’ll point out that your tale of murderous marriage does not take place in Dasnaria.”
“True. But Ordnung is just as bad. Or was,” he amended. “My cousin may be many things, but she’s not a half bad high queen. I imagine she’s cleaned up the place. She eliminated the dungeon, so that’s a start.”
A dungeon. “Was it terrible?” I ventured to ask.
He set the bowl down, still with a few pieces of meat in it, and contemplated me. “You look so sweet and innocent, asking me that with your pretty blue eyes wide. So extraordinary.”
“Almost all the Tala have blue eyes, or gray-blue,” I replied, feeling myself color self-consciously.
“Yes and no. Not your shade of blue, like the sky in the morning, all fresh and dewy, before it gets hot. Soft and deep, rich and full of innocent promise.”
“I’m hardly innocent.”
“You’re a virgin,” he reminded me, picking up the bowl again.
I set my teeth. “Yes, but you called me innocent twice, and not about that.”
He sighed and stared into the bowl. “No and yes, gréine. The dungeon itself wasn’t pleasant, but neither was it terrible. Being imprisoned though…” He lifted his head, and when he met my eyes, his had gone stark and haunted. “I hated it,” he said quietly. “Being trapped. Stuck. If I’d had to spend more than a day or so, I think I’d have gone mad.”
I gazed back at him, uncertain what to say to that, how to comfort him for something that happened long before I met him. But he shook himself before I could think of what to say, giving me a crooked smile that did little to cover the raw pain he clearly still felt.
“But that’s in the past,” he said, speaking my own thoughts, but not meaning them sincerely, I sensed. “We should get going.”
“All right.” Finger-combing the mess of my hair, I separated it into three sections behind my head and swiftly braided it. At least I’d done that so many times
I could do it in the dark.
Zyr eyed me dolefully, finishing the meat in my bowl. “Do you have to? It’s so pretty loose. I love how wildly it tumbles, like ocean waves and eddies.”
I didn’t know how to take that. “It gets in the way of my bow.”
“Ah. Well, that is important.” He considered me. “We forgot to drill you in shooting from my back last night. We should do that before we go.”
The sun tipped over the horizon, spilling light over the verdant, apparently uninhabited landscape. “I thought you wanted to get going, to map more coastline.”
“I do.” He finished the last of the meat. “But this is important. I have a feeling we’ll meet trouble today.” He frowned into the distance, as if he saw something.
I shivered a second time. “Can you see the future?” I asked tentatively.
His eyes came back to mine and focused, a deeper blue. Then he shrugged—extra elaborately, to my eye—and grinned. “Not really.”
Somehow, I didn’t believe him.
“Besides, we might as well take advantage of having a peaceful place to practice, with this nice hill for taking off and landing.” He uncoiled to his feet and pulled me to mine. “Come on, it’ll be fun!”
It was not fun.
Once we’d cleaned up the campsite, doused the fire and packed up our things, Zyr shifted into gríobhth form. I must have been getting accustomed to my highly strange life, because the sight didn’t unsettle me.
Or maybe waking to a black panther breathing in my face had set a new standard for strange.
I strapped our packs onto his back, feeling more practiced at it this time, then made sure I had my bow, quiver, and daggers easily accessible before I mounted. I’d stowed the mapsticks we’d already categorized in a separate bag in our packs and had the next batch of most-likelies in a pocket of my skirt. Zyr wanted me to practice exactly as I’d be midair. He’d been unusually insistent—even serious, but clearly being careful not to give me orders—so I went along.
Not that I’d mustered the spine to outright defy him yet, or even argue all that convincingly.
Once on his back, I practiced as we’d agreed, with him on the ground and me pulling an arrow from my quiver, drawing and shooting at whatever target I picked as Zyr pivoted and ran about. That was relatively easy, not so different from archery on horseback, and I’d pinned any number of apples—and apple-eating birds—that way.
I retrieved my second-best arrows, that I’d used for practice, and remounted. Then Zyr spread his wings, and I began shooting. Every arrow went wild. I didn’t hit one target. Finally Zyr turned his head around—almost completely reversed, like an owl looking backwards, which was creepy—and gave me a hot glare. He didn’t even need to speak.
“I am trying,” I protested. “I don’t want to hit your wings.”
Abruptly, Zyr shifted back to human form, dumping me on the ground in a pile of upended skirts and our packs. He, of course, looked all neat and tidy—but the hot blue glare hadn’t changed from one form to the next. “There’s no point in you shooting at all, if you’re so afraid of hitting me that you can’t hit anything else.”
I scrambled to my feet, embarrassed enough to return the glare. If nothing else, I’d at least had my skill with the bow and arrow. Now I’d lost even that. “Then there’s no point in my shooting from your back. We’re agreed.”
“So you’re just going to sit like a lump on my back if we’re attacked? You’d be dead weight, making it difficult for me to fight back and you not helping at all!” He waved his hands as if fending off hoards of imaginary attackers.
“I never wanted to come along on this mission,” I retorted. “You and I both know I’m only here to keep me from spying on anything important, because you people are too kind to simply kill or imprison me.”
He leaned in, eyes sparking with predatory glitter, face sharp. “The Tala are many things, gréine, but we are not kind. You’re along because Queen Andromeda saw that you’d play a role. So, pony up and get better at it.”
“This isn’t even my war!” I protested. “I don’t want a role. I only ever wanted a normal life.”
“Don’t be a fool,” he hissed, sounding very like the gríobhth if he could speak in that form. “This war will engulf us all. All the people who just want normal, peaceful lives will have to fight anyway. The point is to act despite that, to fight instead of cringing and hiding. After it’s done, we can think about having normal lives. Let’s try again. Do better this time.”
“It’s hard with your wings in the way,” I complained.
“Of course it’s hard.” He rolled his eyes at me, reminding me of Andi. “We wouldn’t be practicing if it wasn’t difficult.”
“If you talk to your students this way, I’m surprised they learn anything,” I spat.
Unexpectedly, he grinned. “Then you’d be surprised. Besides, you’re not a child, are you?” He nodded when I didn’t reply. “Don’t expect me to treat you like one.”
“Fine,” I bit out.
“Karyn,” he said, more gently. “We’re all afraid. Don’t let the fear win. You’re giving up before you’ve even started.”
That took me aback. I hadn’t though of how I felt as fear, exactly. But it explained that hollow loneliness inside, the perpetual sensation of being unprotected, unable to feed myself, to be useful in the smallest ways. I’d always thought I’d have a man to take care of me—my father and brothers, my husband—and now I had no one. Not even this mercurial shapeshifter who yelled at me to do better. Had Jenna felt like this on her escape? Surely she had. I only wished I knew if things had turned out well or badly for her.
“Are you really afraid?” I asked tentatively, more than half expecting his scorn.
But he only cocked his head. “Of course. There’s no shame in it. Only idiots and crazy people aren’t afraid when faced with an enemy like Deyrr. They’re a plague upon the world—and particularly upon my people—for hundreds of years, maybe thousands. My race faces final extinction, either fast from the enemy or slow because we can’t breed viable children. One of my sisters is pregnant yet again and this one is likely to kill her, as close as she came to dying with the last several she tried to birth. My other sister has gone to take Final Form so she might be lost to me forever. None of us have progeny, so our branch of the family line will be gone soon regardless. And if I don’t get killed in this war outright, I face the enticing possibility of final imprisonment where my very spirit will be trapped and bled forever. How under Moranu’s bright gaze could I not be afraid?”
I suddenly did feel like a child, selfish and self-absorbed. None of that had occurred to me. Zyr always seemed so playful, carefree and as if he took nothing seriously. Clearly what he showed on the surface covered a great deal of pain beneath.
“I’m sorry,” I offered.
“Don’t apologize,” he snarled.
“I wasn’t apologizing,” I snarled right back. “I was offering sympathy. It’s not my fault that your stupid Common Tongue uses the same words for different things!”
He blinked at me, slow and steady, losing some of the wildness. Maybe that signaled a kind of recentering in him, that long blink. “You’re right. But it’s not my stupid language. In Tala you could separate the feelings.” He smiled a little. “Your sympathy is appreciated. I should’ve said so right off. This… isn’t stuff I normally talk about.”
No, I could see that. “Why did you?”
Cocking his head, he looked at me thoughtfully. “I don’t know. You get under my skin, making cracks so things I keep inside spill out.”
A strange energy zinged between us, like fire and ice at once, singing in my ears. I felt like touching him, holding him like he’d embraced me the night before, or weeping or laughing. Too many feelings all at once. I didn’t know what to do with it all.
So, I made a face, wrinkling my nose. “That’s a disgusting analogy.”
“Ah, but you didn’t say it was inappropria
te for mixed company.” He waggled a finger at me, apparently happy also to let the tension of the moment dissolve. “Progress!”
It hadn’t occurred to me to say so, which probably meant further moral degradation on my part. Ah well—the least of my worries at the moment. “All right, let’s try again.”
“If you do hit my wing, I can shapeshift back and heal that way, so it’s not the end of the world. Not yet.”
I huffed at him in exasperation. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“Because I’d rather you didn’t hit my wing, thank you. It will still hurt. And blood lost is blood lost. And it takes energy to shift. No sense squandering it when I don’t need to.”
“Fine,” I grumbled, and he shifted, his sharp grin replaced by the wicked curve of the gríobhth’s beak. Picking up the packs, I began strapping them on him again. “It seems to me that if you can shapeshift into a man and drop the packs, then you could become the gríobhth with them on and save me some work.”
He curved his neck and caught my braid in his beak, tugging at it playfully. I swatted at him and he ducked. “Quit that, bird. Some of us are working here.”
Only then did I spot my ribbon dangling from his beak. The ribbon I’d used to tie off my braid. With a groan of exasperation, I grabbed a hold of my already fraying braid, fixed it, and held out my hand for the stolen ribbon. He carefully laid the ribbon over my palm, then ruffled his crest playfully.
“Yes, yes. You’re very funny.”
A rumbling purr rose up, making me smile.
~ 14 ~
We drilled for another hour or so. I got better, though I had nothing like my usual level of marksmanship. After a while I could hit what I aimed at by shooting over or under his steady wing, but my aim deteriorated completely when his wings moved. I’d freeze, or yank my arrow off so wild that it became a menace.
The Arrows of the Heart Page 15
