Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

They were different speeches after Ad died. At first they were simply incoherent weepings delivered from a throat so thick with snot that I barely recognized my own voice. It sounded adult and terrible, and filled me with a furious energy that I didn’t know how to use; until one afternoon when I had run dry of tears and instead picked up a fist-sized stone. I beat the alders until the rock was speckled with my blood. I washed my swollen hand in the village well and hoped that my rage would poison them all. Then I found Tom Homrun and asked him to teach me how to fight.

From the first I was like a pig at a slop pile, gulping down whatever he put in front of me, always rooting single-mindedly for more. He taught me to use my hands and elbows and knees, to judge distance, and to watch someone’s body rather than their eyes. It was hard at first to trust him and his teaching: I’d always thought of him as a native, as a danger, in spite of his fondness for his yellow-haired bastard sister. And it hadn’t occurred to me that he would have to touch me. Apart from Ad, I’d only touched my mother by accident, and the village kids in desperate defense: but this was new and electric. The first feel of his muscle against mine was so shocking that the hair on my arms and legs stood up. I was desperately uneasy to think that I might be moved by Tom after what I’d begun to feel for his sister, as if it were some kind of betrayal of Ad. But I was fascinated by the strength and the power of his body, the way it turned when he wished, held its balance, reached out and so easily made me vulnerable.

I was just sixteen when we began, and the sky was always gray with the start or end of snow. I learned to move when I was too cold, too sore, too tired. I learned to keep going. All the things I wanted—Ad, my mother, a life of endless hard blue days in the fields, and just one true friend with dark hair and a father still alive—all those precious things became buried under a crust of long outlander muscles. I began to imagine myself an arrow laid against the string, ready to fly. I looked at the village kids with my arrow’s eyes, and they stayed out of my way.

By the summer I knew enough not to knock myself silly. I was tired of the same exercises and hungry now for more than just revenge: I wanted to be a warrior. “Show me how to use a sword,” I begged Tom constantly, sometimes parrying an invisible adversary with a long stick.

“No,” he said for the hundredth time.

“Why not?”

“There’s no point until you get your full growth. You’re tall as me now, but you might make another inch or two before you’re done.”

“You didn’t make me wait to learn how to fight.”

“Swords are different. They change your balance. You’ve got to make the sword part of yourself, it’s not enough just to pick it up and wave it around. It’s true that you’ve learned well,” he added. “But you haven’t learned everything.”

“Then teach me everything.”

“Leave it alone, Mars.”

I had no idea I was going to do it: I had never given him anything but the obedience due a teacher. But I was so frustrated with behaving. “You teach me, damn you,” I said, and swung the stick as hard as I could at his ribs.

He softened against the blow and absorbed it. The stick was dry and thin, but still it must have hurt. It sounded loud, perhaps because we were both so silent.

I stammered, “Tom, truly, I was wrong to do it, I just…”

“You’re stupid, Mars.” His voice was very quiet. “You’re not the strongest, you never will be, and no sword will change that. I’m heavier and faster than you, and there’s thousands more like me out there.” He waved at the world beyond the fields, and when I turned my head, he reached out and twisted the branch away as easily as taking a stick from a puppy. “All you have are your wits and your body, if you can ever learn how to use them.”

What had we been doing, all these months? “I can use my body.”

A bruise I’d given him at the corner of his mouth stretched into a purple line. Then his smile changed into the stiff look that people wear when they are forcing themselves to a thing they’d rather not do; like the day that he’d had to butcher Ad’s favorite nanny goat while she cried into my shoulder. I did not like him looking at me as if I were that goat.

“You want to learn everything.” He nodded. “Well, then you shall.” And he came for me.

I managed to keep him off me for more than a minute, a long stretch of seconds that burned the strength from the muscles in my arms and legs. But he was right; he was too strong, too fast. First he got me down and then he beat me, his face set, his hands like stones against my ribs and my face. His last blow was to my nose, and when he finally stood up, he was spattered with me.

“This is everything, Mars. This is what I have to teach you. Become the weapon. Do it, and no one will touch you in a fight. Otherwise it’s only a matter of time before someone sends you to the next world in pieces.”