Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

The Eye of the Storm Kelley Eskridge

I AM A CHILD of war. It’s a poor way to start. My village was always ready to defend, or to placate, or to burn again. Eventually the fighting stopped, and left dozens of native graves and foreign babies. We war bastards banded together by instinct; most of us had the straw hair and flat faces of westerners, and we were easy marks. Native kids would find one or two of us alone and build their adrenaline with shouts of Your father killed my father until someone took the first step in with a raised arm or a stick. These encounters always ended in blood and cries—until the year I was fifteen, when a gang of village young played the daily round of kill-the-bastard and finally got it right: When Ad Homrun’s older brother pulled her from under a pile of screaming boys and girls, and Ad’s neck was broken and her right eye had burst. The others vanished like corn spirits and left us alone in a circle of trampled grass, Ad lying in Tom’s arms, me trying to hold her head up at the right angle so that she would breathe again. It was my first grief.

It was no wonder our kind were always vanishing in the night. “You’ll go too,” my mother said for the first time when I was only seven. She would often make pronouncements as she cooked. I learned her opinions on everything from marjoram (“Dry it in bundles of six sticks and keep it away from dogs”) to marriage (“Some cows feel safest in the butcher’s barn”) while she kneaded bread or stripped slugs off fresh-picked greens.

It shocked me to hear her talk about my leaving as if it were already done. Ad was still alive in her family’s cottage a quarter mile from ours, and I believed that my world was settled; not perfect, but understandable, everything fast in its place. I peered from my corner by the fire while my mother pounded corn into meal, jabbing the pestle in my direction like a finger to make her point. “You’ll go,” she repeated. “Off to soldier, no doubt. Born to it, that’s why. No one can escape what they’re born to.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“You’ll go and be glad to.”

“I won’t! I want to stay with you.”

“Hmph,” she replied, but at supper she gave me an extra corn cake with a dab of honey. Food was love as well as livelihood for her. She never punished me for being got upon her while her man screamed himself dead in the next room; but she never touched me or anyone else unless she had to. I grew up with food instead of kisses. I ate pastries and hot bread and sausage pies like a little goat, and used them as fuel to help me run faster than my tormentors.

One of the childhood games Ad and I played was to wrap up in sheepskin and swan up and down the grass between her cottage and the lane, pretending to be princes in disguise. We were both tall, after all, and looked noble in our woolly cloaks. What more did one need? To be the first child of a king, Tom Homrun said, and our king already had one. There could only be one prince, only one heir. The rest were just nobles, and there were more of them than anyone bothered to count. What’s the good of being a royal if you’re as common as ticks on a dog? my mother would say, with a cackle for her own wit. But I had heard too many stories about the prince. My aunt’s third husband went to court for a meeting of royal regional accountants, and told us in his letters that the prince was fair and strong and already had the air of a leader. And puts me in mind of your Mars, he wrote my mother; something about the eyes. My mother paused after she’d read that part aloud, and looked at me with a still face. It thrilled me to be likened to the prince, and Ad was rigid with envy until Tom carved her a special stick to use as a scepter in our games, with a promise that he would never make me one no matter how hard I pleaded. I could not care about her stick, about her silence and hurt feelings, even though she was my only friend. My head was full of daydreams of walking through the streets of Lemon City, of being seen by the prince’s retainers and taken up into the citadel, marveled over, embraced, offered… what? My imagination failed me there, so I would start from the beginning and see it all again. I began giving the pigs orders, and delivering speeches of state to the group of alder trees near Nor Tellit’s farm.