“Nothing wrong with a good shaggy-gracklet story.”
“You are a horrible person.” But she had to say it through laughter. He rubbed his shoulder where she’d punched him. “I thought Corbin’s jokes were bad. Do you get them from the same guy? I could tell the Blacksuits and get him locked up, for a nice reasonable time like let’s say forever.”
“Your dad tells jokes?”
“Not as much as he used to.”
He remembered that, dimly—Corbin Rafferty never precisely pleasant, but at least wry, vicious in a way that put all the room but him to chuckling. Recently, though, just mean. “How is he, at home?” Felt dirty to be talking about this after a good laugh, but for once, and maybe because of the laugh, Claire seemed in a mood to talk.
“Drunk a lot. You’ve seen him angry. He gets sad too, when he doesn’t think anyone else sees. Keeping life together is hard for him.”
“Is he—is he hard to you and your sisters?”
“That in the square, that’s as mean as I’ve seen him. He shouts. Shoves. Screams. Breaks things. Sometimes we shout back. Hannah especially. We’re all cats drowning in a bag at home.” Claire flicked the reins, though the golem did not change stride. “After Mom, he tried to keep it together. He drank to take the edge off, I guess. Only Corbin has a lot of edges. You can take off one after another until only a little nub in the middle’s left, and once you’ve gone that far maybe you keep going.”
“So you take care of the girls.”
Her arms clenched, drawing back the reins, and the golem slowed. Matt watched her force herself loose. The tension didn’t leave her shoulders, back, or arms, but she faked relaxation well enough. “I pick up what he drops. I maintain.”
“What that gargoyle did to him won’t last forever. He comes back, he’ll walk the same trail as before. And that’s bad for him, and dangerous for you.”
“I know, Mr. Adorne.”
Which was a door closing.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“If there was a way to force him to rest, I’d take it. The girls need the space. So do I.”
A bump shifted crates in the truck bed. Matt turned to right a few squash which further jostling might have rolled onto his eggs. “I might have an idea,” he said when he settled back beside her.
“What?”
“Rather not say much until I’ve talked to people. Don’t want to promise anything.”
They crested the ridge and descended from the forest to the city below, its road-veined circle quartered by the bite of the bay. “Matt.”
“Yes?”
“The story. Gracklet?”
“They’re real. I made up the bit at the end about the vurms, and there’s a name for rallybird that sounds better in Eld. But gracklet are about as common as mountain lions in the Geistwood, maybe a quarter the size, solitary for the most part. They claim territory like spiders do. Friendly, though. Human soulstuff’s too tight-wound for them to drink, and they’ll only go for you with their fangs if they’re hurt or you threaten their eggs. I saw one once when my dad took me camping. Scales aren’t as bright as they get down south, but still brighter than you tend to find up here in winter country. You see one, you offer a bright feather to Kos and a silver coin to Seril.”
“If this is another setup for a joke, I will hurt you.”
“Honest. Old Coulumbite tradition there. Mom’s side of the family, and her people go back to this soil. It’s a strange world we live in.”
She nodded, though that might have been a bump in the downhill road.
*
Tara woke beneath a too-familiar ceiling. Pale yellow metal beams supported white panels overhead; a metronome ticked her heartbeat and a needle pen scraped the sound’s shape onto a palimpsest. She sat up and swore at the pain in her skull, then swore again when she saw the man reading a magazine in the chair across from her bed.
The metronome popped prestissimo as she forced herself to her feet, arm still fabric-cuffed to the heart monitor. Her hospital gown billowed, and stitches pulled in her side. She drew her knife by reflex; the speed of its departure grayed her vision.
Not that there was anything objectionable, on first glance, about the man in the chair, reading a copy of this month’s De Moda. He was lean and strong, a pleasant topology of muscles evident beneath white shirt and charcoal slacks. Good chin. Very green eyes. Emerald, almost.
“What?” Shale said, half-risen. “What’s wrong?”
She caught her breath and guided her nightmares of claws and teeth and chains back to the prisons where they lived in daylight. Her knife faded into the glyphs that ringed her hands and webbed her arm. “Nothing,” she said. “I haven’t seen you looking human in a long time.”
He glanced down at himself, confused. “Did I get it wrong?” The features looked different draped over his skull.
“No. I mean, the wardrobe’s a bit missionary.”
“That’s the point.”