“A leather-worker,” said Shrike. “One who’d escaped a failed uprising in the mortal realm. The king’s men had slaughtered the leader of the rebellion in the midst of negotiations. Then they ran down every soul who’d dared follow him—and some who had not.”
Something in the description recalled Wren’s school-days; the hours spent memorizing the long list of English kings and the various risings and falls that saw them crowned and deposed. “Do you recall the rebel leader’s name?”
“Tyler,” said Shrike.
Wren stared at him. “Wat Tyler? The Peasants’ Revolt?”
“He didn’t call it that. But he’d followed Wat Tyler.”
Wren continued staring. Astonishing enough to find Shrike’s guardian had been a mere mortal. More astonishing still to realize he’d lived in the fourteenth century and had seen the days Wren had merely read of in Shakespeare’sHenriadand Egan the Younger’s radical novels.
“Larkin had fled across the countryside,” Shrike went on. “More concerned with the knights gaining on him than the path ahead, he fell through a fairy ring. He stumbled through the forest—he knew not for how long—until he heard a child wailing and followed the sound until he stumbled upon me. I remember I had fallen out down from the tree. The other fledglings had pushed me out of the nest.”
“Theotherfledglings?” Wren interrupted.
“Aye,” said Shrike, confused by Wren’s confusion.
Wren hesitated, not wishing to offend, before he ventured what felt like the obvious question. “Were you born a bird?”
Much to Wren’s relief, Shrike didn’t appear offended. Merely befuddled. “No.”
“But youwereborn in a nest,” said Wren. When Shrike confirmed this with a nod, Wren added, “From an egg?”
“Aye,” Shrike said as if no one had ever questioned it before.
Wren supposed such circumstances were common in the fae realms. That conclusion didn’t prevent his mind from reeling. “Do all fae come from eggs?”
“Some do. Others grow in flower buds, or on the under-sides of leaves, or beneath toadstools, or in hollow logs—or sometimes in bonfires or particularly sooty chimneys. And,” Shrike added with a sceptical twist of his mouth, “some are born from other fae in the same manner kits come from vixens, or a fawn comes from a doe.”
“Or as human babes come from human mothers,” said Wren.
Shrike’s eyes widened with dawning horror.
“Regardless,” said Wren, who felt no more comfortable with the notion than Shrike evidently did. “You were born from an egg. Into a nest. Amidst other fledgling fae, who pushed you out of said nest.”
“Aye.” Shrike seemed glad for the opportunity to return his tale to its original course. “I wasn’t badly hurt. Scratches and bruises. But it was the most I’d ever hurt in all my life up ‘til then, and so I caterwauled fit to burst my lungs.”
“Didn’t anyone come down from the nest to find you?” Wren asked.
“No,” said Shrike.
Initially, the revelation that some fae—including Shrike—grew from eggs had numbed Wren to the reality that fellow fae had shoved an infant Shrike out of the nest to fall from the tree-tops. Now he thought of the forest he’d seen along the path to Blackthorn and the canopy hundreds of feet overhead. The idea of any child suffering such a fall would distress even the hardest heart. To think of toddling Shrike crashing broken and bloody through all the branches to land on gnarled roots and cold dirt—it wrenched something within Wren he hadn’t known he possessed.
“But Larkin did,” Shrike added, as if to alleviate Wren’s distress.
And Wren did have to admit it lightened his spirits to know someone had come to small Shrike’s aid.
As each word fell from Shrike’s lips, he seemed more at ease with speaking. A warm, deep, sonorous voice that Wren suspected hadn’t seen so much use in centuries emerged—a slight break on certain words the sole remaining hint that it had lain silent for so long. “I heard him afore I saw him. He stumbled through the undergrowth with as much noise as the Wild Hunt. Yet he stood alone—a human man in simple garb, his face streaked with blood and a scythe in his hands. Not his own. He’d taken it up from a fallen comrade. Nonetheless, as he saw me, he halted. Any ferocity that had remained from the battle fled him in an instant. He tossed his scythe aside and gathered me up in his arms. I dried my tears on his tunic while he asked me questions few fae children could answer—where were my mother and father, and so forth. I think he believed me an orphan of the failed rising. Regardless, he assumed charge of me, set me on his shoulders and carried me away with him into the woods.”
It’d been difficult at first for Wren to imagine the rough and hardy specimen of masculinity before him as a small and helpless creature. Yet Wren fancied he found echoes of that vulnerability in the warm depth of Shrike’s dark eyes. He endeavoured to capture it in his sketch and thought at last he might meet with some success.
“I don’t remember much of the first few seasons,” Shrike went on. “He kept us fed by foraging and trapping game, kept us sheltered in wattle and daub. He taught me mortal stories and mortal songs. And as I grew older and became strong enough to be of real help to him, our means improved. Soon he taught me his trade, which I’ve kept up since. By the close of my first century, we—”
“We?” Wren echoed.
Shrike furrowed his brow, confused by his confusion again. “Larkin and I.”
“After a century?” Wren protested. “How could a mortal man live so long?”
