“And that is enough for you to kill him?” Wren knew he ought to feel horrified. Yet his pulse quickened for reasons far beyond dread or fear. That Shrike should value him so highly… and to realise, in his heart, that had he a fraction of Shrike’s strength, he would do the same himself in turn.
Shrike held his gaze. “Your word alone would stay my hand.”
Wren’s heart skipped a beat as the words sang through his blood. Still, he had other concerns to hand. “Tolhurst was a man. The skull-crusher is a beast. Don’t mistake me—I’d sleep far better if the thing were dead. But… ought we to hunt it?”
Shrike stared at him.
Wren coloured. “It’s not as though it attacked me out of spite. It wanted to eat me because it needs to eat. It seems a little hypocritical for us to exact vengeance on it for doing what it must do to survive, doesn’t it?”
Shrike gave him a long considering look before he spoke. “Once, in a springtime long ago, I spent some days lying in wait for a stag where a stream fed into a pond. Many other creatures lived there, including a pair of ducks whose eggs had just hatched. From my covert I watched the ducklings take their first toddling steps from their nest towards the pond where their mother and father taught them to swim. Then a winged shadow swept over the water.”
Wren tensed.
“I knew it at once for a hawk,” Shrike continued. “The ducks did as well, for they quickly began to herd their children back to the nest. But the ducklings were small and awkward, and it didn’t seem likely they’d all make it to safety before the hawk swooped. The hawk didn’t prey on them out of malice; it needed to sate its hunger, as all creatures do, and a duckling is an easier meal than most.”
Wren still didn’t like where this story was headed but nodded all the same.
“The hawk descended,” Shrike went on. “Its talons narrowly missed one of the ducklings. The ducks caterwauled, but this did nothing to dissuade the hawk from making another dive.”
Wren braced himself for nature’s brutality.
“Then,” said Shrike, “the trees burst with a shrieking cacophony. Finches, buntings, warblers, larks, fig-birds, grosbeaks, robins, nuthatches, sparrows, swallows, swifts, martins, bee-eaters, starlings… even wrens,” he added, with a sidelong glance. “Every songbird in the forest, it seemed, flocked forth at once, and all flew straight for the hawk. The hawk, which I don’t think had ever feared anything besides perhaps an owl, was pelted on all sides by scores of tiny beaks and perching claws. They drove it out of the sky down to the ground. Hawks mislike landing flat; they won’t do it unless they’ve no other choice, and this one had none. And there it sat, stunned, flinching as screaming songbirds kept swooping at it. Only when the ducks had got back safe to their nest did the songbirds let up. Still the hawk waited a while longer before it felt safe enough to take flight again, and then it wheeled off far from the pond and did not return within my time there.”
Wren could do naught but stare.
“The hawk did only what was in its nature, true enough,” Shrike continued. “But so did the songbirds in seeking vengeance for every one of their number ever hunted by the hawk. And while the beast beneath the ice may only be doing what is in its nature by hunting to eat, I am likewise merely doing what is in my nature by defending my own heart.”
Wren’s own heart warmed alongside his beloved’s words. Still he couldn’t keep from adding, “And revenging it, as well.”
Shrike gave a half-shrug and a half-smile to match it.
~
The morning of Ostara dawned resplendent.
Wren still felt a twinge of guilt for his long convalescence preventing Shrike from taking on any mask commissions. Yet in the last fortnight or so—with Wren no longer quite so helpless asbefore, and indeed strong enough to look after himself if Shrike would let him, his wound closed and the work-bench no longer required for chirurgy—Shrike had found the hours required to create masks for them both.
Wren’s mask resembled his namesake, with a sharp pointed beak over the nose and intricately tooled pale feathers speckled with dark dye. He’d laughed to see it, remarking how it resembled his own freckles, which brought a handsome blush to Shrike’s high cheekbones. For his own mask, Shrike had crafted a simple domino from black leather, adding only a long, curved raptor beak.
Thus disguised, they ventured forth arm-in-arm through the Grove of Gates to the appointed glade.
At least a hundred masked fae had already gathered. Most turned to regard Shrike and Wren as they passed through the crowd. Whispers sprung up in their wake. Wren supposed those who knew of his fate in the white hart hunt had spread the tale far and wide. He wondered if any of the fae had expected the mortal Holly King to survive his wounds at all, much less attend Ostara.
Unlike last year, Shrike and Wren did not wander throughout the whole of the glade. Instead, Shrike led Wren to an outcrop of broad, flat stones covered over with moss and framed by a patch of forget-me-nots. Shrike laid his own cloak over the rocks and gently guided Wren down to lounge upon it. No sooner had Shrike himself sat than he insinuated his form beside Wren’s until Wren sat almost in his lap with his own head supported by Shrike’s collar.
Satisfied at last, Shrike reached out and plucked up a handful of forget-me-nots and began twining them through his fingers. Wren, already well-familiar with his habit of idle fiddling, left him to it and took out his pencil and gyrdel-book to do some fiddling of his own.
Remaining in one place in no way limited their view of the crowd. On the contrary, it gave the wandering fae a fixed point to approach if they wanted to glimpse the Oak King and his mortal consort, neither of whom had been seen abroad since the white hart hunt. While Wren didn’t necessarily enjoy being gawked at, he found the mask eased a great deal of self-conscious feeling.
And while the fae came to look at him, he looked upon them in turn and recorded them in his gyrdel-book sketches besides—as he’d wished he’d done with all the marvellous masks he’d seen last year. With so many visitors to their queer corner of the glade, Wren began to feel like a king holding court for the first and only time since his coronation.
Thus Shrike and Wren passed an idle hour in companionable silence and contemplative crowd-watching, broken only by the familiar cry of—
“Oi, Butcher!”
Wren glanced up at the sound of Nell’s voice. To his surprise, he beheld not just Nell approaching (in a black domino mask rather like Shrike’s, only without a beak and made from papier-mâché rather than leather), but beside her a figure whose white mask obscured all their face save the eyes, and yet whom Wren had the unmistakable impression must be Everilda. Perhaps the hair gave her away, or her garb. Or perhaps it was merely that she walked almost arm-in-arm with Nell.
Everilda had left Blackthorn a fortnight hence, accompanied by Nell. They went to Fathomseek so Everilda might consult with the ambassador’s apothecary brother.
