Note that he walked. He didn’t sprout wings and glide over.
Truly, that meat I’d introduced to his system was festering, was corrupting.
True natures indeed, mighty Zeus.
As for me, my children are no longer my children—we pass in the night, our teeth flashing—and my first daughter of this new form has children of her own, minor whelps I hear crying from the town walls, where the men pierce them and hang them. It weighs on my heart, their cries.
I still keep to the shadows, yes. To that lonely turn in the road.
Look back if you want. You might even chance to see me.
I’m those footfalls drawing ever and ever closer, then retreating to the shadows just for the thrill of it, just to hear you scream, then finally rushing close on two feet, to hold you close.
Zeus in all his wisdom would have me hounded through the centuries.
Not likely. Not while the roads are dark, not while my teeth are still the sharpest things in that darkness.
Hold steady now, I don’t want to bite too deep.
You will be the second of my new children. Together, the night will be ours to do with as we will.
Punishment? Hardly. More like a gift.
Mighty Zeus, that dead Olympian, his last divine act was to give us the future, child.
Let’s take it by the neck, now, shake it until our fur is matted red.
I said before that this mouth was incapable of smiling?
I was wrong, child.
All I do now is smile.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
* * *
I forget who I told Navah and Dominik I was going to write about, but when I sat down, all I could see was that famous old painting or carving or whatever it is of Lycaon turning into a wolf because he tried to feed Zeus peoplemeat. I couldn’t stop wondering why Lycaon would do that, and what the fallout of it had been. The story we always hear, it stops with Lycaon scampering off, all properly punished, now doomed for the rest of his days. But I didn’t want to let Zeus off that easy, just because he knew what was in his stew. Not saying Lycaon’s the victim here—that is his son cubed up into that bowl—but I am saying that Zeus isn’t exactly the hero, either. So I went with Lycaon into those dark woods of his future, and then started to see that his future and this world we live in, they’re kind of the same place. Thanks to Zeus, I suppose. Who still isn’t a hero. Who, like Lycaon, is the author of his own end. As we all tend to be, whether we’re gods or werewolves or that person in line for a burger, giving the person at the register unnecessary grief—grief we’ll bite into momentarily, and then have to live with forever.
* * *
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES
CURSES LIKE WORDS, LIKE FEATHERS, LIKE STORIES
BY
* * *
KAT HOWARD
WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I cast a curse.
Young. I barely even know how to think of the word now. Young is seven when you are nine. Young is twenty when you’re twice that age.
Through my own fault, I have lived over nine hundred years.
There are few mercies in a life stretched so long. The greatest has been one I thought at first to be a horror: that I too am cursed out of my own self, and into the shape of a bird. A black-winged war raven, one of Morrigan’s own daughters. It is a different sort of witness, this one with wings.
The other mercy is this: The story is finally ending, and I have survived to see it.
* * *
Niamh’s flight into Shannon Airport had been a misery, storm-plagued and sleepless. Not content to simply harry her across the Atlantic, the storm chased her overland, hissing down rain and setting a chill into her bones. The trip to Ireland wasn’t a happy one to begin with, but this truly seemed excessive.
On the drive there, windshield wipers scraping uselessly against the torrent, knuckles white on the wheel, she thought she saw a swan, lightning-white against the clouds, blown on with the wind. She shook her head as if to clear the image and focused more fiercely on the road.
The small house on the edge of nowhere smelled like her great-uncle Aífraic, a combination of wool and peat and pipe tobacco, like his ghost still rocked in the old wooden chair near the hearth. Everything had happened too fast and too far away, and now all she had left of him was an empty house, his boxes of papers, and a promise she had flown thousands of miles to keep, a broken-hearted bird on her loneliest migration. Niamh poured a glass of whiskey and sat in the rocking chair and wept.
* * *
It’s fitting that the end of the story comes in grief. That’s how it began as well. The grief of a husband, for a wife lost. The grief of a sister for a sister gone.
For a moment, it seemed like he and I could pass through our shared grief together. That we could both honor her memory and make it our own. But then I asked him for a child, for one that would be ours. He refused, and my grief turned to acid in my heart. It turned to a curse on his children, the ones that were his and hers and never—never, as he told me again and again—mine.
I am the only one left living who knows all the pieces of this story. That, too, is a curse.
* * *
When Aífraic had asked Niamh to come back at the end, at his end—“come home,” he’d said—he’d told her it was because there were things she needed to know.
“Then why not tell me now?” she’d asked, speaking the words through the salt of tears.
“I can’t tell the story until it’s over,” he’d said. “It’s not rightly mine to tell until then.” He’d given no more of an explanation, other than to tell her the answers were here, in his house on the edge of the sea.
And now, here she was. Too late to ask any questions, too late to hear the answers in Aífraic’s low, warm voice. Another sorrow, to set stone-like on her heart. But she had promised, and she was here, and so she would search for the echoes of whatever stories remained.
She found the notebook of poems half a glass of whiskey later. Tucked in a box full of crumbling papers and notebooks gone thin with time, Swan Poems in pencil inside the front cover, less a title than a category. Three downy white feathers were pressed beneath it.
The pages were worn and yellowed, and all covered with words. Some had numbers as well, dates meant to mark the span of their writing. Or no—something else. If they were dates, those numbers in Aífraic’s looping scrawl, they would have made him impossibly old. Niamh pushed that puzzle aside, and read.
Aífraic had always been fascinated by swans, and he had passed that fascination on to her when she was a child. Niamh remembered a summer when she was perhaps thirteen, walking the sand in too-big borrowed wellies, even the extra socks she wore not thick enough to quiet the sensation that at any moment her feet might go out from under her.
“There used to be swans that lived there.”
Her eyes had followed the direction of Aífraic’s hand. It did not look as if anything could live on the island of Carricknarone, its jagged outcropping sharp as ravens’ teeth in the frigid Sea of Moyle.
“Swans? Out there?”
The cloud-chased sun sparked off the foam of the waves, the water moving like ripples of shattered glass.
“Not recently. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago. A strange enough occurrence that people still speak of it.” That was the sort of thing that mattered to him: people telling stories.