I, Odile, lived in a small town beside Kingsport. There was a famous dying swan in an ancient tale that I was named after. But I was no dying swan. There could be nobody more opposite to a swan; instead of a waddling, sideways gait, I strode in a straight line. My arms were small and sleek, rather than awkward wings. I had a short neck, a white face and straight black hair. My sister, Delphine, was short and dark-haired as well, but ran ragged, with waving hair, always enjoying herself, smiling and laughing. I loved Delphine. I always wondered why Delphine smiled and laughed, and didn't keep her clothes clean and neat. I was inverted and quiet, and preferred sitting on a rock or ledge, or stump, gazing out calmly as my sister ran about. My mother and father were farmhands and worked all day. Cara, our older sister again, worked on the farm as well.
The day I picked up my first bale of hay, conjoined with my mother and father and older sister, the demons came. It was an accident. Nobody knew whether the demons were stalking toward Kingsport, Caldeum or Westmarch: from where the town was placed, their eventual destination could have been any of them. But a maw opened up in the ground near the town, and hellspawn poured out. Nobody had any defence. The people in the farms died first. My parents were taken on the edges of the farm and I saw them fall down, one, two. Delphine, running under trees, saw me run toward her and without a word, drag her away.
"Why? Why are we going?" Delphine kept turning her head toward the edges of the farm from which she had been simply waiting for our parents and myself to return from our work.
"Go," I panted, "hurry. Into the house." I knew nothing about hiding. I had never even hidden from anyone in play. Delphine was good at hiding. I knew Delphine could curl into a tiny corner, fit into a box, crouch in a chest, stand stiffly behind the false wall of a wardrobe.
And that was where I would put my sister.
"Go up into mother's wardrobe. Hurry."
"Is this a game?"
"Yes. You have to stay there until you hear my voice. No matter what you hear, don't come out until you hear my voice. Go."
Delphine liked to protest, but I suppose it was the harsh note in my voice that made her hurry along further under my arm. She liked to argue in fun, but she was silent now. Hurry, hurry, up into the house. I opened the false wall in the wardrobe where my parents kept their few valuable possessions, and saw my sister rest her startled head on her grandmother's intricate quilt. There was quite a space behind there. I knew I could not stay. There was a risk: if my sister spoke to me when daemons were in the house, we would be discovered immediately. Neither of us had ever even seen a daemon. I didn't know what either of us would do if we saw one up close. Never mind a horde of them. But if Delphine knew it was a game, knew only to come out when she heard my voice, there was a chance. My mind flashed to Cara and our mother and father. Then it flashed back to the present. I acted immediately. I could only do what immediately came to me in the moment. I knew that. I knew I could only do what I could. Putting my finger to my lips, I shut the wardrobe door, tears of tension coming into my eyes as I did it.
Then I ran into the woods. First behind one tree, than another, the noises of thrashing and burning fading away. I almost became calm. Where should I hide? Did I even need to hide? Should I have taken Delphine here? My stride slowed to a calm gait. No; the only idea I had was to climb a tree, and Delphine was too clumsy to climb an inch. I staggered into the lower branches of a spreading tree, and pulled herself up one branch after another. At the top of the tree, I gazed out over my hometown.
One hovel, after another, lit up and burned.
No. They would burn the house. They would burn the house with Delphine in it. There was time to run back. I saw my friend's house go up in smoke. Lae. Was she inside? I leapt down from the tree seven branches up, fell on my ankle, and twisted and jarred it both at once. I had to find Lae and Delphine. And Lae's brother, Ospi. No, just Delphine, I thought, staggering on my ankle. Just Delphine. I couldn't go any further. I started to run, and then, as my ankle curdled under her bone, to limp. I limped into the town, hearing the noises come closer and closer. I burst into the wardrobe: Delphine was gone. Of course. Delphine didn't understand the concept of the game. To hide until she heard her sister's voice? What was the point of that? She would have wondered what it meant, and finally burst out to find me and question me. The quilt was gone: she must have been cold. I lurched backward and put her hands to her head.
There was nowhere I could go. I could only hope my sister had run into the forest. Surely Delphine would have run away from those noises.
I could look for Delphine in the forest. Somehow she could get her into a tree. Helping her up limb by limb on my hurt foot? I could barely climb now, myself.
Where did Delphine go when she was scared? Of course: her grandmother's grave. Whenever our father yelled at us, or something difficult happened, or our mother was angry, we both liked to go to their grandmother's grave and sit amongst the fragrent flowers and speak about what Laila – our grandmother – would say and think, what she would do. But would Delphine go there? Delphine wasn't stupid. If she saw or heard the demons, would she just run into the graveyard, where there was nowhere to go?
It didn't matter. I had to go there. I had to. That was the last place Delphine might be. If I found Delphine there, we could flee. And go where? Kingsport? Fine. I took the silver candlestick from behind the false wall, and my father's crossbow, and my mother's rose-gold bracelet, and bundled them into the sheet from the bed. Then I made tracks for the graveyard. My brains were not yet in despair. As long as my sister, - and perhaps Cara, were alright -
I loved her mother and father and the idea that they were gone was just beginning to come over me. I stopped to sob. Then the realisation that my sobbing might mean I missed Delphine, that because of my weakness and my vulnerability, my stopping just to let out one tiny noise, that Delphine might die, stopped me dead.
I would never stop to feel again.
The graveyard was on the edge of town. I had passed it running out of the village. There it was: I saw the outline against the crystalline sky, the white clouds streaking out from the cragging graves. It was drawing into evening. I ran into the picket gate, stopped as it hit me, and pushed it open. It was stuck on the ground.
There was something beside my grandmother's grave.
It was a twisted form, small, skin glowing bright red. It held a rounded club with awkward spikes jutting out of it at odd angles. It had small, slanted, black eyes. Horns. Tiny pointed ears. It stood over the body of my sister. And in my mind, that was it: every daemon that ever existed I saw and felt standing over her small, cold body. But this daemon looked up at me. My eyes met the eyes of the demon and I automatically attempted to find its pupils to gaze into. There were none: just black, oval holes.
My shaking arms moved. My trembling hands found the crossbow, and I was just breathing, breathing, breathing. A bolt. As the demon raised its club to elbow level, there was a crossbow bolt buried in its skull.
I breathed. A line of blood trickled calmly around the stems of plants toward me, finding a path easily. My legs gave out and I fell to my knees beside the grave of my grandmother and, now, the grave of my sister. I picked up the quilt, and moved it gently from the grasp of the small hand still searching for comfort, and simply fell down onto it.
I slept.
The next thing I knew, there were voices in the air around me. I could hear questioning inflections, then tones of calm understanding. All she could think of was, hazily, that there had been something to be questioned, and then the group of voices had decided on an answer.
I opened her eyes. Someone was tucking the quilt over me. But before I realised this, my hand whipped out and grabbed the person's arm, twisted. There was a grunt, and the pushing hands retreated. The wind whirled against my eyes. A flower hit me in the face. There was a strong smell of dirt. Then I remembered where I was and an angry, strained howl left my frame and was bore away on the wind. However, it was loud enough to make the shadows around me start back. Shadows! All I could think of was my father's crossbow. My hand stabbed first one way, then another. The voices sounded, alarmed, as I found the crossbow and raised it. Somehow my other hand found the bolts. The machine of pure instinct joined the one with the other and the bolt left the crossbow and sang into the air. A gabble of voices started to un-knit around her into individual sounds. The shadows came closer.
"Don't worry, she's - "
But another bolt had left its home and the voice stopped and became a harsh grunt, and then a groan.
"Gods!"
"Are you well?"
Hands came down on me then, hands stronger than mine, hands that seemed impossibly large, and wrestled the machine from me. My next instinct shot my arm out to my left where I had left my sister, an arm that curled around nothing. I let out a howl of anger.
"Are you well, Seth?" A woman's voice that time.
"No. She got me."
Another voice laughed, then fell away in embarrassed chuckles. Someone else laughed too. The woman's voice started to speak low to the man called Seth. I tried to sit up but hands were pinning me to the grave. The strange lustre left my vision as I blinked again and again.
"Sit down!"
"Lie down."
"No!" I heard myself say. "I'm never doing it again! I'm never doing what anyone else wants again!"
"What?"
"Other people could be wrong," I said, and spat out a small clump of dirt. My crossbow clicked as it was borne away into the air and I lunged for it. "Give me that!" I had chosen my moment; I had waited until the hands had slackened against me. I sprang free. I could now see people around me, all wearing cloaks and hoods of various colours, lunging toward me. I ignored their faces.
"Give me that!"
"Get her down!" It took five men to contain my movements; I moved as fast as a small eel, my body squirming into all manner of positions, and a strength in my limbs that I had never had to use before flooding into my body.
"Gods! She's holding us off!"
"All right, all right," the man called Seth was straightening up, a little way off, panting and holding his side, "reason with us, reason with us. We'll give you your crossbow back as long as you see us as allies. Speak to us."
A man was speaking to me like an adult. I felt my childhood ease off me like a shroud.
"I will," I said in a decided voice. The crossbow was hastily given back to me. "Where is my sister's body." My usual even, calm tone was piercing and cold.
"We were deciding what to do with her body," Seth said, "like many others."
"Let me be, then," I said. "Let me go."
"Where will you go?"
"None of your business," I had to keep remembering who was speaking. Yes, that was my voice. It had a note of decision in it – like someone who knew what they were going to do until the end of their life. "Where are my things?"
A man to Seth's left, looking nervous, put down my sheet hastily made into a bundle.
"Don't worry. They're yours," Seth said.
"Who are you?" I was grabbing my bundle. It slipped and my things fell into the dirt. I tried to wrap the sheet around them again, but it was cumbersome and impossible to manage and lift without the fear of something escaping. I wanted my legs to be moving. I wanted to walk hard to keep myself from crying. I wanted to move; I was restless.
"We're survivors. We were looking at you sleeping; nobody seems to know you."
"My father and mother were farmhands."
"Ah," Seth said, "that would explain it. Did anyone ever go into the fields? No?"
I felt impatient.
"I would be grateful," I said coldly, "if you would give me a knapsack or backpack to carry my things with. I would just need to sell this bracelet; I can give you gold."
"Hold it," said Seth, and he stepped forward properly. I could see the wound I had given him standing out against his stomach. "You're lucky we found you. Don't be demanding favours of us. Besides, reflexes like that? We have a proposition for you. We're sorry about your sister."
"Don't be sorry," I said, "how dare you pretend to feel. It is my business and my sorrow. You did not know what she was."
"You think no one feels but yourself?" The woman who had spoken earlier took a step forward. She had shoulder-length shining red hair. She took down her hood. Barely healed slashes covered her face, not even once, but criss-crossing. "I'm Audra. I lost my entire family; my husband, my daughter."
"That must be terrible," I said, and meant it. Gazing at her, I realised what the expression in my eyes must have been at that moment. "I'm hasty. I apologize."
"I understand your pain and your need to get away," Audra said, "but Seth is right. Join us. Stay with us. You can't be older than seventeen."
"I'm fourteen."
"Perfect. I had never picked up a crossbow before yesterday. At your age, with your practice, we might be about the same level. Come with us. We can train together."
"Train for what?" I snapped.
"Killing them," Seth and Audra said at the same time, almost a mumble, and as they said it their eyes flashed.
"Them? You mean – the daemons." I said, and I finally stepped down off my grandmother's grave. "Yes. Yes. Yes." My arms and legs felt jerky, like I had never moved before. They moved a little too far when I moved them.
"There are warriors from the town guard here who can teach us to use weapons," said Seth, "I'm the son of the mayor of this town – well – he was the mayor," he spoke bitterly. "I lead this group."
"Yes. Yes," I said, moving toward him. "Of course I will."
"You're very strong," Seth said, "I don't know if it's the grief, but five of us could barely hold you down."
"I don't know. Good," I said.
"I'm very lucky," he said clearly, his face inches from mine, "that your aim was off. If you had known how to use a crossbow properly, I might be dead."
"I apologise," I said stiffly. I realised how little I was used to speaking to people other than my mother, father and sisters, and a few friends of our family. I hardly knew how to interact. I was simply saying what I knew was clear and concisely what I was thinking. I wanted people to hear my voice when I spoke, but not from yelling. I wanted my words to pierce like a crossbow. I wanted to drive my points home. I knew my words were valuable.
A crossbow was even more valuable.
I knew I was important. I was the only one left after the deaths of my family. I was alone for the first time in my life, and my stomach twisted as I realised the benefits of this. I was glad there was nobody from my family with me to see what I would become, what I had already become, judging from the voice I barely knew.
I did not want my family to see how much I wanted – needed – to kill daemons.
As I turned away in thought, I felt a knapsack being pressed into my hands. What I hoped, craved for, demanded, needed, and wanted, to be my last tear, came into the corner of my eye. I turned my face away, and dreamed about Delphine.