I watch the banshee warriors from my sitting place on the beach with my mouth open.
From the left, someone touches my shoulder. Reflexively I move to grab the wrist that is attached to the hand that is on me. It’s another banshee, and I don’t hear her, maybe because she moves so light or maybe because of the sea of noise and pain at the side of my head.
She says, “All right?”
I think that’s what she says.
She says, “Hey!”
I watch her lips move and then go back to looking at a decapitated skrake on the sand before me. Everything feels faraway, beyond reach. My legs are cold from the sea, my ear feels like it’s on fire. My stomach gives a lurch, and I wonder if I’m going to throw up.
The banshee has knelt beside me and is looking me over.
“You were bitten?”
I know she’s speaking, but still I can’t take in what she is saying to me. She looks familiar nearly, and then I remember this is the same banshee I helped with my throwing-knife during the battle, the one that nodded at me. So I nod back at her now, and then turn my eyes again to the carnage.
The banshee calls and waves to another nearby, shouting, “Ciara! We’ve a bite here!”
A moment and then a shout back to her. “On my way, Agata.”
The women move through the horde like a knife through flesh. Banshees are scythes, neatly parting everything from its own self.
“The fire. Did you light that?”
I don’t think I could answer her even if I knew what to say. And besides—I keep forgetting—I’m bit. I don’t have to worry about it anymore. At least I get this, I think, at least I get to see these people, these banshees. At least I know what they were and what I am.
I knew it, a little, already.
I expect Maeve to have some retort for me, but she’s only silence.
Another one of the banshees moves toward us. I watch her mostly because I don’t even have to move my head to do so. I have no energy, no answer for anything. She wears black like the others. Her wrists, from her hands right up to her elbows, are bandaged and bulky-looking. She has things on her ankles, and her hair is cut short—all of them have short hair, short like mine and Maeve’s and Mam’s. That’s not it, though, the only reason I know we’re the same, even though we look different—our skin colors and the shapes of our bodies and our faces. It’s in the movement: light and strong and confident, and the way they fight. The way I was trained to fight.
There is something wrong with the balance of this new banshee’s head, with the symmetry of it. She has moved out of my eyeline to crouch next to me with the other banshee before my mind can catch on to this peeling edge of a thought.
The two banshees are talking with each other, and I tune in, try to decipher their fast-moving tongues and low speech.
But now, they are talking to me, trying to talk to me. The first one is telling me to do something, holding her hand in front of my face. I can’t seem to focus on what she’s saying, my eyes wander off toward the bloody battlefield again.
She slaps me hard in the face. The sting is nothing to the ache already in my head, but the shock brings tears to my eyes. I take a deep shuddering breath, and the world narrows for a moment.
“Here,” says the banshee, and against the hardness of her hand, her voice is soft and gentle. The right side of my face is hot; it matches the left side, warmed from the blood from the bite. It feels like a blush, like shame. I breathe out, a vocal kind of sigh, and the noise I make sounds very small against all the noise of the carnage.
“Keep your head still, look at my hand,” the banshee Agata says again, and I try to do as she says, to look at her hand. If she hits me again, I think I might cry, and I don’t want to cry now, when I’m so close to the end. Not in front of the banshees.
“What’s your name, honey? Ciara, help her.”
“Still with us?” Ciara asks.
Agata reaches for something on her hip, and the movement is familiar to me. It is like my own, or Maeve’s. I pitch away but am steadied by strong, sure hands.
“Hold her.”
Ciara contorts herself to pin my arms, while Agata holds my head, pointing the wounded part upward. I do not struggle hard, but I can feel her strength against mine. She has a knife.
My eyes have lost the run of themselves entirely now. They’re only interested in what’s going on behind her on the battlefield. They want to take in all they can before my death, which seems imminent. All this running—twice I’ve run that road—and death was here for me all along on this lonely beach, with home nearly in view. There are more banshees, picking through the bloody wreckage of the road in the mist. They all wear black. They too have short hair and the same bulky-looking forearms wrapped in black cloth to the elbow. They are tall and small, wide and slim, dark and pale, lithe and powerful.
The woman with the knife has grabbed on to the remains of my ear, and she saws viciously at it. The pain, the sudden, sour ache of it makes me shout. My vision blurs. I feel nausea. I feel a letting go. This is the end, the end at last.
Nearly worse than the agony is the gristly sound it makes. Agata’s blade scratches and tears, hewing through the cartilage in three long movements, and I scream as hard and loud as I can.
“Good girl, go easy now, don’t faint on us,” the one holding my head says, and the other, nearly finished with her work, answers: “Yeah, we’re too tired to be carrying you.”
Ciara laughs. I blink, and tears and snot run down my face.
“All done. Have you anything clean?”
Someone takes my hand and puts a cloth in it, and then brings my hand to where my ear used to be, the gaping wound on the side of my face, and presses it hard against my skull.
“Hold it there now,” she advises. “Hold it tight so the bleeding will stop.”
My arms feel weak, but I do what she says. Does this mean I might survive the bite? I put the thought away for later.
One of them moves off to join the others poking around in the pile of dead skrake on the ground. As I watch, a roar of thunder bellows around us, and the rain, already torrential, sets to with new determination.
There’s an arm around me, a hand under an armpit, and then another at my waist, forcing me upward.
“You’re all right, good girl. Come on with us.” I can barely hear them, but I know the encouraging noises they’re making.
She takes her hands up off me slowly, as if seeing whether I’ll be able to stand on my own two feet, and when I don’t fall, she moves on a little ahead, looking back often to make sure I’m keeping up. I’m moving, my mind a blank. Something in the battlefield catches my eye, and I stop suddenly.
The banshee glances back. “Come on,” she says, and reaches a hand toward me.
I turn away from her, find the skrake that I killed, the one that has bits of my ear in its mouth and down its throat. I crouch to put my knee on its throat and a little awkwardly I pull my knife from its skull. It comes away cleanly and I go to wipe it on my damp, filthy clothes, but my hands are shaking too much so in the end I put it back, dirty, to its place, hidden at my ankle. The banshee is looking at me. I cannot read the expression on her face.
“All right?”
I don’t answer.
“I’m Agata,” she says. “I’ll be your shadow.”
I don’t understand anything she’s saying, I can’t hear properly anyway. One ear is ringing and the other is gone gone gone and sounds only like heat and pain and the waves on the beach back home.
She takes two steps closer and I back away a little, but she’s smiling and her eyes are soft. She reaches out, slow so as not to frighten me, and touches my cheek.
“You’ll be okay,” Agata says, so loudly and clearly that it reaches me. My eyes fill with fresh tears. She makes me lift the rag away from the wound at the side of my head, looks at it, then pushes my hand back again, showing me that I should keep more pressure on it. “Don’t let anyone else see that knife, okay? They’ll only take it off you.” When she turns to walk away again, I follow her without thinking.
Shaking with tiredness and cold and shock, I stumble and slip my way through the sludge of corpses in the road back toward the village in a daze.
Agata walks a little ahead. It’s easier if I just let my feet follow her feet and don’t look around too much. I do not like the feeling of a person being so close, but I’m grateful she says nothing when I stop suddenly at the side of the road to vomit up something sticky and yellow, half-digested shtorella.
I stay like that, leaning over with my hands on my bent legs, swaying a little in the cold and dark. When I’m pretty sure I won’t be sick again, I wipe my mouth with the back of one bloody, trembling hand and look up to find her again, but she’s striding off across the battlefield. Battle-beach.
Dazedly, I watch as she looks about her, goes a little farther, then kneels to pull something from a corpse. The movement is familiar; she is gathering her knife back to her. I blink and look away, and then I see him.
Cillian.
He moves toward me, slipping in the gore, filthy hands outstretched, trying to balance, and then reaching for me. I go to him, and when he wraps his arms around me, I feel the world right itself a little, as if I’m tethered to it again, as if it has something to do with me after all.
“They’re away?” he speaks quietly, so close to my good ear, my remaining ear, that I can hear him okay, and I nod, my chin digging into his chest.
“Gone, through the mist.”
I feel him sag against me, the relief pouring out of him. He must’ve run so hard, following the banshees to get to the beach, terrified of what he’d find here.
“Say nothing to these.”
“Are you all right?” I ask.
“They got to me too soon. They came just before the skra—”
I’m only half worrying about this sentence when there’s a whumph, a shock I feel all through me like a hit, and Cillian goes limp in my arms. Behind him is Agata in her guard, and I see then what has happened. She hit him so hard, I could feel it right through him, and he is out. I let him fall, gently, to the beach.
Agata towers over him, knife in hand, and without thinking, I put myself between them. “Don’t!” I say, looking right at her, seeking out her eyes, finding them. “Please don’t.” There’s a beat while Agata hesitates, balancing on the balls of her feet, and then her eyes flick around us. Nobody is watching. “Please!” I shout, hoping someone will look over, put a stop to it.
“He’s an enemy of the city,” Agata says. “He tried to get away.”
“Please, Agata, please.” My voice is unrecognizable, yelping.
“He’d be better off,” she says quietly.
“Please,” I say again. “Hasn’t it been enough?”
I don’t know if what I’m saying makes sense to her at all, but she lowers her hand and falls out of guard, and at last, at last, the battle is over.