The Search Party

Content warnings: infanticide, accidental suicide

The last drops of the infant’s blood cling to the knife wound like slick glass beads.

Bast gives the body a little shake to dislodge them; one lands in the goblet beneath, the other on Melidrei’s hand. She flinches though the blood is already beginning to cool, staring at the dark spot on her hand as if it’s a spider she’s afraid to spook.

Bast wipes the blood off with his forefinger and pops it in his mouth. “Don’t look so forlorn, Mel.”

Melidrei glances up at him, cat-green eyes dry despite the tremble in her mouth. “This is different, Bast. You shouldn’t have done it. You’re trying too hard to be cruel.”

“It’s not really different. A child dies either way. If anything this is better; knowing the parents makes us feel properly guilty.”

But Bast doesn’t look guilty at all. His golden face gleams in the morning sun, his mane of dark hair tousled by the mountain breeze, the skin around his dark eyes unlined by worry. He makes as if to toss the body into the brush, but at Melidrei’s warning glance he sighs gently and places it into the roots of a hawthorn shrub. No sooner has he turned his back than there’s a rustle in the undergrowth, and Melidrei doubts the body will go undisturbed for even half an hour once they leave. 

Below them, the small city of Enzenauer arcs like a crooked smile, houses and roads fit tightly between the horseshoe falls before it and the foothills of the Smaragd range at its back. Bast takes up the rough stone goblet and drinks three long swallows, then hands it to Melidrei.

“Come on, now. What’s done is done; don’t waste it.”

Melidrei thinks of Caleb and Hanna, peeling through the old forests somewhere below them, screaming for their child. She and Bast are supposed to be part of the search party, two of a score of neighbors scouring the roads and ditches for kidnappers. She lifts the goblet to her mouth and drains it.

“Don’t do that again,” she tells Bast. “How will we ever even look at them?”

He shrugs. “They will have another. Probably many more.”

“You don’t know that. She had a hard labor. She may never be able to carry again.”

“Then they can adopt one of Goodwife Rinder’s innumerable brood.”

“That’s not the same. It’s not their child.”

A flash of irritation crosses his face. “Then it’s their own fault for prizing blood so highly.”

He takes the goblet from Melidrei, slides his finger around the inside for the dregs, and returns it to his satchel. When they turn to start back down the path, there’s a coyote disappearing into the brush, neck arched under the weight of the infant corpse in its mouth. They’ve only been in Enzenauer a year, and already the wild things know their patterns.

They go down the mountain following the deer path that brought them up, their feet sure and swift despite the steepness of the grade. Around them, the old woods are loud with spring life, bird calls and the drone of insects filling their air. The forest floor is carpeted with violets and ferns, and sunlight filters through the young leaves like a shower of golden coins.

Bast pauses on the bank of the creek, offering her his hand for the last of the stepping stones even though he knows she doesn’t need it. When she takes it, he brings her in close, kisses her softly; his mouth is hot and coppery.

“Don’t be angry at me,” he pleads softly. “I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known it would upset you so much.”

She suspects that he did know, and that’s why he didn’t ask for her help. Their routine is always the same; she casts the glamour charm that hides the child from the sight of its own parents, and when they’ve run out to look for their lost lamb, Bast steals the baby from its cradle. But there was no charm this time — Bast snatched the child in the dead of night, and Melidrei knew nothing of it until Caleb pounded on their door that morning, his face streaked with tears.

She says none of this, just smiles and squeezes his hand. He watches her face carefully, trying to discern the truth of her feelings, but they are not so connected in this form as they are in the other. In this one, she can hide from him. That uncertainty is one of the things he seems to enjoy most.

Even at the speed they travel, it’s an hour before they encounter anyone else. Caleb and Hanna are at the front of the search party, hopelessly calling the infant’s name with voices long gone hoarse. Hanna is staggering on her feet, and every breath she draws in is a distant kind of sob.

“Anything?” Caleb asks them.

Bast goes to him, clasps his arms and looks him in the eye. “I’m sorry,” he says. “We went right to the peak. There was no sign.”

Caleb crumples; Bast has to catch him before he hits the ground. Hanna sinks onto her haunches, her eyes are dark pools of despair. They don’t go to each other, Melidrei notices; she hasn’t seen them touch each other once since the search party formed, their individual grief like waves clashing against each other. We’ve ruined them, Melidrei thinks.

“Something ain’t right,” says Weinzen, the old farmer whose granddaughter Bast and Melidrei stole half a year ago. “A baby goes missing near every three months like clockwork around here. Just a couple months back I heard someone down the north side of the city woke up with their babe gone, and then there was my little Birta—”

His chin trembles and he breaks off. Bast and Melidrei do not look at each other. They’d hoped that Enzenauer was big enough that news wouldn’t travel so fast, that they might be able to stay longer, but it seems their time is nearly up.

Melidrei sinks down beside Hannah and puts an arm around her shoulders. “You’ve both been searching for hours now. You should go home and rest; we’ll keep looking.”

Hanna is shaking her head before Melidrei even finishes her sentence. “I can’t. She needs me.”

The woman’s feet are bleeding through her soft leather shoes, and her body is fever-hot, her neck and cheeks flushed and damp. When she stands up, she sways gently, and Melidrei catches her elbow to steady her.

“We’ll stay with you,” Bast says, pulling Caleb back to his feet as well. His brow is knitted with sorrow and frustration, a noble, lordly kind of grief compared to Caleb’s plain desperation. He’s become a good actor over the years.

He turns to Weinzen and the few others who had followed Hanna and Caleb this far. “Why don’t you all go east around the base of the mountain, and we’ll go west?"

Melidrei feels a stab of apprehension, unsure if Bast simply wants to be rid of Weinzen or if he has another reason for wanting to be alone and unobserved with the grieving couple. There was a time when she never would have questioned his intentions, but he’s become more mysterious to her the longer they’ve stayed in this form.

They go west, cutting a gentle grade against the mountain’s slope. It would, in any other circumstance, be a beautiful day, and the greening splendor of the forest feels almost unkind in the face of Caleb and Hanna’s despair. Their hoarse calls for their child scare rabbits out of the undergrowth and send birds clattering into the air, and Hanna’s feet begin to leave little smears of blood in the clover. Melidrei begins to think that it would be better for them to find the body, such as it will be now, than to never know what happened.

They travel on until the sun is high in the sky. Caleb stumbles over a ragged stump and goes down in a heap, his back soaked with sweat. Bast immediately bends over him and offers his water skin.

“Get up,” Hanna says, her voice raw and overloud. “Get up now!”

The husband doesn’t move, and Hanna staggers forward, lifts her foot as if to kick him. “Stand up,” she says savagely.

Bast steps back, and the air turns strangely as if before a storm, pale grief spinning into a cloud of violaceous rage. Hanna drives her poor, bleeding foot into Caleb’s ribs, barely rocking him with the sorry blow, but Mel sees that Bast’s face is suddenly lean and drawn with hunger.

“Come, Caleb,” he urges in a low, impelling voice. “Have you no more strength left?”

Mel has a sudden vision of Caleb rising, striking his wife, venting the fury and loss that compact around his heart and crush it. Hannah will reel back before she recovers, then slaps at him with hands curled into claws; he will drag a fist through her hair and yank her down, she will draw the spindle Mel can see lumped up in the pocket of her apron, and—

— and even that will not be enough for Bast.

Mel steps forward and catches Hanna’s shoulders. The woman tears away from her, but the sudden, violent movement is too much, and she goes down in a heap in the heather. For a moment, the glade is silent but for the sound of Hanna’s sobs.

Melidrei goes to her, takes one of her hands and folds them tightly in her own. “Hanna, we’re going home,” she says, threading just a little of her art through the words. “Driving yourselves to exhaustion will not find her, and it will only leave you unable to care for her if someone else does. Come now.”

Hanna rises without argument, tears still tracking down her flushed and dirty face, and turns for home. Mel stands too; she meets Bast’s eyes, finds them dark and hollowed-out by satisfaction interrupted. When she doesn’t move, he bends, lifts Caleb, slings the man’s arm around his shoulders to support him as they begin their descent.

It’s evening by the time they pass through the gates of Enzenauer. Goodwife Rinder and several other neighbors are waiting at Caleb and Hanna’s home, and the grieving parents are swept away. Someone shoves bowls of stew and mugs of ale into Bast and Melidrei’s hands, and low murmurs circulate through the house and beyond: “No sign of her…” “Neither hide nor hair of the babe nor of bandits…” “Some dark magic afoot here…”

Bast and Melidrei go home, just a stone’s throw from Caleb and Hanna and their empty nursery. They light a fire in their cold hearth to ward off the chill of night, and Bast goes to the window and watches the scene across the street, hungry as a voyeur. Melidrei boils a pot of water; for blanching the meat, she tells herself, and then for tea, and then at last she plunges her bare hands into the pot.

She can stand the pain for no more than a breath, and no sooner has she yanked her hands back out than the raw, red skin begins to heal over. We’re not meant to be among them, she thinks. We’re too resilient, and they break against us.

She turns from the hearth, meaning to say it out loud, but Bast’s gaze is still fixed out the window. The warm glow of the fire doesn’t seem to reach him, and instead the moonlight paints his face lean and pale, his features sharp and ravening cold.

You will never be content.

She cannot blame him; greed is in their nature. But his gaze has turned from gold and gems to human lives, and the voracity with which he devours their joy and their heartbreak strikes her as perverse. She thought it would be enough to live among them, but she sees now he cannot simply observe. She does not know how far he’ll go to elicit what he craves.

It was different in their other form. She cannot estimate the humans she’s killed in that shape, bones broken like so many twigs between her teeth, bodies vaporized by a heat so blistering it could melt the roots of the mountain. There was something pure in that, an understanding between her and them; she was a force of nature, mythic and unstoppable, promising last moments of abject terror before a quick death. What Bast did now was crueler, more malicious — a long game of lies the other party never agreed to. She wasn’t concerned at first; humans were, after all, prey, and when Bast discovered that an infant’s blood would allow them to maintain their human form unnaturally long, she thought nothing of it. It wasn’t until the first time, watching a small body twitch as the lifeblood drained from it drip by drip, that she realized this was somehow different.

The difference became more apparent the longer they went on. Every time the impending transformation would begin to strain their bodies, he would beg for just a little longer, one more time, and she would relent because she loved him. They had lived half a century together, so what was one more year as a human? But there was something black and rotten in the joy with which he went to stalk another family; he said it was to learn their habits and patterns, to know the best time to snatch the child with minimal risk. Melidrei doubts this now.

Bast watches at the window until deep into the night. He comes to bed long after Melidrei has, but unlike her, he quickly falls asleep. When his breath has become deep and even, she slips out from under the blankets and goes to the door, leaving her shoes where they lay.

The road is rough beneath her feet, the wheel ruts made in the wet of winter now dried to packed ridges. She pauses at Caleb and Hanna’s house, peers through a couple of the windows; Hanna sleeps curled on the floor beside the empty cradle, while Caleb is slumped in the rocking chair in their bedroom, the bed itself empty. Her heart clenches in her chest, and she flees through Enzenauer’s gates in the dark, back up the mountain.

The appeal of the human form has always been the closeness and sharpness of emotion, but Melidrei longs to escape this now. As fast as she can run, she cannot leave behind her sorrow for Caleb and Hanna, her grief at the loss of Bast, her fury that he would drive them apart with this obsession, her rage at the humans for being too weak to stop him. She desires the simplicity of her true self, the commotion of her thoughts distilled down to freedom and power and greed.

Her battered feet find the deer path she and Bast used earlier this day. The forest is quiet now, the chatter of birds replaced with the soft hum of insects, the violets washed to blue-gray by the moonlight. She has climbed this path five times since they arrived in Enzenauer; once for Caleb and Hanna’s daughter, once for Weinzen’s granddaughter, once for the boy whose dark hair and eyes could’ve made him Bast’s son, once for the girl whose mother left her squalling on the steps of the church, once for the boy who was nearly dead of cold by the time they cut his throat. As she runs, she glimpses a flash of eyes in the dark, the lean shape of a coyote.

I have nothing for you this time, she thinks.

When she reaches the outcropping, she does not hesitate. She keeps running, straight through the memories of her and Bast lifting that goblet to their lips, time after time. Her feet reach the edge and she flings herself out into space. For a split second, she is weightless and free.

Her body begins to change, but the transformation, so long delayed, is sluggish. Muscles which once flowed freely between shapes now jerk and twist painfully as she tumbles down. Her wings begin to emerge, each one feeling like her spine is being split and pulled like clay. She bares her teeth against the air rushing past, her neck extending with excruciating slowness. Enzenauer rises up to meet her. Melidrei closes her eyes.

Perhaps it’s better this way.

When Caleb and Hanna go through the gates to continue their search the next morning, they find her just outside — human head on a long, inhuman neck, half-formed dragon wings wrapped around her broken body.