When the Snow Thaws... (Part I)

Celeste always told me that training sparrowhawks is like walking a tightrope with a friend who will abandon you at the first sign of difficulty. I had always assumed it to be another of her veiled jabs at my expense, but I make it three days into training my own hunting companion — gifted by Anneliese's mother as a gesture of goodwill — before she has to take the poor bird away from me and nurse it back from the brink of death.

It refuses to hunt if you give it too much food, and it grows frail if you give it too little. It gets aggressive if you spend too much time with it, and it flies away if you spend too little. Not for the first time in my retirement, I am taken back to my early days spent training women recruits in the army who — like me — were not so invested in the defence of the country as much as freedom from husbands or fathers or masters or children.

And I am tempted back into old impulses, when I rediscover that I hunt better alone.

A quail launches from its tree hollow a hundred metres away from me, but it makes it no higher than the canopies before my bullet sends it tumbling back down.

Jan whistles from behind me, leaning on his unloaded rifle like a senile monk. A chain of however-many dead birds drags along the mud behind him, trailing blood, muck and feathers. "That makes twenty-two," he says.

"Twenty-two?!" Piet's voice cracks from deeper into the forest. "We've barely downed ten!"

"If you'd stop scaring the stupid birds with your stupid loud voice—" Anneliese grumbles from the same direction, emerging from the brush with her own bundle of birds. "Rue," she calls out when she spots me, "how're the legs holding up?"

"Fine, I think?" I stretch my false knees and try my best to stifle the grin that threatens to embarrass me in front of the boys. "Certainly better than the last time we did this."

"Yeah," Anneliese hums, "you've been hitting more of your shots too, it seems like." She kneels down to scrub a few patches of leaf litter from my boots, pulling up my pants sleeves to check that the protective stocking underneath remains clean and the prosthetics free of invading snowmelt.

"Can you… not do that in front of other people?" I whisper to her.

"Oh please," she whispers back. "My brothers are as harmless as they come."

The scent of deer dung reaches my nostrils as she fiddles with the magiocrystal graft, and I spy a young stag studying me from behind an ancient oak, with curiosity as pure as a newborn calf's, ears twitching in the direction of the winds and antlers glistening with evening dew. I smile at it as Jan looks at me in amusement.

"Weren't you two in the same army?" He pokes his sister in the side. "Why are you so much worse at aiming than the Comtesse?"

"The same reason that she has a manor and I don't. I wasn't a prodigy sharpshooter at eighteen, you little oaf—"

"ALL OF YOU, SHUT YOUR TRAPS!" comes Uncle Hannes's thundering scream, so sudden and crass that it scares the deer and sends it a-scurry into the underbrush just as another, even worse scream arrives: "I'VE GOT FORTY BIRDS ON ME AND YOU'RE ALL STILL LOSING!"

Jan picks at his ears with a scowl. "He's lying."

"Yeah." Anneliese picks my bird off the ground and tosses it to him. "Still no sign of your lost hawk?"

"Nnnope. Probably flew back to Ma's by now." The boy kicks a stray pebble from his sandal as he ties this newest bird to the end of his cord. "Can't believe I was worried that the Comtesse might miss the quail and hit the hawks for a second there. I mean, for crying out loud Madame, you haven't missed a single shot."

"They're still waking up from the winter," I offer uneasily, "or maybe they've just had too much to eat after the spring thaw. Quail aren't usually this slow to fly where I'm from."

"I've heard a lot about Grand-Chambie, but never that," Jan says.

"You notice these things when you've got nothing better to do in-between battles but shoot at birds." Anneliese elbows me in the ribs with a chortle, and scrambles to catch me when I topple over and nearly dash my skull against the rocks. "Ah, shit, sorry about that—!"

"No harm!" I cackle through the clot in my throat. "I have legs now, Annie! Jumping, running legs!"

"You've always had legs, Rue."

"Legs, Annie!"

"Yeah, yeah." Anneliese turns away to hide a smile. "Just wait until Bea sees you like this. You'll be like those obnoxious sisters in the Wreathlander radio dramas."

Piet and his sparrowhawk, perched on his padded leather gauntlet, turn to meet our eyes in eerie concert. "Who's Bea?" the boy asks.

There is an awkward silence as we both struggle for a good answer. For all of the years we spent staring death in the eye together, it still feels strange to put so clear a name to our bond. "An engineer," Anneliese says.

"A friend," I say.

"Yeah…" she says. "A friend in Artigny. We were going to visit last week, but…"

"I didn't have the legs for it." I grin to myself as I give my knees another few kicks. "Not a problem now, but—"

"I didn't have the patience to lug her around before." Anneliese shrugs. "At least we know where she lives now: some cabaret in the lower city called uh, La Rouge-something?"

"La Couronne Rouge," I say. "An old revolutionary joint."

"Girl still knows how to pick exciting company if nothing else."

"A long way from here, isn't she?" Jan crows. "How'd you end up getting separated for so long if the three of you were—?"

A deafening shot rings out from far too close behind us, and I nearly smack my rifle barrel into Jan's jaw as I spin around to face it. I half-expect men in Volkhovsky colours to emerge from the thicket until Uncle Hannes's voice booms once more: "BLOOD, SHIT, AND PISS!"

"That means he hurt himself." Jan rolls his eyes. "Was bound to happen sooner or later."

"I know." Anneliese sighs. "We call off the hunt, then?"

"But we were winning!"

Anneliese pinches the bridge of her nose. "Rue was winning. You didn't do shit."

"That sounds like loser talk to me."

"ALL OF YOU GET OVER HERE AND HELP ME OUT OF THIS HOLE!" Hannes screams. "STUPID FUCKING DEER TRIED TO KILL ME AND SNATCHED UP ALL MY BIRDS!"

Jan forces out a long groan as he rushes over in his uncle's direction. I follow close behind with Anneliese and Piet, my finger still hovering above the trigger for no reason I can recognise, and my eyes scanning the brush behind us for threats that never come. Anneliese slows down as she trawls through a patch of hungry mud that I've managed to avoid, and she almost smiles when she meets my eyes until Hannes screams again:

"ANNELIESE, YOU USELESS LITTLE BITCH, GET OVER HERE AND HELP YOUR UNCLE OUT OF THIS HOLE BEFORE HE LOSES HIS LEGS LIKE YOUR FRIEND THE COMTESSE!"

The brief camaraderie between us snaps as the gates of her heart slam shut again.

In that moment, I thought that I might have killed that bastard Hannes dead.

We all arrive to the same bizarre scene after a minute of frantic searching: the pot-bellied man, grinning like a lunatic, with his right foot and left hand sunk as deep into the spring bog as they could reasonably go without cracking the rest of him down the middle. His smoking rifle has somehow ended up caught in the branches of the tree above him, and neither his hawk nor his quails are anywhere to be found. He waves a broken antler at us like a trophy of war, and my eyes are soon drawn to the trail of blood and ichor leading from its stump into the woods farther north. A memory of the young stag, fresh and inquisitive, burns again in my mind.

"ANNELIESE—!"

"I can hear you, Hannes."

"THEN GET YOUR ROTTEN ASS OVER HERE AND HELP ME ALREADY!"

I stand at a safe distance as the three siblings work together to pull the man out of the bog. He leaves an imprint behind in the shape of a leech bite, and I cannot help the disgust that overcomes me when he aims a wolfish grin my way.

"Has the Madame had her fill of the hunt?!" Hannes asks, loud enough to make my ears buzz with blood — out of anger or overstimulation, I am unsure.

"Yes…" I grit my teeth. "Let us—"

"Then let us walk back at once! The sun is coming down and these old legs aren't made quite like yours, Comtesse!"

Every other person in the glade tenses at his tone-deaf remark. I try to laugh along but the sound is strained even to me.

Hannes would continue to make these jokes all the way down the hill, and does not stop even when we push through the fence gates of Anneliese's childhood home and hang our weapons and hunting cloaks in the shed — which he neglects to do, intent as he is to show off to his sister that bleeding antler which he had claimed from the innocent stag. Every sparrowhawk nesting in the area averts their gaze as he draws near.

I turn to Anneliese expecting her gaze to have wandered away as well, only to find it frozen in place upon Hannes's back, with none of the warmth that I had grown accustomed to in the past few months. In its place is venom, as black as the darkening sky, and I think that, if she did not have the army to take her in, she would have murdered this sorry man she calls uncle long ago.