skin this creature for dinner. I patrolled with them for weeks, maybe months, and learned many things. I learned to creep through the woods in silence, and to oil bowstrings with fat. I learned to eat meat raw and blood-warm. I learned that all the ogre-stories I’d ever heard were true, and that monsters lurked in the shadows.”
Her voice had gone rhythmic, nearly hypnotic.
“I learned to love Liik and her Hunters. And when I saw them change—their skins sloughing and shifting, their jaws lengthening, their bows clattering forgotten to the forest floor—I was envious, rather than afraid. I’d been powerless my whole life, and the shape of the leopard-women as they leapt into battle was the shape of power written on the world.” I didn’t think I’d ever heard such emotion in Jane’s voice; not when a book ended poorly or the coffee was burned or a party guest said something scathing behind their gloved hand. Hearing it now felt almost intrusive.
“The patrol ended, eventually, and the women took me home: a village surrounded by fruit trees and farmlands, hidden in the cauldron of a dead volcano. Their menfolk greeted them in the streets with fat babies on their hips and fresh beer in clay pots. Liik spoke to her husbands and they looked at me with pity in their eyes. They led me to Liik’s home and fed me, and I spent that night and the next and the ones after that sleeping in a pile of soft furs surrounded by the gentle snoring of Liik’s children. It felt”—Jane swallowed, and her voice sounded briefly constricted—“like home.”
There was a small silence. “So you stayed there? In the village?”
Jane smiled, crooked and bitter. “I did. But Liik and her Hunters did not. I woke one morning to find that all of them had gone back to the forests, to the patrol, and left me behind.” She’d gone very brusque; how much had that second abandonment hurt? “I knew enough of the language by then to understand what the husbands were telling me: the forest was no place for a creature like me. I was too small, too weak. I should stay in the village and raise babies and grind tisi-nuts into flour and be safe.” Another crooked smile. “But by then I was very good at running away. I stole a bow and three skins of water and made my way back to the ivory door.”
“But—”
“Why?” Jane rubbed her finger along the wood grain of the table. “Because I didn’t want to be safe, I suppose. I wanted to be dangerous, to find my own power and write it on the world.”
I looked away, down to Bad now growling phantom-growls in his sleep. “So you left the leopard-women’s world. Where did you go?” People never got to stay in their Wonderlands, did they? Alice and Dorothy and the Darlings, all dragged back to the mundane world and tucked into bed by their handlers. My father, stranded in this dull reality.
Jane gave a great, scornful ha. “I went straight to the nearest British outpost, stole a Lee-Metford rifle and as much ammunition as I could carry, and went back through my ivory door. Two weeks later I walked back into the village, my rifle over my shoulder and a stinking, blood-crusted skull under my arm. I was hungry and thin again, my cotton shift was a tattered wrap around my waist, I’d broken two ribs in the battle—but I could feel my eyes burning with pride.” They were doing so now, gleaming dangerously through the cabin shadows.
“I found Liik in the village street and rolled the ogre skull at her feet.” The gap between her front teeth winked as her smile widened. “And so I patrolled with the leopard-women for the next twenty-two years. I had twelve kills to my name, two husbands and a hunt-wife, and three names in three languages. I had an entire world, full of blood and glory.” She leaned toward me, eyes fixing on mine like a black hunting cat, invisible tail lashing. Her voice when she spoke again was lower, rougher. “I would have all of that still, if your father had not arrived in 1909 and closed my door forever.”
I found myself wholly, profoundly speechless. Not out of shyness or uncertainty, but because all the words had apparently been shaken out of my skull and left nothing behind them but a dull, staticky buzzing sound. Maybe if we’d had longer I would’ve recovered, said