The Twa Corbies

by Marie Brennan

(Originally published in Talebones #31, December 2005)

In all the fairy stories, when the hero is magically gifted with an understanding of the speech of birds, it actually does him some good. A robin brings him a message from his true love, or a bluebird tells him about buried treasure, or a starling warns him of a traitor among his companions. It doesn't really work that way, though -- not in real life. Birds mostly talk about seeds and worms and the breeze and nest-building and the state of their eggs. I should know; I've been listening to them for seven years.

In all that time, they've only ever said one thing that interested me, and that one almost got me killed.

I blame the ravens. Of all the breeds I've been forced to listen to, ravens are my least favorite; bird-talk about seeds may be boring, but bird-talk about carrion is just nasty. Ravens have a tendency to go into all sorts of detail I simply don't want to hear. I avoid them when possible.

But this time I didn't have much choice. I was walking between towns when a pebble managed to work itself into my boot; I tried to ignore it for a little while, but it got really annoying, and at last I had to stop and get rid of it. That, of course, meant finding a place to stop. I'm not exactly fastidious, but the sky had been dumping rain on me for six days, and the road was a sea of mud. I trudged on, the pebble annoying me more with every passing second, until at last I came across a low stone wall. I heaved my pedlar's pack onto the top, then hopped up to sit next to it.

A raven fluttered to a landing in a scrawny ash tree nearby as I unlaced my boot and pulled it off. I ignored the bird; ravens at least have the decency not to chatter to themselves, the way sparrows do. I figured I could work in silence.

But a second bird joined the first a moment later, and they started talking.

"Where shall we feast today?" the second bird asked the first.

I began very hastily to search for the pebble in my boot.

Unfortunately, I have a really hard time tuning birds out. People are easier; don't ask me why. Maybe it has to do with me spending so much time on the road, on account of being a pedlar. At any rate, I found myself an unwilling audience to their conversation.

"I have found a fresh morsel just beyond the dike," the first bird said.

The second raven quorked in interest. "What sort of morsel?"

I intensified my search for the elusive pebble.

"A human," the first bird said with relish. "Of the sort that is encased in metal."

My boot almost slipped from my chilled fingers.

The second bird let out an irritated caw. "They are a nuisance to eat. The metal gets in the way."

"Its head is uncovered," the first raven said. "Its eyes are yet there; we may eat them if we hurry. And its hair could be used for nest-material."

Back to nest-building -- just like a bird. But that thought was irrelevant to what the rest of my mind was thinking.

Encased in metal.

Only knights wore armor.

The second raven sounded tempted as it said, "Perhaps. Are we likely to be disturbed?"

"I think not," the first bird said. "It is but new-dead. And no one knows it has died."

"Did you see it die?"

The dreadful eagerness in the second raven's voice made me shiver. The first one replied, "I did. It was riding alone, on a horse, and then it fell off and died. It had only a hawk and a hound for company, and none has come near it since then."

The pebble fell at last into my searching fingers, which had gone about their task without the rest of me. I tossed it to the ground, then jammed my boot back onto my foot and began to lace it up quickly. A knight, lying dead in a ditch, and no one knew he had fallen.

I couldn't just leave him there, for these unpleasant birds to peck out his eyes. Granted, if he was a knight in full armor, I had about as much chance of carrying him as these ravens did of carrying me, but at least I could see if he had his shield with him; if I knew his coat of arms, I could tell the people in the next town that he had died. They might reward me for the information.

It crossed my mind that they might instead accuse me of killing him, but I didn't worry about that overmuch. I'm just a pedlar; how could I kill a knight in armor? Besides, the raven had said the man fell dead at no outward attack. His heart had probably given out.

With my boot finally laced, I hopped off the wall on the other side and slung my pack onto my back. I could see the dike the first raven had referred to, just a short way across the field, and began to slog toward it through the ankle-deep mud.

As I went, the two ravens flapped past me.

I did my best to hurry, but the mud sucked at my boots and slowed me down. By the time I crested the top of the dike, the ravens had already landed on the body of what was unmistakably a knight, lying in the filthy water at the bottom of the ditch.

"Here now!" I called out to them, making shooing motions with my hands. "Get away from him! Off! Fly off!"

The smaller raven looked at the larger. I had no idea which was which, from their previous conversation, and they all sound alike to me. "It does understand us," it said.

Damned clever ravens. "Yes," I said; this was not the first time I'd had to explain myself to birds. "I was granted a favor a long time ago, and like an idiot, I said I wanted to understand birds. Now buzz off. You can't eat this man."

The larger raven cocked its head at me. "Oh can't we?" And its beak darted down.

"Stop that!" I skidded down the muddy slope toward them, and as I regained my balance I saw an amused gleam in the larger bird's eye. It had not actually taken a bite of the dead man; it was only taunting me.

"Not yet, anyway," I was forced to say. "Please, just have the decency to wait until I'm gone. I don't want to watch you peck off bits of him."

"So go away," the smaller raven suggested rudely.

I would, and gladly, in just a moment. But first I had to figure out who the dead knight was, or at least get enough identifying characteristics that I could describe him to someone.

His eyes were open and staring, glazed over in death; in life they would have been a lively blue. I shuddered away from looking at them for too long. His hair, where it was not muddied and brown, was a rich gold color; he was young, and had probably been quite handsome before he died. Now, however, his pale skin had taken on that ugly pallor that corpses have. I was lucky he hadn't yet started to rot.

But his armor -- chain-mail with a little bit of plate -- was unremarkable, and he wore no tunic to show me his coat of arms. His shield was nowhere in sight.

"How did he die?" I asked the birds.

The larger raven shifted his feet on the man's shoulder. "You were listening, weren't you?" it asked snidely. "It fell off its horse."

"Just fell? Didn't he clutch at his heart or anything? Sway in the saddle? Look ill?"

The raven quorked to itself for a moment, saying nothing intelligible, then admitted, "Well, yes. It looked like it wasn't doing very well. That's why I followed it. When I first saw it, it was fine, but then it suddenly went very green and dropped its shield and I thought it might be about to die." The bird fluttered its wings proudly. "I was right."

Dropped its shield. I'm not much of a tracker; in this muddy trench, I could not make out the hoofprints of a horse. "Where did it come from? Did it drop its -- his shield near here?" I needed to get away from these damn birds; I was starting to talk like them.

"If I tell you will you go away and let us eat in peace?"

The thought of leaving the dead man here for these ravens turned my stomach, but there wasn't much I could do to stop them. I had no horse, and the knight's was long gone. "Yes."

"Come on."

The raven took to the air, flapping up over the other embankment. I followed, slipping in the mud, cursing the ill-fortune that had put a pebble into my boot just at the right moment to get me caught up in this mess. Why couldn't it have happened a mile sooner, or later?

Or why couldn't I just have ignored the damn birds and walked on?

A narrow track ran along the embankment on that side. The raven had flown a short distance along it, and now sat on the ground, waiting for me with an impatient air. I hurried to see whether it was telling the truth or not.

It was. The knight's shield lay face-down in a thorny bush, as if it had been dropped from horseback. I dragged it clear and turned it over to find the knight's blazon. Two crossed spears done in white on a black field.

"I know this blazon," I muttered, talking to myself more than to the raven. As I've already said, I don't like having conversations with them. "It's Lord Tergram's." But that couldn't be him in the ditch; Lord Tergram was an older man, with his hair gone grey. The dead knight must be his son, the one who had gone off to war -- I couldn't remember his name.

"Can I eat it now?" the raven asked, shifting from foot to foot.

I blanched. Somehow it was much worse to think about the bird eating the dead knight now that I knew who he was.

"You promised," the bird reminded me, and glared at me balefully.

I wanted to say no. But knowing the man was the younger Tergram did not make me any more capable of stopping the bird. I sighed and nodded.

The raven said nothing more, but flew off.

I returned to the road and my journey. Tergram was the overlord of the very town I was headed for. I would return his son's shield to him, and hope someone got to the dead knight before the ravens did too much damage.

***

The guards at the town gate were huddled inside their little tower, hiding from the rain. Two of them emerged, though, when I came slogging up.

"I need to talk to Lord Tergram," I said.

The fatter of the two guards shook his head. "Lord Tergram's dead."

My heart skipped a beat. "Lord Rallec Tergram?"

"He died about a year ago." The guard was plainly not interested in this conversation; he wanted to get back inside where it was dry.

I shared that sentiment. "Then I want to speak to whoever's in charge now."

"And why should her ladyship see you?"

I supposed I did not look like someone who deserved to see her ladyship; I was soaked to the bone and spattered with mud up to my hips, thanks to my little jaunt into the fields. I still had a card to play, though. I held up the shield. "Because of this."

The skinnier guard peered through the rain at the shield. "Whassat?"

My impatience slipped its leash a little. "It's the shield of Lord Rallec's son," I snapped, and only barely swallowed the "idiot" I wanted to stick on at the end.

"Right," the fatter guard said, and for a moment I thought he was expressing disbelief. But when I looked at him, he was nodding wearily. "I'll take you to her ladyship."

As we hurried through the half-flooded streets, it occurred to me to wonder who "her ladyship" was. Not Rallec's wife; I seemed to remember him being a widower. Had he remarried? No, it had to be the son's wife.

Great. I was going to tell a woman that her husband was lying dead in the mud. This day was getting better all the time.

The Tergrams were not a powerful family, for which I was grateful; a grand hall would have put the cap on my discomfort. Instead I was shown into a room which, while big and impressive and hung with tapestries, was something I could deal with. My escort muttered to another guard, who muttered to a man standing at the other end of the hall, who muttered to the woman seated in a huge carved chair beneath the Tergram banner, while I waited and dripped on the floor.

The man beckoned me forward.

I advanced across the floor, painfully aware of my appearance, and made the best bow I could while holding the shield. "My lady," I began, wondering if there was any good way to break this news. Probably not. "I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your husband's dead."

She did not scream; she did not weep. She didn't even stare. "I'm aware of that, thank you."

I blinked. Aware of it? What the hell?

"We heard months ago," she added calmly.

My familiarity with corpses was limited, but the knight in the ditch had not been dead for months. Even the ravens had called him "fresh." And if these people knew he was dead, why hadn't they fetched his body for decent burial?

I must have spoken out loud, at least for that last thought. I usually have the sense not to talk about the birds. The lady looked at me as if I were an idiot. "Because no one could find his body," she said.

"I found it," I said, and for the first time I had the attention of everyone in the room. I held up the shield in the sudden silence. "I've got this to prove it."

The lady sat quite upright in her seat. "You . . . found his shield?" she whispered hoarsely. "You've come from the war?"

"No," I said. She was making my confusion worse instead of fixing it.

"Then where did you find that?"

"About an hour's walk south of town," I said. That, at least, was something I was sure of. "He's lying in a ditch out there, and if you don't want ravens eating too much of him, you should send someone for him right away."

"He's not in a ditch," she said, her voice harsh. "When his father died, we sent to him, and the messenger came back saying he had been killed in the war."

"Then somebody screwed up," I said, forgetting to be polite. I hadn't expected this sort of trouble when I decided to be a good guy and bring news of the son's death. "Because your husband really is out there. Send someone out to look if you don't believe me."

The lady looked reflexively to the man at her side. He nodded. "My lady, with your leave, I will check the truth of his words."

"Do," the lady said. "And in the meantime, someone get this man cleaned up. He's dripping."

***

How the raven found me, I couldn't tell you. Maybe there's a conspiracy of birds, and the town pigeons told him. All I know is, I was changing into relatively dry and clean clothes from my pack when he fluttered onto the window-sill.

"This is your fault, isn't it," he accused me.

I stared at him. "You again? Why are you here?"

"You promised we could eat in peace," the raven said. I thought he was the larger one, the one who had found the body in the first place, but without the other for comparison it was hard to tell. "Now more humans have come and taken our food away."

I supposed that was my fault. "Sorry," I said, and did not mean it in the least. "The people here wanted to bury him."

"Well, they did that all right," the raven said disconsolately. "Now I won't get to eat its tongue."

I was in the middle of congratulating myself for having saved the young lord from being snacked on by ravens when the actual words registered on me. "They buried him already?"

The raven glared at me. "Yes. It's a waste, if you ask me."

I wasn't asking. What I wanted to know was, why had they buried him already? That made no sense at all.

At least, it didn't make any sense until they took me back to the hall.

"We found nothing," the man who had led the riders said.

The lady fixed unfriendly eyes on me. "So. You are a liar, as I suspected."

A liar? I might be an idiot, for getting involved in this mess in the first place, but never a liar. "I brought you his shield," I reminded her. Surely that was proof.

"Which you stole off the battlefield, or obtained from someone else," she said. "And, for reasons only you can know, you felt the need to come torment me in my grief by telling me vile falsehoods about my poor, late husband." She didn't sound very tormented or grief-stricken; she sounded angry.

That was so far from the truth that I wanted to scream. Instead I gritted my teeth and searched for something that would get me out of this before my day got any worse. "Maybe . . . maybe I was mistaken, my lady." Mistaken how? I couldn't say they'd searched in the wrong place; I might not know what was going on, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that the riders had hidden the body, and would not produce it no matter what. At this point I didn't care why; I just wanted to stop being involved. "Maybe someone was trying to deceive me, my lady. I did find your husband's shield in the ditch, I swear to that, and there was a man there in armor. Maybe . . . someone else is trying to torment you, as you say."

Worst lie I've ever put together, but it did the job. If by "did the job" I mean "kept me out of the dungeon."

Okay, so I do lie occasionally, but only when there's great need.

The lady glared at me. "You will leave this town," she said. "You will leave and not come back. I do not want to see your face here again."

Fine by me, I thought, and didn't even protest when they sent me back out into the rain.

***

I was all prepared to put that disaster behind me when the raven found me again.

"Go away," I snarled through clenched teeth. "You've caused enough trouble for one day."

Then a hawk came arrowing out of the damp air to land next to the raven on the fence. She looked at the raven, then at me. "Can he really understand me?"

"Oh, no!" My protest made both birds flutter their wings. "I am not talking to you anymore. Any of you. Leave me alone!"

The hawk fixed me with her bright eyes. Normally I'd rather talk to a hawk than a raven, but not right now. I remembered well enough what the raven had said about the dead knight. If this wasn't Tergram's hawk, I would eat my shoes. And hawks are very single-minded creatures.

"This one tells me you have a care for my master," the hawk said.

"No," I said immediately. "I just wanted to get him buried. That's done, so I'm done." Even if the knight had been dumped in an unmarked grave.

"I would not count on that," the hawk said.

Against my will, she had my attention. "Count on what?"

"Being done."

I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

"My master was murdered," the hawk said.

"Now wait a second," I cut in. "This raven here said your master just fell out of his saddle and died. He didn't say anything about an arrow or an attack."

The hawk mantled, and it occured to me that she could rip me bloody if I made her angry. "He was murdered by magic," she said.

Your average man would have laughed this statement off. Your average man, though, has never caught a pixie skulking around his fire one night, and has never forced that pixie to grant him a wish. I had proof of magic, all right, although I seriously regretted asking to be able to understand birds.

I had thought they might be able to give me directions on the road.

The rain was tapering off to an annoying mist. I stood in the middle of the road and tried to tell myself to keep walking. The knight had been murdered by magic, his hawk said. His lady thought he had died months ago. His lady's right-hand man had hidden the knight's body and then lied to her about it.

This had all the marks of something I should have never gotten involved with in the first place.

But if that man was responsible for murdering the knight, then the lady deserved to know.

Besides which, I had a hawk sitting not far away with a look in her eye that said she was not going to leave the matter alone until I helped her.

I had a vision of myself pecked to a bloody ruin, and snarled.

"All right," I said reluctantly. "Where's he buried?"

***

The riders had not buried the body very deeply, and the ground was soft. A few minutes of work coated me in mud and revealed the knight's body.

"Now what?" I asked the two birds who were watching from a tree.

"Can I eat him?" the raven asked.

I ignored that. The hawk fluttered down to land on her dead master's chest and nodded her beak toward his hand. "He put that ring on and it made him very ill."

I looked at the ring she had indicated, checking my urge to reach out for it. The ring in question was a heavy signet; with the mud on it I couldn't be sure, but my guess was that it was the Tergram seal. "Why didn't he take it off?"

"It wouldn't come off," the hawk said. "He tried."

So he hadn't been entirely stupid. The question was, what should I do now? I had an apparently cursed ring and an obviously dead knight. If I brought them to the town, at least I could prove to the lady that I had been telling the truth -- assuming, of course, that the guards let me in. But what proof did I have that he'd been murdered?

I looked around and sighed. The knight had been buried in the lee of another low stone wall, farther from the road. There was a wood right nearby; I could go cut branches from that to make a sledge, and use that to drag the body. The mud might actually help me out, by making it easier to slide things. But what would be even better would be to find a farmer who had a horse I could use. According to the hawk, the knight's own horse was long gone, and so was his hound.

The sun was headed for the horizon; I didn't have a lot of time to waste. I flicked my wet hair out of my eyes and looked at the hawk. "Do me a favor. Fly around here until you find a nearby house, okay? You know what a house is, right?" She glared at me, offended. "When you find the nearest one -- preferably in the general direction of the town -- then come back here and tell me."

The hawk opened her beak, but I cut her off before she could protest. "If you tell me this is beneath your dignity, I'm going to dump your master back in this hole and forget the entire thing."

The threat worked. She flew off.

I sat down with my back to the wall to wait. At this point I didn't care about the mud; I was just about as dirty as I could get already.

Not much time had passed before I heard hoofbeats squelching across the fields. The hawk must have found someone quicker than I thought, and brought him to me already.

But wait -- that thought made no sense at all. Farmers can't understand bird talk. How could the hawk have brought someone?

I leapt to my feet just as two horses came sailing over the wall and skidded to a halt in the mud.

"Well," the knight's lady said in a cold voice, turning her horse to face me. "It seems you are yet inclined to meddle."

I clenched my teeth and called myself nineteen kinds of idiot. How had I been so stupid? Her calm was not that of a widow who has come to terms with her grief; it was the calm of a murderess who never mourned her husband's passing in the first place.

At her side, the man she had dispatched to hide her husband's body smiled unpleasantly.

The lady looked down on the mud-covered form of her late husband and made an irritated sound. "If only he had done as he should, and died the moment he put on the ring," she said. "Where he got the strength to survive for so long, I do not know." Her cold gaze lifted to regard me. "But it does not matter. He is dead, and I am Lady, and no troublesome pedlar is going to change that."

I stood with my back to the wall, my heart so far up in my throat I could taste it. There was nowhere I could run; they would ride me down.

"My love," the lady, the witch, said to the man at her side. "Do me the favor of killing this man."

"Gladly," the man said, and his expression echoed it. He would enjoy killing me.

I looked desperately about for an escape as he unhooked a crossbow from his saddle.

"Would you like help?" the raven asked me from its perch in the tree.

Neither the lady nor the man reacted. They could not understand him; all they heard was squawking. I could barely speak for terror, but I managed to yelp, "Yes!"

The man was loading a quarrel into the crossbow.

"Can I eat their eyes?"

The murdered knight might deserve better, but these two did not. "Yes!"

The man lifted the crossbow and aimed it at me.

The raven arrowed down out of the tree and flew directly for his face. The man swore and jerked instinctively away; the quarrel flew, but skipped off the top of the stone wall, missing me by a hair.

The raven flew off, screaming something unintelligible, and left me alone with the two of them.

Some help, I thought bitterly, and ran like hell for the wood.

"Get him!" the lady screeched, and within an instant I heard hoofbeats behind me. I was going to die anyway; the raven had only delayed it for a moment.

Then the birds came.

They poured out of the wood like a flood, thundering past me on a thousand wings. I could not identify half of them; they flew too quickly, and besides, their kind did not matter. What mattered was that they attacked the riders pursuing me, while the raven circled and shrieked battle cries, urging them on to blood.

As I reached the periphery of the wood, I had to turn around. The horses had stopped; their riders were flailing their arms, trying to fend off the birds. They did not stand a chance, though. Here and there they struck a small body, stunning the bird or occasionally hurting it, but there were too many. Their screams rose above those of the raven.

And then the hawk plummeted from the sky like a taloned rock and struck the lady, and she toppled from her horse into the mud. The man followed a moment later, vanquished by a thousand little birds.

He lived, actually -- at least for a little while. The lord who came in to clean up the mess afterward sentenced him to death, so he hung in the end, with the wounds still visible on his face where the birds had attacked him. The lady died out there in that field, though; the hawk had seen to that.

The murdered knight was buried properly, where the ravens cannot get at him. The one who got me into all this trouble didn't hold that against me, though; he made quite a feast of the lady's face before anyone arrived to take care of her body.

I might have been a bit slow getting people out there.

I got a bit of a reward for the whole thing; they found evidence in the lady's chambers of her witchcraft. It didn't make up for nearly being shot, though, and it certainly doesn't make up for what's happened since.

You see, some of the birds got hurt in that attack, and I couldn't just abandon them, not after they saved my life. So I nursed them back into health while all that trial business was going on, and the upshot of it all is that now the birds like me. They follow me wherever I go, and tell me about the worm they caught that morning and the way the breeze is blowing and how they think their eggs might hatch soon.

All except the ravens. They all snicker among themselves when they see me, and ask if I'd like to see the dead bodies they've found.

Next time I catch a pixie, I know what wish I'm going to make.

---

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