Peaches

his silence, so that all of her anger had a place to go. But sometimes, he didn’t come when she called, and where was he? Following Tiger Lily through a bog, holding the spiders and reptiles she picked up and absently discarded into his mud-slippery hands, carrying her bow for her like a servant, listening to her grunt and swear over the wrongs people heaped on her. He even listened to more than her sounds, because Tiger Lily was a girl of few words. He listened with his eyes, watched facial expressions, judged body language, and therefore he read Tiger Lily better than anyone else. Perhaps he was drawn to her for this more than any other reason: Pine Sap had a knack for spotting lies from a mile away. And Tiger Lily was the only person he knew who never pretended.
    I saw her from time to time as she grew. And as she grew she hunted, she ran, she perfected her aim and her abilities with a paddle. It was like she had an instinctive awareness that she had to do a little something extra to be accepted. For a long time, she took up with the boys, going with them on hunts, dominating in mud fights. Only, she did too well at everything. She was too fast; her aim was too good. Her quiet confidence gave her a reputation for being haughty, and the boys—all except for Pine Sap—didn’t like being beaten. So by her thirteenth birthday, they told her that she couldn’t join them on hunts anymore. Without a word of complaint, she started hunting alone, in the same areas, and often ran into them with a stag or a rabbit slung over her back while they stood empty-handed.
    “That child will spend her life alone,” Aunt Agda was fond of saying between cluckings of her tongue, and everyone seemed to agree, except for all the suitors. They began coming from the time Tiger Lily was seven years old (as the shaman’s adopted daughter, her rank was coveted). They came from tribes near and far: the Bog Dwellers in the bogs, the Cliff Dwellers who lived in the snowy, pine-covered mountains. Her temper at those times was a spectacle to behold. She chased them all away with a hatchet, murder in her eyes. The hatchet had been a gift from Tik Tok, though he hadn’t meant it for that purpose. (Aunt Fire, one of the matrons, had even suggested her own son, Giant, as Tiger Lily’s ideal mate, but everyone had only tittered at that, because Giant was an oaf.)
    Usually, though, Tiger Lily saved her inner rage for the defense of lost causes. Such as when the boys bullied Pine Sap, who always seemed too puzzled to retaliate. Or when children taunted Aunt Fire for her wrinkles, though Aunt Fire was no friend to Tiger Lily. She’d knocked two boys unconscious in a spat over Moon Eye, and people said she’d hit both of them with one blow. She even defended me once, though it may have been coincidental. Stone was trying to kill me to make a night-light for his hut. He had cornered me in a crevice of rock, and was just moving for the blow when Tiger Lily appeared out of nowhere, hatchet in hand, and petrified him into backing away. It was the first time I ever thought she might know I existed. But her mind was so dark right then, I never knew for sure. Anyway, whether she’d meant to save me didn’t matter. She was the most interesting girl I had ever seen, and I couldn’t resist staying near her to see what happened next.

    A village, one as orderly as the Sky Eaters’, wants its members to fit just so. Tiger Lily didn’t, and so gossip followed her. By the time she was fifteen, the age she was the day of the shipwreck, opinions by the dozen landed in each hollow track left by her feet. I could hear the thoughts flying overhead, or when I was perched in a hay roof letting myself be groomed by crickets. It was rumored among the young people that at night she became her crow spirit, and they dared each other to leave piles of stones outside her door as a feat of bravery, fearing that they might peer through her window and see only a crow staring back at them. She would collect the stones the following morning, bewildered. Fear and, yes, even a bit of envy of her wild independence followed her side by side. But if she ever turned into a crow and flew away on night adventures, I never saw it.
    Still, the longer I was around her, the more I could see the colors of her mind and the recesses of her heart. There was a beast in there. But there was also a girl who was afraid of being a beast, and who wondered if other people had beasts in their