Bird of Prey
Short story. Nessa leads soldiers to her father's hideout, but the journey is built on a lie.
Snow smothered the landscape as Nessa led five soldiers to her father’s hideout. Despite being spring, a cold snap had gripped the area for the last two days, and the usual deer and rabbit were nowhere to be seen. Even the wind had stilled for their arrival. As she slowed her horse and surveyed the land, she felt stuck in time, her misty exhales disrupting her view.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” Cillian asked as he rode up beside her.
Unease trickled through her. Over the past week, she had had to endure constant suspicion from her companions, Cillian being the worst of the lot. The soldiers followed the orders of the Elantraith council, a body set up to investigate the whereabouts of Wanderers, strange beings whose seemingly immortal bodies defied scientific understanding.
The journey was built on a lie. It had been two years since she had last seen her father, two years that she had spent doing odd jobs several counties over and running away from her memories in any way she could. She had never intended to come back, but a chance encounter with a traveller had disrupted her cosy repression.
The traveller told her that a number of young people had gone missing from Hockmannon and other nearby villages. One man went searching for his son and stumbled across a shallow grave containing a monstrous, misshapen corpse dressed in his son’s clothes. The commonly accepted wisdom was that it had been the work of a Wanderer, the culprit for any strange occurrences these days, but Nessa knew better. She realised that without her to fixate on and ground him, her father’s experiments had become more daring and more deadly.
Nessa knew crimes in the countryside of the poorest county wouldn’t garner much interest, so she told the Elantraith council that her father was in cahoots with a Wanderer, and the pair of them had preyed on the villagers of Hockmannon. Reciting one of her father’s books that she had read in her youth, she gave a convincing description of the Wanderer’s mottled skin and ethereal voice. Her intention had been to tell them roughly where her father’s hideout was and return to drinking herself into oblivion, but Cillian had insisted they had little hope of finding him without her assistance.
So here she was, leading a group of soldiers who hated her through cold, miserable hills, to the only parent she had ever known, the man who had made her life a misery.
Nessa was the only one of the group who was not armed. Each of the soldiers carried a sword and a set of armour, and a gangly magician named Maeve also carried huge bear hides imbued with magic blocking. It felt too late to ask whether they intended to take her father dead or alive. Nessa imagined her father being slaughtered and found herself torn between satisfaction and anguish. When she thought of him being imprisoned, she pictured his accusatory glare, knowing that to his mind, all his “work” was just about bringing forth a new era of enlightenment.
“If we follow this, we’ll be there before nightfall.” Nessa pointed to a river that wound through the valley, her breath forming a faint cloud in the cool air.
“Alright, everyone. Let’s have one stop before our final push,” Cillian called out. As they dismounted, Nessa heard him mutter to Maeve, “Fecking fool’s errand, this. Need to get me back to Daredarra.”
“Gotta keep an eye on the lass when we find her father,” Maeve replied, taking off her gloves and blowing on her fingers to warm them up.
“What do you think I’m gonna do, suddenly switch sides?” Nessa yelled, no longer able to contain herself. “Or you think I’m laying a trap, is that it? You think I went through this and still think like my father?” Nessa opened her coat and pulled up her shirt to reveal the puckered scars and nodules on her abdomen. Goosebumps spread out across her exposed skin. She had never shown them to anyone before, afraid of the questions that would follow. Maeve had the decency to squirm and look away, but Cillian met her gaze.
“You said your father performed these experiments on others. You yourself saw a Wanderer, so you claimed. So why’d you spend two years on your arse doing nothing?”
Nessa straightened her clothes, embarrassed at her outburst. There was no simple answer.
When she had lived with her father, the only people he had carried out his clumsy surgery on were her and a servant boy, although a seemingly endless number of animals also fell under his knife. He was an animalist, a magician able to see through the eyes of any nearby animal and force it to do his bidding. His power hadn’t come about through study or ancestry, but was merely due to being born when the planets had aligned just right. His life’s ambition was to allow everyone else to have this power, starting with Nessa.
He had often told her how he had tried to ensure she would be born an animalist too, giving her mother fertility concoctions nine months before, and gathering herbs to induce labour on the right day. It was a common enough practice in Tirmorran, although other countries nurtured a hatred of magicians instead, and held abstinence festivals to prevent them from being born. Nessa had dashed his hopes by being born two weeks early. He had been trying to fix the issue ever since.
When she finally fled after the servant died, it didn’t occur to her that anyone might care. It didn’t occur to her that he would seek out new people to further his research. Drowning her sorrows in a different tavern every night felt like the only thing that made sense.
“Did you hear me, woman? I asked why we’re traipsing out to the middle of nowhere two years after you saw a Wanderer.”
“People from Hockmannon and -”
“Yes, we heard what they said. Children of poor families went missing and they think a Wanderer’s responsible. Same shit we hear the whole country over. But you said you actually saw a Wanderer. One lived under your father’s roof. That true? Or did you just want to get attention?”
Now was the moment to tell the truth, Nessa thought. They would still put a stop to him - she knew they wouldn’t want to come back from the trip empty-handed. They might hate her for it, but at least she would no longer have to carry the burden of her lies.
She opened her mouth to speak, then froze. A barn owl had swooped down and perched on a tree branch just over Cillian’s shoulder. Its pitiless black eyes were fixed on Nessa.
An icy terror engulfed her. For a few moments, she felt paralyzed, her mouth hanging open.
It was her father’s owl.
For years, she had dutifully followed her father’s orders, hunting and cooking and burying the mutilated corpses of rabbits and deer her father had experimented on. There was nowhere she could go to be truly alone, no secret display of defiance she could carry out in the wilderness, because there was always the possibility he was watching. Any time she wandered too far or did something she wasn’t supposed to, she’d see an owl circling above her. Even around the house, there was a mangy cat who followed her around, and she could never be sure it did so of its own accord.
The bird ruffled its feathers, but kept its eyes on Nessa. She felt pinned under that gaze, like the rabbits that would writhe on her father’s surgical table. The last time she had seen the owl was the night she had fled. Under her father’s possession, it had tried to peck and claw at her skin for what felt like hours. When he could no longer possess it at such a distance, it had collapsed to the ground, exhausted.
It could attack at any moment, Nessa thought, yet she couldn’t move a muscle. Her father must have seen the weapons hanging from the horses, and know they were there to put a stop to him. Did he despise her for leaving, she wondered, as she often despised him?
Then the bird screeched, tumbled off the branch, and thumped onto the snowy ground. It screeched again, then spread its huge wings and flew off over the river.
Cillian looked over his shoulder to follow Nessa’s eyeline.
“What is it?”
“He… He knows.” She croaked.
Maeve peered up into the sky and cursed.
“Let’s go, go, go!” Maeve gestured for everyone to get moving. “C’mon Cillian, whether or not there’s a Wanderer, we’ve still got to get the bastard.”
As Nessa got back on the horse, the reins suddenly felt too small, her hands too big. It was a sensation she had been used to when she was younger, and one her father had encouraged, telling her it was a sign that his experiments were working. To feel like she didn’t exist in her own body was the ideal in his mind.
The group broke into a gallop, huge puffs of snow churning up in their wake. Any animal trails that had existed before were hidden from view, so Nessa just led them up the smoothest looking ground, keeping the river on her left to guide her. Even at their fast pace, it was several hours before they crested a ridge and spotted her father’s house.
She hadn’t realised until that moment how hidden it was. It was nestled on the edge of a small wood in a narrow valley, many miles away from the nearest village. Tears stung her eyes. Much as she loathed him, seeing the wooden house flooded her with sorrow at the loneliness he must have felt after she had fled. She abandoned him, she thought. She had been his whole world, and she abandoned him.
The group halted on the ridge, looking down at the quiet valley. A knot formed in Nessa’s stomach as she imagined the upcoming confrontation.
“Do Wanderers have powers?” Maeve asked.
“My father doesn’t know any Wanderers. There, I told you. That doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous enough on his own.”
Cillian snorted.
“You think we haven’t dealt with wayward animalists before? Come on.”
Nessa took the rear as the group rode down to the valley. All were alert for any signs of danger, but nothing stirred. As they approached, they saw the front door hanging open.
“He’s fled?” Meave asked Nessa as they dismounted.
Nessa shrugged, but the knot in her stomach eased. His flight meant she wouldn’t have to face him, not yet at least. Fleeing was the logical choice for him. He had little in the way of fighting skills, last she knew, and whenever he possessed an animal, it left his human body vulnerable.
Cillian entered first, sword in hand, then the others followed. Nessa lingered outside by the horses at first, half afraid she’d burst into flames if she crossed the threshold, but a cold wind whistled through the valley and soon she relented and stepped in.
The main room was a mess of upturned furniture, smashed crockery, and bloodied clothes. Her father must have been in a hurry to collect everything that was important to him. There was a faint smell of smoke, and Nessa saw the fireplace was clogged with burnt paper, a few embers glowing amongst the ash. She prodded the remains with a poker and spotted a few snatches of her father's spidery handwriting.
“Not long gone, then,” Cillian muttered. He marched outside.
Despite the mess, it was still the same house that had haunted her dreams. The same green woven rug lay on the floor and identical dried herbs hung from the ceiling. The only thing her nightly visions always added was a staircase. In pleasant dreams they were a portal leading far away, in her nightmares she would find herself knee-deep in contorted bloodied corpses.
“There’s someone here!” Maeve yelled from another room. Then: “Oh.”
Nessa looked up from the fireplace and saw flecks of blood on the rug, and a bloodied handprint on the wall. Heart pounding, she followed the sound of Meave’s voice. Her first thought was that her betrayal had been too much for her father.
Someone lay in her old bed, splattered in blood. Nessa rushed to their side, but soon saw it wasn’t her father. Instead, it was a young, emaciated woman, presumably snatched from one of the villages. Maeve was muttering a prayer over the woman’s body. Congealed blood had formed over several wounds on her torso, and blood caked her hands. There were older scars too, and strange scars and lumps all around her eyes. Her body looked like it had been rearranged after death - her arms were crossed over her chest, her eyelids closed, and pieces of jewellery were laid out beside her on the pillow. Her father had killed her so she wouldn’t spill her secrets, but still thought to show some respect to her corpse. As she realised this, Nessa rushed out of the room and heaved.
Nothing came out of her, but she stayed bent double, feeling like she might throw up at any moment. The hard nodules on her abdomen ached. Why had he killed the woman in her old room? Was it simply where she had been staying since he kidnapped her, or was it a message to Nessa herself, a symbol of his hatred?
“There are tracks, but they’re everywhere. It’ll take a moment to find the true one,” Cillian yelled from outside. With nothing to do, Nessa staggered over to a chair in the corner of the main room and collapsed down onto it.
She had done what Cillian asked her to, no more, no less. The soldiers could go chase after her father, but there was no need for her to venture further, she decided. She didn’t want to stay in the hellish house, but her body felt too sluggish to ride back to Hockmannon.
“Alright you lot, he clearly isn’t here, so let’s get moving. He doesn’t have much of a head start, there’s a chance we’ll catch him by sundown.” Cillian marched over to Nessa. “You coming, or what?”
Nessa slouched back into the chair and gestured for them to leave. She didn’t want to have to face her father, not after seeing the body.
Cillian snorted and left with the others to prepare the horses, but Maeve lingered, a tight smile of pity on her face.
"It's not your fault, you know," she told Nessa.
Nessa stared at her. The thought that she was in some way responsible for the woman's death hadn't entered her head, but now it did. She searched her mind for guilt, but found none. What life did the woman really have? A swift death was better than what the servant boy had suffered.
"Thanks." Nessa replied, just to reassure Maeve that her words had given her comfort.
Nessa listened to the horses whinny as the soldiers rode away. Then there was silence.
It occurred to her to bury the woman's body, but she couldn't bring herself to touch it, not yet. She started a fire to warm herself up and curled up on the rug in front of the fireplace, staring into the flickering flames.
She could have just left her father alone. Or else refused to go with the soldiers. Being back in the house made her feel small again, and the scars on her abdomen throbbed with pain. She hadn’t even entered the surgery room, but she thought she could smell its strange tang from her place on the rug.
Her father used to keep records of his experiments, she remembered, tomes that she was never allowed to gaze on. He had always assumed she didn’t know where he hid them.
Spurred on by this thought, Nessa jumped up and kicked the rug aside, then grabbed a loose floorboard and threw it across the room. At least ten bound books were nestled in the space below, and she grabbed the nearest one, dated a year ago. She wondered if it was only his most recent journal he had burnt in the fireplace. Had he stumbled across some revelation in his work?
She stoked the fire and then settled back down on the rug. With quivering hands, she cracked open the journal at a random page.
It opened to a side portrait drawing of her with her chin up, looking slightly amused. She didn’t even know her father could draw, but he had perfectly cross-hatched the shadows to highlight the contours of her face. Next to it, her father had written:
Always inquisitive, even if she disagrees with everything.
Nessa grimaced. She had expected to find long rants about how she had ruined his experiments, but the affection in his note unnerved her. She flicked through to another page, her eyes caught by another drawing: a rabbit’s head, far more crudely drawn, with Xs marked around its eyes and the base of its whiskers. Below it was a description of how he had pierced a rabbit’s flesh and inserted some of his own dead skin into the wound, theorising that it must be some quality of his body that allowed him to do magic, and it would be more easily transferred to a small creature than a human.
Nausea returned. She wasn’t surprised by his scribbles - it was the same theory he had been touting for years - but it brought back shadowy memories that she couldn’t be sure were real. Her father returning from a trip to the nearest town, excitedly showing her a series of tiny magic bones, etched with runes. His dejected face as he handed her three dead rabbits to bury. Him closing the door to the surgery room the night the servant boy died.
She felt compelled to read on, to peel back the layers of her enigmatic father and understand how he saw the world. Perhaps even more pressing, she wanted to know how he felt about her. She skimmed through references to his experiments, his dreams, and his childhood, seeking out any mention of herself. For the whole trek here, she had assumed he hated her for leaving, or at least would hate her when he realised what she had done, but when he wrote about her, he wrote with tenderness.
Nessa - quiet as a teenager, did I make her so? When we went to market day in Hockmannon she’d run around with the other children, but when I took her less often, she became near mute.
The village had felt familiar as she passed through it with the soldiers, but she couldn’t remember ever going there regularly.
Stupid of me to attack N. Could have tried to chase her back with a wolf but not actually touch her. Is she well now? Is she alive? Still hope she comes back, realises the work is important. Once I’ve cracked it, I’ll seek her out. Let the Society in Daredarra know she was my inspiration, couldn’t have done it without her.
Nessa let out an empty chuckle at the idea of her father proudly stating he had let several people die under his care. He still thought he would be congratulated and gain the respect of his peers. Then another thought slithered into her mind: he could be right. If he did discover how to transfer magical powers, others might be willing to sweep his criminal behaviour under the rug in the name of progress.
Dreamt of N. We flew through the air, me as a swallow, her as a human spreading her arms. She kept trying to grab me, kill me maybe, but I’d dive to the other side, still wanting to be close. Prophetic? Don’t know what type of person she is now.
She snapped the book shut. She had had similar dreams, though often she was the prey instead, escaping his clutches.
A prickly feeling spread through her body, and everything felt small and unreal again. Nothing had changed. She knew he had to be brought to justice, but she realised that until now she had kept him at a pleasant mental distance. He had been the obsessive monster she was drinking to forget. One dimensional. She hadn’t had to think of him as a complex human being with his own thoughts and memories.
Outside, the sun dropped below the horizon, and a full moon reigned. Nessa pulled herself upright and rummaged through the kitchen, looking for alcohol. Her father used to brew disgusting moonshine that she would swig after his surgical attempts, but now her search came up empty. She shuffled out to the lean-to to gather more firewood, lantern in hand.
There in the moonlight, she saw the outline of an owl, perch utterly still on the nearest tree branch. Once again, Nessa froze. She knew it must be possessed by her father - no normal bird would stare at her so - but if he was going to attack her, he would have done so already. It turned its head from her to a nearby slope, and then back again, as if it wanted her to follow.
“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”
The owl swooped into the air and landed on another tree, just about visible in the moonlight. Nessa followed.
A cold sweat covered her skin as she followed the owl from tree to tree, barely paying attention to where she was going. She felt like she was in a dream as she tread over the same ground as when she was little, following the same bird her father had possessed on and off for years.
She often wondered how the owl felt. Her father described possession as two minds conjoining, with him as controller, but he would sense the animal’s desire and allow it a few idiosyncrasies in quiet moments, a brief grooming session, or a sniff of the nearest tree. Whenever she had seen him relinquish his power back to the animal, it always looked dazed or distraught, as if it struggled to cope with its return to freedom. She wondered if they, too, felt unreal.
She wove a path through the snow and followed the bird over the nearest hill and down towards a rocky stream. As she approached it, the owl screeched, then flew off into the night.
On the other bank was a sprawled figure covered in thick furs, their head on a huge knapsack. Nessa lifted her lantern to watch them shakily push themselves up to a seating position and brush the snow off their clothes.
It was her father. His face was more haggard than she remembered. Thick lines creased his forehead, and his cheeks were hollow. He smiled weakly as he peered at her from across the stream.
“Dad.” Nessa wasn’t sure if he could hear her over the babbling stream, so she raised a gloved hand in greeting. He mirrored her.
“It’s good to see you again,” he called out. His tone was uncertain, as if he was trying to convince himself of his words. There was a strange fragility to him. She realised she was the one with power now, backed by soldiers who were somewhere in the hills, even if they weren’t present at the meeting. If they had continued tracking him in the night, it was possible they would follow his trail there soon enough.
“Why did you kill her? The woman. The woman in my bed.” The woman hadn’t even crossed her mind until she found herself mentioning her.
“I’m so close now, Ness.” Despite the water between them, his voice was clear. “So close. I didn’t want someone else to speak to her and get the credit for my discovery. I saw those soldiers with you. Why are you back?”
Nessa set her lantern down to peer at the stream. There were some jagged rocks interrupting the flow, but trying to cross would be reckless. This might be as close to her father as she would ever get.
“I heard there were others. When I left. Other people you… did stuff to. Killed.”
He gazed up at the moon, his face contorted in anguish.
“Nessa. Nessa. Every time you lay on that table, I thought it would be the last. I thought I had cracked it, every time. Then you’d forgive me, and we’d race over the hills as wolves, or soar through the sky together, following each other’s flight. I thought if I got it right with someone else, I could come find you.”
“How many people were there?” Nessa yelled over the water. She wiped her nose and realised her face was wet with tears. He was so earnest she couldn’t bear it. She wanted him to admit he was selfish, cruel, obsessive, but he couldn’t see her point of view any better than she could see his.
He shrugged.
“Nessa, it’s okay. It’s okay,” he said, reaching out a hand as if he could stroke her from metres away. “It wasn’t just to get close to you, it was to connect humanity. Imagine, imagine everyone being able to do what I can do. What would the world look like then? Imagine what we could achieve. This country most of all, if we were the first to discover how to transfer power. Some of them understood what I was doing was necessary, you know. I tended to every one of them. I gave them meaning.”
There was a shout in the distance. Her father turned towards the dark mass of trees on his side of the stream.
“Surrender, dad. Surrender! I don’t care if you tell them about your research or not, just surrender. You’ve hurt enough people. You’ve hurt me. Don’t hurt me more by fighting it.”
Nessa stepped right up to the edge of the bank, the tips of her boots no longer on solid ground.
“That’s what you want? That’s what you really want?” He asked.
They listened to the sound of hurried feet through the snow. Cillian came bursting out of the darkness, unsheathing his sword as he approached Nessa’s father. Meave followed, then the other soldiers, forming a semi-circle around him. Cillian briefly frowned as he glanced in Nessa’s direction, then refocused on her father.
Nessa watched the scene unfold mere metres away from her, unable to act as peacemaker. Cillian stretched out his sword so it touched her father’s exposed throat.
“We’re to take you back to Daredarra for questioning,” Cillian boomed.
“Just go with them,” Nessa pleaded. Conflicting emotions tugged at her heart - guilt, eagerness, dread, elation.
The moment stretched out, as if they were frozen in time. Even the wind stilled. Finally her father knelt down in the snow and bowed his head.
Up above, an owl soared, relishing its freedom.
Very loosely inspired by reading some of my dad’s prison journals (with his consent), although he is nothing like the father here.
I ended up taking a lot longer than intended to finish this. I started writing it before Timeball, but really struggled with the plot. It needs more external conflict with the soldiers, and I’m also not sure if the emotional arc makes sense, or feels all over the place. I could edit it more, but I just want to move on to something new. Right now I see this Substack as a playground to push me into writing regularly, not for writing perfect stories.
What are your thoughts on Bird of Prey? I’d love to hear what you think works and what doesn’t, or how it could be improved. Also, let me know if you’ve got a better title!