Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff

Author:Sarah Davis-Goff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

Chapter Twenty-Two

This is what happened to Mam.

A figure in the distance. It catches the scent of her on the wind. Out there somewhere, out in the battleground of Ireland; Mam and Maeve looking around, making sure things were quiet. Imagining me with them, the next time, thinking about what they’ll show me and teach me. The skrake scents them both or sees them and starts coming, awkward and fast. Too fast. I try to call up an image of the two of them in which they are not ready, and I cannot.

Still and all, the skrake gets on Maeve, and then Mam has to get between them.

I wonder if there’s that sudden connection between them, Mam and the skrake, like fire, like the moment my knife leaves my hand to bring down a gull. Mam would know it, this feeling. She’d know she was caught, and then she would have thought of me, and that hurts to think about. That hurts a lot.

Or, maybe it was different, quicker. Maeve was off getting firewood, and she never saw it, maybe. She stumbles, and it grabs her and goes for the first thing it can get its mouth to. And Mam comes between them, in the nick of time. It bites hard just as Maeve’s knife comes down on its skull. Just a fraction too late. A blink earlier and she’d have been home with a lesson on it, and telling Maeve to keep quiet and not be scaring the child with a story of near-miss.

That fraction of time is why we train, Maeve’d say. And still she was too late.

Mam’d know when it bit her, though; she’d know everything then about what would happen.

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