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Waffles is a year old. It feels like Hunter has known her his entire life. It feels like he finds something new about her to delight in every day. Palismen are funny like that.
Waffles herself is funny too. Hunter’s pockets fit a notebook where he scribbles behaviors he finds endearing, confusing, or silly. An incomplete list: She starts yawning early in the evening and gets clumsy off-staff when she’s tired. She all but has STUBBORN tattooed on her primary feathers. She doesn’t pull his hair; instead, she perches in a high place and calls to him unceasingly. She rubs fire bees on herself until they stop burning and can’t explain why. She tries to hide in the beards of friendly men, sample size Darius, Harvey, and Dell.
There is a routine to their mornings. It starts when the sun is still a dream. Willow kisses them both on the forehead before heading out to coach derby practice at Hexside. Waffles has a tell: she ruffles her feathers if she wakes for it. Hunter smiles every time. Willow lets him think he’s so clever. It wouldn’t matter if she let it slip that she knew he’d stirred. He's just happy to be reminded that he is loved.
When Hunter sits to nibble toast and read Penstagram news, Waffles clatters at the window until he lets her out. She perches on the bird feeder as he spreads butter and jam on the warm innards of a bagel or the gritty planes of toast. She picks fights with other birds as he sips his hot morning boneless apple blood.
Apparently this is instinct, but Hunter suspects she does it to make mischief and fun. Her wings flare and the squickadees and slime warblers cower; she squawks and the one-eyed handbirds hiss back.
It’s all the more confusing because she shouldn’t need to do this. She stared at a chunk of suet like she didn’t know it was food. She has never shown interest in the peanuts in the feeder. Maybe the true sustenance is the chaos she sows among her fellow birds along the way.
This is every morning, so Hunter doesn’t pay close attention to the feeder theatrics. He gets lost in the Penstagram headlines. Hettie Cutburn is running for council, but is she eligible? Who’s financing her campaign? Why is her registered address an empty lot on the outskirts of the Knee? The intrigue is fractal.
Five tabs accordion to twenty. He emerges hours later with a hunch that Terra Snapdragon has been illegally experimenting on radishes she wants to integrate into the food supply. She needs an ally on council. Hettie is uncharismatic as a candidate, but her association with the restorative Healing Coven increases her electability. She herself is just a figurehead for a network of formerly persecuted wild witches who want to turn the Knee into a ski resort to launder money, and—
Waffles taps on the window again. Hunter startles. It’s been hours. His apple blood has gone corpse-cold in its cup.
The jay’s expression is devious, you’re welcome! She knew he was running late but figured she’d let him enjoy the morning anyway.
“Well aren’t you a benevolent thing!”
He taps her beak. She tries to bite his finger, but her crest doesn’t raise. This is play.
Hunter notices powder on his fingertips where he touched her. “Waff, what’s this?”
She yawns and sticks out her tongue, where there are larger flecks in the same color, along with what might be insect legs. There’s casual pride in the display. Her feathers spread, wingtips curved. Look what I did! Be proud of me!
“You ate.” Hunter sniffles. “You really ate.”
Waffles expects praise, but Hunter tears up. He can’t help but remember the days when Flapjack pecked at crabapple claws and pulled rattleworms from the soil. Even that had stopped without explanation after a few weeks. His hypothesis had been that attuning to a new owner takes energy beyond what a palisman’s body could provide. Most only got one partner for life, after all. Anything else was eaten for texture, for flavor, or for fun. In the human realm, Flapjack bit an endless supply of black oil sunflower seeds and cracked his own corn kernels, but those pieces mostly stayed on the ground.
Waffles makes herself compact, raises her crest and closes her left eye. Hunter knows what this gesture means. I recognize the shape of your hurting, you recognize his shape in my form, and You don’t miss him any less now, just differently, and Have you noticed how we perch on different shoulders but I love you just the same?
Hunter had managed a half-hearted Don’t do that the first time Waffles thought of this, before he understood. Now it’s comforting to see Waffles try to rhyme with Flapjack, remember but not replace. It helps that she looks awfully cute all scrunched up.
He lets himself cry a little. Waffles coos at him with her quietest song.
Hunter refocuses on her smudged beak. “Has Hooty been a bad influence again? He can eat random things he finds on the ground, but you’re a well-behaved palisman, right? All that will happen if you eat something is it’ll get stuck in your beak when you turn into wood again. I think? So, what did you eat?”
Cunning and innocence duel in Waffles’s eyes. She tries him constantly. She gives him feelings to feel. He allows it.
“Okay, fine then. Don’t tell me. I’ll find out eventually.”
Waffles goes rigid and summons her staff. She flies fine, steady as the first time. Nothing feels amiss, but something must be wrong. Hunter outlines the facts. Waffles is eating things. Palismen don’t do that for no reason. They only look like animals. Attuned palistrom sustains itself for a long time.
As the veiny streets of Bonesborough unfold below them, he wonders, if he was wood that turned into the shape of a witch and then into a real witch, maybe he could cause the same to happen? Maybe this is another trace of Flapjack swirling in the eddies of his life. Now his touch turns wood into animal shapes that become real animals. It makes as much sense as anything else, which isn’t much. More importantly, it tells a story that ties together emotional strings. If only the knots weren’t so big.
Dell will know. Generations of palisman-carving knowledge settles in dew-like distillate around him. A simple sentence here or there glints with the wisdom of a dozen sets of callused hands. Going to the source is far superior to Hunter’s back-up option of typing Why is my palisman being weird? into Penstagram search. He can’t do that right now without violating Bonesborough’s new “don’t scry and fly” law anyway. Even with the new person he’s becoming, he still hasn’t shed his soft spot for authority and rules.
The answer to what might be in Waffles’s mouth comes to him as he lands in the Bat Queen’s grotto.
“Paint?” he guesses once she’s off-staff. He’s seen similar flakes of it dusting like titan-sized dandruff off the walls of Mr. Blight’s workshop— ahem, of Alador’s workshop. Being on a first name basis with Amity’s dad just because he and Darius put their mouths on each other is still new and weird.
“Paint a palisman?” Dell laughs. “You could, but it wouldn’t turn out like you think. The colors come from structural changes the wood undergoes when it reacts to a witch’s feelings.”
It had happened in Hunter’s hands. Waffles was a ruddy, increasingly corvid-shaped chunk. Then, Hunter finally knew the words he had been living years to find. All at once she was brilliant and blue, she had heat and a name, and her xylem was feathers.
Waffles shivers at the memory of being born. Dell doesn’t notice.
“Oh, but my daughter is writing up a paper for an exhibit on old toy palismen from the Savage Ages.” His beard parts around a smile. “They used to paint those and seal them with a resin that, ironically, also came from the palistrom tree. The tree’s secretions are only magical once you— oh, there I go again, shedding facts on you like falling leaves.”
Dell running long is a treat. Hunter’s preferred comparison is to maple syrup dribbling over the edge of a stack of pancakes.
“Lilith could tell you more about it. Anyway.”
Hunter gleans tidbits about the elder Clawthornes’ relationship with Lilith at odd and oblique angles, like a cubist face.
“I do have another palisman question though,” Hunter says. “They don’t eat, usually, but could they just decide to? Y’know, just like a random craving.”
Dell looks relieved to have a different topic for discussion. “Hm, no.” Dismay settles on his face as he realizes how short-lived the conversation will be.
“Then I might have done something wrong with Waffles.” And Flapjack, Hunter leaves unsaid. Guilt comes fast. He rubs his fingers against his palm to ground himself.
Dell’s hand on his shoulder reassures him. “That’s snorsefeathers, witchlet.”
The old woodcarver’s lips press against each other. Hunter knows he’s going to say something like, the only mistake is to not listen to the feeling of the wood. He’s heard another notebook’s worth by now. Dell knows he knows this.
“But what about—” Hunter presents his theories. Dell treads lightly. Flapjack is a delicate topic, a crisp snow that could crunch and expose something unexpected under too much pressure.
“You’ve made scores of palismen in the years before this. We haven’t heard of a single incident, among them or among the palismen who got adopted. Why would they be unaffected?”
The answer comes to Hunter with the speed of a reflex. “What if it’s because I’m Waffles’s witch?”
His phrasing is deliberate. He doesn’t say because Waffles is mine. He may have made her, but her wood guided the motions of the chisel and the gouge. She chose to awaken. She makes it very clear that she decides again to be his palisman with each passing morning, peering into his sleep-crusted eyes with a gaze that says, see me, see how I’m here through the night and with the dawn.
Hunter’s hypothesis is untestable, not without doing unimaginable things that he can imagine all too well. He can recall the inside of the wood resisting strangely formed hands, yielding to sharp digits he no longer has. For a moment he freezes, tumbling down a well-worn recollection. His breathing stops once his lungs empty. It’s like reenacting being dead. Waffles nibbles at his ear, hey, stop hurting yourself with your thoughts.
“Maybe we should talk about this later,” Dell offers. He knows how to read Waffles’s behavior. Everyone in Hunter’s orbit does.
“I’m okay.” Hunter says in the hope that that will make it true.”
“Well, alright.” Dell looks to his palisman. Both quirk bushy brows. “Have you tried simply asking her?”
“I have, but it goes nowhere. Waffles only knows she needs to do it. And I’m not going to stop her if it’s what she needs, but I would feel better knowing why, knowing that it’s not my fault.”
“In my life I have seen people be poor to their palismen, from neglect all the way up to surrendering them to that bastard Belos. No one who worries this much over their companion does them any wrong.”
Hunter pouts at Waffles, who returns confusion and concern.
“Let me rephrase. No one who dotes this much on their palisman does them any wrong. Your worry tells you more about yourself than about her.”
Hunter writes that down in his notebook so he can try believing it later. He mumbles the words as he scrawls. “No. One. Who…”
“I hope you’ll find it tells you good things.” Dell offers a hint of a smile.
“Me too, but still. It doesn’t explain anything.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Dell agrees.
The woodcarvers share deep frowns. Waffles perches on Hunter’s head and weaves strands of hair into a wide whirl around herself.
She gets through a quarter circle before Gwen distracts her from across the clearing.
“Dell, Hunter, do you see yourselves!?” A nasal snort works as her interrobang. “I oughta photograph you boys and become infectious on Penstagram.”
“You’d have to sign up for Penstagram first, dear.” Dell’s throaty laugh sounds more like a cough.
“@GrannyGwenzGainz reporting for duty. Luz and King came up with my moniker, isn’t it delightful? I have five followers!”
Dell’s thumb, index, middle, and ring fingers rise to represent them. “Your two daughters, your grandson, your grand-Luz, and— and?” His pinkie wiggles.
“And their house demon,” Gwen says.
Hunter frowns again, but the distraction is welcome. “Hooty got his Penstagram ban lifted?”
“Who knows how that happened.” Gwen shrugs to her ears, feigning an exaggerated ignorance to suggest the opposite. She whispers behind a hand, “I’ve heard that when your CEO happens to get ambushed by a swarm of angry fire bees, it helps to be an owl tube able to eat said fire bees.”
“Did our daughter perhaps have something to do with the fire bees being there in the first place?” Dell asks.
“You’ll never guess which one.” Gwen holds up a daring finger.
“Hm. They both have motive.” Dell smiles deviously. “But glad to hear Lilith is living a little. It’s about time. But how did Hooty get banned in the first place?”
“Swallowed his scroll while live-streaming.” Hunter says. “The official message was, Some things were not meant to be seen by mortal eyes.”
“Ah,” Dell nods. “Eda did tell me about that. I think they were too harsh.”
Hunter shakes his head in agreement. “It wasn’t that many flaming, teeth-filled eyeballs, honestly.”
When the laughter dies down, he has another thought. “Granny Gwen, you know all sorts of weird things.”
“I wouldn’t have put it that way, but I am a trivia connoisseuse, er, connoisseur-ess.”
“She’s a gatherer of eclectic knowledge from years of trying to heal Eda’s curse,” Dell helps.
“What’s the category? Bonus round answers in Wheel of Misfortune? Decommissioned bus routes of Bonesborough? Abomination-themed bodice rippers? Psst, did you know that each one of those was personally approved by the former coven head?”
Waffles shields her face with a wing. Hunter blocks out that last comment and makes a note to message Gwen on Penstagram whenever he gets stuck on a crossword clue asking about crystal ball soap opera stars or Latissan literature. “Try Palisman Behavior for six hundred sixty-six snails.”
“Oh my, that’s a big category. You know, Owlbert always behaved pretty well, even through the worst of the curse. Is Waffles giving you trouble? I see the potential for mischief in her.”
“No, she’s wonderful. She’s more than I could have asked for. More than I could have imaged.” Hunter isn’t surprised to find her feathers’ blue brighter through a sudden lens of tears. “I don’t want to fail her.”
“And why would you do that?” Gwen examines the jay. Waffles sizes her up in return. This is good behavior. She used to scream at everyone with a larger bird palisman. Every Clawthorne but Eda got an earful.
“She’s eating things. I know palismen can eat things, if you offer or ask nicely. That’s how we know they don’t like goreberries, for example. But I caught Waffles eating paint! That’s not a thing you eat! Palismen don’t get sick, right?”
“I’ve never heard of that, but maybe the Bat Queen has? When it comes to palismen, Clawthornes make them, but the Bat Queen knows them, you know?”
“Okay. That makes sense.”
“One more thing, Hunter. I have some motherly advice, earned the hard way. You can’t always know what will turn out to be the right thing to do. You just can’t. But you can do your best and hope that your children— your palisman, I suppose, will understand.”
Hunter smiles and nods. It’s easier to do that than to verbalize the maelstrom that comes with responsibility for a living thing who he loves and who loves him.
The Bat Queen perches upside-down on a palistrom branch. “Be dazzled! You spoke of me and I appeared!”
Hunter startles. Waffles screams a greeting.
“Not to be eavesdropping or tree branch-dropping, but I am dropped, yeh. My children eat many sorts of goodies. One day they will be as large as I.”
“Of course! You’re a palisman from a different time.” This is so obvious that Hunter forgets it more often than he remembers.
“You call me ancient? Haha! As I tell my little flittermice, Your mamma so old, she was there when the Boiling Sea was just lukewarm.” The Bat Queen smiles cryptically.
“Your kids eat all sorts of things, but the palismen that witches make rarely do.” Hunter gestures between two invisible piles in front of him. “Some of them, I think, never.”
“Yes, it’s true. My pups request silver spoons, but I will not spoil them. Gold foil coins, maybe, on the holidays. But then you notice that Clover, bee of Willow, has no interest in nectar or pollen.”
“Okay, so there is a difference there. Then, can you tell me why Waffles is eating things that aren’t food?”
“Hm, how to start. The soil of the Titan became putrid, yeh. The brass emperor played in it like a sandbox. Palismen stopped drawing from it because there was no longer nourishment to be found. But now the red grass grows all around, all around.”
“Let me get this straight. The Boiling Isles are healing, and that’s why Waffles is eating paint?” Hunter has said less sensical things before, but this one has few competitors.
“Perhaps she wishes to be an artist. Hm. This is most unusual for one of her youth. I suggest you go to the one who made the paint.”
Waffles chirrups at the Bat Queen. Their eyes glow together.
“Oh? Oh. Great excitement, little blue bird. And great anguish in your friend. Yeh, yeh. Grimwalkers had palismen, then became rare. A grimwalker ungrimming with palisman, making more palismen— even more rare. If it was ever heard of, it is lost.”
“So not even the oldest palisman has answers?” Hunter wipes his brow. “Oh boy.”
“Answers could be, but I cannot tell.”
“You can’t tell whether it’s ever happened, you can’t tell what’s going to happen, or you can’t tell because it’s me who’s asking?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” the Bat Queen says with opaque certainty. “Now is the time for you to witness the world. Snakey human girl carved an egg as palisman. That had not been done before. She had great learning.”
“And what if I don’t know what to do? What if I learn the wrong thing? What if something happens to Waffles?”
“So then you don’t, you do, it does! You, sapling of a woodcarver, why so eager to blame yourself? Hah! Why assume your own badness? Sometimes things are strange because they are so beyond us, yeh? Sometimes that is best way for them to be. Listen to bird named for morning food. Let her be your partner. Good things will come.”
One of the Bat Queen’s children emerges from the greasy tresses of her hair. His eyes cross. He strains, then coughs up a compact white pellet. It lands, projectile, in Hunter’s hands, dry and crumpled.
“Paper,” Hunter announces as he presses it flat with a thumb against his palm.
“My babies have never done that before. But see, I am not alarmed.” The Bat Queen laughs. “What does your fortune say?”
Hunter reads the digestion-faded text, his eyes widening. “Jays are sometimes seen knocking bits of light-colored paint off houses and eating the paint chips. They are seeking calcium, which is an ingredient in most paint, and is especially important for— important for—”
His voice stops as his brain processes the words it takes in. His lungs hoard air. Waffles rubs her head against his cheek.
“—female birds forming eggshells. Oh my Titan.”
“My child has good memory. We ate that book months ago, imported from human realm.”
“I need to make a crow call. Can you get me the phone?” There’s so much breath in his chest and yet Hunter sounds out of it. He sits uneasily on a stool.
“We’ll be right back.” Dell and Gwen make knowing eye contact and leave together.
Hunter motions for Waffles to perch on his wrist. He puts his forehead to hers and whispers, “You can tell me these things, you know.”
She looks at him, turning her head to one side to better see his face. They both know his worry. Unsaid is, I remember what happened the last time a bird kept a secret from me.
The phone flies from Dell’s hand to Hunter’s ear.
“Athletics department at Hexside,” he directs into the bird’s dark breast.
Waffles picks at the crow’s tail feathers. It positions her well to listen in on both sides of the conversation.
“Coach Park speaking. Who is this?”
They both know that modern crow phones have cawer ID.
Waffles screams her unmistakable call. It’s me!
“Never mind her,” Hunter says. “It’s, um, your secret admirer?”
“Hunter!” Willow shifts to a whisper. “What if the office crow was stuck on speaker again?”
“Then they can listen and see how it’s done.” His eyebrows bounce, even if his audience can’t see them. “Look, I’m supposed to be working, but I’m telling you now, as soon as I found out. This way there are no surprises. Well, maybe there’s one. Um, I think Waffles is going to be a mom.”
Willow gasps on the other side of the line.
The days that follow are a blur. The paint eating continues. Alador says nothing, which means Darius says nothing. Waffles forages for twigs in the mornings and builds herself a nest, which she makes Hunter take inside before they leave the house.
One beautiful morning, when a flock of squickadees are chirping squick-a-dee-dee-dee and ripe for harassing at the feeder, Waffles doesn’t ask to go outside. She sits in her nest and watches Hunter put leftovers in the micrograve.
“You’re awfully quiet this morning.” Hunter sips his apple blood and stirs the heat through his unevenly revived tentacle noodles.
Waffles opens her beak wide as Hunter adds “not a complaint!” She closes it benevolently.
There’s no gossip blowing up Penstagram news this morning. The last noodles soon wiggle into his gut. “Time to go,” Hunter announces.
Waffles gives him the most cantankerous I’m busy look that a creature who loves him wholly and unconditionally could.
So Hunter has to take a transit worm to work. Waffles and her nest stay on his lap in a backpack meant for cats, on loan from Amity thanks to a quick stop by Luz on her way to classes. Waffles looks out the hemispherical window like an undersea explorer.
The Bat Queen is waiting at the palisman shop, delighted. She does have a sixth sense about these things, and a seventh and an eighth. “Breakfast bird, show us your handiwork.”
Waffles stands in place and reveals an egg. Hunter recognizes the swirling patterns from before Stringbean hatched, but this is different. Brown freckles a shell that would blend in seamlessly if held up to the human realm’s daytime sky.
“You must be very proud,” the Bat Queen says.
The jay makes private, quiet noises. Only Hunter doesn’t seem confused at how Waffles sounds unlike herself, no shrill, no shriek. He knows this song from her morning murmurings to him. Hello dear one, I am here.
This is the first of five she lays, one egg each day in a row. The fifth comes on the weekend. Willow staggers into the kitchen, bedhead on full display like an ornamental shrub. Clover rests upside-down in her hair, still aslumber.
Look, Hunter mouths and motions to Waffles, asleep and fluffed over her brood.
Willow turns to him, finds his hand and laces their fingers together, pinky first. Her voice is half asleep. “Waffles looks fine.” She smiles a drowsy smile. “And you? Is it hitting yet, that you’re going to be a grand-palisman-parent?”
Hunter blushes redder than a house finch’s face. “I’m fine, really,” he lies.
“Mhm, right.” Willow leans into his shoulder. She’s still bed-warm.
Hunter keeps himself to a whisper. “I’m excited. I’m scared. I’m excited again?” It’s too early in the morning for emotions this size. “Palisman chicks? The first ones in decades, if not centuries? Unprecedented in our lifetimes? Just fine!” he teakettles.
Clover stirs. Waffles half-lifts one eyelid, curiosity crossed with do you mind? in the sliver of shown pupil.
“Sorry, Waff. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Waffles raises her head and chirps softly to him, urging him close. When he approaches, she runs her beak slowly over his nose.
Hunter strokes Waffles’s wings. “I love you too, buddy. We’ll be here for you, even when it’s scary. You’re doing great.”