by Lynn Gazis
The crows do not know me. Trapped in the wrong body now, I have no way to tell them, “I am one of you.”
Once, with them, I flew and roosted, foraged and played. Together we used sticks to pry insects from holes, sledded down roofs of houses on flat circles of metal that humans had left where we could grab them, and traded information about where food could be scavenged. When we needed to, we joined forces to chase off hawks.
Now the crows do not know me. When I tried to approach, to find some way to signal, hey, I’m still me, I was the threat and the one mobbed.
It’s all the fault of that old sorceress. She left a small, shiny circle on her windowsill. I always loved shiny things. I flew to the window and grabbed the shiny circle. But she saw me and cursed me.
I fell to the ground. When I tried to rise, I was bigger and less graceful. When I tried to cry out, I heard not my beautiful crow voice, but an ugly human voice. My naked body had no trace of feathers. Most of all, I had no wings!
I clutched the shiny circle and put it on one finger for safekeeping, because if I was going to be punished for taking it, I had damn well earned the right to keep the object for which she had cursed me. Then I rose on my overly long legs and staggered away. So slow and awkward were my steps that I was sure the sorceress would chase and grab me. Instead, she watched and laughed, that grating, scary laughter that humans have.
Once I had walked over a hill and past a grove of trees, safely out of sight of the sorceress, I dropped and crawled on all fours. I felt strange, as if I was dragging my wings in the dirt, but I also felt more stable crawling than standing on such long legs. A human family found me crawling along the road and helped me to their small hut. They gave me clothes — how odd it felt to wrap my body in cloth, rather than having it covered with my very own feathers! They let me sleep on a blanket on their floor. In front of their hut, I dared to walk again, balancing precariously on my new legs.
The witch’s curse contained a small mercy. With my human form, I gained a knowledge of the human language. Scratch that. I learned one of the human languages. It turned out that they had many. Unlike my fellow crows, who could speak to crows from anywhere, traveling humans struggled to make themselves understood. Perhaps this difficulty in human communication was a good thing. Think what a threat humans could be to crows if they all understood each other! Still, stuck in my human body, I knew I could not venture beyond the land where humans spoke the one language that I knew.
Each day I woke, hoping again to have my wings and to take to the air. Each day I rose forlorn, bereft of feathers. The humans gave me food, a strange mush each morning from which I picked the bits of fruit and nuts, and only occasionally meat. The first morning I slipped outside, once I had finished my fruits and nuts, and found an anthill, where I enjoyed some tasty insects. But the humans stared and exclaimed so that I had to learn to enjoy my insect treats when they weren’t looking.
I learned over time to eat and enjoy more and more of their food, my new favorites being a rice dish with bits of fish and a serving of mostly lettuce with bits of other vegetables. The family was patient with my slow efforts to learn to walk, and only when I was steady on my feet did they ask me to help them on their farm. I agreed. What else could I do, stranded without wings?
The farmers gave me a spade, dull gray to the eye and hard to the touch.
“Dig here,” he said, “and put these seeds in the ground.”
I wanted to scratch the ground with my nails, but human nails aren’t good for much, so I settled for the spade. Next they set me the task of milking the cow — such an odd sensation, to grasp the cow with these things called hands, so soft and tender! Then came the day when I helped the woman of the house, carrying baskets of vegetables with her to the market in town, to sell. There I saw the shop of the town silversmith. Shiny things!
I wandered into the shop. I watched the silversmith rub a stick against a shiny thing, until he looked up.
“Can I help you?” said the silversmith.
“Just looking,” I said.
He grunted as if he had hoped for something more from me, I wasn’t sure what. But he let me look.
Soon I spent every spare moment I had, when done with my work on the farm, at the silversmith shop. If I could not have my crow body, at least I could be close to shiny things all day. I started to fetch and carry, to please the silversmith and be closer to his shiny things. He had fascinating tools. Some had blades to cut the shiny things, others held shiny things still so that they could be cut, and odd sticks with rough edges could be run over those shiny surfaces to smooth them the way the silversmith wanted. I learned the names of each, and where to find them. My favorite, though, was the cloth that could be used to bring out the shine.
In time, the silversmith paid the farmers who had rescued me, to buy out my contract and take me on as an apprentice. I had not known I had a contract, but if I did, well, I was happy to have it purchased, so I could spend all my days with silver. I took up with enthusiasm the first job the silversmith gave me, shining tarnished silver.
One evening, after my work was done, I wandered to the blacksmith’s shop a few houses over. The metal at the blacksmith’s shop did not shine as the things at the silversmith’s shop did, but it glowed bright when the smith put it in the fire. As I watched the glow of the fire, the blacksmith’s daughter approached.
“Aren’t you the new silversmith apprentice?” she said. “Where are you from?”
“Down the road, past the trees, and over the hill,” I said, “as the crows fly.”
She laughed, though I couldn’t see why.
“Ah, but which trees?” she asked.
I am a crow. I can talk all day about trees.
“There’s the big old stump,” I said, “where termites live. And the young tree with silvery bark and leaves shaped like this.”
I sketched the shape of a leaf with my hand.
The blacksmith’s daughter listened to me more intently than anyone else had, since I left the crows behind. For a human, she was lovely, nearly as dark as a crow, her skin a lustrous dark brown and her hair tightly curled. When she smiled, the white of her teeth drew my eye. And she looked at my ugly human form at times as if I still had a crow’s beauty. Most of all, she listened.
After that day, I came back often, in the evening after work, to talk with the blacksmith’s daughter and find the comfort of a listening friend. Sometimes I was tempted to confide in her about the curse. Each time I was tempted, I thought better of it. Safer to keep the friend I had, and not risk the friendship by sharing things she might not understand.
As my visits became more frequent, the blacksmith muttered odd things about wanting to know my intentions. How could I tell him that my intention was to become a crow again, as soon as I could figure out how? Each time he muttered, I returned to the silversmith’s shop and busied myself with shiny things.
In time, the silversmith judged me ready to do other work with silver. As a silversmith in training, I learned that awkward as human legs could be, human hands had a certain grace and finesse. The day that I hammered my first dish, I stood amazed at the result. Never, as a crow, could I have done the work with silver that I could now do!
Yes, human hands had their uses. But they could never reconcile me to being trapped in a human body. One day, I stumbled on a trail and twisted my ankle, and it ached for weeks afterwards. Often, my back ached. Walking on legs could not compare with flying. Most of all, the body was not mine. I felt wrong in this body, as I felt right in my old crow’s body. And in this body, the crows do not know me.
It’s this essential wrongness of my new body that led me, finally, to leave behind my beloved shiny work as an apprentice silversmith. The shop where I worked did not just make new shiny things. It restored and repaired old ones, and, for those rich enough to pay for the service, even did routine cleaning and polishing of silver. The silversmith left most of the routine polishing to me, his least experienced assistant. In this way, I came to be the one to be sent to pick up some silver for polishing, from a local magician. Silver bowls are important for making magical mixes of all kinds, and they must be clean, for the potions to be pure and work true.
A magician! If I could find work with him, I might learn the trick that changed my form, and what could change my form back. I hurried to his shop as quickly as my awkward human legs would take me.
The magician’s shop stood at the edge of town, a small house of stone with a thatched roof. As I stepped inside, I saw the magician at work mixing something in one of his silver bowls. On the table lay mint leaves and parsley and basil.
“What are you making?” I asked.
The magician glared at me. “Who are you and why are you in my shop?”
The name the humans gave me always felt awkward on my lips, so I skipped it. “I’m the apprentice from the silversmith shop, here to collect your silver to shine.”
“Do that, then,” said the magician, and handed me a bundle of silver.
I took the pieces away and shined them to a fine gleam. When I brought them back, I asked the magician directly, “Do you need an apprentice.”
“Certainly not,” said the magician, “and if I did, I wouldn’t want one so eager to skip out on his contract.”
I wasn’t ready to be give up, though. I made it my business to win him over. I shined his silver with extra promptness and care. I gave him small presents — finding out from other villagers what herbs he liked to purchase and getting good quality rosemary and thyme. He started asking me to run errands on the side. Finally, I found my way where I wanted to be, working by his side in his shop, fetching and cleaning and passing and, most importantly, watching and listening.
It paid off when I learned why he never let his wand out of sight, waking, and slept with it under his pillow.
“Get hold of a magician’s wand,” he said once, “and you can unravel his spells. I’m not about to let that happen to mine.”
I didn’t dare ask how — I didn’t want him to think I had my eyes on his wand. I didn’t, after all — I wanted only the wand that had made me human. I listened and waited for other hints.
Hints like the time I took one of his silver bowls back from the silversmith to his house and stopped at the blacksmith’s shop on the way. The blacksmith’s daughter welcomed me back — it has been so long since we spoke! She thought I had forgotten her! Her father let me know that I would hear from him if I forgot her again. I dallied there all afternoon, talking with the blacksmith’s daughter. I thought, when the magician frowned on my return, that he was angry because I had taken too long, stopping to chat for as long as I had. No, he had other reasons.
“I smell iron,” said the magician.
In my shock, I forgot to conceal my crow nature.
“People can smell iron?” I asked.
As a crow I could smell food, blood, and even fear, but never metal. My human body didn’t quite perceive things the way my real crow body did. Colors were missing. But it never occurred to me that humans might smell things that crows didn’t. Had I missed this new sense all this time? Perhaps it was harder to process since I hadn’t grown up with it.
The magician laughed, but then set his mouth again in a firm line.
“I can smell far more than you know,” he said, “Don’t bring my silver to the blacksmith shop. It’s bad for magic.”
If I can bring iron to the witch’s wand, I thought, can I break her magic?
It seemed unwise to ask such a question of a magician. I would watch, and wait, and look for magic’s vulnerable points. Iron might not be the only one.
I watched, and I learned. Iron could weaken silver’s magic for days, but burning the right herbs hastened the recovery of magical properties. When the magician gave me a list of which herbs to bring, I made up a little poem to remember them, for these herbs were the very herbs I’d want to remove from the witch’s house, if I wanted to break her wand.
I watched, and I learned, as the magician gave me instructions on polishing his silver. Wands, like bowls, must be made of silver. Clean silver worked better magic than tarnished silver.
I listened, and remembered, as the magician spoke his spells. Words must be carefully spoken. And a wand, I learned, carried a record of all the magic it had ever worked.
I did not, however, learn to work any magic of my own. Perhaps magic could not even be worked by a crow trapped in the wrong body. In any case, I could see that there were secrets the magician would not share. Some of them he had recorded in marks on paper, but such marks were unintelligible to me.
Each day I woke and saw the wrong face in the mirror. Each day I moved awkwardly on the wrong legs. Some days my back ached. Each day, I looked to the sky and could not rise. Most of all, whenever I saw my old friends, I was reminded: The crows do not know me.
After one heartbreaking morning glimpse of crows in the magician’s yard, none of them seeing my crow nature, I could bear it no more. I told the magician that I needed to stretch my stiff back, and I set out for the blacksmith’s shop, to find my best human friend. I stood with her on the porch, her father’s sharp eye watching my every move, and the two of us spoke, in voices too low for him to hear. My voice trembled as my whole story tumbled out, how the sorceress had cursed me, exiled me, hidden me from my family. My whole story? Well, not quite my whole story. I left out the part about being a crow. I wanted her to believe in the curse. I wanted her to help. Perhaps the part about being a crow would be too much for her to believe.
The blacksmith’s daughter did not disappoint me.
“We’ll lift the curse together,” she said, “tell me all the herbs you know that a sorceress would use for potions. And meet me at my window tomorrow night.”
How slowly the hours passed till the night when I could meet her! But I looked in the magician’s mirror at my pink fleshy nose and imagined the fine beak I would soon have. Good things are worth the wait.
I threw a pebble at the window of the blacksmith’s daughter, as she had told me to do. It bounced from her closed shutters, and she flung them open, and tossed two bags down to me. Then she clambered out onto the branch of a tree and climbed down to meet me.
“My father will kill me,” she said, “if I don’t return with your ring.”
“No” was on the tip of my tongue. Give up my one shiny thing? But I reminded myself that she was my best human friend, and that soon I would have my true body back. Surely that was worth a ring.
“Yes,” I promised, “You shall have my ring.”
I doubted her father would kill her if I failed in my promise. Would he kill me? Of that I was less sure.
The two of us set out for my old roost site. On foot and with no cart, it took days to make the trip. At night, the blacksmith’s daughter pulled out an iron poker and laid it between us, as I laid down to sleep.
“Until I have my ring,” she said.
Smart of her to bring the iron, I thought. It could be useful, once the two of us got hold of the wand.
When we reached a grove of trees near the house of the sorceress, we buried the iron poker, and set up camp for a few days, so that the blacksmith’s daughter could lose the smell of iron before she scouted out the sorceress and her house. In place of the poker, she placed a large stick between the two of us, when we laid down to sleep. During the day she sang to me, and I told her stories of the places I had been, still leaving out the angle from which I had seen them.
One morning she set out to see the sorceress, a small basket of herbs in hand. I paced as I waited for her return. After some time, she burst through the grove, running toward me.
“Good news!” she said, “She needs more herbs tomorrow,” and she paused for emphasis, “because she’s leaving to see her sister the next day.”
“But she’ll take her wand with her,” I said, “that means we need to grab it by tomorrow night. And she’ll recognize me.”
“No,” said the blacksmith’s daughter, “It’s a day trip, and it’s a day trip to Mondavir. I know that town. They don’t allow wands within their walls.”
Hope clouded my thinking. Surely if anyone could charm secrets out of the sorceress, it was my friend, the blacksmith’s daughter. I believed that I had only to show up, the day after tomorrow, and the wand would be mine for the taking, and the curse undone.
The day came, and, while I dug up the iron poker, the blacksmith’s daughter kept watch from the side of the grove that looked on the sorceress’s house. She fetched me once the sorceress had ridden her horse out of sight.
The two of us approached the door of the house, and a three headed dog charged out, and jumped on the blacksmith’s daughter, biting her arm.
I had attacked before, but always in a mob with my fellow crows. Now I stood alone, frozen in fear, for long moments. Then I remembered the poker and charged, stabbing it at the dog.
The dog let go of the blacksmith’s daughter to dodge me. She landed a kick while I missed it with the poker. On the third try, I managed to stab the poker into its side. The dog collapsed and dwindled into a whimpering one-headed toy poodle. Iron combats magic.
The blacksmith’s daughter bandaged the dog, while I ransacked the house looking for the wand. I found it. The sorceress had not, after all, lied about traveling to Mondavir, the town where wands are forbidden.
I returned to the blacksmith’s daughter.
“It will live,” she said of the dog, “I think. But it will do better if we take it back with us.”
“Take it,” I said. I knew the blacksmith’s daughter to be kind to a crow, so why not a dog?
I lifted the poker to the wand. Would it dwindle, like the three-headed dog? It did not. Instead, it sprouted bright lines. A web of spells, kind, cruel, and petty, spread out before me. I saw the babies the witch healed, the extra bit of flavor she added to her zucchini, the pratfall she forced on a woman who had been mean to her when both were teens.
I did not see any lines leading to me. Where was my curse? Only my ring, my bright, shiny ring, stood linked to the wand by a slender line.
I dropped the iron poker and the wand.
“Are you alright?” asked the blacksmith’s daughter.
“I need you to take this ring,” I told her.
“Yes,” said the blacksmith’s daughter. “Yes. A hundred times yes.”
I took the silver ring off my pinky finger and placed it on her ring finger. She gazed at it and grinned.
Then she looked up at my face and screamed, as she saw me begin to sprout feathers.
As I took to the sky — free at last! — my joy at returning to my beloved murder of crows mingled with pity for the human best friend whom I left weeping on the ground.
* * *
About the Author
Lynn Gazis (she/they), being one of nine children, grew up in a small town in New York surrounded by cats, dogs, mice, gerbils, turtles, snakes, and an invisible goldfish. As a child, she played “For All the Saints” on the piano at a funeral for a mouse. She now lives in Southern California with her husband and cats. She works in IT and is active in her Quaker meeting. She has stories published by Cathedral Canyon Review, Air and Nothingness Press, JayHenge Publishing, Persimmon Tree Magazine, and Friends Journal. The cats, though, want you to know that her most important function is scratching them right where they want it and placing items on the table for them to knock down.