birds in the wood

Chapter Seven

Beware the Court of Owls that watches all the time,

Ruling Gotham from a shadowed perch behind granite and lime.

They watch you at you hearth, they watch you in your bed,

Speak not a whispered word of them, or they’ll send the Talon for your head.

Bruce knows the nursery rhyme.

He doesn’t remember the first time he heard it. It has always been familiar, a memory lingering at the back of his mind. His mother must have told it to him first. He doesn’t know who else it could have been.

“Beware the Court of Owls, that watches all the time…”

She always sang to him before bed. Songs from her childhood, songs she heard on the radio, and poems she had memorized long ago. Songs in English, and Hebrew, and German, whatever she happened to think of that night. Almost never the same song twice.

“Ruling Gotham from their perch above granite and lime.”

She hummed along with the words. She stroked his hair with her hand, soothing him to sleep, so he almost missed the end of the poem.

“They watch you at your hearth, they watch you in your bed… Speak not a word about them, or they’ll send the talon for your head!”

His father didn’t like it. Bruce remembers that, too. Thomas Wayne never believed any of the legends; he brought them up only to dismiss them.

“It’s just a story, chum. An old story people tell themselves to explain things they don’t want to think about.”

The story is very old. The rhyme dates back to the early nineteenth century, though the wording has changed significantly over time. Folklorists generally trace its origin to the high population of owls in the swamplands that would eventually become the trading post of Gotham. Nearly every colonial account of Gotham’s founding mentions its native owls somewhere.

The original source of the poem is unknown. The earliest written versions are records of something that already existed.

“It’s a story,” Martha would say. Bruce thinks he remembers that: a bright fireplace, and his father sitting at a desk, and his mother holding him on her lap. “We learn things from stories.”

“Such as?” Thomas says.

“Someone is always watching.”

⁂

Bruce knows this about Gotham: someone is always watching.

Cameras line the eaves of buildings, swiveling back and forth with the tides of people on city streets. Some lead back to a control room somewhere, to a human eye watching for thieves and vandals. Others are nonfunctional, a stopgap deterrent for owners who can’t afford anything better. It’s hard to tell at a glance which is which. No one set of surveillance cameras can track a person across the city, but all of them together could.

Then there’s the press. Newspapers, magazines, online journals and blogs—Gotham is full of people who want to be heard, and many of them find their outlet in the written word. As soon as something happens, someone will have written about it—though the accuracy of their account may leave something to be desired. Bruce subscribes to every major newspaper within Gotham city limits, and around seventy percent of the smaller outlets. He regularly trawls online publications for bits of information on daily events.

He spends a lot of time reading.

In Gotham, someone is always watching. Someone is always willing to report what they’ve seen. With enough time, dedication, and money, it’s easy to find people.

Bruce starts at the top.

Charles Edwards III comes from one of Gotham’s founding families. He is—was—a member of the board of trustees for Gotham University. His wife, Elizabeth, is a concert pianist. His oldest son is away at college, attending NYU; his two younger children still live at home.

As of thirty-six hours ago, Charles Edwards III is dead.

The news hasn’t broken yet. It hasn’t appeared in any of the papers; Edwards’s profile with the board of trustees hasn’t changed. But it looks like the family has been notified. Elizabeth Edwards and her children left Martha’s Vineyard yesterday, sometime in the morning. A series of fashion and celebrity-watch blogs locate them back in Gotham by nightfall. Bruce finds a picture, clearly taken from a car, of Elizabeth walking up the steps of the Powers Hotel. Her face is cold and impassive, her outfit immaculate. Her children trail behind her. They have red eyes, teary faces, and their clothes are rumpled.

Ada, the daughter, is fourteen years old. Ethan, the son, is eleven.

Bruce didn’t remember that. The reminder jars him like a missing stair. The Edwards children are almost the same ages as Talon and Jason.

That doesn’t mean—

Bruce takes a deep breath. He feels the horror, the sudden jolt of adrenaline, flowing through him. He takes another breath and lets it go. That doesn’t mean they’re in danger.

Charlie Edwards is dead. Every other person present on that night is dead. The GCPD is surely aware of the connection by now. Jim Gordon, at least, can be trusted to look into it.

Elizabeth Edwards appears to have checked into the Powers Hotel, rather than return home. Bruce can guess why. The house is still a crime scene. The police will have moved the bodies, but they won’t move anything else.

Bruce thinks of the blood smeared across the walls. He wonders if it dried that way.

He wonders if Elizabeth Edwards knows about the children the police found hiding in her house.

From the outside, the Edwards family looks perfect. Charlie and Elizabeth are kind, polite, stylish people, with three gorgeous children. Charlie speaks several times a year at the university; Elizabeth holds free concerts for underprivileged children; they attend Gotham’s First Presbyterian Church every Sunday. Twice a year the family hosts a charity banquet to support education and the arts in Gotham. No one would have suspected them of any sort of crime.

Bruce is not inclined to cling to that image of the Edwards family.

Bruce found two children covered in blood in their house. He remembers Jason—wrapped in a blanket, barefoot, staring through him. He remembers Talon, kneeling on the floor, holding a knife.

Please, Jason said. They were going to hurt him.

He didn’t try to beg for himself. After everything he went through—things Bruce doesn’t even want to think about—all he cared about was Talon’s safety.

Bruce doesn’t know who they are. He doesn’t know which of the nineteen people present on that night were perpetrators and which were merely accessories. All he knows is that the party happened at Charlie Edwards’s house. He must have known what was going on.

Bruce opens a new file folder. He labels it—after some deliberation—Background (V). He won’t know the identities of the other victims until the news breaks, but he has a starting point. He knows one person to be involved in this case, and that person happens to be someone who pays a lot of attention to his social circle. Bruce doesn’t have access to the missing persons cases and internal reports that the police do, but he can look into the victims. Any one of these people could be the key.

He thinks of another folder, creased and water-damaged and faded with age, hidden away at the bottom of a drawer in the library.

The fact is—the fact Bruce does not want to admit, least of all to himself—the Court of Owls legend has some grounding in reality.

Most legends do. The word sasquatch comes from sasq’ets, a creature in the tradition of the Sts’ailes people. The Nlaka’pamux, Lummi, and Iroquois nations tell stories of the same creature. The jackalope originates from sightings of wild rabbits with the Shope papilloma virus, which causes leporids to grow horn-like protrusions from their heads and necks. Most UFOs are not hoaxes but meteor showers, planets, satellites or aircraft—real phenomena, misidentified. Conspiracy theories grow from the creeping, subconscious desire for a world that makes sense, where death and corruption and tragedy can all be blamed on a single hidden enemy.

None of them are true, but all of them come from something real.

The city of Gotham began as a tiny English trading post, sandwiched between the territories of New Netherland and New Sweden. Its early inhabitants were wary and suspicious, always on the lookout for signs of aggression from their neighbors. From the beginning, they associated the owls that hunted in the swamplands with the enemies they saw on every side. The owls became a symbol of danger, deception, treachery—and anyone who wasn’t English.

Then England conquered that surrounding territory in the 1660s, and Gotham became much more secure. The subject of owls faded from colonial accounts for almost a century—until tensions began to rise between England and her American colonies. As people took sides in the conflict that would become the Revolutionary War, both sides associated the other with owls—though owl imagery was most common on the revolutionary side, which took the owls as symbols of Parliament, a reminder that British spies might be anywhere.

The association of owls with treachery continued through the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and even during the Civil War. Then, in 1870, a group of Gotham shipyard workers decided to unionize.

This kicked off a series of labor battles that wouldn’t end until well into the twentieth century. Unionization efforts spread across the city, as uneven as they were impassioned. The wealthiest families in Gotham—the Crownes, the Elliots, the Van Derms, and the Waynes—closed ranks. By 1872, they had formed a society, ostensibly for the preservation of their livelihoods, really to maintain control over commerce in Gotham. The society had an official name, but no one remembers it; they remember that it was informally called the Congress of Owls.

Solomon Wayne was a founding member of the Congress of Owls. Bruce knows the story; he’s read the man’s biography, and the corresponding diary entries from Solomon’s son, Alan.

He feels something watching him.

Bruce twitches. Then he goes still. He sits with his head bent over his desk; he doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe. He holds his breath and listens to the silence.

Nothing.

He lifts his head. Turns to look over his shoulder.

Nothing.

There is no one else in the room. The door is closed. The windows are sealed against high winds. Bruce is alone, as he prefers to be.

He could have sworn he felt someone else in the room with him.

Bruce takes a deep breath. He tips his head back and hears the joints in his neck pop. No one else is close enough to hear. He is alone, in his study, despite the shot of adrenaline that tells him to duck, roll, move. It’s been a while since he felt that warning.

Felt. Not heard.

It’s different in Gotham. Here people want their targets to see them coming. They use guns, sacrificing stealth for intimidation as much as for power. In Gotham, death is noisy, chaotic, and Bruce can’t help but think of it as slow.

Most people wouldn’t call a bullet slow. Those people haven’t felt the hairs on their neck stand up, and a heartbeat later seen the blade buried to the hilt in a man’s back. Those people haven’t seen the trigger depress, and the muzzle flash, and the desperate tangle of limbs, and the slow, slow collapse of a person into a heap of dead flesh.

Bruce has seen it. He knows. There are quicker ways to kill a person.

Bruce’s neck prickles. He doesn’t look over his shoulder. He already knows what he’ll find. He’s been sitting here too long, staring absently at empty folders and news articles he’s already read twice. He needs to do something else. He needs to move.

He stands up from his desk. He steps away from the computer. He does not look over his shoulder. He leaves his back open, exposed, as he walks to the door.

No one grabs him from behind. No knife bites into his back. Because no one is there.

He heads downstairs. He’ll see if the coffee in the kitchen is still warm. If it’s cold, he’ll make tea. A single serving in a mug, the way Alfred hates. Anything to chase away the paranoia prickling at the back of his neck. It follows him all the way down the stairs.

Paranoia has always followed the Waynes.

Thomas never liked to talk about it. He never believed any of the legends. He laughed at them; he explained, in great detail, how all the stories were complete hogwash. He was a man of science, a doctor, with a rational explanation for everything.

Bruce didn’t realize until later—much, much later—that his father was afraid, too.

Paranoia has always followed the Waynes. It never attacked Thomas, but he knew; he saw it, Bruce thinks, lurking on the edges of his life. It runs in the family. Thomas grew up hearing what stories and legends did to his great-grandfather: how they dug their way into his mind and slowly pried it apart.

Solomon Wayne died in 1885. Alan Wayne took his place as the head of the family. His passion was architecture, and he poured money into building up Gotham’s skyline. He made Gotham a city to rival New York and San Francisco, and every year, he grew a little more afraid.

The Congress of Owls dissolved in 1876, less than five years after it formed. For Alan Wayne, it lived on. He became obsessed with the group—not with their businesses or goals, but with what they represented. He saw them as symbols of greed and vice, of everything wrong with Gotham—even as he used his father’s money to fund one project after another. He saw owls everywhere. Images of owls, mice, and snakes began to appear in his designs—predators killing prey, over and over again.

I see them everywhere, he wrote, in a diary entry from December of 1888—a few weeks after construction finished on Wayne Tower. I see them watching me. Always they watch me. Always they see. They are not real! one says—They are only graven images! How can their eyes see anything? But I see them watching. I see them following me in the street. At night I hear their voices whispering behind walls. Beware the owls, the owls of Gotham, hear their warning, heed their omen! But for what have they marked me? For what? For what? For what?

Bruce has read the diary. It only gets worse. In the second half of his life, Alan Wayne slipped further and further into paranoid delusions, and no one in his family knew how to help him. In 1912 he fled Wayne Tower in the middle of the night, yelling for help, claiming that the owls were going to kill him. He fell through an open manhole, into the sewer, and drowned.

Henry Wayne, Alan’s son, was a scholar. In addition to his business pursuits he wrote biographies of his father and grandfather, and he spent years researching everything he could find on the legendary owls of Gotham. He never succumbed to the paranoia that destroyed his father, but the source of his obsession was clear. After Henry’s death, his son Patrick denounced his work as the grief-stricken ramblings of a broken man.

At the bottom of the stairs, Bruce stops.

At first, there’s nothing. Just the prickling of his neck and the airy silence of the living area. Then he hears it again: a voice coming from the library.

It’s not Alfred’s voice. It sounds young. Bruce moves toward it, past the windows and patches of pale light on the floor. The double doors at the back of the living area are open. Bruce pokes his head through. His fingers brush over the mezuzah.

He hears Jason’s voice, reading.

“…When he was exactly halfway through the test (he was on question twenty, regarding the difference between para—para-tax-is and hypo-taxis), Reynie heard Rhonda Kazembe rise from the desk behind him. Was she already finished? Well, of course! She had all the answers.”

The library doors open on the reading area. Jason sits on the couch, wrapped in a fluffy blanket, with a thick paperback balanced on his lap. Talon leans against his shoulder, draped in a blanket of his own.

“Reynie grimaced in irri-tation, and as Rhonda stepped forward to turn in her test, the other children gasped in… amazement.”

Alfred sits in an armchair by the doors to the balcony. He has a pair of knitting needles and a ball of yarn to wrestle with.

“But the pencil woman seemed not the least bit… suspicious. If anything, she was absorbed in Rhonda’s bizarre appearance and hardly glanced at the test as she took it. Reynie had a sudden insight: Rhonda was—”

Jason sees Bruce in the doorway and stops reading.

He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t move. Talon turns his head and Bruce sees a flash of eyes glowing behind dark lenses. Alfred glances up from his knitting.

“Don’t—” Bruce says. “I mean. As you were.”

He turns to leave the library. Alfred stops him.

“You’re welcome to join us.” His voice is perfectly polite, as always, and warm.

“I…” Bruce looks back. All three of them are still watching him. The boys are alert, but they don’t look scared. They keep each other calm. “I don’t want to bother you.”

“It’s okay,” Jason says. He lifts his shoulders. “If you’re okay with me f—screwing up words.” He glances at Alfred. “’M not a good reader.”

“That is not true,” Alfred says calmly.

“’M only doin’ it ’cause he won’t,” Jason says. “And Talon can’t. I don’t think.”

“You can’t read?” Bruce says.

Talon, of course, says nothing. He turns away, breaking whatever eye contact he might have made, and leans in a little closer to Jason. Jason narrows his eyes at Bruce.

“Hey, look,” he says, and he holds the book up so it blocks Bruce’s view of their faces. The book has a whimsical, illustrated cover. “Can you tell me what that says?”

Talon makes a soft warbling noise.

“It’s okay,” Jason says. “It’s—it’s allowed. Nobody’s gonna be mad.”

A few hours ago Jason asked what their rules were. He wanted to know how Bruce would punish him for making too much noise. He got so scared he almost had a panic attack. Now—whatever else he thinks—he trusts Bruce enough to take his eyes off of him. To say It’s allowed. No one is going to be mad.

That takes a lot of trust. Bruce is impressed by it, and thankful, and scared.

“Gr…een.”

Talon’s voice is dry. It frays, on the point of breaking. Bruce turns and ducks out of the library.

“Good,” Jason says behind him. “That’s good! You got it. What about this one?”

Bruce goes to the kitchen, grabs a bottle of water from the pantry, and carries it back.

“Hhhand,” the Talon reads. He breathes out with the word, and this time his voice does break. Bruce approaches and holds out the water.

Talon doesn’t take it. He looks at the bottle. He tilts his head to the side.

“It’s for you,” Bruce says. He glances at Alfred, who has yet to offer any help. “...You can drink it.”

Talon takes the bottle.

He responds to orders, Bruce thinks. He does what others—Bruce, Leslie, Alfred, Jason—instruct him to do. That is not all he does; like Jim said, none of them would be here now if Talon didn’t act on his own will. But he’s hiding, Bruce thinks. Waiting.

Talon opens the bottle. He drinks a few sips. Then he closes it again. He tucks it under the blanket, out of sight.

“Yeah,” Jason says, drawing Bruce’s attention. “He can read.”

It’s not a lot of information. They don’t know when Talon learned to read, or how, or if he knows anything beyond basic phonics—but it’s more than they had before.

“Thank you,” Bruce says. Jason shrugs.

“I’m gonna keep reading,” he says. He glances at Alfred again. “Unless someone else wants to take over.”

“No need,” Alfred says. “You’re doing a fine job.”

Jason rolls his eyes. “Whatever,” he says, under his breath. He adjusts the book on his lap, looks one more time at Bruce, one more time at Alfred, and takes a deep breath.

“Reynie had a sudden insight: Rhonda was calling attention to herself on purpose. It was a trick.”

Bruce slips past them, into the depths of the library.

Jason watches him move, loses his place, and pauses to find it again. He looks back at the book. Talon keeps looking at Bruce.

Talon seems to have no problem with eye contact, with looking at others and being looked at. It’s not what Bruce would have expected from a child treated the way Talon has been. It’s another twisted detail, another incongruity. Another clue.

His gaze prickles on the back of Bruce’s neck.

The library takes up almost half the first floor of the penthouse. It wraps around the living area, with an exit to the balcony at either end. It holds the majority of the books that once made up the library at Wayne Manor. At the far end, around the corner from the open reading area, is a section for family records. It houses—among other things—a copy of Alan Wayne’s diary, first editions of Henry Wayne’s seminal biographies, the original deed to Wayne Manor, and Martha Kane Wayne’s copies of the Tanakh.

It houses, at the bottom of a drawer, an old water-damaged folder.

Alfred kept it. Bruce didn’t realize until the move, when he found it amid the clutter of books and papers in the old library.

It was very important to you, once, Alfred said when Bruce confronted him. I am not in the habit of wiping out memories.

Now Bruce kneels to take it from the drawer. He does not look at the books. He feels—he imagines—them glaring down at him, judging him, for choosing this memory to retread.

Bruce settles on the floor of the library, crossing his legs in front of him, and flips back through pages he doesn’t want to remember.

⁂

When he was eight years old, Bruce Wayne saw his parents murdered.

It almost killed him, too.

After the murders, Bruce stopped talking. He stopped sleeping. He stopped eating. He vacillated between depression and anger, between ignoring the people around him and violently lashing out. He was hard to take care of, he knows. He was inconsolable. He was lost.

As he moved through clouds of grief and horror and despair, an idea took root.

It couldn’t have been random. The Waynes couldn’t have been killed by some nameless mugger over pocket change and pearls. There had to be another explanation. There had to be something else at work.

Bruce knew the story of the Court of Owls. He knew the nursery rhyme. His mother had told him—had warned him. His father had dismissed it, laughed it off, but there were signs. Two weeks before his parents’ deaths, Thomas had found a barn owl nesting in the attic. He’d tried to destroy the nest, but the bird kept coming back.

It was a sign. It was an omen. The Court of Owls was real, they had killed Bruce’s parents, and he was going to take revenge. He was going to destroy them.

So Bruce began his own investigation into the Court. He never told anyone; he knew no one would take him seriously, and no one could be trusted. He knows now that Alfred caught on, that Alfred followed his investigation from a distance—but at the time, Bruce was alone in the world.

The more he looked, the more clues he found. Everywhere he turned, he found some new piece of evidence for the Court’s existence. He saw owls painted on walls and molded into architecture. He began making lists of Gotham’s powerful families, of the people his parents had known—politicians, business partners, scientists, friends. Everyone was suspect. Anyone could be an agent of the Court. No one could be ruled out.

In his own family history, Bruce found the death of Alan Wayne—more evidence, he thought, of a vast conspiracy against his family. He traced Alan and Henry Wayne’s investments in architecture, the owl iconography littered throughout Gotham, and it led him to a building: an old abandoned club on the west side of Gotham.

It was known as Estuary House. The Congress of Owls had met there, and every family on Bruce’s list had belonged to that club at one time or another. Bruce hunted down the blueprints and found the most likely meeting place: a windowless attic room, right above the double-owl crest over the doors of the building.

He waited until nightfall, snuck out of the house, and went to find the people behind his parents’ deaths.

He crossed Gotham in the dead of night. He hopped the dilapidated fence around the old club and broke in through a window. He climbed a set of ancient, creaking stairs, sticking close to the wall where the boards would be strongest. Owls watched him from all sides—carved into the railing, molded into the walls, emblazoned on doors.

The only entrance to the meeting room was a trapdoor in the ceiling. Bruce climbed a set of old shelves to reach it, stretching up as far as he could reach to trip the latch and push it open and peek inside. There, at the top of the house, at the end of his search, in the secret room, he found—

Dust.

The room was empty. It had been empty for a long time. The walls were peeling. Water dripped from a sagging corner of the roof. And the floor was covered in dust.

There was no council of evil men. There was no conspiracy. There was no answer. All of Bruce’s investigations, all his evidence, led to an empty room that hadn’t been touched in decades.

An empty room with a trapdoor that fell shut behind him and latched from the outside.

He was trapped in that room for over a week. Bruce doesn’t remember much of it now. He knows he passed out at some point from dehydration; he knows that when Alfred finally found him, he was nearly comatose. He spent three weeks recovering in the hospital.

Later Bruce would learn more of the history surrounding the Court of Owls. He would see how the legend was used to spread fear, how it divided people and painted some as monsters. In the 1600s, the Owls stood for Dutch, Swedish, and most of all Indigenous people. In Bruce’s time, too often, they stand for Jews. That alone would lead him to disavow the myth as a piece of Gotham’s history better left in the past.

But he never forgot his months of frenzied research into the Court, and he never forgot that empty, dusty room.

Conspiracy theories grow out of a desire for the world to make sense. In the months after his parents were murdered, Bruce needed there to be a Court of Owls. He needed to find some great evil behind the night that tore his life apart. He gave into that need. He let it guide him, over caution, over reason, over sanity. He followed that desperate need into the dark, and it almost killed him.

He’s looked into the legend since then. He’s never found anything substantial. At the end of the day, it’s another of Gotham’s myriad urban legends. Mothers tell it to their children; children scare each other with it; adults remember it and look over their shoulders. It inspires fear; it inspires obsession; or it inspires apathy, but in the end the story is just that: a story.

⁂