“It could have been in this river for years,” Nox pointed out. He was starting to feel anxious. The longer they stuck around, the more likely the soldiers would catch up to them. They didn’t have time for distractions. “Or the storm may have washed that thing for miles.”
“Or,” said Ellie, “they could be nearby, desperate for help. Maybe hurt or sick.”
“You do realize we’re already behind schedule?” Nox said. “If you don’t reach Thelantis in three weeks, you’ll miss your only chance at the Race of Ascension. And if I recall, the last time you answered someone’s cry for help, it cost you a race.”
“And if I recall, that someone was you, and I saved your life,” she snapped back.
He shrugged. “Look, it’s your future you want to throw away.”
“He’s right, you know,” said Gussie. “This person could be really far upriver, or the message could be days old. Maybe someone else found them or …”
Or maybe it was too late, was what she didn’t say.
“One hour,” said Ellie. “We can scout upriver for one hour and if we don’t find anyone, we turn back.”
“I’m in,” said Twig eagerly. Probably just because he wanted to look for more crayfish or something.
Nox pinched the bridge of his nose. “We’re not heroes, Twig. We’re not responsible for whoever this person is.”
“I agree,” said Gussie, shouldering her knapsack, its many filled pockets jangling. “We should keep moving. This is not our problem and turning back now would be counterproductive. Upriver, if you haven’t noticed, happens to be the direction of the fortress we just robbed, and thus the soldiers hunting us.”
“Good,” said Nox. “We’re decided then.”
“I’ve decided I’m going to help,” said Ellie. “Come or don’t come. But what right do I have to be a Goldwing if I won’t help a person in need? It’s like Sir Garesh the Red says in The King’s Ladder: A heart without honor is no heart at all.”
“Honor!” scoffed Nox as Ellie shot into the air. “Well, you know what the Talon says? He says honor makes for a fine funeral shroud and little else.”
“Go!” she said. “I’ll catch up to you later.”
“Fine!” Nox shouted as she flew away. “Go be honorable and dead! Meanwhile, I’ll be smart and …” He sighed. “She can’t hear me, can she?”
“Nope,” said Twig. “She’s gone.”
Ellie had taken off through the canyon without even looking back.
“She’s insane,” said Nox. “I mean, you both agree, right? She’s completely, totally—”
“I’m going with her,” said Twig, and he took off with a flutter.
Nox growled in frustration and looked at Gussie.
“You’re right,” Gussie said. “She’s crazy. But … I kind of like her. Besides, aren’t you a little curious who dropped the doll?”
He groaned as the Falcon girl took flight, and then all three of them were gone.
Lunatics, the lot of them.
Nox remembered the day the Talon had made him watch as the Goldwings hanged a thief from a rival gang. Nox asked how the man had been caught.
“His girl walked into a sting, got herself nabbed selling stolen pearls to undercover guards. She was lost the moment she stepped through the door, but this fool ran in anyway, thinking to save her.” The Talon had shaken his head in disappointment. “We look after our own, Nox, but you can’t look after anyone if you’ve walked into a noose. You want to survive this world? Listen to your wings, not your heart. Your wings will always tell you when it’s time to fly.”
Well, his wings didn’t like any of this one bit.
Nox growled and kicked at pebbles, determined not to let Ellie drag him into danger. They’d be back soon anyway, after finding nothing and nobody in need of saving. He cursed the Sparrow girl and her stupid hero complex, and her storybook with all its ridiculous platitudes. A heart without honor, indeed. Well, at least at the end of the day, his heart would still be beating.
But after five minutes of sitting on a rock, he stood up and yelled, “Fine! Have it your way! But only because I’m bored and I wanna see your face when you realize what a mistake this is!”
He planted one foot on the rock he’d been sitting on and bounded up, wings spreading.
Remembering the bend in the river, Nox took a shortcut over the treetops, through a sky tossed by strong winds. The forest below shook and roared like ocean surf.
He gritted his teeth and swooped back down to the river, just as Ellie, Twig, and Gussie rounded the bend.
“Ha!” Ellie said, slowing to hover in front of him. “Don’t try to talk me out of this, Nox.”
“As if I could,” he sighed. “I’m here to hold you to your promise—one hour of searching, no more.”
Ellie grinned, then flew past him. “Try to keep up!”
At least his shoulder was a lot better; it still twinged painfully, but he could fly without feeling like every wing beat would kill him. And he wasn’t about to ask for a break to rest, not when his pride depended on it. He kept pace with Ellie as she flew farther upriver.
After another forty minutes, Nox fluttered to the front of the group and flared his wings, stopping them. “Time’s up. There’s nobody out here.”
Ellie shook her head. “But—”
“Sparrow, we had a deal.”
“Nox—”
“I’m not budging on this. We have a schedule of our own, you know, and—”
“Nox, look,” Gussie interrupted.
He turned to see what she was pointing at.
A little girl lay on a rock in the middle of the river, curled up so that she was hard to see at first. Rapids churned all around her.
“She’s trapped,” whispered Ellie, swooping past Nox.
They landed on the rock, startling the girl lying there. She couldn’t have been more than six years old, her reddish-brown skin shivering uncontrollably and her black hair hanging in wet ropes.
“Who—who are you?” she said, scrambling back. “Are you here to help?”
“Yes,” said Ellie gently, kneeling beside her. “We got your message. Why are you on this rock? Why don’t you just—”
Nox saw it the same moment Ellie did: the reason the girl hadn’t flown to safety.
Her wings were gnarled and twisted as old tree branches, the few feathers clinging to them ragged and useless. The delicate skin stretching over her wing joints, which should have been covered in protective down, was dry and scaly.
Ellie, who’d reached for the girl, now withdrew her hand as if from a snake. Nox sighed and lowered his gaze. He’d seen this kind of thing before.
“What … what happened?” the Sparrow asked, her voice a rasp. “How’d you end up here?”
“My mother,” the girl said. “There was a rockslide and we fell. She—she’s stuck up there.”
She pointed upriver, where a heap of boulders piled into the river and up the bank. Nox could just make out a bundle of clothes in the mess. His stomach dropped.
“What’s your name, kid?” he asked.
“M-Mally,” she stammered. Her lips were nearly blue.
“Let’s get you warm. Then we’ll see about your mother. Oh, and I think someone’s been missing you.” He took the doll from Ellie and handed it to the girl, who hugged it tight.
“Sam,” she whispered, kissing the doll’s cheek. “I knew you’d bring help!”
Stepping around Ellie, who was still staring at the girl’s withered wings, Nox scooped Mally up. She was light as a sack of seed, and at once she nestled into his warmth.
“Nox,” whispered Ellie. “What if she’s contagious?”
“She’s not,” said Gussie sadly. “It’s wingrot. Not contagious, but very dangerous. Half the people who contract it don’t—”
“Gus,” Nox said sharply. “Why don’t you go check on the mother?”
Gussie blinked, then winced. “Right. Sorry. C’mon, Twig.”
They fluttered toward the rockslide, and Nox drew a deep breath, preparing to launch himself into the air over the rapids.
Then Ellie laid a hand on his arm. “Let me help,” she said. “You’re not in much better shape than she is.”
Nox relented because his shoulder was starting to throb.
“Together,” he said, and Ellie nodded.
He held Mally’s shoulders and Ellie took her legs, and together they flew over the deadly rapids to the shore, landing on a muddy bank.
“Stay with her,” said Ellie. “I’ll help Twig and Gussie.”
He nodded, unable to speak, as his pain was starting to make his vision blur. He sat beside Mally and tried to keep his breaths even.
“Thank you,” Mally whispered. “I thought I was gonna die on that rock.”
“What were you and your mother doing out here?”
“We were going to Stillcreek. There’s a doctor there my mom thinks might … might help me.” Her broken wings twitched, and he noticed her face flinch with pain.
“Yeah,” he said, his heart wrenching. “Maybe he can.”
But he knew the truth. There was no cure for wingrot. It was a new disease, and a fast-working one, destroying a person’s wings within days. He’d known a few people in his home neighborhood of Knock Street who’d caught it. They’d all been driven out of the city, because even though the disease wasn’t contagious, people still feared what they didn’t understand. A whole new village called Rottown had sprung up outside Thelantis’s gates, full of the afflicted. Some survived and returned, but their wings were always so mangled it was obvious they would never fly again.
Most never returned at all.
“Look,” he said to Mally. “Here they come with your mother.”
Ellie, Gussie, and Twig landed, supporting a Dove clan woman between them. Her soft gray wings were healthy and unharmed, but she had a nasty bruise on her leg. She landed gingerly, and Twig grabbed a stick for her to lean on.
“Mama!” Mally cried, jumping up to hug her mother. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, love. My leg was pinned under a rock, but these brave young people helped. Are you hurt?”
Mally shook her head and cried as she squeezed her mother.
“I’m Shayn,” the woman said, nodding to Nox. “Thank you for coming to our aid. You are brave young heroes, and we’re in your debt.”
“Yeah, sure,” he mumbled. He was used to being cursed at and chased away, not praised. This whole thing was starting to feel really embarrassing.
“It was Nox’s idea to come, the minute we found Mally’s doll. Wasn’t it, Nox?” Ellie shot him a wicked smile.
He scowled back. “Glad we could help.”
“Let me return the favor,” said Shayn. “There’s an inn west of here. We planned to spend the night there. I can pay for your bed and supper. Please. I have means.”
“Thanks,” said Nox, “but we really—”
“Would love to,” Gussie quickly inserted. “Warm, dry bed? Hot supper? Absolutely.” She glared at Nox.
“Relax,” Ellie said, nudging him with her elbow. “We deserve a little break, don’t we? You heard the nice lady. We’re heroes.”
She laughed, patting Mally on the head as Nox hung his head and groaned. He knew when he was defeated.
After a few hours of walking with Mally and her mother—the time mostly filled by Twig showing off his pets to the delighted little girl—they came to a crossroads, five paths meeting at the largest tree Ellie had ever seen. It was easily as wide as the Home for Lost Sparrows, its bark so tough and gnarled she doubted there was an axe in all the Clandoms that could dent it.
Driven into the ground at the bottom of the tree were three signs:
GRANNY TAM’S BATHS! BEDS! AND BREAKFAST!
LOOK UP
MORE UP
Ellie tilted her head back until she nearly lost her balance, then finally spotted the building huddled in the large branches. The inn didn’t look like it had been built in the tree so much as dropped from a very great height to crash higgledy-piggledy into the canopy. Rooms, porches, and staircases leaned at disastrous angles, as if at any moment they’d break away and plummet to the ground. Multiple chimney stacks belched gray smoke into the leaves, and a string of laundry dangled between two branches. Strangest of all were the four large pods hanging like massive fruits from the branches. Yet it all held together somehow, and the smell wafting out its windows was undeniably—
“Bacon,” sighed Gussie. “And potatoes.”
They flew up cautiously to scout the place. Mally and her mother took a rickety staircase that wound up and around the trunk.
No soldiers waited to ambush them inside, and no posters with their faces on them had been pasted to the walls. Ellie’s nerves unclenched a little.
The inn’s main room consisted of a dining hall—the floor slanting downhill—and a kitchen. An old woman sat between them, behind a wooden counter, smoking a pipe. She had one eye covered with a patch, leathery skin as dark as sunflower seeds, and gray hair bundled in a gravity-defying pile atop her head.
“Well, well. Hello, tadpoles,” she crooned, smiling around her pipe. A cloud of curiously familiar, sweet-smelling smoke hovered in the air above her, and Ellie suddenly realized it was the same scent she often sniffed in Mother Rosemarie’s private rooms back at the Home for Lost Sparrows. “What can I do for you?”
“If you please, I’ll take a room for my daughter and me, and these four as well,” said Shayn, laying down coin.
“Lovely,” said the old woman, leaning forward to swipe the coins. “Poor dears, how tired you all must be, and traveling in such dreadful weather as we’ve had! Tsk! You let old Granny Tam take care of you now. I’ll heat the baths if you want them.”
Twig made a face. “Forget it—”
“We’ll all have baths,” Gussie said sternly, driving an elbow into Twig’s ribs.
“Anyone else staying here?” asked Nox, who was still looking around suspiciously.
“Alas, it’s been a quiet season,” sighed Granny Tam. “Fewer travelers lately, likely due to the rise in … Well.” She glanced pityingly at Mally’s wings. “There are many sad stories in the wind these days. It’s a strange time, and a cruel one. I reckon I know what kind of help you’re seeking, poor dears, and I wish you good fortune.”
Shayn put an arm around her daughter. “Thank you.”
“Your staff!” said Gussie, pointing to an odd stick leaning on the wall. It had one large crook, like a shepherd’s staff, and a shorter hook protruding from the other side. “It’s a lockstave, isn’t it?”
“Sharp girl,” said Granny Tam, considering Gussie more closely.
“I learned about all the ancient fighting methods,” Gussie said. “I didn’t know anybody used lockstaves anymore, except for …” Gussie’s eyes widened. “Are you a member of the Restless Order?”
“That I am,” said the old woman, her crinkled smile spreading.
“The Restless Order?” asked Ellie.
It was Nox who answered. “They’re a group of hermits who live up in the highest mountains, where they worship rocks or something.”
“We don’t worship anything,” sniffed Granny Tam. “We spend our time in meditation, attempting to understand the secrets of the natural world in order to settle the restlessness in our souls.”
“Bums who stare at rocks,” said Nox. “Leastways, that’s how I’ve heard them called. Um … not that I, personally, have ever called them that.” He cleared his throat.
“Rocks, young man,” said Granny Tam, “have quite a lot to say, if you know how to listen.”
“And they can see the future,” said Twig.
Everyone turned to stare at him.
“Rocks?” asked Ellie.
“No, the Restless,” he muttered. “What? There was an Order monk in the circus I was in. He did fortune-telling for a half-copper.”
“Oh, good grief,” said Gussie. “Nobody can tell the fu
ture.”
“Strictly speaking,” said Granny Tam, winking at her, “you’re right, young Falcon. Loosely speaking, however … sometimes the future tells itself, to the sensitive ear.”
Gussie scowled. “If you’re in the Order, what’re you doing way down here?”
“The thing about mountains is they get cold, and old bones dislike cold.” She shrugged. “There are as many rocks down here as up there, and trees, rivers, and plants to boot. We of the Order meditate upon all nature’s wonders.”
Granny Tam rapped her knuckles on the counter, making them all jump. “Enough talk. Supper needs cooking, bodies need scrubbing”—her one eye fixed on Twig’s muddy face—“and the day grows no younger. You’re a hungry bunch, I can tell.”
No one argued against that.
That night, bellies full of roasted carrots, potatoes, and apple tart, and bodies and hair scrubbed to shining with warm water and goat’s milk soap, Ellie and the others followed Granny Tam to their sleeping quarters, one of the large hanging pods made of pale woven reeds.
“You’ll have to all share,” said the old woman. “The others were damaged in the recent storms. But there’s room aplenty.”
Anchored to the tree by ropes on all sides, the suspended pod barely moved when they stepped in. A hanging plank walkway afforded access from the main building, so Mally had no trouble reaching it. Ellie was sure to check that the ashmark over the pod’s door was freshly drawn.
The interior was cozy, a circular floor piled with straw-stuffed pallets, clean blankets, and cushions. The springy, woven walls breathed in the cooling night air, so there was no need for windows.
As they unpacked, Mally scooped up The King’s Ladder from Ellie’s pile of stuff and cooed over it.
“Pretty! Has it got pictures?”
Ellie grinned. “Mally, did you ever hear the story of Sir Chan the Loyal?”
When the girl shook her head, Ellie took the book and sat beside her.
Shayn smiled and gently brushed Mally’s hair while Ellie read to her of the Goldwing knight who’d once led an entire town to safety during a gargol-infested storm.
“The lesson of this story,” said Ellie, “is to teach the fourth step in the Ladder of Ascension: loyalty. That might be loyalty to friends, to the promises you make, or to the duty you’ve been given.”
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