Black Wings Beating

by Alex London

  When they were little, before she’d taken up the family business, she and Kylee would play bone dice underneath the market stalls. These days, both of them were too busy when the market came around; Kylee hustling bronze and Vyvian hustling secrets. Her family spied for one of the kyrgs at the Talon Fortress, so she usually knew what was happening on the rest of the plateau before most Six Villagers. “Your mom has the sense to do her ranting in private. This priest doesn’t have the right to spread panic at the Broken Jess. People are nervous enough about the Kartami already.”

  “Do you think it’s true?” Kylee asked. “Are they coming?”

  The Kartami—also called the shards—were a roving band of religious fanatics who lived in the farthest reaches of the Parsh Desert. Even the Crawling Priests were too moderate for them. While the Altari believed that humans taming birds of prey was a sin, the Kartami believed that the birds themselves carried the sin. The Altari looked away from the sky in awe; the Kartami looked directly at it with disgust for what it had become. Where one group prayed to repent, the other prayed for annihilation.

  In the Six Villages, the Altari were moralistic scolds, while the Kartami were merely a distant threat that parents used to scare their children: Eat your greens, or the Kartami will steal your songbirds while you sleep. Clean the mews, or the Kartami will steal all the birds from the sky. But the Kartami had been growing bolder, attacking closer, cutting roads between settlements, and cutting the fists from every falconer they found. Minor Altari nobles—those who had been pledged to Uztar—had begun to surrender, committing their souls to the Kartami faith, their bodies to the Kartami cause, and their resources to the Kartami war machine. The Council of Forty urged calm throughout Uztar as towns and villages begged for the Sky Castle’s protection.

  Now that the thaws of the ice-melt season had come, rumors of Kartami advances flew as fast as sparrow hawks.

  Vyvian shrugged at Kylee’s worried question. “You know my family doesn’t give out information for free. What kind of spies would we be if I didn’t make you pay for it?”

  “An old friend?” Vyvian frowned, and Kylee rolled her eyes. “I don’t spend bronze on rumors.”

  “Who said anything about bronze?” Her friend turned back to the battle pits, raised an eyebrow at Brysen on the edge. He was talking to his trainer, Dymian. They were leaning in close. “I can take all kinds of payment.”

  Kylee groaned. “Even if I were the kind of sister who’d sell you her brother, you are singing to the wrong bird.” Brysen had his fingers laced between Dymian’s, his lips whispering against the older boy’s ear.

  “It’s a tragedy,” Vyvian sighed. “The things I could teach your brother about a body…”

  “Gross.”

  “I’m just saying, if he ever stops preening for Master Birdnester over there, send him my way.”

  The trainer, Dymian, had taken his own falcon from a nest he’d found when she was still a baby eyas. Someone who took eyasses from their nests was called a birdnester, but Kylee was pretty sure that wasn’t what Vyvian meant by it. Dymian was a few seasons older than Brysen.

  “You can’t see it because he looks like you, but with that hair and those eyes … your brother’s keener than a prize peregrine. And you’re not such a plain pigeon yourself.”

  If Kylee could’ve rolled her eyes straight out of her head, she would’ve.

  “I’ll take a fight!” Brysen shouted over the crowd, and the rough boys around him cheered and patted him on the shoulders, ruffled his thunder-struck hair. Dymian squeezed their interlaced fingers.

  The Broken Jess had been a temple in ancient times, of what kind no one knew. Like most sacred things in Uztar, it had been put to more human uses than its founders could have imagined. All that remained of its sacred past now was a big stone sanctuary that housed the pub, piles of random stones scattered about its yard, and a great rock painting of two falcons in combat that decorated the cliff face behind it.

  Below the sheer cliff face and the hawk mural were the battle pits. There were three pits around the edge of the property and one large “show pit” in the center. Brysen was at the smallest pit.

  The pits were about as deep as a sinner’s grave but wide enough for two people to circle each other. The sides sloped up, wider at the top than at the bottom, and spectators sat and stood around the rim, crowding, shouting, and cheering the fighters they’d bet on. Brysen had begun his climb into the pit when a man slid down the edge opposite him.

  What was Brysen doing? They did not have time for this!

  His opponent wore the pale tunic and loose pants of a long-hauler. Not master of a convoy, but someone higher up than a driver. His red beard was thick and full, bejeweled with colorful desert glass, and his copper hair was hidden under a flat white hat that was also dotted with more desert glass.

  He removed his tunic to show a pale, muscled chest covered in long-hauler’s ink. He had markings along his collarbone for every journey he’d made across the Parsh Desert, ornamented text of a hauler’s prayer to the flocks scrawled up his side, and, across the rippling expanse of his back, a colorful scene from the Epic of the Forty Birds. The tattoo was filled with symbols whose meanings were known only to long-haulers, but he showed it off now to make one thing clear: His back had never met the whip.

  Had Brysen ever taken his shirt off in public, his back would tell a very different story.

  The long-hauler’s companions whispered to one another, laughing beneath their colorful round umbrellas, which cast their faces in shadow. The man in the pit had a female kestrel, square-tailed and brown-striped, that sat steady on his glove. He removed her ornamented leather hood, and the teardrop eyes in her white face fixed on Brysen and his hawk.

  Brysen swiped Shara’s plain hood off, revealing her bloodred eyes. The pupils were so wide that the red barely ringed them, two blazing eclipses held afire inside a bird’s skull. When she saw where she was, she shrieked and spread her wings, clutched her talons around Brysen’s wrist, footing him hard. He whispered something to her. The bird calmed.

  Shara was a goshawk—far bigger than the kestrel but far moodier, too. She had a crooked wing and a nervous temper, was prone to fits of brutal violence and days of sullen pouting. The two of them weren’t so different, Brysen and Shara.

  She shifted her weight nervously on his fist. His thumb rubbed one of her talons.

  “Here’s some news for free,” Vyvian whispered in Kylee’s ear. “That long-hauler’s nickname is the Orphan Maker.”

  “Don’t do this!” Kylee called to Brysen, shoving her way through the crowd to the edge of the battle pit. Brysen’s ambition in the pits was not always matched by his talent. He always tried to take on the biggest opponent with the longest odds. When he won, he won big, but when he lost, there were scars.

  “The challenge is accepted, Ky!” Nyck, one of the battle boys, called across to her. “He can’t back out now.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Brysen shouted up. “When I win, I’ll buy us all lamb leg for dinner.”

  He smiled but not at her, then unhooked the short string that tethered Shara to his glove, unwound the battle rope from his shoulder, and, with one hand, tied the split end to the jesses around her ankles. The rope had a clasp on a swivel below the bird’s ankles, giving Shara a free range of movement while keeping her attached to the glove. They were bound to each other in the battle, tethered from wrist to ankle, from earth to air.

  Mud below and mud between.

  “Wish me luck,” Brysen said.

  “When have you ever had luck?” Kylee asked.

  Brysen scowled, then drew his black-talon blade.

  2

  Her brother turned to face the Orphan Maker and gripped his knife in the fighter’s stance. The curved black blade mirrored the brutal beak of a hawk, and Shara’s eyes glanced at it unsteadily.

  The knife was old, but how old they didn’t know. It’d been inscribed with symbols their father had alwa
ys said were in “the Hollow Tongue,” the ancient language of the birds. But their father was also easily deceived and might’ve just convinced himself that was true to avoid facing the fact that he’d been ripped off for a fake antique. No one could actually read the Hollow Tongue or even knew for sure what it would look like in writing.

  Regardless, it was the only thing they had left of the man, and Brysen had wanted to keep it. He had scars on all his fingers from where their father missed whenever he played a drunken game of pinfinger using Brysen’s spread hand pressed against the table. Why Brysen clung to it puzzled Kylee. Strange magic bound a blade to the wounds it made.

  Brysen crouched, arm across his chest, resting the base of the knife handle on the middle of his gloved forearm and forming a T with the blade as its base.

  He waited.

  The Orphan Maker assumed the same position, and Brysen’s eyes fixed on him.

  Shara saw the other blade and the other falconer and the other bird. It was a familiar sight, surely, but not a comfortable one. She shrank back into herself; this was a bad time to show fear.

  A frightened goshawk perched with its talons tucked under its tail feathers and its head pulled back is a ridiculous sight. They’re big birds but stubby, shaped like a thumb drawn by a child, with the beak an angry V in the center of the face. And Shara, who perched with a slight tilt to the side, looked more ridiculous than most.

  Her chest was striped gray and white in a herringbone pattern, and her red eyes were hooded with black. The rest of her feathers were a mixture of grays, which helped camouflage her against the rocky terrain of the foothills but stood out brightly against the lush green grasses down in the Six Villages as the melt came on.

  Nyck whistled, and the opponents circled each other. The birds sat on their gloves with a stillness known only to a predator and its prey. Kylee could feel the stillness in herself.

  Anyone who grows up in a home where they are prey to a parent’s rage learns to sip silence the way the rich sip wine. Silence has infinite flavors, with endless shades and notes. The sharpest of all the silences, and the most necessary to know, is the silence before an attack. Kylee took half a breath in and held it just as the other falconer thrust his arm up, launching his bird.

  “Utch!” Brysen shouted, and thrust his own hawk arm up. For a heartbeat, Kylee feared Shara wouldn’t let go, would foot her brother so hard that not even the glove would protect him. But just as his arm reached the apex of its rise, offering her to the air, the air accepted. Her wings stretched, her head pulled out of her shoulders, and she took flight. His arm jolted.

  The bright white underside of Shara’s wings glowed like snow on mountain peaks. Her tail feathers opened, her flight feathers spread, and her talons tucked up beneath her. She flapped furiously in the opposite direction of the brown kestrel and screeched. Brass bells tied to her anklet, meant to keep track of her during a hunt, jingled as she flew, and the battle rope unfurled behind her.

  When she reached the rope’s full extension, Brysen planted his feet and turned his torso, steering her back toward the other hawk, which had caught an air current and spread her wings to glide, swooping beneath.

  Shara looked down, her eyes following the line back to him. His muscles strained against her power and the wind’s pull. He circled to keep his distance from the other man and whistled, more a warning than a command. Shara tucked her wings against her body and dove.

  She was a sleek streak of gray across the sky. Head forward, eyes fixed, tail feathers wavering to steer her straight for the brown kestrel. The air rushing through Shara’s anklet bells shrieked. Brysen’s hawk, so gawky and afraid on the fist, had become grace and perfect form, never more beautiful than when doing what she was born to do: kill.

  Shara’s strafing dive was aimed at the smaller bird. The kestrel saw her coming and reacted instantly, turning her body so their talons clashed and tangled in a midair collision that sent them rolling, tumbling in imitation of the cliffside mural behind them. Just as quickly, they parted and swooped away from each other in opposite directions.

  A few feathers whorled to the dirt.

  On the ground, Brysen and his opponent tried to control their hawks with their gloved hands while closing the distance between themselves.

  Brysen shuffled his feet around the perimeter of the pit toward the long-hauler. The long-hauler’s arms were thicker than Brysen’s thighs and his bird smaller than Brysen’s, so he moved with far more ease, cutting the distance between them straight across instead of along the edge. His blade came up, and he swiped it fast, straight for the rope that connected Shara to Brysen’s glove.

  If the tether between hawk and human was severed, the match was lost. The match was also lost if bird or man or both were killed. Every fight in the pits could be a fight to the death.

  Brysen twisted away from the Orphan Maker’s blade, using Shara’s tether and his light weight to swing sideways. As he moved, he slashed with his own knife, blocking the attack. There was a clang of metal on metal. Kylee winced as the power of the blow shook her brother’s hand. His opponent was far too strong for him, but he was faster.

  The second and third knife attacks went wide while Brysen dodged the blade with a dancer’s grace. Even his slight weight pulled Shara low as he regained his footing, but he timed the last pull so that her drop put her just below the circling kestrel.

  When he released the line again, Shara was able to shoot straight up, her wings beating mightily, and she slammed into the underside of the other bird, slashing at its belly.

  There was a tangle of talons in the sky, a drizzle of blood. The two fighters on the ground were pulled toward each other by their entwined battle lines.

  The birds broke apart, circled, and clashed again, shrieking, talons tearing for each other but unable to hold on. With every turn and attack, the battle lines below became more twisted and Brysen was drawn closer to the Orphan Maker.

  “I’d rather cut your pretty face than your rope, little bird,” he taunted, and slashed his blade at Brysen with blinding speed.

  Brysen’s parry connected and he protected his face, but the force of the attack was so strong, it snatched the curved blade from his hand, sent it scuttling away in the dirt. He moved for it, but the long-hauler tugged the tangled lines and pulled Brysen back. He could’ve cut Brysen’s battle rope right then, but instead he yanked Brysen closer, spun him like a dried-grass doll, and gripped him from behind with his gloved forearm. The battle lines whipped and twirled while the falcons fought, but the long-hauler’s thick arm locked Brysen in place against his chest.

  The air turned to stone in Kylee’s lungs when the Orphan Maker put his knife to Brysen’s throat.

  3

  It was considered bad form to kill your opponent when you had the option of cutting the line, but it wasn’t against the rules. It wasn’t murder if it happened in the pit. The rules did, however, say you had to offer a chance to yield three times.

  “Do you yield?” the long-hauler hissed into Brysen’s ear, so loud that everyone could hear.

  Brysen struggled to break free.

  “Yield, little bird, or I’ll give you your first shave with this blade.”

  Brysen struggled. His eyes scanned for Shara in the sky.

  Five melting seasons ago, their eleventh, he’d rescued Shara from the battle pits after she’d lost their father a full moon’s fortune. She was wounded, and Brysen hand-fed her for weeks, snuggling her to his chest at night to keep her warm and training her in the few hours he could snatch in the meadow whenever their father was away.

  “Shara’s got potential,” he always said. “She’ll show she’s a great hawk when she’s given the chance.”

  The hawk had yet to show greatness, but Brysen still had the scars from protecting her from their father’s rage.

  “Hawks aren’t your pets!” their father had grunted as he whipped Brysen with a dog-leather leash the night Brysen brought Shara back home. He’d cradle
d her under himself to protect her. Crack! The leather had struck his skin. Crack! “I’ll teach you what loving one will cost you!”

  Crack! Crack!

  Later, Kylee had helped Brysen scrub his own blood from the floor, but he cleaned it from the bird’s feathers himself one by one in a cold bucket. The bird had let him do it and never made so much as a chirp. They’d been a pair ever since.

  Brysen returned to the battle pits with Shara, match after match, chasing a victory so high and wild, it would blow away the past. He hadn’t found one yet, and he lost far more matches than he won. There was no convincing him that only a fool chased the approval of a dead man.

  “Yield!” Kylee shouted. She looked for his friends, the ragtag gang of battle boys, and saw Dymian. He was maybe the only person whose advice Brysen would heed. Maybe. “Dymian, tell him to yield!”

  Dymian locked eyes with Kylee, frowned, and opened his palms up to the sky. He couldn’t make Brysen yield any more than she could. Her stupid brother would rather die than fail. He slammed his lips shut and clenched his jaw.

  The long-hauler grinned. “Last chance, little chick. Do you yield?”

  Their hawks screeched above. Shara had bitten the other bird’s wing and forced them apart. The creak of the clasps straining against the leather gloves sounded like a body being stretched on a torturer’s slab.

  Kylee’s heart screamed for her brother. In his face, she saw their father’s brutal stubbornness. She hated to see it in Brysen, hated the part of her brother that hated himself so much.

  As her heart screamed, she felt it reach out to him, like an invisible tether that looped between her chest and his, an endless figure eight. Her pulse quickened, and a strange wind rushed through her, like the sky bursting from her lungs. She felt she would explode if she didn’t exhale. It hurt to hold it in.