Black Wings Beating

by Alex London

  Brysen glared at her. “I thought you were only good at chasing things away.”

  “I wasn’t trying to chase anyone—”

  “I don’t need your help,” he grunted. “You just make things worse.”

  “I make things worse?” Kylee couldn’t believe it. She’d saved his life and gotten him a win. Every bronze in his pocket belonged to her. And she’d done it for him. She’d done it because she cared about him!

  “Why don’t you just join the Crawling Priests or something,” he grunted. “And stay out of my business.”

  She knew it was just embarrassment and hunter’s leaf making him act like a scuzzard, but still, it pushed her over the edge. Seething, she bent down and grabbed an old stone from her feet, palm-size. It was one of the bits of ancient rubble that littered the ground. She tossed it once in her hand to get a sense of the weight, then flung it at a scrubby bush by the gate leading to the road.

  A big jackrabbit bolted from cover, and at the same time, Kylee whistled for Shara.

  The raptor’s head snapped around, instantly catching the rabbit’s mad flight for new shelter. The hawk wasn’t in so much shock that she’d let such a tasty morsel get away. She launched herself from the cliff, then tucked her wings to dive, coming down hard on the rabbit’s back. She pinned it to the ground, crushing it in her talons as it struggled. Other birds in the yard shrieked, but the hunt had already ended. Shara stood on top of the rabbit, hunched her shoulders, and mantled her wings over its corpse, guarding it from the greedy eyes of other hunters as she broke into its flesh with her beak.

  Then Kylee whistled again. The hawk raised her head, turned, and looked back at her. Kylee held out her fist.

  “No,” said Brysen. “Don’t.”

  But the wind burned in Kylee’s lungs again, the pressure built. She saw the pain on Brysen’s face, the hurt and fear, and even as she knew she’d gone too far, even as she knew she should stop herself, she couldn’t. She wanted to be nice. She wanted to focus on setting up for the market and getting the birds ready, freeing Brysen and herself of their final obligation to their dead father, but Kylee never got what she wanted. Chasing after Brysen, making sure their mother didn’t fast herself to death, keeping the business running so they could pay their tax to the Sky Castle and their debt to the Tamirs—everything she did was for someone else.

  Now that she was close to the one thing she wanted for herself, her brother was being reckless. Well, she could be reckless, too. Frustration parted her lips, and the burning breath inside rushed from her in one searing word, as angry now as it had been desperate before.

  “Shyehnaah,” she said, and in an instant, Shara unmantled her wings, scooped up the dead rabbit, and flew straight to Kylee. As she swooped to Kylee’s fist, she dropped her kill at Kylee’s feet and opened her wings to slow her landing. Her bright white under-feathers practically blinded the twins. The bird hooked her bloodied talons around Kylee’s bare knuckles and then stood, proud, eyes fixed on the rabbit she had killed and, for reasons she probably didn’t understand herself, dropped at the feet of her master’s sister.

  The pain of the talons gripping Kylee’s skin was like nails being driven into her hand, but she clenched her teeth and didn’t let it show. The red trickle down her knuckles wasn’t all from the dead rabbit.

  Brysen stared at her, mouth agape. Hawks didn’t bring their catches back to their falconers. It wasn’t natural. Kylee had shown off, in public, with everyone watching.

  She regretted it instantly.

  There were no secrets in the Six Villages. The Otak brothers had seen, and they were spies, both of them. And Vyvian, who was already making her way toward Kylee through the crowd.

  All it took was one angry moment, one flash of self-pity and rage, and the power she’d silenced since she was a child was being whispered from spy to spy and would soon wing its way across the plateau. Why now, after all this time? Why today? For a searing instant she wanted nothing more than to take it back, but words weren’t trained falcons. Once released to hunt, they could never be called back.

  Brysen glared at his sister and his hawk. “I’m glad you two are so happy together,” he grunted, not having noticed the murmurs in the crowd. He made the hooked-thumb salute across his chest, but he clenched both fists instead of stretching them into wings. The broken-wing salute. Then he stormed past Kylee, leaving the yard of the Broken Jess.

  She wanted to go right after him, but Vyvian stood in her way before she could follow.

  “Ky,” she said, “was that … did you just—?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

  “This is huge, Ky,” Vyvian told her. She glanced over at the Otak brothers—men her father’s age—who were whispering excitedly to each other. “When word gets out that you can—”

  “That I can WHAT?” Kylee yelled at her. “You don’t know what you heard. And if you’re my friend, that’s what you’ll tell whoever pays you for your secrets, okay? My family’s been through enough. Don’t pick us over like a buzzard, Vyvian. Not you.”

  “Calm down,” she said. “No one’s trying to pick you over. It’s just that it’s a dangerous time and everyone’s looking for an advantage.”

  “Well, I’m not your advantage, Vyvian,” she said. She saw Nyall watching them from across the yard, his head cocked with concern. “Or yours!” she yelled. “Or yours!” she added at Dymian, who was leaning in the doorway of the Broken Jess. She was causing a scene now, she knew, but she couldn’t stop herself. Like a hunter’s leaf addict, she was binging on her own shame, and now the only thing left to do was storm away. Just like her brother.

  Everyone watched her leave the yard, and she could only imagine how fast the rumors of her whispered word would spread from one end of the plateau to the other.

  Maybe Brysen was right; maybe she should forswear all birds of prey and pledge herself to the Crawling Priests. It might be the first thing she’d ever done that would make her mother proud.

  She grunted to herself. That alone was reason enough not to do it.

  After this market, she’d leave the falconry business for good. Let Brysen carry on if he wanted, but she would be finished with birds of prey and the strange violence they drove her to. Shara’s talons cut into the bare skin of her hand, but she knew she had to carry her brother’s hawk back to him. She owed him that much.

  She owed him much more than that, really.

  She always would.

  5

  Their house stood in a clearing in the foothills on a lonely stretch of rocky ground above the Villages. Their father said he valued the quiet that living over the Six Villages on the high side of the Necklace gave them, but they knew, even as little kids, that it was the only patch of land he could afford. The slopes were so bare that anyone who chose to could look up from the villages and see them in their yard, or as they trudged to the outhouse, or as their father staggered home. Privacy was a luxury their landscape did not offer.

  Nor was prosperity.

  The soil barely sustained a vegetable garden, the path to the Six was steep and dangerously slick in the rain, and the retaining wall against the side of the mountain had to be patched constantly to protect them from rockslides.

  Still, it was home.

  The front fence was made from long slats of petrified wood left from the Altari who had lived in the foothills long, long ago. Thorny briars grew through the fence, engulfing it and forming a natural barrier. Inside the property, the hawk mews were cobbled together from mismatched boards. They kept the rain out and the birds in, but when the hawks started screeching, it could be unbearably loud.

  The house itself was a simple stone dwelling built in the old style, three rooms curved around a circular central room for the hearth and chimney. The main door was built into the back of the center room, and a three-pronged stone path led from the door to the gate, the mews, and the outhouse against the cliffside. The stones were uneven in the dirt, so they click
ed when trod upon.

  That was one of Kylee and Brysen’s early innovations. When their father was still alive, they’d been able to hear him coming home by the click of the stones.

  Click click. Click click. Click click.

  It didn’t always keep them safe, but it gave Brysen time to gnaw some hunter’s leaf, which distracted him from the sting of the whip. That was why he’d started chewing it so young. He hadn’t even liked the taste back then.

  Kylee clicked down the path to the mews now, and put Shara inside on her perch and hooded her in one practiced motion. Sightless and soundless, Shara could finally rest. Hawks could see more and process it faster than humans could imagine. Their eyes together weighed the same as their brains, and their reactions to what they saw were instant. It made them fierce hunters, but it also made them extremely sensitive. The only relief they ever had from the onslaught of the world was beneath their finely wrought leather hoods.

  There were times Kylee wished that she, too, could drop on a heavy leather hood and find peace for a few hours. Her ma had, in a way. She was constantly in prayer or meditation, clutching handfuls of dirt, insensate. When she wasn’t in one of her trances, she was lecturing Kylee and Brysen on the evils of falconry and the virtues of the birdless. Still, she ate the meals the sales of the birds provided.

  Kylee made a round of the remaining hawks in the mews, the ones she hoped to sell tomorrow.

  There was a finch finder—a breed of hawk popular with beginners—that Brysen had caught last week. It hadn’t been manned yet—trained to be comfortable around people—but it wouldn’t take long. Finch finders were easy birds. Some buyers wanted the chance for their children to man one themselves.

  The snow-white dovehawk had just molted and wouldn’t be worth much. There were two blue-winged kestrels—a small breed of falcon. They’d sell as a pair to some collector who wanted company rather than a hunting bird. They were as friendly and affectionate as birds of prey could be.

  The finest bird, the peregrine, shifted from foot to foot on its perch, no doubt eager to fly. It was a racer and a hunter, a true long-winged falcon, and more valuable than any other bird in the mews. If Brysen showed it well tomorrow, Kylee might be able to get an auction going. She wondered when the last time was that Brysen took it out to fly.

  She went to the logs and looked them over, her jaw clenching tighter with each page.

  They hadn’t been updated in days.

  The log—which Brysen was meant to keep—tracked each bird’s weight, how much it was fed, when it was heavy, when it was low, and when, precisely, it was at flying weight. Without the logs, they’d have no way to be certain—or to show buyers—that their birds were in good form and keen.

  “You had one job, Bry,” she muttered, and set the log back down.

  She locked the mews, triple-checking the chains on the door, and inspected the traps around the perimeter—little dart snares and loud, rattling trip wires.

  Normally, she wouldn’t bother—no one in the Villages would steal from them—but around market days, with all the strangers in town, robberies and vandalism were not unheard-of. Nor was outright aviacide. A Kartami sympathizer wouldn’t just kill a bird or two; if they could, they’d poison the feed of every last bird in the market. They’d empty the skies and burn the Six Villages to the ground. Although the Tamirs and the distant Uztari kyrgs swore they were safe in these foothills, Kylee gave the chains a final, extra check. If all went well at the market, she wouldn’t have to worry about flying weights and logbooks ever again.

  With their future as secure as chains could make it, she trudged across the yard to the house.

  Click click. Click click. Click click.

  Brysen was home, studying his hair in the glass on the wall, singing quietly to himself. “Never old and never new, lay la li, lay la lu…” He stopped when she came in. “You brought Shara back?”

  Kylee nodded. “Brysen, I’m sorry I—”

  “It’s fine,” he said abruptly. Silence settled between them.

  They used to talk about everything. They’d had a game they’d play in whispers, where they’d pretend to be a falcon—the two of them as one bird. One would describe their house from above, then the other would take the falcon higher and describe what they could see, and then back and forth, higher and higher, describing the world as they imagined it from above—what their neighbors in the Six Villages were doing, what the convoys crossing the Parsh Desert were like, or the kyrgs in the Sky Castle and the Talon Fortress, and beyond, to places they invented—lost Altari kingdoms, bustling ports on the edges of a saltwater bay—seeing who could imagine a bigger world in more detail. A falcon could mount to the stars and still count the hairs on a goat’s head. So could a good imagination.

  But when their father died three ice-winds ago, they’d stopped their game. After disappearing for an entire turn of the moon, Brysen began hanging out with the battle boys, started spending time alone with Dymian, said less and less at home, shared less and less of himself with her. Life had gotten lonely.

  “You hungry?” she asked, grappling for something to perch a conversation on. “I can cook something up.”

  Brysen shrugged.

  She kept her voice level. “Where’s Ma?”

  “In her room.” Brysen pointed his chin toward the closed door.

  If she found out what happened at the battle pits, what Kylee had done, there’d be a long night of chanting and repenting ahead. Damning your daughter to a skyless hell took a lot of energy, and she’d forget to eat if Kylee didn’t put the food right in front of her.

  “I’m making dinner!” Kylee shouted toward the door, and grabbed a heavy iron pan from the hook on the wall. “We’ve got some grains I can toast and the last of the smoked rabbit sausage,” she told Brysen, talking just to fill the air. “I figure we can eat it today, because we’ll have enough bronze to buy fresh tomorrow.”

  “Uh-huh,” Brysen grunted, and pulled down the wooden box of candied ginger they kept on the high shelf. He popped a piece into his mouth and put the box back. Whatever he was thinking about their future after they paid off the Tamirs, he was keeping to himself.

  “I think we’ll get a good price on the peregrine,” Kylee continued. If she’s ready to fly, she thought. If you didn’t overfeed her. She dropped a handful of grain into the hot skillet. It was time to make amends. Brysen would be able to run the business however he wanted soon, and until then, they might as well not argue about it. “The dovehawk probably won’t fly; she just finished her molt. Looks like she plucked out one of her blood feathers this morning?”

  “Someone’ll buy her,” Brysen said, chewing.

  “I thought you and Dymian could show the birds together tomorrow, while I negotiate the prices?” At that, finally, Brysen perked up.

  “That’d be good.” He actually smiled. “People like to see a real hawk master in a tent. Gives us credibility, raises the price. Good thinking.”

  A compliment! She resisted nagging him about the logbook.

  “I think I’ll keep the peregrine on my fist,” he continued, warming to the subject of the market, “to show how agreeable she is. We’ll keep the others tethered to the perch until people ask about them. Maybe I’ll see if Nyall will loan us some of the nicer bird boxes from Dupuy’s shop. Unless you’d rather ask him…”

  Kylee could feel her brother’s grin without looking at him. She stirred the warming grains in the pan over the fire, dropped in a spoonful of goose fat to melt and soften. “Whatever,” she said.

  “Ha!” Brysen laughed and stepped up next to her, leaning against the wooden table along the wall. “Your ears twitched. You like him.”

  “Oh, come on,” Kylee replied. “We’ve known each other since you two used to have peeing contests off the cliffs. I do not like him.”

  “Well, you know he likes you,” Brysen replied.

  “Yes, well, everybody likes one another here. We’re all one big, happy valley.” K
ylee was the one getting snappy now—her brother’s main source of amusement when he did seem willing to speak was in making her uncomfortable. She had no interest in romance, but its shades and shapes were his favorite subject. If he ever bothered to read anything, she was certain it would be the filthy love stories old people sold for a chip of bronze alongside jugs of rose-petal wine.

  “You keep brushing him off like that, you’re gonna lose him,” Brysen told her. “He’s got lads and ladies alike throwing themselves at him every day. He is, objectively, gorgeous. You do see that, right?”

  “You like him so much, why don’t you go after him?” she told her brother, dropping a sausage into the pan and watching it sizzle. She laughed to herself at the symbolism.

  “I’m taken, Ky. You know that,” Brysen said, and Kylee had to bite her tongue. She worried that she’d said the wrong thing. Brysen’s good moods were like hummingbirds. Fleeting and fast. One wrong gesture and they’d dart away. “Anyway, you can’t be attracted to someone you peed off a cliff with when you were little,” he joked. “It’s a law of nature. Nyall would tell you the same. Maybe that’s why he likes you so much. Never saw you pee.”

  “You’ve got an odd view of courtship, Bry.”

  He smiled a boyish grin that reminded Kylee her brother was still in there. “I’m a romantic; what can I say? Talk to him. Give him a chance.”

  “We’ll see how the market goes,” she said, as if that had anything to do with Nyall’s chances. “Tell him that when you negotiate for the boxes.”

  “Sis, you are devious with your feminine wiles!” her brother laughed.

  She poked at him playfully with her spoon, but he dodged, taking up a chipped plate like a shield. She thrust and he parried, spinning away. She jabbed again and missed.

  “Come on, great huntress!” he goaded her. “Get me!”

  She jabbed again and he blocked. Once more, and he knocked the spoon out of her hand. It hit the floor and he dove after it, scooping it up to aim at her. The bits of grain at the tip had picked up some dust and maybe a mouse dropping or two.