Black Wings Beating

by Alex London

  “I’m not like you,” Kylee replied. “I can’t just stop caring.”

  “But I do care,” her mother said. “My sin is my own longing—my longing that you be saved. Redeemed. I should curse you, should leave you to your damnation, but I can’t. I thought your father’s cruelty would poison the cult of Uztar for you forever, but it didn’t work. I should have taken you away. You know you can save yourself from the blasphemy of Uztar. You can simply … stop. Let your brother go. Be free. I know that is what you want.”

  Kylee felt her insides cracking, like a long-melting glacier finally breaking off and collapsing. She did want freedom, from the raptors, from her father’s debts, and from her brother’s oaths, but not on these terms. Not like this.

  Kylee pulled from her mother’s grip and backed toward the door, shaking her head. Her mother shook her head, too. “The Hollow Tongue’s not meant to be spoken by those who walk the dirt,” she said as her daughter retreated. “That’s what it is, Kylee. The Hollow Tongue is a sacred thing not meant for you. No good’s ever come of speaking to the sky. You, I hoped, might escape.”

  Kylee found the handle to the door and wrenched it open, backing outside. Her mother collapsed to her knees, not to beg, but to stare at the floor and pray.

  “Empty the skies so my children will fall; empty their hearts so they have space for the truth; empty the skies and their hearts and their sin before misery mantles over them unending; empty, empty, empty…”

  Kylee closed the heavy door so she couldn’t see or hear her mother anymore. The woman had made her choices.

  Brysen was in danger. And not from some abstract superstition. His body could be destroyed by a thousand things in the mountains, from the ghost eagle to other trappers or even a fall off a cliff. Her mother had never protected Brysen’s body before and would not start now.

  It would be, as it always was, up to Kylee.

  She hoisted her pack and made for the mountaineers’ trails behind their house and the start of the ascent toward the ghost eagle’s eyrie. She knew a hundred different pairs of eyes were watching her from the Villages below, but she kept hers fixed upward. Up was the only direction that mattered to her now. She had to catch up with Brysen before the sky fell down around him.

  14

  Kylee hiked until dusk, following the well-trod trappers’ trails, until she turned off the main route for the steeper slopes that led to the rocky ridges of the Cardinal’s Crest.

  The sun sank between two jutting peaks in the distance, the sparkling snow that blew off them bejeweling the air. The light had dimmed perilously by the time she reached the misty lowlands, where the stands of ash, juniper, and cypress trees grew sparse, where large boulders littered the landscape and sheer cliffs rose straight up at odd intervals, like the jagged teeth in a giant’s broken grin. Above her, over a lip of sharp rock, was the blood birch forest, thick with trees that needed almost no soil but were said to grow wherever blood had been spilled.

  As she rounded one wide outcropping of stone, she finally saw Brysen, high above on a flat gray rock face, climbing the vertical. As the bird flies, he wasn’t too far ahead of her now, but the height of the sheer cliff must have slowed him down considerably. If he’d planned his route more deliberately, he might have found easier paths instead of climbing the first rock face he saw, but Brysen was a believer in running headlong into … well … everything. Kylee was a strong and deliberate climber. She’d plotted a smarter route, and she might catch up to him before midnight if he rested and she didn’t.

  Her brother had flown Shara up with a long leash tied to her jesses. The other end was tied to his belt. If he fell, she’d stay bound above him to mark his body. Either someone would see and recover him, cutting her free, or she’d starve there, tied to him. It was a selfish choice not to let her fly on her own—she would surely follow Brysen without being tied to him, Kylee thought—but she understood why her brother did it.

  If he fell, he didn’t want to be left all alone.

  He had on just his vest and leather pants; he’d tied his packs and coat to another spider-silk rope so he could climb up the sheer face, looping it over outcroppings as he went, then hoisting the bags after him. It was a slow process but one that gave him periodic chances to catch his breath. He was two-thirds of the way up this cliff face and moving very slowly, toehold to toehold, muscles tight and shining with sweat in the last light of the sinking sun.

  Weaker climbers hauled themselves up by the arms, but Brysen knew that the real power came from the legs. He never looked lighter or more graceful than when he was climbing, freeing himself from gravity and from all the worries that waited back in the dirt. Climbing used to be one of their favorite things to do together, but he hadn’t done it for fun in a long time. She always offered to bring him along on her morning climbs, but he always refused, choosing to sleep in and then go down to the Broken Jess.

  Kylee had found solace in climbing. It was calming, the simple search for toeholds and handholds. Plotting the vertical path was like putting together a puzzle where the solution truly mattered. Your life and death were in your control. It was almost a pleasure watching Brysen do it with such confidence.

  Then his foot slipped, and Kylee’s heart beat like the wings of a startled dove.

  He slid down along his belly, a torrent of loose stone cascading around him. His fingertips caught a jagged outcropping and stopped his fall, but his legs dangled and his other arm swung free, flapping like a useless wing.

  “Scuzz!” he shouted.

  “Scuzz … scuzz … scuzz … scuzz…” His voice echoed down to where Kylee stood.

  From above, his goshawk watched the struggle. Her line still had slack, so she felt nothing of his fall. To her, this brutal drama was the tedium of a life among the wingless. Brysen’s fingers clung, bony knuckles clutching, tight tendons straining, grasping, fighting gravity. It hurt Kylee to see her brother fling himself back against the rock, hard, gasping and scrambling. But he held on. He steadied. He climbed again.

  He had scraped the side of his face, and now, foot over foot, handhold to handhold, he ascended through the bloody streak he’d painted on the rocks above him. It took him until the moon was perched above the far ridges to reach the point where Shara, by that time, had been waiting for hours. Kylee covered most of the distance in half the time, careful to keep out of his sight line, but pushing herself relentlessly after him.

  Long ago, the ancient caravans from the steppes followed the migration of birds from lands of ice and dust to the lush plateau, where they’d built the Uztari civilization. But to follow the birds, they had to cross the mountains—these mountains. The humans scrambled and struggled, seeking the gaps and passes. Those they found living here already, the Altari, they fought and they subdued. And then, battle-bloodied, bone-weary, and half-frozen, they had to keep climbing down.

  What took them generations to traverse, the falcons flew in minutes. For the Uztari, the birds led the way to salvation. For the Altari they chased down into the desert, the birds were a portent of their exile. No wonder Kartami fanatics hated the Uztari and hated the raptors that served them. The birds had flown over the peaks and brought cataclysm with them.

  Now, Brysen repeated that ancient journey in reverse, straining to leave the safety of the hills and make the treacherous ascent into the brutal wild, led, once more, by a bird.

  At the top of the cliff, Brysen collapsed onto the ledge beside his hawk, stroking her wing gently, which she seemed to enjoy, and playing his finger-pecking game on the ground between them. When she’d tired of nipping at him, he rolled flat on his stomach, bruised, bloody, and exhausted. He tilted his head over the edge without moving his body and, loudly, lavishly, barfed off the mountain.

  The sound echoed.

  Ugh. Kylee cringed.

  Brysen spat and rested his head on his hands, facedown. He’d kept a good pace, given the condition he’d started the day in, but he wouldn’t be able to make his dead
line if he kept going so slowly up cliffsides. He needed to find and follow the ancient goat roads. They were winding and longer than the straight ascent but far easier. He was straying from any known route and entering a wilderness whose pitfalls Kylee couldn’t anticipate and for which Brysen was definitely not prepared. The blood birch forest loomed over the direction he was heading, and no Uztari had ever charted a route through those woods. If Brysen just stayed near the ancient paths, Kylee could catch up to her brother without scaling a cliff in the dark, and once she was at his side, he’d have no choice but to let her help. She knew better ways up than he did, safe ways that steered clear of known dangers, and climbing together, they could watch each other’s backs. He couldn’t refuse. Anyway, it was better to apologize than to ask permission.

  She’d find a path up to him and lead him from there. He’d strayed from the route to the Cardinal’s Crest Ridge, but she could guide them both back. She’d already begun to plot a likely way, when her eyes caught something moving on the ledge just above Brysen, and she stopped, squinted up, trying to make out the shape of the movement in the moonlight.

  At first, she saw only the scraggly brush of the overhang, but her eyes caught the movement again, a shadow in the shape of a cat—a big cat, lean and purple-black as the lips on a corpse. A rock panther.

  The great beast lowered its head, eyes fixed on Brysen’s lithe back. Had he mustered himself to build a fire, the panther would never have dared come so close, but he hadn’t. Had he been sitting upright, it might have stayed away, as rock panthers prefer to take their prey from behind and rarely attack when they can see its eyes. But Brysen was asleep, exhaustion having hooded him before he bothered to make camp. If Kylee were closer, she’d probably be able to hear him snoring.

  If she were closer, she’d have been able to help.

  The panther lowered itself nearly flat against the ground, creeping to the edge of the outcropping directly above Brysen.

  “Get up,” Kylee whispered. “Get up, get up, get up.”

  If she shouted, would he hear? Would it scare the cat away?

  “Get up!” she yelled.

  “Get up…,” echoed back at her. “Get up … get up … get up…”

  The angle of the cliffs and the direction of the wind blocked the sound. Brysen heard nothing. The panther heard nothing. Whatever Shara heard, she did not move. Shara was looking out over the valley, her back to the rocks, unaware that a predator was stalking in her blind spot. Rock panthers knew how to stalk raptors. Wild hawks were a staple of the big cat’s diet.

  Kylee felt helpless down below, as helpless as when the long-hauler held his knife to Brysen’s throat in the battle pit. She felt that tug on her heart, a thrumming pulse in her ears. She closed her eyes, breathed deep, and tried to light the air in her lungs aflame, tried to find the words her mother had called blasphemy, the words of the Hollow Tongue.

  She pictured her brother being torn apart, pictured the cat’s paw tossing him over, ripping his belly, the blood on its teeth as it tore his entrails out.

  “Shyehnaah,” she said, but it had no effect, no meaning. She could make the sound on purpose but couldn’t make it work. She couldn’t command it, couldn’t control it. She exhaled feeling nothing but cool night air.

  She took another breath; the cat crept forward, poised. She pictured her brother in the mews at home with her father and his torch, blue eyes looking into blue eyes, one pair wet as ice-melt lakes and the other cold and hard as glaciers. And the light of the flame reflecting off both, inching closer and closer. She made herself see the fire touch his skin, she made herself hear the sounds and smell the burning cloth and flesh and hair. The fire lit in her lungs, and she spoke the word again.

  Shara’s head turned. The panther’s lips pulled back from its bone-white fangs, its muscles quivered beneath the taut, corpse-colored fur. There was a jolt as Shara saw the predator, a lightning shock of instant action, eye to wing, wing to beak.

  “Ki ki ki!” Shara shrieked, launching herself from the ledge, the leash unspooling behind her.

  Shara’s outburst startled the panther and woke Brysen at the same time. Brysen saw Shara sky out, and a heartbeat later, he spun toward what had scared her.

  The startled panther swiped, but Brysen rolled out of its reach toward the precipice of the ledge.

  He had no escape, and when the second swipe came, he rolled under it, toward the mountain and below the overhang. He drew his blade as he rolled and released the knot that tied Shara to him.

  The panther leaped down to maul him but instead found itself impaled on the curved black-talon blade of Brysen’s knife. Brysen whistled, and Shara spun, then dove for the panther’s back, sinking her talons in just below its skull.

  A hawk knew in its blood that the panther was an enemy. Shara squeezed the cat’s spine from behind as Brysen jerked his blade upward, into its heart.

  The squeal of the big cat echoed around the mountain.

  Its blood poured down past Brysen’s elbow, over his chest and stomach. Brysen shoved it off and drew himself back against the rock, holding his bloody blade in front of him and staring at the dead panther while Shara proceeded to peck at it, tearing the gray-and-black fur apart with beak and talon like a mad butcher’s apprentice. She broke into its flesh and stuffed her crop with the pulsing, hot meat.

  If Brysen didn’t stop her eating, she’d fill up so much that she wouldn’t fly in the morning. Brysen would need her keen for the next several days, or he’d never make it to the ghost eagle’s eyrie and back in time for Goryn Tamir.

  Then Brysen slumped, and Kylee shuddered. Had the cat clawed him somewhere Kylee couldn’t see? Was he bleeding up there, his throat slit, his arteries open?

  She sprinted toward the trapper’s narrow path to make her scrambling way up the slope. She could stop his bleeding and save his life if she reached him in time. She’d have to run and climb faster than she ever had before, but her feet were sure, her heart pulling her on.

  Only a few paces into her run, she heard a hoot.

  “Woo-hoo!”

  Kylee stopped and looked up at the ledge, and there was Brysen, standing up, dancing in a circle, his bloody arms raised in the air. He was hopping from foot to foot, his white grin and ashen hair gleaming.

  “Woo-hoo…,” echoed around her. “Woo-hoo … woo-hoo … woo-hoo…”

  “Ha-ha!” he shouted. “You’ll have to throw more at me than that, you scuzz-guzzling carrion cruncher! You hear me?! I will beat you!”

  “Beat you … beat you … beat you…”

  She watched his dark form dance in the moonlight while Shara ripped into the dead cat at his feet. He was as happy as Kylee could remember seeing him in ages, celebrating a victory he believed was his own. Just like in the battle pits, he thought he’d saved himself. He thought he was still alone.

  Kylee decided not to reveal herself. She would stay hidden. Give him his victory, give him his pride. She’d help her brother from a distance but remain invisible. She had to let him feel he was flying free if she had any hope he’d return when this was over.

  15

  The moon had nearly scratched its entire arc across the night sky when Kylee reached Brysen’s camp on the ledge. The path had taken her on a winding route between boulders and up rocky slopes. One moment she was scrambling on her hands and knees, the next she was leaping gorges. She hadn’t known the path quite as well as she’d thought, at one point nearly stepping straight into the opening of a deep bat cave from which she would never have emerged.

  At least the bats had already gone out for the night.

  When she arrived on the very outcropping over Brysen’s camp where the panther had stalked him, he was asleep by the dying embers of a fire, where the panther’s flesh spit and hissed over the coals. Kylee was tempted to slide down the ledge and steal some of it, but she didn’t want to risk waking Brysen. If it weren’t for her, he’d have been panther food and not the other way around, yet she’d
eaten cold, pickled hen eggs for dinner.

  Shara slept beside Brysen, her feet pulled up under her body into the downy warmth of her feathers. She shifted her weight from side to side to keep the blood flowing, and her head was tucked around nearly under her wings, but she remained unhooded. Brysen would want to use her as an alarm if danger approached. Kylee stayed very still, very calm, and moved very slowly so she wouldn’t wake the boy or the bird.

  She pulled back from the ledge and slipped farther off into the dark. Brysen would begin his climb again after sunrise, hiking up into the blood birch forest over the next ridge. It would be easier to follow him but harder not to be seen.

  She wondered who else was out there in the night below, making their way up the mountain after them, and what else was out there in the night above, watching and lying in wait. She shivered and knew she needed some sleep, but she had to find a sheltered spot.

  On a nearby slope, two boulders had rolled together to form a kind of lean-to in the space beneath. She could stretch out there, safe from predators and from Brysen’s view but still with a clear sight line to his route in the morning. She laid some sticks across the path, precariously perched, so that if her brother left, he’d disturb the pattern and she’d know he’d gone already, even if she overslept. Beneath the boulders, she felt perfectly safe to close her eyes and let sleep obliterate her worries awhile.

  * * *

  The next thing she knew, dawn had broken like the pale yellow of overcooked eggs. She lifted her head, wiping a slash of drool from her chin, and studied the path. Her sticks remained undisturbed.

  She crept on her belly back over to the ledge and saw Brysen still asleep below, snoring slightly. He’d draped the crook of his arm over his eyes, and his other hand was resting on the knife handle in his belt. His fire had gone out, and a sprinkling of frost had settled over him. If he didn’t start sleeping under a blanket, he’d surely freeze to death when he got higher into the mountains. He’d slept blade-ready, but it would have taken an earthquake to wake him.