Black Wings Beating

by Alex London

  “Scuzz,” he said, and the ice broke.

  21

  Brysen spread his arms wide in pale imitation of a hawk slowing to land, but there was no wind to lift him or fist to catch him. He crashed through the ice, and the cold dark closed around him like a fist slamming shut.

  The shock of the icy water felt like rolling on a bed of broken glass. It sucked half the air from his lungs, and the weight of his clothes dragged him down, deeper and deeper. He flailed his arms, tried to kick himself to the surface but then, in cold confusion, doubted which way the surface actually was. The frigid water burned his eyes when he opened them, but it hardly mattered. There was no light. How could he get out if he didn’t know which way was up?

  Bubbles rise, he thought. Against all instinct, against every part of his animal brain that screamed at him to cling to his last bit of breath, he opened his mouth and let the air out. The last burst of life in his lungs floated away from him, and he followed furiously behind.

  He couldn’t swim fast enough. The heaviness of his clothes, of himself, pulled at him, and no sooner had his fingers grazed the solid underside of the ice than he sank again.

  But he kicked through the burning cold as his lungs’ hunger for air tore at him from the inside. His fingers found the bottom of the ice again. He tried to punch through, but the force pushed him back down. He kicked up again, burning precious energy. He couldn’t find the hole he’d made when he fell in; couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it. His fingers were numb and his vision narrowed. He sank once more, and this time he didn’t fight it. He was so tired. He’d been struggling all his life, he figured—fighting against the weight of a world that dragged down boys who wanted to fly.

  Maybe drowning was for the best. Maybe it was time to stop fighting.

  The thought of surrender warmed him, wrapped itself around his body, and swaddled him in the loving hold of oblivion. He stopped feeling cold. It was peaceful below the ice. Quiet. Safe. So what if his soul couldn’t find the sky and stayed frozen in that cold pool forever? The sky had never helped him before. He’d never been meant to soar. His father had been right about him all along. This was the kind of end he deserved. He’d been born to sink. He was ready now. He let his feet touch the bottom. He didn’t struggle. He let his arms float up over his head. He relaxed into the void.

  There was his father’s face, floating in front of him, twisted in the rage and surprise of his last moments. Brysen had been there. Brysen had seen the ghost eagle take him. Their eyes had met one final time. The grimace now turned into a smile. This was his father’s revenge.

  Suddenly, he felt a hard hand grip him, lift him, pull him up. His father’s face vanished. He couldn’t see who had grabbed him, but with that touch, the cold rushed back through his body, the burn of his lungs screaming for air and the choking urge to live. He came back to himself and remembered that his father was dead and that he had lived. He’d survived beating and burning and more fights than he could count, and he was not going to die underwater. He was meant to see the sky again, to be reunited with Dymian in victory and glory.

  He tried to kick his legs for the surface, but they refused to obey. He thrashed and flailed and the hand held him tighter. He needed air, but the struggle to stay alive … it hurt.

  He screamed, and freezing water rushed in to fill the sound, choking him. He knew he was drowning; his brain yelled at him as his vision narrowed to a point.

  You are drowning, you are drowning, you are drowning.

  And then he was out of the water, felt himself being dragged by his belly along the ice, rolled onto his back, felt ice-cold lips on his, warm air blown into his mouth, and then he was coughing, throwing up in endless heaves.

  “He’s breathing,” someone said. “I’ll start a fire.”

  Nyall. It was Nyall scrounging around in the dark for scraps of birch bark and forest twigs to get a fire going. He saw his friend run off, but he still felt a hand on his back. He was sitting up, on the ground outside the cave in front of a long line of drag marks in the frosted dirt. Someone was holding him. Someone had dragged him outside. If Nyall was over there gathering kindling, who was…? Oh, right. He remembered Jowyn, the boy as white as a snow owl. The laughing phantom boy whose body told a story. He’d wanted to punch him in the cave, to take him hostage, but that same boy had saved him, pulled him to the surface, breathed air back into his lungs.

  For an instant, he couldn’t remember why he’d needed saving at all, how he’d ended up underwater and out of air, and then it came back to him. “Shara!” he coughed, and his throat felt like shards of glass.

  “She’s fine,” Jowyn said. “She’s still in there.”

  Brysen looked up at the frozen waterfall, locked in its unmoving rush. He wanted to go back to get his hawk, to leash her, to hold her close, but at the first effort to move, he found his legs completely disobedient. They didn’t hurt; they simply wouldn’t move. He looked down at his fingers and realized they wouldn’t obey him, either. He tried to tell Jowyn but found that his words came out as an unintelligible slur. His tongue was numb. His thoughts were, too.

  Freezing, he realized. He had escaped drowning only to find himself freezing to death.

  To his left, down the slope, he saw Nyall assembling the meager scraps of wood he’d found into a suitable shape for igniting, but he looked so far away, too far for his fire-starting to have anything to do with Brysen. Nyall seemed to realize only after he’d built a little pyramid of twigs that he had no stone to light it with. All their supplies were back in the covey’s cave.

  That struck Brysen as funny, like the personal disaster of his own dying was absurd compared to the disaster of Nyall’s hopeless attempt to coax a flame to save him. He started to laugh, and the laughing started him shaking uncontrollably. Jowyn said something to him, but he couldn’t really even hear it. It was like he was still underwater and the phantom boy was shouting at him from the surface. Words couldn’t warm him, anyway, so why should he try to hear what the words were?

  He felt Jowyn pawing at him, tearing off his wet clothes.

  He’s trying to get me naked, Brysen thought. Sorry, friend, but I’m taken.

  The thought set him laughing even harder, although a part of him knew his laughter sounded like gasps. He was, he noticed, having trouble breathing, gasping and not getting enough air.

  At least he’d stopped shivering. That made it easier for Jowyn to get his clothes off. He was suddenly naked, and the phantom boy had wrapped himself around his body.

  He’d never let a stranger see him like this before. All his scars were visible—the raised keloid trails across his back, the smooth tangle of burns up his side. But he couldn’t make himself care to resist or to fight back. He saw his wet clothes in a pile beside him, but he made no move to recover them. If the pale boy with the strange skin wanted to mock his scars, so be it. What did Brysen’s body matter, anyway? It was about to die.

  Brysen had seen a man freeze to death in the Six Villages during the ice-wind when he and Kylee were small—an old hunter’s-leaf fiend everybody called the Goldfinch. He’d talked endlessly but said nothing and had been tossed out of the Broken Jess for starting a brawl. Drunk, he’d stumbled into a snowbank and lashed out at anyone who tried to help him. He’d shivered for a while, then fallen asleep on the slope heading up the hill toward Brysen’s home above town. The man froze there, dead, and Kylee and Brysen were the ones who found him the next morning when they went to collect their father. The man had looked so peaceful. Brysen wondered why his father never just lay down in the snow. He always seemed to pass out by a warm fire.

  Freezing to death was, at least, a lot nicer than drowning. He felt the steady rise and fall of Jowyn’s chest against his back. It felt good to be gripped in Jowyn’s arms. Safe. Brysen closed his eyes. So many different ways to die, he thought, and wondered why he’d been so afraid to do it before now.

  “How’s that fire?” Jowyn shouted at Nyall.

&nbs
p; “I can’t get it started!” Nyall shouted back.

  Jowyn cursed, and Brysen felt himself being laid down on his back. “’S all right,” Brysen slurred. “Easy to die…” He opened his eyes and the boy was leaning over him, one arm raised, fist clenched. The stark-white muscles of his forearm bulged and his veins popped.

  For a moment, he saw his father’s face again, instead of the boy’s. Maybe Jowyn had been a ghost all along, waiting for the moment to give Brysen one final hit, one last smack for daring to climb higher than he deserved, for trying to do what his father never could.

  Strangely, the boy didn’t hit Brysen. His gentle face was back and he pulled Brysen’s curved blade from the pile of wet clothes and held it to the back of his own white fist. He drew a small gash with the tip across the back of his own hand. The red blood beaded against the white skin, glistening like jewels.

  “Drink,” he commanded, dropping the blade into the dirt and using his free hand to lift Brysen’s head. He pressed Brysen’s lips against the skin. The blood smelled like moss and metal and blazing bonfires. It smelled like sunlight and switchgrass and steaming cider. It smelled alive. “Drink,” Jowyn repeated, and Brysen put his mouth to the wound, touched his tongue to the skin on the back of Jowyn’s hand, and let the blood flow into his mouth.

  At the first swallow, he felt cold again, started to shiver; then warmth blossomed in his stomach and radiated out, chasing the cold from him. His mind cleared; he was aware now, aware of the ground against his legs, the mountain wind against his back, the pain in his throat, but also of the heat returning, the rush and thrill of life in his heartbeat. His breathing calmed.

  He’d heard of hunters drinking goat’s blood to stay warm when they were caught out in the ice-wind and of desert convoys that ran out of water drinking the blood of their livestock. Blood was life, after all, and Jowyn was offering it freely.

  He drank.

  As he drank, the pain vanished, and although he was naked in the mountains with his best friend staring, slack-jawed, while he drank blood from a stranger’s hand, he felt no shame. He felt amazingly well and whole and free … more so than he could ever remember feeling in his life. And the feeling flooded him so full that he cried, hot tears of pure joy streaming down his cheeks.

  Jowyn began to pull his hand away, but Brysen reached both his hands up, grabbing his wrist and holding the hand against his face to get another gulp of blood.

  “Stop,” Jowyn warned, trying to pull away, but Brysen wanted more. All he wanted was more.

  On a distant branch, an owl hooted. Brysen, with eyes closed, could see the owl perfectly in his mind. From the sound of its hoot alone, he knew exactly where it was, could hear its claws against the bark, its feathers moving in the breeze. He imagined what it saw, tried to see with its eyes and know what it knew. It was hungry; it was curious; it was patient. He tried to listen farther, to the distant peaks. Could he hear the ghost eagle’s heartbeat? Could he see his way to its eyrie just by thinking it? Could he call it to him where he lay right now?

  “Stop!” Jowyn warned again. He yanked his arm free and used his powerful leg against Brysen’s chest to push him back onto the frozen ground. The moment his lips broke from Jowyn’s bloody fist, Brysen came back to himself. He couldn’t see the owl or the eagle, didn’t know where either were. His head cleared. He became deeply aware of who he was, what he could and couldn’t do, and how he was now sprawled on his back, blood on his lips, stark naked on the edge of the blood birch forest, where this strange pale boy’s blood magic had saved his life.

  This was not exactly the heroic quest he’d envisioned when he set out.

  22

  Brysen sat up, drew his legs up to his chest, and wrapped his arms around his knees, shielding as much of his body as he could behind his skinny shins. His breathing began to feel ragged again; all the euphoria he’d just felt was becoming a hazy memory. He was not even the littlest bit cold, but he began to shiver and wanted nothing more than to cover his skin.

  “What did you do?” Nyall spoke for Brysen as he came up the slope, which was good, because Brysen couldn’t quite find any words.

  “I did what had to be done to save him,” Jowyn answered, locking eyes with Brysen. “Your body temperature had dropped too low.”

  “Will it—?” Brysen wasn’t sure how to form the question, wasn’t sure if he wanted to know the answer. Jowyn’s skin was unmarred, marked only by his tattoos, which he seemed to take great pride in. It was skin without anyone else’s history carved into it, and Brysen wondered what it must be like to look at your bare skin proudly, as a thing earned rather than inflicted. On the other hand, was a life that left no mark any kind of life at all? The wound on Jowyn’s hand had already begun to heal. “Will I turn into—?”

  Jowyn shook his head. “You won’t turn into one of us, no.”

  Brysen swallowed, relieved but strangely sad. He wiped the traces of blood from his lips. “I need to get Shara,” he said, and he looked down at the exposed scars on his chest, at the rest of himself, just as exposed. “And I could use some clothes.”

  Jowyn smiled at him, gentle mirth back in his eyes. “Maybe not in that order, though?”

  Brysen smiled, too, but pulled his legs closer to keep himself covered just as the other boys of the covey arrived. There were stones digging into his bare backside, and his knees ached, but he couldn’t imagine standing up in front of everyone and strolling nude across the ice.

  Jowyn looked at Brysen a long moment, then at the thin red line on his own hand. He took a deep breath, like he’d decided something hard, and went over to talk to the others.

  Sitting alone, Brysen raised his fist out to his side, holding his knees to his chest with the other arm like a shield. He whistled. If Shara was in the cave, she could certainly see him, even in the dark. She could at least see his silhouette. He imagined her in there, beak wet with snake blood, staring at his distorted form through the moonlit ice.

  He could feel the stares of all the covey on his bare back, crosshatched with whip scars and burns like a wax casing stretched over ground sausage meat. His whole back tingled with the sensation of being seen, but getting his hawk back was more important. A falconer hunting a lost bird had no time for shame. The self was meant to disappear when a man called a bird of prey home. At its best, it was a moment of total selfless peace; at its worst, it felt like a crushing emptiness.

  He felt his heart pulling out toward Shara, focused all his thought on her, gave no space to his own worries or plans or fears … but they made space for themselves. He felt totally exposed.

  “Come on,” he pleaded with Shara under his breath. “Come on, come on, come on…” He moved his fist up and down like he sometimes did in training when there was food on it and whistled again.

  Still nothing.

  If she wouldn’t come to his whistle, he would have to go get her, no matter the risk. This time, though, he’d be smarter about it. He looked back over his shoulder. The covey boys were now locked in a full-blown argument with Jowyn, and it seemed like Nyall was trying to get a word in. They were pointing at the rapidly healing cut on Jowyn’s hand, wagging fingers in his face. No one was looking at Brysen.

  He stood quietly, trying to will himself invisible. His eyes searched for the thickest ice to cross, but before his bare foot set down on the glassy surface, three voices shouted.

  Nyall yelled, “Bry, no!”

  Jowyn yelled, “Don’t!”

  And from atop the icy waterfall, backlit by the moon, his sister yelled, “Brysen, what are you doing? And why are you naked?”

  23

  Brysen’s eyes darted up to his sister. She was breathless, panting, looking from him to Nyall to the bone-white, tattooed boys around them, puzzled. She glanced over her shoulder, like she was being chased. “Get your clothes! We have to go!”

  “Where are the Mothers?” Jowyn called up.

  Kylee ignored him. “Come on, Bry! Quickly!”

&nbs
p; “Stay exactly where you are, all of you,” a fourth voice commanded. Üku passed through the crowd of boys behind Brysen like sunlight through a cloud, carrying her huge gray owl on her left fist. Her eyes were red and irritated and the skin around them looked as if it had been burned. She raised her left arm as she walked and her lips moved, whispering a word to her owl. “Thaa-loom.”

  The owl launched from her fist with two flaps of its wide wings and swooped up to Kylee, hovering just over her head, just out of reach. Its strong taloned feet extended down. She had enough force in those claws to open Kylee’s scalp, and it was an uncanny ability of owls to hover over their prey in patient silence.

  That the Owl Mother could send her owl to hover over a human target just by whispering a word chilled Brysen in a brand-new way.

  More Owl Mothers emerged from the trees, and they, too, had owls on their fists or hovering over their heads, owls of different colors and sizes. At least now he knew why Shara wouldn’t come out to him. She wasn’t being cruel. She was afraid.

  “I guess it didn’t go so well with them, huh?” he yelled up to his sister.

  Kylee shook her head, her face haunted. Something had happened, and it had shaken her. She wore a look Brysen hadn’t seen in a long, long time.

  “You should not have run from us,” Üku called up to her, and then looked at Brysen. He covered himself with his hands. The Owl Mother snapped her fingers.

  Without a word, the boy nearest her brought Brysen a dry pair of feathered pants like the covey wore and his own coat from the cave. Brysen dressed, slipped on his still-wet falconer’s glove, and, with the confidence of the newly clothed, turned to face Üku to demand passage up the mountain so he could complete his quest for love and honor. She, however, did not give him the opportunity to speak.