by Alex London
“Shyehnaah-tar,” she said, and like a stone from a slingshot, Shara burst from the cave, tucking her wings perfectly as she slipped between two icicles, then spreading them wide to land calmly on the Owl Mother’s fist, where the great gray owl had been perched. The other owls watched Shara, blinked, but made not so much as a hoot or a ruffle of feathers.
“Don’t move,” Üku ordered Brysen, stroking his hawk’s tail feathers with her right hand.
“I won’t,” he pleaded. “Just … please. Be gentle to her.”
“Prrpt,” Shara chirped, twisting her head sideways to look at him.
Though Shara clutched the cloth around the woman’s knuckles, she might as well have been squeezing Brysen’s bleeding heart in her talons. She’d obeyed a stranger before she’d obeyed him. They were at the Owl Mothers’ mercy now, and the danger they were in was, for once, not Brysen’s fault. He looked up at Kylee, whose wild eyes darted around like a trapped rabbit’s. What had happened to her?
Üku nodded at another mother, who took Brysen’s curved blade from where it still lay on the ground, wet with Jowyn’s blood, and came to him. She stood about a head shorter and held him in the same impassive stare as an owl blinking from a hollow tree. She took his gloved left hand in her own, gently raised it, then turned and locked his arm in the crook of her elbow. She slid his glove off and pressed his own blade to his bare wrist. His left wrist.
She intended to cut off his falconry hand.
Brysen’s heart pounded against his rib cage loud as a goose’s wingbeats, and he tried to wrest his arm free, but the Owl Mother’s grip was unbreakable.
“Don’t hurt him,” Jowyn pleaded. He touched his finger below his eye. “He means no harm. This is not necessary.”
Üku glanced at Jowyn’s bloody fist, then at Brysen, and then back to Jowyn. The rest of the covey tensed. “What have you done?”
Jowyn bowed his head. “He would have died.”
Her nostrils flared, her jaw clenched. “Death is not yours to give, and nor is life. We have very few rules here, but the ones we have must be obeyed.”
“I know.” Jowyn stared at his feet.
“You have bound yourself to him.” She gestured to Brysen. “And so, as you have freely chosen, you are unbound from us.”
Jowyn flinched and looked like he might cry, but instead he raised his head, puffed out his strong chest, and nodded. “I understand. I accept your justice and my”—his voice cracked, but he cleared his throat—“exile.”
Jowyn had saved his life and was being punished for it, cast out. The blade pressed against the soft skin just below Brysen’s hand, the curve of it seeking out the tight tendon. His knees felt weak.
“Please … no…,” he pleaded. He could handle the pain of a thousand whippings, of being cut and burned and broken down, but he couldn’t bear the thought of losing his fist, the vital perch where Shara sat, of never calling her to sit on it again. Panic buzzed in his ears; he thought he might faint. “Please,” he repeated. “Don’t.”
“This is our way,” Üku said. The Owl Mother thought Brysen was pleading on Jowyn’s behalf. In the pit of his stomach, he felt shame that he wasn’t.
“Please,” he whispered, disappointed in himself, looking away from Jowyn. “Don’t cut me.”
After all, he hadn’t asked Jowyn to save him. He hadn’t asked for anyone to save him, not for a long, long time. All he wanted from anyone was that they not hurt him. He felt like a little kid again, cowering beneath his father’s rage, admitting everything, anything, inventing sins to confess, heaping whatever shame upon himself he could with the hope that it might make the hurting stop.
Then, as now, his pleas were not heeded.
The blade cut.
Brysen wanted to scream, but Kylee did it first, screaming from above on the frozen falls. Her scream was a word or a command or an avalanche made of wind.
When it left her lips, every owl in the clearing—even the one hovering above her—and every passage hawk and nesting pigeon and wild bird within hearing—Shara, too—burst into the air and formed a giant cloud of a thousand winged things, and then this massive midnight flock of feather and claw, beak and talon, swooped down upon them, sending the Owl Mothers and the covey boys scattering.
Brysen dove to the ground and rolled away, shielding his head with both hands, staining his gray hair red with the blood from his wounded wrist. There was a chaos of shrieking, honking, calling, and wings beating against the air. The frantic flock filled the sky so thickly, they hid the moon, the stars, even the trees of the forest. All was feathers. All was claws.
What had his sister done?
What could his sister do?
Through the melee, Brysen saw Üku standing straight and unafraid in the swarm, her eyes locked on Kylee. Üku was smiling.
MUD BETWEEN
The fortune would be nice, of course. Even split up between the two of them, the kyrg’s reward for the ghost eagle would give the Otak family enough wealth to match the Tamirs themselves. Goryn wouldn’t like being beaten at his own game, but Kyrg Bardu had made it clear that she could protect them from the wrath of those Six Villages tyrants. She might even grant a title to the Otaks, which would elevate them immediately.
No more spying for other families. The Otak kyrgs would dictate their own destiny. They would have spies of their own. Wealth could be won by anyone with a will to do it, but nobility was the real lure that had called Petyr and Lyl Otak up the mountain.
Petyr knew the hazards, both physical and spiritual, that this journey entailed. His brother had been asleep when the long-haulers came for the twins, but he’d watched the scene unfold with a cold sweat collecting at the small of his back. He’d known those two since they’d been born, watched them grow in fits and starts. He’d felt bad for the boy, beaten all those years by his father, a petty man too weak to fight anyone his own age. Petyr’d been tempted to slug him countless times, but never had. He was a man who observed, not a man who acted on his observations—unless ordered to. Such was the duty of a spy.
After Yzzat’s death, Petyr had watched Brysen train, sending off regular reports on his lout of a trainer back to that young man’s family. The Avestris paid well for information on their son, Dymian, but Petyr had done his best to leave out the more lurid details of how Dymian carried on with Brysen. No sense bringing the amorous boy into the intrigues of a noble family. There was surely some noble boy or girl Dymian’s parents would’ve preferred him with once his exile in the Villages ended. Brysen would’ve been an inconvenience, one they could have ordered vanished if they’d chosen to. Boys vanished all the time. In his way, Petyr felt he’d protected Brysen.
So it was hard to watch his head rest on the long-hauler’s chopping block, hard not to intervene. He’d nearly charged up the mountain and come to their rescue, but the Owl Mothers’ sudden appearance had put that plan out to roost. He’d been forced to follow them and wait, plotting a rescue if need be, but only so they could continue their quest for the prize.
Brysen was hopeless, but his sister’s talents might be just the thing to bring the mighty bird down. Petyr and Lyl had pinned all their hopes to her and were rooting for her still, even though they knew, at the end, they would have to take the ghost eagle from her. Most likely by slitting her throat. Anyway, if they didn’t do it, Goryn Tamir surely would when the twins returned to the Villages empty-handed, and Goryn would be far less gentle about it than Petyr would be. Petyr didn’t want these kids to suffer, not more than they had to. How could a heart hold such contradictory things together? He wished them safety and success, knowing that he planned to rob them of both.
He wondered if, when the time came, he’d be able to kill these two children and their friend.
For riches alone, no. Never. But for nobility and respect for his family for generations to come? He could do anything.
When the kids went up the mountain with the Owl Mothers, he and Lyl followed.
“You go
with the boys,” he’d told his brother. “I’ll follow the girl to the Mothers’ camp.”
Lyl had happily accepted the suggestion, which was a relief to Petyr. He was a better tracker than Lyl. And he hadn’t wanted his younger brother getting too close to those women after seeing how brutally they’d dispatched the long-haulers.
He gave his brother the winged salute across his chest, then touched the charm around his neck, the Otak family seal: carved bone in the shape of a rabbit with eagle’s wings and humongous talons. The seal had been a source of much mockery in their boyhood, but they’d both worn it proudly and thrown fists to defend it. The Otaks were like their symbol—easy to laugh off until they landed hard upon you with vicious claws and rabbitlike speed. He kissed the charm and his brother did the same to his own, and they went their own ways.
Petyr found a route up the east side of a spur along the edge of the blood birch forest. There were a few hairy inclines, a gorge he had to cross on a half-rotted trapper’s rope that was older than he was, and one vertical he had no choice but to free-climb, but he kept up and kept track of them straight through to dusk. He passed the time imagining the inevitable future when he and his brother, elevated to nobility, would be invited to the Sky Castle: Kyrg Petyr. Kyrg Lyl, the Otak Counselors for … what? Trade, weights, and measures? Breeding licenses. There was no limit to the fortunes a motivated member of the Council of Forty could make.
So lost was he in the daydream that he didn’t notice the loose stones falling down the slope in front of him, disturbed by figures moving into an ambush. Before he could reach for his weapon, one of them threw a heavy sack at him, hitting him square in the chest and knocking him flat on his ass.
The sack was wet and round, and lifting it off himself turned his hands a bright and angry red.
Blood.
The sack was soaked in blood.
“Open it,” an Owl Mother suggested, standing above him with her tawny owl perched like a hungry ghost on her fist. It watched with unblinking black eyes as Petyr peeled back the fabric of the sack and then gagged at its contents.
His brother’s face stared back at him, eyeless sockets in a head that had been roughly severed.
“Mud below and mud between. The dead can’t rise to a sky unseen,” the Owl Mother said as Petyr gagged again, dry heaving into the dirt next to his brother’s face. “You two should not have interfered here.”
There are moments when what you know of yourself and your world is shaken loose, sudden shocks, after which nothing can be the same. These moments send some men spiraling into the abyss, while others rise, soar, and are reborn stronger into new and unfamiliar lives, girded with hard-won wisdom.
Petyr Otak was not going to become a better man for having held his brother’s eyeless head in his hands, but he was incandescent with rage and discovered in himself a feral thirst for vengeance he had not known he harbored. He wanted to tear the woman above him apart.
He sprang from the ground, drawing his dagger as he rose and rushed at her.
The tawny owl shrieked and jumped from her fist while she blocked the knife thrust with ease, using Petyr’s own momentum to toss him sideways to the ground. She stomped the blade from Petyr’s grip and broke every bone in his hand, then she kicked him straight in the teeth, shattering more than a few and cracking his nose. She bent down and rolled him onto his back, resting a knee across his chest to hold him.
Petyr tried to curse her, but all that came from his mouth were bloody choking sounds. Above him, the clouds had gone flesh pink with sunset, run through with veins of arterial red. The tawny owl glided down from that fleshy sky and landed on its master’s fist. The Owl Mother set it across his breastbone and stood; the owl’s hooked beak was poised to strike his face.
He tensed, tried to remain very still, fearful of provoking the bird. A breeze ruffled the feathers on the crown of its head.
“No,” Petyr croaked. “Not … like … this…”
Two other Owl Mothers came into his line of vision, standing over him.
“You’ll be coming with us,” one of them said. “You’ve got a purpose yet to serve.”
With a whistle, the owl jumped from his chest back to its master’s fist, and the other two women lifted him from the ground, binding his hands.
“Consider yourself lucky,” the first one told him as they led him away from the sack where his brother’s eyeless head stared up at the sky. “Most men don’t get to live through their own sky burial.”
His knees buckled. They had to drag him up the mountain, each step bringing him closer to the night sky and whatever brutal end the Owl Mothers reserved for trespassers and spies.
KYLEE
THE HOLLOW TONGUE
24
Kylee stood on the frozen falls, puzzling at the scene below: a boy whose skin was white as clean-picked bone, pleading for her brother’s safety. Her brother’s hawk on Üku’s fist, and a blade pressed to the base of his own.
The Owl Mothers were not the benevolent guardians of the mountain that they at first seemed. They were dangerous and duplicitous, and what they had planned for her and her brother was not going to end well. It’d been a mistake to head toward their territory.
She knew the moment her brother was seized that she had to find the searing words inside her, even as she knew that was exactly what Üku wanted. The Owl Mother wasn’t threatening Brysen because she wanted to cut off his hand. She was threatening Brysen because she wanted to provoke Kylee. But she wasn’t bluffing. She would do it.
For a moment, Kylee tried to focus on her brother’s hand, tried to imagine the pain he’d feel as it was severed from his wrist.
“Shyehnaah,” she said, but nothing happened.
You have to mean what you say, the Owl Mothers had told her.
Brysen could still be a falconer one-handed. Some stories said Ymal the Cask-Breaker only had one hand, and he’d found a way to greatness. Brysen was afraid, but Kylee couldn’t make herself feel his fear.
She had to find another way, another word. She had to make herself speak.
“Please,” Brysen whispered below, the words carrying on the still night air. “Don’t cut me.”
Kylee remembered the stories she and Brysen used to tell each other about the distant lands that their imaginary birds flew over; the stories that gave them escape from their father’s rages. She pictured the vastness of the world they’d invented and focused on how the two of them tried to awe each other with even greater feats of imagination. Hawks made of glass, goats grazing on clouds, winged youths who lived in the forests on the other side of the desert and whistled tunes that erased memory.
Where should we go now? Brysen would ask back then.
I don’t know, Kylee would tell him. Surprise me.
And he would. He invented castles made of fur; he described giant birds who kept people on their fists; he created entire cities out of candied ginger.
Your turn, he’d say. Surprise me.
Their imaginations had been as big as the sky, untethered to what was real or what was possible in their ground-bound lives. Their imaginations flew.
Surprise me.
She closed her eyes and took a breath, then opened them and saw Brysen’s terrified squirming, his panic, and the knife blade cutting skin.
The word burnt inside her, and she shouted it as loud as she could. It came without her knowing what sounds her mouth had formed, what word she’d spoken, but she knew precisely what it had meant as she screamed it.
Surprise me.
That was what she told the birds of prey, above and below—any that could hear her scream across the mountains.
Surprise me.
And they did.
Every owl, every wild bird swooped up and dove as one, a solid wall of feathers, a cacophony of calls. They scattered the Owl Mothers and those strange pale boys in every direction.
Üku was the only one not covering herself. She stood like a mountain peak in a snowstorm and loo
ked up at Kylee, smiling.
“Brysen, Nyall, come on!” Kylee shouted down at them. Üku’s smile was sharp as a beak, and she did not want to stick around for its first peck.
The boys scrambled to their feet as the Owl Mothers and the pale boys tried to regroup, harried by the flock, pushed down the slope in a riot of squawks and shrieks.
“My blade!” Brysen yelled, and tried to cross to the spot where the Owl Mother had dropped it, but a crossbow bolt cut the distance and snapped into the dirt just in front of his hand.
“Leave it!” Kylee said, and Brysen offered no argument. He and Nyall leaped to the icefall, climbing the slick surface as fast they could. Nyall had the sense to kick through the ice below him as he climbed, cutting off the fastest route on which they could be pursued.
When he reached the top and stood again, Brysen didn’t look at Kylee. He turned back around and held out his fist. His face was pained but hopeful, and he looked at the wild flock, still driving the Owl Mothers and the odd collection of boys away. Shara was there among them, obeying Kylee’s command.
Brysen whistled, and Kylee doubted the hawk would respond. She worried her brother would linger too long trying to call her and would get them all caught, but before she could warn him to just run, Shara broke from the flock and flew with furious grace to Brysen’s bare fist. Her feet settled gently over his knuckles and though her grip surely stung, a small smile stole the corner of his lips. Weary as she was, Kylee smiled with him. His bird had come back to him on her own.
“What happened?” Brysen asked. He could have meant what happened with the birds or what happened with the Owl Mothers that could have gone so wrong, but she wasn’t sure she could explain either, and certainly not right now. Nyall just gaped at her.
“You really going to stare at me like that forever?” she asked.
He shook his head, still speechless.