by Alex London
“In battle?”
“In service of the kyrg,” Üku said. “For whom we have promised to train you.”
“You sold me out to the Sky Castle?”
“Sold you out?” Üku shook her head. “That’s dramatic. We are helping you get what you want: to command the ghost eagle from the sky.”
“That’s not what I want,” Kylee said. “I want to help my brother. He wants the ghost eagle and only so he can save someone he thinks he loves.”
“Interesting way to phrase it.”
Kylee shrugged. They didn’t need to know Brysen’s business. “I’m not doing this so that a kyrg can just take the eagle from us once we catch it,” she said.
“A war is coming, Kylee,” Üku said. “The Kartami are growing and moving fast, and they are coming to tear every bird from the sky. Our interests and those of your kyrgs in the Sky Castle are the same. What good will saving Brysen and his lover do if the Kartami cut all of your heads off?”
“What do you care? Why would you serve the kyrg?” This time Üku offered no information. Kylee had to puzzle it out for herself. “Because they stand between you and the Kartami…,” she said. “The Kartami are as much a threat to you as to the Six Villages … but they have to go through us first. The lowland foothills are your first line of defense.”
Üku didn’t deny it, but there was more. Kylee couldn’t quite figure it out until she looked around and realized there were only women and girls here. To survive, they needed outsiders … outsiders that the Uztari kyrgs provided. Boys disappeared all the time.
“We’ll survive,” Üku said. “You can help us all survive.”
“Catch the ghost eagle yourselves,” Kylee grunted.
“We cannot,” said Üku. “It has no interest in hearing us … but it has long been interested in you. In your family.”
“Interested enough to kill my father,” Kylee said.
Üku nodded thoughtfully. “That is one way to see it, but perhaps the ghost eagle has more perspective than you can know. From high atop its perch, it sees more than you can imagine. Its will is its own, but you might persuade it to serve yours. To serve all of ours.”
Kylee shook her head. She was not a warrior, and she would not become their warrior. She had seen what violence did to bodies, and she wanted nothing more to do with it. Birds of prey killed to eat, but, as the Owl Mother had said, only humans could choose to kill. Or choose not to. She would not let them turn her into a killer.
Into more of a killer than she already was.
“I’m going to find my brother,” she said.
“We will not simply let you walk away from this.” Üku cracked her neck and stood in Kylee’s way. “One who speaks the Hollow Tongue irresponsibly cannot be allowed to roam free. You might fall into the wrong hands. Imagine what our enemies would do with you. Not everyone has your interests in mind, Kylee.”
“You don’t, either.”
“Our interests align. That should be enough.”
“Just let her go; we don’t need her,” Grazim spoke up, but a harsh glare from Üku silenced her.
“You should listen to her,” Kylee warned, and strode for the edge of the circle. Üku was in front of her again before she’d made it three steps, and two other Owl Mothers flanked her just as fast. Behind her, the rest of the Mothers had stood from their seats along the mountain slope. Kylee felt a tingle on the back of her neck, a sense that untold numbers of owls had their wide eyes fixed on her. “Let me go.”
Her eyes darted quickly to the sides of the pit around her, confirming what she’d feared: crossbows pointed at opposing angles between her shoulder blades. If they fired, the crossbow bolts would make an X right through her heart. She looked at the vultures, who were still feasting. Could she find a word to command them? Would Üku counteract whatever she tried? And what would become of Brysen if she died right here, right now, and left him on the mountain?
In front of her, Üku raised an eyebrow, asking a question of her own. What now?
One thing Kylee and her brother had in common—a great gift of their family perhaps—was a refusal to back down in the face of total hopelessness. It had to be an inherited trait, she figured, because Kylee had never before imagined herself doing something as foolish as what she did next.
“Thanks for the tea,” she said, and then, raising the cup as if to toast her captor, she tossed the hot liquid into Üku’s face. As the woman grabbed at her eyes, Kylee did a forward somersault, knocking past her. The crossbows bolts flew, one grazing Üku’s head, the other zipping harmlessly over the side of the mountain and toward the treetops below.
Kylee was already running at full stride, taking controlled falls down the dark slope and hitting her feet just in time to scramble over boulders and along the lip of a narrow gorge, running straight for the blood birch forest.
* * *
“And that’s when I found you,” Kylee said to the three boys sitting around her. “The Owl Mothers sold us out to save their own skins.”
She waited for Jowyn to defend them—the women to whose cult he’d belonged until recently—or for Nyall to comfort her, or for Brysen to tell her she did the right thing and that Petyr Otak deserved it, but none of the boys spoke. Each was lost in his own thoughts, she supposed, changing what he thought of her, deciding if she was a danger, maybe, deciding if she’d always been a monster or had just become one on the mountain.
She knew the answer to that question, of course, but none of them asked it. Instead, Brysen stood and offered her a hand up from the ground.
“So it’s true,” he said. “About the Kartami? They really are coming.”
“The Owl Mothers think so,” Kylee said.
“And so must Goryn,” Nyall added. “That’s probably why he wants a ghost eagle. For defense?”
“The ghost eagle does not defend people,” Jowyn said. “And neither does my brother.”
“I don’t care about the Kartami’s war with the Sky Castle or Goryn’s plans for the eagle,” Brysen told them. “I care about doing what I promised. I care about Dymian.”
Kylee noticed her brother looking at his feet, avoiding Jowyn’s or Nyall’s gaze. Avoiding her gaze, too. Some part of him had to know how reckless he was being. Some part of him had to think of the bigger picture here.
Whatever part that was, he’d squashed it when he looked up again, resolved. “I’m doing this. That’s the deal I made. Jowyn will lead me to the Nameless Gap. If I can make it by nightfall, then I think I have a plan to catch the eagle.” He looked at each of them in turn. “But I could use some help.” Her brother stepped to her, squeezed her hand. “I won’t force you to use the Hollow Tongue,” he added. “I know how hard it is for you.”
She gave his hand a gentle squeeze back, glad to have her brother’s kindness after so long without it, glad he was finally asking for help. But even as she nodded at him, all she could think was You have no idea how hard it is for me.
They formed a line and climbed single file toward the ragged edge of the Demon’s Beak, a high traverse of stone with a giant hooked peak above it. They climbed until well after nightfall, then woke to keep climbing. It was nearly a whole day before they finally reached the narrow pass below the Beak, pressing their backs against the snow-blanketed stone to shuffle along the edge of an endless fall. Once they passed the traverse, it was a quick climb over the lip to the rough slopes of the Nameless Gap, where the ghost eagle kept its eyrie. It watched all who approached. They would be no bigger than rats in the eagle’s eyes.
Kylee knew this climb. She’d done it once before.
Petyr Otak had not been her first kill.
THE SAPLING FOREST
A mess of blood and feathers littered the snowy slope. Packs were scattered among the corpses of human and eagle and owl alike. Gray-haired women lay sprawled, throats sliced, staring dead-eyed at the sky, their beloved owls lying bolt-blasted beside them. Uztari mercenaries lay mangled as meat, their corpses strewn
with crossbow bolts and feathers. What a sickening waste of life, thought Yval Birgund, but battles always are.
He’d seen a few in his time as a soldier, fewer since he’d been the defense counselor of the Forty. For more seasons than he could count now, he’d spent his days explaining provision allotments and expenses for the movement of falconry officers to the cloistered kyrgs and their attendants. It’d been a relief from the tedium of courtly life when he was dispatched to the Six Villages for the market and even a delight when he’d been informed that he was required to attend to an expedition in the mountains above the Villages.
That was before he knew he’d be chasing children into the clouds. After a few words with the many village spies, he’d learned of the children he was meant to pursue and the lofty, if absurd, task they’d set for themselves. He’d also learned that he’d encountered the boy before, that gray-haired eyas who’d come to the aid of a street urchin. He hoped at least for the chance to deliver that boy a whipping. No one made him look like a fool, especially not some smooth-cheeked hatchling from the Villages.
When his retinue had found the bodies of the long-haulers, he took it for the sort of mountain brigandage that Six Villagers had a reputation for. Brutal but nothing unexpected. Standing before this second scene of carnage, however, he had to revise his expectations. These young ones had unleashed a massacre.
“A new forest will grow here,” Üku, the Owl Mother, told him, stoic as ever in spite of the injuries she had received. “I will mourn to see many of these saplings grow.” She kicked at the body of one of the mercenaries. “I will spit at the base of others.”
Yval Brigand sighed. Üku had lost a lot of her people. So far, Yval’s men had not found Yves Tamir’s body, which was for the best. Her mother would demand retaliation, and Kyrg Bardu had made it clear that the Sky Castle’s alliance with the Owl Mothers was a priority. So, too, was the bronze the castle received from the Tamirs’ vast and varied businesses. War required wealth to win, and the Owl Mothers weren’t the most affluent of allies.
“You have to admit,” Yval told her, “these children have shown resourcefulness, turned their weaknesses into strengths.”
The woman merely grunted agreement. The red burn on her face and irritated eyes spoke to why.
“When the time comes, we will still rely on you to train the girl,” he said. “Grudges aside.”
“I do not hold grudges,” she told him. “But I do have a memory. A very good memory.”
The last remark might’ve been aimed at him as much as at Kylee. He’d known Üku long enough not to turn his back on her when they were alone.
“Do you think she’ll be able to bring down the ghost eagle?” he asked.
“That will be up to the eagle,” Üku said. “Her talent is raw, which makes it unpredictable, and there is much we don’t understand about it. She’s protective of her brother, which might be a help or a hindrance.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“And I’m not a mystic,” she snapped at him. “You want fortune-telling, study augury. I deal in what is knowable.”
“Well then, tell me what you do know,” Yval said. “Or consider our alliance at an end.”
“Our alliance did not protect my family,” she said. “Our alliance, so far, appears rather one-sided.”
“When my forces keep the Kartami off your mountain, speak to me again,” he growled. “There will be plenty of bloodshed to share when these shards blow in from the desert with their kites. Unless we can control her.”
“And unless she can control the eagle,” Üku added.
“Yes, unless that.”
“So, you’ll want to make for the Nameless Gap?” Üku asked him, and he turned his eyes, squinting, toward the snow-capped peaks of the Upper Jaw range. High above them, past the Demon’s Beak, he could just see the cloud-shrouded dip into the Nameless Gap, a narrow gorge that formed a jagged, lonely U and rose to the summit of the range, where only the ghost eagle flew.
“No.” He shook his head. “They’ve a guide?”
Üku nodded. “He’s a good boy. It pained us to lose him.”
“There’ll be others,” Yval snorted. “We always see that there are.” He found the business of their covey distasteful, and their strict views of male and female bewildering, but it was not his place to rewrite the traditions of the Owl Mothers. They had their ways, Uztar had its ways, and they needn’t care much for each other as long as they could work together.
He turned the discussion back to the twins. “With their head start, we’d risk missing them on the way down if they succeed, and if they fail, it won’t be worth the effort to make the climb.”
“If they fail, we’ll surely hear their screams,” Üku observed.
“I think I have a different plan,” Yval said. “But it will require more of you than you want to give, perhaps?”
“The sacrifices I’ve made so far demand that I see this to the end,” she said. “If more is required of me, more will be given, but I will not have sacrificed in vain, understand? Not even the walls of the Sky Castle will keep you safe if all this comes to nothing.”
“Funny you should mention the Sky Castle,” Yval told her, and her stoic frown slipped as he explained the rest of what he required of her. Owl Mothers, he knew, did not like to leave their mountain.
In war, a lot of people had to do things they didn’t like. And this war was only just beginning.
BRYSEN
WINDS AND WOUNDS
29
“You look sick,” Kylee told him. “You okay?”
Brysen leaned his head against the closest rock, breath clouding in front of him, eyes closed. They’d stopped to rest. “It’s the altitude,” he said, which could have been true. This high up, everyone had a little trouble breathing, everyone felt a little sick. Well, everyone except Jowyn. Whatever the blood birch sap had done to his body had adapted him to thin air. Brysen hoped Kylee wouldn’t look at him too closely, because some of that sap’s properties were in him now and he wasn’t really feeling the effects of altitude, either. He was troubled by a different sickness as they huddled halfway up the steep slope leading into the Nameless Gap.
Memory.
A short run down the slope from where they were, past abandoned packs and tents and ropes from ill-fated expeditions past, a few scrubby bushes had taken root, growing up through the rocky ground and patches of snow that clung stubbornly against the whipping winds funneling through the gap. He knew those bushes, remembered the feel of their scratchy branches on his face as he cowered behind them, how their tough leaves rattled when he shivered, giving him away. How the sounds of what had happened next echoed off the high sides of the Nameless Gap for a long time after.
He’d been here before.
At the moment he’d nearly been caught following his father. Yzzat’s breath had been bated and his blade drawn, and Brysen had known he was about to die. He’d been certain that, instead of gratitude that he’d come to help—to show he could help—his father would finally kill him, and he’d known he wouldn’t fight back, couldn’t.
He’d imagined the curved, black-talon blade entering him, could practically feel how it would part the scarred flesh of his side to slide between his ribs, the twist of the blade and the cold flood when the razor tip touched his heart. He hadn’t been afraid; he’d been relieved. Finally, there would be no more fear, no more waiting for the brutal end. It was here, it was now.
And then it wasn’t.
He’d come expecting death and had been given life. The ghost eagle had saved his life that night.
Better that Kylee didn’t know. He’d always told her that he stole their father’s knife before he left for that final expedition, and that he’d wanted it as a keepsake afterward, and she’d never questioned him. She never questioned him about that time at all, when he said he’d spent a full moon’s turning in hiding after stealing the knife, afraid of what would happen to him when their father returned. He�
�d only come home once everyone knew Yzzat wouldn’t. What Kylee had done while he was gone—how she and Ma had gotten on without him—he didn’t ask and she didn’t bring up. And Ma only ever prayed at them, never asked questions. Of all the silences in their lives after the ghost eagle killed their father, the silence around that time was the heaviest.
But here he was again, like a hawk circling its hunting ground, flying the same circle again and again, but at a greater height with farther to fall.
His own hawk shifted from foot to foot on his fist, shrinking into herself. The Nameless Gap was not a comfortable place for her, either. Her head dipped and turned, snapped around as she tried to see in every direction all at once. He set her on the ground, left her unleashed. She would need that advantage if she had to escape quickly. He wouldn’t tether her this close to the ghost eagle’s eyrie. If things went wrong, she’d have a flying chance.
“We could all use a rest,” Jowyn said, eyes on Brysen. He was playing along, but there was a question on his face, a question Brysen had no intention of answering. Yet he felt like he could, like Jowyn might understand. Jowyn had fled to the mountains once, too, after all. The only difference was that, unlike Brysen, he’d found what he was looking for. Brysen hadn’t yet but was poised to.
“We’ll have to get into position before sundown,” Brysen said. “I’ll need each of you to play a part in this. I lost my nets and snares back with the covey, but I’ve still got enough spider-silk rope to tie the eagle once we tackle it.”
“‘Tackle it?’” Nyall gasped. “You sure the height hasn’t cooked your brain? No one can tackle a ghost eagle.”
“No one can,” Brysen said. “But a group together might. Think about it: Did you ever read the stories of the old trappers—Ymal the Cask-Breaker, Valyry the Gloveless, the Stych Sisters?”