Flight of the Dragon Kyn

by Susan Fletcher

  Chapter 7

  At the world’s edge lies a land called Thrym where steam seeps from the skin of the earth and snow-bearded peaks breathe fire.

  —KRAGISH SEAFARERS’ LORE

  I stepped back, startled. The gyrfalcon screamed, tightened her grip on my hand. One wing clouted my head, and then the bird was flying. She crashed into the slatted door and tumbled to the ground in a flurry of feathers.

  “Get out now,” the man said.

  “She may be hurt!” I bent down to look, fearful for the bird.

  “Now. Out!” The door opened behind me; the man reached in, grabbed my arm, and roughly dragged me back. The bird’s harsh keening tore at my heart. She launched herself into the air. I staggered backward past the door; the man slammed it shut just as the bird hit the slats.

  She fell again, still screaming.

  “If you’ve hurt her, if you’ve ruined her for hunting I’ll—I’ll ruin you,” the man said through clenched teeth, pulling me back and away from the mew.

  “I ruin her!” I protested. “She was well before you came.”

  “No one is permitted within that mew. No one is permitted near that mew, except for me. Do you ken me? I have spent a half-moon gentling her, and you may have undone it all. She cost the king a fortune. She is worth …” He glanced at the bird, hunkered on the ground, and his eyes softened.

  “Corwyn?” Rath was tugging at the man’s tunic, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Corwyn!” Rath said again. The little girl peered out from behind him, her dark eyes trained on me.

  “She is worth five fortunes,” the man murmured, as if to himself.

  He was a big man, stout of girth, though not, I saw, so tall as first I had thought him. His face was clean-shaven. His hair, reduced on top to a few thin strands, was a deep shade of brown. Corwyn, Rath had called him. An Elythian name. But … wasn’t the queen mother’s healer an Elythian named Corwyn?

  Now he turned and glowered at me. “I want you out of here—now. You could! have caused her to break her wings. You may yet have done so.”

  I was stung by the unfairness of this. “I did not harm her. She flew to my fist. She was settled there, serene as a suckling lamb. Then you frightened me, and that frightened her.”

  “She flew to your fist? She flies to no one’s fist—not even mine. You must have enticed her with meat, although how—” He stopped, his eyes narrowing, taking in my gown, my rings, my circlet. “Who are you?” he asked. “Your face is not known to me.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you, Corwyn! This is Kara.” Rath waved at me. “Hullo, Kara. You’re bleeding.”

  I looked down at my wrist. Blood welled out from where the gyrfalcon’s talons had pierced through the cloth to my skin. I hadn’t marked it before, but now that I had, it hurt. I should have known better than to call a falcon, gloveless.

  “Kara?” the man was saying. “This is the one you told me of? The king’s dragon girl? Gudjen’s ward?”

  “Yes,” Rath said. “She’s good with birds. I told you so. And the gyr was preening herself on Kara’s fist when we came in. I saw. And look now. She’s back on her perch, and not a sign of harm about her.”

  The little girl poked her head out from behind Rath. Catching my glance, she dived behind him again.

  Corwyn was studying the bird. She had stopped screaming but still shuffled from side to side on her perch, bobbing her head and warily eyeing us. He turned back, regarded me appraisingly. His shrewd, intelligent eyes seemed to encompass all of me at once.

  “So,” he said at last. And then gruffly, “I had best make a poultice for that wrist of yours. If it festers, Gudjen will have me flayed.”

  In a nook behind the door stood a small workbench, which I had not seen when I came in. Atop it were two narrow shelves, crammed with all manner of jars and bottles, flagons and vials. Herbs hung in bunches from the ceiling; three brass scales and an assortment of stone bowls were arrayed upon the bench.

  An herbary? I was confused. “Are you … the healer?” I asked.

  Corwyn nodded curtly, motioning me to the bench. He unstoppered a vial containing a strange blue liquid; its acrid smell overwhelmed the herbs’ delicate pungence. Rath and the little girl looked on as Corwyn poured the liquid onto my arm.

  It stung.

  “Ouch!” I said, pulling away.

  “Corwyn is the king’s own mother’s healer,” Rath said as Corwyn set to mixing various sharp-smelling liquids and powders in a small stone bowl. “The king sent for him all the way from Elythia to attend Prince Rog when his arm was festering. Corwyn cured it, and now the queen mother won’t let him go. She needs him for her ailments—”

  “Fanciful ailments,” Corwyn muttered under his breath.

  “But I thought he—you,” I amended, turning to Corwyn. “I thought you were the king’s falconer.”

  He slathered my wrist with a cool green paste before answering. “I learned much of herb lore in tending to birds. It was but a short jump to tending folk.”

  “Now folk come to him from everywhere,” Rath said. “He’s the best healer for three kingdoms round. The best falconer, too.”

  Corwyn made a gruff shushing noise. He began to wind my wrist about with strips of linen cloth. The cuts had stopped hurting without my being aware of it; the poultice still felt cool.

  The little girl—of four or five winters, I guessed—had picked up the clay from the floor and was working it in her hands. Her hair and eyes were dark, like Corwyn’s.

  “And who are you?” I asked her. She scrambled behind Corwyn.

  “My daughter, Myrra,” Corwyn said. “Myrra, come out. It’s nothing to fear.”

  Myrra sidestepped out into view, looking tiny beside the broad bulk of her father. She quickly ducked her head—but not before I caught a flash of smile.

  Now Corwyn fastened the linen strips with a neat knot. “So,” he said, turning my wrist in his hands to inspect his work. “You can call down birds from the sky, or so they say. Could you call, say, Gussie—that goshawk—from her perch?”

  I surveyed the hawk. Her red-gold eyes, slightly flattened on top, gave her a wild, intent expression. Her beak was cruelly hooked; her talons, huge. She was big—bigger than any bird I’d called before, save for the gyrfalcon.

  Gussie fixed me with her red-gold glare; I sensed her seeking me.

  “I … think I can call her,” I said.

  “Shall we put it to the proof?”

  I shrugged. “Very well.”

  Hanging from the edge of the workbench were a passel of left-handed leather gloves, gauntleted to the elbow. Corwyn unhooked one and handed it to me. I slipped it onto my hand, and he did the same with another.

  Corwyn loosed the goshawk’s jesses from her leash and, speaking to her softly, touched the back of her legs. The bird stepped backward onto his gauntlet.

  “Stand by the door,” he said, “and call.”

  “Come.” I directed my thoughts to Gussie. “Come.”

  I felt the rippling of hawk consciousness in my mind as the bird bobbed her head, then hunched her wings and crouched down on Corwyn’s wrist.

  “Come.”

  She leaned forward, unfolded her mottled brown wings, and then she was airborne, pumping through the sun-streaked gloom of the mews. A breath of air on my cheek, a thump on my wrist; the bird clumsily alit, flapped, nearly fell off, then at the last moment regained her balance. I teased her breast feathers upward, murmuring soft praise. She drew up and stretched out her wings, pleased with herself.

  Rath was smiling broadly. “Good girl, Gussie,” he said, pantomiming applause.

  Myrra, aping Rath, did the same. “Good Gussie, good Gussie.”

  Corwyn favored me with that level, appraising look again. He reached behind him; when he held up his hand there was a dead mouse between his gloved fingers. He whistled.

  I let my mind go away from the hawk; she pushed off from me and flew to Corwyn’s fist. When she had done gobbling the mo
use, Corwyn set her on her perch and retied the jesses.

  “What you do does not seem so different from what I do,” I said.

  “Save for that you do it without bait, without training, and without familiarity with the bird,” Corwyn replied, “which makes it very different, indeed.”

  We flew the kestrel and the hunchback and the redwing in the same wise, with me summoning them off Corwyn’s fist, and Corwyn whistling them back for food. Corwyn mellowed as we worked, although he still eyed me from to time as if he did not know what to make of me. As I watched him now, he seemed not so harsh as I had thought him before. Truly he seemed not harsh at all, but only tender for the care of his birds. He and Rath and Myrra told me the names of the birds, and their histories, and the quirks of their various tempers.

  The goshawk, Gussie, had been taken as an eyas from her nest and had virtually to be taught how to fly. “That’s why she’s so clumsy,” Rath said.

  “She’s a clodhopper!” Myrra put in.

  “She hunts middling well,” Corwyn said, “but she’ll never equal a passager or a haggard.”

  “That means captured on its first migration,” Rath said. “I mean, passager does. And haggard is a bird that’s captured when it’s older.”

  The red-winged falcon was named Erik, after a warrior Corwyn knew. He was of stippled grays and browns, with red-tipped wings that, Corwyn said, would turn entirely red at his next molt. A thin, feathered mustache ran along the top of his beak and partway down his neck.

  “And that hunchbacked hawk is Slouch,” Rath said. I smiled, for Slouch’s black-capped head jutted forward, making his shoulders look hunched.

  “Don’t forget Killer!” Myrra piped up.

  “The kestrel,” Rath said.

  I laughed. Such a fierce name for so tiny a thing. She was striking, with her blue-black eyes, creamy black-flecked breast, and foxy-brown wings. And that she was a terror to mice I had no doubt.

  The mountain falcon, Bruta, was an ill-tempered gray-and-white haggard whom none but Corwyn could fly. “Best hunter of the lot, and she won’t tolerate the king,” Corwyn said. “And Rog even less. She footed him badly some years ago—caused the nasty abscess I was summoned to cure. He’s never so much as approached a hunting bird since.”

  “After Corwyn’s done training the gyr, only the king will hunt her,” Rath said.

  “But perhaps you might try Bruta one day when you are better known to her,” Corwyn offered.

  I nodded—a false nod—for at once I minded me of Gudjen, and the king’s mother’s ladies, and tablet weaving. My heart sank. I would never become better known to Bruta nor any of the other birds. Gudjen would not deem it fitting for me to loiter about the mews. She would never permit me to come here again.

  I did not ask to fly the gyrfalcon, and Corwyn did not offer so much as to let me approach her mew. But she had taken hold of my thoughts, that fierce, splendid white one. I recalled her wild blue-black eye and the pulse of recognition that had rippled through my mind. And a longing grew inside me to see her, to call her, to hold her again upon my fist.

  We were admiring Rath’s wind gull, which he had named Hild, when the outer door opened and someone came in. Kazan, the trader. I felt myself stiffen. He paused a moment, then strode forward.

  “So, Kazan!” Corwyn said, moving to meet him. “What brings you here? If you’ve come to see me fly that falcon of yours, you’re early, by a moon-turn, at least.”

  Kazan smiled and shook his head. “No, I come … for Kara,” he said in his odd, clipped speech. He leaned around Corwyn to address me. “Gudjen is—” He hesitated, seeming to seek the right word. “Displeased,” he said at last. “She has gone floor-reeds to roof-turf searching for you.”

  Displeased? She was furious, like as not.

  “I thought … you might be here,” Kazan said. He waited, his gaze steady but not overbold. He did not say why he had come to fetch me.

  I sighed, feeling my freedom slipping away from me.

  “You’re not taking her back, are you?” Rath asked. “Kara can make the hawks fly to her. You can watch, too.”

  “I would like to see that one day,” Kazan said.

  One day when you have your snares with you, I thought bitterly.

  “But Gudjen wants you now, and …” Kazan shrugged.

  And what Gudjen wants, Gudjen gets, I thought.

  “But Kazan,” Rath persisted, “could you not go back and tell Gudjen you have found Kara and she is safe? Could you not leave her here a little while yet?”

  “Let her stay! Let her stay!” Myrra chimed in.

  Kazan still said nothing, but gazed steadily at me.

  “Corwyn?” Rath said. “Tell him she can stay! It’s well with you, is it not?”

  To my surprise, Corwyn seemed regretful. “For me it is well. But Gudjen wants her and …”

  And what Gudjen wants, Gudjen gets.

  I took a long, last look back at the mews, at Rath and Corwyn and Myrra, and the birds I had just begun to know. I turned toward the gyrfalcon’s mew, and I marked a light, fluttering form behind the slats.

  “Lady Kara?” Kazan said, motioning me to the door. He crooked his elbow, inviting me to take it. Startled, I looked up and found myself staring straight into his long dark eyes, nearly on a level with my own. I broke away, strode past him into the barnyard.

  “I am going,” I said.

  In silence, we walked toward the courtyard.

  I had not meant to speak to Kazan on our way back. But something Corwyn had said snagged in my mind, and at last I had to ask. “Corwyn said … your falcon. Which one is yours?”

  Kazan smiled. “I have no falcon. But Corwyn calls the gyr mine, for it was I who snared her and brought her to your king.”

  “You?” At once I felt foolish. Of course it had been Kazan. The falcon was newly come here. And Kazan traded in falcons—I knew that well enough.

  My surprise must have shown, for Kazan laughed and said, “Did you think I would not sail so far north, despising this as I do?” He held up his hands to the snow, which whirled about more thickly than before. “But … I must go where there are goods to trade, like it or no. And even when I am lost, I find something.”

  “Lost?” I had not meant to encourage him, but my curiosity was caught.

  As we walked up through the barnyard, Kazan told me of a storm at sea that drove his ship north—farther north than ever he had been. He had thought that he and his crew would die in the open sea, so far had they strayed from the known lands—until they sighted the cliffs through the fog. There they found birds and foxes and walruses and whales and other creatures far more plentiful than ever they had seen. And not a sign of man, or that man had ever trod this land before.

  “But most strange were these … smokes that went up from the land. Not fire-smokes. Water-smokes. We found a place where water bubbled up from a cleft in the rock—so hot, it boiled our meat. The ground where we slept felt warm, as if a fire burned beneath it. And inland there were ice-bound mountains that breathed out steam.

  “We set out our traps and snares; there was wealth enough in that place to fill our hold many times over. Yet on the second day one of the mountains cleared its throat and began to spit fire and ash into the air. And the sky turned black as a moonless, starless night.”

  They had set sail at once. There was time only to take up a few snared birds, the white gyr among them.

  I had nearly forgotten about Gudjen, so taken was I with this tale of Kazan’s. But now I saw her tacking toward us through the whirling snow, brisk as a ship under a stiff breeze.

  Kazan turned to me, intent. “I wish you could have seen that place,” he said. “You could have called a thousand birds, they were so thick.”

  I recoiled as if I had been slapped. So this was what he was leading to. A thousand white falcons would make him wealthier than the king!

  I turned abruptly from Kazan and hastened for Gudjen and the tongue-lashing she had in sto
re.

  And yet someone must have spoken to Gudjen later that day, for in the evening before we supped she took me aside and said that I might spend my days in the mews with Corwyn, instead of with the queen mother’s women. I gaped at these tidings, for they went entirely at odds with the harsh words she had had for me earlier, when I had returned from the mews.

  Now she grew stern all at once and said that I must do as Corwyn bade me, that it was cold and damp and dirty in the mews, but that I had better not complain after all the vexation I had caused her. Hastily I agreed, before she could change her mind.

  And then a further astonishment: On my way to the women’s quarters after supper, Corwyn appeared at my side. “You come to the mews on the morrow?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Do I have you to thank for this? It is … beyond what I dared hope.”

  Corwyn brushed aside my thanks. “Come at early morn, and we will begin work with the gyrfalcon.”

  “The gyrfalcon! But you said—”

  “All is now changed. The king has given the gyrfalcon to you. Given her. You had best thank him first chance, for it is a great honor—greater, I think, than you know. Since his last gyr died he has not had a falcon proper to his rank. But Orrik has his purposes, and now the bird is yours.”

  For the second time that night I stood gaping. “Remember—early morn” Corwyn said. He turned on his heel and strode away.

  The gyrfalcon was mine. And Corwyn would train me to fly her. This was a thing of such wonderment, I could barely credit it. To fly the gyrfalcon … Mine.

  I should have been overjoyed, and yet … a wisp of unease trailed through my mind. It was so sudden, so much of a change. What had brought this about?

  Orrik has his purposes, Corwyn had said. And now I minded me of what Gudjen had said of birds and dragons: They are akin: What one hears the other hears also; what one obeys, so obeys the other.

  And I knew it as strongly as I knew my own name: This kindly, amiable king was using me, was using the gyr, was using us both to achieve his own end.

  Chapter 8

  When you see wax on her claws and beak, you will know she has silera. Here is the cure: Take a black snake and fry it in a pan. Mix the cooked fat with peppercorns and grouse flesh and feed this to the falcon for nine days.