by Kate Elliott
Arda looked her up and down in a way that made Nallo alert, and surprised, because she was more used to men looking her over that way—and then dismissing her. But Arda smiled, as if she liked what she saw. “He’s a good reeve, but he’s vain, if you ask me. Always thinking women will come round to his way of thinking just because he’s got a handsome smile and a handsome face. Cursed tiresome, if you ask me.”
Nallo’s amusement at this plain speaking quickly sputtered. “How did you track me down?”
“I didn’t. Tumna did.” Arda nodded toward the raptor, now preening her wing feathers and seeming to ignore them. “She turned up a week ago at Naya Hall and began sweeps of the area, which told me that she’d tracked you. But there are hundreds of laborers brought here with Qin coin to build and dig. So I tracked her, tracking you. I have a proposition for you.”
“So did Marshal Joss. Only his was more like an ultimatum.”
“It does make you wonder how he manages to sweet-talk women into his bed, doesn’t it? I’m just glad I’m not fashioned that way, to be susceptible to his charm.” She smiled, and Nallo blushed as Arda went on. “I don’t care whether you become a reeve or not, Nallo. That’s your business, not mine. But I need my eagles jessed. An unjessed eagle not retired to the wild lands is an unpredictable eagle. Anyway, I need all the reeves I can get. In case you didn’t know, we’re living in troubled times.”
“My husband was murdered by that army.”
“I’m sorry to hear of it. Plenty more will suffer if we can’t act. Here’s my proposition. I don’t care what you choose. Just fly first, and then tell me what you’ve decided.”
Nallo felt every grain of dirt stuck to her sweaty skin. She remembered the spill of dirt on her shoulders as the ceiling gave way. She thought of crouching at the base of a narrow shaft, hoping to be hauled up before the air choked her as it sometimes choked out lamp flames.
She thought of her dreams.
“I have a debt contract,” she said.
“If you choose the reeve hall, the Qin will release you. If you don’t, you can come right back to whatever exciting work you’re doing here.” She studied Nallo closely. “And I must say, we have a better water allowance at the hall. You can get a decent bath. For that matter, on your day off you can fly to Olossi and get a real bath in a real bathhouse. Cold scrub, hot soak, and all.”
Nallo shut her eyes, woozy at the memory of a cold scrub and hot hot water in which to soak away all the angry voices that gnawed.
“Just one flight,” she said, knowing it was a trap. Yet Tumna did sit there waiting for her, the only creature in the world who had actually gone to the trouble to seek her out on purpose.
Despite Tumna’s fearsome reputation, Arda showed no fear of the eagle as she beckoned Nallo closer. “Help me get the harness slung.”
“I’m flying her?”
“Of course. I’ll show you how to rig this.”
“Didn’t she rip off her last reeve’s head?”
“Yes, and disemboweled him, too. He had turned against his reeve’s oath and, besides that, didn’t treat her properly when she was injured. I don’t blame her one bit. Did us a favor, I should think.”
“That’s a coldhearted way of looking at it.”
“I train reeves. Nothing burns me more than a reeve who doesn’t care properly for her eagle. I’d sooner feast a reeve who had betrayed all her companions but placed her eagle’s welfare above her own, than one who neglected her raptor. Treat Tumna as she deserves, and she’ll repay your loyalty with her own. She’s a short-tempered, irritable bird, it’s true, but we all have our quirks. I suppose my lack of sentimentality is mine. So. Are you going to help me, or should I leave? If I go now, I’m not coming back.”
Maybe Arda was just playing on her contrary nature, or maybe it was that Tumna looked healthy and strong, no trace of injury like the other times Nallo had encountered her. Maybe it was the dreams, or the raptor’s undeniable beauty and edge of danger.
“All right.”
Arda walked over and showed her how to get into the harness. “It won’t be the best fit. Reeves are measured for their harness to make sure there’s no chafing. But it’ll do. You can tighten it—that’s right. Your feet go there—that’s the training bar—so you can adjust your weight in flight. You’re ready. I’ll show you how to hook in.”
She walked in under the cruel beak, right up to where the talons could puncture her. If Arda showed no fear, Nallo certainly was not going to. She followed her in under Tumna’s shadow. The raptor huffed, straightening. Her feathers were gorgeous, golden-brown, splashed with white highlights. She wore a jess on each ankle and her own harness fastened over the shoulders and across the breast so it did not impede the wings. Working slowly and with the greatest patience, Arda showed Nallo how to hook the various tethers that allowed the bird to fly and the reeve to tuck in beneath.
“You get the best view. Free hands for signaling or to hold a weapon. As you saw, you can hook another person in front of you without oversetting the balance, although not every raptor is strong enough to manage two. With training, you’ll learn how to hook in and out quickly.”
“I didn’t promise to become a reeve!”
“No need to rip my head off!” Then she grinned, leaned in, and kissed Nallo on the cheek. Nallo flushed like she hadn’t since—well—since ever. With a laugh, Arda backed away. “Just one flight. That’s all I ask.”
“Oh, gods,” murmured Nallo, as she realized she was well and truly hooked in. The rush went to her head, and then the raptor pushed so hard that Nallo thought her feet and her head were in two different places. Her feet slipped off the training bar, and she flailed, sure she was about to plunge to her death. Gripping the straps with knuckles gone white, she couldn’t breathe. The powerful beat of Tumna’s wings drowned out everything in the world except the plunge of the earth away from under her and, when she could see again, the many upturned faces staring as she rose. Air thrummed against her body. Tumna stopped beating her wings, simply held them out in that vast wingspan, and Nallo choked out a gulped cry, only they did not fall. They were rising as though in the hand of the gods, the earth dropping away to reveal the patterns of human handiwork below: the alluvial fan where the conduit had its exit; the holes marking the shafts; the gullies and hills. A pale berm, like rope, ran all around a hill where a brick palisade was also going up, plus many canvas tents and awnings to shelter the hundreds of folk now living and working here. The reeve hall was little more than canvas barracks for the reeves and fawkners, with massive perches set like skeletal trees rising off into the wilderness over a distance too broad for her to measure.
An eagle plunged past, the reeve in its harness whipping a flag signal at her that she did not understand. Tumna kept going, heading for the mountains. Off to her right the sea spread flat with the sun’s light gilding the waters. Eihi! So beautiful!
The winds rumbled at crosscurrents as they rose over the foothills, heading straight into the black clouds. Thunder muttered above the mighty peaks. Lighting spiked.
“I don’t—! I don’t—!”
She had no cursed idea what to do; she was at the raptor’s mercy, likely to get her head ripped off or—
She screamed as Tumna folded her wings and plunged down, down, down, wind shrieking in her ears. The wings unfurled, and they jerked up hard and Nallo began to laugh and sob together as the raptor found another rising stream of air and they sailed up along the face of the massive peaks of the thunderheads until the hair on her neck rose.
A dazzling form of blue light—not lightning—sizzled into being an arrow’s shot away. It winked, and vanished.
Winked back, and vanished.
Winked back, and vanished.
All in the space of her taking in a shocked and heaving breath and letting it out.
The hells! It had eyes, of a kind, and it was looking at her.
It winked into being, and it boomed—like a laugh!—and vanished.
Tumna cut right, and they beat away from the face of the storm and glided down on the winds running before it. They dipped toward a valley cut deep into the foothills. Threads of light spun where a waterfall spilled over a cliff to cut a pool. A stream gushed through luxuriant vegetation. That same prickling feeling crawled on her skin, as though they were about to plunge back into the storm, but instead Tumna swept a wide turn and headed back toward the east. The sea glimmered in the distance. Nallo could not spot the settlement, but a strange web of light sparked to their left where two rocky hills joined in a saddle. Tumna swooped, and thumped down on the bare ground of the saddleback ridge.
Nallo was still laughing and crying as she wiped her eyes and looked around. Wind roared over the span of earth. A pattern carved into the rock glittered, tracing a labyrinth. Aui! Her skin went cold and she thought she would faint.
The eagle had brought her to a Guardian’s altar.
“We can’t stay here, Tumna! It’s forbidden!”
On one side, an overhang offered shelter. Coals and ash smoldered in a fire pit, wood stacked neatly against one wall. Someone was living here, where all were forbidden to walk. All except Guardians.
“The hells! Move! Move!” She tugged on the uppermost jesses.
Tumna thrust, and they were up again, battered in the swirling currents, turning toward the sea. The winds fronting the storm buffeted them as they glided east, and once over the water the eagle had to beat her wings. It was getting dark, the setting sun occluded by the storm rolling out of the Spires. She banked, and ahead Nallo saw the flickering lights of watch fires and of scattered lamps and torches being lit against the gloom.
They sailed in over the settlement, and with a dainty dip Tumna landed by the reeve quarters. Nallo pulled her feet up out of reflex and, slowly, lowered herself within the angle of the harness to stand, legs shaking, on earth.
She swayed there, dazed, as folk called and Arda came out with a pair of fawkners to tend to the bird. They unhooked her and led her, unresisting and unable to speak, to a big tent covered in canvas, just in time, because rain began to fall, drumming on the taut canvas roof. Nallo hoped that everyone working in the conduit was out for the night but she didn’t say so because she could not talk.
Arda sat her down on a bench and handed her a cup. The sharply spiced cordial scalded her throat. She coughed, blinking away tears.
Reeves—mostly young men and a few women and older men—came running in under cover. Out beyond the roped-back entrance a stocky black-haired young man who looked remarkably like one of the Qin soldiers—only he was dressed in reeve’s leathers—was speaking with evident intensity to a pair of black-clad Qin soldiers. They shrugged and turned away, leaving him alone in the rain while everyone else laughed and talked around plank tables set up as an eating hall.
“You don’t have to fly again if you choose not to.” Arda poured cordial from a pitcher into the empty cup and sipped.
“I—I—I saw—” She wiped rain from her brow and blinked as another pair of lamps flared. The gods! This place was lit like they had oil to spare, and surely they did. Thunder boomed. “I saw a fireling, just like in the tales. It boomed, like thunder only so much smaller. Like it was laughing at me.”
Nallo hadn’t thought she could say anything that would surprise that competent woman, but the trainer’s face went blank as she blew out breath between pursed lips. “Eihi!”
“You don’t believe me!”
“Don’t snap at me! I’m shaking my head because I do believe you. Here, now.” Her gaze slipped away and her eyes narrowed. “What’s he doing here?”
Nallo turned.
Volias sauntered up. “Greetings of the day to you, too, my darling Arda.” He made a gesture of rudely passing a kiss before turning to Nallo. “Listen, Nallo, I have a proposition.”
“Volias,” said Arda with a sour grimace, “why you think she’d be interested in your ugly—”
“Neh, neh, not that kind of proposition. I’m not Joss, am I? Listen, Nallo.” With a bright grin, like Jerad when he’d caught a fish, he straddled the bench, grabbed the cup out of Arda’s hand, and drained it in one go. “Whew!” He screwed up his mouth, squinting. “That’s strong stuff!” He set down the cup. “Listen, Nallo, I know you’re angry about Joss and how he handled things, so I had a talk with the commander in Clan Hall. Plus in addition this trouble with Pil has got to be solved, so—”
“What are you doing here?” demanded Nallo.
He shut his mouth, ceased talking, and flushed.
Arda smirked. “Heard we’d tracked Tumna, did you, Volias?” She looked at Nallo. “He’s been flying in and out of Argent Hall for weeks now, riding messages down from Clan Hall. He has become a pest, always asking if there’s been any news of you and is anyone looking, like he thinks we’re cursed fools who can’t do a thing right. You followed me here!”
“I can’t help worrying,” muttered Volias without looking up. “Just like Joss to use too tight a rein. He must be honest in the very wrong way when maybe it would be better to let a person work things through with a bit of—I don’t know—”
“A bit of dishonesty?” asked Arda with a laugh.
Nallo didn’t know who to warm to, and who to snap at. “You knew, didn’t you?” she said to Arda. “That once I flew, I would want to fly again.”
Volias let out a whistle of breath. “So that’s how you did it.”
Arda said, “It does happen that way, often enough. How do you suppose I feel, Nallo? I’d have given anything to be chosen by an eagle. It’s all I ever wanted. But it never happened. So I’ve dedicated my life to training those lucky enough to be jessed.”
“To be slaves?”
She raised her hands, palms out, in the exact gesture she’d used to signal Tumna to lift. “I’m not treading that path, girl. Don’t even try me.”
Volias poured the last of the cordial into the cup and shoved it in front of Nallo. “You refuse to become a reeve because you say it’s like being forced to sell your labor as a slave. And yet you go ahead, so I hear, and sell your labor as a slave, working for the outlanders. So wouldn’t it make more sense to have remained a reeve, with autonomy, a hall filled with comrades, responsibility and authority?”
Nallo did not take the cup. “I myself chose to sell my labor. You at the hall—the marshal, everyone—made the choice for me.”
“We made no choice. The eagle made its choice.”
She shook her head. “Do you know how I got married? My father came up to me when I brought in the goats one afternoon and said, ‘Nallo, the clan has sealed a contract for you to marry a ropemaker in a village on the West Track. About ten days’ walk from here. You’ll leave tomorrow.’ ”
Arda shrugged. “A story heard a hundred times. How are you different from most other lads and lasses married out to benefit the clan?”
Volias picked up the cup, thought better of drinking, and set it back down, turning it halfway and leaving his hands cupped around its curve. “I can see you may have felt roped—heh—into a bad situation. But Arda is right, as much as I hate to admit it.” Arda rolled her eyes. “That’s how contracts are arranged between clans.”
She was boiling now, remembering the way her father had turned away with relief at finally being rid of her. “I didn’t even get to meet him beforehand. No one asked if it was what I wanted.”
“Was he cruel?” asked Arda suddenly. “Did he mistreat you?”
Volias pushed the cup closer to Nallo and removed his hand.
“No. He was a good man.” She picked up the cup and gulped down the cordial, glad of how the spicy aftertaste burned her mouth and made her eyes water. “The truth is, he got the worse part of the bargain, but he never said one word in complaint.”
“Ah,” murmured Volias.
“Ah! What’s that mean?”
“The hells! Just a way of making noise come out my throat. No need to rip my head off.” As soon as the words were out of
his mouth, he winced.
“A smooth talker,” said Arda, “which accounts for his success with women.”
Nallo said, “Tumna killed her reeve.”
“Yes,” said Volias. “And from everything I hear, he’d earned death. I am not a good man, not like your dead husband, may he rest beyond the Spirit Gate. But I do not fear Trouble.”
“These days everyone fears trouble,” said Nallo tartly.
“No, I mean, my eagle. Her name is Trouble. Now I admit she is a particularly good-natured bird, besides being as everyone acknowledges the most beautiful eagle known to be alive in the entire Hundred.”
Nallo laughed. “You’re boasting.”
Arda sighed.
“It is not boasting if it is true. Like that Qin captain. You have to admit his wife is a lovely creature.”
“I never saw her,” said Nallo, thinking of Avisha and the children, and finding another tear on her cheek.
“And by all accounts a canny merchant,” added Arda, “capable of twisting the knife with a smile and a compliment that makes you not even feel the pain. I think what Volias is saying is that no one could believe Trouble chose him when she could have had her pick of any decent person.”
Volias grinned, and Nallo saw that he cared nothing for what people said about him and Trouble, because he had her, and they didn’t. “Listen, Nallo. As I said, I have a proposition. I’m taking Pil back to Clan Hall to get his training. You come, too. Then you’re away from all this, and you can make up your own mind. I admit that Arda is the best trainer we’ve got, but Ofri’s experienced and cursed mellow, and a good man, for that matter.”
Arda propped her chin on a hand as she examined Volias with a frown. “What’s your angle?”
He wasn’t a handsome man, but when he wasn’t sneering, he had a nice face. “Get her away from Joss. He’s the one who put her back up.”
“You two must give up your feud. It bores the rest of us.”
He turned a shoulder to Arda and fixed so warm a gaze on Nallo that she tried another swallow just to get the cup between her and his face. Arda reached across the table and patted Nallo’s other wrist, stroking it teas-ingly, and Nallo shifted, feeling in that touch a promise that pleased her.