A Blight of Blackwings

by Kevin Hearne

  I hoped they could swim. Even those that could, I realized, might not make it. They still had to fight the tide and the cold and the shock of being attacked by a kraken, followed by the shock of being saved by one.

  Something Fintan said finally got through to me as we ran. “Kaelin save me, but it was so fast,” he breathed. “Those arms just rose up and—wham!”

  I understood his surprise. I’d always thought krakens wrapped their arms around a ship and pulled it under the surface in a sort of deadly, watery hug, but instead what they did was just slap them down, creating a nearly instant shipwreck. And once the sailors were in the water, the kraken obviously had little trouble finding them. In the normal course of events, they would have been gathered up and fed to a cavernous beak.

  We kept running to close the distance and help whoever made it to shore. Two sodden figures crawled out of the surf as we approached. They staggered to their feet and cast their eyes back at where their ship had been. They looked for other crew members fighting against the surf. And then they turned and saw us coming and they screamed, their voices indicating that they were women. I’m not sure if their reaction was because of the giants or because of Murr running alongside me. Each of them had two daggers tied to their belt and they pulled both of them out, adopting a stance that was quite clearly defensive and something they’d been trained to do. One of the daggers was straight-edged, and one was serrated.

  “Hold up,” I said, halting my advance and raising my hands. “We’re freaking them out a bit. Murr, please sit here next to me so they don’t think you’re hungry.”

  “Yeah,” Fintan agreed. “Let’s look friendly.” He called up to the Hathrim. “Karlef and Suris, try to seem tiny and nonthreatening.”

  “Are you joking?” Suris said. Then to Karlef, “Is he joking?”

  Karlef and Suris were armed. We all were, with daggers at least. But they remained in their sheaths as we tried to communicate that we meant the women no harm and in fact we wanted to help. We said as much, but the women didn’t seem to understand us. The few words they spoke sounded like nothing I’d ever heard either.

  “Fintan, do you know what they’re saying?”

  “I have no idea. That’s not a language from this continent. They’re not from this continent. I mean, look at them.”

  I was looking. Their skin was similar to mine, except that where mine was a warm coppery hue, theirs had cool undertones to it. High cheekbones. Hair jet-black like that of Nentians, though they had theirs braided and pinned underneath maroon mesh caps hemmed in gold thread. The fact that they were still on top of their heads after that ordeal meant they must take extraordinary measures to secure them with pins and twine or something. They wore dark-blue jackets with gold buttons, and the lapels were edged in maroon that matched their hats. Their pants had a maroon stripe down the outside of the leg, and they wore knee-high leather boots tanned to a reddish brown.

  They were disciplined. As more sailors crawled out of the Northern Yawn, exhausted and dripping, they immediately saw their crew confronting us and rushed over to back them up. We were soon outnumbered, facing a phalanx of desperate sailors with knives that they very clearly knew how to use.

  Fintan observed aloud something about the crew that was unusual—apart from the fact that they weren’t like any people we’d ever heard of before. “They’re all women,” he noted. “An all-woman crew of sailors from an undiscovered country, each wearing two long daggers. This is turning out to be a spectacularly interesting day.”

  They were having their own conversation as we had ours. It became clear that they were deferring to one in particular, who had a design of wavy lines embroidered in gold thread on her hat but was otherwise dressed identically to the others. This one sheathed her knives and stepped forward, looking at me. I don’t know why she thought I was the leader. Maybe it was because of Murr.

  She nodded once, then tapped her chest twice, just below the collarbone. “Koesha,” she said.

  I repeated the gesture and said, “Abhi,” hoping that she was telling me her name and not demanding that I give her all my worldly goods or something.

  The bard picked up on this and did the same, introducing himself as Fintan. The Hathrim were quick studies and followed suit.

  Koesha pointed at each of us in turn and repeated the names, getting them a little wrong but close enough. We nodded and smiled and then she pointed at the bloodcat, raising an eyebrow in question.

  “Murr.” I knelt next to my friend and pointed at the woman. “Murr, this is Koesha. Will you please nod your head at her, or maybe raise a paw to say hello? That will show her you are friendly.”

  He did both, and a hushed whisper of awe and surprise trilled through the sailors. A couple of them visibly shivered.

  I stood again and hugged myself, pantomiming a shiver. “Cold, yes? You should get warm. Will you come with us to camp?” I pointed toward the river mouth and the others quickly did the same, making various gestures to encourage them. Koesha watched us for a moment, taking in our expressions and body language, and then turned her back on us to face the others. She gave an order and the daggers disappeared.

  Spinning around, she said my name and some other things after it and projected her right arm forward, palm up. It was the equivalent of “lead the way.”

  There were about thirty of them, all told, shivering there on the beach and dripping with salt water. They had lost who knew how many of their crew in the attack but had yet to show any grief.

  That would come to them later, I knew. Grief could be delayed, but it always demanded its time.

  Karlef ran ahead to inform Olet that we were coming with some unexpected guests.

  I smiled at Koesha and tried to include everyone in my welcome. “Come on, Murr. Let’s head back,” I said. As I turned with the bloodcat toward what would be first a camp and later a city, I realized that Eep had missed all the excitement with her scouting mission to the island. Perhaps she’d found something intriguing there too.

  * * *

  —

  The Raelech bard switched his seeming directly to Koesha Gansu without comment.

  I pushed it too far. A week of sailing madly along the northern coast, always searching the shore for wreckage—Maesi’s or anyone else’s—and not a clue. Over another glass of wine, this time at midday, Haesha reminded me that it was time to turn back, using the timeline I’d set myself. My face must have revealed my thoughts.

  “Look, I know you want to find your sister or a northern passage,” she said. “But we’re in dangerous territory here. Consider that returning home when no one else has is going to be a victory in itself. We can tell everyone that this continent exists and that something in the north has obviously taken our ships. But what might lie to the south? I bet no one has even gone that way, since we’ve all been looking for a northern passage.”

  I snorted. “I bet you’re right.”

  “Let’s come back next year and go south. You’ll have no shortage of women volunteering to go once you demonstrate that you’ll bring them home again and they’ll be rewarded. Everyone wins.”

  “That’s wisdom,” I said, defeated. “Very well. So be it.”

  But then Leisuen knocked on the door and reported that an island had been spotted from the crow’s nest. I immediately lobbied for a quick look at that, and Haesha sighed and agreed.

  “I’ll tell the crew we’re looking at the island and then turning around.”

  “Fair enough.”

  And minutes later, three enormous tentacles shot up from the sea and clobbered my beautiful ship to flotsam. I immediately lost two-thirds of my crew—friends, classmates, many of them—and would have been lost myself if I’d been in the cabin. I was at the prow, however, trying to get a peek at this rumored island, so I was shortly in the coldest waters I’
ve ever felt and doubting my ability to survive it.

  When a tentacle wrapped around my torso, I thought the end had come, but then it didn’t. It lifted me to the surface, dangled me briefly over the sea, and dropped me back in, letting me swim to land.

  And then, on this alien shore, we few survivors met the strangest group of people I’ve ever seen. Two giants with yellow hair and blue eyes, pale skin weathered by the sun; a brown-skinned man with a huge beak of a nose, some kind of jeweled band circling his right arm, and a stringed musical instrument strapped to his back; and an astoundingly pretty young man who looks the most like us, with long dark hair and skin a warmer tone than ours, accompanied by a huge but apparently trained cat with disturbing red eyes.

  We now trudge after them to some unknown location, shivering with cold in our wet clothes. I don’t see a city or anything like it on the shore ahead, but they appear confident that they’re leading us to someplace better.

  “Do you trust these people?” Haesha asks me.

  “No. But we have absolutely nothing except what’s on our backs and belts. Our choices are to hope for their generosity or, failing that, take what we need.”

  “What do we need, Zephyr?”

  I search her face for a challenge and find one there, but not the mutinous kind. It’s the sort that a friend gives to clarify your thinking.

  “We need to get warm and then secure food and shelter. We need to mourn the lost. And then we need to get home somehow. We can do that by making friends or by fighting. I’d prefer to make friends.”

  Haesha nods. “Aye, Zephyr.”

  We trudge a few steps in silence and then I mutter, “Go ahead and say it.”

  “You think I’m going to say we should have turned around?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. You were right. Look at what we’ve found.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Krakens guard the northern passage. This place—this is where they go every summer. That’s why no one has ever made it around the world.”

  I recognize the truth of it. “So the krakens took Maesi.”

  “Yes. And every ship before hers. And us too, though somehow we’re not dead yet.”

  “And there are giants here.”

  “And red-eyed mega-kittens.”

  “And so much more. Joabei knows nothing of these things. We must get home.”

  “Yes. Somehow.”

  After another few moments and an involuntary chattering of my teeth, I add, “One step at a time. We will get there.”

  I’ve been trying not to think about the lost crew. It’s almost easy right now, since we still have our own skins and these strange people to worry about. But there will be a quiet time ahead, a space in between our gasping breaths of just trying to survive, and then the grief, waiting its turn, will step in and spread itself out.

  We will build a grand mourning tunnel for the lost, on the shore where we crashed. If we can fashion one, that is. Perhaps a hollowed-out bough will serve in lieu of fired clay, so that the wind can howl through it and keen for their lives. And inscribed on the base will be the individual names of our crew, as well as the names of Maesi and the captains of all the other ships we found carved into that rock in the west.

  “Not everyone is going to agree that you made the right decision,” Haesha added, interrupting my thoughts.

  “I’d be surprised if they did,” I replied. “I’ll try to make it right. And make sure that they all get home.”

  The handsome lad with the huge cat turns out to have another friend: A raptor of some kind, feathers the color of sand, spirals in from the north and lands on his forearm before leaping nimbly to his shoulder. It’s a gorgeous creature, with longer legs than most birds of prey I’ve seen, and while its feathers and wing shape don’t look built for speed, it does appear to have the silent flight adaptations of an owl.

  Falconry in the traditional sense is not all that surprising. But when the boy starts talking to the bird and it seems to reply via shakes or nods of its head, just as the cat did, I realize I’m not looking at a mere animal trainer here. There’s something more going on. What was his name again?

  “Obbeet?” I say, hoping that I’m getting it right.

  He turns around, face expectant. I ask him if he’s talking to the bird, pointing at it with one hand and making gabbling motions with the other.

  He nods and says a word that might mean yes in his tongue. Then he introduces me in a roundabout way. He points first to himself and says, “Abhi,” which means I’d gotten it wrong but was close. He points at me next and says my name correctly, increasing my embarrassment, then points at the bird and says, “Eep.”

  I raise my fist in greeting and bow my head, hoping I’m not making a fool of myself. “Hello, Eep.” Abhi says something in his language—which I rather like the sound of, honestly, unlike some other languages from our part of the world—and the bird cocks its head at me, blinks, bobs its head a couple of times, and makes a noise that sounds remarkably like “Eep,” its name. The boy turns and smiles at me, and it’s kind and welcoming, not malicious or making fun. So I have done the right thing. And this boy, Abhi, can apparently talk to birds and cats.

  “Zephyr, is that kid talking to animals?” Haesha says. “I’m only asking to make sure I’m not hallucinating.”

  “I think he is.” A sudden thought makes my jaw drop, and I am left desperate to figure out how to ask him this question. He sees I want to communicate something and frowns. We both look down at the ground at the same time. There’s no wood at all on the shore, but there are plenty of rocks. I bend to pick one up and kneel in the sand, gesturing to him to join me. He says something to Eep and the bird hops off his shoulder to stand on the ground, on the opposite side of the cat. Once the boy is kneeling next to me, with Haesha looking over my shoulder and the brown-skinned musician looking over his, I draw a wavy horizontal line in the sand with the rock’s edge and then do my best to sketch some kraken tentacles emerging from it. I drop the rock, point to the tentacles, and make the same gabbling motion with my other hand.

  “Did you talk to the kraken? Did you tell it to stop killing us?”

  “Good question,” Haesha says. “But he also might have told it to kill us in the first place.”

  “Maybe,” I say, but keep my eyes on the boy. He makes clear through his gestures, nodding and pointing and pressing his palm out, which I think means stop, that he indeed communicated with the kraken—intervened, I suppose. Picking up my rock, he draws a tentacle wrapped around a stick-figure human and indicates that he told the kraken to lift us out of the sea.

  “Sweet goddess,” Haesha says. She had seen the same gestures and interpreted them as I had. “He saved us? This absurdly pretty man who wears his beautiful hair down can talk to krakens and make them leave us alone?”

  “I think so.”

  “I would like to point out for the record that I saw him first.”

  Without thinking, I look up at her and laugh, because Haesha has been seeing men first as long as I’ve known her. But then I realize that our benefactors might think we’re having a joke at their expense. I turn back to Abhi, horror-struck, and feel the heat rise in my cheeks as I struggle to explain, even though I know he doesn’t understand a word I’m saying.

  “I wasn’t laughing at you,” I tell him, pointing at Haesha and shaking my head, hoping he’ll understand somehow.

  “Oh, shit!” Haesha cries, realizing we’ve spit into the wind. “Diplomatic fuckup!” She plops to her knees next to me and prostrates herself in apology, and I do the same. I hear the rest of our crew drop down and follow our lead, because when the zephyr and first mate do something, you damn well better do the same.

  Thank Shoawei and the twelve winds, I think they understand that we did not m
ean to insult them. Both Abhi and the brown-skinned man make noises, and when I peek up they’re encouraging us to stand, and they’re smiling. Even the giant man, way up near the sun, is smiling at us. He doesn’t look hungry, so that’s good. What was his name again? Karl-off? I am terrible at names. I think the brown fellow is Fin-tum.

  I nod at Abhi and shiver involuntarily as I get to my feet. It’s not warm up here in this northern air, and my wet clothes aren’t helping. They motion at us that we should continue on. They point ahead and say some words. It looks like they want us to go inland.

  We nod agreeably and follow. Haesha waits a few steps before saying anything.

  “Zephyr,” she whispers as the bird flies back up to roost on Abhi’s shoulder. “That man must be blessed with the fabled Sixth Kenning.”

  “It would appear so.”

  “A person who can talk to krakens can go anywhere they want. Sail any ocean at any time of year.”

  “True. Which makes me wonder why he’s here, of all places.”

  “Huh. That’s a good point. This is the most extraordinary day. The sort you’ll remember for the rest of your life, however long it lasts.”

  “Yes.”

  Haesha’s teeth chatter. “I am really fucking cold.”

  “That’s the name of our new club. Remember that.”

  We reach the mouth of a river that’s cut through some rather steep soft stone, and it looks like a rough climb to the top. You could call it a steep hillside or even a cliff and either one would be correct. Abhi points out that we’re going to scale it, and that’s when I have doubts that we’re being led to any kind of civilization.

  Baejan, the scout leader, says aloud what I’m thinking: “If these people live here,” she calls out, “why haven’t they carved some blasted steps into the side of this stupid cliff face?”