Black Wings Beating

by Alex London

  He picked up the logbook, a quill, and a pot of pokeberry ink and quickly jotted in some missing weights and feeding data for each of the birds. He made up what he couldn’t remember. It was a fraud, sure, but harmless. No falconer who was serious would take a logbook at face value, and a falconer who wasn’t serious wouldn’t know if the logs were a little off anyway.

  He blotted the ink and put the book back. His glove and a few spares hung on pegs beside the birds. The extra gloves were in case potential clients with more bronze than sense showed up without gloves of their own. If they had a noble buyer, Brysen would take the bird outside and let it fly, using one of the lures to get it to dive, to demonstrate its speed and accuracy.

  He’d tried to train each hawk and falcon to wait on, which meant circling overhead until given the signal to hunt, but he’d never been much good at it. Even with Dymian’s help.

  “I guess you’ll have to stick around to teach me the right way,” Brysen always said.

  “I think you’re not learning on purpose just to keep me around,” Dymian always replied, teasing him. Sometimes their training for the day ended then and there. Those were Brysen’s favorite days.

  Brysen wished it were true that he was pretending to be bad at it, though. The sad fact was he really did want to get better. He just couldn’t focus on the finer details. He got impatient easily, and distracted. How could the techniques come so naturally to his sister, who hated everything about falconry except getting paid, when he wanted so badly to be great at it and always fell just short? Weren’t they twins? Weren’t they supposed to share everything? And what kind of a scuzzard did it make him to resent her talents instead of focusing on his own? Self-loathing wasn’t a solitary hunter. It formed a flock with every unkind thought it could find, and then, like crows, they mobbed.

  Brysen stepped out of the dim tent to clear his head in the morning air. He glanced down the avenue to his left. Nothing but hawkers’ tents. To his right, the same. Straight across from them was Dupuy’s Equipery, selling lures and perches, boxes and ropes, gloves and hoods. He hadn’t realized they were so close. That couldn’t have been an accident.

  Behind his wooden table, Nyall was in gleeful negotiation with Kylee for the high-end boxes they sold to carry birds in. He was smiling and gesturing, no doubt trying to turn Kylee’s desperate attempts to pay him in bronze into the promise of a walk along the Necklace instead. Male hawks pursuing females with shrill cries and tail-waggle twirls were more dignified.

  “Ymal the Cask-Breaker’s Guide to the Sighting and Capture of the Ghost Eagle?” A pinch-faced scholar in a ragged cloak and vest shoved himself directly in front of Brysen. “I’ve three au-then-ti-ca-ted fragments here, straight from the latest ar-chae-ol-og-i-cal dig on the southern slopes beside the Sky Castle. Leg-i-ble and le-git-i-mate, sky’s honor.”

  The man had the accent of a North Uztari, overpronouncing words he could’ve said simply. He flashed three weather-worn and moth-eaten scraps of parchment from under his robes.

  “Ymal tells in his own hand of two unknown eyries where the ghost eagle makes its home and six sure tricks for catching one.”

  “Six?” Brysen stared at the man. “Who’d need more than one?”

  “One to catch the beast”—the man leaned in conspiratorially and smirked—“and five to survive the en-count-er.”

  The market was lousy with parchment dealers like this. They sold counterfeit scraps of paper claiming to be the original, firsthand knowledge of the great trappers of the past. At best, any fool who bought one would find himself on some cold cliffside no closer to wealth and glory than if he’d stayed home sipping dandelion wine in the nude. At worst, he’d end up with a lonely sky burial. The trade in false trapper’s manuscripts was expressly forbidden and was, therefore, thriving.

  “Your moth holes are too even,” Brysen told him, pointing to the shabby papers. The man’s brow furrowed. “Moths don’t nibble perfect rounds.” Brysen knew a lot about moth holes. “Looks like you made them with … what? A leather awl?”

  The man pulled his hand back from Brysen’s shoulder as if he’d been burned. “How dare you accuse me of—”

  Brysen shrugged. “My head hurts too much to accuse you of anything,” he said. “But peddle your bird droppings someplace else, or you’ll find out where else a man can stick a leather awl.”

  The scholar’s whole body became a frown, and he huffed away into the crowd. He’d surely find a buyer by the end of the day but not a Six Villager. They knew the only true tales of ghost eagles were told over cups of milk stout and vats of hunter’s leaf. The truth never allowed itself the insult of being written down where any old moth could eat it.

  At that moment, an Uztari kyrg on horseback clomped down the road with his retinue of servants behind him. He wore the purple and green of his clan. His robe, intricately embroidered with gold stitching, glimmered against his amber skin. He needn’t have dressed so finely. On his arm perched a massive gilded eagle, unhooded but perfectly serene.

  Only nobles could afford a bird like that. One so calm had clearly been trained well. A gilded eagle could take down a deer on the open plain or knock a mountain goat to its death. They posed a danger even to men, and to march one unhooded through the shrieking crowd on market day was the towering height of arrogance.

  A little boy, one of the village urchins who cleaned droppings for a bronze chip a day, was playing with a finch on a string, swinging it high to catch bugs. He wasn’t paying attention and he wandered right out into the middle of the road, the small bird flying into the horse’s face.

  The horse reared. The eagle on the kyrg’s arm shrieked and bated, diving away, but he was tethered by strong leather jesses, so he flipped upside down, pulling the kyrg with such force that he almost fell out of his saddle.

  “You vermin!” the kyrg yelled, regaining control of his eagle and his horse. “I should have you flayed!”

  The boy squatted, covering his head and cowering while his finch flew off. “I’m … I’m … I’m…”

  He couldn’t even get an apology out before one of the kyrg’s servants was off his own horse, grabbing the boy by the shirt and lifting him one-handed. From his other hand he unfurled a six-talon whip, a wooden handle with six leather strands off the end, each tipped with a small curved talon. Another innovation the Six Villages had given Uztari civilization. The talons on this whip were from a merlin, one of the littlest falcons. If the six-talon whip had been tipped with eagle talons, the boy would’ve been torn to shreds. As it was, he’d be scarred. Brysen shuddered.

  “Hey! Symon!” he shouted, inventing a name for the boy as he made his way over. He grabbed one of the pigeon crates from his tent as he walked. Hopefully, the boy was smart enough to play along. “Why are you bothering these fine gentlemen?”

  “I … I’m not Sy—” the boy spluttered, terror-stricken eyes fixed on the talon tips of the whip.

  “Sorry, sers,” Brysen said to the servant and his master. “My little brother is a fool, and, I’ll tell you, Mother will flay him mercilessly when she gets back from her master’s hunt.”

  “Your mother is on a hunt?” the servant asked with some skepticism. He had a wide face with thin lips bent into a sneer and wore his long hair pulled back tight. “During the market?”

  “Yes, ser. She’s the bait keeper for Yaga Verosan of the river-bend pasture. She’s been on the hunt for a month but returns today. I will tell her of my little brother’s stupidity and, wow, will this baby scuzzard suffer!”

  The boy hung from the servant’s grip like meat on a hook.

  “You don’t look like brothers,” the servant said. The boy’s ruddy complexion gave away the lie pretty plainly.

  Brysen dropped his head to his feet with a feigned look of shame while he hunted a better lie. “My mother has a fondness for her Altari master…,” he said. “My little brother is her only legitimate heir. I’m—”

  “The Altari’s village bastard,” the ky
rg laughed.

  Brysen had made up Yaga Verosan’s name, of course, but the Uztari kyrgs were bound by noble duty to show grudging respect to the elevated rulers of the grassland plains, where Altari were allowed to rule as long as they tithed doubly to the Sky Castle. This kyrg would have no interest in following up on some village bait keeper and her affair with a minor land-keeping noble. It was a gamble on Brysen’s part.

  “Why don’t I give you a nice snack for your fine eagle, there?” Brysen held up the pigeon box. “My gift and apology. Of course, if you’d rather have him whipped, I understand completely. I sometimes whip him myself just for fun. He’s so used to it, he doesn’t even cry anymore, although I bet you could bring out a tear or two if you tried hard enough.”

  The boy whimpered at the thought.

  “Pffft,” the kyrg muttered. The servant set the boy down and took the pigeon. “Hardly worth our time.” He gave Brysen a withering up-and-down glance. “It is too bad his father had no sons,” he said, and the kyrg’s retinue rode on.

  “My name’s Rhyme,” the little boy said through a quivering lip.

  “Like a poem?” Brysen smiled and squatted down in front of him. The boy nodded. “And I’m Brysen,” he said. “Listen, you’ve got to watch where you’re going on a day like today. That kyrg could’ve killed you if he’d wanted to.”

  “I didn’t mean to scare his eagle,” Rhyme sniffled.

  “I know.” Brysen cleared his throat. He took a piece of candied ginger from his pocket. He’d hoped to use it to settle his stomach later, when last night’s mistakes came back to haunt him, but he pressed the candy into the boy’s hand instead. “You have a home?”

  Rhyme nodded.

  “Is it safe? You stay there?”

  The boy nodded again.

  “Okay, run off home then,” Brysen said. “And don’t come back to the market. Stay out of sight and you’ll be fine. He’ll forget about you as soon as his bird takes a crap on his shoe.”

  Rhyme smiled. Brysen ruffled his hair and sent him running.

  As he turned back toward the tent, his sister’s friend Vyvian nodded at him from the corner of another tent. She had a pigeon in her hand, a message tied to its ankle, and she let it fly. Then she shook her head at him sadly.

  “What?” he called over to her.

  “You know who that was?”

  “The kid?”

  “The kyrg.”

  “I’ll leave politics to you, Vy,” he said. “I’m a lover, not a schemer.”

  “Be careful, Brysen,” she told him. “The former doesn’t protect you from the latter. Clouds are rolling in.”

  7

  Brysen pulled the flaps open for the morning’s business to begin and pushed Vyvian’s ominous warning out of his head.

  “That was twice as stupid as it was brave, and it was incredibly brave.” Dymian’s voice startled Brysen from the back of the tent.

  “I’m not much for math.” Brysen turned to him. “How’d you get in here without me seeing you?”

  “I slipped in from behind,” Dymian said.

  Brysen was about to make a joke, but Dymian didn’t look in the mood. His cheeks were shadowed with light-brown stubble, and there were dark circles around his eyes. There was a bruise on his forehead only partly covered by his hair.

  “That kyrg with the eagle was Kyrg Yval Birgund,” Dymian told him. “Defense counselor at the Sky Castle.”

  “Well, he was also an arrogant dirt biter who hurts little kids,” Brysen told him. “I should’ve turned the whip on him.”

  “You’d have been dead before your body hit the ground, but still…” Dymian smiled. “I admire your pluck.”

  “My pluck?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “A killer in the pit, a hero in the streets,” Dymian cooed. “A little of both in between the sheets…”

  Brysen’s chest tightened, and he felt the blood rush to his head. The blood rushed everywhere. “Wasn’t sure if you’d show up today,” he told his trainer casually, fearing his heartbeat might start an avalanche.

  “I need to talk to you.” Dymian glanced at the tent opening. “Privately?”

  “On market day?” Brysen shook his head. “Everybody’s watching everybody. Vyvian Sacher just sent a pigeon about me, I think.” Dymian bit his lower lip, frowned. Brysen didn’t like this timid version of his trainer. “Hold on.”

  He closed the tent flaps, giving his sister a gesture across the way that it’d only be for a moment. Kylee held her hands up at him and shook her head, her jaw hanging open.

  Once the tent flaps fell shut, he turned around in the dim light filtering through the canvas. Dymian crossed the space and stood before him, so close that Brysen had to look up for their eyes to meet. The hawk master put his hands on Brysen’s shoulders.

  “I want to apologize for yesterday,” he said. “I know you saw that I bet against you.”

  Brysen swallowed.

  In stories, people said they were dumbstruck by love, but those storytellers knew nothing. Love didn’t make you dumb; it made you too smart, too quickly. In the span of a breath, a person in love could imagine everything they should say and its opposite, every tone of voice they could use and why each one was a mistake. They could weigh every word and analyze every gesture. He was not great at math, but Brysen could calculate the emotional trajectory of an eyebrow and the infinite combinations of two lips touching, and the knowledge stuck his tongue. A person in love was paralyzed by the brilliance of their own longing.

  “Whatever,” his voice cracked out.

  Yeah, the instant genius of the lovestruck sounded a lot like stupidity.

  He tried to add a shrug, but Dymian took the gesture wrong and pulled him against his warm chest, gripping him tightly. Brysen was glad the hawks were hooded on their perches. They’d sense the riot beneath his skin and start shrieking.

  “I know it bothered you,” he whispered into Brysen’s hair. “It’s what’s so great about you. ‘Your heart’s a wing, a feather-fragile thing.’”

  Brysen laughed. “You’re a poet now?”

  “It’s from the Epic of the Forty Birds,” Dymian told him.

  “Never read it.”

  “It’s amazing. I’ll read it to you one day. The first hawk knows there is more to the world than she has seen but can’t discover it all alone. She has to unite all the birds, one by one, hearing each of their stories before they can fly off together in search of the truth of the world. How have you not read our founding epic?”

  Sometimes being with Dymian made Brysen forget he was just some Six Villages hawker’s kid. And other times, it reminded him. “I didn’t have tutors or schooling like you did,” he said. “I learned what I learned when I learned it.”

  “Of course,” Dymian said sweetly, and brushed a lock of Brysen’s gray hair from his forehead. When Dymian touched his head, it didn’t feel ash-heap gray. It felt like pure silver. “And you always amaze me by how much you do know. More than you give yourself credit for.”

  Brysen smiled. It was a lie, obviously, but still, it was a kind lie, and he loved that someone like Dymian would make the effort to lie a smile onto his lips. The truth was rarely kind, so why not let a lovely lie linger?

  “Anyway, I’m sorry about yesterday,” Dymian repeated. “I had no choice. I needed some money, fast, and … well, I thought you were outmatched by that long-hauler. I should’ve told you to let Shara loose and take a loss safely.”

  “Told me to?” Brysen pulled away. How was it that the person who could launch you to the clouds was the same one who could snare you to the ground? “I make my own choices, D. I’m not some harem boy you can boss around. You don’t tell me what to do.”

  “I know. I know. I’m sorry.”

  Dymian should have been snapping back at him, or making a crude joke about harems, or knocking him down into the dirt right there in the center of the tent, pinning Brysen beneath him, telling him a thing or two that might be fun … but instead,
he just said, again, “I’m sorry.”

  “What’s going on?” Brysen demanded. “You’re worrying me here.”

  “It’s nothing, Bry. Really. I just owe the Tamirs some money.”

  “Everyone owes the Tamirs some money,” Brysen grunted.

  “More money than I have right now…”

  “Oh … well … do you need an advance on your pay?” Brysen suggested. “With my winnings yesterday and the market on, we’re about to pay off everything we owe them anyway. Kylee won’t be happy about it, but I’m sure we could throw in some extra for you.”

  “Kylee hates me,” Dymian said.

  “She hates that I like you,” Brysen corrected him. “But she likes me. She’ll do it if I ask her to. I am, technically, her older brother.”

  “By about half a chime of the bell on a falcon’s ankle,” Dymian laughed. “And I’ve got a few seasons on both of you. I shouldn’t be asking you for money.”

  “I respect my elders.” Brysen grinned. “Let me help you. When we’re on the road together, we’ll be splitting costs evenly anyway…”

  Dymian laughed and pulled him by the belt until there was no air between them. “It’s just—” He lowered his eyes to the floor. “It’s not only bronze. Last night, I promised Goryn Tamir that I’d—”

  “Oh, how sweet!” The tent flaps opened with a slash of light. “A tender moment between a fledgling and his mama bird. You gonna feed a worm into his mouth now?”

  Brysen’s head snapped around to see five big silhouettes in the opening. The central figure carried a hawk on his arm while the other four held sturdy leather clubs. They lumbered inside and let the flaps fall behind them. The perched hawks sensed the change in energy, perhaps sensed the arrival of the new bird on the glove, and shifted on their feet.

  “Ser Goryn, I was going to find you later,” Dymian said.

  The man in the middle of the group laughed and pulled a small piece of bloody meat from his pocket. He held it up to his bird’s beak, then pulled it away, leaving his gyrfalcon hungry and keen for a kill. Her feathers were white and silver, her beak a razor-sharp, pearl-white hook. She was bred for snowy mountain hunting, not foothill and brush like the short-tailed hawks most folks in the Villages had. Goryn liked her because blood from a kill would glisten bright red against her perfect, pearlescent feathers. She was an expensive predator bred for luxurious violence.