Black Wings Beating

by Alex London

  Victyr could never outrun them. He shouldn’t have sent his son off alone. His wife would never forgive Sylas for doing that. He wondered when she would be visited by the first of the mourners’ crows. Would she be in the Council of Forty when they came or at home, looking out over the bluffs and watching the black flock approach in maudlin formation, their tail whistles wailing as they descended to her? Would there even be anyone left to report his death and dispatch the crows?

  Desert vultures were already circling overhead. At least I’ll have a proper sky burial, he thought, unless they take my head too.

  Maybe our boy won’t be captured, he prayed. Maybe they’ll let him live.

  The Kartami rolled on like a wave, the blessed vultures diving to the feast left in their wake and carrying him into his eternal breeze bite by holy bite.

  BRYSEN

  DIFFERENT VEINS

  18

  They hiked for a full day up toward the blood birch forest, single file along knife-thin spurs of rock and on hands and knees up loose stone slopes. Brysen had to unleash Shara so she could follow on her own, flitting from boulder to boulder overhead. She flew back to him every few minutes, pecked nervously at his glove, and kept a wary eye on the owls, who each slept serenely on their Owl Mother’s fist as the sun burned down the day.

  When they reached the snow line, they stopped to stuff fur and feathers into their boots, then hiked on, crossing a series of ice bridges over deep gorges, until they finally reached the dim forest. They stopped in a clearing of skinny white trees. There were taps scattered among a few of their trunks, collecting the red sap, drop by drop, into jars. A few small boxes were nailed high up for fledgling owls. Nothing made a hoot, however. The forest was silent as the sun set behind the western slope, drenching them almost instantly in white darkness.

  Brysen knew his life, and therefore Dymian’s, depended now on the Owl Mothers who’d captured them. Not rescued—despite the unmistakable relief he felt at having not lost his head to those long-haulers—but captured. He was a prisoner, but the best path to the ghost eagle was through his captors. They knew where the ghost eagle hunted; they knew the best routes to its eyrie in the Nameless Gap. They were the key to his success, and they had come to him. He felt a rush of pride.

  His plan was still working, although it’d had a few surprises and a lot more violence than he’d hoped. Still, he could picture Dymian’s face awash with relief when Brysen strolled down the mountain with the giant black eagle secure in a net across his back. He could already hear the cheers from the battle boys and feel Dymian’s hot breath on his neck when they embraced. He was perched on the edge of glory. He’d be a hero! A legend! He’d probably be able to run the business without Kylee, if she still wanted to leave it. He could set her free, just like she wanted, and he’d be her hero, too. He could be everyone’s hero.

  “The covey will look after these two,” Üku said to Kylee, not deigning to pay Brysen any attention. It was going to be hard to bring her around to his cause if she wouldn’t even speak to him.

  “If I could just ask you a few—” he began, but the woman pursed her lips and held up a hand to silence him. She turned back to Kylee. “He’ll be safe with the covey. You’ll come with us for a while.”

  “Where’s the covey?” Brysen asked, trying hard to assert his right to speak. He looked for some kind of mews or cages where the Owl Mothers might keep a flock of birds, but he saw none. Just more bone-thin birches, their smooth trunks rising up the slope as far as he could see. Baby owl eyes blinked at him from boxes, and he slipped Shara’s hood over her head, then drove the small folding perch into the rough soil with his boot and leashed Shara to it. He didn’t want her shrieking or skying out when the owls roused themselves for the night. If she went after a baby owl, the parents wouldn’t be far behind. They’d make short work of a hawk like her, tough as she was.

  Üku looked at him but didn’t bother to answer his question.

  “I don’t want to leave them,” Kylee told her. “We’re on a journey together. We have to trap the—”

  “Shh,” Üku hushed her. “There will be time for that later.”

  Kylee looked at Brysen, uncertain. He hoped she’d be able to convince them to help. She’d made the biggest wrinkle in his plan. If she hadn’t come along, the Owl Mothers would have had no choice but to talk to him. As it was, he now had no choice but to let his sister do the talking while he stayed with the covey, whatever it was.

  “It’s fine,” Brysen reassured her. “Nyall and I will be fine. Just … you know, explain to them that I need their help, that I’ll do whatever they want, but that they have to help me. I’m trying to save someone’s life.” He looked at Üku. “Can you tell them that?”

  Üku glared at Brysen, obviously annoyed. One of the other Owl Mothers moved toward him, fist balled, but Üku raised a hand, stopped her.

  Her silver hair was shaved on the sides, so she had a kind of mane swooping from her forehead down between her shoulder blades. She was solidly built, and in her looks she was more mountain goat than bird. In his mind, he named her Goat Mother, but he didn’t dare say it aloud. He wasn’t stupid. She could break him in half and break those halves in half if she chose to.

  “We hear you,” she said coldly, raising a finger and pressing it to her cheek just below her eye again. Then she turned back to Kylee. “The covey will look after them with care while you have a talk with us. Come.”

  The Owl Mothers surrounded Kylee and moved her on up the slope, into the forest, leaving the boys alone in the clearing. Unguarded.

  “So, this is not what I expected would happen when I woke up this morning.” Nyall swiveled his head all around, looking at the taps in the trees, looking for footprints on the ground or the feathery remains of prey, the castings of undigested bone and fur that predators left behind—looking for any sign of this covey that was supposed to look after them. “Like, are baby owls guarding us from those boxes?”

  “We’re no baby owls,” someone said, and both boys whirled toward the sound.

  What they saw in front of them was not a bird. It was a boy, of sorts, yet there was something of an owl about him and something of a phantom. He was wide-eyed, white as powdered snow, and shirtless in spite of the cold mountain air. His stark-white skin was tight over his muscled chest and arms, which were tattooed with calligraphy that went from his left wrist all the way up his arm and halfway across his chest to his neck, then tapered down the left side of his rib cage to vanish below loose, feathered pants that draped over his hips. The feathers were the brown and white and gray of the owls, and he had a matching scarf over his shoulders. His feet were bare, and the left one was also covered in tattooed words. The markings looked something like the symbols of the Hollow Tongue on Brysen’s black-talon blade, but these were more intricate, ornate, and far more beautiful.

  The tattoos’ positions were also a mirror image of Brysen’s burn scars, hidden below his clothes. The coincidence made him flinch, more so than the sudden appearance of the phantom boy.

  “We’re the covey.” Beside this phantom appeared a larger, older, stronger boy, and then another beside him—a flock of them materializing from behind the trees and within the shadows of trees. All of them had words and symbols tattooed on their snow-white bodies. A few of the oldest ones were covered from head to toe in tattoos, while the youngest, little boy phantoms, had only a few marks on their slim wrists. Even the oldest of them was no more than Dymian’s age.

  “She yours?” The boy who’d first appeared gestured at Shara on her perch. Brysen nodded, still speechless. Then to Nyall, “You have one?”

  Nyall shook his head. He hadn’t brought a hawk with him. Wisely. Brysen feared he shouldn’t have brought Shara after all. The phantoms might feed her to an owl.

  “Relax,” the boy said. “You’re all safe here. We’re told to look after you, and we will. No lie.” Just like the Goat Mother, Üku, had done, the boy pressed his index finger to the chee
k under his eye. “You’re our guests. Make yourselves comfortable.”

  “So you’re the covey, huh?” Nyall asked.

  The boy grinned, his lips and gums flashing pink while his pale eyes shined. “Who’d you think we were?”

  Nyall looked at Brysen, and Brysen shrugged. The truth seemed the best approach here, so he offered it. “We honestly don’t have any idea what’s happening right now.”

  That provoked a round of laughter from the entire covey. “Right. Well, to explain: You’re guests of our Mothers until they decide what to do with you. So what’s happening now … is dinner.”

  He laughed and pointed Nyall and Brysen to a spot in the forest where two birch trees leaned together like a new couple holding each other up after too much wine, and the rest of the covey peeled off and climbed to it. As they stepped below the arch the trees made, they vanished underground.

  “Maybe they’re ghosts,” Nyall whispered.

  “Boo!” the boy said, laughing. “Maybe we are…” Suddenly, he burst into song:

  “To live and die, then live some more,

  without our bodies to come along,

  would be an awful wretched boor.

  What good is living without your don—”

  “What is going on?” Nyall whispered over the crude rhyme, but Brysen could only shake his head. He’d planned to make a plea for safe passage to the Owl Mothers this morning and be on his way toward the Nameless Gap by now. Instead, he was being invited to dinner by a group of rhyme-spouting mountain wraiths. He was losing time that he and Dymian didn’t have, but he picked up Shara and her perch and followed the boy toward the arched trees and the cave below.

  “You’re Nyall, eh?” the boy asked as he led them down the sloping path that cut into the mountain. “And you’re Brysen?”

  “How do you know our names?” Brysen stopped walking. Nyall bumped into him from behind, and the boy turned around, cocking his head.

  “You don’t recognize me?”

  “Why would we recognize you?” Nyall wondered.

  The boy shrugged. “We grew up together.”

  Brysen looked at the boy closely, searching for something familiar.

  “My name’s Jowyn,” the boy said. “I lived in the Villages until my legs were long enough to run.”

  “Jowyn?” Nyall gasped. “Jowyn Tamir?”

  The boy touched his finger to the skin below his eye again. “See for yourself.”

  Brysen looked him up and down. He had known Jowyn Tamir, Goryn’s younger brother. They were the same age. Sometimes they’d played bone dice together outside the Broken Jess while Brysen’s father gambled inside. Some days Jowyn had shown up with new bruises from his siblings. Some days Brysen had shown up with new ones from his father. Some days both of them had shown up wounded, but neither of them spoke about it. They hadn’t needed to. There were no secrets in the Six Villages, not even for little boys at playtime.

  And then one day Jowyn hadn’t come to play. He hadn’t come the next day, either. Rumor said he’d gotten ill. Goryn told everyone that he’d died of frost fever. The mourners’ crows came. Even Brysen’s father sent one to the Tamirs.

  Brysen saw it now, in the boy’s face. His coloring was different—an unnatural white—and his head was shaved, but he had those same broad Tamir features that his brother and sisters had. Goryn had lied. His little brother was standing right there in front of Brysen, transformed, but very much alive.

  “You’ve … uh … changed…,” Nyall noted.

  “New pants,” Jowyn said.

  They stared blankly at him, and then he exploded into laughter. He amused himself to no end.

  “Seriously,” he told them after he’d calmed down. “My brother and sisters would’ve carved me hollow before I grew my first armpit hair. I had to leave. I ran for the mountains, thought I could cross over, find the heroes of the old stories on the other side. But a little boy alone is no match for the winds of this world. I starved, mostly froze, and nearly broke every bone I had on the climb. After a full moon’s turning, I finally caught a vole in a snare. Just before I snapped its neck to eat it, the Mothers found me. They gave me a choice: Kill the little vole, eat, and be banished from their mountain … or spare it and carry on. I was near dead with hunger, but I let the vole go. The Mothers melted away like fog. It was another few days of brutal hunger and loneliness before they appeared again, offered me sanctuary, gave me sap from the blood birches to fortify me for the mountains.”

  “The sap did this to you?”

  “I did this to me,” Jowyn replied. “The sap was just the means. It bled me, broke me, battered and rebuilt me. Now I can walk barefoot on a glacier or roll nude in burning coals.”

  “Are you all runaways?” Brysen wondered.

  “Not all.” Jowyn didn’t offer any more explanation.

  “What’s with the tattoos?” Nyall asked.

  Jowyn looked down at his markings, ran his hand across his chest. “Gifts from the Mothers. There is a story in these mountains older than can be told, bigger than can be told by one teller. But we all get to tell parts of it—the truest parts we can. They write ’em down for us once we find them out for ourselves.”

  Brysen felt like his scars had tightened over his chest and side, pulling so hard that his bones might break out. What story did his burns tell? Whose story was it?

  They had reached the end of the passage. It opened into a large cavern, where the covey lounged in little groups all over the floor, sharing some sort of bright red beans served on large flatbreads they used as platters. The air smelled sweet with sweat and spice and smoke.

  Over their heads, the roots of the blood birches made a massive crimson filigree that arched across the ceiling. Torches burned along the stone walls, and mineral deposits in the stone made them sparkle like starlight. The far wall of the cavern had a large fire pit, with a stone chimney leading aboveground. A group of the youngest boys ran back and forth from the fire, bringing dinner to the older boys. They reached barehanded into the fire and carried red-hot clay bowls. None of them had so much as a scar.

  What would it be like, Brysen wondered, to have a body free of scars and skin impervious to wounds? Does that sap heal wounds that go deeper than skin?

  “So no women in the covey?” Nyall wondered, looking around. Brysen hadn’t thought to ask.

  Jowyn laughed again. “There are girls training with the Mothers. They come and go as they please. They’re always welcome, and we are always glad to see them. But we make do among ourselves just as well.”

  “Some of us more than others!” another of the pale phantoms laughed.

  Jowyn grinned and waggled his eyebrows. “A heart’s like a bird; who can tell a bird on which branch to land?”

  “We know which branch you like birds to land on!” the other boy shouted.

  “My branch is big enough for any bird who wants to perch on it,” Jowyn laughed.

  Nyall and Brysen looked at them, stunned.

  “What?” Jowyn chuckled. “You thought we’d be chaste as Crawling Priests up here?” He shook his head. “The sky makes rainbows same as clouds.”

  “So the Owl Mothers don’t … keep you here?” Brysen wondered, changing the subject away from the boys’ branches. His eyes were tracing the strange writing over Jowyn’s skin and the taut muscle beneath. Everything in his own body tightened further. He felt hot and, at the same time, ice-cold. Sweat beaded on his upper lip. He forced himself to look away.

  “Keep us?” Jowyn wrinkled his forehead. “It’s a gift to live on their mountain. It’s a gift to have the illusion of our differences blown away. Who runs away from a gift?”

  Brysen met Nyall’s eyes. If they weren’t prisoners, that meant Brysen and Nyall could just go. Jowyn, however, caught their glance.

  “Sorry, friends,” he said. “I should’ve been more clear. We aren’t kept here. You two … would not get very far if you tried to run.”

  “We just want to know
if his sister is okay,” Nyall pleaded. Brysen felt a stab of guilt. He hadn’t been wondering that at all.

  “Kylee is more than okay,” Jowyn told them. “She’s up with the Mothers. No sense worrying. Might as well eat.”

  They dug into the food and Brysen watched Jowyn carefully. If the Owl Mothers wouldn’t talk to him, maybe Jowyn would help him reach the ghost eagle’s eyrie, as long as Brysen didn’t mention that he planned to hand it over to the big brother who’d tried to kill Jowyn as a child. He might be hard to convince.

  Shara would need to eat something soon, but Brysen decided not to feed her yet. If she stayed hungry, she’d be able to help them fight when the time came. Maybe he couldn’t shed blood on the mountain, but not even an Owl Mother could stop a hawk who was keen for blood, and if Jowyn wouldn’t be an ally, then he could become a hostage. He made sure she was untethered to fly.

  19

  Brysen tore off a piece of the steaming flatbread and used it to scoop up the beans piled on the platter between Jowyn, Nyall, and himself. It smelled like a dish his mother used to make: heavy with mountain onion, sweetroot, and deep dirt chilies. His father would rage that there was no meat in it, but this version tasted thick and hearty and exploded with flavor. Something in the stew made his tongue tingle and his head feel light. As he ate, the dim room brightened. It felt like hunter’s leaf felt the first time but clearer, sharper, cleaner.

  He couldn’t get enough.

  “Eat slowly,” Jowyn warned. “It can be intense if you’ve never had it before.”

  “Had what?” Brysen asked, scooping up another mouthful.

  “There aren’t enough nutrients in the soil here, so we supplement with a little tree sap…”

  Brysen stopped with the glob of beans halfway to his mouth. His eyes widened at the pale boy. Brysen did not want to be broken, battered, and reborn as a phantom.

  Jowyn, who was never too long a walk from laughter, laughed again. “Don’t worry, a little of it isn’t going to change you. It’s how folks have survived up here since forever. You’d have to drink a lot more of it, fresh from the tree, to get as pretty as I am. And you’d need permission for that. Can’t suck the sap from any tree you please up here. Gotta ask first.” He winked, then slapped his knee at his own joke.