Black Wings Beating

by Alex London

  “You laugh a lot for someone living half-naked on a mountainside,” Nyall observed.

  “I wasn’t supposed to live at all,” he replied, not laughing. “My siblings wanted me dead; this mountain tried to kill me. But I still get to laugh because I’m alive. I get to laugh and cry and love and sing, and every time I do, I tell death she hasn’t got me yet.”

  “You learn that from the Owl Mothers?” Brysen asked.

  “I learned that”—Jowyn leaned forward—“by trying the other way for long enough, believing what the world told me about myself, and dying every day because of it. Up here, I learned that I get to tell the world about myself, not the other way around. You should try it, Brysen.”

  Brysen wanted to answer, to deny that he let anyone tell him how to feel, but he couldn’t quite find the words. Nyall could sense Brysen’s mood turning and changed the conversation. “Is it true that the trees only grow where someone’s been killed?”

  Jowyn touched the cheekbone below his eye.

  “What is that?” Brysen asked. “Why do you keep doing that?”

  “It’s a reminder to see,” he said. “If you’ve got eyes but won’t use them, you might as well not see. When something’s true and you don’t see it, you gotta look closer.”

  “So you’re saying it’s true about the trees?”

  “There was a war on this mountain.” Jowyn pointed to his wrist, where the strange words looped and tangled, crashed into each other.

  Brysen couldn’t read the words, but they looked like a war. As Jowyn spoke, he moved his finger up his arm, narrating the pieces of the story that were written in ancient calligraphy on his skin. “The people who think they’re Uztari fought here against the people who think they’re Altari, before either of them had those names for themselves. Sky-bound, Mountain-bound. The war made the words. The two peoples named themselves for what they yearned for. They believed the lie that what you want is who you are. But death doesn’t care what you want. These slopes ran red with the blood of men, women, and children who wanted to be alive but died anyway. Every death fed the seed of a tree, and the forest grew from murder’s soil.”

  He touched his shoulder, where the lines of the text ran vertically, like the trunks of the blood birch trees.

  “Yeah, but those are just stories,” Nyall told him. He showed his own tattoo, the line of the old poem. The tattoo that had seemed so ornate down in the Villages suddenly looked paltry and plain beside Jowyn’s. “It doesn’t mean they’re real.”

  “The forest is real,” said Jowyn. “The struggle between Uztari and Altari is real. What makes the story not real?”

  “It’s just something people made up to explain the world,” Nyall explained. “It didn’t happen.”

  “So everything that’s real must happen?” Jowyn touched beneath his eye again. “What’s the difference between Uztari and Altari?”

  “Where we live.” Nyall shrugged. “How we hunt. How we use birds. Our words, our food … I mean, it’s who we are.”

  “And you’re real?”

  Nyall looked at Brysen and laughed, but the laugh had a blade in it. “Is this guy ill?”

  Jowyn laughed, too, but his laugh was smooth and clear as a mountain lake. Brysen could’ve bathed in it. The thought of bathing with Jowyn made his ears burn.

  “I mean, if you left where you lived,” Jowyn said. “And you let go of your beliefs. If you stopped telling the Epic of the Forty Birds, stopped hunting with falcons, learned a new language, ate different food, would you become Altari?”

  Nyall shook his head.

  “He can’t change his history,” Brysen added. “Who we are is as much what’s happened before us as it is what we do.”

  “What you believe happened before you,” Jowyn corrected him. “You weren’t there when the mountains were born or when the first hawk flew over them. You weren’t there when the people followed. You decide to believe the stories you’ve been told, and what you decide to believe makes you who you are—about your people, about yourself.”

  “You talk like a mountain mystic,” Nyall grumbled. “Who cares what we believe? What matters is what’s true.”

  “You’re up here chasing the ghost eagle,” Jowyn observed. “A bird that can change the fate of kingdoms if it can be controlled. I’d say what you believe matters a great deal, if you plan to wield that kind of power.”

  “How do you know that?” Brysen asked.

  Jowyn touched his finger under his eye again. “Only ones who come up here are running from something or running to it and runaways come alone. You are not alone.”

  Brysen glanced at Nyall. “Maybe I meant to be alone.”

  Jowyn shrugged. “So you aren’t after the ghost eagle?”

  Brysen didn’t deny it. “I am.”

  “Why?”

  Brysen took a deep breath, looked for an opening and saw the futility of evasion and went with the truth.

  “Because I believe in love,” he said.

  Jowyn raised a pale, white eyebrow, surprised.

  “I’m not looking for wealth or glory or power. I’m trying to save someone’s life. The person I love. And my sister followed me because … well … she loves me. And Nyall followed her for love, too. We’re all here for love.” He felt like a fool saying these words out loud, but he needed help, and the only weapon he had to get that help was the ridiculous, embarrassing truth. His voice caught in his throat and he coughed. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but I know I can do this. I know that my father died believing this same dumb thing, but I know I can capture this eagle, because I’m not doing it for the wrong reasons. I’m doing it for love.”

  Jowyn stared at him. An uncomfortable silence lingered. He rubbed his palms on his knees and leaned back. “The ghost eagle doesn’t care why you’re after it. It kills lovers just as well as hunters.”

  “You just said it matters what we believe.”

  “To me, it matters,” Jowyn said. “Not to the eagle.”

  “Well.” Brysen tried his luck. “Will you help us?”

  “I can’t take you to its eyrie,” Jowyn said. “Not until the Mothers allow it.”

  “Forget this,” Nyall stood. “I say we leave this cave, get your sister, and go on ourselves. I’m tired of sitting around being lectured.”

  “You can’t go yet,” Jowyn said.

  “I dare you to stop us,” Nyall told him. “I’d love to see you try.”

  “We don’t bring violence here,” Jowyn answered, rising to stand in front of him.

  “That’ll make it easier for me to smash your face in,” Nyall growled.

  Everyone turned to them and silence as sharp as a falcon’s beak snapped over the cavern. Nyall’s jaw tensed, muscles tightened, and his fists flexed. Brysen got ready to spring to his feet for the fight.

  They were outnumbered fifty to one, and every one of the covey looked like his skin had been carved from stone. If it turned into a brawl, there wasn’t much of a chance Brysen and Nyall could win.

  He slid his glove on, reached to the perch where Shara stood, and touched the back of her foot; her cue to step onto his fist. Once she was there, he stood and unhooded her. She screeched with surprise at her underground surroundings.

  No one else moved.

  “We’re going,” Brysen said. “I made a promise that I have to keep.”

  “You can’t,” Jowyn replied.

  Nyall took a deep breath. “We’ll cut through you like a fart through fabric.”

  “Do what you have to,” said Jowyn.

  He put his body directly in their way, opened his arms wide, tattooed chest rising up and down with his breath. He looked Brysen straight in the eyes, firmly rooted as a blood birch tree but completely vulnerable, undefended. If he was a tree, Brysen and Nyall were the ax.

  Nyall moved to knock Jowyn down, but Brysen held him back. They didn’t need to hit the boy; they could just go around him. When they turned, Jowyn pivoted to block them. Still, he did n
ot raise a fist.

  Nyall shook his head. “Get out of our way, or I’m gonna break all your branches and use them to light a fire.”

  “Do what you think you have to,” Jowyn replied. “But remember that stronger winds than you have tried to break me.”

  Nyall drew his fist back and punched Jowyn in the stomach. The boy grunted but didn’t bend or flinch. Nyall had pulled the punch. He’d just wanted to send a message, but the message didn’t make the boy move.

  Nyall drew back again. The next punch was harder. It snapped across Jowyn’s jaw and turned his head, but his feet stayed rooted. Blood beaded on his lip, but he stood straight. He looked at Nyall and then at Brysen. The joy, that inexplicable joy, was still twinkling in the pale boy’s eyes.

  Nyall cranked his fist back a third time.

  Brysen had known violence. Victim, survivor, attacker, defender. He’d taken beatings from his father and from bigger boys and girls. He’d cut himself quietly in the dark, releasing his hurt with the clean slice of the blade across his thigh. He’d made violence a sport and bled for the thrill of it in the battle pits, and he’d stood side by side with Nyck and Nyall in the kind of scrapes battle boys were known for. He never doubted that he was in the right when he drew blood.

  But this fight?

  Jowyn had fled violence to live here, and it seemed like he was ready to take a beating before committing it himself. The others were just going to let him take it.

  Brysen could’ve unleashed Shara on him. He could’ve punched him in the gut and doubled him over, or at least let Nyall do it … but instead he reached out, caught Nyall’s shoulder, and pulled his friend back.

  “Stop,” he said. “Not this way.”

  Had he been charmed by the pale boy’s laugh or fallen like easy prey to the way the lines of his hips slid in a migrating V beneath his feathered pants? Was his heart so easily swayed? He’d sworn to cut through armies and climb through hell to save Dymian, but here he was, faced with a ghostly pale, tattooed boy standing in his way, and all he had to do was move him by simple force, and he couldn’t.

  If he really loved Dymian, he’d do anything to help him, after all. He’d long ago learned that it was better to shed blood than tears, so he bit his lip. He clenched his fist. He leaned back.

  At that moment, without a sound of warning, Shara shot from his other arm with a burst of power he hadn’t expected, nearly dislocating his shoulder. As she flew toward the passage they’d entered by, Brysen saw the last flash of a snow rat racing ahead of her. Her first dive at the rat missed, and she tumbled head over tail against the wall.

  “Shara!” Brysen tried to whistle her back, but she was up and off again instantly, with the unshakable tenacity that made goshawks infuriating to their trainers. A falcon that missed a kill would stand confused long enough for the hunter to track her, but a goshawk never ceased, never slowed when its blood was up and its hunger was keen. Brysen should have fed her when he had the chance.

  She dove again, missed again, and the rat raced for the passage’s opening. Jowyn and the other owl boys of the covey watched her shake her feathers out and launch herself after it in furious flaps, a tenacious hunter with more appetite than skill.

  We’re a lot alike, Brysen thought, and before he could whistle her back again, she was out of the cave and flying madly into the mountain night.

  20

  Jowyn had turned his back to watch the hawk’s furious hunt, and in that moment, Brysen shoved right past him and straight through the cave into the woods after Shara.

  “Pfft!” he whistled. “Pfft!”

  “Stop!” some of the covey shouted after him, but he sprinted harder.

  His eyes scanned the dark trees and the frost-coated ground, searching for his hawk. It was common in the Villages to chase your bird through other people’s property, to find yourself tangled in a thorny goat fence or wading knee-deep across the Necklace, because a hawk neither knows nor respects the boundaries people draw across the world. The demarcation of kingdoms, invisible lines drawn by war and language, treaty and betrayal—hawks erase them with a flap of their wings. Shara obeyed her blood and the tremor of her moods, and the hunt had called her.

  He saw the white stripes of her chest flash from the corner of his eye and then glimpsed her in a blood birch, feet gripping the branch and back flattened, head low and level. He whistled her down, held out his fist, but she didn’t even turn to look at him. She was focused on a small heap of frost-covered rocks, where the rat must have taken shelter.

  Brysen whistled again. While he stood there, his eyes fixed on her and her eyes fixed on the rocks, Nyall and Jowyn and the others caught up to him, their breaths huffing out in misty clouds of damp air. The night temperature on the mountain had dropped well below comfort, and Brysen had left his coat and supplies back in the cave. He was amazed that Jowyn could run around shirtless, like he was in the blazing desert. Nyall had kept his coat on and was already shivering.

  “It’s not safe out here,” Jowyn warned.

  “That’s why I have to get her back,” Brysen replied just as Shara launched herself from the branch at the rat, which had bolted from its hiding place. It’d been flushed out by a deep-blue ice snake that now had the hawk’s complete attention. The rat dodged a strike from the serpent, but before the snake could turn, Shara smashed onto it, snatching it just behind the head and pinning it down. Its body twisted and writhed, trying to free its head and snap its fangs into her, but Shara’s grip tightened with every move the snake made.

  An ice snake’s venom was especially toxic at this time of year, when it had built up over the ice-wind, heating the snake from the inside and burning to get out. Ice snakes ended their hibernation when their venom’s heat woke them to hunt, and they wanted nothing more than to expel the poison into their prey, cooking their meal from the inside out.

  Brysen ran toward them, huffing his way up the snowy, wooded slope, muttering half prayers that the snake wouldn’t get its venom into Shara before he could slice its head off. He drew his knife as he approached, but Shara had already crushed the snake to death and mantled her wings over its corpse. She didn’t need Brysen’s help.

  As she bent down to break into the snake’s meat with her sharp beak, Brysen’s clumsy approach up the mountain froze her. She glanced over her shoulder at her master, saw him and his drawn blade, and then unceremoniously took off, the snake’s corpse hanging from her talons like a flapping war banner. She weaved through the wood, wending and winding until Brysen couldn’t see her anymore.

  “Scuzz!” he shouted, stomping the ground.

  He knew it wasn’t meant as an insult, just goshawk instinct, but he couldn’t help feeling stung by her flight away. Woodland hunters, goshawks preferred to eat in private, where other predators couldn’t see what they’d caught or scheme to take it. It wounded him that she would think of Brysen as just another predator. It was irrational to expect that she would treat him differently, that she’d think fondly of all he’d done for her, that the ways of the world would make an exception just for him, but still, he wished they would.

  Brysen tore off running again.

  “Bry!” Nyall called up to him. “Bry! Where are you going?”

  Brysen didn’t answer. Shara had flown across a low sloping field shaped like a bowl. He skirted the edge, keeping to the lip and leaping over patches of slick ice, before finding himself back on the tree-covered slope again. As he ran, he caught a glimpse of Jowyn from the corner of his eye; he was cutting straight across the snow field, his skin nearly perfect camouflage in the icy moonlight.

  Brysen stopped and listened. He heard Nyall panting and scrambling, feet crunching, but beneath those noises Brysen listened for the sounds of panicked woodpeckers or crows or anything that might give Shara’s position away. He searched the dark wood for signs of feathers or snakeskin snagged on a bush or branch. A hawk always left some sign of its hunt if you knew what to look for.

  Up to his right,
the trees ended at a steep gray rock. There was a frozen waterfall pouring off the top and tumbling down in an unmoving crystalline crash. Behind the wall of frozen water was what looked like a cave. Some of the icicles at the edge of the cave’s entrance had been smashed and their shards lay on the still, solid pool below.

  Shara had to have broken them off while flying into the cave with the snake. A cave behind a wall of ice would make the perfect private place for her to eat in peace.

  Brysen rushed over, determined to get her leashed to his arm before she could fly away again. He slipped a little as he crossed the ice, forced to widen his stance and shuffle to the edge of the frozen waterfall. He peered around the curtain of ice, searching the moonlit cave. Dim silver slices of light slipped through the frozen falls and cast shadows like the bars of a cage. In a corner, he saw the shape of Shara’s mantled wings. Her head jerked upward with a tearing sound. She had blood on her beak.

  Brysen let out a relieved breath. She was eating. He shuffled his way into the dark to reach her as calmly and quietly as he could. She was so fixated on eating that she didn’t look up this time. He kept his eyes fixed on her gray wings, ready to dive at her if she tried to fly off again.

  “Stop!” Jowyn shouted at him, his voice echoing inside the cavern. Shara flinched and paused, then returned to her serpentine supper. Brysen glanced behind him and saw Jowyn’s shape on the other side of the icefall. His figure bent and wavered, backlit by the moon.

  “I’m getting her now,” Brysen said.

  “Stop right where you are!” Jowyn repeated slowly. “And don’t move.”

  Jowyn’s voice wasn’t a threat, Brysen realized. It was a warning, and it came at the same instant he heard a telltale snap-pop-snap beneath his feet. The sound of ice cracking.

  He knew better than to run over frozen water during the ice-melt, but he’d been so focused on getting Shara back that he hadn’t been careful. This was the kind of carelessness that Kylee always yelled at him about, that Dymian thought was so endearing. The kind of carelessness that his father had beaten him for, over and over again. Looked like his father was right: Carelessness was going to kill him.