Black Wings Beating

by Alex London

  Their cave openings were hung with heavy rugs to keep out the elements and there was a large circle dug into the ground in the center of the settlement, its sides sloping up just like the largest battle pit back at the Broken Jess, but this one had steps carved into its sloping edge.

  After a hearty but silent meal around a stone oven, the Mothers assembled on those steps and directed Kylee to stand with Üku in the center. To her left was a tall wooden pole with a small hook on top, perhaps some kind of a perch. She felt like she was in a battle pit, but she had no falcon and no blade. She’d never wanted either before, but she felt helpless and exposed in front of them, lit by a too-bright moon.

  “Kylee’s come to us,” Üku announced to the gathered women, “with some reluctance.”

  The Mothers laughed. Word traveled on the wind up here, and just as in the Six Villages, secrets were rare birds indeed, hardly seen and never kept long. “It is no accident, Kylee, that you are here. The wind that blew you to us has been buffeting you our way for a while.”

  “You know me?” She was stunned. Knowing about a ghost eagle expedition was one thing—the Owl Mothers could easily have seen her, her brother, and Nyall coming—but knowing her, expecting her … that was a different story.

  “You’ve spoken in the Hollow Tongue since you were a child, have you not?” Üku asked.

  Kylee didn’t answer. Let them know what they know and nothing more.

  “You’ve also resisted it for just as long, have you not?”

  Again, she gave them nothing. She had a purpose here, and it wasn’t this. “My brother and I are on a trapping expedition,” she said. “With your blessing, we’d like to climb for the Nameless Gap.”

  “To capture the ghost eagle?”

  She nodded.

  “And you think you’ll do it without our help?”

  “We would appreciate your help,” Kylee said. She was careful to say we, careful to show it was not her quest but her brother’s and that he was essential to her. She would not accept any harm coming to him, wherever they’d taken him and Nyall. They would ascend together or not at all.

  “And we will help you, Kylee.” Üku put a hand on her shoulder. “We found you in order to help you. But for us to help you, you must learn to speak. You mustn’t be afraid of the Hollow Tongue. You must master it, as birds of prey are masters of the hunt. They deal life and death as their appetites demand it, but unlike them, we choose. We—and only we—can choose when to create life and when to take it away. We can harm, and we can heal. We alone beneath this sky have the power to make those choices with reason and with care. Why should we fear it?”

  Kylee crossed her arms. “Teach my brother. He’s the one who dreams of commanding raptors from the sky. He’s the one who wants to catch the ghost eagle.”

  “He doesn’t have the words.”

  “You can teach him.”

  The Owl Mother swatted the air dismissively. “We can teach anyone the sounds. But making the sounds and speaking the language are not the same. Words have weight, wrought by history and memory. The weight of a word can only be held by the living of it. Your brother speaks many unspoken languages, and he will have to learn his own in time, but you carry the words for the Hollow Tongue, those that have not been entirely lost to time.”

  “I don’t want them,” she said. The Hollow Tongue was poison. It had only led her to trouble all her life, and not just because her brother couldn’t speak it. She’d learned what believing life and death belonged to you could do, how thinking you could command the rulers of the sky curdled your heart like sour milk. “The Hollow Tongue is a dead language that should be left dead.”

  “The Hollow Tongue is a living language,” Üku countered. “It is like a flame that must be tended. Each generation must preserve the language of their mothers, or it will be lost, and each generation must invent the language for themselves, or it will have no meaning. The language grows with all who speak it.”

  “Let someone else learn.” Kylee looked around at the weather-worn women who’d taken her prisoner. “I can do enough damage with the language I speak already.”

  The skin around Üku’s eyes crinkled with her smile. “Oh, we do teach others.”

  She opened her palms and gestured for a girl Kylee’s age to come forward. She was dressed like an Altari merchant’s apprentice, her long blond hair pulled back into a braid and wearing thick leather leggings under a colorful blouse, but over that she wore a padded leather vest and had thick cloth wrapped from her knuckles to her elbow for a falcon to perch on or to soften a punch. By the power in her shoulders and thighs, Kylee wasn’t sure whether the former or the latter was more likely. She didn’t love the thought of either.

  “This is Grazim,” the Owl Mother said. “She, like you, has some instinct for the Hollow Tongue and, like you, must learn to wield it. You will compete tonight.”

  Üku whistled and threw a small piece of meat on the ground between Kylee and the other girl. A haggard red-tail, a small, wild, male hawk, flew up the slope from below and landed on the ground between Kylee and Grazim, snapping up the meat in its beak. It stood still equidistant from them both, and Üku backed away toward the edge of the circle.

  Grazim widened her stance and wet her lips, eyes fixed on the hawk. The owls around the circle on their masters’ fists shifted from foot to foot but otherwise did not move. The hawk, sensing the moonlight predators all around it, sank into itself, flattened its feathers against its body, afraid.

  Kylee’s first impression of this place had been correct. They were in a kind of battle pit, but there were no ropes, no knives, and only one bird. Grazim knew the rules already, but Kylee could only guess. Were they meant to command the bird to attack each other?

  Üku waved and three Owl Mothers emerged from one of the carpet-covered caves above them. They hauled a limp figure, a man who could hardly keep himself standing. His hands were bound and he had a rough hood over his head. The women dragged him to the wooden post at the edge of the circle and hung him by the binding of his hands on the hook at the top. Then they tied his legs to the pole with a thick rope and swiped the hood from his head.

  Kylee gasped. She’d known Petyr Otak her whole life. He and his brother were spies for one of the kyrgs. They claimed it was Bardu, but most people thought they were paid by a lesser member of the Forty. They’d never had the devious talent necessary to rise up in the ranks, not like Vyvian and her family. Either way, the Otaks had always been fairly harmless, but they had seen her at the pits when she’d called Shara from the sky in the Hollow Tongue.

  “He followed you into the mountains,” Üku said. “He and his brother meant to rob you.”

  “Where is Lyl?” Kylee asked.

  “Dead.” Üku showed no emotion.

  “Kylee…,” Petyr murmured, looking at her through bruised, swollen eyes. His nose was broken, his face bloodied. “Kylee…,” he repeated.

  “There were traditions in the ancient sky cults from which we all come—your people and Grazim’s, and ours as well,” Üku said, beginning a lesson Kylee did not want to hear. “They involved sacrifice to the raptors. Human sacrifice. We honor those traditions. Grazim will command the attack; you, Kylee, will control the defense. You may not touch each other or the sacrifice directly but act only through the bird. It’s that simple.”

  She stepped farther back, out of the circle. “You believe the Hollow Tongue is good for only destruction. Perhaps you’re right, perhaps not. Now is the time to find out.”

  “Shyehnaah,” the other girl said, and the hawk launched itself at Petyr.

  27

  As the hawk attacked, Petyr squirmed but could not break free. The bird flapped in front of him, talons scratching at his face, screeching.

  “Ah!” he screamed. The Owl Mothers and the owls on their fists watched with equal impassivity.

  “Stop this!” Kylee cried.

  “The Hollow Tongue word for a bird of prey is shyehnaah,” Üku lect
ured her, voice heavy with urgency. “The word itself is just a sound. Like any word, it is a carrier for the stories that make it. In the old stories, the shyehnaah was one great bird that summoned all others to it. Many were lost on the journey. Pretty birds had their bright plumage burned away by the desert fires; shy birds feared to fly in flocks and lost their way alone in storms; and brave birds saw themselves in the clear waters of the endless lake, and cowered at their smallness, and flew too low in order to make themselves seem bigger in their reflection. The waves crashed over them. Of all the birds that left to find the shyehnaah, only forty survived, which is what the Uztari reference with their Council of Forty. But the suffering and the longing—the hard journey to find the self—that’s the word. Only when you know yourself can you mean the word you speak.”

  “Shyehnaah!” Kylee yelled. “Shyehnaah! Shyehnaah! Shyehnaah!” It made no difference. The bird clawed and pecked at Petyr’s face. He couldn’t defend himself. He was counting on Kylee to defend him.

  “Do you want to help him?” Üku asked.

  “Yes!” she said.

  “I don’t believe you,” Üku said. “The hawk does not believe you.”

  Kylee whirled to the girl, fists up, although she knew to strike the girl would be to summon her own punishment. “Call it off!” she pleaded. “Call it off.”

  The girl shook her head. She was fighting a smirk at the corner of her mouth. She knew she was winning.

  Kylee turned back toward Petyr and the hawk.

  Petyr had stalked her and Brysen into the mountains, had worked against her. Worse, he was a man her father’s age who knew her father’s cruelty and yet had never raised a finger or a word to help. They’d probably been drunk together at the Broken Jess. Patted each other on the back on the way home. In her heart, she knew, she didn’t much care what happened to Petyr Otak.

  But she did not want to be that person. She was not someone who’d watch a man suffering and do nothing to help him. She could feel the heat inside her, the breath beginning to burn. This was not about Petyr. This was about her.

  “Teach me a word,” she called out to Üku.

  “What word do you want?”

  “How do I call it to me?”

  “Use the word for the place to which one is bound. It is in the name of your people,” Üku said. “Tar.”

  “Ahhh!” Petyr screamed again.

  Kylee closed her eyes. She thought of herself at her favorite moments. Climbing alone in the morning as the sun came up, hot on her back. Reaching a peak just at the moment she thought her legs would give out on her and finding she could make the last push. Taking in the view of the Necklace and the Villages below. Seeing her home in the golden light of morning and knowing it was safe and she was free.

  “Shyehnaah-tar,” she said, and the hawk dropped to the ground, turning its head nearly upside down to look at her. It took a tentative step, then another, and then it beat its wings and thrust itself up, flying to her fist and settling with a fluff of its feathers. Her arm shook, which caused the bird to spread its wings and rouse, but it did not take off again, and it calmed as soon as she did. The hawk looked at her expectantly, without shock. Her face surely showed enough shock for both of them.

  “Thank you.” Petyr’s tears streaked the blood on his face. “Thank you, Kylee. Thank you.”

  Usually, when Kylee blurted out a Hollow Tongue word in desperation or terror, she felt diminished afterward, relieved but empty, like the breaths that come after sobbing. But now she felt the warmth of the word lingering on her tongue. She felt a connection to the wild hawk on her fist, something precious in knowing she had spoken to it in its language, not hers, and it had understood.

  She hadn’t known until that moment that she hadn’t ever felt truly understood before. Her father had thought she was withholding her talents out of stubbornness; Brysen was jealous of her; and her mother thought her talent was blasphemy. Everyone looked at her and saw what they wanted for themselves. But this raptor had heard her, seen her, and come simply because she asked it to. She said exactly what she meant and meant exactly what she said.

  “You’ve called the hunter to you,” Üku said, “but its nature is not your nature. Be careful what you tell it now, because truths traded between such different bloods as yours cannot be undone.”

  “Shyehnaah preet,” Grazim snarled, and Kylee didn’t need to know the meaning of the second word to understand its cruelty. The hawk dove from her fist, swooped low, and grabbed onto the belt of Petyr’s pants with its talons, flapping to keep itself steady.

  “Kraas,” the girl said, and the hawk’s head shot forward with lighting quickness, its beak puncturing Petyr’s belly and breaking into his flesh.

  “Ahhh!” he wailed, and the hawk pulled away with a string of flesh hanging from its beak like a fresh-caught worm. It swallowed and dove in for another bite.

  “Shyehnaah-tar,” Kylee said, but the hawk did not respond.

  Petyr shrieked as he was ripped open alive.

  “In the Hollow Tongue, some truths are stronger than others,” Üku shouted over his screaming. “Preet is the word they know for prey. Kraas is the word for ‘eat.’ The basic animal urges of the hunter will always cling to it harder than a command attached to human truths.” Üku paused and watched Petyr writhe, blood pouring out of his gut. “Unless those truths are bigger than the animal’s urges. Whoever speaks the truer words can command the hunter. That is the challenge of the Hollow Tongue. That is its demand.”

  “Kylee!” Petyr cried, looking at her through a veil of blood. Her hands shook; her mind was blank. What truth could she find stronger than a hawk’s instinct to kill and eat? She had nothing. With every passing heartbeat came another blood-curdling scream from the man on the post. She’d lost too much time already. She’d never save him now. Even if the attack stopped, he wouldn’t live. His screaming scattered any clear thought she could find.

  “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I’m so sorry.”

  The hawk flew to the top of the post and jumped down onto Petyr’s head, talons clutching his skull, digging into his scalp. It bent to set its beak to his eyes.

  “No!” Petyr’s voice was shrill. “Not that! Please!”

  Grazim smiled, but Üku looked grim. “You can stop this, Kylee. The tether that ties thought to feeling is the bond that makes language possible. Use it.”

  She remembered her brother’s screams the night when her mother held her and sang, the night when Brysen was lit on fire. She remembered the screams, and she remembered running to the herbalist afterward to get a salve to rub across his skin, to soothe the heat and stop infection. She couldn’t undo the burning, but she could provide the salve.

  This time, she did not need to be told the word. It rose up in her on its own, pulled from some place inside her that knew things she didn’t know she knew. Her heartbeat slowed, and the heat inside her built. She harnessed it and spoke it like breathing fire. “Iryeem,” she called out. “Iryeem.”

  From above, there came a strange rattle. The hawk stopped pecking, looked to the night sky as the first vulture dropped to the ground in front of Petyr, then another and another. A wake of vultures surrounded the unfortunate man.

  They were huge birds, the mountain vultures, with pale blue faces on downy white heads, the rest of their feathers somber browns and grays. The hawk, outnumbered by the larger birds and calmed by what Kylee had called, took off, skied out, and vanished over the mountain.

  Grazim’s smile bent into a frown, and she shook her head, looked to the Owl Mothers for guidance. While most whispered among themselves, Üku nodded approvingly at Kylee.

  More vultures descended, called from the wild on whatever wind Kylee’s word had flown. They flocked around Petyr, then rushed him, wings open in a curtain of brown and gray and white that blocked the fatal feast from view. Petyr’s screaming stopped a few moments later as the vultures put him beyond pain. Kylee shuddered; the warmth of the word had left her feeli
ng chilled.

  Üku was at her side now, having fluttered up as silently as an owl, and her voice was soft as mist in Kylee’s ear. “Do you know what it means, the word you spoke? Iryeem?”

  Kylee shook her head. The word had come to her the way breathing comes when a swimmer breaks the surface of the water after too long below.

  “It means ‘mercy’,” Üku said.

  28

  “I didn’t want to kill him,” Kylee confessed, tears in her eyes. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed. She’d dropped to the ground after the battle and had doubled over, throwing up. She couldn’t stop shivering and she wondered if she’d fainted. The moon had sunk lower in the sky and the feasting vultures had turned Petyr into little more than meat on a hook.

  She tried to stand, but her knees wobbled, her feet were numb. “I didn’t know they’d do that,” she added.

  Üku squatted down beside her, pulled her hair back, and, when she was finished retching, handed her a flamestone cup of hot tea. “Great poems know more than their poets, but they cannot exist without them. This is the art of the Hollow Tongue as well. Sometimes a novice will hit on a perfect word, but the lack of control can be dangerous to both the speaker and the spoken to. That’s why we’d like you to study and to train with us. We can learn from each other.”

  “But he’s dead; I won!” Grazim objected, still standing tense in the battle pit, looking ready to fight Kylee herself to prove her victory.

  “Yes,” Üku said. “He’s dead. You won. And you will be trained, too. But Kylee has shown us something valuable.” She helped Kylee to her feet, nudged her to sip the tea, which warmed Kylee instantly and cleared her head at the same time. She felt calmer and clutched the cup with both hands but resolved not to sip again. Whatever they’d put in it, she wanted no more. “She showed the kind of creativity under pressure that will be required in battle.”