Black Wings Beating

by Alex London

  Kylee was far down the slope, trying to get back to her feet, climbing on hands and knees to where he’d dropped the rope.

  Jowyn had climbed the slope and was trying to distract the bird from behind. It knocked him back with its tail and a swipe of its wing. In that flash of distraction, Brysen pulled himself up to scramble around the boulder, but the eagle blocked him, lunged not with its beak but with its head, and hit him in the chest. The wind left Brysen as he fell onto his back. He gasped, he gagged, and the eagle hopped to his side and pinned him to the ground with one deadly foot on his shoulder. A talon pierced him, thick as a dagger.

  Brysen screamed. The eagle reared back, mouth open. He saw its slug-gray tongue, the tiny gleam of the razor hook at the end of its beak. He wondered if he’d feel it when the bird tore his throat out, or if it would go for his stomach instead, disembowel him like some birds of prey preferred to do. He tried to punch it with his free arm, but the quick beak snapped at him, and he drew back to protect his hand. He tried to kick free, but the eagle’s other foot slammed down onto his right thigh and squeezed. He froze, knowing that if he moved again, the game would end, the eagle would rip him open.

  Kylee had reached the rope and was racing up the slope with Nyall close behind, but they were still too far away. They wouldn’t get to him in time. They couldn’t save him.

  Maybe Kylee should have stayed with the Owl Mothers, Brysen thought. Learned a little more. He could have used her new knowledge now that he was about to die.

  “Ki! Ki! Ki!”

  Just then, Shara bolted from the crack in the boulder where he’d hidden her.

  The eagle cocked its head and saw the bird coming for only a moment before the hawk’s talons crashed into its face.

  “REEEEEEEE!” the ghost eagle shrieked. It flailed its head to shake Shara loose, then snapped at her as she flew free, snared Shara by the leg, and threw her to the ground. The hawk landed hard, stunned, and the eagle lunged at her prone body.

  “Fly, Shara! Go!” Brysen yelled, and at that moment his sister yelled something, too. Whether it was his words or hers or some vital burn of Shara’s to live, Shara came to and dodged the first strike, flapped hard and launched herself up, into the sky. She flew crooked and one leg hung limp, but she was airborne.

  She was too slow, though. The eagle would be on her with just a hop and half a wingbeat. Already, it was poised to snatch her down again.

  But that was as much time as Brysen needed. His shoulder and his leg were free.

  Kylee threw the spider-silk rope to him. In one motion, he swung it up, beneath the eagle’s tail, catching both its legs just as it lifted off the ground. Its legs snapped together as the noose pulled taut around its ankles. The momentum of the eagle’s forward lunge at Shara toppled it beak-first to the dirt.

  Brysen swung the loop he’d made at the opposite end of the rope to Nyall, who arrived, breathless but just in time, and whipped it down over the eagle’s body. With the bird’s next thrash, the power of its own bound legs pulled the knot tight and pinioned its wings to its side. It flopped like a river trout stranded on the banks. Its dark eyes were gripped by the same animal panic Brysen had felt only moments before.

  While the ghost eagle panted, Brysen looked to the night sky, tried to see where Shara had flown, but found nothing—not the stars blotted out in the shape of a small and wounded hawk, nor the rustle of a bush where she might’ve taken shelter. In vain, he whistled once, but he knew she’d flown for safety much farther than he could call her.

  “REEEEE!” the trapped eagle cried.

  Come back when it’s safe, my friend, Brysen thought in the direction Shara had flown. Please come back to me.

  She’ll never come back to you, he also thought, but the voice, he knew, was not his own, not really. She’ll leave you, and she’ll die alone in the wilderness.

  The eagle flopped and flailed, but every move it made only tightened the rope more. Brysen bent down in front of it. It snapped at him, but he squatted just out of reach. He’d caught a much smaller eagle this way before: with one rope that tangled and twisted until it was beyond any hope of escape. This time, however, he’d actually meant to do it. This time, he’d planned it. This time, he wouldn’t burn.

  He placed his hand on the ghost eagle’s heaving chest, his fingers brown with Jowyn’s dried blood. On his palm, he felt the rapid, terrified heartbeat beneath the eagle’s soft black feathers. It felt no different from that of a trapped pigeon or sparrow or hawk. The bird looked at him with char-black eyes, radiating hunger and hate and fear. All of which were essentially the same. He felt Kylee place her hand between his shoulder blades.

  “You know nothing,” he said aloud. With the eagle in front of him, his friends by his side, and his sister’s hand resting on his back, he smiled.

  The eagle shrieked again.

  32

  For such a massive bird, the ghost eagle was surprisingly light, trussed and tied to Brysen’s back with its wings folded and its legs tucked up beneath it. Nyall, being so much taller, would’ve had a much easier time carrying the big raptor, but Brysen wanted to do it himself. The bird was his burden and his trophy and his bargaining chip all in one. No one else could carry it for him. “REEEEE!” it screeched as they helped him hoist it onto his back.

  He carried it like a pack, with the eagle’s head facing away from him so it couldn’t turn and slam its beak through his skull. It wriggled and writhed, but was too tightly wrapped to do Brysen any harm. It could only stare out behind him, forced to watch the nighttime sky and the moonlit peaks shrink away during its descent as a captive.

  “REEEEE!” it shrieked again.

  They’ll never let me have this victory, he thought, and felt his chest tighten. Already, the eagle was in his head again. The panic must have shown on his face, because Jowyn rushed to tie a piece of his scarf around the raptor’s beak, shutting its mouth and stopping its screeching, and with that, its troubling whispers in the mind fell silent.

  “It’s not magic,” Jowyn said. “If it can’t speak, it can’t speak.”

  Brysen was grateful, but some of the damage was already done. He couldn’t stop looking around for Shara, hoping to find her waiting on, circling above or flitting from boulder to boulder as she followed them down the mountain. There were an infinite number of ways to look up, he figured, and not all of them were hopeful. The sky brought rain as sure as it brought sunshine, and not everything that went up was promised to come back down. Who am I, he wondered, without her?

  Brysen had bandaged Jowyn’s leg with the rest of his scarf, although the bleeding had stopped long ago. Even his own shoulder wound had begun to heal. Kylee and Nyall carried whatever supplies they could scrounge from the half-buried campsites of less fortunate expeditions into the Nameless Gap. They found firecakes for long-burning fires; they found dried fruits and nuts still safe for eating; they found a shovel and some picks that would’ve made digging those blinds a lot easier had they decided to scrounge before trapping the eagle. They found an unsheathed blade or two—blades that had done nothing to protect the trappers who’d drawn them.

  Brysen wondered if some of the supplies had belonged to his father, but nothing looked familiar. Maybe Kylee had avoided those on purpose. Surely some pieces of him had been left behind the night he died.

  They decided to take a different route down the mountain than the one they’d taken up, in order to keep their distance from the blood birches. They’d lose time, but if they ran into the Owl Mothers again, they might not return to the Villages at all. Brysen didn’t know how much longer he had before Goryn Tamir tired of waiting, but he couldn’t make the journey much faster. The new route would force them to cross Reychs Icefall, a huge slope of collapsing glacier, with thin paths and switchbacks of solid ice winding their way between endless gorges. They’d lose a full day traversing it, but better to go slow than fall to their deaths. Climbing was a great teacher of patience.

  * * *


  “No one would ever know about our glory if we vanished up here,” Brysen said, holding an old trapper’s rope steady as Jowyn slid his way over a narrow ice bridge. After a day’s grueling journey, they were crossing the longest gorge in the Reychs Icefalls.

  Jowyn had sacrificed his scarf, but he didn’t look cold. Brysen watched his lithe movements and thought about his tattoos. Was there someone back in the Six Villages good enough to add this journey to Jowyn’s body? Surely he’d want it there. Brysen felt another pang of guilt over Jowyn’s exile. Now he was returning to the place he’d long ago fled, again on Brysen’s behalf. The least Brysen could do for Jowyn was find a decent body artist. Nyck would probably know one. Nyck knew everybody.

  “And Dymian would suffer if you didn’t return,” Jowyn said as Brysen took his hand and pulled him up over the crest of an icy ridge.

  “Right,” he said, flushing. “Obviously.” He’d been so caught up in the near-impossible victory, the capture of the greatest prize of their civilization—and in staring at the mysterious boy from his past who’d made it all possible—that he’d forgotten for a moment why he’d caught the eagle strapped to his back in the first place.

  The eagle on his back shuddered in its bonds, and for a moment Brysen could’ve sworn it was laughing.

  Of course, eagles didn’t laugh, not even ghost eagles. That was just the wind passing through its feathers. All the same, he had Jowyn tighten the fabric around its beak the first time they stopped to rest.

  Kylee offered to carry the bird for a while, but Brysen refused. In truth, his back was hurting and the awkward way the huge eagle forced him to hike was making his legs sore, but he didn’t like the way Kylee looked at it with such unrelenting intensity. She was studying it like she studied a new climbing route, something deadly she could conquer. And before he heaved it onto his back again, he saw the eagle looking back at her the same way.

  * * *

  That night, they camped inside a cave, hooding the ghost eagle beneath a blanket and keeping their fire low lest anyone was following them. The firecake burned blue and steady and they didn’t need to tend it like a wood fire. They wouldn’t have found wood up here anyway, Kylee had pointed out, a subtle dig at Brysen’s lack of planning, but one with which he couldn’t argue. Luck favors the bold, he thought, and liked considering himself one of the lucky.

  After they ate some of the fruit-and-nut mixture Kylee doled out, Brysen took the first watch and sat at the cave entrance, staring at the high slopes and crags on the mountain range. Every now and then, he’d glance to the others, make sure they were sleeping, and then hold out his fist and whistle.

  Shara didn’t come.

  * * *

  Two mornings later, they reached a narrow stream alongside a goat path that ran into the Necklace. By that afternoon, the air was warm and they’d reached the cliff over the battle pits of the Broken Jess. As he’d hoped, the market was still underway. A few tents had packed up, but most people were trying to squeeze every last bronze from the market days—uncertain if they’d have another one next season. Others had probably stuck around just to hear if the ghost eagle had killed them all.

  “I say we march through the street with the eagle in open view,” Brysen suggested. “Show them who we are and what we’ve done. Let them know we’re not to be trifled with.”

  “‘Trifled with’?” Nyall shook his head. “Kinda grandiose, no?”

  “I’ve got a ghost eagle taller than I am bundled like firewood on my back,” Brysen said. “I’m allowed to be grandiose.”

  “We need to have some element of surprise,” Kylee said. “Don’t give Goryn a chance to scheme anything.”

  “You okay?” Brysen asked Jowyn. His eyes were wild as lightning skies, taking in the bustle of the Villages, the clatter of the market, the clusters of round houses with hearths smoking, the squawking from the mews, and the shouts and laughter of civilization.

  “I never thought I’d see this place again,” he said, a hint of regret in his voice. He looked back at Brysen. “But I’m fine.”

  “Maybe we should go home first?” Brysen suggested. “Check in on Ma. Let Jowyn stay there.”

  “I want to come,” Jowyn said.

  “What if Goryn recognizes you?”

  “He won’t.”

  “And it actually helps us if he does,” Kylee added. “Throw him off balance. It’s the best way to make sure he doesn’t pull anything.”

  “Maybe I should go alone then, to check on Dymian?” Brysen suggested, hoping he didn’t sound frightened of seeing Goryn Tamir or too eager to get away. He just wanted a moment with Dymian, a moment alone to show what he had done … what he had done for them.

  “The longer we wait, the more risk there is of someone taking the eagle from us,” said Kylee. “We have to do this now. And look who it is.” She pointed down to the battle pits below the cliff, where a thin crowd had gathered for a fight. Nyck was wrangling the battlers, and there, in a leg splint by the edge of the crowd, was Dymian, chestnut hair pulled back behind his ears, brightly colored falcon on his glove. He was smiling, laughing, carefree as ever.

  Looking at him, Brysen remembered how Dymian could make a day flash by like lightning and a night turn on and on forever. He remembered the heat of their skin when they touched and the ice in his veins when Dymian pulled away. His throat went dry and he reached for a pinch of hunter’s leaf, which, of course, he didn’t have. He chewed his lip instead.

  Two of Goryn Tamir’s “attendants” were in the yard, watching Dymian like he was quarry. The carefree attitude was an act; Dymian wasn’t the type to let them see him cower, but he wasn’t half as brave as he acted. Brysen remembered him in the tent that day, how shaken he’d been, how frightened. But thanks to Brysen, he wouldn’t have to be frightened anymore.

  “Let’s get down there,” he said. “Let’s make this exchange.”

  He pushed himself up, made his way toward the steep path down into the yard, but Kylee got in his way, stepping right in front of him. “Wait,” she said. “We can’t.”

  “And we can’t just sit up here all day, either,” Brysen told her. He’d made the original deal with Goryn. It was up to him to close it out now.

  “No, I mean, we can’t give Goryn the eagle.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Owl Mothers made a deal with the kyrgs,” Kylee said. “They made a deal for me and the eagle, so they can defend Uztar. And Yves Tamir wanted it, too, didn’t want her brother getting ahold of it.”

  “Yeah … and we took care of both of them,” said Brysen. “We won.”

  “But if Goryn’s not after the ghost eagle for a kyrg or for his own family,” Kylee said, “then who is he after it for? What’ll he do once he has it?”

  Brysen cocked his head at her. Had she not been there on this whole quest with him? Had she not known the point of it, the point of saving Dymian, who was down below them right now, trying to act like he didn’t have an executioner’s blade hanging over his neck? This was the plan. This had always been the plan!

  He tried to push past Kylee, but she blocked him again.

  “Let’s just think this through,” Nyall suggested.

  “No more thinking,” Brysen said. “This is over. I said I’d catch the ghost eagle to save Dymian, and I did.”

  “We caught the ghost eagle,” Kylee corrected him, which made him clench his jaw.

  “Let me just check the cloth around its beak,” Nyall offered meekly.

  “It hasn’t slipped,” Brysen said. “My sister’s just trying to control me, like she always does. It’s not magic. And it won’t work this time.”

  “You can’t do this.” She stepped back into his path when he tried to go around. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” Brysen told her. “I’m not some dumb, lovesick songbird. This is my destiny. I’m bound to this eagle, and what I do with it is what’s meant to be done.”

  “You
’re bound to it?” Kylee cocked her head.

  “Be careful, Brysen,” Jowyn warned. “No one is bound to the ghost eagle.”

  “Stay out of this, please!” Brysen answered him. He met his sister’s stare. Time for the truth, he figured. “Kylee, I am bound to this eagle, because it saved my life. I was there when it got Da. I was hiding in the bushes and nearly got caught. That’s how I got Da’s knife. He was going to cut me open with it. But before he could, the ghost eagle took him.” He looked over at Jowyn. “You’re right,” he said. “When you save a life, you’re bound to it. That night, I became bound to the ghost eagle.”

  Kylee’s lip trembled. He should have told her sooner, should have told her a long time ago that he’d snuck into the mountains after their father and seen him killed. But he’d never quite found the way to admit it, to admit that the thing every Six Villager was raised to fear was the thing that had set him free—set them both free. That a part of him loved the ghost eagle because of it.

  So it surprised Brysen when a tear traced a slow line down her cheek and she shook her head. “It wasn’t the ghost eagle that saved you that night, Brysen. It was me. I did it. I was there. I killed our father for you.”

  FEATHER AND ASH

  Tears of gratitude meant as much to Anon as cries of pain. Less, even.

  The tears of his victims he could understand, but those who wept, grateful for their liberation from the sky cultists of Uztar, simply baffled him. Why should they weep to him in gratitude when they should have been apologizing? They could have taken steps toward their own liberation at any time, but only now, in tears amidst the flaming ruins of their camps, did they make a show of their long-buried hopes.

  In short, Anon hated those who had refused to help themselves more than he hated the enemies he slaughtered. As the Kartami kite warriors stormed across the desert and the grasslands, wiping out any trace of Uztar on their way to the foothills and the heart of false civilization, he found himself reluctantly in control of an ever-growing population. He had no desire to rule; his service was to the dust itself, a return to the mountains and a clearing of the sky. He hadn’t the time or the desire to devise taxation plans or to enforce water and grazing rights, to settle disputes or regulate the provision of festivals.