Eyrie

by K Vale Nagle

  The two kjarr fledglings recognized Orlea from her babysitting efforts and chirped a greeting. Orlea grabbed Kia, Zeph, the fledglings, and Hatzel and pulled them into a circle.

  “Do you know where Jonas keeps the goliath birds?” she asked the kjarr fledglings.

  One of them nodded.

  “Kia, Zeph, would you go with her and see if the goliath birds are still here?” Orlea asked. “If so, we may be able to pack these gryphlets up and ship them out. I’ll stay behind and clear the goliath bird trail south of town. There’ll be at least one gate to break.”

  Hatzel nodded and sent Merin’s two remaining gryphons and ten of hers to help Orlea. Hatzel could only hope that being outnumbered five-to-one would keep Merin’s pride from balking at obeying orders from an opinicus. Afraid to climb the rotting trees, she jumped as high as she could, beat her massive wings, and began her ascent to find Satra. A moment later, the concussive blast of the flameworks shook the eyrie and cracked the hatchery walls.

  Askel slipped away and met two of Merin’s most loyal offspring by the waterworks. Water was pulled from Crater Lake and the Snowfeather River below up to incredible heights, where it then fed into the aqueduct system. It was a testament to the construction that when the entire eyrie shook and swayed in the blast, the aqueducts stayed in place. Askel’s assistants were splashed with water.

  He hadn’t told Hatzel that Merin had his own plans for the eyrie just like he hadn’t told Merin anything about Hatzel’s opinicus allies. He was good at keeping secrets. He knew that his pride had not evacuated west to the taiga border, but instead had gone east. He hoped he’d be able to join Hatzel’s pride, but he liked to keep his options open.

  He was here to create an explosion, but Merin had been specific. When they’d discovered the rangers had used fire suppressant powder to keep the weald’s wildfires from gaining purchase, Askel had pointed out that the eyrie was also a forest that hadn’t had a good wildfire in years. The eyrie’s redwoods had been kept from burning for far too long. He knew all about that because he’d been placed in charge of starting small weald fires to clear out underbrush. It kept the weald healthy.

  Now, Merin had told Askel, the eyrie needed him. It was time to cleanse the bad and let the forest regrow healthy and strong. The opinici may evacuate and find safety elsewhere, but the eyrie as a construct and institution needed to go.

  Askel had ordered his two pridemates to remove the safety powder next to the braziers before the flameworks went up. He could just kick the braziers off the sides and see what burned, but he couldn’t be sure of how that would go, so he’d come up with a different plan.

  He went out behind the largest butchery and called for help in his best opi trill. When the butcher came out, the gryphons subdued him. Askel now had access to all the oil used in the braziers for this market level.

  When the flameworks exploded, a moment later there was a smaller explosion from the middle of the market, courtesy of some of the saltpeter he’d brought with him. The gryphons with him looked confused at the hole. What was the point? He ignored their questioning looks and sent them out to get ready to evacuate the residential areas. Merin hadn’t asked for an evacuation, that was Askel’s touch, but the gryphons just assumed it was part of the plan.

  “How will we know when to start the evacuation?” one gryphon asked.

  “Look for the flames,” was all Askel said.

  Once they were gone, he lit the butchery on fire. The oil burned bright and high but remained contained. Then he went up to the aqueduct above the butchery and set the second, smaller explosive.

  The explosion was tiny, but it took out a length of the bamboo. He squawked an apology to Triddle for harming his beloved waterworks. The redirected water spilled into the butchery and spread the flaming oil across the market square, where it hit the large hole in the center and spilled down into the depths of the eyrie, a waterfall of flame.

  Askel sat atop the aqueduct and watched it burn, the fire and water mixing together and spreading. Was there a better way to describe his relationship with Triddle? He hoped Orlea would be able to evacuate the lower levels. He didn’t want anyone to get hurt. But when Merin took him aside and suggested this plan to him—just him, no Triddle—he knew it would have to happen. He’d never get another opportunity like this in his lifetime. He was made for this moment.

  When some Reeve’s Guards located him an hour later, he was still staring at the flickering orange light coming from the hole in the market floor. His wings and tail were spread, absorbing the dancing light and heat. They pulled him away, put a leash on him, and led him to the jail north of the market to question later. Even as they locked him up, they seemed unaware that the oil had spread the fire to the lower levels. The fire had yet to reach up to their glistening spires, but it would come. Yes, the flames would come.

  11

  Insurrection

  When the kjarr fledgling led Kia and Zeph to the goliath bird ranch, they expected to find the birds unattended. They did not expect to find Headmaster Neider and his cockatiel packing up a bird full of books to make their escape with. Despite the fact that he may have been the one to send the rangers after her, the owl opinicus still seemed to be Kia’s best bet for notifying the university all at once. Before Zeph could do his hunting thing, she flew straight to the scholar.

  Kia could smell smoke in the air. Had cinders from the flameworks reached the underbough? “Headmaster! Wait, you need to notify the dorms and get everyone out of here.”

  Neider turned around and started in surprise. He looked around, perhaps for a guard, but saw only Zeph. The kjarr fledgling had begun putting pack harnesses on the goliath birds.

  “Kia? What brought you back to the eyrie? You need to go,” the headmaster said.

  The cockatiel looked around nervously. He had patches where he’d groomed away his fur and feathers. His harness was packed, and he was trying to hold a book in his talons, The Complete Genealogy of the Forest Reeves. Why would anyone need to know who they were?

  “We, we, we need to go, headmaster,” the cockatiel managed. They must have cut off his supply of red fern after what happened with Kia. “They’ll be expecting us when word gets to them about what hap, hap, happened here.”

  The acrid scent of smoke had grown stronger. It came from the center of the eyrie.

  “You have to help us evacuate. The eyrie is on fire,” Zeph said. “The weald may already be burning. We have to get the opinici north.”

  It was like a switch had been flipped in the headmaster’s brain on the word north. He laughed. “Zeph Parrotbane, in the flesh! The world is already burning, didn’t you know? We were just the last to ignite.”

  “I don’t understand—” Kia began, but the opinicus interrupted her with a wave of his talons.

  “Save yourself, Kia. Go run off with your gryphon and escape to the taiga. Maybe they won’t want the heights? They’ve ignored other pockets of gryphons. Or come meet me, in the north. You remember the circled eyrie, yes? They’ve promised, promised so much, in exchange for just a little information here and there.” The cockatiel dropped the book and shook the headmaster, snapping him out of it.

  “Kia, I’m so sorry about Cherine. Goodbye.” He and the cockatiel fled north before Kia could tell him that Cherine was still alive.

  “What can we do?” Zeph asked her.

  “The chimes outside his office,” Kia said. “They won’t reach far, but when students come, we can send them to spread the word. They’re designed to reach across the campus.”

  “I’ll do it. You help save the kjarr gryphlets,” Zeph said.

  “No, the upper levels won’t be safe for you alone,” she protested.

  Zeph held up his forepaws. “You’re going to be able to secure the harnesses faster and safer than anyone else. Get the gryphlets out. I’ll find the chimes.”

  She nodded, and he dashed to the nearest tree and climbed as fast as he could before gliding into the darkness. She fl
ew over to where the cockatiel opinicus had dropped the book and picked it up. This was an original, not one of the forger’s copies, as best she could tell. She opened it. The first pages contained a genealogical tree with sketches, all past reeves and their descendants. Starting on the third page was Reeve Brevin’s father. All the living members of her family, including her seven children, were circled in red ink.

  “What is it?” the kjarr fledgling asked.

  “Nothing, it’s just…weren’t the reeve and his children killed prior to the invasion of the Crackling Sea Eyrie?” Kia asked.

  The kjarr gryphon nodded. Kia frowned and stuffed the tome under her harness.

  “Let’s get the goliath birds to the gryphlets.” If the tome survived the night, Kia would give it to Cherine to ponder.

  To their credit, Merin’s gryphons were following Orlea’s orders. Neither of them had been in the eyrie before tonight, and both seemed reassured by her confidence. Orlea would never deny the underbough was decay and rot, but it was that and so much more to her. Her red beak and wings made it easy for the gryphons to keep track of her.

  After her mate had died poaching from the forest, she’d abandoned their nest together and moved to the edge of the eyrie. It gave her a better view of game animals who came close enough to the eyrie to scavenge from the trash heaps, allowing her to trap them without alerting the rangers. Despite her offer to help the gryphons infiltrate the underbough, she’d been avoiding all but the outskirts of it for over a year. Even now, she felt reassured to be at the edge, dismantling the dilapidated gate.

  When the gryphons first smelled the smoke, she thought they must be looking in the wrong direction. They were facing the center of the eyrie. There’d be no way a spark from the flameworks could reach that far. The shaking must have knocked a brazier down. If she couldn’t detect it yet, that meant the other opinici living down here may not be able to, either. She grabbed two gryphons—they happened to be from Merin’s pride—and gave them new orders: raise the alarms.

  How does one decide who to warn first and who to warn last when the end of the world is near? she wondered. These were questions for scholars. Despite her arguments with Cherine, or perhaps because of her arguments with Cherine, she thought of the university as a place where the hard decisions were weighed and measured.

  There was a way to warn everyone that maximized the number of opinici likely to survive the night. Therefore, there was a right choice. She didn’t know what it was or how to figure it out in the little time she had. Her best guess was to have the three of them fly to the center of the eyrie and then spread out warning the underclass about the fire.

  What the university was designed to counter was the heart of every opinicus. While she would follow that plan, what she really wanted to do was to go to her mate’s family and warn them first. She felt like that’s what he would have wanted. It would not be optimal, but it would let her sleep soundly in the nights to come that may stretch on to years. She would rather fail doing what she felt was right than risk succeeding at the cost of his family. They’d dealt with enough already.

  Orlea and the gryphons reached the center without interruption. The Reeve’s Guard stations were eerily quiet. Whatever Strix’s pride had done, the bottom levels were free of security. She told Merin’s gryphons what to shout to get opinici to listen. The underbough residents might ignore a warning of invasion as a fanciful fiction, but they’d probably believe there was a fire. She hoped.

  “Forest fire! Get out of the eyrie!” should do it, she said. She made them repeat it.

  “Can you do anything about your accents?” she asked. “They’re really thick. I don’t know if they’ll understand you.”

  They looked aghast at being told—in an opi trill, no less—that they had accents.

  “I guess you can’t help it. I don’t have time to teach you how to talk. Let’s do this.” She sent one southwest and the other southeast. She didn’t know how long they had, and she wanted them out of the city as soon as possible. That left her with more than half the eyrie to talk to. She thought of her mate and flew to his mother’s nest. If things went well, they’d help her spread the word. Their chimes had long since been stolen, so she rapped on the door.

  Her mate’s mother answered with bloodshot eyes and red stains around her beak, hinting at heavy fern use after her son’s death. His family grew it along the inside edge of the eyrie where a little light reached. It didn’t take much for the fern to grow. Orlea saw several of her mate’s brothers and sisters asleep inside.

  “Orlea?”

  She had not seen or talked to them since her mate died. She’d started the poaching when the hunting grounds closed. It was her fault he was dead. Even now, she didn’t know why she’d made it out and he hadn’t.

  Orlea looked at her mate’s mother. “The eyrie is about to burn down. I’m heading north to spread the word. Please, hurry east and west and get people out of here.”

  “Orl, you’re not well…” her mate’s mother began, but the smell of smoke was heavier here, and with the door open, she heard it. A few moments later, something gave way on a level above them, and the waterfall of fire crashed upon the forest floor and spread. Her mate’s family rushed off, carrying two chicks to spread the word. Orlea headed north and hoped that her beloved’s spirit had been appeased.

  Reeve Brevin returned to find that Jonas had gone home to sleep, for which she was grateful. She’d concede that he knew politics and logistics, but when it came to military strategy, she’d rather have that conversation one-on-one with Commander Wolden.

  The commander had been dispatched to the Crackling Sea Eyrie to aid them against the kjarr, making him one of the few opinicus military commanders in either eyrie who had seen combat and was still alive. The Crackling Sea opinici had a strange disfigurement of honor that required them to go into battle with their troops. Wolden’s own vanity had been appeased by the loss of his digit to a monitor when he was still young. As she understood it, he’d hung onto the lizard’s back for dear life, and the talon had been torn off. Since then, he kept up his talon-to-talon combat training but never stuck his neck out when it didn’t make tactical sense.

  The commander arrived with a contingent of the Reeve’s Guard. The main bulk of the military forces were helping establish a raftworks and new fishing outpost on the far side of the Crackling Sea. The rangers who weren’t at the weald were deployed north to watch for anything suspicious, minus one group of the brightest who stayed here to advise the commander. It seemed most likely that the next invasion would go after the weakened Crackling Sea, but it was too much to hope that the other eyries had forgotten about this last, little outpost tucked away in the Redwood Valley.

  With the wingtorn—hopefully—subduing the coast, the city defenses were left to the Reeve’s Guard. The city division of the guard were trained exclusively to manage small disputes and find illegal fern growers. Had they been competent tacticians, she wouldn’t have sent three of them with Larren to watch the wingtorn. The Reeve’s Guard assigned to defend Reeve’s Nest were meant to look impressive, which made them the natural escort for Wolden. Not that she expected them to need the Reeve’s Guard, but the Crackling Sea reeve had been torn limb from limb, after all.

  The commander stuck one of the shoreline maps to the wall. Swan’s Rest, Crane’s Nest, and Sandpiper’s Dune were circled. The rangers were stationed at Sandpiper’s Dune. The opinicus who led the far west fisherfolk settlement had been eager to be declared part of the eyrie and receive citizenship. They’d purged their gryphons, according to the ghastly ranger who held the area, Rakesh. Brevin was unsure if that meant the gryphons had been kicked out or killed.

  Her middle daughter, Ivess, sat in on the meeting. Of all Brevin’s daughters, Ivess was the most driven to learn how to run an eyrie. She attended every meeting she was allowed to attend. She’d spent time at the university learning the history of the eyries and the names of each one. Brevin had considered her daughte
r’s pursuits a waste of energy back then, but current affairs had proven Brevin wrong.

  Her only complaint, a nitpick, really, was that Ivess took after her father. Her plumage was far too blue to give her the iconic look of past Redwood Valley reeves. She’d tried to dye it as a fledgling and had only succeeded in turning the fur-covered half of her body green. Having been teased by her sisters, all emerald-plumed like their mom, she’d finally devoted herself to being better than them. There was no rule that the reeve had to be the eldest child—as Ivess herself often said in front of her older sisters.

  Their talk was interrupted by an innocent-sounding thud outside the front door.

  Before Wolden could send a Reeve’s Guard, Brevin said, “Would you go check on that, dear?”

  Ivess hopped up and fluttered to the main doors. She was still dainty enough to fly short distances indoors and have it considered cute instead of impolite. She opened the door and was lifted off her feet by the talons of a large owl gryphon.

  “My name is Strix,” the gryphon seemed to speak without opening his slight beak. Brevin was reminded not of the cobra or rattlesnake, but of the tiny krait which made no noise, gave no warning, before it bit and killed.

  “Reeve, stay back,” Wolden warned.

  “I would like a word with you alone.” Strix tightened his claws, drawing blood from Ivess. “I am not patient.”

  Brevin’s heart went out to Ivess, but none of her daughters were ready to lead the eyrie if something happened to her. The eyrie needed Brevin, not her offspring. Still, it was impossible to watch a child she’d hatched in danger. Brevin knew her father would never have saved her, but she wasn’t her father. She took a step forward, and Wolden took the decision out of her hands.

  “Reeve’s Guard, attack!” he yelled, and they rushed the gryphon.