A Perjury of Owls

by Michael Angel

  I chewed my lip anxiously. “I’m not a doctor. If you wanted healing, I could have asked for a spell, or at least brought my first aid kit–”

  “Healing is not needed. Death is inevitable for the one you must see.” Xandra looked up at me, as miserable as an owl could possibly look, and added, “One merely asks for your aid. To help one who is held dear. Perhaps to bring a single sunrise to a life filled with fog and cloud.”

  I had to ask the question that had been gnawing at me the entire time.

  “Are you bringing me to the Albess?”

  “Nay, nay! The owlet whose sight shall soon gaze upon nothing is of this one’s own clutch of eggs.”

  Xandra had a sick child? That alone rocked me.

  “If it helps she-from-another-world, a common link exists,” Xandra went on. “The child has the same addlements and illnesses, what we Hoohan call the ‘Marks of the Anointed’, as the Albess. These addlements are such where only one such as you can provide comfort.”

  I still didn’t know what Xandra really meant. But if there was something I could do to help a sick child, I wasn’t about to hesitate. So I nodded, then hefted myself over the lip of the opening into the owls’ hidden world.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  When I’d first visited the Andeluvian Parliament, the first thing that had struck me was the smell: parchment and pastry. Here, it was the sound. The light rush of air, the patter of dripping water, and the distant, utterly unexpected sound of a choir.

  Was I hearing things?

  I stopped for a moment to check. Also, it was really dim inside the owl’s quarters, and my eyes needed time to adjust. To my astonishment, where the moonlight ended, the cavern I stood inside was lit by the steady, powder-blue phosphorescence of a mossy lichen covering the walls. And the choir? Not only did I hear it, I could almost understand it.

  Quem quaerimus adjutorem…

  Media vita in morte sumus…

  This rocked me to my core. I’d heard blatty trumpet calls and polka-esque tunes from Fitzwilliam’s court musicians. And I’d listened to the droning ohhhmmmmm of the Fayleene’s Lead Does during their ceremony to choose the next Protector of the Forest. But this? This sounded just like Latin chants sung by a brotherhood of Benedictine monks.

  Xandra perched atop a nearby ledge, looking at me with a mixture of curiosity and urgency. “One sees marvel and appreciation for the music of the Hoohan.”

  “I just didn’t…I mean…” I stuttered. “Back on my world, owls don’t sing.”

  “Here in the Roost of the Star Child, all dwellings are placed so that one and all may hear the music of peace at any time of day. Were events different, one would be welcome to meditate with us. But now, we must go.”

  Xandra led the way, fluttering from perch to perch down a winding corridor that led deeper inside. She set a rapid pace that kept me almost in a constant jog.

  Still, I glimpsed sights in the dim light that stirred my sense of intrigue and wonder.

  The Hoohan of this ‘Roost’ lived in individual stone chambers, much like cells in a honeycomb or rooms in a monastery. Each chamber’s opening was a flattened oval like the one at the cavern entrance, allowing room for a family to perch on their front door. Patterns or Latinate words were scratched on the walls over the glowing mats of lichen, though I could only guess if they were announcements, street signs, or owlish graffiti.

  The corridors were two stories high, and just wide enough to permit a Hoohan to fly unimpeded, with wings outstretched, for the entire length. The air was cool, moist, and completely without odor. It was a far cry from the feel of the supersized caverns and salt-tanged air in the griffin aerie.

  Xandra brought me to an opening in the wall that was different than the others. The oval space had been sealed off by a wooden door. For some reason, that filled me with a sense of foreboding. A tall, brooding Parliamentarian stood guard over it, one with a distinctly male look about his heavy brow.

  “This is Dayna, she-from-another-world,” Xandra said, introducing us. “Dayna, this is Orestes, one’s mate and the sire of this one’s clutch.”

  I nodded in greeting. Orestes frowned disapprovingly at my presence but did not speak.

  “One asks she-from-another-world to bide but a moment,” she said, and using her beak, she pressed a lever to open the door latch.

  The door swung inwards wide enough to admit her entry. She disappeared inside, and I watched her shadow on the wall move jerkily against the flicker of a new light source. I heard the sounds of talking, and then Xandra reappeared.

  She fluttered up to a perch just outside the doorway, and then indicated the way inside with an outstretched wing. “One begs you to enter, and spend only a few minutes of one’s life to give comfort and company that others cannot.”

  I swallowed hard and put my hand to the door. The wood felt smooth and slick. “This would be your offspring that I would be speaking to?”

  “It is pleasure such as is rarely experienced to introduce him as this one’s youngest son,” Xandra said, aquiver with anticipation. “This one’s son is named Perrin, and his waiting for you has been as bittersweet as the biting of a tart fruit.”

  I opened the door just enough to slip inside and then closed it behind me. The chamber inside was about the size of my bedroom, and just tall enough so that I could stand. The illumination came from a pile of glowing stones set in one corner. I didn’t know what they were, but they put out a happy, dancing yellow light and enough warmth to drive back the cool damp of the caves.

  Piles of books and scrolls lined one wall, stacked in no order I could fathom along crude shelves made of flagstone-shaped chunks of rock. Shallow clay bowls of water and untouched food lay next to a raised platform crafted from woven reeds and soft cloth.

  Swaddled inside the folds of cloth was a little owl, no larger than an adult chicken and a lot scrawnier. Perrin looked as if half his body weight was taken up by his large head and inquisitive golden eyes. But what grabbed and held my attention was his plumage. It was sparse and tattered looking, and it didn’t have the mottled brown-black of his parents or the other Parliamentarians. It was closer to the butterscotch yellow of the Noctua, but that wasn’t quite right. His feathers were the shade of orange sherbet mixed with ice milk.

  In other words, his coloration was exactly the same as Albess Thea’s.

  “Oh, hello,” Perrin said, in the faint, sweet voice of a little boy. “You must be the kindly monster that my parents keep talking about.”

  Kindly monster? I wasn’t offended so much as surprised. And to an owl, I probably did look pretty strange. Certainly the griffins had though the human body was an oddball thing. I actually had to choke down a laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation.

  “Um, yes, I…I guess I’m your kindly neighborhood monster,” I said. That sounded a little too flip to my ears, so I quickly added, “You can call me Dayna, if you wish. Your mom, Xandra, asked me to talk to you.”

  Perrin cocked his head at me for a moment. He blinked in astonishment, as if surprised that I’d actually spoken back. “I’d really, really like to talk with you, Dayna. You are so very tall, though. Are all monsters as tall as you?”

  “Well, no. I mean, some of us are taller, some are smaller.” I abruptly realized that given our relative sizes, it did look as if I was monstrously tall. I knelt down and sort of scooted over in Perrin’s general direction. “Is this any better?”

  He nodded, not taking his eyes off of me. “Uh-huh. Wow. I don’t think you monsters are as weird as my parents say you are. The black stuff like fine feathers on your head…it’s really pretty.”

  “Thank you. Some monsters – I mean, humans – think so too.”

  “I hope you’re not mad at me for calling you a monster,” Perrin whispered. He let out a tiny cough and added, “It’s just how my parents like to tell me about the world out there. Like everything’s from one of the long-ago stories in my books. They have to tell me, because I’m t
oo weak to go outside anymore. They think it’s the only way I can understand things, but I know better.”

  My heart gave a twang at that, but I tried to keep things positive. “You’re a smart kid, Perrin. Smart owlet, that is.”

  “Pretty smart. I understand why I’m here, you know.”

  Perrin craned his neck to look over my shoulder. He saw the door was still closed, and then motioned weakly with his wing: come closer. I shifted position so that I sat right next to his little raised nest. Now I could hear the wheezy sound of his breathing.

  He whispered, “I’m here because I’m broken. And they don’t know how to fix me.”

  I didn’t know what I could say to that. I jumped to the reflexive, positive thing to say, and it sounded flat even to my ears. “I’m sure they’re trying their best–”

  “They are. I know that. But I keep getting weaker, I can’t even eat anymore, and all our healers have been trying for the past year and more.” He gave me the most serious look I’ve ever seen on a child’s face, and it didn’t matter that he was of a different species. “I know what is coming. Some of the Noctua say I might come back as Anointed again, but I don’t know. What do you think will happen to me? I mean, after I’m finally gone?”

  Perrin spoke so calmly of his end. It threatened to break the dam of emotion that had started to well up within me. “I…I don’t know, honestly. Some people I know say that we come back again, sure. Some say we go to a paradise, at least if we were good. Others say that we just stop. That there’s nothing at the end. Just…the end.”

  “I think that’s weird. That it would just ‘end’ like that. What would all the point be, then? Of being alive in the first place?”

  “I wish I knew,” I said. “I’d like to think that there is a point. It’s why I try very hard to protect and care for my friends, my family…”

  “And you do care, I can tell. You are kind.” He looked up at me, grimacing as he shifted in his nest. “So can I ask a favor?”

  I had absolutely no idea what Perrin was going to ask of me. But I could hardly turn down any request he might have. So I nodded, afraid to speak, and listened to what he said next.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Perrin’s eyes glazed for a moment with pain. He waited, his breath coming in short, quick pants, and the moment finally passed. The owlet then leaned forward and spoke again in his little boy voice.

  “Would you put your hand on me? I’ve never been touched by a monster before.”

  Slowly I put my monster hand out and gently stroked him from his head down towards the feathers on his back. A satisfied burble of sounds came from his beak. I did my best to be gentle. The young owl felt like a bundle of sticks wrapped in a thin coat of feathers. Under his ratty plumes, I felt nothing but solid angles and knobs of bone, as if his flesh had melted away. If I clenched my hand into a fist, he would crumple under my grasp like a fistful of feathery tin foil.

  “That feels so nice,” he sighed. “Everyone but my parents and the healers have always been afraid to touch me. They were always afraid my madness could jump to them. Like fleas or lice.”

  That puzzled me. “Madness?”

  Perrin nodded miserably. “That’s really how I’m sick, you know. My body’s giving out now. But my mind…it’s always been this way. They can’t understand me. Not really. And I can’t understand well right back. My head hurts when I try. That’s why my parents talked about asking you, ‘she-from-another-world’, to come. It’s so good they did that. To get you to meet me here, at my end. To know that someone has the same madness as I do. I feel…less alone.”

  My puzzlement vanished as everything fell into place. The dam holding back my emotions began to crack. My eyes burned and I fought desperately to hold back the tears as I finally understood.

  Perrin had the same ‘affliction’ as me. The same one as Thea.

  When he spoke, he freely used the word ‘I’.

  I’d thought that the Parliamentarians had some strange cultural reason for avoiding that simple word. That the Albess had somehow taught herself the trick of speaking to humans and other creatures so that she could make her people’s wishes known. But now I knew. The Hoohan weren’t abiding by some oddball tradition. This was how their brains were wired, from birth. Thea hadn’t figured out how to communicate with humans for the sake of the owls. She’d first had to figure out how to talk with her fellow owls, and somehow had been promoted to deal with humans as the Albess.

  That realization finally burst the dam inside of me. Perrin had been isolated for all his short life, stranded all alone while in the middle of his flock simply because he knew no other way to express himself. That sort of social isolation bred a special kind of despair. It bred a special kind of insanity, one that could twist and annihilate a soul.

  In the end, that’s what had destroyed Holly. I’d always wondered if there was anything I could have done to save her. To block the road she’d chosen to travel. Now I knew. There had been no hope, no chance, from the day she or poor Perrin had been hatched. They had been damned to an isolation as complete as if they’d been exiled to the moon.

  Perrin stretched out a quivering wing tip. He touched my chin, lifted it slightly so that he could see my face. Tears ran down my cheeks, so hot it felt as if they would turn to steam.

  “Who are you crying for?” he asked quietly.

  “For you,” I choked out. “For me, I guess. And for a griffin I know. Knew. She had a…a madness, I guess. Just for being born the wrong way.”

  “Will you tell me about her? Please?”

  “I don’t know if I should,” I confessed, as I wiped my eyes with my sleeve. “It’s not a story for…I mean, it doesn’t end happily. For her, I mean.”

  He snapped his beak with a faint clack. “I still want to hear it.”

  So I told him.

  I don’t remember what I said, exactly. But the owlet sat perfectly quiet and still, as patient as small feathered stone. I told him about my visit to the aerie, my first meeting with Hollyhock, how I got to know her, even our final confrontation in the Lair of the Elders. I know I shed a few more tears after I stumbled, brokenly, to the end of my story.

  “And so it still hurts,” I sighed. “It hurt to see Holly in so much pain at the end. It hurt that she was never truly a friend. That she’d lied to me the entire time.”

  Perrin shifted uncomfortably and then looked me in the eye as he said, “I think you’re wrong.”

  That made me pause. “About what?”

  “About Holly not being your friend. About her lying the entire time.”

  “I just told you all about that, Perrin. She was just manipulating me, shadowing me on behalf of–”

  “No, Dayna. That wasn’t it, not all of it.”

  I let out a shaky breath. “What do you mean?”

  “She may not have told you everything she was doing, sure. But she didn’t hold back her feelings.”

  “I…”

  “She shared all her secrets with you, didn’t she? I mean, about doing something for love. About trying to build a family. About how hard her life had been.” He coughed again a couple of times, gasped, and went on. “And she listened to you. Tried to understand you. She knew you enough to say ‘you didn’t bluff’.”

  “But I told you,” I protested feebly, “what happened in the Lair of the Elders.”

  “You said that she sounded sad. When Holly said you were both alike. Don’t you see? She didn’t want to hurt you.”

  He had a point. And…Holly had refused to hurt me before. The mysterious ‘him’ had been forced to send Ironwood to try and murder me in the night, before anyone realized that Shaw was there keeping an eye on me.

  The kid’s right, I thought. Suddenly, a frosty knot of hurt unkinked itself deep inside of me, to be replaced by delicious warmth. Holly had only moved against me when she had run out of choices, and even that had hurt. Shaw’s daughter had valued my friendship with her. It hadn’t all been an act.r />
  A few more tears forced themselves to the surface. I wiped them away, and found myself – of all the darnedest things! – actually smiling at the very same time. I took a shuddering breath as I rested my hand on the owlet’s emaciated body.

  “You’re a marvel,” I said. “I came to help you. And you ended up helping me even more.”

  “Did I?” He beamed. “Then maybe you can help me just one more time?”

  “Anything, Perrin. I owe you so much.”

  “I don’t have much time left,” he sighed. “I’m okay with it, now that I’ve met you. But…what can I do for my parents?”

  I took a deep, shuddering breath. “I think…that the best thing would be to bring them joy. As much as you can, for as long as you can. You’re not ‘mad’, you know. You just got the wrong brain for the wrong body.”

  Perrin actually chuckled, at least until another coughing fit overtook him. But he looked happier than ever as he said, “I don’t know…I kinda like being ‘mad’ now. It’s like you and I have this private language. Oh, if I only could have had you as a friend to talk to around the other owlets! We’d have driven them mad!”

  “I bet we would have,” I agreed. “Want me to let your parents in now?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Now I know what to do.”

  I got up and knocked gently on the inside of the door. It swung open, and both Orestes and Xandra flitted inside.

  “One was concerned,” Orestes said, in a gruff voice. “For she-from-another world is a strange choice to bring into our roost.”

  “One must show respect to our guest,” Xandra quickly insisted. “She-from-another-world has come through many dangers to meet one’s offspring.”

  “I’m glad you both trusted me enough to let me do this,” I said humbly. “I think Perrin wants to speak with you now.”

  I moved out of the way and the two owls came to the side of Perrin’s nest. The owlet had struggled to perch on the edge. He spoke in the same frail voice, but this time it was tinged with warmth and excitement.