Gold Wings Rising, page 14
This would be a very her way to die.
19
Kylee nearly fell over as the ghost eagle’s cry stole the air from her lungs. “REEEEEEE!”
She saw visions of the Owl Mothers chasing her through the forest, great gray owls and brilliant snowy owls and blunt-headed barn owls diving and tearing at her. It was a memory of her first escape from the Owl Mothers, when things had not gone to plan. She saw Brysen grab his left hand, no doubt caught in the memory of when Üku had threatened to cut it off.
The ghost eagle stepped toward her, pushing her away from the cliff face and out into the open.
“Watch out!” Kheryn leapt over Kylee, pulling their knife in midair and charging for the massive ghost eagle.
“No!” Brysen yelled, whether to Kheryn or the bird, Kylee couldn’t tell. But no sooner had Kheryn’s feet hit the ground, knife thrusting for the ghost eagle’s shoulder joint, than another eagle dove behind them. Scything a piece of the dark from the night sky, the second ghost eagle slammed into Kheryn’s back, knocking them forward so hard they lost their grip on the blade. The eagle swooped down to the trail, landing with its head cocked sideways, onyx eyes devouring moonlight.
Kheryn rolled forward with the force of the blow. The battle boy didn’t even have a chance to grunt or scream or yelp before a third ghost eagle appeared, talons outstretched, and snatched them by the skull and shoulders, heaving them skyward, their neck snapping. After gaining some height, the eagle tossed Kheryn’s body halfway down the slope.
“REEEEEEE!” the eagles screeched together, and Kylee saw avalanches in her mind, rockslides and floods—every manner of obstacle that nature could inflict on a traveler in the mountains. She saw Nyck and Lyra, gutted and devoured by the massive birds. Grazim’s body, lying untouched in the mud at the bottom of a gully, a single slash opening her from forehead to waist, her innards splayed to the stars like a blooming flower. She saw Brysen and Jowyn, alone on the snowy peaks, shivering and freezing in each other’s arms until the last breath left their lungs, turning to ice that sealed their lips, forever just a feather’s width from each other.
These tragedies hadn’t happened—they were the ghost eagle’s threats. And as far as Kylee knew, ghost eagles didn’t make idle threats. They could share nothing they didn’t believe was true.
But Nyck and Lyra were still behind her, doubled over, no doubt seeing the same terrible images she was. Jowyn had tackled Brysen and covered him with his body, as if some fragile flesh and bone could protect him from the eagles’ hunger. Brysen, to his credit, was struggling out from under Jowyn.
Lyra came to herself and bolted from where she crouched, turning back in the direction they’d come. At first Kylee thought she was fleeing, but that wasn’t the battle boy way. Lyra was trying to go wide, to circle around and reach Kheryn’s body.
“Leave them alone! Don’t you dare eat them!” Lyra yelled.
A ghost eagle dropped in front of her from the sky, flapped its wings, harried her back up the slope, but it didn’t strike.
“REEEEE!” the eagles cried, and now there was a sunrise in Kylee’s mind. Kylee felt the warmth on her skin. She saw the sun burning high, sending gold over the plateau, its brilliant light shining on a crumbling black structure tucked into a jagged mountain. She’d seen this before: This was where the ghost eagles had perched around an empty nest in another vision, but this time the view was from far enough away that she could recognize the location.
The Talon Fortress. It had been abandoned long ago, but it still loomed on the far side of the plateau.
When her eyes refocused, Kylee found herself still standing in the dark. The three massive ghost eagles blocked the path in front of her. One of them launched into the air and flapped to the top of the cliff they’d been set to scale. Its talons gripped the upper lip as it leaned down over them and screeched again. It was hard to distinguish between the pain of the pitch and the horror of the visions it carried. One of the eagles took two hopping steps to the side and lowered its head nearly to the ground, where a thin trail wound away through the rocks, heading in the opposite direction of the blood birch forest.
And then the birds waited.
“This isn’t an attack,” Brysen said, catching his breath, sitting up. “They’re telling us where to go. They’re…”
“Herding us,” Kylee finished his sentence.
“But Kheryn?” Nyck groaned, eyes flitting between the terrible trio of monstrous birds blocking their way.
“That was self-defense,” Brysen said sadly. “If this was an attack, why’d they stop?”
The two eagles turned their heads to him, then turned as one to look at Kylee.
“They want us to go to the Talon Fortress,” she said. “Not to the Owl Mothers.”
“And we’re just going to do what they want?” Nyck cried, fists balled. He took a step toward the birds, sliding a blade from his belt, like he was being subtle. The ghost eagles had the ability to see his heartbeat; they could definitely see the knife in his hand.
“No, Nyck,” Kylee told him. “Don’t.”
“Calm down!” Brysen warned. “They’ll kill you if you give them reason to. Stay calm.”
He pulled out the egg, showed it to the eagles and then to Nyck. Its shell was still gold, but there was more black than before, like storm clouds forming on a sunny day, and they were growing.
“The only way to beat them is to let go of that rage,” Kylee said. “They’re creatures of violence. They can’t understand its opposite.”
“I can’t just forgive them,” Nyck said.
“That’s the point,” she said. “It’s impossible to forgive them, which means it’s the only way to stop them. They’re not expecting it.”
“You want me to weaponize forgiveness?”
“Yes,” Kylee said. “No other weapon we have can possibly work.”
She took satisfaction in the idea that it wasn’t really forgiveness if it was being used to thwart them. She hoped that would satisfy Nyck in some way.
He looked back at her with tears in his eyes. Battle boys were not the forgiving sort, and Nyck had just lost a friend. Kheryn had been one of the very first battle boys. They’d been around when Nyck first formed the gang out of street urchins. Nyck had left home, abandoning sisters who wouldn’t see him for who he was, and found Kheryn. Kheryn, who was so sure of themselves, it seemed perfectly natural for them and Nyck to join together. Nyck and Kheryn met Nyall later, and the three of them scraped and scrapped and scavenged for survival for half the seasons of their lives.
In an instant, the ghost eagles had ended that story. Kylee could see it all. The ghost eagles were showing it all. They didn’t want Nyck to forgive them. They wanted Nyck to attack. They were hungering for it, even as they hoped the group would simply follow the path they’d pointed out, the path away from the blood birch forest.
They’re torn, Kylee thought. What they want and what they need are tearing them in different directions. They’re longing for violence, but they’re confused by peace.
“Stand down, Nyck,” she urged him. “Take a deep breath and stand down.”
Nyck whined. “But—”
“I know,” she said. “But it’s the only way.”
Nyck hesitated but unclenched his fists. The black clouds on the egg’s surface lightened. He put his blade away and took a step backward. One of the ghost eagles lunged at him, and for a terrible heartbeat, Kylee thought she’d been wrong. But Nyck didn’t move.
The ghost eagle’s beak snapped closed hard enough to tussel his hair, but it didn’t touch him.
“We won’t fight you,” Kylee said. “If it’s death you want, you’ll have to take it from us, because we won’t give it to you.”
The ghost eagle shuddered, then swung its head toward Brysen. There was a terrible silence as the ghost eagles thought without screaming, shared nothing of their thoughts, and then, the two of them as one, charged at Jowyn, launching from the ground and flapping toward him.
“No, please!” Brysen cried as their talons stretched for Jowyn’s pale skin, and Brysen dropped the egg to protect him. Kylee dove on top of the egg as one of the eagles broke away and tried to snatch it. She felt its sharp talons graze her back and slice her shirt, cutting her open like a whip cracking across her skin. She screamed and saw flashes of her father bringing his talon-tipped whip across Brysen’s back.
The eagles wheeled away from the attack. The egg was out of their grasp, beneath Kylee, and the only way to get it would be to finish ripping her open.
And yet they didn’t.
And they hadn’t.
They were bluffing, and she’d called them on it. Ryven was right: The eagles were bound to the twins through this egg, and they wouldn’t hurt Brysen or Kylee as long as they had it. They were safe with the egg, but she wondered how safe their friends were. Kheryn was already dead, and the others were just as vulnerable. She and her brother couldn’t shield them all for the whole journey, especially if they went against the ghost eagles’ wishes and continued for the blood birches.
She looked up at the three giant eagles. They were circling above the group now, only visible by the shape of the stars they blotted out. She held on to the egg, a swirl of gold and black in her hands. She looked at Brysen and Jowyn, who were shuddering and clinging to each other, and then back at Grazim, her hand on the hilt of her knife, prepared to attack these harbingers of doom to protect a pale boy she didn’t even like. She looked at Nyck, who was struggling to keep himself together after watching his dearest friend be murdered. Kylee felt a swell of pride for these people, a swell of hope. They were going to win, because they could do one thing the ghost eagles hadn’t figured out. They could love one another in infinitely more complex ways than the huge birds’ tiny brains could fathom. That was how they would defeat these birds of prey: by being human.
“We’ll take your egg where you want us to take it,” Kylee said. “We’ll go to the Talon Fortress—”
“Kylee, no,” Brysen said. “We have to go to the Owl Mothers.”
“We’ll never make it,” she told him. “Not all of us, anyway.” She nodded toward Grazim and Nyck and Lyra, and Brysen understood. She was going to make a deal with them.
“You don’t touch any of us on our way!” she shouted up at the dark.
The sky was quiet. Like owls, the ghost eagles had serrated feathers and could fly without making a sound. Kylee wondered if they’d understood her, tried to think of a Hollow Tongue word with which to command them. But finally they screeched their agreement and flew toward the Six Villages and whatever grim meals awaited them there.
They did, however, leave Kylee with a parting image.
She saw Nyall, her oldest friend, ragged and tired and surrounded by ghost eagles, a prisoner in their nest at the Talon Fortress. With him, dropped by rough talons, was Ryven.
Then the image vanished. The ghost eagles were gone.
“Did you see that?” Brysen asked her.
“What?” Nyck asked. “What did they show you?”
“They showed us where they took Ryven,” Kylee said. “And that they have Nyall.”
“They … what do you mean?” Nyck grumbled. “They have him?”
“He’s a hostage,” she said.
“What kind of bird takes hostages?” Lyra groaned.
“One that learns from us,” Kylee said, clutching the egg, whose shell had gone black again. If they did anything to hurt her friend, she wasn’t sure she would be able to take the advice she’d given Nyck. She wasn’t sure she could forgive.
“So we’re not going to the blood birches anymore?” Grazim asked.
Kylee took a long look up the cliff, toward the distant mountain forest. “No.” She sighed, doubting the wisdom of following where the ghost eagles wanted them to go, but knowing it was the only way to keep her friends safe.
“If we’re lucky, maybe the Owl Mothers will find us on the way,” Grazim suggested.
“Or if we are very, very unlucky,” Kylee replied.
EXIT STRATEGY
Something had changed beyond the walls of the Sky Castle. Kyrg Bardu could feel it in the same way she could feel a storm coming. She always had a good sense of shifts in weather—and of shifts in power. Those two talents helped her rise to become proctor of the Council of Forty, the highest authority in Uztar.
From her earliest days on the Council, she’d directed the nobility to fair-weather hunts and warned them when the rains or winds might turn on them, and she did the same for their political fortunes. She knew precisely when to ask for favors and when to call a favor due, when to cultivate a friend and when to cut a friend loose. She didn’t often commit violence herself, but she had no qualms about deploying it with precision.
None of those skills was helpful to her now. She was barely hanging on to order in the city now that it was cut off from the rest of the plateau, its gates sealed and strong nets hung over every open street and courtyard. Some districts were already in open rebellion. Her army was stranded in the Six Villages along with her most loyal kyrg, and the treasonous Kyrg Ryven had escaped. She’d had to deploy her personal guard to keep order below the nets, as food stores were running low and the ghost eagles picked holes in their defenses nightly. Outspoken dissidents were left tied on the wrong side of the nets, and their screams carried from one end of the city to the other, though it was the sudden silences that had the greatest impact on maintaining order.
The other kyrgs were growing restless, and she needed to do something to hold their loyalty. Fear alone couldn’t tame them for long. One trained a hawk by feeding it just enough to stay hungry, and one managed subjects in the same way. How could she keep her council keen to obey when she had so little to offer and their people needed so very much? And how could she do anything at all when she didn’t know what was happening, when she couldn’t get a message in or out because those cursed ghost eagles snatched any messenger pigeon she posted?
She was in a tough spot, but she was not helpless. She just had to look for help in unsavory places.
And that was why she’d had Goryn and Yves Tamir brought to her. They were the only living heirs to the Tamir clan, and they were trapped in her city, far from their home in the Six Villages. Goryn had escaped her dungeons but didn’t make it far, and his sister had been living quite openly in the city for some time before the ghost eagle attack, building her own criminal network. Bardu had kept her brother prisoner as a favor to his sister, in fact. Yves didn’t want the competition. Now that Goryn was free, he didn’t seem to know that his sister didn’t have his best interests at heart. Bardu held on to this knowledge like precious bronze, and Yves knew it. That was the tether that kept the criminals bound to Kyrg Bardu, what allowed her to trust that they would do as she wished. She could turn them against each other any time she chose. She felt, in that sense, as powerful as a ghost eagle herself.
“You’ve got smugglers’ routes into and out of the city?” she asked the Tamirs.
“We do,” confirmed Yves.
“But no one is foolish enough to take them,” Goryn said. His cruelty was legendary, but he wasn’t terribly bright. His sister looked irked that he’d volunteer that information, and Bardu shared a knowing look with her. Bardu had no younger brothers herself, but she was familiar with the concept. They could be quite a nuisance.
“Someone is,” Bardu said. “After the Council meeting tonight, I’ll have someone who I need you, Goryn, to escort outside the walls.”
“But it’s death out there,” the petty gangster began. “I wouldn’t even—”
Bardu cut him off. “You will be protected,” she said.
“How?” he asked. “Who can protect me from the ghost eagles?”
“I can,” said Üku, leader of the Owl Mothers, who was entering the chamber behind him. “And I can even give you a chance for revenge, if you do exactly as I say.”
Goryn Tamir nodded and didn’t say another word in objection. Bardu admired him for that bit of wisdom, at least. He knew when to keep his mouth shut and obey a powerful woman who knew so very much more than he did. She almost felt a pang of guilt that his reward for obedience would likely be death all the same, but she left that decision entirely up to the Owl Mother.
That was the first part of their agreement.
The second part would happen when the Council assembled one last time.
* * *
The Council of Forty was much diminished. Kyrg Bardu had appointed her nephew to replace Kyrg Ryven, so their number was steady at thirty-nine, but she didn’t dare try to replace the absent defense counselor, lest she provoke dissent from his remaining soldiers, most of whom were still loyal to him and eagerly awaiting his return. While absent, however, Kyrg Birgund could neither aid nor threaten her current plan, which suited her just fine. When it was done, if he returned, he would fall in line for the good of Uztar. He was noble that way. He did whatever he thought Uztar needed, and as long as Bardu ruled Uztar, Birgund would serve her. If he didn’t, she’d find a way to discredit and destroy him.
“Thank you for coming,” Bardu told the bedraggled council. They’d been mostly holed up in the central citadel itself, as the city was no longer safe for nobility to wander unescorted. There was anger in the air, rumors that the Council was hoarding food and weaponry. These rumors were, of course, true, but Bardu intended to use them to justify the extreme course of action she was about to take. “I know this last moon’s turning has been hard on all of you. I’m aware of the challenges you face.”
“We’re unable to keep the nets of my district patched! I lose people every night!” one of the kyrgs said, an earnest, older man whose district was rather pitiful but who’d amassed quite a fortune in fixing hawk battles—a fortune that was largely worthless under the present circumstances.
“There’s violence in my district all day,” another councillor whined. Her district was filled with well-equipped merchants and falcon dealers, and Bardu knew the Tamirs had built much of their new criminal gang by extorting those very businesses. Clashes between them and the kyrg’s constabulary were regular and bloody, and Bardu had to repeatedly assure the kyrg that she’d put a stop to the violence.
