Gold Wings Rising, page 17
“What?”
“Don’t do what you usually do,” she said, and he knew just what she meant, but she said it anyway. “Don’t be reckless.”
Before he could argue about the relative merits of recklessness, she took the ropes from his bag and began tying them into a climbing harness and belay lines. She was always better with knots than he was.
“You want to make sure this side goes under.” She showed him. “Or else it could slip and you’ll be meat paste on jagged rocks.” She shoved the rope back into his hands.
Siwoo and Clava strolled past them, putting their hands against the sheer rock and then looking back at the twins. “I suppose you would need ropes,” Clava grunted, reaching for a handhold and starting the climb, sure-footed as a mountain goat. Siwoo was right behind her, and their owl circled overhead at the top. They climbed so fast, Nyck and Lyra were still throwing things into their bags by the time the Owl Mothers were halfway up.
Kylee didn’t wait for Brysen but followed close behind, hauling one end of the rope with her. Grazim followed, tossing her hawk skyward with a command to wait-on, so that he and Jowyn had to belay for the battle boys and go up last themselves.
Once they were alone at the bottom of the cliff, Brysen and Jowyn had a chance to talk.
“You’re hiding something from me,” Jowyn said. “You have that look.”
“I’m just worried about you,” Brysen said. He hated to lie to Jowyn, but he hated to hurt him even more. A little lie could be like a stitch in a wound, something to keep a person from bleeding worse. “You’re exiled, and going to their territory scares me. What will the rest of the Owl Mothers do when they see you again?”
“Well, exile made me like any other outsider,” he said. “So they’ll treat me just like you … They’ll probably try to toss us both in a crevasse if I make them mad.”
“Wouldn’t some of your old friends try to protect you?” Brysen wondered. Jowyn had been a member of the covey since he was small. If anyone still held affection for him, it was likely one of the Mothers, although, as Jowyn had made clear, his affections flew as wild as the winds and could just as well have felled one of the fledgling Owl Mothers.
“That’s not how it works,” Jowyn said. “When we’re in the covey, we sublimate ourselves to the Owl Mothers collective. Our own desires are always subordinate to the needs of the community. No one would choose one exile over the verdict of the group, even one as absolutely charming as me.”
“And humble, too.”
Jowyn grinned. “What good’s a peacock who won’t show his feathers?”
“So there isn’t even one person among the Owl Mothers who wants you back?” Brysen asked, knowing he shouldn’t keep pecking at this but unable to stop himself.
“Oh, I assume they all want me back,” he answered, “but now I’m snared in an entirely different trap.” He squeezed Brysen’s bicep.
“All traps can be unsprung,” Brysen countered.
Jowyn chuckled as he composed his rhyme. “But not a trap that’s so well hu—”
“Get moving!” Clava shouted down at them, her focused voice sharp as an arrow.
“Well, here we go,” Brysen said. “Just promise me that if I say run, you’ll run. Promise me you’ll trust me over them.”
Jowyn frowned at him. “I trust you,” he said. “I run when and where you do, whenever and wherever that is, got it?”
“Got it,” Brysen said. “For now, that means up.” He reached for the first handhold, grasping and coming up short. He tried not to feel ridiculous. Who reaches for a mountain and misses?
Jowyn took Brysen’s hand, put it gently to his lips and then placed in on the rock face as gently as setting a baby bird in a nest. “I’ve got you,” he whispered, and Brysen knew he meant it. They’d climb side by side.
“Left leg up, out to the side—there!” Jowyn told him. “That grip’s still an arm’s length above … Go for the one on your right. See it?” Jowyn guided him, and with Brysen’s skill and Jowyn’s depth perception, they made it up the cliff. It took only three times longer than everyone else.
“That was not pretty.” Kylee smiled down at him after he finally hauled himself over the ledge and rolled onto his back to catch his breath. “But it was impressive.”
“That’s how I want to be remembered,” he wheezed at her, clutching the bag holding the ghost eagle egg to his chest. “Not pretty, but impressive.”
“I think it’s more likely to go the other way,” Jowyn joked in between gulps of air. He was beside Brysen, just as breathless.
Both their knuckles were bloody, and Brysen’s face was red from where he’d smacked into an outcropping he thought was farther up than it was, but otherwise, he felt elated. He hadn’t climbed anything larger than a boulder since losing his eye, and scaling this first cliff was a triumph worth celebrating.
He forgot himself and whooped.
Siwoo grunted.
“Waiting for these boys is taking too long,” Clava said. “Jowyn used to be better than this.”
“Life is change, Mem Siwoo,” Jowyn said to her as he pushed himself up off the ground and extended a hand to help up Brysen.
“We fly and fly the same round range,
And turning, and turning, change and change.”
“This is not the time for your poetry,” Siwoo snapped at him.
“That’s not my poetry,” Jowyn said. “That’s an old prayer I used to say as a kid.”
“Well, it’s no time for prayers, either,” Siwoo grunted.
“You’re not in charge of him anymore,” Brysen defended Jowyn, who put his hand on Brysen’s arm to stop him.
“It’s fine,” he said. “Let it go.”
“But—”
Jowyn locked his eyes on Brysen and shook his head. He didn’t want this argument, didn’t want Brysen talking back like this. It was a reminder that the pale boy had a full life in the covey of the Owl Mothers before he and Brysen glided into each other’s lives, that Jowyn hadn’t chosen to leave but instead had been exiled for choosing Brysen. Just because he was on Brysen’s side didn’t mean he wanted to antagonize the Owl Mothers. Suddenly Brysen’s fears of bloodshed and battle and the death of an innocent bird were perched beside new but familiar sensations: anxiety and jealousy. What if Jowyn remembered that he liked life better with the Owl Mothers than with Brysen? What if he had an ex in the covey? What if he regretted choosing Brysen in the first place?
Siwoo removed a bulbous waterskin from her belt and passed it to Brysen. “You are too slow. This will move you faster.”
Brysen took the pouch and studied it skeptically. “Distilled hunter’s leaf?”
“Sap of the blood birches,” she replied. “All of you should drink. You will climb faster and farther.”
Jowyn stared at the bulbous skin of sap as though it was a rock snake. He neither moved toward it nor away from it, but he looked like he might do either in an instant. “You’re not allowed to share this with us,” Jowyn said. “Especially not with me. The sap is forbidden to outsiders.”
Brysen held it tightly but didn’t drink.
“And yet there it is,” Siwoo said. “Drink.”
“I’ve always wanted to try this.” Nyck took the pouch from Brysen and knocked back a gulp. After he wiped his lips, he seemed to realize something and, looking at Jowyn’s unnaturally white skin with poorly masked concern, asked, “This isn’t going to, like, transform me, is it?”
“You will always be what you always were,” Siwoo said cryptically, and offered no more, which Nyck took as no comfort. Siwoo likely hadn’t meant it as any.
Lyra drank next, warily, then Grazim. Brysen watched the waterskin move among them. Kylee hesitated, then drank before passing the container back to Brysen. He thought about Jowyn’s tattooed skin, how hard it had been when they met, how quickly its wounds healed.
“Will it—?”
“No,” Siwoo grunted at him. “It will not restore your eye, but it will sharpen the vision of the one that’s left, and bring back the strength in your sad, tired little body.”
Brysen prepared to drink, but Jowyn put a hand on his wrist, stopped him.
“Don’t,” he said simply, almost pleadingly.
Jowyn’s sudden earnestness was odd, but Brysen gestured toward the two Owl Mothers in front of them. “They gave it to us.”
Jowyn leaned in close and whispered, “We’re not meant to. Neither of us.”
Brysen frowned. He looked out across the plateau, in the direction of the Talon Fortress. It was still days away. He looked back at Jowyn, so worried about permission and rules.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got to. We need to climb.” He knocked back a gulp. As it hit him, he could find only one word to describe it: “Whoa.”
23
Brysen had ingested the sap with food the last time he climbed up this mountain, and he’d drunk it, distilled through Jowyn’s hot blood, after nearly dying of cold in a frozen lake, but he’d never had it pulled pure from the tree. The taste was something uncanny—familiar and mysterious at the same time. It was sweet like white walnut, bitter like dandelion, and metallic like fresh blood. There was something he couldn’t quite place, too, a cold taste that made him think of hungry wolf pups crying on frozen steppes, of a vulture circling over bare rock, of death and helplessness. There was also a hint of cherry.
That was the flavor that blew his mind.
When the cherry taste hit, so did a rush of warmth, and the light around him sharpened. The outlines of the mountains, the scrubby trees, even the people popped into greater focus, and he could see depths and distances with dizzying clarity. He could see details in the dirt and the stone. He could spy a pattern in the wind, movement of the sky, and even the difference in temperature compared to the plains below. With this sight and sense came a burst of energy that was both calm and ecstatic. He wanted to scale the nearest cliff and the one after it. He felt he could climb all day and all night.
Jowyn took the sapskin from him slowly, reverently, and passed it back to Siwoo without drinking. Brysen saw what passed between the Owl Mother and Jowyn—a tiny, respectful nod—and he saw Jowyn dart a nervous glance at him and then look away. And in that look he saw every moment since they’d known each other bound like a pigeon in a snare. His thoughts squirmed.
“Onward, then?” Siwoo suggested, and then they were moving. Brysen had to force himself to slow down so he could walk with Jowyn.
“Is it always like this?” he asked.
“No,” Jowyn said in a tone Brysen didn’t recognize, but it was one he understood. It was the voice ice would use if it could speak. “It gets more intense.”
Brysen put a hand on Jowyn’s shoulder and, to his surprise, didn’t miss on the first try. The sap worked. “Are you mad at me for drinking it? Because I had to.”
“Listen, the sap is not like hunter’s leaf,” he said. “It changes you. Look at that augur we met in the alley. Without it, he went mad.”
“You’re worried I’ll lose my mind?”
Jowyn didn’t answer.
“Are you worried you’re going to lose your mind?”
Still Jowyn didn’t answer, but his mouth twitched briefly. Brysen never would’ve seen that without the sap’s vision.
“Loneliness and bitterness drove that guy mad,” Brysen said. “Neither of those things are in your future, not while I’m around.”
“It’s not that,” Jowyn snapped at him. He’d never snapped at Brysen before. “This isn’t about you. Drinking it means something. Drinking it is supposed to mean something, anyway. It’s not just supposed to be useful. It’s sacred. Or at least, it was.”
Brysen felt dizzy from the tension. His senses were sharp and his muscles loose and lively, but despite that, he felt like he was falling. He’d been so focused on his own sense of what had to happen, he hadn’t even noticed that he and everyone around him had just stomped on something sacred to Jowyn. There was so much about the Owl Mothers he didn’t know, and no matter how close he and Jowyn were, he could never know what it was like to grow up in their covey in the blood birch forest. He’d let his needs of the moment drown out Jowyn’s, and he didn’t have to understand why what he’d done was wrong to know that it had hurt the person he cared about. He wanted to make it right.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I just thought it’s the only way to move fast enough…”
“It is,” Clava interrupted them. She’d fallen in at the rear of their march and showed no interest in their privacy.
“It’s fine,” Jowyn said coolly. “I’m an exile, after all. I don’t get to have an opinion about this anymore.”
Clava looked like she wanted to add something, but instead she nudged Brysen forward. “We have to keep up,” she said, and they kept walking.
By sunset, they’d hiked a distance that usually took days and scaled another two cliff faces. Brysen tried to help Jowyn, even offered to carry him, but the boy refused for as long as he could. When his legs finally gave out, Brysen caught him in his arms, but it was Siwoo who lifted Jowyn and carried him the rest of the way.
They reached the opening of a cave, high enough that, in the distance, they could see the edge of the blood birch forest in one direction and the high black spires of the Talon Fortress in the other. Brysen thought he could even make out the movement of large black-feathered birds among the spires, but it could’ve just been a trick of the light and the sap and his own racing mind. The ghost eagles had left them alone so far, even though they were now going the wrong way. He wondered what they would do when night fell.
The Owl Mothers had considered it as well.
“We won’t be in the open when night falls,” Siwoo told them as she whistled her owl down from the sky. Grazim’s hawk cowered on her fist, clenched its feet tighter and tried to bury its head into its own feathers. “By the time the sixth star appears, the ghost eagles will come.”
“They won’t hurt us,” Brysen said, patting the egg in his bag.
“They won’t hurt you,” Clava replied. “We won’t take our chances.”
Once they were inside the cave, the two Owl Mothers covered the opening with a large boulder using a mechanism. It looked to be engineered just like the entrance in the cave they left behind in the Six Villages. Everyone knew the Owl Mothers kept caverns and tunnels all over the mountains, but Brysen was surprised at how well-stocked this one was. The floor was smooth dirt, and there were thick furs hanging to use as bedding. There were sturdy barrels of food and water along the rear wall, and perches for at least a dozen owls inside smooth, carved niches. He could even hear the trickle of water from a subterranean stream they used as a latrine. This cave was nicer than the one they’d left.
As Brysen settled down to sleep, with the straps of the bag holding the ghost eagle egg wrapped around his arms, he turned toward Jowyn, who lay beside him. He could see the boy clearly despite the dark. It wasn’t like Jowyn was torchlit but rather as though the dark itself was a different kind of light. Brysen wondered if this was how nocturnal birds saw the world at night, if this was how the sap made Jowyn see. He wondered how Jowyn had seen him when they first met.
Jowyn was radiant. It was like Brysen could see the vitality pulsing in him, the tight coils of every muscle, the heat coming off his skin. But there was also anger flapping behind his features. His eyes were open and damp, staring straight up at the ceiling.
“Do you want to talk?” Brysen whispered.
“Shh!” Siwoo hissed from the other side of the cavern.
“I want to sleep,” Jowyn said, and rolled over with his back to Brysen. The tattoos up his side rippled with energy, like the story they told was itself alive. For the first time, Brysen was afraid he’d just cut himself out of that story. He thought he’d known the right thing to do, but it had hurt the love of his life.
I had no choice, he thought, although of course he did. He had a choice, and he made it. He hoped Jowyn would forgive him eventually. He hoped they lived long enough for Jowyn to forgive him. Between the Owl Mothers and the ghost eagles, he wasn’t sure how long their survival was guaranteed.
As night came on, he watched the other boy’s side rise and fall with sleeping breaths, unable to fall asleep himself. There was some darkness no light could break, and Brysen still saw it when he closed his eyes. Outside the cave, he heard the ghost eagles shrieking.
24
He must have fallen asleep, because he was walking through snow with his sister, somewhere on a high mountain pass. They were barefoot, but the cold didn’t hurt, and when he looked down at his feet, worried they’d gone numb from frostbite, he saw giant bird’s feet with great black talons. He looked at his sister, but he saw double. She was his sister, but she was also a ghost eagle. Her large eagle head dipped up and down, taking in the sight of him. He, too, was a ghost eagle and himself.
Dreams are strange, he thought, and then wondered if it was strange that he was aware he was dreaming.
He cried out in the eagle’s voice, “REEEEEEE!” and launched from the snow in unison with his sister. Together they flew, skimming just above the icy slopes, flapping over jutting peaks, then catching a breeze and gliding high in the air current, seeing the world below like mapmakers looking down at stretched paper, sensing every brushstroke that made the world. There was no division between the earth and the sky, nor between Brysen and Kylee. The wind that carried them was the same as them, and they were the same as each other, and that feeling of unity was pure, blissful joy, as thrilling as the flight itself.
And then a scream tore through him, and suddenly Brysen’s thoughts were solely his own and the world below looked alien and strange. The great bird beside him looked just as strange. There came another scream, and he found himself diving in its direction, certain that if he could just stop the screaming, then he could fly free again and find his joy again and be one with everything he saw.
So he dove, and the scream grew louder and louder, and there he saw the Six Villages. He dove for them, and he saw his house, and he aimed for it, and it stood like it had before it burned.
