Black Wings Beating Read online

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  For Tim, to whom I’ll always fly,

  and for my parents, who taught me how.

  —A. L.

  You but half civilize,

  Taming me in this way.

  Through having only eyes

  For you I fear to lose,

  I lose to keep, and choose

  Tamer as prey.

  —THOM GUNN,

  “TAMER AND HAWK”

  * * *

  … forgetting his own thoughts he had known at last only what the falcon knows: hunger, the wind, the way he flies.

  —URSULA K. LE GUIN,

  A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA

  AN IMPOSSIBLE BIRD

  All birds of prey mock human glory but none so cruelly as the ghost eagle. It looks down upon the world from its mountain eyrie and sees only scuttling rats. And yet mankind, the clever rodent, has found some ways to trick the eagle, to blind its all-seeing eyes and bend the bird to its will.

  But first it has to get into the scuzzy trap.

  “Come on, you stupid bird,” Yzzat grumbled, wrapping a boar pelt around himself. Frost clumped in his blond beard, and he shivered against the whipping mountain wind, but he kept his ice-melt eyes fixed on the sky above. Ghost eagles built their nests inside dark caves as high as possible, shielded from wind and light and prying eyes like Yzzat’s. The altitude alone made less hardy trappers ill.

  Yzzat knew, from thirty years of tracking and almost finding, of too long waiting and too late arriving, that the eagle’s lair would be littered with the bones of hawks and buzzards. There would be goat skulls and the rib cages of wolves. There would be the bones of male ghost eagles, because the females killed their mates when they were through with them. There would be one or two skeletons of the distinctly human variety.

  The ghost eagle was an opportunistic hunter, and people presented plenty of opportunities. It had a wingspan wider than a mule and flew faster than ground lightning, with feathers so black, they could blot out the night itself.

  Yzzat knew the giant bird was near. He’d climbed from the dusty lowlands of the Six Villages, through the blood-birch forest where the Owl Mothers reigned, and into the high crags of the Nameless Gap in its pursuit. From his turf to the eagle’s, like countless failed trappers before him. Like the rare few who had succeeded.

  The eagle knew the territory better than Yzzat ever could, saw to the horizon in all directions, and had surely been watching his approach for days. But Yzzat had patience, patience to match its own, and he was determined to wait this bird out.

  When he did, he’d become a powerful man.

  No more haggling at the market for second-rate sparrow hawks and counterfeit breeds of falcon; no more standing at the scuzzy battle pits, ending a night of gambling covered in bird droppings and pigeon guts. He’d have a valet with an umbrella to keep the filth from falling on his head. And he’d eat lamb. Fresh lamb. No more chickpeas and onions for dinner. His children would learn to respect him, and he, in turn, would share his new fortune.

  Yzzat knew his children were terrified of him, but he also knew he could be kindly. He would be kindly, just as soon as the world showed some kindness to him. Until then, he would do the twins no favors by treating them like high and mighty kyrgs in the castle, when their lives were as cursed as his own. He only beat them down to keep them grounded. When he took flight, so would they.

  This was the night. He was perched on the edge of happiness. All of them were.

  He tugged the thin silk string, small and strong as a spider’s web, that led from his fingertips to the tail feathers of a hobbled corral hawk. The shimmering pink raptor was enraged at the insult of being tethered. Proud birds, these hawks were. Not used to being bait. This one flapped and shrieked, rising from the ground as far as the string would let him. Yzzat yanked him down again, simulating the motions of a bird that had been injured.

  Ghost eagles would only eat live prey, so Yzzat had captured this fine hawk first. Normally, the sale of a corral hawk at the market would be enough to keep him in drink and gambling at the Broken Jess for a full moon or two, with enough left over for his wife to stop nagging him about clothes for the twins or alms for her Crawling Priest, but this hawk would hardly be worth the weight of its beak by the time it had served its purpose tonight. The loss of the hawk would be repaid with the reward of the eagle.

  It watches high upon the eyrie,

  Thus only fools approach unwary,

  Yet for the faithful, it reveals

  The dreams they’re seeking

  Or it kills.

  He whispered the old Uztari poem to himself while he waited. The trap was his own design, a delicate operation that relied on perfect timing and absolute attention. Only one falconer in a thousand could capture a ghost eagle, and only one in ten thousand could hope to keep it once caught. It could not be tamed but might be controlled.

  Might be.

  He had a buyer ready, a great kyrg of the Sky Castle, one of the Council of Forty, who already had an impressive cast of raptors in his mews. There were perfect gyrfalcons and peregrine falcons and kestrels in every color imaginable. But the kyrg wanted a ghost eagle more than anything. A man who’d mastered a ghost eagle would be revered. He could command armies and decide the fate of dynasties. He could crush a rebellion or ignite one. A man who mastered a ghost eagle might rule.

  Whether or not this man could master a ghost eagle was not Yzzat’s problem. He’d been willing to pay any price Yzzat could name just for the chance to try. Prices Yzzat hadn’t even the imagination yet to name.

  All he had to do was get this one into his net.

  Mountain, field, and forest alike were littered with the bones of those who’d tried and failed before him. The ghost eagle loves a worthy fight but kills all who disappoint it. It has long found humans the greatest disappointment.

  Yzzat, however, had made a lifetime study of disappointment. His wife was disappointing with her fits of pious melancholy, guilty tithing, and awful cooking. The twins were the disappointing offspring she’d given him.

  The girl had a gift for falconry, a once-in-a-generation gift, but was reluctant to outshine her brother.

  What had Yzzat done to deserve a timid daughter?

  And to think of her brother … Yzzat felt the blood rise behind his eyes. Her brother was a waste of a boy if there ever was one.

  He was timid like his sister and pretty like her, too. He was slim and slight for a boy who should’ve been molting into manhood. In appearance, he was as far from Yzzat as a fish was to a falcon, but he looked back at his father with the same mountain-blue eyes that Yzzat saw in his own reflection.

  His son had no special talents, no great intelligence or strength. He took up space and ate the mediocre food from Yzzat’s table and outgrew clothes beyond his mother’s mediocre mending, and his every sigh and sniffle reminded Yzzat that this was the boy who would replace him one day. All
sons destroy their father’s legacy—that was the widening gyre of generations—but this one might do it while his father still lived.

  No amount of beating seemed to motivate the boy. He bled and bruised and burned, but he never learned. When men looked at his son, they saw Yzzat’s own failings. If the fruit was rotten, so was the tree from which it grew, no?

  Yzzat shuddered. These thoughts weren’t his. The bird must’ve been readying to attack.

  They said a ghost eagle could not only see the hot breath in your lungs and the warm blood in your veins but could also see the weakness in your heart and show it back to you. This was a bird that drove its prey to madness before it devoured them. Brave men soiled themselves when it was near, and pack animals hurled themselves from cliffsides as it circled above.

  Yzzat cleared his head and focused his thoughts on the one thing that mattered now: his purpose. He was in position. He was ready to pull an impossible bird from the sky.

  Then he heard a stir from the slope above him and glanced up toward the lip of a ridge near the top of the Nameless Gap. There was a person skulking in the shadow of a shrub. He’d been followed!

  Was it some poacher thinking to take his score once he’d done all the dangerous work? Or perhaps one of his buyer’s enemies on the Council of Forty, another kyrg, or a kyrg’s assassin? A religious fanatic who thought the trapping of a ghost eagle was blasphemy, or one who believed the ghost eagle would bless them if they could take it? The great bird gave wing to unlimited wants.

  He drew his knife. The curved, black-talon blade slid silently from its dog-leather sheath. He gripped the handle in a fighting stance, let the cold metal rest against his forearm, the razor edge facing out so he could slide it straight across the throat of his night stalker with a backhand swipe.

  He took a breath in, held it, listened and looked into the dark, trying to relocate his prey with the same intensity as a hawk on the wing.

  There!

  He saw the shrub shudder, and through the leaves, a glimmer of starlight reflected off an eyeball. He sprang toward it.

  But his feet never hit the ground.

  Gigantic talons came from the dark behind him, snatched him by the shoulders, and pinioned him. He dropped his knife as he felt himself being hoisted into the air.

  The tethered corral hawk shrieked, unscathed. The trap remained unsprung. The eagle had him, not he the eagle.

  “REEEE!” it called so loud his ears rang.

  He was airborne, as every falconer dreamed of being, but there was no joy in this flight. He knew the bones in his arms were broken. He knew one lung was pierced.

  He also knew, as certain as the eagle’s beak would tear out his throat, that he would not be missed below. He watched as the human shape that had distracted him cut the corral hawk free with Yzzat’s own knife. He screamed.

  The person below watched, unmoving, as Yzzat was carried away into the starlight, and Yzzat allowed himself to cry with the shame of it all. His tears fell like paltry rain, and they were the last piece of him that ever touched the earth. Everyone in the Six Villages heard his screams on the wind as he was carried away, aloft and alone.

  He did not go quietly.

  KYLEE

  TETHERS

  1

  It was the day before the Hawkers’ Market, and Kylee found her twin brother exactly where she had hoped not to find him: at the battle pits.

  Brysen stood in a throng of the usual battle boys, his sleeveless vest buttoned to the neck, his long goatskin jacket on the ground at his feet. There was a coil of battle rope around his shoulder, and he had on his elbow-length leather glove. His hawk, Shara, stood perched and hooded on his fist, tethered by short leather jesses to the forearm loops on the glove.

  Brysen was easy to spot in the crowd. His storm-cloud-gray hair spiked out in all directions like a hatchling’s fuzz, and his lower lip bulged with a wad of hunter’s leaf. When he turned to spit, he saw Kylee at the gate, met her eyes between the jostling shoulders of gamblers and spectators.

  But for his hair, Kylee and Brysen were the mirror image of each other. Hers was still black, like his had once been, but they had the same elk-brown skin as their mother, the same ice-blue eyes as their father, bright as cloudless mornings. They were the kind of eyes that held windstorms. You’d be blown away if you looked too long.

  Folks in the Villages thought Brysen’s prematurely gray hair made him look wild and dangerous, like a haggard falcon, and he did his best to encourage those ideas, used them as a shield against other people’s pity. Kylee couldn’t have cared a puke what other people thought of her.

  She opened her palms toward him, questioning what he thought he was doing there when she needed him working. This was the most important market of their lives, and he knew it. Brysen turned his attention back to the battle pits.

  “Dirt-biting scuzz-muncher!” Kylee cursed.

  After her morning climb up the knife-edge ridges, she’d come home to find his bed empty and had made her way down the rocky slope from their house, over the rickety bridge that crossed the meltwater river—the Necklace, as they called it—and into the Six Villages. Just a few weeks earlier the Necklace had been solid, shining ice. The Six Villages were strung like beads along its bank, more one town than six separate townships.

  There was no formal date in the Uztari calendar for the Hawkers’ Market, but the thawing of the Necklace told the time. When the Necklace flowed knee-deep, the tents began to rise along the road. When it rolled waist-deep, the market opened.

  There was no announcement, either. Spies simply watched the river and sent pigeons back to tell their masters, who were traveling along the haulers’ routes from the Sky Castle in the north to the Talon Fortress in the south.

  Everyone knew who the spies were, of course, and for whom they spied. Spying was a Six Villages tradition, passed through families for generations. The more prestigious the noble family, the more prestigious the village family who spied for them. There were no secrets in the Six Villages, after all. With the surety that ice turns to water and back again, when the river ran, the customers would come and the spies would buy the first round at the Broken Jess.

  Her brother couldn’t resist. Kylee watched, seething, as Brysen laughed with the other battle boys. The current fight drew to a close, and two of the youngest boys swept up the footprints, blood, and scattered feathers from the pit.

  Running off to the battle pits the day before the Hawkers’ Market was the kind of recklessness for which their father would have beaten Brysen breathless. Then again, their father had never needed an excuse. He seemed to enjoy the sport of hurting her brother the way a hawk enjoys stunning a mouse.

  Good thing Da’s dead, Kylee thought, and spat once on the ground, then stomped the spit into the dirt to keep him that way. Mud below and mud between. The dead can’t rise to a sky unseen. It was a superstition but a satisfying one. Some men didn’t deserve sky burial.

  Travel across the plateau was becoming dangerous, and prices for Six Villages birds were soaring. From one end of the steppe to the other, everyone knew the Six Villages offered the best birds of prey—for hunting, racing, fighting, or companionship—and the market was the only time the best buyers would risk traveling all the way there. Word was that this would be the last good market for a while. Word was that war was on the wing.

  What “word was” didn’t concern Kylee, but she knew that if they could sell off all the birds Brysen had trapped and trained this year, they could finally pay off their inheritance: gambling debts their father had racked up at the Broken Jess. After three seasons of desperate scraping for every last bronze they could get, Kylee and her brother could break even and close the business; they could be free of falconry.

  Not that Brysen wanted to be free of the profession. But Kylee did. She could finally be free.

  Already the roads and inns sparkled with throngs of eager village visitors. Even Altari holy men crawled in, the backs of their sunburned ne
cks shining angrily up from knee height. One of them bumped his head against Kylee’s leg as he approached her on all fours at the gate of the Broken Jess.

  “Alms for your skyward sins,” he groaned through the din of the growing crowd, lifting one dirty hand at her without looking up. The Crawling Priests had bloody knees and hoarse voices from shouting doom upon the falconers’ craft, but they kept their eyes fixed firmly on the dirt. They believed the Uztari training of birds was blasphemy and that only the ancient Altari cult of reverence for the wild and untamed sky was the true faith. They saved their harshest words for Altari who left the religion and became Uztari, with a bird on the fist.

  They were, however, happy to beg for Uztari bronze.

  “Go away,” Kylee grumbled.

  “It is not too late for you to repent,” the man cried, gripping her by the shin so hard that his knuckles went white. “Repent the wicked wind you worship and accept the true faith of our land. Repent and be saved from the coming destruction and—ooof!”

  His face bit the dirt when a foot swept his other arm out from under him.

  “Suck a vulture’s toe,” Vyvian Sacher laughed at the Crawling Priest as he pushed himself back up on all fours. “Get out of here!”

  “Your kind brings the curse of the Kartami upon us,” he growled at her, and lifted his head to look Kylee and Vyvian in the eyes. “None shall be spared.”

  Vyvian raised her rolled-up umbrella and the Crawling Priest winced, then looked down and crawled away, leaving the rough crowd of the Broken Jess behind.

  “You believe that cockatoo?” Vyvian scoffed. “Threatening us in our yard.”

  “It’s the usual nonsense.” Kylee shrugged. “Not even half as bad as the stuff my ma says.”

  “Yeah, well, your mom’s a fanatic,” Vyvian said, running a hand through her long, dark hair and tying it back into a knot. She wore black-and-brown leather pants and a long feathered robe, and the way she stretched looked more like preening than working out a kink in her neck. Vyvian wanted to be seen, which was why she carried an umbrella to protect against bird droppings but never opened it. Only the truly wealthy actually opened their umbrellas, caring more for their fabrics than the view other people had of them. Vyvian aspired to riches but had a long way yet to go. She did love market days, though.