Power is a wind; invisible but for the branches it shakes, the walls it topples, and the wings it raises high. Power is a force some people fly on, and no one in the Six Villages flew higher on it than the Tamir family. They were as close to nobility as existed in this part of Uztar. Some distant kyrg held title over the region, but their claim to actually visit and assert authority had ended generations ago, when one of the Tamir clan fed that kyrg’s toes to his own falcon one at a time until a concession was granted. All taxes would be paid, and the Villages would remain loyal to the Council of Forty so long as no interference was made with how the Tamirs ran things. While they were never granted a formal seat on the Council themselves, their rule over this little yet potent patch of civilization was never again questioned.
Until Brysen screwed it up.
Because of him, Mama Tamir’s eldest son, Goryn, sat in some Sky Castle dungeon, and professional soldiers now had a garrison in the Six Villages. They said it was to oversee the construction of the barricades against the Kartami siege, but everyone knew they had their eyes on Mama Tamir, waiting for even the smallest excuse to execute Goryn, lock her and the rest of her family in chains, and seize the wealth they’d long hoarded. Wars were expensive, and though Mama Tamir helped fund this one with generous contributions of bronze, she never gave too much. She treated the Sky Castle like a tame falcon—always keeping it fed just enough so that it wouldn’t turn on her, just hungry enough that it would keep coming back.
“We shouldn’t be here,” Jowyn warned Brysen as they walked up the narrow steps to the heavy stone doors that marked the entrance to Mama Tamir’s favorite home. She had many around the Villages, not wanting her enemies to know in which she slept, but Nyck had told them where she’d be this morning—Skypool House, they called this one—and Brysen and Jowyn had set off to find her there.
“I’ve turned away every pigeon she’s sent,” Jowyn explained. “Haven’t answered a single message. I even told her attendants that they’d have to drag me unconscious to see her and then explain to her why they’d injured her long-lost son. She’s not going to be happy when I walk in with you, making demands.”
“She’s your mother,” Brysen said, like that meant anything. Altari parents, like his own mother, felt a duty to raise their children, even if they weren’t kind or nurturing or gentle about it. His mother’s pious scolding showed, in her way, a kind of commitment to family that Uztari parents did not share. Uztari parents modeled their families on the birds—caring for the littlest children until they were old enough to fend for themselves, then pushing them from the nest. If they flew, they’d sometimes be welcomed back, sometimes fought off as competitors and forced to make their own way. If they fell, well … that was the will of the sky. Not everyone gets to soar.
Mama Tamir, at least, tried to keep her children around. She considered herself sentimental, which explained why she was so angry at the boy who’d had her first son arrested and was harboring her second, runaway son.
“You shouldn’t be here,” the first attendant at the door grunted at them, echoing Jowyn exactly. The Tamirs called their guards “attendants” because they’d never admit to needing guards at all. They did their own violence. It was a point of pride. If it came to killing him, Brysen was pretty sure Mama Tamir would do the deed herself.
“We need to talk to her,” Brysen said, crossing his arms and staring up at the large woman, who had an unhooded sunset hawk on her fist. “Now.”
“You need to go back home,” the attendant said. “Look after those glass grinders you took in.”
The sunset hawk cocked its head at him, shifted its feet on the fist while Brysen seethed. Not only was the attendant showing that she knew about the refugees, she was also demonstrating that she could use that slur right to his face and he couldn’t do a thing about it.
“She will want to see me,” Jowyn cut in before Brysen could find an insult to hurl and get a talon in his eye. “Of course, we could leave, and I could send my ma a message that I was turned away?”
The attendant narrowed her eyes at the pale boy but didn’t have the nerve to insult a Tamir heir, no matter how estranged he was or how strange he looked. She stepped aside to let them pass but didn’t bother pushing open the doors. Both boys had to lean on the stone with all their weight to get it to open. The sunset hawk screeched at them but didn’t move.
Once through the doors, Brysen saw why this place was called Skypool House. It was carved directly into the mountain, but not by human hands. Ancient subterranean rivers had cut winding caverns into the mountain, and the smooth stone walls were striped in layers of minerals and sediment. The result was more imaginative patterns and colors than any human art could’ve imagined. Morning light cut down through openings in the rock overhead, painting the halls and caverns pink. In the ice-wind season, these openings would fill the home with snow. The passages would be impassable, and the entire place would freeze. Brysen couldn’t imagine the kind of wealth that allowed a person to have a home for just fair-weather days.
Somewhere, Brysen heard the flow of the ancient streams that had carved these caverns and now fed their baths and springs. No hauling water for the Tamir family; they had their own private rivers inside.
“Come on.” Jowyn led the way along the halls.
He’d last been here as a little boy, but he still knew the winding way to his mother’s sitting room. He trailed his fingertips along the smooth stone wall, and Brysen wondered what memories Jowyn’s fingertips were tracing. He had suffered violence from his family, just like Brysen had, but he’d left them and meant never to return. Brysen still lived in the house that had been his torture chamber, even though his torturer was dead. Now Jowyn was walking in to see one of his own, and he was doing it for Brysen.
They both heard the screaming before they saw its source.
In a large chamber open to the sky, Mama Tamir stood on the edge of one of those flowing underground streams. In a niche in the wall above her, a river eagle watched the water hungrily, but was tethered in place. Jowyn’s mother, her sturdy frame wrapped in a robe of raven’s feathers and silk, had a handful of worm-meal, which she tossed in the water while making gentle clucking sounds. The screams were coming from the river.
“The worm-meal is so they don’t eat too quickly and spoil their appetites,” she said without looking back at Brysen and Jowyn. “Like some little boys used to do.”
Jowyn stopped and tensed. Without warning, he grabbed Brysen’s hands and held him back, too. He squeezed Brysen’s fingers, more in warning than affection, but still Brysen’s face heated … until he looked back and saw the terror on his friend’s face.
“Don’t get closer,” Jowyn whispered.
Brysen didn’t move, but he couldn’t help looking. There was a man in the river, tied by the wrists and ankles to its banks, splayed out just below the surface. To breathe he had to strain his neck and lift his head. Upstream from him, downy-feathered eagle chicks pecked the worm-meal from the water and hopped about in play. Some of them still had blood on their tiny beaks from pecking at the chained-up man.
“Please,” he coughed through a mouthful of water at Jowyn’s mother. His face was a mess of bloody beak marks. “Please.”
Jowyn’s mother squatted over him. “You can drown any time you like,” she said, running her fingers through his wet hair. “Or you can hang on until my little chicks are strong enough to fly and then I won’t have to put your wife in here, too. Your choice. Think on it.”
With that, she stood and turned to Brysen and her son. Jowyn let go of Brysen’s hand, straightened his back. “Ma,” he said with such a tremble that Brysen wanted to grab him and run, apologize for making him come here. Regret mobbed Brysen as fast as crows on carrion.
“Jo,” she replied coldly. “You look…” She cleared her throat, looked him up and down. “Ridiculous.”
Though they had similar features—a broad face; wide, heavy-lidded eyes; and ears that stuck out just a little farther than most people Brysen knew—mother and son did not look alike at all. Jowyn was shorter and lithe, where his mother was thick and bulky with muscle. His skin was nearly white as a snow owl, with hair just as white, while she had a light umber complexion and thick black hair. “Why the Owl Mothers do this to their boys, I’ll never understand.”
“The sap makes us strong,” Jowyn said.
“I could’ve made you strong.”
“Goryn would’ve killed me if I stayed.”
“Goryn is gone now.” Mama Tamir finally looked at Brysen. “Thanks to this one.”
“I’m sorry for my role in your eldest son’s fall, Mem Tamir.” Brysen offered the winged salute with as much respect as his current terror would allow. His hands shook where he held them in front of his heart. Jowyn shifted his shoulders just slightly in front of Brysen, a tiny, protective gesture that would do nothing if the woman’s wrath were unleashed, but it steadied Brysen’s hands nonetheless. This was a feeling he thought he could get used to, if he had the chance. If he lived through this conversation.
Mama Tamir snorted. “Goryn’s own ambitions failed him, and he deserved what he got. We don’t coddle mistakes in my family. We do, however, demand amends. So … are you here to make amends?” She glanced at the gentle stream around the room’s perimeter. There were more cleats where ropes could be tied, more spaces to hold prisoners.
“I’ve come to ask you a question,” Jowyn said. “Someone tried to abduct Brysen, and we think you might know who it was.”
“You assume it wasn’t me?” She smiled. “Maybe this is how I planned to bring you home again. Taking your little lover there.”
“We’re not lovers!” Jowyn blurted too fast, and Brysen found it stung, even though it was true. He didn’t have to say it so emphatically. “I mean … we’re just friends. Anyway, we know it wasn’t you.”
She shook her head. “You run away from me, let me think you’re dead for more changing seasons than I can count, then you come home white as a snow owl and ignore me until you want something, and then you come running back to the nest? That is very selfish of you, Jo. I’m not some Owl Mother who happily provides you everything you might want. A relationship is an exchange, and you ask for information but offer me nothing. Not even the gratitude a chick pays a hen, nor so much as an apology.”
“I’m sorry, Ma,” he said. “I never should have let you think I was dead.”
She waved her hand dismissively. “You want to know who is after your ‘friend’ here, and why?”
Jowyn nodded.
“You want him to be protected?”
Jowyn nodded again.
“I would do anything my son asks of me,” Mama Tamir told him. “However, you are still a stranger. You want to be my son again? Prove it.” She drew a knife from her robe and set it on the banks of the stream, beside the man gagging in the water.
“You want me to kill that man?” If Jowyn could’ve looked paler, he would’ve then.
“He’s an enemy of the family,” his mother said. “We kill our enemies.”
A small whimper escaped the water.
“It should not be hard,” Mama Tamir said. “He is suffering, and you would end his suffering. Everyone wins.”
“I…” Jowyn hesitated. His eyes met Brysen’s; there was an apology in his glance. “I won’t,” he said at last. “I can’t.”
His mother sighed. “Then I can’t help you. You’re no son of mine. You’re nothing to me. You may go and hope you do nothing else to disappoint me. There are things in this world worse than nothing.”
“I’m sorry,” Jowyn said to Brysen. “I can’t kill this man.”
Brysen shook his head. He was the one who was sorry. He never should’ve made them come here. He never should’ve dreamed that this woman would be anything other than the monster she’d always been. They’d simply have to prepare to defend themselves, even if they didn’t know who they had to defend themselves against. “It’s not your fault,” Brysen said. “I’d never want you to kill for me.”
“How moving,” Jowyn’s mother sneered as they turned to go. Mama Tamir called after them, but not to Jowyn. “Brysen could still be something to me.”
They stopped. The air in the cave hung heavy with her words. The only sounds were the gentle trickle of the stream and the ugly gasps of the man in the water, trying not to drown.
“You’ve taken two sons of mine,” she said when he turned back to face her. “And still you live, which makes my reputation suffer. You are the one who should make amends.”
Brysen waited. She would tell him what she wanted when she was ready. Asking would only demonstrate how much power she held over him. She seemed to appreciate his silence. She smiled and folded her thick hands in front of her.
“If I can’t have a son,” she told him, “I could use an assassin.”
“Brysen is not an—” Jowyn started, but she cut him off with a look, as only a parent can.
“The debt is his, not yours,” she snapped. “And so the choice is his, not yours.”
Brysen braced himself. He’d never killed anyone, not even in a fight in the battle pits, but it wasn’t like he was opposed to the idea of killing. He was a hunter, and hunters killed all the time without moralizing about it. He loved Shara, and she was as murderous a bird as could be. How many sparrows and rabbits had met their end by her tender talons? Why should he celebrate her killings but fear to do his own?
And yet, doing work for the Tamir clan was like hunting in a lightning storm: You might catch what you wanted, but you’d never know when the killing strike might fall from above.
Nevertheless, he found himself asking, “Who?”
“Bry … don’t…,” Jowyn warned.
“The same person, in fact, who tried to abduct you,” Jowyn’s mother said. “The Kartami leader. He wants you for a hostage—to keep your sister and the ghost eagle out of the war. I want you to use that to get close to him, then cut his head from his body.”
Brysen wasn’t sure if the whimper he heard came from Jowyn or the man slowly dying in the stream or from his own throat, but Mama Tamir smiled and whistled for her attendant to usher them out.
“I see you’re nervous,” she said. “Take the night to think it over. Talk to your”—she gave her son a withering glance, then looked away from him like he was nothing more than a house finch—“friend about it. I think, by morning, you’ll be eager to agree. In my experience, it is much better to be the hunter than the prey. And in the war to come, you will be one, or you will be the other.”