The only light within the tent came from the embers burning in an open brazier next to a fur-covered pallet. In the dim glow, she saw Jowyn’s pale skin gleaming. The strange tattoos looked almost like elaborate cutouts up his side.
He seemed so peaceful, lying on the pallet in the flickering light, his chest rising and falling slowly, that it took her a moment to realize he was alone. Brysen wasn’t there.
“Where’s Brysen?” she whispered as she rushed to him. The boy gasped, bolting upright, and turned to her wide-eyed, sleep and confusion flapping across his features.
“Uh … I … what … who?” His confusion looked suddenly like fear, and she realized she was soaking wet, covered in mud, and probably looked more like a monster than a person.
“It’s me,” she said, making sure he heard her voice. “Kylee. Where is Brysen?”
Jowyn frowned at her and then looked at the pallet beside him, like he expected to see Brysen sleeping there in the empty space. “He’s … he was. He was here.”
The boy jumped up, all sleep gone from him, and did a quick survey of the tent. He was stark naked in front of her, but either he wasn’t shy or hadn’t yet remembered.
It turned out to be the latter, because the moment he realized he was completely exposed, he yelped, covered himself where he felt most vulnerable, and scurried around the tent picking up his clothes and yanking them on haphazardly. He tore his tunic’s collar in the process.
“He was here,” he repeated. “When we went to sleep he was right next to me.”
“Where could he have gone? Is there a latrine?”
“They wouldn’t let us go without a guard,” Jowyn said.
“There were two guards nearby,” Kylee noted.
“‘Were’?”
“They aren’t guarding anything anymore.”
“If they were both there, that means he didn’t go to the latrines,” Jowyn said. He was too worried about Brysen to question what had happened to the guards. Or he simply didn’t care.
“So where?”
Jowyn looked up at the top of the tent, but Kylee suspected he was looking well beyond it, to some imagined sky. He was shaking his head. “Oh, Brysen, no.”
“What is it? Where do you think he went?”
“I think he went to look for Anon,” he said. Seeing Kylee’s confusion about who or what an Anon was, he added, “The Kartami leader.”
“To try to kill him,” she confirmed. Jowyn nodded.
“They were going to make us attack the barricades tomorrow. He thinks he can stop it.”
“We have to stop him,” Kylee said. “They’ll kill him.”
“I’ve been trying to talk him out of it,” Jowyn told her. “Since before we left.”
“And you’ve done a great job,” she snapped. It was unfair, but her anger needed a place to perch and Jowyn was convenient. No matter what she did or how far she went, it seemed she was the only one who could keep her brother safe. She tossed the worried boy a halfhearted “sorry” and then asked if he knew where Anon’s tent was.
Jowyn shook his head. “Brysen had views of the whole camp while we were training in the war barrows, but he didn’t tell me that he saw anything.”
Kylee gritted her teeth but popped her head outside the tent flaps to speak to Grazim. “We need to find someone else to question,” she said. “We need to know where the Kartami leader’s tent is.”
Grazim nodded and crept away. A few pecks and one painfully placed talon later, they had their answer. There might’ve been a time when the thought of making someone suffer to get what she wanted would have bothered Kylee, but when she searched herself for any remorse for whatever Grazim had done, she found none.
A hawk feels nothing for a hare, so why should I feel anything for these people? she thought, even though she knew these warriors were not hares and she was not a hawk. Easier, though, to think of them that way. There’d be more pain to inflict before the night was done; she couldn’t leave it all to Grazim and her hawk.
The three of them made their way out into the rainy morning dark, moving fast between the tents, staying as low as they could to avoid being seen. The sun was on its way up the back of the mountains but hadn’t shown itself yet. If they could beat the full dawn, find Brysen, and flee before light, they might get away without rousing the entire camp. Grazim kept looking to the far horizon, anxious to get back to their army’s camp before their absence was discovered.
“You can go,” Kylee told her. “We’ll catch up.”
“As long as you’re here, I’m here,” Grazim assured her. “And if it comes to it, there’s no reason we can’t do what Brysen was planning to do for ourselves.”
“Is that why you came?” Kylee realized. “You assassinate the Kartami leader, you get to be the hero?”
“The idea crossed my mind,” she confirmed, shrugging. “I won’t apologize for being ambitious.”
The idea to do the job themselves hadn’t even occurred to Kylee. She wanted to get Brysen and get out of there, but Grazim was already plotting how to turn this rescue mission to her advantage. She’d probably make a great kyrg, Kylee realized, if she lived that long.
They reached what they’d been told was Anon’s tent and saw it was well-guarded. A pair of warriors walked the perimeter, each dark-skinned and muscled.
“That’s Visek and Launa,” Jowyn whispered. “They’ve been training us to fight. There’s no way Brysen could sneak past them.”
“So if he’s not inside, where is he?”
Jowyn looked around. They’d ducked behind a tall war barrow. Several more were sitting around the tent, all pointed with their noses out, ready to roll at a moment’s notice. And one of them, Kylee saw, sat heavier in the mud than the others.
“He’s in there.” She pointed. They watched the barrow for any signs of movement, and sure enough, she saw a flash of gray as Brysen shifted inside it. He was only two spans from where Visek and Launa patrolled and a straight run from the front of the tent. What his plan was from there, Kylee couldn’t imagine. Maybe he couldn’t, either. They watched and waited, and he made no more movements.
“We need to distract those two guards,” Kylee said.
Grazim stroked her hawk’s spotted chest feathers and whispered to it. “She’s getting tired, I think, but we’ve got a little more left in us.” She raised her fist and tossed the bird into the wet morning air. The hawk flapped across the distance, swooping right in front of Visek and Launa, who turned after it, and while they were looking away, Kylee sprinted, leaving the others behind and rushing to the war barrow. She leapt into the open back and ducked down, practically tackling Brysen as she clamped her hand over his mouth so he couldn’t scream.
“I’m here to rescue you,” she whispered to his wide, wet eyes. He’d been crying. She took her hand away, ran it over his arms and chest, looking for bleeding. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“I didn’t do it,” he whispered. His blue eyes gleamed in the brief flashes of lightning, so much softer than their father’s eyes, but still so unsettling to find staring back at her in the dark. “Anon came right outside to stretch in the rain, right here … his back was to me … I could’ve done it, and I didn’t move.”
“You were scared,” she reassured him. “It’s okay to be scared. That’s your mind telling you something’s wrong.”
“I’m not scared,” Brysen said, sounding so much younger than his seasons. “I chose not to do it. After everything I put Jowyn and the battle boys through, all the big promises I made myself about ending this war … and I decided not to do it.” He shook his head, like he couldn’t believe what he was saying. He had the faraway look of a dazed augur, a mystic who’d stared too long at the sky.
“That was smart,” she said. “This isn’t some singer’s tale where the big bad gets killed and all the monsters turn back into clouds. You’d never have gotten out of here alive if you’d done it.”
Brysen’s expression shifted, like he was just realizing this conversation wasn’t happening in his head, that Kylee was really there, in front of him. He looked at her and frowned. “Wait. What … what are you doing here?”
“I told you,” she repeated, “I’m here to rescue you.”
“Kylee.” Brysen squeezed her hand. “Kylee,” he said again. “I have so much to tell you.”
She smiled at him, squeezed his hand back, and felt the anger that had been boiling inside her melt away. There was something different about him. He’d always seemed like a storm held together by scar tissue, but sitting in the dark of the war barrow in the midst of an actual storm, he seemed calm, like the mist that comes when a storm has passed.
“It’s good to see you, too,” she said. “Now can we flutter out of here while we still have heads attached to our bodies?”
Brysen nodded, and they rose to peek the tops of their heads out from the war barrow together.
The rain had slowed, and fog shrouded the camp in a hazy light. The rising sun in the distance made a rainbow that ran like a bridge behind the Six Villages, over both war camps, all the way to the far end of the Uztari plateau, over the landscapes the two of them used to dream about as kids.
Maybe we’ll explore them one day soon, far past the reach of any armies or kyrgs or nightmare birds, Kylee thought.
“Shyehnaah!” Grazim’s voice cut through the morning, and Kylee’s head snapped up to see the hawk, turning hard, falling fast with a spear through its chest, and then Jowyn running after her as she charged at Visek, who’d already raised another spear in her direction. Jowyn tackled her out of the way and the spear grazed over his back, slicing a thin red line between his shoulder blades.
“No!” Brysen yelled, bolting up from the barrow, leaping over his sister, and running to Jowyn, grabbing the boy in his arms and looking up at Visek with red-eyed rage.
“Shyehnaah,” he snarled, and Kylee felt dizzy. She’d never heard him speak the Hollow Tongue before and didn’t know to what bird he could possibly be speaking.
On the ground, the hawk with the spear through its chest looked like a chicken on a spit over a flame … but it stirred. It flapped its wings and tried to stand, charging madly at Visek with the wood shaft dragging in the mud behind it. The warrior cocked his head, then raised a boot and stomped the bird straight into the ground, crushing its skull as he heaved the spear out of its back with a wet crunch.
Brysen collapsed where he sat, like a tether had been snapped between him and the bird. He held Jowyn’s bleeding back against his chest, his jaw hanging open in a silent scream. The tent flaps opened and a large shirtless man stepped out, his long hair hanging past his shoulders and a huge hooked sword clenched in one hand. The sword probably weighed more than Kylee.
“Gag them before they speak again!” he ordered, and warriors descended on Kylee, Grazim, Brysen, and Jowyn from all sides.
She was hauled from the back of the barrow as a rag was stuffed into her mouth, and though she wanted to fight, wanted to scream out and call down the wrath of a furious sky on her captors, she found she could only stare at her gray-haired, teary-eyed brother, who had chosen not to end a man’s life and had, somehow, called a bird back from the dead.