Kylee pressed her hand into the dirt and cursed, but she crawled from between the boulders and pushed herself up to standing. The Orphan Maker, backed by his two friends, sucked his teeth in front of her, spat on the ground between her feet. His brown-striped kestrel once more perched on his fist.
“Took all night to find my little one,” he grumbled, then looked from the kestrel to Kylee. “Move too fast, and she’ll dig a talon in your eye.”
One of the other long-haulers had a bow pulled tight with an arrow pointing straight at Nyall’s face. It was so close, he could’ve licked the arrowhead. The other long-hauler had Brysen kneeling in front of him with an ax blade against his neck. Shara was pinned down in a net snare, which was staked hard into the rocky slope. She struggled and tried to flap her wings but couldn’t escape, and she called incessantly.
“Ki! Ki! Ki!” she shrieked. “Ki! Ki! Ki!”
“Nyall?” Brysen said, puzzled, then slumped on seeing her. “Kylee?”
Her brother actually had the nerve to be disappointed that she was there. He should have been more disappointed about the wooden block that the copper-haired long-hauler threw down at his knees, because they clearly meant to behead him on it. Brysen never was good at keeping his priorities straight.
“Ki! Ki! Ki!”
Kylee stared at Brysen as the executioner grabbed his neck and shoved it down to rest in the groove of the chopping block. This wasn’t a block used for livestock, stained from the viscera of a thousand meals. This was an ornately carved executioner’s block, covered in scenes of crime and punishment with channels to flow the blood away and deep gauges in the slot where other unfortunate necks had rested before. There was a rough and brutal justice among long-hauler convoys, and Kylee had no way to know if these men just meant to frighten them or if they truly planned to kill. The ax blade gleamed, well sharpened. Brysen’s hands were bound behind his back.
“Ki! Ki! Ki!” Shara screamed and flapped frantically under the net.
Kylee couldn’t find the wind to burn a word through her body. She searched her breath, her heartbeat; she focused on her fear … nothing. An exhausted quiet had overtaken her.
“Ki! Ki! Ki!”
The long-haulers turned Nyall toward Brysen with the arrow pointed at his back. They wanted him to watch his friend’s head come off.
“You Six Villagers think you’re so much better than us,” the Orphan Maker said. “Life on the mountainside has made you weak. We risk Kartami attacks when we cross the desert to bring you the grains you glut yourselves and grow soft on, but we who cross the valley know what it is to go days without water, weeks without food. One drop of our blood is worth ten of your lives.”
“Then I guess your face is priceless now,” Brysen replied.
The Orphan Maker touched the wound that Shara had given him, then bent down in front of Brysen, nudged his hawk off his fist and onto the ground, so she stood just in front of Brysen’s nose. “She’s keen,” he said. “Maybe keen enough to take a bite out of your face.”
“What’s the point of killing us?” Kylee shouted, trying to divert the attention away from Brysen and whatever smart-ass comment was forming in his mind. “Have you no honor?”
“Honor,” the Orphan Maker sneered, leaving his hawk on the ground in front of Brysen as he turned on her. “A pretty word for a pretty village girl. Let honor sleep indoors. When his soul can’t see its way to sky, then I’ll think about honor.”
There was no crueler punishment than to separate a head from its body and keep them apart in death. When the vultures came to devour the dead in sky burial, the head of a corpse had to “see” the sky, or the soul would rot instead of rising into the blue. This was as true in the Villages and mountains as it was in the plains and the desert, in her mother’s faith and her late father’s. Kylee didn’t care much about superstitions, but Brysen was a believer.
A sound escaped Brysen’s lips, involuntary. A whimper. The long-hauler licked his lips, nearly panting with excitement.
“Ki! Ki! Ki!” Shara cried.
Brysen’s eyes still met Kylee’s, but the anger had left them and the momentary flash of fear had turned to something else. It was a look she hadn’t seen from him in a long time but one that she would always understand: the look of her twin in cahoots. She nodded slightly in return, and he blinked once, breaking the stare, accepting her help.
Nyall was ready. She was ready. They had no weapons to hand, and she couldn’t count on her mind to conjure up the right words on purpose. They had only each other’s speed and guts. The chances were good that not all three of them would survive this.
“Hey, Kylee—one question for you?” Nyall said. His voice was calm and casual, as if they were still back down in the market tent, haggling over how many cups of tea she had to drink with him to get one of the bird boxes.
“What is it?” she replied.
“Did I stand a chance with you?”
She had to laugh. “I don’t know, Nyall. I’m not a game of chance you can win or lose. But I do like spending time around you.”
Nyall smiled his dimpled grin. “I guess that’s better than nothi—”
“Enough!” the Orphan Maker cut him off. “Word is the girl’s got some talent … might make her worth keeping around. You.” He pointed his knife at Nyall. “I’m selling you to the slavers. You’re pretty enough to be a catamite. But first, we’ll take off this little bird’s head.”
He wasn’t talking about Shara.
The executioner tapped his ax once on Brysen’s neck to get his aim, then raised it high. Brysen kicked his bound legs out, tripping the would-be executioner, and rolled off the chopping block. The sudden movement spooked the kestrel, which jumped back crying, opening her wings and launching herself off the ground.
At the same instant, Nyall bent his knees, arched his back, and flung his arms forward as he jumped into a backflip, hitting the archer’s arm. The arrow fired just under him and snapped harmlessly into the dirt. As he landed, he lashed out with a fist and knocked the archer sideways.
He was a battle boy through and through.
Kylee aimed her first kick at the fateful point between the Orphan Maker’s legs, but he blocked her before it connected, which drew his focus down, so she could chop hard at his throat, a much more vulnerable spot. He gasped but caught her with a jab in the teeth that knocked her onto her back. She scrambled away, but he charged at her, wheezing, as he pulled his blade and found the breath to whistle for his hawk.
The bird dove at Kylee, harrying her face, blocking her view, and forcing her to shield her eyes from the flurry of talon and feather. As Kylee backed up, she bumped into Brysen, who was trying to free his wrists, while backing away from the executioner.
“Ki! Ki! Ki!” Shara flapped and twisted against the net.
“Ya! Ya! Ya!” the little brown kestrel screeched. Kylee tried to knock her away, but she kept coming. A talon cut the back of Kylee’s wrist, and she felt the bird’s beak nip at her hair.
Nyall wasn’t faring so well, either. The archer had recovered from the punch, and though he’d lost his bow, he still had an arrow and over a hundred pounds on Nyall. He had Nyall’s hair in one hand and was about to slam an arrow through his eye with the other.
Except, with a flash of white, the arrow was snatched from the archer’s grip and carried aloft by a massive, snow-white owl, gliding silently. The archer still clutched Nyall with his free hand but stood utterly still, his mouth hanging open.
“Ki!” the small kestrel shrieked, and then whirled, racing away for safety. From just over the snowy ridge above them, a second owl shot up, just a shadow against the rising sun. It intercepted the kestrel in midair, snatching her in its talons and dragging her, crying, back down behind the other side of the ridge. It was gone nearly as soon as it had appeared.
A third owl, a great gray with bright yellow eyes alight, glided over the Orphan Maker and appeared almost to hover above him, then dropped, snatching his blade hand in its talons with such force that it knocked the knife free.
Then the great gray owl flapped away without a sound.
Shara had fallen still below her net, huddled against the ground with her head tucked back. She looked more like a shuddering stone than a bird of prey. It was clear that she was desperate to avoid the same fate as the little brown kestrel.
Brysen had sawed his wrists free on a stone, but the executioner had him leaping and diving away from the ax. He’d have been split in two if the snow-white owl had not come between them, slipping around the ax blade like its feathers were fog, and pushing the executioner back.
The whistling arrow made the first loud noise since the owls’ arrival, and it appeared so fast, it didn’t look like it had been fired at all. But there it was, sprouting from the executioner’s chest. The black feather fletching gave him the look of a molting bird with but one plume left. And, like a bird’s broken pinfeather, the wound began to squirt blood.
The long-hauler fell.
“I think I found the Owl Mothers,” Brysen announced as if it had been his plan all along.