Jowyn had turned his back to watch the hawk’s furious hunt, and in that moment, Brysen shoved right past him and straight through the cave into the woods after Shara.
“Pfft!” he whistled. “Pfft!”
“Stop!” some of the covey shouted after him, but he sprinted harder.
His eyes scanned the dark trees and the frost-coated ground, searching for his hawk. It was common in the Villages to chase your bird through other people’s property, to find yourself tangled in a thorny goat fence or wading knee-deep across the Necklace, because a hawk neither knows nor respects the boundaries people draw across the world. The demarcation of kingdoms, invisible lines drawn by war and language, treaty and betrayal—hawks erase them with a flap of their wings. Shara obeyed her blood and the tremor of her moods, and the hunt had called her.
He saw the white stripes of her chest flash from the corner of his eye and then glimpsed her in a blood birch, feet gripping the branch and back flattened, head low and level. He whistled her down, held out his fist, but she didn’t even turn to look at him. She was focused on a small heap of frost-covered rocks, where the rat must have taken shelter.
Brysen whistled again. While he stood there, his eyes fixed on her and her eyes fixed on the rocks, Nyall and Jowyn and the others caught up to him, their breaths huffing out in misty clouds of damp air. The night temperature on the mountain had dropped well below comfort, and Brysen had left his coat and supplies back in the cave. He was amazed that Jowyn could run around shirtless, like he was in the blazing desert. Nyall had kept his coat on and was already shivering.
“It’s not safe out here,” Jowyn warned.
“That’s why I have to get her back,” Brysen replied just as Shara launched herself from the branch at the rat, which had bolted from its hiding place. It’d been flushed out by a deep-blue ice snake that now had the hawk’s complete attention. The rat dodged a strike from the serpent, but before the snake could turn, Shara smashed onto it, snatching it just behind the head and pinning it down. Its body twisted and writhed, trying to free its head and snap its fangs into her, but Shara’s grip tightened with every move the snake made.
An ice snake’s venom was especially toxic at this time of year, when it had built up over the ice-wind, heating the snake from the inside and burning to get out. Ice snakes ended their hibernation when their venom’s heat woke them to hunt, and they wanted nothing more than to expel the poison into their prey, cooking their meal from the inside out.
Brysen ran toward them, huffing his way up the snowy, wooded slope, muttering half prayers that the snake wouldn’t get its venom into Shara before he could slice its head off. He drew his knife as he approached, but Shara had already crushed the snake to death and mantled her wings over its corpse. She didn’t need Brysen’s help.
As she bent down to break into the snake’s meat with her sharp beak, Brysen’s clumsy approach up the mountain froze her. She glanced over her shoulder at her master, saw him and his drawn blade, and then unceremoniously took off, the snake’s corpse hanging from her talons like a flapping war banner. She weaved through the wood, wending and winding until Brysen couldn’t see her anymore.
“Scuzz!” he shouted, stomping the ground.
He knew it wasn’t meant as an insult, just goshawk instinct, but he couldn’t help feeling stung by her flight away. Woodland hunters, goshawks preferred to eat in private, where other predators couldn’t see what they’d caught or scheme to take it. It wounded him that she would think of Brysen as just another predator. It was irrational to expect that she would treat him differently, that she’d think fondly of all he’d done for her, that the ways of the world would make an exception just for him, but still, he wished they would.
Brysen tore off running again.
“Bry!” Nyall called up to him. “Bry! Where are you going?”
Brysen didn’t answer. Shara had flown across a low sloping field shaped like a bowl. He skirted the edge, keeping to the lip and leaping over patches of slick ice, before finding himself back on the tree-covered slope again. As he ran, he caught a glimpse of Jowyn from the corner of his eye; he was cutting straight across the snow field, his skin nearly perfect camouflage in the icy moonlight.
Brysen stopped and listened. He heard Nyall panting and scrambling, feet crunching, but beneath those noises Brysen listened for the sounds of panicked woodpeckers or crows or anything that might give Shara’s position away. He searched the dark wood for signs of feathers or snakeskin snagged on a bush or branch. A hawk always left some sign of its hunt if you knew what to look for.
Up to his right, the trees ended at a steep gray rock. There was a frozen waterfall pouring off the top and tumbling down in an unmoving crystalline crash. Behind the wall of frozen water was what looked like a cave. Some of the icicles at the edge of the cave’s entrance had been smashed and their shards lay on the still, solid pool below.
Shara had to have broken them off while flying into the cave with the snake. A cave behind a wall of ice would make the perfect private place for her to eat in peace.
Brysen rushed over, determined to get her leashed to his arm before she could fly away again. He slipped a little as he crossed the ice, forced to widen his stance and shuffle to the edge of the frozen waterfall. He peered around the curtain of ice, searching the moonlit cave. Dim silver slices of light slipped through the frozen falls and cast shadows like the bars of a cage. In a corner, he saw the shape of Shara’s mantled wings. Her head jerked upward with a tearing sound. She had blood on her beak.
Brysen let out a relieved breath. She was eating. He shuffled his way into the dark to reach her as calmly and quietly as he could. She was so fixated on eating that she didn’t look up this time. He kept his eyes fixed on her gray wings, ready to dive at her if she tried to fly off again.
“Stop!” Jowyn shouted at him, his voice echoing inside the cavern. Shara flinched and paused, then returned to her serpentine supper. Brysen glanced behind him and saw Jowyn’s shape on the other side of the icefall. His figure bent and wavered, backlit by the moon.
“I’m getting her now,” Brysen said.
“Stop right where you are!” Jowyn repeated slowly. “And don’t move.”
Jowyn’s voice wasn’t a threat, Brysen realized. It was a warning, and it came at the same instant he heard a telltale snap-pop-snap beneath his feet. The sound of ice cracking.
He knew better than to run over frozen water during the ice-melt, but he’d been so focused on getting Shara back that he hadn’t been careful. This was the kind of carelessness that Kylee always yelled at him about, that Dymian thought was so endearing. The kind of carelessness that his father had beaten him for, over and over again. Looked like his father was right: Carelessness was going to kill him.
“Scuzz,” he said, and the ice broke.