“I didn’t want to kill him,” Kylee confessed, tears in her eyes. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed. She’d dropped to the ground after the battle and had doubled over, throwing up. She couldn’t stop shivering and she wondered if she’d fainted. The moon had sunk lower in the sky and the feasting vultures had turned Petyr into little more than meat on a hook.
She tried to stand, but her knees wobbled, her feet were numb. “I didn’t know they’d do that,” she added.
Üku squatted down beside her, pulled her hair back, and, when she was finished retching, handed her a flamestone cup of hot tea. “Great poems know more than their poets, but they cannot exist without them. This is the art of the Hollow Tongue as well. Sometimes a novice will hit on a perfect word, but the lack of control can be dangerous to both the speaker and the spoken to. That’s why we’d like you to study and to train with us. We can learn from each other.”
“But he’s dead; I won!” Grazim objected, still standing tense in the battle pit, looking ready to fight Kylee herself to prove her victory.
“Yes,” Üku said. “He’s dead. You won. And you will be trained, too. But Kylee has shown us something valuable.” She helped Kylee to her feet, nudged her to sip the tea, which warmed Kylee instantly and cleared her head at the same time. She felt calmer and clutched the cup with both hands but resolved not to sip again. Whatever they’d put in it, she wanted no more. “She showed the kind of creativity under pressure that will be required in battle.”
“In battle?”
“In service of the kyrg,” Üku said. “For whom we have promised to train you.”
“You sold me out to the Sky Castle?”
“Sold you out?” Üku shook her head. “That’s dramatic. We are helping you get what you want: to command the ghost eagle from the sky.”
“That’s not what I want,” Kylee said. “I want to help my brother. He wants the ghost eagle and only so he can save someone he thinks he loves.”
“Interesting way to phrase it.”
Kylee shrugged. They didn’t need to know Brysen’s business. “I’m not doing this so that a kyrg can just take the eagle from us once we catch it,” she said.
“A war is coming, Kylee,” Üku said. “The Kartami are growing and moving fast, and they are coming to tear every bird from the sky. Our interests and those of your kyrgs in the Sky Castle are the same. What good will saving Brysen and his lover do if the Kartami cut all of your heads off?”
“What do you care? Why would you serve the kyrg?” This time Üku offered no information. Kylee had to puzzle it out for herself. “Because they stand between you and the Kartami…,” she said. “The Kartami are as much a threat to you as to the Six Villages … but they have to go through us first. The lowland foothills are your first line of defense.”
Üku didn’t deny it, but there was more. Kylee couldn’t quite figure it out until she looked around and realized there were only women and girls here. To survive, they needed outsiders … outsiders that the Uztari kyrgs provided. Boys disappeared all the time.
“We’ll survive,” Üku said. “You can help us all survive.”
“Catch the ghost eagle yourselves,” Kylee grunted.
“We cannot,” said Üku. “It has no interest in hearing us … but it has long been interested in you. In your family.”
“Interested enough to kill my father,” Kylee said.
Üku nodded thoughtfully. “That is one way to see it, but perhaps the ghost eagle has more perspective than you can know. From high atop its perch, it sees more than you can imagine. Its will is its own, but you might persuade it to serve yours. To serve all of ours.”
Kylee shook her head. She was not a warrior, and she would not become their warrior. She had seen what violence did to bodies, and she wanted nothing more to do with it. Birds of prey killed to eat, but, as the Owl Mother had said, only humans could choose to kill. Or choose not to. She would not let them turn her into a killer.
Into more of a killer than she already was.
“I’m going to find my brother,” she said.
“We will not simply let you walk away from this.” Üku cracked her neck and stood in Kylee’s way. “One who speaks the Hollow Tongue irresponsibly cannot be allowed to roam free. You might fall into the wrong hands. Imagine what our enemies would do with you. Not everyone has your interests in mind, Kylee.”
“You don’t, either.”
“Our interests align. That should be enough.”
“Just let her go; we don’t need her,” Grazim spoke up, but a harsh glare from Üku silenced her.
“You should listen to her,” Kylee warned, and strode for the edge of the circle. Üku was in front of her again before she’d made it three steps, and two other Owl Mothers flanked her just as fast. Behind her, the rest of the Mothers had stood from their seats along the mountain slope. Kylee felt a tingle on the back of her neck, a sense that untold numbers of owls had their wide eyes fixed on her. “Let me go.”
Her eyes darted quickly to the sides of the pit around her, confirming what she’d feared: crossbows pointed at opposing angles between her shoulder blades. If they fired, the crossbow bolts would make an X right through her heart. She looked at the vultures, who were still feasting. Could she find a word to command them? Would Üku counteract whatever she tried? And what would become of Brysen if she died right here, right now, and left him on the mountain?
In front of her, Üku raised an eyebrow, asking a question of her own. What now?
One thing Kylee and her brother had in common—a great gift of their family perhaps—was a refusal to back down in the face of total hopelessness. It had to be an inherited trait, she figured, because Kylee had never before imagined herself doing something as foolish as what she did next.
“Thanks for the tea,” she said, and then, raising the cup as if to toast her captor, she tossed the hot liquid into Üku’s face. As the woman grabbed at her eyes, Kylee did a forward somersault, knocking past her. The crossbows bolts flew, one grazing Üku’s head, the other zipping harmlessly over the side of the mountain and toward the treetops below.
Kylee was already running at full stride, taking controlled falls down the dark slope and hitting her feet just in time to scramble over boulders and along the lip of a narrow gorge, running straight for the blood birch forest.
* * *
“And that’s when I found you,” Kylee said to the three boys sitting around her. “The Owl Mothers sold us out to save their own skins.”
She waited for Jowyn to defend them—the women to whose cult he’d belonged until recently—or for Nyall to comfort her, or for Brysen to tell her she did the right thing and that Petyr Otak deserved it, but none of the boys spoke. Each was lost in his own thoughts, she supposed, changing what he thought of her, deciding if she was a danger, maybe, deciding if she’d always been a monster or had just become one on the mountain.
She knew the answer to that question, of course, but none of them asked it. Instead, Brysen stood and offered her a hand up from the ground.
“So it’s true,” he said. “About the Kartami? They really are coming.”
“The Owl Mothers think so,” Kylee said.
“And so must Goryn,” Nyall added. “That’s probably why he wants a ghost eagle. For defense?”
“The ghost eagle does not defend people,” Jowyn said. “And neither does my brother.”
“I don’t care about the Kartami’s war with the Sky Castle or Goryn’s plans for the eagle,” Brysen told them. “I care about doing what I promised. I care about Dymian.”
Kylee noticed her brother looking at his feet, avoiding Jowyn’s or Nyall’s gaze. Avoiding her gaze, too. Some part of him had to know how reckless he was being. Some part of him had to think of the bigger picture here.
Whatever part that was, he’d squashed it when he looked up again, resolved. “I’m doing this. That’s the deal I made. Jowyn will lead me to the Nameless Gap. If I can make it by nightfall, then I think I have a plan to catch the eagle.” He looked at each of them in turn. “But I could use some help.” Her brother stepped to her, squeezed her hand. “I won’t force you to use the Hollow Tongue,” he added. “I know how hard it is for you.”
She gave his hand a gentle squeeze back, glad to have her brother’s kindness after so long without it, glad he was finally asking for help. But even as she nodded at him, all she could think was You have no idea how hard it is for me.
They formed a line and climbed single file toward the ragged edge of the Demon’s Beak, a high traverse of stone with a giant hooked peak above it. They climbed until well after nightfall, then woke to keep climbing. It was nearly a whole day before they finally reached the narrow pass below the Beak, pressing their backs against the snow-blanketed stone to shuffle along the edge of an endless fall. Once they passed the traverse, it was a quick climb over the lip to the rough slopes of the Nameless Gap, where the ghost eagle kept its eyrie. It watched all who approached. They would be no bigger than rats in the eagle’s eyes.
Kylee knew this climb. She’d done it once before.
Petyr Otak had not been her first kill.