Brysen pulled the flaps open for the morning’s business to begin and pushed Vyvian’s ominous warning out of his head.
“That was twice as stupid as it was brave, and it was incredibly brave.” Dymian’s voice startled Brysen from the back of the tent.
“I’m not much for math.” Brysen turned to him. “How’d you get in here without me seeing you?”
“I slipped in from behind,” Dymian said.
Brysen was about to make a joke, but Dymian didn’t look in the mood. His cheeks were shadowed with light-brown stubble, and there were dark circles around his eyes. There was a bruise on his forehead only partly covered by his hair.
“That kyrg with the eagle was Kyrg Yval Birgund,” Dymian told him. “Defense counselor at the Sky Castle.”
“Well, he was also an arrogant dirt biter who hurts little kids,” Brysen told him. “I should’ve turned the whip on him.”
“You’d have been dead before your body hit the ground, but still…” Dymian smiled. “I admire your pluck.”
“My pluck?” He raised an eyebrow.
“A killer in the pit, a hero in the streets,” Dymian cooed. “A little of both in between the sheets…”
Brysen’s chest tightened, and he felt the blood rush to his head. The blood rushed everywhere. “Wasn’t sure if you’d show up today,” he told his trainer casually, fearing his heartbeat might start an avalanche.
“I need to talk to you.” Dymian glanced at the tent opening. “Privately?”
“On market day?” Brysen shook his head. “Everybody’s watching everybody. Vyvian Sacher just sent a pigeon about me, I think.” Dymian bit his lower lip, frowned. Brysen didn’t like this timid version of his trainer. “Hold on.”
He closed the tent flaps, giving his sister a gesture across the way that it’d only be for a moment. Kylee held her hands up at him and shook her head, her jaw hanging open.
Once the tent flaps fell shut, he turned around in the dim light filtering through the canvas. Dymian crossed the space and stood before him, so close that Brysen had to look up for their eyes to meet. The hawk master put his hands on Brysen’s shoulders.
“I want to apologize for yesterday,” he said. “I know you saw that I bet against you.”
Brysen swallowed.
In stories, people said they were dumbstruck by love, but those storytellers knew nothing. Love didn’t make you dumb; it made you too smart, too quickly. In the span of a breath, a person in love could imagine everything they should say and its opposite, every tone of voice they could use and why each one was a mistake. They could weigh every word and analyze every gesture. He was not great at math, but Brysen could calculate the emotional trajectory of an eyebrow and the infinite combinations of two lips touching, and the knowledge stuck his tongue. A person in love was paralyzed by the brilliance of their own longing.
“Whatever,” his voice cracked out.
Yeah, the instant genius of the lovestruck sounded a lot like stupidity.
He tried to add a shrug, but Dymian took the gesture wrong and pulled him against his warm chest, gripping him tightly. Brysen was glad the hawks were hooded on their perches. They’d sense the riot beneath his skin and start shrieking.
“I know it bothered you,” he whispered into Brysen’s hair. “It’s what’s so great about you. ‘Your heart’s a wing, a feather-fragile thing.’”
Brysen laughed. “You’re a poet now?”
“It’s from the Epic of the Forty Birds,” Dymian told him.
“Never read it.”
“It’s amazing. I’ll read it to you one day. The first hawk knows there is more to the world than she has seen but can’t discover it all alone. She has to unite all the birds, one by one, hearing each of their stories before they can fly off together in search of the truth of the world. How have you not read our founding epic?”
Sometimes being with Dymian made Brysen forget he was just some Six Villages hawker’s kid. And other times, it reminded him. “I didn’t have tutors or schooling like you did,” he said. “I learned what I learned when I learned it.”
“Of course,” Dymian said sweetly, and brushed a lock of Brysen’s gray hair from his forehead. When Dymian touched his head, it didn’t feel ash-heap gray. It felt like pure silver. “And you always amaze me by how much you do know. More than you give yourself credit for.”
Brysen smiled. It was a lie, obviously, but still, it was a kind lie, and he loved that someone like Dymian would make the effort to lie a smile onto his lips. The truth was rarely kind, so why not let a lovely lie linger?
“Anyway, I’m sorry about yesterday,” Dymian repeated. “I had no choice. I needed some money, fast, and … well, I thought you were outmatched by that long-hauler. I should’ve told you to let Shara loose and take a loss safely.”
“Told me to?” Brysen pulled away. How was it that the person who could launch you to the clouds was the same one who could snare you to the ground? “I make my own choices, D. I’m not some harem boy you can boss around. You don’t tell me what to do.”
“I know. I know. I’m sorry.”
Dymian should have been snapping back at him, or making a crude joke about harems, or knocking him down into the dirt right there in the center of the tent, pinning Brysen beneath him, telling him a thing or two that might be fun … but instead, he just said, again, “I’m sorry.”
“What’s going on?” Brysen demanded. “You’re worrying me here.”
“It’s nothing, Bry. Really. I just owe the Tamirs some money.”
“Everyone owes the Tamirs some money,” Brysen grunted.
“More money than I have right now…”
“Oh … well … do you need an advance on your pay?” Brysen suggested. “With my winnings yesterday and the market on, we’re about to pay off everything we owe them anyway. Kylee won’t be happy about it, but I’m sure we could throw in some extra for you.”
“Kylee hates me,” Dymian said.
“She hates that I like you,” Brysen corrected him. “But she likes me. She’ll do it if I ask her to. I am, technically, her older brother.”
“By about half a chime of the bell on a falcon’s ankle,” Dymian laughed. “And I’ve got a few seasons on both of you. I shouldn’t be asking you for money.”
“I respect my elders.” Brysen grinned. “Let me help you. When we’re on the road together, we’ll be splitting costs evenly anyway…”
Dymian laughed and pulled him by the belt until there was no air between them. “It’s just—” He lowered his eyes to the floor. “It’s not only bronze. Last night, I promised Goryn Tamir that I’d—”
“Oh, how sweet!” The tent flaps opened with a slash of light. “A tender moment between a fledgling and his mama bird. You gonna feed a worm into his mouth now?”
Brysen’s head snapped around to see five big silhouettes in the opening. The central figure carried a hawk on his arm while the other four held sturdy leather clubs. They lumbered inside and let the flaps fall behind them. The perched hawks sensed the change in energy, perhaps sensed the arrival of the new bird on the glove, and shifted on their feet.
“Ser Goryn, I was going to find you later,” Dymian said.
The man in the middle of the group laughed and pulled a small piece of bloody meat from his pocket. He held it up to his bird’s beak, then pulled it away, leaving his gyrfalcon hungry and keen for a kill. Her feathers were white and silver, her beak a razor-sharp, pearl-white hook. She was bred for snowy mountain hunting, not foothill and brush like the short-tailed hawks most folks in the Villages had. Goryn liked her because blood from a kill would glisten bright red against her perfect, pearlescent feathers. She was an expensive predator bred for luxurious violence.
His goons spread out, flanking Brysen and Dymian.
“My mother trusted me with great responsibility over the finances of her business,” Goryn Tamir said. The dirty fingers of his free hand rubbed the thick black stubble on his chin and brushed the silk collar of his long jacket. No matter how finely the Tamir children dressed, their fingers always stayed dirty. It was a sign of pride. The Tamirs did their own work.
“When I study the ledgers,” Goryn continued, “as I do regularly, I see a very large outstanding payment due … a payment from you, Dymian, that’s preventing me from balancing the books. This bothers me. I like my numbers balanced. An unbalanced ledger is like an itch I can’t scratch right at that spot on the small of my back. You know that spot, Dymian? That spot where, right now, you’ve got a trickle of ice-cold sweat?”
Suddenly and without the slightest signal, one of the men behind Dymian lashed out, striking him in the lower back with a club.
“Ahh!” Dymian cried, and dropped to his knees, gasping.
Brysen rushed for him but found himself tripped with a blow across the shins from another goon’s baton. He fell forward but had spent enough time in the pits to turn the fall into a roll. The hit was hard enough to make him limp later, but for now he didn’t feel a thing. Even his headache had vanished. Nothing like sudden brutality to sharpen your senses first thing in the morning.
He sprang back to his feet just in front of the bait boxes. He snapped one open and a pigeon burst out, racing for freedom, which caused the unhooded gyrfalcon on Goryn’s glove to rouse and launch herself, still tethered.
The noise was enough to make the five hooded hawks on their perches bate, leaping to the end of their own tethers before being yanked back, scrambling, screeching, and blind.
In the chaos of shouts and feathers, Brysen delivered a high kick into the chest of the man who’d tripped him, grabbed the baton, and smacked it across his head. At the same moment, he drew his black-talon fighting blade and whirled around, a weapon in each hand.
He needn’t have bothered.
The other two had Dymian held up, his arms pinned behind his back, and the stiletto point of an assassin’s dagger against the soft underside of his throat, already drawing a bead of blood.
“You’ve got heart, little bird,” Goryn said to Brysen, smoothing his hawk’s feathers as if he were petting some domesticated chicken. “More than your old man did, anyway. But you’ve got your mother’s glass-grinder blood in you, and you’re letting it get the best of your brains. What did you plan to do? Beat me and my men into submission and then … what? Ransom me back to my mother one finger at a time?”
Goryn looked giddy at the thought. Brysen kept his weapons up. He had simply wanted to keep them from beating Dymian. He turned as the man he’d knocked down stood up.
Goryn clucked. “You know we would make meat of you and your sister out there and then we’d send some of our friends to visit your mother. I’d burn your home to ash and bury your picked-over bones beneath it.”
Brysen’s eyes darted around the dim tent, plotting his next attack.
“Put your weapons away, kid,” Goryn sighed. “Our problem’s not with you. You’ve got your blood up, and I can forgive that at your age. Put your weapons away, and you and your family get to live. We won’t even take Dymian’s private parts off as punishment.”
Dymian whimpered.
“But make me wait another breath,” Goryn hissed, “and you’ll suffer beyond the limits of imagining.”
There was no suffering Brysen couldn’t imagine, but Goryn didn’t make idle threats, and he didn’t want Kylee punished for his fights. He dropped the club and sheathed his knife.
Goryn nodded, and the goons let go of Dymian, shoving him hard to the ground.
“You made a deal with me, Dymian,” Goryn told him. “Honor that deal, or you die.”
“I’m going to kick your teeth out one day,” Dymian threatened, and Goryn closed his eyes and smiled. Then he crossed over to Dymian, raised his foot over the back of Dymian’s shin, and stomped.
“Ahh!” Dymian yelled, his lower leg cracking. “Ahh!”
“I’ve never understood why you make life so hard for yourself, Dymian,” Goryn said, then looked right at Brysen. “Some people just don’t know their limits.”
He smiled, then left the tent with his men as suddenly as he had arrived. The settling tent flap narrowed the streak of light across the ground to the size of a blade, then a needle. It yawned wide and bright again when Kylee and Nyall burst in. Nyall was hauling five large bird boxes.
“That was Goryn Tamir himself!” he exclaimed.
“What in the flaming sky was that about?” Kylee demanded.
Brysen rushed to his trainer, who was writhing on the ground. When Dymian finally looked up at him, his eyes were damp and darting. “I’m in trouble,” he said, half-breathless, clutching his broken leg. “Sky-high trouble.”
Brysen felt an odd sensation course through him right then. It wasn’t pity or love or fright.
It was pride.
A strange and miserable time for it, he knew, but he couldn’t help standing a little straighter. Dymian was asking him for help. Anything for you, he wanted to say, but instead his sister spoke.
“Tell me what you did to bring Goryn Tamir into our tent, or I swear he won’t even be able to find your corpse to spit it into mud.”
“I made him a promise,” Dymian groaned. “I promised him a ghost eagle.”