Brysen had ingested the sap with food the last time he climbed up this mountain, and he’d drunk it, distilled through Jowyn’s hot blood, after nearly dying of cold in a frozen lake, but he’d never had it pulled pure from the tree. The taste was something uncanny—familiar and mysterious at the same time. It was sweet like white walnut, bitter like dandelion, and metallic like fresh blood. There was something he couldn’t quite place, too, a cold taste that made him think of hungry wolf pups crying on frozen steppes, of a vulture circling over bare rock, of death and helplessness. There was also a hint of cherry.
That was the flavor that blew his mind.
When the cherry taste hit, so did a rush of warmth, and the light around him sharpened. The outlines of the mountains, the scrubby trees, even the people popped into greater focus, and he could see depths and distances with dizzying clarity. He could see details in the dirt and the stone. He could spy a pattern in the wind, movement of the sky, and even the difference in temperature compared to the plains below. With this sight and sense came a burst of energy that was both calm and ecstatic. He wanted to scale the nearest cliff and the one after it. He felt he could climb all day and all night.
Jowyn took the sapskin from him slowly, reverently, and passed it back to Siwoo without drinking. Brysen saw what passed between the Owl Mother and Jowyn—a tiny, respectful nod—and he saw Jowyn dart a nervous glance at him and then look away. And in that look he saw every moment since they’d known each other bound like a pigeon in a snare. His thoughts squirmed.
“Onward, then?” Siwoo suggested, and then they were moving. Brysen had to force himself to slow down so he could walk with Jowyn.
“Is it always like this?” he asked.
“No,” Jowyn said in a tone Brysen didn’t recognize, but it was one he understood. It was the voice ice would use if it could speak. “It gets more intense.”
Brysen put a hand on Jowyn’s shoulder and, to his surprise, didn’t miss on the first try. The sap worked. “Are you mad at me for drinking it? Because I had to.”
“Listen, the sap is not like hunter’s leaf,” he said. “It changes you. Look at that augur we met in the alley. Without it, he went mad.”
“You’re worried I’ll lose my mind?”
Jowyn didn’t answer.
“Are you worried you’re going to lose your mind?”
Still Jowyn didn’t answer, but his mouth twitched briefly. Brysen never would’ve seen that without the sap’s vision.
“Loneliness and bitterness drove that guy mad,” Brysen said. “Neither of those things are in your future, not while I’m around.”
“It’s not that,” Jowyn snapped at him. He’d never snapped at Brysen before. “This isn’t about you. Drinking it means something. Drinking it is supposed to mean something, anyway. It’s not just supposed to be useful. It’s sacred. Or at least, it was.”
Brysen felt dizzy from the tension. His senses were sharp and his muscles loose and lively, but despite that, he felt like he was falling. He’d been so focused on his own sense of what had to happen, he hadn’t even noticed that he and everyone around him had just stomped on something sacred to Jowyn. There was so much about the Owl Mothers he didn’t know, and no matter how close he and Jowyn were, he could never know what it was like to grow up in their covey in the blood birch forest. He’d let his needs of the moment drown out Jowyn’s, and he didn’t have to understand why what he’d done was wrong to know that it had hurt the person he cared about. He wanted to make it right.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I just thought it’s the only way to move fast enough…”
“It is,” Clava interrupted them. She’d fallen in at the rear of their march and showed no interest in their privacy.
“It’s fine,” Jowyn said coolly. “I’m an exile, after all. I don’t get to have an opinion about this anymore.”
Clava looked like she wanted to add something, but instead she nudged Brysen forward. “We have to keep up,” she said, and they kept walking.
By sunset, they’d hiked a distance that usually took days and scaled another two cliff faces. Brysen tried to help Jowyn, even offered to carry him, but the boy refused for as long as he could. When his legs finally gave out, Brysen caught him in his arms, but it was Siwoo who lifted Jowyn and carried him the rest of the way.
They reached the opening of a cave, high enough that, in the distance, they could see the edge of the blood birch forest in one direction and the high black spires of the Talon Fortress in the other. Brysen thought he could even make out the movement of large black-feathered birds among the spires, but it could’ve just been a trick of the light and the sap and his own racing mind. The ghost eagles had left them alone so far, even though they were now going the wrong way. He wondered what they would do when night fell.
The Owl Mothers had considered it as well.
“We won’t be in the open when night falls,” Siwoo told them as she whistled her owl down from the sky. Grazim’s hawk cowered on her fist, clenched its feet tighter and tried to bury its head into its own feathers. “By the time the sixth star appears, the ghost eagles will come.”
“They won’t hurt us,” Brysen said, patting the egg in his bag.
“They won’t hurt you,” Clava replied. “We won’t take our chances.”
Once they were inside the cave, the two Owl Mothers covered the opening with a large boulder using a mechanism. It looked to be engineered just like the entrance in the cave they left behind in the Six Villages. Everyone knew the Owl Mothers kept caverns and tunnels all over the mountains, but Brysen was surprised at how well-stocked this one was. The floor was smooth dirt, and there were thick furs hanging to use as bedding. There were sturdy barrels of food and water along the rear wall, and perches for at least a dozen owls inside smooth, carved niches. He could even hear the trickle of water from a subterranean stream they used as a latrine. This cave was nicer than the one they’d left.
As Brysen settled down to sleep, with the straps of the bag holding the ghost eagle egg wrapped around his arms, he turned toward Jowyn, who lay beside him. He could see the boy clearly despite the dark. It wasn’t like Jowyn was torchlit but rather as though the dark itself was a different kind of light. Brysen wondered if this was how nocturnal birds saw the world at night, if this was how the sap made Jowyn see. He wondered how Jowyn had seen him when they first met.
Jowyn was radiant. It was like Brysen could see the vitality pulsing in him, the tight coils of every muscle, the heat coming off his skin. But there was also anger flapping behind his features. His eyes were open and damp, staring straight up at the ceiling.
“Do you want to talk?” Brysen whispered.
“Shh!” Siwoo hissed from the other side of the cavern.
“I want to sleep,” Jowyn said, and rolled over with his back to Brysen. The tattoos up his side rippled with energy, like the story they told was itself alive. For the first time, Brysen was afraid he’d just cut himself out of that story. He thought he’d known the right thing to do, but it had hurt the love of his life.
I had no choice, he thought, although of course he did. He had a choice, and he made it. He hoped Jowyn would forgive him eventually. He hoped they lived long enough for Jowyn to forgive him. Between the Owl Mothers and the ghost eagles, he wasn’t sure how long their survival was guaranteed.
As night came on, he watched the other boy’s side rise and fall with sleeping breaths, unable to fall asleep himself. There was some darkness no light could break, and Brysen still saw it when he closed his eyes. Outside the cave, he heard the ghost eagles shrieking.