1
Every night since the bursting moon was a fingernail sliver, the ghost eagles had returned to test their defenses, and every night, Kylee watched Brysen toss and turn in his sleep, muttering in a long-dead language, mouth frothing and muscles taut near to tearing, until the dread flock left at dawn.
There was no amount of wax Brysen could stuff in his ears to block out the screeching, though for the first few nights he had tried. Nothing helped. Nothing calmed his dreams. Jowyn would hold him close, cover his ears with pale hands, rock Brysen in his arms, and whisper soothing words as though Brysen were a baby. But the screeching came from within and could not be stopped.
Kylee would sit stone-faced, watching. No one held her close. No one rocked her or whispered soothing words. She’d sit on the hard floor of the cave they now called home, jaw set tight, and show no sign that she heard the shrieking, too, that she saw the same visions her twin brother saw, asleep or awake, and that, when she did sleep, her nightmares were the same as his.
Kylee always woke before Brysen, and this morning, in the predawn stillness of the cave, Grazim told her she’d been muttering in her sleep, speaking words in the Hollow Tongue that neither of them recognized.
“You sounded just like him,” she said. “I think you two never look more alike than when you’re asleep.”
“Don’t watch me sleep,” Kylee told Grazim, who shrugged. Kylee asked the girl to swear her silence. She didn’t want her twin to know that she was experiencing the same nightmares.
“Keeping secrets from your brother?” Grazim shook her head. “That never works out well for you.”
“Just swear,” Kylee said.
And Grazim swore, and the moment Brysen woke, when the first feathering of morning sun fluttered through the cave’s narrow open skylights, Kylee was at his side with the same question as the morning before and the morning before that and every morning for the last half turn of the swelling moon, ever since the convocation of ghost eagles had first descended on Uztar and begun to crush the world in their talons.
“What did you see?”
“Darkness and snow,” Brysen whispered, his voice hoarse. “Just like every night.”
“Anything else?” she asked.
His right eye met hers, sky-blue but cloudy from restlessness. The bronze patch he wore over his left eye had a dull patina to it, and his skin was still raw where it had been stitched with sparrow’s tendon, but the wound was healing neatly. Jowyn regularly reminded Brysen to keep cleaning the wound and applying ointment to it at night, and so far, Brysen had obeyed. But now they were running low on the necessary herbs, which were becoming harder and harder to find. Foraging outside the protective nets was getting difficult, and some of the herbs could only be harvested at night, which was impossible. As it stood, what they had stored was all they would ever have, unless something changed. Unless they figured out how to fight back against the murderous sky.
When the wound finished healing and growing closed around the eyepatch, the bronze would be like a part of Brysen’s face. Kylee was still not used to looking at her brother and seeing only one eye staring back. He was her twin, and somehow the change to his body made her cheekbone itch, like a reminder that, whatever happened to them, they would always be bound together. That was family: a leash or a tether, for good or for ill.
She’d have liked to tug at Brysen’s leash, train him like he was a wild-caught falcon, keep him honest. She knew he was holding back what he dreamed. She raised an eyebrow at him.
“I saw footprints,” he told her after it became obvious that she would wait for him to continue all morning if she had to. “Hundreds of footprints in a line that crossed over the whole world, then suddenly stopped. Empty snow ahead of them, and a shadow of wings. When the wings flapped, the snow was disturbed and the footprints vanished—all but two sets. Children’s footprints. The wings flapped harder but couldn’t erase them. There was a screaming regret.”
“What does that mean?” Grazim scoffed. She stood against the smooth stone wall opposite Brysen’s pallet, arms crossed, impatient for her morning tea. She made no secret that she found this whole exercise a waste of time, especially since she knew that Kylee already knew what Brysen had dreamed. “They showed you a ‘screaming regret’?”
“Not everything that is shown can be seen,” Jowyn interjected, his pale fingers lacing with Brysen’s. “You ever try to describe a dream?”
“I don’t share my dreams,” Grazim told Jowyn, but she directed her next comment straight at Kylee. “They don’t have anything useful to tell me.”
“Some people just don’t want to know themselves,” Jowyn replied.
“Some people should mind their business,” she snapped back. Grazim wasn’t the type of person who tried to get along with others. She was a scholar and a warrior, and she didn’t think making nice was a necessary part of either title. Kylee liked that about her. People pleasers exhausted her.
Kylee focused on getting information out of Brysen, ignoring the squabbling of her friends. “Where were the footprints leading?”
Brysen frowned and shook his head. “I don’t know.”
He was still holding back. She had the same dreams, saw the same line of footprints. She saw where the children’s footprints led. She didn’t ask him because she needed to know the answer; she asked him because she wanted to know if he would tell her.
The ghost eagles were putting these visions in their heads with their nightly shrieks, and Kylee hoped what they saw could be useful to destroy the flock. Brysen, who had healed a ghost eagle on the battlefield, didn’t seem to want them destroyed. By holding back, by keeping information to himself, he revealed divided loyalties. Kylee wondered whose side he was on: hers, or theirs? How deep into his head had the ghost eagles penetrated? Could she trust her brother?
“Is there anything else you can tell me?” she asked, hopeful.
“No. Sorry,” he said, wincing. “I’ve got a headache.”
Kylee wanted to touch his shoulder or his hand, reassure him that it was okay, that it wasn’t too late to do the right thing. It was, she believed, never too late to do the right thing. But urging Brysen to be his best self was Jowyn’s job now. Brysen preferred the comfort Jowyn offered over hers anyway, and she, in fact, had little comfort to give him. If he was choosing to protect the ghost eagles, then he was beyond her help. She knew where the footprints in the dream led, and she would go there the first chance she had, with or without his help.
She had made a battlefield vow to the ghost eagles and to herself.
She was going to destroy them all.
2
“Breakfast!” Ma called, her voice echoing through the cavern, turning the simple sustaining noun into an imperative. “Fast … fast … fast … fast…”
With the surviving battle boys sharing the meal, it was an appropriate echo; if Kylee didn’t get to breakfast fast, the boys would devour every scrap of food before she had taken her first sip of weak tea.
Grazim had already shoved off the wall to make her way toward the large kitchen chamber. “I’ll save you some bread,” she said, “if the vultures haven’t snatched it all already.”
“Thanks,” Kylee said.
The Six Villages themselves were deeply overcrowded now and desperately unsafe, and the caves set into the foothills above the village had become coveted property. The cave they lived in had once been a distillery for the Tamir gang’s foothill gin, so it was fairly secure and easy to defend, which Kylee appreciated. Defending it, however, meant living with Brysen’s old friends, the ragtag gang of battle boys who protected it and protected them. Just because the ghost eagles declared war on all humanity and united the different armies against a common enemy didn’t mean they all suddenly got along. It didn’t help that people blamed Brysen and Kylee for the ghost eagles’ attacks in the first place. They had a lot of enemies in the Six now, and there was a need for friends with few scruples when it came to using violence to protect their own. Grazim described them as vultures, but Kylee thought of them as a mob of loud but loyal crows.
“You coming?” Kylee asked her brother. She wanted to keep an eye on him. If he was following the dream footprints, too, then she wanted to know about it.
“I’m not hungry,” he replied.
She left him and Jowyn in their sleeping nook. She’d developed a rule for herself: to eat whenever she had the chance, because in war you never know when your next meal might come. She had the same rule about going to the bathroom. So much of survival is about the basics, and she made a point not to neglect them. Brysen, as usual, had different priorities. He’d probably sleep through the end of the world, if it weren’t for the nightmares. If the world hadn’t, in fact, already ended.
The battle boys were already scarfing down breakfast when she reached the kitchen.
“It’s real good, mem,” Nyck told Kylee’s mother as he shoved flatbread dusted with chili root into his mouth, then crunched on a handful of crisped river rice with charred sweetgrass. He looked up at Kylee when she came in but didn’t stop eating. Ma was, it turned out, a decent cook.
“Your father never appreciated subtle flavors,” she told Kylee as she gave her a smooth ceramic dish. “If there was no meat, he didn’t think it was food.”
“I remember,” Kylee replied, and felt a jolt of pain as the memory yanked her backward, an entire history boiling up behind her eyes: the fervent prayers and dire curses Ma offered instead of affection; the retreat Ma took in the face of her violent husband; the suffering Brysen endured, from which Ma never once shielded him; the lack of comfort Ma offered, never once helping Kylee soothe him. Kylee had never been hit, but she felt the blows in her own way, even now, and they stung.
Kylee breathed through the memory, amazed that the simple act of remembering could make her body react so aggressively. She felt actual sweat beading in her hairline, and her heartbeat accelerated. She hated the power the past still held over her present.
Ma’s mouth twitched at the corners. She wasn’t asking forgiveness, and she wouldn’t get it, but, of all the strange developments since the ghost eagles’ return, her mother’s transformation was by far the strangest: She’d become an actual parent.
Kylee took her dish over to the mat where Nyck and three other battle boys sat, glad for the distraction they’d provide. Grazim preferred to sip her tea and eat a short distance away from the others—she didn’t like the sound of people chewing—but she tossed Kylee a disc of flatbread she’d saved. Her aim was good, and Kylee thanked her again. The constant thank-yous made Grazim roll her eyes, but Kylee really was grateful. It was nice to have a reliable ally in the house. It was not something she was used to. Brysen had never been reliable, and his loyalty often caused more problems than it solved. She wondered now if she could even count on that.
“Where’s your brother?” Ma asked.
“Having a late morning with Jowyn?” Nyck smirked, eyebrows waggling with insinuation.
“Not every bird is a peacock,” Grazim grunted.
“He’s resting,” Kylee said.
“Resting could be a euphemism,” Nyck offered, which got a well-aimed pebble winged at the back of his head. “Ow!”
“And that could be a sharper stone next time,” Grazim said.
Kylee smiled. This little community that surrounded her had become something like she always imagined a family should be. They bickered and they bantered, and they ate together whenever they could, and even Ma, who never appeared to enjoy anything in their lives before now, appeared to enjoy providing for all these young people. All it had taken to find happiness was the fall of civilization.
“They caught one!” Jowyn came running into the cavern, still pulling a shirt on over his too-pale chest, which was covered with strange tattoos from his time in the blood birch forest, with the covey of the Owl Mothers.
“One what?” Nyck asked, but Grazim and Kylee were already on their feet.
“A ghost eagle,” Jowyn said. “In the nets, last night. It’s injured.”
“How do you know?” Lyra asked. She was new to the battle boys, the daughter of a slain Altari grass merchant, and she hadn’t known any of them before the war began. She didn’t know the history of Kylee, Brysen, and the ghost eagles beyond what rumors carried on the wind and the hints and insinuations made around the cave. She asked questions no one else was fool enough to ask out loud, either because they already knew or because they didn’t want to know the answers.
“Brysen can hear it,” Jowyn explained, and tapped the side of his head. “Said it’s being tortured, and he went to…” The sentence trailed off.
Kylee bit the inside of her cheeks. Was she angry that Brysen ran off without her? Or was she upset because he heard the ghost eagle’s cries and she didn’t?
And then she realized that she did hear them. The pain she felt when she remembered her father, remembered their lives before … that was the ghost eagle’s pain, too, like two words that rhymed, sung in harmony. She didn’t hear the ghost eagles because her own inner voice was too loud and indistinguishable from theirs.
It was not easy having the thoughts of giant killer birds echoing in your head, not easy to feel so much of what they did, half-tamed and enraged.
She was out the door before her plate finished rattling where she’d dropped it. The others ran close behind. The ghost eagles had already killed hundreds of Six Villagers, and she really hoped her brother wasn’t going to run into a mob of the surviving friends and families just to do something stupid, like try to help this injured eagle.
She knew, of course, that helping the injured ghost eagle was exactly what he was going to do.
3
Neither Kylee nor her brother were supposed to go into the crowded village lanes without at least two battle boys, and now Brysen had run, one-eyed, half-dressed, and all alone, into the heart of the village.
Brysen couldn’t run very fast these days—he was still prone to tripping as his depth perception adjusted—but he was smart enough to know that Kylee would be after him, and he clearly did not want her to be.
The cave’s entrance was hidden from outsiders by a large round stone set in a groove on a system of pulleys and ropes for easy opening and closing. Brysen had wedged a small stone in the groove, stopping the door stone from rolling open.
Kylee pulled against it, cursed, and pounded on the rock face in frustration.
“The scuzzard!” she shouted, then called for Nyck and the others to come help her. “You couldn’t have stopped him?” she asked Jowyn.
“You ever stop Brysen from doing what he wanted?” he replied.
She grunted and leaned her weight against the huge round door. Together, Kylee, Grazim, Jowyn, Nyck, Lyra, and the last battle boy with them, Kheryn, all pushed and heaved together, but the stone barely moved at all.
“Why’d he shut us in?” Nyck wondered.
“Maybe he wanted to keep us safe from the captured ghost eagle?” Jowyn offered optimistically.
“He doesn’t want me trying to stop him,” Kylee said.
“From what?” Lyra asked.
“From helping a ghost eagle,” she said.
Lyra began: “Why would he help a—”
“Not the time, Ly,” Nyck interrupted her. “Just push.”
Still the stone didn’t move. Kylee cursed. She considered tying Brysen up and keeping him prisoner when he came back—if he came back—at least until she finished off the ghost eagles herself, but she imagined he wouldn’t submit willingly. Jowyn and Ma might also offer some resistance. There was no easy way for her to hold her brother against his will, even if it was for his own good.
“You all could take one of the smugglers’ passages,” her ma called from the hearth.
Copyright © 2021 by Alex London.
