Oddly enough, it wasn’t until I had been there for nearly an entire day and night that I thought of Gilda. I was shocked that I had not noticed her absence. Perhaps I, too, had begun to seal off those memories. Before I could stop myself, a question slid out.
“Mum, what happened to Gilda?”
“Oh, I let her go.”
“Let her go! How could you? She saved my life.”
“Well, she wasn’t a very good housekeeper. I felt I could do it better. She was very distractible. I think nest-maiding wasn’t really in her … how should I put it … her skill set?”
I nearly exploded. I wanted to say, You’re darned right, it wasn’t. Gilda was a fighter, a warrior if I ever saw one.
My mum continued, “I felt I could take care of this new hollow as well as any nest-maid snake.”
My mother was betraying a sudden streak of domesticity that was completely unlike her. The first thing she had announced upon my arrival was that she’d had no broody for Ifghar. She seemed enormously proud of having brooded him herself. I dared not ask if she was contemplating retirement.
My father was not considering any such thing. Indeed, he was called back to the front on the eve of Ifghar’s First-Meat-on-Bones ceremony. At dawn before he left, Da and I went out to hunt for rockmunks, which were at their tenderest this time of year and perfect for Ifghar. Their flesh has an almost creamy consistency.
Mum had a funny light in her eye as she greeted us on the branch outside when we returned. A familiar trill issued forth from deep in the hollow.
“But look who’s here!” My gizzard locked. It was Tantya Hanja. “I’m just in time,” she said, waddling forth. No wonder my mum had that odd look in her eye. “One family member has to leave, but another arrives. Nothing like having family about when it comes to these ceremonies!” Tantya Hanja cackled.
“But I want my da,” whined Ifghar.
“He’ll be here for the ceremony, dear,” my mother said.
“But then he’ll have to leave right after,” Ifghar complained.
“I am here, darling lad,” Tantya Hanja said. “I know all the songs.”
“I don’t like the way you sing. It hurts my ear slits.”
“Ifghar! Shame on you,” Mum scolded. But I nearly laughed out loud.
It was not the jolliest of ceremonies, although we all did our best. I kept thinking about Gilda and wishing she had been there. She always told such good stories. Who cared about her skills as a nest-maid?
A very nice Barred Owl family and another family of Barn Owls stopped in. Moss, bless his soul, showed up at the last minute with his three sisters, who had grown into lovely lasses and would be returning to the Academy with us come autumn.
I noticed that everyone perched as far away as possible from Tantya Hanja. I found myself actually feeling sorry for her. Once upon a time she’d had a mate, but he died rather young. She led a very lonely life. Some say that she had attempted to be a gadfeather, but her voice was such that she never had a real following. The one time she had attended the yearly spring equinox gathering of gadfeathers, she performed to an audience of one, an elderly Whiskered Screech who had seemed quite besotted by her but had dropped dead within hours of hearing her sing. That fixed her reputation not simply as a terrible singer, but as an ill-omened owl.
Thinking about all this depressed me greatly, especially as I hadn’t received any messages from Lil since I had returned home. Every day I looked for a Great Horned Owl messenger. Great Horneds were most often messenger owls, for they flew the fastest of all of us. I also looked for a falcon, just in case. Falcons can fly twice as fast as any owl,23 but were generally reserved for military messaging.
I had written to Lil once but hadn’t received any reply and was uncertain if I should write to her again. I didn’t want to seem too eager, but I was eager, darn it! Four days after Ifghar’s Meat-on-Bones ceremony, I couldn’t help myself and took a charred twig to begin to scratch something out on a piece of birch bark.
“What’cha doing?” Ifghar asked, trying to perch beside me.
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Writing a letter.”
“That’s right.”
“Who to?” Ifghar could be a little annoying at times. And once he started asking questions, they multiplied endlessly.
“A friend.”
“What kind of friend?”
“Just somebody I met at the Academy!”
“What kind of somebody?”
“Really, Ifghar! How can I write if you keep interrupting me?”
“Quit pestering Lyze, Ifghar. Come help me tuck in this rabbit’s ear moss.”
“I bet it’s a girlfriend!” Ifghar hooted. “Ha-ha-ha! Lyze has a girlfriend! Lyze has a girlfriend!” He began to dance around the hollow chanting this annoying refrain.
“Why don’t you just go outside and announce it to the whole world!” I exploded.
“I think I will.”
He had just started branching and was quite full of himself. He had taken right to it. I could hear him outside hopping about. Then suddenly, he gasped. “Mum, a messenger’s coming!”
I was out of the hollow in no time and flew up to where Ifghar had perched. My gizzard was thumping. It was a Great Horned with a scroll in his talons.
“I would have been here sooner, but this was passed on to me. The falcon was … er, intercepted.” I felt a twinge of anguish.
“Is — is it for me?”
The Great Horned looked at me narrowly. “Not unless you’re Major Ulfa Megascops Trichopsis.”
Oh, great Glaux, I thought, trying to still my gizzard. “No, I’m not,” I said softly. “I’ll get her.”
My mum took the scroll with trembling talons. I didn’t need to hear the news — we both knew what a scroll like this meant.
Her beak quivered as she read the words: “‘Dear Major Ulfa Megascops Trichopsis, it saddens me to inform you that your mate, General Raskin Megascops Trichopsis, supreme commander of the Kielian League, fell in battle in the H’rath Range two nights ago. General Rask died serving his league valiantly. He took an ice sword straight to the gizzard.’”
Death had touched us again. First Edvard, then Lysa, and now my da. Death bears with it a stain that seeps into the hollow and fills the mind. Those first days when dawn came and I tried to sleep while hearing the soft mewling of my mother, my thoughts were streaked with memories of Da and me together and our wonderful flight to the Hock. It was all I could think about. In my dreams, it was my father who flew into the sea smoke and seemed to dissolve before my eyes as the smoke thickened. The dreamscape merged with the suffocating smoke of the fiery pine from the night when Lysa died. The haunting scent of the sweet, boiling sap suffused my dreams, almost like the scroom of the tree.
That smell had clung to my feathers for days after Lysa’s death. I remember being so glad when I molted that season, for at last the cloying odor was gone. But now it came back again to haunt my dreams — my dreams of death.
My mother became deeply morose and, as the nights passed, only seemed to be getting worse. Until this point, my experience with grief had been limited to Lysa’s death. I had known Lysa for just a few scant moons, and I couldn’t imagine how difficult it must be to lose a mate you had known for countless moons, for years. Mum became so quiet and so unresponsive to Ifghar, who was a demanding little owlet, that I asked her if it might not be a good idea to get a new nest-maid snake. Mum seemed obsessed with trailing around the nest and cleaning up vermin.
“No!” she said. “I need something to keep me busy.”
“Don’t I keep you busy?” Ifghar asked plaintively.
“Oh, Ifghar, you have Lyze,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. “He’s teaching you wonderful things. How’s your flying coming along?”
“He says I’ll soon be ready to fly to the Hock.”
I couldn’t wait until he was ready, for I really wanted to try to find Hoke. I had not stopped thinkin
g about my ideas, or how General Andricus Tyto Alba had encouraged me to think about what he called the “newfangled ways of fighting.” One evening, when my mother’s silence lay as thick as brikta schnee in the middle of winter and I felt I couldn’t stand it one more minute, I turned to her.
“Mum,” I said, flipping my head around to where she was distractedly petting some of Ifghar’s new feathers. “When I was at the Academy, I had … had —” I wasn’t sure how to begin.
“Had what?” Ifghar said. “A girlfriend?” he said, smirking. I remember wondering how a little owlet knew how to smirk. It felt unseemly in one so young.
“No, Ifghar,” I snapped. “I had some ideas about warfare.”
My mum blinked. “Really, dear?” It was the first time since the news of Da’s death that I had seen a genuine sparkle in her eye. It illuminated our hollow like a blast of sunlight.
“Yes, Mum, and General Andricus Tyto Alba encouraged me to come up with more over the break.”
“Andricus himself! Well, tell me about it.” She turned to my brother. “Don’t interrupt as you often do. Try to listen, Ifghar.”
I took a deep breath. “Mum, how big is your commando unit, the Ice Daggers?”
“Twenty owls.”
“All Whiskered Screeches?”
“No, a couple of Barn Owls.”
“But generally, what you would call midsized owls.”
“Yes, definitely. Midsized owls are best with Ice Daggers. That’s what a commando unit is, after all: a specialized unit composed of owls who are skillful with certain weapons.” She paused and looked at me. “Why all these questions?”
“What if we redefine specialized to still mean focused, but include a mixture of owls of different sizes that excel with more than just one weapon?”
“You’re losing me here.”
I had blessedly lost Ifghar, too, for he had fallen sound asleep. However, my mother continued to listen attentively as I explained. She occasionally stopped me to ask a question. The notion of the support of Kielian snakes staggered her.
“Snakes? I hope you’re joking! They have no native intelligence. They’re lazy —”
“They’ve never been challenged, Mum. We don’t know what they might be capable of. Please hear me out.” I paused. I knew what I was going to say next was going to be difficult. “Mum, when our pine tree was hit by those hireclaws, you could have lost me, as well. It was Gilda who saved me. She couldn’t save Lysa or Gundesfyrr, but she saved me.”
Mum’s eye teared up. I extended my wing tip and stroked her back feathers. “She found me, Mum, and she dragged me to safety. Kielians are very strong.”
“I know,” she replied in a small voice. “At least, that’s what they say. But what exactly are you getting at, Lyze? Because, although they may have many good attributes, they aren’t owls. They can’t fly.”
“I’m not worried about that now,” I said.
“I’m so relieved,” Mum said, somewhat sarcastically. Her tone didn’t bother me in the least. I was delighted to see that I had genuinely engaged her in this conversation. She seemed to be emerging just a bit from her fog of grief.
I closed my eyes for a moment and drew in my mind a picture of a fleet, a light-armored unit. A striker unit! That’s what it would be. Because we would strike before a conflict could even begin. We would complete daring midair reloads, and Kielian snakes would serve as nimble ground forces. The notion of a few — for a few was all it would take — Kielian snakes smashing a repository of ice weapons to smithereens was riveting. Bylyric might be a tyrant. He was brutal. He fought savagely, but not with his head. We would bring a new kind of war to the Orphan Maker.
“Look, look at them, Mum! It’s almost like they’re flying!” Ifghar hooted as we caught our first glimpse of the Hock.
Indeed it was. The sky seemed to sizzle on this nearly moonless night with iridescent jolts of light as dozens upon dozens of Kielian snakes leaped from the cliff. It would be impossible to pick Hoke out from the hundreds of snakes that shimmered in the night air. But that was not what occupied me at the moment. I was studying their descent as they plunged. Some floated down slowly, others fell at a blistering speed toward the churning waters beneath them. They evidently had ways of controlling their speed. How could this be? They had none of the arsenal of feathers we had to shape the wind beneath our wings. They couldn’t shift spoiler flaps into gear, as we could, to slow for landing. What could they do, for they were just long vertical, wingless, legless, slithering tubes covered in scales? Their shape alone defied such possibilities.
“Slow down and enjoy it, Yentse!” someone hissed. I believe it was a cerulean lazuli but I couldn’t be sure. I watched the snake carefully.
“Didn’t your mum ever tell you not to stare?” she hissed at me as she drifted through the air in a slow dive.
“Oh, sorry. I was just so fascinated at how you can adjust the speed of your descent.”
This seemed to please her.
“Well, glad you appreciate it! My son down there doesn’t get at all the finer points of diving yet. It’s all just a quick plunge for him. Look at the pretty designs we can make!” With that, she curled herself into a tangled triple loop and scrolled the night with shimmering hues of blue against the blackness. For a moment, it was as if she were nearly still, as if she had stopped the world for a long, languorous hover. I noticed a collarlike ruff of scales that had extended from her neck. It wasn’t dissimilar from the secondary set of scales that I noticed on Hoke when he had smashed the rock so long ago.
“You see,” she said as she coiled herself into a double helix. “We can lighten our bodies.”
“How do you do that?”
“Hordo knows!” she said. “It’s connected with breathing and then these.” The scales on her ruff shimmered as she fanned them out, and her speed slowed. Are they like wings? I wondered. This was all enormously fascinating to me.
The snake’s name was Dylan. She invited my mum, Ifghar, and me to her nost.
“Where’s the young’un we saw diving with you?” Mum asked.
“Hordo knows!”
“Who’s Hordo?” Ifghar asked. I was mortified by this question, but Dylan shrugged it off.
“Hordo, dear,” my mother said, “is the Kielian snake spirit. We have Glaux, our spirit. They have Hordo.”
“But ours is better, right?”
Mum and I both gasped. I was horrified. But Mum replied sweetly, “Ifghar, there’s no such thing as a ‘better spirit.’ It’s not a competition.”
A croaking sound issued from Dylan’s throat, the sound of Kielian snake laughter. “Oh, goodness, you owls are so curious. What would you like to know, young’un?” she said to me.
“Lots, ma’am,” I said.
Ifghar cocked his head. Mercifully, he remained silent, but I saw the question in his eyes. She’s a snake — why did you call her “ma’am” like she’s important? The words might as well have been spoken, and I saw a glare rise up in Dylan’s slitted eyes.
“First of all, what species of Kielian are you?” I asked.
“I’m not a nest-maid,” she replied sharply, and then, as if to put a finer point on it, she showed a bit of fang. “There has never been a nest-maid in our family. I am a cerulean lazuli with a touch of cobalt.” As she said the word “cobalt,” a silvery blue seemed to flash through her scales. “The cobalt is mostly visible on bright sunny days or under a full-shine moon.”
A torrent of questions poured from me — how long could a snake hold its breath underwater? What were those scales that flared like a ruff to slow her plunge?
“My extended scale plates, or ESPs,24 as we call them.”
We talked for several minutes before my mum said, “Lyze, don’t you think you’ve asked enough questions? We don’t want to wear our host out.”
“Just one more question!”
“Go ahead, young’un,” Dylan said.
“All right. I know you’ve never served as a
nest-maid, but have you ever thought of another kind of service?”
“For owls?” she asked. Her eyes slitted, revealing only a glowing line of luminous cobalt.
“For the kingdom,” I replied quietly.
On my first day back on Dark Fowl, I found myself in General Andricus Tyto Alba’s hollow with his topmost advisors explaining my ideas for a “newfangled” fighting force.
“The unit would be very small compared to most commando units,” I explained.
“How small is small?” the general asked.
“A dozen, no more.”
“A dozen!” Captain Nillja Micrathene Whitneyi exclaimed. She was an Elf Owl who had distinguished herself in the Frost Beaks’ unit as a superb strategist.
“Yes, Captain.” They were all looking at me very skeptically, except for the general. They would only be more incredulous when I revealed my plans for Kielian snakes. I thought I might as well get that over with quickly.
“Small, but a mix of species,” I added.
The owls in attendance all blinked. There were derisive snorts and hisses.
“Let him finish,” General Andricus shushed them with a wave of his port wing.
“I propose using Kielian snakes, mostly as ground troops.” This wasn’t entirely accurate, but I didn’t want to startle them with the idea of snakes in flight on the backs of owls. There was complete and utter silence, but the air reeked with contempt.
“And I suppose he has a role for, let us guess — white-footed mice?” an ancient Barred Owl muttered under his breath. I knew this was my biggest problem — getting these owls to begin to think of Kielian snakes as actual soldiers and not just mindless rock crunchers or honers. I stole a glance at the general. He seemed lost in deep thought, his white, heart-shaped face as blank as a pale winter sky. When at last he swiveled his head toward me, there was a shimmer in his black eyes that snuffed out the din of scornful whispers.