Before they left the lower valley, Orion had finished the thing he had been building for Zara in the evenings: a second hand crossbow, small and mean and balanced to match the first. Zara turned the new weapon over in her hands, found it exactly as she would have made it herself, and said nothing, which from Zara was the same as a speech.
Then there was the matter of the Clear Light itself, and what it was for. Two Shards and an Ember sat in Gilli’s keeping, dark and weightless and useless until a Clearing came to wake them. The notes from Ysolde’s cottage said one thing, the Prior’s study said another, and somebody wondered aloud whether a stone like that might take a charge in the dark. Nobody thought so. The Prior, who had by now spent a whole day with five strangers and had begun to enjoy it, was sure of the rest: within a day or two, on the rocky shelf above Farthingholt, the sky would open.
They were on that shelf now, at dusk, with the cave they had climbed out of at their backs.
The outcrop gave them most of the valley. Farthingholt was a smudge of low roofs in the distance and the Priory was somewhere on the far side, buried in trees. Up here the vegetation gave out: stunted trees, lichen on every rock, and underfoot a dark slate that shed the drizzle in sheets and was slick wherever the lichen grew. Far off, across the valley, the bells began to ring for night.
“Bells are ringing,” said Zara. “Night’s coming.”
She salted the cave mouth, as she salted everything. Somebody asked whether she had an endless supply, and she said she made a point of having it when they left a place. Makani and Marcus dragged stones across the opening to make a half-wall of it. Orion, who did not trust a hole in the ground he had not looked down himself, went to the lip and looked down it for a long minute: the same stair they had climbed, and nothing coming up it. He said so. The Prior, looking over his shoulder, said that in his experience nothing at all was the thing to be wary of, and went to find his blanket.
A fire was agreed on, and then everybody was a good deal less eager about doing it. Zara had a tinderbox. Orion offered a Firebolt, and Marcus told him a man of his talents should certainly use it. Makani and Orion went off to find wood and came back with some. Marcus announced that he would take the first watch, very nobly. When the others lay down, he lay down too, and was asleep before the fire had settled. He told no one.
The watch, as it turned out, was kept by Bruin. The steel bear sat at the edge of the firelight with his head up, and he did not sleep, because he did not need to. Some time in the small hours he got to his feet and made a low, grinding noise in his chest and pulled at Orion’s boot until everybody was awake.
Zara was on her feet with a crossbow in each hand. Makani woke already angry. Marcus, who had been asleep and had told no one, rolled to the edge of the rock and became very interested in the view, as though he had been awake the entire time. None of them could see anything. The dark on the shelf was complete and wet, and Gilli, who alone could see by it, made out only a shape: a bulk with wings and paws, high up and moving away from the camp, not toward it.
It was Marcus who heard it plainly, even if he could not see it. The flutter of large wings, beating slowly and not from anywhere in particular, somewhere above them in the rain.
“How big?” he asked.
It was not a bird, he was told, and it was not a dragon, and they would have to find out what the wings were attached to if they wanted to know more. Marcus, who had taken it upon himself to disapprove of the whole mountain, said he would not be sleeping, and that he had two more birds in his journal and then he would have a full set. Zara, who had noticed how sleepy Marcus seemed and was beginning to wonder what his watch had consisted of, took the next one herself, sat beside Bruin, and leaned against him.
Some time after that, the light came.
Zara woke the rest. It was off along the path above the cave, and for a long while it was the only thing in all that dark: an orb of light hanging in the air with nothing under it, not in the cave, not in anyone’s hand, doing nothing whatever except, very slightly, to swell and shrink. It had the look of a lamp whose size you could not tell, in a country where there was no horizon to measure it by.
Marcus put it to the camp that this was the Clearing. It was pointed out to him that Clearings did not come in orbs and did not come at night. Zara called out, “Who goes there?” and was told, by Marcus, that she was giving away their position, and by Zara, that they had a fire going and everybody knew. Marcus backed away to a place closer to Makani and the wall.
They woke the Prior, because he was from here.
He came to the edge of the firelight in his blanket and looked out for a long moment and said, “Oh, my.” Then he said it again, and then he said that he had lived long enough to know not to meddle with such things, and that he did not know what it was. But there were five of them and they seemed well armed, and if it came closer, perhaps the lady with the crossbows could frighten it off. He advised them, very much, not to approach it.
Makani wanted them to form a circle round the old man and see what the light did. Marcus said that perhaps it was the old man it wanted, and the camp had better think hard before they protected him. Then the light began to flicker, and from it came a sound too faint to be words: a whisper, a hiss of something near speech, with no word in it that anyone could pick out. It flickered once more, and there were two lights. They rose along the crag over the cave mouth and began to drift, very slowly and with a little shudder to their going, down the line of the ridge, north, toward Thornhollow.
“Shoot them,” said Marcus.
“They’re just lights,” said Zara, who was not going to waste a bolt.
“Lights that flicker and move on their own are not lights,” said Marcus. “That is an angler fish. It is mapping the valley.”
They watched until the two lights went dim and then out. Makani took the rest of the watch and told the others to get some rest. Marcus did not. He said, to anyone, that he had not slept since the lights, and went on not sleeping.
The dark thinned to the grey of old slate.
Within the hour the rain came on harder and the wind with it. At this height the wind did not carry the rain so much as throw it, and nobody could have called what they were doing sleep. Then Bruin was up and growling again, and the whole camp with him, and there in the grey, in the direction the lights had gone the night before, was a patch of sky less dark than the rest.
The Prior was already at the edge of the rock, bent at the waist and shaking. “There,” he said. “There. It’s there. We have to get there before it goes. It could open at any moment, and we need the crystal ready and the stones prepared.” He turned and called after them. “Please. Please, let’s make haste.”
Marcus said that he still did not trust the old man, but he went.
The ground rose, and the rock turned to scramble: stone to stone, hand to hand, the Prior hauled up by an arm or a belt at two places where he could not have managed alone. The slate ran with water. The patch of brightness grew until they could see it had edges, and then they climbed onto a ledge, and the path ended.
Before them was a raised shelf of rock, a hundred feet off or fifty, about as high as the ledge they stood on. Over it a few thin rays of light came through, not a Clearing yet but where one would be. Between the shelf and the ledge was a ravine. Where they stood, a narrow lip of rock ran off to the right and then fell away into nothing; in front, a broken field of boulders, with two pits among them so deep that nobody wanted to look into them twice; and to the left, lower down, the ground of the ravine itself. It was not a place for a quick or quiet crossing. It was a place for three-point contact and prayer.
Then they saw the nest.
It sat on the near side of the shelf, close to the path they would have to take, a wide tangle of branch and bone and feather. Round it, on the rock, lay a great many sleeping animals. They were larger than horses and built wrong for it: bird’s heads, bird’s wings, the haunches and paws of cats, with a long thin tail. A few lifted their heads and settled them down again. Not one of them seemed to care.
“Hippogriffs,” said Gilli, who had seen their shapes in the dark.
“Hippogriff eggs,” said Marcus, “are very sought after.”
The Prior, whose eyes were on the brightening sky and nowhere near the ground, said he did not mind whether they went by the quiet way or the fast one, if only they went.
Gilli had an answer that stood above all of this. She could fly. She could carry the Prior, and the Clear Light with him, and set them down on the far side, and keep the old man out of the fighting before it started. It would be slow, with a passenger, and she would have to leave the others to the stones. It was agreed on in principle. Nobody had settled the details when Marcus went first.
He had to cross the stones in plate, in the rain, with the Prior’s cheerful remark that “quiet would be best” still in his ears. The plan was to be silent and to get to the far lip in one clean leap, and what he actually did was to run up to the edge, bound clear across, and land on a slick stone beside the nest with a clang that rang all the way down the ravine.
The nearest hippogriff opened one eye.
Zara had said before he jumped that she strongly advised against it. She said it again, more quietly, and Marcus said he was doing it. He had seen the egg. Everyone else had seen what he was doing, and the nest woke around him one animal at a time, with a rising sound that was not quite a cry and not quite a cough.
The Prior, who had not waited for the plan to be finished, chose that moment to cross. He had not looked like a man who could jump, and in the dawn light over a drop that would kill him he jumped six feet across a gap and landed on the other side, to a general murmur of admiration. “This old man,” Marcus said, “is more spry than we gave him credit for.” He took one more step and a wet stone slid out from under him and he sat down hard. Zara, who had been about to go herself, went to help him instead, and got him steady on his feet. Then she went to jump her own gap, and her foot found the slick of the stone, and she went off the rock and down the face of the ravine.
Thirty feet is a long way. She hit the lower ledge on her back and lay there with the air out of her.
The nest was up now, and loud. Those that could fly rose and wheeled over the ravine and called to each other. One of them stooped on Marcus and struck him a blow that knocked him sideways, and then shoved him with a shoulder like a barn door, and he went over the edge and down thirty feet to the same ledge Zara lay on, landing hard enough to turn an ankle. From down there, for a moment, there was no sign of him at all.
He climbed. It took his whole strength, and when he came up over the lip he was still hurt, wet, and had somehow come to a plan. He stood in front of the hippogriff that had pushed him, in full view of the entire nest, and began to dance.
He did not do it quietly. He flapped his arms. He bowed his head. He kicked one leg out behind him and did something with his shoulders that he insisted was the hippogriff shuffle. The hippogriff watched him with its head tilted. It took a step. It spread a wing and folded it round him and began, with great tenderness, to nuzzle his helmet.
“Who needs an egg?” said Marcus, from inside the wing. “I’ve got myself a mate.”
The rest of the nest was not charmed. One went for Makani and found him, to its surprise, already raging. He struck it with Old Smitty’s club hard enough to turn it in the air and sent it spinning out over the gulf with a wounded shriek, and swung again and sent another after it. Orion, who had been standing next to a hippogriff he’d had no particular wish to meet, set Bruin on it. Bruin was not built for wet slate and went in anyway, sliding across the rock to swing a steel paw at the thing, and it reeled back.
Gilli had taken the Prior, and a good share of the party’s hopes, up into the grey on her wings. One of the hippogriffs followed her and clipped her flank on the way past.
Makani, meanwhile, had seen something no one else had. The nest was open. Whatever else might happen on the ledge, the nest was open and nobody stood in front of it. He picked his moment, strode forward, and took the egg out of the middle of the tangle as casually as taking a loaf from a shelf. A hippogriff rose to stop him; he hit it. Another; he hit that too. Then, with the egg stowed and the rain in his face, he dropped his weight into his boots, and the boots did what they were enchanted to do. He went up and out over the ravine in one long flat leap, and came down in the light.
It was the first thing about the morning that went entirely to plan.
“You just smacked two hippogriffs out of the way,” said Marcus, from under a wing, “stole the egg, and bailed out?”
“And I’m gone,” said Makani.
“You could have done that the whole time. I didn’t have to seduce a bird.”
On the shelf the Prior’s rucksack lay where he had dropped it, and Makani, with an egg in one hand, began going through the other, to see what the old man had packed. The first thing he felt was warmth on the back of his neck. The cloud above the shelf had opened, as if a lid had been lifted.
By then the morning belonged to the birds.
Zara got to her feet on the lower ledge, put her back to the rock, and began to shoot. She had two crossbows now, and she used both of them. One bolt went in as a plain hit and the next went in beside it, and the bird she aimed at fell out of the sky into the gulf and did not come back.
Then the light came down.
It did not break so much as arrive. One moment the shelf was grey and the rain was in everybody’s face, and the next there was a column of sun standing on the rock, as solid as a pillar, with the rain stopped on either side of it. Gilli came down into the gold with the Prior in her arms and set him on the warm stone. She turned, and the air behind her filled with something bright and angry, a crowd of small shining guardians that fought on her side and not on theirs. The first hippogriff to follow her across flew straight into the light of them and came out of it smoking.
“There it is,” the Prior said, to himself. “There it is. I knew it.”
More birds were coming. From down the cliff to the south they rose in the light, three and four at a time, and the nest, which had been a loud and vicious place, began to be a battlefield. Makani went back into it. Zara fired from the ledge. The Prior, kneeling in the sun, asked quietly for the crystal.
They did not learn. The birds were not clever, and Gilli, standing in the gold with her guardians turning round her, was the brightest thing on the mountain. Hippogriff after hippogriff dove at her through the rain and flew straight into the light of them, and came out burning, and wheeled, and came back for more, like moths to a lantern. By the time the sun was fully up, the shelf round her was strewn with the ones that had tried.
Marcus, meanwhile, had made up his mind.
He had spent the morning being struck, shoved, bruised, and moved to tenderness, and he had come to the conclusion that there was a bird in all this for him. It was the one that had nuzzled his helm. It stood in front of him, entirely unarmed, with its beak open and an expression he took to be affection. He took the blanket from his pack and twisted it into a rope as long as his arm, and said, aloud and to everybody, that he intended to jump onto its back and put the rope in its beak like a rein and break its spirit and make it his own.
“If I can’t have the egg Makani stole,” he said, “I will get the bird.”
Marcus went up the animal’s flank in a single scramble and landed on its back with both knees dug in. It turned its head and looked at him, and he leaned forward and said something into its ear that no one else heard. For a long moment the bird did nothing at all.
Then it lifted into the air, gently, with a rider on its back.
“It loves him,” said Makani, in a voice of horror.
“You are the wind beneath my wings,” Marcus told it. “Take me to the sunlight. We are as one.”
For the length of a hard breath, they were. The hippogriff carried him out over the ravine and back, bucking a little, not meaning it, while Marcus clung to its neck with his good hand and murmured things.
Below them the fight went on in pieces. One bird had gone for Orion and stayed on him, striking and shoving, until a blow put him off the ledge and down into the pits on the lower level. Zara shot it out of the sky. It took Orion a whole breath of the morning to climb the thirty feet back. When he reached the top he used what he had to hand, a whip of thorns thrown at a bird that was out of reach. It missed, and he said so. Bruin, wounded, kept his feet on the slate and kept on. The sun made a bright shape on the rock where Makani and the Prior stood, and the rest of the gulf was the colour of tin.
Gilli had set the crystal on the ground. The old man’s hands shook as he pulled the cloth away, and they began. The light came in through the focusing lens in a single hard beam. She put the Ember under it, then the Shards, slowly, in the order he had shown her, and the stones drank the light and began to glow.
Marcus’s bird, meanwhile, carried him back across the shelf with the whole fight round them, and every time it turned it flew straight into Gilli’s guardians. They did not let go of it. It burned, and wheeled, and flew back into them, and burned again, and Marcus clung to its neck through all of it and said nothing that anyone could hear. He threw himself off at the edge of the sun. He had been up there thirty seconds, Makani would say afterward, and he came down on the rock like a dropped sack and lay for a moment on his back. Nobody had tried to keep the bird alive. Zara put a bolt into it as it went past, and it did not come out of the air again. When Marcus could stand, he went to where it lay and took one feather from its wing, and held it.
“I loved you,” he said, to no one else.
Another hippogriff had lifted off after Gilli and the rest of the party on the shelf. It was a big one, and it did not care at all about Clearings. It came in low across the shelf, straight for the crystal, and it was plain from the way it turned that it meant to knock the whole apparatus into the gulf.
Orion saw it first. He put out a hand, said a word, and a lance of fire went across the shelf and took the bird in the breast. Bruin was meant to follow it up and instead stood on a slick stone, having trouble; Marcus said he must have recognised another beast. The bird came on, burning, and struck Marcus on its way past, a glancing blow, and shoved him two places back across the stone. It hung in the beam of the Clearing, beating its wings in the full light of the sun, and Gilli’s guardians closed on it. It did not last. It went up in the beam like paper in a stove, and what came down on the shelf was cinders, a few feathers, and a smell that Marcus was not going to forget.
“You are all monsters,” said Marcus, getting up. “Especially you, Priestess. They didn’t have to die. I was trying to tame one. I was trying to live alongside them. You could have turned your hellfire off at any time.”
“And whose fault is that?” said somebody.
He looked at the cinders for a moment, and at the feather in his hand, and put it in his belt.
The light drew back.
It went the way it had come: out of the corners first, and then in from the edges, until the beam on the crystal was a thread and then nothing, and the rain began again, soft and cold, and the Shroud closed up overhead like water over a stone. The wind came back. The bells in the valley, very far down, began to ring for morning.
What was left was a shelf of rock strewn with dead birds, most of them cooked to a crisp; a smoking nest; and five people, none of whom looked as though they had slept, standing in a patch of weather they knew all too well. Gilli had a very tired Prior, who was sitting on a stone with his hands in his lap and his lips moving, saying a prayer that the others tactfully did not listen to.
On the ground at his feet, in the grey light, the stones the Clearing had touched still glowed with a small steady gold. They had charged. At least some of them had. The Prior reached out to touch them, and stopped, and put his hand back in his lap.
Makani had an egg. Marcus had a feather. Gilli had a Prior. Between them, they had the beginning of a way to fix a sky.
“This,” Marcus said, “was a truly traumatic session for me.”
Open Threads
- The charged Clear Light — the Prior’s focusing crystal took a real Clearing on the shelf above Farthingholt, and “at least some” of what Gilli carried is now charged. How much, and which grades, is not yet counted.
- The hippogriff egg — Makani took it from the nest and carries it. Marcus wants it.
- Marcus’s feather — plucked from the bird he tamed, before it died. He means to keep it.
- The lights — one orb, hanging motionless near the cave, which split in two, whispered, and drifted north along the ridge toward Thornhollow before going out. The Prior would not go near it and would not say what it was. Marcus has not slept since.
- The Prior’s second site — Old Ash, three valleys over, where he lost a brother and a sister, now that the first has come true.
- Still waiting from Chronicle 9 — the invitation to Vaunt, Hilda’s town-hall records at Farthingholt, Ferrell at the gate, the song, the goliath rider.
Dramatis Personae
Also met: the hippogriffs of the shelf above Farthingholt — a great many, most of them dead by sunrise — and the one Marcus danced for and called his mate.