Gold Wings Rising by Alex London

Author:Alex London
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

21

“Try to scream and you’ll lose the other eye,” the Owl Mother whispered in his ear. “We’re not here to hurt you, but we’re not opposed to hurting you, either, got it?”

Her hand smelled like oiled climbing rope. They were days from the Owl Mothers’ territory and headed in the opposite direction. Brysen hadn’t known them to come so far down the mountain. This wasn’t right. But most things hadn’t been right since he first found that egg. He wanted to wriggle free of their grip and call for help, but he asked himself, What would Kylee do? He figured his sister would play it slow, hear them out, and not take any reckless action before she understood the situation.

Be like Kylee, he thought. Just be more like Kylee.

He nodded in the woman’s grip as best he could. He wished his sister had been there to see him being reasonable.

The Owl Mother released her grip on him, but the great gray still had its eyes locked with his. He’d never move fast enough to escape an attack if the conversation took a bad turn. Brysen hoped, were he gone long enough, that Jowyn would come looking, but he’d made it pretty clear that in the shared heights and plummeting crags of their relationship’s landscape, he’d prefer to leave some parts of the map unexplored.

To put it another way, Jowyn wouldn’t interrupt him pooping.

“So,” he asked, pulling his belt straight and doing what he could to regain his composure, if not his dignity. He tucked a stray hair behind his ear, then remembered he hadn’t had time to wash his hands or anything. He decided not to think about it. “What brings you down the mountain in daylight with your nocturnal friend?”

He nodded at the owl. The owl panted, blinking one eye, then the other.

Stupid creatures, owls were. You had to have some sense to let yourself be tamed, and owls didn’t have much. They were beautiful, of course, with astonishing hearing and eyesight, along with powerful talons. They had serrated feathers on the fronts of their wings that let even large owls like the great gray fly silently, but no bird of prey was perfect. Most of an owl’s skull was taken up by its impressive eyes, leaving little room for brains. They were quite easily confused, and it was no wonder the Owl Mothers relied on the Hollow Tongue to train them. The mundane training methods of regular falconers rarely worked well on owls. The Owl Mothers were the only ones who could reliably deploy them.

“You have to come with us,” the first Owl Mother said.

She was young, probably not much older than him, but her face was already creased with lines from a hard life at high altitude. While Owl Mothers had access to the sap of the blood birches, which could heal them and toughen their skin, they never used it on themselves. They claimed it was because their scars, scabs, and wrinkles were sacred signs of full lives.

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