In the seventh year of the reign of An, four thousand spearmen marched on the Okland edgetowns in the south. None stood against the bristling march of death. The small folk fled before the death and destruction with tales of woe and slaughter; words passed on to the Great An by fast-flying scouts from the Kairin mountain pass.
Great An, my childhood friend, the one who’d held my hand as we waited for my father’s heavy breathing to finally finish in a fading gasp, called for me. I ran through the oak doors carved to look like wings to the common room where he waited with his electors.
“Take three of our fastest skyknights,” An said. “Go east until you see the Heron tribes. I’ve sent messages ahead; they will let you pass. Once fed and rested, make for the coast and petition for a meeting with Ibbisal.”
“Ibbisal?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Their slow, silk skyhawk ships had clashed with the Heron tribes so often. “The Heron hate him. He’s a rising threat to all we built in the east. Some think the spearmen are his.”
“If that’s the case, and they are, find out what Ibbisal wants, then see what you can do to stall him. But the scouts say the spearmen are wearing Condor colors.”
Okland fought them in a great war three years ago, and we’d burned their rookeries, smashed their eggs, and hunted their skyknights down. We’d ignored them since. They couldn’t fly, so what threat were they to us?
Our pride had left us vulnerable.
The electors had a plan. Two hundred of our archers assembled outside, and An would lead them to the river island Riket. It would serve as a fortress.
“We spent so much time building our defenses against the air, we neglected our ground troops,” one of the electors said bitterly. “We need time to fix the mistake. We can harrass them by air with our fifty rocs and with our archers until we have the numbers needed to push them out.”
An gave me four papyrus rolls, each with his seal on them. “Here’s an offer to Ibbisal to help us. We leave for Riket as soon as you fly east. Will you do this?”
Every assignment was voluntary. I could refuse.
A whole full moon ago I’d told An I wouldn’t fly again. I’d been training skyknights for three years now. It hurt to climb up onto the back of a flying creature, and I could barely pull a bowstring anymore.
I would give lectures, and teach theory, and live in one of the turrets. I’d see the young nights off and wish them luck.
That had been the plan.
“Of course I’ll fly for Okland,” I said.
We hugged. An kissed me on the cheek. The electors wished me luck.
***
I took Gar, Lain, and Silv with me. They met me at the rookery, all of us in our fur-trimmed flying leathers and smoked glasses.
“Again into the air?” Gar asked.
“For the Heron lands.”
Lain pulled the skydoors open on the balanced weights. The vets had already left to fly the other rocs off to Riket, so that left only the four meanest, strongest birds for us.
“Skyknights,” I said, “every league counts, every minute matters. Okland lives or dies by our wings in the days ahead.”
“It’s five days around the Spine to get to Heron,” Silv said as she snapped on her gloves. Rumor said she lost her three fingers to the ice in the clouds. It wasn’t true. That only happened to balloonists or crew on a skyhawk. A roc would die, or freeze, just like a human.
I knew Silv lost her fingers to knife fights. One reason I’d chosen her for this. Silv had ridden tailfeather with me in a battle against a pirate over Fallen Gorge. I’d dropped her onto the ship’s balloon, and she’d cut it from stem to stern, and when she slid off the side, I’d flung my roc into a dive to catch her.
We’d thrown each other into our beds for nights after that, young and invincible, lords of the sky. Now she’d married an elector, wore an emerald rank necklace, and slept in an eerie with running water supplied by a spring.
I’d never go on a mission without her.
We slapped our forearms together. Looked at each other with a warrior’s grin. Okland called for us, and we would answer that call again.
What retirement? We would save our country yet again.
“We go over the Spine,” I said. “I’ll find the Widow’s Cut. I won’t say you must do it with me. You can fly around.”
Silv nodded. “I’ll fly it.”
Gar and Lain nodded as well. My youngest instructors, they’d flown with me through the trickiest rising winds. Steady men, with the slight build needed to be a skyknight. Gar, in particular, an almost child-like sized man with a vicious mind for flying. And Lain could hit a target with a bow and arrow while in a swooping dive, leading a roc with just nudges from his knees.
The other reason I liked Gar was that he didn’t speak much, but he was a calm flyer.
The massive rocs snarled and shrieked at us as we crawled up into our wicker saddles. We waddled them over to the balcony and they leapt off into the air. My stomach plunged, as it always did, from that inevitable moment of weightlessness.
Then came the steady beat of the vast, feathered wings.
The spires of the Elector’s Castle hung off to my right as the roc found rising air, then spiraled up. I adjusted the reins until the compass on my pommel showed due east.
I glanced once more behind me, right before it all disappeared behind the clouds that always fetched up against the mountains the castle nestled up to.
We called them the Spine because they ran down the center of Okland. From here Okland had risen on the wind the mountains flung into the air, to rule the lands for four days flight in any direction.
I’d trained hard to become a skyknight, sworn to the electors to protect our way of life.
Now it was in my hands, and I couldn’t be more terrified.
The Spine’s peaks hid inside of the clouds ahead of us. The Widow’s Cut lay ahead, unseen.
***
Five sightings I had. Land beneath me in gaps that showed me the land below us as clouds parted for a brief moment. Then there was the count.
The moment we’d turned and crossed the eastern flight marker, I’d started counting. My old music teacher drilled rhythm into me, and now I kept a second-by-second count in my head like a human metronome.
But I also knew I was no machine, and every second, I introduced a slight mistake in the count.
At the ten-minute mark, I shouted and pointed. Close.
My roc had beaten for as much height as it could, and I could see Gar hung just below me when I looked back.
The mountain loomed ahead, but we couldn’t tell, unless you paid close attention to the wind.
Buffeting, whipping winds and my roc’s reluctance to keep an easterly course all told me the wall of rock sat right in front of us.
“Higher, Gar, higher!” Lain shouted. I couldn’t see Silv anywhere.
Then the clouds broke, and we flew right at jagged stone shards that wanted to rip us apart.
I had no time to look around me, only to yank on my reins and fly. I banked and spun, fluttered, and rock passed just winglengths away from me.
A scream. Feathers exploded into the air. Silv had dived ahead of me and struck a peak. Her roc tumbled across our flightpath, shrieking as it tumbled in a mess of broken wings, and then Silv pitched free of her saddle.
Her body pinwheeled off rock, then hit a crevice with a splatter of blood.
My roc and I rose on the wind and skimmed the Widow’s Cut. As the roc banked, using the violent rising winds, we made the turn before striking another pillar of rock. And then we did it again, this time well high of them.
There was more mountain nearby, but in this tight plateau, surrounded by crag, we gained height.
The air grew bitter. So cold I couldn’t think. My skin cracked and tears froze to my face.
And then we burst into sunshine, far over the Spine.
The roc tried to dip out of the rising winds, but I pulled it back in to keep circling.
“Not yet,” I whispered. “Trust me.”
I looked back and saw Gar and Lain break out of the Widow’s Cut behind me. We all kept circling higher and higher.
Now I could barely breathe.
“Higher,” I said.
The higher we rose, the farther we could glide before coming back to land. The closer to Heron territory we could get on the first day’s ride. Only Gar kept up with me. I saw Lain’s roc twist and break off as Gar and I kept rising.
My roc bucked and threw itself out of the rising wind, refusing to rise any further. Wings spread clear out, we began the glide.
I couldn’t argue, my vision had spots. My fingers barely held the leather straps of the reins. I slumped forward, only correcting the roc when I noticed the compass twitching away from east.
Below me, so far below me, were the clouds.
Had any skyknight risen so far?
Maybe in stories, drunkenly told around fires. I knew of none who rose this far above the Widow’s Cut.
***
We found a stablery as the sun dipped over the flat land and forests of the east.
“The featherhand says it’s a half-day to the Heron territories,” Gar said. “He has a flightmark map he can copy for us while we sleep.”
The rocs tore at the carcass of a cow while the hands watched on, excited to see the massive rocs and the skyknights who rode them. The invasion was a distant threat to them, something happening on the other side of the Spine.
I led Gar to the small pond out back. I stood and looked at the fields of barley and tried to get my shaking hands to hold the roughly hewn wooden railing.
“Can you continue?” I asked him.
Gar nodded. “My roc is well. My lungs burn, but the rest of the journey is just hops over the trees. There are few rising winds out here, and the roc will tire quickly from flapping with a person riding it.”
“But you should be close to the Heron, and then the rest of our mission.”
“Thanks to you,” Gar muttered.
He flexed his fingers. One of them didn’t move quite right.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Maybe I shouldn’t—“
“No,” Gar said earnestly. “The price was high. But you cut three days off the trip. Days that will matter when we seek Ibbisal’s help. If we hadn’t taken the risk, Okland falls.”
Silv.
“You’re young, Gar. I remember thinking, every battle, every action I did, it was the fulcrum on which everything pivoted on. But the truth is, everyone else thinks the same. You, Lain, Silv. Right now, each elector is trying to save us. Each bowman who will put their life on the line, every skyknight who dives on the spearmen at Riket, they all think that.”
“But three days,” Gar said. “It speaks for itself. And I never would have dared to fly that high if you hadn’t been up there ahead of me. I was terrified the sun would sear me, but instead, I froze!”
I made a fist and lightly tapped his back. “I have images of flying back to Riket at the head of relief force of Ibbisal’s skyhawks and rocs, and maybe some Heron? Maybe An will look at me and think, there is a great man, I should make him my prince!”
Silv’s body would hit that rock in my mind forever. Her blood had erased that noble image I’d started with.
All the people I’d lost, fallen from the sky, hit by arrows, and Silv had been the final feather lost that dropped me from the sky.
“I don’t regret the choice to make for the Widow’s Cut,” I said to Gar. “But to bring you all with me. It was careless.”
“Let history and Okland judge. But tomorrow we fly.”
“You will fly. I’m staying here.
Gar raised an eyebrow. “I—“
“I taught you to fly, Gar. I know your skill, and more importantly, I know a roc will go further for a man of your build than mine. Particularly once I give you my roc. It will follow you on a lead. You will swap them out when it tires. Do this, and you will reach Ibbisal on your own far faster than if we both fly.”
Gar looked stunned.
“Go rest, Gar. You will hold Okland’s fate on your shoulders tomorrow.”
I had to let my pride die.
For Silv.
For my country.
I would not be leading a flying army back to save An. Gar would.
Getting us over the cut, that was my contribution. From here on, Gar would be Okland’s hero.
I spent the night watching the rocs sleep, then watched Gar rise up into the sky, the heavy roc wings blowing straw and dirt into my face.
And then my own bird rose to follow him, hundreds of feet of tight silk rope between them.
Many days later, when the flocks of Ibbisal’s fleet pulled his great warships over the stable, I shielded my eyes and looked up. The fleet of airships and birds turned south, making their way around the whole length of the Spine. I hoped they made it.
Lain had offered to fly me up to one of the skyhawks, so I could join the battle.
Instead, I’d taken the supplies I’d purchased and made her drop me off in the foothills.
It would take me many days to climb the Spine without a roc, but I had the papyrus maps strapped to my forearm to guide me, and a travel bag full of food.
Walking the foothills, it was strange. Everything took so much longer than the quick jump between marks I was used to.
But I would make it back up into the Widow’s Cut, on foot.
I would find Silv and bring her body back off the mountain while the war raged on without me.