I had fallen asleep last night without making a fire, and the stone walls now stood with cold permanence in the overcast morning light. The sound of the ocean echoed inside the hollow of my room. Odors of salt and seaweed hung in the air like new ghosts. Damp fog thickened the sky outside my arched window, and waves rolled in the distance, steel-colored swells capped with streaks of white foam that broke relentlessly against the rocky beach.
I cleared my lungs with a deep breath, remembering the chore that awaited me.
My father is dead now.
The ache of loss returned in a rush, filling me physically as if my nighttime dreams had served to keep this reality away. He had been working in our open-air laboratory, concocting another spell that he would someday pass on to me if he found time. Something went wrong. The explosion rattled the whole of Castle Talon, the small stone building my father and I have lived in for as long as I can remember.
He probably never knew what happened.
Fitting. My father had always been a man whose focus was intense, who could set aside distractions in order to concentrate on what he found important. And as one of the distractions he oftentimes placed aside, I knew how firm the walls around those compartments had been.
So today I was alone inside this place he named after the hawks, the place where the two of us have lived for so long, alone to deal with him like I have always been.
And for the last time, deal with him I would.
I tightened the drawstring on my trousers and slipped summer sandals onto my feet. The morning was cool and overcast, but the sun would soon burn through the morning mist. Building Father's pyre would be hot work, and there was no one else here to share the labor.
Kiva chose that moment to land heavily on my stone windowsill. Her golden brown feathers beat against the air as she navigated the tight quarters. Once settled, she stood proudly on the sill and stared at me with her intent black eyes, her gaze unwavering but nervous, the feathers of her chest ruffled and full.
At her feet lay a bone, the small curved rib of perhaps a mouse, bare and smooth, its surface gray in the morning gloam.
Her call pierced the room.
"Fly, Kiva," I said while making a sweep of my flat hand, the motion that meant she should return whence she came.
But she did not. Instead she cocked her head and continued to stare intently at me.
Confused and angry, I strode to the windowsill. The sound of the ocean was stronger here. The wind blew cold against my face, moving my dark hair away from my eyes. The bone lay pitched up at one end. I twisted it around in my fingertips. It was dry and brittle, its surface slightly roughened like the finest of all sandpaper.
But it was just a bone.
I let it drop outside the window, knowing it would be lost amid the shale rock that lined the beach.
Kiva called again, and she leapt off the sill, swooping downward to catch the bone in midair just before it disappeared into the jagged rock. In a moment she had perched back on my windowsill and the bone lay again in its spot.
"Damnation," I said to myself, wondering if she had lost the common sense that the gods gave all creatures. "All right, Kiva. I'll keep it." I slipped the bone into a small pouch that was clipped to my belt, then turned and walked out the door.
I had more things to worry about than a deranged hawk.
)
A young man learns to live on his own and finds that things are not always as they seem.
