Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Fikani Shang is posted to the Bloodborder, they warn her that she will be tested. She is young, and she knows nothing; and they say she will be a danger to herself if she is not careful. Her captain curls her lip when she first sees her, this fresh young recruit with bright blue feathers, but she does not turn her away.

The war is not going well. It has not been going well for a long time, but the tenuous balance between the Highwing Remnants and the Commonwealth has been slipping badly of late, and not in their favor. If they slide too far down the slope of defeat, they might never claw their way back up again.

Fikani is swift, and eager to fly. Her instructors called her the fastest little bluebird in the sky. Nimble. Startlingly strong. So they sent her to the Bloodborder, where she might make her mark.

Her specialty is reconnaissance, soaring high to spy out the lay of the land, the movement of troops and supplies. Still, she sees her share of skirmishes, here and there, and shows her mettle well enough. She may not be as disciplined or as dedicated to the cause as she could be, but she is sharp, daring, promising, with a quick inquisitive mind. A valuable asset, in the midst of a war that has spanned generations.

She is young, and she knows nothing; and they do not know how right they are.

---

Where the mountains begin to spread their skirts into the flat expanse of the Bloodborder, there is a stretch of rugged foothills covered in old-growth forest, rearing their jagged backs to the sky. The terrain there is a nightmare for the Commonwealth, whose soldiers struggle to cross it, but it serves as mile after mile of precious eyrie for Harps about to make the long crossing from one side of the plains to the other.

Fikani’s unit is exhausted by the time they reach their assigned roosting-place, but the young harriers are still abuzz with weary excitement and anticipation. They perch for the night in ancient oaks crusted with lichen, whispering and laughing among themselves, covering their voices with the rustle of feathers. Some of them have hardly seen combat; some of them are far more experienced. They trade secondhand stories of battles survived and enemies fought, gasping at past exploits and dreaming of glorious deeds of their own.

Did you hear? Was it true?

A nomad wielding twin blades who fought like a demon and cut down three harps before a lucky strike cut her down.

A stinking bog crone lurking at the edge of a melee, flinging jars of something that scorched and melted feathers wherever they burst.

A cur snatched wriggling from the ground in a single swoop, carried aloft and released, to tumble helplessly down onto the hard rocks below.

Huddled down against the cold, Fikani shifts uneasily on her branch and wonders what it’s like, to fall without wings, without the knowledge that the air itself waits to catch you. The thought sobers her anticipation for the mission ahead. She’s capable enough in battle, but to her it’s the grim price of flying, not the purpose.

Their captain clears her throat, pointedly, without lifting her head from her wing; and the young Harps twitter and settle at last. Sleep must be seized while the chance remains. Something is brewing in the damned Commonwealth. There are scattered parties of soldiers everywhere, swarming the wasteland in obvious preparation for some new maneuver, with outriders galloping back and forth between them.

At the crack of dawn, they’ll have their orders. For now, Fikani fluffs her feathers for warmth, and does her best to sleep.

---

Their mission, as it turns out, is simple. They will be splitting up and fanning out to fly reconnaissance over wide stretches of the Bloodborder. No-one is sure what the Commonwealth is planning, but they don’t want to be caught unawares.

Gather whatever intelligence you can. If you encounter a rider, disrupt them in whatever way you can. Report back in one week.

Fikani’s heart soars to hear it, even as she perches at strict attention among her fellow harriers, keeping her face as impassive as she can. This order is as good as a written pass to explore new territory.

Her captain pauses mid-sentence, and gives her a sharp look. Fikani quickly schools her face back into a solemn frown. She’s never broken the habit of smiling too easily; her mouth betrays her when she forgets to mind it, quirking a dimple into one cheek.

Next to her, her wingmate smothers a chuckle behind her wing. Their whole unit knows Fikani’s vices. Slow to rise in the morning, but far too quick to seize on any chance to fly where she shouldn’t.

This is why she requested a reconnaissance post; they all guess it, though she can’t admit it openly. The mountains of her home are harsh and lovely, the only safe haven left to the Harps, but compared to the whole wide world they seem so small. Her thoughts are forever drifting out over the horizon, borne by the longing to feel unfamiliar updrafts under her wings.

The command to move out can’t come soon enough. Fikani launches herself from the tree the moment their briefing ends, and maneuvers her way deftly through the general flurry of flapping wings and shrieking war-cries.

Before she knows it, her fellow Harps have scattered like bright scraps of paper, and she is alone again. Just her and the wide blue sky.

The wind lifts her and bears her onward, and her soul feels as light as a bubble. Fikani sighs contentedly. For the moment, she can almost dream that there is no war, and that she could fly as far as she liked and never encounter an unfriendly arrow.

Southeast. She’ll fly southeast, to start with. She’s never been past that ridge before.

---

The clouds to the west are aglow with the first crimson of sunset when she hears hoofbeats. Fikani makes a face, then lets the flicker of regret pass and tilts her wings into a descending spiral. She has a duty to do.

It takes more looking than she expected, straining her eyes in the dimming light, but she finally picks out a small moving shape on the plain below, and frowns.

It’s a lone outrider, leaning low over their horse’s neck as the beast gallops along at a frightful pace. Foolish, or hopelessly daring, to be out in the open like this, just before dusk. Unless...

Fikani scans the middle distance, then the horizon, and finally spots exactly what she expected. A plume of dust, rising over a slight heave in the earth. There are more riders on their way. This one must be an advance messenger, sent ahead in a gamble; a few extra minutes of warning for whatever the Commonwealth is plotting.

It’s very daring. But still foolish, to risk a swift horse that way. They haven’t seen her yet, too focused on their mad race across the plains; and with luck, they never will. Fikani closes her steel talon sheaths, braces herself, and wheels over into a sharp dive.

The wind batters at her face, forcing tears from her eyes as she falls like a lightning bolt. She matches her trajectory to the speed of the horse, folded wings tensed and ready. One silent powerful strike with her talons, to the back of the head. She’s killed that way, before. It’s clean and quick. Nearly painless.

She holds her breath, stretches out her steel claws...

And then, in the last moment, the rider lifts his head, and looks up over his shoulder. His eyes widen in sudden terror as he sees her bearing down on him, and he lets out a shout and wrenches his reins as hard as he can to the side.

The horse screams and bucks, thrown off balance without warning. Its legs tangle, and it rears once and goes down in a heap, flinging its rider from its back. Fikani shoots past in a whistle of angry air, but behind her she hears the heavy thump and muffled cry of pain as the outrider hits the ground. Then more shouting, unintelligible.

Damn. Damn! She doesn’t dare give him the time to get back to his feet, perhaps armed and ready to defend himself. Fikani opens her wings and winces at the painful crack of caught air as she brakes and turns, coming around for another pass, as quickly as she can.

The horse is bolting back the way it came, reins dragging in the dirt behind it. Fikani spots the flash of a sword hilt, still sheathed beside the saddle. The outrider is on his hands and knees in the dirt, struggling to stand. His long cloak is tangled around his legs, and he’s fighting to get free of it, stumbling unsteadily to his feet.

She sweeps toward him, wings rustling low across the ground, and crashes into him with the full force of her flight, knocking him flat on his back as she drives her knee hard into his belly. The breath slams out of him, and he lies helplessly under the weight of her body, dazed and gasping.

He’s at her mercy, head lolled back, the warm line of his throat throbbing with a hammering terrified pulse. One slash of her talons would open that soft flesh wide and make an end of him. But Fikani, still breathing hard, hesitates. There’s no satisfaction in winning like this. She at least ought to see his face.

With a flick of her wing, she pushes back the outrider’s hood. He turns his head slightly, still dazed, and the carnelian light of the setting sun catches his face, limning every line.

Fikani’s heart stops.

He’s beautiful.

---

(He can hardly see for the pain in his airless lungs, but when the Harp gasps sharply, he looks up into her wide green eyes and—oh, Scribes. He’s never seen such eyes.

Once, in his first year of fighting, he was struck by an arrow, the point thudding into him with an echo that rang throughout his body and threw his entire world sideways.

The sensation as their gazes lock is painless...but otherwise, very much the same.)

---

The moment stretches like a bowstring, taut and quivering.

Fikani realizes faintly that he hasn’t moved to push her off, though he should have, by now. What kind of a reckless fool is he, to gallop alone through the plains at dusk? To lie unprotesting under the claws of a Harp? If this is the way he lives, how has he lived this long?

Suddenly and intensely aware of the warmth of his body radiating into hers where she’s pressed against him, Fikani swallows, and licks her lips.

“You ought to be more careful with your life,” she mutters, tongue gone dry.

He gazes up at her as if he’s drinking her in; his eyes are warm and amber-brown, and crinkle pleasantly at the corners now that they aren’t wide with fear. His hair is tousled and bright, almost the true red of a Harp’s feathers. She didn’t know that nomads could be so bright. Fikani shivers. What’s happening to her?

“It was worth it,” the outrider breathes, and reaches up fearlessly to touch the curve of her cheek with one curled knuckle; and just like that, ever so gently, Fikani’s world caves in.

Before she can draw breath to reply, the moment is shattered by the drumming of approaching hoofbeats.

They turn as one, both faces swiveling toward the horizon. Is it the same rearguard she saw before? She can’t tell, at this distance. The oncoming riders raise a shout of alarm; they’ve already spotted the unmistakable searing blue of Harp feathers.

Fikani freezes, feeling the man’s body go tense beneath her. If she stays, they’ll be riding down on her in a few short minutes, ready to break her hollow bones beneath their clubs and swords.

If she goes, she’ll never see him again.

The sudden, absolute certainty of it scoops her hollow, and she cannot bear it.

Blind instinct takes hold. Fikani rolls off him and surges into flight, hopping up into the air like a sparrow, her wings beating frantically. She needs height for this, height and speed and momentum. As she looks over her shoulder to gauge her distance, she sees that he has stumbled to his feet, one hand outstretched after her in a plaintive gesture.

He doesn’t understand, and she doesn’t have time to explain.

Fikani wheels around and swoops low, claws open and outstretched. She seizes the nomad’s – her nomad’s – shoulders, rocking him back with the impact as she clutches him as tightly as she dares.

Then she pumps her wings hard, with a desperate prayer to the sky, and takes flight.

---

He struggles at first, which terrifies her. They’re too high above the ground by now for a fall to be safe, and her steel battle armor is dangerously sharp. If she tightens her grip too far...

“Stop!” she cries, short of breath and shouting over the rush of the wind. “I don’t...want...to drop you!”

At that, he goes still, hanging motionless in her grip. After a time, she feels him reach up and wrap his hands around her ankles, holding on tightly. That makes it easier, though she doesn’t dare loosen her talons.

It’s hard flying, laboring under the double weight. She doesn’t know where she’s going, other than away. Her wings beat to a silent mantra. Don’t let them find us. Don’t let us be found.

Darkness falls slowly on the plains, light radiating over the horizon long after the sun has dipped below it, but she can’t stay in the air forever.

As the last sliver of light is melting into the west, Fikani sees a vast black ripple in the ground ahead, and makes for it like an arrow.

Both sides in the war simply call it the Gorge. It’s a gaping tear in the earth, valleys within valleys within valleys, stretching away to the southeast like an open mouth. A river runs like a white thread deep between its evergreen-fringed cliffs, churned into froth as it carves its way through the tumbled shale and boulders far below.

Fikani circles briefly over the dizzying expanse of broken stone, and feels the outrider’s fingers tighten around her ankles. She doesn’t blame him. Even a Harp would hesitate over the Gorge.

Her sharp eyes, accustomed to scouting for a roost, find a stand of old pines growing from a jutting series of ledges halfway down one cliffside. The widest ledge is broad enough for comfort, she thinks, even for someone without wings; and the trees will provide cover from the sky.

Muscles aching, she coasts slowly down.

---

To her embarrassment, she’s too weary to stick the landing; not with a passenger in tow. They tumble into an undignified heap on the sandy soil of the ledge. Scraps of dry grass and dust flutter up in a cloud around them.

Fikani coughs, and rolls over. The outrider is lying sprawled on his back next to her. As she watches, he struggles up onto his knees and looks around. His hair is a windswept mess, but there’s a look of wonder in his eyes. Fikani recalls her first real flight, with the world spread out beneath her like a quilt, and smiles at the memory.

His answering smile crinkles up the corners of his eyes again. It makes the roots of her feathers tingle.

“Sorry about that. I thought—” he says, and she nods.

“I know.” She can’t fault him for doubting her. If he’s been on the Bloodborder for long, he’s seen other Harps carry their struggling foes into the air and let them fall. It’s a popular tactic; Fikani has used it herself. “I...I’m sorry. I can bring you back, if you—”

“No,” he blurts, and then adds, “Please,” and glances up at the darkening streak of sky overhead, between the cliffs, where the first stars are beginning to twinkle. “It’s too late to fly, isn’t it?”

He’s not wrong, but... “Your message,” Fikani reminds him. “You must have been carrying one.”

He bites his lip, considering. “It won’t matter by now,” he admits after a moment. “I’d never get anywhere without my horse, and...” He shrugs, wearily; who knows where the animal is, by now?

If you encounter a rider, disrupt them in whatever way you can. She doubts this is what her captain had in mind.

“Who are you?” He sounds so hesitant, almost reverent. Fikani swallows. What is she supposed to say, with him looking at her like that? She’s so tired, weariness dragging at her as she tries to think.

“My name is Fikani Shang,” she mumbles. “I’m a reconnaissance scout for the Highwing Remnants, born in Tuckamore Eyrie.”

His eyebrows lift a little, as he recognizes the format of her simple statement; the bare facts, as they’re drilled into every soldier. The permissible maximum to divulge when caught by an enemy combatant. Then he relaxes, and chuckles.

“Well, if that’s how we’re doing this,” he says, with a friendly grin, “I’m Hedwyn. An outrider for the Commonwealth, born on the Bloodborder.”

He sticks out a hand to shake, then realizes this isn’t quite right and starts to pull it back; but before he can, Fikani solemnly stretches out a wing. Hesitant, he turns his hand palm up, and she rests her splayed pinions lightly on his fingers.

Somewhere in the Gorge, she can hear a cricket singing in the quiet of nightfall.

Then a yawn catches her, so huge that she can feel her jaw crack. She covers her mouth, mortified, and Hedwyn chuckles. “You must be exhausted,” he says. “I can’t have been a light load.”

“I’ve carried heavier,” she can’t help pointing out, but he’s right. She can hardly scrape a complete thought together at the moment; her vision is starting to blur with faint halos. They both need rest. Fikani frowns, and looks around. She can perch in the trees, in a pinch, but will he be all right?

Clearly thinking along the same track, Hedwyn gives her a wry smile. “Hey, I’ve slept rough before. Don’t worry about me.” Shrugging out of his cloak and folding it at his feet, he sets a small pack on it that she hadn’t even realized he was wearing underneath, and goes to the nearest pine tree to pull down a branch with a sharp crack.

Fikani watches him work for a few minutes. He’s piling boughs in a heap, close to the base of the cliff, as far from the sheer drop as he can get.

She doesn’t know what a nomad would call it, but by her standards, Hedwyn is building a nest.

Feeling a bit lightheaded, she musters her nerve, and wings up into the top of the tree. The branches are lighter there, fine and soft and springy. Her claws make short work of tearing them loose.

His look of gratitude, when she starts to toss them down, is dizzying.

She does as much to help as she can, but her sheer exhaustion overtakes her in a rush while Hedwyn is still arranging his bedding to his liking. Too tired to say goodnight, she finds a branch that will hold her weight and settles in, pulling off her helmet and shaking out her long hair. She doesn’t remember falling asleep.

---

When she wakes, the sky is rosy with pre-dawn light, and at first she can’t remember where she is, or why. She’s slept in her flying harness, which is a miserable discovery, although she at least managed to take off her steel talon sheaths and hang them over a branch. Disoriented and drowsy, she rouses her feathers and looks around.

She’s somewhere in the Gorge, perched in a pine tree. Memory returns, and she winces and edges along her branch for a better look at the ground.

There he is. Her nomad is still asleep, sprawled face-down on his camp-bed of branches, with his cloak wrapped around him and his pack under his cheek for a pillow. Fikani watches his back rise and fall peacefully as he breathes, and considers the situation in the cold light of day.

It’s impossible. Everything about it is completely impossible.

Has she gone crazy, to snatch him up like a salmon and bring him here? She’s heard of harriers on patrol cracking under the strain of long days alone, but she’s always loved her time in the sky. She doesn’t know what she was thinking.

(No; she knows what she was thinking. It just doesn’t bear consideration. There’s no sense wishing for the impossible.)

There are several ways out of this, but all the obvious choices turn her stomach. No. She can still take him home, or close to it. Back near the Bloodborder, somewhere discreet, where he can make his way to a friendly unit. She’ll find the strength, somehow; she has to. She cannot trap this man here against his will. He’s not her prisoner, treasonous though it may be to refuse to make him one.

But she’ll need breakfast, first, and so will he.

Fikani shakes her head, hard, clearing the last of the sleep from her brain. Then she pulls her talon sheaths on over aching feet, and with a rustle and a creak as her weight lifts from the branch, she glides out into the morning air. It’s time to hunt.

---

Her first catch is quicker than she expects, a squirrel too fat with tree-nuts to dodge her for long, but it’s not big enough to feed them both. She deposits it near him, where he’ll find it easily, and flies out again.

When she comes back, with a limp rabbit dangling from one talon, Hedwyn is awake and sitting cross-legged by a crackling fire of pine boughs. The squirrel is skinned and split and dressed on a stick across the flames. Hedwyn looks up as she backwings to a landing, and his face lights with inexplicable pleasure at the sight of her.

“Good morning,” he calls, as friendly and easy as if he wasn’t breakfasting several hundred feet up a cliff with an enemy combatant, and reaches out to take the rabbit from her. Pulling a small knife from his belt, he starts to slit the skin, then stops. “Oh. Should I, ah, leave it be, or...?”

Fikani gives him a quizzical look, then realizes what he’s asking. “Oh, no,” she says, trying and failing to cover her amusement. “I like my meat cooked, thank you.”

Hedwyn blushes – actually blushes, color flooding across his cheeks. “Sorry,” he mumbles. “I wasn’t sure.”

Neither of them knows the first thing about the other’s world, do they? Who knows what sort of propaganda they hear, in the Commonwealth? Even so, he’s doing his best. Fikani is determined to do the same, for as long as he’s here with her. She waves away his embarrassment with one wing. “It’s all right,” she says. “It was kind of you to ask.”

He relaxes again, and busies himself with efficiently skinning and gutting her kill. Fikani watches the movements of his clever fingers with interest. She’s never had the chance to watch a nomad work like this before. Her own claws feel clumsy in comparison. She likes the delicate strength of his hands, with their blunt nails and smooth skin. He dresses the raw meat with the casual confidence of long years spent surviving outdoors.

The males of her own people are all but gone, and Hedwyn is not a Harp. He can’t possibly know what it once would have meant among them, to build a nest together; to bring food to him, and to have him prepare it for her. Can he? A prickle of heat flows up the back of her neck, and she busies herself with taking off her talon sheaths.

They sit quietly as their breakfast cooks, listening to the calls of awakening birds in the trees around them and the spit and crackle of fat in the fire. Fikani rests her chin on her knees and tries not to stare too obviously, stealing glances sidelong as she pretends to gaze out across the canyon.

She can’t help noting that his hair really is that astonishing shade of red, even in the bright light of morning. She’d wondered if it was the sunset playing tricks on her.

She shouldn’t be thinking about any of this. He’ll be gone, soon.

“It’s beautiful up here,” Hedwyn says, breaking the silence, as he reaches over to turn the meat. He starts to take one skewer off the fire and pass it to her, then pauses. “Why did you bring me here?” he asks. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, I’d just...like to know.”

Fikani has been working that out all morning. “I didn’t want to leave you,” she admits, sheepish. It’s the truth, simple and ridiculous though it is. Reluctantly, she forces herself to add, “When I said I would bring you back, I meant it. I’ll take you after we’re done eating, if you like. Just say the word.”

But he shakes his head, as if he doesn’t want to hear the offer. “That’s all right,” he says, “Rest your wings. I’m in no rush to get back.”

She gives him an odd look. He should be in a rush. He should be desperate to return. Doesn’t he realize the trouble they could both be in? But there’s only friendly warmth in his expression as he hands her breakfast across the flames.

Fikani’s spent too much time in the field to expect much from squirrel roasted over a campfire, and she bites into it tentatively, braced for the usual mixed results. But the burst of flavor stops her short, and her eyebrows rise. She turns the morsel of meat in her mouth, savoring it. It’s perfectly cooked through, neither burnt on the outside nor raw in the middle. He must have rubbed spices on it, from that little pack of his; it tastes amazing, smoky and savory.

“You’re a chef!” she exclaims, staring bewildered at him as she chews. He lights up with pride at the compliment; it’s oddly sweet. Gulping down her mouthful, she demands, “Where did you learn to cook like this?”

A wistful look passes across his face. “The woman who raised me was a master forager,” he says, distantly. “She used to bring home...oh, all kinds of things, every time she went on a patrol. She had to, to feed all of us kids. I figured out how to work with what we had.” He chuckles, rueful. “Meals were sort of dodgy for a while, but I got better with time.”

“Clearly.” Fikani ponders his strange choice of words, stringing together connections out of habit. The woman who raised me. Not his mother? Military, clearly, if she was patrolling. A mentor figure, or a guardian? For other children as well, from the sound of it. She takes another bite, swallows, then asks, hesitantly, “Will she be waiting for you, back at camp?”

Hedwyn ducks his chin, not meeting her eyes. “No,” he says. “She’s...gone.”

“Oh,” she blurts, “I’m so sorry,” and bites her lip, strangely mortified, unsure if she wants to ask any more. This war has ended so many lives. She’s lost sisters to it herself, they have that much in common; but what will it mean, if a Harp killed the woman of whom he speaks with such affection?

“They wouldn’t tell us what happened.” He’s still talking to his own hands, head bowed. She can’t see his face, but his voice has gone flat, all the gentle warmth drained away. “She was a captain, on the Bloodborder. She went out one day, and...never came back.”

Silence stretches between them, with bleak unspoken knowledge lurking beneath it. Whatever happened to Hedwyn’s mentor, it was not honorable. A captain’s death in combat should have earned her a hero’s funeral. If they buried her without honors, then she must have died in some unspeakable way. Worse yet, she could be alive, but exiled to the wastes of the Downside.

A cold finger traces its way down Fikani’s spine. She’s well aware of the Commonwealth’s method of ridding themselves of traitors and criminals. Captive Harps suffer the same fate, after their wings are clipped.

What will they do to her nomad, if she doesn’t bring him back soon? What has her impulsive decision done to him already?

He lifts his head, and the rueful smile is back on his face, albeit a little crooked now. “Sorry,” he says, too lightly. “It was a long time ago, more than ten years now. Please, don’t let me ruin your breakfast with grim old stories.”

The meat is still delicious, but Fikani hardly tastes it as she finishes her share.

Perhaps he does have some sense of what this could mean, after all.

---

The day passes pleasantly enough, as they tend to their camp and explore the area around it. There’s a thin sparkling waterfall nearby, one ledge over and a short but tricky climb down a stretch of tumbled boulders. The water is sweet and clear, and they both refill their flasks and splash their faces.

They spend some time carefully shoring up the makeshift bed with heavier branches. Neither of them wonders aloud how long it may need to last.

They talk about other things, instead, comparing notes on birdsongs and edible plants they recognize, sharing small fragments of their pasts. He makes her laugh with a story about one of his foster brothers; he picks a fragrant herb she’s never seen before and shows it to her, explaining its uses.

The conversation skips lightly from topic to topic, skirting around the reality of their situation as if acknowledging it would burn them to the bone. Harmless tidbits of talk; nothing strategic, or valuable, or treasonous.

(Every kind word out of his mouth, every smile he gives her is a small act of treason. How can he be smiling at all?)

(Why doesn’t he ask her to take him home?)

The sun passes its zenith; the shadows begin to lengthen. As he shuffles past her on a narrow ledge, arms full of branches for the fire, his shoulder brushes softly against hers. She flinches back as if stung, and they stare at each other. He looks quizzical, confused, a little hurt. Her skin is tingling, even through the cloth of her tunic.

They haven’t touched since that strange, tender moment the night before.

“I should go hunting again,” Fikani says, trying and failing to ignore the way the air hums between them. “Is there anything you want?”

“Whatever you can find,” he says, and she takes flight with painful relief.

---

(It’s been getting worse all day, no matter what he says to her. She’s hardly meeting his eyes anymore.

Hedwyn is well aware that none of this makes sense, that her uncertainty is the sensible response to where they’ve found themselves. By all rights, he should have taken her up on her first offer. Certainly the second one. She truly does seem to mean it; her worry for him is palpable. But he can’t bring himself to ask.

There must be some way, something he can do to clear the air...)

---

Soaring over the plains, at least, feels familiar and reassuring. Fikani knows how to hunt; she doesn’t know where this is leading, or why. She refuses to think too far ahead. She doesn’t dare to assume.

She could do with a nice long hunting flight, to be honest, just to clear her head. Instead, luck hands her two fat rabbits almost immediately, scurrying along the sandy bank of a stream, not far from the edge of the Gorge. She swoops down quickly; it’s over in seconds.

Back aloft, she circles for a moment, unsure whether to head back or find some excuse to stay out longer...

A crash echoes off the cliffs beneath her, followed by an unmistakable shout and the rattle of falling stones.

Fikani blanches, and strikes the air with her wings, racing back as fast as she can fly.

---

When she crests the cliff, their ledge is empty, and her heart leaps into her throat. Then she spots him, a shock of red against the gray cliffs, several feet below.

Hedwyn is clinging white-knuckled to the sheer rock face, his boots slipping against the crumbling stone as he tries and fails to find a foothold. There was a narrow ledge down there when she left, but not anymore; it must have broken under his weight when he tried to edge across it. Where was he trying to go?

As Fikani treads the air, racking her brains for a way to reach him safely, he kicks out in a panic and knocks loose a scatter of pebbles, which bounce and clatter down, and down, and down...

No.

His fingertips are slipping, slick with sweat; and then, with a crunch, the stone gives way entirely. With a cry of terror, Hedwyn clutches at empty air, and falls.

No!

The rabbits tumble from Fikani’s open claws, forgotten, as she dives after him. She’s done this in drills, in practice, a risky technique to rescue a wounded sister, she can do it again, she has to. He’s freefalling, thrashing, panicking; she matches his speed, fumbling to catch hold of him – and then her steel talons close tightly on one flailing arm, and she opens her wings.

The crack as they catch the air nearly knocks them both out of the sky. Fikani gasps, half-blinded by agony, and hears Hedwyn yell as her talons pierce his flesh, but she can’t let go.

She flaps desperately, still weary from carrying him the night before, fighting her way back up the cliff as he kicks in her grasp, and for a moment she thinks her strength is going to run out and they’ll both pinwheel down to their deaths...

And then they struggle up over the edge at last. Fikani flops down panting in the dry grass, strange colors swimming in front of her eyes.

“Are...are you...all right...?” she wheezes.

She hears his hiss of pain, and rolls over. He’s sitting up, gingerly peeling back the torn cloth of his sleeve. His arm is bleeding freely, staining his shirt. At least the cuts don’t look deep. Fikani hopes the jolt hasn’t wrenched his shoulder loose; she’s never helped relocate a joint before, and she’d rather not practice on him.

“I’ll live,” Hedwyn grits through his teeth. He’s visibly shaken, trembling like a spooked horse. It occurs to her that he might be in shock, and she forces herself to get up and stumble to the campfire, blowing the embers back to life and adding fresh wood. The flames leap up eagerly. “Can...can you bring me my pack?” he manages.

It’s heavier than she expected, but she snags one strap and pulls it back to him. He rummages briefly in it, pulls out a roll of bandages and packets of ointment.

There is no awkwardness about touching each other, now. They’re both soldiers; the dressing of wounds is as familiar as breathing. His shoulder is intact, at least, which is a small blessing. Fikani moves quickly around the camp as needed, fetching his water flask to rinse the cuts, helping as best she can as he tries to pull the bandages tight with one hand and his teeth.

He is still shaking when they finish. She pulls the cloak off his camp-bed and drags it to him, wrapping the warm wool around his shoulders and pushing him to sit closer to the fire.

Finally, she has to ask. “What on earth were you doing?”

To her surprise, he turns away from her, covering his face with his good hand as if he’s ashamed of something. His ears are red. “You’ll...it was foolish,” he mutters.

“Hedwyn?” she prompts, and he gestures down at where he was climbing. She peers over the edge, and sees a cluster of white wildflowers, blooming in a crack in the stone.

“I thought you might like them,” he says, so quietly that she can hardly hear him. “I was going to give them to you.”

Fikani stares at him.

“You idiot,” she breathes, and then, louder, “You idiot!” Anger flares in her chest; he’s so young, so wingless, so reckless. He nearly died! He nearly died, for wildflowers! “How could you,” she starts, and cuts herself off. “What did I tell you,” she tries again, and it still isn’t enough.

Nothing is enough, no words are enough to blot out the thought of his body broken on the rocks three hundred feet below, so instead she surges forward and wraps her wings around him, as tight as she dares.

He struggles briefly, surprised and warm and mercifully alive, and she is too thankful for that to speak. Dizzy with relief and frustration, she rears back and looks him straight in his astonishing brown eyes; and then, she kisses him.

---

(She kisses him and he thinks: I’m dreaming. She kisses him with her sweet fierce mouth, and her soft curls all around him, and he must be dreaming; that, or dead. He must have broken his neck when he fell from his horse, because everything since then has been too good to be true.

And then he lifts his hands to pull her closer, and sharp pain shoots through his wrenched and savaged arm; and for the first time in his life, Hedwyn is grateful for pain, because it proves that he’s awake, and alive, and that Fikani Shang is really kissing him.)

---

At last, something deep down in the core of her hums, at last. It’s the relief of letting magnets snap together, of finally giving in to sleep, or gravity, or the currents of the wind.

Fikani kisses her nomad as hard and as fiercely as she can, and his arms wrap around her, and he kisses her back. His lips are warm and slightly chapped, and she can smell the fragrance of pine sap that still clings to him. Her heart sings.

He draws back, breaking the kiss, and she makes a little sound of protest without meaning to, but Hedwyn just rests his forehead against hers and breathes for a moment, as if he needs to collect himself. His fingers brush a loose strand of hair away from her face, tucking it behind her ear, then settle at the nape of her neck.

“I,” he says, unsteadily, “I’m sorry.” She must look confused, because he adds, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Fikani huffs a little laugh. Scare her? What on earth can she say? You terrify me; being here with you terrifies me; what I feel for you terrifies me! I don’t—no—I do know what I want from you, and that frightens me the most of all, because it will never, never be allowed, and I will die without you.

“I thought I’d lost you,” she sighs, into the warmth of their mingled breath. It’s as much as she can admit, right now. “I can’t...I can’t lose you.” She squeezes her eyes shut, tingling with embarrassment, fully aware that her voice trembles with desperation, stripped bare of all pretense.

 “Please,” she whispers, “stay with me.”

His warm hands cradle her face, lifting her chin, and she opens her eyes and sees to her astonishment that he is as breathless and flushed as she is.

“Fikani,” he says, and a shiver runs down her back at the sound of her name on his tongue, at the way he pronounces it, with utmost tenderness, “I’ll stay as long as you’ll let me.”

Forever, her heart sings, forever, and she can’t help it; she kisses him again, thunderstruck by the sheer goodness of a world with Hedwyn in it, with Hedwyn’s mouth on hers and his hands in her hair. He doesn’t want to leave her. She doesn’t want him to go. She is a hypocrite for calling him reckless; she stole him like a raptor, simply because she wanted him, and he doesn’t care and neither does she.

She would do it again, a thousand times, just to call him hers.

His hands are wondrous, slightly callused and gentle, combing through her hair as he kisses her, touching her face, stroking her shoulders and back and wings. There is a great deal to be said for human hands, Fikani is realizing.

When his fingers find the hem of her tunic, skimming lightly across her skin, she gasps, and Hedwyn hesitates. Dark is falling, but even in the dim light from their dying fire, she can see the need in his eyes.

“I shouldn’t,” he manages to stammer, but Fikani has had enough of shouldn’t.

 “Please,” she breathes against his mouth. “Please.”

After that, there’s very little need for words; only soft sounds, and the snap and sigh of the fire as it slowly burns down to embers.

At last. At last...

---

(It remains etched in his heart forever, the way she clung to him and whispered his name, pinions brushing softly against his back.

She will haunt his dreams for all the years to come, as he wakes in the darkness of the creaking Blackwagon with empty arms in a cold bunk; with the echo of her voice in his ears and the ghostly memory of her feathers still tingling on his skin.

He will never forget.)

Chapter Text

Birdsong wakes her. Morning light is just creeping over the edge of the Gorge, bright against her eyelids. Her back is snug against Hedwyn’s chest and his arm is slung heavy and warm around her waist. She smells pine boughs and woodsmoke and last night’s sweat, and the slightly musty wool of the outrider cloak tucked around them both.

For a long, blissful moment, Fikani keeps her eyes shut, and doesn’t think about anything at all.

Then Hedwyn stirs, rustling the branches under them. “Hey,” he says, a little uncertainly. “You awake?”

“Mmm.” Fikani rolls over to face him, and yelps in surprise. “Your hair...!”

He reaches up to feel it, wincing as he moves his poor arm. It’s sticking up and out to the side in unruly tufts. “Ahh, like yours is any better,” he points out with a sheepish chuckle.

Her hair is always tricky to manage in the mornings; she’s considered cutting it for convenience, but vanity keeps winning out. She puffs at the tangled strands falling across her face. “And whose fault is that?”

“I, uh, think it might have been mine,” he admits, almost but not quite succeeding at sounding contrite, and reaches up to brush a wayward curl very gently back behind her ear. His contented smile is as warm as sunshine. “Sorry about that.”

Her cheeks tingle; she’s blushing despite herself. “I don’t mind if you don’t,” she mumbles, flustered. “Um. Hungry?”

“Starving,” he replies, fervently. Dinner was the farthest thing from their minds last night, but now Fikani’s stomach is growling. Reluctantly, she sits up and winces as the cold morning air strikes her, raising goosebumps on her bare skin.

“I’ll have to go hunting again,” she grumbles. “Even if I knew where I dropped those rabbits, something will have gotten them by now.”

Getting up is a painful reminder of her own strained muscles; she ignores the ache and hurries into her clothes. A few minutes in the air will loosen her up again. “Don’t fall off the cliff again while I’m gone,” she says; it comes out a bit more tart than she intended.

Hedwyn has succeeded in very carefully sitting up in bed, and is scratching sleepily at his unruly hair and watching her dress. “You’re not a morning person, are you?” he observes, sounding thoroughly amused.

At least he isn’t annoyed. “So they tell me,” Fikani admits, wryly, as she drags his own clothes over to him. He accepts them with gratitude; it really is a cold morning. Before she can step back, he reaches up to catch her wing.

“It’s all right,” he reassures her. “I’m early-bird enough for both of us. I’ll get the fire going while you’re gone.” He ducks his head and brushes a kiss against the tips of her feathers, quick and light, a bit self-conscious; she’s not the only one blushing, now. “Come back soon, alright?” he murmurs.

Even the morning chill can’t wipe the smile off her face as she soars up into the open air.

---

The third day passes, and the fourth. A routine is forming between them, as much as any routine can form in so little time.

They rise when they feel like it, two weary and aching soldiers on the world’s least authorized leave, enjoying the chance to doze as long as they want. She chose their roost well; they have all the water and the shelter they need at this time of year, provided the weather holds.

It was easy enough to add more boughs to their camp-bed, to make it comfortable for two; when she finally slips up and calls it a nest aloud, he doesn’t laugh at her, but seems charmed by the thought.

Fikani hunts for their meat, gradually picking the slopes clean of game. There’s an unmistakable pride in returning to him with her catch, an ache of tenderness in her breast at the sight of him seated by their fire, with his face upturned to the sky. Waiting for her to come home.

The cliffs block out the sun in the Gorge long before shadows finally swallow the plains above them. They go to bed early; they have no complaints.

Curled together under his cloak one clear night, he points up at the stars, and tells her the names of the Scribes. She tucks her head against his shoulder and wonders what they would think, that infamously motley band, if they really were looking down at them now.

Perhaps they, at least, would approve.

On the fifth day, after wrinkling their noses at each other over breakfast, they scrub their clothes clean in the freezing spray of the waterfall and hang them in the pines to dry, splashing each other and laughing like children. Afterwards, they sprawl on a patch of warm stone together, letting their damp hair dry in the midday sun.

She carefully preens each feather back into place; he watches her with a look on his face that makes her heart swell as if it would burst. His shoulders are scattered with freckles, barely visible against his dark tan; she wishes she could memorize every last one of them.

He shares fragments of his childhood, tales of the formidable woman who adopted him into her rough-and-tumble clan of orphans. She tells him as much as she dares about everyday life in the eyrie, and he laughs himself breathless at the story of how she tried to take her first hopping flight too soon and ended up stuck in a tree.

Report back in a week, her captain’s voice echoes in her head, persisting every time she shoves it away. Report back in a week.

The days are passing too quickly, moment after sweet moment, slipping away from her like a lifeline rapidly running out.

They talk about everything, except the future.

---

Sheer luck, on the seventh morning, hands her what little warning she gets.

Hunting for their breakfast, she dives the wrong way and ends up pursuing a hare across the grass in a tail-chase, much farther from the Gorge than she meant to go. White tail bobbing, it leads her in breakneck zigzags to a marshy spot by the little stream, then shoots under a patch of brambles, well out of reach.

Fikani huffs with disappointment and peels off, soaring high again. She scans the plains for other signs of life, then blinks and looks farther.

A plume of dust is rising in the distance. Riders, approaching from the south.

The warm day goes cold.

Staring at the billowing dust, Fikani automatically runs figures in her head. It’s a small party, from the size of it. Horses, given the speed of travel. Headed their way, and at their current pace, they’ll reach the canyon in half an hour or less.

Have they seen her? She hopes not. A plan is crystallizing rapidly in her head, almost against her will, taking shape at last after days of stubborn resistance.

Fikani folds her wings, and dives for the Gorge.

As she lands, Hedwyn gets to his feet immediately at the sight of her. “Riders,” she pants, out of breath from the swift flight. “Riders coming from the south.”

He blanches under his tan. “Looking for me?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

Hedwyn turns and strides for their nest, grabbing up his cloak. “We can hide,” he says, throwing it over his shoulders, and bends to pick up his pack. “They won’t find us—”

Fikani’s guts clench.

“No,” she says, fighting to keep her voice steady. “We can’t keep hiding. You know we can’t.”

He was startled before, but the look he gives her now is stunned, struck by an unforeseen blow from an unexpected quarter. “But...”

“Listen to me,” Fikani says, tense and urgent. “You can go up there and tell them you were captured, say you escaped. They’ll take you back, they won’t know any different.”

As a story, it should hold water. Who would imagine anything else? She’s abruptly thankful for his wounded arm, so obviously the work of Harp talons. He’ll be a hero. They won’t suspect a thing.

 “If they don’t find us, the other harriers in my unit will,” she tells him, pleading. “They’re expecting me tomorrow, when our mission ends. I’ll be missed, and they’ll come looking for me. We won’t get a better chance than this.”

“They won’t—” Hedwyn starts to say, and she slashes one wing through the air in an impatient gesture.

“I’ve flown with them, Hedwyn! I know how good they are. If they find us, they’ll kill you, do you understand?” Her voice breaks a little as she says it. Her pulse is thrumming high and fast. They are wasting time here, arguing while a golden opportunity slips away.

He’s still staring at her. He looks so young, so bleak, hands clutching his pack. Of course he understands. They’ve been pretending, all this time, like fledglings, but they can’t keep it up forever.

“This isn’t goodbye,” she insists, trying very hard to believe it herself. “It’s...it’s just for a little while. We found each other once already. We can do it again. We’ll think of something.”

Hedwyn takes a deep breath; lets it out, slowly.

Then he nods, and yanks the buckle tight on his pack. “How much time do we have?” he says.

She shuts her eyes. “None.”

---

The ledge she carries him to is tucked just below the lip of the Gorge, out of sight from the plains above. They crouch low, heads down, exchanging frantic whispers. They can already hear the approaching horses over the wind in the canyon, hoofbeats vibrating through the earth.

“Can you climb up from here?”

He’s eyeing the cracked earth, looking for handholds. “Well, I wouldn’t say no to a boost,” he admits, carefully stretching his sore shoulder. “But I think I can manage it.”

“Good.” There’s no time for a better plan.

Fikani presses her forehead against his, wrapping her wings around him. “When you get to the top,” she whispers, her nose brushing his, “run to them, and don’t turn back.” She gives him a little shake. “Can you promise me that?”

Hedwyn swallows hard. “I promise.”

They kiss, once more, while they still can, both of them breathless with the impossible speed of it all. The moment is too brief to savor, to memorize. His fingers run through her hair, just once, and then slip away.

“Go.”

He reaches up for the first handhold, as she folds and braces her wings as best she can to help lift him up. About to start climbing, he hesitates. “Wait—”

“Go!” she cries, tears starting in her eyes. It’s like tearing away a bandage. It has to be done quickly or not at all. This is not goodbye, it’s not, it can’t be.

Hedwyn’s mouth sets into a stubborn line. “I’ll find you,” he says. “Just give me two weeks. I swear, I’ll find my way back here again.”

And then he steps into her hold and pushes off, scrambling up over the grassy fringe at the cliff’s edge and out of sight.

No more time to think or worry. He’s on the stage now, in full view of the audience; she has to play her own part as well as she can. She has to make this look believable, beyond suspicion, or he’ll be in unimaginable trouble. Fikani listens intently, wings poised and ready...

Startled shouts ring out in the distance. The rhythm of the hoofbeats changes, picking up speed, swinging closer.

Fikani counts off the seconds in her head, ten, twenty, thirty, and then takes flight.

As she bursts up into the sky, claws outstretched and armor gleaming, she catches a split-second glimpse of the Commonwealth riders, their horses milling and stamping the earth three hundred paces away.

Hedwyn is running toward them, feet strong and sure on the solid earth, cloak billowing out behind him. He’s almost reached them. She arcs high and begins to dive after him, as if in pursuit.

Three of the riders lift loaded bows to aim in her direction, and Fikani swerves off her course, dodging the arrows easily as they fire. She’s outnumbered; he’s out of her reach; they’ll see that immediately. Circling back, she hovers at a wary distance, whispering silent prayers. Run. Run...

One of the riders stretches out her arm as Hedwyn reaches them, and swiftly hoists him up into the saddle behind her. Chaos reigns for a moment, unintelligible shouts and sharp hand signals passing back and forth. And then they spur their horses back up to speed, and gallop away to the south.

Fikani watches them until they shrink and vanish over the horizon.

The updrafts carry her gently back down. She drifts like an autumn leaf, wending her way back to the empty ledge, and lands beside the dying embers of the campfire.

This is not goodbye. This is not goodbye...

As the sun begins its descent, she curls up in the empty remains of their nest and falls into a dreamless sleep.

---

(Everything around him is noise and dust and shouting, as they gallop into the camp. Unfamiliar hands are pulling at him, helping him down from the saddle, taking his pack from his aching arms. Someone presses a flask into his fingers. He smells brandy, pungent and rich, but he’s forgotten how to drink.

Just a few hours ago, he was tending their campfire.

Hedwyn lets himself be led away into a tent; the flap falls, mercifully blocking out some of the clamor outside.

They sit him down on a cot, take away his cloak, coax brandy into him, then hot soup. Someone is calling for a medic. No one expects him to be anything but dazed, exhausted. He stares at his empty hands, oblivious to the bustle around him.

There must be a way back to her. He just has to find it.)

---

It’s cold, when she wakes. Dawn hasn’t broken yet, and everything is blue and gray with shadows. Fikani shivers, wondering if Hedwyn has rolled over and pulled the cloak off her in his sleep. “Hedwyn?” she whispers, and reaches across the nest for him.

Her feathers brush only emptiness. Her stomach twists, as she remembers.

Morning will be a misery without him, but Fikani hauls herself out of bed anyway, stamping the feeling back into her frozen feet. She has work to do.

The campfire has burnt down to dead ash, but she scatters the remaining coals, ensuring that no live ones remain. She makes short work of the last cold scraps from yesterday’s breakfast, then reluctantly drags their nest over the cliff, piece by piece, letting the boughs spiral and bounce down out of sight. They can build another one, she tells herself, swallowing the lump in her throat. There’s no sense leaving evidence.

There is nothing else to bring with her. They stored no food, made no provisions for a future that stretched no farther than the next morning.

Her sore wings have mostly healed after a week’s rest; the long flight back will be uncomfortable, but not impossible. She fills her flask one last time at the fresh clear waterfall, and washes her puffy face.

The bright morning sky awaits her. Fikani grits her teeth, leaps into it with laboring wingbeats, and puts the Gorge behind her.

---

She makes slow but steady progress, stopping as often as she needs. She works out her own story as she flies, weaving it together in her head from strands of carefully-selected truth.

It helps to have something to think about.

It’s almost nightfall when she sees brightly-colored wings circling over the trees ahead. Fikani rolls once in the air, flashing her wings in greeting, and coasts in.

Home, safe, back again.

She expects a dressing-down at her debriefing, at the very least; but her captain listens with obvious interest to her edited account of patrolling around the Gorge, seeing no Commonwealth soldiers except for the single riding party that tried to attack her. As she speaks, the strangeness of her own report dawns on Fikani. She was too grateful for the reprieve to question it, at the time, but there should have been more patrols passing through the area; yet she saw almost no one in seven days.

Her captain nods to herself in satisfaction as she leaves, and Fikani wonders.

Around the fire that night, her wingmates tease her about her late return. They ask her if she was too busy exploring to remember to come home, laughing away the ghost of their fear for her, their own swift little bluebird.

Fikani bears it all quietly and answers as little as possible, shame gnawing at her conscience. Her secret feels enormous, filling her lungs as if it would burst out of her. Did you know? Did you know how kind a nomad can be, how warm and gentle and bright?

They mistake her flushed silence for embarrassment, and cheerfully press another drink into her grasp.

The entire unit is commanded to rest up for a few days with no word of when their next mission might be, which makes everyone happy except for Fikani. She itches to be out on patrol again; the sky is clear and blue, full of breezes to ruffle her hair like gentle fingers. With the wind behind her, how quickly could she fly back to him?

It has been more than a week. She counts the passing days with increasing worry. What will happen to her reckless nomad, if he rides out to meet her and she isn’t there?

The fine weather is finally blotted out by a mass of clouds that rolls in overhead, dampening their spirits with unpredictable brief showers of rain. Even her sisters are fidgety now, preening the wet out of their feathers and scowling as claustrophobia sets in under the lowering sky. And then, when the two weeks are nearly over, their mission comes at last.

The orders are peculiar: Patrol the southern border of the mountains. Be on the alert for any stray parties of Commonwealth soldiers. Be ready for a call to action, if it should come.

Something is about to happen. Fikani can feel it prickling the back of her neck like summer lightning about to strike. She should stay her course; she should stand ready; but her worry for him is too strong.

As soon as her sisters have scattered out of sight, she veers off to the south.

---

The plains around the Gorge are empty. Fikani flies two long passes overhead, north to south and east to west, circling far afield. Nothing. Nothing, and then...something.

As the afternoon light begins to ripen and turn golden, she spots a small grove of trees at the south end of the Gorge, just beside the lip of the cliff. It would be unremarkable, were it not for the thin, wavering threads of smoke that are beginning to filter up through the branches.

She knows the smoke of cooking fires when she sees it. Someone is camped there, in the shade beneath the spreading branches. Many someones, from the look of it; perhaps even an entire squad of Commonwealth soldiers.

Biting her lip, Fikani considers her options. She is alone; but then again, how would they ever catch her?

Mind made up, she sweeps her wings back and dives as low as she dares, just out of arrow range, skimming in a swift scout’s flyover above the whispering leaves of the trees. She peers between the branches as she whistles past, catching glimpses of pitched tent canvas and flickering campfires, grazing horses and startled faces, mottled with leafshadow as they gape up at her. None of them look familiar, but she is moving too quickly to register more than a few blurred impressions.

One pass should be enough. She doesn’t want to frighten them into packing up and moving out. Confident that she’s been clearly seen, she breaks off her flight path and turns west.

She flies as far as she dares; no farther than a fast horse could travel, in perhaps half an hour’s time. Out and away, into the trackless plains.

Then, nerves humming, she gains as much altitude as she can and glides like a kite, circling aimlessly over the miles of rippling grass.

Hours pass. The plains blaze crimson with the light of the setting sun, then fade into a sea of shadows. Still, she coasts on the cooling air, watching. Waiting. The moon is a slim sickle overhead, shining only rarely through gaps in the scudding clouds.

The darkness is nearly complete. It’s a night for furtive secrets if ever there was one.

Fikani is just beginning to wonder if she should let go of her hopes and find a roost for the night, when she hears the faint, muffled beat of approaching hooves.

A surge of eagerness struggles with common sense in her breast, but she forces herself to descend slowly, following by ear until she’s low enough to pick out the solitary figure on horseback from the other shadows around him. The rider lifts his face to look up at her, pale in the dim moonlight, then raises one arm in a playful salute.

All her caution flies to the winds. Fikani catches her breath with joy, and arrows toward the ground.

As she lands, the horse pricks its ears and sidles away from her. It’s clearly seen her kind in battle before, but Hedwyn leans down and strokes its neck, murmuring soothing nonsense until it calms. She keeps her distance for a few maddening moments while he dismounts, not wanting to frighten the animal further, shifting impatiently from foot to foot while Hedwyn carefully hobbles it and turns it out to graze with a kindly pat on the flank.

Then he straightens and turns, opening his arms, and Fikani runs to him at last.

“I can’t stay long,” he whispers against her hair, as he pulls her close. “We’re camped to the southeast, not far from here, I’m supposed to be on watch, I’m sorry—”

“It’s all right.” She presses her face against his shoulder and simply breathes in the scent of his skin. “They think I’m flying patrol. Something is,” she starts to say, and then he tips up her chin and kisses her, hot and urgent, and her jangling nerves catch fire.

She has been waiting for this for fourteen long days. It felt like an eternity.

Their old nesting-place in the Gorge is miles to the east, but the waving grass here is tall and soft. They sink into it together, oblivious to the dark clouds gathering low overhead. Even the stars are blotted out; there are no witnesses here.

Together alone, for a few brief and blessed hours, they can forget the warring world.

---

Some time later, nestled in her nomad’s arms, Fikani wakes with a jerk from an unexpected doze. She hadn’t meant to waste time sleeping. How many hours have slipped away from them?

Reluctantly, she untangles herself and sits up, peering around them through the curtain of loose hair that falls across her face. There’s a faint reddish glow on the horizon. She feels a sting of regret; the night has passed more quickly than she realized.

Despite everything, a trembling glow of hope is pulsing inside her, tentative and new. They really did find each other; what’s to stop it from happening again, and again, until a better plan has time to form? There must be a way to make this work, this bewildering, exhilarating thing that’s growing between them.

Hedwyn stirs, and blinks drowsily up at her. He looks so peaceful, lying rumpled and content in the grass. Her nomad, her sweetheart, her desperate secret.

“I should go,” she whispers, regretfully. “It’s almost dawn.”

He frowns at that, and pushes himself up onto one elbow. “What? It can’t be that late already...” His voice trails off. He’s staring past her at the hint of ruddy light in the distance, with his brows knitted together in confusion.

If the plains were not so featureless – if she weren’t still half-asleep – she would have worked it out sooner herself. Disorientation spins the world and realigns it as Fikani realizes; that faint fiery glow reflecting off the low-hanging clouds is not coming from the east.

It’s coming from the southeast.

“No.” Hedwyn’s stunned whisper is almost too faint to hear.

Then he lunges to his feet, and before she can reach for him – speak to him – try to stop him – he’s yanked on his boots and is running, yelling for his horse. Fikani starts to follow him, then doubles back for her talon sheaths and helmet, tossed so carelessly aside.

By the time she catches up, armored and ready for battle, his horse is unhobbled and tossing its head uneasily. He’s got one foot in the stirrups, about to mount.

“Hedwyn, wait!” she cries after him, pushing her way through the long grass.

“I have to go!” he shouts, desperately, and hauls himself into the saddle with a grunt of pain. Has his arm healed yet? Is three weeks enough? What is he about to ride into? Fikani flashes back through every murmur and rustle of news from the Highwing command over the last several days. Something is happening. Something is being planned. She was going to tell him, should have told him right away...

He drives his heels hard into the horse’s sides, and it takes off at a gallop, flinging up clods of earth behind it.

There is no time to think. Fikani launches herself into the air, and follows.

---

True dawn is staining the sky by the time they come into sight of the little grove perched at the edge of the Gorge. Soldiers in Commonwealth uniforms are swarming everywhere, horses milling around the trees, fires still burning, and for a moment, Fikani thinks their fears were mistaken.

But as they draw nearer, she realizes with a jolt that the soldiers are in such clear view beneath the trees because the branches have been charred leafless and black; the glowing ashes scattered on the ground are not campfires. The tents are gone; the few remaining tent poles have fallen crooked and bare, pointing to the sky with tattered scraps of blackened canvas fluttering from them like flags.

Then she catches her breath in a gasp, as she spots the long line of motionless shapes.

They have been laid out with respectful care, off to the side of the trampled battlefield, wrapped in their own cloaks. There are too many of them to get an accurate count at a glance, and a glance is all that she gets. At that moment, someone raises a shout of alarm; and several soldiers wheel their horses around and race toward them.

Hedwyn reins his own horse up short, staring at the carnage. He doesn’t seem to know what to do.

Fikani’s mind is awhirl with panic, struggling to think of a plan, any plan. They’re coming for them – he’s been seen with her – she could snatch him off his horse again – fly away with him – they could flee together – but where could they go – how can she be thinking of this – his squadmates are dead – how will he ever forgive her –

The first of the soldiers reach Hedwyn, shouting, furious – she hears his name, they know him, they know him – and then one of them roughly seizes his horse’s reins, and the other grabs his arm with a bitter curse and drags him from his saddle. Hedwyn doesn’t even try to fight; he crashes to the ground and lies there, dazed and unresisting, trapped at the edge of the yawning drop as the other soldiers close in around him.

He was meant to be on watch. He has failed in his only duty. Reeling with horror, Fikani realizes: they will never forgive him.

With a shriek, she opens her claws and dives toward the nearest rider. There can be no plan now, only sheer desperation to save him from whatever they intend to do to him, or die trying.

She never sees who loosed the barbed arrow; she doesn’t notice its rising arc until it punches through her wing, spinning her in midair. Fikani screams in shock, flails at nothing as her momentum carries her onward – over the edge of the cliff – and falls.

---

(His hands are bound roughly behind his back; flung face-down across a saddle, he cannot see where they are riding to and he does not care. He squeezes his eyes shut, but the images are impossible to block out. The row of silent bodies, illuminated by the last flicker of dying coals.

Too late. Too late.

He can’t stop seeing them, motionless beneath their bloodstained cloaks. He can’t forget the way her brilliant wings folded, stricken, her long hair streaming like a comet as she plummeted out of sight.

“And the Harp...you killed her?”

He flinches at the haughty tone of command, but his captor answers before he can speak.

“Shot her down, sir. The terrain was too rough to confirm the kill before we moved out. We saw no sign of a body.”

A snort of disgust. “Escaped, then, likely as not. Pity. I’ll mention it in the report.”

In his mind’s eye, Fikani falls, again and again and again.)

---

The pines of the Gorge do her one last service; they break her fall.

The favor is not a gentle one. Fikani crashes through layer after layer of branches, flipped one way and then another. The trees tear at her feathers and rip at her hair, rough bark scraping welts along her skin as she slithers past.

When her back finally strikes hard dirt, she lies stunned, ears ringing, for a very long time.

Breath seeps back into her body, bringing feeling with it, and pain. She struggles to sit up, and finds the arrow still sticking from her flesh; it’s passed clean through her wing. She snaps off the head with one twist of her armored talons, grimacing as she slides the shaft free, and pitches it away.

Painfully, she lurches into the air. Every inch of her hurts, but by resting where she can, in stages, she eventually reaches the top of the cliff again.

The ravaged camp is abandoned. They’ve stripped it bare of anything still useful before they rode away, and left only ashes and wreckage behind. Even the bodies have been carried off, though smears of blood remain on the trampled grass.

There is nothing left to save.

Hedwyn is gone.

Standing alone in the middle of the ruins, Fikani buries her face in her wings and sobs. She crumples to her knees and cries until her tears choke her and she makes wet strangled hiccuping sounds instead, shoulders jerking helplessly. She cries until there are no tears left in her body, and shudders back into stillness.

She can’t help him now. He is out of her reach, perhaps forever, and chasing after him will not help his case.

Let him be safe, she prays helplessly to the sky. Spare him from their cruel justice. I will never ask for anything again, only let him be safe.

Sore and swollen-faced and feeling a thousand years old, she lumbers back into the sky on bleeding wings and turns toward home.

---

It is far too easy to fall in with a returning flock of Harps. Her sisters were busy tonight; the flying wounded are still limping slowly north from their victories on the Bloodborder, in little groups of threes and fours. With their trap sprung, they have no further need for stealth. It is nestlings’ play to spot their bright plumage in the broad daylight.

They see her as well, and wait patiently for the straggler to reach them; they welcome her into the flock with shrieks of triumph; and, as they all fly north together, they regale her with tales of their success.

Last night, while she drowsed in her nomad’s arms, the Bloodborder exploded. The Commonwealth had drawn the bulk of their forces to the west for a massed attack, gambling on leaving their eastern flank thinly patrolled, scattered and vulnerable. Thanks to intelligence reports, the Highwing command was able to deploy their forces in a many-pronged strike under the cover of night.

The Commonwealth has lost their gamble. Entire squads are dead. It is a massacre.

If her sisters notice Fikani’s face going white and drawn as they speak, they chalk it up to the pain in her wing.

The Harp eyries in the foothills are bright with flashing wings that day, swooping and dancing in the air to the joyous clash of zills and drums. The chaos of the celebration covers Fikani’s shaky explanation of her whereabouts; no one is surprised to hear that she was among the scouts who responded to last night’s sudden call to fly south as reinforcements, or inclined to cross-check her account when there is drinking and dancing to be done instead.

Later in the day, as a surgeon is carefully treating her wing, she overhears that the raiding parties flew south through unguarded territory, along the canyons of the Gorge.

That night, she dreams that she is circling down to their old ledge, with the morning sun warm at her back. Hedwyn is lying in their nest; she recognizes the shape of him huddled under his cloak, though he should be awake by now. Puzzled, she goes to him and pulls back the cloth, and staggers at the overpowering coppery reek of fresh blood. Hedwyn rolls limply onto his back; his throat is slit wide open, blood soaking the pine branches under him. His beautiful eyes stare blankly at the sky.

Fikani wakes screaming, thrashing herself off her perch and onto the ground.

It is the first night of many.

---

Time passes, and Fikani’s wing heals. The pain of her wound fades into a memory, and her grief becomes something tucked away and hidden, like the scar beneath her feathers.

She is cleared for active service; she resumes her patrols. What else can she do? Who would comment on the way she forever scans the horizon, except to commend her? It is, after all, her explicit duty.

The months stretch into years. Fikani flies every reconnaissance mission offered to her. She crisscrosses the Bloodborder; she makes daring runs into enemy territory. There is nowhere she will not go for a little more knowledge, another glimpse of terrain. Officers comment on her single-minded determination, her keen eyesight, her zeal for gathering information.

Still, she will never make officer herself. There are marks on her record. She has been caught, more than once, showing soft-hearted mercy to the Outriders she harries, spending unnecessary effort to kill the horse and spare the rider. There is no good argument she can put forward to defend herself.

She accepts discipline when it is meted out, takes her stripes and returns to the sky. The Highwings are too desperate for good intelligence to allow her to do otherwise. Outright treason is a line she hasn’t crossed since the Commonwealth shot her out of the sky and tore her beating heart from her breast in one bloody morning, and the only one who could tell a soul is gone.

They warned her, once, that she would be tested. She was young, and she knew nothing; and now, she knows too much, and still not enough. She wants to crack open the world and demand its secrets, to swallow them until they blot out the howling loneliness inside her.

I’ll find you. I swear it...

Five years of searching go by, but despite all her efforts, her nomad is gone without a trace.

---

There is a revolution brewing in the Commonwealth. The signs are everywhere. Fikani has helped to gather them, listening as her wingmates pass along the information they’ve picked up, the things they’ve seen and heard.

The rumor passes her like a thousand other pieces of intelligence, dubious and unconfirmed. A rumor, and a name. The exile Volfred Sandalwood has found a way to send messages to and from the Downside.

Once she starts thinking about it, she can’t seem to stop. If Hedwyn is still alive somewhere, then the odds are good that he’s been exiled.

She has to know.

The revolutionaries sometimes send riders of their own through the plains near the Bloodborder, carrying esoteric messages scrawled on scraps of paper. They travel in twos or threes; never alone.

On the lucky night that one of her solo patrols finally takes her over a pair of riders, Fikani swoops down and lands at a safe distance, and waits. The revolutionaries trot their horses forward, circling her warily, hands held ready at their sword hilts. She takes off her helmet and casts it aside; unfastens her talon sheaths and kicks them into the grass beside it.

“Peace,” she says, firmly. “We’re all enemies of the Commonwealth here.”

“What do you want, Harp?” one of them demands, but the other rider holds up her gloved hand.

“Let her talk.”

Fikani takes a deep breath. “I want to speak to Volfred Sandalwood.”

“Sandalwood is in exile,” the hostile agent snaps. “What do you want with him?”

“I’ve heard he has a way of communicating from the Downside. I’m searching for someone.”

The female revolutionary looks thoughtful. “An exile?”

“Possibly,” Fikani allows. “I have plenty of information. We could...come to an understanding.” It’s worth her head even to offer – the Highwing Remnants have no alliance with this band of rebellious fledglings – but she is beyond caring, if it means knowing at last.

The woman trots her horse closer and leans down for a better look at her. “What’s your name, Harp?” she asks, not unkindly, all things considered.

“Fikani Shang,” she declares, and to her surprise, both riders visibly start and exchange a glance. The woman raises her eyebrows; after a moment, the man shrugs, as if to say, it’s up to you. Fikani watches the silent exchange, and wonders what it signifies.

“We’ll need to discuss it amongst ourselves,” the woman says, finally, “but I believe we can bring an associate of Sandalwood’s here to speak with you. Can you return here at dawn in, hmm...three days?”

It could easily be a trap, but then again, so could her own offer, for all they know. They will have to trust each other. Fikani nods. “I’ll do what I can.”

---

In the end, to meet them at the appointed place and time, she has to slip away from her assigned patrol for the first time in years. The danger of it thrums in her bones. She is well aware that every passing moment raises the risk of discovery.

It doesn’t matter. She has had three days to think, and she’s already decided what she’ll do, if this associate agrees to have her message sent; if Sandalwood sends back word of her nomad; if exile has not killed him already.

The trip down the River Sclorian can be survived, although it only goes in one direction.

This risk is nothing in comparison.

Still, when three riders in drab civilians’ cloaks appear on the horizon, she finds that she can hardly breathe. This may be her last chance to ever find out what happened to him. She cannot fail to persuade them. She has to know, finally, one way or the other.

They’ve clearly seen her approaching, for they rein in their horses and wait for her. By the time she lands, the lead rider is dismounting, boots striking the dust with a heavy thump.

Fikani takes off her helmet, shakes out her long hair and lifts her chin, shoulders squared and ready. This must be Sandalwood’s associate, the one she’ll have to convince. She inhales, mustering all her carefully-prepared arguments.

He turns toward her, and pushes back his hood with both hands. Red hair catches the dawn light, flaring like embers.

He is leaner than she remembers, weathered and scarred by time and hardship, and his gentle eyes are bright with tears; but Hedwyn is still beautiful.

Fikani lets out a wordless cry, and flings herself into her nomad’s arms.

---

 (He has found his way home.)

self-protection was in times of true danger
your best defense, to mistrust and be wary
surrendering, a feat of unequaled measure
and I'm thrilled to let you in
overjoyed to be let in in kind

and I salute you for your courage
and I applaud your perseverance
and I embrace you for your faith in the face of adversarial forces

and I support you in your trusting
and I commend you for your wisdom
and I'm amazed by your surrender in the face of threatening forces
that I represent