Chapter Text
“I became a knight to save people and have adventures,” Alanna muttered to herself, on day four of chasing a bird. Because this was what her life had come to.
She gripped her charm, and looked hard at her quarry and hoped fervently that she was just having some sort of unfortunate hallucination. But no, the oversized hawk-thing she had been chasing along the Gallan border for four days was definitely dripping more Gift than any bird or most people had a right to.
She neither had nor wanted the skill to figure out what the spells were actually doing, but she figured that either some mage somewhere was using a bird as a spying tool, or they had turned themselves into a bird, for the same reason. Or, the City of the Gods was missing a student who had made some very bad choices, but they usually called Thom when that happened.
She had really hoped that catching it would be enough. There was a reasonable chance that, faced with the King’s Champion, an enemy mage would surrender, and drop the spell, and then either she’d have a human prisoner, or no need to keep the bird. But she had never had that sort of luck.
“If you have a reasonable explanation for this,” she told the thrashing animal, “just explain yourself and I can get back to what I was doing.”
The bird tried very hard to bite her hand, she was wearing gauntlets, but she took that as a no.
Alanna didn’t consider herself a particularly talented or enthusiastic falconer, but she could handle a trained hawk when she wanted to. The creature she was currently trying to restrain was twice the size of any hawk she’d had to deal with, definitely wasn’t tame and demonstrated a talent for working its beak into gaps in plate armour that leant credence to her enemy mage theory.
He was far to big to fit into a standard carrier. To make matters worse, as soon as he stopped trying to rip her hands off, he he immediately tried to take flight with enough force to risk pulling Dark Moon off balance.
So, feeling embarrassed, and furious about being shown up by a bird, she resorted to pinning his wings with magic and dragged him into the nearest village where she could find a cage to stuff him into.
“Begging your pardon Lady Knight,” said the blacksmith who sold it to her, “but this won’t be near big enough for that bird.”
“I just need to get him where I’m going,” she said, lashing the bird onto the perch with makeshift jesses, “its only for a few days. Its more comfortable than what I was doing before. I hope.”
So she spent the next day’s travel trying to ignore her passenger while he thrashed, and chewed on the bars, or his jesses. She’d expected to be deafened too, but he didn’t really shriek. The most he seemed to be able to work up was a frustrated sort of whistle. She supposed she should count her blessings.
She tried offering him pieces of the rabbit she caught even though he was a horrible, troublesome beast and probably a spy. She wasn’t heartless. But he was more interested at biting her fingers than eating. When she left the meat on the bottom of the cage anyway. He picked it up and threw it at her.
By the next day, he seemed to have given up, and alternated between huddling with his head under his wing and chewing disconsolately at his own feathers. It wasn’t ideal, and it didn’t make her feel good. But Alanna was just happy he’d stopped trying to bite her.
She caught up to Raoul and the Own just after that. The squad Raoul had with him did not have any trained falconers with them, but did have very thorough laugh at her bleeding hands and a supply wagon she could store the bird in until she could make him Thom’s problem. Assuming he hadn’t starved himself to death before they got back to Corus.
Which would be just typical of the week she was having.