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I set up a base camp in the shadowy foothills beneath mount Fay and tend to my charts. I focus on keeping my parchment in the habitable zone where my oil lantern could not burn it and the whip-sharp wind would not tear it away. Such precious material doesn’t come cheaply. I turned my drawing, considered the angles, and remembered my master. My watchfire ahead, the hand on my back. What would she see in this place? A challenge, likely, or a story to be learned.
The child who calls herself Hornet appears, as she often does, from the silken spaces on the edge of my perception. She does not frighten me, but when the long needle she carries shines where previously there was nothing I find my claw poising over my belt and heel digging. Sometimes, when I look into the eyes of her mask, I wonder at the true ends of her strength and thank good fortune that she calls me an ally. Her eyes are different today, I note, rimmed with the tells of strife and strain.
“Is there any dismal corner of this place that you will let lie in obscurity?” Hornet wielding needle asks me.
“Poshanka! My wings are strong and rings sharp, so my quill won’t rest until either my master is found or Pharloom has been surveyed down to the last pebble.”
“Poshanka.” Her intonation is lacking, but I’d never heard her return the greeting. “Your aid as a scout has been indespensable to me.” Today she posesses a humility that rankles the hairs across my arms.
“I know that gait. Rest here a while before your ascent.”
“The beast that menaces the peak will answer to me. Waiting is a luxury I won’t afford it.” Elegant snowy threads whip out from beneath her cloak, wrapping about her form and binding fast. But her gaze forward is rusty still. A fierce red streak, she splits from my camp so quick that the gust almost sends a loose page tumbling into my lantern. She vaults up mount Fay’s mighty crags until the thick blowing snow hides her from me. I ponder wether she ever slows, ever tarries more than a moment.
I return to the comforts of pen scratching paper. Far above, the sound of ice splitting and beasts crowing echo down to me through the canyon, dampened by snow but still distinct. A spray of ice shards fall to the ground beside my shelter, and I brace for an avalanche. But the only things that tumble down are more ice, some crumbs of broken rock, and then Hornet herself. The impact makes a spider-shaped crater in the snow.
Hornet climbs out of the bank with a chipped mask, then leans for a moment against her weapon like a cane. Her gaze catches mine and retreats immediately. She shouts, and then a silk spell appears to heal her more egregious wounds, but some things evidently can’t be mended by magic. She flies off again into the squall; I count the moments before a scarlet-cloaked body returns by limply rolling down a slope and breaking into a messy landing. Breaths come quick and heavy as she climbs to her knees, trying and failing to steel herself. She shouts a word of healing, but all that it musters this time are a few lifeless strands that drift away in the wind. Her next word, almost certainly something rude, she expels under her breath. “Why do you study me so intently?” She asks.
I pack away my supples and give her my full focus. “Sit. Now. Garb worn threadbare keeps nobody warm, nor can a broken body protect itself.”
“I am not easily broken.”
“Whatever godstuff you are made from, Child Wielding Needle, it evidently possesses limits. A weapon so precious as a body should be maintained carefully and often.” After some moments of contemplation, she stands, heaves through the snow to my meager campsite and deposits herself on a cushion beside me. She stares a while into my lantern’s hot flame, offering no words. “Will you let me repair your mask?” I ask.
Hornet holds up a claw to study the extent of cracks radiating from a nick on the left edge of it. She draws breath, as if to mount a great argument, but the fight vanishes from her just as quickly. “Yes.” I find among my supplies a tin of lacquer, and patted the space beside me. Hornet brings herself closer, but still does not look me in the eye. “I’m afraid I can’t let you remove it.”
“Very well, but grant me some proximity to work by.” Hornet shifts nearer still, but not near enough; I tire of the hesitation and take her by the shoulders to lay her head across my knees, and this time meet no resistance. Her eyes float up to me and breaths measure out as if marking a predator’s behavior. I twist open the tin with a pop, scrape out a dollop with my claw and begin working it into the fissures of her face. My free claw rests against the side of her head for stability, and I find myself humming a half-remembered tune. It evokes my younger, rowdier years when my village’s medicine woman would chide me for presenting to her with a gash in my shin or tear in my wing too many times in the same week.
Minutes pass us by. I take a soft rag and buff away the excess with tight circles along the jaw of Hornet’s mask. Her stillness is unnatural, and she breathes in calculated reserve. “Cold and wet conditions like these necessitate more time to dry. Are you comfortable?” I had witnessed her steel gaze driving up from beneath the shadows of great enemies, and I’d watched her chase down dangers unthinkable to me with an assurance that acknowledged no possibility of failure. But now, she nods, so subtly as to feel like a secret. One skill I can see that Hornet has let rust is that of vulnerability.
I decide to lift my own mask off, and set it down beside the lantern. I breath deeply of the frost-rimed wind. “I hope you don’t think me crass; I sometimes find open air brushing my cheeks to clear my mind.”
“Might I ask what clutters it?”
“Pakaat. Merely because I expose my face to you does not mean I will expose my thoughts.”
“Very well.” Finally blinded by the tenderness, Hornet turns away from me and lays her cheek on my lap. It may be a lull in the onslaught of snowfall, a moment of mercy from the cutting wind, or nothing more than my own imagination, but the blanket of heat keeping the elements off our backs seems to intensify. “Will you sing?” She asks.
“Sing what?”
“The tune that floods the caverns when you’re near.”
“That is one half of a mourning cry. It carries little comfort.”
“Such contexts are foreign to me. I’ve come to find comfort in it.”
The melody is from a call and response sometimes practiced at funerals, where one mourner represents the deceased, and the others wish them a safe journey (My master chose it as a sign for us to summon one another by as a sort of morbid joke). It feels jagged and lopsided in my throat, but I indulge her still.
Whatever godstuff this Hornet is made from, she rests with me now as a mortal bundle of nerves and lymph wound tightly behind a cloak and mask. There’s solace to be taken in knowing even she can't feign immunity to such base stimuli as exhaustion and song. The bundle unspools a little; her breaths draw out long and deep. I let my hand rest on her head; the song repeats until my imagination loses itself in the practice, and I slip between waking dreams.
—
My eyes open, and see a ring-cuffed arm pulling a needle and thread through the torn edge of my cloak. My head still rests on Shakra’s knees; she’s put her mask back on but kept on humming her song. I decide I’ve indulged enough.
“Hold still, child.”
“Need I remind you who the elder is?”
Shakra chuffs, a sound I’ve come to recognize as amicable laughter. Conversation with her is a furious dance, a feigned duel where every movement is foreseen and considered. I settle on a cushion and allow her to finish mending. "What manner of beast made this wound?” She asks me.
“You don’t recognize something so singularly fearsome by the mark it leaves on its victim? I’m afraid I don’t have the words for a thing so terrible.”
“Do not speak down to me!”
“Are you certain you won’t break under the knowledge?” Shakra nods, and after a sufficiently overburdened pause I say, “My cloak caught on an icicle.”
She furrows at me for a few moments. *Chuff*. “I did not know you told jokes.”
“I’m quite out of practice.”
“Wielder of needle, spinner of silk, teller of jokes. Such a life you’ve lived.” She trims and knots a thread with her claw, then pats the corner of my cloak to say 'done'.
“Do be careful, if you mean to explore these cliffs one day. It was once occupied by Weavers who left dangers to fester in their absence.”
“D’stak. Careful is my nature. You, on the other hand, fling yourself up mountains with no wings and a metal stinger.” A nauseous itch flashes across me like ripples over a pond; then it is gone.
“The higher I climb, the greater becomes my respect for these pilgrims. Extremism can become an art, it would seem.”
“Everything we do in this life is an art, a practice. The current that runs between reticence and self-destruction is narrow and difficult to hold.”
“My respect for you grows greater as well, Child Wielding Rings.” Shakra preens, something I hadn’t known her to be capable of doing. I gather my wits and stand to face the squall that howls just outside.
“Before you return to your practice,” she interrupts, “oblige me with a few moments of meditation.” She straightens out her elegant carapace, shakes off some tension, and draws slow, heavy breaths. I follow suit as best as I can, being one who considers contemplative silence a horrible place to linger. I inhale all the lantern-warmed air that my body can hold and find my claw relaxing from a painful grip on my needle’s haft I’d been holding for so long that I’d become blind to it.
I nod to her, she returns in kind, and great curtains of snow welcome me back to my conquest up the cliffsides of Mount Fay.
—