A Gathering of Wings (2 page)

Today they are filling an order for the noble House of Goldmane, a series of spindles for a balcony railing. Brion lays a bar across the fire so that the center point is resting over the heart of the coals. When the bar has gone from red to yellow, Malora takes the tongs and removes it from the fire. Brion catches one end in the vise, then grabs the other end with the pliers and gives the rod several sharp yanks, so that the molten center of the rod twists like a grapevine. After they have quenched the rod and laid it out on the hearth to cool, Malora takes the knife out of the ashes and again dunks it in the tub before reheating it. They work like this all morning.

At this midday break Brion and Malora eat outside, their gloves turned inside out so the high sun will dry the sweat-damp
linings. They eat slabs of coarse bread slathered with goat cheese and date preserves.

“Your blade is well tempered now,” Brion tells her between bites.

Malora nods. “This afternoon, I will work on the tang.”

“I have been thinking,” Brion says casually, “that when you’ve finished your little knife … you will be done here.”

Malora lowers her bread and stares at Brion’s sooty face. “Why would you say that?” she asks. “I still have so much to learn. I must be some time away from qualifying for recognition.”

“Weeks, I’d say,” Brion replies. “You’re a quick learner. Or perhaps it is simply a case of ironwork being in your blood.”

Malora has told him her theory about her ancestor. Far from scoffing at her, Brion showed her some ancient tools that he had found buried in the sand floor of the shop, a small hammer and a primitive pair of tongs, along with three rusted, U-shaped pieces of iron: horseshoes. In the mural on the monument to the People slaughtered in the Massacre of Kamaria, the horses are sheathed in armor and their hooves are shod with iron that looks just like these relics. Not even Malora’s father, Jayke, a master horseman, could have imagined such a thing as shoes for horses. But then, there had been no forge and no ironworking in the Settlement. What objects of iron they possessed had come down to them from the ancestors.

“Your thoughts are very far away today, Daughter,” Brion says.

Malora clears her head with a quick shake. She knows not to bring up the subject of the Massacre. Now that the centaurs
know her, it shames them to think of what their ancestors did to hers. Instead, she says, “I was just thinking that after I have achieved recognition, whether it’s weeks from now or months, I will stay and work for you, in payment for your having taught me my Hand.”

“Custom doesn’t call for it,” Brion says, popping the last piece of bread into his mouth and chewing. “It’s a centaur’s obligation to teach the Hand he has mastered to whoever has gained the right to learn it. I have two young Flatlanders waiting to learn from me. As for you, you are expected to set up your own shop.” He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, smearing soot across his cheek. The joints of his legs creak as he straightens to a stand.

Malora envisions having her own shop, on the beautiful tract of land the Apex has granted her by the river. There, she will forge shoes for her horses, whose hooves—now that they are standing around in the riverbank grass and no longer traveling across the bush every day—are softening. She has noticed the same tendency in the horses in the other stables in Mount Kheiron. Out in the bush, her horses’ hooves were hard as rock, seldom brittle or flaky. Who would have thought that life in the bush actually gave horses healthier hooves? This causes Malora to wonder: Had the bush conditioned her in a similar way? While ironwork has made her hard of body, has life here in Mount Kheiron, the Home of Beauty and Enlightenment, made her soft of spirit? Would the old Malora have let herself be spooked by a few Night Demons? In the bush, Malora rarely had bad dreams. Waking life there was so fraught with real dangers, there was no room in her head for phantasms.

As if he has read her mind, Brion asks, “Do you miss the bush?”

Malora considers her years of wandering in the wild: protecting herself and her horses from predators, having to gather her food or kill it in order to survive. The bush had moments of stark beauty, but it was a day-to-day struggle and she withstood it alone, with only the horses for company. Here in Mount Kheiron, it isn’t the glorious golden domes that sustain her. Nor is it the delightful concerts, soft and beautiful clothing, and delicious meals. She values none of these as much as the company. And it isn’t just the company of her good friends, she thinks, but the sheer number of centaurs that surround her every day, the astonishing perfection of their half-horse, half-human bodies, and the music of their voices, talking, shouting, singing, declaiming, arguing, calling out to one another and to her.

“No,” she says to Brion, “I don’t miss it.”

Malora dusts the crumbs off her hands and returns to the shop, deep in thought. It seems to her that she has both feet as firmly planted here in Mount Kheiron as they are right now in the deep sand of the smithy floor. She no longer even makes daily forays into the bush as she once did with the Flatlander Neal Featherhoof to hunt for ostrich and impala and other wild game. First it was training for the Hippodrome that kept her from it. Now it is training for her Hand. The only thing she misses, living here, is time. In the bush, there was always time enough to do everything she needed to do—groom and treat the horses, fashion tools and weapons and apparel, gather leaves and roots and wild fruits, hunt, trap, skin, and dress the game—with plenty of time left over to do nothing but lie on
her back and stare at the clouds while the horses munched on grass. Here in Mount Kheiron, there never seems to be enough time to do everything she wants to do, and no time at all to lie in the grass and stare at the clouds. Civilization, she often thinks, is a greedy monster that gorges itself on time. Rousing herself from these thoughts, she goes to work on the tang of her little knife.

At the end of the workday, Malora climbs another seven tiers to the summit of Mount Kheiron, where Cylas Longshanks keeps his cobbler shop at one end of the Mane Way. She moves through streets thronged with centaurs. As always, the centaurs’ sense of style fills her with admiration. Males and females wrap themselves in a single piece of fabric that drapes over one shoulder, leaving the other bare, and winds around their bodies clear down to the horse tails, shielding from view their private parts. She can tell a Flatlander from a Highlander on sight. Flatlanders are wrapped in cruder fabrics and wear coarser boots. Many of them are painfully self-conscious about being seen in the Heights, where up until three months ago they seldom were even allowed to set foot.

Highlanders, being very much at home, carry themselves with poise, many of them holding beneath their noses squares of colored fabric sprinkled with scents created in Orion Silvermane’s alchemical laboratory. Orion says that scents have the
power to alter moods and to set the tone of society. But Malora cannot help but feel that these days some Highlanders use their scent cloths to mask the earthier smell of the Flatlanders. Trailed by their Twani attendants, the Highlanders pick their way through the crowds, lifting high their elegantly booted hooves, the females girded with belts and sashes. The Highlander females wear caps adorned with fresh flowers or beads or feathers or gems, while the Flatlander females swaddle their heads in drab scarves. But all the females in Mount Kheiron over the age of twelve, except for Malora, cover their heads in observance of the Seventh Edict regarding public decency.

Flatlanders and Highlanders alike greet Malora, the Otherian in their midst, with friendly smiles, hearty rounds of “Hail, Malora Victorious!” and the centaurs’ salutation—the right hand placed over the heart, then raised palm-out to her. She is so busy answering the salutations and cramming the proffered Maxes into her pouch that she nearly collides head-on with Zephele Silvermane.

As lovely as ever in a bud-green silk wrap with magenta kidskin boots, her ebony curls escaping from a pale pink cap embroidered with green butterflies, Zephele seizes Malora by the shoulders and cries, “What are you doing up here?” She takes Malora’s arm and steers her onto a side street.

“I’m on my way to see Cylas Longshanks,” Malora explains. “I’m going to ask him to make a cover for the handle of my knife. I finished it today. Would you like to see it?”

Malora starts to unwind the burlap bundle, but Zephele lets out a little shriek and says, “Why in Kheiron’s blessed name would I want to see it? It’s bad enough I have to hear you wax poetic about it every night.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to see it?” Malora asks teasingly. “It’s very sharp and very shiny.”

“I’m sure it’s a fearsomely vicious implement, my dearest darling,” Zephele says wearily. “I still don’t understand why Honus’s knife wasn’t sufficient for your needs.”

“It was a
butter knife
, which I sharpened on the stones of Honus’s terrace,” Malora reminds her. “A poor substitute for the real thing.”

Zephele has beautifully shaped, very expressive eyebrows, and right now they are arched imperiously. “Yes, well, I have no doubt you’ll put this new, improved weapon to ignoble use. Skinning my poor little defenseless squirrel friends and sawing off the noble heads of innocent impalas.”

“I’d probably use one of Neal’s axes or swords on the noble-headed impala,” Malora says, then adds tauntingly, “all that muscle and gristle, you know.”

Zephele looks faint. “Kindly dispense with the grisly detail.”

“Why are we standing in this alley?” Malora asks.

“Because I don’t want to spoil the surprise,” Zephele says, her eyes going crafty.

“What surprise?” Malora says.

Zephele flings up her hands. “If I told you, it would be a sorry surprise indeed, now wouldn’t it?” She gives Malora a speculative look from beneath her long dark lashes. “Well … if you insist, I will tell you, but only if you promise on Kheiron’s wise head not to let on to Orion that I told you, because you know how my brother loves to surprise you, and he would be exceedingly Put Out with me, not to mention Downright Cross, if he finds out I have spoiled it.”

Zephele takes a deep breath, and Malora is about to advise her not to spoil the surprise, but as usual Zephele is far out ahead of her. “Well! They are transporting the bed from Honus’s rooms down to your charming new cottage on the Flats with its perfect view of the paddocks and your glorious band of Ironbound Furies, not to mention the adorable Max the Champion. Very soon now, you will stop bedding down in that crude little tent like some savage, bush-bound nomad and move into your cozy new quarters, Malora Victorious.”

Malora smiles. “I was a savage, bush-bound nomad until recently, and I like that little tent,” she says. There is nothing crude about it. It is made of the finest silk, in the colors of the House of Silvermane. It is large enough to contain her sizable chest of clothing, a scrivening table, a cot with a down-filled mattress, and a blanket with a satin border. “And please don’t call me Victorious,” she adds. “Max is the real victor.”

Zephele shrugs gaily. “I’m sure the fetid old dear doesn’t mind sharing.” She catches her lower lip in her teeth and frowns, a shadow crossing her face. “I do hope they don’t damage the bed while transporting it. Did you know my dear father had that bed made from lilac wood especially for Honus? But Honus shunned such luxury and chose to sleep on a hard bench instead. Isn’t that just like our dear Honus?”

Honus the faun is their tutor and was Malora’s host for her first three months in Mount Kheiron. A hibe of goat and man, Honus is the only Otherian in Mount Kheiron apart from Malora. Were it not for his occasional visits down to the Flats to tutor her in reading and writing and mathematics, she
would never see him these days. She misses the daily contact with him.

“Lilac wood? I didn’t know that,” Malora says. It explains, she thinks, the streaks of pale lavender that swirled like mist across the dreams she had when she slept in that bed. It is the most comfortable bed she has ever known, with its mattress as soft as a cloud, its silken coverlet, and its dark blue canopy with golden stars forming pictures that shift when the breeze ripples the fabric. It was in that bed, after sprinkling the canopy with Breath of the Bush, the scent Orion had made especially for her, that she dreamed repeatedly of Sky, her stallion that escaped capture by the centaurs and ran off into the bush. Sleeping in the tent these last few months, there has been no Breath of the Bush and no dreams of Sky, only the Night Demons. Perhaps now she can return to the more pleasant dreams, which she has missed nearly as much as the horse himself.

“Honus is too generous,” Malora manages to say before Zephele claps her hand, fragrant with wild jasmine, firmly over Malora’s mouth.

“Remember, Malora Ironbound! On the head of the Wise One, you are sworn to secrecy,” Zephele hisses.

Malora removes Zephele’s hand and holds it briefly in her own. “Just like Orion swore
you
to secrecy?” she asks with a grin.

Zephele tosses her head and laughs merrily. “Ah, but you see the difference is, Orrie doesn’t expect
me
to keep a secret. Whereas we all hold you to the very highest standards.”

Malora sighs. What Zephele says is true, but it doesn’t
seem quite fair. Nor is it possible for her to be as good as the centaurs would like her to be, her little knife a case in point.

After waiting for the horse-drawn wagon carrying the bed to rumble past, Zephele releases Malora back onto the Mane Way. Zephele glides off in the opposite direction toward the House of Silvermane, saying over her shoulder, “Neal Featherhoof has an appointment with my father, and I’m going to arrange to bump into him by chance in the lower gallery.”

“Be nice!” Malora reminds her, but Zephele has already met up with another acquaintance and is deep in animated conversation, the only kind she knows. Zephele is, by her own definition, wildly infatuated with Neal, the captain of the Peacekeeping Force, but to Malora’s mind has an odd way of showing it.