The Wicked Day (30 page)

“You’re flying!” yelled the ghost. It sounded like it was perched on Jute’s back, but he was not sure. He could not see the ghost. “You’re flying. And about time, if I may say so.”

The hawk slid into place beside him. His outstretched wing almost touched his fingertips.

North.

I’m flying!

Ribbons of clouds streamed past them. They flew blind in gray mist, water shooting past them in a hundred thousand stinging droplets. And then burst up into the purity of the clear blue sky. Blinding light. Sunlight shone on the bird’s feathers. Glossy black like wet stone. The air was clean and cold and scarcely seemed breathable, so thin was it.

Of course. We were ever waiting for you. The sky, the wind, and me.

They flew up the coast of Hull. The sun shone on the sea flashing below them, shining on the spray crashing against the rocks. The smell of salt filled the air. Far out to sea, a ketch beat its way north. Its sails were taut and bellied with wind, as white as a gull’s wings. But soon it was only a speck on the horizon behind them, for the hawk and the boy flew as fast as the wind.

It seemed as if his flesh frayed into nothingness as he flew, faded into the insubstantiality of air and then back again to plain, normal flesh. He could look through his hands; he could note the faint outlines of them but then see right through their blur to the sky and earth beyond. The change did not disturb him. It felt right. It was right. He laughed out loud.

The wind
, said the hawk in his mind.
You are the wind.

They neared the town of Lastane in a driving, slashing rain. The sky had gone gray and the sun was lost high in its own solitude of light, somewhere beyond the clouds. Jute could smell woodsmoke in the rain and he was aware that he was hungry and cold and wet. The hawk chuckled.

Old things, fledgling. Old needs. As you grow and learn, you shall discover that such complaints of the flesh need be no longer heeded. My old master once wandered north, beyond the abode of the ice giants, and tarried with the winds there, talking of snow and ice and the frozen night. A full year and more, he was, and did not taste food or sleep or warmth.

Well, I’m not him, and I’d like a bite to eat.

Lastane was much smaller than Hearne. It huddled in shades of gray stone at the mouth of a river that rushed out into the sea, turning the bay there into a roiling mass of muddy water. Further out, waves crashed against a breakwater guarding the bay. The tallest roof in Lastane belonged to an old manor perched on a rise overlooking the wharfs. Smaller houses crowded up against it, as if its taller eaves would somehow protect them from the rain and weather. Smoke streamed up from chimneys, whipped away by the wind into the gray sky.

The manor
, said the hawk.

Why, that isn’t a castle at all.

Most of the dukes are nothing at all like the regent
, said the hawk in some amusement.

They came to rest on the steps of the manor, blurring down out of the rain and in a swirl of wind that flung raindrops so hard against the front door that it sounded like the pounding of dozens of tiny fists. Jute walked up the steps, the hawk balancing on his shoulders. The door opened and the doorkeeper looked out.

“Can I be helping you, lad?” he said.

Maernes. Duke Maernes.

“I have a message for Duke Maernes.”

“Very well,” said the man mildly. “He’s just finishing lunch. Come in. You look as if you’ve taken a plunge into the sea.”

The doorkeeper let Jute in, closed the door against the rain, and disappeared. It was warm inside. He was standing in a hall. He wasn’t sure how a duke’s house should look. Whatever it should look like, he would not have imagined it would look like this. A pair of worn hip boots stood in comfortable collapse in one corner, a fishing pole and wicker bag leaning alongside them. A pegged board ran the length of one wall, sporting an assortment of walking sticks, umbrellas, and cloaks. On the opposite wall hung a painting of an old woman. She looked out on the shabby room with good humor, her gray hair wound around her head, her blue eyes snapping with life.

“My wife, Maeve.”

Jute turned to see an old man standing in one of the doorways. He was thickset and sturdy and as gray as the stone of the town. He limped forward and stood beside Jute. They both inspected the painting.

“She looks nice,” said Jute, not sure what to say.

“Aye, she was. Nicest thing ever happened to me. Caught a cold one winter, three years back. The wind blows off the sea something fierce. Nothing can stand before it. That was the end of my duchess.” He shook his head and smiled. “Still, we had our years and I’m nothing but grateful. Tush, lad, I’m an old gander to be maundering on like this. What’ve you to say? Are the yellowfin running again off the cliffs?”

“No, sir. It’s not that. I’ve come—”

“You look familiar, lad.” The old duke stared at him. His eyes flicked to the hawk and widened, as if he had just seen him for the first time. “And a black hawk. Now that’s a rare sight. Only one I’ve seen before.”

“Sir, I’ve a message from Owain Gawinn,” said Jute, stumbling a bit on the words. “He invokes the writ of sovereignty. He bids the duchies remember their old allegiance to Hearne and send what soldiers they can.”

“A black hawk,” said the duke, still gazing at the hawk and looking as if he had not heard a word Jute had said. “Now I remember. Not twenty years old I was. Hadn’t been duke but a few months. Wind been blowing out of the east all fall, and then one day it changes. He came walking into town with a black hawk on his shoulder. The wind lord.” His gaze switched back to Jute. “I remember you now. You were at the ball. With Lady Callas. When the wind arose.”

“He is the wind,” said the hawk. “He is the guardian of the wind.” His voice sounded harsh in the quiet hall.

The duke did not say anything for a while, but then he nodded slowly.

“I should’ve known. There was a different feel to the rain this morning, and I could tell the land was waiting for you, lad. I know my duchy well, well enough to tell when one of the anbeorun come calling at my door. You do us honor.” But the duke sighed as he said the words.

They left shortly after that, with the old duke standing in the cold rain at the top of the steps. But even before they had lifted above the roofs, with the wind rushing to meet them, the duke stumped back into his house, voice raised. Hull would ride south to Hearne. Old allegiances would be honored on the strength of Owain Gawinn’s word. And on the strength of the word of the guardian of the wind. It was only until they were high above the clouds that Jute realized he had forgotten about lunch. It didn’t matter. He no longer felt hungry.

The weather grew worse as they flew farther north. The sky darkened to nearly black, blowing with snow and towering with clouds. The air was so cold that it seemed he would surely die from it, that his lungs would freeze with the next breath. But this did not happen, of course. The cold merely blew through him and he found it was no better or worse than sunlight on a summer day. Jute discovered that he delighted in the fierceness of the sky. The blasts and blows of the wind, the splinters of ice arrowing down through the gloom, the clouds boiling and massing together on the howling currents of the wind, the snow lashing against his face in shattered bits of flakes. The height and depth of it all. It was beautiful, marvelous, enthralling. He could stay up in the sky forever. Flying north through the storms. Learning the different voices of the winds until they were as familiar as his own. Forgetting the earth.

Aye. It would be easy enough.
The hawk shot past him, snowflakes tumbling from the tips of his wings.
And that is a danger.

Far below them, the coast road meandered along the cliffs above the sea. The Scarpe plain stretched away into the distance, looking just as vast as the sea itself. They passed over a valley opening out onto a rocky beach and a bay beyond.

“Look,” said the ghost. “The Stone Tower! Except. . . except. . .”

Except there was no Stone Tower.

Jute could not see a single sign of the tower. The cliff where the tower had stood appeared bare and lifeless, falling away to the meadow below—the meadow that they had run through toward the boats and the sea, with the wihht coming after them like a black cloud blowing along the shore.

“It’s gone,” said the ghost. “It should be right there. Right against the cliff. Past the eucalyptus trees. Er, you don’t mind if we stop and look about, do you?”

“We don’t have the time,” said the hawk.

“Sorry,” said Jute.

“Never mind,” said the ghost sadly. “It was only my home. That’s all. Nothing important.”

Further north, they veered inland. The Scarpe plain rose up to a series of hills, rough with brambly scrub and broken by outcroppings of stone. The hills ascended in leaps and bounds until they leveled out into a moor. It was a wild, lonely-looking country. They were well into Thule by now, according to the hawk, the duchy that lay between Hull to the south and Harlech to the north. They flew over a herd of cattle strung out across the moor, dotted between the occasional pool of water, oblivious to the rain and the snow, heads down, grazing on the withered grass.

Averlay is the only town in Thule
, said the hawk.
The duke has a house there but he is most likely in the country.
The hawk chuckled.
Which means all the rest of Thule.

Then how’ll we find him? Will we have to fly back and forth until we spot him? That could take days.

I will find him easily enough. You shall learn how, given time, but dukes are unusual people. They’ve the land in them, somehow, and the land will always point the way, if a duke does not mind being found. And I think that Galaestan will want to speak with us.

The day darkened toward twilight. There was no evidence of the sun, and the sky could only offer gray clouds and the rain and snow that, more and more, was becoming just snow. Jute flew along in a bliss of awareness—the wind, the tumble of snowflakes past him, the slight variations of colors and textures of the moor far below, the ever-changing shapes of the clouds as they surged across the sky—all of this existed for him in vivid detail. Even a field mouse nosing about in the grass was visible to him. But it was not just his eyes that had sharpened; his mind seemed able to reach out around him, to smell and touch and taste and hear with such clarity that it was almost as if the sky and the wind and the weather were right inside his mind.

A flock of geese winged their way toward them. They veered abruptly at the sight of the hawk, but then straightened out again in renewed confidence. Jute could hear them chanting as they flew.

South by south, lads! So we fly

from winter’s blast and snowy sky.

Lake on lake, ho! We shall feed

on little trouts and tender weeds.

Little trouts, ho! And tender weeds!

The geese were past them, wings beating slowly and powerfully. They bent their necks to Jute as they passed, but they did not pause in their flight or their chant. Even when they had diminished to specks against the gray sky and the falling snow, the faint call of their chant could be heard.

Little trouts, ho! And tender weeds!

“Trout, I understand,” said the hawk. “But weeds? Disgusting.”

“What’s that?” said the ghost. He did not understand the language of geese and had only heard what sounded like a cacophony of passing honks. “Trout? Are we going fishing? How peculiar.”

And then Jute could smell woodsmoke in the air. It was faint, blurred almost into nothingness by the wind, but woodsmoke nonetheless. He looked about eagerly. The snow swirled down under the blast of the wind. But then he saw the fire far below them. It was still far off, and it winked in the gloom like a friendly eye.

“There’s a fire down there!” he called to the hawk.

“I daresay that’s where we want to go.”

The fire burned in a hollow, sheltered by a thicket of bramble and a tumble of tall standing stones leaning on each other in weary decline. Snow lay piled in a drift against the other side of the brambles and provided an excellent break against the depredations of the wind. Two horses stood patiently, scraping at the snow with their hooves and cropping the withered grass they uncovered. A length of canvas stretched over a pole frame provided shelter behind the fire. Jute landed in a swirl of snow, the hawk settling on his shoulder. An old man looked up from the fire. He was crouched there, gutting a rabbit, flicking the entrails from his knife into the flames. He was a gaunt, rawboned-looking man.

“Sit down by the heat,” he said. “Rabbits’ll be ready in no time.”

He finished gutting the rabbit and then added it to a spit already heavy with several other carcasses. The fat hissed in the fire. A young man walked out of the darkness, carrying an armload of wood. He dumped it by the fire and turned as if to go again.

“That’s enough,” said the old man. “Ain’t all that cold. I ain’t an old woman.”

The young man grinned, shrugged, and sat down.

The old man turned the spit.

“I reckon I know you,” he said to the hawk.

“Duke Galaestan,” said the hawk, nodding. “It’s been many years. And your son, no?” The bird hopped down from Jute’s shoulder and settled under the shelter of the canvas.