Sword Quest Page 8

  Wind-voice swallowed his gasp—the feathers had that familiar purple gloss. They were Stormac’s.

  “Good. Go join your friend in Sky Land.” Ignoring the soldier, the Ancient Wing jumped from his throne and struck Wind-voice’s neck with his left wing. His claws sank into flesh.

  I won’t cry in front of Maldeor, Wind-voice thought, throbbing with pain.

  “Your eyes will rot,” Maldeor’s grip tightened. “The dark magic of my wing will rot them. You cursed crossbreed and your lot, always wrecking my plans.” He thrust Wind-voice at his soldiers. “You’re too lowly for me to kill. But don’t worry. You’ll still die in agony.”

  All the while, Ozzan, the blacksmith toucan, watched through a swollen, blue-lidded eye. He felt that the white bird was quite brave to stand up to Maldeor. He himself had been tortured in all manners imaginable. They beat him, they hung him upside down by his feet, and they poured chili pepper oil onto his face. Last night a sleeping draught had been forced on him. He had tried to clamp his beak closed, but in the end the potion had trickled down his throat and he had slept. Unknowingly, he must have murmured in his sleep about Kauria, about Pepheroh, and about the sword. He knew this because later, when he had woken, Maldeor had jeered in his face and thanked him in his sarcastic gracious manner for what he had revealed. What if Maldeor really captured the sword!

  Somehow, Ozzan’s heavy heart felt lighter as he watched Wind-voice.

  That evening, as the rain stopped and the sky turned red, Wind-voice was marched out to a log and chained to it. More soldiers came, dragging the faltering toucan. Wind-voice’s vision had worsened. He could barely make out the bird’s closed eyes and a bleeding whip mark that had nearly cut his face in half. The toucan did not struggle in the least as he was tied next to Wind-voice along the log; he simply laid his huge beak to one side. Maldeor watched, motionless, as his soldiers lifted the log and plopped it into the river.

  Neither prisoner spoke as the log drifted slowly. Very soon their feathers were wet all the way through. However, at the moment the archaeopteryxes were out of sight, the blacksmith grew animated and started to gnaw at Wind-voice’s rusty chains. Whenever the log bobbed and turned, one of them held his breath as he was submerged in the water, but the toucan did not bother to stop his work.

  “Why are you trying to free me and not yourself?” Wind-voice gasped to the blur of black and yellow.

  “You must be free. You must.”

  Rocks began to appear, jutting out of the river and slicing the water like knives. Every time their log hit one, they spun in treacherous circles. Then the current picked up speed, and Wind-voice felt as if the water had washed away all his thoughts. There was a roar in the distance, the sound not of a battle, as he thought at first, but of a waterfall.

  “Free yourself while there is time!” Wind-voice cried.

  The toucan shook his head. “Don’t worry about me. It doesn’t matter anymore. Maldeor seeks the sword, the one from my homeland, Kauria…” His eyes clouded with shame. He rasped on: “I told things, under torture and the effects of a sleeping potion. I don’t know how much I spoke…. But you—I can feel it, looking in your eyes—you can still stop him.”

  The rushing sound came nearer, nearer.

  “No! A few seconds more, a few seconds more…” Ozzan’s beak had worn away a tiny slash in the dull iron, but the link still held firm. In his desperation he spat out the chain and rammed at it with the tip of his beak.

  The log shot forward. A rush of air gushed all around them. Below came the terrible roar.

  “Stop Maldeor!” Ozzan croaked. Using the last ounce of his life strength, he reared his powerful old neck back and brought his beak down on the chains that bound Wind-voice just as he used to beat iron on his anvil. Only this time he was not forging metal but forging hope.

  Ewingerale pulled the dark hood of his vest over his bright red head.

  “They haven’t noticed us yet,” Fleydur said grimly. He pulled off his bells, muffled them quickly in a wad of moss, and put them into his knapsack. Together the eagle and the woodpecker put distance behind them as they skirted the desert and bore on toward the lands of the Forests Battalion.

  The dry, stony land slowly turned green, and they glimpsed a river in the distance. As they crossed the river, the ground gave away to a shaded valley waving with bracken. A rocky hill rose in the distance. Fleydur soared higher into the air and called for Ewingerale to cling to his back. A tailwind carrying the sounds of rattling yelps told them that they had been spotted by the archaeopteryxes, but Fleydur didn’t seem the least bit worried.

  When he was above the rocky hill, he snagged a thermal updraft and, spreading his wings so that all of the primary feathers at his wing tips were separated, spiraled high into the sky. The archaeopteryxes below, yammering away, flapped furiously in pursuit, but their crooked wings could not catch the wind as well as Fleydur’s did, and their tails were heavy. They were not built for long, soaring flights. Fleydur grinned as arrows and spears shot at them by the archaeopteryxes fell harmlessly back to earth. Ewingerale was struck silent by the beauty of the vastness, high in the crystal cloudless sky, where their only companion, apart from each other, was the sun.

  More powerful winds that existed only at high altitudes carried them along, and, selecting a quick gust that bore them briskly seaward, they flew onward, chasing the sun. The great golden ball flushed red in anger at this pursuit and sank faster.

  As evening bore on, Ewingerale and Fleydur saw a slice of something glittering along the horizon. Above them, the sky bled through banners of stratocumulus clouds. All of a sudden they soared over a fringe of pale white beach that clung to a shore, and then the sea welled up, worried and wrinkled, beneath them. The two shadows that they cast onto its surface were pounded to pieces by the waves.

  When the sun finally drowned in the ocean, the stars flickered to life.

  It would take five days and nights of continuous flying before they reached the other shore. When they arrived, they would be surprised at the sight of the White Cap Mountains.

  When they arrived, they would be surprised that the Waterthorn tribe was waiting for them.

  When they arrived, they would be even more surprised at what the robins had to say.

  One of the hardest things to break is the tie of family.

  —FROM THE OLD SCRIPTURE

  11

  THE GREEN GEM AND THE PURPLE GEM

  Wind-voice’s mind was taking him on strange flights. In his imagination, he saw heavy eyelids hiding tortured yet triumphant eyes, the slight nod of a familiar head, that sincere, dangerous, glittering smile.

  And he saw again, with a cold rush of air into his very bones, Yin Soul, waiting, against a background of candle-studded rocks and leaping flames. Had Yin Soul offered Maldeor the same thing he had offered Wind-voice? Was that what the archaeopteryx had meant when he spoke of his mentor? When nobody understood or cared for Maldeor, had Yin Soul pretended to, and seized him?

  Wind-voice’s eyes slowly opened and he sat up. His vision was even worse. The evil magic from Maldeor’s batlike wing was working. “The toucan…the blacksmith…I have to thank him; he broke my chains—”

  He saw a dark blur, and a voice came from that direction. “The poor bird’s dead. I don’t know where Fleydur and Ewingerale are. Wind-voice, what did they do to you?”

  “Wanted me to help him…the Ancient Wing, the new one, not Hungrias. He believes in our legend of the hero. He knows about the sword.” Wind-voice paused as a headache drummed on the inside of his skull. “And the legend, more than ever, is real. That toucan, he is a blacksmith of Kauria…” He died, but he saved me, Wind-voice thought, and tears fell from his eyes, clouding his vision even more.

  “What? Maldeor seeks it?” a new voice shouted, dripping with horror. Wind-voice looked toward a blur of brilliant red.

  “That’s Kari,” a dark bird whispered in his ear.

  Wind-voice blinked hard to clear h
is vision. “Stormac? They said—I thought you were dead! How did you find me?”

  “I was sure you had gone to Sky Land too,” Stormac said, perching near Wind-voice’s bed of cushiony grass. “But I found the parrots, and they helped me search for you. We discovered you, flung onto the grass on the bank, the body of that poor toucan swirling in the pool at the bottom of the waterfall.”

  Kari, however, was incensed to hear of Maldeor’s plan. “Dead? We’ll all be shining bones, soon enough, with Maldeor! How could he be still alive? I never thought Maldeor knew about the sword!” Kari’s voice rose above the scream of cicadas around them. “Do you know if he’s found any of the remaining Leasorn gems?”

  “The yellow gemstone of the kingfishers,” Stormac said, thinking back. “He must have that one. But we kept the red Leasorn gem from him. I don’t think he has any more.”

  Wind-voice was intrigued, however. “Remaining Leasorn gems? What do you mean?”

  “I thought you knew. You must know.” Kari’s eyes were round. “But no—it happened two years ago. There was one gemstone, more famous than the other ones because the Avish words on it were not a riddle at all. It was with a tribe of doves, and it told of Hero’s Day. Surely you’ve heard of that…it’s next spring.”

  Wind-voice tried hard to focus on Kari. My mother is a dove! he thought.

  “The tribesbirds were nearly all slaughtered by Maldeor and his soldiers; the gem somehow disappeared. He lost Prince Phaëthon, too. That was why Hungrias punished him.”

  “Do you think that’s why Maldeor hates me?” Wind-voice asked.

  Nobird knew what to say.

  Kari continued, “We know the archaeopteryxes wanted the Leasorn simply because Hungrias likes beautiful gems. Now I suspect Maldeor knows about the hero’s sword. Birdkind is in even greater peril. He’ll be crazed looking for it, and with his army he will be unstoppable.” Kari sighed. “At least the green Leasorn is safe for now.”

  Kari cupped something in her claws. They all leaned toward it. Wind-voice tried to squint through his still-fuzzy vision. To his surprise it cleared, and he saw that it was a stone she held, and in that stone were two figures flying over something vast—perhaps it was an illusion. Then he blinked, and miraculously his vision was restored.

  “Peace opens the door,” Wind-voice read excitedly, tracing a claw over the carvings on the gem.

  “We parrots and macaws feel sad,” Kari said. “We live so long, and so we witness far more cruelty. Before the archaeopteryxes, four-winged dinosaurs plagued us. Will these times ever end? Our gem itself seems to have some magic. It can help heal the wounds of birds who go near it.”

  It healed Maldeor’s dark magic, Wind-voice thought, awed.

  “…But it is too feeble to heal all the troubles of our times, when thousands of birds all over the territories hurt each day. ‘Peace opens the door.’ Whatever it means, I wonder, when will peace come?”

  Nobird spoke for a while, and then Stormac grumbled, “I don’t believe this. Besides, what use are these clues? Nobird can understand them!”

  Wind-voice ignored the question. “Sooner or later, I must start off again. I don’t know where Ewingerale and Fleydur are…but will you come with me, Stormac?”

  “Yes, of course. We can make our way back to Fisher and the herons.”

  “No, we can’t.” Wind-voice’s voice was low. “We have to find more of these stones.”

  “What?” The myna exploded. “Lore, legend, myth. Dealing with these foolish things brings nothing but trouble. I care about now. For our lives and futures. If these special gemstones grew like a bunch of grapes on a vine, then fine. But they don’t!” He pounded the floor with his staff. “How in the world are you going to find another one? Let me guess: Wander around like a beggarbird, with the archaeopteryxes on your tailfeathers? You are going mad, aren’t you?”

  A silence followed. Wind-voice stared into Stormac’s bright brown eyes. Then the myna looked away. Wind-voice looked down at the green gemstone and saw his own reflection: Partway into a molt, he had bald patches and uneven sprouts of new feathers among his splotchy, burnt feathers. Bumps on his head. Scabs. Bloodshot eyes. Yes, he looked nothing short of mad.

  A memory of Fleydur’s voice, something the eagle had mentioned, came to him. He raised his eyes and whispered, “Skythunder…”

  Morgan, the eagle chieftain who once had been able to smash rock into dust, was terribly ill.

  Many thought it was the worries of leadership, the tension of watching the archaeopteryxes expand their territory, that had made him fall sick. Medicine birds were called, and they checked his tongue and looked at his eyes. They gave him dandelion tea, fresh herbs, dry herbs, hairy ones, pungent ones. But no matter what medicine Morgan took or how much he rested, he grew steadily worse.

  Only Forlath knew that his father was heartsick for his eldest son.

  Morgan had tried to push thoughts of the headstrong young eagle out of his mind since he had disowned him. Yet his grief gnawed at his heart.

  “They don’t call these mountains Skythunder for nothing,” Stormac said, awed. Wind-voice and Stormac, after weeks of recovery and rest, had set out for the homeland of Fleydur.

  Each peak loomed up to greet them. Delicate wisps of purple mist crowned the ledges. The slopes were sleek with ferns and violets, and pine trees linked branches as they hailed the sky.

  When the two companions reached the foothills, an eagle swooped down from a high ledge, screaming, “Who are you? If you seek passage to the tundra beyond the mountains, follow that stream. It will lead you to a pass through the mountain range. Other than that, no strangers are allowed here!”

  “We do not seek passage,” Wind-voice said clearly. “We wish to find Morgan, king of the eagles.”

  “If you are sent here to represent the archaeopteryx empire, the chief wishes you well, but he cannot see you at present,” said the eagle wearily.

  “No, we come in the name of Fleydur, a bird of the Skythunder tribe,” Wind-voice answered.

  “We do not know him.” The eagle landed on a dead pine tree. He shifted his weight from one set of talons to the other, so the branch shook. Stormac looked at Wind-voice, confused.

  The sentry eagle turned and let out a series of short screams. Another eagle, larger, somehow familiar, swung into view. He landed on the same branch, and his gaze pierced the two travelers.

  Then, though it almost broke his heart, Forlath said quite slowly and deliberately, “There is no Fleydur.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Stormac burst out. “We met him, we know him, we fought alongside him!”

  Forlath shook his head again. “The bird that you name—he does not exist.”

  Wind-voice froze and then tried again. “Well, whoever our friend was, we shared many a song together. I think he would like us to give you a gift, like gifts he always gives to birds around him.”

  Forlath’s heart was racing. It took all his training in dignity and courtesy to stop happy tears from spilling out of his great brown eyes.

  “It is something that thousands of birds would like, something that some birds would even die for,” Wind-voice murmured. Stormac shot him a worried glance. He smiled reassuringly and continued. “Its luster outshines the best of diamonds; its durability is greater than iron or stone. It is so valuable that nobird has ever dared to place a price upon it. The most precious thing in the world!” He placed his claws in the feathers over his heart and reached out, his claws closed over something. He uncurled them slowly.

  “Love.” He smiled gently over his empty, open claws.

  “He still loves us! Oh, Fleydur, my brother,” Forlath said, his face collapsing in a confusion of sadness and joy. The mask of dignity faded, and Wind-voice found himself looking at the same kind eyes that he remembered from Fleydur’s face.

  “Come, do come. Tell me more of the elder brother of mine. I haven’t seen him for so many seasons.” The eagle prince led them to Sword Mountain, the hig
hest peak in the range.

  Morgan, the eagle king, was astounded when his son, Forlath, laughing and crying, brought in a myna and a strange white bird, and was even more so when he heard of their adventures with archaeopteryxes and gemstones and with Fleydur. He sat up straighter on his perch, and a wrinkle in his heart softened.

  For the first time that day, the old eagle spoke. “Yes, indeed, we have a gem, like the macaws, the robins, and the herons. It is purple, like our mountains.” He gestured, and Forlath brought out a chest. The eagle prince opened it, and the stone within seemed to be the embodiment of majestic pride and dignity.

  “And see here,” Morgan continued, tracing a talon over a carving. “The Avish script.”

  “‘Look into the eyes to choose your path,’” Wind-voice read carefully.

  “That’s right!” Morgan exclaimed, looking glad and surprised that another bird recognized Avish. “Whatever it means, though, I don’t know. But I know one thing.” Morgan closed his eyes, and then he opened them again to look at Wind-voice. “Perhaps it’s time for a change. You tell me of troubles, of war, of darkness, of tyranny. I was wrong to merely watch and do nothing, to forbid our youngsters to go out into danger. If the tale of the hero’s sword is true and this new emperor, Maldeor, can lay his claws upon it…” He looked at Forlath. “There are many things that I’ve done that I regret, things I believed were for the best. I hope we can still help.” He nodded. “Yes, it is time to let the world know what our standards are. We value family. We defend one another, and without a doubt it can be said that the birds out there, suffering, are our family too!”

  “Aye!” Forlath was grinning widely.

  “Wind-voice, Stormac,” the chieftain said, “I wish you the best of luck. Maldeor indeed must be stopped. I know one thing that may help you: There are gemstones in the south.”