The rope snapped beneath Jaetheiri's knife. Without its support, she was thrown upside down, hanging only from the hooks on her boots.
She stared down at Yethyr, her scarred and startled face alarmingly near. “Hold on!” she hissed.
“Me?” Yethyr was incredulous, gripping his rope that now only had Jaetheiri’s swinging body for tenuous support. “You’re the one about to fall!”
Yethyr looked further up, relieved to find that Mandorias and Kettir were still on the cliff. Kettir must have shot his arrow, splitting the rope below before it could drag them off the cliff as it had done to Nisari.
Nisari.
He looked toward the windsinger to find that she was climbing the very rope that had pulled her with the roc. Ruzar was still in its beak and alive as far as Yethyr could tell. His bones did not sing of deathsong.
Nisari seemed determined to make the roc's bones sing first. She clamored onto its back and unsheathed her warfang, gleaming red in the morning light.
She stabbed; the roc shrieked, writhing and spinning to try to unseat her from its back.
Nisari clung on and swung again. Clearly, she was not considering what would inevitably happen once she actually did slay the bird. She didn’t have the horn she had used to get airborne during the burning of Leena’s Wind.
If the roc died, she and Ruzar would fall.
No, when the roc died. That was not in question. Already, Yethyr could see the sprays of the roc’s blood from where he hung from the cliffside.
He was going to lose his last hope at defeating the Datreans.
No. Yethyr rallied. There was still hope so long as the roc died while it was still near him.
The Prince thought fast. He did not dare command it to die, for fear his command would hit Nisari and Ruzar as well.
“Wesed, you remember what you sang last night?”
“Of course.” Wes’ disembodied voice came from the sack below him. “That’s a stupid quest—”
“Repeat it when I conduct you to exactly as I dictate it.”
“Okay?”
“Kettir,” Yethyr shouted up the cliff. “Kill the bird!”
The archer did not question the command. He fired another arrow, and Yethyr heard the moment the roc’s bones became deathsong.
At that moment, he unleashed Wes upon the bird’s spirit, using my maker’s voice just like he did the pendant or his bone armor.
As an instrument of his will.
Except Wes was willing and aware of what was being done through him, granting his voice more precision than any instrument Yethyr had ever used.
He sang a new composition. It was a modified version of what we had sung together the night before, music of talon and tension, music of grip.
Through Wes, Yethyr took control of the bird, and it dived toward the cliff, about thirty feet below him. He forced it to sink its talons into the cliffside and stay, not crash lifelessly on the rocky ground below with Nisari and Ruzar in tow.
“Hold it there, Wesed, and try to keep the pressure in its beak as light as you dare. Enough to hold Ruzar, but not enough to crush him.”
Wes made no acknowledgement, but kept on singing.
“Should we climb down to you?” Kettir shouted from further up.
Yethyr didn’t like that idea. Mandorias and Kettir were nearly at the top; there was no reason to jeopardize their near success by forcing them to waste their dwindling energy climbing back the way they had come and then do it all again with a wounded and heavy Ruzar in town.
Especially if there was a way to do it himself.
“Keep going!” Yethyr commanded. “We will follow you in a moment.”
Mandorias obediently continued the climb, and Jaetheiri frowned down at her prince. “Now what? Nisari’s hanging from a bird; I’m hanging from bird hooks; you’re hanging from me. What exactly are we supposed to do?”
“I’m going to handle it,” Yethyr said firmly. “Just don’t fall.”
Jaetheiri looked unconvinced, but didn’t argue.
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Nisari clung to the back of the dead roc, baffled at its sudden unnatural stillness, but when that confusion faded, she was angry. “I had it handled!” She shouted up at Yethyr.
Yethyr sneered. “How exactly did you plan to survive the fall, woman?”
Nisari did not answer because she had no answer. Satisfied with her silence, Yethyr focused on actually getting to her.
Thirty feet down.
He would need to rappel down to her, which meant relying on his infamously unreliable strength. He was being bolstered by the pendant, but he was wary of trusting the constancy of such strength.
Carefully, Yethyr gripped the rope. Slowly, he took a step backward, and the hooks on his boots still held his weight. He let the rope pass through his fingers. He lowered a foot, and Jaetheiri’s upside-down scowling face became ever so slightly further away.
“I don’t like this,” she hissed. “If you fall…”
“I’m still attached to you.”
“I’m hanging on by my boots! Don’t trust that. I could fall at any moment!”
“Then we fall together.” He shrugged. “As it has always been.”
“Tezem, I have to die before you.” A wild, desperate light gleamed in her eyes. “Don’t pretend you don’t know this.”
Yethyr looked up at her, and a thousand things passed between them that I did not understand. I felt an abrupt aching despair rush through him. It was a strange sensation in so stubborn a man, and yet he greeted the sensation like an old friend.
“Pretend? I am not the one among us who makes sport of what I know better than you.” Yethyr sighed tiredly. “It matters not. Neither of us will die.”
He kept descending, and Jaetheiri said nothing more.
It was not a far drop, but Yethyr did not trust his grip and so dared not descend too quickly.
When he neared the roc’s head, he could see his cook’s mangled body in its beak.
“Ruzar?” He called softly. The cook groaned incoherently, and Yethyr was relieved. “He lives.”
“He will wish he hadn’t,” Nisari said. “His body is surely broken.”
“Perhaps.”
“He will be useless—”
“Do you think that such a reason would inspire me to abandon him?”
Nisari met his eyes, and it seemed like she was seeing her Prince for the first time. She took his bone-reinforced body and stubborn scowl. It very well might have been the first time Nisari looked like she understood him at all.
“Aye,” she whispered. “You would abandon no one for that.”
Yethyr ignored her, trying to fish out his wyvern blood ink while still holding on to the rope. He was briefly forced to hold it with one hand and then, of course, his hand slipped.
There was a moment, a single moment, before he would fall. Perhaps he would hang from his boots as had happened with Jaetheiri. Perhaps he would fall to his death. It was a single moment where his panic lowered all his walls, and I was in.
I did not think; I just moved his hand to grab the rope, faster than a human body could naturally.
Yethyr panted, his heart pounding. He understood what had almost happened; he understood, too, that it had been me who had caught him.
“Thank you, Bonesong,” he said carefully, politely, but he could not hide his alarm from me. I had been careful to avoid revealing how much power over him I really had, and now he had an inkling of the truth.
The truth frightened him more than the thought of falling ever had.
Damn it. I had not wanted that. He would be warier than ever now.
He flexed his fingers, relieved when he sensed no further influence from me. He wouldn’t. I had withdrawn as soon as it happened.
His heart began to steady. Perhaps his momentary panic was the only thing that had given me so much power over him, he thought with nervous optimism.
I hope he kept believing that.
Yethyr eventually started drawing notation on the roc’s beak and Nisari watched him work gravely. “Maethe frowns down on this, my Prince. Making a corpse thrall of a bird of Heaven—”
“It is only temporary. I just needed a way to prevent you from plummeting to your death.” He looked at Nisari hard. “I need you for this hunt.”
Nisari blushed, suddenly flustered, and it looked so strange on her boisterous face that I almost laughed.
Nisari being tongue-tied worked well for Yethyr. It gave him a minute of silence to draw proper notation on the bird's beak, enough to get it properly under his control.
“What is it you do?”
“I need to ensure its beak doesn’t crush Ruzar.” He put away his tools, satisfied with his work. “Make space for me, aeromancer. I’m getting on.”
“Why?” She asked as she shuffled to make way for him.
Yethyr tied himself to the roc grimly. “Because it's going to fly us to the summit.”
“It is?”
Just as Nisari expressed her shock, the corpse of the roc was off, flapping into the air on stilted wings.
Yethyr aimed it at Jaetheiri, who was watching their approach with wide eyes in her upside-down face.
“I don’t know whether to be impressed or terrified.”
“It won’t drop you,” Yethy assured her.
Jaetheiri eyed the roc’s sharp, dead talons dubiously. “If you say so.”
It snatched her up, and with her in its talons, Ruzar in its beak, and Nisari and Yethyr on its back, it rose, swooping up the cliff. The bitter wind bit their cheeks, but the speed made Nisari whoop for joy.
They reached the top in moments, crashing beside where Mandorias and Kettir lay waiting.
Wes’ voice fell silent, and the roc grew still, never to move again.
Yethyr and Nisari clamored off its back and helped Jaetheiri out from under its bulk. As the women helped pry Ruzar from the roc’s jaws, Yethyr took in their surroundings.
They had landed on a shelf carved into the cliff. A path carved its way through the peaks, leading deeper into the mountain range.
That was their road now, and the way was dusted with some strange white powder that Yethyr’s mind called snow.
The air was cold, colder than I had ever known. Each breath was rough and harsh in the Prince’s throat.
Kettir’s breathing was even worse, strength expended from the climb. Mandorias sat beside him, looking almost embarrassed that he was not panting along with him.
The dead scholar leaned against a sole gnarled tree. It clung to the stone shelf with an admirable tenacity. Its trunk could not be seen beneath coil after coil of rope. It seemed to be almost more chain than rope.
I could hear it singing with a metallic voice. Brass, I was sure of it.
Yethyr frowned. “That’s not our rope.”
Kettir looked at it bleakly. “No, it is not.”
Nisari straightened. “What does that mean?”
Yethyr stared at the coiled brass chain with wary understanding. “We are not the first to climb up this way.”
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