As she gripped the rope and stepped off the branch, the eel pendant fell free from her chest and then banged back against it. She dangled for a moment, her full weight committed to the rope. She caught herself starting to invoke a prayer to Maeben. She clipped the words and swallowed the unspoken portion. Once she stopped swaying, she climbed up, hand over hand. For some reason she thought of Melio, perhaps because her lithe fitness had so much to do with his training. But then she reached the tangle of brittle branches that was the nest and could think about nothing except how to claw her way up over the curve of it.
She was clinging there, panting, trying to find a decent placement for her hands, when an avian head rose up from inside the rim of the nest. It was just more than an arm’s length away, a grotesque, hooked visage. It opened its beak and squawked. Something was wrong with it, Mena knew, but she could not stop to think what. She expected the bird to take flight, and she moved more jerkily for fear of it. She scrambled as far back as she could. The nest swayed with the shift of her weight. Branches and twigs snapped. It took an absurdly long time to position herself well enough to let go with her right hand and draw the sword. Once she had the weapon in hand, however, she knew exactly what to do. She swung at it, using all the full, awkward force she could muster. The sword bit the bird on the neck, but the blade angle was off and it did not cut deep. She yanked it out-still surprised that she had the time to do so-and struck again. She got the angle and force right this time. The creature’s head sailed up and away from its body, then plopped down next to it.
In the nest a few moments later, staring at the convulsing body of the thing, she realized what had seemed strange about it. The bird was feathered sparsely, ill formed and pathetic, no bigger than a vulture. Fully grown sea eagles were two or three times as large. It was not Maeben at all. It was barely more than an infant of the species. Mena half formed a joking comment about the things only a mother could love, but she did not speak it aloud.
She sat down across from it, thinking how very strange this all was, amazed that she was actually here, in a sea eagle’s nest well above the forests of Uvumal, across from a corpse, with a naked sword in her hand, swaying as the wind buffeted the creaking, aged tree from side to side. Who was she? When had she become this person? Perhaps this was all madness, she thought. It was a crisis of her own creation. She could envision two paths for her future now: one of them that ended no farther than this aerie, the other one such a complete leap into the unknown that she could scarcely believe she had conceived of it. And yet in some bizarre way either course was acceptable to her.
She realized that she could just climb down now. She had taken a child from the goddess. Let her see how it feels. Mena could grasp the rope and swing into the air and be down from these heights before the storm-which was even more palpable now-dumped rain on the canopy. She could go home feeling she had accomplished something, an act of retribution, sealed in blood.
She could, she thought, but no, she wouldn’t. She was not finished yet.
By the time she distinguished the flapping of wings from the sounds of the strengthening wind, she had repositioned herself. She lay back against the nest with the dead infant in her lap, propped against her chest. It was headless, of course, but she held the severed part roughly in place with one hand. Thus situated, she watched the mother return, hoping the disguise would help her get close enough to strike.
The raptor appeared in silhouette against the clouds. Her wings flared just before she landed, massive, like a gesture meant to hide the entire sky. The nest shifted as the bird’s weight came to rest, talons squeezing the brittle branches near to snapping. She was enormous. She must have stood as tall as Mena did. Maeben. There was no doubt this was Maeben. Her beak could close around Mena’s face; her talons were each a vicious dagger capable of disemboweling her with a single tearing motion. Mena did not doubt any of this; yet she was glad, glad to finally face her. She was filled with an emotion, but it was not fear. She had never hated harder than she did at that moment. To be a child snatched by this monster…just a child…
Wait, she thought. Wait until she is closer.
There was a short stillness, and then the eagle cried out. The call was sharp, piercing in a way her offspring’s had not been. Maeben nudged her chick, pulled back, and then thrust forward again, knowing now that something was wrong.
Mena shoved the infant away and swung for the bird’s head. She might have ended it there, but the sword caught a branch, shifted, and only grazed the creature’s beak.
Maeben rose screeching into the air, her visage one of carnivorous indignation. She screeched again, a cry so fierce Mena’s eyes shut against it. She had the momentary sensation that the sound had shredded the skin of her face just as the talons would. But then her eyes were open again.
The eagle plunged, talons first, with all her power and weight. Mena stumbled backward. Her heel caught, and she fell over the edge of the nest. Trying to grasp something, she let go of the sword. As she fell free of the lip, the fingers of her left hand grabbed for the fiber rope. The fibers tore through her palm, slick and abrasive at the same time. She somersaulted around and got her other hand on the rope. This yanked her to a halt. Then whatever had held the fishhook anchor snapped. Mena dropped through the air a few frantic seconds. She smashed into a branch. It broke almost instantly, but it had slowed her enough that, falling again, she looked down and grasped for the next lower branch. She hit it with her chest, swung around it, and dropped, horizontal now, to the network of branches just below it. That stopped her. The rope cascaded around her. The hooks fell just beside her and one of them pierced her leg.
She would have cried out, but events were crowding so fast upon her she did not have the luxury of that time to waste. Smacked by a furious gust of wind and a splattering of rain like icy stones, the tree leaned farther than it had yet. Tremors ripped down through the rotten trunk. She felt it give and knew it had cracked somewhere below the canopy of the other trees. It was going to topple.
Maeben was aloft again, beating the air as she tried to get at Mena, lashing with her beak, her talons reaching. Mena yanked the hook from her leg and hurled it at the eagle’s face. Her aim was off. It sailed past the raptor, over her shoulder. It hung there for a moment, a still line having missed its mark. The great bird kept flapping her wings, intent on her prey, gauging the moment of attack, ignoring the import of the tree’s slow motion. It seemed an endless moment.
Then the pull of the falling tree sped up so rapidly it broke the pause. Mena felt herself recede from the bird. She was descending with the tree, but she did not take her eyes off the eagle. She saw the rope tighten, saw how the far end, which had started to fall on the other side of the eagle, began to be pulled down with the tree. The line snapped taut. The rope cut into the wing, dragged over the feathers and bone until the hooks caught in the bird’s flesh at the shoulder joint. The rope-the far end of which was knotted in the limbs of the falling giant-yanked Maeben downward with a force the bird clearly could not fathom. Her beak opened in disbelief, wings flattened behind her body, eyes, for once, filled with terror.
Mena had seen enough. She pushed herself away from the toppling tree, turned in midair and, with her arms outstretched as if she too could fly, faced the canopy rushing toward her.
End of Book Two
Book Three
CHAPTER
Hanish lay a long time without moving, aware every second of the body pressed against his. He did not want to wake her, to have to talk and smile and begin the day with a lover’s platitudes. At least that was how he explained it to himself. Better to minimize how good it was to feel her naked contours in the places they touched. Better not to fully admit how right it felt to have the curls of her hair entwined in his fingers. He knew that traces of her would cling to him in many ways. This pleased him, but it was better not to acknowledge that at some level he held still so that he could absorb more and more of her into his skin. He would taste her all day on his tongue, in the corners of his mouth, as a scent off his own body that he would catch in the air as he turned his head. He would have liked not to have thought about all these things, but he could think of nothing else.