She had found her den long before. Ever since she could remember she had needed somewhere to hide. Hide from her uncle’s sudden, inexplicable rages, from her aunt’s equally savage tongue, from her boy cousins’ thoughtless roughness. Only occasionally did anyone hurt her on purpose. Indeed, once or twice when she was small and at the end of one of his outbursts her uncle had slammed out to the barn, her aunt had deliberately sent her out to call him in, despite her terror of him. It was one of her aunt’s ways of punishing her, though she’d never been told what for. So she’d crept through the barn door, tensed for his anger, but instead he’d called to her and put her on his lap and fondled her like a kitten for a while, and spoken gently to her, though she could feel his rage still roiling inside him—and it was the rage itself that had terrified her, not the fear that she herself might suffer from it. Usually it had been her big cousin Saranja who’d suffered, or the two boys—and they had been always angry too. Even her own mother had been too vague and feeble to notice her much, let alone stand up for her when she needed help. She must have had a father, of course, but she’d never known him, and had no idea who or where he was. She didn’t dare ask. Saranja had been the only person besides her uncle who had sometimes smiled at her, as though she had meant it.
But then there had come the day she had taught herself never to think of, and at the end of it Saranja had gone away and the rage had been ten times worse than before and her uncle had never spoken to her kindly again.
And it was all Maja’s fault. It always had been, even before that. Since she was born.
There was a bit of the heap of ashes that had been Woodbourne which she fed with fresh wood to keep the embers going, and then hid under layers of ash when she’d finished her cooking. She’d just done that when she’d spotted the woman trudging along the lane with an old horse trailing behind her, and a solitary figure limping along further back. They hadn’t looked dangerous, but all the same she’d clucked to the chickens, who’d come hustling over, imagining it was the start of the evening drill that kept them safe from foxes. She’d laid a trail of barley to lure them into the den and lain in the entrance to watch, letting the scorched branch of fig that screened it fall back into place.
Now the woman came into the yard and stared around. She was grimy with long travel, but despite that was beautiful in her own fierce way, with a mass of glossy dark hair hanging well below her shoulders. Maja had a vague feeling she’d seen her before—or perhaps it had been in a dream, or perhaps she’d just imagined her in one of the stories she told herself. She had the look of a queen, angry, proud and sad—a defeated queen who refuses to accept her defeat. Maja used to tell herself a lot of stories like that during her lonely and miserable years, stories of adventures she would never have and courage that would never be hers.
The horse shambled in behind the woman and stopped, as if it didn’t know what else to do.
The woman called out in a strong voice.
“Anyone there?”
No one answered, so she started to wander around, scuffing here and there with her feet at the edges of the pile of ash that a month ago had been Woodbourne. She stooped and pulled what looked like a golden feather from the ashes. Another followed, dangling below it.
Maja stared. The roc feathers! Why hadn’t they burnt with everything else? She knew them well. Once a year, after supper on the eve of Sunreturn, the whole family would sit and listen to her mother telling them the old story of Tilja and the Ropemaker, and her aunt would fetch the feathers out of the box where she kept them—she never let anyone else touch them—to show them it was all true, and then put them back when it was over.
The woman smoothed them between her fingers and turned and said something to the horse, then looked back along the way she had come. After a while a man limped into the yard. He too was stained with travel, but unlike the woman looked sick and exhausted. There was a bloodstained bandage round his left leg. All the same, he also looked like someone out of one of Maja’s stories, the last loyal soldier in the queen’s defeated army, perhaps, a laughing warrior, an officer used to giving orders. Despite everything, his neat triangular beard gave him a jaunty look. Maja decided she liked him. She wasn’t afraid of him.
“Ribek Ortahlson,” he said.
That was obviously his name. Ortahlson! That was in the old story too. He must come from Northbeck and a man in his family sang winter after winter to the snows to make them fall and block the passes, so that the savage horsemen of the northern plains couldn’t come raiding, the way they had now—just as a woman from Woodbourne sang winter after winter to the unicorns in the forest so that the sickness stayed in the forest and the armies of the great empire to the south couldn’t get through to tax the Valley of everything it owned.
The woman answered but she was facing away from Maja, who couldn’t hear what she said. They both turned to the horse, which had wandered up to the mounting block, letting Maja hear and see everything. The woman laid the feathers on the horse’s back, behind the shoulders, and began to stroke them. She whispered something, and the whole Valley seemed to shake and shimmer. The shock-wave thundered through Maja’s body, and she passed out.
When she came to—it could only have been a few seconds—the quills of the feathers were sinking into the hide. The horse shrugged, raised its head, and gave a long sigh as if of sudden, huge contentment.
The woman stood back beside Ribek, watching the feathers twitch as they embedded themselves into the muscles that had grown to receive them. At once they started to thicken and extend themselves. The quills became bone. The individual barbs lengthened into vanes. A joint appeared below them, dragging with it a fold of hide along the undersides of the quill. All along this fresh plumes erupted, as golden as the original pair. The horse itself started to grow to accommodate the major muscles that its wings were going to need, and still to remain in the true proportions of a horse. At the same time its original indeterminate dunnish hue lightened and brightened to a glowing chestnut. It raised its head, stamped a hoof and snorted like a charger. The movement allowed Maja to see that it was no longer a gelding, but a stallion, entire. The whole landscape seemed to pulse and quiver as the woman continued to stroke the now enormous wings.
Vaguely for some time Maja had been noticing a dull drumming that had been coming from the southwest. Abruptly it changed its note. Absorbed in the wonder of the event, neither of the other two seemed to have noticed it.
The woman sighed.
“I never believed it,” she said. “I was still hoping it wouldn’t happen.”
“I’ve always believed,” said Ribek. “To see it is something different. What now? To judge by the story we’re expected to ride it. I’ve never ridden a horse—we’re boat people and millers.”
“We can’t go on calling it ‘it.’ What do you call a horse that’s partly a roc?”
“A rocking horse? I’ve ridden a rocking horse at the Gathering when I was a kid.”
“A name,” said the woman. The tone of her voice, Maja thought, meant she didn’t really get it that anyone could be lighthearted at a moment like this. She seemed to change her mind.
“Well, I suppose Rocky’s not a bad name for a horse,” she said, and repeated it, trying it out on her tongue.