The Rise of a Legend Page 8

  “A forge!” the Barn Owl, who was a female, screeched. “Are you yoickers? Females are not smith material, not at all, never ever!” And it was a female squawking at poor Thora! It was shocking to me how rigid the instructors and officers of the Kielian League were. Shocking and disheartening, for none of them seemed to have much imagination. They never entertained the idea that there might be other ways to do things.

  The elite commando units were very specialized in the types of raids they implemented and the kinds of weapons they used. I wanted to do it all — sabotage, surveillance, reconnaissance. I was very interested in military strategy in general. Serving in a commando unit, no matter how elite, seemed limiting to me. But cadets couldn’t pick and choose what they wanted to do or what they felt their strengths were. There was a rigid curriculum and any picking and choosing was done by the regimental commander of the Academy. That was a Barred Owl named Optimus Strix Varia.15 He was a stern, old owl and, although he was missing three of his four talons on his port foot, he was skillful with fizgigs and fizblisters. These spiked iron spheres on the end of lightweight chains were among the most challenging of weapons to manipulate. Inside the fizblisters were hot coals that made them even more difficult, for if the owl wielding the weapon made the slightest mistake, he could ignite his own feathers. But the fizblisters could be lethal. An attacking owl could swoop into an enemy formation and scatter it with one twirl of the weapon. There was a release mechanism on the chain that had to be operated with great precision, and experts with fizblisters could hurl them great distances. Timing was everything!

  Moss, Thora, and I settled into our barracks in the outcropping of lithite rocks and began to make friends with our fellow cadets. The most memorable were Blix, a tiny Northern Saw-whet, and Loki, a Great Gray. They had known each other since they were fledglings and made quite a pair, as Blix didn’t even come up to Loki’s knees. But they were fast friends. When I first met them, I could not help but notice that Loki’s wing tips were a bit tattered, as if he had bashed them up somehow. I remember saying, “Looks like you have already seen some combat!” The two friends exchanged almost guilty glances.

  “Oh, it was nothing,” Loki said quickly. “I just got a scrape on these fresh feathers.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. I realized it was a source of embarrassment to Loki and I dropped the subject. “That can happen.”

  What interested me the most about Blix and Loki was that they came from a region in the northernmost reaches of the Bitter Sea, in fact very close to Shagdah Snurl, the coldest and darkest place on Earth. But it was not the Shagdah Snurl that intrigued me. It was the place at its very center called Nacht Sted, where my mother had told me the winds were hatched.

  “Have you ever seen a wind hatch?” I asked the Great Gray and the Northern Saw-whet.

  “Of course!” they both said at once. “We have a celebration when the kitibits come,” Blix explained.

  “Skyboshing?” Thora asked.

  “It’s great fun. You ride the backside — the bosh — of a curl wind.”

  “You ride the kitibits?” I asked. I was astounded.

  “Sure we do,” Blix replied.

  “But you’re so tiny,” Thora gasped.

  “I won’t take offense at that,” the Saw-whet said, and squared her shoulders. “But actually being small makes it easier.”

  “I have a question,” I said slowly. The serious note in my voice caught their attention.

  “We’ve been at the Academy for three days and have been told about all sorts of classes and exercises to turn us into skillful warriors, but no one has ever mentioned anything about weather.”

  “What about weather?” Moss asked.

  “I mean weather interpretation — analysis. Think how helpful that would be to planning battle strategies.”

  “Well, I don’t mean to brag,” Loki said. “But they say no owl flies better than owls from Shagdah Snurl.” He spread his enormous wings and lofted into flight to begin a series of beautiful curling loops. When he alighted on the ground again, Blix turned to him.

  “You might not mean to brag, Loki, but that was bragging!” But she said this with good cheer. One could tell that they were used to pulling each other’s feathers.

  “Are there any instructors, flight instructors, here at the Academy from Shagdah?”

  “There used to be one, I think,” Blix said thoughtfully. “But she died a long time ago.”

  “That brings up another question,” Thora snapped. There was an edge to her voice that we hadn’t heard before.

  “Gotta burr in your plummels?” Moss asked.

  Wrong question, I thought.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I do.”

  “What is it?” I asked cautiously.

  “Blix mentioned a flight instructor. A she. There are several female instructors of note here, I believe. There is a colonel who commands the Frost Beaks. A Pearl-spotted Pygmy, Esa Glaucidum Perlatum. She commands the A unit of the Frost Beaks. I hope I get into A unit because B unit is headed up by Coloniel Stellan Micrathene Whitneyi, who is about as haggish as an Elf Owl ever gets. A nasty piece of work, that one.”

  “What’s your point, Thora?” I asked as gently as possible.

  “My point is this! There are several female instructors and commanders. Your own mother, Lyze, heads up the Ice Dagger unit and was an instructor here at the Academy before that. But there is not one blacksmith on the island of Dark Fowl who is female, not one Rogue smith in the entire Northern Kingdoms who is female. I have no interest in fighting, in becoming a warrior serving in some elite commando unit. But I do have a great interest in learning how to smith the weapons these units employ in battle. When I mentioned that I wanted to study smithing and serve as an apprentice to Orf, the regimental commander nearly lost his gizzard!”

  “He did?” I asked.

  “Yes, he did.” She paused as if to remember. “I really think I almost killed him when I said that.”

  The others were finding this entire story rather humorous, but I began to think about it.

  “I think,” Thora continued reflectively, “that the Academy has a rather narrow view of things. I mean, as Blix and Loki mentioned, the best fliers come from the Shagdah Snurl but none of the flight instructors are from there. And think about the rocks that melt in the volcanoes, the flames that must make those rocks melt. What kind of coals might they produce for a smith’s forge? Ice weapons from the Dagger are said to be superior to any that are harvested from the Shag, but maybe the harvesters are looking for the wrong kind of ice? It seems to me that we should be sending owls to research up there.”

  “My mum lost her eye to an ice splinter,” I said. “But my father said it was crudely honed. They thought it was inferior ice from up around the Shag. But I’m beginning to wonder if it was inferior or if they don’t know how to make a proper cold coal with those coals from the volcano up there at the Nacht Sted.”

  “Precisely,” Thora said. “If someone knew how to use those coals properly, well, it could be very dangerous for the Kielian League.”

  “You know what?” Blix often began her comments this way. She was a very reflective owl.

  “What?” Thora asked.

  “Well,” Blix said, “with your interest in coals, and Lyze’s in weather, you should come up to the Shagdah Snurl for the holidays.”

  “Could we?” I said excitedly. I could think of nothing better. What was home for me now anyway? The charred remains of the slender pine. The memory of Lysa. As far as I knew, Mum and Da were back at the front already. They usually were in the summer months. It would be a dream come true for me to go to the place where the winds hatch. I felt it might be a place of inspiration.

  This war would never end unless some new ideas were born. But who would listen to a bunch of young owls like ourselves? The more I thought about it, the more ideas I had. A delegation should be sent to Shagdah to recruit great fliers and study the winds. Smiths should be sent to the v
olcanoes to examine the coals. Some should be sent to the land called the Beyond to see how the colliers retrieved coals from the ember beds of the Sacred Volcanoes there. If Bylyric had turned into an Orphan Maker, and the front was coming closer every night, there wasn’t much time before the Kielian League would be overrun. Already, there were rumors that our class would be fast-tracked to graduate early and head immediately out to the front.

  When our intensive training period began, our first class was scheduled before tweener. They thought that cadets learn better when hungry. The classes were larger than the beginner courses, with more owls than before. Some we had not yet met, as they had been brought in from a sub-camp on a small island off Dark Fowl where they had completed their preliminary training week. I was ordered to report to the Ice Squires, commanded by a pompous old Short-eared Owl, Captain Ludvigsen Asio Flammeus. Just to give you the flavor of the old hoot, here is how he introduced himself:

  “I am Captain Ludvigsen Asio Flammeus the Fifth. My father, my grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather all served at this Academy after distinguished careers in the Ice Squires unit, one of the oldest units in the Kielian League. As you may know, the Ice Squires fight with both hot and cold weapons. Although, not fire claws, of course. It might also interest you to know that my family’s name, Ludvigsen, is taken from an Other,16 a certain Erich Ludvigsen Pontoppidan, who first identified our species.17 It is a name I carry with deep pride.”

  “Weird,” whispered a Whiskered Screech who perched beside me on the rocks where we had assembled.

  I also wondered why someone would be proud to be named after an Other and began to say, “My sentiments ex —” but the words caught in my throat as I turned to her. She was the loveliest Whiskered Screech I had ever seen.

  “Did you have something to say, Cadet Lyze Megascops?” the captain asked. And this, unfortunately, is where my history caught up with me.

  “Nothing, sir,” I replied crisply, and gave the required salute.

  “Tell me, were you as vociferous in the attack on Stormfast, where you supposedly distinguished yourself?”

  “No, sir, it was very hard to breathe for all the smoke.”

  “Well, why don’t you inhale all your hot air now and cease speaking!” he barked.

  “Sir!” It was the lovely Screech next to me. She had raised her starboard talon.

  “Yes, Cadet Lillium Megascops? You have something to say?”

  “Indeed, sir. It was I who initiated the conversation with Cadet Lyze Megascops.”

  “So you want to take the blame, I assume?”

  “Yes, sir,” she answered. The captain folded his wings behind his back and strutted over to us.

  “Well then, Miss Cadet!” he huffed. He was about to continue, but Lillium broke in.

  “Miss Cadet Lillium Megascops, sir?”

  “Do you have a hearing problem?”

  “No, sir. It’s — it’s —” she began to stammer. “It’s just that I have never heard a female cadet referred to as ‘Miss.’”

  “And you take issue with that?”

  “Well, sir …” She was silent for several seconds, and I thought she was going to wilf. But quite the reverse, she seemed to increase in size. “Yes! Yes, I do take issue. We are all serving here together, and there is no need to call attention to our gender.”

  You could have heard a feather drop. Not just any feather but the finest fringe feather, a plummel. Great Glaux, I thought. I had never encountered anyone like this Lillium.

  “I suggest, Miss Cadet, that along with your friend here, you inhale some of your hot air as well and shut up!” The captain turned on his talons and stormed away.

  She flipped her head around toward me, winked, and whispered, “I’d say we’re off to a good start, Cadet Lyze Megascops!”

  Oh, great Glaux, my gizzard went into a flutter. She wasn’t frightened of the old hoot at all. Despite this rather rocky beginning, the practice went rather well, even though I could hardly concentrate due to my giddy condition over Lillium. We practiced with a variety of weapons, both of ice and metal. We learned the proper way to grip an ice weapon with our battle claws, both on and off. Luckily for us, the two lieutenants, both Short-eared Owls, did most of the real instruction and they were quite nice.

  “Don’t let the captain get you down,” said Lieutenant Artemis Asio Flammeus. “He bellows about quite a bit with the new cadets. He doesn’t mean much by it.” I did not want to admit it but it didn’t get me down one single bit. If it hadn’t been for the captain, I might never had had my encounter with Lillium.

  In this first training session, our instructor set up several targets with the peculiar double crescent insignia, just like the ones we had seen emblazoned on the owls’ faces who had attacked us at the Ice Dagger and on Stormfast, the night my sister died. There were perhaps twenty targets altogether, but only one had crossed crescents, which we were told were the badge of Bylyric, the Orphan Maker himself. After exposure on the training field, it would not take long for this so-called “symbol of sacred force” to lose its mystique entirely and become about as sacred as a wet pellet.

  Both Lillium and I did well in the training session, which seemed to aggravate the captain. Every time Lieutenant Artemis would praise us or Lieutenant Ganymede Asio Flammeus said how well we had executed a maneuver, the captain felt compelled to find a slight flaw in our performance. “Let’s not get too fanciful, Cadet Lillium Megascops.” Or “Cadet Lyze Megascops, you have an odd twist on the downstroke when you wield that blade. Is that a peculiarity you picked up in the skirmish on Stormfast? Or are you just trying to be creative?” He said the word “creative” as if it were something profoundly shameful.

  “No, sir,” I would mutter.

  For our next training session, unfortunately, Lillium was put in another group. This session focused on flight formation, or FF. FF was perhaps the most challenging exercise new cadets encountered. We were all used to flying and dealing with a variety of weather conditions, but we were not used to flying in formation. It was a new discipline, used in warfare for purposes of mutual defense and the concentration of strike power. I had heard my parents talk about it, and I knew their positions in a number of different formations. But no one ever called the formations out loud. All commands were expressed nonverbally through wing signals so the flying units could operate in total silence. Therefore, our first lesson was to learn what we called the WWS, the wing waggle signals, for a variety of maneuvers. There were perhaps two dozen or more aerobatic maneuvers that had to be mastered for flying in formation and so there was a lot of code to learn.

  We began with the signals for the five basic formations — the retract and roll, the vertical break, the crossover break, the flat pass, and the tail slide. It was after midnight before they actually let us take flight and practice giving the signals and performing the first couple of maneuvers.

  “Oh, sorry, old fellow!” said a Great Horned Owl, Cadet Skellig Bubo, as he bumped into me. “I’m about as graceful as a puffin with its wings gone cattywampus!” I had to laugh. Cadet Skellig came from a somewhat aristocratic family that lived in a firthkin far up in the Firth of Fangs.18 Skellig spoke very properly with the cultivated accent of the owls from that firthkin, but he was not at all stuffy or grand or self-important like Captain Ludvigsen Asio Flammeus. He had a terrific sense of humor. Indeed, he was the one who came up with the nickname for the captain — Lud-Dud, which, at the time, we all thought was hysterically funny. We did not have the most sophisticated senses of humor.

  Cadet Skellig seemed somewhat older than his years and was rather small. His flight skills were not promising, but he did try hard. Blix and Loki had told me that cadets from his firthkin were usually admitted to the Academy because of their distinguished ancestry. What he lacked in skills, he more than made up for with his sense of humor and good spirits. Everyone liked Cadet Skellig Bubo. He was elected as our barracks sergeant, which meant that he had to mak
e sure we kept our personal hollows neat — there were no nest-maid snakes in the barracks. He even helped us clean if our hollows got messy. After twixt time, no one was supposed to leave the barracks but he never reported the many who snuck out to visit the grog trees. I did myself a few times. I didn’t drink the highly potent bingle juice, but it was fascinating to listen to the soldiers back from the front with their combat tales. The grog tree offered an education apart from our formal training that was very valuable.

  While we were doing our drills for formation flights over the training field, I caught sight of Blix and a dozen or so Northern Saw-whets, Pygmies, and Elf Owls practicing with ice splinters. Our flight formation instructor pointed them out.

  “A Frost Beak unit in training below us,” he announced. Targets had been set up on the ground, and the small owls were zooming in with their launch sticks loaded with the ice splinters. Few of them were hitting their marks. “It takes a great deal of practice,” our instructor, a Brown Fish Owl named Colonel Solsten Ketupa Zeylonensis, explained as we made a flat pass over the field. “The launching stick is difficult to manipulate and requires a great deal of practice. You need to find the proper grip and there’s a rhythm to it.”

  “May I ask a question, Colonel, sir?”

  “Certainly, Cadet Lyze.”

  “How many ice splinters does a launcher hold?”

  “Good question. Just two. Then it’s back to the field quartermaster. Orf is working on a launcher with a larger capacity, but of course that has to be balanced out against the very slight weight of the small owls best suited to these weapons.”

  “Yes, Colonel, sir,” I replied. “Thank you.”

  I have to admit something troubled me about this explanation. It wasn’t a larger launcher that was needed, but a better system for resupplying mid-flight. And if it was a question of merely larger launchers, why couldn’t bigger owls be trained to fight with ice splinters? Ice splinters were very effective weapons, very deadly. Why were Pygmies, Elf, and Northern Saw-whets the only owls who could be trained with them? I looked down at the owls below us as we made a second flat pass. Blix was doing quite well. I nearly hadn’t recognized her because all of the Frost Beaks wore protective goggles ground from blue ice, as Orf had the first time I’d met him.