Hawkmaiden (4 page)

Chapter Two

The Cottage In The Nutwood

The oldest part of Westwood Hall was the actual hall, a large square stone room which was dominated by the great round stone fireplace in its center, where the Flame lived.  The fireplace structure was four feet tall and ten feet wide, with three grand pillars of rock supporting the massive stone chimney above it.  The Flame was built, family legend had it, when the Westwoodmen first arrived at the Westwood, centuries ago.  Everything else in the manor had been built after and around that central fireplace.  The Flame was, literally, at the center of the Westwood’s existence.

Supposedly the Flame had been burning continuously for hundreds of years, constantly tended by her family, but Dara somehow doubted that.  It just seemed impractical.  But the reverence her family displayed for the fire was profound, bordering on religious.  That made them very odd to the rest of the Vale, who worshipped the proper Narasi gods when the monks and priestesses made their circuits through Sevendor.  To them, fire was just
fire
.  

But a Westwoodman swore his most sacred oaths by the Flame, bore witness to the most important ceremonies, and he
would not willingly lie in its light.  Her people were wedded by the Flame, and when they died their funerals and wakes were held in its presence.  Babies were named in the light of the Flame, and promises made there had to be kept.

The great fireplace was where the meals of the house were served, where the family gathered to eat and socialize.  The Flame was where the Hallfolk gathered to talk and drink and share stories, where anyone from the various cottages and homes of the Westwood could find warmth, comfort, a mug and a pipe.  The hall around it was scattered with benches and chairs, while chests containing the estate’s more valuable property lined the walls.  

There were other fireplaces in the house, in the kitchen and in the additions to the hall that had been made over the years, but there was only one Flame.  It represented the goddess Briga, the Westwoodmen told outsiders, because the Narasi fire goddess was something the people of the Vale understood.  But the Flame was more than a shrine.  It was the living heart of Westwood Hall, the light in the darkness, the heat against the cold.

Everyone had a role in keeping the Flame burning, from the time they were children.  The youngest were taught to guard it and bank it, while older children were tasked with cleaning the ashes away and feeding the flame.  After adolescence, girls usually tended the flame until they married, while boys were responsible for supplying the great stack of hardwoods kept on the north wall.  The Flame was eternally hungry, and it was the duty of the Westwood boys to feed it.

Dara had taken her turn, in due course, and had spent plenty of time simply staring into the Flame.  Now those chores were given to younger children.  But when Kamen was brought inside to have his leg set, bound and bandaged, he rested and recuperated near the Flame, instead of his small room.  It was considered beneficial to healing.

Though Dara was now thankfully exempt from tending the fire, she and her siblings each took turns sitting with their father near the Flame to keep the normally-active man company for the next few days.  Kamen was a robust Master of the Wood, and was used to spending his time ranging the forests or overseeing the various enterprises that supported the estate.  As the manor’s Yeoman, he was responsible for fulfilling the castle’s requirements.

Now that he was injured, however, Uncle Kamen had to take over seeing to the day-to-day operations of the estate.  While he was fully capable of doing so, Kamen started complaining about things almost immediately.  The forced inactivity soon had him irritated with nearly everyone in the Hall.  After two days sitting next to the Flame with the youngest of the Hall, Kamen looked like he was ready to eat a basket of kittens.

His youngest daughter proved to be one of the few people that did not invite his ire.  Dara did her best to be entertaining, even singing to him in her disturbingly uneven voice.  She tended and cared for him, to keep him from verbally abusing her Aunt Anira and other members of the family, but she quickly grew weary of the chore.

That’s when she remembered the falcon’s nest on the peak of Rundeval, and the rumors that her father had once scaled the summit.  Dara suddenly realized she actually had something to talk to the cranky old bear about.  She could not come right out and ask him if she could go after the fledgling – he would refuse, of course, on the grounds that it was far too dangerous.  

But she could solicit information just by showing interest, Dara figured.  She’d noticed that her father loved to talk about his exploits in his youth, back before he’d met and married her mother.  In fact, most men she knew did.  If she asked him the right questions, he would never know what she was planning.  

She began, innocently enough, when she brought him his afternoon tea.  She gingerly stepped around his splinted leg, shaking her head as she handed him his great earthenware mug.

“Poor Father!  It’s hard to believe that broken leg once climbed to the top of the peak of Rundeval,” she said, with just the right amount of sass to her voice.  

Kamen warmed, patting the broken leg fondly.  

“Oh, aye, they’ve carried me from one end of Sevendor to the other,” he agreed.  “And when I was a lad, they carried me all the way to the top of the mountain.  It was glorious,” he recalled.  “It was my cousin Kilmer, and his father Keshin, who was Master of the Wood at the time.  We went all the way to Rundeval’s peak.  It took hours.”

“You scaled the entire cliff?” she asked in wonder.  The raptor’s nest was three-quarters of the way up the steep slope of dark gray basalt mountain.

“Scaled it?  Nay, Little Bird.  We went the long way around, the trail up the south side of the mountain.  It’s steep, but we only had to scale the last forty, fifty feet to get to the peak.  Why, my legs were ready to give out as it was – I can’t imagine scaling the entire front face!” he laughed.

Dara’s face fell at the news, but she recovered before Kamen noticed.  If even her powerful father had not considered scaling the cliff, how could
she
possibly think to do it?

“But surely you
could
have, when you were younger?”

“Younger . . . and had wings,” he snorted.  “By the Flame, girl, the back ascent was difficult enough.  Barely a handhold to speak of, the last twenty feet.  There’s no more than a knob of rock the size of a hogshead atop the thing to keep you from sliding down the slope, and there are briars and needlebush everywhere.  It was a test of our manhood, scaling that mountain.  It fought back.  I could have hurt myself far worse than
this
,” he said, gesturing to the large wooden splint on his leg.  “The mountain is no picnic site, Dara,” he said, seriously.

“Just promise me that if you go up again someday that you’ll take me!” she said, with just a little too much girlish enthusiasm.  She couldn’t let him forbid her to go, not in front of the Flame.  That would end her plan before it was begun.  But if she tried to get him to promise, he might back off telling her not to go, she reasoned.

“Now, Dara, I’m not a young man, anymore,” he sighed.  “I’ll never scale that mountain again.”

“But
if
you do—!” she pleaded.

“
If
I do . . . and gods alone know what would possess me to undertake such a fool stunt . . . but
if
the notion does take me, then
yes
, I will consider bringing you along,” he conceded.

“Oh,
thank you
, Father!” she said, kissing his head with relief.  
That had been close
.  If he had made her promise not to try to scale the cliff in front of the Flame, she would have been compelled to obey.  This way,
he
was the one who felt compelled to consider taking her, if he went.  Someday, maybe.

Dara was not inclined to wait.  She didn’t have much more time before the fledglings she knew were in that nest would learn to fly on their own and that would be too late to train them, from what her Uncle Keram said.  

She had been haunting his steps, too, as he made the rounds from the curing sheds to the woodyard to the nuttery, asking him a thousand questions about falcons and hawks.  

He apprenticed under the castle falconer, briefly, as a youth, before the domain had changed hands.  Then the new tenant lord, who had a love of boar hunting, had the mews dismantled and turned into a kennel.  But for a year and a half her uncle learned about hunting birds.  Dara asked him everything she could think of, without annoying him.  And while he thought he was merely entertaining her, he was helping his niece assemble a list of the equipment she’d need.

She considered all that Kamen and her uncle Keram had said, that night, and the more she thought about it, the more she realized that there
had
to be a way.  

At some point, she realized that she had committed herself to actually trying.  She
would
find a way to scale that cliff, or die trying.  That night her dreams were filled with wings and shadows, and in the morning she barely felt as if she had slept.  But she already had the beginnings of a plan.

If she wanted to succeed, she knew, she would have to be organized about it.  And there was no half-measures involved.  She was not just breaking the rules and risking punishment, she understood, she was
endangering her life
.  No one in the Hall would be agreeable with that, regardless of how obnoxious she thought she was.  It seemed insane to even consider such a stupid,
stupid
course of action.  

But the idea of such a magnificent bird perched on her arm was just too enticing.  

After helping serve her father his breakfast and gather laundry for the week, Dara dashed off to the tall spruce tree she and Kyre had perched on a few days earlier.  Scaling it was easy, she proved, going up the smooth bark of the tree with the alacrity of a raccoon.  She found her familiar perch, the one that offered the best view of the cliff overhead.

She studied the bare rock face for hours, imagining every way she could possibly ascend to the cliff.  Some routes she estimated brought her hundreds of feet in the air . . . but in the end, all of them met the sheer vertical face of the cliff, where handholds and resting points ceased altogether.  The best route she’d envisioned to the nest still left her eighty or ninety feet shy.  

There was no way to do it, she could see.  No matter how badly she wanted it to be so, there was no
possible
way the cliff face could be scaled.  The raptor mother had found an impregnable site for her nest.  There was no way any predator could sneak up on the vulnerable nest from below.

Frustrated, Dara climbed down out of the tree and cast herself into the loamy ground below it.  She seethed with frustration over having the chicks so near to her – near enough that she could almost imagine seeing them, if she squinted really hard.  The clouds in the sky floated by serenely as the mother falcon mocked her with her beautiful flight over the vale.  

Dara watched the raptor fly for a while, until she could imagine what it was like to fly so vividly it alarmed her.  She shook her head to clear it, and then saw the mountain peak again, upside down from her perspective on the ground.

If only I could fly to the nest,
Dara teased herself.  
Perhaps if I made wings, I could just descend from the sky . . . once that mountain peak moved out of the way . . . and light right
there
, on that cliff.  And then you and I would be together, little chick,
she promised.

Come get me!
she imagined the baby falcon was calling to her, in her mind.

But even as she thought it, she knew it was pointless.  The idea that she could find a way to steal away a fledgling, and then raise it and train it to hunt – all without her family or anyone else at the Hall knowing – was laughable, she knew.  

She was just being Dara the Dumb, as her big sister Linta called her sometimes when she asked too many questions.  Dreaming impossible dreams far too big for a redheaded oddity of twelve.  This was no different than when she had tried to build her own castle, out behind the tanning sheds.  She’d gotten the help of several enterprising children who agreed that having their own castle would be the best way to guard against bad old Sir Erantal’s men.  Together they had built a tiny hut out of stone that had collapsed the first time someone put weight on it.

Dara the Dumb
, she scolded herself.  
You can’t scale an impossible cliff, so now you dream of flying there yourself . . . because you’ll never reach that nest from below!

Then something occurred to her, and she opened her eyes.  They fixed on the very top of the peak, which seemed upside down, from her perspective.  In the light she could make out the nest perfectly where it sat near the top of the mountain . . . only fifty or sixty feet below the peak.

With stunning clarity she realized . . .
she could reach the nest from the top of the mountain!

The more she studied it, the more it looked possible.  Indeed, the slope above the nest was not nearly so steep as right below it, and the ragged eastern side seemed to have handholds and rests aplenty . . . yet  before she could reach that point, she would have to rappel down a rope . . . three or four hundred feet above the hard black rock below.