The Nightbird and the Cardinal

The Falcon's Children, Chapter 8

This is Chapter 8 of The Falcon’s Children, a fantasy novel being published serially on this Substack. For an explanation of the project, click here. For the table of contents, click here. For an archive of world building, click here.

She knew it would happen quickly, after that, and so it did.

We’ve had you long enough, you’ve seen enough, it’s time to choose, they told her, but really it didn’t feel like a choice at all. The priest was in her thoughts, in her dreams — sometimes offering her help, rowing her across vast gulfs of icy water; sometimes embracing her, his lips touching fire to hers, dreams from which she woke ashamed; but most often cut off from her, an elusive figure glimpsed across chasms, canyons, rivers, crowded streets.

In her waking life his unexpected intervention was a torment, offering her something — a sign that she needn’t stay in the House of Birds, a sign that someone in the outside world might care about her — but also nothing, because none of his proposals were any different from the things that she had weighed and considered for all these many months.

Her only real idea, the day after his visit, was to go in a group of girls to the next tenday sacrifice and try to talk with him again. But to her unsurprise the final decision intervened before then — final because no part of her could imagine leaving after she had let herself become a woman of the House, taking her soiled self to the priest or to the Gray Sisters or to the boats and back to Balenty.

No, she could only leave before, a before that became a now when the Ladyhawk and Reffio told her that they had a client ready for her, a kind man, an important customer who would treat her gently, someone she could trust. And from then on there was never really a moment when she felt like she could make any decision except to go along, to accept that this was somehow the destiny the angels had marked out for her, maybe it was her punishment for leaving Hilwen, maybe it would lead to happiness eventually, but either way there was nothing to do but take the thread and walk.

They dressed her in blue and silver, a tight band to lift her small breasts to prominence, a feathered headdress, a beaked and beaded mask. Names were discouraged in the bedroom: She was the Nightbird, they told her, singing in her master’s chamber. They gave her wine and sweets, they daubed her with perfumes, Arella kissed her, Kedwen squeezed her tight. She heard herself say something in a small voice about not knowing what to do, how to please the client, and the Ladyhawk’s voice responding:

There’s a time for that. But for now men will pay for yourrrrrr innocence.

That might have been chilling to her once, but now she felt hazy and dreamy, not drunk exactly, or at least she thought not, but floating just a little way outside her body, observing everything from a slight distance, detached from an experience that just hours (just moments?) before she had regarded with unutterable dread. Had they put something in the wine?

Did you put something in the wine?

Laughter, no, of course not, she just wasn’t used to it, it had gone to her head, the feeling would pass …

She was sure there was something in the wine. She had never really been drunk but certainly a little tipsy here and there, as at the Snow Goose that first night in Rendale, and they drank hard cider on Winter’s Eve in Balenty, she remembered the warm feeling, the excited talk, and it hadn’t been like this at all. This was dreamier, stranger, the voices around her humming and harmonizing, the world blurred and transformed before her eyes.

Now they were in the room where clients picked their women, the screens with their birds glowing in the candlelight, the birds watching her, a swan’s gaze, a cardinal’s, a bluejay’s. A goldfinch cocked its head. A dove flapped its wings. A raven cried something, a word, a name, that she almost understood. The House of Birds — it was a house of birds, it was, birds and birds and birds, fields and forests filled with beating wings, she understood now, everything here was an illusion except for the wings, the beaks, the eyes …

There must have been something in the wine, but that was fine, more than fine it was a great kindness, because this way she could experience the night from a great distance, the way she might have watched animals in her father’s barn, or dancers around the autumn bonfires in her childhood, or birds in the woods, birds in their their trees, their nests — seeing everything from afar, observing not experiencing, a watchful outsider to the strange rhythms of the world.

They were going up the stairs now, through halls and doors and curtains, and when they came to the room itself the door opened and for a moment it too was full of wings, not just bird’s wings but butterflies and moths, a field of flapping and fluttering, golds and greens and browns and grays and blues and scarlets.

Now she knew, absolutely, that she was in a dream, and maybe it was the drug in the wine but maybe it had always been a dream, everything from the first nights in Rendale until now, because only in a dream could you see so many wings, and only in a dream would they part, fragment, blow away, so that beyond them — just for a moment — she could see golden trees and green ones, a woodland almost like a pillared hall, shimmering with all the colors of the butterflies as they scattered through the trees, except for a red shimmer that stayed near her and resolved into a cardinal, bright and pert, cocking its head as if to urge her deeper into the forest, out of the room and out of the House of Birds and out of Rendale, into somewhere strange and far away.

Just for a moment the butterflies and woods and bird were there, just for a moment the cardinal beckoned her, and already she could sense the real room returning, she could see it superimposed against the trees, four walls and a fireplace and of course the couch and bed, she could hear the voices of her keepers and feel their oh-so-friendly hands, and she knew that in another moment it would be her time …

But a moment can last a long time in a dream, she thought, and followed the cardinal into the wood.

It didn’t just feel like a pillared hall, she realized, it was a pillared hall, with trees growing up and into one another to make arches, doorways, a long line of them on left and right running away ahead of her into the distance. The scene was warm, welcoming, lit by shafts of gold that pierced the green canopy but also by some kind of ambient light, omnipresent but sourceless, as though the trees and leaves and roots and even the path beneath her pulsed with it.

She looked left and right, through the arches immediately beside her, and though in each case all she saw were more trees in the same colors, more birds and butterflies flitting and darting away, still she somehow knew that if she passed under either arch she would be in a different place, and that turning either left or right would be a fateful move, like setting out on a voyage from which she might not easily return. Only by walking forward, down the avenue, could she postpone any decisive choice — and as she realized this the cardinal dropped down level with her face, its wings beating, and then zipped off ahead of her, straight and true, a red streak down the hall of trees.

She followed, the openings flitting past on either side, each one similar and tame when she turned and saw it squarely but different, very different, when caught from the corner of her eye. Then she saw, or half-saw, all manner of strange things, vine-draped towers and wishing wells and hedges made of roses and fields of bones and once a jester in black and white motley who gave her a supercilious glance and once an albino wolf standing over a fresh-killed deer. And there were voices, murmuring, musical, indecipherable, that likewise stilled whenever she stopped and tried to really listen.

She lost count of how many openings she passed; still the bird flew onward, still she followed, untired. At last he alighted on a branch, a birch’s bare white arm, and cocked his head to her right, as if to say, here.

But here was indistinguishable from all the other openings: birches knotting overhead, a path of sorts, the same bright forest, with maybe something slightly more autumnal in the color of the leaves and light. Still, she was following the bird, so she took a step toward the right-hand opening —

“Rowenna!”

Hilwen.

She spun to face the left-hand opening, which at last glance had mirrored the one the cardinal was urging her through, but which now opened on an entirely different vista: No forest, no path, no strange light, but instead the familiar bright green of the summer grass that grew on Balenty’s common, with a cow chewing lazily just a dozen spans away from her while a raven pecked the ground nearby.

She knew the beast, it was Old Dremon’s cow, just as she knew the houses and shops around the common, the crowd gathered outside the shrine — it must be a feastday — and the familiar undulation of the deep-green hills beyond. Just as she knew her own sister, standing closer than the grazing cow, so close she could run to her before an eye blinked thrice; her sister, alive and well, not dead in an alley or drowned in the depth of Lake Orison; her sister, barefoot in a white dress studded with blue flowers; her sister, smiling fondly at her under a cloudless sky.

“Rowenna, it’s time to come home.”

Home, yes, of course. This all had been a dream, all of it: The ship and the river, the city and the dark, Reffio and Father Aldiff. How could she had ever thought otherwise? And now she had dreamed her way out of the dream — quite the trick, she would have to remember it for future nightmares — and all she had to do was go to her sister, take her hand, let Balenty reclaim her and let the mists and shadows around her mercifully dissolve.

As if reading her mind, Hilwen said: “Rowenna, really, have you been sleeping? The day’s half-gone. Da will be taking the wagon home soon. Come along, goose.”

The kindness in her sister’s voice was the most welcome thing of all.

“I’m sorry, Hil,” she said, with a laugh that carried so much joy, so much relief. “I’m coming.”

No, no, Rowenna —

It was strange, that was Hilwen’s voice again, but it wasn’t the Hilwen she could see, it was a floating echo, drifting somewhere near her, fading into the bright air …

No, Rowenna, don’t …

“Rowenna, you goose, come along with you. He won’t wait forever.”

Yes, of course, she shouldn’t make her da wait, and her sister too, because of some echo that belonged to her dream. Reality was here, just within her reach, and she took a step toward the leftward archway, toward Balenty, toward home —

— and as she moved there was an odd fluttering around her fingers and then a stab of pain in the back of her hand, and she looked down and saw the cardinal on the ground, black bird-eyes looking up at her, and then blood welled out from near her knuckles and she realized it had pecked her. 

“Come, sister,” Hilwen said, more urgently, while Rowenna pressed the bloody spot and the cardinal hopped away a span and cocked its head at her again. The pain was sharp but it made her mind clear, just a little, like a fog bank pierced by a sudden ray of sun.

Rowenna, take the other door.

The other Hilwen-voice was clearer now, and when she looked toward the Hilwen standing just beyond the arch, the vision was somehow less concrete than it had been a moment earlier — as though Rowenna’s own eyes had been filling in details that were never really there. The buildings were familiar but somehow not quite right — one house too tall, one shop too red, the shrine squatter than it should have been, a few she didn’t recognize at all. The hills behind rose and fell too regularly, like an artist had run an overly careful brush along the horizon. The cow – did the cow’s spots repeat themselves? And the raven was so large, and it was staring at her, staring at her, staring at her …

Rowenna, sister, take …

“Come now, dear sister,” and this voice had power, real power, enough to jerk her a full step toward the trees of the archway, now just within her reach.

But that kind of power didn’t belong to her real sister, nor to anything in the real Balenty, which meant that whatever this was it was something else, some kind of  

snare

lure

trap

Rowenna, it’s a trap

She blinked and blinked again, and now through the archway everything she saw looked false, like a painting by someone who had never really seen the world as humans did; even the blue of the sky was a shade that she had never seen on earth, with a shimmering behind it like something else was breaking through. And the falsest thing of all was not-Hilwen — the eyes black as midwinter ice, the flesh rippling strangely, the voice commanding her in tones that now sounded nothing like her sister and the raven flapped its wings and lifted off in her direction and she turned and flung herself headlong through the rightward arch, toward the more autumnal trees, while the voice shouted Come to me come to me come to me come to ME –

And then it cut off. There was no corridor of trees, no arches, no raven, no not-Balenty, no false Hilwen, no true Hilwen voice either. She was alone in the deep woods, on her hands and knees where the roots of a great oak spread across a path so thin and overgrown that it might just be a deer trail.

Except she was not alone: The cardinal fluttered down onto the path, hopped from root to root for a moment, and then flew on a little way ahead. And what could she do but follow?

As in the corridor it was impossible to know how long she walked through the forest. It might have been a single hour, it might have been half a day, but either way she felt untroubled and untired. The changes in the landscape were gradual: A deepening of the autumnal tint on all the leaves, more brown and less green in the undergrowth, a slight dimming of the light that still left the wood feeling warm and welcoming.

At a certain point the land began to rise and fall, and rocky shelves and granite fists took shape on either side of her. She had been a long time among these rocky outcroppings before she realized that some of them looked less like natural features and more like the overgrown remnants of walls and buildings and towers, and even longer before it became clear that the forest was growing around and through the ruins of a city.

The path had widened by then into what must have once been an avenue, crossed occasionally by other grass-grown tracks. The cardinal flitted onward, now alighting atop a great mound of thorns and white roses, now on a long branch that snaked its way in and then back out of a mossy ruin of a tower, now amid a stand of fir trees that ringed a vine-choked well.

Rowenna’s eyes followed the bird, mostly, but whenever she let her gaze wheel all around she felt that the ruined city, trees and buried buildings both, had something a little of the not-Balenty about it — a hint of illusion, a sense of not being quite all there. But where the vision of her home had felt like a drawing sketched too hastily for detail, here the feeling was more like an old painting, flawless in its execution but now faded and cracking at the edges, after too much sunlight, age and wear.

They reached a river — green, sluggish — and the path became a mossy bridge, guarded by shapes that might once have been statues before the growth of vines and creepers took them under. On the far side the trees were somewhat thicker, the leaves redder and yellower with flecks of brown. She had almost reached the further bank, the cardinal still flitting just ahead, when one of the statue-shapes shifted, unfolded, rose.

She should have been terrified. The shape was taller than any man, a creature of pure green with fur that looked like leaves or leaves that looked like fur, a beard of moss, strange mossy horns curling from its head, mossy hooves and eyes hidden beneath a cascade of grass-like hair or hair-like grass. It stretched and grunted and issued what must have been a yawn, and it brushed at its grass-hair and spoke in a rumbling voice that didn’t roll through the air so much as echo somewhere deep inside in her head.

Is it time? Is it time? Must the sleepers wake?

She should have been terrified but somehow all she felt was a peculiar tingle of regret at the answer that some part of her dreaming mind knew she had to give:

“Unripe, unripe. I will pass this way again.”

With a rumble that somehow mixed frustration and relief, the strange sentinel collapsed back into itself, into the welter of shrubs and vines and ivy. The cardinal lit upon a green creeper that might have been part of its hair, and then lifted off and flew ahead again, toward the thicker trees. She followed –

— only to find that the road or path ended decisively at their trunks and roots. And a high hedge of thorns grew in between the trees, like a netting spread carefully by some farmer determined to keep the deer from nibbling his vegetables, with roses that looked dry and faded and thorns that looked extremely sharp.

The bird, needing no path, flicked up and ahead, through the thorns, between the trees.

Rowenna hesitated — I can’t, she started to say — and then she realized that when she looked at the cardinal, and only when she was looking at the cardinal, she could see a gap in the netting, a space between the thorns just wide enough for a single traveler to pass.

So she passed — a single thorn dragging at her cloak and then snapping off as she cleared the hedge and began to pick her way forward, between the trees, through the undergrowth, the red flash of the cardinal always just ahead.

In these trees it was dark, darker, darkest. The foliage went dry and its leavings crunched beneath her feet yet remained thick enough above to hide the sun. The autumnal air gave way to something danker, the crunching to squelching, the dark to a gray and sour light. There was a curtain of hanging vines ahead, dessicated and yet somehow still retaining all their leaves, brown ropes twined together. The bird had slipped through somehow, she pushed after him, the curtain parted —

When she remembered the scene or dreamed about it was always two visions superimposed upon each other: A great blue lake set with forested islands and thronged with boats and barges, encircling a vast island citadel, white and gold and gleaming, rising to topless heights among puffs of snow-white cloud … and then an endless sweep of brackish marsh and mudflats and barren rock, from whose distant center rose a gray ruin of broken battlements, sheared-off towers, and fallen-in domes under a low and heavy sky.

The two visions flickered, exchanged places, resolved — into the marsh, the ruin, the wasteland. The smell washed over her — rot, stagnation, sulfur, death. Her feet sank into mudflats, her breath burned in her throat, she almost retched.

There was a road ahead of her again, a causeway of cracked mud, crumbled stone and puddled water. Yellow mists blew across the water, the ooze, the barren land; strange shapes, like monstrous storks, floated in the distance, whether on land or water or just above it was impossible to tell.

The cardinal hovered, wings beating, as if loath to land upon the waste. Trying not to breathe she went forward again, out onto the causeway, toward the distant ruin. And again there was the sense of time’s elasticity: It took forever to cross the vast marsh, her breath ragged, her darting eyes catching a hundred different strange things moving in the fog, the decaying citadel never any closer, never any closer — until she reached its gates and it seemed like the whole journey had only taken moments.

The gates were smashed, cast down, vast doors of metal broken in a heap that blocked her way. The cardinal went no further; it circled Rowenna, once, twice, thrice and then alighted, its claws much kinder than its beak, on her right shoulder. She looked ahead; the way was shut and silent. She looked around her; fog and stink and vapor, crumbling walls, black water, rust-colored rock. Waste and void.

“I must set my house in order.”

The jut of rock where he stood had been empty when her eyes swept it, but now a man was there — or something like a man. He was dressed as a great noble, gold cloth and purple, though the colors were faded and the fabric worn they were still bright enough to be startling against the landscape. His hair was wild and silver, and his face was somehow both ancient and smooth, pale skin and golden eyes, ears and cheekbones sweeping up together. He was sitting, legs a-dangle, and he held what she first took to be some intricately-carved staff, some symbol of his rank or office, but which from the string and wheel, she realized, could only be the strangest fishing rod that she had ever seen.

He had spoken to himself, barely above a murmur, but as she became aware of him he looked at her and started. A terrible weariness suffused his features.

“Another one of my brother’s phantoms,” he said — addressing not so much her as the sky and stone and even the brackish water where his lure was cast. And then, a little more to her: “What bargain did you strike, I wonder? What did he offer you, poor mortal thing?”

She tried to speak but unlike at the bridge she had neither words nor voice. He cocked his head, a movement that reminded her of the cardinal, and seemed to look at her more closely.

“Are you —” He set down his pole and made to rise; he had a crutch beside him, and levered himself up with it, favoring his left side as though there were some grave weakness near his midsection. “You are not a phantom.”

As if in contradiction she looked at her hand and saw that it had become translucent, shimmering.

“Wait,” he said, “wait. Do not leave me. I will come down. But you should not be here. Our cousins would not permit it. And the twins are always hungry. But you must tell me how you reached me, after all this time …”

At the mention of the twins she felt her gaze drawn up, up, to the heights of the ruined citadel. Was there movement on some crumbling parapet? A gleam, a rattle of pebbles, a distant hiss?

He was clambering down the rocks, leaning and hopping, hopping and leaning. The shimmer in her hands had expanded, and now it felt as though her entire body no longer had real substance, as though a breeze could sweep through her middle and blow everything except her eyes away.

But there was no breeze in this stagnant land, and so she felt herself float there, unmoored and yet unmoving, as the strange figure came down to her.

“Who did you bargain with? Which road did you take? Which court do you serve? You cannot go without speaking to me, you must tell me your name —”

He had a circlet around his brow, the same gold as his eyes. She tried to say Rowenna of Balenty, Rowenna of Balenty, but she had lost the power to say anything. Far off but closer now there was a noise of footsteps descending, and she knew somehow that she must not be there anymore when they arrived.

He reached the road and hobbled toward her. “Do not go yet,” he said, “stay with me,” and his words made her feel like she actually had the power to go, and since she ought to go, and soon, she ought to use it—

— and somehow just thinking that was enough to make the world around her flicker, the waste land and the citadel and the crippled king turning transparent in a different way from her own shimmer, the world doubling again but this time instead of seeing the citadel’s unruined past she was somehow in two places at once, in the heart of the wasted land and in the bedroom in the House of Birds, a plain dark room with a fireplace and a cushioned bed and herself already arranged upon it, waiting as they brought him in, her appointed one, her destiny.

When he came there were somehow two of him: The man who was there for her, the client come to claim her, and also the man with the golden eyes and the golden crown, who reached out for her as he flickered and dissolved into the waking world, taking with him his ravaged citadel, the two strange shapes suddenly looming in the ruined gate behind him, and his own pale and lovely and inhuman face, the mouth opening to say something she could almost hear, almost understand …

Are you

Are you one

Are you the one who was promised?

“And here she is, just as lovely as we prrrrromised,” the Ladyhawk said.

The client’s voice spoke to her softly in return, and though the other world was entirely gone now, dissolving like the gleaming birds and butterflies and the dank fogs around the citadel, Rowenna felt that she must be still inside the dream, because the client’s voice was the same voice as the shadow she had dreaded for so many months, the same voice as the master of the fox-faced man, the same voice that had spoken so dismissively over Hilwen as her sister, her faithless younger sister, had scrabbled to escape.

Of course it was him, because that was how a nightmare worked. The dream road might be long and strange, running through woods and waterways and waste lands, but there was only one monster at the end of it.

Now they were alone, without her even noticing the others going, just the two of them and the fire, and she had her part to play — and she found that it was so much easier now that she knew none of this was real.

She rose from the bed to stand before him, in mask and trailing dress and bare shoulders. His hood was thrown back and his face was not what she had expected — older and softer, a silver beard and a doughy nose, an expression in which several different emotions seemed to be at work. But desire was certainly one of them: He came across to her, his hand went to her shoulder, then up to her cheek, brushing up against the mask.

“You’re very beautiful,” he said, still the voice that she remembered but rougher now, tentative rather than commanding. “So beautiful. I can make you feel even more lovely, though. You don’t have to be afraid of me — I’d never hurt anything as beautiful as you.”

She murmured something, a thread of terror licking at her even though it was all just a dream. Now he pushed at her mask, pushed it up onto her forehead and then off, to fall beside her to the floor, exposing her brown hair, her blue eyes.

Those eyes squeezed shut, involuntarily. “I just want to see your beautiful face,” he said, his voice even rougher than before, and now his hand went down her shoulder, down to cup her breast, and it wasn’t his hand, it was the sailor’s hand on the river, it was all the same monster, all the same dream …

The movement stopped. The hand left her breast, and with her eyes closed she felt his weight pull back from her. Suddenly his hand was under her chin, lifting her face, and when she finally opened her eyes there was a slackness and confusion in his face, even possibly a touch of fear.

“What’s your name, girl?” he said.

No names, no names. She knew her part, she remembered:

“I’m the Nightbird, m’lord, here to sing for –”

“None of that,” he said, with a very different kind of roughness than before. “Tell me your name, your real name.”

The king of the waste land and the ruined citadel had asked her the same question and she had been struck dumb. Did she even have a name in the dream? In her waking life she had one, but here? Her tongue was thick, the line from thoughts to words was overgrown with creepers. She tried to think. What might a monster do with a name?

“Your name. No one will hurt you, I need to know your name.”

Rowenna. A thought only, nothing spoken. I am Rowenna of Balenty.

“What – is – your –”

“Rowenna,” she said. “My name is Rowenna of Balenty, m’lord.”

He took another step back. “Rowenna.”

“Yes, m’lord. Yes.”

“In your face,” the man murmured. “They’re both there in your … Seven hells. You’re Rowenna … tell me your father’s name.”

The blood on his chest, the softness of his corpse. “My father’s name was Edferth, m’lord. He’s dead since the summer.”

The client was nodding, his eyes burning her, cursing softly under his breath. She felt like she was supposed to say something more, but what was there to say?

“I’m sorry for it,” he said. “Do you know anything, do you know why your father was killed?”

She hadn’t said that he was murdered but of course the man knew how her da died because he had killed him. But she couldn’t say that, even if this was a dream, you couldn’t tell a murderer that he was a murderer, even she knew that much …

“I think … m’lord … I think it was a robbery. He went out to meet to some men about business, m’lord, and I found him – he was killed outside our inn.”

“That’s all you know?” he said. “That’s all? Not what the business was?”

“He had friends here, he thought he had friends, they were going to set him up in business, as a trader, m’lord. He didn’t tell me more than that.”

“No more than that?”

“My da – my father didn’t ever tell me very much, m’lord.” That much, at least, was the honest truth.

His face was so strange. Was this what she had been afraid of, all these months and tendays? This aging, soft-faced man who seemed to be almost crumpling before her?

He reached for her again, but only to pull gently at her dress, as if to cover a little more of her shoulders, to hide any swell of breast. He stepped back again.

“Angels, I’m going to burn,” he said.

There was table with a basin near the door, a place for clients to wash. He looked that way, his eyes finally breaking from her face.

“Forgive me,” he muttered.

A moment later he was hunched over the basin, making a retching sound. And Rowenna was watching him, amazed and clear-headed and awake.