Owlflight

Darian woke in the morning feeling as if his head weren’t working quite right. It was difficult to put his thoughts together; he seemed to be taking a very long time to get even a single thought to form. He stared for a long time at the wall that was a hand’s breadth or two past his nose, and wondered why the rough texture didn’t look the way it should. Why did each rough-sawn plank look rounded? And why wasn’t the wall itself slanting toward him as it formed the peak of the roof? His mind moved slowly and his thoughts felt fuzzy around the edges. And what was wrong with the light? It was greenish, and it was much darker in the loft than it should have been.

It couldn’t be just turning dawn, because he never woke up that early. Maybe it’s going to rain? Justyn hadn’t Fore-Seen any rains, though, and that was one thing that he could do right; his weather-watching was always accurate.

He’d had the strangest dream, too - that the village had been attacked by a whole army. There was fire, a lot of fire in the dream, the whole town had been on fire. It had been more of a nightmare. Darian shivered and tried to remember more. There was a lot of him running, and monsters chasing him, then more running through the forest, then horrible men on horseback chasing him - getting rescued by a Hawkbrother and an owl, a huge owl -

A pretty strange dream, too. When would I ever see a Hawkbrother? Never in a thousand years. And who would ever bother to attack Errold’s Grove with an army? What could they possibly want? Beans and turnips? Or maybe chickens - He had to shake his head at the way he was trying to make sense of a dream. Anything can happen in a dream, of course - one of Widow Clay’s chickens must have started laying silver eggs with golden yolks. Or maybe Justyn ‘s spells finally worked and everyone was suddenly rich, and that was why an army came.

Then he rolled over, and saw that he wasn’t in the loft, but in a strange, octagonal hut made of rough logs - windowless, and with vines over the door. There was a huge owl, the same one he thought he’d only “dreamed” about, blinking sleepily on a perch to one side. At that moment, he realized with a plummeting heart that it hadn’t been a dream at all. It had all been real, horribly real. Errold’s Grove was gone - or if not gone, it was in the hands of an army of violent strangers, and everyone he knew had fled in fear of losing their lives.

In one moment, he went from sleepy and laughing at himself to despair. His insides became cold; a lump rose in his throat that was half grief and half fear, and his thoughts spun dizzily with nowhere to go. He still couldn’t quite remember all that had happened, and the way his thoughts kept spinning didn’t help. There was something about Justyn - and his mind shied away from the thought, as if he didn’t want to remember, as if remembering would be the most horrible thing that had happened to him.

The village had been taken - but why? What could anyone possibly want with a little town that was on the verge of drying up and blowing away? If there were a single gold coin in the place, he would be surprised. A few of the women had jewelry, silver and silver-gilt, but he was sure there was not enough in the whole village to fill a hat. The women depended on their needlework to brighten their apparel.

Most ornaments were made of carved and painted wood, plaited straw, beads and beadwork, copper, and bronze, and not a single precious stone in the lot, just turquoise, agate, and colored quartz. There simply was nothing worth looting - and even if you cleaned out every bit of beer and liquor in the place, by the time you parceled it out among all the soldiers, there wouldn’t even be enough to get them mildly intoxicated!

This is insane; nothing is making any sense. I should be home, I should be in the loft, not here. Wherever “here” is. . . .

But if he wasn’t in the loft in Justyn’s house, where was he?

I’m with the Hawkbrothers - he remembered. This house belonged to them. What were they going to do with him now? He remembered, with a dreamlike vagueness, that they had asked him questions about what had happened, but they hadn’t given him any idea what they planned to do. Where was he going to go if they didn’t want him to stay? Could he get them to take him to Kelmskeep? But then what would he do?

Thoughts of Kelmskeep led him back to the village. Kelmskeep must have been where all the villagers were trying to escape to, and that was why they were running without trying to take anything. They could make Lord Breon’s lands in a few days or a week or so - it would be a hardship, but this was summer, and no one would die of exposure or thirst. But what had actually happened to the rest of the villagers? How well-planned had that attack been? Had those horrible fighters caught anyone else? How could they not have? If there had been four men on horseback ranging out that far from the village to catch those who tried to escape, mightn’t there be more?

No matter what the town did to me - they never hurt me on purpose, they just wanted me to be like them. They never did anything to anybody, they don’t deserve to have those awful men get hold of them!

What would happen to them? The man who caught him hadn’t killed him right off, but what would he have done when he learned that Darian didn’t have any money and didn’t know where any was? Darian had only vague notions of what enemy soldiers wanted, based on what bandits wanted. If you didn’t have money for them, what would soldiers do? How could you satisfy them if you didn’t have what they had come for?

Now Darian’s vivid imagination portrayed all manner of terrible things that could have befallen the folk of Errold’s Grove, and he grew more and more agitated as he thought about their possible fates.

The owl turned his head then, as if it sensed something was wrong. It opened a pair of enormous eyes completely and fastened its gaze on him. He found himself locking eyes with it. It clearly was not afraid of him, and strangely enough, he was not afraid of it, although it was easily large enough to hurt him quite seriously, if not kill