Windblowne

Oliver followed, pressing the button once more as he went. He heard the kite rack slide closed behind him.

When he reached the living room, he found the crimson kite smacking itself against the front door.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” said Oliver. “Here.”

He opened the door, and the kite flew outside into the night, then paused, hovering, its long tail beckoning.

“Forget it!” shouted Oliver into the winds, thinking of the long slashes on the barricade, and the dark fighting kites. “I’m not following you anywhere else tonight. It’s too dangerous!”

The kite rose higher, shaking frantically.

“Come home with me,” pleaded Oliver, feeling guilty despite himself. “We’ll alert the Watch at dawn.”

But the kite shuddered in the turbulent winds and flew no closer.

“Fine!” he shouted. “I’m going home. Great-uncle Gilbert told me to stay away anyway. He doesn’t want my help!”

Oliver came down the steps, leaning into the winds, as the kite danced backward, lashing its tail.

“I’m not scared or anything! It’s just that I’ve got the Festival to think about!”

He tried to march onward impressively, but before he could take his first impressive step, he heard a whoosh, and then the kite was in his face, beating its sails against him. He tried to grab the kite, but it slipped around him, striking at him. Oliver ran down the path, arms over his head, the kite in close pursuit.

He stopped. The kite drifted menacingly before him, blocking the path. Oliver thought longingly of his safe, warm bed. He had to come up with a way out of this. The last thing he wanted to do, given his reputation, was run through Windblowne being chased by a kite.

“Look,” he said to the kite, “be reasonable.”

The kite hovered warily.

“There’s nothing I can do to help Great-uncle Gilbert, whatever’s happened to him, even if I wanted to. Even if he had trusted me. Even if he hadn’t almost shoved me down the stairs and set his kite-eater on me and”—Oliver realized he was getting carried away—“and everything else.”

The kite buzzed, tail lashing like a whip.

“You heard Great-uncle Gilbert,” Oliver said. “I don’t have any talents. I’ll never be a kitesmith. My great- uncle wants nothing to do with me, and neither does anyone else!”

The kite’s sails sagged mournfully.

“So that’s it,” Oliver continued uncertainly. This had been easier when the kite fought back. “If you don’t want to come with me, then fine. I promise to tell the Watch all about this.”

The kite drooped away. It drooped past Oliver and back up the path. Oliver watched it go. It appeared determined to fly on, whether Oliver was coming or not.

“Fine!” declared Oliver, without conviction. He turned toward home. The path ahead swirled with fallen leaves. A few low, bare oak branches draped the path, their shadows tracing the ground.

A distant sound came to his ears—an immense wave of wind, far off but rolling closer. The world seemed to gather itself. The treetops stilled, oak leaves settled to earth, and Oliver held his breath. He knew this sound. A windburst was coming, and a big one.

Before he felt it, he could see it, as oaks in the distance began to thrash wildly, sending up clouds of leaves to join the wave.

Oliver braced for impact as the wave hit. He threw up his hands to protect his face when the leaf-cloud enveloped him, rushing past.

The winds pummeled and fought, and he fought back, pushing with all of his strength. Step by step, he battled forward.

He risked a glance back.

The crimson kite, buffeted by the winds, was drifting heavily up the path. In moments, it was lost to Oliver’s view.

Oliver dropped his hands. The winds rose again, and thousands of oak branches shook together. Then the wind-wave passed, and Oliver listened as it rolled away across the mountain.

He fell to his knees, exhausted from his struggle with the winds.

I win, he thought. I can go home.

But he didn’t go. He crouched there, hearing the weird and distant dying voices of the windburst.

He plucked a few dead leaves from his sweater. Looking at them, he could see that they were not all from the sick oak. One of them came from a sentinel, and another from the oak across the Way from his own home oak.

He looked at these leaves, and he remembered the soft feel of the sick oak’s bark, and he remembered the way Great-uncle Gilbert had shouted “No!” and looked at him, and how that distraction had resulted in his great- uncle’s defeat and disappearance. Something was very wrong with the oaks, and he had a feeling that Great-uncle Gilbert had been trying to do something about it.

And all this with the Festival only two days away.

Oliver groaned, then ran after the kite. When he caught up, it whirled about in surprise, then spun happily in the air.

This is madness, thought Oliver, and in a way that sealed it for him. He was mad like his great-uncle and his parents.

“All right,” he said with resignation. “If you know where Great-uncle Gilbert is, then take me there.”

The kite shot back up the path, and Oliver followed, buffeted by the winds. He ran all the way back up the path, following the lashing tail, past the turn to his great-uncle’s house—and then, in horror, he realized where the kite was leading him. The crest.

In moments they reached the oakline, where the path emerged onto the crest. The kite stopped, hovering, and Oliver stopped too, just a few feet away. He clutched at a nearby branch and squinted as dust and debris from the raging winds swarmed over him.

On the crest, the grass was bent flat as a sheet, and the moonslight stabbed down through a chaotic cloud of unbridled power, a screaming maelstrom where the protection of the oaks ended and the night winds leveled everything. Oliver felt as though he were staring into the maw of an invincible creature bent on total destruction.

The crimson kite dipped down like a flier preparing to leap.

“Please,” Oliver begged, screaming. “Don’t! You’ll be destroyed!” He held out one hand in supplication. “Please.”

The kite shook proudly, sails snapping, and flew into the storm.

Oliver screamed and lunged for the tail, but too late. It flickered just ahead of his hand, and was gone.

As he stumbled across the oakline, the night winds knocked him flat, driving the breath from his body. Ahead he could see the kite, somehow resisting utter destruction, flying defiantly toward the peak.

Then the winds picked him up and threw him as though he were a scrap of silk. They slammed him into a nearby oak, knocking the breath from him and causing him to see a dazzling array of stars. He managed to crawl around to the lee side of the trunk, away from the full force of the winds. The crimson kite, illuminated by moonslight at the peak, turned in circles as though searching for something. It spied Oliver and flew at him.

The kite came to an abrupt halt only a few feet away. Oliver did not understand how the kite could fly in the night winds, but he didn’t care, for the kite’s tail was now dangling in front of him tantalizingly. He leapt and found a fistful of silk. He whooped in triumph as the tail lashed itself around his forearm like a striking whip.

The whoop died as the kite began to drag him, powered by the irresistible force of the night winds, onto the crest.

“I can’t!” screamed Oliver over the roar of the winds. Bits of leaf and twig blistered his cheeks. He dug in his heels and fought back, knocked from one side to another as the winds beat at him. He pulled as hard as he could. But with the night winds powering the kite, Oliver couldn’t win.

The savage winds tearing at him, he struggled up the crest, expecting at any moment to be hurled away. But no matter how ferociously the winds blew, the kite held firm, pulling him higher. He passed the jumping marker, hardly noticing it. His mind was filled with cautionary tales told to Windblowne’s children, stories of how the night