Eagles and Swans
Chapter 13: Blood Runs Thick
Preface 03: A cage, however large, is still a cage
It was the end of autumn in year 490. Hollia could hear the birds again.
Her heart sank with every chatter and every twang.
Every Sunday morning in autumn, as she crossed from her bedroom to the kitchen, she made every single journey of her lifetime a thousand times over.
Amid the sputter and hiss of the stove, she squatted by the unassuming kitchen cupboard, lacquered beech with rusty handles—one that would typically have held condiments, or utensils.
She pulled it open, and everything within it gleamed. Biting her lip, she picked a glass syringe from the tray. It wobbled in her trembling hands.
She willed herself not to let it slip out, and reached then for the accursed bottle of ghastly white serum beside it.
The aviary of Hollia’s home was divided neatly into two portions. One of the two sections contained the tamer birds—the ones who, over the generations, had lost most of their wild instincts, and spent most of their time roosting and fluttering about for food or new foliage.
The restricted section, scaffolded in thick steel netting, was made for the birds that had not lost the desire to escape. They continued to be ruled by whims of the blood, even though five hundred years of forebears had lived in captivity.
Some birds held clocks and compasses within their minds, natural instruments that called each one to a faraway place, every year at the turn of spring.
Sometimes at night, they threw themselves at the bars of their cages, longing for a land that called from somewhere they couldn’t see but knew existed, burning in their iron blood. Those kept indoors lost hope quickly, but those that had a view of the stars continued relentlessly to pound at the bars and the gates in the direction of south as their parents had—even though the bars did not budge. They knew they had to go somewhere. Their destination, which generations of prisoners had inherited. They would injure themselves against the netting, bleeding as they tore their feathers.
Once upon a time, someone had had an idea, to take birds into captivity and to savour their beauty the way one might a painting or a sculpture. And that idea had created the aviary to which Hollia Canavere owed her livelihood.
The girl slipped through the back door. Brilliant birdsong surrounded her. Feathers fluttered, the tiny bodies of perching birds, like gemstones lining the branches, exploding suddenly into fluttering bursts of red and gold.
She hated the way the new birds screeched, as the needle sank into them for the very first time. But it was only necessary.
She briefly recalled watching their dances deep in the night, from her window—those flitting silhouettes in the indigo, railing against the tight-strung wires of a net that seemed to have trapped the entire sky. The rhythm of twanging, of bodies irrevocably drawn to the magnet-south by a passion without reason.
She injected into each one a moon-clear sickness. It lasted short: the resistance of skin and a smooth jab inwards, the slow pressure of thumb on plunger—the excruciating draw of the needle. Twenty times over.
And as the night fell again, she watched them sink into the silence, forgetting for a week their ties to the sky above, forgetting how to fly.
The West Wind Tunnel brought Ruthenia to the New Town on Tuesday morning. She diverged from the early morning flight crowd at gate 85, ascending through the smoggy little tunnel into the midst of pedestrians. Factory steam billowed in towering black bastions over the rooftops, between which she wove, choking on the stench.
“You’re late!” shouted Tante amid a field of gleaming bottles. Ruthenia landed atop a crate and gingerly set her feet down where she couldn’t knock any over. Behind Tante, the other three were hard at work, uncorking the vessels one by one to dump crimson into the empty barrels.
“Mornin’!” called Gordo, and Den offered a casual salute.
Hyder waved her over. “The plan’s been refined,” he explained, waiting for her to arrive at his side before resuming. “We’ll hang the barrels over the drains with Threads. Once we’re far away, the Threads will snap—and splash, we’ve done it!”
Ruthenia squinted at him. “Who’s doing the Weaving?” she said. “You didn’t involve some outsider, did you?”
“No, I will,” he said, grinning and wiggling his fingers. “You’ve inspired me to pick up new tricks! Gordo will be taking them inside, one barrel at a time, and I’ll be hanging them up.”
“Oh—well, I’m...staying out of this,” she muttered.
“Are you?” said Tante, face scars wrinkling. “Long ago, you would have relished such defiance.”
“That was when we didn't come with the real risk of death!” she answered.
“It’s not that big of a risk, Ruth!” Hyder interjected, patting her arm to appease her. “I’ll be safe. I’m good enough, trust me.”
She snatched her arm away. “Just stay alive,” she said.
He grinned, lifting a hand to Weave a veil around it. “Will do, ma’am.” His hand flickered into invisibility, before resolving again from the air.
While they resumed the task at hand, the fear descended upon her, darker than before. When they had poured the last drop of food colouring into the last barrel, and the rest yelled and pumped their fists.
“Skip lessons and come with us, Ruth, yer missin’ out on all the fun,” said Gordo.
“Ruth can do what she wants,” Hyder answered.
Two days later, there was an uproar at the Helika Palace.
The city alarms went off all at once, chiming angrily over the hills. The shock of the noise almost sent Ruthenia tumbling off her umbrella and into the corn below.
Squinting at the distance, she felt her stomach clench at the thought of Hyder getting chained up and carted off. “You’d better have run off by now, you idiot,” she growled, then screwed her eyes shut, and diverted her flight around the perimeter of the urban area.
“Late,” was Tanio's verdict as Ruthenia entered his house that evening. He sat reading cross-legged on his couch, face deep in the Afternoon Herald. She turned to retort, but he did not let her. “Did you hear about the attack on the palace today?”
Ruthenia set her umbrella down on the dining table with a thud. “What happened?”
“Someone poured blood in the palace drains,” he said. “I wager it wasn’t real blood, but it was a ridiculous feat nonetheless.” He clicked his tongue, before lowering his head to resume his read. “Some strange troublemakers.”
She glanced at the red dye trapped under her nails, and hid her hands behind her back. “Do they know who did it?”
“A rogue weaver, apparently. They can't find their signature in the registry. See, Ruthenia? You can get good even without classes.”
She frowned. “I'm sure it takes more than just a strong will,” she replied.
Ruthenia crept away, exiting the house quietly through a door almost too narrow. Facing the scintillating night sky, she breathed in and felt the world spiral around her.
All at once she could feel the Threads fluttering angrily, vibrating to the tones of an ethereal scream. It was for brief seconds, and then other thoughts overwhelmed her, but she knew what she had heard.
Instead of returning with Tanio on Saturday, Ruthenia took a detour through the New Town in the honey afternoon sun. The factory smokestacks were hunkering down for the day and the worn roads that criss-crossed the town were bare, but now was the hour when the street carts stowed their shutters and began their business. By one of them she swung, picking up a meal fit for four.
As she landed in the alley between station and bank, her feet skidded over the street. The whoosh of wind was replaced by the grumbling of steam engines in the lazy afternoon still.
Tante, relatively uninterested as usual, sat cleaning a knife on his blackened shirt with a dump of aur coins scattered before him. Den and Gordo were having a small chat in a corner beneath a towering, splintering crate. Hyder was the only one who waved and sprang to his feet, dashing to her with eyes trailing the paper bag in her hands.
“Ruth, there you are!” he cried. “What's in the bag?”
The way his eyes went round, glistening when she lifted it for him and the aroma of roast chicken hit him, made a pang ignite behind her throat.
“You, you didn't have to—oh, Ruth!” He snatched the paper bag from her hands and flew back to the circle, waving the others towards himself.
Long after Den and Gordo had flocked around Hyder and started portioning out the cups of fried chicken and bread, Tante finally kicked a crate lid over his money. “Hello there,” he said, grinning.
She planted the umbrella ferrule firmly on the ground. “You’re in a good mood.”
“What can I say. Hauled in thirty aurs, and then saw the news. You see the coverage?”
“I heard you didn't get caught.”
Tante raised his eyebrows, glancing meaningfully at Hyder, who turned away with a chicken drumstick in his mouth. The knifeman bent for something beside his money—a copy of today’s news. Leaping off the crate, he shoved the papers into Ruthenia's hands.
Blood Runs In Palace Drains: Scare sparks fears of a rogue Weaver on the loose
The ancient Helika Palace Complex has always been a place of intrigue. Centuries of diarchs have lived within its walls, and with them centuries of scandal. Needless to say, there is bad blood between the families housed there, but no one ever expected this expression to manifest in a literal sense.
Ten minutes after noon yesterday, canals all across the palace grounds were flooded with a thick red liquid resembling blood. Her Majesty, Ordinary Queen Althea, was one of many royals who discovered it on leaving her abode.
Fearing murder, she raised the security alarm of the palace, and guards were immediately deployed to seek out the cause.
“I could hardly believe my eyes,” says the Ordinary Queen. “Which sick-minded fool thought such a trick amusing? Where were our guards?”
At least six fainting cases were attended by the palace doctor in the next three hours as the spill was cleaned up. Many nobles and administrators suffer from haemophobia, the acute fear of blood.
The source of the “blood” was discovered half an hour after the attack: barrels, numbering twelve in total, had been launched from bridges around and beneath the palace complex, each containing traces of the same red liquid. The liquid has since been confirmed not to be blood, though its actual identity is as of yet unknown.
No clues have been found as to the perpetrator’s identity. Experts have concluded through filography that a single attacker was involved. Some barrels were found half-Masked, pointing to a high likelihood that the culprit possesses advanced skills in Weaving. However, their Weaving signature could not be located in the Ministry of Flight’s records, which has sparked fears among experts that a powerful rogue Weaver bearing ill intent towards the government may be on the loose.
Authorities caution against reckless exploration and have issued a statement requiring all advanced Weavers across the nation to update their signatures with the Ihira clergy within the next week.
Lifting her eyes from the papers, Ruthenia proceeded to fix Hyder with the same odd stare as Tante had.
He pulled the bone out of his mouth and flung it aside. “What?”
“You really should be in a Weaving school,” she said.
“I would be, if things were any different,” he answered with a twinge to his voice. He glanced from one to another. Not one gaze left him for the next ten seconds. “Stop staring, I didn’t do anything special!”
“D’you realise what this means?” answered Tante. “They called you an advanced Weaver!”
“What happens if they find me?” answered Hyder, folding his arms.
“They don’t know the last thing about you!” Tante laughed and clapped him on the back.
He cast a pleading glance at Ruthenia. “Will they find me?”
“Just don't register your signature,” she said. “And avoid people with brass forks in their hands.”
Come the next day's tea break, Ruthenia finally sucked up her pride, and made for the cafeteria lift. She didn't usually go the whole way down; Tanio's offerings didn't warrant the full trip. But it was the only time and place where she was sure to find a certain someone when he wasn't otherwise occupied.
The cafeteria was as crowded as it typically was, every table in every quarter seated to its full capacity. It was five minutes of jostling through the crowd before she finally reached the stairs to the mezzanine.
As she climbed, she found herself watching the comings and goings of the crowd. As she went, she unfolded the paper bag and pulled today's tea—a minced beef pie—from inside. Pausing at the top, her eyes swept the tables, and she frowned when she noticed, among them, her second least favourite classmate at a table by himself, with nothing but a book for company.
She munched on Tanio's lunch, and blinked when she found it unexpectedly bearable. Aleigh did not move, except to turn the page, or to take another forkful of whatever he was dining upon. She would have supposed that the Arcane Prince of Astra would see no end to the number of schoolmates wanting his attention, and yet, somehow, he was completely alone.
“Hey,” she said, dropping into the seat opposite him.
Aleigh lowered his book and peered up. “Ah. You,” he sighed. “How may I help you?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt your Royal Highness, but I seem to recall that you felt you hadn't repaid my favour. Well, good news—I have a perfect opportunity for you to do just that.” He did not respond. She puffed up and put on a mockery of his accent. “I would like to request your kind assistance.”
His frown deepened. “What sort of help?”
Ruthenia shrugged. “D’you know what spooled Thread is?”
“Curious, why should you need something of that sort?”
“It’s not for me! My boss has been nagging me about it all week. He says it’s something expensive, so I assume it’s something you’d know about. Well, do you?”
“Yes, I do,” he said, assuming a businesslike tone. “It is a raw material, often used in building suspension, and other configurations that must retain function without frequent reinforcement. And, I happen to know at least one wholesaler personally.”
Ruthenia straightened. “Could you introduce me?” she said, reserving her musing.
Aleigh drew his lips into a line, brow furrowed in consideration. “Only this once, and only because my mother is so pleased with your work. I'll have to take a look at my schedule, but you may expect a response within the week.”