Silverwing Read online

  "How come we're not allowed to see it? I mean, I know it's the law, but why?"

  "We're banished creatures, Shade, and have been for millions of years."

  "Banished?"

  "Punished, sent away."

  "For what? What did we do?"

  "It's easier if you hear for yourself. Come with me."

  The Echo Chamber

  Last dawn Shade had traveled to the summit of Tree Haven, and now Frieda was leading him to its very depths. They spiraled down the length of the great trunk, and Shade again marveled at the sheer size of the tree. Down and down until they landed on the mossy bottom. He was aware of how much cooler it was, and the strong smell of soil and wood. He thought he'd explored every winding inch of Tree Haven, every passageway and hollow, but he'd never noticed this small archway of gnarled wood, which Frieda was scuttling toward on all fours.

  He followed her through, and down, and instantly he knew he was beneath the earth. His echoes bounced harshly against the walls of the narrow passageway.

  "Here we are," said Frieda up ahead.

  The floor of the tunnel fell away, and Shade gladly opened his wings and swooped down into a large cave. He felt the cold seeping through the stone walls and thought: winter. And then he heard the wind—or at least he thought it was wind. But as he flared his ears, listened harder, he realized it was voices he was hearing, bat voices, so many of them, mumbling, mumbling, over one another, like a ghostly breeze through leaves. It made the flesh beneath his fur crawl.

  "Who's down there?" he asked, faltering.

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  "Nobody/' said Frieda. "I'll show you."

  "There're voices ..."

  "You'll see. This way."

  Frieda led him deeper still, down to the bottom of the cave, and then landed on a narrow ledge. In a small niche in the rough stone Shade saw a panel of mud and mulched-up leaves. The voices were coming from behind it.

  "Quickly now," Frieda told him, and pushed through the soft center of the panel with her nose.

  He didn't know what to expect. Maybe a mournful chorus of ghosts, maybe only one with a thousand weeping mouths. He found himself in a surprisingly small, completely round, and totally deserted cave. But it wasn't truly deserted. All around him, like currents of warm air, were voices, moaning at his ears, getting caught in his fur, his wings.

  "Fold your wings tight," Frieda said, carefully closing the mud panel behind Shade, "and stay still."

  He barely breathed. Still the voices seemed faint and far away, but he could hear them more clearly now as they swirled about:

  "... in the winter of that year ..."

  "... owls took their revenge ..."

  "... fifteen newborns died in the nursery ..."

  "... rebellion crushed after the battle ..."

  And he realized they were echoes, bouncing off the walls of the cave, again and again and again.

  "See how smooth the walls are," Frieda whispered. "It took years to hollow them out, polish them. Generations. But it had to be smooth, or else the echoes would snag and fade. Here they can bounce for centuries. It's not perfect. Sound escapes even through the door they so carefully built, and which I tend to every spring. Sound gets old, loses its power."

  "What's it for?" Shade asked.

  "This is the history of the Silverwing colony,"

  explained Frieda. "Right here. Every year one of the elders is appointed to sing the year's stories to the walls, and there they stay."

  "How do you keep them all straight?" Shade wanted to know, his ears flicking from one eddy of sound to the next. His mind felt cluttered and confused.

  "It takes a certain talent," said Frieda. "Concentration, patience. Few can do it, but I have a feeling about you . . . here, let me help." Shade watched as the old bat swiveled her ears, eyes darting as if in search of insects. "Yes, here it is, the oldest story of all . . . catch it now . . . concentrate ..."

  Shade moved his head up against Frieda's, eyes closed, ears pricked high, and suddenly there was a voice inside his head, so clear, so much a part of him, that he jerked back and pinned his ears flat to escape it.

  "It's an odd feeling, isn't it," said Frieda.

  "It gets right inside you," he said sheepishly.

  "It's all right. Try again."

  He tensed as the sound flowed into him, but this time held on.

  "Long ago," came the voice, "millions and millions of years ago, the world was an empty place." It was a female's voice, steady and melodious, and it gave Shade the strangest feeling to think she had spoken these words so long ago, and he was hearing them now, as if for the first time. He listened intently, eyes clamped shut.

  "There was only Nocturna, the Winged Spirit, whose wings spanned the entire night sky, and were the night sky, and contained the stars and the moon and the wind. One by one Nocturna fashioned creatures ..."

  The words faded away, and without warning, his mind was filled with pictures. A brilliant silvery world flared up before him, as clear as his own echo vision at night.

  His eyes popped open in surprise.

  "What's happening?"

  "Echo pictures," the elder told him patiently. "We see

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  with echoes, and with practice it's also possible to sing echo pictures into bats' heads."

  "It's so real!"

  "Listen. You'll lose it if you're not careful."

  He shut his eyes, exhaled slowly, and let the silvery world fill his mind once again.

  The beginning of the world—and he was there, watching it.

  He soared past a thousand different birds, skimmed over a thousand different beasts on the ground. The earth steamed. He could almost feel the heat, the newness of things.

  He saw bats, lifting from trees, beating their way through the air.

  And it was full daylight.

  The sun burned high in the sky.

  "We were allowed then," he muttered, incredulous. "We were allowed to see the sun!"

  The scene changed abruptly, and he was at the top of a giant tree, and all around him raged a huge battle. Birds dived down at beasts, fighting with their claws and beaks, carrying their smaller victims away and dropping them ta their deaths. But the beasts fought back, leaping up and snapping the birds in their jaws, smashing them with taloned claws. The beasts scaled the trees, destroying nests, pouncing on birds in the branches.

  Shade looked down with horror and saw a wildcat scrabbling up his own tree toward him, and he cried out in alarm.

  But at that moment he was suddenly higher in the sky, overseeing things from a great, safe distance.

  "A war!" Shade called out excitedly to Frieda, his eyes still closed, still watching.

  "The Great Battle of the Birds and the Beasts," he heard Frieda say.

  "But why?"

  "No one knows what started it."

  He noticed something. "Where are the bats?"

  "We refused to fight. Each side asked us to join them, but we said no."

  The silvery images in his head shifted again, and he was flying over a ravaged forest, the trees naked and broken, the earth pockmarked with animal holes and trenches. He knew the battle must have gone on for a long time, years and years.

  He soared down over a great field and saw beasts and birds gathered there together, holding some kind of important meeting.

  "The peace treaty," he heard Frieda say. She was listening along with him.

  The bats were there too, and all the other creatures seemed angry with them, shouting and pointing. A great owl spread its wings in judgment, and a huge wolf threw back his head and howled. The bats flew, spiraling up into the air, spreading across the sky.

  And suddenly it was night.

  "What happened?" Shade cried.

  "The beasts blamed us for losing the battle; the birds branded us cowards for refusing to fight. Listen."

  The voice that Shade heard at the beginning came back into his head now.

  "For milli
ons of years we have lived in the dark. The sunlight hurts our eyes now. The Winged Spirit, Nocturna, was angry with the other creatures for banishing us. Though she could not undo what had been done, she gave us new gifts to help us survive: She darkened our fur, so we might blend in with the night; she gave us the echo vision, so we could hunt in the dark. But the greatest gift she gave us was the Promise."

  There was a brief silence, and then:

  "Long ago, millions and millions of years ago, the world was an empty place ..."

  The message had come full circle, and Shade shifted his head out of the echo stream. He felt as if he'd been away for a long time.

  He turned to Frieda. He'd heard of Nocturna before, every newborn had, the mysterious Winged Spirit who made everything. But he'd heard so many new things, and was so knotted up inside with emotion, he scarcely knew where to begin.

  "We didn't do anything!" he exclaimed. He'd expected something terrible, some crime that would make him shudder and feel ashamed of his ancestors. "They banished us just because we didn't take sides in the war!"

  "To the birds and beasts, we were cowards and traitors."

  "But before then we could really fly in the day? Is that true? We were free?"

  "I believe so, yes."

  "What's the Promise?"

  "That's here too," Frieda said, tilting her head around the echo chamber. "Let's see if we can find it. It's one of the oldest here ..."

  Shade knew Frieda could find it in a second, and that she was trying to teach him how to use the echo chamber. Together, they sifted through the eddies of sound, and Shade soon discovered that they were all different. The newer messages were clearer and slightly louder; the older ones had a faint hiss to them, words and pictures occasionally muffled, or obscured altogether.

  "You're getting close," Frieda said.

  He found one story gusting across the cave's bottom, quite faint. He listened, caught a few words. "Is this it?"

  Frieda cocked her head, squinted, and gave a nod. "Well done."

  Shade latched onto the echo and let the story fill his head. It was another voice this time, unsteady and old, but filled with a kind of radiant hope.

  "This is the story of Nocturna's Promise. It has been carried from bat to bat for over a million years, and I speak it to these walls so that future Silverwing generations will know what has passed, and what will come to

  pass. The promise was made one day long ago ..."

  Shade was in an ancient forest, peering out over the fields. There were no bats in sight. He was alone in the middle of the day, the sun high in the sky. Suddenly darkness seeped over the earth, as if a giant bat were slowly unfurling her wings and blocking out the light. The beasts shrank back in terror. The birds shrieked and fled to the cover of the trees.

  The sun disappeared.

  Not disappeared exactly, but to Shade it was as if a huge black eye had opened in front of it. Nocturna's eye. That was the first thought that popped into his head. Only the rim of the sun remained. And he was staring at it.

  This blazing ring of silver light.

  So bright that even as a picture in his mind, it made his eyes smart.

  All at once bats were streaming from their roosts, and he was among them, an ecstasy of wings. They knotted in the sky, then flew apart, swirling beneath this silver ring.

  It was the first time in a thousand years they had been out in the day.

  The dark sky began to speak, and Shade felt every inch of his body tingle. He knew without a doubt that this was Nocturna's voice, speaking to the bats long ago.

  "One day your banishment will end, and the cruel law will be broken. You will no more have to fear the claws of the owls or the jaws of the beasts. And you will be free to return to the light of day once again."

  The silver ring in the sky slowly faded, and then black silence filled Shade's head.

  The echo began to repeat, and Shade shrugged it off, turning urgently to Frieda.

  "Will there be another war? Is that what it means?"

  "Maybe. I don't know."

  "When? When will it happen?"

  The bat elder shook her head. "Maybe not in my lifetime,

  or yours." She paused. "But I think it will be sooner than that."

  "How come?" Shade asked, startled.

  "Because of this/' Frieda told him, unfolding her wing and revealing the silver band on her forearm. Shade gasped, as if seeing it for the first time. He remembered the image from the echo story: the sun being blotted out by Nocturna's black eye, so that it was only a blazing ring of light. A ring of silver. Just like the band on Frieda's forearm.

  "You see it, don't you?" Frieda asked.

  He nodded. "How did you get it?"

  "The Humans gave it to me when I was young. Not much older than you, really. There were a couple of us in the forest one night, and they took hold of us and fastened the bands, and let us go. I believe it's a sign, Shade. A sign of the Promise to come. I don't know what part the Humans will play in it, but I believe they've come to help us in some way."

  Shade sent a delicate wash of sound over the band, and picked out the Human markings around the rim. He could only wonder at their strangeness, the curves and sharp edges. He'd seen owl scratchings once, and raccoon hieroglyphs, but these were by far the most complicated.

  "May I?" he asked.

  "Yes, of course," Frieda replied, extending her forearm.

  Shade touched the band with the tip of his claw.

  "Did the Humans give bands to anyone else?"

  "Not for a long time—so long I began to wonder if they meant anything at all. But two winters ago, yes, they came again, and banded some males."

  "My father," said Shade instinctively.

  "Ariel told you, did she?"

  "No. She doesn't talk about him much."

  Frieda nodded. "We used to tell all the newborns these stories, the ones you've just heard. That was years ago. But most of the elders thought we should stop. It was no

  use thinking about the Promise, they said, something that might never come. That's how Bathsheba thinks. They didn't want any more bloodshed. About fifteen years before you were born a rebellion sprung up, but the bats didn't stand a chance against the owls. They fought anyway. We fought, I should say."

  "You did?" Shade said, gazing again at the scars on Frieda's body.

  "I was lucky to escape with my life. After that, the elders wanted to just stay in the night, and forget they'd ever had the freedom to fly in the day. Most bats think they're right, and I can't fault them for it. It makes sense. But for some bats, they just can't let go of that idea of the sun, of freedom. I'm like that. And your father was too."

  "Mom said he was killed by owls."

  "He flew off somewhere just a few nights before we started our journey back north. He didn't tell anyone where he was going, at least I never heard of it. Maybe he told one of the others. All I know was there was something he wanted to find out, about the bands, about the Humans, maybe. And he never did come back. There were a couple others before him who disappeared too."

  "Mom just said he was foolish for wanting to see the

  sun."

  "I know that she never agreed with his views. And she wants to protect you, Shade. She might not have told you the whole truth, but I suspect there's a lot Cassiel never told her either. Try not to be angry with her."

  "We should fight them," Shade said with a cold, sudden fury. How could the other Silverwings be so feeble? Letting the owls and the other birds and beasts tell them what to do for millions of years. What right did they have? "If all the bats would fight then we could—"

  But Frieda was shaking her head. "No, not even your father thought that, Shade. He knew we couldn't win in battle, that was obvious. He thought there was something else coming, something we needed."

  Shade looked away, ashamed at his outburst. He felt immensely tired, as if he'd lived through all the stories in the echo chamber.

  "Why did you show
me all this?" he asked. What was the point? he wondered. There was nothing he could do to change the past, bring his father back, or even change the future. He was a newborn runt in a Silverwing colony in the middle of nowhere.

  Frieda smiled at him, and he didn't find the deep wrinkles in her face so frightening anymore. "You're not like the others. I see something in you, a kind of brightness I don't want to be smothered. You're curious. You want to know about things. I've been watching you. You're a good listener too: You'll hear things no one else can. And this is far more important than your size, Shade."

  He flushed at the compliment, and only wished he could believe it. He had so many more questions he wanted to ask, but there was a fluttering of wings outside the echo chamber and Shade heard Mercury's voice.

  "Frieda," the messenger said urgently. "The owls are coming. And they have fire."

  Ablaze

  Shade circled anxiously over the peak of Tree Haven with Frieda and Mercury, watching the owls soar toward them. They flew high up in the sky, thirty-five, maybe forty in an arrowhead formation, and the eerie silence of their powerful wingbeats made Shade feel sick. Clutched in their claws were long thin sticks, the ends glittering like dangerous stars. Fire. Shade stared in horror. Only the owls had fire. Hundreds of years ago they'd stolen some from Humans and kept it burning in secret nests deep in the forest.

  "Mercury/' Frieda said with amazing calm, "go spread the news through the forest, and tell everyone to take cover there. Tell them there's to be no fighting. Shade, go back inside and make sure everyone is out of the roost."

  He swallowed hard.

  "Do you understand?" Frieda asked him.

  "Yes."

  "You know what might happen?"

  He nodded fiercely and flew off, grateful to have something to do. He dove back inside Tree Haven, crying out the warning.

  "Clear the roost! Clear the roost!"

  He poured all his energy into his task, trying not to think of the fire in the owls' claws. He started at the bottom

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  and worked his way up, darting through every twist and turn of the branches to make sure he didn't miss anyone. "Clear the roost! Everyone out!" And all this because of him—his fault. Lucky that most everyone was out hunting; the bats still inside were old and frail, and he had to nudge some of them awake, and help them toward the exits, explaining hurriedly.