Falcon of the Night Read online

my father.

  He taught me everything he knew, of men, of fowl, and of craft. He was learned and understood the art of swords and politics, but he had given up on the tribes, tiring of the hypocrisy he saw among their leaders. This didn’t go unnoticed, ultimately resulting in him being forced from his home at the center of the village to a hovel on its western border long before I came along.

  The tribes are very strange. Having spent most of my life in the Northern Kingdom, it is clear to me why my father never fit in. Privacy is valued in the north, but among the tribes, it is considered immoral, though it was ironically used as a way to punish my father for being different. It seems just that our tribe’s own hypocrisy led to its demise.

  It was on a day filled with thunder and hail. Some members of the tribe had been trading with a town on the southern border of the Kingdom of Neir, an arrangement so tiny and insignificant that it should have gone unnoticed and simply been let go. It was against the unwritten law of the tribes, but such commerce had existed among many of the border tribes for centuries, so our elder thought it would be fine for us to do the same.

  Unfortunately, he had an enemy among a distant tribe, one whose leaders wanted to bring the border tribes back into line. The elder of that tribe invoked an old decree, one said to have come from the original founders of the plains, allowing for an elder to take absolute control of tribes that have strayed from the principles of the plains.

  Our elder contested the claim, and a battle was fought, one we lost. Those who persisted in defending our rights were executed shortly thereafter. I was barely a teenager at the time, grateful that my father had chosen to remain silent. Tragically, his fate ended up being no different from those who stood up to our enemies.

  Rather than take over the affairs of our village, the elder of the belligerent tribe decided to simply harvest the spoils of war and leave those of us who had survived to fend for ourselves. His men went from house to house, taking what they wanted, people included as they so deemed, while he went alone to visit my father.

  Although somewhat of an outcast, my father had gained renown for his falcons, and the elder came to him demanding that he give all of them up as a peace offering. My father was willing to comply, with the exception that he keep one, his own falcon, for himself. The elder refused, spilling my father’s blood without hesitation.

  I beheld the horrific scene from a hiding place. I did not make a noise, but I screamed on the inside. At that instant, the lessons from my father about the power of action came back to me, and I emerged from my place in the shadows and stabbed my father’s killer in the back.

  Knowing that I had to run, I took the elder’s horse and fled to a neighboring village. I was followed there and had to sneak away, only to be discovered again. It soon became obvious that I had to leave the plains entirely.

  Second Life on the River

  I fled north, both from my crime and my heartache, not stopping until so exhausted I lacked the strength to weep. I stole when I needed to eat, and hid when I needed to sleep. The weeks came and went in a haze I can hardly remember. What I do remember is that I could not stop going. That is, of course, until the North Sea kept me from getting any further away from my past.

  That moment remains vivid in my memory, my view standing on the beach as I contemplated swimming as far as I could until my muscles became so weak that I would be hopeless to return to shore. With nowhere more to run, I cried for a long while, collapsing to the white sand beneath me and wishing that the water would consume me then and there and blot out the sun.

  Alas, it didn’t, nor could I drag myself any closer to the end I wished to embrace. I was only a boy, after all, one who had both witnessed the destruction of his world and exacted vengeance on the man who had brought it about. I didn’t want death, but a rebirth, a second life I would eventually find on the river feeding the sea, the Oure.

  Acclimating to this world of kingdoms and borders was difficult at first. The plains of my youth were nothing but a wide expanse of unruly land, governed only by old traditions and those who loosely enforced them. As I quickly learned, I would have to adjust to the ways of the western kingdoms if I meant to start over.

  It took several years for me to slowly build a life for myself. I thieved, marauded, kidnapped, blackmailed, did everything else imaginable, and was jailed more times than I could ever remember, but no prison was able to hold me for long. I went by so many names that the guards never quite knew just who they had captured.

  My aliases changed depending on where I was, and I switched them so frequently that I started to lose sense of my true self. Perhaps that was a good thing, giving me the time I needed to ignore my past while my soul mended itself. Once I was ready, something I’d started to realize, an opportunity to live a legitimate life presented itself.

  It was in a prison in Teuvinna, ironically, that I was put on the path to where I am today. I say that because I am certain that I have done more ill against the dukes and leaders of that city than any other. The jailor, unlike his superiors, had a good understanding of who I was and offered to free me on the condition that I spend a year working for his brother, a bargemen whose trade had suffered greatly from frequent raids along the Oure. I accepted, and he secured my release. To this day, I am uncertain how he managed to free me, but little matter.

  To understand why that deal took place, you have to appreciate what the rivers were like then. Whereas now the dukes are reaching out and taking greater jurisdiction over the countryside among the many hills and forests of the Northern Kingdom, back then most areas beyond the borders of the city-states were lawless wildernesses.

  The jailor’s brother had been running into a lot of trouble with thieves in the night and marauders in the daylight, so it made sense to hire a person like me for security, though he was taking a great risk that I wouldn’t run. That thought never crossed my mind, however, because I enjoyed the prospect of figuring out how to stop thieving and raiding since I was damn good at both myself.

  After my year was up, I stayed on with the bargeman, having developed with him what could almost be called a friendship, almost because I never gave him my real name, and I think that to call someone friend, you have to be willing to share at least that. Nevertheless, we were close enough that when he died, he left it to me to take over his barge for him since his brother was also dead.

  I enjoyed the simple life on the river. It wasn’t that I felt incapable of more, but I went through a phase during which I actually thought I could have a somewhat normal life, and even wanted it. Hopes of finding a wife even went through my head, but it wasn’t meant to be.

  Return to the Wilderness

  Because I had gained some repute for keeping cargo safe and completely accounted for (most smalltime traders tended to be at least a little dishonest), I was periodically approached with opportunities to transport more than just goods. Sometimes people needed to get up or down the river without anyone knowing, and I was more than happy to be the one paid to make it happen.

  More often, these were suspicious characters, spies and the like, but every once in a while, the person in question would be a politician. Those were my favorites, not just because they paid the best, but because of the secrets I was able to leech from them. Whereas spies tended to keep to themselves, politicians by their very nature were typically blabbermouths, though I had to learn to decipher the garbage from the truth. What I heard always intrigued me, almost like stories yet to be finished.

  I once had the opportunity to transport the mayor of Teuvinna, the duke’s nephew, to a secret meeting in the forest west of Harvenbak. Things went smoothly, but on the journey back, I came across some information I’d rather not have, the details of a plot I immediately recognized as so traitorous and toxic that any and all who had knowledge of it could potentially be in grave danger.

  Despite the extraordinarily high toll he paid, double what we had agreed to, I regretted taking him onboard and was glad to be rid of him.
A week later, another suspicious character approached me needing a ride from Teuvinna all the way upstream to Bayfell. I accepted as I generally did, only this man seemed to be more interested in me than in getting back to the place he called home.

  Once we were beyond the borders of Teuvinna, he asked me of the duke’s nephew. I remained indifferent to such questions as I always was, but he persisted, reassuring me that I was in no danger. Despite this, I withstood all of his pressure, replying that I would not be good at what I did if I could not keep a secret. I still remember his response, which was that someone good at doing what I did would know which secrets to keep and which to sell.

  We spoke several times during the journey south. Each time he tried to be even more persuasive, making it that much harder to resist his charm, yet I stood firm, and good thing. The whole time I had supposed him to be an agent of Bayfell, but I would later learn that he was actually working for Teuvinna, sent to see if I could be trusted. Had I at any point divulged anything to him, I would have found myself at the bottom of the river.

  What he had said about selling secrets, however, caused something within me to stir, the thrill of evasion and of almost being caught. Deep down, I sensed that this spy was not