Disclaimer: I don't own anything/anyone from the Tortall books. I do own a couple of the characters in this story.
The Freeing Starfrost and Wildshadow
Rajmuat, capitol of the Copper Isles, in the reign of Queen Dovasary Balitang:
Sylv smiled as the black-and-white colt shook out his wings, each just a little longer than his body. She reached out and stroked the black bat-like frames and tickled Sunling's silvery mane. Her little friend whinnied up at her and tried to nibble her crinkly hair, coppery red-brown, as it popped out of the half-braid she kept it in.
Sunling's father whickered and nudged the youngling's shoulder. Kypry, his mate Stombattle and Sylv, half-crow daughter of Aly, Spymistress of the Copper Isles and Nawat Crow giggled in their own way (kudarung or human). Sunling had tried to leap into the air in a graceful mirror image of his father, but only succeed in making an odd little hop-skip-flap motion.
"Hey, don't worry," Sylv said and helped the little winged horse repair his dignity by folding his wings gently back into place. "You'll get it eventually." The little kudarung gave what sounded remarkably like a sigh and started to graze on the grass of the pasture.
Sylv looked around, seeing again all she had seen so many times before. The palace would not think of confining their magnificent allies, but they were given a fenced-in area to graze on their own. Off to the side were the stalls that housed those kudarung who had given their permission to partner a human in the Sky Patrols, the group of men and women who rode the lovely creatures to protect the Isles. They were outside the palace grounds, but there was a passage from the stables through which the humans could enter into the servants' quarters.
She brushed the grass from her mellow cream-gold sarong, swirling silver running across it, and put her hair back into the proper half-braid. Like Vereyu she wore two small knives bunched up in it. She had, like her mother, knives in leg sheathes as well. Also like Aly, she was adept at them. Like her father and the other crows, when they took human shape, she was a natural archer.
Sylv resettled her light shirt of a brown more gold than true brown and adjusted her various other objects. The young woman checked her wrist cuffs, which, nearly like a puzzle, fit together in such away that they could fall apart and into a handful of throwing stars. They had been spelled so that when she threw them and she wished them to they would return to her.
Her bracelet had a pendant, an inch-long sphere which could open. Inside was a new mage-made device, like a compass, though attuned to her and not the north. It worked anywhere in the human realms; if she was in trouble all she had to do was drop the necklace where rescuers could find it.
"Sylv!" The young woman of sixteen years turned at the sound of the summons. Her father waved at her from the fence, beckoning her over. She came and the sat up on the fence. "A while yet?" he asked. She nodded, but sighed. "It'll be soon. Just keep thinking of all the fun you'll have together."
"I do. All the time."
He was silent. After a while she left and returned to stroking her young friend. Sunling whickered apologetically.
"No, I know. It's all right." She sighed. "I'm just impatient, like mother says."
She finished her visit with the kudarung and left them to pasture. Overhead in the sky as she left the paddock two crows called to their wing-kin. We will fly later, my friends, she told them sadly. Mother wants me for some archery practice. As she said, she next went to meet Alliane, formerly of Pirate's Swoop in Tortall, at the archery range.
"You should spend less time with the kudarung, you know." Aly pointed to the horsehair and grass stains that graced her clothes, then gestured with bow, arrow quiver and string she held for her daughter to take them. Sylv did so and fired off her five shots automatically. The distance was far enough for her to feel it presented a challenge, but close enough so that she need not dwell long on her aim.
She became aware that her mother watched her, and raised an eyebrow. Aly sighted and loosed. In the end she lost. "You've been using your knives too much, skipping off on archery, Mother," commented Sylv as she unstrung the bow. "At least I cane still hit a decent target even after being with my kudarung all day."
The young woman began to carry her supplies back to the shed. "Wait… I've got something for you." She looked back at her mother to see her fish something out of her sarong. "Here you go. I don't know who left it but the mages say it's not dangerous, but it is magical. That's about all they say." She handed her daughter a small package about the size of her hand.
"Magic? As in of magic, spelled with magic or previously in contact with magic?" She pulled away the copper ribbon and the cream cloth fell away. Inside was a necklace, the pendants two intricately shaped immortals, both rearing and facing the middle, a kudarung and a unicorn. Its twisted wire from which these were suspended was long enough to hand to collarbones on a person, braided with two strands of incredibly fine silver chain, matching the kudarung and unicorn, and one gold.
"I never got a clear answer, and I can't See anything through the wrapping." Aly took the necklace from her daughter and clasped it around Sylv's neck, then stood back to look at the result. "Quite pretty."
"Thank you," Sylv told her. She took the kudarung pendant and held it as close to her eyes as she could still see it, examining the intricacy of the working. "Look at this," she told her mother, holding it out as far as the chain would go. Aly took it curiously. She looked aside for a minute, adjusting her gift of the Sight to see the details even closer.
Sylv had not inherited the Sight from her mother. Her father's legacy, shape-shifting into a crow, was her power. Seemingly as a combination of the two bloods, she could speak with either kindred in whichever shape she wore. Another side effect of being of the two worlds, which seemed to be neither or both, asset and hindrance, was that in crow form she always had a copper-red sheen, like her hair, not on her head, but trailing down her flight feathers.
"Probably had a mage do it, whatever they did. I See lots of magic there, though whether simply as a result of the making or because it is magic I can't tell." She let the pendants drop back into her daughter's hand.
"Either way, I think it's beautiful," Sylv commented. She held the kudarung up again and stroked the little silver image and smiled.
000
Laying on Sylv's dresser as she lay in bed the necklace shimmered. The small kudarung, dragon and unicorn on it twitched ever so slightly, as if in a breeze. A haunting voice filled the air, not with volume, but with the endless, immortal patience. Perhaps it was not even a true voice as borne on the air, for Sylv did nothing.
Sylv.
That was all the voice said. It was thoughtful. Ages of wisdom fell in that single word. The moon climbed high into the sky ere anything else happened.
Silvery-white beams drifted in from the necklace. She stirred and opened her eyes. The streams spiraled down and took form on the floor. No, there were two. Each was as gossamer as spun moonbeams. They looked down at the girl, who sat up slowly. She sensed no evil in these two immortal, eternal beings, as they stood, or rather hovered, in her room.
Had she felt threatened, they would each have a knife at their throats. For all the good it would do, she reflected. They were not of the flesh-and-blood world she knew, but of something far older and more powerful than any she knew.
Neither the winged horse or unicorn did anything for a long minute. They only gazed with infinite patience and calm at the girl. She eventually looked to the side, unable to meet their gaze.
The unicorn extended its silvery horn to her. Sylv looked up, startled, then slowly reached out and touched the tip of the horn. A sense of sorrow and pain filled her and she did not realize she was crying until the tears dropped onto her arm.
Wildshadow took her horn from under the girl's hand and looked at her with large, pale blue eyes, ancient and calm and wise. Sylv looked at the kudarung. Starfrost now came forward and she touched the tip of her wing.
The same yearning to be free again filled her once more. As Starfrost backed away, they passed on to her the knowledge of her special gift. Only she was of both their worlds, part crow, for the skies and stars and moon, and human, for the earth and trees and waters great and small. Only she could set the free from the imprisonment of the necklace.
"Go, then!" she cried softly, lurching upright to stroke each one's neck. "Go, and do not look back." Then she stood still and repeated as if from a dream words in the tongue of the eternal sky and then in the language of the rich earth.
"Heed my words, Starfrost, Warrior of the Moon and Skies. Go swiftly, do not look back. Return home in peace without anger."
Then she turned to the unicorn. "Hear me, Wildshadow, Warrior of the Earth and Waters. Go now, tarry not, and do not harbor rage in you heart when you return."
A strange weakness settled over her and she sat on the bed. When Sylv looked again for the unicorn and kudarung, they were fading back into streams of moonlight. The ribbons spun into a long funnel, the point a globe around the necklace. As an oddly peaceful Sylv looked on the light permeated the metal with a soft glow, then the entire necklace vanished.
The moon slid behind a cloud, and the only light in the room came from the two beings who took actual physical form there, no longer of shimmering moonbeams, an echo of their essence, but flech and bllod creatures.
Starfrost waved her wings, as if testing their strength. Wildmoon reared and shook her mane. They looked as Sylv a last time, eternity of wisdom a gratitude filling their pale eyes, and leapt out her window. She watched them gallop their separate ways for home, be it the stars or the earth.
Long moments passed as Sylv waited. Nothing further happened. At last she lay back cautiously on her pillow, and slept.
In the darkened room she smiled. As of from dream, three separate voices whispered the same thing, two with the same reason, freedom, the third for the gift of seeing the other two, knowing both the others would hear.
Farewell.
Good luck.
And thank you.