a.n. (Thank you so much for such a sweet little comment on the prologue!)
Chapter One
Hoarfrost turned the forest to glitter, like stars reflecting off silver grass. In the soft breeze that came off the water, the seeds of sedge and milkweed danced circles around each other. The temperature had plummeted through the day, where the evening before the last of the fireflies had danced in their stead, twinkling beneath a dark and cloud covered sky. But sunlit winds had whisked that cloud away, letting the crescent moon shine bright on the lake's black surface.
It was autumn in the northern forests, and hundreds of bats were speckles streaking through the air, each chasing the ever fading insects that slept or fell to cold as winter winded its way between trees and crawled across exposed mossy granite, having swept over distant ice fields, through tundra and taiga, southbound once more. In a few days the Silverwings would leave their water logged forest behind, a nursery colony of mothers and their four month old pups on a path their lineage had taken hundreds of autumns before. The moon was waxing, and on its final night Frieda would guide them singing joyfully.
Laughing wildly, Muirheart's shadow sliced through the moon's reflection, and with cold air filling her lungs, wings clipping the tips of reeds, she spiraled up into the sky on the tail of her silent prey.
"More than I can count on all the colony's wings!" she cried. Wings folding around the fluffy moth, she volleyed it into her mouth before righting herself. Diving close to the water, she sang pulses of sound seeking another.
"You can count?" someone cried back. "Shout some more, maybe the moths will come right to ya!"
"Well, well, well! Now who's shouty?" Muirheart wheeled around, fingers tapping the ears of another bat as she passed. "Hush, hush, little tigermoth." But they both smiled warmly, and angling their wings as one headed back towards the reed bed. Muirheart flexed her claws, grasping onto the crackling stems as her friend landed across from her.
"Passed one hundred," Chervildrop said, grooming her ruffled fur. "Just thought you might want to know."
"I didn't."
Muirheart watched the water ripple, further out a single bird landed, one with a long beak, its feathers adorned with rows of dappled white. From the distance its strange red eyes could not see her, and its haunting call, like a mother who is in mourning, spread across the lake. She listened a short while to the familiar song. Like her colony, the loons of the marsh would soon be gone, migrating south towards a distant sea.
She sighed heavily.
The Silverwings' migration route passed a great waterway, the fringes of an ocean, but briefly. Tired they stopped at the light pillar a single night, never taking time to stick around, never a moment to explore and only to feed, before carrying onward to the next landmark. But she'd daydreamed of each place they passed, wishing she could take a few moments to do more than hunt for dwindling moths and mosquitoes and move ever forward. Her mother hurried her on. Yet not back.
It was Muirheart's second migration, and Chervildrop's third, and this moon both their mothers were gone. Nocturna would carry them home, Bathsheba had said, as she would carry their children one day too, where they'd meet again in a brilliant shining place, an endless forest, never tired and never hungry and never chased. It was perhaps the one kind word she'd ever imparted on her granddaughter; still it had not calmed Chervildrop's grief. And after the loss of the summer, it had only grown.
Muirheart glanced her way. Against the pale and papery bark of the reeds, Chervildrop's dark fur stood out, her bright eyes gazing across the water. Like the loon, white dappling speckled her back and under her eyes, like stars had caught in her almost purple tinted fur. As light began to crawl across the horizon, it seemed some of the cheer left her, borrowed by the coming sun.
"Moon's fading."
"Hmm? Bet you're missing Cian right now," Chervildrop purred.
"You know I only have love for one bat," Muirheart said. "But I'm missing my brothers."
"I dread it a little. Telling them all."
"Let Bathsheba. It is her daughter."
"I guess it is," Chervildrop said wistfully.
Hating sorrow, she wanted nudge the topic aside.
"You know I'd really just like to have that race if you maybe do recall."
"Pfft! You would."
"Let them taste the bitterness of unrelenting defeat!"
"Lazy moths," Chervildrop sighed, "the reason you didn't get to is they put it off until we left."
"Because they knew I would win!" Muirheart laughed, flexing her wings.
"No."
Chervildrop snorted and Muirheart smiled before darting into the air.
"Yes! Last to the river mouth has to eat a firefly! Haha!"
"Ew, no! You're a sore winner!" Chervildrop called after.
"But I am the winner!"
"Slow down! My wings are weaker!"
"Bet that firefly's gonna be delicious, I'll catch it for you!"
Sedge and thick grasses were a blur beneath her, smothering what was once a river. She sped towards open water, where the river drained before weeping into the marshland. With only the sound of her breath and her wing beats. Closer and closer as the grass retreated and the thinned out reed bed came up fast.
"Aaaagh!"
Muirheart snatched a cattail at the edge of the little lake. It swung with her violent landing, nearly tossing her off into the water.
Huffing and puffing, Chervildrop finally caught up to her, speechlessly recovering her breath.
"You are fast but you are clumsier than a naked little birdy," she said, coughing.
"Of course it sounds bad if you say it like that! I'll get better. I'll be the best flier the Silverwings will ever have. They'll tell stories about me."
"They'll tell stories alright. Stories about how you smashed your face flying into a cliff side or a barn or maybe the ocean. Too big for you to dodge."
"Don't be mean now, you're just jealous," Muirheart hummed.
Chervildrop had always been a slow flier and Muirheart, much the opposite, could outpace even the strongest of the males, an ability she took perhaps too much pride in. But she didn't mind her own arrogance much, a flaw of personality. Why not embrace the small gifts Nocturna had blessed them with?
After all, Chervildrop had her own to take joy in. She was many times more perceptive than Muirheart, so Muirheart believed she deserved at least one superior skill to her friend, and that was flight. Though quick to observe the world around them, Chervildrop's pride was much quieter, measured. The healer for the nursery colony, alongside her mentor Lucretia (a very old, very tired bat, now such a poor flier she rarely left her roost and relied on colony-mates for food), Chervildrop knew every plant in the marshland and the forest, even the cliffs of Stone Hold and the foothills of the Wolf Mountains. She could tend the coughs and small fevers, the pain of achy bones, the infections from a battle lost with a bramble bush, and all manner of little things.
But not the difficult or the strange, like Muirheart's dull and watery-grey eye. As a pup she'd flown straight into a bare sapling on their first migration, the twigs swatting her face and a thick branch snapping against her right eye. It left what Lucretia had called a cataract, and that they could not heal. Ugly though it was to look at (and certainly it scared many of the pups) the grief and regret had healed, and Muirheart found herself less bothered. After all, sound was the true domain of hunters, and both ears heard the world perfectly fine.
Bats old and young were now turning back towards Tree Haven, their twisted and lightning struck oak. It had stood for centuries and sat firmly on a small granite island, its roosts bursting from cracks in the rock and, like a parasitic grape vine, wrapping firmly around everything it chose to touch. Not even the strongest of winds could take their nursery roost and pull it down into the dark water. And Muirheart felt pride in this too, this place that harboured her family for seasons beyond memory, carved out within by her ancestors, the first mothers of the Silverwings.
It was theirs and theirs alone, no one dared touch it, some things were sacred to all animals. Though she'd been told one spring the adults had chased out bold and arrogant nesting mice who seemed to miss that particular message.
As Muirheart placidly watched, a single bat was flying circles, calling out and quickly expanding her reach on every lap in a great spiral. Her usually peaceful voice had a note of anxiety.
"Hiya, Ariel," Muirheart said, looking up from her place in the reeds. "Looking for little Shade?"
"He's late again," Ariel replied, shaking her head. Though many moons older than Muirheart, and with several older sons now, she was still quite young, and it would be a long while til grey replaced the silver and gold in her bright fur. Fur that was puffed up and on edge, in a mix of worry and anger.
"Not tonight he is," Muirheart said. "He'll be home before you I think."
"You saw him?"
"Sorry, mom!"
And a little pup, far littler than the others born that season, blew past Ariel's gold flecked head, whipping towards Tree Haven, with a rather large pup hot on his tail.
"I'll get you for that you nasty little runt!"
Ariel cleared her throat just as Chinook was about to pass her and he spun around with a full body wince. Green eyes dark with disappointment burned into him.
"Oh," he squeaked, ears flattened and reddening on the tips. "Sorry, Ariel, I didn't mean- he tricked me! He was chasing a firefly so-"
"And you learned that fireflies don't taste very good," she said matter-of-factly.
"Aw man. That could've been the last of them. I needed that thing."
Chervildrop snickered.
"They're poisonous, ya rascal," Muirheart said flatly and Chinook's eyes widened.
"I'm gonna die!" he cried, tears waiting to burst forth. His wings beat faster as he flitted about as if looking for an escape from fate.
"Aw, me," Muirheart said with a dramatic gasp, hand resting on forehead. "What terrible mistake for a pup to make! And so young!"
"Oh, stop. Go get a drink to wash the taste out, Chinook, you'll be fine. I have seeds in my roost if your stomach hurts, but you spit it out?" Chervildrop asked.
"Y-yeah."
"And maybe be a lil nicer to your colony mates and try not to steal all their food?"
"I didn't! I wouldn't do that! Shade was-"
"Can wash the bad language and fibs out of your mouth while you're at it," Muirheart continued lightheartedly. "Too much of it and the elders say it will poison you. Worse than all the fireflies you can count on your fingers! Why I once knew a bat who-"
"You'll be fine, Chinook. She's teasing."
"But I wasn't fibbing!"
"Silly lil pups," Muirheart chimed with a wink, "we've got eyes on the back of our wings, you know."
"No you don't. I don't see 'em."
"Well you can't see them but all mothers have them," Chervildrop added.
"But- you two don't have pups! You're just making it up!" he replied, a slightly smug and victorious tone to his voice.
"Back to the roost now," Ariel snapped. "Unless you'd like to explain to Isis why you were so late."
Without another word the young bat was off, racing the sunlight and his own mother's fury as his ears popped up like nothing had happened save a night of innocent hunting, not a speck of burnt pride.
"I'm sorry, Chervil."
"He didn't mean anything, I'm sure he wouldn't remember them," she said. "I'm fine, honestly. Might want to warn Shade about the fireflies."
"Hah, he knows," Ariel said with a smile. "I don't know how to get them to stop fighting. I know Isis tries too, but unless we're supervising them it's always something."
"You know, maybe it's not so bad, kids have their rivalries. Is Shade ruffled or really hurt by it?"
"Sometimes. If they bring up... family."
"Maybe if you talked about Cassiel it would help," Chervildrop said and Ariel cast her eyes aside. "I know it's hard. But I really think it will give him something to feel pride in. Cassiel was a good bat, one of the best of us, that's not changed because he's passed."
"I just worry Shade will want to be like him… I'll lose him."
It tugged at all their hearts. Cassiel had been kind to everyone, a bright and cheerful friend, enthusiastic father to his children, a joyful trickster with his brothers, filled with stories of far away places and strange histories and eerie prophecies. And then as the last sliver of the Moon of Cold faded, he disappeared, his friends with him, as if they'd never been in this world at all.
For nights Ariel had waited alone.
The days grew longer and the new moon too, and she never caught up with the colony. Frieda watched the horizon for her. Her sisters grieved for her.
They'd thought she'd surely been killed. And the moon began to wax.
"All sons want to be like their dads. Share the best of Cassiel, maybe it will help you too."
"Thank you, Chervil."
Muirheart tapped both their shoulders.
"Important as this is, there's a big old ball of anger staring us down over there and I'm not liking how orange those clouds are looking. Let's skedaddle, shall we!"
And she took off like lightning, the warm laughter of friendship close behind her.
The owl circled once with a wraith-like hiss, then disappeared back into the thick darkness of weeping conifers, just as the sun crested the horizon.
.