His cousins arrived on wing almost at once from their own guard posts around the ancient tree. They were a fearsome sight, these Rathersting warriors, lean lads just across the threshold of manhood, their shoulders and sharp cheekbones patterned with coal-black tattoos, no two alike. Talon wore the tattoos too, though he was yet a lad. And he wore something they didn’t, a circlet of woven reeds on his wild pale hair.

“Prince,” said his cousin Shrike, alighting beside him on the tower’s high wall. “What is it?”

“There.” Talon pointed. “Vultures, from beyond. Monsters. Six of ’em.”

They looked. Wick whistled low. “Nasty meat.”

“Aye. Fetch the chief,” ordered Shrike, and Wick dove over the edge of the tower, dropping nearly to the rampart before snapping open his wings and whirring away into the deep courtyard of the hollow yew.

By the time the chief came the vultures had sunk into the forest near the upsweep of the great spine of rock where the Magruwen’s temple lay in ruin. “At Issrin Ev, sir,” Talon told him, pointing. “They circled and went down less than a minute ago.”

The chief of the Rathersting clan was a formidable faerie. Coming on seven hundred years old, his beard had gone silver but his hair was still white-gold and gleaming, like Talon’s. He was thick in the chest and narrow in the hips and he moved like a peregrine on the hunt, a few fast flicks of his wings launching him into a long deadly glide. He wore a dagger on each arm and each thigh and had slung his crossbow over his back. He looked at his son. “Good eyes, lad,” he said, and gripped Talon’s shoulder hard.

Talon couldn’t feel proud, though, because he was already tasting the shame of what would necessarily come next. “Shrike, Wick, Corvus, come with me. We’ll see what we see, neh?” said the chief, his eyes flicking to his son and away. Talon pretended not to notice. He knew the look too well, the look where his father still, after a hundred years, seemed puzzled to have found himself with such a son. “Keep on the watch, son,” said he, heaving skyward. “We hunt!” he bellowed, and Wick and Corvus and Shrike launched after him, eager and blooded for danger.

Talon watched them all the way and saw them breach the forest canopy just where the vultures had. At his shoulders his own stunted wings twitched with the yearning to follow them but he bit his lip. He would keep the watch. He might be a prince of the Rathersting, but with wings too small to lift him in flight, guard duty was about all he was good for.

He watched and watched the distant treetops, waiting for their return. His daydreams had slipped away completely and he forgot to send word to Orchidspike to tell her he wouldn’t be coming today. She would watch the gate all afternoon and frown while she worked, wondering. And Talon would be frowning and wondering too, and pacing and scanning the treetops with his hawk-keen eyes, watching for the small distant shapes of his father and cousins returning. But the relief and jealousy that usually flooded him when a triumphant war party returned to the castle would elude him today.