Translation please,I prompted.
I said the girl is someone important to us and we’d like her back. He answered rather aggressively that she was his and he wouldn’t let us have her.
His what? Meal? Tell him over my dead body.I held my sword in front of me as I tried to peer around the eagle to see Zara, but all I could tell was she was still unconscious on the ground.
Neo made another series of sounds, ranging from those mild-sounding warbles to high-pitched screeches, and the wild eagle responded.
He says she is the one he’s been waiting for,Neo said, and I could hear the confusion in his tone.He says we had injured her, and that you were letting her fall to her death.
“That’s not even true,” I shouted. “If you hadn’t attacked us, I wouldn’t have dropped her.”
Neo shot me a look as if to say,Who are you even arguing with?
Neo said more in that strange eagle language, but before the wild eagle could respond, Zara awoke.
The other eagle turned toward her as she came unsteadily to her feet, and I took a step toward her but had to jump back again when the wild eagle snapped his beak in warning. I watched, speechless, as the eagle helped her walk forward, supporting her with his wing.
“Zara,” I said, “are you all right? This eagle won’t let us get close to you.”
She nodded, but she looked pale.
“Have you ever seen this eagle before?” I knew it had to be impossible, but I still asked.
“No,” she said as she took careful steps toward me. I squeezed the hilt of my sword; I was barely restraining myself from rushing toward her. I wanted to see for myself that she was uninjured.
When she got close enough to reach out to me, the wild eagle wrapped its wing around her, effectively cutting her off from us.
“Let her through,” I said, holding my sword in a way that required no translator.
The eagle screeched in my face.
“I can understand him,” Zara said, her eyes full of awe. “He doesn’t want me to go to you.”
“Tell him no one asked his opinion,” I growled.
She laid her hand on the eagle’s wing. “This man and eagle are my friends.” She tilted her head, quiet for a moment as she listened to the eagle’s response. “He says he could sense that I was in danger, and he thought it was from you and Neo. He came to find me.” Her voice dropped, soft and disbelieving. “Talon, I think…I think we may have bonded.”
34
Zara
An eagle. Somehow, I’d bonded with an eagle, and I didn’t even really know how it happened. I’d just woken up on the ground, the giant creature in front of me, his voice in my head. I thought of the moment I heard the eagle, when the threads of bonding snapped into place. The part of me raised on the plains amongst horses, my feet fully grounded, rebelled at the idea, but the one born of the wind, who dreamed of flying, felt the bond and knew it was right. All those times I’d snuck into the mountains, willingly braving eagle territory, had I subconsciously been seeking out this eagle? I looked at the massive bird of prey now, easily three or four times bigger than Neo. His feathers were a brighter gold around his head, becoming darker through his wings and body. I could see my entire reflection in his huge eye, the color like topaz.
One thing was clear. If there was a small chance before, now I was absolutely certain that my father was not a Child of Earth. I thought again of Ama’s evasiveness on the subject. Had it not been for the fact that the wind spirit had called my father a windcaller, I would have thought he was an Eagle Rider. But nothing ever explained being able to use the power of the wind. The wind spirit had told me that I needed to find my destiny to be able to fully harness the wind, and I hadn’t understood at the time. As I gazed into the amber eyes of the eagle before me, I thought I knew exactly what Mistral meant.
This is what I’ve been waiting for all my life,that part of me whispered. But at the same time, guilt crashed over me like an avalanche. Shazeera. What if Emperor Altair had realized we had gone against his orders to not attack the Devourer and took it out on Shazeera? We had to go back immediately. We were much too far away to communicate, so I had no way of knowing if she was okay.
And then another horrible thought occurred to me that made me feel lightheaded with the sheer weight of it. I had never in my life heard of anyone bonding with more than one horse, even after the untimely death of a horse, much less bonding with an eagle, too. Worse, I couldn’t communicate with her to make sure the bond was still in place. Whenever I sank within myself to test the bonds, all I could feel was the eagle’s blindingly strong connection. It could be that the wind had weakened it yet again, and combined with distance, I couldn’t sense it.
There was no way to know for sure, though, until I saw Shazeera again.
But before we did anything, I would have to first convince this enormous wild eagle that Talon and Neo were our friends.
“Tell him that we won’t hurt you,” Talon said, his attention trained on the eagle towering above me. “I want to be able to speak to you from less than twenty feet away.”
I reached up and put my hand on the feathers of the eagle’schest, stroking them gently.They really were just trying to save me,I thought to the eagle.
He looked down at me with those enormous eyes.I sensed that you were in danger. That you were dying. I came to find you, and when I did, that one had you clutched in his talons.His gaze shifted to Neo as he snapped his beak threateningly.
