Where the Eagle Lands

The family had brought their door. It lay on a handcart between two bundles of bedding, its lower panels scratched white by a dog that had been dead for seven years.

“Second arch on the left,” the woman told Yavren. “We lived behind it. My father made that door. I kept thinking we’d come back.”

Beyond her, Esvay lay open to the spring sky. Grass grew along the fallen streets. The western arcade had come down in the wars after Yavren left the valley, and through its scattered columns she could see the hills where three armies had once hunted her. Nothing moved there now except sheep.

Yavren asked the family to join the others on the slope. Then she walked out among the stones.

Her shadow opened.

It passed beneath the broken arcade, climbed the hillside, and rose behind her in the shape of an eagle so immense that its head stood above the clouds. Along each outspread wing, separate feathers narrowed to points finer than needles. Yavren felt them as clearly as her own fingertips. She slid them beneath the fallen masonry, taking the weight of columns, lintels, the long curved fragments of the market dome. Earth sifted from a thousand rising surfaces. In the sudden shade the sheep began to bleat.

She lifted an entire street into the air.

For a little while Esvay hung in pieces, sunlight passing through the spaces where houses would be. Yavren turned the stones slowly, bringing their sound faces together along the foundations the masons had marked. Replacements for the missing blocks stood newly cut beside the old. These, too, she lifted. The Eagle’s pinions spread through the suspended street until every arch had its curve, every column its capital. Then she lowered them.

The sound went through her soles: one long, deep settling.

She withdrew her power. The great wings thinned into daylight, leaving stone to bear stone. Where there had been a field of wreckage stood a roofless street.

For nine years she had carried the memory of another Esvay: banners, painted balconies, a reception where the Eagle Queen had been offered poisoned wine. With it came the remembered desire to break the city down to bedrock. That desire had once felt as intimate as thirst. It was still hers to remember. So were the eyries she had saved, the valley she had spared, and the eastern road she and Pelka had taken while a throne waited empty behind them.

Someone on the slope was crying. The woman with the door was already coming down.

Irdas met Yavren by the rebuilt arcade. He had a loaf under one arm and was trying to shake grit from his dark curls without dropping it. The sight pleased her more than the applause beginning behind him. Six years together, and he still behaved as though hair could be persuaded.

“You’ve got it all down your neck,” she said.

“Then help me. You’re standing there enjoying it.”

She put her fingers inside his collar and brushed out the dust. He leaned into her hand. At thirty-six he had acquired a little silver above his ears; at thirty-three she had begun privately counting it, as though noticing each strand would slow the others.

He kissed her palm before she took it away. Then they ate under the first standing arch while the family fitted their old door into its new opening.

By midsummer there were roofs over four hundred households. The Eagle raised streets in a morning; the carpenters, glaziers, and people deciding where to put their beds took longer. Yavren slept deeply after the great lifts and woke hungry enough to annoy anyone sharing a dish with her. The bakers learned her days. Children learned that when she spread the Eagle over the city, their shadows vanished beneath it, and invented a game in which the smallest child could catch everybody.

Esvay acquired competing dye shops, a school in a former countinghouse, and a bride who refused to shorten her procession when it met a cartload of cabbage. For twenty minutes neither could turn. Yavren, watching from an upper window, laughed until the bride looked up and recognized her; then she hid, delighted and ashamed.

Pelka arrived the following week and found her in the same room, listening to a man explain why his warehouse should be raised before his neighbor’s.

“I can wait,” her foster sister said, from the door. “I waited an hour downstairs.”

Yavren ended the audience too abruptly. The man left affronted; Pelka remained in the doorway with her dusty pack.

“They said tomorrow,” Pelka said. “As though I’d come to sell you something.”

“They don’t know you.”

“I’m not doing that again. Come and see me for once.”

It stung because Pelka had been back in the valley two years while Yavren and Irdas traveled. Her sister had asked her home three times. Each visit had become possible after some other journey.

“Stay with us,” Yavren said. “There isn’t a proper bed yet. We’ll find one.”

Pelka looked at her a moment, then let the pack slide off her shoulder.

Over supper she told them the high eyries had fledged eleven young. She had brought the news in person because Yavren never asked enough in letters. She also brought a petition from the valley families: at the western border, returning settlers were having their carts searched and their sons detained for old military debts.

Irdas stopped cutting the cheese. Two of his players were being held at that same border.

“You have players?” Yavren asked.

“Three so far. You met the woman with the red boots.”

Yavren remembered a singer at supper, and Irdas showing her the ruined hall below their rooms. He had been talking about that hall since their arrival. Yavren had liked listening: a man in love with a place spoke about it much as he spoke about a person.

The next morning a royal messenger arrived. The western queen claimed the newly valuable properties of Esvay and expected rent. Before he left, a southern envoy presented the king’s older claim. Both carried plans to establish a garrison. Beyond the hill passes, Tolrath’s scattered people were asking when Yavren would come to them.

She wrote to all three rulers, including the hill regent. She described the families arriving in Esvay from every kingdom, the empty workshops they would fill, and the trouble already waiting at the borders. She invited the rulers to come after harvest with their councils, prepared to settle the claims together. Pelka added the valley petition. Irdas enclosed the names of the players detained.

That evening Yavren found him marking the theatre floor in charcoal.

She stood in the doorway while he paced away from a semicircle of benches. The hall had once been a nobleman’s winter garden; its glass was gone, but its stone vault carried a voice beautifully. Irdas spoke two lines from a play she knew, turned, and spoke them again toward the far wall. The second time she could hear the tiredness in the old father’s voice. She had watched him be that father in village squares, on tavern tables, in a field where the audience kept chasing flies. Here, his quietness reached her.

“That’s good,” she said.

He grinned. “Come stand here.”

She did. He walked to the doorway and said her name, softly, and she heard him as though his mouth were against her ear.

“I want to open in spring,” he said.

“We’ll be in Tolrath.”

“You’ll be in Tolrath. I thought I’d stay through winter.”

She looked down at the charcoal near her boot. “You said you wanted to try the hall.”

“I do. With a company. With more than the three people we’ve found.”

“For how long?”

“Years, if it works.”

The word made the room feel suddenly crowded. All those future winters, already occupied.

“I asked you to come back with me,” she said.

“I came.” He glanced at the benches. “I like it here.”

She had imagined his delight as something they would take away together. They had done that everywhere: a room, a season, a favorite cook, another departure. There had always been somewhere neither of them had seen.

“You engaged people without telling me.”

“I told you about the singer. And the brothers coming after harvest.” He rubbed his blackened fingers on his trousers. “I didn’t ask you to stay. I should have asked that.”

“Then ask.”

He came back across the hall. “Live here with me.”

She could have lifted the entire vault more easily than she could answer. Above them waited the two rooms where they slept with their clothes still in traveling chests. She pictured those chests closed while petitions accumulated outside a door everybody knew.

“I don’t know how long Tolrath will take.”

“I’m asking where you’ll come back to.”

“And when they need another city? And another?”

“You might go.” He sounded tired now, in his own voice. “I might have a rehearsal.”

It was the first time she had understood that she could leave and he could remain, each wanting something the other could not carry.

They went upstairs without settling it. In bed she reached for him, then stopped, uncertain whether touch would seem an answer. He found her hand beneath the blanket and held it against his chest.

“I still want this,” he said.

“So do I.”

In the morning he began writing invitations to actors. She rode north to look at Tolrath, and returned eleven days later with drawings of its shattered terraces. They argued twice more that summer, less carefully the second time. She hated his assumption that she would eventually stay; he hated waiting to discover whether they would live together again. She promised to return for the spring opening. He asked her to mean a particular day. They chose one.

The rulers’ replies followed her between the cities. Each offered her guards; each warned against accepting the others’ protection. She declined all three. Instead she sent back the names of their own displaced subjects who had volunteered to speak in Esvay. By harvest, each ruler had agreed to hear them.

When the rulers came to Esvay, autumn washing hung across the street where their escorts wanted to assemble. The woman whose father had made her door told a soldier to go around. Yavren watched him obey. Nine years earlier she had hidden from men wearing his colors in a hollow under tree roots.

The city had elected twelve residents to speak beside the crowns. They met in Irdas’s unfinished theatre, where there was no raised seat yet and everyone had to step over the same roll of canvas. Councilors occupied the back benches, arguing quietly among themselves whenever a ruler offered something they disliked.

By the third afternoon the southern king had agreed to free the detained travelers if the western queen did likewise. The queen would surrender her rents in Esvay only for a share of the city’s future customs. The hill regent wanted that share divided three ways. He also wanted troops from both larger kingdoms withdrawn from the passes.

“So either one can march through after the other leaves?” the western queen asked. “No.”

“Then neither comes back without our agreement,” said the regent.

The southern king pushed aside a dish of apple cores. “Whose agreement?”

The argument widened. A common assembly, the regent proposed, with the crowns and the towns both represented. It would decide the borders and authorize defense. No king would be free to begin a border war on his own. The western queen called that surrender. One of Esvay’s elected speakers, a cooper who had lost two sons to different armies, said yes, it was, and asked whether she had come prepared to make any.

Yavren watched the queen’s face. Her seal had stood at the bottom of the warrant for Yavren’s capture. She was older now, the jaw thinner, but the memory of the folded paper remained terribly sharp.

“My villages are emptying,” the queen said at last. “They’re coming here. I am being asked to give up the means of bringing them back.”

“Mine too,” said the southern king. “But my wool merchants can’t sell north while your soldiers take half their loads.”

The cooper started speaking at the same time as Pelka. They both stopped; Pelka motioned him on. He wanted a house in either city to belong to the family living in it, with old claims heard individually instead of whole streets confiscated. Pelka wanted a valley woman to be allowed across a border without supplying a son in return.

“And what do you want?” the western queen asked Yavren.

It was tempting to answer for everyone. She had been doing it in letters for months. She looked toward Irdas, who was sitting on the floor, making notes about something other than this meeting.

“A seat here when you perform,” she had told him that morning, trying out the thought of an ordinary claim. He had said she would have to buy one; then, seeing she was serious, had kissed her until they heard the delegates arriving.

“I want to keep raising the cities,” she told the queen. “I won’t govern them.”

“Will you enforce what we agree?”

“No. You must be able to keep it when I’m elsewhere.”

The queen stared at her. Yavren let her. Across the room the cooper had begun counting on his fingers, explaining to the regent how many town representatives would be needed to prevent the three crowns from outvoting everyone at once.

They stayed six more days. The western ministers argued for the returning trade and against paying for two ruinous frontier fortresses. Their council accepted the shared customs; the southern king secured the northern markets; the regent obtained common defense and the abandonment of the rival garrisons. The residents won free settlement across all three kingdoms and a voice equal to the crowns’ combined delegation. Border judgments would bind all three. Yavren listened as the terms were read aloud and the councilors gave their votes, one after another. In the street outside, where she had stood among the broken stones, the three rulers swore before their own people to obey the common assembly.

The union acquired its first quarrel that same evening, over which disputed hill estate should be heard first. Yavren left them arguing in the theatre and went upstairs with Irdas. Through the floor she could hear Pelka demanding that someone bring a lamp.

The first snows found Yavren in Tolrath.

This city had been built in seven terraces against the mountain. Its collapse lay in great white bands down the slope: houses, stairs, colonnades, the long front of a palace that had lost its supporting streets. A few hundred people lived among the lowest ruins. Beyond the passes, thousands waited for places to return to.

Here she remembered the Eagle Queen dancing. A green dress, pearls heavy against the collarbone, a young man with a beautiful mouth whose name had gone. The remembrance came while she studied the broken palace front, and for a moment the cold stone held the sweetness of an evening before any vengeance had become necessary to that former self.

She kept the curve of the great stair. She raised the palace’s surviving columns around an open square, where the returning families could build their own celebrations.

All winter the Eagle spread above Tolrath. Yavren stood on one terrace with darkness rising from her living body and extended its wings along the mountainside. In her grasp the fallen city moved upward, a hundred tons of pale stone along each feather, broken stairways ascending past windows where people leaned out to watch. She set whole rows of houses on their old foundations. She fitted the long colonnade to the square. Where stone was missing, masons cut replacements; where timber had burned, crews brought new beams over the passes.

The first timber train traveled under three sets of colors. Its guards came from the towns, serving the common assembly. In the opposite direction went the western garrison, their baggage piled high, and behind them the southern troops. They passed each other badly, with insults and horses backing into snow. They passed.

Letters arrived from Irdas. A leading actor had departed because he would not be allowed to play both lovers in the same scene. Another had married the costumer. The red-booted singer had a sister whose voice made Irdas want to abandon spoken drama altogether. Yavren read some pages impatiently, looking for herself, then went back and read them properly.

She wrote that the hill regent’s cousin had lost his claim to six inhabited streets before the new assembly and was still threatening to appeal. She wrote about a little boy who had asked why she wore dark feathers when the stone dust turned them white. She described the green dress she remembered and asked Irdas whether his costumer could make her something green for the opening. In a separate letter she told Pelka she would come for the eyries’ hatching, after the first performances. Pelka sent back the dates she could expect a bed.

His next letter contained a length of green thread and a demand for measurements. Below it he had written, without any attempt at elegance, that he missed her body in bed and was tired of sleeping diagonally to prove there was an advantage.

She laughed alone in her room, then wanted him so suddenly that she had to put the letter down.

By the thaw, Tolrath had six occupied terraces and a seventh rising. Smoke stood above hundreds of chimneys. Market awnings filled the palace square; from the rebuilt colonnade she heard a quarrel about the price of onions and, farther away, someone practicing a horn very badly. She had seen that square packed with soldiers in a memory older than her present body. Now two women were spreading a carpet there to see whether its colors suited the daylight.

On her last morning she lifted the remaining stones of the seventh terrace. The Eagle’s head turned with hers; its vast wings held the city above the city. She could feel each separate weight high above her and the mountain solid under her boots. She lowered the stones into the places waiting for them. As the shadow withdrew, sunlight climbed the new walls.

The masons would finish without her. She left before the lime had dried.

Five days later, on the appointed spring evening, she reached Esvay with her dark hair full of road dust and the green dress folded in her saddlebag. The theatre doors were open. Outside them stood a cart bearing the southern king’s colors; beside it, valley ponies and the hill people’s shaggy packhorses. Nobody had been turned away at the borders. Somebody was complaining about the price of a seat.

Pelka met her in the passage and took the saddlebag.

“He’s upstairs. Hurry. You can tell me about the city afterward.”

Irdas was struggling with the fastening at the back of his stage robe. He turned when she entered, one shoulder bare, and for a moment neither of them seemed to know how to cross the little room. Then he came so quickly that she was still laughing when he kissed her. His curls were damp from washing. She put her face against his neck and breathed him in.

“You came,” he said.

“I said I would.”

“I know.” He held her another moment. “I kept listening for a horse.”

She helped with the fastening. Her traveling chest stood where she had left it, but he had cleared half the clothes cupboard. There were flowers in a chipped bowl on the sill, and the window gave onto the arcade she had first raised. She could see the family’s door through the branches of a young tree.

“I’ll have to go again,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Sometimes for months.”

He touched the cupboard door. “I left you half.”

“I saw.” She caught his hand before he could move away. “I want to live here.”

He looked at her with an openness that made her shy. From below, someone called him by the old father’s name. He closed his eyes, kissed her forehead, and went.

Yavren changed into green. Downstairs Pelka had kept her a seat. Around them the audience was still settling: three kingdoms’ accents, a cough, a late arrival edging past somebody’s knees. When Irdas stepped onto the stage the room quieted. He began so softly that she had to stop listening for anything else.

The Eagle Queen had heard music beneath gilded ceilings. Yavren remembered the beauty of those rooms, and the people who had died in them, and the years of wanting everyone else to lose as much. The memory stayed with her. Above this room were her clothes beside Irdas’s, beyond it two cities standing in the spring night. Her sister’s shoulder rested against hers. She let the dark wings sleep inside her and listened to the man she loved.