Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

Lokey tugged insistently. The curious bird usually plucked at the beads down the sleeve or the leather thongs at the end, but now he pulled the sleeve itself.

"What?" she asked. "What do you want?"

He let go of her sleeve and cocked his head as he peered at her with one gleaming eye. Ravens were intelligent creatures, but she was never quite sure just how intelligent. Sometimes she thought that Lokey was smarter than some people she knew.

Lokey's throat feathers and ears lifted out aggressively.

He suddenly let out a piercing caw that sounded very much like angry frustration at not being able to talk so that he could tell her something. Kraaah. He fluffed out his feathers again and cawed again. Kraaah.

Jillian stroked his head and then his back, scratching gently but firmly under his raised black plumage-something he loved to have done-before smoothing down his ruffled feathers. Instead of clicking contentedly and blinking lazily, as he usually did when she gave him a such a scratch, he hopped back a step out of her reach and let out three piercing caws that made her ears hurt. Kraaah. Kraaah. Kraaah.

She covered her ears. "What's gotten into you today?"

Lokey hopped up and down, flapping his wings. Kraaah. He ran across the top of the old cobble road, flapping and croaking. At the other side he fluttered up into the air, alighted, and then lifted off the ground again. Kraaah.

Jillian stood. "You want me to come with you?"

Lokey cawed noisily as if to confirm that she had at long last guessed correctly. Jillian laughed. She was sure that the crazy bird could understand every word she said and sometimes read her thoughts besides. She loved having him around. Sometimes when she talked to him he would quietly stand nearby and listen.

Her grandfather had told her not to let Lokey sleep in her room or he would know her dreams. Jillian mostly had wonderful dreams, so she didn't mind if Lokey knew them. She suspected that maybe her friend did know her dreams and that was why she often awoke to find him perched on the nearby windowsill, sleeping contentedly.

But she was always very careful not to send him any nightmares.

"Did you find yourself a nice dead antelope? Or maybe a rabbit? Is that why you're not hungry?" She shook her finger at him. "Lokey," she scolded, "did you steal another raven's cache?"

Lokey was always hungry. Her ravenous raven, she often called him. He would share her dinner with her if she would let him and steal it if she wouldn't. Even if he was too full to eat the lizard, she was surprised that he didn't at least take it away and hide it for later. Ravens hid whatever they couldn't manage to eat-and they could eat a lot. She couldn't understand how it was that the bird didn't get fat.

Jillian stood and brushed the dust from the seat of her dress and her knobby knees. Lokey was already airborne, circling, cawing, urging her to hurry.

"All right, all right," she complained as she held her arms out for balance while scurrying along the top of the fat wall along an enclosure strewn with rubble.

At the crest of the small hill she stood with one hand on the sash of cloth wrapped around her hip while with her other hand she shielded her eyes as she peered up into the bright sky to watch her friend pitching and rolling in a bid to keep her attention. Lokey was a shameless show-off. If he couldn't do aerial stunts to impress other ravens, he would happily do them for her.

"Yes," she yelled into the sky, "you're a clever bird, Lokey."

Lokey cawed once and then swiftly beat his wings. Jillian's gaze followed him, her hand shielding her eyes from the sunlight, as he flew south out over the vast expanse before her. Random ribbons of green summer grasses, up closer to the foot of the headland and mountains behind her, cut through the barren landscape. To the sides, hazy violet fingers of distant mountains, each farther one a shade softer and lighter, extended down into the desolate plain that seemed to go south forever. She knew it didn't, though. Grandfather said that to the south was a great barrier and beyond a long forbidden place called the Old World.

In the distance, down among the green patches on the plain that lay close up against the foothills, she could see the place where her people lived in the summers. Wooden fences filled the broken gaps in ancient stone walls that held their goats, pigs, and chickens. Some of their cattle grazed out on the summer grasses. There was water in this place, and some trees, their leaves shimmering in the bright sunlight. Gardens stretched out beside the simple brick houses that had withstood the harsh winter winds and baking summer sun for untold centuries.

And then, when she glanced up again at Lokey, Jillian saw at the horizon toward the west a faint cloud of dust rising up.