Animal Skins by Ilye

---

Bird of Prey

---

Time was meaningless up here, tethered to his eyrie. But even so Prey-Bird knew by rights he should be dead.

It was the dearth of living things that was killing him more than anything else – not, he thought with a strange, grim elation, that he’d be allowed to die if he wanted to. The bedevilled manacle was doing more than just suspending him from the cliff.

When the birdsong came after so long, he wanted to weep for the first time since he’d been captured. But birds didn’t weep. Since he’d been lifted from the pit, bleeding and broken and plucked, and hung on the side of the mountain, the only voice had been the wind’s and the only song that of the rusted chain. The songbird sonata would have been innocuous enough on a Spring day in Valimar, but here in Moringotto’s cesspit, it stuck out like a Silmaril.

His heart took wing in hope. He sucked together what little spittle he could muster, after an eternity surviving on insects and rainwater, and whistled back.

Silence fell. Probably lost and now scared away. Prey-Bird shuttered his eyes and was about to screech a familiar string of curses against the stone, when there came another curious tweet.

Hello?

He dropped his skull back against the cliff with a clunk that resonated in his ears. That was no bird.

Who goes?

He held his breath, straining his eyes through the constant grey gloom towards the outcrop where the sound had come from. There was a scramble; a skittering of slate; then a tattered cloak appeared over its brow with a great hound at the traveller’s side, and Prey-Bird’s weeping turned to chittering laughter.

Falcon! Trust you to march in here singing like a starling! Quiet, else they’ll hear you!

Irissë’s response came with all the dry humour he’d missed.

Does the Dark Lord speak avian, then? But her song hushed nonetheless and she pivoted, searching. Prey-Bird called again.

Up! In the eyrie!

Irissë’s head snapped up and her hood flopped back, opening her face to the veiled sunlight and Prey-Bird’s aerial view. Her eyes widened as she took in the cliff face and her lips parted as though she were about to speak. Huan leapt forwards and loped up to the rock face. As Irissë joined him he reared up, front paws scrabbling several ells above her head. Irissë set her hand upon his back and murmured something to him, and he quieted with a whine.

How do I get up to you?

Prey-Bird flapped his free wing, vaguely. Climb. Fly. I don’t know.

Even from this far up he could see her scowl. But climb she did, steady and sure, until finally she perched on the ledge a few handspans below his dangling toes.

“Tyelko – oh!” She inched her way closer on the ledge. He reached for her shoulder and caught hold of her, and they both took a moment to draw breath. Their eyes met, and he was struck with the sickening feeling that she was about to say something intimate and unstomachable.

“What did you bring him for?” he snarled at her as a diversion, gesturing with a kick to where Huan paced at the foot of the cliff.

Irissë’s eyes hardened. “He brought himself. He’s the reason I found you as easily as I did. What did you leave him for? Chained to a tree, no less?”

“To look after my brothers,” he replied. Irissë stared at him blankly, so he elaborated with a hiss, “He’d have died if he came with me, Irissë!”

Died, like the rest of them. His heartbeat swelled in his ears. Battle sounds rent the background, the stench of blood and fire thick in the air and the acid taint of humiliation sour on his tongue. Irissë continued to stare at him. He looked down to her hands, balled into fists at her sides, and chuckled.

“Hit me then, if it helps you.” He meant it, but it seemed to startle her anger from her. She blinked at him, her grey eyes dove-soft, and swallowed.

“Valar, you sound like a raven wheezing.”

“No birds here, Falcon – only you.” He thought of the scar on his right side and twitched; the instinct to commune with the wild things warring with that of survival. “Even the vultures gave up and left.”

Irissë’s grip tightened. He couldn’t read the emotion on her face – once upon a time he might have done, but that was when he’d been more Elf, less creature.

With her other hand she fumbled at her belt. Her cloak brushed against his legs, scratching and ticklish as a bird’s flight feathers.

“Drink.”

The water in the skin was clean and cool – she must have filled it far away, in a greener place where the birds still sang. He slurped at its sweetness, the logic of his Elf to drink not too much battling his animal to take as much as he could. Irissë, it seemed, was still all Elf, for she withdrew it before too long with murmurs that he’d otherwise be sick, and turned her attention to his captivity.

She set her hands on either side of the iron band chewing into his limb. Prey-Bird only knew she held his wing because he could see it – he’d given it up for dead long ago. The longer bones closer to his body, though, they were more tender. With gritted teeth he watched as she traced the badly-healed scars, fingers stumbling over the mosaic of shattered bone beneath and sparking jolts of pain up to his scapula.

“You won’t undo it,” he told her. He’d cut the tips of his free wing to the bone many times trying. “Amputate, it’s the only way.”

“I could just take the thumb and slip the cuff.” Irissë spoke almost as though she were thinking aloud and hadn’t heard him, forehead knitted as she manipulated his unfeeling fingers. Prey-Bird gulped down another shock of pain.

“No point. It’s dead. Cut the whole thing off.”

“That doesn’t make my job easier.”

“Does.” He grabbed at her hand. She caught her breath in surprise and looked down with wide eyes, but didn’t flinch when he dug between the small bones of her wrist. “Here, disarticulate the joint. You can lever the knife – much easier. Otherwise – you’d have to saw it off.”

“Studied this, have you?” Irissë’s eyes were two bright points in the day’s grey backwash. The softness of her voice was telling. Prey-Bird let go of her wrist.

“Tried to hack it off myself, but the rock was too blunt and then I dropped it.”

Irissë’s face iced over, as though she were only really looking at him for the first time. Then the shock melted, and her expression thawed into something else that Prey-Bird couldn’t read any more, but which he knew he wasn’t going to like.

She was hesitating. He couldn’t afford that.

“What’s the matter, Falcon?” he hissed, more goad than query. “I swear, if you don’t get me down because you haven’t got the stomach for it, I’ll –”

“Shut up, Tyelko!” Her eyes flashed and her jaw locked with the determination he’d hoped to see. “I am trying ! Believe it or not, you’re not my first amputation. But look at you – if you were an animal, you’d tell me to put you down rather than get you down!”

“I am an animal.”

Irissë made a sound deep in her throat. It sounded like the bear-grunt he’d taught her and would have lifted the plumage on his mantle, if the bastards had left him any.

“Well I’m still going to get you out of here alive. Open.”

He obediently let her stuff a wad cut from her cloak between his beak. That alone was a luxury. She didn’t take her hand away immediately, but held her palm against his jaw for a moment, thumb resting at the top of his throat.

“I’m still furious over Losgar, you know.”

I’d expect nothing less.

He grinned at her as best he could around his bite. To his delight, she grinned back. Then she began to make good on her promise.

~~~

Trapped and injured animals tended to do one of two things: either they fought or they froze. Prey-Bird had waited, tethered, for far too long. As the last of his sinews gave way to Irissës’ blade and he fell forward into her arms, the fight rose up in him again, a desperate beating inside the cage of his ribs, that overwhelming urge to be free.

His right wing flopped limply to his side: broken, useless. Pain shrieked through his wishbone and his blood ran freely from his severed blood feathers, as free as he now felt. Hands grabbed at him but he could only taste the wind, smell the air, feel the thermals. Even with one mutilated wing he could still make a glide; float down from the eyrie and then away… His blood swooped. He spread his flight feathers, curled his talons around the rock edge and keened into the breeze.

“Tyelko! No!”

There was pressure around his throat – then pain exploded across his scapula and he found himself staring up at the grim, grey sky. His Falcon loomed into his sightline, all sleek black plumage and beady-bright eyes.

“You can’t fly.” The words came slow and sobbing, counterpoint to the garrotte of her fingers. “You can’t – you can’t fly.”

He beat at her hand for a moment, then remembered he had fingers and went limp.

Right. Still an Elf.

Slowly, Irissë released her grip. He sucked in a deep lungful of air and released it on a breathless groan. In his Elven skin the pain was far, far worse. The adrenaline buzz began to fade and with the clarity of the sun ducking out from behind a cloud he realised he was naked, smeared against a ledge on the rock face, scarred skin bared to the elements. His right hand was missing and the pain was making him tremble. Below, he could barely hear Huan’s pacing and whining over the chatter of his teeth and his laughter.

“All right.” Irissë’s voice was a woosh of relief behind him. “We’re not a bird anymore.” She began to move. He could not.

She murmured to him, nonsense of home and freedom, as she eased him upright and wrapped him in her cloak. Up close he could see its soft green-brown tones were tattered, frayed, like the vanes of ruffled feathers. It settled around him, swathing his nakedness in layers of primaries, secondaries and coverts, and leaving him feeling less like a plucked fowl. His head listed against her shoulder and the world turned grey at the edges. In the background her heart beat with the bass regularity of great wings. Her breast heaved once beneath him, deeply as though gathering breath, and then she loosed the long, plaintive cry of a prey-bird into the filthy air.

“Eagle.” The pain and the adrenaline were making him feel lightheaded in a way that his tormentors had never managed. He wheezed a chuckle out into the fabric of her tunic. “Y’were always good at that.”

“Let’s hope I’m better than good today,” Irissë said, and pressed her lips against his forehead. “I’m still furious, you know.”

There was another eagle’s call, as though she were proving her point. The air billowed around them. Prey-Bird blinked in confusion and this time, it was Irissë who laughed.

The giant eagle landed on the ledge’s far edge. What little breath Prey-Bird had left stuttered in his throat.

“You –” he spluttered and reached out his fingers almost without realising.

Sorontar, Irissë chittered. We are indebted to you.

Not to me. Sorontar tilted his head and lowered the wing closest to them. 'Tis my Lord Manwë who is gracious yet.

So great was Prey-Bird’s thrill that he hardly noticed the pain when Irissë scooped him to his feet and staggered them towards the eagle. She had to bodily heave him onto Sorontar’s back, where he perched, precarious and stunned, until she leaped up behind him. It was then, as she wound her arms and her cloak tightly around him and Sorontar shifted towards the empty air, that his heart finally broke free. He wore the skin of a prey-bird, and they were going to take flight.

The wind ripped the joy from his lips as they dove, swooped and then soared. Sorontar’s wings, each longer than Prey-Bird’s own armspan, beat in the air like sails, and under his skin the glossy feathers held a downy warmth. He found himself fascinated by the way the minute twitches of the flight feathers matched a change in direction or height; how the plumage was arrayed just so. Everything was going numb, towards that peaceful, insensate place one visited after hard battle or a good lay. He let his head loll back against the support of Irissë’s shoulder – and, just before they disappeared into the clouds, he caught sight of a figure far below them.

“Huan…”

“He found his way here and he’ll find his way back again.” Irissë’s breath was hot against his neck and growing hotter the higher they climbed into the cooling evening sky. Prey-Bird grunted, but there was nothing else for it. It was becoming increasingly hard to keep his eyes from rolling back in their sockets. Sorontar screeched, a sound that made Prey-Bird’s spine prickle. He sagged back against Irissë’s shoulder, chuckling to himself.

“What did he say?”

He grinned, lax and sloppy and weak. “You pr’nounced his name wrong.”

In his ear, Irissë growled. “If you weren’t already bleeding to death by my own hand, I’d drop you off his back and kill you that way instead.”

“King of the Eagles,” Prey-Bird sighed in awe, and passed out.

---

Chapter End Notes

Random animal fact: Birds have a thing called blood feathers, which are essentially new growing feathers with an aterial blood supply. If a blood feather is severed or broken before it finishes growing and the blood supply has closed off, it is possible for the bird to bleed to death unless proper attention is given. Probably not quite as bad as amputating a hand, but still possible.