Chapter VII A Historic Flight
VII
A Historic Flight
The nightjar that carried Agnes’s letter down the mountain had a difficult task.
The first difficult task, however, had been finding a bird that was fit and obliging.
The barren peaks did not make hospitable homes for many creatures, save for goats, which were likelier to eat the letter than deliver it, and snakes, which were sadly short of any appendage that would make them suitable for letter-carrying.
There were vultures, which had been Adele-Blanche’s favored of all beasts, but they were too wicked to be tamed, even when tempted with the ripest pieces of carrion.
Agnes lacked her grandmother’s affinity for vicious things.
So Agnes had chosen a nightjar, luring him with beetles and writhing pillbugs.
He was perhaps smaller than she would have liked, but he saw better in darkness than in light, which would be useful for the business of flying through the valleys of the black peaks where the sun barely reached.
His camouflage was impeccable. He blended perfectly with the bark on rotted branches, or among the dry, underfed grass.
And perhaps most important, he was a peculiar creature, fit only to serve the House of Teeth.
He would remind any who received his missive that Adele-Blanche’s strange customs were still followed, that they had not been driven into the mud with her innards.
Let the other houses keep their dull and familiar messengers.
The nightjar’s journey was a harrowing one.
He had never flown farther than perhaps half a mile down the mountains, and so the lushness of the green scrub he encountered at their base was arresting, confusing.
The dirt was white—sand, an element he did not know.
And the bright air was pricked with salt, a bitter, pungent smell that confounded his senses.
He landed on the branch of a tall, narrow tree that resembled a pine if it had been shaved down nearly to its trunk.
He scratched the white dirt from his feathers. He blinked salt from his eyes.
But the nightjar did not fail at his task.
He landed upon a windowsill, chirped to announce his arrival, and allowed the letter to be unclipped from his leg.
He took this time to rest on the sill while the letter was read, while humans moved in and out of the room, murmuring to themselves, poring over the parchment until it crinkled and dampened.
As was his nature, he slept during the day and was woken in the evening, to a man fixing another letter to his leg. The man had hair the color of wet gold, and though his body was large, his ministrations were gentle.
The nightjar fluffed his wings. The darkness was not so dense here, not so complete.
The castle walls were ablaze with moonlight—powerful, silvery beams that shot to the ground like arrows.
The nightjar flew in a swooping, diving pattern as if to dodge them.
The sand captured the light and held it, spread it until the whole beach sparkled like glowworms on the ceiling of a cave.
The nightjar was relieved when the shadows of the mountain overtook him again, slicking him with their oils.
He carried the letter to Lady Agnes, who waited in the garden, under the gloom of a willow tree.
She rose and took the parchment from him, feeding him a centipede to thank him.
He was too much an animal to understand that he had accomplished something momentous: The letter he delivered would summon the lady and her mistress down the mountain, and Castle Peake would stand precarious and empty, not even groaning with the footsteps of ghosts.