“You’re such a Speaker.”

“Am not!”

“Are too! Can’t even go near you without you knowing exactly—”

“Shut up!”

“My mother says it’s a good thing,” Egred said, pausing for breath as she finally caught up to us at the level where we’d stopped climbing. A winding path cut long ago ran up the walls of the granite hill. Tall trees swooping at odd angles with immense trunks did their best to shade the blistering sun that pierced the wind and leaves to warm our shoulders.

“Your mother doesn’t know what a Speaker is,” Griffio, the skinny black-haired boy three weeks younger yet half a foot taller than me said.

“I am not a Speaker,” I said, hopping down from the tree branch where I’d been hanging. “I just know she’s up here.” My feet made a satisfying crunch of loose stone and leaves on the sparse grass covering the outcrop.

“See, you even know it’s a girl. How do you know it’s a girl — I barely saw it and now you know it’s a girl. I’ll be you already have a name for it.”

“I haven’t gotten close enough to know her name.”

“What, you think it’s gonna tell you its name!”

“Shut up, Griffio,” green-eyed Sarah said as she stopped climbing up the side of the path. “For all you know it’s a loose one.” Unlike the rest of us who ran up the path as fast as we could upon seeing the crown, Sarah stretched her slender arms and legs up the side of the rocks without so much as knocking a stone loose. She certainly looked less winded than I was.

“No, it’s wild,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s turning into a Speaker,” Griffio laughed.

“Shut up!” I replied. I had never met a Speaker. Neither had Griffio. We were separated by two rivers from that rarely found people and even at this crossroads of Mother, where desert, forest, mountain, river, all sorts of people fleeing for some reason or another, no Speaker had ever joined our melting pot of a tribe. Had I ever met one, I might not have felt it an insult at all.

“I know it’s wild,” I said, “because of the way it flies. The trade ships’ crowns are smaller and more controlled in their movements. This one is bounding on the wind, not using it.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, Kagis,” Egred said. Once I said the crown was wild, she had put a large boulder between her and the open sky, searching the clouds with wide eyes.

The loud cry of the crown, a growl like an enormous dog mixed with a very small porpoise, pierced the noise of the wind and echoed stair-stepping down the wall of the mount.

“There it is!” I shouted, and ran, the others whooping and laughing as they followed. Even Sarah gave up climbing in favor of running alongside us up the smooth path.

Racing up the gradually narrowing summit with the crown’s cry calling us forward, we collapsed against one another and fell inside the enormous opening in the trunk of a walnut-laden tree. “You’re on my foot!” Sarah said with a laugh as she kicked me off.

“I can see the harbor from here!” Egred exclaimed.

“You can?” Griffio said, and joined her at the precipice. “No you can’t. It’s—”

With the swooping flutter of suddenly changing wind, the crown darted past the summit with such speed I was sure it would come around for another pass. Then I lost sight of it. “I told you it was a girl!” I cheered.

“You never said it would get this close.” Griffio reached behind him and pulled two long hafts from the small pack of materials he was seldom seen without. Screwing the rounded tips together, he clamped on the wide knife strapped to his side.

“What are you doing?”

“You never said it would get this close.” Within five seconds, he’d fashioned the spear and stood with his feet planted. Were the day more humid beads of sweat would have been trickling down his forehead.

“You’re not gonna kill it are you?” Egred asked, though she made sure the spear was between her and the sky. “I mean, it won’t come down here, right?”

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“He’s not going to kill it because the crown wouldn’t be stupid enough to come near us,” Sarah said, and in one hop stuck herself to the mount’s edge. She looked comfortable as if she were in a chair, though the wall must not have been less than a ninety-degree angle.

“I hope she does,” I whispered a little too loudly.

“And then what would you do?”

“I’d—”

The cry of the crown sweeping past the walnut tree made everyone duck to the ground while I jumped off the edge of the mount and grabbed hold of the stoutest branch I could find. It was gone quick as it showed itself, and I was left with my sandals clinging to my feet above open sky.

“I don’t think this was such a good idea,” I said, thankful to have climbed enough trees to know I’d picked a sturdy enough branch.

“Kagis! Kagis!” Griffio shouted. “Kagis, did you — oh, you didn’t fall.”

“Why would you think I fell?” I asked, still dangling from the walnut tree.

“Aren’t you going to come back?”

With practiced movements, I swung a leg around the branch and hoisted myself to a sitting position, one hand on a second branch to steady myself in the wind.

“What, you think it’s just going to land next to you?” Sarah asked, biting her lip as she watched me from the wall.

“If it does, let me have its tail” Griffio said. “I hear the tails fetch—”

“You’re not taking its tail,” I nearly shouted. “No one’s—”

The crown sailed into view once more and, strangely, made a long, slow bank to come around for another pass. In this way, I was able to get a first full look at her. She had long mahogany fur and that triple white streak running down her middle like all crowns had, or so I’d been told. The thin fur on her wings rustled like blades of glass in the wind when she spread them wide for a slow curve then flattened like the skin of an eel when she banked in a swooping dive. Opening her wide wings, she revealed the thin white fur underneath, and her four paws, claws tucked in behind thin toes, of a rich black skin. Here wide eyes glistened a golden hue, and atop her head sat that crimson bit of fur that gave her species its wondrous name. Like a lock of leaves given to the champion of a foot race, her ears flowed back to a ring of red fur in a crown shape that may have led to the Prophets giving these creatures a loftier prestige than even the most traditionally-minded Mother-Dweller.

“Come to me,” I said in my thoughts, reaching out to the creature like I’d do with the squirrels who liked to solicit walnuts from me in trees like this. Before she could so much as look at me, she bared her row of teeth as if to bite the air and dove out of sight, her tail with its wide vertical sail tucked down to expedite her descent.

“Did she tell you her name?” Griffio asked, and immediately started laughing to hide his panting.

“That was amazing!” Sarah said, and leapt off the wall to lean against the tree and peer over the edge. “Egred, get out from beneath that tree.”

“Uh-uh,” Egred said.

“It’s long gone. Probably smelled Griffio and ran off.”

“It flew off, thank you,” Griffio said. “And I probably scared it away.”

“You probably did,” I said, and stood, both hands supporting me from the branch above my head. “Next time put your spear away.”

“No way, not unless she puts her teeth away.”

“She’s not going to get any closer if you threaten her like that.”

“How does she know I’m threatening her?”

“You’re holding a spear.”

“She shouldn’t know that.”

“She’s smarter than she looks.”

“Oh, so you know her name and that she can read and write? You really are turning into a Speaker.”

“I don’t know her name,” I said, calling out with my feelings toward the spot I still felt a tinge of the crown calling back from. “And I’m not a Speaker.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with Speakers,” Sarah insisted.

“Oh, sorry,” Griffio said, and rolled his eyes, catching a glimpse at the position of the sun as he did.

“You’re not sorry.”

“Maybe not. But I’m gonna be if my ma catches me out after dark. Plus, I think Da brought a leg of that beast they caught this morning.”

“No kidding?”

“Ooh, beast steak!” Egred said, and emerged from the trunk.

“You coming for beast, Kagis? Or are you going to play with the squirrels some more?”

“Squirrels are good company,” I said.

“But they can’t give you beast steak.”

“Come on, Kagis, it’s time to go,” Sarah insisted.

“I’ll be right behind you. I just want to see if any of those pouchers live up here.”

“You sure? The Prophets said they might stay for dinner. With beast on the menu, I’m sure they’ll stay.”

“I’ll see the Prophets, don’t worry.”

“Okay. Just don’t fall off the mount.”

“Sure.”

The sun began to set as my friends mirrored its fall. I knew for a fact that it was too high for pouches to be nesting. Maybe a few squirrels now and then, and of course those little white birds who liked to nest at the top of the hills, but no pouches.

My friends were eating beast steak with two Sevens Prophets as guests, and all I had to eat were the walnuts growing around me. This tree was better than the others. For one, it was on a hill I hadn’t tried yet, had bigger walnuts, and many of its branches stretched far out over the edge of the mount. That meant more visibility. That meant she could see me.

“Okay then,” I said as I tossed another empty shell over the side, watching it fall soundlessly to the darkening abyss. “Are you going to come back?”

Crowns rarely stayed in the same place twice. They didn’t travel in packs and they refused to allow any other creature to inhabit the trees where they rested. As much as I wished to eat some beast, the last time I had the smell of cooked beast meat on me I didn’t hear so much as a flap of crown wings for a week.

My thoughts on that tree were like a beacon. At least I hoped they were. I stretched out with thoughts of calling, ever-focusing on the sensation and always aware of the possibility another’s presence would be felt. It was said some of the trappers crowns so feared used this method, and that some crowns knew the practice. That was why it was so rarely successful for trappers, why I had to tweak my broadcasted emotions. It was while fine-tuning my outreach that I felt the approaching presence of another person.

The caw of the crown reeling back made me stand up so quickly I fell off the branch.