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focused on her own task, and for a time they worked in
silence. At last, when the sun was near to setting and the eventide
hours of the Day Cloak were drawing in, the birds were ready. A row
of six of them stood at Llandry’s left hand, all glittering with
the coloured gems she had set into the metal.
    ‘ Should be ready,’ Aysun said, getting to his feet. He walked
up and down for a few moments, wincing. Llandry understood his
discomfort as soon as she stood up; the hours of motionless
activity had stolen most of the blood from her legs, and they
prickled painfully as she moved.
    Her father
crouched down behind the row of bokrens and nudged one of them with
his hand. It jerked forward, its wings flapping as its legs moved.
Llandry could hear the whir of tiny gears inside the bird,
maintaining the flow of movement. Soon all six were rattling around
the garden, walking jerkily but steadily in circles. Llandry jumped
as one of them opened its jewelled beak and emitted a
squawk.
    ‘ Reckon that’ll do nicely, don’t you?’ Aysun folded his arms,
observing his creations with a pleased expression.
    ‘ Reckon so,’ Llandry agreed. ‘Just one last thing.’ She dashed
away to the old bokren pen and grabbed a few of the real birds’
nests. They even had a few feathers still clinging to the woven
straw. She laid the nests around the garden, placing a few
dark-shelled bokren eggs in each one.
    ‘ Perfect,’ she beamed.
    ‘ Think she’ll like them?’
    Llandry
considered that. ‘She’ll either love them or hate them,’ she
decided. Her father just nodded glumly.
    ‘ I’ll
wait upstairs.’ He wandered off to the stairs and began to climb
them slowly. Aysun was from the adjacent realm of Irbel, and lacked
the wings that Llandry and her mother both bore. Llandry sometimes
wondered if he felt like an outsider in Waeverleyne; few wingless
humans lived there for more than a few moons at a time. But he’d
never seemed dissatisfied to her.
    She stooped to
grab Sigwide before he could get his teeth around the leg of a
downed metal bokren. ‘I’ll be up in a minute,’ she
called.
     
    ***
     
    Ynara arrived
home with an aching head and an aching back. Too many hours spent
sitting in a hard chair in the councillor’s halls was never good
for her. She went straight up to her bedchamber to brush and
rearrange her hair and wash her face. Feeling revived, she
descended the stairs on her way to the kitchen.
    Her husband and
daughter were waiting for her at the bottom.
    ‘ What? Is something wrong?’ She felt a flicker of anxiety
under their scrutiny.
    ‘ Nope,’ said Aysun.
    ‘ Did
you pass through the garden on your way up, Ma?’
    ‘ No,’
she said slowly, looking from one to the other. Where they were
expressionless before, now they were looking very pleased with
themselves. ‘What have you two been up to?’
    ‘ You
really need to come and see this,’ Llandry replied. The two of them
turned as one and went to the door. She followed them down the
exterior stairs, feeling that mixture of anticipation and
trepidation once again.
    A scene of chaos
awaited her in the garden. Half a dozen metal birds flapped and
squawked their way around the flowerbeds, their wings shining a far
brighter red than any real feathers. They were bokren birds,
perfect to every detail; the very jerkiness of their mechanised
gait mimicked the graceless movements of the real birds eerily
well.
    She took in the
nests filled with eggs that were scattered about, her lips
twitching into a smile.
    ‘ Good
grief,’ she managed faintly. ‘You two are just... just... there
aren’t words.’
    ‘ That’s not all,’ Llandry said. She pointed at one of the
blue-leaved glaeshur bushes that Ynara had planted around the base
of the stairs. Sigwide crouched beside it, watching the bokren
birds with avid interest. Then he exploded into action, yipping in
excitement as he charged at the nearest bird. He nudged the thing
with nose and paws until it changed