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helmets winking in the sun, paced just inside the fence.
    At last the door of the inn swung wide. The bird tensed. Onto the porch came a heavy, muscular man, slow of step, dressed in the uniform of a merchant officer: black coat, gold trim, high collar turned up at the back. Over his chest flowed a curly, rust-red beard. The man's eyes were bright and restless. He looked suspicious of the doorway, the horses, the very air.
    The carriage driver scampered down from his seat, opened the passenger door and lowered the footstool. The red-bearded man paid no attention. After a moment a servant came from the inn bearing a tray. Upon the tray, a dish, and within the dish the falcon saw four of the tiny, sky-blue eggs of milop birds. The bearded man scooped them into his hand. The servant waited, the horses stamped, the carriage driver stood in the rain, but the man had eyes only for his eggs. With great patience he lifted each one, rolled it in his palm, and then with a surprisingly delicate motion cracked it between his teeth and drank it raw. He did this four times. Then he passed the eggshells to the servant and lumbered toward the carriage.
    Now the falcon saw it: the odd, toe-pointing twitch in the man's left foot. Not quite a limp, but unmistakable—his master had demonstrated. Beard, eggs, twitch. It was enough.
    The carriage door closed. The driver took his seat and whipped the horses into a trot. Nearly a mile away, the falcon leaped from the mast with a warrior's cry, startling the prisoner so badly he scalded his leg with tar. The ship was already forgotten: the falcon shot like an arrow into the thunderheads, beating west and screamingdefiance of the wind. Shedding rain, delighted to be under way, he climbed until land and sea vanished utterly beneath the clouds, and then higher still. At last he burst through to sunlight, and skimmed low over a wild, brooding cloudscape, a kingdom of his own.
    All day the bird flew west, hardly changing the tempo of his wingbeats. Toward evening a cloud-murth on a horse like white smoke chased him, leering and waving an axe, but the falcon beat the demon to the edge of the cloudlands, and taunted it with a corkscrew dive at the setting sun. Before dark he saw a pod of whales surging east, and a ship in pursuit.
    Under the moon, his name-father, the bird flew faster than ever, and at midnight with a thrill of joy he felt the wind shift behind him.
I shall be early, early!
He passed gulls, terns, cormorants as if they were standing still. Now and then a wander-star crossed the heavens: one of the metal eyes the ancients hung over Alifros to spy on their enemies.
    By the second day the wind tasted of Etherhorde. Marsh gases, city smoke, the sweet reek of farmland. At last it came: a bright coast, ships beyond counting, harbor bells and the barking of dogs, the rumbling, gabbling noise of the afternoon market, the children laughing in the slums, the fortresses, the black parade of the Emperor's Horse Guard. Etherhorde was the mightiest city in the world, and one day (so his master whispered) would be the only city where power dwelled, all others made its vassals.
    Being a woken animal, the falcon lacked his wild brethren's terror of cities. Still, he could not ignore their dangers. Men fired arrows, boys threw stones. Thus the falcon took the same course always to his master's window: up the River Ool, past the cargo piers in the estuary where ships from all Alifros docked, past the marble mansions and the Queen's Park, the ironworks where cannon were made for the fleet, the home for veterans maimed by cannon fire, until at last he reached a grim stone compound at the river's edge.
    Travelers on the Ool mistook the place for a prison; in fact it was an academy for girls. The unfortunate creatures trapped inside those walls knew the falcon by sight. One—the fair-haired girl who tended to sit alone by the catfish tanks—was looking up at him now. Too clever, that one. She watched him with