The sky was just lightening when I woke to find a soldier standing above me, pissing on my lower back. I lifted my head from the muck, spat to clear my mouth of their filth. Everything from my wings to my feet ached with cold, everything not warmed by his pestilent stream. I blinked in the grey predawn light, my eyes dry from hours of staring.
The soldier took no notice of me until my wings began to tremble and stretch, then he jerked back, cock still in hand. His feet slipped on the edge of the earthen latrine, and down he fell, into my waiting arms.
I chewed his throat out before he could raise an alarm.
The blood of men crackles with an evanescent charge mine can’t carry: the savor of mortality. The iron in their veins tingles and prickles my throat like sour beer.
I pushed the soldier's corpse under the surface of the refuse, shoving his slack face into the mud of his own kind before clawing my way out of the pit on stiff and aching arms.
My throat burned as if I’d gone too long without water, a pain not helped by the wash of salty soldier blood, and I grimaced as I rubbed the lumpy rope of scar tissue beneath my chin. The mark would fade before sunset, but I still resented them for disfiguring me, no matter how temporarily.
In hindsight I should have waited, should have stayed in my piss-scented grave until night's cover came again, but I was too eager to wait, too glad to have air in my lungs once more. I tried to get a running start to launch myself aloft, but my legs shuddered beneath me, my wings fluttered like useless cloth and I could get no lift.
Cries of alarm rose through the camp as soldiers caught sight of me, and I only flapped a few meters into the air before the first arrow struck me, high on the collarbone. I faltered, sank, and that was enough for the soldiers to all come swarming. More shots, more sharp, triangular arrowheads punched into my flesh, and a cheer went up from the gathered men.
They’d brought me down a second time. What a grand day for their pride.
A spear slammed down through the feather and sinew of my right wing, pinning me to the ground. I screamed and arched my back, beating my free wing at the soldiers, trying to drive them back, but they weren’t afraid of me anymore. I wasn’t the imposing marvel of snow and ash that had nearly brought them to their knees. Now I was just another ugly, shit-streaked demon running loose in their camp, and their instinct was to kill.
Quick enough, their captain stood over me, upside down in my field of vision. “So,” he said, “not so easily killed, are you? More than just a man with wings.” He gestured to his left.
I bared my teeth at the heavy clank of iron manacles, snapped and clawed, but the soldiers outnumbered me too greatly. The iron stung my skin like ice water, burning at me, itching in a way I could never hope to scratch.
They snapped one manacle on me, then the other, and then the pinning spear was yanked free.
I tried to launch myself up into the sky once more, to catch them by surprise, but my perforated wing was next to useless, and the manacle chains gave no slack. I fell back to the dirt, defeated.
The captain gestured. “Take the crow’s cage into my tent, and lock this misery inside. If the Magician wants to spy, he can watch me scratch my balls every night.”
I fought. No one can ever say I went easily, but the iron left me weak, and in the end they dragged me back to the cage like a cow to slaughter. The soldiers’ jeering echoed off the valley walls, loud enough to carry over to my side. My lord would not be pleased.
Back into the iron cage they crammed me, threading the chains through the bars so they could tug my arms to and fro like a drunken puppet. They pulled my arms against the iron bars to hear me scream, and their ugly, coarse faces split with laughter. I tried to impose my will on them, tried to lie them into leaving me alone, but after months of battle and loss and death, they would not release their one scrap of joy.
The captain did not intervene until it was time for the midday meal. He shooed them out of the tent like an ugly, bearded mother hen, then stood before my cage and stared.
Smoky ichor stained my lips again, from where I’d bit my cheeks against the pain. “Why cage me?” I spat.
He hooked his thumbs into his sword belt. “They’re good men, and they’ve fought hard. They’ve earned a bit of fun.”
“But why…keep me?” I could feel nothing from fingertips to wrists. The iron no longer even burned. “No one keeps a spy.”
“Normally, no. But you’ve proved yourself hard to kill. What else am I supposed to do with you? I could have the men kill you every day…” he tilted his head to the side. “Or we could melt down the manacles and make you drink them.” He rocked back on his heels. “I don’t know. I haven’t yet decided. I suppose it all depends on your behavior, and whether you can be an asset to us.”
I peeled my lips back. “Why would I aid the rats running underfoot?”
He did not answer, but seized the nearest manacle chain.
My instinct screamed at me to pull away, but my iron-numb muscles did not respond.
He drew my arm out through the bars and removed a key from a pouch at his belt.
I watched with mild amazement as he unlocked the left manacle. My arm flopped uselessly against the cage once released.
He moved over to the other manacle.
“Why?” I asked again.
The captain did not look up as he freed my right arm. “My men have had their fun. I am not one to revel in the misery of others.” He took the open manacle away and carefully lifted my nerveless arm, pushing it back through the bars to settle in my lap. “Even when they are agents of evil.” He pushed my other arm through the bars, and set the manacles on the floor by the tent flap.
“You threatened to torture me not long ago.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “You, of all creatures, should know that threat and action are entirely different beasts.”
I stared at my pale, useless arms with dumb wonder until he started to open the tent flap. “Do you know what my side does to spies?” I asked quietly.
He paused. “I’ve heard stories.”
“I could tell you worse ones,” I promised. “Truer ones.”
His head lowered. “If we treated our prisoners as you treat yours, then we would be monsters as well.”
“Perhaps,” I called after him as he stepped outside, “but at least your monsters would be well-fed!”