It's a Trap

The southern and eastern sides of Ohm are the most protected from the wind. And, this sometimes gets confusing for newcomers - the wind is also called Ohm. Or just “the wind”. Everybody will know what you’re talking about, trust me. It never stops.

Once upon a time, the wind was a minor annoyance in Hehn, the agricultural region I’m from. Mainly, it made us rich. Because we’re on the eastern side of Neste, the X-shaped mountain range that cuts Ohm in pieces, and because Ohm blows from the northwest, we get most of the snow runoff. The wind is so strong, in fact, that us humans can’t live in its direct path, and about 90% of the snowmelt travels east, in the form of Hehn’s mighty rivers. At the height of my family’s agricultural production, about 60% of the entire world’s food came from our fields. Not any more, of course. The wind is still there, and getting stronger due to de-mountaination, but my family is gone.

Now, we are at war.

My name is Sonnet Helio and I was once fifth in line to marry The King and become Queen of the Six Kingdoms of Ohm. That’s according to the odds-makers anyway, though it’s not a bet I would have made on myself.

The Helio family peacefully and prosperously ran Hehn for 300 years or so, until now, and now I’m the one in charge. Nobody blames me. After The King was murdered and the war started, we needed military help. So we are now mostly controlled by Ziyad, an island off the east coast of Hehn. That’s a good thing. Hehn has never had much of an army, we’ve just been happy farmers for as long as anybody can remember. Hehn and Ziyad have always got along well, and some of my earliest memories are of Ziyadi toys, gadgets, and carnivals. The carnivals are one of those things that are especially tough to think about during war, but I’ll try. As a little girl, I would ride my horse down to the docks to watch them unload a never-ending stream of exotic animals from boats so big it seemed unreal. I wasn’t much of a princess growing up, but if you are forced to be a princess, be one in Hehn so you can at least ride a horse. In Ziyad, they rode all kinds of different animals: zebras, alligators and ostriches. Their warriors rode rhinoceros and it was rumored some girls rode dolphins. In what now seems like another lifetime, rumors had me marrying the Prince of Ziyad, and I imagined us side by side, riding rhinos. I thought that was excuse enough for my parents to get me one.

“Nope.” said dad.

“Two rhinos?”

“Nope.”

He said that about everything fun. Other girls I knew were jealous because I was an actual princess. I was a princess who wanted to be a cowgirl.

We still mostly do the same farming we did before, and the Ziyadi army protects us from the real bad guys: the puppet queen Shakko Sanbabbin and the armies of the rich families of Veran. They took the opportunity of the King’s death to grab power and exploit everybody. Everybody.

Don’t worry, we aren’t all letting them.

The wind. As the population of Ohm grew, we started tearing down the mountains to build a giant wall along the unprotected west coast so more people could live there. The wall will now take you 3 weeks and a good horse if you want to see the whole thing. This monument has grown at the expense of the mountains that protect us in Hehn and Ziyad. The mountains that protect our ability to grow crops, for everybody to survive. Population in the now-habitable zone west of the mountains has doubled every few years, and with it a longer, higher wall is demanded, taking more rocks and mountaintops with it. Once a desolate land of outcasts hiding behind hills, the west region has joined together as The United Tribes of the West, or UTW, and they are consuming ever more food, gadgets, and carnivals. Before the war, they were planning a second, interior wall because they can’t handle a little wind.

But here in Hehn, we barely have enough land and water to meet the demand right now. And it’s getting windier.

I run things here in Osyo, the city at the eastern base of what everybody calls “magic mountain”. Magic mountain is a wind, gravity, and ox-powered cart and pulley system that moves goods through the mountains and takes rocks out. Ziyad built it at the middle part of the X-shape, as well as The Borealis, so they could make some easy money selling to the UTW. That was before they realized the true price tag.

Foremost in the fight against the puppet Queen Shakko is Coco Caffoi, who before the war was considered the most powerful woman in the world. The Caffoi are from the south, The Freelands, where the rivers end up and the wind is the weakest. Before magic mountain, all trade to and from The King’s Castle and the rest of Veran passed through The Freelands, and the Caffoi controlled a fair amount of it. Their giant falcons have become the messaging system the whole world depends on, and nobody has been able to replicate it. If you need to say something important to someone who isn’t nearby, you either need to get there by horse, boat, or mountain cart (or rhino if you’re lucky); or go through the Caffoi. We used to use barn owls in Hehn, but the falcons got cheaper and easier. Barn owls had a reputation for being finicky about what they carried. If you were just picking up a barn owl to send a birthday card to a friend, they knew. They judged. They sometimes refused to take messages. So, even in Hehn we started using falcons. And honestly, we rarely had anything important to say before the war. The important stuff was all in the news scrolls, which were also run by, you guessed it, Coco Caffoi.

Coco left the safety of my castle here in Osyo two days ago, on a magic mountain cart, to meet with “investors” at Joon Lake, the old resort town in the middle of magic mountain. Investors, to Coco, are anybody who offers warriors, weapons, or prayers to our struggle. The UTW is currently undergoing sort of a civil war in the middle of the bigger war, and Coco thinks she can get a commitment from a few of their tribes to join us. About half the UTW are demanding more wall, and half realize we can’t keep cutting down mountaintops. It’s making it hard for them to choose sides in the war.

So, when I saw the gigantic, majestic, clearly injured falcon flying up from the south, my heart sank.

The Caffoi’s falcons returning from Joon Lake had been showing up injured and nearly dead for a few years now, if they made it back at all. This falcon was new, and old, and beautiful, and near-dead, and definitely flying from the wrong direction. A falcon so majestic could only belong to one of two people. One of them was obviously Coco, so this had to be from her daughter, Parisola Caffoi, and she knows Coco just left.

The note, predictably, read:

It’s a trap. Get her back.

“What are we going to do?” asked Inka, “We can’t send a falcon to Joon right now.”

Inka is the falcon and pigeon handler here at Osyo, and she was right. The falcons that have made it back lately are in no shape to go back out, and pigeons can’t make it through the broken mountain range with its now windier wind-tunnel. The Queen has been breeding and training falcon-hunters, called bij. Bij, “the rodents of the sky”, are little dart-shaped hummingbirds that attack like suicide bombers. They can’t catch the falcons in flight, of course, but enough of them can make it impossible for them to land. So if you know where falcons are going, the bij are very effective, and we haven’t had time to train all the falcons on the new routes. War.

“She’s going.” I nodded to the upper corner of the barn, where an old barn owl sat on a rafter, silently watching us.

“I always forget about her. How will you get her to go?”, asked Inka.

“She already knows she’s going. I can see it in her eyes.”

“She won’t make it,” warned Inka, “Have you seen how old and frayed her feathers are?”

This particular barn owl has been in this roost since I was a little girl. She was young when I was, but that was almost 20 years ago. Life for barn owls is good in Hehn, but she is about ready to move on to the next owl phase. I can see that in her eyes too. Her mate died a few years ago, and I’m surprised she’s put up with the war this long. I guess the mice keep showing up and needing to be eaten, so she keeps eating them.

“Old, yes.” I answered Inka, “but her feathers are frayed to make her silent, even when she flaps her wings.”

Inka re-studied the tips of the owl’s feathers, “I can see that now. It’s like she becomes the wind. My Caffoi training program just lists all the bad traits of the barn owl. They bred their falcons to make owl deliveries irrelevant.”

“I guess they wanted to sell a lot of falcons.”

“I guess so.” Inka examined the bij marks on Parisola’s giant falcon, now lying on the table. “This attack would have killed most falcons. I’ve never seen one this big before.”

“Paris sent this one for me.” I knew Parisola’s falcons better than anyone in Hehn, and she knew it. Before the war, Paris and I were practically roommates at the King’s Castle. She was once third in line to be Queen, according to the odds-makers. Paris knew she probably didn’t even need to attach the note, that I would get the message without it. She was right.

“Only Caffoi falcons can make it through the wind tunnel.” warned Inka. “The bij and pigeons have to be carried in crates, and no other birds have been able to-”

“She’ll make it.” I cut her off.

“Let’s hope the storm holds. I remember from falcon school, owls can’t deliver in the rain. And the bij? And that altitude?” Inka knew her falcon marketing platform very well, but marketing wasn’t going to save Coco.

“She knows all that. I’ll bet she knows more about the bij than we do.”

I looked up at her in the barn rafters, her heart-shaped face turned toward the open window, and held my gaze on her for a few seconds. When I turned to fill out a not of my own, I caught her turn her head to watch me.

Parisola’s falcon arrived. It’s a trap. Get Coco back any way you can.

Without a hint of anything else or a whisper of a sound, the barn owl spread her wings and landed on the table next to me, somehow all in one motion.

“I feel like we should say a prayer,” said Inka.

“Come back to me safely. Bring them all back safely. And if you see Rem, bring him back to me too.” War will do that to you. War will have you asking old birds to do what whole armies can’t. It will also make you believe in the impossible, because sometimes the impossible happens. “Remember, you’re a barn owl. You’re not afraid of rodents, even flying ones.”

She turned her head to look at me one last time, and if there was fear in her eyes, I couldn’t see it. Like magic, she was out the open window and flying straight at the half-moon. We followed to catch a last glimpse but she was nowhere to be seen, showing off for Inka no doubt, hidden from the world until the job was done.

Copi runs our barn in Joon Lake. When he sees my old barn owl, he’ll know it’s important, even without reading the note.