Caelan had endured a great many things in the name of 'training'.
He had climbed cliffs in the dark. He had sparred with his hands bound behind his back, which had been both instructive and deeply unpleasant. He had spent three days on a small island with nothing but a knife and a waterskin, eaten things he preferred not to name, and come back leaner and considerably less idealistic about nature. He had been thrown, choked, twisted into shapes the human body was not designed to hold, and on one memorable occasion set on fire. Briefly, and technically by accident, but still.
He had not expected this.
The ground was a hundred feet below him now and getting further away.
"Stop," he shouted, which was useless. Then, even louder: "Stop you crazy bird."
The eagle did not stop. The eagle was not in a stopping mood. It beat its great wings in long, furious strokes, each downstroke hitting the air like a hammer, the whole massive body lurching with the effort of carrying something it hadn't intended to carry. The rope was still around Caelan's boot and shin, wound twice, and every time the bird drove upward the line snapped taut and yanked him by the leg so hard his whole body swung.
He was upside down. Then sideways. Then, briefly and horribly, directly beneath the bird's churning wings, close enough to feel the wind of them against his face.
He grabbed the rope with both hands and held on for dear life.
Below him the plateau edge passed and then the cliff dropped away and then there was nothing underneath him but air, and below the air the dark canopy of the Kelmoran woods, very far down. The wind at this height was sharp and cold and continuous. It pulled tears from the corners of Caelan's eyes and ripped the sound out of his mouth before it could go anywhere useful.
He tried anyway. "Can you please calm down !?"
The eagle screamed, and banked hard to the left, which swung Caelan out wide and then back like a pendulum and did nothing good for his spine.
He tightened his grip on the rope. His knuckles had gone white. The wind was so loud now it had become its own kind of silence, a wall of sound that pressed in from every direction and made thinking difficult.
I need to think. I need to think of a bloody way of getting down. Caelan promised himself he would never be coming back here if he survived.
He could see, when he craned his neck, that the bird was struggling. Not tiring, it wasn't tired, it was furious, which was different, but it was definitely struggling. The rope that he'd thrown, the first line, the one that had caused all of this, was still partially looped around the bird's lower set of wings, binding them slightly against its body. Not enough to stop it flying. Enough to make it wrong, uneven, the downstrokes unmatched, the whole trajectory less controlled than it should have been.
They were losing altitude.
Not quickly. But the canopy that had been very far below was becoming less far below, the individual trees beginning to resolve from a dark mass into actual shapes, actual gaps, actual branches that were going to be a problem shortly.
"Shit." Caelan gritted his teeth, which was about all he could manage. "Come on, we don't need to be up this high. Please calm down!"
The eagle tilted. Its body angled, the wings adjusting, and for a moment Caelan thought it had listened, then realised it hadn't, it was just following the uneven drag of the bound wings, trading forward speed for a slow, spiralling descent that carried them further from the cliff, further from the plateau, deeper over the woods.
The first branch hit him across the shoulders.
It was not a small branch. It caught him hard enough to spin him, and then the next one caught his arm, and then the canopy was all around them. The bird crashed through the upper layer with a sound like continuous breaking, great wings battering at pine boughs, Caelan thrown through gaps and into bark and across things that bent and things that didn't.
Something hit him across the face. He tasted blood.
Then the ground came up and the rope went slack and he hit the forest floor and everything stopped.
He lay still for a moment. The world was quiet except for the sound of disturbed birds somewhere above and his own breathing, which was louder than he'd like and not entirely steady. Pine needles under his cheek. Cold dirt. The smell of resin and damp earth and something metallic that was probably him.
I must be dead.
He tried to feel what was wrong with his body, and it felt like everything was. Everything hurt, which wasn't useful information. He moved his fingers, then his hands, then worked methodically outward until he was reasonably satisfied that nothing was broken, just damaged in the various ways that crash landing through a forest tended to damage a person. His left arm had a gash along the forearm. His face was cut across the cheekbone. His ribs on the right side made their feelings known when he breathed too deeply.
He managed to push himself up.
The eagle was six feet away.
It had come down hard too. Both sets of wings spread across the ground, half tangled in a low branch, the rope still looped around the smaller pair. It was breathing fast, head low, and it was looking at him with the gold eye in a way that left very little room for ambiguity about its intentions.
"Easy," Caelan said. He kept his voice flat and steady. "Easy now. Just let me-"
The eagle lunged.
He threw himself sideways and the beak snapped shut on empty air six inches from his ear. He rolled, got his feet under him, rolled again as one massive taloned foot came down and raked across the ground where his torso had been. The bird was still partially tangled, still hampered, it couldn't get full purchase, couldn't get the leverage it wanted, but it was working around the problem with the focused patience of something that intended to get there eventually.
Caelan got underneath it.
It was not a planned decision. It was the only gap available and he took it, rolling in close beneath the body while the wings beat against the air above him, too constrained to swing properly inward. Close enough to smell the bird, which was a significant, damp smell. He got his hand into his jacket pocket and found his knife by touch and got it open.
He quickly sawed at the rope and broke free.
The eagle felt it, and the reaction was immediate. It drove both sets of wings down simultaneously and hit the air with everything it had and rose, straight up through the canopy gap, branches crashing and pine needles raining down, until it was above the treeline and then above that and then just gone.
Caelan lay on the forest floor and breathed for a moment.
Then something in the trees snapped.
Not a branch falling. Not the settling of disturbed wood. A deliberate sound. Weight on a branch, something large shifting its footing, and then, underneath it, a sound that started low and became a furious, hungry growl.
Without thinking any longer, Caelan ran.
He didn't look back. Looking back was how you tripped, and tripping was how you died, and the sound behind him, the heavy crash of something moving through undergrowth without caring what it hit, told him clearly that slowing down was not an option. Caelan ran hard, picking his line by instinct, ducking under a low branch and cutting left around a boulder and sliding through a gap between two pines with his arms pulled in.
He caught a glimpse of it in his peripheral vision. Brown fur, dense and dark at the shoulders, moving fast for something its size. Big. Bigger than a dog, bigger than the largest dog he'd ever seen. It ran like it wasn't working very hard.
The forest floor here was pine needles over packed dirt, soft enough to be quiet, uneven enough to be dangerous. Roots crossed the ground at ankle height and the light was patchy and deceptive, full shadow one moment and a blade of morning sun the next that killed your depth perception just when you needed it.
He hurdled a log. Landed, kept moving. Another log, lower, he slid over it on his side and came up running without breaking stride. A cluster of stones half-buried in the slope and he went between them, feeling the gap was there before he fully saw it.
Behind him was loud crashing. Getting no further away.
The ground began to slope downward. He let it take him, leaning forward, taking longer strides, the speed building past the point of full control. A small hill, steep enough that the slope was more slide than run. He went down it half on his feet and half not, catching himself twice before the bottom, arriving on level ground already off-balance, staggering, one knee hitting the dirt hard before he pushed back up and kept going.
His ribs screamed.
He could hear it now. That was the part that focused the mind remarkably well, not just the crashes behind him but the breathing, heavy and rhythmic and close, the sound of something working. Something that was not yet tired.
Caelan was beyond tired at this point.
The trees thinned. The light changed, opened up ahead, and he could hear something under the sounds of the chase. A rush, growing louder as he ran toward it.
Water.
He broke through the treeline and the ground ended.
Not gradually. A clean edge, a flat shelf of pale rock, and beyond it was nothing. At least fifty feet below, the river ran fast and dark between boulders, white water breaking over stone, the surface churned and murky.
He heard the animal hit the tree-line behind him. Caelan didn't stop, didn't think, he simply leapt.
For a moment there was only air and the sound of the falls and the cold spray rising up to meet him. His stomach was somewhere above his head. He had time to think, briefly, that this was a significant and stupid commitment. Especially a stupid one.
Then the water hit him like a wall and everything became chaos.
Cold. That was the first thing. Cold that took the breath clean out of him, that pressed in from every direction at once, that turned the world into a roar of dark water and pale bubbles and stone coming at him from angles he couldn't track. The current was stronger than it had looked from above. It grabbed him and moved him, turned him over, pushed him down and then up and then sideways against a boulder that caught him across the back with enough force to knock the last of his air out.
He fought for the surface. Got his head above water, got one breath, went under again.
Another rock caught his shoulder. He pushed off it, got his feet forward the way you were supposed to, let the current take him rather than fighting it full-on. He could breathe in the gaps between the churning white water, short and desperate, not enough but something.
The rapids began to ease. The roar dropped by degrees, the current losing its violence as the river widened and the boulders spaced out, and Caelan moved with it and focused on the simple task of keeping his head above the surface.
He spotted a log. Half-submerged, caught against a bend where the bank curved, one end stuck in the shallows and the other extending into the slower water.
He reached for it. His fingers found bark, rough and real, and he gripped it and held on and did not let go. He got his arms over it, then his chest, then he stopped moving and just lay there draped across it like something washed up, which was exactly what he was.
The river moved past him. The sound of the falls was distant now.
He breathed. In, out. In, out. The log rocked slightly under him and he tightened his grip and breathed again.
Somewhere far behind him, back in the woods on the cliff above the waterfall, something was probably still prowling the tree-line.
He would think about that in a minute. For now, he needed to catch his breath.