Free Gods and Warriors by Michelle Paver

black cloaks. They ignored her, heading for their camp among the pines.
    Pirra hated the Crows. They’d emerged from the woods as the ship dropped anchor, like real crows descending on a carcass. They
said
they’d been sent by the Lykonian Chieftain, but Pirra didn’t believe that. Those hard-facedwarriors with their sinister obsidian arrows weren’t sent by anyone. She had been around powerful forces all her life, and she knew the smell of evil. In the Crows she sensed a darkness that made her skin crawl.
    Through the murk, she glimpsed a battered rowing boat drawn up on the pebbles. She realized that she’d reached the end of the bay.
    Next to the boat, an old man sat mending a net by the light of a smoky fish-oil lamp. He stank like a dunghill, and his tunic was the filthiest Pirra had ever seen. His straggly beard was crusted with snot.
    She stared at him and he threw her a rheumy glance. Then his gaze dropped to the gold bracelets on her wrists.
    Up in the hills, a bird called.
Kee-yow, kee-yow.
    Pirra recognized it. Userref was good at bird calls, and he’d done this one because she’d wanted to hear the cry of a falcon.
    Suddenly she knew. That falcon was calling to her. It was telling her that this was her chance.
    Slipping one of the bracelets off her wrist, she held it out to the fisherman—and pointed at the Sea.

10

    T elamon quickened his pace, while the falcon wheeled overhead. It had flown up from the south. He hoped this meant that Hylas had reached the Sea.
    He was sore from last night’s beating, and the food sack was chafing the weals on his back. His head was in a whirl. After the beating, his father had talked to him late into the night. “It’s time you played your part,” he’d said grimly. That turned out to mean wedding some Keftian girl from across the Sea, and shouldering the burden of who he was. His father had spoken of the Chieftaincy, and why he’d sought to distance Lykonia from what was happening in the rest of Akea. Afterward, Telamon had lain awake, feeling as if he was in a bad dream from which he couldn’t wake up. When he couldn’t bear it any longer, he’d slipped from the stronghold and run away. He tried not to think of his father’s face when he found out his son was gone.
    Telamon had taken the shortest trail up the Mountain, and around noon he reached the top of the pass. He ran to the rock where he and Hylas and Issi sometimes leftmessages. There was a pebble in the secret hollow, with a sign scratched in charcoal: a leaping frog. Telamon chewed his lip. Had Issi left it for Hylas, to tell him she was still alive? Or had Hylas left it for her? Or had one of them left it for
him,
to tell him—what?
    Hurriedly he scanned the ground for tracks, aware that he should have done this first, instead of trampling them. Hylas wouldn’t have made a mistake like that. Hylas knew all about following a trail: He could track a ghost over solid rock.
    From the moment he’d first seen Hylas, Telamon had wanted to be his friend. It was four winters ago, and he’d been hunting with his father. As they were passing the village, they’d come on some boys chucking stones at a small girl in a grimy badgerskin cloak, who was laying about her with a stick, even though they were twice her size. Then another boy had emerged from the woods, a scruffy figure in a filthy hareskin cape and rawhide boots caked with mud. Grabbing the girl by the belt, he’d faced the bullies and said, “Touch her again and I’ll break your legs.” They’d jeered at him—and he’d stared. Just stared. And they’d seen that he meant it, and slunk away.
    More than anything, Telamon had envied that boy. Those village boys had known at once that he would do what he said. Telamon feared that if it had been him, they would have put him to the test, and he would have failed.
    Near the meeting rock, he found several of Issi’s footprints and one of her brother’s. There’d been astorm in the night, and