Ophelia Skyfeather's Arc

Chapter 1 of 11

Ophelia Skyfeather flew east because east was where the wind pushed her, and she had no better plan than that. She was eighteen, unmated again, and the other harpies on the last cliff had driven her off with sharp beaks and sharper words about females who could not keep a male. Her wings ached. She did not know where her kind gathered to court. Her mother had died before teaching her, and the two males who had claimed her before had never taken her anywhere she could find twice. What she wanted was simple and had not changed since she was small: a male who would keep her, a nest of her own, and chicks in it. She scanned the hills below for feathers, for other harpies, for any sign at all. She saw only pine and rock and, near dusk, the smoke of cook fires she did not recognize. She landed at the edge of the tree line to drink from a stream, and the net came down before she lifted her head. Green hands pinned her wings. Goblins. They bound her arms against her sides with leather cord and marched her uphill to a hall of stacked timber, where mushrooms grew in the corners and a dirt mound sat fresh beside the throne. The goblin on the throne wore a crown of iron points. He looked at her a long moment without speaking. "Harpy," he said. "Alone." She tried to answer and could not shape the words. He stood. He was taller than any male who had touched her before. He took her chin in one hand and turned her face to the light. "Mine now," he said. "You nest here. You bear here. You do not fly." He said it the way another man might name a price on grain. She waited for the part where she could refuse. It did not come. A collar of braided leather closed around her throat, and Gruk Ironjaw knotted the end to a ring set in the floor beside his chair. The drifting was over. She had a place. It was not the one she had wanted, and she did not yet know how to want anything else out loud.