Among the Strikers

An untouched forest, studded with trees of all ages,

sizes and types, is more than a mysterious, magical place - it is one of the energy reservoirs of nature." -Scott Cunningham

In the end, Rhona did not take them all the way to Tamal. She looked around the hall as she walked, her gaze sweeping the aisle on both sides, chewing her lip as if debating. She finally stopped about two-thirds of the way up the main table. The Silva deputy reached out and tapped the shoulder of one of the diners. The person turned around, revealing an angular face so sharp it was almost frightening. The girl had thick black hair that fell nearly to her waist, braided with leaves in various places. Her eyes were hazel, her only ornamentation a necklace of forked twigs strung around her neck. Her bird bond, a small falcon Julie thought was called a merlin, fixed Rhona in turn with beady eyes. The girl raised finely curved eyebrows at Rhona in question.

"Fay, would you take them? Make sure nothing happens?" Rhona paused. "For me?" she added, as if she were requesting a favor.

The dark-haired girl looked Julie, Luke, and Seth over. Her companion, a lean, slightly hunched young guy with light blue eyes and a bird with a pointed beak and long tail, was watching now too. He was also wearing glasses, which amazed Julie. They had a single crack in the left lens, but were otherwise normal and intact. They gave him a very scholarly look for a tree-dwelling bandit.

Finally, the girl nodded. She turned to the hunched boy next to her and gave him a light shove. "C'mon, budge up a bit, Monty. Make some room for the ground crawlers."

The bespectacled boy gave her a short punch in retaliation, but it was a friendly blow, just to make sure he got the last say. Then he scooted sideways, bumping along a few more Silva further down, who also complained good-naturedly, but moved.

Feeling more than slightly out-of-place and uncomfortable, Julie squished into the empty space left, followed by Seth and Luke.

The black-haired girl looked Julie over again, still appraising. Then she held out a slender but callused hand. "Fayola," she said curtly by way of introduction. "Oh, and this is Mercury." She pointed to the merlin, which blinked intelligently at Julie as she shook the girl's hand tentatively.

"And?" The boy beside Fayola prodded pointedly, nudging her with his slightly crooked shoulder.

Fayola rolled her eyes good-naturedly. "And Monty. Feel free to ignore him though."

The boy scowled, as his small tan bird bond hopped lightly to the crown of his head, burying its claw-toed feet in his brown hair. The bird gave out a strange warble that sounded too musical for its drab looks, ending in a completely different whistling cry. Julie stared.

Monty lifted his eyes like he was rolling them, but he was only looking up at the bird. "This is Emil. He's a mockingbird," he said, as if this explained everything.

Julie felt even more overwhelmed, if that was possible. "Nice to meet all of you," she managed. Luke, sensing her state of mind, leaned around her to conduct the introductions of their group. He used all their real names, but Julie thought that probably didn't matter anymore. Tamal and Rhona had heard them use each others' names already.

"So, we aren't a bother to you or anything, are we?" Seth's question was innocent, but there was a sharply teasing glint in his green eyes. He hadn't missed Rhona's appeal to Fayola.

Fayola turned in her seat to regard Seth. "Not really. It isn't anything personal, but you are ground crawlers. That just kind of makes you…y'know." She shrugged, apparently not able to come up with any accurate words. Then she looked more closely at Seth. Her eyebrows rose. "Hang on…you're that one, aren't you? Orinda was going on and on about how you run the trees like a Silva. Got to the APO all by yourself, didn't you? Well, then I guess you aren't technically a ground crawler."

"Aw, really." Seth made an exaggerated flicking motion with one hand, as if brushing off the attention. "It was nothing. I'm just a common thief, that's all." So fast Julie wasn't sure she'd seen it, he winked at her, a gesture meant for her alone.

"Hmm." Fayola looked skeptical and appreciative at the same time. Julie felt the slightest frown crease her forehead. Why did everyone keep looking at him like that? "Anyway, Rhona's a good friend of mine. If she says watch out for you, I'll watch out for you."

"Um, thanks I guess." Julie didn't know that she cared for the phrasing, which made it sound like Fayola was babysitting them, but she didn't want to argue.

"Here, have some food." Fayola shoved a bark platter piled with sliced fruits toward the three of them.

Once again, the lure of fresh food after several days of eating dried trail provisions was enough to banish Julie's misgivings for a while. For approximately the next hour, Julie, Luke, and Seth did little but dig into whatever dish Fayola passed to them. Although they didn't talk much, Julie found herself relaxing in the company of their two Silva neighbors. Fayola seemed friendly, if a little disdainful of them, and it was hard not to like Monty, who chattered animatedly out loud to Emil and kept pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose.

Luke, as always, collected information; he had always been the outgoing one between the two of them. He leaned one elbow casually on the wooden table and asked, "So, not to sound ignorant, but what do you guys actually do? Just…hang out up here?"

Fayola gave Luke an eloquent look, arching her dark eyebrows. "We're a civilization," she pronounced finally. "You can't tell?"

"Give 'em a break, Fay," Monty said kindly. "They haven't been around much yet."

"Well, from what we've heard, you're just a bunch of tree-dwelling bandits that attack people and steal stuff and live wild." Luke tried hard not to make his tone challenging, but the feeling was there all the same.

Fayola hissed, "We are not common thieves!" at the same time Monty said, "Yep, that pretty much covers the basics." The dark-haired girl scowled at her seatmate, who gave her an impudent grin.

Glaring Monty into silence, Fayola continued, "We do make much of our livelihood relieving travelers and the rich of their extra possessions. Sometimes that requires force, if they aren't cooperative. We've never killed anyone unless they've directly threatened to harm a Silva."

"How…noble…of you," Luke said sarcastically.

" 'Relieving people of their extra possessions,'" Seth repeated thoughtfully. "We'll have to remember that one, eh, Corax?" The raven bobbed his head and cawed once in agreement.

"Otherwise, we keep to ourselves. Some people stay with us for a long time, others only a couple years. Some don't like the life. A lot of us are runaways or orphans; a couple were born here. Some of the villages around here actually think it's good luck to have their kids grow up with the Silva Offendo."

"Are they crazy?" Luke exclaimed without thinking. Fayola's answering glare would have cracked stone.

"Some of them appreciate our take on life," she said coolly.

"Which is?" inquired Seth, eating a piece of fruit off of Sheridan's blade.

"Well…live, I guess," Fayola replied, her eyebrows drawing together. "We have everything we need to live and be human up here, we have our bird bonds…mostly, we do what we please."

Julie didn't know if that was the kind of lifestyle she could get used to…but it wasn't a terrible philosophy either. It kind of appealed to an inner part of her that had run wild in the streets, jumping in mud puddles and flicking pebbles at passersby when Mother Acko wasn't watching her.

Finally, Julie felt at ease enough to ask the question she had really been wondering about. "Um, Fayola? Who was it that attacked us? Tamal yelled at someone, but…"

Fayola's face darkened, and that razor-sharpness returned to her features. Monty stared at the table, looking suddenly subdued and almost…ashamed.

"Oh, that. That was Zephyr, and his bond Saturn. He's a bully. The Silva are supposed to be kind of tough, and we look out for each other and everything, but…even I can't find anything to like about him. He's just…he's…" Fayola stabbed a piece of meat violently with her rough wooden utensil, again apparently unable to come up with words to describe Zephyr.

"He's my brother," muttered Monty, still staring at the table.

Fayola shot her neighbor a surprised and sympathetic look, as if she wasn't expecting him to reveal this information. Julie felt equally shocked. This young guy, with mousy brown hair and light blue eyes and glasses and a mockingbird for a bond, was kin to such a bully?

"Yeah." Monty seemed to register their surprise without even looking up. "No one ever believes it. I'm not sure whether I should consider it a complement or not."

Emil the mockingbird let out a sharp, descending note scale that seemed to mirror Monty's sudden glumness.

Fayola gave him a hard thump on the back that seemed to be part sympathy and part 'snap-out-of-it'. "Well, you're nothing like him and you know it, so stop feeling sorry for yourself."

"Thanks Fay." Monty pinched a handful of grain from a bowl in the center of the table and held it up in his cupped palm for Emil. He looked a little happier.

Julie realized with a guilty start that she had not fed Icarus yet. She felt awful, having violated one of the most basic rules of bonding; tend to your bird as you would yourself.

Ic, I'm sorry. I can't believe I forgot…

Much has happened to us in a short time, Julie. I forgive you. Icarus nibbled her bangs, chirruping affectionately.

"Here." Fayola shoved another bowl towards Julie. It contained a mixture of raw meat scraps, bone bits, and strings of fat and muscle. When Julie looked at her gratefully, the sharp-faced girl just nodded. "I should have shown you how we handle the feeding here first."

Julie took a generous handful of the bloody scraps without reserve and held them up for Icarus. His beak pressed gently against her palm as he delicately picked each shred and gulped it back with a jerk of his gray-black head.

Finally, when both humans and birds had finished their meal, Tamal rose from his chair again. Without preamble, he began reeling off lists of names, sometimes followed by incomprehensible words that might have places or instructions. They sounded like they came from the old language that was inscribed over the entrance to the hall.

All the Silva were leaning subtly towards Tamal now, listening for their names and what Julie assumed were their orders or assignments. When Tamal had finished, he made a hand gesture that seemed to be half-salute and half-dismissal.

As if on cue, the entire hall full of Silva rose as one, with a deafening thunder of moved stumps, clattering dishes, and sudden chatter.

"Well, Tamal didn't assign you three any evening duty," Fayola commented as she stood. "Which means I suppose you could come with Monty and I to do lookout. Good thing we didn't get patrol today; you'd never be able to keep up."

"Um, thanks." Julie wasn't quite sure what the proper response was, but since Fayola gave the impression that she was doing them a kindness by allowing them along, it seemed to make sense to stay on her good side.

"Come on then. We'll be up on the west side. I assume you can climb a little, even if you can't actually run the trees?" Fayola looked so skeptical that Julie had to give a firm nod, even if she hadn't really had any climbing experience at all.

"You need some help, Monty?" Fayola turned her attention to her neighbor. It was a friendly, routine kind of question, but Julie couldn't imagine why Fayola had offered.

She found out a moment later.

"Nope, I think I've had enough practice by now, Fay." Monty placed one hand on the wooden tabletop, turned his body around on the stump seat, and stood, a little shakily.

Sitting, Monty simply looked as though he were a little shy or scrawny, with his tendency to hunch over the table. But standing, it became clear that it was more than that. One of his shoulders was thrust higher than the other, throwing his arms out of proportion and bending his back into a perpetual curve. He was not quite hunchbacked, like pictures Julie had seen in books, simply very lopsided looking.

As Julie forced back her shock, she realized Fayola had been watching all three of them shrewdly, waiting for their reactions. Luke looked like he was having a similar struggle to Julie, trying not to appear overly surprised. Seth, on the other hand, looked genuinely unmoved, as though Monty looked perfectly ordinary. Julie wondered if maybe he'd seen this before, or if he simply so observant that he'd noticed before Monty had gotten up.

"Yes, he can climb. Yes, he can fight. Yes, he was born like this. No, it doesn't hurt, but sometimes it makes things awkward." Fayola's voice was cool as she spoke with the flat tones of someone reciting this to others many times. She glanced dryly at Monty. "Did I miss anything?"

"You forgot to mention the perks," Monty said cheerfully. "It gives me great balance, since being bent over makes it easier not to slip and fall. And it makes me an excellent decoy if we need to distract trade caravans or travelers. The poor crippled boy."

Seth gave a soft, appreciative chuckle.

"Well, let's get going. Tamal's very strict about lookouts." Fayola set off at a brisk pace up the clearing aisle between the tables, towards the door. Monty followed her, Emil bobbing on his shoulder. He walked with a strange kind of rolling lope, surprisingly graceful to Julie, who had been expecting a jerky shuffle.

It had gotten dark outside while they had been eating, and the world Julie emerged into was transformed. Misty shadow engulfed the treetops, creating a web of softly bobbing tree limbs that stretched out into the darkness until it became an indistinct blur. A cool night wind rustled the leaves all around them. Julie saw dark forms go flashing past, just flickers of movement in her vision. Tree branches creaked and whispered as Silva leaped onto them and then away again, seeking their nighttime posts.

Seth had started feeling his way toward the edge of the branch when a soft hiss from Fayola made him stop. "I don't care how nimble you think you are, thief-boy, you'll break your neck if you start climbing before they light the lamps. Just let the glows do their work."

Julie became aware that bird and human forms were pausing at various spots along the branches. They were just dark smears, but then Julie realized that each smear was being briefly illuminated by short flares of light. When she squinted, she saw that it was flurries of sparks; the Silva up in the trees were striking rocks for fire. There were flutters of feathered forms here and there, as birds of every size and species helped their partners to coax the flames to life. Moments later, Julie was watching in awe as tiny lights began winking into life, one by one, all around them. They seemed to radiate in a wheel outward from the oak tree, spiraling away from the hub of Silva life and off into the depths of the forest. The little lanterns, for Julie saw that was what they were, were comprised of dirty pieces of glass set at angles around a square of what seemed to be bark. Each bark base must have had some kind of fuel on it, because the fires burned steadily without catching anything around them on fire. Strange dark collars encircled the bases of the ingenious lights. Looking directly above her, Julie saw what those were. They made sure that the lights couldn't be seen by anyone passing below, but were clearly visible to everyone in the Silva's above-ground world.

After a few more minutes, a sharp bird call pierced the trees. The forest of the Silva Offendo now resembled a giant, floating night city, tree branches turned into avenues, trees into buildings. For the first time, Julie began to understand what Fayola had meant when she said the Silva were a whole civilization in the treetops.

"There we go. That's the signal that everything's been lit up. Time to go." Fayola glanced at them. "We'll try to go slow, for your sakes."

Without even bothering to find an appropriate branch to climb, the dark-haired girl launched herself straight at the oak tree's massive trunk. Using what appeared to be a combination of her nails, palms, knees, and feet, Fayola started scaling the trunk straight up, hand over hand. It looked almost inhuman.

Monty gave a short laugh that seemed to be nothing more than sheer anticipation of climbing and the night air. Rocking lightly on the balls of his feet, he looked up, his glasses sliding back slightly on his nose. Then, with a stunningly athletic bounce for someone whose torso and limbs were completely out of proportion, Monty leaped almost vertically, catching the branch above him and hauling himself up onto it in one smooth motion. He crouched four-legged on the limb, his brown tunic shirt sliding up slightly over his lower back as he hunched, looking more like a tree-dwelling animal than a person.

He grinned down at them, white teeth flashing, his light blue eyes taking on a deeper color in the flickering tree lights. "You still haven't asked me one question yet."

Only Seth seemed to have the voice enough to manage, "And what's that?"

"How do my glasses stay on?" Monty laughed, as if at some private joke, and then set the branch he was on rattling and raining leaves down on them as he vaulted higher still. Julie was surprised that one of them didn't flutter into Luke's unabashedly open mouth.

Seth sighed and placed his hand on the oak's trunk. "You know, I could probably climb up this without too much trouble. But after that…it would be like a sparrow following a bald eagle. C'mon. I'll show you two how to find handholds. Hopefully the shift won't be over by the time we make it up there