The valkyrie stands seven feet tall and carries eleven feet of wing, which is why she needs open ground to land on and why the walled pastures below Urnmoor are never grazed past the second fence. These notes run from one first frost to the first real heat of the next year.
October. She comes down at sunset, roughly twice a week, onto the split boulders west of Urnmoor. The wings snap open to brake, and her boots skim the heather before they touch it. The bronze plates overlap like roof slates and turn copper at the edges when the light is low. She plants an ash banner pole in the turf, plain and unmarked, and leaves it standing until dark. Frost and flower petals lie around her heels, though no frost has fallen anywhere else on the moor. One pinion has a crescent notch at the tip, which is the quickest way to know her at a distance. She turns her head three-quarters toward the west and holds it there for an hour. I could not confirm what she is looking at. Nothing on that horizon changes while she watches.
December. The pale tracery on her forearms spreads toward the wrists. She stops flying and walks the basalt terraces of Kiteridge at an even pace, wings folded flat. She eats nothing I could see. She drinks barley water from a cupped hand, and spring water from the one seep on Kiteridge that does not freeze. Every evening, before the light goes, she scours her wing plates with wet sand from the burn, one plate after another, and rinses her hands. There is nothing more to it than upkeep, and she takes the same care on the days when no one is near. Tamsin Orrick, who cuts peat on Urnmoor, sets a crock of barley water on a boulder at the first frost and says the crock is dry by dawn. The peat crews follow one rule without discussing it: nobody crosses the line between her eyes and whatever she is watching, and anyone caught on it stands still until she turns.
March brings the thaw and the flying again, with a faint green glow along the wing edges at dusk. The pole leaves a round hole a hand deep wherever it goes into the turf, with the heather pressed flat around it. Those holes are the practical way to track her. They run from terrace to terrace in a line, and the crews steer their carts around them. By July the dusk is short and I see her only twice, a copper flash over the boulders and then nothing, only a pole hole and a few petals going brown. She has never struck at anyone in my notes, and the people of Urnmoor and Kiteridge still leave the moor before the sun touches the ridge. What is she looking at in the west that has not yet arrived?
- Classification
- Winged war-chooser, humanoid
- Habitat
- Upland moors and basalt terraces
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 7 ft tall, 11 ft wingspan
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- High sky roads and upland battlefields
- Binomial
- Aquila bellatrix
- Diet
- Barley water and spring water
- Temperament
- Watchful, exact, unhurried