COURT ODDITIES:

The Royal Pets

The Hunting Companion of Kings

The Falcon

By Yume

A Yumes Parlor Original

I climb.

That is the first thing. Before the stoop, before the strike, before the moment that every falconer in four thousand years of recorded history has held their breath to watch — I climb. I find altitude the way other animals find food: with purpose, with patience, with the absolute knowledge that everything that comes after depends on getting high enough first.

From up here I can see a kilometre in any direction. My eyes have a resolution that makes human vision look approximate. I can spot a pigeon at a distance you would need binoculars for, track it through its evasions while maintaining my own speed and trajectory, calculate the intercept geometry in the processing centres of a brain that has been doing this since before your civilisation had a word for mathematics.

Then I fold.

The wings come in. The body becomes a wedge. Gravity and design work together in the way they were shaped to work together over millions of years of evolutionary pressure toward a single outcome: the fastest thing alive.

Two hundred and forty-two miles per hour is the fastest recorded. The fastest animal on earth, in the fastest manoeuvre any animal executes. The stoop: a controlled fall from height at a speed that would tear the lungs out of almost any other creature, except that I have bony tubercles in my nostrils specifically to regulate the airflow so the pressure doesn’t destroy me on the way down. I have a third eyelid — a nictitating membrane — that clears my vision while I travel faster than a skydiver in freefall, so I can see the target the entire way.

Then the impact. The strike. The quarry taken from the air.

Every king who ever wanted me on their wrist understood one thing above all others.

They were not possessing me.

They were standing close to the fastest thing in the world and choosing to let it go.

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