When the men had limbed their haul of timber and lumped it into pyramids on their sledges and dragged it creaking over the snow back to the village, when the sun had broken and run on the horizon like a watery egg, when the night had bled in enough from the east that you could see sparkle the tiny windows to heaven that the men called stars, Armand unfurled his wide wings and flew. He dropped from the wood out into the field, on and on over the sparkling white to the stone wall where the village kept their sheep at night. He had only been sitting for a moment when there was a soft whirr and whisk, and his mate Abigail settled in next to him. She stepped sideways, off the still-warm shrew she had brought him. Armand tore it into gibbets and swallowed while Abigail told him about her night and her day, which she had spent in a different wood. It wasn’t unusual. If one got drawn one way hunting and the other, the other–well, they would find each other in a day or two. They always did.
“The men are doing the strangest thing between our village and the next,” Abigail reported. “They are tearing these great, dark lanes in the snow and covering them with stones.”
“Are they bringing timber as well?” Armand asked around a gulp of shrew. Abigail nodded into her feathers.
“Carts and carts.”
“Hi there! Gustav!” Armand hooted into the darkness clotting in the sheepfold. What looked like a dirty snowheap jostled at the far end, and a ram walked out of the heap of sheep crowded together to keep warm. He was old, with dragging wool and great curving horns. His eyes glinted golden in the gloaming.
“Armand, Abigail,” the ram bleated and tossed his head once he recognized them. “What brings you to the fold?”
“We seek a word of counsel, as ever,” Armand said. People thought sheep were stupid, but they were the most considerate of the animals Armand dealt with. They didn’t make their minds up quickly, but once they did, they were usually right. And they could understand the speech of men. “The men–why are they making the long gashes in the snow and filling them with stone and wood? Have you heard?”
“I have heard them say the word ‘train’,” Gustav cocked his head. “Bertie the shepherd boy said, ‘When the train comes, it will put our village on the map at last.’ And his sister Violet said, ‘When the train comes, I’m leaving.'”
“What is a train?” Armand asked.
“I don’t know. I will try to find out for you.”
“Thank you,” said Abigail. “Keep your young from the west wood for now; there is a hungry den of foxes there, and while one alone is no threat to a yearling, a den may well be.”
Gustav bowed his horns to her. “I thank you, good owls. May the hunt be plentiful tonight.” And he turned and shimmy-stilted, in the way that only sheep can, back to his flock. Armand and Abigail spread their wings and stepped up into the night.
The Rookery 