Al-Sāmiyah

Al-Sāmiyah is a giant eagle, and not only a giant eagle. She nests above the red-doored keep low in the cliffs of the Valley of Doom, one of the seven keeps the curse holds, and she guards it. Her name in Taal translates as the exalted matriarch; the Taal words themselves are not written down anywhere the party has found. Aldo calls her Sammy, and nobody else does.

Appearance

Reddish-gold, cresting to a faint platinum at the tips of the feathers, and unlike any bird Koa has looked at. The nest gave her away before she did: it is far too large for the Aderian giant eagles of the mountain guides’ stories, big enough for three people to sleep in, and her eggs are larger than an ostrich’s.

She carries two riders at once and can barrel-roll out of the path of a heavy-crossbow bolt with both of them aboard. On the ground she can rear and put on a display that stops armed hobgoblins where they stand. Her measurements were never written down. The only scale anyone offers is that a giant eagle seen at distance reads as at least person-sized, and she is bigger than that.

Her kind

Giant eagles were once numerous in the western mountains and kept the wyverns in check by their presence alone. Then the poaching started. The eggs are a delicacy and worth something near two hundred and fifty Dell gold apiece, and live birds sell as pets in Escaria, and between the two of them the eagle numbers have crashed and the wyvern numbers have swelled. Poachers who can keep a near-hatching egg warm long enough raise a bird that answers to them. Wipe the eagles out and the wyverns become a regional catastrophe, which is the part of it the party worked out for themselves.

She is held to be seven or eight hundred years old, tied to Vëné, and transformed by the curse rather than born to what she is. Her descendants are giant eagles sharper and cleverer than the common sort but smaller and duller than she is, and are marked by gold-tipped back feathers that can only be seen from above. All of that comes down as report rather than as fact, and the party themselves have wondered aloud whether the bird the Elder knew died long ago and this is a granddaughter wearing her name. They never discovered which.

The poachers

While the party were working at a window of the keep she dropped onto the ledge, took Aldo by the shoulders and threw herself off it with him. She set him down in a prepared mountain nest where he found a scrap of torn dark cloth and a single leather glove, and then, over the rim, a second giant eagle lying dead and bloodied beside a cracked egg and a dead chick. She picked him up again. She dropped him in the snow on a trail beside the talon-mauled corpse of one of the hobgoblins who had guided the party into those mountains. Then she carried him back to the keep, threw his wineskin off the balcony, and slept on top of him to keep him warm through the night.

In the morning she crouched and gestured him aboard, flew him for the joy of it, shimmied him gently off her back, dug the leather glove out of his pack and put it in his hands. The party read the whole of it as a message and read it correctly: poachers had killed her mate and her chick and taken her eggs, and the glove named who.

Getting them back took a day and an argument. She dove on the hobgoblin herders and had to be talked down out of her fury, having just seen a slain kin and a smashed egg. To prove she could think, Mikhail spoke to her in G’lin, and she answered, and Rakhzan watched her listen and reason and changed his mind about what he had been trading in. Two eggs were handed back and settled under her, one of them tucked deliberately on Aldo’s side. The third herder refused and lost his pack anyway, and she snatched the last egg out of it herself. Then she flew home with all three and ignored everyone thoroughly. The Elder, when he was told, was joyful about it.

It cost the people around her. Rakhzan lost an eye, his freedom and his family’s name for having traded those eggs to the party. Phillipa, whose egg-collecting contract had just been redirected to serve an influential buyer in Ravenhold, gave up dealing in them the moment she learned what had laid them. Nathan Fox, told the whole story, was astonished chiefly by her mind.

Aldo

Whatever passed between them in that nest held. She took him for her own, in the way a bird does and without anybody’s leave, and by the time the party left the mountains he was saying goodbye to her with a promise to come back in spring and getting a peck and a headbutt for it. He warned her about the fire he had seen burning far off in the sky. She shook her head: she did not know what it was either.

He has also been wearing her. The feathered plague-doctor disguise he built out of her shed feathers walked around town often enough that people began reporting a birdman, and the rumor eventually drew four to six armored hobgoblins with silver-sheened weapons into Loshev, hunting a cryptid and buying up Mól relics they described as their birthright.

Where she stands

The Elder said she would bear a rider who could sing Vëné’s song, and sent the party to look for that song among the Peren’s own records, on the grounds that it is because of Vëné that the Peren have their freedom and they ought to have kept something. They have never found it. She has carried riders regardless, and no one has yet sung a note at her.

She has been the answer to a logistics problem for three seasons running: seven keeps and one party only works if somebody can fly. The Elder, who was bound inside those keeps longer than anyone counted, wanted a ride on her himself one day, and a taste of Taziondale dragon fruit.

The eggs hatched, and every one of the young is accounted for. She is four birds now rather than one, and between them they are holding down the wyvern numbers across that whole country. The keep they shelter in is fast growing too small for four, and there is a window in which the young have to build the strength to fly; miss it and they may never learn at all, and the window is a few months at most. The wyverns can feel all of this and are circling, and she will not leave the chicks to go and fight them.

When the gods stood in the ruins of the Twisted Grove and asked the company where a portion of a divinity ought to be spent, Aldo named her and the three others, and the wyverns they hold in check. All three ballots put the waypoints first and her birds second. Vëné declined that one herself: “no, they have so much more to do; they need to be where they need to be.” Beltran is dead and the overarching curse is broken, which takes both of the things the company had put in front of her off the board. The next road out of Loshev runs west, to her mountain.