Dragon's Key--Complete

Chapter Five

I made my way outside, my eyes bare outside of my room for the first time in more years than I could remember.  I went out the kitchen door, ignoring the memories from the night before with Aaron.  This was the door closest to the stables and therefore, closest to the thing I was hunting for.

I could still see birds flying above it in my mind and now that I had that master key, I was going to do an in depth exploration of the building to see what it really needed.  It helped me to focus on something tangible so that I didn't have to think about how totally detached I was feeling.  I felt bruised and empty inside with a depth that made my chest physically ache.

I made my way across the perfectly manicured lawn and toward the smaller side door that led into the stables.  They had been kept up perfectly over the years along with the rest of the property but hadn't been actually occupied by horses in more years than I was aware of.  I had picked up the ring of master keys as I had left my room in a daze and I used them to unlock the big wooden door.

I stepped into a smaller alcove that was lined with several doors that looked like storage closets for tack and supplies.  Up ahead was the main hallway that joined the two rows of stalls that ran the length of the building.  On the far end was a large covered training area for winter training.  Outside in the yard behind the barn I knew there was another large training area cordoned off by fences.

I walked down the main eye, scanning both sides with my eyes.  I leaned over one wooden doorway to check out the interior of one of the stalls.  Each of these areas was large enough, in fact for some of the species of birds that I wanted to work with, these stalls were too large.  I imagined that with a bit of carpentry work, they could be easily converted to half size, or even smaller if I needed.  Most of it depended on the location of the actual supporting walls of the building.  I didn't know a lot about that sort of thing, but I knew about load bearing walls.

There was a rustle of movement, a shift of sound in some left over straw at the other end of the building and my head turned, whipping around to try and locate the source of the noise.  I took several steps toward that end of the stable, listening carefully.  I worked at moving silently, but I was wearing the shoes I liked to wear around the house and they had been chosen for their comfort, not their composition.

When I got to the other end, I glanced into one of the stalls and saw the movement of straw that had been left there.  A flicker of tail and I understood.  I would have been surprised had mice and rats not been an issue.  Still, at first, it had sounded bigger than the noise a mouse could make.  I knew some of these old barns had become housing for owls and sometimes bats.  I had assumed that because the building had been so well taken care of that rodents could not be in here, but I should not have made that assumption.

That was one thing that I would have to know about before I brought other birds in here.  I didn't mind housing owls, but they could cause quite the commotion with the other raptors during training if they were loose and flying around and not part of the training.

I looked up, eyes scanning the rafters for something to indicate that there were flying things up there that shouldn't be.  I didn't see anything right away, but the rafters were actually much higher than it looked from the outside.  There were several supporting beams and many deep, dark areas that owls and bats would love to hide in.

I looked around again and spied a beam that angled downward enough that if I stood on the wall of the stall just beneath it, I'd be able to climb up onto the beam, across it and then to the connecting beam that led into one of those darker areas.  Up closer, I should be able to get a better idea if there were owls hiding out in here.

Getting up to that wall was going to be an issue.  I wasn't that tall, topping out at 5'9” in my bare feet.  I was tall compared to local women, just not tall enough to scale up that wall without some help.  I found an empty, mostly broken crate in one corner and dragged it over and into place.  It only took me a moment to scramble up the crate, over the wall and onto the beam, walking along it until it met with the large support that I was actually aiming for.