Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 315

This week's picture prompt was created by hungarian born, Sarolta Ban. She doesn't give this a name, but it is located in the fabulae category.  It's not the first time I've used one of her images. I used one on Week 31, Week 304, Week 28, and Week 24 . She has some exceptional images, I would probably pic a different one every week to use they're so good. 

A brief one as I keep exploring some ideas for Tricky's tales. Last time I wrote one for her was Week 314 - just last week.

The General Guidelines can be found here.

How to create a clickable link in Blogger comments can be found on lasts week's post here. 

There is also a Facebook group for Mid-Week Flash, if you fancy getting the prompt there.

Spies

“It was huge, it came at me out of nowhere!”

“It was just a bird, Dimitri. It was probably as frightened as you!”

“No, it knew what it was doing! It had been sent by her.”

“Who?”

“Tricky, that thorn in our sides.”

“But talking to birds is not one of her gifts, that belongs to Dufray.”

“It definitely wasn’t one of his, Gandalf. I’d have recognised it.”

“I think you’re exaggerating. It was probably one of his jackdaws.”

“Oh no, this was much bigger than one of those.”

“Probably one of the larger corvids then.”

“Are there bigger ones?”

“Oh yes. I used to have a pet raven, beautiful bird it was, so intelligent. I couldn’t communicate with it like Lucien does his birds, but it was smart enough to be able to communicate with me. There aren’t many of them left now – at least I don’t see them around where I live. I hope they have managed to repopulate.”

“Aren’t ravens black though? This was brown with a white head.”

Gandalf laughed.

“That was no corvid, that was a peregrine falcon. And that means they’ve brought Safa Odeh in.”

“Who’s that? Someone we should be worried about?”

“Probably not, though her falcon is definitely as keen as any raven. It seems they have their spies out.”

“Maybe I should arrange to have the birds killed.”

Gandalf laughed again.

“Oh, Dimitri, I doubt very highly you’d be able to outsmart a bird of prey. But no, if they are watching us, we can put on a show for them and lead them on a merry dance.”

Dimitri Stanislav’s thin, hard face lit up with an ear-splitting grin.

“Oh yes, what a good idea.”