The Golden Gryphon and the Bear Prince: An Epic Fantasy Romance (Heirs of Magic Book 1)

by Jeffe Kennedy

  An odd scent teased Zeph’s nostrils, her gríobhth’s hackles rising, and she sharpened that sense, too. “If you’re done being melodramatic,” she said, “will you tell me what we’re supposed to be seeing up here? It looks completely quiet.”

  “Too quiet,” Jak intoned darkly. Then he reconsidered. “Actually, it really is too quiet. I know the sea mon—lake creature is supposed to be elusive, but where’s the rest of the wildlife?”

  “Exactly,” Zeph agreed. “Why is there wind up here, but not below?”

  Jak frowned at the lake. “Air is different at various heights. Maybe Lena can explain the phenomenon.”

  “Maybe,” Zeph replied doubtfully, looking farther down to where Henk and Dina were still expounding to Astar, Gen standing a glum short distance away. “Where is Lena?”

  “She said she sensed something odd in the weather and needed to be alone to listen or some such. She walked off that way. As to your original question, the locals apparently regard the lake creature as a source of bounty and good luck. When Her Majesty originally busted the barrier around Annfwn lo these many years ago, one of the first signs that magic had returned to the then twelve kingdoms was the reappearance of the creature in Lake Sullivan.”

  Now that Zeph was hearing this, it occurred to her that the tale had been included in Henk’s monologue. Maybe she should have been listening. That would’ve been the responsible thing to do. “But sightings are rare.”

  “Right—rare, but consistent. There’s a bunch of mystic woo-woo theories that only the chosen blah blah blah, pure of heart and so forth see the lake creature, and they’re blessed or they bless it. The stories conflict.”

  “And recently…” she prompted.

  “Yes, recently—notably since the Feast of Moranu and the full crystalline moon—the lake creature has been seen frequently, and is acting agitated, according to witnesses.”

  “What witnesses?” She extended her long vision to search the distant reaches of the lake. “There’s no one here. Not even a fish or bird.”

  “That is odd,” Jak agreed. “But apparently there are villages? In the nooks and crannies.” He waved vaguely. “And the manse of Groningen’s we’re staying at tonight is staffed, very likely with people who have eyes and ears—though I’m just guessing there.”

  Zeph wanted nothing more than to investigate—by wing or fin, possibly a combination of both. She seethed to go, prodded by an urge she didn’t quite comprehend, mentally clacking her beak at the restraining presence of Henk and Dina. If not for them, she’d already be on the wing. Why did those two have to come along? Surely their presence did more to hamper the group’s true quest. She was no expert on mossback travel, but if this manse of Groningen’s sat at lake level, in one of Jak’s nooks or crannies, it would surely take hours to get there, wending their way down in the carriages on the switch-backing road. She’d have to sit idly in the carriage all that while, pretending to be something she wasn’t, waiting for an opportunity to slip away to shift. Nightfall didn’t bother her, but the keen sense of urgency, as if a window had opened that would soon close, had her close to breaking her promises of discretion.

  If she asked Astar’s permission to shift, would he give it? More important, if she shifted without asking, would he forgive her? Once, she wouldn’t have cared. Once, she wouldn’t even have considered the concept of permission and forgiveness. Now, all she could imagine was his summer-sky eyes clouded with disappointment in her—and she couldn’t bear it.

  A faint cry touched her sensitive ears, strangely garbled, as if it came from elsewhere. A place on the other side of something, like where all the wind below had gone. Zeph’s skin prickled with unease, a wrongness filling the air. The same wrongness she’d first sensed below the confluence, before she’d seen what was indeed so very wrong.

  It turned her stomach. She growled, nothing human in it.

  Stella, Gen, and Astar, sensitive to her reaction, looked too, heads swiveling to search for what bothered her. Jak leapt from his rocky perch, sword appearing in one hand like magic, a dagger in the other, keen dark eyes surveying the silent landscape. “What?” he demanded tersely. “What do you hear?”

  “Lena,” Zeph breathed. “She’s in trouble.”

  Jak took off running in the direction they all were looking. “Wait!” Zeph shouted, to no avail.

  Stella dashed over to her, magic thick around her, eyes dark and wild as a building storm. “Where does he think he’s going?” she gasped.

  “To save Lena,” Zeph replied grimly.

  “But she isn’t—”

  “I know.” Lena wasn’t here to be found. She looked desperately to Astar, who was running toward them at top speed, Gen going after Jak. All of them still stupid slow on two legs. Jak had finally stopped—in the middle of the road on the windswept hilltop—spinning wildly in a circle.

  “What happened to Lena?” Astar demanded of them both.

  Surely he meant to ask Stella, who actually understood this stuff, but she turned her turbulent gaze on Zeph. “I don’t know. Zeph does.”

  “No, no, I don’t know.” Zeph shook her head, the buzzing wrongness getting stronger. It tasted like the wrongness at Gieneke. “Something is very wrong.”

  “Can you find her?” Astar asked, insistent but not terse. A good leader.

  “Not in human form,” she told him. “I need to be the gríobhth.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at Henk and Dina, strolling their way, arm in arm. “How about a regular bird?” Astar asked hopefully.

  “There’s nothing regular about this. Lena is not in our same realm anymore.” Even as Zeph spoke the words, she knew they made no sense. “I can’t reach her as a regular anything,” she added with an edge of desperation.

  “Zeph is right,” Stella put in. “The gríobhth is a chimera, a creature of earth and air, both of this realm and the realm of the gods. Only as the gríobhth can she move beyond the boundaries of our world, which is where she must go to retrieve Lena.”

  Astar stared at her in some astonishment. “How do you know all that?”

  “It’s a sorceress thing,” she answered tersely. “It comes to me unexpectedly.”

  With a frown, Astar turned back to Zeph, calculations passing behind his fierce stare. “Does it have to be now?” He tipped his head in Henk and Dina’s direction. “Consider the implications,” he warned.

  Right. Don’t be impulsive. There would be consequences here beyond the moment. She tried to feel for Lena, the frantic, silent call tugging at her. “I’m afraid that if I wait it will be too late to get to her. I can’t explain why. I just… feel it.”

  “Do it, then.” Astar stepped back with a decisive nod, giving her room to shift. “And Zephyr—come back to me. Promise.”

  She held his gaze, memorizing how he looked, eyes warmer and bluer than the cold winter sky framing him, his golden hair like sunlight. “I love you,” she told him. “I promise to come back to you.”

  With a fierce rush of relief and power, she became the gríobhth.

  ~ 26 ~

  Berendina’s scream of terror shrilled across Astar’s nerves as Zephyr unfurled her magnificent wings. She shone like gold in the pale winter light, her fur and feathers gleaming, claws flexing. Henk charged at Zephyr, sword drawn, and Astar dealt with him by the simple expedient of thrusting a meaty arm in his path. The princeling ran smack into Astar’s hard forearm and dropped like a rock.

  Berendina kept screaming.

  Zephyr’s head turned around nearly backward at the sound, her tail snapping with a whiplash crack, her sapphire eyes full of predatory ferocity. That’s all they needed—for Zephyr to be distracted by her rival. Zephyr the woman might understand that Berendina posed no threat, no competition for Astar’s heart, but the gríobhth wasn’t nearly so reasonable. It was another reason he’d hesitated on the wisdom of Zephyr taking gríobhth form. But she’d been sure of the necessity, and he trusted her with his life. More, with Lena’s.
“Nilly, would you—”

  “On it,” Stella crisply subvocalized in return, and the screaming stopped.

  He didn’t look to see how she’d accomplished that. Instead he strode to Zephyr and took her lethally curved beak in his hands—well aware that the least movement on her part could slice off his finger—and making her focus on him. Her eyes were even more extraordinary in her First Form, blazing like living sapphires, fierce and otherworldly. “Lena,” he said to her. “Save Lena.”

  Rational intelligence returned to her eyes, and she dipped her beak in acknowledgment. He lowered his voice so no one else could hear, trusting to her keen hearing. “But not at the expense of your own life. Don’t make me go on without you.”

  She rubbed the side of her beak against his hand, the glossy surface cool and sleek, then she head-butted him away. Reaching under a wing, she plucked out a secondary feather and gave it to him. He took it, the barbs glinting like spun gold, and held it tightly. “I love you, too.”

  Rearing onto her powerful leonine hind legs, she spun in place and ran full speed for the cliff’s edge—and leapt off into the abyss below. Though she of course knew what she was doing, his heart stopped beating until she rose again, golden wings shining in the light of the setting sun.

  Jak and Gen were jogging back, Stella kneeling beside an unconscious Berendina. Henk had sat up, staring at Zephyr in the sky with open-mouthed astonishment—face a rictus of horror. “That… thing.” he stammered. “She’s a monster, and I rode in a carriage with her. What were you thinking, Willy, putting us in that kind of danger?” he demanded.

  Astar clenched his fist, wishing he’d actually cold-cocked the asshole.

  “She’s still the woman you rode in a carriage with, Henk,” Gen said, her arms folded as she stared at him as if seeing him for the first time. Maybe she was.

  “I thought maybe you girls turned into something cute and fluffy, like a bunny rabbit, or a… a kitten! Something ladylike, and pretty.” He stared at Gen suspiciously, as if seeing her for the first time. “You don’t turn into a… a monster like that, do you?”

  Gen’s deep indigo eyes glinted with unusual fire. Steady and even-tempered like her father, Gen was typically slow to anger. But she was her mother’s daughter, too—even her name meant “born of the dragon”—and Gendra possessed plenty of fire when pushed. Suddenly a tiger stood where Gen had been. With white fur dappled with gray spots and stripes, and long front fangs, she was no tiger that had been seen by anyone outside of Annfwn. The white saber cat prowled toward Henk, snarling a question as if to ask “like this?”

  Henk emitted a thin scream, scrabbling backward on hands, feet, and butt like a panicked crab.

  “Gendra!” Astar called, loudly and sharply to catch her attention. She glanced his way, the arched stripes over her intensely blue eyes giving her an inquisitive look—her jaw hanging open to reveal rows of serrated teeth besides the intimidating saber-like fangs, looking lethal enough to make even Astar want to step back. But he was the leader, and so he held his ground. “Don’t eat our allies,” he told her calmly and clearly.

  She glanced back at Henk, seemed to shrug, then was back in human form. Turning her back on her erstwhile love interest, she prowled over to Astar, her gait revealing that a good deal of the saber cat’s murderous rage lingered inside. “What can I do to help Lena?”

  He nearly asked how he was supposed to know, but Stella, crouched beside an unconscious Berendina, and Jak, with a weapon in each hand, also stared at him expectantly. Tipping his head back, he searched the sky. No sign of the gríobhth. Astar had been distracted by Gen’s display and had lost track of Zephyr’s position. Wrestling back the panicked bear within—charging off in a fury wouldn’t help Zephyr—he asked, “Did anyone see where Zephyr went?”

  “She was circling,” Stella said, “then vanished. There one moment, gone the next.” She stood and dusted off her hands, leaving Berendina apparently asleep on the frozen ground. Behind her, Henk crawled over to pat the princess’s cheeks, urging her to wake so they could escape the monsters. Likely he assumed that none of them could overhear his whispered words. He was wrong—and a slow learner. Dismembering Henk wouldn’t solve anything either, so Astar ruthlessly contained that urge as well.

  Astar studied the clear sky, pale winter blue and cloudless—and without any indicator of where two people could’ve disappeared to. Think. Calm and rational. Be a leader. He caressed the hilt of the Silversteel sword Ash had given him, but no inspiration occurred to him.

  “What do you think?” he asked Stella, then expanded his gaze to Jak and Gen. “All theories welcome.”

  A fraught silence fell, no one wanting to volunteer first. Finally, Jak shrugged. “Before Lena called out—or whatever Zeph heard—Zeph and I were looking at the lake and chatting. She said there was something wrong. That the wind was blowing up here and not below. And that there should be birds and fish, even in winter, but she couldn’t detect any of them.”

  Stella frowned. “Lena said something similar, that the weather was wrong. Like there were odd divisions that shouldn’t be there.”

  Astar nodded encouragingly, projecting an aura of optimistic leadership he was far from feeling. “As if there are different realms crowded together, maybe? With different weather in each, and people—or lake creatures, even enormous ones—might seem to appear and disappear as they move back and forth.”

  Gen gave him an approving smile. “Good insight. That would explain why the lake creature disappeared for centuries when magic was isolated to Annfwn, then reappeared when magic returned to Carienne.”

  “It’s moving back and forth between one realm and another,” Jak mused. He’d sheathed his sword but idly spun the dagger between his fingers. “But what is this other place?”

  “Or places,” Gen put in, emphasizing the plural.

  “Aunt Andi described the problem she foresaw as a magic rift,” Stella said slowly, gray eyes focused on the far distance—or perhaps something not in this realm at all. “A rift is like a fissure. So what if these realms are meant to be separate, which must be the case, or there would be utter chaos with everything overlapping. If that’s so, then magic might be a kind of physical force, like gravity, that either allows or denies passage between the realms. The presence of magic changes the normal rules that prevent moving back and forth. The rift then might bend those rules.”

  “Or break them,” Gen concluded bleakly. “Possibly a rift like that could allow an intelligence unfamiliar with our world to reach through and animate a stone giant for fun, just to see what would happen.”

  “It makes sense,” Astar concluded, battling the wave of hopelessness. He should come up with a plan. He had nothing. So, he looked to the people he trusted most in this world and asked them. “Though that doesn’t give us much of a clue in what we should do next. Any ideas?”

  Jak spun a dagger, the silver flashing bright. “Well, we could—”

  The harsh call of a driver and the rattle of carriage wheels interrupted him, and they all spun to watch one of their two carriages speed away, making the turn so fast it went up on two wheels. Henk and Berendina were gone—presumably inside the fleeing carriage—along with both drivers.

  “They left us,” Gen said in disbelief, her indigo eyes wide. “What kind of person does that?”

  “Scared people,” Stella told her gently.

  “People who don’t think we count as people,” Jak put in more cynically as Gen winced. “Sweet Gen, if you’re about to apologize for the saber-cat display, don’t. Henk isn’t worth it, and it was a treat to watch you scramble his excuse for brains.”

  Gen combed her hands through her curling chestnut hair, scrubbing her scalp and looking pained. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “You had enough,” Jak and Stella said as one, then exchanged bemused smiles. “He was an ass and you reached the end of your rope,” Jak continued alone. “Well done, I say.”

  Stella nodded. �
�You are a lovely, kind, and generous person, Gen, but even you have your limits.”

  Gen shook her own head ruefully, then met Astar’s gaze. “I have not been lovely, kind, and generous to you and Zeph,” she said baldly. “I’ve been jealous, mean, and envious.”

  “Is there much difference between jealous and envious?” Jak asked, and Stella shushed him.

  “Ugly, then,” Gen retorted.

  Astar had been staring after the rapidly disappearing carriage in consternation and building rage. Even if the decision had been Henk’s alone, abandoning their crown prince and the high queen’s appointed delegates came very near to treason.

  “Willy?” Stella said quietly. “I have something to tell you.”

  She sounded so uncharacteristically hesitant that he had to stifle a groan. What next? “Oh?” he asked as neutrally as possible.

  Briefly shapeshifting, she returned to human form with a glowing topaz sphere atop her outstretched palm. Perfectly smooth and round, the distinctive color depthless, the jewel was instantly recognizable, though Astar had only seen it once before. “The Star of Annfwn,” he breathed, as Jak and Gen crowded close, equally rapt. Astar lifted his gaze to Stella’s turbulent one. “Aunt Andi gave you the Star of Annfwn?”

  Right away, he thought he should’ve tried not to sound so incredulous, but Stella only nodded somberly. “Just before we left. She said that I would need it, and that it should be mine now, since I bear the mark of the Tala.”

  Jak whistled low and long. “I wonder what that thing would be worth on the open market?” When everyone glared at him, he widened his eyes in innocence. “A purely academic question.”

  “The Star’s real value is in its ability to focus magic anyway,” Gen said, studying the jewel intently. “Why didn’t you tell us you had it?”

  “Aunt Andi didn’t want Rhy to know,” Stella explained quietly. “She was concerned that he’d see her giving it to me as…”