“Did that make him see the light?”
Shaw shook his head peevishly. “Nay, Dayna. My wounds left me unmarked, else he might have considered my opinion with more weight.”
“But…the Elders helped organize throwing Rocky into the sea! Surely they must have believed that something was going on at that point!”
“They helped in order to humor the needs of their chief ally, King Fitzwilliam. But none of the Elders heard the rock-demon speak. Nor did they witness it cast spells, such as the one that changed thy character to a most unwelcome nature.”
My cheeks reddened with that one. Rocky had indeed altered my mind, in a horrifically subtle way, until Liam had dispelled the magic used. I still felt awful about the entire incident, and more than a little violated by it.
“I hope that didn’t put Ulrik off. He does support your kids, in that whole ‘Way of the Serpent’ thing.”
“Elder Ulrik? ‘Tis doubtful. Ulrik served as the mount for Good King Benedict nigh on three decades, and survived wounding to the quick many times. Truly, he is one of the toughest of my people. Emotions shall not be his undoing.”
“And the council’s decision about your kids?” I prompted.
“Their decision is that the Way of the Serpent is a martial school that...is less honorable than it should be.”
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, concerned. “What does that mean for Ironwood? Or Blackthorn and Holly, for that matter?”
“Nothing involving exile or loss of position, let alone promotion to the Skinned Ones. Yet while they may still practice their art, they may not teach it to others. Their dishonorable school with perish with them when they die.”
“That’s half a loaf, at least. I’d hate to see anything bad happen to your children.”
“They are not all of my offspring,” he said, almost reflexively. “But wouldst my mind settle on a course of action about them!”
Shaw began to pace. His paws threw up sand as he did so. “Thou knowest how I feel about their ‘art’. But mine own pride sired them as True Born, and my pride cannot help but take wing at what they have done. Ironwood is one of the few intelligent enough to have sired a new martial art. Blackthorn is one of the best warriors, and he can perform feats I never thought possible for any griffin. And Hollyhock is a natural leader out of the egg. Why she was passed over for Lance Captain in favor of others mystifies me.”
My mind jumped back to what Belladonna had said before to Holly: Thou hast freighted more dishonor than all the griffins here.
But it was Ironwood who had created this ‘dishonorable’ Way of the Serpent, wasn’t it? Shaw seemed to think so, and so did the Elders. If so, then what the hell had High Elder Belladonna been talking about? Was it some fantasy that had been concocted in one of her fever-dreams?
I didn’t get a ‘click’ from my brain. Instead, I got a solid feeling in my gut, right where the cops said to check when hunches were formed.
There was something rotten at the core of the aerie, and not knowing what it was made my skin prick up with fear.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Shaw squinted at something approaching us from above. I couldn’t make it out against the bright morning sunshine, but he filled me in.
“Speak of the fledglings, and they shall appear,” he said, half to himself. “’Tis the three siblings. They spoke of joining thee for the morning repast, and to bring something fresh for your fare.”
“Didn’t I just eat that?”
“Nay, that was a special treat from Hollyhock to thee. Observe, and you shall see how we hunt away from land.”
I got to my feet as the trio of griffins soared past us, heading south out to sea. Intrigued, I dove into my pack and found my binoculars. With just a little fiddling I was able to watch the action, even without Shaw’s superhumanly keen eyesight.
Once they had made it some distance offshore, Ironwood and Holly began to patrol in a wide, lazy oval. Blackthorn began a steep climb, ascending so that he was much higher than either of the other two. His great wings spread out to their maximum, and he leveled out into a controlled, tight spiral. Abruptly I realized that he’d caught a thermal, an updraft of warm air, and was using it to efficiently maintain his altitude with a minimum of effort. In the meantime, his brother and sister had continued their flight, which took them over different patches of blue-green sea.
“The lower two…I’m guessing they’re performing a search pattern.” I observed.
“They are the spotters,” Shaw confirmed. “Blackthorn is the striker. Look, Ironwood has spotted the quarry. The hunt goes easy this day.”
Indeed, the smaller male griffin had begun twitching his wingtips, pointing down and to one side. Holly joined him, and together they zeroed in on one patch of ocean, wings silently signaling to their brother further above. Finally, the target must have been spotted, as Blackthorn hovered in one spot.
Then he brought his wings in with one final, propulsive beat and dove towards the ocean. His wings folded into his body and he became a sleek fur-and-feathered torpedo. Blackthorn plunged beak-first into one of the deep blue swells with a mighty splash. I couldn’t hear it at this distance, but the plume of spray kicked up looked like a geyser blowing its top.
I suddenly became aware that I’d been holding my breath. I counted the seconds as I waited for the griffin to resurface. I stopped after I’d passed the two-minute mark. Blackthorn probably had huge reserves of air in his lungs, but he was a big animal and had been working hard aloft.
“Are we sure that he’s okay?” I asked timidly.
Shaw gave a shrug. “He is not fresh from the egg. I must trust him to know his limits.”
Suddenly, Blackthorn erupted from the water like a breaching killer whale. Only, he didn’t stop with a breach, he kept heading skyward on dripping wings. In each taloned paw he held a sixty-pound salmon. I let out a gasp as I realized that he had an even bigger fish held firmly in his stout beak.
“Okay,” I said shakily, as Blackthorn headed back towards us, flanked by his siblings. “That was impressive.”
“Aye,” was all Shaw said, though I believe he sounded a trifle smug about it.
There was plenty of open space around the trading cabin for the three griffins to land. Blackthorn carefully placed the two fish held in his paws on a clean patch of stone. The third, largest fish he lay before his father.
“’Tis quite a meal for one such as I,” Shaw said, and I definitely heard some paternal pride leaking through his restraint. “Share it with me, if thou wouldst.”
“You do me honor,” came the reply. “Bide, if you would.”
With that, Blackthorn stepped away from us. He fluffed out his feathers and then sent a rolling, rhythmic quiver down from the base of his skull along his spine. The fur along his torso sloughed off the water in a spray, like a dog shaking itself off after climbing out of a pool. The clean, salt scent of ocean water hung in the air as he rejoined us, still damp but no longer dripping.
“When you last left, we looked at the gear you brought,” Ironwood said. His tan-gold fur gleamed in the morning sun. The cut on his flank had crusted over and seemed well on its way to healing. “Our sire informed us that you planned to eat what is inside these bags and boxes. Since we scented nothing resembling food, we decided to bring you a fresher repast. Given the work of the Kescari, we are sure that humans eat fish, if nothing else.”
“That we do,” I acknowledged. “Thank you for your generosity in ‘hunting’ down the morning meal.”
“Hunting is always enjoyed,” Blackthorn said, in his deep, bass voice. The sprinkle of black spots running up and over his eyes twitched with pleasure as he nodded at his catch. “These put up a good chase. Hope you like fish. We know not how humans eat them.”
I considered. “I do like sushi, but I’m thinking that I need to cook a piece of that salmon.”
“We have flint and steel,” Holly put in. “And there is kindling stored in the cabin.”
“The kindling I can use. I have something from my world to handle the rest.”
It took me only a moment to pop inside and grab a bundle of stored twigs. I set up a nest of flammable material in one of the stone fire pits outside the cabin then, with a flourish, I produced a long-necked lighter from my pocket. A snap, and the gas-powered flame set the kindling alight with ease. I got a couple of ‘Ooohs’ as a reaction from Shaw’s kids.
“That would come in handy on the colder, wetter winter nights,” Ironwood observed.
“If the Elders allow me to gift one to you, I’d be happy to,” I said. “I just don’t know if they would. Andeluvia seems to be very leery of allowing outworlder technology in.”
“Given the council’s suspicion of anything ‘new’?” Holly asked rhetorically. “I doubt they would allow it. But at least we can watch how it works for now.”
I built up the fire with some larger sticks, and then unfolded a portable metal grill frame to sit on top of it. Then I got out a nonstick pan, spices, utensils, and a large camping knife. I knelt by where Blackthorn had deposited his catch. The salmon was still glistening from the sea, brilliant silver-pink, and much too large for me to eat.
I carved out a half-pound chunk from the midsection as best I could and moved it to my pan before looking up. Everyone was so riveted on what I was doing that they hadn’t touched their food. Well, when you have a strange, otherworldly creature over for breakfast, I guess that was to be expected.
“Come on,” I insisted, as I shook some spice blend from a plastic canister on the fillet and moved it to the flame. “Don’t wait on me.”
Shaw lopped off the front third of his salmon with one snap of his beak, and then nudged the larger portion to Blackthorn. Ironwood and Holly went to work on their own meals in a similar fashion. In the time it took me to sear my fillet and put it on a plate, all four griffins had downed their meals. I suppose the fact that they didn’t have to stop and chew helped speed things along. That said, they were extremely neat diners. At most, I spied a few silvery fish scales left on the ground. I didn’t comment. I couldn’t anyway, not after my first forkful. Perhaps it was the extreme freshness of the fish, but I’d had salmon in four-star restaurants in Los Angeles that didn’t hold a candle to this. I downed my portion only after forcing myself to take human-sized bites instead of griffin ones.
“Delicious,” I pronounced, as my fork hit bottom with a scrape. “Blackthorn, any time you want to bring home dinner, you be my guest.”
The big drake simply bowed. I began bagging up some of the used cutlery to take back and wash, including the empty plate Holly had left out for me when I’d arrived.
“I gather you liked the snack before the meal as well,” Holly observed, noting that the plate was empty.
“Better than liked. Loved. Where did you find those berries, anyway?”
Holly fluffed her feathers slightly, obviously pleased with my compliment. “There is a stand of amidach trees at the lee edge of the Greenway.”
I clearly heard her pronounce the capital in ‘Greenway’, so I had to ask. “What’s that?”
Shaw cocked an eyebrow at me. “As an outsider, Dayna, what do the flights of mine own people look like, upon their coming or leaving?”
I considered. “Pretty random, I guess. It’s hard on the human brain to think of casual pedestrians moving in three dimensions, not two. In my world, where we use machines to get airborne, we employ people to ‘control’ which routes an aircraft can take so it can fly safely.”
“Don’t be deceived by appearances,” Holly said. “Before fledglings are allowed to leave the nest without an escort, they are taught in which spaces they are allowed to spread their wings.”
“And the Greenway is one of these spaces?”
“Think of it as a lane in a road. The Greenway is where we use the land, to eat the fruit or hunt the game when we wish. Then there is the Redway, where anyone can fly into or out of the aerie as they wish.”
“Got it. One space for ‘hunting and gathering’, the next for ‘general aviation’. Any others?”
Ironwood let out a deep chuckle. “As with all things mortal, what comes in must go out.”
“True.” The trader’s cabin had come with a neat set of chamber pots, but I’d set up a small portable chemical toilet in the far corner, complete with a privacy curtain.
“The final area we leave for elimination of waste.”
“That would be…let me guess: the Brownway?”
A nod from the Lance Captain confirmed my guess. “We rotate the uses of each space in a quarter-score of years, so that there is always one place left fallow, one useful, and one fertile.”
It sounded like the griffins utilized organic agriculture of a sort. Interesting. And a ‘recharge time’ of ten years was certainly long enough for griffin waste to compost away any pathogens, as well as become grade-A fertilizer.
“So…you never just go in the water, then?”
Holly made a mild squawk of disgust. “In the Weatherglass Sea? The water is considered something sacred, not to mention our main source of food! A coldspring of water emerges from the depths offshore, bringing with it tremendous bounty.”
“Sounds like what we would call the ‘upwelling’ of a cold bottom current. You’re right, that would produce a lot of sea life. All that easy-to-harvest food would explain why your people chose to found their aerie here.”
A snort came from Blackthorn as he stretched languorously, like a sated tabby. “That food we ate. Not as easy to harvest as one might think.”
“What do humans from your world typically eat?” Holly inquired. “As my brother Ironwood said, we scented nothing edible in any of your gear.”
“If you’re interested, I could open some of my packages,” I offered.
With that, I opened a half-dozen of the MREs I’d bought sight unseen from a surplus store. I put the contents on my remaining plates and passed the pre-packaged food around. Despite the amount of salmon that had just gone down the four griffins’ hatches, immediate crunching and slurping ensued.
“These large worms are so tender!” Holly announced, as she gobbled her entrée down. “And the way your people left the blood to clot is magnificent!”
Well, it looked like Holly liked the spaghetti in meat sauce. Ironwood poked at his meal with a talon, sniffing his mottled-green pesto chicken suspiciously before devouring it in three relatively delicate snaps of his beak.
“It looked like someone left your bird out in the sun too long. But it did not smell rotten. I could grow to like it.” He turned to Blackthorn. “What say you, brother?”
“Good,” Blackthorn said, as he tore into the remains of a spicy beef enchilada. “It tingles.”
“What be this meal?” Shaw asked, his beak still half in the entrée’s serving bag.
I checked. “That’s Sloppy Joe filling.”
“‘Tis delicious!” He made a truly horrendous slurping sound as he vacuumed up the rest of the contents.
I’d learned from first-hand experience dealing with Andeluvian beings to turn anything snack-sized into a smorgasbord. I did just that by putting the rest of the side-dishes out for whomever could snatch them up first. In that way the four griffins polished off packages of jalapeño cheese spread, raisin nut granola bars, hard baking soda biscuits, mashed potatoes, vanilla pound cake, corn bread, strips of turkey jerky, cinnamon scones, walnut brownies, and even a large bag of dehydrated butter granules.
They followed that up by idly munching on and swallowing each of the squeeze pouches, spice packets, and everything else I’d brought. That is, except for the things I’d already removed: the miniature glass bottles of tabasco sauce, hot beverage bags, cutlery, and flameless heating elements. Part of me worried about the griffins consuming a good chunk of plastic and god-knows-what-else that was non-organic. Then again, I’d seen Shaw eat tin foil and plastic wrap without getting so much as a case of heartburn.
“Now that we h
ave filled in our empty spots,” Holly announced, “I think we need to tell Dayna about her role as nest keeper. What say you, Lance Captain?”
“I should have brought it up first,” Ironwood agreed.
“Wait, what–” I began, before my mind caught up with the conversation and I remembered my little one-on-one with Lance Captain Thundercrack.
My concerns about the theft in my world, the machinations among the griffin Elders, even the damned inscrutable Codex suddenly seemed like background noise. I’d been volunteered against my will yet again. This time in a sporting event run by beings with the size and power of airborne grizzly bears.
And this sport was for blood.
Just my rotten luck.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Shaw got to his feet, his food sated, lazy demeanor falling away. “Nest keeper? What dost thou mean?”
The three younger griffins exchanged looks that fairly well expressed ‘Uh-oh, do you wanna be the one to tell our grumpy dad what we’ve been up to?’
Shaw had been right in assessing his youngest as a natural leader, as Holly was the one to speak up. “Father, this is the fallout from the confrontation with Thundercrack of the Valkir. Once he had been bested, he challenged us for honor’s sake to a pride-spar match.”
“With Dayna as nest keeper?” Shaw’s voice rose a notch. “Art thou relieved of all thy senses? She is an envoy of Andeluvia! Anything that happens to her could mean war!”
“Nothing will happen.” Blackthorn replied, in his choppy speech. “We are Reyka. They are Valkir. They are talk. We are fire.”
For the first time, I saw Shaw’s expression shift to disbelief and concern.
“Confidence is thy strength, Blackthorn. As it is for all three of my True Born. But now I worry that all thy abilities lead to arrogance. The Valkir are killers. They seek out advantage in strange ways some might not approve of.”
“As do we,” Ironwood said evenly. “We know you have denounced my art to the Elders in Council, and they may yet rule against us.”
Grand Theft Griffin Page 14
