Further up the aisle came a loud clatter. I started and jumped back, twisting my head round to see a toppled bucket with its contents spread across the floor. The gryff let out a screech that seemed to burn my eardrums. I clamped my hands over my ears with a gasp and it screeched again, snapping at the air with its hooked beak. Massive wings rose at its slides and flapped in agitation and I heard a hoof kick the side of the stall. Its eyes were wide, showing their whites and it flapped its wings again, this time rearing up on its hind legs and showing me a flash of scaled talons where front hooves should have been. I forced my hands from my ears and held them low and open.
“Easy. Easy, boy,” I said, stretching my words out and keeping my voice as calm as I could. I had no idea with no idea whether it was male or female, but I hoped it wasn’t smart enough to know the difference. “You’re okay. Steady, steady.”
The flapping stopped but it eyed me distrustfully, still flashing its whites, and pranced on the spot.
“I know. I know. It’s okay. Here, want a fish?”
I crouched down without breaking our eye contact and reached into the bucket. My hand closed around something cold and slimy, and I drew the fish out. The creature’s eyes immediately twitched to the food and then back to mine.
“Yeah, that’s better,” I soothed. “Here you go.”
I stood and held the fish out and the gryff shook out its wings one last time, settling them back into position on its shoulders, and reached out, snapping the fish from my hand. It tilted its head back and swallowed in one gulp, then stretched its head out and butted my hand.
“Alright, alright,” I said with a chuckle. “I’ll get more.”
It wasn’t until I stooped to grab the bucket that I realised the barn had gone utterly silent – no traipse of footsteps, no laughter or chatter from the students, no Alden barking instructions. Every single pair of eyes was on me.
“Absolutely incredible,” Alden said as she broke away from the group of staring students. “Never have I seen anyone calm an agitated hippogryff so quickly. And you still have all your fingers, I presume?”
I glanced down at my intact hands and a smile crept onto my face.
“Very good, Miss Eldridge. Do not keep your gryff waiting. That goes for the rest of you, too. Quickly now, back to work.”
I hefted up the rest of the bucket and smiled at the stunning creature. And if I wasn’t very much mistaken, the gryff smiled back.
Once the gryffs were fed, Professor Alden showed us how to put on a head collar and lead the creatures from their stalls and out into the expansive of fields that surrounded the academy. Two boys were kicked, and a girl was bitten, but other than that we managed it without incident. My gryff followed by my side, tugging gently at strands of hair on my head as we walked. The professor just watched on in quiet amazement, which I took to mean the gryff wasn’t about to take a chunk out of my skull.
One by one, Alden took the creatures and released them into the fields, some galloping, others flying, until only mine was left, prancing impatiently by my side, and occasionally shaking out its massive wings.
“Very well, Lyssa,” said Professor Alden. “When you’re ready, take Stormclaw’s headcollar off, the exact same way I did, and let him go.”
“You… you want me to do it?” I eyed the gryff’s hooked beak warily. Several of the other beasts had taken snaps at Alden when she unclipped their headcollars – and she knew exactly how to handle them. I didn’t particularly rate my chances of managing it unscathed.
“Yes, go on. You seem to have a way with him.”
I sucked in a deep breath and blew it out slowly, then stretched up a hand towards the creature’s face.
“Alright, then. Nice and steady,” I said softly, as much to myself as the gryff. “No need for anyone to get bitten.”
As if understanding my intentions, Stormclaw lowered his head towards me, so that I didn’t have to go up on tiptoes to reach him. My fingers brushed against his feathers, smooth and silky to the touch. For a moment I forgot all about his vicious hooked beak, and reputation for cropping first-year fingers, and ran my fingers along his crest, caressing him. He leaned into my touch, emitting a low, thrumming sound in his throat that almost reminded me of a cat purring.
I unclipped the headcollar and slipped it off, keeping it well clear of his legs… or, er, talons. I didn’t want him to get tangled up or hurt, not after he’d so considerately resisted the urge to trim my fingers. Instead of running right off to join the rest of his herd, he lowered his head and butted me in the chest. I staggered back a step, off balance, and he cocked his head to one side, blinking as he watched me. He butted me again, more gently this time, and I couldn’t help but chuckle. He might look fearsome, but he was behaving like an overgrown puppy. I scratched his long, feathered ears and he made the thrumming sound again.
“Go on,” I told him, looking off to the rest of the herd. “Get out of here.”
He gave a single squawk, then cantered off towards the group. After a dozen strides, he flapped his black and gold wings, and took to the skies, screeching loudly.
“Well, I have never…” said the professor. “I do believe he has chosen you.”
Chapter Eight
It was a relief to know that I wasn’t completely useless at everything I turned my hand to inside the academy walls, or, well, outside them in this case. Felicity had made a snide comment about it being a servant’s work, but not even she could completely smother the look of surprise at how well Stormclaw had responded to me.
“Of course,” I overheard her saying on our way to breakfast, “I have half a dozen hippogryffs at home. I bet charity case couldn’t even afford a feather.”
Her little cluster of hangers-on dissolved into sniggers at that, but I didn’t care. Professor Alden had said I was a natural and told me I could help out with them to earn some money. She’d even said something about learning to ride – not that I was sure that was such a great idea. I mean, they might not all be quite so keen on me as Stormclaw had been. Sure, the academy hospital wing could regrow fingers in a matter of hours, but somehow I didn’t think that would make losing them any less painful, nor was I in any hurry to find out.
Kelsey and Sam had said gryffs tended to be cantankerous creatures, and it was rare they’d allow strangers to handle them – much less stroke them the way Stormclaw had allowed me. The rest of the day’s lessons passed in a bit of a blur. I was terrible in elemental manipulation again, and I didn’t have a clue what was going on for most of Gaelic class, but eventually the end of the day came around. We had two hours before dinner, and while the others headed to the common room to make a start on the heaps of assignments we’d already been given, I grabbed a bottle of water and tugged on my cloak, then headed down to the barn.
Alden was already waiting for me when I got there, and she beamed when she saw me.
“Ah, Lyssa, excellent. I’m thrilled you decided to take me up on my offer.”
I eyed her warily. No-one had been that happy to see me since I arrived at the academy.
“Now, we keep a lot of different species here at Dragondale, but I intend to keep you working with my herd of gryffs.” She headed inside the barn and I walked alongside her, breathing in the heady scent of gryffs again. “If you show as much natural talent as you did this morning, and you work hard, then I’m sure I can keep you busy for the rest of the semester. The year, if you want.”
The closest stalls, twelve in all, were occupied with a dozen gryffs of all colours – one solid black, another solid white, and a couple white with brown patches on their hides and faces. A pair of them were deep shades of brown, and another still was black with a multi-coloured sheen to his feathers wherever they caught the light, like a magpie. None bore black feathers lined in gold.
“Where’s Stormclaw?” I asked, peering into the stalls further back in case he was lurking there.
“Out in the fields still. These are the Earth Itealta team gryffs. Th
ey have a practice scheduled for this evening.”
“Which team is Stormclaw on?”
Alden shook her head.
“He’s not. He put his last three riders in the hospital. He’s too dangerous to ride. Shame. He’s a beautiful specimen and as agile as any gryff I’ve seen, but he just won’t accept a rider. Now, enough talk. The team will be arriving soon, and we need to get their mounts prepared.”
That basically involved fitting each gryff with a saddle – much the same as the sort you’d put on a horse, but with a massive saddle horn at the front – and attaching a pair of reins to their specially-adapted head collars. Gryffs weren’t ridden with a bit in their mouths, Alden explained, due to the shape of their beaks: the rider had to rely on their animal’s training and willingness to please the rider. Having seen their tempers this morning, I was amazed that anyone ever managed to control one. They seemed pretty wilful.
Despite that, we had all twelve tacked up and ready for their riders by the time the team joined us. They took their time greeting the creatures, and to my amazement not one of them took a snap at their riders as they mounted.
The game of Itealta was possibly the most bizarre thing I’d witnessed so far, and that was saying something. The team was made up of eight riders, plus three substitutes and a reserve, and the goal was to score goals by tossing a soccer-sized leather ball, with metal handles on each side, through a vertical hoop atop a pole thirty foot in the air. The riders had to carry the ball, or pass it between their teammates, while the other team attempted to snatch it from them – either by intercepting a pass, or by trying to rip the ball out of their opponent’s arms.
As I watched, one student attempted the latter ‘steal’, almost succeeding in unseating both riders – which in itself would be worrying enough, but given that the whole thing was happening twenty foot in the air, with their gryffs flying shoulder to shoulder… I winced and tried to look away, but my eyes refused to leave the spectacle, certain that one of them would tumble to the ground and be carted off to the medical wing. I was wrong. The stealing rider gripped the ball with one hand, and with the other, squeezed his reins whilst pressing his legs to his steed, and the gryff wheeled away, attempting to use the force of the massive flying beast to rip the ball from his opponent’s hands. The other rider was forced to choose between relinquishing possession of the ball, and being ripped clean from his saddle, to fall to the solid ground beneath. For a moment I thought he was going to cling to the ball regardless, but at the last second it was torn free from his fingers, leaving him half in, half out of his saddle while the attacking rider wheeled away, towards the hoop at the far end of the field. The defending rider’s mouth moved in what I was pretty sure was a cuss word that was snatched away by the wind, and spun his mount round to give chase, the speed of the turn throwing him back into his seat.
If I had to choose a word to describe the sport, I’d be torn between ‘exhilarating’ and ‘absolutely certifiable’. Well, okay, that was two words… and yet it was still the one I’d go with. Somehow, and I don’t know how, an hour later the session ended without anyone having needed to pay a trip to the hospital wing – though there’d probably be a few bruises in the morning. Seriously, if this was the druidic world’s idea of sport, then I was definitely signing up to be a cheerleader, not a jock.
When their practice ended, the team headed off, with their captain critiquing their individual performances the whole time. I watched them go with a shake of my head, then Professor Alden showed me how to untack the gryffs. By the time all twelve were done, I was getting the hang of snatching my hands back in time to avoid being bitten. The professor cast an eye over the untacked gryffs tethered to the fence and nodded her approval.
“Excellent. Let’s get them out to the field to join the rest of the herd, and then you’ll be about done.”
It was not as simple as she made it sound. The gryffs were feeling excitable after their training session, and they all danced around on the end of their lead ropes, kicking up their legs and shaking out their wings. A couple took snaps at each other, so that we had to make sure there was a good distance between them at all times – which meant we had to make half a dozen trips down to the paddocks and back. By the time that was done, I felt like I’d run a marathon, and my entire body was aching.
“Good work,” the professor said as we lugged the last of the saddles back into the barn. “Yes, that one on the very end rack. Yes, that’s the one.”
I hefted the saddle onto the rack with a grunt, and glanced at my watch with a stifled yawn. What I really wanted was to sleep, but if I got a move on, I’d just about make it to the main hall before the kitchen mage packed up for the evening. There was nothing like grappling with twelve cantankerous gryffs to work up an appetite.
“Just a moment, Lyssa,” Professor Alden said, wiping her hands clean on her robes in a way that I was sure would have horrified Professor Swann. “One last thing before you finish for the evening. Grab that bucket, please.”
I swallowed my groan of protest by fantasising over what I was going to spend my first lot of wages on – and if I was going to be honest, school books were not top of the list – and picked up the bucket, casting a cursory glance at its contents.
That was a mistake.
I gagged, almost dropping it right back on the floor. The only instinct that made me keep a grip on the handle was the one that said I definitely did not want to risk its contents spilling over my shoes.
“What is that?” I wheezed in between gagging and retching.
“What does it look like?” the professor asked mildly, pulling on a pair of thick gloves covered in some sort of greenish-blue scales.
I decided not to chance another look in the bucket, and just went off my initial impression.
“Guts and organs, and… something that smells vile.”
“Very good. That’ll be the lung you’re smelling. You’ll get used to it. There’s some meat in there, too.”
I absolutely did not want to get used to the smell of anything inside the metal bucket, nor did I particularly want to know what sort of ‘meat’ it was. In fact, I’d started to suspect it was a whole can of worms I should never have opened. Still though, as I hurried after Alden, trying to keep my nose away from the sloshing red mix, I couldn’t help myself from asking,
“But Professor… What eats this?”
I shouldn’t have asked. I knew I shouldn’t have asked the moment the words slipped out of my mouth, and the twinkle in the professor’s eye just confirmed what I knew.
“We don’t normally let the first years meet him. Or the second years. Or most of the third years, really… but, well, he really is a magnificent beast. This way.”
She pressed her hand and pulsed an energy password into the door of what looked like an old shed, but it might as well have been the wardrobe to Narnia. I stepped through and found myself in a small stone building, one side of which was constructed entirely of heavy metal bars. Beyond them was a jungle that had not been outside the shed.
“Ares!” the professor called. “Dinner time!”
She took the bucket from me as I stared out in wonder. How many more buildings were there like this one? How big was the academy, truly? But my mind was soon ripped from the topic as a flying, tan-coloured beast swooped from the sky, landing with a thud that made the ground shake beneath my feet. At a distance, I’d thought he was a hippogryff, but up close I could see how wrong I was. This creature was far more heavily set, his entire body armoured in thick slabs of muscle. His front end was bird-like, just like the hippogryffs, but that was where the resemblance ended. His back feet were paws, not hooves, and each was bigger that my head, and tipped with sharp, curved claws that were longer than my fingers. His tail was a thick rope, like a leopard… or a lion.
“Ares is a gryphon,” Professor Alden announced proudly, confirming my suspicion. “Half eagle, half lion. One of only a handful left in the country, probably the world. He sired
half of our herd of gryffs.”
Well, at least that explained why they were so cantankerous.
“Is he… Is he safe?” I asked, taking a tentative step towards the massive beast, who was regarding me with his head tilted to one side.
“Oh, no, dear – he’d eat you as soon as look at you. Wouldn’t you, sweetheart?”
I took a hasty step back, while the professor eyed him with almost maternal pride. He screeched at her with what might have been affection – if I was to give him the benefit of the doubt – and she thrust the bucket through the bars. He shoved his head into the bucket, tearing it from Alden’s grip, then came up again with a mouthful of something I didn’t care to identify. He tipped his head back and swallowed it in a single gulp, then screeched at us again, flapping his wings in a show of aggression before snatching up another mouthful.
“Isn’t he something?” the professor said, nearly breathless with admiration.
He was something, alright. Deadly. Crazy. Terrifying. Take your pick. One thing was for sure – Itealta didn’t seem nearly so dangerous as it had half an hour ago.
Chapter Nine
“Today we will be focussing on illusion magic – specifically, glamours.”
Professor Atherton stood at the front of the class and peered out at us. A couple of groans met his words, although for my part I was just confused. I’d been at the academy a couple of weeks now, but I still had no idea what half of the things the professors talked about actually were. Our spellcraft class was no exception.
“Now, for those of you who do not know, a glamour is a spell that disguises your appearance. A trained magic user will be able to see through your glamour – and I’m not just talking about druids – so the primary use for this spell is outside of the magical community. With sufficient training, you will be able to transform your entire appearance. Today, however, we shall start small. You will cast a glamour on your hair to change its colour.”
Druid Magic (Druid Academy Book 1) Page 6
