The Shadow's Heart

by K J Taylor

  She was dressed like a griffiner, and sounded like one too. ‘Guard, come up here. Now.’

  He came through the door at once. ‘What is it, milady?’

  At the top of the stairs, in the featureless round chamber that made up the lowest level of the tower, a great, dark griffin was waiting.

  The moment he saw him, the gaoler bowed low. He had never seen this griffin before, but there was no mistaking the silver feathers and the black fur. ‘The Mighty Skandar!’

  ‘Quite,’ said the woman, while Skandar eyed the gaoler haughtily.

  The gaoler glanced at her. ‘Is the Queen here …?’

  ‘The Queen is busy,’ said the woman. ‘The Mighty Skandar wanted to talk with you, and found me on his way here. He asked me to come with him to translate.’

  ‘Wanted to talk with me?’ the gaoler exclaimed. ‘Er, I mean …’ He bowed again nervously to the griffin. ‘Of course. What can I do for you, Mighty Skandar?’

  Skandar rasped out a few words.

  ‘He wants to see a particular prisoner,’ the woman translated. ‘The rebel who was arrested at the feast.’

  The gaoler coughed. ‘He’s being interrogated.’

  Skandar snarled.

  ‘Skandar doesn’t care,’ said the woman. ‘He wants this prisoner brought to him immediately.’

  The gaoler looked warily at Skandar. The prospect of arguing with him was far too intimidating, so he went for second best and argued with the woman instead. ‘Look, I’m sorry, milady, but I can’t bring a prisoner up here without a direct order from — ’

  Skandar made a sudden rush at him, and screamed in his face. The gaoler leapt out of the way, and just barely avoided a blow from one of the dark griffin’s flailing talons. Skandar came on, backing him up against the wall, and kept him there, hissing with his beak open wide, as if to demonstrate the fact that, if he wanted, he could easily fit the gaoler’s head inside.

  ‘Do it!’ the woman shouted from nearby, panic edging her voice. ‘He says he’ll kill you if you don’t do as he says!’

  All thought of duty and protocol evaporated from the gaoler’s mind. ‘All right, all right!’ he yelled. ‘I’ll do it, I’ll bring him up here right away!’

  Thank gods, Skandar seemed to understand. He backed off and sat on his haunches, fixing the gaoler with a threatening yellow eye.

  The gaoler made a hasty bow, and retreated into the prison corridors. He summoned a couple of his men and ordered them to go and fetch the prisoner. Seeing the look on his face, they hurried off without argument.

  While he waited for them to return, the head gaoler tried to calm himself down, and hoped that he wouldn’t get into trouble for this. But what else was he supposed to do? The Mighty Skandar ruled the Eyrie as much as the Queen did, and in his own way he had the same level of authority. If he had decided to start throwing his weight around, then that wasn’t the head gaoler’s problem. Let the Queen deal with it.

  The two guards returned, leading the prisoner between them. They hadn’t put any chains on him: he wasn’t in much shape to fight back.

  ‘Good,’ said the gaoler. ‘Take him up top right away, and make sure he doesn’t go anywhere.’

  The two guards nodded and made for the stairs, and the gaoler brought up the rear.

  Heath went quietly. He was too exhausted to do anything but what they wanted. His entire chest was a mass of throbbing lines, and he could only see out of one eye. He had long since given up any hope of escape, or of dying with a single secret left. The only thing he had not told them yet was his birth name, and that was only because they hadn’t seemed very interested in knowing. He had told them everything else he knew, and now, when he realised they were taking him back up to the outside world, he thought they were finally escorting him to his death.

  He stumbled up the steps, head low, and stood still when his guards did.

  ‘This is the one,’ said a voice. ‘Give him to the Mighty Skandar, now.’

  That voice …

  Heath looked up blearily, and squinted in puzzlement when he saw the face was familiar as well. ‘You?’ he mumbled. ‘What are you doing — ?’

  ‘Be quiet, you scum!’ Wydd snapped. ‘You — guardsmen. The Mighty Skandar wants this prisoner. Don’t keep him waiting.’

  ‘But, milady,’ one of them said, ‘we can’t hand over a prisoner like this, just because — ’

  He stopped abruptly, as Skandar approached. Heath, coming out of his stupor, looked up and felt his heart freeze. The griffin’s chest in front of him was like a big feathered boulder, the head looming overhead. The feathers were silver and black. It was the Mighty Skandar, the dark griffin come for him, to kill him …

  But … but …

  Something wasn’t right. Heath struggled with his thoughts, trying to get them back into some kind of order. There was something not quite right here, something he couldn’t quite grasp.

  Skandar, however, had no such troubles. He struck, shoving one of the guards away. The man fell, dragging Heath with him, but as his colleague tried to interfere Skandar smacked him aside as well and hooked his beak around Heath, dragging him away.

  The guards knew better than to resist. They let go of their charge and retreated to a safe distance, unable to do anything but watch helplessly as Skandar hauled their captive off.

  Bewildered and not knowing what else to do, Heath caught hold of Skandar’s wing. Whether to try and fight him off or just to support himself he wasn’t sure, but Skandar did not object. He stalked off, pulling Heath with him, making for the door that led out of the tower. It was closed, but several brutal blows of the dark griffin’s beak broke the wood into pieces, and he passed through the opening and into fresh air.

  There, blocking the exit with his body, he finally shook Heath off.

  Heath fell onto his back and lay there, gasping for breath as he looked up at Skandar and wondered whether he was about to die. But Skandar only stared at him through impenetrable yellow eyes.

  Yellow, Heath thought. His eyes were yellow. And his beak was grey, not black, and so were his forelegs, and he was too small …

  The name finally rose in his mind. ‘Echo …?’

  Echo snorted at him and offered his back. He was already wearing his harness.

  Heath scrambled to his feet, his old grin finally returning. ‘Echo, you little …!’

  Echo hissed and shoved him. No time for talk. Heath pulled himself together and climbed onto the griffin’s back. Echo straightened up and loped away from the tower. Fast, but not too fast.

  As they approached the wall that surrounded the Eyrie, Echo took off. He did it rapidly and roughly, and once he was in the air he flew away from the Eyrie as fast as he could.

  Heath, clinging to his back, was too tired and shaken to feel much in the way of triumph. But what he did feel was gratitude. Gratitude toward Wydd, who had helped him for who knew what reasons, and gratitude toward Echo — but most of it was simply gratitude for the fact that he had found a partner like Echo in the first place, a partner who had both the cunning and the bravery to help him the way Echo had.

  Before he had been glad to have Echo with him because of the opportunities the spotted griffin offered. But now he had learned just what a griffin’s partnership really meant, and it made him feel a kind of awe that he had never felt before in his life.

  FIFTEEN

  THE LOST TRIBE

  Heath paused again at this point in his story. Caedmon and Myfina had both been listening in silence, utterly riveted.

  ‘So what happened next?’ Myfina demanded when he went silent. ‘Thank gods you got away — but I’m so sorry you went through that because of us.’

  Heath shook himself. ‘It doesn’t matter. Even if I hadn’t been a rebel I still would have lost a hand down there, and probably more. In fact, if I hadn’t been a rebel then they probably would have just done that right away, before I had a chance to escape. I’ll take a few burns over having to wear a hook for th
e rest of my life.’ He grinned.

  Caedmon grinned back. ‘Nothing ever keeps you down for long, does it? But tell us what happened next. You didn’t get that griffin-skin in Malvern, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Right you are.’ Heath accepted the cup of hot wine from Myfina, and sipped it with a blissful expression. ‘Oooh, dear gods, if the manna from the Meadows of Heaven taste better than this, I don’t want to know about it. Anyway … right, yes, the story. Well, as you’ve probably guessed, Echo and I didn’t get away clean from Malvern. I never did find out what happened to Wydd, but I hope she escaped too. If they caught her, then she probably had the sense to say she thought Echo was Skandar and he just fooled her too.

  ‘In any case, the guards would have passed on the news that their prisoner had been carried off, and we didn’t get far before people started chasing us. They sent griffiners, and a couple of Unpartnered came too — probably in the mood for some excitement. And we were in big trouble. We couldn’t go to any of the cities, and if we went anywhere else we’d be tracked down in no time. The Eyrie pays big money for rogue griffiners. I don’t know what Echo had in mind, but he probably realised that too.

  ‘We did our best to stay away from people, but I was in a bad way. I needed food, and healing as well, so when it got obvious that I’d die without it Echo took me to some village or other. I’ve forgotten its name, but I managed to get some help there. Peasants are always very quick to help a griffiner. We couldn’t stay there long, so we ended up moving from place to place in bits and pieces until I was on the mend and Echo decided it was time to head off into the wilderness.

  ‘But we’d stayed too long. Word got out, griffiners came looking, and in the end they chased us northward for two weeks. Every time we thought we’d lost them, they’d show up again. Even when we were in the middle of nowhere, days away from the nearest village, they didn’t give up.

  ‘Eventually — and I’m pretty sure Echo was just flying at random, since he probably wouldn’t have left Skenfrith before he met me — we wound up at the coast. We would have turned back from there, but those blasted griffiners showed up again. They were persistent, I’ll give them that.

  ‘They cornered us there, with our backs to the sea, and I thought we’d have to surrender, but Echo decided to do the only other thing we could do. He got me on his back and flew out over the sea. They chased us out there until we’d lost sight of land, and then they finally turned back. I guess they thought we’d just keep on going until Echo ran out of energy and fell into the sea. And for a while I thought that was what would happen too.

  ‘But it didn’t. Echo kept on going, until I thought I’d freeze to death before I got to drown. And then I saw it.’ Heath paused dramatically.

  ‘An island?’ Caedmon guessed.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Heath, looking slightly disappointed. ‘A big, icy island, hiding out there off the northwestern coast. Actually, I found out later on that there’s more than one — there were two other, smaller islands just off the coast from the main one. You can swim between them — and I did, at least once. So Echo landed on the main island. Most of it is covered in pine trees, and there was snow everywhere even though winter had just about passed by then. I thought, great, a hiding place; we’ll stay here until those bastards have moved on, then we can go back to the mainland and find somewhere I can hide without freezing my balls off. But it didn’t work out quite like that.’

  ‘Why, what happened?’ Myfina rubbed her hands together in anticipation.

  ‘I found out that there were already people living on that island, that’s what,’ said Heath.

  ‘Really?’ Caedmon cocked his head. ‘Northerners?’

  ‘Oh yes. But … it’s not just that. The people there are …’ Heath struggled for words, which was unusual for him, ‘… real Northerners.’

  The others looked blank.

  ‘We’re real Northerners,’ Myfina said eventually.

  ‘No we’re not.’ For once, there was no trace of mockery in Heath’s face. ‘We’re … well, we’re civilised Northerners. We fought off the Southerners here, but we never did go back to our ways. We live like they do now. Cities. Books. Money. Griffins. That sort of thing. Things the Southerners taught us. But the people on that island, they don’t have any of that. They wear furs and live in little huts buried under the snow. They don’t farm — everything they eat has to be gathered, or hunted. With stone weapons. They don’t even have metal. None of them speaks a word of Cymrian. They speak the old language, nothing else. And,’ he added with a grin, ‘they stink. Far too cold there for bathing, you see.’

  ‘Wow.’ Even Caedmon looked impressed. ‘That’s incredible! A lost tribe!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Heath. ‘And they’re not used to visitors. In fact if it hadn’t been for Echo they probably would have killed me on the spot. But when they saw that he and I were working together, they were frightened, then impressed. They still worship animal spirits as well as the moon, you see. Just the moon, mind you — they don’t seem to have much concept of the Night God. Anyway, they know what griffins are — there are some living on the other two islands I mentioned — and they worship them especially; think they’re extra-powerful spirits. So when they saw that I was friends with one, they assumed I was some kind of sorcerer. Luckily I knew enough of the old language to understand some of what they were saying, and I picked up on that easily enough. So I thought, wonderful, they’ll help me, give me something to eat and maybe some of those furs to keep me warm.

  ‘Unfortunately it seemed they had a different idea of what to do around sorcerers. They gave me food, sure enough, and a place to stay, but after that they wouldn’t let me leave. They wanted me to stay with them and use my magic to help them, and apparently they don’t believe a sorcerer can magic away stone spears when they’re aimed at his throat.

  ‘When Echo tried to put a stop to it they didn’t show much fear — they just drove him off. In the end he flew off to the other islands and found a home with the wild griffins, and in the meantime there I was with the wild humans.

  ‘Now, at first I thought, great, I got out of prison and now I’ve taken shelter in another, completely different prison. But after a while I realised they weren’t that bad. The women certainly liked me! And I remembered the old stories about Arenadd, and how he found your grandmother in the mountains and she taught him the old ways. So I thought, maybe this is my time in the wilderness, and I’ve come here to learn without even realising it.

  ‘And I thought about it some more, and realised that I wasn’t likely to find a much better place to hide. For all I knew you were dead, so there was nothing left for me on the mainland except a nasty end. The island wasn’t much, but it could be a home, and at least nobody was trying to kill me.

  ‘So I stayed and let them teach me how to live like they did. And as you can see, I wound up looking like one of them as well. No razors over there, you know. Besides, the beard kept my face warm.’ Heath coughed again.

  ‘And the griffin hide?’ Caedmon prompted.

  ‘I’m getting to that. So I stayed with the lost tribe for … however long it was, months probably. Eventually the season changed — not easy to notice over there — and they started preparing for some kind of yearly ritual. In this ritual, it’s expected that every young man will go out and hunt an animal. The animal has to be a predator, and the bigger it is the more respected that hunter becomes. Of course I was more than happy to go looking for a possum or something, but I was the griffin-man, and everyone there just sort of assumed that I would swim over to one of the other islands and hunt a wild griffin, which very few people were ever allowed to do.’ Heath ran his fingers through the feathers on his shoulder. ‘So I did.’

  ‘You what?’ Myfina exclaimed.

  Heath shrugged. ‘I hunted a wild griffin and killed it. Echo was on the island I chose, and he came to help me. Once it was dead I floated it back to the main island and Echo helped me drag it to the village. Ther
e was a big celebration, and the chief had a couple of men skin the griffin and prepare the hide for me to wear. You’d be surprised how good they are at tanning, but let me tell you, this thing was damn smelly when I first put it on. I probably wouldn’t have kept it, but it was so warm I couldn’t resist. Besides, it made me feel pretty important, as you can imagine!’ Heath grinned. ‘I never said I didn’t have a weakness for other people’s adoration.’

  ‘I never met anyone who didn’t,’ said Caedmon. ‘So what happened next? How did you find us?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Heath. ‘Not long after the special hunt, things got bad on the island. There hadn’t been much food there to begin with, but it started to get even harder to find. I think they have famines like that fairly often, because nobody seemed very surprised. But I’d been having a tough time of it, as you might’ve guessed, and I didn’t do very well at all. I started to get sick again, and my old wounds started opening up. Most people start to feel a bit spiritual in these situations, and I started to think that maybe I wouldn’t live to see the end of the year.

  ‘And then I decided that I’d left too much unfinished to just accept it, so I left. Echo seemed to want to leave too. I said goodbye first, of course, but none of the tribe was too unhappy about my leaving. One less mouth to feed, and sorcerers are meant to vanish mysteriously anyway.

  ‘We flew back to the mainland, and I was feeling in the mood for a little religion, so I asked Echo if we could come here. And here we are.’

  Caedmon clapped him on the back. ‘It’s wonderful to have you back, Heath. I missed you.’

  ‘I missed you too,’ Heath said solemnly. ‘I’m afraid it seems I’ve lost my taste for just looking after myself. I must have spent too much time with you, because I’ve apparently caught a bad case of loyalty and nobility and so on. And a bad case of being a griffiner, as well. You should’ve warned me all that was catching.’