Birthright

by Wendy L. Koenig

  As soon as Fiera dismounted with Marie, he shifted to his man form. He pointed at the four guards on either side of the gate. “You take her and run as fast as you can across the bridge to those men. Tell them you were attacked and your daughter needs a doctor. You have to remember she’s your daughter or they might not act as quickly. Do you understand?”

  Fiera nodded, her face pale, her olive eyes dark.

  “Good. I’ll go find Captain.” He let his gaze rove over her face for a moment and then cupped her cheek in his hand. Leaning in, he kissed her gently. Her lips tasted like rose petals floating in fine wine and they were as soft as silk. Regret thickened his voice. “Darken your hair. Change your clothes back into a dress. Run like the wind.” He gave her a gentle push toward the bridge.

  She turned and ran, weaving through the trees, her hair turning brown as she went. He watched her race past patrons across the lit bridge, pants becoming dress, screaming for help, until she reached the guards. One of them appropriated a traveler’s steed, mounted with Marie, and charged into the city, Fiera running at his heels.

  Efar let out his breath in a rush, aware he’d been holding it for too long. Marie would be all right. She had to be. Now, to find Captain. Turning, he shifted to griffin in three strides and took to the night sky, heading south again.

  It pleased him Fiera hadn’t made a fuss about his nakedness. She seemed to take it in stride as a practical necessity. As she had the kiss. Yet…

  He frowned. Why would she accept his kiss now, when she’d rejected his earlier caress? It didn’t make sense. He tried to clear his mind, to float thoughtless on the night breeze, but he kept returning to the kiss. It had lit him up from the inside. He’d never felt anything like it, not even with Gabriella. It wasn’t just passion. There had also been a desire to secure Fiera as his. As if he’d been in love. He’d experienced that plenty before, but never so soon after meeting a woman. It felt different a bit, almost as if they were supposed to be together, as if they already belonged to each other. What did it mean?

  Reaching their campsite after flying hard for another half hour, Efar landed and took a quick look around. The man injured by the fire was gone, but the dead werewolf was still dead. As was the man he’d thrown against the tree.

  He studied the road edge near where Captain had been fighting. On the west side of the road was nothing, but on the east were hoof prints heading into the dried out forest. Boot prints followed. Some were scuffed, as if they’d been dragged a fair bit. Good boy, Captain!

  Efar checked his wound. The scab had finally broken and blood oozed down his leg. No time for that now. He had to find the horse.

  Excellent in the daylight, his eagle eyesight wasn’t well suited for night flying. But, as long as the trees had no leaves, he should be able see well enough. Lunging into the sky again, Efar slowly headed east, overlooking the sharp stakes of the trees, following Captain’s trail. The horse and his captors were at least two hours ahead of him, still. He put every ounce of energy he had into the pursuit. He should be able to catch them; they were, after all, on foot and working with a temperamental horse. As he feared, though, the trail arced toward the green, past the northern edge of the drought zone. Within moments, the canopy of leaves was too dense for Efar to see through.

  He landed and shifted to man, letting the griffin sleep, and cursing his lack of clothes in the thickness of the night. Boots, at least, would have been nice.

  Though it was darker beneath the sprawling branches, heavy with leaves, the trail was nearly as clear to him as it had been from above, before the trees had blocked it from sight. The trail was wide, with broken saplings and branches. Deep gouges marred the loose loam where Captain had dug in his hooves and fought his captors. Efar followed this trail for more than an hour, sure he was gaining ground.

  Then, as he crossed a horizontal wide rock face, still sun-warm beneath his feet, all signs of Captain’s passing suddenly disappeared!

  Thinking that the thieves had turned while on the rock slab, he walked the edges of the monumental shelf, searching for the exit path. He found none.

  He returned to where the trail led onto the rock and checked that the thieves hadn’t backtracked on the same prints. But, no. Every hoofmark and boot print was heading onto the rock.

  Efar turned round and round. Moonlight shone on the stone, turning it nearly luminescent and highlighting crisscrossing cracks, some filled with blown dirt and the occasional sprouting seed. There were no hoofmarks or prints of any kind. Nor were there any scuffs of freshly chipped rock. It was as if Captain had been spirited away!

  Standing with his hands on his hips and tapping the horizontal stone shelf with his bare foot, Efar considered how a horse could just disappear. He let his gaze rove the breadth of the rock slab and slowly raised his head to view the window of night sky above. A large flying creature—say, a dragon—could have landed here, snatched up Captain, and flown away. And he, Efar, wouldn’t have seen it because he was below the canopy of trees, following on foot.

  Without hesitation, he shifted to griffin, clenching his jaw at the icy pain that scored his bones and muscles, and launched into the furious dark between midnight and dawn, after what he believed to be ahead of him but couldn’t yet see. He drove his wings hard, tucking his lion’s feet and eagle’s claws tightly against his body, cramping his injured leg, in an effort to streamline his flight.

  The dragon had to be big to carry a horse like Captain. It didn’t matter though. No dragon could out fly a griffin. And Efar was the fastest in all the griffin family. He’d proven it many, many times.

  The thieves were currently headed north, but they’d have to turn west sometime, toward the dragon holdings on the edge of their territories. Worried they might have already turned, Efar kept a constant scan to both the north and the west.

  The dragon was on the furthest edge of his vision, straight ahead, to the north; he hadn’t turned yet. It was flying just below the gray puffs of scattered clouds. As he gained on it, he saw it was a giant of a beast, yet it labored heavily, swinging the horse like a pendulum beneath it. Captain didn’t help by squirming. The horse probably didn’t realize that, if he got loose, he’d fall to his death. Serious injury, anyway.

  There was a single rider atop the dragon. So, Efar thought, a dragon hadn’t landed; one of the thieves was a shapeshifter. Was the other?

  * * * *

  The chair Fiera sat in was hard and she’d been in it for hours. Squirming, she tried to find a place on her bottom that wasn’t sore from the unyielding wood. The moans of those sick and dying surrounded her. She hunched further into the corner of the temporary cloth walls, glancing around to see if anyone was watching.

  Marie laid beside her, a small lump that didn’t even stretch the full length of the bed. White salve lay thick in the cuts made by the werewolf. The scent of lavender water was heavy about her. She lay so still and was so pale that Fiera watched closely to see that her young friend still breathed.

  They should have listened to Efar and taken the eastern road. So far their…her…stubbornness had gotten one person injured, one nearly dead, and one missing. She’d had the foresight to remove Marie’s potion pouch, but with nowhere to hide it, had tied it around her own waist. If it were found, everyone would know she and Marie were witches.

  Fiera shifted on the chair again so that her weight was only on one side of her bottom. Sitting and waiting had never been her strong point. She sighed. If only someone was there to speak with, Efar or even Captain.

  Thinking of Efar brought up the memory of his kiss. She’d been too worried about Marie at the time to really comprehend the significance of it. She’d barely noticed he’d done it. She touched her fingers to her lips, remembering the firm heat of his mouth on hers and the passionate depths in his eyes. Her heart swelled so that she found herself breathing hard. Her stomach felt like it had butterflies in it. She closed her eyes and tried to recapture the spice of his
male scent next to her.

  Abruptly, she threw her eyes open, her whole body heated in a furious blush. There was something besides the kiss she hadn’t noticed in her concern over Marie: Efar had been naked! She turned her face toward the wall and squinched her eyes shut tight.

  Her mind refused to obey her commands to not see Efar. Her memory traveled over every inch of his body, every pore, every—

  Fiera jumped to her feet and began pacing. Stop! Stop! Stop! She pounded her fists against her thighs and ground her teeth. All her life she’d only had contact with one man, her father, and he’d kept himself decently covered. Even when he and her mother had sex in the large bed across the room from hers, they’d done it under the blankets.

  She’d been taught what the church preached. Nakedness and sex were done only in the privacy of marriage. Now, the first man she met not only kissed her, but he’d shown her his full body!

  True, he’d just come from being a griffin and returned right back to one, so he had an excuse. A good one, at that. But, he’d kissed her while naked! In the eyes of the church, that had to be tantamount to falling into Hell itself. The fact that she couldn’t banish the image from her mind twice condemned her.

  She sank to the chair again, with a moan. Thrice condemned because she was a witch.

  The clip of shoes on stone brought her attention to a small, stocky man rapidly approaching. Her senses tingled, sharpening into a narrow focus on him. This man was a witch.

  He stopped at Marie’s bedside with a frown. He barely noticed the injured girl; all his attention was on Fiera. He spoke in a low voice, laced with urgency. “We must get you out of the public eye. There are many in this city that seek to destroy our kind.”

  Fiera stood and gestured to Marie, angry that he assumed she’d abandon her friend. “I’m not leaving her behind.”

  He shook his head, frowning harder. “Nor will you have to. She’s also one of us. We care for our own.” He peered over his shoulder and at all points in the giant room. He even left the bedside and checked behind every cloth partition, of which there were quite a few.

  Seemingly satisfied, he returned and slid his arms beneath Marie, lifting her. Without a second look back, he turned and strode straight for the exit. Fiera hurried after him. For such a short man, he moved quickly; she had to half-run just to keep up.

  The main door led them directly onto the drive that approached and then circled the Abbey. In the dark of post-midnight, they followed straight down the cobblestone drive and turned toward the east gate once they came to the road. Before they reached it, however, they turned south again, on a road that eventually curved to run along the city wall. At the first crossroad, a thinly trampled path, they turned west, passing a dark dwelling on the left before stopping at the next. This house was brightly lit and, when the door opened to the man’s gentle kick, light spilled onto the street from the owner’s candle. The woman was as a scarecrow, very tall and lean. Behind her, several more people appeared holding candles. She reached her arm around the short man and propelled him inside. “Hurry, Laurence! Before someone sees you three!” Looking over the top of his head at Fiera, she said, “I’m Gwen. This is my house. You’re safe here.”

  Fiera and Laurence, still carrying Marie, were ushered down a long hallway into a large kitchen. There the woman paused and leaned low over the injured girl, examining the wounds. “These are deep. If we don’t do something now, she won’t survive the dawn. What’s her name?”

  Fiera’s breath caught. The monks at the abbey hadn’t told her the injuries were that bad. Tears sprang to her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. Her friend could die! “She can’t talk, but she likes it when I call her Marie.”

  Gwen, freakishly tall, nodded and led them out the back door to a barn behind. The people in the house hadn’t been all of those present. Three more people in long gowns swept the straw from the dirt floor at the center of the barn. As they swept, a pattern of inset stones became apparent: a large star pointing north in the center of an even larger circle.

  Laurence laid Marie in the center of the star, her head aligned with the tip, at the north.

  Gwen came close to Fiera, bending from the waist to peer in her face. “What did this to her?”

  “A werewolf.”

  The group in the barn hushed and then softly began to whisper. The tall woman straightened and, one by one, they quieted. She returned her attention to Fiera, but didn’t bend to look in her face again. “A werewolf? Are you sure?”

  “I saw it change.”

  Gwen pressed her lips close together, nodded, and turned to her group again. “Let’s prepare.”

  The candles were blown out, all except for Laurence’s. He took Fiera’s arm and gently piloted her toward the door of the barn. “You can’t stay.”

  “What will they do to her?” She looked back over her shoulder to see the spark of another single candle flare into being. The dim light cast upon Gwen. She was holding a long, sharp sword.

  * * * *

  Efar knew the second thief wasn’t a flying creature, or he wouldn’t have been riding. But he could still be a shapeshifter. Possibly a second werewolf. He’d have to plan this down to every fine detail.

  He angled his wings to fly above his opposition. An attack from there wouldn’t be expected. But, he had to time it carefully; otherwise one of the thieves would alert the other. His goal, therefore, was to take out the rider when attacking the dragon, all in one movement. And, of course, sometime during the fight, the dragon would have to let go of Captain.

  As he flew, his wings sliced through the damp edge of a low cloud. He considered another problem: fire. Dragons ate phosphorous rock so they could spit fire. Would this one, a thief, have done that? Would he have had the money to buy some, or wanted to carry it with him? Would he have eaten it already, gambling that someone would attack him while he was shifted into his beast? Somehow, Efar felt the answers to all those questions were a resounding “No.”

  The dark shadow below changed course toward the west. Efar followed. So far, neither thief had thought to look up. Ahead, the moonlight glinted off a series of six lakes. This would be his best chance, before they had to rise for the mountains that marked the beginning of dragon territory.

  Just as they crossed over the largest of the lakes, he dove toward the dragon’s head, sweeping one wing against the rider and knocking him off. The thief fell with a scream. The dragon didn’t drop Captain as hoped. It snaked its head toward Efar and hissed. Instinctively, Efar rolled away, but no fire came.

  Again, he dove toward the dragon’s head, clawing and pecking at its eyes. As long as it held Captain, there was little it could do other than snap at Efar if he flew too close. In an effort to escape, the dragon flew lower and lower until they were just above the tree line.

  They passed the water and banks of the first lake, coming to the smaller second one. Efar backed off and the dragon took two mighty flaps. Then, it was over water again. Efar attacked. This time, the giant beast let go of the horse and turned belly up to counter the griffin’s attack with claws, wings, and teeth of his own.

  Efar, instead of joining combat with his enemy, tucked and rolled to the side, and then straightened out and rocketed after the plummeting Captain. In the brief span of the fall, he wondered at why he would risk so much for a woman he barely knew and who wasn’t sure if she wanted his touch. There was one thing he didn’t wonder about, though: Fiera would never forgive him if something happened to her horse.

  Efar’s plan was to follow Captain right into the lake and help the horse swim to land. His plan hadn’t included the dragon, angry at the loss of its prize, diving after him. But, within seconds of Captain’s feet touching water, the dragon barreled into Efar’s back, driving him deep into the lake, all the way to the peat bottom.

  In the dark water, Efar couldn’t see what he was doing, where his enemy was, or if Captain made it to safety. The weight of the dragon forced
all the air from Efar’s chest as he lay trapped on the lake floor. His lungs ached from oxygen deprivation. His limbs felt heavy and his head grew fuzzy.

  He had to do something or he’d die here, at the bottom of this lake. The dragon was big enough to keep its head above water. Squirming brought Efar no relief, nor did pushing with his legs. He tried swiping at the dragon’s skin with his razor-sharp eagle claws, but to no avail. The thick scales protected the beast. He faded in and out of consciousness.

  He took one talon, reached up to the dragon’s foot, and rammed it under the dragon’s claw. The terrible crushing weight lifted off of him. With every last bit of strength funneled into his weak limbs, he pulled himself to the surface. His head broke above the water and he took in a great gulp of air, filling his lungs to their fullest capacity. He spread his wings like a raft, holding himself above the water. The dragon was grappling with Captain, trying to once again lift him.

  Efar was in no shape for another speed flight, especially not one over the mountains. He had to stop this thief right here, right now. With a final burst of energy, he exploded into the night sky, directly in front of the giant beast. Stretching his neck, he hissed at the dragon, and then loosed with a primal scream that brooked no confusion. He tipped back and opened his talons with a snick and shoved them and his lion claws forward. He fanned his wings as large as he could, showing the heavy bone that could break a man’s head. That dragon needed to know exactly what it’d be facing if it tried to take the horse.

  The heavy monster hesitated. It was alone and far from anyone who would help. Bellowing back at Efar, it dropped the squirming and kicking Captain back in the water and arced neatly into the clouds above.

  Efar landed in the mere beside the swimming horse and slowly changed back to human. He lay back in the water, drinking in air and staring at the quarter moon. His head buzzed and his limbs tingled from the unspent adrenaline.