by K Vale Nagle
“Maybe there aren’t anymore.” He moved his head back and forth, his ears plastered straight back. “We need to tell the other prides. There’s still time to find the saltpeter and move it before it’s too late.”
She frowned. “Merin was holding Cherine prisoner. He thinks Cherine was the one planting the crates. He saw him lighting some of the saltpeter to see what it was.”
Orlea fidgeted. The strange gryphon-doctor and most of her entourage had moved on to help the new opinicus patient, leaving Orlea with a single sleeping gryphon watching over her. The gryphon, poor dear, had a blue face with black bars and then yellow haunches with black spots. With coloring like that, it was no wonder she’d turned to healing instead of hunting. She was fit only for hunting a blueberry bush at sunset. She looked like one of the sillier songbird-opinici had mated with one of the gryphons that came with the Crackling Sea Eyrie delegation. Her face had a constant surprised look that slumber did not erase. Even now, Orlea found herself wondering what the mismatched apprentice was dreaming of. Perhaps the sun setting over a field of blueberries.
Orlea knew her grumpiness wasn’t because of her wing sprain. Once treated, she’d been told it would heal quickly and without permanent damage. No, it was because she’d never been around so many gryphons before. In her wealthier days, before the forests of the eyrie stopped being public hunting lands and became the reeve’s lands, she’d seen one or two fisherfolk gryphons come to market to sell salt or fish. With her current state of affairs, she’d gotten to know some of the refugees at the bottom level. She’d even made some beads helping watch their fledglings when they reached the age where they started to try to fly. Everyone in the lower levels was hungry, but the fledglings’ insatiable curiosity was endearing. It was better than dealing with opinicus chicks, who took their cues from their elders and treated her like part of the lower class.
She stretched her good wing and flapped it slowly.
“Careful there,” came the voice of Hatzel from behind her.
Orlea tensed in surprise, then in pain.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” Hatzel frowned.
“I’m not used to being around so many of you,” Orlea said.
“Oh, there’s only one of me,” Hatzel said. “You can’t throw a rock without hitting ten Zephs, however.”
Zeph looked up from where he’d been napping along the edge of the room. “I don’t think you could hit one Zeph with a rock.”
“Just let me find a rock.” Hatzel flicked a tiny pebble, perhaps an acorn, at him. He gasped and pretended as though he were dodging a boulder, flattening himself against the ground.
“You must be glad to have him back,” Orlea said. The medicine the apprentice had given her was finally starting to take hold. “Did he escape from the army? You’re lucky he made it out before they cut off his wings.”
Hatzel and Zeph looked at each other in alarm.
“Before they did what now?” he asked.
4
Kia
After being separated from Zeph, Kia was questioned for an hour by Brevin. The reeve was polite, making a show of her relief that Kia had made it home safe. Brevin’s long neck meant that her beak was always hovering above Kia’s eye line. Kia found herself staring at seven delicate chain necklaces of varying sizes that cascaded down the reeve’s neck to her chest. They caught the fire like starlight on a field of green feathers. Each necklace clasped in the front with two serpents intertwining. She had never seen such delicate metal work before. She wondered if anyone at the eyrie had the skill to make something so small, so detailed.
“Kia?” Brevin prompted.
Kia looked up. She’d been lost in the swaying of Brevin’s neck. “Yes, sorry. It’s been a long day. I seem to have dozed off for a moment. Please forgive me. You were asking about the gryphon?”
At Brevin’s nod, Kia explained that Zeph had been assigned to her by the pride and turned over her field notebook. The reeve seemed unsurprised by the gryphon territorial glyphs but commended Kia on her attention to detail.
Behind the reeve stood the commander of the eyrie forces. With just the two of them, he looked like her bodyguard. Kia tried but couldn’t remember his name. He looked like he wanted to ask her some questions, but the reeve put a talon on his shoulder and then told Kia to go home and get some rest.
Kia was grateful for the dismissal. When she exited into the brisk, moon-bathed night, she perked up. A cool breeze pulled smoke past her nares. The brazier light danced against the spires, illuminating some while others fell into the night. The flighty shadows of moths chased each other along the walls.
A gryphon with black ears and a circle of yellow feathers on her head passed Kia, heading inside. The stranger bowed slightly as she passed. She wore a harness with a pink fish on it.
For a moment, despite the wrong plumage and build, Kia thought the gryphon might have been Zeph. She’d meant to find Zeph, but the hour was late, and she didn’t know where they’d have sent him. To live with a refugee family? To stay in the diplomat’s quarters? She finally gave up and headed back to the university.
The guards stationed at the border of the Reeve’s Nest building and the university grounds were stopping and questioning anyone out this late. Ahead of Kia was a cockatiel opinicus hopping from side to side. He was black, maybe midnight blue, with a little red stripe under his bloodshot eyes.
A red-leafed fern, once limited to a fairly secluded valley along the mountain pass to the Crackling Sea, had become popular for opinici to grow in the shaded sections of the eyrie once its mind-soothing qualities became known. In small doses, it calmed the nerves and served as a contraceptive. In larger doses, hallucinations and paranoia were common. It was too valuable to forbid outright, but it was still a good idea not to get caught in possession of it while out and about. The cockatiel’s beak was starting to chatter. He slipped his harness off and shoved it behind a decorative plant. When the guards were busy questioning another opinicus, he tried to slip out of the line and back the way he’d come. His back feet stepped on Kia’s tail and she squawked. Several guards turned and chased after him. She watched him dive straight down into the deeps of the eyrie at break-neck speed and prayed he wasn’t too wobbly to dodge the branches and herb-drying lines on the way down.
By the time Kia arrived at the front of the line, they saw her university-issued, many-pocketed harness and sent her on her way.
Kia was flying up to her small nest when she passed by an open door. Under other circumstances, she’d have ignored it. Some opinici preferred a cold nest even this high, and others were up late studying and wanted to let in the moonlight. Braziers were available in the common areas on campus for late-night studying, but candles in the housing nests were prohibited. Fire provided a great boon for working late, but until the spires were rebuilt with nonflammable materials, a project whose funding had dried up, candles were out of the question.
Two things caused her curiosity and concern to overcome her fear. The door seemed to be hanging at an unusual angle, and it was Cherine’s home. There was enough light from the moon to let her see inside, so she pushed aside the door to look around.
Cherine had always been a bit of a magpie, figuratively speaking. She’d seen his parents’ place once, and it was the cleanest nest she’d ever set foot in. Whatever quality caused them to clean every day had not been passed down to their youngest son. Youngest living son, she corrected herself. On one bookshelf were several feathers that had once belonged to his little brother next to a goliath bird egg re-creation and several pouches of grass seed.
The only way to know for certain that something had been taken in Cherine’s nest would be if the place had been emptied out. He took his work home with him and treated his hobbies like they were a second job. One rounded wall was entirely filled with books, a quality he had inherited from his mother instead of her cleanliness, as her own clean nest housed a fancy bookcase with books that weighed more than an opinicus
chick.
The scribes often worked at a major library and for a fee they would make a copy of a book. The fee was large, but the university offered researchers a stipend for any books related to their work. With this many books, Kia thought he was probably keeping at least one scribe flush with beads.
She looked for any familiar titles, A Treatise on Feather Dynamics or perhaps the ever popular What Does Your Coloring Say About Your Personality, but didn’t see either. Taking a book to the door and holding it under the moonlight revealed that these were all books he’d written himself based on the observations in his field notebooks. They seemed fairly tame—this one was on the ratio of grass consumption to manure production in capybaras—though the gaps in the shelves suggested that many of them were missing. Maybe the library had them and was making copies of the more interesting tomes for use by other researchers, or perhaps he’d taken them with him to the grasslands for reference. He’d have had to bring one or two with him at a time. These all used the older vellum and weighed a good bit. As she’d once heard Cherine’s mother say, it was the kind of book you could have killed a lace monitor with if you had to.
Several containers of ink looked undisturbed on a short, makeshift desk. Several feathers, converted to quill pens, were resting upright in a cup. Only two looked like they’d been his, the other four didn’t match his golden eagle hues. One green and blue feather looked suspiciously like it’d come from her own plumage. She blushed and left the house, doing her best to wrestle the door closed.
Her own home was two stories higher. Having a high-altitude home meant that there was no one above her. She opened the roof and let the moonlight settle in. She unhooked her harness and dropped it on the floor. She started to head to her sleeping nest but remembered she had a few questions she didn’t want to forget for tomorrow. She reached into her harness for her field notebook and, just as she remembered she’d given it to Reeve Brevin, she pulled out Cherine’s bloodstained book from the grasslands. Sleep was going to have to wait.
Daylight came early with the open roof. Kia left at once to get to the university. The headmaster—an opinicus who embodied his title so well that his hatching name, Neider, was nearly lost to history itself—had sent Cherine to the grasslands to do research and had sent Kia after him. She wanted to know how much he knew about what Cherine was up to. Neider had university staff more skilled than her, more trusted, but she’d been sent instead. She’d assumed it was because no one was more invested in Cherine’s well-being than she was, but was that why?
The sun warmed her wings even as the early morning winds chilled her face. She shared the skies with two young opinici. Siblings, judging by their matching upturned scythe-beaks and similar build, were also descending upon the university. Housing formed a rim around the classroom buildings, which were several stories shorter than the surrounding area, giving her a nesting feeling when she traveled this route.
The university grounds did, in fact, resemble the ground. The tops of buildings were covered with a small layer of soil and seeded with variants of the same grass they used to feed the herds on the grasslands. What started from the necessity of science had become an aesthetic choice. The scythe-beak siblings joined several apprentices who were already up and going through different sections of the grass picking weeds and recording their type and frequency in their notebooks. The imported capybaras found several native berries and flowers poisonous, so efforts were underway to determine which types of grass encouraged which types of weeds to help keep their herd rodents safe. As far as Kia knew, there was no discernible difference in weed frequency, and this was all a plot hatched at the highest levels to get the apprentices to keep the grounds looking nice.
They were used to seeing her come and drop by with breakfast, so they perked up when someone noticed her bright colors. She was embarrassed that she’d forgotten and promised to bring something by for them tomorrow. They accepted her apology graciously, and she continued on her way to see the headmaster.
She ran a talon along the chimes outside his office. The heavy, water-proof curtains—imported from the Crackling Sea—were parted and a brown owl’s face stared out at her. She’d heard he was in his office before daybreak, but from the blinking of his eyes, she suspected he was either still awake or newly awake.
“I’m quite busy this morning. Could you come back later… What was your name again, apprentice?”
His forgetful owl act was just that: an act. She was certain he could name every opinicus in the university from memory. After spending weeks on assignment at the Crackling Sea Eyrie to trade saltpeter for seeds and capybaras, he hadn’t missed a beat when he returned. His mind was as sharp as a ranger’s trap.
His assignment had been necessary because the initial attempts to domesticate the goliath birds for use on the grasslands had only created a feral goliath herd that rejoined their fuzzy kin in the mountains. Capybaras were supposed to be easier to care for.
In lieu of words, she unlatched a pocket on her harness and pulled out Cherine’s bloodstained journal. Headmaster Neider squinted but seemed to recognize the handwriting.
“Ah,” he said. “Come in.”
The headmaster’s room was as ceremonial and decorative as it was functional. It contained paintings and plumage of past headmasters and notable graduates. While an apprentice’s good standing outside the university was linked to the master whose tutelage they had endured—and often depended upon their master’s reputation remaining intact—the university’s multiple-teacher system had allowed its graduates to remain inoculated from the transgressions of any one master.
It even seemed to thrive upon a certain level of scandal, as the paintings attested to. Felicio, nicknamed “The Phoenix,” had pioneered techniques that were used today for heating and luminescence. His nickname was appropriate for a life full of near-hits and at least one accidental self-immolation. His death, most likely but not definitively accidental, had come heralding experimentation in saltpeter. His son, Bario, had taken over the work and still had a scorched section of wall with the blast shadow of his father hanging in the flameworks outside of town.
Other paintings included Impir the Mad, the blue peafowl opinicus whose research continued from jail. Mally the Nighthaunt, who had fled the city with a dozen eggs but left behind excellent research in the form of the Nachlass Mal still used today, and even a single gryphon who had helped set up the university. The gryphon painting’s picture frame was unusually high at the bottom, covering his paws to protect the delicate sensibilities of modern opinicus scholars. She looked from the gryphon painting to the headmaster’s owl foretalons, which had been left shaggy. Most owl-taloned opinici trimmed back their fur-like feathers to keep them from being mistaken for forepaws. The headmaster was lazy, obstinate, or perhaps just recognizable enough on his own that he felt no need for such shearing.
The books along the walls were beautiful and practical, just not for reference. Opinici Lacuna: Lexical Gaps in Native Eyrie Populations Volume IV was a dense book that no one ever referred back to. What the eyrie really needed was a term for research so esoteric that even the university shied away from it. The books, heavy curtains, and thick walls provided a barrier against the incredible auditory senses some opinici possessed.
“I had a letter from the reeve this morning. It didn’t mention Cherine’s notebook.” The headmaster’s words floated on the air like bees. Whether he was discussing the most horrific plague or a beautiful flower, his words remained weightless.
Kia considered asking him about the gryphon she’d seen outside the reeve’s building but decided not to muddy the waters further on tangents. “I didn’t know I had it until I got home. Look, here. He was doing math on the herds and how many opinici he could feed with them. He determined that we’re already producing far more food than we need to consume here in the eyrie. Is this right?”
The headmaster recoiled a little from the blood on the journal but pulled it over to him and glanced over the
figures. “His math is correct. He just fails to see the scope that the future holds.” He walked to the wall and pulled back one tapestry to reveal a map of the valley and surrounding areas.
“Are we expecting a rise in chicks?” she asked. Their eyrie was small on the map. The area between the coast and the mountains, the weald and the fishing villages, was small enough that she could cover them all with both forelegs. The tapestry must have been at least a decade old because the grasslands were still forest and the weald ran unchecked from ocean to eyrie.
“Most of our food is sent to the Crackling Sea Eyrie. Jonas is here to serve as trade ambassador. In return, they keep watch on the mountain pass.” Neider traced a talon from the forest eyrie through the mountain pass to the Crackling Sea in the northwest.
“Did something happen to their fish? Why does the pass need watching?”
“Another eyrie attacked.” He touched a claw on several other eyries marked in the north and west. She couldn’t name half of them, didn’t know if they’d interacted with any of them in her lifetime. The mountains allowed for isolation. The goliath bird pass allowed the Crackling Sea Eyrie, which traded with the other eyries, to then transport any notable goods on to the Redwood Valley Eyrie with significant mark up. One eyrie far north had a recent circle scratched around it. It drew her eyes.
