by K Vale Nagle
The fisherfolk who’d first braved the taiga had hoped to return with sugar frogs. That proved impractical. They still ate their fill, having to delay their departure a day because of upset stomachs, but ended up trading their fish for aneda leaves and resin. These had proven more valuable than frogs for preventing infection. Aneda resin worked on sting ray barbs and most jelly stings.
When the wingtorn attacking Crane’s Nest had retreated to meet up with the wingtorn across the delta at Swan’s Rest, several fisherfolk had slipped back into Crane’s Nest hoping to find eggs. Only two eggs were found, but they located the supply of aneda and brought it with them.
“Is it done?” Rorin asked her.
Tresh smoothed her feathers. “Yes. Their spirits turn to light and join the sky ocean.”
“Thank you for doing this,” Rorin said. “It’s too easy to forget tradition in the face of adversity.”
She was unsure how to respond. Their interactions had never been this formal or about tradition in the past. She’d always been one of his best, even though she wasn’t one of the hunters who learned from him and painted their throats red. Those hunters celebrated him and sought to learn from what he did well. She’d flown—well, swum—a different current and had her own disciples who’d heard she was back and were making their way up. She kicked off her webbed boots, and another petrel gryphon took them to be mended.
Her relationship with Rorin hadn’t been emotional, and she didn’t like to see him morose now. “So, some wingless snakes from up north decided to come to our nest and soil it. What do we do now?”
Rorin shrugged, but there was a hint of a smile. “Tonight, we sleep. In the morning, we get more spears and make a plan. In the afternoon, we kill them. Then, when they’re dead, we figure out who they were.”
“I like a straightforward plan,” she said.
Thenca found herself with a strange reprieve the next day. Larren, flying high above the forest and nowhere near the water, reported seeing two flights leave the island for the mainland. They went west past Crane’s Nest instead of east towards the wingtorn camp.
“Is there another village west of here?” she asked Larren from her perch atop a redwood branch.
“How should I know?” He turned his beak up at her.
“You actually live here,” she challenged.
He snorted. “No, I live in the eyrie.”
Her tail twitched. “You live in an eyrie. It’s not the only one. And I meant you live here, east of the mountains. I’ve heard that the fish at the eyrie are mostly caught here, yes? You must know something.”
“No one knows anything about the fisherfolk. They’re just sick opinici who can’t integrate with the eyrie proper and run off to live at the edge of the world. Perverts who want to nest with gryphons.”
His sneer and candid speech belied a blind spot she’d seen among the Redwood Valley opinici: they no longer thought of the wingtorn as being gryphons anymore. In truth, most wingtorn felt the same way. What alarmed her was that opinici might think of the kjarr gryphlets as gryphons instead of integrated eyrie citizens.
“How did you know where to find Crane’s Rest?” She deliberately mixed up the absurdly similar town names.
“Crane’s Nest,” he corrected. “That’s how it was written on the map—” before she could interrupt, he caught on. “Maurle had the map. He’s the one the shark got. I don’t know if it had more cities.”
She looked out at the shore. The tide was low again. If last night’s high tide hadn’t washed Maurle out to sea, they could still get the map. If the fisherfolk were about to bring in reinforcements, the wingtorn needed to flee now. There’d be no way to win.
“Did either of you see the map?” Larren tried to yell down to the other guards. They seemed caught up in their conversation with Urious and ignored him.
She rolled her eyes and then did an exact impression of Larren at a much louder volume. “You two! Over here, NOW!”
Larren and the two guards all started, then the guards flew over. Urious smirked.
“Yes, sir?” the guards said in chorus, one echoing the other.
“Did you two see the map?” Larren asked. They nodded. “Good. Now, is there another village west of here?”
“I think I saw an ‘X’ far west of here, south of the taiga,” the first guard said.
“No, I think that was just the artist’s way of drawing the peaks of the mountains,” the second guard offered.
“Does the taiga extend all the way to the ocean?” Larren asked.
They all looked at Thenca.
She stared back. “I don’t live here, remember?”
“But on the kjarr side?” the second guard asked.
The kjarr side was all mangrove swamp along the coast. She thought back to the pretty owl-faced taiga gryphon she’d spent so many hours talking with. Hadn’t he said he’d flown to the mountains’ end once? And found sand?
“I think there are dunes,” she said at last. “I don’t know if anyone lives there, but a taiga gryphon told me he played in hills of sand where the mountains end and the ocean starts.”
Larren preened, his way of coping with annoyance. “We need to make a try for the map to be sure.”
Ari was long, sleek, and covered in small black spots. Urious had found the fastest wingtorn for the map retrieval task. Black streaks like tear stains flowed down her eyes and around her black beak. She looked a little like the sand in direct sunlight, which might help.
Thenca drew a map in the dirt showing where Maurle had died while Ari looked on.
“If there’s no map,” Urious explained, “just head back. I think we’re seeing his body there, but it can be hard to tell.”
Ari nodded. She removed her harness and stretched. With a positive attitude, she’d been popular before losing her beautiful orange wings. She’d been the denmother of the kjarr pride once. Two of the gryphlets being held at the eyrie were hers. Since becoming wingtorn, her popularity had only increased.
She’d been a good flyer, but she was a wonder at running, something she’d never have discovered living with wings at the edge of a peat bog. Jun had calmed her many times, reassuring her worries about the gryphlets, complimenting her ability to run. Fortune in misfortune was the mantra he’d used. There was little of that to go around, but the eagle’s share had gone to her.
While Larren was on the ground, the other two guards kept watch from atop the redwoods. There’d been no sign of stirring from the island since the two flights left to fly northwest at dawn. There were still some debris along the shore—driftwood, barrels, and a tall post that rose above the water line even at high tide that held water skins, spears, and other supplies. They couldn’t help but notice that the fisherfolk villages had been designed as if to protect them from the ocean side. Ari didn’t know what that meant, but she would have loved an opportunity to sit and talk with one of them, find out how they lived.
One of the guards gave the all-clear, and Ari made a dash for it.
The distance from the forest to the huts: cleared in a flash.
The loose rocks before the sand: cleared, but not as fast.
The sand slowed her down, but she kept at it. Around forty yards from the corpse they thought was Maurle, she heard an alarm. From her left and right, further down the beach, two all-black gryphons crawled out from beneath driftwood. If they weren’t the same shark-gryphon who killed Maurle, they were cut from the same cloth. Their back feet looked strange, webbed, as though they were backwards opinici, and their harnesses were made from something waterproof. When she realized they were both gryphons, and thus wouldn’t be throwing spears her way, she continued her dash for the map.
Instead of going after her, they attempted to go towards the rocks to cut her off from the camp.
Her paws shook as she checked the body. The tide may have withdrawn, but the entire ocean seemed full of possibilities that ended poorly for her.
She had one bit of luck. The body was Ma
urle. She snapped his harness off and held it in her beak.
She tried running left and right, but the sand slowed her down too much to let her go around the gryphons. When she sprinted, one of them flew to stay between her and the forest. If there were more, they were probably coming from the water. She could see Urious and Thenca running out, but they weren’t her first choice for backup.
Another call of warning from the tree tops: gryphons from the water. There was a third gryphon, more brown than black, but with the same flippers and build, flying from a raft to the shore.
Ari called out for help. The two fisherfolk hissed at her. They saw Urious and Thenca coming from the forest and decided to make their move. One of them started to fly when a spear flew past its head.
The two guards had abandoned their station as lookouts and had joined the fight with as many spears as they’d been able to scavenge between raids. Their aim was poor, but it was enough to shift things in their favor. The two black gryphons split, one going east, one going west, then they cut south to the water and disappeared. The third gryphon watched them from the edge of the water. He seemed to be going to check Maurle’s shrimp-eaten body to see what was so important about it.
The guards escorted Ari back into the forest, and they picked through the harness looking for the map to try to determine just how much trouble they were in.
10
Flameworks
The Redwood Valley Eyrie was quiet. With the impending shore invasion and weald fire, Brevin took a moment away from Reeve’s Nest to tuck her children in. They’d grown up in the same nest she’d lived in as a chick, away from the politics of the official housing. If she’d taken a consort, he or she would live here and watch the children. Despite the parallels to gryphon culture, reeves were often expected to have several eggs with different opinici to protect the family line. She’d been considered unusual in that she was an only child.
Even the Crackling Sea Eyrie’s reeve, whose consort and interests were exclusively male, had felt the pressure to father a small flock of children. She understood that pressure. She’d never been attracted to another opinicus—the power dynamic complicated issues further—but she’d found time to lay seven eggs.
On most nights a team of nannies would watch over her brood, but since the Crackling Sea Eyrie’s attack, she’d also assigned guards to keep an eye on her youngest. Three of her oldest offspring had homes and mates of their own now, so all of Brevin’s eggs weren’t in one nest, so to speak. She didn’t know what good it would do, but she couldn’t send them away from the eyrie. There was nowhere safe to go.
The only way to live in a safe world was to reshape it, pacify it. It was why she’d made the decisions she had. Her father’s only indulgence to the eyrie’s isolationist policies was to keep the goliath bird pass open to the Crackling Sea. Living at the far corner of the world, past a frozen taiga, against the untamed ocean, had been an effective strategy for independence for many years. It had allowed generations to be born, live their lives, and die without interference. If the Crackling Sea Eyrie’s diminutive size and lack of prosperity was any indication, the Redwood Valley Eyrie had done well for itself by comparison.
Her youngest child, the one she’d had with Larren, chirped for a story. Under protest, they were all sharing the same room with soft nests lined against the walls. The feral goliath birds of the taiga had feathers that resembled fur, and each of her chicks had a bed made from the feathers of a different goliath, ranging in color from white to grey. Brevin sat on a cushion and settled in for story time.
She told them about their ancestor killing the great cobra to save the lord of all eyries. Seven snake pendants, all different species, had been crafted to remind them of their lineage. Whoever became reeve after her would inherit her cobra necklace as she’d inherited her father’s on his passing.
They asked about the types of snakes across the continent, snakes that hadn’t been seen by any of the Redwood Valley opinici in her lifetime. Cobra were a world away. The taiga formed a barrier that kept most snakes out. She didn’t know if sea snakes existed off the weald shores. They were excited by the idea of snakes that swam but seemed unimpressed that gliding snakes were a rarity outside the weald.
She’d have to ask someone at the university about offshore snakes when she had a moment. I should have asked that apprentice, Kia, when I interrogated her. She didn’t provide any other useful answers. The scholars kept a taxonomy of all wildlife. They’d insisted on updating it with capybaras after the grasslands experiment—the tome’s first new addition since squirrels. During her last meeting with scholars, she’d feigned interest and they’d regaled her with reports of massive snakes crossing the grasslands, a few large enough to eat an opinicus whole. Still, she told her children the stories of serpents as her mother had told them to her.
She finished up the story of the krait, her youngest’s favorite for being more venomous than a cobra without drawing attention to itself. The last child to ask for a story was her middle child, Ivess. She had a dorm at the university but had been called back, under protest, after word of the Crackling Sea’s invasion arrived. She was the only one with a native favorite, the leaf-nosed snake.
A leaf-nosed snake was far too small to eat an opinicus whole. It didn’t have the venom of a sea snake nor the flair of a cobra. It couldn’t fly. Still, Ivess loved it. This was not a story Brevin’s mother had told her, so Brevin’s telling of it was her own creation. It’d become a game they shared.
“What does it do if I were to come after it?” Ivess would ask.
“It rises up and flattens its neck like a cobra,” Brevin would respond.
“But what if that doesn’t scare me? I am reeve’s blood, after all.” Ivess’s questions hadn’t changed in all these years.
“Then it puts its tail into some leaves and shakes them to sound like a rattlesnake.”
“But what if I take that as a challenge?”
“Then it flips over and plays dead.” Much like politics, Brevin thought.
Being a cobra was enough to keep most problems away. Other times, a warning served. Lulling your opponent into thinking they’d won was sometimes the only way to survive. The Crackling Sea Eyrie was clearly on its back now. The army was stationed there in case the invaders returned to finish them off. A leaf-nosed ploy.
“May I come with you to the meeting tonight?” Ivess asked.
Brevin thought of the reeve’s children found after the Crackling Sea Eyrie invasion. Would Ivess be any safer by her side? She didn’t know.
“Yes, but only for a little,” she conceded. If all went well, the fighting would be a day’s flight away at the closest.
The small ledge below the Snowfeather Dam overlooking the flameworks and Redwood Valley Eyrie was crowded. Zeph, Kia, Orlea, Askel, Triddle, Hatzel, and twenty gryphons they’d picked up from their pride on the way all huddled and kept low in the pre-morning darkness. Their goal was to unleash Triddle on the flameworks—no one trusted Askel inside anything with flame in the title—while the rest would infiltrate the eyrie from the ground up and use the confusion to smuggle Satra and the gryphlets out of the city.
When they’d left the medicine cave, Askel and Triddle had put on harnesses that contained saltpeter wrapped in a dry covering. The saltpeter had come from the crate they’d found Cherine with. The dried leaves were the same type Zeph used to wrap the ground parrot meat when it was time to bring it to market. Askel and Triddle had been understandably nervous about bringing the explosive with them into the medicine gryphon’s cave. The additional saltpeter caches the prides had found with Cherine’s map were moved to a pile just north of the weald in the grasslands. It wasn’t an ideal location, but there was a small pond for the capybaras and no pride wanted to house anything combustible in their territory.
Merin and Strix’s groups were in position, waiting on the flameworks diversion to begin. Merin was at the ground-level eyrie gate that Zeph had used to escape. It was safer to
have two groups going after Satra in case one ran into trouble.
Strix was in the east. Because his plateau was the only safe place for the eastern prides to flee to, most of his owlish kin stayed behind to help with the evacuation. They were trying to find a safe path up for the wingtorn. Only Strix’s children, six owl gryphons, had come with him to help find Satra. He’d said he would clear the route out and make sure they weren’t disturbed by guards. The other pride leaders had not come themselves, opting instead to attempt to find the other caches in the weald.
Merin considered it cowardice, but Zeph understood. What good was any of this if all the prey animals in the weald burned? The trees would survive, even thrive once the fires burned down. But if there wasn’t enough food to support the prides through the winter, tensions would rise even higher than they were now. A few stragglers had shown up despite their pride leader’s commands to the contrary. Zeph recognized at least one feathermane. In total, there were almost fifty gryphons against an eyrie of thousands.
Younce had guided them through the mountains to get to their vantage point unseen, then left. He’d promised to bring the orange and blue medicine apprentice with him and ask his pride leader if Cherine and Kia would be welcome. The medicine apprentice had been sent because after the monitor sickness, the old medicine gryphon wanted to check on the health of the prides and pool knowledge. Her apprentice would do just that, if she could survive the cold and Younce’s grumpiness. While Zeph would never admit it, he did miss Younce’s taiga pride grit, just a little bit.
Everyone knew the plan, so Hatzel’s only words of wisdom were simple. “Everyone know what to do? Good. Now go do it.”
They split into groups, and Triddle led the first into the flameworks.
