by K Vale Nagle
Strix flung the limp body of Ivess at the Reeve’s Guard. Brevin couldn’t tell if her daughter was alive or dead. Wolden tried to escort Brevin through the back, but the door had been barricaded from the outside. Strix slipped between the Reeve’s Guard and dashed at Brevin. Only Wolden’s last minute intercession saved her. Strix showed no sign of annoyance, made no comment. He just stared at her and Wolden, then renewed his assault.
Zeph arrived at the university grounds ahead of the fire. It took him a moment, but he found the open door of the headmaster’s study and flew inside. There were chimes of all sizes and materials. He wasn’t sure what to do. Ultimately, he just shook all them, surprising himself at just how loud they were. Several opinici who’d been awakened by the blast from the flameworks heard the chimes and flew over. They didn’t look twice at Zeph’s forepaws. His infamy did not extend past the guards to the common opinici. He explained that the eyrie was on fire and they needed to evacuate, but to spread the word on their way. Soon, the skies began to fill with opinici heading out of the city to the hills.
“Where now?” Zeph wondered aloud. The smoke was only going to get worse. He needed to get out of here soon. Maybe he should look for more chimes in the other districts.
His thought was cut off by the collapse of the market spire. The mushroom-shaped structure collapsed in on itself and toppled over, knocking the top off a neighboring spire. Zeph launched himself into the air and fled south before the university spire gave out.
By the time Kia arrived back at the hatchery with the goliath birds, the way had been cleared, and most of Hatzel’s gryphons had returned and were helping corral the kjarr gryphlets. Kia and her fledgling helper had found packs for fifteen of the goliath birds. The other three wandered behind the others, not wanting to leave the safety of the flock. Since they were designed to bring large quantities of fish from one eyrie to another, they smelled terrible but could fit two gryphlets in the left harness pouch and two gryphlets in the right side of the saddlebag. The goliaths stood nine feet tall, dwarfing the small gryphons and lone opinicus. Kia hadn’t found a cart to attach them to but thought this would handle most of the gryphlets.
The two adolescent kjarr fledglings took the reins and led the flock while Kia and the weald gryphons each grabbed a single gryphlet and followed the trail. They’d made it forty yards when Kia looked back and could just make out the top of the hatcheries catching fire. She hoped they weren’t taking the gryphlets out of the eyrie just to find the weald and grasslands aflame.
Hatzel approached Reeve’s Nest with trepidation. The grounds and walls were decorated with blood. She didn’t see any gryphons, but Reeve’s Guard corpses littered the grounds. This looked less like a surgical strike and more like a war had been played out against an unseen enemy. The silence unnerved her, and she wasn’t reassured when it was broken by an opinicus calling for help. She flew up to an open balcony and looked down upon the chaos.
The Reeve’s Guard inside had fared little better than the guards outside. The maps on the table suggested the reeve had been talking strategy when Strix arrived. The commander’s escorts were dead. She counted twenty bodies, all opinici. They were next to the throne, and Brevin was nowhere in sight, so Hatzel assumed they’d been killed buying time for the reeve to escape.
A small blue peafowl opinicus was slipping out the main doors, but before Hatzel could decide what to do about that, the light of a brazier flickered off a shape across the room from her. The metal badge on the harness of a ranger watching from another balcony glinted in the firelight.
Strix himself clashed against Wolden. Hatzel recognized the opinicus from Kia’s description. The two flew against each other, Wolden with a war cry, Strix with silence, and then separated. Wolden’s breastplate lay in tatters. The lacerations on his chest looked extensive. It took Hatzel a moment to realize Strix was similarly wounded. The talon scrapes across his chest were hard to spot in his dark plumage, but sticking out of the wound was a metal claw that had been pulled off Wolden’s talon.
Across the room, Hatzel saw another ranger with a net join the first one in appraising the situation, preparing to come to the commander’s aid. As they pulled themselves up and got ready to launch, Hatzel flew into the building and cried out a warning for Strix. She caught one opinicus mid-flight and crashed with him into the maps on the wall on the far side of the room. Strix slipped around the other’s net like oil on water and slashed the opinicus’s throat as though it had been an adolescent lace monitor with an inflated sense of self.
“Nice of you to join me, Hatzel.” Some of the softness of Strix’s speech had been sanded away by his wounds.
“I’m looking for Jonas. Did he escape with the reeve? He’s duck-shaped, blue heron, Crackling Sea harness.”
“There was no duck here when I arrived.” Strix looked around, his eyes pausing momentarily on the location where the blue peacock opinicus had fallen and was now absent. “The reeve escaped but is on her own. I will take care of her once he is dead.”
Hatzel wanted to help Strix but was unsure of how this had come about. He was supposed to be guarding their escape route. Had he left his kin there? Her thoughts were interrupted by his speech, which came slow, labored.
“Now, if you wouldn’t mind?”
She took the hint and grabbed the map of the cache locations from the wall and held it in her beak. She left through the balcony she’d come in from and risked one glance back at Strix and Commander Wolden. She flattened her ears. She needed to find Satra and get out of here before things devolved further.
12
Predators and Prey
Satra watched Jonas sleep. His chest rose and fell. She pulled herself close to him and pushed him onto his back. No response. She traced her paw along his stomach, letting one claw down to draw a line of red blood across his soft underside. He didn’t stir.
She worried she’d given him too much. It was the same drug they’d used to cut off the wings of the kjarr gryphons. Her father had refused it, of course, but most of the others had taken it. They slept and awoke wingtorn, all except for five who died in their sleep. She’d been worried that Jonas would be the one in a hundred who never awoke.
Lying around them were his tools, tools she’d stolen and bribed a metalsmith to modify to let her use them with her beak and paws. She’d even stolen several of the pink Crackling Sea harnesses to tie him down with, just in case he awoke mid procedure. She hadn’t planned to let him live, but she’d wanted him to get a taste of what it was like to live without flight. He’d observed the wingtorn, the stitches where their wings had been still bleeding, and told his assistants to take notes on their mood and resilience and adaptation.
He’d shown no compassion when some wingtorn, unable to cope without their wings, flung themselves off the cliffs of the Crackling Sea Eyrie. Resilience, adaptation—he didn’t understand what those words meant. How could he, growing up in an eyrie, eating fish other people caught? To be a kjarr gryphon was to survive. The kjarr was not a kind place to live. It was frozen taiga on one side, bog on the other.
To be kjarr was to survive. Her father had told her that. A poor taiga gryphlet had taught her that. This would not be her first murder, but it would be the first she’d planned.
The other had come from that very same taiga gryphon. They’d been young and playing on a frozen lake. Both were adults with their own hunting grounds. Both were new adults with their first hunting grounds. The taiga gryphon had seen her try to pounce a lace monitor and miss. The light snow had concealed the ice underneath, and Satra had gone sliding. The taiga gryphon’s name was Mignet, but Satra hadn’t known that yet.
Satra had heard the laughing and growled—well, squeaked, her voice giving out—a challenge. Mignet had flown down and landed daintily on the ice. She’d been beautiful, graceful. While taiga gryphons included several designs and shapes, she’d been the one most strangers conjured up if asked to describe the taiga pride: white with black bars and rosettes. She was Satr
a’s first, and only, crush. Satra had pounced at her and sent them both sprawling across the ice.
Times were not as lean back then, and Satra had spent her mornings hunting and her afternoons with Mignet on the frozen pond. In retrospect, things had always been moving towards this particular end. They’d played and slid, preened and talked. If Mignet had seemed coquettish, Satra hadn’t minded. She’d just liked having a friend outside of the kjarr pride. They’d played through into the spring.
In the angry phase that had come later, Satra had thought that Mignet should have known better as a taiga gryphon. The weather had warmed ever-so-slightly, and one day the ice had broken with both of them above it. The water below had been still cold enough to cause shock. They’d called for help and struggled, their legs and wings losing feeling, their soaked fur weighing them down. The ice that’d been so solid for months now rebuffed their claws and refused them purchase.
Satra had no way of knowing their cries had been heard. She’d been certain she was going to die, so she’d used the only thing she could get purchase on to give her the leverage she needed to get above the ice: Mignet. To be kjarr was to survive.
The taiga gryphons had arrived moments later. They’d seen blood in the water and no Mignet, whose voice had brought them here. They’d only seen Satra, with her paw in the water. They’d had no way of knowing she was searching, hoping to pull Mignet out. Had it not been for Thenca’s arrival a moment later, Satra wasn’t sure what they would have done to her. Trade with the taiga gryphons had fallen off after that. Her father had predicted that the taiga gryphons would never come down from the mountains to anyone’s aid, but Satra had always suspected that his comments were meant more to soothe her.
His words had been prophetic. The taiga gryphons had not come to help the kjarr when the Crackling Sea opinici raided their nesting grounds.
She looked from the metal saw to Jonas’s wings. Despite what her pride thought of her, despite the monster the taiga gryphons thought she was, she was frozen with indecision. Jonas was evil and deserved much worse.
Staring at the soft fur of his stomach, listening to his heart beat, it required a different gryphon to have the strength of will to operate the saw. She was not that gryphon, and not a day went by when she didn’t wish she’d pushed Mignet up at the cost of her own life. The way her pride treated her had made her cold and cruel like the ice that’d taken Mignet, but Satra had not become that gryphon. She stood up and kicked the saw away from Jonas with her bloody paw.
Merin burst through the door and found her standing among the tools with Jonas, stomach still bleeding from her scratch, next to her. The saw was bloody from her paw. Jonas’s wings were underneath him at an unnatural angle.
Merin did not comment on any of these things. “You need to meet with the prides south of here as fast as you can and get to the shores with at least one of the gryphlets.”
She understood why she needed a kjarr gryphlet with her. She needed proof that she hadn’t left her pride’s gryphlets to die. It seemed word of her past had spread across the mountains.
From outside the hut, she heard another gryphon calling for Merin. He pushed Satra out the door and closed it.
“I found her!” he called out.
The gryphon who landed dwarfed Satra and was half a head taller than Merin. Could a gryphon that large even fly in the forest? Satra knew who it was from reading Jonas’s maps. The saber-toothed beak and black eagle-like features gave it away. There was only one pride leader who fit that description.
Hatzel landed. Her claws reflexively dug into the posh, northern quarter flooring. Part of it crumbled. She set the map down at her forepaws. The ambassador’s quarters were at the northern tip of the northern quarter, the last district not covered in smoke. The rest of the city burned in the night sky. There was no longer a clear path straight out of the city anymore.
“Satra?” Hatzel asked. Satra nodded. “You need to get to your father as soon as possible. Can you get her out of here, Merin?”
“Where are you going?” he countered.
Hatzel pointed to the map. “I know where the explosives are. I’m going to meet up with the rest of my pride and get the word out. Triddle and Askel should be meeting in the west. They might have some ideas about this. You remember how they handled the fires that one summer.”
Merin nodded. Satra just looked on without a word. When he lifted off, she joined him. Hatzel went off in the other direction. Satra didn’t know what would happen to Jonas, but that was up to fate now. Maybe that was better than bloodying her own paws. While they flew, she did her best to groom the blood out of her left forepaw. No need for the gryphlets to see her this way.
Askel watched from the jail window in the northern district as the flames spread across the eyrie. Removed from the immediacy of his fiery waterfall, the heaviness of what he’d done sunk in. He hoped the eyrie had been evacuated in time but no longer held any certainty that everyone would make it out okay.
He was sorry for what he’d done, and as the smell of smoke began to reach his cage, his own mortality settled upon his wings. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to be with Triddle again. He wanted to talk to Hatzel. He wanted to watch Zeph hunt parrots. He wanted to ask Triddle about the flameworks and help him trace the underground river and map it.
The opinicus in the cage next to Askel was rambling. The guards had told him not to mind “mad `ole Impir here, our resident scholar.” Impir, a painfully bright blue peacock, was talking about a formula he’d invented to allow only the maternal or paternal appearances to pass along to opinicus chicks. “Designer chicks!” he’d laughed. He claimed that the proof of the potion was the reeve’s chicks—six emerald, only one blue. “She forgot the potion for that one, you see. It was my own fault. We were up in the mountains and she just couldn’t resist my charm. Or maybe I couldn’t resist her charm. Ha-caw!”
Askel preferred to spend his final hours staring out the window, despondent. He wasn’t worried about making friends in a jail that was going to burst into flames and collapse. Contrition was a better use of his time.
There was a knock at the door. The guards—he had to admire the sense of duty that kept them here, if not their reasoning skills—looked at each other. Finally, they opened it. A blue peafowl opinicus with bruising and lacerations across her chest walked in with several other opinici in tow, including a ruffled red one with a bump on his head.
She looked around and came to Impir’s cage. “Let him out.”
The two guards protested, but she spoke again.
“My mother is missing. I’m in charge now. Let him out.”
They opened the cage but backed away, afraid to get near Impir.
“You can go,” Ivess told the guards.
“Try not to burn, Askel. Ha!” Impir called to him. The strange red opinicus next to Ivess broke out of his daze. A look passed between him and Impir before he turned to Askel.
“You’re Askel? You were caught here tonight?” He seemed to be trying to remember something but was shaken by the events of the evening.
Askel nodded.
The red opinicus looked from the top of Askel’s crestless head down to Askel’s feathered tail as if things weren’t quite matching up. Finally, he shouted “Wait!” at the guards. “Toss me the keys.”
Ivess gave him a questioning look. “Are you mad, Bario?”
“This is the gryphon scholar who dragged me out of the workshop,” Bario said. “I must know what they know. We hadn’t even considered that there might be gryphon scholars before tonight.”
“Nor had we considered gryphon assassins,” Ivess retorted. “Fine, bring him along.”
Bario unlocked the cage. “Now we’re even,” he whispered.
Hatzel found a collection of weald gryphons and underbough opinici waiting south of the eyrie in the grasslands. Some of her pride parted to give her room to land, and she went searching for Triddle.
She found him in a muddle of feathers an
d fur, discussing options. Kia and Zeph waited outside the collective and listened to them talk intently about something with a red and black owl gryphon. Strix’s daughter asked if they knew what had happened to her father and brothers.
Hatzel thought of the last time she’d seen Strix and decided to keep her mouth shut. With opinici around, it was probably better not to mention the carnage at Reeve’s Nest. No one else answered the owl gryphon’s question.
Hatzel thought she caught a glimpse of Askel’s plumage, but the nonfeathered tail meant it must have been one of his relatives. She asked one of her pride what had happened with the gryphlets and was told the goliath birds had met with more of Merin’s pride, and his gryphons were escorting them down the trail and then east at Glacial Run to get to Strix’s plateau. The best they could hope was that they could reach the owl gryphon nesting grounds without being cut off by the weald fires. She forced her way into the circle and found Triddle. His ears dropped and his crest lay flat.
“I know you’re worried about Askel,” she said, “but he probably had to evacuate the city at the other side. I need your help.”
She handed him the map of the weald she’d stolen from the eyrie. There were dozens of circles on it. For the underbough opinici, this was the first they’d heard of their ranger kin building a network of bombs.
“This is a lot of explosives,” Triddle said. “We didn’t find half this number.” He was preening his feathers in agitation.
“Can we get to them before—” Hatzel began. Another explosion occurred, this one far outside the eyrie. She could just see the flames licking the northern border of the weald, just south of them. “Okay, no, we can’t. What can we do?”
Triddle was counting and mumbling. “I can’t save the whole weald. But I think I can save some of it. We need to get to the caches the other gryphons caught with Cherine’s map. They were supposed to leave them for us in the grasslands along with some of the fire suppressant powder from the camps. I sent a flyer to the medicine gryphon caves for some of the goo they soak their fire keepers in, too.”
