by K Vale Nagle
Everyone leaned in closer while Triddle began to lay out his plan for saving their homes.
There was something therapeutic about having room to spread his wings to their full span, Merin thought. The weald rarely afforded a gryphon of his size the opportunity to glide like this without running into a branch or getting caught up in vines. He didn’t know how Hatzel stood it. Did she feel as constrained as he did?
“We’ll help you get the kjarr nesting grounds back,” he told Satra. They ducked between fleeing opinici who were oblivious to the gryphons in their midst. Most of them went north and then west to the goliath bird pass that led to the Crackling Sea Eyrie.
Satra’s eyes were on the Redwood Valley Eyrie. Flames blossomed along the bottom levels, spreading out to the surrounding forest like roots. The smoke interwove the different spires and districts together, creating a giant ashen tree expanding into the heavens and disappearing from view. Where would all the opinici go? Was the Crackling Sea Eyrie large enough to take them in? He wondered what the following weeks would bring but decided that depended mostly upon the state the weald was left in. As far as he knew, the kjarr was in one piece. Only its people had been maimed. Had the opinici set up a camp there? If so, perhaps the taiga pride would help him clear it out. When Satra finally spoke, it surprised him.
“I don’t want the kjarr,” she said.
“You need somewhere to settle. You’re welcome with us, but I don’t know how much of the weald will be left.” He didn’t know how many gryphons would be left, either.
Satra had finished cleaning Jonas’s blood from her feathers but was still coated in the ash of the fallen eyrie.
She looked Merin in the eye. “You misunderstand. The kjarr was a hard life. I will not live that way again. With the wingtorn at my back, I will take the entire Crackling Sea if it takes me generations. I’ll not see my kin scrape to get by ever again. I will not see them at the mercy of any opinicus.”
He smiled in spite of himself. He often worried he was the only one of his generation with ambition. Now, it turned out only a mountain range had separated him from the only other gryphon who shared his vision.
The weald may end up reduced to ash, but the kjarr and sea awaited. With the kjarr gryphons in his pride—or his gryphons in the kjarr pride, he wasn’t as arrogant as some believed—they could make that happen. Satra’s kin lacked flight, which he could provide, but that would change as the kjarr gryphlets grew up. He would never have more leverage with her than he had right now, right here.
“When you get your pride, come northeast. Follow the coast to the plateau and look for me. I’ll make sure the sea is yours.”
She gave him an appraising look. He knew what she saw. He was strong. He was able to show discretion. He would provide new blood for the pride. He knew how to lead.
“Not mine. My father’s pride,” she said, but it sounded half-hearted to him. Would they want a landbound leader? Did her father share her ambition?
Merin and Satra hit the edge of the eyrie and cut south. In the distance, the two kjarr fledglings led a parade of goliath birds. His pride escorted them to safety and carried any gryphlets who wouldn’t fit in a saddlebag. One of the fledglings trilled a greeting to Satra, and both flew up to escort her down.
While they preened her and worried, Merin caught up with one of his pride. They were taking the kjarr gryphlets southeast to the plateau. There was no way to know when the forest was going to go up, and they hadn’t wanted to wait. That turned out to be prudent, as he and Satra heard the caches explode from the far side of the eyrie. The weald burned in several places. He hurried to her.
“You need to go south before the whole weald is aflame. You can’t fly over it once the smoke gets bad. This is the only chance for you three to get to the shore and stop the bloodshed. I’ll take you.”
“No,” Satra replied. “You make sure the gryphlets are safe. I’m placing their well-being in your care. I’ll go to my father, but I have to know they’re in good paws. I can find the ocean. I’ve spent hours studying the maps. I need you, personally, to guarantee their well-being.”
He nodded. “We’ll be at the plateau.”
One of his pride brought harnesses with food and aneda wraps and helped the kjarr fledglings into them for the trip. Satra changed into the new harness but held onto her Crackling Sea Eyrie one, too. As they flew off over the weald, she dropped it over one of the small blossoms of wildfire.
Merin watched them go, then spoke. “Okay, enough resting. Let’s get out of here before we’re cut off. Did you leave the caches on the grassland? Excellent. If Askel and Triddle need them, they know where to find them. If not, it won’t make much difference now, will it?”
He grabbed the reins of the lead goliath bird in his beak and led the flock down the path, deeper into the weald. With luck, Askel had finished his mission in the eyrie and was now helping safeguard the weald.
A trail of blood led into the smoke. Strix was too angry about losing Brevin to let Commander Wolden get away. When part of the Reeve’s Nest collapsed, Wolden had fled, leading Strix on this chase. Strix spared a single thought for his own children who had come with him tonight. They were smart enough not to linger once the fires spread. He hoped Ninox, his daughter—not that family meant much to some gryphons—had escaped from the Reeve’s Guard headquarters and gotten to safety. She had orders to leave as soon as the smoke started, but she had a tendency to get lost in her work. As a gryphlet, she’d once focused so hard on a squirrel that she’d missed the branch between her and it. That single-minded focus was a trait she’d picked up from him. Her trouble with trees must have come from her mother, a fantail.
With his forepaws tucked under his body, and his back legs obscured by the fan of his tail, he looked more like a long owl than a gryphon. He was a black shape with red wings flying through the smoky haze. Several opinici fleeing upwards from the underbough nearly crashed into him. He didn’t waste his time expressing his annoyance but continued to follow Wolden’s trail.
When the net came at him from above, Strix dodged it with less ease than he expected. The throw was solid, and his body had never been taxed like this before. Wolden dove after the net and managed to graze him. Droplets of Strix’s blood fell into the dark smoke and disappeared into the abyss.
He pivoted and rushed Wolden. Wolden reared back and guarded his chest with his claws as though he was expecting a body shot, but Strix went left and managed to take out a pawful of feathers. They continued this back and forth with as much grace and strength as they could muster while their lungs filled with smoke.
Buildings crackled, cracked, and collapsed around them. An asphyxiated opinicus, its feathers ashen, fell past them and disappeared into the labyrinthine underbough. The sky was lost in the smoke. Embers hung in the air like bog wisps. Where trees were artificially raised into platforms, the platforms toppled.
Strix coughed, the only sound he’d made since his conversation with Hatzel. Wolden’s ability to fly was in question, but he made one last leap. The platform Strix was standing on gave way, sending them both into the hungry furnace below.
13
Conflagration
Triddle’s plan for the caches was twofold. With the jars of oil removed, they could be dropped on the new fires. The concussive explosion should have the same effect as the one detonated by Hatzel’s nesting grounds, suffocating the flames and preventing the fire from spreading. They could also be used to create a barrier by destroying the trees and starving the fire of fuel.
He drew a map in the dirt as best he could. It was summer, so the mountain runoff wasn’t at its spring high. The large river running down from the mountain, Glacial Run, met the runoff from the plateau and cut the weald into two. The top half made up just under a quarter of the weald, but the prides had found four caches up there already. Then there was the one by Hatzel’s nesting grounds.
Merin’s pride had confiscated the saltpeter crates they’d discovered Cherine
investigating. Those were now resting at the bottom of the cave that’d been his prison before Triddle and Hatzel’s rescue mission. Since Cherine’s map came from his own exploration, its information hadn’t strayed far from the border with the grasslands.
If they were going to save any of the weald, Triddle thought, they needed to use the natural barriers and hope the winds stayed on their side. Winds from the north might push the eyrie’s fire to the northern weald, and winds from the south might allow the southern weald fire to jump the river.
Glacial Run was wide enough to keep the fire limited to the south. There was only one section that might be a problem, where the fisherfolk trail crossed it. A decrepit bridge wide enough for twenty goliath birds had been built long ago and abandoned in recent generations. As time passed, seeds landed on the bridge and found purchase until it became an extension of the weald itself. The varnish protecting the planks wore down. Vines took root, spread across the bridge, died, then dried in the sun. Chances were good that, whether or not Triddle managed to stop the fires in the north, if the fire in the south made it to the bridge, it’d carry the flames back north.
All of this, he explained, depended on the fire from the eyrie not crossing the grasslands. He was saved from having to make a plan for that by the fortuitous arrival of Orlea. With her she brought a flock of opinici who’d heeded her warning and didn’t know where else to go. While Hatzel led teams of gryphons and opinici to carry the caches and drop them on the northern weald fires that’d sprung up, Orlea’s opinici brought something more valuable, the powder the guards used to put out fires. They’d been using it to rescue opinici trapped in flaming nests.
Orlea’s reminder of the fire suppressant triggered something in Triddle’s brain. He scrambled to grab his map. The squared circles were caches, but the triangles might be the camps the rangers set up between pride hunting grounds. Any smart ranger transporting explosives would have brought some of the suppressant powder with them. In fact, he was now certain the strange white ash found at the site of several lightning strikes had been the rangers making sure the weald remained ripe for a massive fire at the end of the summer. He shouted after the teams that they should check the ranger camps for powder before returning.
“What do you need us to do?” a speckled blue opinicus merchant asked. It had been her idea to grab the powder.
Triddle pointed to the map. “If the fire gets to the grasslands, it’ll be nearly unstoppable. Can you keep the eyrie fire from crossing the reeve’s hunting grounds?”
“It’s well-kept by orders on high, so there’s not much underbrush,” the merchant chirped. “If it’s possible, we’ll do it.”
“We’ll do it,” Orlea confirmed.
Most of the gryphons and opinici were now deployed. All that remained were Zeph and Kia, two of Triddle’s pridemates, and Strix’s daughter. Also, two caches of explosives.
Ninox, the owl gryphon, stepped forward, and Triddle realized that what he’d taken to be a dark red design in her plumage was dried blood.
“Where do you need us?” she asked. Her ears remained still, not moving the way a normal gryphon’s would to indicate mood and subtext. He’d never seen an owl gryphon with ears. Combined with a nocturnal lifestyle, she must not get to talk to the other ear-expressive weald gryphons often.
He motioned to Zeph and Kia first. “You two, take that cache and blow the dam. With any luck, it’ll flood part of the reeve’s hunting grounds and some of the grasslands.”
Zeph nodded. Triddle showed them how to use one of the fuses he’d picked up from the flameworks. They struggled a little to get the crate into the air, but it had rope handles on each side. Kia’s adrenaline must have been in overdrive because she had no trouble lifting it. Triddle appreciated their skill set and knowledge, but he’d given them the smaller of the two remaining saltpeter crates because Zeph was too slight a gryphon to handle the heaviest. That task fell to the two Merin pride gryphons.
Once Zeph and Kia flew off, he motioned to his two pridemates. “You two, grab that last cache. We need to get to the bridge as fast as we can.”
He looked directly at the owl gryphon. Specifically, he was staring at the blood on her left ear. “Can you keep me safe?”
Ninox licked her paw, wiped some of the blood off her face, and nodded.
The Snowfeather Dam had been built before anyone’s memory, possibly even as a precursor to the Redwood Valley Eyrie itself. A peacock statue topped one side with a cobra bookending the dam at the other. Their construction used a white brick that may once have been the same color as the dam, but generations of aging revealed their differing compositions. It must have been imported at the time of construction or traded from a different eyrie. Whatever the stones were, there were no quarries in the valley. Zeph couldn’t imagine what you would trade to get enough stone to build a dam. As far as he knew, parrots were the most precious thing around.
As the Snowfeather River flowed through the northern mountain range and passed through the glacial crater, it fell twenty stories to continue along the northern border of the weald, eventually diving underground and passing by Cherine’s former cave prison. Runoff from the snow kept the river flowing during the summer months, but in the winter, it slowed to a trickle. The falls had been nicknamed the Summer Falls due to their seasonal temperament. The dam, as Kia relayed from her reading of the eyrie histories to him on the flight up, had been built one winter to allow water to accrue for eyrie use, creating Crater Lake. A few fishing huts stood at the far side of the lake across from the dam.
Slits along the left side of the dam allowed the summer runoff to flow down the falls instead of flooding the settlement on the lake. Zeph and Kia were panting by the time they lifted the saltpeter crate to the top.
“Where do we set it off?” she asked.
“It shouldn’t matter, should it?” he responded. “It should blow up all this easily. You were there when the last one went off. The crater seemed pretty deep.”
She clicked her beak. “I guess. I’m just worried that if we detonate it up top we won’t get the full lake to spill out. If we detonate it at the bottom, assuming we can find a place to set it, it might cause the rubble to block the way.”
“We could set it atop Brevin’s beak. It wouldn’t be effective, but it’d feel pretty good,” he thought aloud.
She looked up at the peacock statue, and her eyes widened. “It really does look like her! I never noticed before. I must have flown by here a hundred times. It must be based on her ancestor. That beak has definitely been passed down.”
Zeph was struck with how much the bird looked like her. He couldn’t remember seeing another bird statue or carving that resembled someone before. He’d never, say, seen an owl carving based on a gryphon or opinicus with owl features.
Most of the gryphons and opinici did have features that matched with a specific bird, though he couldn’t identify all the avian influences, and there were birds he’d never seen a gryphonic version of. He’d never met anyone who resembled a seagull, for example. Maybe if the weald burned down he’d go try to find someone who looked like a seagull.
While Kia pontificated on the best location for the explosives, Zeph continued his mental feather-gathering. If their front halves were near matches for birds, at least sometimes, what were their back halves?
The furriest animals he could think of were the small squirrels that glided through the trees. Their paws weren’t like his. Or the herd rodents, the capybaras, where had they come from? There hadn’t been any in the weald before the grasslands were created—someone had brought them here. He knew his view of the world was limited, but talking to Kia and Cherine had made him realize that the eyrie scholars were as ignorant as he was on some of these questions. If he saw Satra after this, he would have to ask her who lived beyond the kjarr.
Kia chirped to get his attention.
“Sorry,” he apologized. “Ideally, you want the rubble to be blown outwards, right? It’s too bad
we can’t put it on the water side. The saltpeter doesn’t work wet, right? I don’t remember if they let Triddle throw it in a lake or not.”
Kia snorted. “The flint and tinder aren’t waterproof even if the saltpeter is, though I’m pretty sure it’s not.”
There were some refugees gathering across the lake at a settlement. Their harnesses were blue and gold.
“I don’t think we have a lot of time.” Zeph looked closer. Those were definitely guard harnesses. There were four outside and at least one more in the hut.
“Okay, there’s a ledge partway down,” Kia said. “Let’s put it there and get this done. We can’t risk the grasslands catching fire while we make birdsong up here.”
One of the guards seemed to notice them and was pointing. Zeph and Kia slipped over the fall’s side and lowered the saltpeter into place.
“How long do the fuses take?” he asked. They couldn’t risk the guards coming over and clipping it off.
“We don’t actually spend a lot of time blowing things up at the university.” Her voice showed the stress. “We should light it and fly.”
Zeph flew up a little and peeked over the edge. All the guards—seven in total—and an emerald peacock opinicus were flying across the lake. “They might extinguish the fuse if we leave it. I can’t take that risk. You light it and get out of here. I’ll draw them away as best I can.”
She frowned but nodded.
Zeph flew up just as Reeve Brevin alighted on the dam.
Triddle had no problem finding the bridge over Glacial Run. The goliath bird trail went straight through the area Cherine had scouted, mostly Merin’s territory. By the lack of smoke, Triddle felt pretty sure his pridemates had taken care of any explosives.
