Beru, Estrid, and I turned and ran down the wooded path, coming quickly back to the abandoned guard station which was still spitting black smoke into the night sky. We ignored the fire and the fallen bodies and ran through the gate, back into the woods, and toward the cliff’s edge where we had come up. From here, I could see the watch fires burning in Barepost, and though I couldn’t see much other than dark forms against the night sky, I could hear the terrified screams of the people in the town, and the clash of metal on metal as the guards engaged with the bird-men.
I hoped Gerves and Grissall had taken cover. I hoped Harbin was still on the Gem, somewhere far away from here. I remembered how the ur’gel had snapped that bird’s neck and even hoped Aysche and Luthair were hidden away safely in the house on the ridge. No one deserved to meet that kind of end.
“It’s going to take forever to get down,” Estrid said even as Beru was already lowering himself over the edge and dropping to the ledge below.
She was right. By the time we got down there, it would practically be morning and Barepost would be long destroyed by those monsters. Just as I was trying to invent a quicker way down, and wondering if it would be quicker to go through the path in the mine, there was a sound behind me like the call of a large bird.
I turned in time to see a whole herd of griffins burst through the trees, led by the one who had been watching us by the airship, recognizable by the white band around her eyes. They were running with their wings spread, their front feet nearly coming off the ground as they prepared to take flight.
Beru let go, dropping the few yards to the ledge below.
Estrid dove to the side to get out of their way.
But not me.
Because what quicker way down the cliff was there than flying? When the griffins were nearly on top of me, I took two running steps and then leapt, the griffin beside me, her wing nearly brushing against me.
For a terrifying moment, I was falling, certain that I would end up like the tree monster or Savarah, in pieces on the forest floor. I heard Estrid call my name, saw Beru reach for me as I fell past him, and then my grasping hands found fur and skin and powerful muscle, and I held on tight, my fingers wrapping around the fur coating the griffin’s wide, muscled back. Even as she wheeled and bucked, I held on tight, finally managing to pull myself onto her back, tucking my knees behind her wing joints and squeezing. It was like riding a horse, I told myself. A giant, flesh-eating, flying horse.
After her initial protest, the griffin didn’t seem to mind having a passenger. She stopped diving and leveled out.
One of her friends drew up beside us, its eyes fixed on me, its head cocked to the side as it tried to figure out what this strange creature was.
I laughed and straightened up, slowly spreading my arms and tilting my face to the sky. How was it that, in such a terrible world, there could be such beautiful moments and such magnificent creatures?
When my mother had left, my father tried to convince me of that. I’d been young, but not so young that it hadn’t hurt. Not so young that I hadn’t felt the sting of shame and guilt, the burn of the betrayal by a world that had, until then, been kind to me. He had taken me out to the hills where we spied on a family of young forest cats playing beneath the canopy of leaves. We’d hiked to the fields during the first snow and watched the winter flowers burst to life, blue and silver against the white powder. We’d lain on soft grass beneath black skies and watched the stars wink to life, pinpricks in the dark canopy.
But that doubt had always been there, that belief that this world was, on its inside, a terrible place, full of anger and betrayal and abandonment. That its beauty was just a cover, that something horrible was always waiting beneath it. Now, though, as the griffin rose into the sky, I thought that maybe I finally understood what my father was trying to tell me. That the darkness didn’t exist beneath the beauty, but that the beauty existed in spite of the darkness, and that it all depended on my perception. It all depended on what I chose to see.
The griffin’s powerful muscles flexed beneath me, her wings beating in long, steady strokes to keep us aloft. We were high above Bruhier now, and soon we were inside the veil, that ever-present layer of clouds. Moisture gathered on my skin, and I couldn’t see. I felt the panic tightening my throat, but then we were on the other side, the veil below us. Far away to the north, I saw lights of a distant town on a plateau, high above the dangers of the monsters below. Lamruil, I thought, the elven city. Overhead, the stars shone down on us, and I wondered what my ancestors thought of me now.
I leaned forward, putting my hands on the beast’s neck. “Take us down.” I applied gentle, downward pressure to her shoulders. I didn’t know if she would understand or if she would even let me go, but eventually she turned and tucked her wings in a bit so that we began to descend.
As Barepost came back into view, so did the horror there. Families fled from burning houses just to be snatched up by flying ur’gel. The ur’gel would then lift them high into the sky and drop them, leaving a trail of broken bodies littering the ground in their wake. For a moment, I lamented not having Arun and his bow with us, but then the griffin dove. My heart leapt into my throat, and I held on tight as she crashed into an ur’gel, tearing at it with teeth and claws. The ur’gel bellowed in surprise, scratching at the griffin with its claw-like fingernails. I took out my ax and, as the griffin shifted, swung it at the ur’gel’s throat, spraying all of us with black blood. It dropped out of the sky without another sound.
Over and over we did this, the griffin and I, attacking from above, a strategy I never in my life would have come up with. I didn’t know where the rest of her herd was, or Estrid and Beru. I didn’t know why she was helping me. Nothing made sense, but I fought on, dispatching ur’gel after ur’gel until we were both covered in their thick black blood. There was no time to stop or think or question.
We had just sent one more to its death when something slammed into us, nearly knocking me from my perch. The griffin squawked and spun to face her attacker.
There was no one there. Just the inky blackness of the sky.
Below us, someone screamed, but before we could move, there was another blow, this time to our other side. When I looked, I saw it. The ur’gel latched onto the griffin’s wing.
The griffin screamed, trying to get her claws up to strike at the monster.
I should have helped, should have taken an ax to the beast’s head, but I was too busy holding on, my injured hand throbbing. We were falling, spiraling out of control through the air as the griffin lost the use of her wing. The ur’gel was relentless, holding on and bellowing with what I thought could only be joy.
The ground rushed up at us. Holding on with my legs and one hand, I grabbed my ax, but it was too far away for me to hit. So, I took a deep breath, shutting out the screams in my ears and the wind in my face and the panic in my gut, and aimed. We spun once, caught the wind, and I threw the ax. For a second, I saw Jesper, the ax between his eyes, but then it was the ur’gel again, its eyes lifeless as it released the wing.
But the damage was done. The griffin’s wing was destroyed, torn to shreds like the sails on Arun’s ship.
We were still falling, but slower now as the griffin worked to compensate for the lost wing. I knew that I was weighing her down, so when we were close enough, I jumped from her back. She landed with a thump and collapsed to the ground. I put a hand on her head.
“You did good,” I told her, and she closed her eyes.
There was no time to drag her to safety, no time to mourn. We had landed right in the middle of Barepost. Many of the ur’gel had taken to the ground now, busting down doors and dragging people outside, mauling them in the street. I found the ur’gel that had attacked us and pulled my ax from its head, wiping the black blood on its thick grey hide. We were close to the Gold Mine, and when I heard a shout from inside, I darted away, weaving through the panicked residents of Barepost and into the pub’s open door.
The
interior was dark, but I paused, listening, in the doorway. For a moment, I heard nothing but my heart pounding, and then there was a crash from the kitchen.
“Leave us alone!” Grissall’s tiny voice shouted.
I leapt over the bar and banged through the swinging door to the kitchen beyond. Four sets of eyes met mine—two human and two something else. Grissall and Gerves were huddled in the back corner, Grissall wielding a shining knife and Gerves with nothing more than his bare fists. I remembered that he’d given my brother his only weapon, the galestone pistol that had saved our lives when we’d encountered the tree monster.
Two ur’gel bore down on them, but their attention had thankfully shifted to me. One of the ur’gel looked much like the first one we’d seen up by the airship, but the second was something else, something other. Instead of leathery bat wings, he had feathered wings that, even though they were folded against his back, rose high above his head in black arches. Its face was more human than the others, with average features topped with dark eyebrows and long, stringy hair. But its hands were gruesomely large, the fingers extended into long claws, and its legs and feet strangely feline.
“Are you ready to meet Dag’draath, human?” it asked in a strange, hissing voice that sent shivers down my spine.
I hadn’t known that ur’gel had the power of speech.
I drew my sword and my ax, spinning them once around my hands. “You’re mistaken,” I said. “I’m not human. I’m D’ahvol.”
“It is all the same to us.”
It attacked, swiping with its long claws.
I jumped back out of the way as the other one grabbed for my arm. I knocked its hand away and brought my ax down, slicing through thick skin and bone. Its hand fell the floor.
Grissall screamed.
The ur’gel bellowed, turning to her as if realizing she was the easier target. It reached for her with its good hand, and I drove my sword through its back just before it made contact. But it came at the cost of ignoring the other ur’gel, the bigger threat to me.
The second ur’gel, the only one still alive, took advantage of my distraction to drive its claws into the back of my shoulder. I wasn’t able to stop the scream rising up in my throat. Looking down, I saw one of its claws poking all the way through my shoulder, coming through the front, my own blood staining my shirt red.
“Frida!” shrieked Grissall, and before I could stop her, she’d thrown herself at the monster.
“No!” Gerves cried, but he was too late.
Grissall, small and insubstantial as she was, knocked the ur’gel back. It ripped its claws from my shoulder, the pain turning my vision black for a moment, and wrapped her in a gruesome hug.
I saw it coming, imagined him ripping her in two right there in front of her father. I saw how it would damage Gerves, how he would blame me, how it would all be my fault. I groped for my weapon, tried to stand, fell again. And then the ur’gel dropped Grissall, and we all froze as she tumbled to the floor and scooted away, back to Gerves’s arms. There was a knife buried in the monster’s neck. Its eyes were wide with shock as it fell, gave one last gasp, and grew still.
“Onen save me,” Grissall gasped, staring at the bodies on the floor, at the blood seeping from my wound.
“No,” I said, “you saved us.”
Except for the hole in my shoulder, the wounds in my back were mostly superficial. Even the one in my shoulder had gone through cleanly, not tearing anything that wouldn’t heal.
Grissall cleaned the wounds with alcohol while I gritted my teeth against the pain of her ministrations, and then bound the shoulder with clean rags from the bar. It was my left shoulder, my ax-wielding side, the same side with the injured hand. I was glad that it seemed like most of the fighting was over, at least for now.
“This will have to do.” she said. “You said you have a healer?”
“There’s a healer waiting for me. We’re leaving.”
“Luthair let you go?” Gerves asked. He stood at the door, watching the battle rage in the street beyond.
“No. But it’s time for us to leave.”
He turned his eyes away briefly, finding mine. “Good for you. Good for all of you.”
“Come with me.”
Grissall looked at her father, then at the floor. “I couldn’t.”
“No,” Gerves said, “I couldn’t. But you can, if you wanted to. Perhaps it is for the best. There aren’t many chances to leave Barepost. And you have proven that you can handle yourself.”
“Leaving Barepost would mean leaving you.” Grissall looked between her father and me.
“Well, you would always know where to find me when you wanted to come back home.”
I thought of Haklang betraying Luthair so that we would take Xalph away from here. I thought of my own father back in Bor’sur, of his last words to me before we’d boarded the Sea Spider.
“Go,” he’d said. “Have your adventures. Make your fortunes. Find your fame. I’ll be here when you are ready to return.”
Before Grissall could answer, Gerves stepped back from the door just as it burst open.
Alarmed, I turned, pain shooting down my arm, but it was just Estrid followed by Beru, both of them looking tattered and windblown and splattered with black blood.
“I thought I’d find you here,” Estrid said breathlessly. “Come on, you have to see this.”
Chapter 21
Estrid was right. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I never would have believed it. It wasn’t just griffins and humans fighting the ur’gel now, but all types of cliff monsters had joined in the fray. They were chasing each other through the streets and the sky in a chaos of wings and teeth and claws.
“What happened?”
A dreadwing and an ur’gel collided in an explosion of feathers overhead that sent us staggering away.
“After you did maybe the stupidest thing I have ever seen you do—and there have been a lot of stupid things, so that’s not an easy accomplishment—there was a mass exodus from the mountaintop. All kinds of monsters you’ve never even seen were swarming down the cliff to hunt the ur’gel. So”—she said with a shrug, motioning to Beru—“we hitched a ride.”
“On what?”
Estrid grimaced. “Well, I . . . I rode a dreadwing.”
“You did what?” I hissed. “And you called me stupid? It could have carried you off and fed it to its babies.”
“So could the griffin.” Strangely, Estrid fought to keep a smile off of her face. “Besides, it wasn’t that bad.”
“Wasn’t that—” I stopped and turned on Beru. “And what did you ride?”
“Some sort of long-necked demon bird,” he said, and it was as close as I’d ever heard him come to making a joke.
That was when an ur’gel fell from the sky. One of its wings was ripped, but that didn’t stop it from lunging at us. Beru was closest. With two strikes of his sword, he cut the monster down. When it fell, we readied ourselves for more but were surprised to find it fairly quiet.
I looked up and saw several dark figures disappearing into the veil, followed by a colorful array of different cliff monsters, all in different sizes and shapes.
After a few moments of quiet, Gerves emerged from the pub, Grissall peeking over his shoulder. “Is that it? Are they gone?”
“I think so.” There were bodies everywhere, human and ur’gel and monster alike. And there, a few yards away, the griffin with the white band around her eyes sat watching us, her broken wing hanging limply at her side, the other one tucked against her back. She had black ur’gel blood on her beak and claws, but she looked as stoic and disinterested as ever.
I left Beru and Estrid talking about how to get back up the mountain and approached the griffin, stopping an arm’s length away. I reached a hand toward her beak, knowing that with a snap of her powerful jaws, I’d be left mangled for the rest of my life. But I didn’t think she would do that. I felt that we had bonded during that battle.
“Wi
ll you let me help you?”
She stared back with blank eyes. “We can mend your wing, get you back in the air again.”
Though I was sure she had no idea what I said, perhaps it was my tone of voice that inspired her to dip her head into my waiting hand.
Her beak was hard, like stone, but the feathers on her face were soft and fluffy, like those of a newborn chick. I ran my fingers up between her eyes and scratched behind her head. Her tail twitched, but she made no other movement.
But then her back went stiff, and her head snapped up. She twisted her long neck around, and the rest of her body followed as she nudged me to the side with her hip. She was making that strange clicking noise in her throat that I decided was a growl.
I peeked around her, and that was when I saw what—or who—had her on edge. Who she was protecting me from.
Luthair stood in the otherwise empty alley, completely alone without a black-clad guard in sight. He was dressed all in black, though, from his boots to his tunic. His cloak was bright red, clasped at the neck with a golden brooch. The belt across his chest didn’t hold a sword, but instead bags of coin. He didn’t seem intimidated by the griffin but was looking past her, to me. There was a look on his face that I’d never seen before—it was open, vulnerable, hurt—things I didn’t know he could feel. He knew, then, that we’d come from the plateau, that we’d helped Arun and the others escape. That I’d been lying to him all along.
He looked behind me at Estrid, then to Beru, then back at me. “If you are here and your brother is not, does it mean you have given my offer some thought?”
“What offer?” Estrid asked.
“I’m only here to help the town,” I said, ignoring Estrid, not wanting to answer her question or even think about his offer of marriage.
“The town does not need you anymore.”
I laughed. “There are ur’gel attacking Barepost, and you say that now you don’t need us? Why are they here? What are they looking for?”
“Maybe for you,” Beru said quietly behind me.
Being the Suun Page 14