Grand Theft Griffin

by Michael Angel

  I put my hand out to stroke the feathers at the base of Shaw’s neck, hopefully smoothing whatever feathers I’d ruffled. Obviously, his daughter hadn’t reacted to my hail, and no angry mob of Reykajaran griffins had come flying up demanding I attend finishing school, so whatever I did wasn’t beyond saving. But I stayed quiet and kept myself busy removing my saddlebags and slinging them over my shoulder until Shaw worked out what he wanted to explain.

  “’Tis a strange thing, now that I see it from the outsider’s place,” he mused. “Needs I must explain something that springs forth from the nature of mine own aerie.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  Shaw’s voice was measured, and he motioned both with forepaw and half-unfurled wing as he spoke. “One grows up here in sight of all, Dayna. Nothing to top off our dwellings, and mere half-walls to separate our most intimate moments from where any and all can see in. So we griffins must view things differently than most, methinks, because of that.

  “Where thine eyes see but half a wall, thy mind must create the rest. Shouldst my offspring be sleeping in her nest, neither neighbor to left nor right can tell, for they cannot see through these walls. To pretend otherwise is something most foul, ‘ere one breaks into another one’s life without consent or welcome.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “I think I understand. Right now, if we look at Hollyhock’s dwelling, you can’t see the very top of her head over the wall.”

  “Aye.”

  “You cannot see it, or you will not see it?”

  “To us, one is the same as the other.”

  Interesting. That was a quirk of a griffin’s mental conditioning I’d never heard of. If, as a species, they believed in something enough for a cultural reason, it simply became fact. So even though the griffins soared through the skies overhead, able to look down into any number of apartments at will, in their minds they saw nothing but opaque roof tops. I suppose that someone like myself who insisted on ‘seeing’ where nothing should be seen would be treated like a peeping tom in this world, or worse.

  “I get it. Now that’s settled, how do we speak to someone if we don’t know if they are even home or not?”

  “Why, ‘tis simplicity itself: we knock.” And with that, Shaw and I walked up the shell-gravel path until he could use his beak to peck a trio of beats on the tumbled stone wall.

  “Bide a moment,” came Hollyhock’s voice, from just inside. I suppose that I could have stood on tip-toes to see if I could glimpse anything over the top edge of the wall, but after Shaw’s lecture, I wasn’t about to compound my initial mistake. In any case, we only waited a few seconds before his daughter half-leapt, half-flew over her dwelling’s outer wall to land next to us. She and Shaw greeted each other by rubbing cheek and neck against each other like a pair of lions out on the African veldt.

  Shaw sighed once they completed their gesture. “I conveyed thy charge for the day. Now, I must report to the council, to speak ill of thy sibling, and of the school of martial art thou hast created.”

  Hollyhock gave him a look. “Are those mixed feelings I hear in your voice?”

  “Thou art surprised?”

  “After your speech to us yesterday? I thought you’d relish the chance to speak against it.”

  “Think not of me like that. I dislike the Way of the Serpent, aye. Yet ‘tis something new under the sun created by Ironwood, and upheld by you and Blackthorn. It commands my respect, if not my affection.”

  As if embarrassed by that admission, Grimshaw bowed to us once more, turned, and launched himself into the air. He vanished into the swirl of fog and individual griffin flights on their various errands of the day. Hollyhock looked bemused. I did my best to keep a straight face. I’d seen the same expression on Galen’s face the day his father had taken him back into the family fold.

  “More than bone resides under that crown of feathers,” Shaw’s daughter remarked. “I should know that, but there are times it’s easy to forget.”

  “You won’t find me arguing against that,” I agreed.

  She took the bags I had hanging from my shoulder with her paw. “So, are you ready to use your brushes on my lance, Dragon-Hand? Or do you prefer ‘Dayna Chrissie’?”

  “I’m ready, but just call me Dayna. Your father does, and he lets me refer to him as ‘Shaw’.”

  “A mark of favor,” she said, impressed. “One which I can follow to no less extent, given how you helped me against the wyvern. If you’d like to use ‘Holly’ for my address, I would not object.”

  “That works for me.”

  “Follow me upslope, then,” she said, and inwardly I groaned. The mountain was a good deal steeper on this part of the slope. Still, there was nothing to do but shoulder my burden and fall in behind. “By necessity you will be starting with lances that have trained under my Captain, so we need to ascend to our part of the training grounds.”

  We wended our way up the path, and then over to an even steeper slope. Holly halted, though not for a rest break. Instead, she let me pass and go first.

  “Bear to the right,” she said, from about three paces behind me. “Worry not! Should you slip, I shall be here to brace or catch you.”

  “Wouldn’t it…” I huffed and puffed, “Be easier just to fly me there?”

  “Mayhap. But to my eyes, you appear a bit soft. I think the exertion would do you good.”

  Another minute, and we continued to ascend towards the lowest of the wispy cloud layers. Sweat beaded along my brow and I heartily cursed myself for letting my exercise club membership expire.

  “Being soft…really isn’t that bad,” I protested between breaths.

  “True. If one is a hare, a hart, or any other animal that can fit down a griffin’s gullet,” Holly remarked, and I could hear the gentle teasing in her voice. “The curious nature of your form continues to puzzle me. From the rear, I must say you do not look unpleasant. But it doesn’t seem that you should be able to walk about properly, let alone do half the things humans are able to do.”

  Not unpleasant from the rear? I thought. Well, at least she didn’t say that my butt looks fat. ‘Soft’, or ‘curious’ I could handle just fine, thank you very much.

  “Linden. She would agree,” I said haltingly, as Holly called a quick stop at a flat spot in the trail. “Young griffin I met this morning. With your father.”

  “I know her, or at least of her. Quite the young reeve, and just out of the shell.”

  “You call her a ‘reeve’?”

  “Certainly. Didn’t my father teach you some of our terms?”

  “He’s had other things on his mind. He just explained a bit about how you all protect your personal space, for example.”

  “Be that as it may, you have earned your rest break. Catch your breath and listen.”

  “Gladly.” I gratefully stumbled my way over to a handy rock and plopped down.

  It turned out that although the term ‘griffin’ was all-inclusive, adult males were ‘drakes’ and females were called ‘reeves’. Beyond that it got more complex, as it involved the stages of hatching, first plumage, first flight, and a bunch of other rituals that depended more on an individual’s emotional or physical development as opposed to their chronological age.

  There were ‘hatchlings’ ‘or those ‘just out of the shell’, which to my ear sounded like an infant in the crib. ‘Chicks’ could walk outside a nest but not fly, so to my mind that seemed like a toddler. Fledglings were yet older, from when young griffins grew their semi-permanent flight feathers, and then there was the term ‘gryphlet’ which applied to those seeking to join their first patrol.

  “Linden said something about just being hatched,” I remarked. “It surprised me a little. I suppose I thought that since griffins have lions’ bodies that you had live…kittens? Pups? Whatever the term would be. Not eggs.”

  Holly’s pleasant laugh filled the air again. “That would make no sense, Dayna! Any reeve unfortunate enough to find herself gravid would be unable
to fly if she had to carry around young in…whatever you humans use. Some kind of fleshy ‘pouch’, correct?”

  My laugh joined hers for that one. I’d liked Holly from the first time I’d met her, and if she wasn’t Shaw, then she was certainly her own griffin. Or ‘reeve’, to be exact. She came to my side and with one wing, pointed towards a cliff much, much higher up the slope. Inwardly, I prayed she wasn’t going to make us hike all the way up there, or I would have to plead for mercy. Or a ride.

  “See up there? That is an eggery.”

  My face flushed as I recalled Shaw’s lesson. “Are we supposed to be able to see this?”

  “Of course. It’s not like we’re looking into someone’s home dwelling.”

  With cultural permission given, I craned my neck to see. A half-dozen crags in the rock were jammed next to each other. Two were empty. Sleeping griffins lay in two more, protectively curled around their egg. And a final pair of eggs lay out in plain view as they sat in low oval nests made up of curved branches. The four eggs came in a rainbow of colors. One shone cadmium yellow. Two others were a mix of indigo and white spots. The last held the startling red hue of a freshly dipped candy apple.

  “That’s a rarely used, very public place to have your egg,” Holly said, her voice taking on a strange, wistful tone. “For those who want all to know they bore a True Born. All other griffins have their eggs in their home nests, where it is more convenient. More…normal.”

  “Then you were birthed – I mean, hatched – up there? In public?”

  “My brothers and I, yes.”

  She turned away abruptly, ending our conversation. Damn it, I wanted to ask more about whatever this ‘True Born’ thing was. But unlike Shaw, Holly’s moods seemed to shift a great deal more often. She made a motion with her head to follow her up the last stretch of slope. I groaned and picked up my bags.

  Ten more minutes of huffing and puffing finally brought us out onto a large plateau tucked in along the north side of the griffin mountain. Natural hollows in the rock had been widened and pressed into service as a number of small arenas, probably for sparring.

  A couple had tiers of rough stone benches, looking like a miniature version of the aerie itself. A quartet of lances sat at something like parade-ground attention on a flat open area to one side. None wore armor, but several of the griffins here had tipped their tails with hard metal spear points, marking them as practitioners of the Way of the Serpent.

  Griffins looked naturally tough. As it was, the line of feather, fur, hard muscle, and glinting metal made me think of the times I’d seen the SWAT team getting ready to deploy. Only the SWAT guys didn’t look like they could eat you alive in three snapping bites.

  Shaw’s daughter walked up and down the line, nodding to some of the warriors, complimenting one and murmuring corrections to others. As she did her inspection, I found a handy flat-topped rock to spread out my stack of buccal swab kits, a couple ballpoint pens, and an empty box to hold the collected tests. Using a stern voice, Holly explained who I was, and that I was to use my ‘brush magic’ to measure their fitness to join the Andeluvian Air Cavalry.

  “To that end,” she finished, “You will do exactly what she tells you, until you are dismissed in turn. Is that clear, warriors?”

  A raucous caw came in reply.

  “I’m ready to start,” I called.

  “Good. I will go first.” Holly walked up to me confidently, though her tail swished back and forth, betraying a bit of nervousness. Sitting down, I tore a brush package open and put on the latex gloves included in the kit, then carefully removed the sterile swab.

  “Open your mouth, please,” I said, and she did so.

  I stuck the piece of flocked cotton down past the point of her beak, noting in passing how both upper and lower edges were razor-sharp. It made me feel like one of the show people who put their hands into a croc’s mouth. Holly’s long pink tongue lay still in a kind of channel between the edges of her lower jaw, and her breath whistled gently past my face. It smelled surprisingly clean. All I could pick up were traces of a thyme-like herb and the brine smell of freshly caught fish.

  A quick rub and rotation of the swab for a few seconds ensured that the entire tip made contact with the inside of her cheek. Holly looked at me curiously as I pulled my arm back and tucked the swab into the collection envelope. I uncapped a pen and wrote HOLLYHOCK on the line, followed by the date, time, and unique alphanumeric code of the test kit I had just used.

  “That is it?” she asked.

  “That’s it. Not much to it, is there?”

  “Not much at all.” That seemed to trouble her. “And yet…this magic is powerful enough to tell you who is worthy and who is not?”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but in a manner of speaking, yes.”

  It only took me another twenty-five minutes to take care of the rest of the warriors in the group. None showed a bit of hesitation as I swabbed them and sent them on their way; having seen one of the leaders of a lance take the test probably reassured them. For that, I sent a silent thank-you to Holly.

  It was a lot more pleasant performing this test on griffins rather than humans, especially ones who hadn’t brushed in a while. Griffins lacked teeth to catch food scraps on, for starters. About the only odor I got from a couple of the warriors’ breath was, as with Holly, the clean smells of vegetable matter or very fresh fish.

  “And that’s the last,” I pronounced. “We still have a lot of time left in the day. Let’s round up some more griffins and continue testing.”

  A thought popped into my head: That was actually pretty easy. Maybe things are finally going my way for a change.

  “I had to see it for myself,” a deep voice boomed from over my shoulder. “What a pathetic waste of time, subjecting our drakes and reeves to this nonsense!”

  Holly all but snarled a reply. “No one asked your opinion, Thundercrack.”

  A hulking griffin sauntered up to my makeshift testing station. A jagged scar ran along the base of his beak, twisting the flesh there and his overall expression into a permanent sneer. He sniffed at my gear and then turned his back on me.

  “I’ll take my lance into a dragon’s nest,” he announced, “before I let a human sorceress practice her dark arts on me or my warriors!”

  I grimaced. Way to go and jinx myself.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  As far as I could tell, adult griffins came in three sizes. Large, like Shaw, Holly, or Ironwood. Extra-large, like Holly’s brother Blackthorn. And the truly humongous, such as Pride Leader Firewing. Thundercrack looked to be in a size and weight class that fell somewhere between the latter two. Which meant that getting him mad would be like having a flying Sherman tank pissed off at you.

  And that looked inevitable from where I stood.

  “Look,” I said reasonably. “Thundercrack, is it?”

  “Lance Captain Thundercrack, of the Valkir Pride,” he corrected me.

  Holly stepped in. “In case you didn’t notice, Lance Captain,” she pointed out, “Dayna’s not one of our kind. Since when has a human been required to follow our unit protocol?”

  That point scored. Thundercrack’s tail fairly slashed through the air.

  “Regardless of that,” I pressed on, “I have no dark arts. In fact, I can’t do magic. This is just a health examination.”

  He snorted. “No dark arts? No magic? Word comes on the wind that you have ensorcelled members of Reyka Pride. That they and the Elders themselves have fallen under your power, to take you ‘round the aerie, seeking to pry out our weaknesses!”

  It took everything I had to keep a poker face at that jab. The cover story I’d had to use with Belladonna definitely had its downside. This was all I needed.

  “My pride hasn’t been ensorcelled!” Holly flared.

  “Really? One wonders who and what has swayed you in past months.”

  Holly’s forepaw clutched unconsciously in the air, as if seeking something hanging ar
ound her neck. I thought of the little silver chain I’d seen her wear before. But I needed to nip this in the bud, and fast, or I’d never get to complete my testing. And if there was one thing I hated, it was some idiot getting in the way of my job.

  “Everyone knows the amazing things that the Valkir Pride can do,” I said, hoping that this was indeed the case. “Even if I were up to no good, the entire aerie knows they are strong enough to resist any kind of sorcery, do they not?”

  “The Valkir are strong indeed,” he agreed warily.

  “And are they bound by their honor?”

  “As much as any griffin!”

  “Good. Then I have a challenge for you.”

  “A challenge?” Thundercrack scowled. “I can scarce believe you could provide one.”

  “Strength comes in many forms. I believe that you and your pride are strong enough to resist any ‘magic’ I could possess. But I need you to acknowledge that I am stronger than you physically.”

  Thundercrack blinked in astonishment. So did the other assembled griffins. It used to be hard for me to read emotions on a griffin’s stern eagle face, but it was getting easier. I was getting a lot of extra practice, after all.

  “Let us hear your strength challenge, then.”

  “It’s simple. If you can throw a rock farther than me into that part of the ocean,” I pointed north, towards the lee side of the griffin’s wave-shaped mountain, “Then I shall leave without testing your or anyone else’s pride. If I can throw a rock farther than you, then you drop your objections and let me do my testing on your and all the other prides.”

  “Done, and touch tips on it!”

  “It’s to seal the bet,” Holly said quickly. “Reach your hand out, palm up.”

  I did. Thundercrack loomed over me as he approached. His dark gold body and white feathered head made it look like I was about to shake hands with a snow-capped mountain. He unfurled a wing and rapped it against my outstretched hand, making it sting. At the touch, the surrounding griffins broke out into excited murmurs as they departed.