I screamed. “Bastian! Bastian!”
Akiva’s hood was blood-red around my shoulders, and I knew without having to think about it that she was either dead or taken. I screamed for Bastian again as I tumbled out of the bedclothes and into the hall, barking my shin on the door as it swung back from my tempestuous shove. I collided with him at the front gate, and he caught me by the forearms, swinging me swiftly behind him as if he thought the danger was coming from the house.
“What is it, Rose? Are you hurt?”
“We have to find Cassandra,” I said curtly, pulling away and busying myself with the strings of Akiva’s hood. Now that I was warden it no longer obeyed Akiva, and I wanted to be sure it was on tight. I jerked my chin to indicate its colour to Bastian, and said in a tight voice: “The wardship fell to me this morning. Akiva’s dead or taken.”
“We will find her, Rose,” Bastian said insistently. “Rose! Listen to me: you can’t go charging into Cassandra’s wardship!”
“She’s the only one we’re certain about!”
“Let me track Akiva first.” Bastian caught me by the arms again, and this time I couldn’t wriggle away. “It’s not safe to go after Cassandra.”
I put up my chin but eventually nodded because I knew he wouldn’t let me go until I agreed. “All right. But if we can’t find her–”
Bastian nodded at the dropped sentence. “We’ll go after Cassandra. I promise. Did Akiva give you any inkling of what she was up to before she went?”
“She said there was something she needed to do. I think she had an idea who was behind it.”
“Who would she have talked to before or after she left, apart from David?” At my startled look, he added: “I saw her slipping through the forest last night to see him.
“I don’t know,” I said, furious at the helplessness in my voice. “Mara? I haven’t seen Akiva in days, and when she left she wouldn’t tell me what she was doing or where she was going.”
“Then we should speak to David and Mara. They might know something we do not.”
“All right,” I said again. “If David told her anything he remembered it might give us an idea where she was last.”
“Could he have recovered his memory?”
My heart sank. “Perhaps,” I said, and told him about Kendra’s brief reappearance. “I think she was trying to talk to me, but David saw her, too.”
“Did he recognise her?” Bastian’s eyes were sharp.
“No.” I hesitated. “That is, I didn’t think so, not really. He was confused.”
“He may have been less confused when Akiva visited him last night,” Bastian said, a little grimly. “Little witch; I hate to ask, but are you sure David is to be trusted?”
I nodded sharply. I didn’t know what David had been like before he lost his memory, but the David I knew, the one without a memory, I trusted absolutely.
“Then let us pay him a visit.”
When we found him, David was sitting in the back garden, looking silently out into the fields. He was wan and somehow thinner than usual, and I thought with a pang that he looked like the war-scarred soldier we had claimed him to be. I knew at once that he had somehow got his memory back: he had the same tortured look I had seen once before, when Kendra disappeared and he thought it was his fault.
He continued to gaze out onto the fields without acknowledging us, but said quietly: “I suppose you want to know what I told Akiva?”
“She’s gone,” I said shortly. I could feel tears of frustration and fear gathering at the corners of my eyes, and I didn’t want to give them a chance to escape.
David nodded, but still didn’t look at me. “I know. I felt . . . a change, I think: only a little after she left.”
“Where was she going?”
David rubbed a weary hand across his brow. “I don’t know. She asked about what happened when I was taken, that’s all. When she found out for certain that it was a gryphon that had taken me she left.”
“I told Akiva I thought it was,” I nodded. “I went to the place you disappeared, and I saw claw marks.”
He nodded. “Cassandra was the one who threw the curse, but someone else was controlling the gryphon. I don’t know who.”
I said: “I only met a gryphon once, and it was Mara who saved me from it.”
“Then we will speak with Mara,” Bastian said, pulling me gently away. “She might know who has the power to control a mythic as powerful as a gryphon.”
I wanted to stay and talk with David until the smile came back to his face, but his face was closed to me and I let Bastian draw me back into the forest without protest.
I didn’t notice that I was edging imperceptibly closer to Cassandra’s wardship until I felt Bastian’s hand under my elbow, lightly guiding me away.
“Mara first,” he said gently, edging us toward Akiva’s cottage. “And fetch that comb of yours. I’ve a feeling it will prove important.”
Fretting at the delay, I left Bastian at the gate and dashed into the silent cottage. The salamander, who had been lying in a patch of warm sunlight on the kitchen window sill, scuttled after me and climbed up to my shoulders, burning strands of my hair when I tried, impatiently, to remove it. Hot and bothered and cross, I fetched the comb from beneath the pillow of my bed and noticed belatedly that I seemed to be still wearing my party dress, which most inconveniently had no pockets. Crosser still, I shoved the comb into the back of my singed hair, hoping with an annoyed huff of air that made the salamander’s skin glow from red to white briefly, that it would stay put.
Mara’s wardship was unhealthy and darkening even though it was hot, bright noon. The scowling line of trees that greeted us made me uneasy. Things were out of place in small, creeping ways that pricked at the back of my neck, and as Bastian and I entered the wardship we even passed a gnarled old strangler fig with roots in both my wardship and Mara’s. I thought briefly that it looked as though it were trying to flee to the safety and light of my wardship. Something was going wrong with Mara’s power as well, and the forest was reflecting it. I wondered if it could be more than just teething trouble the forest was going through as it adjusted to Mara’s control: perhaps she simply couldn’t keep so much forest in health and order. Bastian raised his brows at the disorder as we walked, but didn’t speak.
The salamander, which had shown its determination to accompany us by continuing to curl about my shoulders and refusing to be dislodged, raised its head and cheeped in distress.
“Well, you would come,” I told it crossly. The shorter strands of my hair had only just recovered from being burned off, and I didn’t appreciate the faint aroma of singed hair that was at present following me about. “It serves you right.”
The salamander gave me a reproachful look and tucked its head back down into my neck, sulking. To tell the truth, I could empathise with its distress: the forest’s dark, brooding air gave the uncomfortable feeling that it was somehow angry with us. The lines were crooked and overlapping, sending confusingly mixed signals of the forest around, and as we continued further I wondered how Mara could sense anything at all in her wardship.
She was planting precise rows of chives with a poker-straight back when we found her, and such was the confusion of the threads around her that she didn’t sense us until she saw us. I thought she looked frowningly surprised, and wondered if we were unwelcome.
To my relief, Mara’s voice was light and even a little amused when she spoke. “What brings Akiva’s apprentice to see me?”
“Akiva’s vanished,” I said baldly.
Mara’s eyes sharpened on me, and she dug her trowel into the ground, giving us her full attention.
“When?”
“This morning,” I said shortly. It would take too long to explain that Akiva had been gone for much longer, and that I simply knew that she was gone for good now. “We need your help.”
Mara stood up, stripping dirty gloves from her hands. “Protection? My dear child, I’m barely keeping these
wardships together as it is. The lines are in disarray, and frankly, the dryads have been uncooperative at best. I doubt I could even protect you on my own wardship.”
“We don’t want protection,” I said grittily. “We want Cassandra brought before the warden council.”
Mara was visibly startled, but said with her usual calmness: “Then you had better come in. I’ll make tea while we talk.”
Mara’s cottage was as spare and tidy as her person. The floor-boards were spotless, scrubbed to within an inch of their lives, and each tea cup and utensil hung exactly an inch from the whitewashed plaster of the wall and no further. It struck me, suddenly and uncomfortably, that I hadn’t wiped my feet before coming in.
“What charges will you bring against her? I believe nothing less than the apprehension of the attacker will draw the other wardens out of the safety of their wardships.”
I nodded, absently stroking the salamander. It was disturbed, its tail curling and uncurling about my neck.
“I sneaked into Cassandra’s wardship,” I said quietly. I found myself looking back on the episode with faint wonder. What had I been thinking? It had been slightly less than a year ago, but I felt older and quieter and somehow less sure of my own expertise. “I thought she’d kill me, but she admitted it all to me: she didn’t care. She also told me that someone else has been helping her: she said that her part of the bargain was that she would get Bastian and I to herself without fear of punishment from the warden council.”
Mara set her kettle on the hob slowly, her cool blue gaze on me. “Do you have proof of this?”
I nodded. “Akiva found David the day he disappeared. We’ve been keeping him hidden ever since, waiting for him to recover his memory.”
“So he recovered his memory,” she said with quiet finality: a statement rather than a question. Her eyes dropped to the kettle and it seemed to me that thoughts crossed her face swiftly, as if she were trying to decide something.
“His story agrees with Cassandra’s,” I pointed out, because I knew that to convince the council I would first need to convince Mara. “He told us that Cassandra cursed him, but that someone else was directing the attack; someone who was strong enough to control a gryphon.”
“I see.” Mara had turned to fetch three mugs from their appointed hooks, and now she gazed silently out of the window, the three tea cups balanced delicately in her capable hands. “Have you spoken to anyone else about this?”
“No,” said Bastian, his eyes flicking from me to Mara. “We came straight to you. You were the one Akiva trusted the most.”
“Very well,” Mara said calmly, not turning from the window. “I will call the council. You said you visited Cassandra’s wardship: what did you find there? The council will require more information.”
I drew the comb out of my hair to show her, and was puzzled to find that it was glowing softly. My stomach did a queer flip-flop as I looked up from it to see the single, matching comb in Mara’s tidy bun. I’d seen it before, the day Bastian and I followed Cassandra. I simply hadn’t realised it.
“I wish you hadn’t found that,” she said quietly, and I knew she must have sensed it from the moment we stepped in the house. She wasn’t calling the council. “I would have let you go, you know.”
“You swapped pieces of wardship,” I said, understanding at last. I should have noticed the bright, gaudy bracelet dropping just below the cuff of Mara’s sleeve. It didn’t suit her, but it would have fit any of Cassandra’s bright ensembles. “You had to be able to trust each other absolutely.”
“It restricts my movements more than I like,” Mara said, still gazing out the window. “I’ll be glad to have it back. Cassandra wouldn’t deal with me unless we swapped anchors, and even then she would keep visiting me every few days to make sure I was looking after it. If I’d had my own I would have known David still had his piece of wardship on him, and he would never have been a problem.”
There was a storm of magic approaching on the forest lines. As twisted and confused as the threads were, I couldn’t tell what was approaching, but I could guess. Cassandra may have cursed David, but she hadn’t called on a gryphon. Horned hedgepigs, but it irked me to think that I’d believed Mara was the one who saved me from the gryphon! She had been trying to kill me, even then. No doubt that was why she had never claimed the rescue: she must have thought the dragon-fever had driven away all memories of that day. I wondered how long I would have remained safe if she hadn’t thought so, and found something for which to be thankful.
“Why did you try to kill me that time?” I asked her.
“You were meant to be the start of it,” she said. “A whim on my part. But Kendra turned out to be more effective in any case. Once you’re gone, I shall of course gracefully step in and claim Akiva’s wardship. I was planning on stepping in after she was gone, but this will be much easier: no claimants to the wardship, you see.”
My mind began to work very quickly indeed, seizing on the single, important fact that Mara didn’t know the wardship had fallen to me. I felt a little boost of hope; perhaps Bastian and I could get out of this with a whole skin after all. The storm of magic was rushing toward us at an increasing rate of speed, and it was all I could do now not to show that I had sensed it. I didn’t know how well I succeeded in hiding my apprehension, but Mara didn’t seem to notice anything amiss, and I thought in brief, brittle annoyance that she probably expected me to be afraid. It was with difficulty that I swallowed my wounded pride, and tried to prepare myself for the gryphon’s arrival. Would a startled look be enough, or would Mara expect me to scream?
As it turned out, I had no need to pretend. I’d forgotten that as a deep forest creature, gryphons didn’t necessarily exist on the same plane of material existence as the rest of the forest, and when the splendidly plumed head with its cruel, curving beak and molten eyes thrust through the wall as if the wall weren’t there, I yelped and instinctively leaped for cover. Bastian was in front of me in a moment, swinging me behind him in a swift, tight arc, but by that time my jumping heart had come to rest again with a thump, and I was able to take my stand beside him, my fingers tight around his wrist to stop him doing anything rash.
The gryphon’s voice was more cat-like, purring, than bird-like as it said: Well met, human child.
The golden eye roved from my face to Bastian’s, and then, amusingly birdlike, it twitched its head to the other side and did the same with its left eye. You have grown. Wolf; we meet again.
I stole a brief look up at Bastian, who was looking with narrowed eyes at the gryphon. The gryphon eyed us both in amusement.
He never told you? He and I have met: I believe he rescued you from my, er– attentions.
Mara’s fingers curled tightly around the gaudy bracelet that had once graced Cassandra’s wrist.
“Kill them both,” she said.
The gryphon turned a look of bird-like consideration on her, and said with cold amusement: No.
“What are you waiting for?” demanded Mara. “You are under my command: you will do as I say!”
Bastian, beside me, was breathing in quick, shallow breaths, his legs tensed and his eyes intent on the gryphon. I found that I knew what it meant: he was preparing for swift action. The gryphon turned a single eye to me, and I heard an edge of deadly amusement in its voice.
Ignorant human! it said, and the edge in its voice was sharper, more dangerous. Regardless of the fact that it was referring to Mara, I felt distinctly uneasy. My fingers were cold where they gripped Bastian’s wrist. The gryphon took one step and then another toward Mara, who stumbled backward, fear and anger fighting for dominance in her face. Huge, muscled legs followed the magnificently plumed head, razor sharp claws scraping against Mara’s spotless floorboards and raising curls of wood. The scent of cedar filled the room, rising on hot, salty air. It was hard to see quite how the gryphon was managing the wall: the plastered stones were still there, they and the gryphon equally present, equally intact. I fou
nd that I couldn’t wrap my head around it and abandoned the attempt to understand as another step brought the gryphon’s muscled chest and shoulders level with Bastian and I.
Mara’s voice was an undignified squeak. “I order you to kill them both! Remove them from the forest and kill them!”
Ignorant human, the gryphon said again, in a caressing purr that I found distinctly more unnerving than its cold, deadly tones. Our contract forces me to do as you order, but gryphon law, like deep forest law, prohibits me from killing one who has already escaped death at my hands. You have violated our contract by ordering me to do so. I claim my freedom forthwith, and you may be sure I will prevent any others from falling into your traps.
There was a surge of immense heat, and Mara, with great presence of mind, threw up a wall of powerful magic. In the resulting calmness of cool air, I realised that the salamander, traitor that it was, had slipped away from my neck, and was now lovingly curled under the gryphon’s neck-quills.
Amiably, the gryphon said: I can wait. You cannot stay awake forever.
Mara turned swiftly, pinioning me with her eyes. “Give me the comb!”
“No,” I said.
Mara gripped the bracelet until the beads dug into her palm, and I saw the sweat on her brow. It was not until a stifled groan broke from Bastian and I looked up to find his face white and narrowed with pain that I realised she was using a torture spell on him.
I gave a snarl of rage, and held the comb taut between two hands. “Stop or I’ll break it!”
“Give me the comb or I will kill him,” Mara countered, and there was neither remorse nor shrinking in her face. She would kill him, forest law or no. In desperation, I found the trace of magic leading from her to Bastian, and tore savagely at it. Bastian gave a gasp of pain, or relief, and Mara was thrown back with a choked cry of anguish.
She pulled herself up with the help of one of the kitchen chairs, and I braced myself for a battle that I couldn’t hope to win. The gryphon gave a laugh, satisfied to watch us fight it out, but Mara, one side of her perpetually neat bun hanging loosely by her left ear, was visibly beginning to lose her calm.
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