by Jess E. Owen
Esla loosed a pleased sound, and Shard touched his wingtip to Kjorn’s flank in approval. Stars pricked the sky, Kjorn kept his head low, and at last Orn tucked his beak down, though his ears perked attentively.
“Truly, you are different than your forebears.” He lifted his head, ears alert, eyes bright. Kjorn saw that he was not any kind of grasping, aggressive warlord, but only a gryfon who had been chosen to rule, who wanted the best for the pride. They both understood that the best meant the less fighting, the better.
“Your blessing?” Kjorn asked again, quietly.
“You have my blessing,” Orn declared. “My support, my fealty, Kjorn, son-of-Sverin.” He raised his voice a little. “I think everyone here can see there is only one king of the Dawn Spire.”
Kjorn didn’t realize they’d gathered an audience until they heard the hush that followed Orn’s statement, and Kjorn glanced to the side to see all manner of creatures watching them. They’d slowly gathered to witness, and the first to raise his voice, to Kjorn’s surprise and his eternal gratitude, was Stigr.
“Hail Kjorn, king of the Dawn Spire!”
Shard joined him, Valdis, Asvander, and his aunt, all the voices Kjorn knew. The lions roared their approval, the eagles swooping through the dark, cheered him, and when he looked again at Orn, the older gryfon mantled, straightened, and raised his voice with the rest.
When the fervor died and all began to disperse, Shard slipped to Kjorn, and draped his wing over Kjorn’s back. “Well done, your Highness. With Orn on your side, the Dawn Spire will be secure while you return with me to fetch the others.”
“Yes,” Kjorn said quietly, understanding the hint. “It will.” He stepped away and met Shard’s eyes. “If your Vanir are well . . .”
Shard studied his face, and Kjorn felt the sense of urgency kindle between them. “Yes,” he murmured.
Kjorn watched as his wingbrother’s gaze wandered the gathered creatures, settling briefly on Stigr who was laughing with Valdis and Asvander. Then his eyes found Kjorn again, and he raised his head. “I’ll spread the word not to stay up too late celebrating. We can depart at dawn.”
~38~
Leavetaking
A STIFF, COOL WIND GUSTED across the Voldsom, but from where Shard stood on the rim, he spied good weather dawnward. They would leave today, fly across the Winderost to the Dawn Reach and depart from that shore, where Shard had first arrived. It was, as far as anyone knew, the most direct route back to the Silver Isles.
Nerves and relief mingled in his muscles to at last be embarking on the journey home. Behind him, the Vanir woke, stretched, and the canyons filled with their buzzing anticipation.
The final evening of negotiations had seen old alliances renewed, new alliances forged, and Kjorn firmly recognized as king of the Dawn Spire.
It was the greatest meeting ever known by the Winderost since the Second Age, and so Kjorn declared it the Greatmeet, a rite of peace, and had asked that every clan of creatures send leaders to meet once again each year, every year, in the spring, to keep strong the bonds they had tied there. All agreed.
Shard had thought he would feel more pride, more awe, but all he felt was relief that it was done, and anxiousness to get home.
Shard had bid goodbye to the eagles, the painted wolves, and the lioness Ajia. He’d bid goodbye to all in the Winderost who were at the Greatmeet and who knew him, who considered him a friend.
All but one.
“Good day for flying,” Stigr remarked, walking up to Shard’s right side.
Hard talons seemed to grasp Shard’s throat. He nodded once.
“I’ll be all right, you know,” Stigr went on, blunt, as wry and dry as the first night Shard had met him on Star Island. It felt as if his uncle’s voice and presence permeated the wind all around, reverberated in the dust and in Shard’s every feather. “I’ll be all right, here. I see now what you see in Kjorn. He’ll be a good king. And I have Valdis—”
Shard turned and buried his face against Stigr’s neck, grinding his beak against fledge-like whimper. “I’ll miss you, Uncle. You did everything for me, and I—”
Stigr tucked his head over Shard’s and drew a ragged sigh. He preened one feather briefly, in a paternal way. “You’ll be all right too, Shard. You will.”
He stepped back, appraising Shard with a critical eye. Shard realized how desperately he would miss everything about his uncle, how he’d imagined their life in peace back in the Silver Isles.
“Thank you for everything you did for me,” Shard said, ducking his head in deference.
Stigr laughed wryly, looking over his wing at the mix of Aesir and Vanir behind him, the strange harmony. “No, Shard. Thank you.”
“Stigr . . .” Shard bit back more words and shut his eyes, trying to will some strength into his voice.
Stigr smacked him over the head with a wing. Shard jumped, laughed, and shook himself. “I’m complimenting you,” he grumbled. “I want to remember you bright, happy, princely. Give it a try.”
Shard laughed again and sleeked his feathers with more dignity, raising his head. Behind, the others waited, quietly preening, stretching, readying.
“I’ll still miss you.”
“I hope so,” Stigr said wryly. “But not too much. I think we’ll see each other again. I want to meet your kits. Maybe you can even drag that sister of mine here some day.”
Shard nodded once. There was much to do before any of that might happen. But he said only, “I will.”
Wind brought the scent of sage, a good dawn wind that would help them rise high and cover a lot of ground. They heard Kjorn, bidding farewell to those who would keep order while he was away, and gathering those who meant to escort him to the Silver Isles.
He heard Brynja and Ketil, counting heads among the Vanir. But no one approached Stigr and him. No one would interrupt or rush them.
Stigr stepped in close to Shard again. “I want you to listen to me one last time, Shard. And listen well.” Shard tilted his head, ears perking obediently. “You’ve got to let them serve you. The Vanir. You’ve got to let yourself be their prince. You were born to a great line, you’ve done great deeds already, and you’ve got work yet to do. At first they saw Baldr in you. Now, they see Rashard, the Summer King, and love you in your own right. Let them. I’ve said it once. I say it again now, while I have your ear.”
“I know.” Shard’s ears flicked back self-consciously.
“I don’t think you do.” He perked his ears sternly, watching Shard with piercing fondness. “Let them help, obey, and protect you. Above all else, when this is done, you must remain, you must be there to rule your pride.”
“I know, Uncle.” He pressed his talons into the hard earth, breathing the scents of the Winderost.
“You keep saying that, but listen to me, nephew. Valdis told me when they came upon you in the Outlands, you’d practically challenged that big she-wyrm to single combat after finding Toskil’s mother dead. That won’t do. It’s well enough that you’re their hero now, but now you must stay alive. Stay alive for them, for your mother and the pride, and the work to be done at home.”
Stigr’s true meaning sank in slowly, like water to his skin. Anything could happen on the journey. Even now, the wyrms might be ravaging Shard’s own homeland. “I’ll have Kjorn at my side, too.”
Stigr glanced over his shoulder. “I know Kjorn thinks he would die for you, I’ll give him that. But in the moment he’d have to decide between saving you and surviving, he would decide to live. For his pride, for the rest of his family, even if it meant losing you. You must be willing to do the same.” Shard began to argue, but Stigr moved his head sharply in negation. “That’s what it means to be a king. He knows that. You need to know it too.”
“I would die for any of them,” Shard said, eyes narrowing.
“I know, Shard. So do they. But they don’t need you to die, they need you to live. A living king is better than a dead one. Remember that.”
“Stigr—”
“A living king,” he said again, very quietly.
Shard drew a slow breath. His mind flickered to an old vision, a dream of a red gryfon and a gray gryfon battling over the sea. “My father,” he said as it dawned on him. “You don’t think he should have challenged Per.”
Stigr looked taken aback, as if he hadn’t been thinking of it directly, then his eye narrowed and he nodded once. “I told him not to, but I think he believed it was best at the time. But that’s long done.”
“It is,” Shard said, surprised and encouraged to hear his uncle letting go of the past, at long last.
Wind drifted, stirring the scent of dust, frost, and all their allies.
Shard felt locked to the earth. He knew there was nothing more to say.
The day of Halflight would soon rise, and with it would come the spring whelping. Shard knew that Kjorn wanted nothing more now than to be present for the birth of his heir. Shard knew that. He too wanted nothing but to ease the strong tugging in his breast that still insisted he must be home, that now felt like a hot claw in his chest.
But he could not move.
“It’s time, Shard.” Stigr backed away from him, bowing his head. “It’s time.”
Taking a long breath, Shard turned, extending his wing toward Stigr’s good side. With soft surprise, Stigr opened his wing to eclipse it.
“Fair winds, Uncle.”
“Fair winds, my prince.” Stigr gave him a long, quiet look, and a rueful laugh. “My friend.”
Shard met the sharp, green eye one last time, turned, and hoarsely shouted the order to fly.
The first two days passed in excited chatter, with fair skies the first day that took them across the Winderost to the dawnward shore. A brisk tailwind gusted them the second day, ushering the air toward spring, and the exiled Vanir toward their home.
A band of over a hundred warriors from the Dawn Spire, the Ostral Shore, and the Vanheim flew at their backs.
Taking Shard’s dire suspicions about the wyrms to heart, Kjorn had assembled an eager army to escort them home. Misgiving shifted in Shard’s heart to have them, though he didn’t dare tell Kjorn he didn’t want them. He hoped he could speak to Rhydda if she truly was there, could make her see reason.
“I made the mistake of not trusting you about them leaving the Winderost,” Kjorn had said when Shard commented on the size of the force. “I won’t make such a mistake again.”
There was iron in his expression, and Shard knew his golden friend thought only of Thyra, now, and what might await them at home. He said nothing about not wanting to antagonize the wyrms further, for he could see that having the warriors made all the rest of his pride feel more secure.
They flew in compact units, some as large as ten, most smaller than five. Each had a responsibility to know those in their group, to keep an eye on each other, to pause or slow if needed.
Nilsine, flying with Kjorn and Shard, had surprised them both by wanting to come. As a leader of the sentry warriors of the Vanhar, she insisted, said she wanted to see the Silver Isles, to meet the gryfons who she was certain had descended from the Vanhar in the Second Age. So she, Rok, Asvander, and Dagny formed an honor guard for Kjorn.
In Shard’s unit flew Brynja, Ketil, Keta, and Toskil, and they all flew close to Kjorn’s group at the head of the great company. Keta’s nest-sister, Ilse, flew just behind with three of the elder Vanir, and it took everything in Shard’s will not to constantly check back over his wing that everyone was still there.
Keta and Ilse had already proven their mettle by diving in and out of the sea for fish, and others of the younger generation followed, bringing small fare to the eldest and the middle-aged who led the groups.
When Shard did look back and see the clusters of Vanir with him, and the mass of warrior gryfons behind, he thought both of his ancestor Jaarl, one of the first gryfon kings of the Silver Isles, and of Per the Red, leading his loyal and cursed and blessed Aesir over the sea.
Were you running, or were you trying to help the Dawn Spire, or your son? Shard supposed he would never truly know.
That first long flight, alone, Shard had fallen Nameless, had followed an albatross and his instincts. Now, there was too much to pay attention to. It had felt so long, the sea endless, fathomless, the sky both ally and enemy.
Now the sea lay still, rippled only by little, bumpy waves. The sky glowed with sunset. Shard spied a clear horizon, and the air filled with the stirrings of gryfon wings and voices.
The winds calmed in the evening and they flew high and straight, following the line of stars that Shard believed would lead them to the Silver Isles. Ketil agreed, recalling the way.
As night fell, he thought again of Hikaru as the great dragon band of stars blazed across the night sky.
The third day passed in surprising laughter, with the Vanir showing off in the water, with Brynja impressing even Ketil by managing to snare fish from the waves. Warriors who flew with them but had not practiced sea flight remained on higher winds, tense, alert, and growing weary.
Shard directed the Vanir to fly to them, to teach them how to better use the sea air for more dynamic, long-range flying, as an albatross had once shown him.
When Shard looked at Kjorn, he appeared to be constantly counting heads. Occasionally his wingbrother would glance around, find Shard as if to reassure himself, then look forward again. They shared an understanding, a tension, both trying to focus on the journey at hand, but worried for those at home. Shard didn’t dare try to reach out to Rhydda while he flew over the sea. It would take too much effort, pose too much risk.
That night, it rained. The slow, freezing drizzle was miserable, but not the kind of dangerous storm that Shard had faced when making the flight windward last autumn.
Dagny managed to keep spirits light by reminding everyone they would soon be home, they would soon build warm fires and taste the fish of their homeland and see their family and friends.
Shard was grateful for her. He knew he should be the one bolstering everyone, encouraging them, keeping spirits light, but he let others do it. The closer they flew, the heavier, rather than lighter, his heart became. His wings felt strained.
A darkness crept into his heart as he watched Kjorn’s face, growing tense, Shard thought, at the idea of perhaps seeing his father again, nervous over his unborn kit, and Thyra, and the pride while they’d been away. Shard knew the source of his own worry—fear that he had led Rhydda and her horde to the Silver Isles.
At last when he’d lost count of the nights, under a star-swept sky, Shard looked up at the sparkling band of Midragur, felt the arc of the curving earth.
In a dreamlike way, he almost thought he could see his islands laid out in the sky, islands like the pad of a gryfon’s hind paw.
The great Sun Isle, where he’d been born to a king and queen, where great, white mountains towered over broad fields of peat and birch forest. The Star Isle, where he’d met his friend and guide, Catori, and the boar, Lapu, and the dead wolf king, Helaku.
The stars seemed to raise their shining heads like wolves to call him, call him home, and a great pack raced along the dragon’s back across the sky.
Shard felt he could soar to Talon’s Reach, where the birds dwelled, Crow Wing, where wild horses ran, an island he’d never explored. At the far end lay Black Rock, where the dead were laid to rest.
Nothing moved, nothing breathed. Everything was hiding. The trees themselves seemed as if they would close in on the earth and hide. Flat. Still. Dead.
Then he beheld Pebble’s Throw, where the lava ran.
And clustered on Pebble’s Throw, Shard felt them. He felt them with a seizing thread of terror. He felt their anger, their pulsing, Voiceless rage.
Rhydda—
Amidst the unnatural stillness, ravens burst suddenly from all corners of the islands and swirled into the black sky, and formed a laughing, cawing storm. They clustered into a giant, wiggling mass and became Munin, laughing, but
when Shard looked down, Munin’s shadow was not a raven’s shadow on the snow. The shadow of a horned head bellowed, a spade tail lashed.
Down on the pale, muddy earth in the shadow of the wyrm, a flame flicked, ran, singing across the snow, and he knew it was Catori.
She cried out toward the ravens, and their great shadow bled toward her across the ground. Oh, what days have we lived to see?
Seeing that, Shard’s heart swelled, but not with joy. His blood and wings and heart expanded into a great, hot, beating heart of fury and anger and confusion.
But it was not his fury, or his heart. It was Rhydda.
He struggled to control the dream once he realized he was dreaming, to show her images of peace, rolling green fields and woods. Taking memories from her own dreams, he showed her waves of silver and gold.
Her blaring roar sucked the breath and the fight from him.
He dove, trying to outpace the surge of Nameless rage, and someone shouted his name.
“SHARD!”
He woke just before he hit the ocean like a rock.
Seawater filled his beak and his eyes. Flailing, Shard sputtered, realized he had fallen asleep, dreamed, and dropped right out of the sky. Night sky and clustering wings and shouts surrounded him.
“I’m fine!” he managed, flexing his wings against the waves which were not wild, but had only shocked him.
“Give him room,” ordered Brynja from above. “Give him air! Shard, can you fly out?”
“I can.” So saying, Shard flexed his wings again, coughed out more saltwater, and kicked. Gaining momentum, he was able to force himself from the waves.
“What happened?” Brynja winged around him as Shard tried to shake off freezing seawater.
Kjorn circled back to them, his eyes enormous in the starlight, his voice hard with worry. “All well, Shard? You fancy a midnight swim?”
“Yes, next time join me,” Shard said, shuddering, pumping his wings to get away from the water and cold drafts near it. Brynja called out to reassure the rest, and they silently formed back into their groups. Shard looked around at the sky and saw familiar living stars, not the warped, eerie, vision of his dream.