by K Vale Nagle
Off in the distance, Hatzel dropped a cache to stop a forest fire while several opinici used the fire suppressant powder to smother the few remaining sparks. The path beneath Triddle had the footprints of a flock of goliath birds that cut east before the bridge.
He could just make out Satra and two fledglings flying far south of them towards the ocean. They had their own mission, but it was a relief to see she’d been rescued successfully. The kjarr gryphlets should be on their way up to the plateau. There was no way to know what the shore looked like at this point, but those were not his problems. His problems began when he arrived at the bridge.
Three rangers, probably stragglers who’d lost their way, were trying to follow Glacial Run out of the weald. They were surprised to find four gryphons attempting to blow up a bridge. The four gryphons attempting to blow up the bridge were surprised to be found.
Two of the rangers dive-bombed the saltpeter crate, causing the two Merin pride gryphons to drop it and leap out of the way. A third rammed Triddle and knocked him to the northern edge of the bridge.
The first two opinici grabbed the cache and were overcome by its weight. They were dragging it towards the edge of the bridge when Ninox struck.
One ranger dropped the cache and ducked while the other took her claws across his face. The two large gryphons rushed in to finish him off.
Triddle felt drowsy. He saw a little blood, but no serious injuries. The third ranger landed, and his front left talons clicked as he walked, metal on the joints of the bridge. Triddle remembered the glove with the poison sac from the flameworks. They must have been produced for the rangers. Desperate, he reached into his harness for his last saltpeter bomb but instead pulled out a pawful of parrot treats.
He was saved only by the intervention of his owl bodyguard. Without a sound, she crashed into the opinicus, and they both went flying over the edge. He wanted to shout for her to watch out for the metal claws, but he was having a hard time opening his beak. The world was moving slower now.
The last ranger held off his two gryphons remarkably well. None of his metal claws glistened with poison, but he moved like a snake, dodging slashes and returning kind with kind. The fire was starting to spread on the other side of the river, and they needed to blow the crate before the flames crossed the bridge.
The two gryphons made a charge, only to be repelled. One was bloodied, the other made wary. The unwounded gryphon roared and the opinicus stepped back. Before the ranger’s back paw could set down on the edge of the bridge, Ninox’s gryphonic paw reached up from under the bridge and caught it, pulling him over the edge. The splash told Triddle that the opinicus hadn’t managed to right himself before hitting the rapids.
While the healthiest of the Merin pride attempted to figure out the fuse and flint and tinder, Triddle still lay paralyzed, waiting for the toxin to wear off. Strix’s daughter sat a way off, inspecting the metal glove. She removed the talons from it and tried to get it on her paw without success.
Triddle’s pridemates chose a long fuse but were having trouble working out how to get the flint and tinder going. He wanted to shout at them, but his beak wouldn’t open. Two curious ground parrots snuck out from the underbrush and began to eat the treats from his paw. A third one was nuzzling under him to pull the treats out of his harness pocket. A small bit of drool leaked from the side of Triddle’s beak.
Ninox finally noticed the trouble on the bridge and came over to light the fuse. They were talking, but Triddle couldn’t make out the words from here. She tilted her head to the side. The two gryphons looked back and forth, then mimed a huge explosion and crater as they talked. Her eyes widened. She nodded, they lit the fuse, and then they ran to get him, waking the glutinous parrots that had cuddled up next to him.
The gryphons were too weary to fly with him, so they took turns carrying him on their backs as they hastened away. It was fortunate that they chose the long fuse, because when it went off, they were still close enough that it knocked them all to the ground.
The version of Brevin that Zeph was experiencing here was different from his previous interaction. Her long tail feathers remained tucked. When she glided down and backbeat her wings, he’d seen only brown with a hint of green. Gone was the jewelry and glittering harness. What she wore now was practical. Her only indulgence was a small cobra necklace and metal talons on her left foreleg. Her right foreleg had long, sharp claws. Since most upper-class opinici filed down one set of talons to allow them to better write and use instruments, the metal glove was an interesting adaptation. She knew she may have to defend herself.
“Zeph Parrotbane,” she said. Her voice was too smooth for her to have flown through the smoke. She must have escaped before the fires hit their worst.
“Reeve,” he said. His natural inclination was to fight or flee, but he needed to keep them occupied until the dam exploded. If Jonas and Cherine were any indication, some opinici liked a good conversation. Unfortunately, this opinicus only had one question for him.
“Who sent you?”
It was a silly question. Who did she think sent him? Hatzel? Merin? The truth was easier and might buy him some time. “I just hunt and sell parrots.”
“No one just sells parrots.” She looked from his lack of a harness to his drab plumage. From an opinicus point of view, he wasn’t much to look at.
He stood a little taller. “They should. It’s a good life.”
From the distance came the sound of a district collapsing. Only the expensive living quarter in the north had been intact last he’d looked. There would no longer be any safe districts left.
“I suppose all the beads I’ve collected will be useless now,” he mused.
With her neck fully extended, she towered over him. “Saving up to buy eyrie lodgings, were you?”
“No, just fish and books. I’ve acquired a taste for both.” He’d paged through What Does Your Coloring Say About Your Personality while waiting for a merchant. It was not kind to brown gryphons with black bars. He’d always thought of his inner plumage as being a vibrant red: good for risk taking and love making. This was according to the author, a male cardinal opinicus.
The guards were starting to spread out and move to his sides but still maintained a healthy distance. He didn’t want any to get close enough to look over the ledge. He didn’t know if they’d seen Kia, too. Her plumage was bright enough that there was no missing her if they’d looked over earlier. If they knew, there was no indication in their posture. They were all focused on Zeph, only Brevin seemed distracted by the fire. The Redwood Valley Eyrie’s spires had all collapsed. Only smoke and burning redwoods remained.
“Was this destruction worth it?” she asked.
He kept his eyes on her. “That wasn’t my intention. Someone needed to save Satra.”
“You let your weald kin burn thousands of opinici to save that little murderer?” Her laugh was high-pitched. “Say you save the wingtorn. Well done. We stuffed the weald full of saltpeter. It’ll burn for weeks, burn to ash. You may scatter to the mountains. Maybe the shore is even saved. What do you think happens next? I have an army waiting for me at the Crackling Sea. There are hundreds of wingtorn waiting on the other side of the mountain pass. Enough of this, attack—”
Zeph’s pounce caught all of them off guard. Brevin pivoted too quickly for him to catch her long neck in his beak, but she took the brunt of his tackle across her chest and fell back into the frigid water while he kicked off from her stomach and dashed low across the lake to pull the guards as far from Kia as he could get.
Orlea was sure the entire world was going to burn. She was certain they would run out of the fire suppressant powder. Having seen the size and scope of the Snowfeather Dam, she was certain it would survive a single saltpeter crate. She was also sure that all the opinici would band together to save their eyrie home.
She was learning to live with being wrong.
What she had not made any predictions about was the number of gryphons who would
come help stop the spread of the eyrie fire. As gryphons finished their bombing runs on the weald fires, they retrieved boxes of the suppressant from the ranger camps and brought them to Orlea, who then made sure the powder was sent where it was most needed.
At the present, that was the northeast corner. When there were fewer options, she’d considered letting the aneda forest north of the eyrie burn. Now that the powder supply had tripled, she was no longer willing to risk the fire spreading from the mountains back into the grasslands. She sent a pack of four gryphons led by an opinicus to take care of it. The opinicus, Foultner, was a northern poacher Orlea had crossed paths with several times, so she trusted her old rival to know the terrain.
Another explosion racked the forest. Several factories and storage facilities full of explosives had remained insulated from the initial fire but had later fallen into the depths. She looked over to see two scythe-beaked opinici wounded from debris. She started to rush over, but two gryphons covered in the flamekeeper’s grease from the medicine gryphon’s cave materialized out of nowhere to help. The slick gryphons glistened in the firelight but were unhurt by the falling embers.
Orlea’s mate’s sister put her foreclaw on Orlea’s shoulder. As strange as it felt, she understood. Someone needed to coordinate the firefighting efforts, and everyone had decided to report to her. For once, she was grateful for her bright red beak. On several hunting expeditions, she’d had to rub black smear on it to keep from being spotted by the rangers. Now, it made her an easy target to find and request orders from.
Seeing gryphons and opinici working together eased her fears for the future only slightly. Gryphons had destroyed the flameworks. Nothing had suggested that the fire would be this extensive. She’d helped them because she’d believed the eyrie would remain untouched. The way the fire spread to the ground level suggested that someone had wanted the eyrie to burn, and when the flameworks failed to get the job done, they’d taken matters into their own paws. As gossip spread, relations would grow even more strained.
Yet, the current whispers she was hearing told a different narrative. A brave opinicus—with a description matching Kia or Cherine, depending on the telling—found out about the reeve’s plan to burn everything and stole a map to warn the gryphons before it was too late, gryphons who then returned to evacuate the eyrie before it was burned down. The fact that the upper crust of opinicus society were fleeing to the Crackling Sea just confirmed that they’d known what was going on.
Just because Orlea didn’t know the truth, it didn’t mean she didn’t know a lie when she heard one. For tonight, the lie was helping smooth over relations between disparate groups working together to stop the fire from spreading. The eyrie would need the weald, and the weald would need the eyrie in the days to come. Long term, she wanted to know exactly what caused the burning waterfall that destroyed her home and the homes of her loved ones.
She leaned down to speak to her mate’s sister. “Go to the grasslands ranch and find out how much food—living and processed—is there now. Bring your brothers. Relocate that food to the ranger staging area in the hunting grounds without being seen, if possible. The grasslands are no one’s land now. I want that food under our control.”
Her mate’s sister, an opinicus who’d fought with her every time they encountered each other from the moment Orlea mated her brother, just nodded and disappeared. More than her departed mate, what they shared in common was knowing what it felt like to starve.
More gryphons arrived, and she assigned them to the western border.
The Snowfeather River climbed into the mountains, meeting the first straggly aneda trees. Zeph climbed with it. Right behind him was the leader of the remaining Reeve’s Guard who was, Zeph could not believe, wearing a circlet that resembled a tiara. The captain’s stomach and throat were chestnut with a black head, feathers, and rear half. Zeph wondered if the opinicus had won that tiara at the Reeve’s Guard annual races or if all captains had one.
The captain had left his fellow guards far behind to catch up to Zeph. He took a bite at one of Zeph’s tail feathers.
Zeph dropped down, letting his paws push off from the ground and buy him a little altitude as the captain adjusted. He would much prefer to have the element of surprise or the time to figure out this opinicus’s strengths and weaknesses, but every moment the captain lived was a moment his guards were catching up. Zeph flew straight up or as close to straight up as his wings could manage.
The captain was gaining on him again. This time, Zeph twisted and pulled his wings in before the falcon opinicus crashed into him, giving Zeph four paws to defend himself with. He kicked at the captain’s stomach but took a left hook across his chest before they separated.
Zeph watched a shower of blood and feathers fall to the tree tops and did a quick check. He didn’t feel any pain, but adrenaline did weird things to pain perception. He’d seen gryphons fly with injuries that should have prevented it only to pay later with permanent wing damage. He looked down at his chest where he’d seen the captain hit him. Some damaged feathers, no blood. He risked a glance back.
The captain was losing altitude quickly. He was holding his stomach with his left foreleg, the talons of which had been sanded down. His position in the Reeve’s Guard must have been too prestigious and required too many hand-written reports for him to leave his left talons sharp. It must also have paid too little for him to afford metal talons, to the benefit of Zeph’s health.
Zeph slowed and landed near the opinicus, who was now coughing. The captain was unsure what to do about his injures. He was unstable in his footing. Zeph pulled the bark off a nearby aneda tree. Infected with beetles, no use. He found another without beetles.
“Hold the sticky side against your stomach. It’ll keep it from becoming infected until you can get help,” he told the captain.
Overhead, two of the other guards flew past them. Zeph looked at the captain and mouthed for him to keep quiet.
“Down here!” the captain shouted with the last of his energy.
So much for the kindness of strangers, Zeph thought. He slipped into the forest heading north and quietly tried to backtrack once he was out of the captain’s view. If it were just the two opinici, he’d kill them and be done with it. But there were other guards on Zeph’s trail. If these called out for help, soon there’d be too many for him to fight. The aneda forests, as he knew from his childhood, were too sparse to allow for the kind of forest combat he was used to.
He made it to the shoreline undetected and looked across Crater Lake to the dam but didn’t see Brevin. Had she been with the guards chasing him? That didn’t seem like her. In fact—
He jumped straight up. There hadn’t been an odd feeling. There wasn’t a prickling on the back of his neck. His ears hadn’t picked up on a strange sound. There was just a moment where he realized his back was to the one place someone could hide along the shore, the fishing hut. The reeve’s metal talons missed his tail by a squirrel-length.
Pursued by an angry, long-necked opinicus bent on killing him, he flew to the one place where he shouldn’t have, the dam. She was lithe and quick. Had her talons been poisoned, he’d already be dead. Her neck moved like a snake. He couldn’t seem to catch it with his own beak or dodge her when she struck at him. Nothing he hunted in the weald fought like this. She was serpent, monitor, and gryphon all in one.
Just as he made a leap up to try to dive down the cliffs and escape to the weald, the fuse ran out. Both he and the reeve were caught in the shock wave. Consciousness faded from him with twenty stories of air between him and the ground.
Kia couldn’t bring herself to light the fuse at Zeph’s command. Instead, she waited until she heard a splash and the shouts of the guards flying after him before lighting the longest fuse Triddle had given her.
She remembered the last explosion and Xavi’s offspring recovering at the medicine gryphon cave. This time, she wanted to be as safe as she could make herself. She knew better than to be airbor
ne. It was probably not safe to be along the cliff itself. If things went well, the grasslands and hunting grounds would be flooded. That left the edge of the weald. The grasslands were narrowest here where they met the weald, mountains, and reeve’s hunting grounds. An avalanche or falling debris could still reach her, but the more time she spent flying away, the higher the chance she’d get caught in the air.
Once she arrived at the weald and found a good vantage point—careful to look away until after the explosion—she was left with time to think. With the reeve gone, assuming Zeph was able to get the upper paw, Kia might be able to follow the refugees to the Crackling Sea.
While she held no loyalty to the Redwood Valley Eyrie itself, she couldn’t see herself fleeing north to try to find the eyrie the headmaster had gone to. She didn’t want to throw herself at the mercy of a culture that employed spies. The fisherfolk might be the easiest option if they’d survived the wingtorn, but she knew nothing about fishing. Had they need of a scholar? Could she be happy cataloging fish?
Then there was Zeph’s pride. No, Hatzel’s pride. She didn’t like the way gryphons didn’t form lasting romantic relationships. It wasn’t necessarily that relationships didn’t happen from what she could tell, it was just that they weren’t respected the way two mates might be respected in the eyrie. As an opinicus among gryphons, she didn’t want one more reason to be an outsider. She also didn’t know what Zeph’s intentions were. They’d been through a lot together but didn’t have a common language for feelings.
This just left Cherine. Long ago, she’d broken his heart, and once she thought he’d died, she felt like she couldn’t live without him—until he turned up alive and recovering well, at which point she found she didn’t care for him that way again. She’d felt no jealousy at his newfound connection to Orlea. The two of them had grown close in that brief time, but Cherine developed a relationship with everyone he met. It was what had driven Kia crazy when they’d been together.