[Firebringer 02] - Dark Moon (22 page)

He remembered the gryphon—a green-and-gold male overwhelmed by the same vast wave that had claimed Jan. He remembered glimpsing the other’s limp form floating on the waves afterward, seeing it cast back up on shore—perhaps
not
dead. Had the wingcat survived? Something moved upon the rocks just above the waterline ahead. Jan halted, staring at the creature as yet unaware of his gaze, while overhead Tlat veered and circled. The creature’s dull golden pelt was sandy and scabbed, his foreparts a mass of shabby green feathers: a gryphon on the brink of starvation.

Jan shook himself. Beside him, Ryhenna pressed against his flank, peering over his back at the wasted predator. The lionlike haunches were sunk in, his rib cage showing starkly through thin, patchy fur. One wing lay folded against his side. The other dragged awkwardly across the rock. The wingcat lay in a heap above the swirling tide. One eagle’s claw reached down into the sea. From time to time, the gryphon jerked his submerged forelimb from the water, talons clenched—but always empty.

The wingcat was fishing, Jan realized, as with a weak but triumphant cry, the gryphon at last hefted into sight a small, struggling fish. With one snap of his hooked, razor-sharp bill, the fish disappeared down the raptor’s scrawny gullet. A moment later, the wingcat returned to scanning the water, foreclaw once more extended beneath the surface of the tide. How many fish could he hope to catch thus in a day? Jan wondered. Surely not enough to keep himself alive. Overhead, Tlat dipped, cawing and feinting at the fishing gryphon.

“Haw! Cat-eagle! Enemy!” she shrieked. “Look up! Look up!” The tercel hunched, ignoring her, but she persisted, swooping just close enough to scatter any fish. At last the starving gryphon raised his head.

“Take yourself off, you accursed seabird,” he rasped. “Has your kind not taunted me enough?”

“We feed you!” cried Tlat. “Our generosity kept you alive this winter past.”

“I never asked for your food!” the gryphon snarled, swiping at her with sudden, unexpected vigor. Tlat hovered flapping in the air above him, merrily out of reach.

“You never ask,” she shouted, “but you always eat what we bring. Without us, you would be dead!”

“Better death,” the gryphon spat, “than to live, starving and maimed, on the leavings of arrogant sealice.”

With a caw of delighted contempt, Tlat alighted upon a stone just barely within the gryphon’s reach. Her gorge heaved. Had she given him time, he could have lunged and caught her, but in less than an eye blink, she had disgorged three large fish and darted away into the air again. Jan watched appalled as, driven by hunger too great to deny, the wingcat snatched up Tlat’s gifts and wolfed them down.

Yet the gryphon’s own look of disgust told Jan he hated himself for accepting, for living as a prisoner of the mocking seaherons.
As I once lived a prisoner of the two-foots,
Jan could not help thinking. A disturbing sense of empathy touched him. Angrily, he shoved it aside. This tercel, along with companions, had sought to kill him and his band half a year ago. Beside him, Ryhenna stood shuddering.

“You do not keep me alive for charity,” the wingcat shouted after Tlat, who now circled overhead, chattering derisively. “I know that well enough! But your taunts cannot move me, who destroyed the unicorns’ black prince. Surely now my flock will drive the hated intruders from Ishi’s sacred Vale. My life no longer matters, already sacrificed to the wind-god’s almighty glory. I pray only for an end to my misery.”

“Kah! Haw! Nonsense!” screamed Tlat. “The first storm of autumn battered your companions to bits. None survived to report the outcome of your raid. Your flock will assume you failed—as indeed you
have
failed. Behold! The prince of unicorns returns, alive and hale, unscratched by treacherous cat-eagle claws.”

She wheeled to circle above Jan and Ryhenna. Turning, the wingcat started, green cat-eyes wide. An instant after, they winced, grimacing at the pain his sudden movement had caused his injured wing. Cautiously, Jan moved forward, careful to remain well beyond the wingcat’s reach. After a moment’s hesitation, Ryhenna accompanied him, still peering with fascination and terror at the wounded gryphon. Jan snorted, lashing his tail.

“What Tlat, noble queen of our allies, says is true, wingcat,” the prince of the unicorns flung at him. “Your raid did not succeed, though the sea washed me far. It has taken me a long time to return to the spot where last we met, enemy.”

“Great god of winds,” the gryphon exclaimed. “It
is
you, cursed prince of trespassers. The sea has not been kind to deliver you back unharmed, while mangling me beyond repair. Have you come merely to mock, as this harridan seabird does, or will you kill me at last and end my shame?”

“I go!” cried Tlat from above. “My mates hunger and my unborn chicks grow cold! I leave you to do with this predator whatever seems good in your eyes, friend Jan. Do not forget it was your allies, the seaherons, who preserved his worthless life to await your vengeance.”

“I will never forget your invaluable service, Tlat!” called Jan. “May your flock ever increase!”

Overhead, the queen of the dust-blue herons wheeled, winging swiftly toward the Singing Cliffs. A moment later, she was lost against the hot, flame blue of the cloudless morning sky.

“So, unicorn,” the tercel snapped, “did you come merely to gawk? I am Illishar, of the nest of Shreel and Kilkeelahr, kin to great Malar, matriarch of all my clan. I fear no unicorn!”

Were he one of my own people,
Jan mused,
we would call him brave.

The young prince snorted with frustration. Why was it so hard for him to despise this enemy as he should? The tercel’s fellows had attacked Jan’s peaceful band. This very wingcat’s talons had scored his shoulders to the bone. Yearly, the gryphon’s kind raided the Vale to steal away the unicorns’ newborn fillies and foals.

“Well?” the wingcat taunted hoarsely. “Have you nothing more to say before you end my life, prince of thieves? Or do you mean to take the coward’s way and simply leave me? The herons are done with me. Without their fish to add to my own meager catch, I’ll quickly starve.”

Jan stood silent, considering. The gryphon shifted painfully, hissing. The dark prince felt Ryhenna huddled against him.

“Come, my lord,” she whispered urgently. “Let’s depart. His hate-filled words frighten me.”

“Have you lost your tongue?” the gryphon Illishar shrieked. Jan felt the coppery mare start, flinch. “Or has that silvery chain now clamped shut your jaws? Kill me now, invader—infidel—or else be off! I’ve little leisure to spend arguing with unicorns.”

“Moonbrow,” Ryhenna urged him, “let’s away.”

Jan nodded abruptly and turned. “Aye, Ryhenna. I’ve long promised to show you all our haunts along the Summer shore. I’ll do so now while I ponder what’s to be done with this foe.”

He started off across the sand, and with a relieved sigh, the coppery mare fell in beside him. Glancing back, Jan glimpsed the tercel sagging as though only anger had kept him upright to challenge Jan. Once more the young prince champed his heart tight against pity. Marauding wingcats deserved none! Quickening his trot, he led Ryhenna away from his injured enemy, eastward along the shore.

For the better part of the morning, Jan showed the coppery mare the beaches along which he and his fellows had galloped that half year past, the cliffs under which they had sparred, the sparse coastal woodlands in which they had foraged and bedded and sought shelter against mild summer storms. He described for her his people’s alliance with the dust-blue herons and spoke of how he and Tek had courted and pledged. Ryhenna harkened, rapt, but as she walked through the vast courting glade, he heard her soft and bitter sigh.

“Why do you sorrow?” he asked, puzzled.

The coppery mare tossed her head. “I think on the day, not long distant now, when we shall join your herdmates in the Vale.”

Jan frowned, moving to stand in front of her. “I thought you welcomed the prospect!”

The coppery mare refused to meet his gaze. “I do,” she murmured, “and yet I dread it. What will become of me among thy people, Moonbrow? Will I ever dance court in this sacred glade?”

Jan cocked his head, trying to see her better. “Ryhenna, such is my dearest wish,” he told her, “that one day you may find in this glade that same joy which I so lately found with Tek.”

His companion sighed again, as though swallowing down some hard little pricking pain. “Who among your people would want me?” she said heavily. “Hornless—crippled. Useless.
Imperfect.”

The dark prince fell back a step at her quiet vehemence. “You must set no store by Queen Tlat’s thoughtless words….”

“Even though they be true?” Ryhenna finished, turning to meet his gaze at last. “O Moonbrow, dost think I have not always known that while I might one day walk among thy people, I can never be one of them?”

The dark unicorn stared at her, astonished. He shook his head vigorously. The halter of silvery skystuff clinked and chinged. “Nay, Ryhenna,” he told her. “You are wrong.”

The breeze off the golden strand stirred the trees surrounding the glade. Ryhenna’s coat gleamed fiery copper in the late morning sun. Jan looked away, at the seabirds gliding overhead, at distant herons winging home to the Singing Cliffs from fishing in the bay.

“The sea-unicorns told me—and Jah-lila herself once told me a thing which leads me to hope our rescuer’s tale may be true—that my mate’s dam was once hornless as you are, born in your City of Fire, but fled and, joining our company, became a unicorn.”

The coppery mare’s gaze changed, intensified, grew full of such wild longing suddenly that he found it difficult to meet.

“Surely this is but an old mare’s tale thou hast spun to keep my spirit up,” she breathed. “My own dam used to do the same, but I pray thee to have done. I am no filly to be made docile so.”

Again Jan snorted, shaking his head. “I pledge to you, Ryhenna: my mate’s dam is a powerful sorceress; if any among the unicorns has power to make you one of us, it is she.”

He saw the coppery mare flinch, shuddering. “And if not?”

“If not,” the dark prince told her, “then you will be no less welcome among us, admired for your bravery, your counsel, your beauty.” The silver halter jingled as he spoke. He made himself say the words: “A horn upon the brow—it is not the world, Ryhenna. “

The coppery mare turned away suddenly. He followed her. “Moonbrow,” she breathed, “I fear this above all else: that rejoining old friends in the Vale, thou wilt forget me.”

“Ryhenna,” the young prince cried. “How could you think it? Such shall never come to pass.”

The coppery mare turned again to face him. The breeze sighed through the trees. “Thy mate will reclaim thee,” she said bluntly, “and thy duties as prince.
I
am not thy mate—”

Jan shook his head. “Nay.”

“Among
daya,”
she offered, “a stallion may have many mates.”

Again the dark prince shook his head. “But not among unicorns.”

She gazed at him, lost. “In the City,” she whispered, “I was called thy mate, if only from courtesy. What am I now to thee—what can I be—if not thy mate?”

Her voice was tight, her tone desperate. He moved to stand next to her. “My shoulder-friend,” he answered her, “she to whom I owe my freedom and my life. Those among the unicorns who love me, Ryhenna, will love you as well.”

“I shall never love any as I love thee, Moonbrow!” she cried.

He nuzzled her, very gently. “Nor I you, Ryhenna,” he said. “Tek is my mate. I love her. You are my shoulder-friend, and I love you. I love you both, but differently. And when in a year or two years’ time, you dance court within this glade, it will be with one whom you love in a way entirely other than the way that you love me. I am your companion, your friend, Ryhenna, just as you are always and ever mine. Stand fast with me,” he said, “and no foe shall ever part us.”

The pain so plain upon her features all at once subsided. She whickered low, and champed him lightly once, a comrade’s nip, no more. “Well enough then, my shoulder-friend.”

He shrugged against her laughing, relieved. Sun overhead was climbing toward noon. He shook himself, snorting.

“So tell me, Ryhenna, what should I do with this gryphon?”

The mare beside him shuddered. “Leave him,” she answered. “Leave him to his fate.”

Jan sidled uneasily. “By rights, I ought to kill him,” he murmured, “as a sworn enemy of the unicorns.”

He heard Ryhenna gasp. “Too perilous,” she answered quickly. “Weak and starving as he is, Moonbrow, he nonetheless might do thee harm.”

The dark unicorn nodded. “Aye. And skewering a crippled foe scarce seems honorable—yet simply leaving him to starve smacks hardly more noble….”

“He frightens me,” Ryhenna whispered, “and yet—”

“Yet?”

“I pity him,” she finished, glancing at him, “hobbled by his broken wing as surely as a firekeeper’s tether once hobbled me. Captive of the herons—and now of us—as truly as once we two were captives in the City of Fire.”

Jan stamped, frustrated, lashing his tail. He longed now only to quit the Summer shore and begin the last, short leg of the journey inland toward the Vale. Yet the gryphon’s fate stymied him.

Great Alma, guide me,
he petitioned silently.
Tell me what to do.

The air around him hung utterly quiet, silence broken only by the whisper of breeze, the soft sigh of Ryhenna’s breath, and the faint, far cries of seabirds fishing. Herons winged swiftly overhead, crops heavy. Some carried more fish, silver gleaming, in their bills. The prince of the unicorns sighed. His goddess remained mute still—or else spoke in words he could not reck.

“We’ll feed him until I can decide, Ryhenna,” he muttered, trotting across the glade toward the trees and the shore beyond.

A dead skate, newly cast up by the tide, rounded their haul into a fair-sized catch by the second hour past noon. Jan set about devising a means to transport their gryphon’s food to him. The two-foots, he recalled, carried all manner of goods in wheeled carts. Though he and Ryhenna possessed no carts, he mused, they could still drag.

Eventually, the dark unicorn hit upon tangling fish and shellfish in a mat of seaweed and dragging the whole contrivance back to the gryphon on the rocks. Ryhenna suggested that if she lifted the other end of the seaweed clear of the ground, the pair of them might carry it with greater speed. Jan laughed through his teeth, marveling at their innovation as, trotting side to side, he and the coppery mare brought their prisoner his meal.

Despite obvious hunger, the tercel accepted their offering with little grace: screaming and hissing. Ryhenna refused to approach, so Jan pulled the food-laden mat within a few paces of the shrieking tercel by himself, then sprang away to stand with Ryhenna as the wingcat hauled himself laboriously near enough to snag the seaweed and draw it to him.

He fell upon its contents with savage relish. Jan watched, fascinated as the gryphon’s razor beak made short work of the skate, slicing and swallowing down the tough cartilage along with the flesh. Strong yet amazingly nimble talons picked lacelike bones from the fish, pried open shellfish, and plucked strings of flesh from the crabs’ hollow limbs.

At last, the seaweed mat completely pillaged, the wingcat subsided with a heavy sigh, green eyes half shut. Plainly it had been the most sumptuous meal he had eaten in more than half a year. Behind the dark unicorn, Ryhenna twitched nervously, anxious to be gone, but Jan lingered. Slowly, carefully, he approached the tercel, halted just out of reach. “Earlier this day,” he said, “you called my people trespassers. What did you mean by that?”

The tercel stirred, obviously annoyed at Jan’s proximity—his very presence—but too sated and contented to raise further protest.

“I called your people what they are, unicorn: thieves,” he answered, almost amiably. “The great vale we call the Bowl of Ishi was ours long before you unicorns came.”

Jan stared at him. “Yours?” he cried. “How so? No gryphons ever dwelled in our Vale. It was deserted when the princess Halla first claimed it, forty generations ago.”

The wingcat’s eyes snapped open, then narrowed angrily. “Deserted? Pah!” he scoffed. “It housed the sacred flocks of goat and deer Ishi gathered for my people’s use: to provide first meat each spring for our newly pipped hatchlings. But you vile unicorns drove away the tender flocks, profaning the Vale with your presence. Now the formels must hunt your bitter kind in spring, though we prefer the sweet flesh of goats or deer.”

The prince of the unicorns stood dumbstruck. The Vale of the Unicorns—claimed by gryphons as a sacred hunting ground? He had never heard of such a thing. Yet ever since the first attacks upon the princess Halla and her followers, gryphon raiders had returned to the Vale every spring. At last, after forty generations of conflict, Jan had learned the reason why.

“Four hundred years have we sought to drive you out,” the wounded gryphon rasped. “My own parents died on such a mission two springs past. They flew to kill the unicorns’ black prince. Not you, the other one—the one before you. But they failed. Their names were Shreel and Kilkeelahr.”

Jan cast his mind back, two years gone, to the time just before his pilgrimage of initiation, when his father Korr had still reigned as prince and a pair of gryphons had nearly succeeded in assassinating the then-prince Korr, his mate and son. The memory was bitter, tinged with bafflement and fear.

“My people slew your father and mother,” he told Illishar.

“How well I know that,” the gryphon snapped. “When they did not return, we knew they must have perished.”

“They came near to killing my sire and dam,” Jan added, remembering still.” And me as well.”