Heir to the Sky (9 page)

He nods, and takes off running toward the steep hill crowned with a tangle of trees. I follow him, running as fast as I can with my aching ribs. It's easier to run without those sandals after all, the grass soft and pliable under my feet. He's faster, though, probably used to running for his life down here.

That's when I think about the others like him. Because he can't be the only one to survive, can he? There must be others as swift and equipped as he is.

When we reach the edge of the hill I hear a frenzy of howling behind us. I turn to the distant mound of the chimera. A dozen wild doglike monsters are crawling over it like maggots, tearing flesh and chomping with their large fangs. One of the giant birds I've seen circling the valley is hovering over the carcass, the wild dogs snapping at its legs while it scrapes at them with its talons. I can't look away from the horror of it.

That could've been me they were feasting on. It nearly was.

I feel the strong grip of the boy's hands on my wrist, and I turn to look at him. His shining eyes are looking into mine, the paint on his face smeared by sweat. “Only look forward,” he says, pressing my hand into the thick grass. My fingers are still stained pink from the raw chimera meat.

It's enough to snap me out of it. “Thanks,” I say, grabbing at the thick tufts to pull myself up the hill. We scramble up the steep hillside to the sickening slurps and growls of the scavengers behind us. My ribs burn, and my left wrist throbs. When I'm almost at the summit he's already at the top, reaching a hand out to help me. But I want to show him I can do it, so I make my way, slowly, and he waits.

When I get there I collapse, panting as I rest a hand on my stinging side.

He looks alarmed. “Are you injured?”

“My ribs,” I say. “I think I broke one or two when I fell.”

“You can't climb, then?” he says, looking up at the tall tangle of ancient trees.

I tilt my head back, looking up. I have to admit the truth. “I'm...not sure.”

He nods. “Rest now,” he says. “I'll make a fire.” He walks toward the trunks, gathering branches that have fallen, and discarding those soaked by last night's rain. He expertly sorts them as I sit there, useless, and I start to realize how lucky I am that he's found me.

I'm going to survive
, I think.
Only look forward.

NINE

I RUB MY
ribs with my hands, trying to stop the aching pain. I wish I could go back to the creek and wash my fingers properly. They're sticky and rank with the smell of raw meat. I wipe them against the ground for a bit, my elbow clanking against the iron lantern at my waist.

Suddenly the boy's standing above me with an armful of branches. He puts them down and arranges them in a cluster, the sides of his fur cloak spreading out against the ground like wings. “What's your name?”

The question startles me. In Ashra and her lands, everyone knows who I am. “Kallima,” I manage. “Kali, for short.”

“Kali,” he says. “And are you all right now, Kali?” He smiles again. He smiles a lot for a monster hunter, I think. His face should be battle-worn and hopeless, like the unbelievers in the annals. But it isn't, not at all. He's cheerful and healthy, capable and pleasant. Elisha would laugh at me for using words like that.
Healthy and capable?
She'd sidle up to me and whisper in my ear.
What are you
really
trying to say?
And she'd be right. I blush at the thought.

“I'm sorry that was your introduction to earth,” he says, pulling up tufts of dried grass that grow in little huddles near the campfire.

I clear my throat. “I... I would like to extend my gratitude for your fortuitous assistance.”

He squints a little, twisting his head to the side. I realize at once my mistake. I've turned on my regal voice, rending us apart by status and education. I look like a patronizing show-off, and the formal acknowledgment makes us both uncomfortable. “Thank you,” I add, with an awkward cough.

“No problem.” He shrugs. Aban's blood pressure would skyrocket if someone answered me in such a casual tone on Ashra. The freedom of being a normal girl, floating on the winds of possibility, is thrilling.

But then my cheeks burn as I realize I haven't even asked him his name. He saved my life, but it's all been a blur, a shocking revelation that there are survivors on earth. He's handsome and charming, and I haven't even thought to ask. “What's your name?”

“Griffin,” he says, and he reaches into his pouch and produces two pieces of flint like mine. He strikes them together, the sparks flying on to the tuft of dried grass he's placed on his knee. He blows gently, patiently, and I'm afraid to speak in case I distract him. It takes a few tries, but eventually the smoke spirals up from the patch of grass, and he places it carefully under the branches, blowing the spark until it licks the undersides of the wood.

Then he places the fur bundle of meat in front of him, untying the string and placing it back into his pouch.

“Griffin,” I finally repeat. I've never heard a name like it in Ashra. Most parents think it's fortuitous to name your children after the Phoenix or her attributes. Jonash, for example, has the word “ash” in it, while Elisha's name uses an older variant. My own name is more unusual, but my mother had wanted to name me after the butterflies that gather near Lake Agur. Even though she died in childbirth, my father upheld her wish and named me Kallima.

But I've never heard a name like Griffin. It doesn't sound like any of the older words for Phoenix or “to rise,” “ashes,” or “plumes” or “embers.”

“What does it mean?” I ask.

He's silent for a moment, adjusting the branches as they kindle in the growing flames. Then he passes me a longer stick, which he's skewered a strip of the meat onto. “It was the first monster I killed,” he says, gazing into the fire.

I think of how quickly he attacked the chimera, how he didn't hesitate even when his life was at risk. I'd been grateful to survive a day. He's been surviving his whole life. “How many have you killed?”

He turns the meat on his on stick. “Like the stars,” he says. I glance upward, but the sun is only low in the sky, not yet setting, and all I see up there is Ashra, looming silently. “I'm a monster hunter.”

“A monster hunter?” The thought turns my stomach. “You track them willingly?”

He smiles, the yellow and purple paint under his eyes creasing with the expression. “I fight back,” he says, and now I can hear the pride in his voice.

Everything I've ever wanted to know is in my reach, but I'm almost afraid to ask. “Are there others down here? Other monster hunters like you?”

The smile falls from his face, and he reaches over to adjust my stick of meat closer to the flame. It's obvious I've never cooked over a campfire in my life. “Some,” he says. “Not many.”

“But there are humans,” I say.

He looks into the fire, turning his meat as the fat drips into the flames. “There are a few of us who've survived.”

I'm not sure what to ask next. I've wondered my whole life about the earth below, scouring the annals for clues. Now I'm here, and there's an actual monster hunter I can ask. I wonder if he's seen the ocean. Maybe that's where he got his shell necklace? But there's one question still burning in my mind, brighter than the others. I take a deep breath. “You said you were looking for me. You saw the flash in the sky.”

He nods. “We always rescue the fallen.”

I frown. It doesn't make sense. “No one's fallen from Ashra in fourteen years,” I say.

“From the other floating mountains, I mean.”

No
, I think. That's impossible. No one's fallen off Burumu or Nartu in my lifetime, and no one lives on the smaller continent fragments of the Floating Isles. “How often?” I ask.

He crosses his legs, resting his elbows on his knees. “Four in the last year,” he says. “Maybe five in the few years before that.”

“No, you're wrong.” I blurt it out, before I can stop myself. “I would've heard about it. It would've been huge news.”

He shrugs, turning his stick of chimera meat over the fire. He doesn't care if I believe him or not. Why would he lie to me? What does he have to hide?

There's a loud screech in the distance, and I cover my ears with my hands, the stick pressed against my temple. It's farther away now, but I know that bloodcurdling sound. It's the dragon again, crying out. Suddenly none of my questions matter.

“I need to get home,” I say. “Back up there, to Ashra.”

Griffin smiles gently, but doesn't answer. He's striking, I think, with his kind eyes and his array of furs and weapons and tools. He doesn't look like someone on the run for his life. He looks self-assured and confident, unlike anyone I've ever met before. He looks the way I used to think of myself—invincible—before my fall and pathetic attempt at survival. I can't help but feel like a fraud now, a dulling, fading cinder in front of a brilliant spark.

He takes hold of my branch and looks carefully at the chimera meat on the end, before nodding. “It's good now. You can eat.”

My stomach growls on cue, and I pull the meat closer to sniff it. Monster meat. But I'm starving. It's too chewy and burning hot, and it scorches my lips and tongue as I bite into it. It tastes faintly like the pygmy goat meat we have in Ulan, but gamey and a little sour.

“I don't know of a way to get back,” Griffin says, his voice so quiet I barely hear him. “I'm sorry.”

I pause and stare at him. Staying here isn't an option to me. I have to get home to my father. I have to quell whatever unrest there is and protect my people. I'm the wick and the wax, the only descendant of the Monarch who can burn for the good of Ashra.

And more than that, I'm a lost child who needs her father's warm and loving arms.

Griffin sees the look on my face, his eyes shining with pity. “Hey, try this,” he says, his voice upbeat. He reaches into the pouch at his hip and pulls out a tiny blue vial, sealed with a cork stopper. He pries the cork from the end with a pop and presses his finger against the opening, tipping the vial upside down before righting it again. He reaches over and shows me the tiny dark crystals glittering on his finger. Then he dusts them with his thumb over my chimera meat. “Much better,” he says, his cheeks turning the slightest pink as he returns the cork to the vial and stows it in his pouch. “From the lava lands.”

I take another bite of the meat, my tongue pressing against the crystals. They flood the meat with charcoal-like sharpness and rich flavor. It must be some kind of black salt. My eyes must show everything, because he laughs at my expression.

“Good, right?” he says, and I nod. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to get salt here, but from the way he handled the vial, and how he didn't even put any on his own dinner, I know what he's done for me is precious and generous. I eat every bite, my stomach reeling as it finally gets food.

“It's not so terrible down here if you can survive,” he says. “You'll make a new life. It will be all right.”

I shake my head. “You don't understand. I need to get back to my father and my old life. If I could only reach the airships...”

He stops midbite. “Airships?”

“You can't really see them from down here, but they ferry passengers from one floating island to the next. You know?”

His eyes are wide, and although he must have seen hundreds of monsters, the novelty of airships clearly sparks his interest. “Ships,” he repeats. “In the sky?”

“Yes,” I say. “Only they don't come down this far. I thought I saw one last night, but it only looked like a speck from down here. If we could...I don't know, rope a dragon or something. Just get a little higher.”

He laughs, reaching again into his pouch and pulling out some sort of leather bag with a stopper. He opens it and passes it to me. I sniff at it.

“Water,” he offers.

It tastes warm and leathery, but it's refreshing after the salty meat. I know without Griffin I would be dead by now, mauled by the chimera and the scavengers after it. “You can't ‘rope a dragon,'” he continues, chuckling. “Unless you want to be its lunch. But we could get higher up.” He points at the mountain range in the distance, the spiky backbone that runs along the horizon of the pockmarked valley to the south. “Could these airships see you from the mountain top?”

My heart jumps at the thought of it. They look like they'd be tall enough, if we could manage to climb them. And the airships fly over those mountains on their way to Burumu. I know, because I remember looking out at them on that trip for the 290th Rending Anniversary when I was seven. It had only looked like a spiky, snow-peaked line then, but I'm certain it's the same mountains.

I pass back the flask and Griffin gulps what's left of the water. “Could...could you take me there?”

“If that's what you want,” he says. It's big, what I'm asking, and yet he's willing to do it. “But it's a long way. And you won't make it without shoes.”

“I can go back for my sandals,” I say, but he shakes his head, pointing at my blisters.

“They weren't the most practical pair, were they? Anyway, those scavengers won't leave until the chimera is a tiny stack of bones. I have family who can help us, not far from here.”

Other survivors. Other humans. And a way home, too. “We can take them with us,” I blurt out. “You can come up to Ashra—that's what the floating island is called. You'll be safe from the monsters, I promise.”

Griffin smiles kindly, but there's something in his eyes that I can't place. Doesn't he believe me?

“We'll set out in the morning,” he says. “It's too far to make it before nightfall.”

“I understand,” I say. “You don't want to be caught out there with the monsters in the dark.”

His lip curls up in amusement. “No,” he says, his hand on the string of his bow. “I don't want
you
to be out there with the monsters in the dark.”

My cheeks burn. I'm useless down here, nothing but a liability to him. In the dark I'd probably trip over a chimera and right into its mouths.

“It's all right.” He grins. “Not everyone is called to hunting, you know.”

“You think I'm not cut out for it?” I say, looking myself over with dramatic flair. “What was your first clue?” Might as well be good-natured about it—I'm no hunter.

He laughs. “Only the lack of weapons and armor.” I'm pleased he doesn't say anything that would alter my opinion of him—that I'm a sheltered girl pretending at being brave; that my hands are thin and pale from an easy life; that I wouldn't last a week out here on my own. It might be true, but I don't want him to think it.

He leaves the side of the dying fire and grabs the nearest trunk in the ancient tangle of trees. Before I can blink he's halfway up, the soles of his leather shoes gripping the sides as he scrambles up like a pika. He walks soundlessly along one of the thicker branches, pushing on the boughs with his foot as he tests their strength. Then he unfastens the strings of his fur cloak and spreads it across a jumble of the branches, tucking it under and around to keep it in place.