The Care and Feeding of Griffins (2 page)

2.  The Lady On the Steps

T
aryn knew better than to talk to strangers.  She also knew not to play with matches, cross the street without holding hands, or pet baby lions.  The fact that her parents apparently expected Taryn to come face to face with baby lions at some point in her life was a great source of pleasure and trepidation for her, and she was very determined not to pet them when it happened and thereby justify their confidence in her.  Anyway, that day was not today.  Today was ‘Don’t Talk to Strangers’ day, and Taryn already had plenty of experience not doing that.  She was about to swing out around the side of the nearest concrete pillar and run back to wait beside the library doors until her mom came, but some strange urge came on her to keep still and watch.

For a long time
nothing happened, but oddly enough, Taryn didn’t feel fidgety at all.  She hid in her shadowed place and did not move or speak.  She watched.

The lady on the steps was dressed in what Taryn
’s six years of life experience could only see as a Halloween costume.  Her white blouse was open at the neck and closed down at the sleeves and very loose and billowy everywhere else.  She had another shirt on over that, like the tube top that Mom wouldn’t let Taryn buy last summer, only very tight and stiff, like it was made of plastic.  This second shirt was black and shiny, and covered in scribbles sewn on with colorful threads so that it almost looked like a sunset, right there on her shirt.  She had a shawl over her shoulders made of dark red netting, and there were leaves and feathers and what looked like bits of bones and funny coins tied to it all over to keep it close against her body even when the breeze was blowing.  Her skirt was a deep twilight blue but it sparkled everywhere like it was almost made of glass or water, and there was so much of it that nothing of the woman’s legs or feet could be seen or even clearly made out.  The edges were tattered and stained with earth.  If it was a Halloween costume, it was one the lady wore every day.

Suddenly, the lady on the stairs shifted, and a whole cloud of small, glittery things rose up from her
curly black hair and shawl-covered shoulders.  They made a rustling, feathery sound as they circled and resettled, and Taryn leaned out to stare.

The lady on the stairs was wearing dragons.  Lots and lots of tiny dragons, each one no bigger than the palm of Taryn
’s hand.  There were all kinds of colors, every color in Taryn’s new box of crayons, even the metallic ones.  The lady shifted again, and the dragons took off in a tiny tornado of hissing and flapping before they took up their positions back in her hair and clinging to her clothes.

Taryn hopped down from the concrete flowerbox and went to get a b
etter look.  She was entranced (not amazed, they were just dragons after all.  Sure, she’d never seen one in real life before, but she’d never seen a baby lion either) and she wanted to see them close up.  She was not unmindful of the rule concerning strangers and talking, but surely it was all right to just look.  Now she could see their little snouts, their tiny tongues, and glints of itty bitty teeth as the dragons preened their paper-thin wings.  She could see their eyes, like little dots of wet ink gleaming hugely on each side of their scaly heads.  She could see claws, no more than slivers of white detailing each miniature paw.  And she could see part of one of the lady’s eyes, looking back at Taryn with a winky sort of look.

“
I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” Taryn announced, just to let the lady know how things stood.  “Mom said.”

“
Thy mother is very wise.”  The lady rocked back and forth once, briefly stirring up her dragons (they buzzed and flickered all around Taryn a sound like beetles and bats all combined, dazzling her eyes and her ears at once), and revealing for the first time a lap filled with squares of colored paper.  The lady’s fingers were busy folding.  “Every world is filled with dangers.  But thee is safe with me.  Aye.  Thee is very safe.” 

“
Do they like to be petted?” Taryn asked, glancing wistfully at the dragons, all the little dragons.  “Can I pet them?”

“
Aye, they do.  Aye, thee may.”

Taryn started to extend a hand. 
“Do they bite?”

“
Nay.  But they taste, aye, that much they do.”

True.  One of the dark blue ones lunged out and gripped Taryn
’s fingertip, chewing all up and down the nail in a frenzy before letting go.  The teeth were pointy, but not sharp, like hairbrush bristles, and its tongue was like a wet eraser prodding her.  It was startling, but not scary, and Taryn giggled as more and more dragons began to climb over themselves to come and taste her.  They nibbled and groomed each other as they struggled to hoard her fingers, clutching her in their tiny claws.  Then, without warning, all of them just jumped into the air, rattled around in a brilliant funnel of color and then settled on the other side of the lady’s hair, snubbing Taryn the way a cat snubs a new kind of food.

Taryn giggled again, clenching and unclenching her hand, still feeling the tingly scratch of dragons between her fingers.  She sat down beside the lady
, but not too close.  She was still a stranger.

The lady hummed, rocked once more as though in welcome, and then resumed her work.  The paper squares in her swift, skilled hands were being worked into dragon-shapes; paper twisted into dragon-tongues, folded into dragon wings, tucked and rolled and bent out into dragon tails with dragon-spikes all down the back.  They looked a little like the dragons on the lady
’s shoulder.  A little.  The way that anything paper can look like something real.

“
Where did you get them?” Taryn asked.  She’d never seen any before.  Not camping.  Not even at the zoo.  And only in the cartoons on TV, never on the nature channel.

“
They came to me, aye, long ago, and they’ve stayed.  One day, perhaps, they will find a place they like better and leave me, mmm.  But ‘tis a pretty wind that blows, whether in or out, and so I am contented.  And thee?  Would thee try to keep them if they meant no more to stay?”

“
No.”  Taryn thought about it, watching the lady twist and shape her paper.  “Dad says if you touch a butterfly’s wings, it’ll die.  I think it’s like that for everything, it’s just the wings can be different things or in different places.”

The lady gave her a look, surprised and a little pleased, the same look Taryn
’s kindergarten teacher gave her when she brought her copy of
The Hobbit
in for Show and Tell and read the first chapter to the class.  Then the lady laughed, a genuine witchy-cackle, although not a scary witch at all.  She nodded, rocking back and forth and folding her paper.  “Aye,” she said.  “Aye.  Just so.”

In the night-like cover of the lady
’s hair, the dragons were singing for sleep.

“
Taryn!  Tar—Oh!”

Taryn
’s mom stood in the doorway of the library, the momentum of her ollie-ollie-oxen-free call plainly disrupted by the sight of Taryn and the stranger sitting together.  She didn’t look alarmed, not on the surface anyway, but she did look awfully alert.  She shifted the plastic bags with library stickers on them in a meaningful way, and Taryn hopped up at once to go and collect her books.

“
Ready to go?”  Mom was still looking at the lady on the steps.

“
Mom, you’ve got to come see.  She has dragons!”

“
Oh yes?”  Taryn’s mom permitted herself to be towed in the direction of the stairs, growing more and more quietly alert the closer she came to the stranger.  “Oh, look at that,” she said, not sounding in the least entranced.

Taryn, excited back to the point of giggles, watched several pencil-thin necks poke several scaly heads up through the drifts of the lady
’s black hair, but when she looked up, her mom’s eyes were on the lady’s lap.

“
Could I have one for my daughter?”

Taryn
’s breath physically caught in her chest.  She shot a swift, disbelieving-and-wildly-hopeful upwards glance and then clasped her hands tightly together to keep from clutching.  Her eyes fixed on the tiny little heads, at all those blinking little beady eyes; her ears burned as they listened for the word, ‘yes’.  She would trade a hundred Snickers bars and a hundred bags of beads for one little dragon.

The lady on the stairs looked at Taryn with that strange, winky look.  She held up a handful of paper dragons, one of every color, while the real ones sang in her hair. 
“For a pretty,” she said.  “Aye, for a little something, for a teaser.”

Taryn
’s heart seemed frozen—not cold, not hurt, just numbed by confusion.  She could see her mom holding out a dollar bill, and she could see the paper dragons in the lady’s hand, but if she moved her eyes just a little, she could see the real ones crowding and rustling and grumbling as they spilled all over the lady’s shoulders.  Taryn looked up one last time, bewilderedly seeking some gleam of recognition in her mom’s face.

Nothing.

“Can I…”  Taryn’s shoulders slumped a little.  “May I have the blue one, please?”

The lady on the stairs flung her hands upwards, curling her fingers around her paper toys so that only one
—the blue one—popped free and fluttered down.  Taryn caught it easily and held it cupped, like a butterfly, letting her eyes rest longingly on the dragons, all the little dragons, startled into flight at the sudden movement.  One of them buzzed right past her mom’s ear. 

“
Thank you,” Taryn said.  Adults thought politeness was very important.  “Goodbye.”

The lady on the stairs hummed and shifted and rocked once or twice, as all the tiny dragons drifted down to nest, and busied herself once more with the paper in her lap.

Taryn could feel her mom’s hand, gently insistent, guiding her back to the car.  She walked backward a step or two, willing her mom to see the dragons, but finally gave in to the inevitability of defeat.  She knew better, even at six and sixteen days, then to say anything herself.  Mom and Dad were better about it than most, but no grown-up liked it when a little kid drew their attention to something they hadn’t noticed.

Apart from that, Taryn was aware (if only peripherally) that asking if you could see tiny dragons was a question that demanded tact, and Taryn knew (again, peripherally) that she lacked the vocabulary for tact.  If she asked anything, it would end up coming out of her as,
“What’s the matter with you?  Are you congenitally incapable of seeing dragons or what?” and then this whole great day would be ruined.

So she let it go.

She accepted the dragons, accepted that her mom wasn’t interested in them, accepted that perhaps Mom couldn’t even see the dragons and that the reasons for this were unknowable and possibly distressing, and so she just let the matter drop and went home.  But she saw them, whether her mom could or not, Taryn saw the dragons.  Long after she grew up, sometimes she would see a dark-haired vaguely-gypsy-looking woman and think, ‘There really were dragons,’ and then smile, not really believing (and yet believing unreservedly) that she had seen them.

In any event, Taryn had her Redmond L
ibrary card for only six years before she moved with her family to Oregon, and by then she had mostly forgotten about the dragons and already had the egg.

3.  The Finding of the Egg

T
aryn’s dad took her camping every year.  He always had, and even after the baby came, he kept doing it.  Not that Taryn had been worried about that, exactly, but there had been a lot of changes since Rhiannon got born.  And sure, Taryn liked being a big sister most of the time, but some things shouldn’t change and it was nice when they didn’t.

Most of the time, they camped up in the Dunes at Dead Horse Flats, but Dad said it got bought up and now they couldn
’t camp there anymore because it was trespassing.  Taryn thought this was hugely unfair.  If it wasn’t trespassing to fish and play with beetles in the sand when she was four, it shouldn’t be now that she was nine.  She resolved then and there to become a millionaire girl-genius and buy up Dead Horse Flats again and make it so everyone could camp there if they wanted.

Not that it mattered a whole lot.  Dad had other camping spots and they were just as cool as the Dunes.  The day that Taryn found the egg, he had taken her to a campsite up in the mountains, in the for-real woods.  It was a long drive, up where the roads and the radio didn
’t go, and you couldn’t drink your pop because the car was bouncing all over the place, but Dad told great camping stories the whole time about the last time he’d camped up here and how the coyotes danced in the moonlight and how much fun this was going to be. 

But once the
y had the camp set up, Taryn’s dad went into the tent to sleep—which was a perfectly good waste of the afternoon in Taryn’s opinion—and she was free to explore.  She got her whistle and her camping knife (one of Dad’s, and she only got to carry it when she was camping, but Dad said when she was twelve, he’d give her one she could keep) and a compass and her walking stick and she set off.

Taryn was a good camper.  She knew to keep the car in sight when she was hiking alone and to check her compass often to stay on track.  She knew to sing as she walked to keep bears from getting startled by her, and to keep her eyes out for bobcats and killer snipes.  She
’d never seen either for real, but her dad had showed her tracks before and made her solemnly swear to come straight back to camp and tell him if she ever saw some.

She wasn
’t seeing any now, just some deer tracks and little pawprints that might be a big raccoon or a small fox, but she always had her eyes open.  It was that—looking for snipes and/or bobcat tracks—that caused her to just happen to see the shallow pile of dead leaves, so out of place in the early summer.  By reflex, Taryn stopped and tracked the leaf fall up a steep incline to a crevasse overhung by branches and more leaves.  Wet leaves, and those were even stranger to see in the dry mountain soil.

Well, this was interesting.  Why were the leaves wet?

Taryn struggled up the incline, turning her feet sideways and digging in her walking stick where there were no roots to grasp.  She came to the lip of the crevasse and put her hand right in a big cold splat of rotting leaves. 

“
Eww.” 

It wasn
’t at all leafy.  It was slimy, like mud or bug guts or something.  And smelly too.

As she wiped her hand off on her shirt, Taryn gave her surroundings a good look.  First, she found the car, just a tiny sliver of yellow and white between the trees, and then she looked into the crevasse.

It hadn’t been a crevasse long, she realized.  Until very recently, it had probably been a den.  But the tree growing over it had fallen down, and in coming down, its roots had gone up and pulled the whole top of the den off, letting in the rain and turning everything to mud.  But the leaves, the leaves had to have been there before.  They couldn’t have fallen in by themselves, because the den was too deep.  Someone had to have put them there, and then left them all piled up and damp.  Weird.

And there was something in there, something besides rainwater and smelly leaves.  Something speckled and mostly white.

Taryn reached, poked with her stick, reached again, and finally took a deep breath and climbed in.  Immediately, she slipped and sank into sludge up to her elbows.  Yuck.  It was warm down deep where her hands were.  Double yuck.  But she set her jaw and started crawling, until she got all the way in to where the white thing was.  She pulled branches away, wiped leaf-sludge out of her eyes, and brought the thing up and out into the light where she could see it clearly.

It was an egg.  An egg roughly the same size and shape as her dad
’s head.  It was the biggest egg she’d ever seen.

Was it an eagle
’s egg?  Taryn didn’t think so.  Every Sunday, she watched Wild Kingdom tucked up in the big bed with her mom and dad and now Rhiannon.  Eagles didn’t lay eggs in holes in the ground.  They built huge platforms in trees.  And besides, the eagle eggs in the nature show fit in the camera-guy’s hand.  This egg was bigger.  A lot bigger.

What did that leave?

Maybe it was a dinosaur egg.  Dinosaurs were supposed to be all extinct, but this didn’t look like the fossils in the museum.  Just like an egg.  And down below, where the water wasn’t pooling, the egg was warm, like the sludge.

Taryn didn
’t know what to do.  She thought the egg might be pretty important—might be a dinosaur or some new breed of eagle, or maybe a killer snipe—but she also thought the egg was dying.

Her first thought was to try and rig up the roof somehow so it was watertight again.  She spent at least an hour trying, but all she got was dirty.  She was a big kid now, but she was too small to make a roof over the crevasse
.

Frustrated and tired, Taryn sat down in the sludge to think.  She could bring her dad here, she knew.  He could build a roof for the egg
’s den.  He could build it a deck and a flushing toilet if he wanted to, but once he saw the egg, Taryn thought he might not do anything.  She was by now completely sure the egg belonged to a killer snipe and that Dad wouldn’t want her to touch it.  And if it really was a killer snipe, maybe she shouldn’t.

But on the other hand, if it was a killer snipe and she hatched it, maybe it would be her friend.  And if it was this big as an egg, maybe it would be even bigger when it was grown.  Maybe
…

Taryn stared into the sludge, no longer seeing or smelling it, imagining the looks on her friend
’s faces when she rode her killer snipe into school in September.

Where would she keep it?  When Mom and Dad saw it was her friend, Taryn was sure they
’d let her keep it even if it was a killer snipe, but she’d have to hide it until she could prove they were friends.

Under her bed, she guessed.  Where the room heater was.  Her mom and dad let her keep her room more or less the way she wanted.  They didn
’t go poking through her stuff or cleaning things the way her friends’ moms and dads did.  She would keep the egg there once she got home, and until then, she could keep it in her backpack next to the fire—but not too close—and she would hatch the egg and even if it was a killer snipe, they would be the best of friends and have adventures together.  Taryn MacTavish, Girl-Genius, and her Killer Snipe.

So decided, Taryn picked up the egg and carefully navigated her way out of the slippery mess, unaware that she had just committed herself to
fifteen years of extensive studying on the subject of eggs, of hidden places beneath her bed and of heating pads and blankets in the closet, and later, of the secret forging of incubators and compost piles, of meticulous egg-turning, of careful egg-cleaning, of futile egg-candling, of egg-hiding in the ancient boiler room of her college dorm, and egg-smuggling on and off campus.  The egg (long after the dream of Girl-Genius and the belief in killer snipes had gone) the egg remained, and Taryn tended it.  Purely by rote.  Purely out of habit.  But she did tend it. 

And a well-tended egg does only one thing.