“Then you must know that you can’t hope to kill me, or take me prisoner. Fire is a weapon that not even griffin feathers can defeat.”
“You have already served your purpose. Listen.”
She listened. But all she could hear was the wind.
He gripped his spear across his body and without warning dashed outside. She jumped up just as the entire nest shuddered. Sticks and debris rained down on her. A broken eggshell, disturbingly large, dropped from the ceiling and shattered into tiny pieces at her feet. The low opening quivered as though probed. A beast screamed shrilly outside. A vast shape moved beyond the entrance and before she could find shelter—not that there was any crevice or cove to crawl into—a huge tufted eagle’s head thrust in through the opening. Snowflakes glittered on its beak. Its throat feathers had an iron gleam and its eyes the look of amber, but it rested its bulk on a lion’s tawny paw, made sharp with cruel talons.
The griffin had come home.
3
SANGLANT had never had cause to consider the limits of his mother’s curse. His wounds never festered, only healed. The grippes and agues that afflicted others never touched him. He could not die in battle or intrigue, only watch as his allies and enemies succumbed.
Now, some hours after fording the shallow river, he huddled in his cloak while the freezing gale tore at him, chilling him to the bone. Walking had warmed his wet feet and boots, but every time he stopped they stiffened and burned. Storm, he reflected, is neither male nor female. Cold is no disease but merely a state.
Maybe Bulkezu wouldn’t need to kill him, only get the credit for it afterward when he dragged in Sanglant’s frozen corpse.
Yet Sanglant could do nothing else but hunt him down. At first, traveling east across Ungria and through the steppe, duty had driven him. Now hate and rage impelled him.
Bulkezu had stolen his daughter.
To even think about it made his head cloud with fury, made him want to shriek and rend like a maddened dog.
But he was a man, and he would only defeat Bulkezu and recover his daughter if he thought and acted like a man.
How did a man hunt a griffin?
Seek them in their lair.
As he did himself, child of human and Aoi, griffins partook of different essences: eagle, lion, and snake. Lions prowled the plains, so lore said, and eagles loved rivers and mountains, often preferring open country. Before the storm closed in around him, he had got a good look at the landscape that lay east, where a river wound through a broad, grassy valley that ended abruptly in the steep slopes of rocky crags.
He heaved himself up to his feet and headed east into the wind. The cold raged around him, but he trudged onward. As the day faded, the gray sky turned to a deep blue-gray shadow and the high crags became a black wall. The snow trailed off, leaving frozen ground swept clean by the wind. The temperature did not rise, nor did it fall.
Through the night he walked on, never varying his pace. His voice was lost; no words formed in his head. Thoughts existed in their raw, inhuman, natural form as he turned his senses outward, seeking, listening, smelling.
The night spoke to his ears: “There is nothing before you, nothing behind.” The earth spoke on his feet as the thin crust of soil was crushed beneath each step: “This is a hard land. Beware.” The cold spoke through his skin: “I come from the mountain, from the sky, from the cold worlds beyond. Join me, and I will carry you away.”
The wind spoke most clearly, bringing scent as he neared the eastern heights. A deer, injured, bleeding, lay down to die. A winter-starved wolf and its mate circled in for the feast. A lone eagle dove in the turbulent winds, investigating a blast of heat high up on the westernmost outcropping of the crags.
Fire.
A blaze tore at the wind high above him, directly east. A campfire, or a bonfire. A signal.
To this conflagration Sanglant listened, thwarted in his quest when the wind shifted and whispered other secrets, as if knowing he sought signs of human life, teased forward when it changed direction and blew down from the east once again. As the night drew on, the cold winter gale subsided into a drowsy breeze hinting of spring, blown up from the south along the ridgeline. He began to lose the scent.
He walked more quickly. The ground shifted subtly upward, then steepened, until he had to pick his route up the slope using his spear as a staff to steady his way. He smelled and listened to the lay of the ground more than saw it; his eyesight was not particularly keen at night, so the curl of the breeze against the land revealed the trail. Late into the night, with the scent of dawn in the air and the clouds shredding into patches through which stars shone, he caught sight of a flicker of light high up among the rocks.