Sworn To Defiance (6 page)

Yeah, I see it.

What are we looking at
? she queried.

The emperor’s personal guard
, he answered with dread.

Before they could speak further, the griffin underneath gave a rage-filled cry. The guards had moved to the side so that they all stood in a diamond-shaped ring. In the center of that ring, an irritated ball of fur strained against ropes that bound it from two different angles.

Ciardis whistled sharply to get Skar’s attention. She wasn’t sure if he could hear her over the loud wind in his tufted ears, but she would try.

“What’s going on?” she shouted to the griffin bearing them.

He didn’t answer. Instead he plummeted from the sky.

As Skar dove down lower and lower, Ciardis realized without asking that the ball of fur was important to him. Even from high in the sky, she could tell as they drew closer that it was another griffin. A smaller one. Perhaps a baby.

Side-by-side, the black and golden griffins plummeted to the street were the group of armed soldiers awaited. The wind tore into Ciardis’s face and tears leaked from her eyes as she bowed as close as she could to Skar’s neck and grasped the leather handholds that were part of an elaborate collar system as if her life dependent on it. She could barely keep her lips pressed together from the swift air pressure. Her hair was everywhere and she was certain Sebastian was getting a mouth full of it as closely aligned to her back as he was.

She needed to do something but there wasn’t much to be done but hang on for dear life on the back of the angry griffin.

“Skar, don’t attack!” she managed to shout seconds before they landed. “They must want something from us. If they didn’t, he wouldn’t just be bound. A trade probably. I don’t think they’ll harm it.”

The rapidly descending griffin didn’t say a word. Soon they were back on the ground and he screamed in rage. The little griffin screamed back in fear.

When Skar found his voice, he shouted, “Let my son go.”

“Gladly,” said a soldier that stepped forward.

Skar stood still with his wings outstretched and his feathers standing upright in anger, so high that they reached halfway to Ciardis’s throat.

The soldier had impressive courage. He came out from inside the phalanx of his men and faced down the enraged griffin. Incidentally, he stopped halfway between the young griffin and the angry father.

“By order of the imperial chamberlain, we’ve been told to bring in Prince Heir Sebastian and Lady Weathervane for their own protection,” said the man without a trace of fear.

“Chamberlain,” whispered Ciardis. “They can’t mean Lord Richard Steadfast?”

Sebastian cursed. “I doubt it. My uncle would say anything to get me to come to the imperial palace if he knew I was aware of his deception.”

“If he did, do you think he’d send these few men?”

“No,” said Sebastian grimly. “From what I heard of his exploits as a young man, he wasn’t the type to do things indirectly. He would have come himself.”

“So I’ve learned,” said Ciardis as she watched the men in front of them. She flashed back to the time the emperor had recruited her for his private project and the time he had personally seen her before the trial of her mother, Lillian Weathervane. Either of those tasks he could have delegated to a lackey, a magistrate or a spymaster perhaps. But he hadn’t. He had thought them important enough to do himself. Either that or he was a control freak.

Either way, Ciardis was sure this emperor had many fingers in many pies throughout the empire. He wouldn’t delegate anything. Especially something as crucial as this task.

“So then...” she said.

The soldier before them repeated his proclamation. “In the name of the emperor himself, by the order of the imperial chamberlain, I assure you that you are under our protection.”

“From whom?” Ciardis called out to the man.

Silence met her query.

The griffin underneath them shuffled to the side. He was ready for them to dismount. Ciardis couldn’t blame him. Skar couldn’t take off as long as his son was held captive. He also couldn’t attack as long as they were astride him.

Sebastian cursed. “Protection, my bum.”

“Protection from what?” Ciardis wondered again. The soldier hadn’t answered. Sebastian couldn’t either.

Thanar and Vana landed with silent thumps. Thumps plural, because Ciardis noticed that Vana dropped to the ground in a wary stance independent of Thanar’s own descent.

He must have let her go in the air
, she thought to herself.

The second griffin with the man and his daughter came in shortly after.

As soon as the little girl saw the young griffin bound by ropes, she screamed, “Skarar! What are you doing to my Skarar? Let him go.”

The sounds of youthful indignation were met by the equally loud and indignant screeches of the young griffin.

The soldier in front turned cold eyes from the new arrivals back to the two humans who sat astride Skarar’s father.

“We don’t want to hurt anyone. But we have our orders,” he said.

Ciardis felt her stomach roil unpleasantly.

Don’t do anything hasty
, was Thanar’s comment in her head.

Sebastian let go of her waist at the same time as he spoke aloud. “I am Sebastian Athanos Algardis, and I demand to know on whose authority you dare to presume to order me. Because I certainly don’t take orders from the lord chamberlain of my father’s court.”

The man paled and quickly went to one knee in a bow. After a minute of silence he rose.

“I apologize, milord,” he said quickly, “but the matter is one of urgency.”

Ciardis watched as sweat began to bead on his brow.

She opened her mouth to speak and the whistle of arrows through the air came back to her ears like a ghost of a memory from the night Stephanie died. Except this was no ghost.

The arrows fell from all directions to take out the emperor’s men. Even though they wore armor they were falling like flies.

Sebastian grabbed Ciardis abruptly and threw them both from Skar’s back. They rolled on the ground and came up in the shelter of the backside of a water fountain.

“They’re using crossbows!” Sebastian cried.

“I can see that,” Ciardis shouted back as she frantically took in the situation. What she couldn’t see was
who
was using the crossbows and who or what their primary target was. Were they after the griffins, Sebastian or the soldiers themselves? For now she and Sebastian were safe, but Skar, his child, and everyone else that couldn’t hide under an overhanging object were sitting ducks.

Ciardis’s eyes widened. The soldiers had abandoned their positions of restraining the young griffin but if possible Skarar was in even more trouble now. As she watched, an arrow pierced his wing and pinned it to his side. Lurching towards his father the griffin didn’t realize he was hit until too late. He fell down to the ground in a painful yell with his father rushing toward him.

Instead of seeing that the adult griffin was only trying to protect his son, the soldiers surrounding their captive only saw a threat. Bringing their swords up, they attacked Skar. He fought them bravely but in the meantime his son only grew more disoriented with arrows still falling, fear filling his screams for his father and the rope tangling his legs. With a curse, Ciardis dropped her glaive and sprinted forward. Pausing only to pick up a felled knife she came up to the young griffin’s side. She intended only to cut the rope that bound Skarar’s body but she should have known better to approach a young, frightened griffin.

Eyes wild Skarar turned and lunged at her. She dove back, falling to the ground with her heart racing. Pain raced up her arm as she brought a hand up to her shocked gaze. He had cut her with his beak from the edge of her palm, up around the curve of her wrist and along the back of her arm. Blood was everywhere. She hadn’t passed out yet so she hoped he’d missed an artery.

The griffin continued to scream in her face with clawed feet upraised and beak agape for another attack. She focused her wary attention on him as she tried to sit up. Difficult when you were unsteady from blood loss and trying to keep hold of a knife with your only ambulatory hand. Letting the knife stay close to the ground Ciardis took in the griffin’s defensive stance. He was young which meant that his beak reached the height of her throat instead of towering over her. That was even scarier. She might be able to maneuver faster if he was adult and his size encumbered him. Instead they were an about even match in height and weight. Which meant that he was big enough to kill and she was truly lucky all he’d done was cut her flesh with his razor-sharp beak.

“I’m sorry,” Ciardis said. “I was just trying to help.”

He screamed long and loud. Wings upraised in a half-motion as if he was going to take flight, but she knew he couldn’t. The rope binding him assured that. She wasn’t sure if he understood what she was saying though. He looked old enough to speak human words now but just because a toddler could mimic speech didn’t mean they understood what they were saying.

She raised a trembling, bloody hand. “Please calm down. Can you understand me?”

The knife was gripped in her left hand by her side. She had no intentions of using it. But she wasn’t a fool. If it was him or her, she would have to choose herself. Arrows continued to fall around them. Some had come too close for comfort. She wondered why none had pierced them yet though.

Seconds later Ciardis heard loud panting breaths coming closer. She turned on her knees so that she could keep one eye on Skarar and another on the approaching individual.

To her surprise, the young girl plopped by her side. Breathing hard with red hair even more askew from the windy ride, she said, “I’m Seraphina, what’s your name?”

Ciardis bit her lip and eyed her new companion. The middle of a skirmish wasn’t exactly the best time for introductions and an insane girl wasn’t exactly her idea of a rescue operation.

Where’s Vana when I need her?
she wondered glumly.

S
eraphina repeated her questioned slowly, as if Ciardis was a dunce who hadn’t understood her the first time. “I’m Seraphina, what’s your name?”

The pause after was deliberate and pregnant with importance.

Puzzled at what the girl was doing, Ciardis finally answered just to see what her response would be. “Ciardis Weathervane.”

Seraphina beamed in praise.

“I’m twelve, how old are you?” the girl asked.

She was staring straight at Ciardis and ignoring the trembling baby griffin just two feet away. The focused exuberance was disconcerting. Appropriate in one so young but unsettling for the situation. Seraphina looked and acted as if they had just sat down for high tea and were getting to know each other. Never mind the fact that they both knelt on cold cobblestones and men all around them, including the prince heir of the realm, had brought up their weapons for battle. Even worse was the fact that Ciardis could see in a glance that the men weren’t making any attempt to combat the hail of arrows around them. Instead they faced off grimly with Sebastian, Thanar, and Vana, who had all moved forward to defend the embattled Skar, surrounded on all sides by stupid human men with swords. Ciardis didn’t see Seraphina’s father. She wondered where he had disappeared off to. She didn’t think he was the type to abandon his little girl. You would be hard-pressed to find a man enough of a coward that he would abandon his child in the middle of what was becoming a pitched battle. But she didn’t know much about Jason SaAlgardis either.

She turned her eyes back to Seraphina. Her face was pinched with pain but she felt calm. In a precipitous turn of events, she’d gotten used to blood and battle enough that she could project that calm through her eyes. So when she turned her gaze to Seraphina, it wasn’t with a crazed look but rather a calm expression of a seasoned professional warmonger. Whether she wanted to be a seasoned professional of war was another thought to be debated on an entirely different day.

Meanwhile Seraphina’s wide eyes told Ciardis to play along. Ciardis tightened a hand on her knife while she felt her other hand go numb from blood loss. She continued to hold it high above her head in the hopes that it was slow down the blood loss and keep her wound from becoming fatal. Then she played along. Maybe the girl had a plan. Maybe the idiot men would stop glaring at Sebastian, Thanar, and Vana long enough to realize that they would have a disastrous situation on their hands if they didn’t return the kit to his father soon.

“Eighteen. And before you ask, I’m from a small vale in the north called Vaneis,” Ciardis said quietly.

The girl shook her head and her red hair flew every which way. Most raised in odd tufts like a halo around her face when she stilled her gesture.

“Not true,” Seraphina said in a singsong voice.

Ciardis felt irritation flow through her. Being accused of lying by a twelve year old who looked eight at best was grating at any time. Here, with people fighting around her and arrows threatening to hit them at any moment, it put a knot of nervous anger in her belly that she didn’t need.

Then Ciardis truly stilled. She looked around and realized that last assessment of activity around them wasn’t necessarily true. Flicking her gaze up, Ciardis saw that none of the arrows were falling within a five-foot radius of the three of them. Every single one that came in their vicinity bounced away as if deflected by a shield.

Turning back to the girl, she said, impressed, “Are you doing this?”

“No, but I know who is,” the girl said in a calmer tone. She sounded less hyped up.

Ciardis narrowed her eyes. “Who?”

The girl shrugged and her eyes glanced over
past
the griffin. Ciardis flicked her gaze to follow Seraphina’s eyes and she worked hard to keep surprise from her face. Partially because she didn’t want to alert the young griffin of another person creeping up on them. The other half of that desire to keep surprise from her face surfaced because she wasn’t sure if the surprise would show as delighted or horrified in Seraphina’s eyes. After all, Ciardis had yet to decide whose side Jason SaAlgardis was on—the emperor’s, Sebastian’s, his own, or that of another entity that had yet to be named. Whatever that side represented, the man creeping up on the young griffin had guts. He slunk low to the ground. A short gladiator’s sword held out in front of him as he snuck closer and closer. Ciardis had no idea what he was about but from a glimpse at his other hand she got the feeling that Seraphina had been telling the truth—
he
was the cause of the invisible shield above him. In the hand opposite of the sword-wielding one was a net made entirely of magic. It glimmered alive with his gift, whatever that was, as he dragged it across the ground.