The Care and Feeding of Griffins (18 page)

Taryn found herself thinking very calmly of the
Standing Stones where she had spent her first night.  In specific, of the hoof print and the horns that had so attracted her.  It hadn’t meant game at all, though, had it?  It meant minotaur.  Minotaur.

The bull
’s mouth parted, issuing a voice as deep and cold and the mountain’s heart:  “I want you gone from my valley.”

She stared at him and, stunned, heard herself say,
“No.”

The minotaur lowered his horns.  It was an impressively intimidating gesture, in spite of the fact that he
’d have to be standing on his head to gore her as she lay strengthless on the ground.  His eyes, oddly human and shockingly grey, narrowed to steely slits.  “This is a grace I am giving you, human,” he told her darkly.  “Get you gone and leave with your life.”

“
No!” she said again, and climbed to her feet in a haze of pain.  She advanced on him, her empty, filthy hands clenched to fists.  “No, dammit, I’m not going anywhere and no minotaur is going to make me!  I just planted my potatoes!  I’m home!”

“
Nay, human,” he said, and came one step to meet her, just one.  “You are in
my
home, and you are
not
welcome.  Remove yourself.”

“
Buster, the time to move me on has come and damned well gone,” she shot back, and never mind that he stood over her by three full feet, she got right up in his bovine face and thumped her dirty finger into the center of his muscular chest as he glared at her.  “You better listen up, because I’m only saying this once, pal.  I have put up with all I’m going to from you and your furry friends.  I know I’m not doing a thing wrong, so you just better back off!”

“
You are over-arrogant,” he told her.  A tap to her chest with the blunt side of his axe sent her back with all the force of a bolt of lightning.  She landed with a thump on her butt and he raised one cloven hoof and brought it down with a ground-shaking whump next to her head, towering over her like God Himself.  “And I am in no mood to encourage you.  Leave this valley.”

“
No!” she shouted.

A snarling
peep heralded Aisling’s entry into the conversation.  The griffin launched himself at the minotaur and Taryn snatched him up and pulled him fast against her chest.  The weight and reality of him struggling in her arms was ice water on her rising temper.  She stared up at the intruder, seeing now the axe and not the minotaur.

He stepped back with a deliberate slowness that, despite his alien anatomy, easily translated a vast and molten anger.  His eyes narrowed again as he considered her and the griffin she was fighting to hold back from him. 
“Where came you by that?” he asked, menace blackening every word.

Fear got a grip on her heart and squeezed it small. 
“You leave him alone,” she said, her arms tightening protectively.

“
Answer me, human.”  His voice was rising steadily, almost thrumming with the force of his rage.  “Where came you by that beast?”

“
He’s mine!”

He snorted, steam jetting from his flared nostrils. 
“So,” he said, the word almost a purr.  A more murderous and malevolent word Taryn could not even begin to imagine.  “And now I am done with niceties.  Now I tell you plainly.  Remove yourself from this valley, this day, this hour—”  He raised his axe, the well-used haft creaking in his grip.  “—or I shall remove you from all this world and every other.”

The fight had left her when Aisling entered her arms.  All she could do was stare at him, blinking at furious tears, and try to stand up.  This hour?  It would take an hour to pack.  She
’d have to leave her baskets.  She’d have to leave her grain.  She’d have to leave her damned potatoes.  And, God, she’d have to
take
her cauldron.

Taryn dropped her eyes from the cold gaze of the minotaur
’s.  She turned away.

“
And you will leave your stolen trophy,” he said tightly.  “Not one day more shall you enjoy the theft of him.”

Her hands shook as they dug into Aisling
’s soft fur.  “I’m not leaving without him,” she said.

“
Aye, you will,” he warned her.  “Whole or in pieces, but you will leave.”

“
He’s just a baby!  He’ll die without me!”  Exhausted or not, beaten or not, she found she had a little fight left in her after all.  She swung back on him, hugging Aisling fiercely close.  “He’s not a trophy and I didn’t steal him!  I found him, I saved him, and I left everything I had to do right by him and you don’t scare me, buster!” she finished, her voice rising shrill.  “You can kill me, but you can’t scare me, so if that’s what this is all about, then maybe you’d just better go ahead and kill me and save us both a lot of wasted time!”

“
You think that I will not?”  The minotaur’s eyes blazed once and he pulled the axe back and swung.

It split the air with a shriek like a living thing.  Taryn saw it coming, hooded Aisling
’s eyes and shut her own, sucking in a breath she knew would be her last.

Steel like a ribbon touched her throat.  Just touched, as light as a kiss.

Nothing then.  His vision gone, Aisling’s ferocious struggles finally waned.  He drooped and slept, chirring peacefully against her chest.  Taryn’s heart could not keep its racing pace forever and began to slow.  Her arms began to shake under the weight of the griffin.  The blade at her neck did not move.

“
If you’re w-waiting for me to b-beg, I w-won’t.”

He uttered a low rumble that was at once menacing and oddly thoughtful, and then said,
“Perhaps I am only waiting for you to open your eyes and see death coming.”

She opened them.

His head rocked back.  He stared at her. 

All the left side of her vision was a gleaming blur of steel, too close to look at, too awful to even try.  His face was beyond, unreadable.  He did not speak.

“I’m still n-not begging,” she whispered.

He snorted again, his horns lowering. 
“More fool you,” he said, his words cut rough.  “For I may yet be swayed by beggars.”

“
No, you wouldn’t,” she said.  “You’d let a helpless baby die.”

His eyes flashed. 
“T’was
you
killed him!” he bellowed, waking Aisling into screeches.  “You, like all your grasping kind that takes and makes
trinkets
of life!”

“
I saved him!”

“
You stole him!”

“
No!  I! 
Didn’t
!”

His chest heaved, his breath coming in bursts of steam, but the hand that held the axe blade at her neck never shook. 
“Did you slay the cob and crown that guarded him?” he demanded.  “Answer me, human!  Admit your evil!  Show the pride of work that has ever been your hallmark!”

“
I didn’t slay anybody!  I found his egg in a pile of wet, muddy leaves in the middle of the woods in a caved-in den.  There wasn’t any…cob or crown!  There was just the egg and it was cold and it was raining!  I took care of it for fifteen years!  I hatched it!”

He drew back, but his axe held its place at her neck. 
“You
lie
!” he snarled.

Taryn
’s blood went from hot to cold in a single instant.  “Mister, I will slap your face if you say that again,” she said flatly.

He blinked.  Slowly, his arm lowered, taking the weapon with it.  He was still breathing hard, but that killing light had faded from his icy eyes. 
“You are over-arrogant,” he said again, as if to himself.  “But no coward.”

“
Who’s arrogant?” she shot back.  “I haven’t called
you
a liar!”  Adrenaline flooded in to fill the place previously occupied by fear.  Aisling was struggling again and her arms were shaking harder and harder with the effort to hold him.  “I haven’t sent people into
your
house every damn day to stare at everything you do while you try to work and find food and eat and…and use the damn bushes!”

His nostrils flared and he backed up a step.  She advanced on him, now in full Irish fury.

“Maybe if you weren’t so damn busy trying to scare me all the time, you’d realize that what I’m trying to do is hard enough without you and your little henchmen pushing me around!  Aren’t I miserable enough to make you happy?  Don’t I look cold enough?  Don’t I look hungry and hurt and lonely and—”  Her voice cracked and she stamped her foot as though trying to kick-start her words again.  “I’m not doing
anything
to
any
of you, so just go away already!  Leave me the fuck alone!”

“
Fuck!” shouted Aisling.

Just like that, the violent storm that had seized her vanished.  Cold took her from the crown down, just as though her anger had taken on a tangible heat and then poured itself out onto the ground.  Taryn stared, horror-struck and unseeing, into the minotaur
’s expressionless face.  Slowly, her eyes went to the struggling griffin in her arms.

“
Fuck!” he squawked again, and snapped his beak at the minotaur threateningly.

Taryn burst into tears.  She didn
’t even care what the minotaur thought of her anymore.  She didn’t care if he killed her.  She couldn’t be any more wretched than this.  His first word and she’d ruined it.  “You get out of here!” she wept, turning around.  “You get out of my camp!  You’ve got the whole damn valley!  Leave me alone!”

“
Fuck!”  It was her own voice, rendered small and strangely hoarse, but recognizably her own.  Her little prince.  This was what she’d given him for speech.

“
Don’t say that, baby,” she said helplessly.  “It’s an ugly word.”

“
Fuck?”  Aisling gave her a goggle-eyed look, and she sobbed even harder.  He started preening her hair anxiously, murmuring his four-letter word over and over in a consoling tone.

Taryn staggered through her open tent flaps and dropped onto her sleeping bag.  She didn
’t care about how dirty she was anymore.  What was the point?  Her bed already smelled like pee and the native Arcadians were just going to keep finding reasons to kill her.  She didn’t hear the minotaur leave, but her weeping would have been a cover for a whole army to pass through unheard.  At any rate, he was gone the next time she looked outside.

“
Big jerk,” she said shakily, scanning the plains from the security of her tent.

“
Jerk,” Aisling agreed, mimicking her miserable quaver exactly.

“
That’s better,” she sniffled, and collapsed onto her bed.

28.  The Lord of the Valley

T
onka, through some prescient ability Antilles never would have attributed to the chieftain, was waiting for him on the bridge.  The lord’s first instinct was to walk by without speaking.  His thoughts, his very soul, would not lie still.  He needed time to reflect, time to recall and re-examine.

There had been something so sincere in her, even in her anger.  Something exhausted past deception, something that stood tall and true in the face of a great fear.  Not of him.  Never of him, despite the unmistakable signs that his kind was foreign to her every sense.

Antilles, lord of the Valley of Hoof and Horn, came to the center of the bridge where his long-time friend stood silent.  He turned aside and walked to the edge of the stone cobbles to watch the water flow by beneath him.  He could see ribbons of his reflection.  The eyes that gazed up at him were hooded and heartless.

“
Recall your guards,” Antilles said abruptly.  He did not take his eyes from the river.  “She means no harm.”

He wanted to spit as soon as it was said.  Grumbling, he turned aside and continued to make his way home.

Tonka fell into step beside him.  The companionship was abrasive for the first minute and soothing thereafter.  Tonka had suffered through this same confusion.  He understood all that Antilles could possibly say.

“
She seemed so honest,” he muttered.

“
Aye,” the horseman said, and rubbed at his brow.

“
I have been deceived before.”  Antilles raised his head to glare at the mountains that rose before him.  “I mistrust that I believe this human.”

“
Aye,” Tonka agreed, just as grimly.  “But I do believe her also, lord.  And it eats at me.  I cannot reconcile the truth of my eyes with that of my experience.  I had to come to the realization that I would rather she come at me as an enemy than endure the uncertainty that she is not, and when I did, gods forgive me, I sought to kill her for it.”

Bluntly put.  It was the freedom of one who knew the burden of proof was not his.  Antilles luxuriated a moment in piercing envy.

Tonka gave him that moment, his own attention diverted toward the east and the human’s unseen camp, but the horseman’s brooding stare ended with a sigh.  “And I believe that would be a murder,” he finished.

“
Aye, perhaps,” Antilles said, “and still I would desire to do so, if for no other reason than the convenience of quickly settling this matter.  I hate that she has come to my holds, in my time.”

“
What will you do?” Tonka asked.

“
Tonight?  Retire.  Drink.”  He glowered at the path beneath his feet.  “Take any number of axe blades to the whetstone while I think of how easily her kind can be killed.  And you?”

“
Much the same, I think, except that I will be sharpening spears’ heads.”  Tonka turned an concerned eye on him.  “Did she say how she came by the griffin?”

“
She claims she found the egg abandoned and hatched it in her care.”

For a long time, the two climbed in silence.  Then: 
“Do you believe this?”

“
I called her a liar.”  He tossed his horns with wry humor.  “She swore to slap my face if I did so twice.”

“
Aye?”  Tonka’s smile tugged at his mouth, seemingly of its own malicious will, and Antilles suffered it with resignation.  “All hip-height of her?  And now I must know.  Would you have bent to allow it?”

“
Her sincerity was such that for a moment, I felt I had ought to.”  Antilles reached the overlook and paused, his eyes going on ahead to the great stone doors he had himself carved.  The familiar carvings, weathered now by all his solitary years in the Valley, assuaged his restless soul but could not hold his gaze for long.  The human’s camp stood dark and still in the plains across the river.  There was no movement.  “So sincere,” he murmured, frowning.

Tonka said nothing.

Antilles shook his head, his eyes never moving from the dark dot of the human’s flimsy shelter.  “Have you ever heard tell of such a thing?” he asked.  “Even in legend?”

“
Never.  Humans take.  They do not rescue.”  Tonka stamped a rear hoof and shook his own head violently, snapping out the line of his mane all the way down to his furred mid-back.  “And yet, here she is.”

“
Aye.  Here she is.”  Antilles glanced around at the horseman.  “And my mind on that matter could be somewhat more settled if I only knew
how
.”

“
My scouts have followed her back trail to the Standing Stones and from there to the borders of the Wyvern’s Wood, but by their oath, she came straight across to where she lairs now.”

Antilles
’s frown deepened.  “Through the Wyvern’s Wood?  Great gods.  Unarmed.”  His head lifted as a new thought came.  “What was she doing at the Standing Stones?”

Tonka hesitated, one hoof pecking uncertainly at the stony ground. 
“My lord,” he said, “my scouts say she slept within them.”

Antilles found himself staring once more at the human
’s tent.  “That,” he said heavily, “changes matters.”

“
Perhaps.”

“
Perhaps?  She slept within the stones and emerged sound of mind and whole of body and you would say ‘perhaps’?!”  A short cut of laughter found its way out of his throat and Antilles turned around and stare blackly in the direction of the human’s camp.  “Perhaps,” he muttered, and shook his head.  “Nay, chieftain.  If your scouts say truth, then there camps a wizard.”

Tonka stamped,
hard.  His war-roughened hands clenched on the air and then he said, “Nay, lord, I believe it not.”

Antilles continued to stand and stare, watching the wind blow over the grass, and watching the unmoving bump that was the human
’s tent far in the distance.  At last, speaking softly and with great reluctance, he said, “Nor do I.  And that I mistrust most of all.”

To that, Tonka had no reply.

Silence, while the wind blew.  Silence, while the water poured itself out endlessly beneath the bridge.  Silence, while the human continued to make herself at home in the Valley of Hoof and Horn.

Antilles raised one hand and rubbed at the headache forming itself between his eyes. 
“Has she been to see the other?” he asked wearily.

“
My scouts say not.  Barring small excursions to her wooded place, she has not left sight of her camp.”

“
Wizards may hide their tracks as well as their intentions.”

“
But if that were the case, why would she still be there?”  Tonka’s hand rose and cut an arc through the visage of the human’s tent as though he were trying to slap it off the plains.  “Why not go to him?”

Antilles only shook his head.
 

“
Tell me what you would have me do,” Tonka said.  “Because I am done with it.  I am drowning in my doubts and I cannot live thus any longer.  Tell me, lord.  I will obey even the willful murder of her.  May the gods help me, I am done.”

And there, if ever he required a deciding word, it was.  If Tonka called the human
’s death a willful murder, than that was what it would be and he, as lord of the Valley, could not order it.  Much as he may wish to.

Antilles pulled in a breath, held it for a short count, and heaved it out again. 
“Leave her be,” he said, and turned away from the entrapping sight of the pitiful camp.  “She has come to the foot of my mountain.  I shall oversee her stay.  Look you to your own kind, chieftain, and ‘ware her…but leave her be.”