The Care and Feeding of Griffins (30 page)

He hesitated, frowning at the paper, and then said,
“Well-favored.”

“
Don’t tell them Aisling’s a griffin,” she mumbled.  “And don’t…don’t tell them you’re a minotaur.”

“
I am not,” he said.  “I am Cerosan.”

“
Well, fine, don’t tell them that.”  It was getting harder and harder to focus on him.  “Just tell them…tell them you’re Tilly.  I’m sure they’ll understand.  They’re very understanding.  And don’t tell them you’re a nudist.”

Antilles wrote quietly for a minute or two while Taryn dozed. 
“Have you any other words?” he asked finally.

She nodded, unable now to open her eyes. 
“I miss you all so much,” she whispered.  “The longer I’m here, the more I realize how much I owe you for what you’ve given me.  I love what I’m doing and you made it possible for me to love it.  You taught me that we’re all responsible for the lives we touch.  As alone as I’ve been, and as awful as it was, I never felt that touch so strongly as I do here.  I feel you with me.”  She rolled onto her side, now more asleep than awake.  She was no longer completely sure that she was still talking out loud, no longer sure who it was she was talking to.  “I love you,” she said.  It erased anything else she could think of, so she said it again, and then slept.

41.  Antilles, Romany, and Nice

T
he human’s campsite had seen little change since the last time he had visited it, but it seemed smaller to his eye regardless.  He lingered at her masterful firepit, tapping a hoof at the charred stones that lined it as he remembered how it had felt to sit on the ground in its glow and share the human’s meal.  How it had felt to watch her raise his axe to strike off her thumb for him.

There was pain between the digits of his left hoof when he stepped back from the pit.  He hunkered to feel and pulled out a thin flake of stone.  An idle glance showed him many such shards littering the ground at the mouth of her shelter, along with several larger stones that showed signs of deliberate chipping.  An odd way to pass the time with winter coming on.  One would think she would find more practical pursuits.

Antilles found the fastens on the shelter’s entry flaps and drew it up.  He eased himself inside, careful of his horns owing to the tent’s thin and unfamiliar material, and shook off each hoof before stepping over the threshold so as to limit the amount of outside that found its way in.  The smell of smoke, sweat, and the lingering essence of oft-washed urine wafted over him, bringing back memories—some cousin’s first birthing and all the family gathered there to welcome it.  Antilles shook it away before that old loneliness could well up. 

He nudged at the empty, rumpled bedding with a hoof and then hunkered down again to pick through it better.  A Farasai bedroll to soften the hard ground, a nyati pelt, and a down-filled blanket of unknown making folded and sealed into a human-sized pocket.  Handy, that.  And two, small, stained quilts for her griffin, the edges well-preened.

There was little else.  Such a sorrowing existence she must have.

There were books beside the lonely bed, one of them with a chipped rock for use as a page-set.  He flipped that one open from curiosity and saw illustrations of stone-work.  How to shape tools from wood and rock.  It filled him with an unpleasant surge of emotion, something very near to sympathetic despair.  He shut the book on its crude page-set and picked up another. 
Wilderness Survival
, it proclaimed.  He opened it and, tucked inside its cover, he found a folded paper.

My dearest, or at least my furthest, daughter
was neatly lettered on the front of the topmost flap.

Antilles unfolded the paper and read.

Words could never describe the attitude of celebration and relief that assailed us when your first letter finally reached our hands.  Your mother cried for hours, swearing the whole time that she knew you were fine all along and she never worried a snip.  I love your mother for many things.  Honesty is not, sadly, high among them.

Your new home looks beautiful, even if the porch is rather broad.  They just don’t make country like that anymore.  I confess that I would feel a tad more secure if only you had a little something thicker than a tent between you and it, however, or should I say, between you and the other things that live in it.  Have you seen any yet? 

Your mother is touched down to her toes that you would name your little orphan Aisling, and so am I.  She has been proudly boasting to all our friends that she has a grandchild.  She
’s already started a college fund for him.

Don
’t worry about your old apartment.  We managed to truck everything out and into storage on time, and the only casualty to our zeal was a box of drinking glasses.  My apologies if they were dear to your distant heart.

There was more, but Antilles didn’t read it.  He folded the paper, returned it to the book’s cover, and flipped a few more pages.  How to build a shelter.  How to make a fire.  How to find food and water.  These were the things that the human did not know, did not learn before she came here.

‘
I’m making all this up as I go along.’  So Taryn had said from her sickbed, but he had not fully appreciated the truth of those words until he saw this pitiable camp.  She was laying down stones as she crossed the stream, not knowing how deep were the waters or how many steps she would need.  That took a certain kind of courage, one Antilles had difficulty reconciling to her breed.  He wondered if she had even hesitated before gathering herself to leave her world.  He wondered if she ever thought of going back.

He thought the answer might be no to both questions.  He could remember only too well how it had felt to stand outside the gates of Dis and watch the line of his people draw its way over the mountain and gone.  He had always known he would not leave his Valley, much as he had understood the necessity of leaving.  And much as he had mourned the loss of his family and clan, he had never once been tempted to follow.  There were times when one
’s duty was clear enough that doubts could never grow.  He thought he understood the human very well in that moment, and it made him regret, at least to some small, grudging degree, the way she had been welcomed.

“
Hail, thee.”

Antilles was not surprised that he recognized the voice,
but the recognition was not a pleasant thing.  “Hail, thee,” he said himself, and came out of Taryn’s tent, unfolding himself to his full height and glaring down at the Pathfinder who had entered the human’s camp.  “May I presume that you are ‘Romany’?”

She did not reply.  The draconids in her hair sprang into the sky and were away in funnels of color and flame, but she did not so much as flinch.  Her eyes were wide, but not with fear.  She stood alone in the tall grass, still as stone, and watched as he approached her.

“You are far from your holdings, Pathfinder,” he said, circling her slowly.  “And far,
far
into mine.”

“
Has thee slain her, brute?”  The words were calmly spoken, holding only a mild interest, but her eyes betrayed her.  The black of them had faded out; they blazed scarlet and gold.  Dark patches of scales were drawing themselves in down her slender throat.  Her fingers were thickening with claws.  “Has thee slain her, thou vile and contemptible
beast
?”

“
Nay,” he said, and came back before her, facing her down impassively.  “For though she came unbidden, she is proved and under my protection.  She speaks for you, Dragon’s Own, and for that alone, I give you hail.”

The Pathfinder looked startled for a moment, and then her eyes dimmed to black. 
“Her good word for me,” she murmured, and turned her face toward Taryn’s tent.  “Ah, thee trusting fool, thee.”

Aye, there was that.  This human who trusted to dragon-born and who gave her name as easily as her open hand.  Trusting every bit as much as she was arrogant, and of that, she had a damned
deep well. 

The heavy snort with which Antilles considered the human
’s nature drew the Pathfinder’s narrow eye.  He met her with a cool one of his own, saying merely, “She has letters to pass into your care.  Have you for her?”

“
I do.”  But she made no move toward them, only regarding him with mingled surprise and suspicion. 

“
Then give, Pathfinder.  I have promised to give you greeting and set you off unharmed, but do not abuse my patience.”  Abruptly, the ghost of Taryn’s fevered voice whispered at him to be nice, and Antilles ducked his horns sharply, gritting his teeth.  In a far mellower tone, he said, “Will you give?”  His jaw clenched.  “Please.”

The Pathfinder
’s expression had been rounding slowly out into one of whole-born wonder as he spoke, and now she said, “She won for me a promise of
kindness
?  From
thee
?”

Antilles felt himself drawing stiffly out to his broadest and most impressive breadth. 
“As if I would never show it otherwise.  I am as capable of kindness as—” 
your kind is of cruelty
, was how his tongue yearned to finish.  He did not.  He would be nice.  “—as any other greeting,” he said instead, and glowered.  “Give over the damned…Give the human’s letters, Pathfinder.  Please.”

Still, she did not move.  Her face had gone very still.

Softly, she said, “Is this peace, Cerosan?”

Peace.  He was stunned to stone at the very sound of the word.  Peace.  After so many thousands of years, so many hundreds of petty conflicts.  Peace.  The bones of his grandfather
’s grandfathers were scattered in the mountains of the Aerie Domain.  The shells of the Dragon’s first clutches had been trampled to dust in the Valley.  Now she would stand boldly before him and speak of peace. 

And yet
…

Antilles rolled his horns before the idea could root and snorted sourly. 
“Let us say this is…passage.”  He reached back into the tent and drew out Taryn’s letter.  He exchanged it for a packet of similar letters and a small box produced from the Pathfinder’s sleeve.  “When you are about her business, Pathfinder, you are welcome.”

“
Here?”  The Pathfinder blinked rapidly and looked away, looked at all the length and breadth of the Valley that surrounded her.  Her eyes were wide, stricken with a hope so deep it seemed almost to be pain.  Her lips, slightly parted still with her surprise, trembled and she raised one hand to cover them.  “I am welcome here,” she said again, in the tone of one cementing a truth to her own self.  “Even here.”

Antilles scraped a hoof, glanced down to see if he had ruined some imperative piece of the human
’s ground with that careless gesture, and looked up again to see that the Pathfinder was once more well-armored in self-control.  Her eyes, though, like the eyes of any immortal creature, could not help but show her heart, and there was enough in them to pull at him. 

“
Perhaps,” he said, and scowled.  “Perhaps when her griffin is grown and she is departed, perhaps then we shall speak of peace.”

The Pathfinder nodded once, her expression closed and solemn, her eyes still alight with fascination. 

“Until that day, the old laws hold.”  Antilles shifted the letters to one hand and aimed a finger down at her.  “There shall be no Pathfinders save you in my Valley.”

“
Agreed.”

“
No Roads but those you walk.”

“
And close behind me.”

He nodded and stepped back, satisfied. 
“I will ask you no oath,” he said.

Again, surprise lightened her features.  She surely would not have given it in any case, but she had certainly been anticipating her proud refusal. 
“I have no lord but one,” she said.  “But I will respect thee, Cerosan, and hold thy laws.  Imagine.”  She smiled slyly.  “Thee and me could pave our road to peace for cause of a human.  What seer could have foreseen it?”

He grimaced, but the taste of her words were not altogether displeasing. 
“Go,” he said, not unkindly.  “We’ll give this peace time to grow moss before we reminisce on its origins.”

She turned from him and took three steps into the plains, but then paused and turned back. 
“I called thee brute,” she said, with an awkwardness uncharacteristic of her kind.  “I apologize.  There is nobility in the open hand, and a lordly will to reach it out to one you would know as an enemy.  I do not call thee lord,” she added, bending her head.  “But I do not wonder that others do.”

She turned again and walked, raising her voice in the eerie song of Pathfinding.  Her draconids came spiraling back once she
’d gone a dozen paces out of his reach, already growing indistinct as they flew into the field of her opening Road.  She was gone in another moment, although her voice continued to waver in and out of the air for several minutes more.

Antilles closed Taryn
’s tent and began to move away, careful not to tread in the human’s garden.  The horsemen had plowed her a proper field in her absence; when she returned, she would have leave to plant ten times over what she had already done.  It was a garden that could support her for a year.  Which meant that she would doubtless be here for a year.

And longer yet, for the griffin would not be fledged for two years
’ time.  How Taryn thought she was going to fledge a griffin was a mystery to him.  Then again, he could not understand what had possessed her to think to hatch it in the first place.

The findi
ng of such an egg, abandoned…

He would have marked it as a tragedy and moved on.  He would never have thought to try and mother it.  Futility.  Fifteen years, she had claimed to tend the egg to hatch.  And now three years to rear it in a foreign land.  She had made that decision in a world that no longer admitted to griffins at all.  She had sacrificed
everything for a creature that should not exist.  She had suffered and she was suffering still.

‘
Admit it.  I’m winning you over, Tilly.’

Tilly.