The Care and Feeding of Griffins (4 page)

‘So?’ she wondered, but there was another memory bubbling up from childhood’s tar.  A speck of blue.  A paper dragon.

Gosh, she
’d had that thing for years.  Until she was fourteen at least.  She lost track of it after that, but it wasn’t really the paper dragon she was thinking about, was it?

‘
Oh come on,’ she thought uneasily.  ‘There were no dragons.  Dragons don’t exist.’

She looked down at the griffin shivering and peeping in her arms.

‘There were no dragons!’ her brain insisted.

Taryn began to pack.

6.  Homecoming

R
edmond, unchanging during all the remembered years of her life in Washington, had grown up.  Apartments and business complexes, identical in shape and color, lined streets where Taryn remembered comic stores, dentists, and ice cream shops.  The park was there, but all the climbing toys were different.  The school was there, but it was blue and white now, instead of green and gold.  There were streetlamps and stoplights where Taryn remembered only long stretches of road.  The pastureland where the Saturday craft fairs were held in the summer (and where gypsies sometimes came to camp) was now a parking lot for a seventeen-screen movie theater and a two-story mall.  SugarPie’s Ice Cream Parlor was gone; she passed three McDonald’s. 

And the library, her wonderful castle of concrete and black glass, was closed.  It had been replaced by a modern building down the street, one complete with computer rooms and a children
’s theatre, and no doubt all kinds of books that there had been no room for before.  The old library remained, derelict and depressed, in a parking lot much smaller than she recalled, now cracked and carpeted with hip-high stragglers of grass.

Taryn had driven through the night
and into the morning with Aisling sleeping and peeping in the pet carrier in the back seat.  She had fed him twice more.  He had vomited three times.

Now she walked across the crumbling asphalt of her library
’s parking lot and looked at the building that had once given her so much joy with eyes that brimmed with tears.  Her heart was breaking.  It had been a kingdom all its own, once upon a time.  Now it was a body no one had bothered to bury.

Taryn walked around the side of the building, too big now to stroll along the narrow ledge with all its ins and outs, but watching it with envious eyes.  Her reflection, shrunken and dim in the desolate windows, was the only one who could walk there safely now.

She was not alone when she came back around to the front of the building.  She wasn’t sure if she was surprised or not. 

The lady sat on the same steps.  She was dressed in the same sparkling, colorful, impossible clothes.  Her hair was still black as ink, kinked and curled as a politician
’s promises.  She was hunched slightly, her hands at work.  Taryn could hear her humming, see her rocking comfortably back and forth as she took the early rays of the sun.

There were no dragons.

Maybe they flew away.

‘
You were
six
!’ shrieked her exasperated brain.  ‘Maybe they
were never there
!’

Hesitantly, Taryn approached the stair, holding her pack cradled in her arms. 
“Hello?”

The lady on the stairs hummed a little louder, that was all.  Between her fingers, pink paper was deftly twisted into dragon
’s form.

“
I had one of those when I was a child,” Taryn said.  “A blue one.”

“
Aye?”  The woman’s fingers curled around the pink dragon, uncurled, and it was blue.  The woman’s head cocked.  One dark eye twinkled beneath ringlets of black.  “For a pretty, aye?”

“
For a teaser,” said Taryn.  She reached into her pocket for a bill and handed it over without looking at it.  She accepted the blue bit of paper with a sinking heart and stared at it in her palm.

There were no dragons.  Not singing in the lady
’s hair, not sleeping on her shoulders.

For a moment, Taryn was
a child again, and remembered (or imagined she remembered) the hurt and confusion of watching dragons buzz just inches,
inches
, in front of her mother’s face and seeing no recognition, no wonder in her eyes.  Her mother was a good woman, a fanciful and wonderful woman.  Her mother deserved to see dragons.

The lady on the steps was smiling at her.  It was the same sly, knowing smile.

Taryn turned away.  The weight of Aisling in her arms was too great for his size.  Dead weight.  A premonition.  She had come all this way, and why?

Her car was sitting in the sunlight, waiting for her to climb back in and drive home.  Taryn looked at it but didn
’t move.  She had driven through the night, and underneath this veneer of anxious fear, she knew she was exhausted but she wasn’t ready to give up yet.  She had come all this way, all right.  She had come all this way because once upon a time, there had been dragons, and the lady who had taken care of them might just know how to take care of a griffin.

‘
There were no dragons,’ her brain insisted furiously.

Aisling needed her and she needed help, and that was why she
’d come here.  If she got back in that car and let it take her home now, that would be it for Aisling.  She couldn’t let that happen.  She had to have help.  And the lady with the dragons was the only person in all this wide world Taryn could think of who might possibly be able to help her.

‘
There never were any dragons,’ her inner self groaned.

“
Yes, there
were
!” Taryn shouted, and heard it roll up the stairs to the library’s doors and back down again.  She swung back before her head could get the better of her, her voice rising sure and strident in the early air.  “There were dragons!  I saw them, they were real!  There were dragons in your hair and on your shoulders and everywhere around you—”

The lady on the steps gazed up at her with her secret smile as understanding slowly took hold on Taryn
’s face.

“
And there still are,” she said softly.  “Aren’t there?”

The lady threw out her arms, laughing.  All around her, dragons exploded into sight, churning around her in a storm of chirping, singing wings.

7.  The Lady and the Dragons

“I
knew, aye.  I knew.”  The lady on the steps picked up another square of paper, metallic green, and began to fold.  Her hands did this deftly, unsupervised.  Her eyes were on Taryn, glittering with good humor, and her dragons were nestled in her hair.  “I knew thee was coming.  The wind told me. The rain.  I did not know who, but I knew there was one seeking me.  What need is it that brings thee?”

“
I have…a terrible problem.”  Taryn looked down at the pack in her arms, paced away, and then returned in an agony of trust.  “Who are you?”

“
They call me Romany, for I go where I will,” the lady said proudly.  Her eye lit on Taryn’s pack and gleamed.  “What treasure, love?  What precious penny?”

“
The most precious,” Taryn admitted, every word a stone.  Her heart in her throat, she reached into the pack and brought Aisling out into the light.

She watched the smile fade from Romany
’s face, to be replaced by an awful shock.  It was the one expression, the one outcome to this spur-of-the-moment trip, that she had never expected.  Seeing it, she suddenly knew she had made a terrible mistake.  The strength left her legs.  The warmth left her blood.  She tried to back away and fell, landing with a bruising thud on her butt in the shadow of the great grey library.

“
Peace, thee,” the lady whispered.  Romany touched her nimble fingers to her lips, still staring gravely at what Taryn held.  “I will not harm thee, nay, thee has but caught me all a’swim. Such a treasure you bear. I thought them lost to this world.  Where found thee this unfledged pearl?”

“
In the woods.  In a caved-in den.  In the rain.”  She didn’t seem to be capable of stringing words together any better than that.  Every breath hurt.  “Fifteen years ago.  An egg.”

Romany looked up sharply and then returned a gaze of new wonder on Aisling. 
“Is it so, aye?  Is it?  Thee raised it to hatching?  Thee and kin?”

“
Just me,” said Taryn.  “No one else knew.  And now I’m so scared.”  Tears that had been building since the previous night finally came to a head and poured out of her.  “You’ve got to help me, please!  I don’t know what to do!  He’s a miracle and I’m going to kill him!”

“
Nay, nay.  Peace.  Be still.”  Romany contemplated the sleeping griffin, her thin fingers folded beneath her chin.  All around them was the emptiness of the abandoned library, but somewhere, Taryn could hear cars driving, people shouting, children laughing.  Somewhere.

“
What would thee do?” Romany asked at last.  Her eyes were hooded and grave.  “If thee had thy will of it, what would thee do?”

“
I need to help him,” Taryn said at once.  “I have to.  He’s got no one else.  But I don’t know what to do.  I thought…you might know things.”

The gypsy looked startled, and then delighted. 
“Aye,” she said, long fingers brushing imaginary flecks of dust from the folds of her skirt.  “Many things and many more things does Romany know.  But for thee…mmm…For thee, the best that I can know is to tell thee where to look for knowledge.” 

Romany stood, a cloud of dragons whirling out and then back to nest in their eerily-orchestrated dance.  She began to move up the concrete stair to the library, beckoning with one slender hand as she passed Taryn.

Taryn’s legs gathered under her almost of their own accord, but she didn’t immediately move to follow.  She looked again at the library and saw the dead, black eyes of its many empty windows, the dead, cracked flesh of its abandoned walls.  “It’s closed,” she said, hugging Aisling just a little tighter to her chest.

Romany never paused.  The sparkling threads sewn into her garments dulled as she passed into the shadow of the overhang, but that was all.

Taryn took two steps up the ramp and stopped again, her heart hurting.  “It’s empty!” she called, and flinched when the library’s hollows threw back her words in broken shivers.  She looked bleakly at it again, the playgrounds of her youth, and said, “It’s dead.”

“
Nay.”  Romany turned just enough to show Taryn the edges of her smile.  “Tis sleeping, aye.  Tis sleeping only.  But it will wake for me and thee.  Come.  Follow.”  Humming, the gypsy put her hands on the heavy, dungeon doors and pulled.

For just a moment, Taryn thought she saw a shimmer rising in the shadows before the library, the way that heat waves will rise off a sun-baked street if you squint at it just right.  And for that instant, it seemed there were two sets of doors, one that remained fixed and shut and one that opened soundlessly, almost gleefully, under Romany
’s slender hands.  Taryn blinked, and then there was only Romany, holding wide the dungeon doors of the Redmond library, smiling back over her round shoulder with that sly and knowing smile.

Taryn drew back, nervously searching the empty parking lot behind her, half-expecting a host of cops to descend on them with lights and sirens and billy-clubs flying. 
“We shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“
Nay,” agreed her companion, utterly without shame.  “Therefore, swiftly go, before the waking of this place brings attention thee might do better to avoid.”

It was hard to argue with that.

8.  The Sleeping Library

T
aryn’s feet took her up under the overhang.  Every step brought her a little further back in time.  There, she could see the drinking fountain, her childhood favorite now impossibly short, and the little carpet-covered concrete stair that bucked out before it.  There, she could see the door to the conference room, dark and still, just a tangle of shadows behind black windows.  There, she could see the display case and no sooner did her eyes strike it, but the little light inside came on, sputtering at first, as unused lights will do, before glowing out with force and illuminating proudly its collection of treasures.

Taryn stepped over the threshold and under Romany
’s arm, all her wondering attention fixed on that glowing glass case.  She was only dimly aware of the great door whispering shut and settling once more.  She was fascinated by what she saw.  She was amazed.

There was an old leather backpack
occupying one corner of the case.  It was a well-used thing, worn and patched and stained.  Its top flap was unbuckled and flung casually back to reveal its contents: metal stakes, half-burnt candles, dented tins (one of these, also open, displayed a dozen of the thickest, ugliest wooden matches Taryn had ever seen), rolls of white linen, several sheets of stained paper, a tiny bottle half-filled with ink, and a book, laid open to a hand-drawn map and some spiky tired-looking letters in a language Taryn couldn’t make out.  A traveler’s pack, that much was obvious.  One that had seen plenty of hard traveling in its time before retiring here in the sleeping library to rest at last.

Beside it, raised up on forked blocks, was a sword.  A saber, really, wider cut at the curve than at the hilt.  It still looked very sharp, for all that it looked very well-used.  It was not made of metal, but of a deep purple
substance that seemed almost crystalline.  Taryn knelt to better see the broad, pitted blade and found that she could see right through it in the right light.  And there were marks down the unsharpened back of the saber’s blade, carvings or etchings, but like the writing in the book, they were not letters Taryn knew. 

The sword
’s scabbard sat below it, still attached to the belt that had carried it.  It was a very narrow-waisted belt.  A ladies’ belt, Taryn thought, although there was no proof of this anywhere.  The only ornamentation the belt carried was in its buckle—a plain, round buckle made of some beaten, dull metal, and marked with a hook-shape.  Or not a hook at all, she realized, but finally a letter she could recognize.  J.  That was all.  Just J.

The other items in the case, although unusual, could not capture quite the same depth of amazement as these three world-weary retirees.  They were relics, she was sure; there were golden idols and jewels and priceless artifacts, there were cups and mirrors, carvings, daggers, beaded headdresses, rings, staff-heads, stone bowls, balls, bottles sealed with silver caps and wax, and so many marvelous things that Taryn couldn
’t seem to see them all, but her eyes kept returning to that pack, that sword, that belt.  J. 

When she straightened up at last and reluctantly turned away from the display case, Romany was waiting by the inner library doors.  At her shoulder was the same library calendar, empty now but for a scrap of what looked an awful lot like leather.  The word MOOT had been painted on it in broad strokes of blue.

“Where are we?” Taryn asked, pulling her gaze with effort away from that unknowable word.  “Where are we really?”

Romany pushed open the inner doors and held them wide, waiting.  After a moment, Taryn went.

It was cold inside and there was a smell, the sort that one came home to after a week’s vacation.  Not neglect, exactly, nothing musty or precisely stale, but only the smell of a building that was lonely.  Taryn ducked beneath Romany’s arm, feeling threads of the gypsy’s shawl brush over her like cobwebs.  A number of dragons made the leap onto Taryn’s back, but quickly scampered off again as she straightened up inside the sleeping library.  She could see empty shelves, empty tables, the empty counter that librarians had once manned.

The lights began to come on, one by one from left to right, and Taryn saw that it was not entirely empty after all.  At her right, halfway down the wall where the old kiddie section used to be (in the very same
set of shelves, in fact, where she had once been able to find the adventures of Jenny Fletcher, Girl Genius) there were books.

“
Go,” Romany said suddenly.  The gypsy’s voice was stark in the cavernous room, but it did not echo.  The library, starved for company, held on to every sound.  “I will hold the door.  Go, thee, and swiftly.”

Taryn moved as one in a dream, her gaze wide and fixed upon her destination, her feet numb even as they carried her.  The books were very old, every one of them bound in leather or in wood, and although many spines were marked in some fashion (crests, circles, strange runic-looking
embossing in gold or silver) none of them showed titles.

She began at the top shelf, the far left, with the first book in a whole row of identical green-covered books.  She put her hand on one and felt leather worn smooth as rose petals beneath her fingers.  She pulled it out into the light and turned it to see the front cover.  Silver paint made letters that, finally, she could read. 
Far-Telling Arcanos
.  Volume One: Aeromancy.

There were no such books.  Oh sure, in the movies, pretty little heroines in tight sweaters were always tripping down to their local libraries when zombies popped up and finding books like these, but Taryn had been to a great many real libraries in her life and there were no such books.  She jostled Aisling to her shoulder so that she could open this impossible book and saw thick pages with hand-written lettering and greatly-ornamented margins.  The first letter of every new page was always drawn in the shape of a contorted dragon.  The secrets of Aeromancy explained.  How to see the future in the air. 

With trembling hands, Taryn shelved Volume One and brought out Volume Two.  Anthropomancy, it said.  She opened it and gazed in silence at many beautiful and painstakingly-illustrated pages diagramming exactly how humans should be laid out for sacrifice, which organs should be read and how.

The voice of Romany drifted to her, no louder than a whisper. 
“Hurry, thee.”

Taryn made herself close the book and pull out the next.  Astragalomancy.  And the next, Capnomancy.  And down through all fifteen volumes of the
Far-Telling Arcanos
.  The first book she touched after that was called
Magickal Circles
, and after that,
A Collection of the Maps of the Ancient Kingdoms of the Three Realms
.  Her heart leapt when she found the words
Magical Beasts
carved on the cover of one book, until she opened it and found the addendum ‘and their uses’ penned beneath an illustration of an eviscerated unicorn.

The books seemed to be in no particular order, although collections were kept together.
  Some books had no titles on the front covers at all and had to be opened.  She found many books on sorcery, particularly on ways of divination: examining tea leaves, candle flames, incense smoke, bird flights, the movements of melted lead or pearls in water, burning the livers of donkeys or llamas or humans, reading palms, reading fingers, reading feet.  She found books on the magical properties of rocks, trees, herbs, and every other imaginable thing.  She found books on the making of amulets and talismans.  She found books on how to make and activate runes and wards.  Books on how to invoke spirits, elementals, djinn, the dead, homunculi, or demons.  And there were spell books by the dozens, providing a reading wizard with everything from magical flames to foods to slaves to sex to killing curses.  And here and there, tantalizing her, were books Taryn would have loved to sit and read: 
The Draconid
,
Chimerae in the Age of Reason
,
A True Accounting of the Infliction of Lycanthropy
.

But it was on the last shelf, tucked unimportantly between
Vedekum’s Necronthology
and the first volume of
The Alchemist’s Arts
, that Taryn found what she knew she was looking for. 

It was a small book, comparatively speaking.  It was about the size of a video cassette tape and half the thickness.  The cover was soft leather, rubbed shiny, and title-less.  The pages were sewn into the binding, not paper at all, but a soft and supple fabric.  The lettering was neat, if haphazardly spelled at times.  And on the first page was written,
The Care and Feeding of Young Griffins
, by Bancha Sorefoot.

“
I found it!” Taryn called, startled, and Aisling raised his head and chirped distress.

Taryn backed away from the shelves, pulling him down in the crook of her arm again and trying to turn pages with jus
t one hand. 
Chapter One: Griffin or Gryphon
?  She laughed out loud, her eyes still huge and unbelieving.

“
Hurry!” Romany said again, and this was urgency in her voice.

“
Okay, I’m coming!”  And without thinking about it, Taryn went to the check-out counter, set her book down, and dug into her back pocket for her wallet.  In the very back sleeve was a worn and wrinkled slip of paper, marked with a six-year old’s best penmanship, and Taryn brought it out.  She turned it over and wrote ‘Care and Feeding of Griffins’ on the back and left it.  Then she picked up her book, renewed her grip on her griffin, and headed for the door.

Romany stared past her at the library card left on the counter.  On her face, an expression of surprise had finally erased all the slyness.  When she looked at Taryn next, she was smiling. 
“Well done, thee,” she said.  “Now come, and quickly.”

Taryn went, ducki
ng beneath the gypsy’s arm and then on ahead, to wait by the heavy outer doors for Romany to come and open them.  Romany was there in an instant, humming under her breath as she pushed.  The gypsy’s arms strained, but the doors didn’t budge.  Taryn knew a moment of kindling panic, but Romany only panted out a dry chuckle and hummed a little louder.  “Think thee so, thee old buzzard?  Ha.  For am I not Romany?  I go where I will!”  She pushed again, rolling her shoulders like a cat about to pounce, as easy in her element as the dragons singing softly in her hair.

Taryn felt, or thought she felt, a subtle shifting beneath her feet, as though the building itself had heaved a sigh of parting, and she glanced back through the tinted glass and into the sleeping library for one last wistful look.

At the librarian’s counter, intangible as a ghost, the figure of an old woman in long robes seemed to be materializing out of the air.  She could see this entity peering down at the counter, see it pinching up her library card and looking around with a baffled expression, but it was fading, or she was.  Romany’s humming grew louder and then the doors were swinging wide.  There was no ghost and no librarian.  All was dark.  The library was asleep again.

Taryn stepped out into the autumn air, smelling rain on wet pavement and hearing the not-so-distant drone of traffic and the raised, laughing voices of children moving in and out of the real library down the street.

Taryn lingered in the shade of the overhang and opened her new book at random, skimming rapidly through words she knew she’d probably memorize before too long.

There are some who believe griffins are only female.  These people need to have sex more often.  Maybe if they did
, they’d eventually realize that, leaving aside the nature of certain invertebrates and, of course, the puppet yewhg, males are necessary for more than just moving heavy objects.  However, I won’t say that males aren’t rare.  In each of the four species collectively known as griffins, males make up only five percent of the population entire
.

“
And is thee satisfied?” Romany asked, stepping up close behind her.

“
Yes!  Thank you!”  Taryn flipped rapidly through pages to continue reading.

Shortly after hatching, the young chicks are fed for the first time. 
One parent (usually the cob, since the crown seldom leaves her den during the hatching process) will bring back some small game and shred the entrails into chick-sized bites.  The stomach, liver, and intestines are always fed to the chick first, while Mama eats the meat of this first meal herself.  It would appear the chicks need something in the animal’s digestive track to set their own works in motion
—

Taryn wanted to scream with joy. 
“Thank you!” she managed at last.  “Oh, thank you, Romany!  I can do this now!”

“
How certain thee is.”

“
But I can feed him now!”  Taryn made herself close the book, but she couldn’t stop hugging it, almost as tightly as she hugged Aisling.  “I know what I’m doing and it’ll be okay now!”