The Care and Feeding of Griffins (7 page)

He was quiet for a long time, just looking at her. 
“I used to love you,” he said finally.  “Or at least, I sure thought I did.  I tried to hold on to that for as long as I could.”

“
But I wouldn’t have sex with you.”  She glanced at him.  “So you stopped.”

He didn
’t argue.

She shook her head numbly and looked back down at her braid.  It was heavy in her hands. 
“You know, in a way, that makes me really glad that I never slept with you.  Because if that’s the kind of man you really are, then I sure deserve better.”

He shrugged one shoulder, showing a little chagrin, but not much.
  “Maybe we both deserve better,” he said.  “Did you ever think of that?  Maybe I deserve to be with someone who doesn’t act like chatting online with me is a chore, or who calls me up once in a while and doesn’t need three days’ warning before she’ll go out with me.  Maybe I deserve someone who actually likes being my girlfriend.”

Her heart sank.  It wasn
’t supposed to be like this.  Not that it could have ever been happy, but the hostility hiding in him kept disarming her.  She didn’t want to fight.  That she’d come here to break it off in the first place only made it more important that this not get any uglier.  But still, the only thing she could think of to say was, “But you’d have forgiven all that if I’d slept with you, wouldn’t you?”

He searched the ceiling and finally shrugged again.  He said,
“Are you going to tell me that I’m breaking your heart?  Are you really going to look me in the eye and say you loved me?”

“
No.”

“
There you go.”  He came around to face her, folding his arms heavily across his chest.  “You seem to be passing out the scripts tonight.  So what happens now?”

She looked down at her hands.  She was still holding the key to his apartment.  She reached out and set it on the coffee table between them.

“Just like that, huh?” he said. 

Taryn stood up
, and all the hurt and anger that had been pooled in her stomach poured out of her, too heavy to carry with her.  “Just like that,” she said in her new, weary voice.  “But for what it’s worth, John, I hope you’re happy.  I only ever wanted that.  And I’m sorry if I embarrassed you or your friend tonight.”

He flinched and dropped his eyes.  As Taryn touched the door, he rallied himself to a lackluster,
“I’ll call you later.”

“
I won’t be there,” she replied.  “But you can write if you want to.  My parents will give you the address.”

He didn
’t even ask where she was going.  He let that end their three months together.  He just let her go.

It was raining when Taryn stepped out into the world again, and that was only fitting.  She buckled herself into her car and heard a muffled peep from the covered box in the back.  And it was good enough, she realized.  If nothing else, it was a clean break.  Better to find out now than sit on his memory for three years and come home to him thinking he was worth waiting for.  She raised her head and saw him watching her through the curtains in his living room.  She raised a hand for farewell.  After a moment, he returned the wave.  And then he closed the curtains.

And that was goodbye.

10.  The Road to Arcadia

T
aryn drove.  West to I-5 and north to the Washington border and on to Redmond, an all-day journey that passed simultaneously as a minute and as a year.  She was leaving her home, a step so much wider than merely going off to college or moving out of her parent’s house.  She was leaving cars and telephones, leaving pizza and
The Simpsons
and traffic during rush hour.  She didn’t know where Romany was going to be taking her, and she had only the most general idea of how long she’d be gone.  She was walking off a cliff with a griffin in her arms.

She was so scared.

Romany was waiting when she pulled into the crumbling lot of the sleeping library, her dragons in full flight around her as the sky darkened to evening.  She waited, statue-still, while Taryn struggled to strap on her hiking pack and gather up everything she was taking with her.  Romany’s first sign of life came as an extended hand when Taryn walked up to her, and Taryn put the car’s keys and a sale slip into the gypsy’s palm.  Romany made it disappear like a pigeon up a magician’s sleeve, and her dragons settled around her in a glittering cloak.  Only then did the gypsy smile.

Taryn tried to smile back, but fear made the effort ghastly.  She shifted Aisling up further onto her shoulder and tried to jostle the weight of the cauldron full of potatoes into something less heavy.

“Thee is prepared?”

Taryn thought about it.  Dressed in layers to make more room in her backpack for supplies, check.  A minimum of camping gear and a maximum of foodstuffs, check.  Books, check.  Towel (she was a big believer in the Douglas Adams theory of the universe), check.  Baby blankets for Aisling, check.  First aid supplies and basic hygiene, check.  All the essentials were in her hands or on her back.  The only sentimen
tal luxuries, she carried around her neck in the form of her grandmother’s wedding ring, her father’s St. Christopher medallion, and two other necklaces she couldn’t bear to leave behind—one of the drop-heart lockets she and Rhiannon had exchanged when they were little, and a puka-shell choker she’d made in summer camp when she was nine and which she’d been wearing when she found the egg.  Was she prepared?

“
I hope so,” Taryn said.

Romany
’s black eyes dipped down to the cast-iron cauldron.  They lingered there a long while.  “Follow,” she said at last, and then turned and walked down the concrete steps and out over the empty field that had stood since time immemorial beside the concrete library.

The first step was the hardest.  After that, her eyes quit burning and her breath came easier.  She was leaving.  It was done.  For good or ill, it was done.

They crossed the tangle of weeds and tall grasses, and when they entered the woods that stood at the far end, Romany began to sing.  The words had a smushy sound that reminded Taryn of the Gaelic her grandmother sometimes spoke, but she knew that wasn’t it.  Romany sang slow and lilting, the tune sometimes seeming to come in two voices or even three, harmonizing with herself as Taryn tried to concentrate on where to put her feet on the uneven ground.  It was getting harder to keep walking.  The air felt dense, heavy all around her.  The woods seemed to swim at the edges of Taryn’s sight.  She could see the hem of Romany’s dress swishing across the ground before her, but more and more, it looking like paint brushed in over shadows, creating the world one stroke and one step at a time.  It made her dizzy, and she looked up, only to see the baffling glow of sunrise through the branches, even though it had been coming on to evening when she’d pulled into the library’s parking lot.  The gypsy’s song was imbedding itself into her like nails, making it difficult to concentrate even on the wrongness of the impossibly-rising sun.  Once, she thought she walked right through a tree, tasting bark and earth and feeling a lingering ghost of pins-and-needles all through her chest.  She pushed her eyes back to the ground, blinking hard, and forced herself to follow the solid trail of Romany’s tattered hem.

And then, Romany stopped, the echoes of her haunting voice hushing in air that was again crisp and still.  Taryn came up beside her, breathing hard already, and waited patiently for direction.  There was no path beneath their feet.  The woods were tall and dark and utterly enclosing.

Romany turned and smiled at her.  It was an expression of sly humor, one that held absolutely no sympathy.  “I go no further,” she said.

Taryn
’s heart skipped and then slammed extra hard against her ribs to make up for it.  “W-what?!”

The dragons, stirred by her panic, leapt out and then circled back, chiding her with their high, angry voices.

“Thee must go on alone,” the gypsy said mildly.  “And swiftly go, for thee must be gone of these woods before nightfall is far upon thee.”

“
Why?”

Romany ignored the question, aiming one slender arm to point further ahead. 
“The moon will be rising, I think, when thee finds thy way out.  Aim thyself into its face and walk until thee comes to the Standing Stones.  From there, the choice belongs to thee.  I wish thee well.”

Romany turned away.

“Wait!”  Taryn tried to raise a hand, but both her arms were leaden with their respective cargo.

Romany did not pause.  She swished back through the trees, her voice again rising in song.  It seemed to Taryn that the gypsy shimmered, like heat over a summer road, but when she blinked, the gypsy was gone.  Her voice remained a few minutes more, echoing so oddly it seemed to be singing different words and tunes as well as keys.  Then that, too, was gone.

Taryn was alone. 

She clutched Aisling tight, shivering as she looked around the woods.  It was cold.  Soon, it would be dark as well.  She had to keep moving.  She couldn
’t sleep here.  She didn’t know why, but if it was reason enough for the gypsy to warn her, then there had to be a darned good reason.

She turned her feet in the right direction and started walking.

11.  The Standing Stones

T
he woods went on for miles and it wasn’t an easy hike.  Taryn knew she’d never been out here before, but she couldn’t remember any hills this jagged next to the old library in Redmond, and the gathering gloom of evening only made her footing that much more treacherous.  The soil was hard, packed and stony, covered with a slick tarp of pine needles and riddled with toe-catching roots.  The ground beneath her feet rose and fell steeply and irregularly, and she was so afraid of losing her sense of direction that she didn’t dare circle around the frequent drop-offs for an easier descent.  Aisling complained at the constant jostling, but she didn’t let his shrill peeping slow her down.  If anything, it sped her up a little; distressed cries from small things had a way of attracting larger ones, and cougars weren’t entirely unknown in these parts.

Taryn stumbled through the woods
as best she could, feeling time like a whip at her back.  She couldn’t see the sun at all through the canopy of trees, but the darkness was growing and the gypsy’s warning not to stay in the woods had a way of resounding in her mind.  There were signs of occupation all around her—scored bark, game trails, hoof prints, pellets—but there had to be something more that Taryn wasn’t seeing.  She doubted Romany would have sounded quite so threatening if the biggest danger out here was rogue deer.  Then again, who knew?  Late autumn, deer could be pretty vicious.  Yeah, she’d just tell herself to watch out for deer.  At least until the sun came up again.

At last, the trees began to thin out.  She saw clouds ove
rhead and then felt rain.  She set down her cauldron full of potatoes to rewrap Aisling in his blanket, and then set off again, ducking her head against the wet.  She had a jacket in her pack, but she didn’t want to dig for it here.  Not until she was all the way out of the woods.  Through the trunks of trees (now beginning to stand out as black shadows against the impending night) she could spy snatches of what looked like open fields.  The end was in sight.  She had to keep moving.

She came down out
of the woods on a sloping hill just in time to see the last arc of the setting sun wink out behind the mountains.  She kept walking for a second or two, already scanning the skies for the moon that Romany had told her to align herself to, and then, like she’d taken a thunderbolt straight to the head, she underwent a staggering convulsion of shock and spun to stare at the mountains again.  She dropped her cauldron.  She might have dropped Aisling, if his little weight hadn’t been quite so high on her shoulder.  In that moment, even the baby griffin she carried slipped entirely from her thoughts.

Taryn had grown up in Redmond.  She had seen the Cascades
all the young years of her life, and even after moving down to Oregon, the sight of those mountains framing out the horizon behind the library had been a familiar one.  These were not those mountains.  Moreover, the right mountains—the mountains which had been behind the woods when Romany had led her into them—were nowhere in sight.

Her mind knew several minutes of perfect non-thought.  Slowly, it came to her that she did not know where she was.  At all.  And the longer she stood there, the stronger the feeling grew that she was not in Washington anymore.

Absurdly, that was the thought that kept coming back to her, looping around and around in her brain in tones of extremely mild surprise, like an internal copy of
The Wizard of Oz
had gone on the fritz in her head:  ‘I don’t think I’m in Washington anymore.  I don’t think I’m in Washington anymore.  I don’t think—’

Aisling struggled in her arms to get his head under her chin, and the movement brought her out of her fugue with a jerk.  If this wasn
’t Washington—

‘
It isn’t,’ her brain remarked.

—
then she had no idea what animals had made their marks in the woods behind her, and Romany’s warning to be out of them before nightfall took on an extra impact.  She had to get well away from here.  She had to find the stones Romany had told her about.  She could worry about munchkins and flying monkeys tomorrow, but she needed to get gone right now.

She knelt down in the damp grass and pulled her backpack off, digging through it to find first her jacket and then her flashlight
—one of those newfangled kinetic ones that only needed to be shaken up to light and never needed batteries.  Under the bluish glow of its beam, she located the potatoes that had tumbled out of her cauldron when she dropped it, and then she gathered everything back up into her arms and started walking.  Rapidly.

It wasn
’t long at all before the pale face of the moon started to show itself, and with it came a renewed sense of vertigo because it wasn’t the right moon.  It was
almost
the right moon, and in a way that was the worst part, because her mind kept trying to see it the right way and when it couldn’t fill in enough blanks, that dizzying panic only churned that much harder.  It was a white moon, with just a tint of blue in the craters that pocked its surface, and it was noticeably bigger than the moon ought to be, or maybe it was just closer, she didn’t know.  In any case, it was easiest just to turn herself towards it and then keep her eyes on the ground where her flashlight illuminated her steps.  Don’t look at the moon, don’t think about it.  Just walk.

The woods rolled away for good behind her and the valley opened up.  The grass grew hip-high, gone to seed, and the day
’s rains made traveling through it a lot like wading through a river.  As she walked, crushing stems, the scent of green growth became eye-watering and gradually the thought that she wasn’t prone to hay fever (and the gratitude that accompanied that thought) began to push out even the horror of the new mountains and that not-right moon.  Her jeans grew soaked, though, and seeds and chaff from the grass clung to the damp denim.  Before long, she was slogging through the valley in a half-suit of organic armor.  Between the chill in the air and the exhaustion sinking into her body, thoughts of hypothermia were getting harder to ignore, and she was uneasily debating the wisdom of stopping and trying to make camp here when she saw them—the Standing Stones.

She had imagined a cluster of boulders.  What she found instead was a tight ring of dolheims, each easily twice her height and half as thick and wide.  There were a dozen at least, set so close together that she realized she
’d have to take her pack off if she was going to slip inside them, which was in itself a daunting prospect, as the entire ring was crowned by a single round slab to form a kind of flat-topped stone hut.

Taryn crossed the field, gazing at the stones in wonder.  She
’d never really been all that curious about Stonehenge or how it was made.  Heck, stones were quarried, carried, and set, end of mystery.  But seeing these monoliths out in the middle of nowhere, stones so purposeful and so fundamentally alien to the landscape, she suddenly understood how people could be fascinated by them and believe them to be magic.  The Standing Stones had no business being here
except
to be stared at, to be magic, to be marvelous.

There was no point in moving on tonight.  Her watch said it was only seven o
’clock, but out here (wherever here was) that still qualified as the middle of the night.  She was tired, Aisling was probably starving, and it was too dark to keep walking blind.  It was time to rest.  Tomorrow would be soon enough to worry about what to do next.

Taryn leaned in through the gap between two stones and set the cauldron down, groaning with relief.
  She shrugged out of her backpack and dropped that inside as well.  She had no intention of setting up her tent.  The covered ring would be shelter enough.  She was nervous about sleeping here at all—something about the stones themselves made the idea seem somehow sacrilegious—but it was a point of necessity.  She was tired, she was done, and she needed to rest.

She slipped inside the
Standing Stones and aimed her flashlight at the rock surrounding her.  The surface of the stones glittered, jewel-like.  She touched one of them hesitantly.  The rock was rough and very cold.  She looked up, and saw with some surprise that the underside of the capstone had been carved.  A great spiral, intricately worked and knotted, wound its way around from the outer edge to the center.  The tiny crystalline facets in the stone caught the light in a creepy way, giving the illusion of movement, as of a giant snake coiling overhead.

Taryn sat down on the soft grass that carpeted the ground inside the ring and pulled Aisling onto her lap.  She fished in her backpack for the rest of the rabbit and fed it to him, trying to ignore her own stomach
’s hungry insistence that raw rabbit would be just the ticket right now.  She had a little jerky and some crackers for her, but Aisling came first.

Of course, once he was fed and was no longer being bumped around on Taryn
’s endless hike, the little griffin went immediately to sleep.  Taryn set him down, feeling awkward and alone.  She got up and squeezed back through the Standing Stones to scrub out the empty plastic dish with a handful of wet grass and stood there in the field for some time, staring up at the moon.  The clouds were moving in, concealing its unfamiliar face and robbing the world of light, but she stared anyway.

‘
I shall take thee to Arcadia,’ Romany had said, ages and ages ago on the steps of the sleeping library.  So that must be where this was.  Arcadia.  Knowing that the place had a name made her feel, well, not good, but better at least.  And better was a start.

It began to rain again, and Taryn went back under the cover of the stones.  Aisling peeped until she said his name, and then he settled down, chirring for sleep again.  Taryn studied him in the beam of her flashlight.  All his little legs were sprawled out.  He had his beak tucked under one of his near-featherless wings.  He was starting to look queerly natural to her.  Funny, how readily the mind could adapt to the fantastic.

She switched her flashlight off and, under the cover of darkness, stripped away her grass-crusted and rain-damp jeans.  She found her sleeping bag by feel and unrolled it.  It still smelled like smoke from the last time she’d been camping.  That helped.  Crawling inside was a little like curling up in a snow bank at first, but she warmed up fast.  It was a good sleeping bag.  Down-filled.  Sturdy.  Good thing, because she was going to be sleeping in it for the next three years.

Taryn pulled her rolled-up tent over to use as a pillow and brought Aisling into the sleeping bag with her.  She could feel his little sides moving with each breath.  That helped, just having something else alive beside her.  She listened to the rain fall on the fields outside.  She couldn
’t hear it falling on the capstone.  She supposed the rock was too thick.

She shifted onto her side, waking Aisling, and then spent several minutes trying to
hush him back to sleep.  The more she petted him, the more he seemed to wake up, but inspiration and a faded memory of baby Rhiannon came, and Taryn brought him against her side and softly sang, “
Too-ra loo-ra loo-ra…hush now, don’t you cry
.”  Aisling relaxed and pressed the top of his head against her breast, beginning to chirr sleepily, and Taryn continued to sing.  “
Too-ra loo-ra loo-r… that’s an Irish lullaby
…”

Two more
repetitions of this and he was out like a light, but it was a battle not to immediately toss around some more.  She was exhausted, her body aching, but her mind would not lie quiet.  At least when she’d been walking, there’d been things to look at, footing to worry about, something.  Here, at night, all she had was the memory of coming out of the woods and seeing those mountains, the ones that were not the Cascades.  The moon that did not belong in the sky above Earth.

She didn
’t know where she was and she didn’t think she could go back without Romany to guide her.  And even if she could, she knew she wouldn’t.  She had Aisling to think about.  If she was right and this really wasn’t Earth…well, as awful as that was, at least it made raising a griffin possible.  No Earth meant no one who could accidentally stumble over her mythical little prince.  But that couldn’t be right, could it?  Romany had promised to bring her letters, so there had to be a way back and forth.

Her head was hurting.  It was too much to think about and she was so tired.  The ground was hard beneath her hip and the
Standing Stones felt smotheringly close.  She was cold.  She wasn’t wet anymore, but her body remembered being wet and that was just as bad.  She itched, she ached, she shivered, and she couldn’t sleep.

Taryn rolled onto her back, crooning
her lullaby under her breath to resettle Aisling before he could work himself up for a real protest.  When his relaxed chirrs had smoothed out to slow breaths once more, her hand drifted for the last time down his downy fur and then slipped away between her thighs.  She moved gently, carefully.  She didn’t want him to know what she was doing—not that he’d understand even if he were to wake up—but she needed to get some sleep and this was always one sure way.