The Care and Feeding of Griffins (42 page)

Taryn smiled uncertainly, a little embarrassed by this outpouring of proprietary affection, and Romany drew in a sharp breath, her eyes flashing wide, as though that little smile were something marvelous and rare.  This time, when she raised her hand, her fingertips drifted, light as fairy kisses, across Taryn
’s lips.

“
And thee is a fine thing,” she whispered, and leaned close.

Taryn drew back, blinking rapidly. 
“Um, no,” she said, startled.  “You can’t do that.”

“
Aye.  I am Romany,” said the gypsy calmly.  “I go where I will.”  She cupped the back of Taryn’s neck, preventing any further retreat, and pressed their lips firmly together.

The first shocked breath that Taryn drew from that kiss was one of heat.  There was nothing figurative in the word; it was not the warmth and moist welcome of a passionate kiss, but real heat, igneous, the blast from an open furnace.  It seared her throat, melted in her belly, and spread out in calescent waves to every other part of her.  Her eyes stung, singed.  She shut them and groped out with one hand blindly.  But it was not the soft fall of curls that Taryn touched, or even the drifts of silk and linen that cloaked the gypsy
’s shoulders, but something else, something like bare skin, only harder and not quite smooth.  It burned under her hand when she pushed, but there was no give and no relief from the smothering heat that invaded her.

God, she could see it now, flames snapping and roaring behind her closed eyes.  She tried to open them, fight her way out of this fever with a look at the chill, autumn skies, and for a moment, it seemed she actually had, but all she saw was flame in twin orbs, set in a field of gleaming black.  She closed her eyes again and felt herself falling as heat poured into her, molten in her mouth and fission in her heart.  She was being covered in heat, surrounded by it.  Heat that raised her nipples like blisters, heat licking at her throat in flames, heat sliding between her thighs to rub excruciatingly golden at her sex.  There was a shape to this inferno, one without hips or hands or breasts, but still solid and inexpressibly female.  It called to her, resonating in the primal core of Taryn
’s own femaleness, and she could feel desire like a sun blazing out from her womb with a clarity that surpassed even orgasm itself.  With the last shred of uncharred will, Taryn pulled in a lungful of scalding agonies and screamed.

Then it was gone, and all at once, though it took Taryn
’s body several agonizing shivers to free itself entirely of that residual heat.  When she opened her eyes, she was lying on the ground, one hand limply outflung and the other pressed and powerlessly rubbing between her thighs.  Gasping, she turned her head and saw Romany sitting with her back to Taryn, motionless.

Slowly, Taryn took her hand from the crux of her thighs, resisting with great effort the urge to return it immediately and work her way to climax.  A minute, half that, perhaps only a few seconds more, and that was all she needed.  She was right at the edge, and the drop was deep.

But she clenched her hands to fists and waited as her heart slowed and her breath finally steadied.  She rolled onto her side and then pushed herself up, shivering in the rush of cold as that searing glow receded.  Her eyes were fixed on Romany’s unmoving back.  They felt dry, baked.  “W-what are you?” she whispered.

Romany
’s head turned, but not much.  Enough to see her little dragons, maybe, not to see Taryn.  She said nothing.

Taryn moved shakily onto her knees.  After a moment, she found the cup in a damp patch of ground and wiped it clean on her shirt.  She filled it with tea from the cauldron and held it out, nudging lightly at Romany
’s shoulder.

Now the gypsy turned.  Her eyes were on fire.  Orange light flickered down her cheeks like tears, where patches of shining black appeared and moved and vanished.  She glanced at the cup, sparking its contents the color of flame in the beam of those awful, burning eyes.  Her lips curved. 
“Ah, thee,” she said, and looked away.

“
It’s all right,” Taryn said awkwardly.  She even tried to laugh.  “Heck, I’ve been to college.  You’re not the first to try.”

Romany held out her hand.  Taryn put the cup in it.  The gypsy raised it and drank, all without looking around again.

“It really is okay,” Taryn said in a small voice.  She crawled forward and sat down again, not quite close enough to touch the gypsy’s arm.  She searched the western horizon, trying not to see the way yellow light flickered in the air in the path of Romany’s gaze.  “I’m not mad.”

“
Aye, I know thee is not.”

“
We can still be friends, can’t we?”

Romany sighed and looked down at the cup in her hands. 
“Aye.”

Taryn picked at an invisible thread on the knee of her jeans.  The silence stretched out, broken by the distant tumble of river over rock, and the occasional spat of dragon tempers or grumble of sleeping griffin.  Finally, uncomfortably, Taryn said,
“Look, if it…if it means that much to you—”

Romany laughed.  It was not a happy sound. 
“What, thee?  Shall I say aye and bid thee lie with me to prove a friendship?  Ha!  And thee would do it,” she went on, bitterness thickening her voice as she stared down at her tea.  “Thee would give me all thy flesh as payment for that I did bring thee here.  Thee would give full plunder of all that I do desire to the hand that even now holds the cup of friendship.”  She threw it suddenly aside and stood up, holding her hands before her face to catch the flickering light of her eyes.  “Nay, sister,” she whispered.  “Nay, I will not.  I will not be the slaving of thee.”

Taryn dropped her gaze to the ground, rubbing restlessly at her hea
rt, which burned unhappy and small in her breast.  “I’m sorry,” she said.

“
Nay, say it not.  Even I must learn…some doors must be respected.”  Romany lifted her shawl from the handlebars of the plow and bound it around her bowed shoulders.

“
You don’t have to leave.”

“
The road is long and the way is treacherous.  I will go.”  Romany paused, her fingers on the long pin of her shawl, and then glanced back.  Her eye was dark again, and shy.  “May I yet be welcome?”

“
Of course.”

“
Aye, of course.”  Romany turned away.  Her hand rose, brushed at her eye, and came away so that she could see the tear that glistened on her fingertip.  “Of course and finally.  Ah, thee.”

Taryn looked away as dragons rose and swarmed away from the tent, following their gypsy as she walked out into the grass.  Her voice came back, distorted by wind and growing distance, a lament in many voices that shimmered in the air before it fell away into echoes and silence.

Alone again.

Taryn righted her cup, but left it on the ground.  She crawled into the tent and curled up on her comfy bedroll, resting her hand on the snoring lump under Aisling
’s blanket.  The last blush of heat in her had faded and that dull, unfocused loneliness was already starting to rise up and fill the burnt-black hollows left behind.  She thought of the magus, all by himself in his cabin in the woods, and tried to buy a little peace in unhappy sleep.

52.  Tea With the Wizard

**T
aryn, come.  Taryn, to me.  Taryn, come.  Taryn—**

There.  At last.  He felt the tremor as she passed through the borders of his wood.  She was coming to him.

The wizard fell silent, redirecting the focus of his spell, but not relaxing it, not just yet.  After so many days and nights of ceaseless summoning, his strength was nearing its limits, but the reward of this distant touch was worth savoring.  Spiders must feel thus, he supposed, at that first twitch of prey on webbing.

But his time was limited.  The woods were not deep and Taryn rarely dallied on her walks.  She had not yet noticed his woods were lifeless; she was always alert to danger.  Or believed she was. 

The wizard rose from his casting circle and dispersed his spell.  He pinched out his candles—the fat of unicorn foals was too hard to come by to let them burn, even though the cost of recasting was high—and stepped carefully through his wards until he was safely out.  He headed toward the bed to collect his robe and the cat raised her head and sleepily said, “Will he pet me?  I want a petting.”

The wizard ran his hand distractedly down her hair as he picked up his garment.  His thoughts were moving ahead.  He would need to wash, need to ready water for tea, need to reinforce the spells set into the bannocks to disguise the taste of clay, and all before she arrived, for it must seem that he were surprised.

“Feels good,” the cat sighed, and rolled onto her back.  The wizard rubbed her belly and she stretched her sensuous body, moaning with pleasure.  Then she caught his hand and bit.  “Hot blood,” she murmured, licking it from her lips.  She rolled onto her side, the very tip of her tail flicking, and went back to sleep.

The wizard left her on the bed and shut the door behind him on his way to the kitchen, clenching his hand to keep from bleeding on his floor or his robe.  There was no point in punishing her, apart from the satisfaction of inflicting pain, and his time was short.  She was his third cat, and his most successful transformation.  At times like this, it was hard to remember just how much worse she could have been. 

His first attempt had been made from a wizarding cat, the breed of familiars native to Avalon.  He had taken her from her mother’s womb so that no name could be given to lock her secret self away from him, and if there had been a mistake made, it had been that.  Oh, the transformation itself had been easily accomplished, but he had failed to appreciate the consequences of the cat’s intelligence.  He had believed her sentience would make her a more winning companion.  And perhaps it would have, eventually.  But she had been aware of her enslavement, and even if she could not resist him, her ability to misunderstand his commands had been tiresome and her natural magical powers had grown in proportion to her new body.  Without a name, he had no weapon to use against her, no leverage with which to batter open her rebellious mind.  In time, perhaps she might have proved able to break free of him entirely.  He disposed of her before he even had the opportunity to enjoy the flesh he’d given her.  What a waste.

For his second creature, he had selected a native of Arcadia, a fellcat cub.  Disastrous.  He could not make her beautiful no matter how many days he spent malleating her human form, and she was lost in thoughts of carnage from the moment of her birth
—a bloodthirsty and hulking beast wearing the face of a disfigured angel.  She was loyal enough, and as an animal, she required little effort to command, but she did one thing the wizard had not foreseen: She could open doors.  And every time the wizard was forced to sleep, she would slip away from him.  She returned to him the instant she was summoned, of course, but her mouth was always stained with blood.  Eventually there came a day when she returned to him with scratches on her broad back and blood between her thighs.  He had resigned himself to her forays of wanton slaughter, but after so many months spent in the shaping and nurturing of her, the sight of her glistening sex sparked in him a blinding rage and when it faded, she was nothing but a stain of ash on the wall.

So his third cat came from Earth.  I
t took him a long time to find his way back to that world, and it was much changed from the last time he’d seen it.  There had been a time when he’d been tempted to try and take Earth for his own, but that time was long past.  The world had changed, the threads of magic sustaining it had decayed, and it had nothing to offer him now but the lifeforce of billions of blinded souls.  He had contented himself with the acquisition of the cat, and left Earth behind him to be forgotten.

The cat.  She
’d been so cute as a child, her cruelty still disguised by playfulness.  And she’d grown into a beauty, a paragon of effortless grace.  She could be controlled with a thought or a wave.  She’d been perfect.  But now she was grown and she was horrible.  He had already decided not to get another one.

And why should he, really?  He would have Taryn soon enough.  Her mind had given before his so readily, even with only the little of her name that he had.  She would be as loyal as any creature he had made, and she would be human.  Not that he had never had the occasion to harvest the humans who came into the Valley from time to time, but those had been peasants, brash and ignorant and squalid, little better than beasts.  Taryn was different.  She was a light shining through Arcadia
’s darkness.  And she was virgin, his to open, his to school, to spoil if he wished.  He had no doubt that he would tire of even her beautiful body in time, but until that day, oh what delights!

Enough, enough.  His time was slipping fast and he still had so much to do.  If one was to set a successful snare, after all, one must use alluring bait and the wizard was well aware that he was that bait.  His openness.  His candor.  His harmless looks and simple setting.  Everything had to be perfect, and he was not so old that he had forgotten just how to display social niceties.

But he was old.  He had told Taryn that he had been where he was for some fifty years, and that was true, from a certain perspective.  That was how long he had been living in this cabin, at any case, here in his lifeless woods.  But he had been here in Arcadia some three hundred years before that.

The wizard put water on for washing, smiling down into the pot as he thought back on those fine, early days.  There had been a short time of wandering, of feeling out this or that place for danger, before he finally came to settle in the Valley.  And ironically, his first quarrel had not been with the
forge-lords at all, but with the other humans struggling to conquer them.  It had not been a long conflict, of course…but it had been a noticeable one.

Chuckling, the wizard began to clean himself for company.  Thinking of the Cerosan always put him in a good mood.  They were not wizarding folk, the bull-men.  They had no defense against his sorcery apart from iron weapons and mortal hands to wield them.  But they did have long lives, long memories, and a lord of keen and careful mind.  There had been one or two tricky moments, he would be the first to admit to them, but
as the saying went, cut off the head and even the deadliest serpent is of no consequence.

The wizard took a moment to freshen the bannocks, still thinking pleasantly of his impending visitor.  He was growing hard.  Did he have the time?  He hated to waste such an opportunity.  If he could get her to swallow his seed, perhaps mixed in marmalade for her bannocks
…she would be seated in the satyr-skin chair already…

No, damn it, no!  Virgin she was and virgins were valuable.  There were bottles in his casting room waiting empty for the treasures that Taryn had to offer, and with that, he would content himself.  He would have years and years to plumb that pleasant hole, but for now, he had to be patient.  He had to think of the griffin.  As he was, the griffin was near useless, but in two year
’s time, perhaps three, he would be a kingly harvest.  And the griffin would go where Taryn went, so the winning of her was even more vital.

The wizard stroked his growing erection wistfully, then dipped his fingers in his washwater and traced a rune of power down his shaft.  He wilted, but the anticipation remained and thoughts of her still clouded his mind.  He could still remember the sweetness of her mouth, the ripeness of her breasts.

Ah, and that was her knock at his door now.  How polite she was.  How precious.

“
One moment,” the wizard called, pulling his robe over his head.  He put the kettle on, brought out his dwindling supply of Tazu tea—nothing magical about it, but he liked the taste and so, it would seem, did she—and went to let her in.

She handed him a pheasant when he opened the door.  It was still warm. 
“Dinner’s on me this time,” she said.

He was stunned at first, and then clumsily touched.  The last gift he
’d been given…gods, he’d been three.  He’d always had to command his creatures to hunt, and the prey they’d brought back for him were usually well-mouthed and savaged.  This…

“
This is marvelous,” he said, accepting it.  “Thank you!  Come inside and let’s unzip this buzzard!”

She laughed with simple delight at his words.  Amazing, how disarming a little familiar speech could be.  The wizard waved her inside and went to the kitchen to prepare it, wondering if she would be as conscientious after she became his creature or if her mind would be benumbed after the claiming of it.  He supposed it made no difference in the long run.

The griffin came frolicking in at his feet and the wizard eyed it with proprietary fondness, passing down choice bites of heart and liver as he butchered the bird.  Little Aisling seemed to have forgiven him his transgressions at their last meeting and now he was full of play once more and utterly enchanting.  Griffin bones for spells of flight.  Griffin feathers to summon storms.  Griffin talons, powdered and added to wyvern bile, could improve the cutting power of any blade.  Griffin liver, boiled nine days and eaten, would guard against all but alchemic poisons for many years.  And griffin’s blood…

Not as good as dragon
’s blood, perhaps, but the wizard had no hope of tasting that.  Yet a swallow of griffin’s blood, drawn hot from the beast’s living body, would buy him back the youth and strength his form emulated but his soul no longer felt.  And he would not need to kill the beast right away.  There were ways to take bones and feathers and all the rest, even the liver, without letting the animal die.  He could keep it, the only wizard ever to hold such a beast in his power, and glean immortality from it for centuries. 

The griffin tired of tidbits and pounced on the wizard
’s feet, then galloped away in screeches of victory.  The wizard watched it go, smiling.

“
He’ll be magnificent when he’s grown, won’t he?” Taryn said, watching her beast at play.

“
Oh yes.  I can hardly wait.”  He skewered the bird and set it to roast, pulling the kettle to brew his tea.  “Have a biscuit, Taryn,” he invited. 

She did, although he sensed the slight resistance of her will.  He wasn
’t surprised.  Sorcerer’s clay was bitter stuff and he was no cook to begin with.  But when she finished the last of them, he would have enough inside her to form the Augment, and that little resistance of hers would be snuffed out as easily as a candle’s flame.

“
So tell me,” he said, settling himself at the table.

“
Tell you what?” she asked, taking the satyr-skin chair.  Instantly, her eyes took on a glaze and color rose in her cheeks.

The wizard suppressed a smile as he watched her, feeling an agreeable tightening in his groin.  He glanced at the glass above his hearth
—still as pure as she herself—and said, “Tell me anything.  It’s just nice to hear someone else talking for a change.”

She laughed, a dazed sound, and began to tell him of all the petty trials of settlement, of her quest for foods and comforts, of Aisling
’s growth, of her news from her family, of the creatures who dwelled in the plains and her befriending of them.  The wizard listened, nodding where appropriate, sometimes laughing, inserting a commiserating word.  And it was a pleasure to hear her, that was no lie, even this insignificant stuff.  Her voice was honey.

“
But you don’t want to hear about any of this,” she said finally.

“
I do.”  He reached to pat her hand, using the little contact to brush at her mind, tasting her purity, the arousal the chair inspired in her.  “I love hearing anything.  It’s been so long.  I wish you’d come by more often.”

“
Me, too.”  She looked around his kitchen, frowning slightly.  “I don’t know what it is, really.  I’m always thinking of this place…oh, that sounded wrong,” she said and blushed.  “You’ll think I’m flirting.”

He couldn
’t help smiling.  “No, I know you’re not.”

“
The thing is…”  She rolled her cup between her palms and then set it aside.  “They don’t want me to come here.  I kind of have to sneak away.”