The Golden Griffin (Book 3) (2 page)

Darik made his decision. “I choose Sanctuary.”

Brannock!” Roderick called. “Bring me the thief. Darik has an offer for him.”

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The young man said all the right things. His family was starving—that’s why he did it. If he’d known the woman was a widow, that it had been her only milk cow, he’d have never bothered her. He would have stuck to hunting deer in the forest instead.

“Yes, my lord. Thank you, my lord,” he said when Darik offered him Sanctuary and told him the terms.

Almost, Darik believed he was sincere. The knights took a quick meal of hard tack and reheated beans, then brought the thief with them out of town, beyond the reach of angry villagers. The knights followed until they reached the King’s Road. Then Darik dismounted from his horse and led the thief away from the stomping horses.

“This is the road. Do not stop except to sleep. Do not deviate from the road. When you arrive at the Citadel, stand in front of Sanctuary Tower and do exactly as I instructed. You must arrive on foot, do you understand?”

“Yes, my lord.”

Darik frowned. “That’s enough of that. There are no lords in the Knights Temperate. There is a captain, and even he must bow to the will of the Brotherhood. All men are equal. You will be, too—if you do what I told you. If not, I am obligated to hunt you down on the road. Do you understand?”

“I do, my lord—I mean, sir.”

“In that case, good luck, and may the Brothers keep you safe.”

Darik held out his hand. He held the other man’s grip a moment too long. As he did, he whispered an incantation under his breath. It was a simple spell that Markal had taught him, and it would have cost a true wizard little magic. But his skill was limited, and pain shot through his hand and his grip weakened and turned limp. The other man didn’t seem to notice.

Darik struggled to hide his throbbing hand as he remounted his horse. The knights were already riding north, but he watched the thief trudge south on the road for several minutes before he rounded the corner and was gone. Darik turned north to catch up with his fellows.

Darik had forgotten to ask the man’s name, and he’d been planning to ask around the next time he was in Arvada. Ah, well.

The knights rode at a steady clip north, passing farms and stands of trees. Once they came upon an overturned cart in the middle of the road, with two arrows lodged in the wooden slats. There were no other signs of violence. A few minutes later, they passed a farmhouse gutted by fire.

Darik caught up with Roderick. “We’re still riding for Castle Crestwell?”

“We are,” Roderick said. “Ruined or not, it will still provide shelter for the night, and perhaps I can figure out who killed the eorl.”

“Then I’ll meet you at the castle. Make sure nobody puts an arrow in me when I ride up to the gates.”

“Did your wizardry take hold?”

“Nearest I can tell, but I’ll find out soon enough.” Darik pulled on the reins with his good hand and turned his horse in the road.

“Do your duty,” Roderick called after him. “And may the Brothers guide you.”

Darik returned south along the empty road. He flexed his right hand as he traveled. It was already strengthening, which could be good or bad. He was either getting better at magic or he hadn’t inflicted enough pain to properly do the job.

He came to the junction where the village path connected with the King’s Road. It was here that he’d sent the thief south, and he was pleased to feel the aftereffect of his simple spell. It was only there if you knew what to look for, like a hint of cinnamon in the air after the spice merchant had packed up his wares in the bazaar. When he turned his head just so, it shimmered on the edge of his vision, like heat radiating from a clay oven. Most men would pass by unaware; others, like Narud, a powerful, shape-shifting wizard of the Order of the Wounded Hand, would see it as clearly as the road itself.

Darik had to pay attention to keep hold of the magic, but it marked a trail that he followed easily enough. He was relieved when it continued straight down the highway, and after a half-mile he began to suspect that his worries had been misguided. A man with a noose around his neck no doubt found the sensation clarifying. The young thief would continue on to the Citadel and there he would—

Darik stopped the horse. The trail of magic left the road, hopped a stone wall, and cut west into an unplanted field, overgrown with weeds.

“By the blood,” he cursed.

He urged the horse over the wall. She had been riding all day and was none too happy to leave the well-tended highway to wade through a meadow, especially when it became clear that her master wasn’t going to dismount and let her graze.

Darik didn’t need the magic trail to follow the path through the weeds. It crossed the field, a ditch, and then came onto a rutted farm lane that ran behind a hedgerow about the height of a man’s shoulder. Here, he picked up the magic trail again, this time headed north, in parallel with the King’s Road for a stretch.

He followed it for twenty minutes. It had rained the previous night, and water filled the ruts in the farm lane. With the magic trail clear enough, he didn’t pay the ruts close enough attention at first, but there were fresh horse prints in the mud, and since he hadn’t seen any riders all day, he climbed down to have a look.

The prints were heavy and plodding. The shoes were worn. They came from a workhorse. One of the shoes left a lighter imprint, and he remembered suddenly the horse the thief’s brother had ridden when he’d tracked down the Knights Temperate to beg their aid. It had favored the front left leg, pain seemingly earned from years of dragging a plow.

And suddenly Darik knew what had happened. The brother had either ridden after the thief or met at some prearranged spot. Once united, the thief threw aside his oath—uttered in bad faith—to seek Sanctuary for his crimes. The two men were on their way together to—what? Hide from justice? Seek out a band of thieves on the Old Road?

Wherever it was, they wouldn’t get there quickly riding double on the back of an old plow horse.

Darik stepped up to his own mount and rested a hand on the pommel of his sword, strapped to the side of the saddle. Two men. One had lost an arm in the war. He could handle them easily. But should he, that was the question.

It had only been two months since his flight from slavery in Balsalom. Since then he’d found himself in the heart of a huge war, consulting with kings, khalifas and wizards. Flying griffins, battling dragons wasps. Learning magic and skill with the sword. He’d cast aside the boy he’d been and his childish passions and rages as if they’d been a ratty cloak.

And yet he somehow felt weaker, less confident. As a slave, he’d been bold and certain. As a Knight Temperate, he was cautious and afraid of his own judgment.

It was almost evening. His quarry was at least an hour ahead of him, maybe two. Darik wasn’t excited at the thought of following the magic trail in the dark, but he didn’t see a way around it.

As he picked up the pace, he rested his right hand—now stronger—on the pommel of his sword. He’d named it Waspcleaver before the battle with the dragon wasps. He’d done a fair share of cleaving in the skies over Sleptstock and the Citadel. Tonight, it would do a different duty.

Tonight it would cut thieves.

Chapter Two

Daria Flockheart climbed onto the griffin’s back, grabbed the reins, and urged him toward the window. Joffa keened, muscles tensing, wings flexing. He tossed his head and pulled, anxious to take to the air.

“I mean it,” Daria’s mother said from the top of the staircase to her rear. “If you’re not back by dark, I’m coming after you.”

Palina Flockheart was in her mid-forties, still striking, even with gray beginning to show in her thick black hair. She was slender and carried herself with the easy grace of an acrobat, a woman who could lean from the bare back of a griffin five thousand feet above the forest to grapple with an enemy mid-flight. Daria’s temperament may have come from her father, but everyone said she looked like her mother.

“You will do nothing of the sort,” Daria said. “I told you where I’m going, now let me be.”

“And I’m telling you that I saw two dragon wasps in the foothills. Can’t you smell the smoke? Something is happening. It’s not safe.”

“It’s never safe, Mother. But what kind of leader would I be if I cowered in my aerie whenever there was trouble?”

“Then let me come with you.”

“Not tonight, Mother.”

Her mother looked hard at Joffa. “You’ve packed bags. Where are you going?”

“Never mind. You can fly if you’d like, but don’t come chasing me, I mean it.”

Daria didn’t wait for her mother to further question her about the packed bags, but dug her heels into Joffa’s haunches. He leaped from the window with a scream. Her stomach dropped away, then the griffin got his wings out and she soared up and over the pine trees that grew around the tower.

Mother. Why couldn’t she move back into her own tower?

There was a reason Daria’s parents had never lived under the same roof, even as they’d raised two daughters together. As a child, Daria had preferred time with her father, who was quieter and difficult in his own way, to Mother, who kept a strict set of rules. Now that Father was dead, Palina had insisted on moving into her husband’s larger tower, where she wanted to rule the aerie and her daughter alike. Never mind that Daria was the flockheart and commanded dozens of riders and griffins. In the aerie, Mother thought she was in charge. Every day, it was something different.

Today, the argument was about flatlanders. “Leave them be,” Mother had insisted. “Let them fight their wars. If the dragons return, we’ll deal with them. Until then, it’s none of our business.”

Daria was up over the rocky crags of the Dragon’s Spine before she was sure that her mother hadn’t taken to the skies to follow. It was colder up top, with fresh snow on the highest peaks. Daria wore a fur cloak and ermine-lined gloves, but the wind stung her cheeks and sent her knotted black hair flapping like a griffin’s tail.

To the right lay the khalifates, fading into darkness as the world of Mithyl turned away from the sun. Sand and brown hills. She caught a glimpse of the hulking ruins of an old castle deep in the Desolation of Toth, and the twinkle of torchlight along the Tothian Way. More armies on the march. Somewhere in that direction was the mighty walled city of Balsalom. She had flown above its towers, seen its unbelievable maze of streets and markets, the hundreds—no, thousands—of people living there.

Before the war, Daria had never seen more than a few dozen people together at one time, and that only rarely. She had gone for months at a stretch without speaking to another soul but her own family, and sometimes only to her father. During the war her natural suspicion of flatlanders had turned to fear as she saw their brutality and bent for destruction.

She crested the massive range, and suddenly the green fields and forests of the Free Kingdoms sprawled to the west. From this height and distance, Eriscoba looked peaceful, even serene. The golden sunshine of late afternoon bathed the land. But the collection of semi-independent kingdoms, eorldoms, duchies, and freeholds was only a few weeks removed from a horrific battle that had seen the death of thousands. Even the ranks of the griffin riders had been decimated in the struggle. Mother was not alone in demanding that the people of the mountains remove themselves from the struggle.

We’ve done our duty. We are few and cannot survive such losses. Let others fight.

This wasn’t a pleasure ride. Daria glanced over her shoulder one last time to make sure that her mother wasn’t winging after her. Then she hooked over into the windward side of the range and came in low to follow a gorge that carried a tributary of the Thorft River.

She flew above fields, paying no attention to flocks of sheep that scattered or to Joffa’s hungry stare after them. A boy with a shepherd’s crook stared up at her with bugging eyes and she smiled and waved. He ran crying for his house, arms waving. It was hard to tell if he was thrilled or terrified. Minutes later, a horseman on the road spotted her and galloped after her, trying in vain to pace the griffin. She quickly left him behind.

Daria laughed in delight every time she saw a flatlander. She hadn’t left the mountains in weeks, and it was thrilling to see these strange people and their reactions. Of course she kept a sharp eye for bowmen. A single lucky arrow would ruin her day. And she couldn’t help but watch for Darik, even if she knew the odds of spotting him were slim.

It was warmer down here, and she loosened the string at her neck to let the air blow through her tunic. It lifted the pendant at her neck with its green stone, and she tucked it back in against her breast.

Daria flew over the lowlands for about an hour until she was north of the highest peaks. They were infested with giants, who chucked rocks at griffin riders with alarming accuracy. Between the giants and the wild griffins that hunted in flocks in the mountains north of the Tothian Way, her people rarely ventured north of the road, and rarely alone.

It was soon dark and she kept flying. Her eyes were sharp, but she was still human, and so she flew higher than usual to avoid crashing into the trees or slamming into the side of a hill. Back up over the mountains, with the day’s warmth bleeding rapidly this late in the season, she soon shivered with cold. She wrapped the reins around her hands to keep from losing her grip.

Joffa was struggling. He was a young griffin in the prime of his stamina, but they had been flying for at least three hours, and there was no way she could make the entire journey in a single night. Hence, the saddlebags.

Daria swooped low over the trees until she found a clearing in the woods. She brought Joffa in for a landing. When he was down, he squatted with haunches heaving. She dismounted and removed three rabbits from her saddlebags that she’d trapped the previous night. Joffa gulped two of them, then eyed the third and keened.

“I know you’re hungry. but I have to eat, too.” She pushed his beak away. “I’m serious. Behave yourself. We can hunt in the morning.”