They clashed, fell together, and fought like witless mountain cats, Halvden’s movements powerful, but wild and desperate, Caj’s calculated and cold. He gave no quarter. Every swipe of his talons to Halvden’s flesh and wings felt like redemption for the foolishness of his entire winter. Green feathers littered the black rock.
They whipped around the steaming fissures and across the broken, treacherous ground. When the ground evened out again, Halvden reared to his hind legs and Caj rose to meet him—they locked and yanked each other to the ground. Caj hit first and warm pain coiled up his broken wing as they rolled. He heard the mud casing crack. Halvden wrestled him across the ground, and the mud cast crumbled away with each twist of their bodies.
Growing weary and short of breath from the poor air, Caj knew he had to win the fight soon. Halvden could wear him down first if Caj allowed it. He would not. Halvden had no armor, he was still bewildered, and alone. It was time to end the fight.
Feigning worse pain from his broken wing, Caj broke away, fell back and twisted as if preparing to flee, leaving Halvden a false opening. The young gryfon should have known better. That time, Halvden lunged forward in attempt to knock him over.
Caj whipped about to meet the charge, sat up on his hindquarters, snaked his forelegs around Halvden’s chest, and drove his own shoulders forward against the impact as the big gryfon slammed into him. Halvden snarled, caught, beak snapping, seeking an opening. Caj thrust forward, driving them both up to stand on their hind legs, toppled Halvden off balanced and slammed him backward. Halvden’s back and wings smashed against the ground, and Caj pinned him there, crushing him into the rock. He pressed his talons deep under his green feathers, against the young gryfon’s throat.
For a moment he reveled in Halvden’s realization that he’d lost, in the perfect look of shock and defeat flashing in his eyes.
“Are you going to kill me?”
There was still no humility in Halvden’s voice, no regret, no apology. He pressed harder and Halvden shut his eyes, taking a gurgling breath.
After a moment Caj muttered, “Do you think I want to face Kenna if I kill you?”
Halvden’s eyes snapped open, again bewildered, as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or curse. “Are you mocking me? What do you want from me?”
He knows,
Caj realized.
He knows he chose poorly and acted foolishly, and that he must pay a price for his choices.
But still, like his father, Halvden couldn’t let go of his arrogance.
“Admit you were wrong.”
“No.”
A deep, warning snarl curled in Caj’s throat. “You weasely, mud-covered vulture. Admit you were wrong!”
“
No.
” Halvden dragged a breath against Caj’s talons. “I did as any of you. I did what I thought was right. I served Sverin. I—”
“You did what you could to seize the most power, you bullied, divided, and endangered the pride, and you tried to murder me.”
“The strong endure,” Halvden rasped.
“Your father was strong,” Caj growled.
Around them, three plumes of poisonous steam shot up, hissing. The drizzle deepened to freezing rain. They continued their stare-down, Halvden’s beak open in a pant. Caj remained frozen, pressing. Not again. He would not falter and lose to Halvden again.
“You could be great,” Caj said. “You could be everything you dream of being, everything your father wanted but could never be—if you will only let go of this insufferable pride.”
Halvden struggled, but Caj held him locked to the rock at every joint.
“What do you want?” Halvden whispered at last. His muscles sagged under Caj and he broke eye contact, staring beyond Caj at the black rock of Pebble’s Throw.
Loosening his talons a little, Caj said, “First, you’re going to tell me what happened to Sverin, and where he is.”
Halvden looked back at him with an incredulous glower. “And then?”
“And then,” Caj took a breath, calming at last, “you’re going to admit you were wrong, beg forgiveness, and apologize.”
“Apologize,” Halvden scoffed, “to whom?”
“Everyone.”
T
HE ICE FLOE ROCKED
and smacked against something hard, jarring Shard awake and nearly tipping him back into the water. He stared up at a towering cliff of ice.
His first sight of the Sunland was nothing but a rock-hard, white and azure wall stretching for leagues to either side. Forcing his stiff muscles to move, Shard gripped his ice floe with quivering claws and peered up again, then around. Land was near, indeed, as the dragons had promised, but not in the way he’d envisioned. At his back, icy ocean lapped on for leagues, for the moment, calm.
Fool,
he thought, grabbing at the wall of ice to drag himself along it and find some friendlier place to crawl onto land. After two days floating—or it might’ve been three, he wasn’t sure—he still seethed over the whales and the dragons taking Hikaru without him.
I should’ve shouted. I should have gone with them. My wings weren’t broken, what’s the matter with me?
He briefly forgot he’d been almost dead from drowning, tossed about by whales, frozen, and losing blood. Still, he felt he could’ve tried harder.
Idiot twice-over, what would Stigr say?
He paused, talons digging against the ice floe as it rocked and bumped the ice wall. He’d had a vision of gryfons and wolves he’d known who were dead.
Einarr…
Shard shook himself. There was no way to know if it was real. He’d had raven dreams before, and found them untrue.
He opened his wings, and aside from mild twinges, found them whole and ready. Crouching back, however, sent flashing heat up one hind leg and he barked in pain. Twisting his head, he examined the limb, and when he beheld the strips of torn flesh from the whale’s teeth, the ooze of blood, and the bone itself, split and angled, his stomach curled. The ice, at least had kept the bleeding low, and the salt water cleaned it. He still
had
the leg, at the very least, could work through the pain and perhaps mend it, even if he moved with a limp from then on.
Shard drew a deep breath. One step at a time. He’d had enough of floating, enough of the sea, which was usually his ally and provider. He gave the ice floe a friendly pat in thanks for bearing him, leaned on his good hind leg and launched himself into the cold, clear sky. The bobbing motion of flight drummed a steady, nauseating ache through his broken leg, and he could only try to block it from his mind. Anything he tried to do would hurt, so he had to do the sensible thing, which was to fly away before he fell in the water, or whales attacked again and the situation grew worse.
The air along the ice wall shifted unpredictably before falling dead, and Shard worked cold, stiff wings to soar over the top, where he found a strong headwind and worked into it to rise. He stroked up as far as he could bear to go.
The sweeping landscape rolled and crested into hills and mountains and back into long plains much like the Sun Isle of home, except all of it shone white, white, white. Shard shook his head, eyes dazzled, and peered around in search of sign of any kind of forest or grass.
The land swept back from him in all directions, enormous and white. Upon that second inspection, he saw the dark edges of rock in the far mountains, and long patches of dirt along the nightward shoreline. Far at the end of his vision along that coast, the wall broke into arches, towers and slides of ice, translucent white and blue.
Distant splashes and high-pitched calls drew his attention to his own shoreline.
For a moment, having felt entirely alone in the world, he breathed in relief, and looked to the water. Life thrived. Gulls nattered in the distance. Larger splashes told him of seals, and he thought he spied the starkly black and white snowrock birds that he’d only ever seen once, on the starward most coast of the Star Isle.
With no better ideas, but relieved to find life, Shard angled inland and flew a course that matched the one he and Hikaru had taken over the sea, parallel to the back of the constellation of Midragur. He couldn’t see it in the day of course, but he knew its path across the sky as well as a vein in his own wings.
For a time, flying, he felt at peace.
Evening fell shockingly swift around him.
He’d thought he was airborne for perhaps only a sunmark, then realized the sun was setting. He remembered the short days of winter in the Silver Isles, but during his time in the Winderost, he’d grown used to longer stretches of daylight. Now the whole landscape glowed dull silver in the weak sun. Shard flapped high again and studied his choices. Weariness crept up from the ache in his leg and washed his entire body as the sky darkened. Plains, mountains, coast. He chose the mountains, where he might find shelter from the night wind.
A whisper trickled through his mind.
“What?” Shard shook his head, looking around for a bird, or an earth creature below, but saw nothing. The whisper nudged again, like wind, no words that he could make out, but calling. Something felt distantly familiar about it.
“Who are you?” he whispered. The dark mountains, patched with snow, ringed a small bowl of a valley. Recognition darted through his mind. Shard dipped lower toward the pass that entered the valley, and then the whispering seemed not in his mind, but ahead.
The sun departed. Stars glowed to life and pulsed in the huge sky. A cold wind swept up and stroked Shard’s wings. Adjusting his flight path to it sent a jolt through his injured leg and he ground his beak to stifle a snarl of pain, peering up to see that he now flew perpendicular to Midragur.
No matter, I’ll get back on course tomorrow.
The mountains stood silent, gleaming white and abyssal black under the impossible stars. Shard dove into the pass, soaring over a frozen river toward the valley he’d seen. The whisper itched now, as if in his left ear. Shard growled and turned, flared to a halt and landed on a ledge that overlooked the pass and the little valley. He caught his breath, listening, and stared.
The wind rushed through the pass, squeezed in by the walls of mountain, and Shard flicked his ear toward the sound of water. Perhaps the river wasn’t entirely frozen. The whisper had faded and Shard’s heart thumped in fear that he’d lost it, that it wasn’t just his lonely, tired mind, that it was something he was supposed to heed.
He stood on the cliff, breathing in the wet scent of snow, the mineral smell of the mountain and somewhere underneath, frozen earth. Closing his eyes, his listened, as closely as he’d listened when he was first learning to speak the language of the earth and the birds. Wind flitted through the mountains, combed and played with his feathers. Shard leaned again onto his good leg, shutting out the pain of the other.
A wavering, distant noise chimed, one that felt more in his mind than in his ears. He flicked his ears, breathing softly. Like the notes of a choir of many birds, the noise pulsed, wavered, folded over itself and faded only to resume again. It was not the whisper Shard had heard. The whisper, he thought deeply, had faded in the face of the new sound. He opened his eyes, and sucked a sharp breath.
The Wings of Tor unfolded all across the sky, ribboning sheets of violent green, magenta, and blue light, ever shifting. Shard had seen the lights in the Silver Isles, but never as he saw them now.
The chiming, weird notes pulsed from the light. The very voice of the sky, of Tor, of a world Shard glimpsed only in dreams, sang through his skin. Cramped on his little ledge, he still managed a trembling bow.
Guide
me,
he pleaded.
The wind flitted around him and he remembered the dream he’d had before. The white star in the little valley. The circle of stones. He looked up at the majestic lights, then down to the valley. Though the first whisper had faded, he knew it had called him to the valley, and that it could be the one from his dream.
With a slow, building thrill in his heart, Shard plunged from the ledge and soared through the pass, exalting under the lights of Tor. When he neared the center of the valley, the orientation of the mountains and the pale gleam of snow all looked familiar. It was as in his dream. He stooped to land, and heard a small voice cry out.
“Hello?” Shard called in reply, gingerly setting down in the snow without putting weight on his broken leg. “Hello? I’ve come!”
The night was not dark. Between the stars and the great shifting lights, Shard saw everything in a bright twilight. From above and in the odd light, the circle of stones had looked like odd pockets in the snow, but indeed they were there, Shard had landed right in their center. Again a voice cried out, this time in glee.
“Hello! You’ve come! She dreamed you would!”
Shard turned, folding his wings and hobbling, to see a snow fox plunging toward him from outside the circle of stones. He thought of the white star in his dream, and how the dragon Amaratsu had taught him that sometimes, a dream thing meant another thing.
The white fox before him, Shard decided, was the star from his dream, and was the guidance he had asked for.
“I’m Shard,” he said, dipping his head. “It’s good to see you.” And as strange as it all felt, it was good to see the fox, to hear another voice, to see a face happy to see him. “Who dreamed I would come?”
“Nest-mother.” The fox padded forward and sniffed Shard all over by way of introducing himself, discovered the broken leg with a little yip, and returned to face Shard in front again. “But you’re injured.”
“Yes. Can you help? Who is your nest-mother?” Shard had never heard of a fox using that term. It was a gryfon word, for a parent who hadn’t birthed a kit, but raised it as her own if something happened to the birth mother. “And, what is your name?”
“I am Iluq.” He perked his ears, his black, narrow eyes glittering. “Come, Shard, Mother will help you with your leg, and she’ll be very pleased to see you, very happy indeed
.
”
“Why is that?”