Sanglant had, after all, been hunting griffins. Yet he was far too weak to kill one. There wasn’t enough blood, only drops visible here and there. If he had been torn to pieces by the griffin, then it had not taken place here, and if he had slaughtered the griffin, a field of gore would have marked their struggle.
Her breath came in ragged gasps as she sprinted, seeing the smoke of their campfires just over the next rise.
The griffin bounded to the crest of the hill and paused there, shining in the midmorning sun to scream its rage as a challenge. Adrenaline hammered through her as she bolted forward, hoping she had not come too late. When she crested the rise and saw the unexpectedly large camp laid out in an orderly fashion below her, when she saw—and how could she miss it?—what Sanglant had done, she began to laugh or else, surely, she would have cried.
3
“THERE’S a griffin on the hill, my lord prince!” Even Captain Fulk, pushed to his limit, could sound frightened sometimes. “God Above! And a woman walking with it. She has a bow.” The hesitation that followed these words was so heavy that Fulk’s astonishment seemed audible. “Lord have mercy!”
“My lord prince,” said Heribert softly. Joyfully. “It is Liath.”
Sanglant had never known it could hurt to open your eyes, but it did. Everything hurt. Breathing hurt. The sunlight hurt, but he looked anyway at the dazzle of light on the eastern slope. It was hard to see anything with the sun so bright and the beast that paced there so very large and fierce-looking, its wings gleaming ominously as it stretched them wide.
It screamed a challenge. Horses whinnied in fear, and he heard men shouting. In response to that cry the silver griffin strained and fought against the ropes and chains that bound it, but the soldiers had done their work well. One rope snapped, but the others, and the chains thrown over its deadly wings, held. Surly darted in to grab the thrashing rope and with the help of several of his fellows tied it down. No one got hurt this time, although it had been a different outcome hours ago when they had walked the hobbled, hooded griffin into camp and staked it down.
“What do we do, my lord prince?” asked Fulk, still nervous. Horses stamped and whinnied, not liking the approach of the griffin one bit despite the calming work of their grooms.
That griffin did indeed look fearsome. Its iron tang drifted on the breeze. It had, no doubt, come to rescue its mate. But what on earth was Liath doing walking beside it as though it were her obedient hound?
“Where is Lewenhardt? We’ll need every archer. Spearmen set in a perimeter, in staggered ranks. Double the guard on the horses if you haven’t already.”
He rested on a couch his soldiers had dragged out into the center of camp so that he could lie close—but not too close—beside his captured griffin and talk to it, when he didn’t doze off. It had to become accustomed to him.
He gritted his teeth and made an attempt to stand, but he did not have the strength. Hathui and Fulk and Breschius moved to help him, but he waved them away impatiently.
“Let her come to me. I need not move.”
I cannot move.
“My lord.” They glanced at each other; if thoughts were words, he would have heard an earful, but they remained mercifully silent. Liath started down the hill toward them while the griffin remained on the hill. Maybe it had intelligence enough to be wary of the soldiers forming up throughout camp, faces grim and weapons ready. Maybe she commanded it with words alone. Maybe she had that much power.
“Do you wish for shade, my lord prince?” asked Hathui.
“No,” he said, because the sun’s warmth—such as it was so early in the spring—soaked into his skin in a healing fashion, as though light itself could knit him back together again.
His retinue gathered beside him, keeping well back from the hooded griffin. It had not liked entering the camp; the scent of horses stirred its blood, and Sibold had taken a gash to his shoulder and several men had been clawed, but in the end they had secured it without loss of life. Blinded by the cloak, it had submitted. Now it stirred again, knowing its mate was close. But that hood still constrained it. It hated and feared blindness.
It was his, now, and he did not intend to lose it. Not even to his wife.
She walked into camp, armed and glorious, and approached him, halting a body’s length from the couch on which he lay. He found himself distracted by that long snake of a braid falling over her shoulder and across one breast, all the way down past her waist. He remembered the way the tip of that golden-brown braid swayed along her backside when she walked.
“Prince Sanglant,” she said in the formal manner, jolting him back to the cold, cruel present.