Leslyn was sick for several more days. When he wasn’t busy appreciating his last meal for the second time or miserably blowing his nose on the same rag yet again since there was apparently no such thing on Koben’s ship as a good stock and regular laundry, he sat in bed, too weak to do much else.
On the third morning, he felt something of himself again. Erin came in with the usual daily water, soap and a towel for Leslyn to wash up with. Instead of leaving after handing them over, like he’d hoped she would, she sat on the end of the bed, her big bag—a messenger bag, she called it—hanging off of one shoulder. “We’ll reach land today.”
“Good.” Leslyn dunked the towel and pressed it to his face, seeking relief in its damp coolness. “I never want to see another boat after this.”
“Do you have your phone?”
“My phone?”
“My tablet seemed okay after I took it apart to dry and used the solar charger, but I can’t get enough power to run it when it’s this overcast. Can I try charging your phone?”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“Oh! Yeah, did it again. Forgot you’re in the role of a native.”
When she left, Leslyn lightly slapped his own cheek, wondering if he’d gone delirious again.
The bizarre nightmare continued on even when they did finally reach “land.” When he was called out to the deck, a still-sniffling Leslyn looked on in dismay as the ship came alarmingly close to the impossibly-high cliff that loomed overhead. High above them, a broad platform was descending on a pulley system while Yardi circled back and forth near it, presumably so that Liren could oversee the descent.
“I had this built two years back,” Koben said as he walked up beside Leslyn, nearly scaring the boy out of his skin. “The land above’s completely unsettled, with plenty of wood for building. We’ll expand there once I’ve caught her.”
“Caught who?”
“Wrath.”
Leslyn was neither impressed nor comforted by the toothy grin that split Koben’s face, or the ominous deepening of his voice as he spoke the name. It was like something he once upon a time would get from a try-hard elder, so desperate for any interaction with the children that everything he said to them was overdone and under-thought, and somehow upsetting.
When the platform eventually came to a rest just above the ship’s rails, Koben and a select few of the crew stepped aboard with bags of gear. The blond man waved Leslyn and Erin on as well. Leslyn was a bit surprised at how relieved he was that Koben wouldn’t be leaving them behind.
While looking up at the dizzying sight of the cliffs above made Leslyn a bit nauseous, looking down made complete sense and did not. He held onto the railing and watched the ship slowly shrink away beneath them as the platform slowly climbed back up the cliff side. Erin insisted on sitting due to a minor fit of vertigo, but she still peered over the edge just as avidly as Leslyn. The sound of the rush and slap of waves faded away, leaving only the sound of wind and occasional cries of sea birds that nested in the ridges of the rock face.
As they neared the edge of the precipice, Leslyn briefly glanced up long enough to note hundreds of deciduous trees in various levels of life and decay bowing over the rim above them like eerie priests of nature, their roots reaching out into empty air as if poised to cast a spell.
A small clearing had been cut at the top, where the sailors immediately began to set up a simple camp. Erin and Leslyn naturally fell in line to work with them, and Koben helped set up several tents before he became distracted by a map pulled from one of the bags. He began pacing as he studied it, weaving aimlessly around the camp.
“Excuse me, sir, how long are we going to stay up here?” Leslyn asked as he walked up with a load of gathered wood for the fire.
Deeply engrossed in scouring the map, Koben swerved around him and kept going, never once looking up. “If we’re lucky, just a day or two,” he said absently. “Plan for at least a week, though.”
He was no stranger to camping, but Leslyn was still not quite recovered from his illness, and definitely not looking forward to sleeping on the hard ground. He didn’t expect that the bedrolls in those tents were anywhere near as comfortable as his own bed at home.
Later in the day, Leslyn was sitting with Erin and some of the others around the unlit fire when Koben tapped him on the shoulder, some ropes and a heavy chain coiled about his shoulder. “Scouting,” he said tersely. “Let’s go.”
After exchanging a bewildered look with the girl, the young man got up and followed the elder into the woods. The light of the sun and the crew’s relaxed murmurs of conversation were quickly swallowed up by the numerous trees and patches of thick brush. He hoped Koben had a compass or something, as there were no apparent paths for them to follow.
“I’ve been through here dozens of times,” the man said, as if reading Leslyn’s mind. He paused in a patch of spotty sunlight that managed to sneak in through the canopy overhead, and held the map out for Leslyn to see. “This particular griffin is an avid fisher, and has made past nests here, and here for easy water access,” he said, pointing at two locations at the cliffs’ edge, one on the east, and one on the west side of the island. “Our camp is here—“ he pointed somewhere roughly near the southern tip, “—so she’s most likely to build this year’s nest on the north edge. That’s where we’re headed. If we can find the nest, we’ll come back later and set a trap that Wrath will never see coming.”
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They trekked through the woods for what felt like hours before Koben stopped again. He touched a finger to his lips to signal silence from that point on, then slowed the pace considerably. Leslyn was fine with that. No longer needing to rush to keep up with the blond man’s lengthy strides gave him ample opportunity to pick the burrs out of his clothes, even while keeping an eye on the ground in front of him to avoid making too much noise. He was finished and busy frowning at a set of thorn-scratches on his forearm when Koben halted him with a wave of a palm.
“She’ll be somewhere along the ridge ahead,” he said in a voice so low that Leslyn almost couldn’t understand him. “You check that way. Stay well inside the tree line, and remember to look up often. I doubt she’ll give you much warning if she sees an opening to strike.”
Leslyn had handled potentially dangerous animals before—poisonous snakes, frightened dogs, even worked with bigger things like horses and cows—but had never dealt with a wild griffin. He’d met Liren’s griffin Yardi a few times, but the memory of the gray landing in front of him on the ship was foremost in his mind as he crept off in the direction opposite the other man. Were Yardi so inclined, he could have easily fit Leslyn’s entire upper half in his mouth.
He slowly searched along the cliffs, close enough to peer through the trees at the sky and rocky ledges, but not to reveal his exact location should the beast hear him. Thankfully, assuming she was about as big as the gray, Wrath would almost certainly be seen before spotting something as small as Leslyn, even if he did rustle a bush or two.
It felt like hours had passed when he finally spotted something that made his heart leap. It was a mound of sticks and other organic materials, built out near the tip of one of the ledges. It looked at least two feet high, and somewhere between ten and fifteen feet in diameter. He would go back and fetch Koben, of course, but Leslyn wanted a good look for himself, first.
Keeping an eye on the sky and an ear tuned for the beat of wings, he crept closer, staying within the woods. There were large, earth-colored eggs in the nest, in the neighborhood of fifteen or so. He could have just barely cradled one in his arms, if he were foolish enough to pick one up. Their shells sported shades ranging from light as beach sand to dark as a deep mahogany.
“They look like a box of chocolates.” Each syllable of Erin’s delighted words felt like an explosion after such quiet. She glanced at the sky and walked out onto the ledge to admire them.
Leslyn froze for a moment, stunned by her sudden appearance. When he came back to himself and sprinted after her, he grabbed her wrist and attempted to lead her back into the trees. She turned to frown at him, tugging against his pull. “It’s not safe out here,” Leslyn said, still trying to keep his voice down. “Come on, Erin!”
“Come on, Leslyn!” she mocked. “You can see forever up here. We’d see her coming from miles away.”
“Don’t make me pick you up and carry you back.”
She smirked and stood on her tiptoes, which made her tall enough to look down on him. “I don’t need anyone to carry me here.”
Absolutely moon-brained! He glared at her just long enough to make her think she’d won. As she relaxed her posture and her eyes started to waver toward the eggs, Leslyn wrapped his arms around her and lifted her feet clear off the ground. She squealed and struggled, but he was strong from years of manual labor. He’d haul her silly behind all the way back to camp, if he had to.
He’d only taken a few steps back toward the trees when his skyward glance fell on a strange void in the canopy at the edge of the forest. It was moving. His grip on Erin went slack, and the moment she stood on solid ground again, she threw an ineffectual punch at his chest. Wings snapped above them, spreading much farther than Leslyn had thought possible. A pale blue griffin, formerly invisible against the sky, beheld him intensely. It was her.
Wrath wasn’t merely as big as the gray. She was bigger.
Much, much bigger.
Erin was still staring up when Leslyn shoved her so hard that she stumbled backward into the bushes. She let out a cry of pain, but there was no time for him to regret the act. He was already running.
The beats of Wrath’s wings grew louder with terrifying suddenness, and he threw himself sideways. Taloned feet as large as he was scraped the rock where he’d been a moment before. The griffin’s wing swept him along the ledge as she swooped past with a thundering screech. He rolled, and one leg dropped off the ledge into empty air. Far below was nothing but ocean, so distant that a dive from that height would mean certain death.
Panic snatched at him, but Leslyn managed to keep his head enough to focus on clinging to an uneven bit of rock and pulling himself fully up onto the ledge before worrying about where Wrath would strike from next.
He saw her coming and scrambled up to run again, this time toward the woods, praying to Ardor that he’d beat her to the tree line. It quickly became clear that he would fail, as the sound of her wings loomed up behind him once more. As soon as he sensed she was close enough, he slammed a heel down and thrust himself to one side again, staying on his feet for a quick getaway this time.
But he didn’t get away. The thought had never occurred to him that Wrath would learn to expect that move so quickly. She had fooled him, flying slowly enough that she could just about match any turn he made. Stupidly risking a look behind, Leslyn saw the leisurely, almost lazy way she trailed him with an occasional touch of her hind paws on the ground to boost her, wingtips scuffing the rock floor and the griffin’s bright green eyes slitted as if she was bored enough to fall asleep. How long before she tired of her game and decisively ended it?
He continued to run until his breath came in heaves, his chest and thighs burned like fire, and he wanted more than anything to lie down, to rest, worried about nothing but gasping and filling his tortured lungs with precious air.
Running parallel to him at the edge of the woods was Erin, screaming and throwing something that fell woefully short of its mark. What a moon-brained fool, he thought to himself with a dreamy, inward chuckle. But somehow, I imagine she’ll be just fine.
Leslyn wasn’t even aware that he’d stopped. The rhythm of Wrath’s wings shifted. He felt the breeze of them as she landed behind him, and heard the hiss of her tufted tail brushing leaves across the rock ledge. A massive feathered wing came down on either side of him, three talons on the crook of each to form rudimentary feet. If he stayed facing away, he would never see it coming. She’d take him in a single bite, and it would be over.
But the girl was there. What would she think of him if he went out that way? When she told Liren how he died, was this the version he’d want to go on the record? He resolved that he would not leave her believing him to be a coward.
He turned to find a piercing lime-green eye in front of his face, waiting for him to do just that. It blinked, and he could see himself reflected in it, for it was as big as his palm. Wrath turned to look at him with her other eye, her broad beak just grazing his face in the process. Her breath was hot and smelled just like a house cat’s—fishy and terrible. What a way to go, completely enveloped in that stench.
Bracing for the big moment did nothing to make it any better. The strength utterly left his body when Wrath reared up with a roar and a flare of her wings, and Leslyn collapsed to the ground, shielding his face with his arms. Instead of coming down with her beak wide open, she lurched into the air, wildly flapping her wings to get off the ground from a standstill.
Open-mouthed, Leslyn remained sitting as she struggled to rise. There, making his way along her back to clutch desperately at the long fur of her mane, was Koben.