(note: this is a continuation of last week’s extra credit entry)
The city was already lost by the time Wulfric made it to the surface. He’d raced through tunnels rocked by blasts above, run past frantic folk being ushered to safety by sigil-bearers whose territories didn’t risk collapsing over their people’s heads—it was already hell below, but it was worse above.
He faltered for two steps, once he was fully out of the tunnels. It was the fire-rain sky: the same he’d seen in Nhalmasque all those years ago, the black of their ships blotting out the stars with wave after wave of soldiers. For a moment he was powerless again, gripped by a boy’s fear until the sounds of gunfire shook the soldier awake. A new spike of adrenaline, and he was running again, barely aware of the tingling numbness shooting down from his right shoulder to his fingertips.
It was still a long way to his family. He cut through the alleyways like an Undercity shadow, like a Glaive infiltrator; he ignored the screams that would have forced him to fight and waste time he didn’t have.
The imperials had already barricaded the stairs that would have taken him straight to the house. Wulfric swore from between his teeth and veered west, thinking to cut through the theatre district; a blast sounded close enough to make his ears ring and send him sprawling onto the cobblestones, arms covering his head. The ground shook from a tumble of bricks just ahead of him: an archway had crumbled into the side of a nearby building.
A blessing of destruction. Sidestepping a body mangled by stone, Wulfric sprinted up the ledge the fallen bricks offered him and jumped, catching the edge of the roof and dragging himself up. Half of his body resisted the effort, grown clumsy from age and two decades of skulking underground, but quickly remembered itself. Climbing had been easy, once.
He set to running again, his path far clearer now from above—and the burning city, too, was clearer. Smoke rose from Barrel Street, he realized with a cold stab of fear. There was no time to doubt the jump without the use of magic—but Stars, he felt empty, so fucking pale compared to the man he had once been—as he leapt from rooftop to rooftop. Soon he was back in the streets below, just a few strides from Rinomy’s, his knee shrieking with pain from some wrong move in his landing,
But he didn’t stop. He could only run and pray it would be empty.
“Gav?” Wulfric shouted as he burst through the door. His boots crushed broken glass from the windows underfoot; there was smoke coming from the cellar. Panic set his lungs alight. “GAWAIN!”
A voice rose in answer; not Gawain’s, and not with words he could make out. Wulfric followed the cry outside, through the back door, along a trail of blood towards the shadows of the alley. He didn’t recognize her right away; not curled up onto herself like this, with half of her face mangled.
“He’s not here,” M’zahre said with a strange smile in her broken voice. Wulfric dropped to his knees beside her, but she pushed his hands away. “I told him to go home; he hasn’t slept in days. Rock-headed bastard was in with the Resistance to bring down the Mad King.”
“Fuck, M’zahre,” Wulfric said, his trembling hands still hovering over her bloody body. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”
She shook her head as best she could. “That’s not gonna happen, boss. Go and keep your family safe. My man’s going to come for me.”
Wulfric didn’t know that that was true; neither did she. But still she said, “I’ll be fine! Go!”
He swallowed. “See you on the other side,” he said, finding her knee intact and giving it a squeeze before running off again.
He could have gotten lost and still known how to find the house by the crackling of magic that permeated the air, by the sharp smell of fire and smoke that had nothing to do with ceruleum: Avis was in the street with both hands raised high, holding a stormy barrier up against the sky. It covered half their neighbourhood—destructive force harnessed into protection. All her.
She could guard against magitek from above, but not the soldiers. That was Gawain, booming with anger, a bowgun in hand. And for a moment, Wulfric thought they might actually see this through, defend their home even while the whole world was falling apart around them.
He sprinted forward, breathless, knives in his hands. Then he heard something like a thunderclap, echoing loud in the dome of strange quiet granted by Avis’s magic—and he felt a burst of pain in his abdomen. He stumbled back and fell to his knees before he fully realized there were two bullets in his belly, and someone was shouting his name.
Avis’s voice cut through it all. “Frey, don’t—!”
She’d married a woman almost as stubborn as she was. Freyja came into Wulfric’s view like pale starlight, her gentle hands on his burning body as she sank to the ground beside him and pulled him up against her.
“Get down!” Gawain shouted, and Freyja was bent over Wulfric as he loosed a volley of bolts into soldiers approaching from the mouth of the street. She cradled his head and held his hand, and it was wrong, he wasn’t supposed to—
“Frey?” Avis said breathlessly over her shoulder.
“He’s gravely wounded,” Freyja called back.
“I’m still breathing,” Wulfric said, fighting through the blinding pain thundering through him as he shifted to try and put himself between Freyja and danger. A stupid, reckless, tired smile worked its way onto his lips. “How many times are you gonna have to watch me die, hey, Highness?”
“You won’t die,” Freyja said. That was just for him, quiet and hard with fear.
“Sorry I made a mess of my rescue again.”
Freyja shook her head; the way she clutched his hand was more than just fear for the inevitable. “She’s tiring, Wulfric,” she said, her grave eyes darting over to Avis. “Saskia is inside. She’ll kill herself to protect her.”
Wulfric choked back a whimper as he moved again, stretching his legs out in front of him to try and sit up at the sound of heavy footsteps. When tried to hold an arm out in front of Freyja, she graciously took on the burden of much of his weight.
“I only see one way out of this. Through you,” Freyja said.
“I’m no use to anyone like this, Frey,” Wulfric replied quietly, the taste of failure thick and bitter on his tongue. All these years, all the fighting—all for this.
“If you had the strength to fight again, could you do it?”
“Planning on pulling those bullets out of me with your bare hands, Princess?”
“The queen’s magic,” Freyja said, and a wave of dizziness washed over Wulfric. “The Glaive’s magic. I could give it to you.”
Wulfric looked into her face, wide-eyed. The ground shook beneath them.
“What?”
“Could you do it?” Freyja repeated, more firmly this time.
“Yes,” Wulfric said breathlessly, unthinking as something surged through him—pushing against the white-hot chill of pain. Anticipation set his heart to racing.
Freyja’s hand tightened around his in what he next understood as an apology as it moved to his abdomen, pressing against his wounds. Wulfric bit back a scream; she touched her brow to his, her breath soft against the jagged scar on his cheek. And when she spoke, they were not Queen Eivor’s words, nor Freyja Emery’s—they were those of Celes Altius, the Oracle, his queen.
“Blessed Stars of life and light—” she began in a soft voice, an achingly familiar prayer that gave way to the firmness of one who knew how to commune with the gods themselves— “I, Celes, daughter of the last queen of Nhalmasque, beg of you a knight. Deliver us my champion, Wulfric of Clan Greyhunt.”
When she poured the magic into him, Wulfric did scream. His vision sparked, black and sylleblossom blue; his whole body burned in an instant as power rent his veins and took up every space, every last hollow inside him. For a moment, he thought he had died once more as he felt the touch of the Stars themselves, unfathomable and ancient. Already once they had denied him, when Ysbrand’s corpse had been weighing his own broken body down, and now—
You again.
There was only complete and utter clarity in their wake.
He raised his hand and threw a burst of lightning down the street, stopping the advancing magitek weapon in its tracks—and he sprang to his feet as though he were thirty years old again, as though he hadn’t had two bullets inside him moments ago, breathing through the exhilaration.
“Wulf,” Gawain said.
“I’m fine,” Wulfric called back. He helped Freyja to her feet, holding her hands tightly in his—there were no words to say what he felt towards her in the moment—as he guided her towards Avis. “Let go of the barrier and get your wife inside,” he said to her.
Avis looked at him with dark eyes, unwilling to lower her guard at first—but she trusted him more than he ever thought he might deserve from her, and she was exhausted. Her hands shook as she dropped her arms and surrendered. The noise of chaos was deafening in the absence of her barrier, closer than ever.
“I’ve got the neighbourhood,” he said. “All of you inside. Gav, make sure she saves her strength—last resorts only. And keep that crossbow close.”
“You don’t need to tell me,” Gawain said.
“I know,” Wulfric replied with a smile. He glanced over his shoulder at the mouth of the street again; the magitek weapon was still crackling with electricity, but it wouldn’t stay down for long, and neither would more soldiers be far behind. When looked back to Gawain, he knew this was a farewell; Gawain knew it, too.
“Come back to us, brother.”
“Wait for me.” Wulfric pulled his hood over his head and secured his mask over his nose, giving a single nod. “For hearth and home.”
With one last look at his family, he took up his dagger, and then he threw it down the street—and his body followed, leaving only sparks of magic in his wake.
For the first time in over two decades, Wulfric was whole.
/
The battle had already taken him halfway across the city when he first stumbled at the end of a warp—as though he were fighting Ysbrand again, Ysbrand who understood his mind and his instincts and would swat his daggers away to sabotage his jumps. But his blade had gone down his chosen path; it was his body that half-resisted the jump. Wulfric ducked under the swipe of a gunblade, threw his dagger to strike into the imperial’s neck, and it felt as though the jump had taken strips of his skin away.
Blood slicked his hands, almost cold against the white-hot sparks of magic crackling beneath his flesh. And he knew, intimately, that it was not Freyja’s gift failing him.
When he threw his dagger to jump to a rooftop, nausea gripped his belly like a bad memory; he came up short of the roof thinking not now, not now, threw again, and then he was freefalling as his body refused to answer, just for an instant—long enough for his heart to thrum with panic before he was barreling across the roof. He scrambled to his feet with the weight of his years on his shoulders and saw the size of the pursuit below.
More imperials on him meant they weren’t in the streets after the more vulnerable, but he wasn’t going to get out of this; not with exhaustion sinking into his limbs, with his body’s growing resistance to the one thing that made it alive. He conjured fire and launched it down at the bulk of the imperials, and it singed his fingers.
Wulfric ran across the rooftop to lead them farther away in their chase of him, feeling the blinding white of their searchlights on his back; he warped back down into the street and, soon after, felt a trickle of blood from his nose. His breathing was starting to burn in his lungs.
He had to duck behind a mass of rubble as gunfire cracked through the air, panting as his flesh remembered the so recent puncture of their bullets—and then it stopped, and he heard their comms screeching awake.
“All units cease fire. Ala Mhigo is fallen.”
Wulfric wanted to laugh, wild and frantic with the grief of what he already knew but couldn’t face.
“Repeat, all units cease fire. First cohort, report to the royal palace to await the orders of Gaius van Baelsar, viceroy to the imperial province of Gyr Abania. Second cohort, begin patrol and restore order in the streets. All remaining insurgents are to be summarily executed.”
You are out of time, Deathseeker.
I know.
Wulfric closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the rubble, drained of everything he had left. All that remained to him was surrender—but he wouldn’t surrender to Garlemald. Not in life, and not in death.
He dragged himself back to his feet and, with the last of his strength, slashed his dagger in an upwards arc through the air, cloaking himself from the imperials’ eyes. He didn’t have to look down at himself to know that it was more a shivering mirage than a proper cloak, but that didn’t matter; all that did, now, was that he could make his way out of the city before they caught him.
He could have gone home—back to Avis and Freyja’s and Gawain’s, to see them all one last time, but he didn’t want Saskia’s last memory of him to be the broken, disfigured shadow he was now. Better it be whatever she remembered now, the uncle she had known when he could bring himself to be with his family.
And Gawain would find his body when he didn’t return. He would know where to look.
The sun was beginning to rise from behind the smoking wreck of the city; it lightened the sky across the lochs, grey-blue and without stars. Wulfric let go of the last of the cloaking magic clinging to him as the rise of the hill came into view, or maybe it wore away—he didn’t know. He only knew how weary he was, how badly he wanted to breathe without the taste of blood in his mouth.
Somehow, he managed to climb the hill with the very dregs of his strength, stumbling the last few steps to the lone tree—the one whose roots had known Marco’s ashes.
“Hey,” he said quietly. “Hope you don’t mind that I rest the old bones here a bit.”
He settled down with difficulty on the ground, in the cradle of two roots, and pressed his back to its trunk. A breeze rose from the waters: a westerly, pushing away the smoke and bringing salt up to his lips. His eyes fluttered closed, if only for a moment; when he opened them, the sky was awash with pinks and oranges.
“I’m glad Ashley picked you a nice view,” he said, blinking away tears he hadn’t shed for Marco in a long time. He pressed his lips together; it pulled stiffly at the pinched skin of his scar. “I hope him and his are all right.”
It was what it was. Wulfric didn’t have enough left in him to wallow in what was lost, in his failures; he simply closed his eyes and decided, for once, to feel peace for having come to the moment he had waited for since he was eighteen years old.
CODA
“Come on, old man.”
The girl was patting his cheek and tugging at his arms, her struggle against his weight evident. Dead weight, and her a scarecrow, not yet twenty.
He wasn’t dead yet, because he said, “Neesa?”
“Yyyup. Gonna help me help you, or what?” When he didn’t move or answer, she groaned out an exasperated breath. “Look, Auntie would kill me if she knew I was out here for you, so let’s crack on.”
Everything hurt, but with Neesa’s help, Wulfric managed to get himself to stand. She wrapped a skinny arm around his shoulders and stroked his hair, supporting him against her own weight.
“There. Let’s get you home, Gramp.”
Wulfric looked back at the tree one last time as though expecting to see his body still nestled among the roots, slowly rotting away atop the hill; but there was nothing but grass, disturbed by his and Neesa’s footsteps.
Those were the first words Avis spoke to Freyja upon coming home from the palace one afternoon; no hello, no kiss upon her cheek.
“I just put her down,” Freyja replied. Then, before Avis could reprimand her for not being asleep herself, she added: “I was about to lie down.”
Avis just shook her head at the defense. “Good. That gives us a reason to whisper,” she said, something frantic animating her voice: the soldier in her had come alive, turning her gaze sharp and wary as she latched the front door and checked the windows.
Avis opened her fur-lined thaumaturge’s coat and took a compact journal from one of the pockets she’d sewn into it herself—complaining about palace mages and their lack of resourcefulness all the while.
“I was— foolish,” she admitted, and placed the journal on Freyja’s desk, right on top of a pile of papers bearing the seal of the king’s own scribe. “Radulf sent me to the archives to look for some alchemical records earlier; obscure shite. I was alone down there for all of five minutes. I think they’re trying to get rid of traces of… I don’t know. But I picked this up from a desk that had ashes beside it.”
Freyja, like any good politician, only eyed the journal before her: if she didn’t look, she would not know. Even if her wife was but moments from involving her, irrevocably. Avis opened the journal and tapped a finger against the pages.
“This is Queen Eivor’s hand, Frey. The whole thing. And someone was going to get rid of it.”
“So you stole it,” Freyja finished for her, as though this were not the most obvious part of their whole conversation.
“I wasn’t thinking. It was in my hand, and then it was in my pocket, and by the time I realized what a monumental fuck-up it was, turning back would have just made it worse,” Avis said. She was aware, then, of how very much she sounded like Wulfric—and that just made her feel as though she were pressed against something too sharp, so she turned her mind firmly back towards the book.
“I didn’t have much time to look inside,” she went on, “but I think it has to do with the Glaive. Not officially; she always used the same ink for official Glaive business, and this isn’t it. I think she and Ysbrand—” she made a warding sign as she spoke his name; had she been outdoors, she would have simply spat— “liked operating like spies.”
More of the same bitterness. Freyja knew to identify it from the sound of Avis’s voice alone, and to address it without words. She touched her wrist and made her sit, taking upon herself to flip through the pages.
“Please tell me I haven’t stolen state secrets,” Avis said, pressing her fingertips to the bridge of her nose. “I’ve had enough of being one step removed from high treason for two lifetimes.”
“In fairness, you got a wife out of the first time, so it can only get worse from here,” replied Freyja distractedly through her inspection, like a reflex.
For a foreigner, she had a masterful grasp on Ala Mhigan humour, and it made Avis smile; the knot in her shoulders came loose, if only for a moment. And then Freyja paused over one specific page, her brows knitting together as she sat up straighter, and Avis knew to dread what was coming even before she opened her mouth to speak.
“She wrote of the gift of her magic and how she passed it on to the Glaive.”
“She wrote about it?” Avis said, her shock palpable. “What—so someone could replicate it?”
“No. Not intentionally, at least. I don’t think she meant to leave a record; this reads like a woman talking to herself. Not to posterity.” Freyja read on. “The toll it took on her…”
Avis couldn’t bear stillness anymore; she stood and began pacing the floor of Freyja’s study. She remembered the toll the queen’s gift took on her Glaives, if anything: the vomiting and nosebleeds of warping and overexertion, the chills and tremors that had racked Gawain from disuse after the loss of his leg had taken him from active duty. The emptiness they had felt once the magic died with her. In that, she had been lucky, to always have her own magic. It had tempered the queen’s, kept her whole, helped her cheat death.
“Avis,” said Freyja quietly. “I think I understand what she did. How she did it.”
She had her forehead cradled against her palm, her gaze lost in the distance: a familiar state for Avis to witness. Here, they named the gift fate-walking; in Nhalmasque, it had earned her the royal title of Oracle. Avis remembered the reverence Wulfric had shown it, in spite of the knot Nhalmasque had formed inside him.
Avis bit down on the inside of her cheek and watched her wife walk across the lines of Queen Eivor’s memories.
“You could replicate her gift? The queen’s magic?” she heard herself ask, unthinking. Through another who should have been queen, the Glaive could live on—but that was a pointless hope she didn’t want to have.
As if the Queenglaive could be put back together, splintered inside the few of them who remained.
“She wrote of her gift like water in a stream. Suitable candidates for the Queensglaive acted as vessels—she would touch her gift to this vessel, and fill it to the shape of her peculiar magic. I can see that shape in my mind.”
When Avis said nothing in reply, Freyja looked up, her pale blue eyes steady on her wife. “Would you want it?” she asked in turn—and Avis knew that if she said yes, Freyja would give it to her.
Not Freyja, perhaps, but rather Celes: the Oracle Queen-in-Waiting of Nhalmasque.
“No,” Avis replied, her voice hoarse. The queen was dead, her Glaive no more, and it had cost them everything. “Never again.”
She had a gift of her own, and a life beyond the horrors of the past; let it be enough. For her, it could be. Like she and Saskia were to Freyja, and all of them and Rinomy’s were to Gawain.
She didn’t want to think of the hollows of Wulfric’s absence and all the ways it screamed that to him, nothing would never be enough again.
Gawain lingered in the antechamber longer than he should. By now, the whole of the Glaive was already lined up inside the Hall of the Griffin, awaiting the beginning of the ceremony—and here he was, still in front of Avis, fussing with her collar like a mother at her daughter’s nuptials.
She was strangely calm; if she’d been nervous herself, she would have swatted at him until he stopped hovering around her. Instead her eyes were rooted in focus, her spine straight: gone were the rounded shoulders, the half-bowed head, the hair worn long and messy like a veil to obscure her face. She looked like a soldier.
The doors opened from the inside, just wide enough for the captain to slip through, twice as imposing in his dress uniform as he was on any given day. He gave Gawain a jerk of his head towards the hall.
“Shift it, Everard.”
“Aye, sir,” Gawain said, smoothing his hands down Avis’s arms one last time. He gave her a nod, and though he should have dearly wanted to be at her side in Ysbrand’s place, he went and waited with the others.
Ysbrand gave Avis’s uniform a quick once-over—unnecessary, given Gawain’s fussing, but he was a man who left nothing to chance—then nodded.
“Ready?”
“Aye, sir.”
He readjusted his own sash and collar and rested a hand against the hilt of his sword. Then, instead of simply opening the door and walking in, he paused.
“I have to admit,” he said, in his deep wind-gust voice, “I had my reservations about you. Mostly your age, and the Greyhunt-Everard factor—I run a unit of elite soldiers, not a schoolyard. But you surpassed both my expectations and your initial promise.”
Avis blinked in surprise; her mouth went dry, unused to praise as she was. “Thank you, sir.”
“I wasn’t finished, recruit,” Ysbrand said. A hint of a smile showed on his lips—and from him, that was something even greater than praise. “What I meant to say is: I will be proud to call you a Glaive.”
“So will I, captain.”
With that, he opened the doors and strode into the hall—and Avis followed, two steps behind him as tradition dictated. The light inside the throne room blinded her, golden-white through the high windows; she brought herself into sharp attention with the shadows of her fellow Glaives standing in a row of black with only the flash of white sashes around their waists. Gawain stood at the very end of the line, nearest to the dais.
Beside him, Wulfric caught Avis’s eye and winked, conspiratorial.
As they came to a halt at the foot of the stairs, the queen drifted in. She stood beside her husband’s throne in her white dress, with its flowing silks and high collar, and the griffin feathers at her shoulders—like pauldrons on armour. It was Avis’s first glimpse of the Griffin’s Bride, and it cut her breath short: the halo of light that seemed to cling to her, the sharp promise of the rapier at her side, the enthralling surety of her black eyes looking down on Avis.
Desperately, she wanted her queen to see the woman who would serve her, and not the little girl she felt she was in that moment. She was glad for the protocol that bowed her head and obliged her captain to speak for her. When he knelt, so did she.
“My queen,” he said, high and clear—like the voice that gave them orders, but deferential, almost loving. “I present Avis Emery to be your blade.”
Ysbrand stood and stepped aside; Avis now knelt alone before the queen, and her breath trembled in her lungs. She unsheathed her lance, and as it sprung to its full size with a smooth click, held it in her open palms to surrender it before the queen. Only once it lay at the foot of the stair and out of her reach did the queen descend to stand over her.
Avis’s body hummed at her proximity—down to her very bones, the well of magic in her called to that of her queen. Her fingers itched to grab her hand, to feel the surge the others had told her to expect, to submerge herself within it.
She spoke with a dry heaviness in her mouth. “I am yours, my queen.”
“If you are to be mine,” said the queen, commanding even as she spoke softly, like telling a secret, “then I shall take you for my glaive, and wield you with honour. If you give me your oaths, I shall forge them into a blade.”
With this, the queen took up her rapier; and like Avis had presented her with her lance, she presented Avis with her own sword. Avis took the hilt with one hand and the blade with the other. She hadn’t decided, yet, what she might do with it; Gawain had given his knee, he said, and Wulfric his hand. The gift of flesh was theirs to choose, and to ponder at will.
But in her queen’s presence, Avis thought nothing. Her mind was empty, filled only with instinct and that buzzing thrill of whispering magic.
She thrust the blade into her abdomen, just above her hip. Not deep, but the pain was blinding; her hands shook around the queen’s rapier, and her breath came in a tremor. She wouldn’t make a sound, not a whimper. Let her queen see nothing but her strength.
The queen bent over her, and covered her hand at the hilt with hers so that they held it together. And there, joined, she poured a bit of her gift into Avis: it shot through her in a burst of colour, her body alight with sparks, the blood thrumming in her ears with the force of an ocean.
Avis did not scream. She only gasped, gulping air through her thirsting lungs as though she were drowning, her hands cold as ice under the queen’s burning touch.
The queen guided her hand to pull the rapier from her body, leaving behind no wound—only blood on the blade.
“Rise, Glaive,” said the queen, “and be welcomed by your brothers.”
“For hearth and home,” Ysbrand declared, his words echoed by the whole of the Queensglaive.
“For hearth and home,” Avis said, dizzy and feverish and swelling with pride—and if Ysbrand or the queen noticed how her eyes went to Gawain and Wulfric as she spoke the words, she never knew.
“That thing is off its nut,” Taupin added. They craned their necks, the lot of them, and squinted against the sun. Helpfully, Taupin had been narrating the entire affair as though the rest of them couldn’t see what was happening right over their heads. “Flapping its wings all angry-like, snapping its beak, screeching to fuck.”
“We know, Taupin,” Avis said.
“Why doesn’t it just fly off? It’s not like a cat got stuck up there. Or some green recruit too scared to warp.”
“All right, piss off,” piped Ensgeir, who had once been a green recruit too scared to warp from the summit of the training grounds tower.
“There’s a grille up there, innit?” Gawain said. “It must have gotten stuck.”
“Has anyone called for a beastmaster? We can’t train with that thing trying to snap our fingers off.”
“And what d’you expect their lot to do? You can’t climb up there without magic,” Ashwin said, because he had attempted it after one pint too many at Rinomy’s and slid right down the tower wall, much to the amusement of the other Glaives.
“There’s more than one griffin in this town, you twats,” Avis said. She waved a hand up at the shrieking beast on the tower. “Let them mount up and get the stupid animal unstuck.”
“That could take ages; king’s sent most of the griffin knights off to wherever the fuck yesterday morning, hasn’t he?”
“Ah, balls, he did, aye.”
“And it’s clearly hurting,” Gawain said, nudging Avis’s arm. “Can’t you melt the grille down from here or summat? If anyone has enough control to manage that, it’s you.”
“And burn its leg off? I’m not that good.”
“Someone should go do something. Up there,” Ensgeir said.
Taupin shook his head. “Can’t go ‘til it’s calmed down.”
“You’re all fucking cowards,” Wulfric said, and that stupid, reckless thing inside him was thinking—or not thinking—for him again, because he added, for clarity, “I’ll go.”
“All right, hero,” Reiver said with a snort. “Sure you will.”
Fear fluttered through Wulfric’s body almost at once, but he didn’t back down. Why would he? It was only a few warps. And facing down an angry, sharp-taloned, quintessentially Ala Mhigan killing machine.
“Wulf,” said Gawain. “Don’t be daft.”
“It’s fine,” Wulfric said, peeling off his uniform jacket to roll up his shirt sleeves. “They’re trained not to kill Mhigans, aren’t they?”
“No, they aren’t,” said Ashwin. And Reiver, at the same time: “Well, you’re not.”
Wulfric flashed Reiver his most insouciant grin. Avis grimaced at him as he handed her his jacket, holding it by the collar between thumb and forefinger.
“What’re you taking that off for?” she asked. “Hoping that griffin rider of yours will come ‘round right as you’re taming his beast, muscles rippling?”
The Glaives booed and flicked sand at him, as they had when first finding out he had slept around with the enemy.
“You know what, Avis? Bite me.”
“I’ll make sure to get in line behind the griffin, then.”
Gawain smacked her on the arm. Wulfric stepped closer to the tower, slipping his dagger from its sheath; for good luck, he pressed his lips to the flat of the blade, his eyes trained on the contre-jour silhouette of the griffin against the sky.
No time to think, or to dread, or to find a less stupid solution. He threw his dagger and began the chain of warps to take him up to the top.
He heard, distantly, through the rush of wind in his ears and the thrill of magic surging through him: “Right, ten gil on him losing a finger. Who’s with me?”
Wulfric let his comrades’ voices fade away, slipping only into his body; into that brief moment between warps where he fell and didn’t fall. His heart didn’t start racing until his feet were on the tower and the griffin was in front of him—the closest he’d ever come to one of them, and if he hadn’t understood their power then, he did now.
When it screeched at him, Wulfric damn near fell back on his arse.
“Hey, hey, hey,” he said gently, sheathing his dagger that he might hold his empty hands out. Not in reach of its beak—he wasn’t that stupid—but to at least display some absence of threat. “It’s all right.”
The griffin’s eyes were wild with fury; it beat its wings again, raising a great gale that stung Wulfric’s skin, and shrieked as it tugged on its bindings. Gawain was right: its left hind leg was caught in the grille at the center of the tower, the talons twisted between the bars. It looked painful as all hells.
“I’d be raging, too,” Wulfric said. He tried to step closer, only for the griffin to snap its beak at him, very nearly catching the edge of his shirt.
And then it swiped a talon at him, and he did fall back on his arse in his haste to avoid it. His heart was in his throat; on his back, he was vulnerable, even with the griffin unable to pounce on him. But it could have, and that put the fear of the sunless sea in him.
“Look,” he said breathlessly as he scrambled to his feet, pressing a hand to his chest. “I’m not even Ala Mhigan by birth.”
The griffin made a sound that he could only call a snarl. This time, instead of blindly throwing himself right at a raging beast, Wulfric stepped slowly to the side in the hopes of eventually placing himself in reach of the grille. But for now, he kept himself firmly in the griffin’s field of vision.
“D’you know what our emblem is, back where I come from? A flower. A pretty blue flower.” The griffin snapped at him again. “Not some vicious, sword-wielding fucking bird born out of a dragon-god, or whatever the story is, fucking superstitious Ala Mhigans—”
He sighed to stop himself, dropping his hands; the griffin stilled, flapping its wings in a gesture almost like a shrug.
“My home’s gone, you know?” Wulfric said softly. “The Empire came, and it just…” Grief was thicker in his throat than fear as he closed his eyes, just for a moment. If this is how I should die, let me die now. And still he opened them. “It wasn’t the Empire then, just Garlemald, but it became. With us.”
One step forward. Two. The griffin watched, dark-eyed. “And that’s why I’m here. I love Ala Mhigo, you know? I want to fight for it. I want to fight for you. So just—help me. Let me help you.”
He reached a hand out again, in reach of the beak, but the griffin still only stared. His fingertips touched its feathers, soft and bone-white. “Like it saved me, yeah?”
A screech pierced his ears; he felt that cutting gale on his skin again, but he was fairly certain he hadn’t lost any of his extremities. His hand was pressed wholly against the griffin’s flank now, and he felt the rush of fear wash down his limbs.
“That’s a good boy. We’re all just friends here,” he whispered, babbling through his trepidation. “Just all good Mhigan mates.”
Finally he reached the griffin’s hind leg, his palm flat against the griffin’s feathers to feel its breath and the shifting of muscles underneath his hand, and he could see where the razor-sharp talons had caught in the grille.
“I’m gonna get you out of there now. So don’t eviscerate me when you’re free, all right?”
Wulfric got to work, crouching down by the grille. The single talon was larger than both of his hands put together; he was keenly aware of how vulnerable he was in this state, and it made him itch for his daggers—but that was how the griffin felt, too, wasn’t it?
There was blood on his hands as he slowly worked the talon back through the grille. That poor beast was hurt, afraid, and furious with it. He could understand that well enough.
The moment it was freed, the griffin loosed a triumphant shriek and leapt up into the sky, wings open wide. Wulfric fell back on his arse again; he heard his comrades below for the first time since his first jump, exclaiming and whistling up at him.
He let himself collapse atop the training tower, his back flat against the grille, his breath and limbs shaking with residual fear and triumph. And a laugh bubbled up from his lungs, breathless, as he shielded his eyes from the sun to watch the griffin fly over Ala Mhigo.
