Chapter Thirty-Five: Snared

With the gryphon hot on his heels, Osmund rode like he’d never rode before. All around the landscape went by in a blur; he tried to recall anything he could use from the march here, but his mind was an endless loop:

goingtodieI’mgoingtodieI’mgoingto—

He forced breath into his lungs as the terror threatened to overwhelm him, leading Banu over the terrain best he could to maximize their speed. He had to formulate a plan, fast. Cover. What they needed was cover.

A screech sounded from behind, so close he was sure at any moment he’d feel talons rending him into meat. Focus! Think! There were trees scattered in every direction, but not dense enough to get lost in, or else they were thickets packed too tightly together to navigate. Guiding Banu onto unfamiliar ground could be a deadly risk. But if they did nothing—

“Krraaaaayyygh!!” Osmund chanced a glance back—and blanched. Time to move!

He veered them into a hard left and felt the rush as the gryphon went sailing right past, so close that the tips of its flight feathers brushed his back. That settled it—Osmund really hated birds!

It was a clean maneuver, but would only buy them thirty seconds at most. The gryphon was circling again, coming in for another approach.

Where?! Where could they go for safety?! The hills were narrow and flat, the cliffs a sheer drop. If there were others, they could work together to divide its attention long enough to lose it or scare it away, but alone, horse and rider were out of options. Except the only one left: outrunning it.

It was impossible, but they would try anyway.

Osmund urged Banu on, issuing a slew of silent prayers as he sensed—and heard, and felt—the gryphon gaining speed on them again. Please let us live, he begged. Mankind, ever unworthy, no longer presumed to know the names or faces of their gods, at least on the Isles, but if the heavens were watching, he hoped they felt some pity for him and the existence he’d led. I’m finally happy and there’s so much I still want to do! he lamented. Plus Sakina would probably feel really guilty if I died, and I bet it would ruin her relationship with Cemil. It would be too sad if Cemil lost both of them. It certainly wouldn’t bring Osmund any satisfaction from beyond the grave!

But even now, in his hour of greatest need, Saint Ocens from his high seat did not turn his smiling face upon him. The gryphon was swooping in close again and there was nowhere to turn. Nothing to do. This was it.

I’m sorry Banu, Osmund grieved in these last moments. To get to him, the gryphon would hurt her too. The impact of those claws would send them both tumbling down the road until they were a broken pile of man and horse. If they were lucky, they’d snap their necks in the fall and it would be over fast. He thought of Bella, Minerva, Callista. Now he was failing Banu, too. I couldn’t protect you, either. I’m so sorry.

Unless.

Born of desperation, one last idea popped into his head. Stupid. But, he was a dead man riding already. If ever there was a time for suicidally stupid ideas, it was now!

Osmund removed his feet from the stirrups and lifted himself out of the saddle until he was kneeling carefully atop Banu, every muscle flexed like a cat ready to pounce. He turned on his heels to face the approaching gryphon, and those talons poised for the kill, outstretched. He would have one chance to make this count. He might yet save his horse, and give himself a chance at survival, too.

“Keep running as fast as you can,” Osmund told his faithful friend, giving her one last pat on the neck. What was it Sakina had said? I hope fate honors our courage today. With a futile prayer, he jumped.

Straight into that waiting grasp.

Strange images floated through Osmund’s head as his stomach lurched dizzyingly. He was falling, only the impact never came.

His thoughts were in pieces, each fragment dissipating at his touch. Here, the memory of a cold stone floor in the dark, pain radiating from his wet cheek. There, a bright courtyard in the royal castle, and a tall girl his own age with a face he didn’t remember, with strange clothes and a strange accent. “Hello,” she said once to him, then “hello” again, because she didn’t know any other words to communicate.

The nursemaids. His mother’s burial. His first pony. Scenes from another life.

Osmund stirred, returning. Well, the good news was that he (apparently) wasn’t quite dead.

The bad news? He nearly wished that he was.

He must’ve blacked out for a few moments, either from fear, or pain. The pain—he could not even contain it.

When he dared open his eyes, the geography of the cliffs went soaring past.

He couldn’t move his arms—could barely even feel them. Bracing for what he might see, he soon discovered they were pinned to his sides. The gryphon’s rough, scaly talons were curled tight around him, squeezing him so mercilessly that he knew some of his ribs had yielded to the pressure.

Oh.

He desperately catalogued his thoughts, anything to keep the shock from swallowing him whole. He didn’t see blood. That was good. Damage, even internal, could be fixed—so long as he didn’t bleed out. Healers were capable of a lot, but they couldn’t put your blood back in your body for you. Lose too much, and you were done for.

Things looked bad no matter how many bright sides he tried to find, but being alive was a miracle. He could not squander this bit of grace. Like Sakina, he, too, had a secret weapon up his sleeve. Or rather, on his wrist. Emre’s bracelet could make him briefly invisible. If used wisely, it just might get him out of this mess. But he’d have to wait for the chance.

Beneath his dangling legs, he watched the scenery go by, his terror having long crossed over into numbness. They were descending into the canyon. Down on the ground, he saw the shapes of horses and riders as they began their charge into the cliffside lair’s lowermost opening. A few of Sakina’s constructs were still swooping about, which meant she was alive—thank heavens. Osmund saw a black blur that might’ve been Anaya, or maybe it was just wishful thinking. He couldn’t focus on anything too long; one glance, and it was already far behind.

After what felt like both an eternity and the mere blink of an eye, the gryphon’s wingbeats changed, and its weight shifted. Osmund opened his eyes (he’d clenched them shut again) to see a cave mouth set high in the cliff wall, yawning ever wider and wider as they made their descent. The gryphon’s talons opened unceremoniously, and Osmund hit the ground like dead weight.

The impact’s brutality rattled his teeth, though it was not a long drop. Cutting pain bloomed through every nerve and synapse; he could only lie there absorbing it all.

Bleary-eyed and blinking fiercely, he took stock of his surroundings. The gryphon who’d brought him here wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. It was backing away from the interior of the cave, lowering its head in the form of a bow. Could this be a display of deference? Then—who is it for?

Osmund considered playing dead, but decided to chance a look. What he saw almost made him forget the gryphon at the entrance.

Further within lurked an immense, strange shape. As Osmund’s senses came back to him one by one, he heard the sounds. Booming, raking, unignorable. Calling it breathing was a disservice. Rasping was perhaps closer. But words in any language were doomed to fall short.

Before he could wonder what had caused a living creature to make such sounds, he heard the flap of wings and a familiar torrent of wind buffeting his body. The gryphon at the entrance had taken off again. There was a rattling as loose debris in the nest clattered and skittered across the floor. What was that? Wood?

No—bone.

Muscles re-animating with fear, Osmund shuddered bodily, ignoring the pain. Yes, those were bones. All around him, bones, carcasses, death!

He really was in a gryphon’s nest. As food.

He dared another look at the hulking silhouette in the cave’s shadowy throat. It was another gryphon, that much he could tell, but it wasn’t reacting at all to Osmund’s presence, even though all his wriggling must be appetizing to what was essentially a giant bird. Was it perhaps asleep? Or was it too sick to even move?

It seemed he had some time to think. Osmund steadied his breathing and gave the nest another desperate look in the darkness, as the edges of his vision pulsed, worringly, ever darker. These were definitely animal carcasses—domestic goats and sheep, if he wasn’t mistaken, and the remains of some other large ungulate that must be native to the canyons, but no humans. No abducted little Anshan girls.

Could this really be where she was taken?

He scanned the dimly-lit contours of the cave. It wasn’t a smooth tunnel like he’d heard about wyrm holes—instead, jagged rocks of all kinds gave it a unique topography. Plenty of places to hide, if you were small. “Little girl?” he attempted in Meskato words she surely would not understand. “A-are you here?”

But incredibly, out from between two rocks—right beneath his eyes, as if by providence—peeked out a tiny hand, human and frail. Almost as soon as it emerged, it pulled back into its hiding spot, like a shy creature retreating into its burrow.

Osmund crawled to the rocks until he could peer into the narrow space between them. Within the black, he could barely make out the edges of a living shape. “I’m here to help,” he whispered, hoping his tone would communicate his meaning for him. He wasn’t sure kids found him likeable or trustworthy. “A-Are you hurt?”

A child’s face came slowly into the visible light. She was close enough now for him to see that, while a little bloody, she wasn’t gravely wounded. Oh, how he wished Cemil and Sakina were here to share in his joy! How relieved they would be.

Of course, none of that would matter if the gryphon got hungry. Osmund looked into the girl’s tearstained face. “Um, stay here,” he said uselessly again, signaling for her to stay put in her hiding place. He hoped it at least brought her comfort to know there was an adult here with her.

Cautiously—keeping his wrist raised, in case he needed to use the bracelet to disappear—Osmund crept back to the cave’s cliffside opening to confirm it was a sheer drop with no way to shimmy down to the canyon, even if they hadn’t both been injured. He didn’t see the Meskato riders outside, either, so he couldn’t signal them.

They likely had no choice but to wait for the search party to arrive. The Anshan apparently believed that all these caves were interconnected into one lair, like an ant colony. Osmund couldn’t see around this huge, sick gryphon well enough to confirm that the tunnel kept going behind it. The heavy way it rested was not like a natural sleep, rather more like a boulder, or a fallen tree.

This gryphon is no threat, he suddenly knew. It won’t be rising up again.

Why did he feel this weak, pitiful sadness in his heart?

It’s not wrong to feel sorry for creatures that are suffering, he told himself, trying to shake his father’s scorn away. And how it suffered. More details resolved from the gloom: scattered feathers given way to expanses of rotten tissue. He could see bones, muscles, sinew. Every second revealed more horror: hollow cavities in a stinking mountain of flesh. And yet he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—look away.

On shaky legs, Osmund approached. There was a foreign shape he couldn’t identify sticking out of the gryphon’s neck. The air thickened to a sickening miasma; the beast’s body seemed to emanate death itself. He was within a few steps of its massive beak when a single eye opened from a depressed socket. It watched him listlessly. A sound bubbled forth from its throat, almost a whine. “I’m sorry,” Osmund whispered, in the manner of someone who’d accidentally woken a sleeping child. “I’m sorry someone did this to you.”

At this distance, the object in its neck resembled a sword hilt. It was a long dagger of some kind, though not near large enough to inflict mortal injuries. Could the blade have been poisoned?

He brought his hand close to the dagger’s hilt as if to draw it out, then—hesitated. The sense of doom grew infinitely stronger with the proximity, and he pulled the hand back like he’d been about to burn it.

Too late. Something had snared its way in already.

He reached out and grabbed the handle.