The Black Gryphon

and inwardly unlike a gryphon. “How do you?”

“The man who flies a falcon has puncture wounds all over his fist from nervous talons. The man who flies a goshawk has an arm that is white to the elbow, because he never dares go without his gauntlet. And the man who flies a hawkeagle is the one with the eye patch.” Amberdrake’s mouth quirked slightly, and Skan chuckled.

“I presume that must be a very old Kaled’a’in proverb,” Skan told him, with the sigh that was supposed to tell Amberdrake he had quoted far too many Kaled’a’in proverbs. “But—nervous talons? What does that mean?”

“Tense birds have tense toes, and peregrines are notoriously nervous,” Amberdrake said, his mouth quirking a little more, this time with a distinctly wicked glint in his eye. “Remember that the next time your little gryfalcon is startled when she’s got some portion of you in her ‘hands.’ “

Skan laid her ear-tufts back with dismay. “You aren’t serious, surely.”

Amberdrake laughed and slapped the gryphon’s shoulder. “You wouldn’t do anything to make Zhaneel nervous, would you?”

“Of course not,” he said firmly and wondered in the next moment if there was any chance. . . .

Amberdrake only chuckled. “I’ve spent enough time with you, featherhead. There are some things I need to take care of, and I’m certain that you have plenty to do yourself. So if you don’t mind, I’ll get on with my cleaning, and you get back to your mate.”

Skan’s crest rose with pleasure at that last word. Mate. He had a mate. And that mate was Zhaneel; swift, strong, and altogether lovely. . . .

He tugged affectionately on a mouthful of Amberdrake’s hair, and then shoved the kestra’chern back in the direction of his own tent. “Back to your housekeeping, then. If you prefer it to my company. You really ought to know that a clean and neat dwelling place—”

“—is the sign of a disturbed mind, yes, I know.” Amberdrake combed the hair Skan had mouthed back with his ringers, grinned, and took himself back into his tent before Skan could retort with anything else.

Such respites were doomed to be short in wartime.

The flight back to the gryphons’ lairs was a short one, and normally completely uneventful. But as Skan took to the air and got above the tops of the tents, he saw evidence of a great deal of disturbance in that direction. Gryphons flew in to the lairs from all over the camp, their irregular wing-beats betraying agitation. Even at a distance he saw ruffled feathers and flattened ear-tufts, crests raised in alarm and clenched foreclaws. Yet there was no other sign of agitation in the camp, so either the gryphons were privy to something the rest of Urtho’s forces hadn’t found out yet or the information was pertinent only to gryphons.

It wouldn’t be the first time we found out about something no one else knew, he thought with a sinking heart.

Immediately, he lengthened and strengthened his wingstrokes, to gain more speed. Whatever had occurred, it was imperative that he learn what was going on!

The lairs had been built into an artificial hill, terraced in three rings, so that each lair had clear space in front of it. There was a small field full of sunning rocks between the lairs and the rest of the camp. That was where everyone had gathered. He landed next to a cluster of half a dozen gryphons from the Sixth that included Aubri. All of them listened intently to what the broadwing had to say, necks stretched out, and heads cocked a little to one side. Their sides heaved as they panted heavily, one of them hissed to himself; their neck-feathers stood straight out from their necks like a fighting-cock’s ruff, and two of them rocked back and forth as their feet flexed. All of this was quite unconscious, and a sign of great agitation.

Aubri stopped in mid-sentence as Skan back-winged down on the top of a rock beside them, and waved Skan over with an outstretched fore-claw. “I’ve got bad news, Skan,” he called out, as Skan leapt down off the rock and hurried over to join the group. “It’s not all over camp yet, but it will be soon. General Farle’s dead.”

“What?” Skan could not have been more surprised if Aubri had told him that the Tower had just burned down. Farle? Dead? How did you kill a General without wiping out the entire Command? Chief officers were never anywhere near the front lines!

Granted, Farle had a reputation for wanting to be near the action, but the General wasn’t stupid, and he was certainly the best-protected man in the Sixth! How had anyone gotten to him? Was it accident? Could it have been treachery?

“I was telling the others—we think that some kind of suicide group got through and took him out, him and most of the other chief officers of the Sixth,” Aubri said. “We don’t even know how or who did it. There was just an explosion in the command tent, and when the smoke and dust cleared, there wasn’t much there but a smoking hole. The mages are trying to figure out just what happened, but the main thing for us is that we’ve lost him.”

Skan swore. There was only one man of Farle’s rank that was not already in a command position: Shaiknam, the General that Farle had replaced. The official story was that Shaiknam was on leave while Farle got more command experience, although the real reason Shaiknam had been taken out of the post was his incompetence.