The Silver Gryphon

He gryph-grinned at her, his beak gaping wide. “You didn’t remember Drake’s favorite proverb— ‘Be careful what you ask for’—”

“I know, I know,” she groaned. Tad had been snacking, and the bag was almost empty, but he had saved her two of the biggest snakes—though they weren’t very big, being no longer than her forearm. One was brown, one was green, and both looked vaguely orange in the uncertain light. Tad carefully scraped some hot coals to one side with a stick, then added drier wood to the rest of the fire.

She skinned out the snakes with Tad’s help, then arranged her snakes, along with her harvest of crickets, grubs, and pupae, on the blade of their shovel and placed that on top of the glowing coals. There wasn’t much aroma, but her bugs did toast quickly, and she was very hungry by now. She picked them gingerly off the hot metal and ate them, trying not to think too hard about what she was doing. They weren’t too bad, though; she could almost imagine that she was eating toasted grain if she didn’t pay too close attention to the shapes.

The snake was better, and made it possible to finish her ration-bread. Tad, meanwhile, had placed his dried meat out in the rain to soak; he wolfed it down with no expression of pleasure when it was soft enough to eat.

“Do you take first watch, or shall I?” he asked. She put a pan of water on the fire to steep her bruise-remedy in, then made up her potion with the addition of a couple of recognizable, foraged herbs known to numb sore throats. If they soothed a sore throat, perhaps they would make her bites stop bothering her.

“I’d appreciate it if you would,” she replied. “I’m hoping this stuff will let me fall asleep without clawing my skin off, but it’s bound to wear off before daybreak. If I’m going to be itching, I might as well be awake so I can control myself.”

He nodded. “The smoke worked as well as an ant hill, and my passengers are no longer with me to bother either of us. At the moment, I’m feeling fairly lively. You might as well get to sleep while you still can.”

By now her clothing and her hair were both dry, though only her gryphon-badge was as pristine as it had been when they set out. Besides being stained, her tunic and trews were torn in several places, and the hems were beginning to fray. I look like a tramp, she thought ruefully. I hope Ikala is not with a search party . . . oh, that’s ridiculous. He would hardly expect me to look like a court lady, and I would be so happy to see a rescuer that the last thing I would be thinking of would be my clothing!

Tad helped her wrap her herb-steeped bandages around the worst of her bruises, and to dab the remainder of the mixture on her insect bites, as best as his large, taloned hands would allow. At first, she thought she was going to be disappointed again in her attempt to heal her bites, but as the mixture dried, she noticed that her itching had ebbed, at least temporarily. The tenderness of her flesh was perhaps in some way eased by the tenderness of the gryphon’s care of her, as well.

Tad looked at her, disheveled feathers slightly spiked from the moisture, with inquiry in his expression.

She sighed with relief. “It’s working,” she said. “I’ll have to make more of this up and keep it with me in one of the waterskins. If I keep putting it on, I might find it easier to freeze in place without being driven mad.”

Tad chuckled. “Good. Now we just need to find something that will keep the bugs off us in the first place— without driving us crazy with the smell!”

With her mind off her itching, she turned a critical eye on Tad, and without warning him what she was about to do, reached over to feel his keelbone, the prominent breastbone that both gryphon and bird anatomy shared. That was the first place that a bird showed health or illness, as muscle-mass was consumed by a gryphon or bird that was not eating enough.

It was a bit sharper, the muscles on either side of it just a little shrunken. Not something an ordinary person would notice, but Tad was her partner, and it was her job to do as much for him as she could. “You’ve lost some weight,” she said thoughtfully. “Not a lot, but it has to be either the short rations or the fact that you’re using up energy in healing. Or both.”

“Or that I’m building leg-muscle and losing wing-muscle because I’m not using it,” he pointed out. “I don’t remember walking this much before in my life. Much more of this and I’m going to look more like a plowhorse than a hawk.”

She granted him a skeptical look, and crossed her legs and rested her chin on her good hand. “I wish we’d find the river,” she replied fretfully. “No matter what is following us, if we just had the river, we could fish; I’d get some decent food into you. Even if there’s something following us and scaring off the game, I doubt that fish would be frightened off by a land predator.” The river, the promise of the river, it now seemed to embody the promise of everything—food, shelter and rescue as well. Perhaps she was placing too much hope on a strip of water, but at the moment it was a good goal to concentrate on.

He heaved a huge sigh and scratched at one bug-bitten ear. “I really have no idea where we are in relation to the cliff and the river,” he confessed. “And this kind of forest is very strange to me. If this place were more like home, I could probably find a river, but I can’t see the sky and the ground cover is ten or twelve layers thick here. . . .”

“I know, and I’m not blaming you,” she assured him hastily. “How could you know anything about this kind of forest? We never trained here. We expected we’d be going to an established outpost, with shelter, a garden, food stores, and weapons.”