The Silver Gryphon

his embarrassment, just as he developed a sudden stitch in his side, Bern, the scout who had been up in the tree, burst through the underbrush behind them, overtook them, and plunged on to the head of the column. Show-off. . . .

Another shout echoed back through the trees, muffled by the falling rain. The words weren’t distinguishable, but the tone said all Skan needed to know. There was excitement, but no grief, no shock. They’ve found something. Something and not someone—or worse, bodies. . . .

From some reserve he didn’t know he had, he dredged up more strength and speed, and turned his trot into a series of leaps that carried him through the underbrush until he broke through into the clearing beneath the break in the trees. He stumbled across the remains of a crude palisade of brush and onto clear ground.

A camp! That was his first elated thought; if the children had been able to build a camp, they could not have been too badly hurt. Then he looked at the kind of camp it was, and felt suddenly faint. This was no orderly camp; this was something patched together from the remains of wreckage and whatever could be scavenged. Regin looked up from his examination of the soggy remains of the basket as Skan halted inside the periphery of the clearing.

“They crashed here, all right.” He pointed upward at the ragged gap in the canopy. “They’re gone now, but they did hit here, hard enough to smash two sides of the basket. They both survived it, though I can’t guess how. Maybe there was enough in the way of branches on the way down to slow their fall. The medical kit’s gone, there’s signs they both used it.”

They were here. They were hurt. Now they’re gone. But why? “Why aren’t they still here?” he asked, speaking his bewilderment aloud.

“Now that is a good question.” Regin poked through a confusion of articles that looked as if they had just been tossed there and left. “Standard advice is to stay with your wrecked craft if you have an accident. I’d guess they started to do that, were here for maybe two days, then something made them leave. It looks to me as if they left in a hurry, and yet I don’t see any signs of a fight.”

“They could have been frightened away,”

Amberdrake ventured. “Or—well, this isn’t a very good camp—”

“It’s a disaster of a camp, that’s what it is,” Regin corrected bluntly. “But if all I had was wreckage, and I was badly hurt, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do much better. It’s shelter, though, and that isn’t quite enough. I wish I knew how much of their supplies got ruined, and how much they took with them.” He straightened,, and looked around, frowning. “There’s no sign of a struggle, but no sign of game around here either. They might have run out of food, and it would be hard to hunt if they were hurt. There’s no steady water source—”

Amberdrake coughed politely. “We’re under a steady water-source,” he pointed out.

Regin just shrugged. “We’re taught not to count on rain. So—no game, no water, and an indefensible camp. Gryphons eat a lot; if their supplies were all trashed, they’d be good for about two days before they were garbage, unfit to eat. After that, they’ve got to find game, for Tadrith alone. My guess is, they stayed here just long enough to get back some strength, and headed back in the direction of home. They’re probably putting up signals now.” He grimaced. “I just hope their trail isn’t too cold to follow—but on the other hand, if they headed directly west, we should stay pretty much on their trail. That’s where I’d go, back to the river. It’s a lot easier to fish if you’re hurt than to hunt.”

Skan groaned. “You mean we could have just followed the river and we probably would have found them?”

Regin grinned sourly. “That’s exactly what I mean. But look on the bright side; now we know they’re alive and they’re probably all right.”

Skan nodded, as Regin signaled to Bern to start hunting for a trail. But as Bern searched for signs, Skan couldn’t help noticing a few things.

For one thing, the piles of discarded material had a curiously ordered-disordered look about them, as if they had been tossed everywhere, then gathered up and crudely examined, then sorted.

For another, there were no messages, notes, or anything of the sort to give a direction to any rescuers. Granted, the children might not have known whether anyone would find the camp, but shouldn’t they have left something?

And last of all, there was no magic, none at all, left in any of the discarded equipment. So the surmise had been correct, something had drained all of the magic out of their gear, and from the signs of the crash, it had happened all at once. And yet none of the search-party gear had been affected—yet.

So what had done this in the first place? What had sorted through the remains of the camp?

And what had made the children flee into the unknown and trackless forest without even leaving a sign for searchers to follow?

Was the answer to the third question the same as the answer to the other two?