If You Wait; Chapter 1

Something behind me is screaming.

Rain on my face.

The blast deafens me, the force throwing me off the half-wooden wall of the nesting stall and into the gryphon chicks suddenly huddled together in fear. I can hear nothing now but the ringing.


The ringing and something higher. Something furious. Something sadder.

I pull myself to my hands and knees, sheltering the three fluffy white chicks as they snap their razor-sharp cub-beaks at me, their huge eyes squeezed shut for protection. Dodging the assault, my back slams back against the wood of the low dividing wall. The ringing silences as does the sound at the end of hall. Now, voices, dozens of voices. The clang of metal, the whooshof arrows flying, the thunk of a spear into the pillars of wood holding the nesting walls in place.

In front of me, Aqrab is standing, her hawk-brown mantle of feathers bristling in anger, her golden eyes pin-pointed on the scene at the entry. I pull myself up, just enough to see over the edge of the wall, and nearly take an arrow to the face. It hums as it shakes from the impact, embedded in the wood rail just below my nose. The floor is being overrun with people, armored in boiled leather, wearing greed bandanas over half their faces, holding weapons far superior to their armor.

The floors below the Rookery house the gryphon riders and the armory.

Rain on my face.

I close my eyes and sink back to the floor, the hope that the riders might sound the alarm and some to their mounts’ defenses dashed in a moment.

The screaming resumes and my eyes startle open.

I’m not sure what her rider would call her coloring but Sheliak, the queen in the first stall closest to the door, was always a striking sight. The menacing gryphon is adoring with grey shades that ripple and shimmer along her dappled lioness’ body, with the magpie triple-shaded feathers in her mantle and head. The last time I saw her in flight, I was in awe, until I saw her drop like a stone onto the fleeing back of a peasant with his hands full of stolen bread. She rent him, limb from limb, and it wasn’t until her master had taken an iron length of rod to her a dozen or more times that she stopped swallowing the man’s body in chunks. Her beak, I catch in my periphery, is still chipped from those strikes.

A beak that now, drenched in blood and still holding a half-smashed torso of a green bandana wearing assault, is more than chipped. It is broken. My eyes wander her body – she is standing in the center aisle of the nesting floor, her wings mantled low, blocking the ways around her to her nest. She is new here, her two eggs only just laid a few days ago. People are swarming over the low walls into her nest, and she is screaming through the gore she won’t release. Her scream is dying though, the length of a gryphon-spear rammed into her chest nearly to the base, the wrought-iron spike sticking out between her wing joints. There are three spears embedded in her body, her wings peppered with arrows, but the pile of dead at her feet, under her talons, is huge.

Horror draws a shriek from me when I see one of the Greens pick up an egg and launch it against the wall, smashing into fragments of shell and slow dropping goop. Sheliak’s eyes fog as the second egg is smashed on the opposite wall. As she slumps forward, the shouts have become accompanied by pointing. They’ve seen me. Heard me. And they’re shouting.

Two nest rows are empty between where Sheliak’s body has created a massive obstacle and where the next gryphon queen is. As her flight sister dies, the unnamed monster launches herself forward. She is dark in my vision, dark lioness body, dark glittery feathers, deeply abyss-colored beak. like a raven and a panther. I see the faded rosettes in her hide and the light iridescence of her feathers. I’ve seen her in training under the new Seneschal, a new steward, and I know this is her first clutch.

As she moves, her lioness’ growl trickles into a raven’s scream of anger. Barreling down the short expanse of hallway, she uses Sheliak’s haunches to help propel her body up and over, wings half-cocked to avoid smashing into the framing pillars.

More arrows land around where I have couched back down. Several punch straight through the wood, and one slices through both my sleeve and my arm. Aqrab is watching, her body tense. The dark panther-gryphon has two eggs in her nest, but Aqrab has three chicks, and her hesitation to join her sister is palpable. Fear for her offspring, fury at the invasion.

I edge to the furthest I can, looking around the corner to the catty-corner nest where two massive eggs, roughly the size of my torso each, sit against each other in a nest of hay, bones, and feathers.

Rain on my face.

Shaking my head I cower back in Aqrab’s nest. She’s the only one who’s never bitten or lashed out at me. Now, she looks down at me with her pale hawk eyes and there is something else in them. Down the way, more people are pouring over the Sheliak’s corpse, pulling spears out and jamming them towards the raven dark gryphon who, riddled with the broken shafts of arrows, is still trying to rush her assailants. Aqrab muffles a soft sound at me and then is silent.

Cheers ring out as the raven-dark gryphon stops fighting back.

I look up as the White Death begins to move. Vega is across from Aqrab, screaming, buffeting the stalls and walls with her wings as she lashes out with talons and beak. White snowy-owl wings silently cut through the air to slam into the wood pylons holding the next floor above our heads. Her beak, only slightly more curved that the others’, is wide open and offering that sand-paper raspy snow-leopard’s call over the smooth-stone coolness of an owl’s call. The competing noise is unique to her, and I cover my ears at the nightmare sound.

She is moving down the hallway without a glance back, two chicks with the beginnings of feathers cowering in the corner of her nest.

Rain on my face.

Shaking my head, I edge towards the end of the wall and peer around the corner. Listening to the sickening sounds of battle, I keep my eyes on the nest-stall where the raven-gryphon had kept her two eggs safe.

One rocks. Shit.

Boldness grabs hold of my throat and yanks me into the empty stall nest door, taking cover from the errantly flying weapons. I do it again, one more stall closer. One more stall to go and then, how am I supposed to get across the hall?

I look back down the hall to where Aqrab is standing, ears up, listening. She is watching Vega, who I can hear behind me breaking bones and slashing through the soft mass of bodies still piling through the busted door. Aqrab tilts her head back and chirrups. It isn’t a loud sound. It isn’t even a resounding sound. But she is a queen, and that is a rally call. The call of a hen in distress; of chicks in danger.

Terror grips me as a spear launches through the air. It lands near Aqrab’s body. She watches and does not move. Her eyes flick back to the war raging over my right shoulder and then, finally, she moves. The gryphon, larger than the farming draft horses feeding the nation, leaps forward. She plants her eagle’s feet into the stone, forearm length talons raking the ground, and she roars. It is a battle call, deafening, shrill as it lifts into the high raspy scream of a hawk.

Splendor. It is the only word I have for her. The gryphon’s body is speckled with ever changing sized rosettes, with a spine that bears two heavy black bars paralleling her spine. Another servant called it king cheetah, after some kind of thin-boned desert creature I think she made up. The feathers Aqrab bristled, as she charged down the hallway to join Vega in their battle, are barred, tipped in white at the edges, with chevrons that bar to the base. Some kind of desert hawk the servant didn’t know the name of, but beautiful, she said, in its golds and coppers.

I scramble as Aqrab joins Vega’s battle, moving one more stall in the confusion that grips the room. The two massive gryphons lay waste to the unstemmed flow intruders. I am parallel the panther-gryphon’s nest when a body drops over the wall into the nest. The cloth covered face blinks at me and tilts their head. I motion to my ears, mouthing, I cannot hear you. They lift a huge knife, the same kind I’ve seen in the kitchens. I frown. I have friends in the kitchens.

They point at the eggs, a wild grin squinting their eyes from behind the mask. Oh, I think. They want to know if I want to smash an egg.

To drive the point home, they set about hammering on one of the eggs. The larger one. It is hard, nearly ready to hatch, I think. They smash it open and pull out the chick, driving the knife into its chest, then holding wet-feathered corpse like a victory flag.

I motion for them to throw me the other egg before I heave all my organs out through my mouth and onto the floor. They toss it, carelessly, and turn to crawl over the next stall when Vega lashes out, eyesight triggered by the cross-hall movement, and hook the person by the guts with two of her front talons.

I vomit.

Hugging the egg to my chest with one arm, ignoring the frantic peeping I hear within, I begin to scramble back, reaching out blindly to snatch a long black feather from the nest as I go. In Aqrab’s nest, two chicks huddle together, terrified, white-rimmed eyes fixed on me. The third, with their eyes not yet open, stays frozen, alone, on the other side. The little one has no idea where everyone is, but they know danger as come.

Frantically, I look around the stall, anxiety, and terror waring for the chance to vomit again, or maybe shit, or maybe run screaming from the floor. A discarded sack is half covered with straw from the nest, there is a ruck of some kind propped against the stall wall; probably left behind by Aqrab’s rider.

Neither is big enough for what I need, but both together might be. The weight though, and the awkwardness of holding them, gives me a moment of shameful pause.

Rain on my face.

Finally, I grab the sack and shove the chest-sized egg into it. Then, pulling up every ounce of courage, I reach out to grab at one of Aqrab’s chicks. It bites me and flees, bolting for its mother on unsteady legs. Making a mad grab for it, I only manage to take a swing at a hindleg, get scratched for my trouble, and then land on my chest as I watch it go skidding into battle, calling out. Making itself a target for a cloth-faced archer who takes clear aim and releases, taking the chick in the chest and killing it instantly.

I am frozen, watching the chick perish. I see Vega is struggling to stand with the length of a horse-killing spear embedded to the hilt into her chest. They must know she’s dead anyway, so the stormers have ignored the wheezing gryphon as a steady stream of blood and foam pours from her gasping beak. They’re pulling primary feathers from the wings of the fallen as proof of their victory here.

Aqrab crushes someone’s skull and, with her wings, sends the whole line of assailants falling backwards with a huge gust of wind. She catches the murderer and things very suddenly change. I feel it.

She screams.

Agony this time as she realizes they’re going to kill her chicks. Desperation tinges her fury, and she redoubles her attack, a frenzy that includes a rainfall of talons and beak strikes. She stands on Sheliak’s body, her whole form shivering with blood loss from multiple arrow strikes, knife slices up her forelegs, and spear wounds across her chest and neck. One lucky strike rakes sharp iron across her face, just under her eye, and for a moment I am convinced she’ll lose it.

Inside the hawk’s scream of rage, and the lioness’ roar of fury, there is a high whistle of grief. I wonder if the others can hear it in their blood lust; the mourning of a mother who thinks she is failing. Aqrab falters slightly as another spear lodges in her wing joint and the pain of it sends her back several steps. Terror drives her into their striking range again when she hears the chicks calling out in response to her pain. Again, she bellows, and again, that high note of sorrow. Heart rending anguish that she cannot protect her young.

I have nothing left to vomit, so I just start moving.

She sees me, briefly, crouching in her nest, the sack with the egg in my hand and the empty place where her offspring should have been. Holding her eyes, I grab the other eye-opened chick and shove it into the sack as softly as possible, ignoring the finger-breaking beak-bite it gives me for my trouble.

I scramble then, shoving the blind chick down the front of my shirt. Without thinking, I dive into Vega’s nest and grab at her two chicks. One is limp – dead from terror, and for a moment I am heartbroken to leave it there. Wondering what horror might befall its tiny body. But I can’t linger, so I grab the second chick and shove it into the rucksack, and tuck it’s sibling into the hay, hopeful the hiding space allows it to have peace.

Racing to the back of the nesting floor, my only hope is the servant exit hasn’t been overrun on the other side. Would anyone think to fight those who might turn cloaks and join the coup? It is only when I get to the door that I realize, in the primal way of prey feeling a predator, that there is one more gryphon present.

Nikawiy. I didn’t realize she could clutch. Cautiously, I turn. The chick is my shirt is squealing, the chick in my bag is thrashing, and the chick in the rucksack just keeps piteously crying out. The egg has stopped peeping, but I can feel the structural integrity of the egg giving way.

The massive gryphon laying in the last stall just blinks night-dark eyes at me, fathomless and expressionless in her flat black plumage. Brightness seems to die in those feathers, her stall seemingly darker than all the rest, as if her form itself were swallowing light itself. At the base of her neck, where her feathers melted into the deep golden-black of a melanistic jaguar, the gold-black between her rosettes looking like lightning streaking through a starless sky, her throat was ringed in vibrant white. It set her apart from the other black gryphons in the Rookery. That, and her size.

She turns her head to the side, looking to where the four other gryphons have met their ends. As I start to take a step forward, her head snaps back around to me. The hair on my arms stands on end then, the pressure of the air around me suddenly thick and choking.

Rain on my face.

Slowly, she stands. The scales of her front legs are just as dark as her beak, the middle toes of each foot slightly longer than the others and capped with a forearm-length talon. Ruffling her feathers, my ears suddenly pop.

Casually, she pulls a long feather from her wing and moves forward, dropping it before she reaches me. On instinct, I catch it. Behind her, as she turns to face down the hallway to where the four other gryphons are being butchered, is one glittering black egg.

As she passes, irrationally I jump into her nest and grab her egg, shoving it into the rucksack with one of Aqrab’s chicks. Nikawiy’s feather, Vega’s, Aqrab’s, and the dead pather-gryphon’s are all jammed into the sack too, sticking out because their length precludes them from being entirely hidden; unless I want to break them into thirds.

All the hair on my body begins to stand on end and, without looking back, and I race for the exit.


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