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It goes instantly limp, collapsing on the ground. The moment it’s down, Ruskin jumps off it, spearing his sword into the earth.
“You can come down now,” he says, not even looking at me.
I wiggle my way down off the branch, feeling a touch ridiculous after his graceful display. He’s barely out of breath, but the fight has left him disheveled in a way I find quite distracting. His hair is mussed and there’s a light sheen of sweat across his neck and chest, which has been exposed by the rip the gryphon tore through his shirt.
It takes a lot of effort not to spend the next five minutes staring at the toned lines of his torso.
“What happened to the plan?” he snaps at me, sounding angry.
“It’s not my fault,” I say defensively. Although…maybe it’s a little bit my fault. I could’ve stayed more alert and not indulged the horse’s desire for an apple. But it had seemed pretty harmless at the time.
“I said this was too dangerous and you didn’t listen.” His voice shakes with ire. “You could’ve died!” He takes a step towards me and then seems to think better of it, turning away and putting space between us.
“But I didn’t,” I point out. “You turned up in time and did your bird sound thing?—”
“The call of the alpha gryphon,” he corrects. “Most animals in the forest are afraid of it.”
“Right, and everything worked out. So why dwell on what might have been?”
“Because,” he growls, looking like he’s holding on to his temper by a thread. I should be nervous about his anger, about the power rolling off him in tangible waves, but I’m not. Not since he had me in the palm of his hand last night and still let me walk away. I still fear what he might do to others, but I don’t fear him hurting me.
“Because what?” I demand.
“Because you’re too important, Eleanor!”
I don’t know what to say to that and neither, it seems, does he. His eyes widen, like he didn’t intend to say it, and I guess this is all part of the many things he won’t explain to me. The stuff he said was too “complicated” for me to understand that day I ran into him in the forest. I do him the courtesy of not forcing him to explain now, instead pulling my gaze from him and staring down at the gryphon. I take a few deep breaths, the sight of it cooling my defensiveness.
“Poor thing,” I say, taking a step closer to it. Even though it was trying to kill me minutes before, I feel guilty as I look at the creature’s huge head, bowed in death. “I see why it had to be put down, but it still seems unfair. It couldn’t help what happened to it.”
“A ruler must often do things he’d rather not,” Ruskin says darkly, turning and heading towards the trees in the direction our horse ran off.
“We’d best go find our ride.”
I don’t immediately move, my eyes fixed on the blood pooling, thick and fast, under the gryphon’s neck. There’s something odd about it, a sheen to it in the light that doesn’t look right.
“Ruskin…” I start to say, but he keeps walking.
“Come on, we still have your plants to find,” he grunts.
I weigh the value of stopping him to explain what I think I’ve seen, but his eyesight is better than mine, and I find it hard to believe, as close to the gryphon as he was, that he didn’t spot this too. I wonder if he doesn’t want me looking too closely.
I slip a vial out of my collection kit and scoop up some of the blood, stoppering it and securing it in my bag. Then I follow Ruskin away from the body.
Without being chased, the horse hasn’t actually gone too far, and we’re up on its back again shortly. I direct Ruskin now, pointing him towards areas I think look promising, allowing him to help me down every now and again so that I can root among the plants, examining them for clues as to their properties. The process seems to soothe us both, easing the anger from earlier.
And Destan was right, Ruskin is good at this stuff. Looking at a mess of foliage, I mention I need something with an acidic base, explaining it should be sharp and sour, like citrus, and he quickly identifies a bushel of fat, blue berries I pick from. Then I talk about the importance of something like asphodel, with its spike of white flowers and poisonous leaves, known for symbolizing the end of things. He finds me the fae equivalent with fifteen minutes.
“Why do you know all this?” I ask.
“It’s not something I learned,” he says, still cool after our argument. “More like a sense.”
I nod. “I know exactly what you mean. I’m guided as much by a feeling about something being the right fit, as an informed calculation.”
“Is that how you worked out how to transform lead into gold?” he asks, eyes on the plants we’re examining rather than me.
I stop wading through the wildflowers I’m in middle of, a bit thrown by his question. I shouldn’t be—it’s straightforward enough, but I don’t think anyone’s ever actually asked me how I worked it out. Once people like Albrecht and Thatch actually knew about it, they were too concerned with how much I could make for them to consider how I did it.
“It was a lot of trial and error. I was very stuck in the numbers and evidence to begin with, but once I broke out of that, I could start considering elements that wouldn’t have occurred to me before—like ore from Faerie.”
