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“Beloved children! We will gnaw your wing bones—”
“We will slurp the flesh—”
“From your knuckles! Half-breed mongrel—”
“You had no—”
“Right!”
Jin stepped slowly away from them, his hind paws clattering on the stone courtyard. But their slavering only increased, and a few—of shapes too strange to guess at—closed the circle behind him. The Monopod was pulling at my pelt, his great black eyes pleading.
“Come away, come away! They will never let him go now. If you run, they will not notice you.”
“But his body! I cannot let them have his body—all this was for your own wretched woman and you would let it happen over again to my brother?”
“This is not a possession,” he mumbled grimly. “It is a mob. They will not take his body; they will tear it into pieces. For them, to lose a single member of their tribe is like losing a leg at the knee. This is revenge, and when they are done, there will be nothing left but a few drops of blood for tomorrow’s churchgoers to wipe off their shoes. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I knew this might happen, but I had to help my Tova, I had to get her free. I promise, there is nothing you can do, even with all your strength. If you killed all of these, with their last breaths they would scream for their siblings—and they would come, from the deepest cracks and alleys of the city. There is no limit to their numbers. If you want to live to birth your chicks”—he blushed slightly and looked away, consumed, I surmised, by some tradition of propriety towards breeding females among his people—“the sky is the only safe place. Go, find some forgotten strand, and hide your young away. While the scent of my Tova is in the air, they will be frenzied, and forget you. When it has passed, they will calm again, and they will not give you the mercy of vivisection. They will take your body and your babes will be born gray and dead, their first cries mocking laughter.”
I stared at the hateful little man, who had sold us to these scavenging horrors. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to put my claws through his eyes as he had begged Jin to do to that creature. It would have felt wonderful, I imagined, and his blood would be hot.
But Giota would be ashamed of me. She would turn away from me, and forget my name, and my children would never know her. She had known that Jin was near death—it must mean something, it must be more important than a mere balanc
ing of scales after a murder.
I leaned into his face, and he did not blink. Quick as a tailor tearing her stitches, I snapped my head to one side and tore his left ear from his head and spat it onto the ground. His blood, hot as I had imagined, dripped from my beak, and I hissed through the red mess at our betrayer, before flapping my long wings—once, twice, three times, and lifting into the night.
I circled overhead, high enough to be safe from the pack of scarified Yi, who quivered with excitement and lust. There was no chance for my brother to follow my flight with his eyes, to know that I was safe before he died, a mercy that stories like ours always allow. It was not allowed to us.
I watched as they lunged forward and sank two dozen sets of diamond teeth into my Jin’s flanks. He screamed, like a wind through broken glass, and kept screaming until one of the pale, bony things caught his perfect blue throat in its jaws, and he died with a wet, strangling whimper.
I watched as they ate him in the sickly light of their Moon.
QURI STROKED THE SAND WITH HER GLOSSY PAW. “All my life, I never gave the Arimaspian problem any thought. How could I, when I was so busy adoring a human woman and bearing these poor eggs? I watched Jin die; I watched him become food for ghosts and wraiths whose blood was moonlight. I did not think about silly men who liked gold enough to kill an entire race for it. I came here; I laid my eggs all the autumn long in a dry patch of sand, and covered them with the fur of my body. Years passed—a Griffin’s egg is a slow thing growing. Gold washed up in the waves, slowly, flecks and nuggets and slivers. It sparkled in the sand; it added to the sand. This island is half made of gold. Of course I didn’t know that when I came; I only wanted a place to rest where no one would ever find me. The Boil would protect me. How could I expect that in the midst of boiling waters an island of gold would rise like a whale’s fin? Slowly, I began to find it beautiful, and draw the larger pieces together to make a real nest for my chicks. Slowly, I began to see it as all Griffin before me had seen it—the color of the sun, burnished and burning, light and life and fire sparkling inside it so fiercely that it gives off a quiet heat that only we can feel. I began to love it. And still I did not think of the Arimaspians, the creatures who killed my mother, the reason we cannot hoard as much of the precious stuff as we wish, because it would draw the killers like bees to summer-honey. Until I saw a ship’s mast, impossibly, on the roiling horizon, I never thought of it. Then I remembered; then I was ashamed at my naïveté. I wanted only to help my chicks break their eggs and teach them to fly; I wanted only to bring Giota under cover of night three perfect children, who would nuzzle against her neck, and press their warm heads to hers. I forgot that I am not a Griffin, I am only quarry—the last quarry.”
Sigrid’s eyes were full of tears, but they did not fall. She knuckled them away and fought the urge to touch the Griffin’s beautiful fur, which glimmered coldly like snow over a silver statue. She just stared up at the fabulous monster, whose eagle head was silhouetted against the clouded sun. The gold of her beak flashed—and indeed, Sigrid could see answering flashes in the sand: Here and there and here again, a gold fleck gleamed among the grains.
Into her thoughts the deep drum-voice of Oluwakim burst like the flight of an arrow.
“Well. She’s an abomination and a coward. I thought we’d come to find a real beast, and instead, we only find this poor heap of garbage, last bedraggled pigeon of a race of pigeons.”
He shrugged, his great black muscles rippling like continents drifting in the night. His men had not moved, standing frozen as blocks of wood. In all this stillness, it would have been easy to miss the sudden rush of movement that snapped through the crowd, but Sigrid saw it: Oluwakim reached for his sleek, thin dagger and clutched it in his fist for only a moment before throwing it, almost casually, between Sigrid’s arm and her ribs, directly at the heart of the White Griffin.
And as soon as the knife had left his hand, a second knife buried itself deep in his back, so that the dying cry of the King sounded in harmony beneath the last keening of the White Beast. Both bodies slumped forward and spilled the blackest blood of their hearts into the golden sand.
Sigrid cried out, and even in her mourning, she searched for the source of the second knife. Her eyes darted over the wretched beach, scouring it for an assassin. Finally, she seized upon black-haired Tomomo, who leaned casually against a skinny, starved palm tree, one muscled leg crossed over the other.
Standing next to her was a woman who might have been the twin of the dead King. Her hair was as long, and as braided with glowering gold. Her skin was as burnished black, the color of shadows within shadows. And where the King’s golden eye had been, she carried an eye of beryl, green and blue, shot through with white. At her waist were at least a dozen knives, all of gold, hanging still as bells without clappers.
As Sigrid stared in wonder, Tomomo took the dark woman’s hand in hers and kissed it in a genteel fashion. The two women smiled at each other, and the stranger took her hand from the captain, striding towards the corpse of Oluwakim with a grim face, her lips so tight that the thinnest thread could not pass between them. She stood over the body for a moment, her breathing harsh and ragged. Then, in one savage movement, she braced her sandaled foot against the King’s massive shoulder and ripped the golden eye from his skull. The Arimaspians howled their outrage, but at a glance from the woman, they fell silent. Solemnly, she removed the beryl eye from its socket and replaced it with the golden one. The blood of the King dripped from the eye like tears.
“Tommy!” Sigrid cried, her limbs so frozen in shock and grief that she had not even left the great nest. “What is happening? What have you done?”
The captain left her tree and joined the other woman at the corpse of the King. She knelt and examined the body, plucking a few choice pieces of gold from his hair.
“Sigrid, this is what piracy is,” she said ruefully, never looking up from the corpse, which she still combed for treasure. “Oluwakim gave us a great deal of money to chase down the poor Griffin. Oluwafunmike gave us more. We hid her away in the hold—not difficult. The Maidenhead is quite as remarkable belowdecks as she is above, as you’ve seen. She hoped, I think, that her father would only take an egg, and not kill the Griffin. It is sad that trust in one’s parents is so often misplaced. But it is not our place to take sides in dynastic squabbles, even”—she raised her eyes to meet Oluwafunmike’s, her gaze full of affection—“if one side clearly has the lion’s share of virtue.”
The princess scowled at her father’s corpse and retrieved her knife. “Our people can no longer allow our entire race to be exalted by the murder of the Griffin. I take the Ocular now, and begin a new dynasty. This eye, this last of all eyes, will be passed from heir to heir, and never again will we rip our gold from the breasts of innocent beasts. The end to this sad circus was worth whatever I had to pay Tomomo—and worth bearing the presence of pirates.” She jostled the captain’s shoulder with a large and comradely fist.
“But this is who we are, daughter of the Oluwa,” one of the Arimaspians protested. “Without the Griffin hunt, we are but nomads on the sea of the steppes. You will destroy our spirit! The Eye blessed us!”
