Chapter 8

  I saw the griffin for the first time in the grey light of early morning. Dawn came to the landing chamber as a gradual dilution of the darkness. The absolute black gave way to a deep charcoal that lifted in stages as the sun moved over the mountain above. The light that filtered down through the opening was indirect and diffuse, strained through cloud cover, and it gave the chamber a washed, colourless quality that turned the stone walls pale and made the shallow pools on the floor look like poured mercury. The griffin was standing. It had risen while I dozed, and it stood in the centre of the chamber with its head lifted toward the circle of sky, perfectly still, lit by the grey light in a way that showed me every detail I had been assembling by touch in the dark. It was larger than any griffin I had seen at the academy. The sun faction's griffins were bred for specific traits: symmetrical wing load, balanced thrust, and the clean proportions that judges scored at competitions. This animal had none of that. Its body was heavy and broad through the chest, with shoulders that bunched with muscle under a coat of feathers that were pale, almost white at the base, deepening through layers of cream and warm gold to a rich, burnished amber at the tips. The gold caught the grey morning light and held it, not bright but glowing, as though the feathers carried their own warmth even in the colourless dawn. The wings, folded against its sides, were massive. Even closed, I could see the span of them in the way the primary feathers extended past the animal's haunches, tips nearly touching the floor. Where the light struck them full, the gold turned almost molten. Where shadow fell, they paled to the colour of old bone.

  Its head was large and angular, built around a beak that was long and hooked and scarred along the left side where something had struck it hard enough to leave a permanent groove in the keratin. The scar was old, the edges worn smooth. The eyes were pale gold, the talons the colour of old iron, thick and curved and chipped at the tips from years of gripping stone. It was not a pretty animal. The academy's griffins were groomed and maintained, their feathers oiled, their talons filed, their beaks polished for inspections. This griffin had never been touched by a human hand before mine. Its feathers were rough and layered in the uneven way that comes from weather and use rather than care. Old scars showed through the plumage along its flanks where feathers had been torn out and grown back thinner. The gold that covered its body was not the polished, uniform gold of the academy's mounts. It was layered and uneven, darker where scar tissue had altered the way the feathers grew, lighter where the plumage was thickest and healthiest. It was built like a tool that has been used for a single purpose for a very long time. Every part is optimized for function, with nothing wasted on display.

  I looked at it standing in the grey light, and the bond in my chest pulsed with a warmth that had nothing to do with temperature. "We need to go up," I said.

  The griffin looked down at me. The pale gold eyes held my face for a long moment. Then it lowered itself to the floor, folding its legs beneath its body and pressing its belly to the stone in a smooth, controlled motion that brought its back to a height I could reach.

  I climbed on. My body protested in a comprehensive inventory of every injury it had accumulated over the past two days. The claw wounds on my back pulled and tore where scabs had formed during the night, and I felt fresh blood seep through my shirt. My rib clicked when I swung my leg over. My ankle sent a spike of pain through my calf when I locked my thighs against the griffin's sides. My hands, raw and bleeding and stiff from the cold, fumbled for grip in the feathers at the base of its neck.

  The griffin stood. The ground fell away beneath me and I gripped harder, fingers digging into the coarse plumage where the neck met the shoulders. The feathers there were thicker and more tightly packed than anywhere else on its body, as if the animal had been designed with a handhold built into its anatomy.

  It spread its wings. In the confined space of the landing chamber, the span nearly reached both walls. The muscle at the base of each wing was a knotted mass of tissue that I could feel shifting under the feathers as it adjusted its stance. In the dim light, the undersides of the wings were pale, almost white, veined with gold where the light passed through the thinner feathers near the tips.

  It looked up at the circle of sky. The pale gold eyes narrowed.

  It launched.

  The force pressed me flat against its neck. The wings drove down with a power that compressed the air beneath us into a solid platform, and the chamber floor dropped away in a rush of cold air and stone dust. The walls of the Pit blurred past on both sides, dark stone streaked with mineral deposits and the carved marks I had felt with my fingers in the dark, visible now as shallow grooves racing past too fast to read.

  The wings beat in a rhythm unlike the measured strokes I had watched the academy's griffins perform. Each downstroke was explosive and slightly different from the last, adjusting in real time to the shaft's shape and the currents of air within it. The wingtips scraped the stone walls with each stroke, and fragments of rock rained down. The animal did not slow. It climbed with a single-minded, vertical intensity that made the muscles in its back roll and contract in waves I could feel through my entire body. Then we cleared the rim, and the world opened.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  The sky struck me as if it were a tangible force. After two days of complete darkness, the bright grey morning light made my eyes water instantly. I squeezed them shut, feeling tears stream sideways across my temples. Then, the cold, swift wind followed, carrying the scent of pine resin and snow with a crisp, clean quality typical of high-altitude mountain air.

  I opened my eyes in stages, squinting against the light, and the world assembled itself around me in pieces. The sky was pale and enormous, a dome of grey cloud that stretched from horizon to horizon. Below us, the mountain fell away in a steep face of dark stone and patchy snow. And below that, spread across a wide valley between two ridges, the academy.

  I had never seen it from above. No unbonded rider ever did. The layout revealed itself: the sun faction's buildings on the western slope, roofs angled, courtyards wide. The moon faction's buildings on the eastern face, pressed into the mountain's shadow, lower and darker. The rider garden in the centre, a grey square of packed earth surrounded by bent trees. The training fields stretching south. The stables, sun on the left and moon on the right.

  The bond in my chest was burning with a warmth that made everything else feel small.

  "Take us down," I said.

  The griffin folded its wings and dove.

  I chose the rider garden. I chose it deliberately. The garden was the most public space in the academy, the one place where both factions crossed paths, and I wanted every person in it to see me come down from the sky on the back of a griffin that was larger and older and more scarred than anything in their stables. A griffin, the colour of sunlight and old gold, burning against the grey morning like something that did not belong to this century. The griffin pulled out of the dive thirty feet above the garden and levelled its wings in a glide that carried us over the low walls and the bent trees and the stone benches. The talons extended. The wings flared. We landed with an impact that cracked the flagstones and sent a sound across the courtyard that turned every head.

  I slid off the griffin's back, my legs buckling upon landing due to the flight and cold. I caught myself against the griffin's side until the trembling subsided, then straightened and lifted my chin. I looked like a disaster, which I could tell without a mirror. My clothes were torn and stained with cave water and blood. Dust and gravel matted my hair. One side of my face was swollen from hitting a stone. My hands were raw, and my boots, darkened with dried water, bore mineral lines on the leather. I smelled of wet stone and old blood.

  The griffin stood beside me, contrasting sharply with my nature: composed, still, and silent. In the grey morning light, it remained motionless with wings folded, its pale gold eyes calmly surveying the courtyard as if unconcerned about its environment. The sunlight caught the gold of its feathers, illuminating them against the dull grey stone and sky. It appeared as if the creature was plucked from a forgotten story, something from a time long past that no one alive could recall.

  The garden was full. First-years on both sides of the faction divide were crossing toward the training fields for morning drills. A group of second-year sun riders had stopped near the eastern arch with their griffins behind them, feathers ruffled by the wind from our landing. An instructor near the practice lance rack had turned and was staring. A cluster of moon riders on the far side had gone quiet. They looked at me. They looked at the griffin. The silence spread outward from the landing site like a pressure wave, conversation dying in stages as more people turned and saw and stopped speaking.

  No one stepped forward. No one spoke or approached. They simply looked at me from afar, where I stood with a bloodstained and cave-dusted bonded griffin. The expressions on their faces were surprising, nothing like the admiration, curiosity, or grudging respect I had anticipated for surviving the mountain on such a remarkable creature in two days.

  They regarded me with contempt. A second-year sun rider near the eastern arch leaned toward the boy beside him and whispered something I couldn't hear. The boy looked at me, shook his head, and turned away. On the far side, a moon rider girl I saw during my cleaning punishment gave me a hard, closed, and final expression, like someone who has already made up their mind and nothing I do will change it. I didn't understand.

  A first-year sun rider walked past me on her way to the training field. She was small, with her hair pulled back in a tight braid and her uniform still carrying the stiffness of new fabric. She did not look at the griffin. She looked at me, and when she was close enough that her voice would not carry, she spoke. "Two days," she said. "Risol took fifty lashes for what you did. And you spent just two days in the pit."

  She kept walking. Her boots crunched on the gravel and the sound faded into the general silence of the garden.

  I stood beside my griffin, the bond warm in my chest, and the pride that had been sitting there beside it growing cold. Risol again. Two days in a cave was an achievement. I had thought coming out alive and bonded was proof of something.

  I received barely fifty lashes for killing a wolf pup — yes, it was unfair, I understand. I had almost died more than once and managed to crawl out in two days with a bonded griffin, yet that wasn’t enough for them because of those fifty lashes. So, what if he did?

  The sun vanished behind the clouds. A breeze drifted over the garden walls, carrying the scent of wolf musk from the moon faction stables. I stood there, feeling the warmth in my chest alongside a colder sensation.