22. Talons
Talons
It took a few more days to get the bones of the kitchen in, the serving opening framed and shored, the new counters built, and the flue run up for the second stove.
When it was in, Sasha sent him home to see to his own work, for the crops were coming on and there would be harvesting to start before long.
He went out to his garden the next morning.
After so long working up at the Kettle it felt strange to be back in his own dirt. Weeds had come up thick around the crops while he was gone, and he set to them straightaway.
The new ground, Plot 9 and Plot 10, hadn't been planted to anything yet, so those he could deal with fast; he took a hoe to the whole of them and tore the ground up again, which would do the soil no harm. With the new plots hacked clean he moved on to the ones that wanted more care.
Here the weeds grew up close against the plants, twined in so tight that a man couldn't pull one without risking the crop beside it. Kain knelt and worked down the rows slow, drawing up the bindweed and the thistles by the root, careful to take the whole of each so it wouldn't come back.
He had worked through two plots that way before he heard hooves on the road.
He paid them no mind until the gate squeaked, and Jeremiah's voice carried across the yard.
"Kain. You out here?"
"Out back." Ghost rose from where it lay by the pumpkins and slipped off into the tree row, gone before Jeremiah came round the corner of the house. Kain stood and wiped his hands down his trousers, though they stayed too dirty to offer, so he didn't.
Jeremiah put his hand out anyway, and Kain shook it.
There was something off about a visit like this. He was up and down the road all day with his dairy and his deliveries, but he didn't stop in without a reason, either advice to give or trouble on his hands.
He stood there a moment, his face gone distracted and far off.
"Well. I know it's an odd thing to ask." Jeremiah turned his hat in his hands. "Would you come and look at something with me?"
"Look at what?" Kain asked. "If there's something on your land you can't make sense of, we're both in trouble. You know this ground better than I ever will."
"I've got three dead goats."
The words sat in the air between them. Kain frowned. "Dead how?"
"Don't know." Jeremiah met his eye and held up both hands. "And that's the truth of it. I've seen what wolves do to a goat, and this wasn't wolves. I can't make it out at all. I was hoping you'd come look at them before I put them in the ground. You know monsters and the like, don't you?"
"Some. I'm no scholar of them." Kain leaned the hoe against the fence. "I'll come look."
He saddled Roan and rode out toward Jeremiah's place with the older man alongside, and partway down the road Kain caught sight of Ghost off in the field grass, keeping pace with them at a distance.
That was a strange thing for the wolf to do. Ghost rarely came along when Kain went off anywhere, and never when there were other people in it; the wolf kept to itself and to cover. Something had put it on edge, or it had a notion of its own.
"You hear anything in the night?" Kain asked. "I take it this happened after dark."
"It did." Jeremiah stroked his chin and shook his head.
"And no, I didn't, not that I can swear to.
I've been turning it over, trying to call up whether I heard the goats crying or any such thing.
There's a piece of me thinks I heard something around midnight, but that might just be my head putting in what it wants to be there. "
"That happens." Kain nodded. "No roar, then. No sound like thunder, no horn, no rush of wind?"
"What kind of thing are we talking about?"
"Haven't seen the goats, so I couldn't tell you yet." Kain kept his eyes on the road. "I'm ruling things out, is all. Some beasts carry a sound with them. A giant moving sounds like thunder a long way off, and so on."
"Nothing like that. A bit of wind, maybe, but it was a windy night."
Kain hadn't felt a breath of wind the whole night before.
They rode in at Jeremiah's place, and through the window Kain could see Elizabeth busy at something in the house, though she didn't come out. The two of them rode up to the goat pen and got down. Three goats lay dead in the corner of it.
"Most nights they're shut in the barn." Jeremiah nodded up at it. The pen ran along the barn wall, with low doors cut for the goats to come and go. "Feed's in there, out of the weather. These three must've wandered out in the night."
"Or were drawn out." Kain leaned over the fence. "May I?"
"Go on."
Kain swung over the fence and crouched by the bodies. One had been half eaten; the other two lay whole, but for what had killed them.
Each had its throat torn open, the ground gone dark and tacky with the blood of it, and it stuck to his boots as he knelt. He drew the matted hair back from the nearest wound. It wasn't a ragged tear. It was round, and clean, and punched straight through.
Something round had done that, not a mouth of teeth. He went looking for the others and found them, two more set back along the body, near two feet between the first and the second, and a third on the far side to match the second. A foot closing on the goat, the points of it driven clean through.
"What is it?" Jeremiah asked.
"Give me a moment, I'm fitting it together." Kain didn't look up. "I can't give you a color or a breed of the thing. I can likely give you the basic taxonomy."
"Basic what?"
"Sorry." Kain turned the word over and let it go. "I knew someone, once."
The someone had been Sarah, who could track a hare across bare granite and tell you what it had eaten the day before, and who had shown him enough of it that some had stuck. He needed all of it now, so he moved to the half-eaten goat.
He found the punctures again, and more besides.
Where the goat had been opened up, the flesh hadn't been bitten through; it had been pulled, stretched and torn, the innards dragged half out and the bones snapped at no even place.
Something with no teeth in its head had taken hold of it and worried it apart.
A beak, then, and talons. The killing had been done with talons, driven through and pulled free, and the eating with a beak, snagging and hauling at the guts. It was a bird, and a big one.
A dragon would have left the marks of teeth, so a dragon he could set aside, but if not a dragon, what kind of bird came down on a goat and tore it open like that?
"Any tracks coming up to the pen?" Kain stood and scanned the ground for the print of anything heavy coming in.
"None," Jeremiah said. "Like the thing dropped straight down out of the sky."
Looking the muddy ground over, Kain found that was near the truth of it. A few strides off from the bodies the earth was punched and scuffed where something had come down hard, with scrapes that could have been the drag of talons, though he couldn't swear to that part.
"Could I trouble you for a cup of water?" Kain asked.
"Oh. Sure." Jeremiah nodded. "Won't be a moment."
Kain watched him out of the corner of his eye until he had gone up into the house, then crossed to the place where it had come down.
He found one set of marks, then went looking for the second, and after a moment there it was, set well forward of the first, with a smear of blood where it had likely landed on a goat.
The front of it had come down on talons, the same that had done the killing, the prints spread and driven deep.
The hind of it hadn't. Behind the talons the ground showed a pair of broad pads pressed in heavy, the track of something that walked on paws and carried real weight on them.
A bird in the front. A cat behind. Near six feet from the fore prints to the hind.
Two sets of feet, fore and hind, and a beak between them, on a body six feet long. He knew what made a shape like that. He didn't want to put the word to it. Not yet.
Off to the side the grass stirred, and Ghost came out of it and padded in closer. The wolf put its nose to the air and growled low, then started to pace, a slow circle that carried it to the fence and back along the same line.
The other goats bolted into the barn at the sight of it, but Ghost paid them no mind. It held a good thirty feet off from the bodies and would come no nearer, the growl never leaving its throat.
Whatever had done this, the wolf knew it and wanted no part of it, and Kain didn't need telling.
Ghost growled once more, then wheeled and loped off. A moment later Jeremiah came down from the house with a cup of water in his hand, and Kain climbed back over the fence.
"Here." Jeremiah passed it over, and Kain took a long drink. "So what were you after, that you didn't want me watching you look at it?"
Kain looked at him over the rim of the cup.
"I'm no fool, Kain. I've sent more than one man off for water to get him clear when I needed a thing done quiet. So what is it? A dragon? You find me a dragon scale?"
"Not a dragon." Kain shook his head. "Whatever it was, it killed with talons and ate with a beak."
"There's not many things fit that."
"No," Kain said. "There aren't."
The word sat at the back of his mind where he kept it. Gryphon.
What he said aloud was, "My guess is a big bird of prey, blown off its range and hunting where it shouldn't be."
"A bird did that?"
"There are eagles up in the northern peaks big enough to carry off a man.
" Kain knew it was no eagle, but he let the answer stand.
Say gryphon, and have it turn out a wandering bird, and he would have loosed a panic for nothing.
Say gryphon, and have the thing move on, and there would be no good come of the word, only fear.
Better to wait, and be sure, and let the town sleep easy while it still could.
"Huh. Things you learn." Jeremiah shook his head. "I'll be glad if it doesn't come back."
"I'll ask Sam whether there've been other reports of big predators about," Kain said.
"You reckon you can take it on, like you did the wolves?"
Kain's hand went for the hilt at his hip out of old habit and found nothing there. The sword hadn't hung at his side since he came to Tillamore, and he shook his head.
"I can't promise you anything. I won't."
"Fair enough." Jeremiah nodded. "I'll keep the goats shut in at night, regardless."
"Do that." Kain turned for Roan, swung up, and put the horse out onto the road.
He rode home with the word still behind his teeth, the one he hadn't given Jeremiah. A gryphon, near as he could read it, had come down into the hills above Tillamore, and a gryphon didn't drift off.
It would kill again, and the next time the word would be harder to hold.