33. First Blood
First Blood
In the days that followed, Kain made trip after trip out into the woods. He kept clear of the nest, but he gathered what he could for the poison wherever it grew.
One night it rained, and the next morning he came back with dozens of nightcap mushrooms in the waxed satchel. He started in on the brewing after that. What came of it was a gelatinous ooze, too thick to pour and too thin to keep in anything but a sealed pot.
The morning after the rain, Kain woke with the sense that something was off. He stood at the window a while, frowning, trying to put a name to it, before it came to him that Ghost wasn't in the house.
He looked through the rooms, then stepped out onto the dark porch. The sun was barely up and the birds were only beginning, and there was no sign of the wolf anywhere.
That was trouble.
He ate a quick breakfast off the night before's leftovers, pulled on his boots, and was in the stable saddling Roan when hooves came pounding up the drive. Sam rode in hard.
"That serious?" Kain asked, swinging up onto Roan. "You'd usually just send word."
Sam's eyes narrowed. "You knew?"
"Had a feeling." Kain gathered the reins. "What's happened?"
"Garland's farm." Sam was already turning his horse. "Come on."
They rode out, and Kain put Roan to a harder pace than usual, driving up the road toward town. On. They had been coming to fetch him, which told him plainly enough how bad it was.
Garland was the town blacksmith, but he kept a small farm besides, half a mile west of the village near the old cracked bridge. As they came through town Kain saw Sasha out on the porch of the Kettle, one hand pressed over her mouth. He didn't slow. They rode on past her and out to the farm.
Garland's place was small, the house not much bigger than Kain's, with a little sheep barn and a pen for a handful of head. The forge kept the man busy enough that he had no time to work more land than that.
Out in the pen two dead sheep lay in the dirt beside a crater punched into the soft ground, and there was blood on the earth in a third spot.
Sam rode straight up to the house, and Kain swung down, hitched Roan to a post, and went in through the front door.
A farmhand lay across the kitchen table with his shirt off and a set of long gashes down his back.
Maggarie worked a needle and thread through them while a woman Kain took for Garland's wife wiped the blood away.
Garland himself stood off to the side, rubbing his jaw. Kain took it in, then looked to Garland. "Gryphon got him?"
Garland nodded. He had gone pale behind the big beard, and he folded his hands together.
"It was an hour ago, near enough. I was fixing to leave for the forge, and Willem here was seeing to the sheep. There was this loud whistling, and then." Garland stopped.
"I can tell it myself," Willem said through his teeth. "I could use something to take my mind off it."
Kain came around to the man's head.
"Garland was about ready to go. We heard it, and I thought it was a storm coming, that's what it sounded like. Wind, fast wind, whistling and screaming. Then I looked up and down it came."
"Where did it come from?" Kain asked.
"The east. Off the hills, and fast." Willem shut his eyes a moment. "Came down so hard the sound of it must have carried clear to Greyhaven. Killed two of the sheep where they stood, and it was going for more."
"Why did it go after you?" Kain asked.
"Because he went over the fence and ran straight at it," Garland said. "Fool of a farmhand."
"I thought." Willem hissed as Maggarie drew a flap of skin back into place, held still a moment, then went on. "I thought it might be like a bear. That something smaller running at it might put it off. I was wrong, and I did not know it until it turned on me."
"That was a brave thing," Kain said.
"A stupid thing," said Garland.
"I won't argue that. But a man who'll go over a fence at a gryphon on the chance of saving your sheep is a man you give a raise, time to mend, and a place at your table."
Garland grunted. "I'll not promise the table. But you've earned a copper a day more, and all the time you need to mend. Half wages while you do. I'd give you full if I could, but I'll have to pay a man to stand in for you."
"I'll be on my feet quick as I can," Willem said.
"He should not be down long," Maggarie said, not looking up from her work. "A week for the stitches to set. No. Two. The muscle's sound under it. The worry is him tearing them open and letting it go bad."
"Bright side, it only raked you," Kain said.
Willem managed a nod. "Just a swipe, then it was gone again. Did not even eat the sheep, and only killed the two. I'll call that a win."
Kain went back out, put a hand on the fence rail, and swung over it to look at the ground where the thing had struck. The line of its coming was plain enough, the crater slanted hard to one side and deeper on the far edge.
He had seen the dents it left in firmer ground before. This was a true pit, dug by the force of the thing coming down into the soft dirt of the pen. The two sheep beside it were torn open the same way as all the rest.
He would have given a good deal to have seen it work.
Ghost had likely heard it come down and gone off, to look or to keep clear of it, and Kain couldn't say which. He crouched over the pit a long moment, working it over, then got to his feet and went back up to the house.
"Well?" Garland said. "You're going to go and kill it."
"It's not as simple as that. I keep saying so."
"But you killed the wolves. The story I heard is you killed a wyvern too."
"I killed a wyvern." Kain held his eye. "I'm the only one of my team who walked out of that job."
Garland did not look away. "You walked out. Willem walked out. The next man might not."
Kain left the house and started up the road toward town. He wasn't surprised to find dozens of people out in it when he got there, every one of them turned his way.
They had decided he was the man who killed monsters, and they had come to see what he meant to do about this one. He went past the hopeful, upturned faces without a word, and when Sasha caught his eye and tipped her head at the tavern, he slipped inside.
"I can't stay long," Kain said. "If I'm taking this thing on, I need more poison made. I've got some. Not enough."
"What's still short?" Sasha asked.
"Nightcaps. The berries and the wolfsbane I have plenty of."
"Could I help you make it, if you brought what you had here?"
"It cooks down over a fire, but low." Kain frowned, working for the words.
"Boil it and the strength goes out of it.
No heat at all and it comes out weak. Somewhere in between.
And the smell of it alone turns my head.
I have to do it outside, and even then I can't be near the pot more than a few seconds at a stretch, holding my breath the whole while. "
Sasha poured him a cup of coffee and took him through to the back, and he leaned against the doorframe.
"They're all looking to you," she said quietly.
"I know." He drank. "I've been getting ready as best I can. I've been hoping I would not have to use any of it."
"What did you think would happen?" Sasha asked. "That it would just leave?"
"It left somewhere else to come here, so it's not past hoping.
" He drank again. "But yes. I hoped. People are poor eating.
Stringy and bony and more trouble than the meat's worth, and we fight back besides.
A thing like that goes after people because it feels crowded, or because it takes to the killing.
Not for a meal." He set the cup down. "I hoped it would keep to the edges, decide we were more bother than we were worth, and move on. "
"And now that it's hurt Willem?" Sasha asked.
"Now it's had a clean win off a man, and that makes a thing bolder. It might start in on people to drive us off. It might just grow surer of itself."
"Which do you think?"
"One doesn't rule out the other." He finished the coffee. "I've got work to do. Will you come down to the house this evening?"
"What for?"
"Village gossip."
Kain went back down to the farm and slipped off into the trees to cook down more of the poison. Ghost turned up while he was at it, padding out of the brush with no hurt on it that he could see.
Kain crouched and laid a hand on its head a moment.
Wherever the wolf had gone, it had kept well clear of the thing.
He had a pot cooking low by the time Sasha came down that evening with Matthew on her hip, and he took them up into the house quick, where the boy especially would be out of the fumes.
"So what are people saying?" Kain asked, sitting down at the table. "Sorry to pull you off the bar. I'll be quick about it."
Sasha shifted Matthew to her other arm. "I've got someone on the bar, and nobody's eating or drinking much tonight anyway. What is it you need?"
"How everyone's taking it. How they talk when I'm not the one standing there."
Sasha blew out her cheeks. "The children are all but shut up in their houses, and every animal in town has been put up in a barn.
Sam's got that field guide of his open to the gryphon page, set out on the counter where everyone coming in can read it.
The tavern's full of folk with questions, and most of the questions are about you.
They've got it in their heads you'll ride out and put an end to it on your own.
The ones who don't believe you're already at it want you to be. "
Kain nodded.
"One more thing." Sasha winced. "They're calling a village meeting. I've been told to invite you to it."
"Invite me?" Kain raised an eyebrow.
"Well."
"I can guess. When?"
"Tomorrow morning."
"I'll be there."
There was nothing else to say to that. Sasha nodded, the worry still sitting in her eyes, and carried Matthew out into the dark.
Kain stayed at the table and turned it all over. It had gone a step further this time. Willem had lived only because the claws had raked him and not hooked.
Had they sunk in, the man would be dead now, bled out on the dirt, or carried off to the nest, or dropped from a height onto the rocks. The gryphon was bolder than it had been, and it had learned tonight that a man could be opened up, and maybe killed.
Kain sat with that a while, then set to working out how to turn it to his own account.