Chapter 4
Rikard
Three cups of mead to the wind, Lucan launched into a ballad about a she-gargoyle with a long tail. Nearly the whole tavern was singing along by the second verse.
“She swept the hearth, she swept the room;She swept the stars, she swept the moon!”
Rikard nursed his drink at the end of the table, his back against the wall.
It meant he could face the door and keep his tattered wings from snagging on chair backs and passing keepers’ trays.
The second-tier tavern where he met with his friends catered to the rookery crowd.
It was loud and reeked of mead and roasted boar.
He preferred it to the polite polish of the establishments on higher tiers, where politics played out in excruciatingly dull conversations.
Down here, nobody cared about what tier you were or whether you’d produced an heir. They were too busy watching Lucan make a fool of himself.
“—so long she wrapped it ’round him thrice!
” Lucan finished triumphantly, standing on a bench with one clawed foot on the table, his horns scoring the ceiling as he raised his cup in the air.
The curly hair that fell rakishly across his forehead had made many in the tavern purr, and not just the females.
The room roared with laughter and applause.
Seated across from Rikard, Bastien shook his head but grinned in spite of himself, his large pointed ears flushed at the tips from the mead. His wingspan took up the space of two gargoyles, and the patron beside him had long since surrendered the perch.
“He’s going to get us thrown out again,” Rikard observed, chuckling.
“He hasn’t started taking off his clothes yet. We have time.”
Drogan, who sat on the short end of the table nearest the bar, brooded into his tankard. He’d been quiet all evening, his broad jaw set and his long, straight horns casting sharp shadows on the wall as he stared at the swirling brew. The air around him thickened, like the pressure before a storm.
“You’re in a mood,” Rikard said, the mead dulling his caution.
Drogan’s lip curled. “Merely thinking.”
“Dangerous pastime.” Drogan growled at him, and Rikard laughed. “Really, what has your tail in such a twist that you can’t even drain your cup?”
“Dirt dwellers,” he snapped. “Worse than the moths. Just a constant natter when I’m trying to guard the gate. You’d think they’d have something more useful to do with their lives than complain, but no. It is endless.”
Rikard snorted. “I catalog their complaints. I’m painfully aware of the pleasure they take in lodging them.”
“Do they think we are their pets? Their servants?” Drogan’s lip curled back from his teeth. “It’s like they’ve forgotten who stood between them and the goblin hordes. Who bled and died for them.”
Rikard took a slow sip of mead. He’d had this conversation with Drogan before, in various forms. Drogan’s hatred of humans ran deeper than the day-to-day.
His younger brother Valric was killed in the goblin wars, and many times he’d expressed that he wished it had been him instead.
The wound of his loss hadn’t scarred over and become a memory, like Rikard’s wings, but festered.
“They’re a weak species,” Rikard said with a shrug. “If they could defend themselves, they would. But they can’t, so it’s left to us to do it for them.”
It was true, and it would soothe Drogan to agree with him. Bastien, however, did not receive the message, his face pulling into a frown. “I don’t know. They do all right for themselves now that they are allowed to use some tael-forged weapons. It was our laws that kept them helpless.”
“Why should we help them?” Drogan burst out, ignoring Bastien. His mouth twisted. “Why devote our lives to their safety and comfort when they’re useless and cause us nothing but pain?”
Rikard drained his cup before answering the questions that were likely intended to be rhetorical. “The treaty demands it. It’s not for us to break a thousand-year-old agreement.”
A keeper spied the empty cup and paused by their table with a pitcher. “More mead, Nadir?”
Without waiting for Rikard’s answer, she splashed the liquid both into the cup and out of it, soaking the knee of Drogan’s breeches. Drogan’s jaw worked, and Bastien caught Rikard’s eye across the table, asking the silent question: should we haul him out of the tavern before he flips the table?
At the same moment, Lucan reached the chorus of a ballad that required audience participation, and the noise swelled until Rikard felt it rattling his mind walls.
He was about to suggest they relocate when a familiar stocky female pushed through the crowd, elbowing past the revelers in a direct path to their table.
His mother. Fallen gods. Cléa’s wide mouth was set in a line that meant she was on a mission, and she wore her gold-and-garnet horn caps, which meant she’d just come from a skyball or some other formal event.
“Brace yourself,” Bastien murmured.
“Rikard.” She arrived at the table, slightly breathless, and placed a proprietary hand on his shoulder. “There you are. I’ve been looking everywhere. You weren’t in your office. You weren’t in the eyrie. Now I find you wasting away in your cups?”
“Is it so shocking that I would choose to relax during my leisure hours?”
“We don’t have time for your wit. Come with me. We need to talk.” She tugged at him, her claws digging into his scarred hide when he refused to budge.
He pulled his arm from her grip. “I’m among friends. Whatever it is, say it here.”
She sighed, snapping her teeth in annoyance.
“Have it your way. élowen of the eighth tier extended an invitation to our family to join hers for an autumn hunt. She specifically asked that you would attend.” His mother’s voice dropped to a confidential murmur.
“Eighth tier, Rikard. Her father was a wing commander in the Third Watch, decorated twice. The family has hunting rights in the northern foothills. Do you understand what this could mean?”
He understood all too well. Cléa had produced another eligible female for his inspection, like a cat depositing a dead bird upon his doorstep.
“I’m not interested.”
“You haven’t even met her. She’s lovely. Wide wingspan, excellent hips.”
Beside him, Drogan’s snicker caused him to inhale his mead, and even Bastien’s ears twitched with the effort of suppressing a reaction. Lucan, mercifully, was too deep in his performance to notice.
“Send her my regrets.” Rikard turned back to his drink, but his mother’s claws dug into his shoulder this time, deep enough to register.
“At least meet with her. You owe me that much.”
He owed her far more than that, and they both knew it.
She’d held their family together through his deployment and the aftermath of his reconstruction.
She’d maintained their seventh-tier status when he was missing and suppressed the whispers about his condition once he came back.
He owed her everything, and the debt crushed him because he could never repay it in the currency she wanted.
“Decline the invitation, Mother. Or don’t, and enjoy a successful hunt. But leave me out of it.”
“What is the matter with you?” Cléa hissed close to his ear so he couldn’t miss a word despite Lucan’s raucous song. “She’s perfect. Pretty, well-connected, from a high-tier family. What more do you want?!”
Bastien’s face had transformed into sympathy, which was worse than the laughter.
Rikard’s jaw worked as he swallowed his bitterness.
It was not Cléa’s fault he was broken, but he wished she would not pretend that he was whole.
But she kept presenting him with the same impossible test, and the failure stung worse each time.
“How do you expect me to hunt with her? Will she carry me on her back? Tow me behind her like a kite?”
“You could watch the hunt from the ground and then feast with the rest of us.” His mother’s face crumpled for an instant before she ironed it smooth again. She knew the humiliation she proposed. Of course she knew.
He did not enjoy being cruel to his mother, but she would not rest until he was. He leaned against the wall and drained his cup again with lazy insolence. “I’ll stick to my human harlots. At least they don’t expect me to catch their dinner before I fuck them.”
He said it to shock her, and it worked. Cléa’s wide mouth fell open, and her stocky frame went rigid. She shot a panicked glance at the moth battering itself against the sconce beside the table and waved a furious hand at it, as though she could erase the gossip from its tiny mind.
It giggled as it dodged her. “The Nadir doesn’t feed his human harlots,” it chortled in its thin, reedy voice. “He likes them hungry.”
“Don’t say such things where they can hear!” she whispered fiercely, her eyes watering. Perhaps he’d gone too far this time. “The moths already call you a deviant. Do you want them spreading this, too?”
“They can say what they like. It hardly matters.” But he rose from his seat and bid goodbye to his distracted friends.
Thankfully, they’d lost interest in his family business because Lucan had unlaced his breeches, and they were attempting to wrestle him down from the table before he disrobed entirely.
Cléa, however, could not be distracted. She carried on as they exited the tavern.
“It matters to me! It matters to your father. It matters to every gargoyle in our family who depends on our tier for their standing.” Her eyes glistened, and he hated himself for putting the shine there.
“You are the Nadir. You earned us our seventh-tier status. If you won’t secure it with a mate and an heir, someone else will take it from you. ”
“No one wants the Nadir’s seat.”
“Perrin does.”
His distant cousin on his mother’s side, Perrin was a smooth-tongued gargoyle a few years younger than him, with a good set of horns and little else to remark upon.
Rikard had filed him away as one of the many relatives who enjoyed the family’s status because it earned him invitations to good parties.
He’d never noticed any particular ambition in him.
“So? He has no claim to the seat unless I’m dead.”
“That’s why you need an heir,” she reminded him as they walked together. “If you die without one, he will be appointed. Or if the Zenith deems you unsuitable for the position.”
Her point was well-aimed. The Nadir’s office needed some appearance of respectability if the humans were to trust it. Gérald, the Zenith, was a pragmatist. If Rikard disgraced the Nadir’s seat, Gérald would make the swap without sentiment.
“Even if I take a mate tomorrow, I can’t produce an heir.” He said it quietly in case any moths were nearby. This bit of gossip, he did not want in circulation.
His mother’s expression shuttered as they reached the hollow center of the Tower.
The open space, bridged by crossbeams, allowed gargoyles to fly between tiers without exiting the Tower.
At this time of night, it was relatively quiet, with only a few members of the watch still training and a few gargoyle fledglings stretching their wings.
“It’s only been five years. You never know what might happen. ”
How does a male tell his mother that his cock is a lost cause? He closed his eyes in resignation. “I’ll attend the next skyball,” he said.
“You will?”
“I’ll roost on a ledge and watch other gargoyles court the females you’ve chosen for me, and I’ll make polite conversation in between dances while they catch their breath. Is that sufficient?”
He opened his eyes in time to see her face brighten so much it made his chest ache. “There are females who value conversation, you know. Not everyone needs acrobatics.”
He wasn’t so optimistic. The skydance was the centerpiece of gargoyle courtship for a reason.
It demonstrated strength, dexterity, and compatibility.
A male who couldn’t skydance was advertising his deficiencies to every potential mate in attendance.
He might as well hang a banner from his horns that said “broken.”
But his mother was already making mental lists of females who would attend and families that overlook his flightlessness in exchange for a seventh-tier connection.
“If you say so.”
“I know so.” She cupped his ruined face in both hands and pressed her forehead to his chin because she wasn’t tall enough to reach his forehead. Her purr was thin and anxious, nothing like the full-throated contentment of a happy gargoyle, but it meant she loved him.
He suffered the embrace for as long as he could stand it, then gently extricated himself. “Go home, Mother. I’ll see you in a bit.”
She frowned at him, her forehead creasing. “I hate to see you climbing the ladders like a keeper. Let me send your father to carry you.”
“I’m used to it,” he grunted and waved her off to begin the seven-story climb.