25. The Witness
The Witness
Kain and Carol put the last of the kitchen to bed the next day, her tile and his edging both. He kept an eye on the sky while they worked, but nothing showed in it, and the birds went about their flights the same as ever, as near as he could tell.
He was no Sarah, who could have read more out of a few startled sparrows than he ever would. No more animals turned up dead, and he let himself think the thing had moved on.
The day after the kitchen was done, that changed.
Kain hadn't yet woken for the day when a frantic banging started up at the door. He rolled out of bed, pulled on his trousers, and went through to the front room.
Ghost was already slipping out the back as he opened the front door, and Oren stood on the step, gasping, looking up at him with wide eyes.
"It happened again," Kain said.
"It did. It was Royce Berkins." Oren nodded fast.
"I'll be along." Kain stretched. "Is anyone dead?"
"No."
"Hurt?"
"No, but everyone's down at the store and they're all worked up."
"Then there's time to eat first." Kain stood aside and waved him in. "You had breakfast?"
"No," Oren said.
"Then you eat here, and I'll be along behind you with Roan." He said it slow and flat. "Come on."
He set out biscuits and jam for the boy and ate a little himself while he went out and saddled Roan. He brought the horse around to the door, Oren came running, and the boy scrambled up behind him and they set off up the road to town.
A knot of people stood gathered at the general store, talking fast over one another, and they looked up and parted as he rode in. Word was out, then, whatever he had wanted. The thing he had been keeping behind his teeth wouldn't stay there now.
He swung down off Roan and went on inside. A farmer near his own age stood shaking by the counter, his hands unsteady, while Sasha pressed a cup on him that he kept refusing.
When he saw Kain he turned and put out a hand.
"There you are. The monster slayer."
"Don't put words in my mouth." Kain shook the hand and let it go. "I killed some wolves once. That doesn't make me a dragon-slayer. Just tell me what happened."
Royce pulled in a breath and started to tell it.
"It was early. I'm up at four every morning, for the chickens and the cow. Eggs want taking early, the cow wants milking early, and I don't mind it as a rule. The birds start up. The whole world comes awake.
"This morning was different. I did the eggs, no trouble, and headed for the barn, and then all at once the birds quit.
They'd only just started, and then there was nothing.
No sound at all. That put the fear in me.
I started looking around, and that's when I saw it.
Huge. Black against the sky, with these great wings on it.
It was sailing over, and then it just dropped.
"I'd only just got the barn door open. I wish to God I'd left it shut, except then maybe it would've been waiting on me instead. I turned and ran for the house. I heard it hit the ground behind me, felt the wind off it near knock me flat. I was sure it would come down on my back.
"I got to the porch and turned, ready to duck inside.
There it was, big as two cows, wings spread wide, and then it folded them up and went into the barn.
My cow set to bawling and kicking, and then she went quiet.
The sheep did the same, their bells going and going, and then they screamed, and then there was nothing.
Then it came back out with half a sheep hanging from its beak, and it flew off and never looked at me, and I came straight here. "
Kain heard him out. The shaking hadn't left the man's voice, but he wasn't finished with him yet. "Describe it for me," he said quietly.
"Tan. All over tan. Gold-brown, more like." Royce worked at it. "The front half was like a bird, a hawk or an eagle, something of that order. The back half was a cat."
Kain lowered his head while Sasha looked from him to Sam, and Sam had the monster guide open on the counter, but Kain had no need of it now. Gryphon.
"What can you tell us about it?" Sasha asked, low.
"B-ranked." Kain crossed his arms. "Solitary. It holds a territory and holds it hard. It'll kill for the sport of it as soon as for food, and it comes down out of the sky faster than you've got time to run from."
Sam put a hand over his mouth, and Sasha went pale. Kain reached over and turned the open guide toward himself, Holloway's, and looked at the plate of the thing without much needing to.
"Are you going to take it on?" Sasha asked, and the whole room leaned on the answer.
"I'm looking into it," Kain said.
"Can you kill one?" Sam asked.
"No." He said it plain. "But I'm the best you've got to look into it. I'll be back in the morning."
"Not now?" Sam's eyes went wide.
"I don't know enough about gryphons to go after one today.
I've fought monsters before. That doesn't mean I know every last thing about every one of them.
" He nodded at Sam. "You couldn't tell me the price of every sack of grain in every market between here and the capital.
You could make a fair guess. You wouldn't know. "
"That's fair." Sam nodded. "The morning, then."
"In the meantime, send word to the adventurers' guild," Kain said. "I don't know which city holds the nearest hall."
"Greyhaven." Sam said it without thinking. "Several days' ride. But there's an outpost a day out, small, and they keep it quiet, only it carries some supplies and keeps tabs on the news for miles around. An information house, you might call it. I'll send a rider now. No telling how soon he's back."
"Have him bring back everything they hold on gryphons in this country. What's been tried on one. What worked, and what got men killed."
"There'll be books for that," Sasha said.
"I've got the book." Kain held up the guide.
"A book tells you how a thing dies in theory.
I want to know how this one's been fought in these hills.
What the ground does to it. Whether it gets stronger over the ridges or in close to the old timber, what it uses and what it won't go near. The practical of it."
"I'll have him look for the practical of it." Sam nodded. "Thank you, Kain. For whatever's coming."
Kain went back out, and the crowd had grown, and few of them missed the local monster guide in his hand.
"What was it?"
"Was it a dragon?"
"Three times now, and all of them on the edge of town."
"Sheep today. Children tomorrow."
"We have to do something."
"Get your pitchforks ready."
Kain swung up onto Roan and gathered the reins. Royce climbed onto his own horse, and Kain saw now that the animal was flecked with dried foam, run hard the whole way in.
He put his eyes to the ridge line as he rode back down toward home, reading the trees for anything that didn't belong, but the hills gave him nothing. It was out there somewhere.
Three kills said it had claimed the place and meant to keep it, and a thing that killed for sport would never run short of reasons to come down again.
He stabled Roan and went on into the house. The rumors would be running through the valley like fire by nightfall, which meant the time for sitting on the thing was past.
He set the guide on the table and went out to the garden.
He worked the rows a while, letting his hands stay busy while his head turned the thing over.
What he knew about gryphons, set down honest. Where they were soft, if they were soft anywhere.
What he had heard over the years of men who had put one down and walked away.
What the Silver Hands would have done with it, the four of them, each to the part they did best.
When the light went, he came in and ate a quiet supper, then spread the monster guide across the table. Beside it he laid out Mark's notes, the loose sheets in his brother's hand with his own writing run in between them, and he worked back and forth between the two.
"Right." He read down Mark's sheet. "Once the potatoes come out, lay a fresh course of ash over the bed if there's any to spare.
Good to know." He turned to the guide and found the part on how it flew, then sat back from it.
"Faster than a man can run," he said. "Faster than a horse.
Once it sets on you, there's no outrunning it, saddle or no. "
The two of them lay open side by side, both his now, in their different ways.
The fire ticked in the hearth, and out past the window Ghost lay stretched in the growing pumpkin vines while the last birds sang the twilight down. None of it changed what was out there in the hills.