31. Nest
Nest
Kain rode home from the ridge and put the rest of the day into the farm. That evening he sat a long while by the fire, watching the flames and turning over what came next.
The gryphon feathers he set on a shelf, to give away when he had the chance. He gave it a day or two, then rode back into town.
Sam looked up when he came into the general store, and Kain leaned against the counter.
"Word on the street is you're getting ready to go and fight the creature."
"Word on the street is worth nothing unless you've got something to back it up."
"Maybe so. Maybe so." Sam tipped his head. "You have to admit it's looking like you mean to do something about it. You starting to think you can kill it?"
"I truly don't know," Kain said. "Same thing I've been telling you since the start."
Sam nodded, then lifted his chin. "What are the odds we get a B-ranked team out here to handle it?"
"None." Kain leaned on the counter. "Tillamore sits so far off the roads the big companies travel that you'd need a fat bounty to make the trip worth it. Enough to cover the travel and the risk both. Broken bones, lost limbs, dying. That sort of thing."
"What are we talking?" Sam asked. "One gold? Two?"
"For a gryphon? Try five or ten."
"Five or ten gold?" Sam said. "There's hardly that much coin in the whole town."
"Which is why it isn't an option. I wish it were, believe me." Kain crossed his arms. "Unless we get lucky and somebody passes through, nobody's coming to take this off our hands."
"What would you really hope for?" Sam asked.
"Honestly? That it decides this is not the place for it and flies off to trouble somebody else." Kain shook his head. "It's still here, so I would not count on that."
"Mind if I ask you something?" Sam said. "Why does it keep going after farms? There's deer enough out there. Deer and bears and all the rest. Why come all the way in to the farms, farther from its lair?"
"Fewer trees around a farm. Fewer branches to come down through." Kain considered it. "And a grain-fed sheep eats a lot better than a deer. Tastes better too, I'd guess."
"True enough." Sam shook his head. "Doesn't mean I have to like it."
"I don't like it either." Kain straightened off the counter. "Anyway. What I came in for is a satchel. Something waxed, so nothing leaks through it onto me."
"Berry picking, is it." Sam bent down behind the counter and came up with a waxed bag, which he passed across.
"Something like that. How much?"
"That one's paid for already. Sasha said you'd be in for one, so she covered it. Said it mattered."
Kain rolled his eyes. "So when you played at only hearing rumors about me, you had it straight from Sasha the whole time."
"Can you blame me?" Sam said.
"No. I'd have done the same in your boots." Kain took the bag and turned for the door. "I'll be by."
He went out into the street, where a few people turned to look at him. He could only guess at the rumors going around.
He could do a great many things, and whether killing a gryphon was one of them he wouldn't know until he tried. He wasn't even sure yet that he meant to try. For now he was building the means and leaving the rest for later.
Before long he was up on Roan and riding out across the hills toward the ridge again. He went better prepared this time, and he meant to push further than he had on the first trip. How much further he couldn't say, and he would play that by ear.
Ghost fell in with him again partway across the hills. At the tree line Kain swung down, tied Roan to the dead tree, and took his supplies down from the saddlebags.
"All right, boy," he said. "Let's get you set."
Roan shifted on the lead and looked up at the trees, knowing well enough that he was about to be left behind.
Kain tipped a measure of feed into a bucket, then carried a second bucket out through the trees to the little crick Sasha had marked, filled it, and brought it back.
When he was satisfied the horse was seen to, he and Ghost set off.
They took the same trail as before, his eyes working the trees as they went. He had left the sword at home and carried only the big bowie knife.
If the gryphon came on him up here, no blade was going to save him anyway, and a sword on his hip had a way of making a man feel braver than he was. Feeling brave up here was a fast way to wind up dead. He wanted to feel like a man with no weapon at all, since that was very near the truth of it.
At the foot of the cliff where the claw marks ran, he stopped and looked along the base of it, then went on the way he had gone before.
The deer carcass had rotted further than when he had last seen it, the smell as bad and the flies louder.
Ghost gave it a wide berth, dropping down into the trees below and coming back up to him farther along.
The trail held along the ridge for a good stretch, then lost itself in a thick stand of cedar. Kain looked it over, sure he could force through, less sure he wanted to. The ground fell away beyond it, and he needed to be going up. Short of finding a path, that meant climbing.
Sasha's map showed a path here, but he hadn't been able to turn it up. Ghost watched him as he set his hands to the limestone and started up, hold by hold.
"You're welcome to follow, or to find your own way around," Kain called down. "Sorry, Ghost."
The wolf shot off through the undergrowth, and Kain watched it go before putting his mind back on the rock.
The cliff was steep without being sheer, and he came up over the top on a tangle of gnarled pine roots that held the thin soil together, got his feet under him on the level, and pressed on upward.
The ground rose again to a second cliff, this one steeper, running off to his right as far as he could see. To his left it bent around a corner, the edge of the ridge. He was weighing which way to go when he caught sight of a bone lying just past the bend.
He went around the bend and crouched over the bone. A cow bone, he was fairly sure, picked clean and left where it lay. He stepped past it and carried on around the cliff.
The rock kept bending until he came out on the back side of the ridge, with Tillamore somewhere behind it now. He found where he stood on Sasha's map and added a few marks. As he wrote, something farther on caught his eye.
More bones.
He went on, and the next bones were from something smaller, a hog maybe, hard to say without the skull, picked clean as well and snapped through in places. Beyond those lay more, and more past those.
He came around a last shoulder of rock to a deep notch in the cliff face, maybe ten feet deep and twenty across, the one sheltered spot in all that stone. That was where the gryphon had built its nest.
The nest itself sat high above him still, near sixty feet up in that spot. It was a great heap of gnarled limbs and stripped bark and bone, with what looked like a snarl of sheep's wool worked through it.
The ground under it was scattered with bones and tufts of fur, the leavings of kills that had dropped from the nest to the rock below. Kain looked up at it a long moment, then sat down.
The gryphon wasn't home. That much was plain, since he would never have gotten this close if it were, though there was a chance it had heard him and gone off to hunt him instead.
He watched the sky over the ridge for a while and saw nothing circling. Wherever it had gone, it had left for the day, and he settled in to study the ground.
He couldn't see what lay on top of the cliff, but there was plainly no coming at the nest from below without being seen.
The sixty feet of rock might be climbed, and slowly, which would leave a man easy meat for something that hunted from the air.
From the foot of the cliff under the nest to the nearest cover was a good thirty feet.
A man might lie up in that cover and put an arrow into the thing, if the wind sat right.
He turned his mind to the wind, which came mostly out of the northwest over Tillamore, though here, off the ridge itself, it bent round closer to due north.
From a blind set upwind, the gryphon stood a better chance of catching his scent, and the wind would carry his arrow truer.
From a blind set downwind, he kept the surprise, and one hard gust would throw the shot and give him away both at once.
He took out the map and sketched in the nest. To learn the thing's habits he would need the top of the ridge.
Did it walk the ground much, or only fly?
If it walked, did it keep to trails, or wander as it pleased?
He would have to set his snares and his lures where the beast would come to them, and do the whole of it without the gryphon ever knowing he was on its ground.
The moment it caught him out there with his work half done, he was a dead man.
He looked up the rock above him, then got to his feet, walked off until the nest was well out of sight, and started climbing once more. Ghost came bounding up just then, glad to have found him again. As Kain hauled himself up the next hold, the wolf's look turned to plain disappointment.
"You're going to have to wait on me, I think," Kain called down. "Sorry. I won't be long."
Ghost dropped down with a heavy huff, and Kain lifted a hand to it before going on up, hand over foot, until he reached the top of the ridge.
The very top was smaller than he had figured, no more than twenty feet across, though he couldn't tell how far it ran. The nest showed through the trees a short way off.
The trees themselves had been rubbed smooth in long patches, the bark peeled clean away where the gryphon had worked itself against the wood. Feathers hung caught in the limbs here and there, and he helped himself to a few more as he moved through.
It didn't take him long to get what he had come for. He worked his way back down the wall to Ghost, and the climb down came harder than the climb up. When he was low enough to be sure of the landing, he let go and dropped, and Ghost rose as he hit the ground.
"Think you can show me the way out?" he asked. "You managed it up here without climbing. I'd as soon do the same going down."
Ghost dashed off, and Kain followed it down, his mind back at the nest the whole way. He knew where it lived now. He knew where it roamed. It was a start.