43. After the Ribs
After the Ribs
Days went past slow, and his body went on mending.
He'd been trying to saddle Roan since the leg let him bend it that far. Roan had been patient about it.
The shoulder was the thing. The arm could lift now.
It couldn't yet lift the saddle, and the bad hand couldn't yet hold the cinch and pull at the same time, and the gelding stood through one failed attempt after another like a man being made to listen to another man learn an instrument badly.
Buckets of water he could carry. Half-buckets, on the bad side. He could kneel in the garden long enough to get a row weeded.
He could split kindling if he braced the wood right, one-handed and slow. It wasn't much. It was something.
Jeremiah still came out at evening to put Roan up, but Kain had taken the mornings back. Carol still came at lunch.
More and more she was doing what he couldn't do, and less and less what he could. Sasha's basket still came down before dawn with Oren.
Oren still bowed every time. Kain had given up on the bowing.
It was quiet. It was kind.
He hadn't been up into town since the night they brought him in, and he hadn't minded that. The town could keep at its distance for now.
So when he heard hoofbeats on the road one noon as he and Carol were finishing lunch on the porch, his first thought was that someone had come to put an end to the distance.
"Kain isn't cleared," Carol called out before the two horses had reached the gate.
"I'm afraid he's got to be cleared for at least a little of it." Sam swung down. "There's paperwork. I've put it off as long as I can. If I don't hand them something soon they're going to send a man."
Garland was a length behind him, easier in the saddle than Sam. He nodded at the porch and didn't say anything.
"Paperwork." Carol let the word hang.
"A form. From the Adventurer's Guild. They want the gryphon kill logged the right way, with the methods, in case the next man who finds himself in front of one wants to know what worked."
"Then explain why you brought the smith."
Sam looked at Garland. Garland looked at the porch railing.
"He's riding out to the carcass after. That's a separate matter."
"Kain isn't riding out to a carcass."
"That's a separate matter too."
Kain got himself up off the porch chair and steadied against the post for a beat before letting go of it. "I can handle paperwork. Come inside."
Carol set her hands on her hips. She watched the two of them come up the steps without moving out of their way, then she gathered her basket and her cloth off the porch table.
"I'm going."
"Tomorrow," Kain said.
"Tomorrow," she agreed, and she went down the path toward the gate. She turned once at the road and looked back at Sam in a way that said something it wouldn't have helped any of them to put into words.
Then she went.
The three of them sat at the kitchen table. Sam laid the folder out and turned it so Kain could see the form, which was a tidy printed thing with blanks in all the places a guild man wanted blanks.
"I've filled what I could. Name. Date. Place. The leg of the country." Sam tapped the form with one finger. "I left the rank blank. You've got nothing in that column. They'll know what to make of that."
"Or they won't."
"Or they won't. Either way, that's their column to fuss over."
"What else."
"I need the method. The way it ran, in your own words, and I'll write it up in their language after. Just tell me how it ran."
Garland set something down on the table.
Kain looked at it.
It was his sword.
Cleaned, oiled, in the sheath he'd been carrying it in. The sheath itself had been brushed off. The blade's edge had been touched up.
"I found it in a bush off the trail," Garland said. "Took a while. You weren't making much sense of where you dropped it, that night."
"I wasn't making sense of much," Kain said. He set his good hand on the hilt. "My thanks."
"Don't mention it. I touched the edge up where you'd nicked it. The pommel had taken a knock too, but it'll hold."
Kain nodded. He set the sword off to the side and turned back to Sam.
"Bait," he said. "A muscle-relaxant compound.
Worked up from a recipe a man in my company had written down.
Set out where the gryphon was likely to take it.
It ate it. The compound takes a day to come on, and runs about five days through, with a window of two near the middle where the thing is at its worst. I waited for the middle. "
Sam wrote, steady and clean.
"Approached the nest on a ridge southeast of here, set fallback camp in cover, arrows dipped in concentrated compound, the bow a heavy recurve. Took a ranging shot. Lucky one. The shot took the left eye."
Garland looked up at that.
"Followed up with two poisoned arrows. Right leg. Right shoulder. The gryphon came out of the nest. Tried to fly. Could fly some, not well. Lit out down the slope. The eye was a problem for it. A flier that loses half its sight loses its depth."
"I'd not have thought of that," Garland said. "Makes sense."
"Snares had been set along the likely path. Caught it in the rear leg at the crick. Sword went into the leg with poison on it. Cable broke. It got loose."
Kain stopped to take a breath. The ribs were tired of the talking. He let it pass.
"Fire trap at the next stand. Drove the body, drew the talons, kept it from settling on the ground long enough to recover. Took it apart one cut at a time as it tried to bring me down. It went up to fly once more and a wing buckled mid-stroke."
"Wing was bad by then."
"Wing was a wreck. The poison had run a while. The fire had taken what was left of one side. It came down. I came in close. Sword up through the neck from under the beak. That was the kill."
Sam finished writing. He set the pen down and read the page over once, then nodded.
"I'll write it up in their language. I'll keep your words. They'll want both."
Garland was looking at the table. "You make it sound like a man could do it."
"A man who knows the work will read that and see what's missing."
Garland half-smiled at the table. "I expect he will."
Sam set the form back in the folder.
"I won't lie to you. I'd like you to come out with us to the kill site. Carol just went out the door, which is the only reason I'm asking it out loud."
"You waited."
"I waited."
Kain looked at the wall a moment. He hadn't been off the farm since the night they'd brought him in.
There were two reasons to go. He wanted to see the thing he had killed, with the light on it, and his own two eyes on it, instead of in the pieces his memory had laid down.
And there was a question he hadn't been able to put away. The kind of question that, until you asked it of the carcass itself, wouldn't lie down.
"I'm coming."
Garland went out and got Roan from the pasture and put the saddle on him, which Kain watched from the back step and didn't comment on. Garland made nothing of it.
He cinched the belly strap, checked the bit, and led the gelding around.
"She's going to be home tomorrow," Garland said, looking up at Kain as Kain set his good foot in the stirrup. "You'll want to be on the porch and not in a chair Maggarie put you back into. So don't tear anything out today. I'll bring you home on a slow walk."
"Slow walk."
"Slow walk," Garland agreed.
They rode out across the rolling ground east of the farm and Kain took the rocking and the bouncing of it through his ribs and his shoulder and the long line of the stitched leg. Something pulled in the thigh that he was going to pay for later.
He set his jaw and let the pulling be. Roan went careful. He knew his rider wasn't the rider he had been.
They came to the tree line at the foot of the southeast ridge and Kain found that a beaten path led up from there into the trees. Half the village had been through it.
The track was packed and trodden, the underbrush along it bent back by the passing of boots that shouldn't have been bringing folk anywhere near a gryphon nest, alive or dead. Neither Sam nor Garland said anything about it.
Kain didn't either.
They took the path inward.
It was the better part of a mile through the trees, and somewhere in the middle of it Kain knew then that he had walked it. Through the dark. Through the fever.
He hadn't known the distance then, and he hadn't known it on his way down it either, the night Roan had carried him in. He knew it now.
He didn't mention that aloud.
The fire had gone clean past the area around the kill-ground. The rain had ended it at the slope before the slope ended in the village, and that was the thing that mattered.
The forest was scorched and not dead. The bushes still held their green. The blackening was at ground level.
Birds were already back in the upper branches, the loud opinionated kind, scolding the riders for coming.
They came into the clearing.
The carcass lay where it had fallen. Long enough since the kill that the foxes had had their turn. Long enough that the flies had finished moving in.
Long enough that there were birds working at it from one end and the smell carried half a bowshot.
What hadn't been taken by men had been taken by the rest.
The skull was gone. The front talons were gone. The tail had been cut away.
One whole wing had been taken out by some party with a wagon and the will to use one. The other wing lay opened out across the burned ground, pale and stripped of feathers, the membrane already going to leather where the sun had got at it.
The lion-rear had been worked over by smaller scavengers, the muscle gone in pieces, the ribcage opened wide and a thing for the crows now.
Kain wrinkled his nose and looked at it from the saddle.
"I see I provided well for the local foxes," he said.
"You provided well for the local Sam," Sam said. He swung down. "I'm making a fortune on the feathers. You're getting a cut. You want any of them back?"
"I don't take trophies."
"Didn't think you did." Sam crossed to the wing and waved Garland over. "Help me measure this."
They stretched the wing along the ground with a knotted cord. The pinion ran to about five feet end to end.
The other wing had measured the same off the body before it had been taken away, Garland said. With the body width between them, the spread had run to a foot or so over twelve. Wider than the wagon they'd come on, near the way to wider than the road.
Kain looked at it from the saddle and wasn't entirely certain, in the daylight and with the wings off it and the body opened, that this was the thing that had nearly taken him apart on the slope.
He could remember it had been fast. He could remember the talons had come down at him with the force of something twice his weight.
He could remember the beak going through the branch he had set between him and it like a man biting through a carrot.
He couldn't, looking at it now, put those memories on the thing in front of him.
He found that was how it went sometimes with a hard one.
Sam and Garland worked their way around the body, taking measures and notes. They asked him questions, where the first hit had landed, where the second arrow had gone in, how high the gryphon had gone when it had lit up to fly.
He answered what he could from the saddle. He didn't ride around to point out the nest. He pointed instead.
"Up the cliff face. Eastern side, where the notch is. You'll see the scrape marks on the rock where it tried to climb the wrong way and gave up. Then the right way, the diagonal coming up from the lower section. It's plain."
"It's plain," Sam repeated, writing.
When they were as done as Sam had the use of being done, he swung up and brought his horse around to Kain's side. Garland came up the other.
Sam held his hand up. Kain shook it. As they let go of it, Kain caught the thing in Sam's face that hadn't been said yet.
"What is it."
Sam looked at him a moment.
"There's a question. Garland and I have been chewing it back and forth, and neither of us wanted to be the one to bring it up to you. Not the day after a man kills a thing is the day to ask him."
"Ask."
"Why was it here."
Kain was quiet a moment.
"Two hundred miles south of its country, give or take.
" Garland was looking at him too now. "I've been through Holloway's on it, three editions.
I've read what I can find. A gryphon's country is the high range in the north.
They don't come south of the line. Not for hunting. Not for nesting. Not in living memory."
"It was here," Kain said.
"It was. Which leaves two answers." Sam raised one finger. "It was driven down. Something bigger than a gryphon ran it out of its country." He raised a second. "Or it was drawn down. Something here pulled it out of the mountains."
"You've been writing letters."
"I have. To anyone who keeps records up there. Not one report of a beast that would push a gryphon out. Not one. And no other gryphons sighted south. If a bigger thing had taken the country, you'd see the smaller ones running ahead of it. There's been nothing."
"Then it wasn't driven."
"Then it wasn't driven."
Kain looked off into the trees east of the kill-ground. Past the ridge. Where the country dropped away again into hills he'd not walked.
"Something drew it."
"That's the only answer left."
"What does that." Garland said it more than asked it.
"I don't know." Kain shook his head once. "I've thought on it. I can't put a name to it."
"Any chance you'd be willing to look into it," Sam said. "I know that's a load to set on a man who just took one down. We wouldn't ask if there were anyone else for it."
"I'll see what I can find." Kain set Roan's head toward home. "After the ribs."