The Griffin's Flight Read Online Free Page B

up.
    It was strange. He was so afraid of dying, and yet he wanted to die. The idea followed him day and night. If he died, there would be no more fear. No more pain. No more nightmares. No more running, no more hiding, no more hunger. And yet, when he touched the side of his neck and felt nothing, he was terrified. And when he looked up at the sky and thought he saw wings coming for him, he would panic and run for cover. There were so many ways to die out here: poison, cold, starvation, wild animals. More than once, when food had been scarce, he had been convinced that Skandar was going to eat him. But the griffin never did. He’d gone without food for several days at a stretch but had never once attempted to eat the human that he had adopted.
    Arren had thought of leaving him, but he couldn’t make himself do it. Skandar was his only company, and the closest thing he had to a friend. Most likely he was the only living creature in the world who did not want Arren dead.
    Murderer .
    Once again the memory of Lord Rannagon’s dead body rose up in his mind. The boy has lost his mind. Murderer .
    Arren curled up, wrapping his arms around his knees and hugging them to his chest. No, he thought. No. They wanted me dead even before I was a murderer .
    Blackrobe .
    “I couldn’t help it,” Arren whispered. “I couldn’t help it.”
    No man chooses his heritage. He can only try and make the best of it. But you …
    Arren clasped his throat. The wounds had long since healed, but the scars were still there, large, deep, swollen and occasionally still painful. He knew he would have them forever.
    Every Northerner has a madness inside him. One day it will come through in you .
    “No,” Arren whispered again.
    The boy has lost his mind .
    He rolled over onto his other side, covering his ears with his hands, trying to blot it out. But the accusations were in his memory, not in the world around him, and they could not be escaped.
    Murderer .
    Arren’s black eyes became hard and cold in the darkness. I don’t care, he shouted back mentally. You hear me? I don’t care that you’re dead. I’d do it again if I got the chance .
    But still the voice would not leave him alone.
     
    H e woke up again at dawn, to the sound of Skandar’s screeches. He got up, rubbing his back, and squinted muzzily at the sky. The black griffin was flying overhead, calling his name.
    “Darkheart! Darkheart!”
    Darkheart. That was the name they had given him when he was a captive in the Arena at Eagleholm. As punishment for his crimes, he was used as entertainment there. Skandar was a man-eater. He had been born wild and had turned to preying on livestock and then on human beings as well. Arren, as a junior griffiner, had been sent by Lord Rannagon to capture him and sell him to the Arena. He had succeeded, in spite of the fact that he had been sent on his own and had no prior experience—but his griffin, Eluna, had met her end at Skandar’s talons. Arren had returned home grieving for her, only to find that his mission had not been authorised as he had thought it was. Rannagon then claimed that Arren had gone without permission and in defiance of the rules binding griffiners to stay at their posts unless given leave by the Mistress of the Eyrie. No-one believed Arren’s story, and he had been disgraced and cast out of the order of griffiners.
    Alone, bereft, without a griffin to protect him, he had lost first the respect of those around him and then all his respect for himself, and from then on his life had begun to spiral out of control.
    It was strange, he thought, that it had ended like this, with his having become a partner to the griffin that had killed Eluna and destroyed his life. But then again, it hadn’t, he remembered with a little chill. It had ended months before, when he had fallen from the edge of the great mountain-top city and into space, his bid for freedom over and his last hope gone. That was when his life had ended. This,