Chapter 1
AN EYE CLOSED
They are the elite
They are undefeated; they
Are dust in the wind
It should have been a routine flight.
“Is everyone here?” The captain yelled. “Girault! Weren’t Battier and Stall tailing you…?”
“They were just behind me, Captain. They didn’t react fast enough… It closed in on me.”
“Damn it!”
It should have been a routine flight, a patrol like they did every day over these damned mountains. No one saw it coming—neither the riders nor the griffins. The fabric of the sky had torn silently; from that wound poured a rain of lightning, and hail fast enough to pierce steel.
“Néra?” The captain called out again.
“We’re a little shaken, Sir,” the young woman replied on behalf of her mount. “But we’re fine!”
“Sautiet?”
Sautiet didn’t move at the sound of his name. His head was trapped in the grip of a tremendous migraine; ferrous blood dripped from his nose, saturating his senses. He could barely hear. His ears were registering the rumble that was growing louder around them; his eyes were tracking the spots of light spreading on the screen of clouds. The six riders and their griffins—no, four now—were hovering in the center of an almost perfect sphere cut out of black cotton, several hundred yards above the ground. Outside of it raged chaos and death.
“Sautiet!”
“We’re way off course; we shouldn’t have strayed off the patrol path,” he said out loud. “Where are we…?”
“We’re in the eye of the storm,” Néra said.
The four riders cast glances that bounced off the walls of clouds around them. There was no way out for them: neither from their sides, nor below them, and Sautiet further confirmed it by craning his neck:
“Above too,” he said. “We’re completely boxed in.”
The other three lifted their heads in turn. Captain Lanne tugged on his scarf. He bared his teeth in a snarl.
“This is not natural,” he growled.” We shouldn’t be having hurricanes this far north.”
“Is it magic?” Girault asked. “Could we have crossed the border without realizing it?”
“An orog shaman? Sure seems like the work of a demon…”
Sautiet had whispered, but the lightning had granted him a few seconds of silence and his words had become its thunder. Everyone tightened their grip on their reins. The griffins stood alert at the mention of “orog,” wary of the invisible enemy that had trapped them in this bubble, waiting for the coup de grâce. Sautiet scanned the shifting clouds again. He felt them narrowing in on his group for a moment, yet as soon as he looked away, the walls returned to their original position. A distant bolt of lightning seemed to taunt him.
“This is impossible. We haven’t left Lantardia,” Néra shot back, straight as an arrow.
“We’ve been receiving reports of orog activity in the border forests for months,” Girault said. “I understand that some of the reports may have been greatly exaggerated, but still…”
“So we’re stuck? Are we all going to die?” Néra’s voice rose nervously. “We can’t just stay here; we have to try something, anything! If it’s indeed a shaman who has targeted us, we can’t stay here—no. We have to…”
“It’s not orog magic,” Captain Lanne said.
He sized up each of them one by one, then seemed to turn his gaze inward, toward old memories.
“Orog magic,” Lanne reiterated, “doesn’t work like this. Let’s calm down and think. It takes days for a shaman to summon a blizzard; it doesn’t just happen all of a sudden. And it requires complex rituals. You haven’t experienced that. We’d perceive changes in temperature in our flesh, variations in pressure under the wings of our griffins…”
Néra’s mount flapped her wings twice, as if trying to pull the captain out of his daze.
“In that case, what is it then?” The young woman asked. “Sides boasting to the rookies and soliciting free drinks out of them, what good are your war stories?”
“I don’t know what it is, Lieutenant,” Captain Lanne said, “but knowing what it’s not is at least as important in preserving the lives of my men. However…”
Sautiet felt it—his griffin did too. A sudden change in atmospheric pressure. The wind warned those wise enough to heed it. A chill seeped under the rider’s uniform; he couldn’t tell if it was the caress of the air or the caress of fear. Captain Lanne had paused in the middle of his sentence. His gaze met Sautiet’s.
“Did you catch that?” He asked.
“I think so.”
“Where from? My right?”
“No.”
“Front?”
“I don’t think so either…”
“What’s going on?” Néra exclaimed, getting jumpy.
Lanne and Sautiet scanned the walls of clouds, searching for turbulence in the swirls, for a light brighter than the others, that would be growing closer to them. If the hurricane was moving, it would press on the eye according to a median plan, like a child pushing a marble with a flick of the finger. According to any sense of logic. But logic no longer applied to this marble suspended hundreds of yards above the land, where there shouldn’t have been a hurricane. Where they should have been doing a godsdamned routine flight.
Sautiet grew colder in his uniform. The rider realized, then, that it was fear. His instinct made him tilt his head in the only illogical direction left. He saw that the vault above them was losing curvature, and that there were only fifty yards of empty air left out of the initial eighty.
“Sir. It’s coming from above. And it’s going to crush us.”
Lanne looked up as well. His jaw went slack, then his lips narrowed to a slit.
“Damn,” he muttered, before finding his officer’s voice again. “We’re diving; everyone dive! Move it!”
The captain nosed down. In his wake, Néra was gaining on him with every stroke of her mount’s wings. Her griffin, Aveline, could catch up with anyone—and outpace them. Gravity didn’t like her much and she couldn’t call it to her aid, but she was staying ahead of the wind, avoiding its potholes, jumping over its bumps. Aveline could fly circles around the big males of the squadron. Sautiet would not have been surprised if the little griffin could dodge the lightning javelins that the storm would throw at her.
“The fuck are you doing?” Girault yelled at him. “We gotta bail!”
His mount hissed close to Sautiet’s ear. The young man flinched; his griffin Nydir was at a standstill, ready to tilt forward as soon as his rider gave the signal. Sautiet leaned his body forward. He was struck by a solid column of air as he plunged straight down. His back bounced against Nydir’s rump, and he struggled to realign himself with the griffin, who was clawing his way into the currents. Sautiet risked a glance over his shoulder. A gust of wind hit his cheek. Behind them, the cloud ceiling descended like a syringe piston; in front of them, the tunnel that formed the eye was narrowing too fast.
The eye of the hurricane was about to close in on them.
Néra had taken the lead in the formation; Lanne was in second position, checking for stragglers. Nydir then detected a turbulence about twenty yards away, at two o’clock, just below the beak of Girault’s griffin. Without doubt, Girault had taken it into account, or—no, he was going to crash straight into it. Sautiet knew that his voice would never overcome the deafening noise; he shouted at the top of his lungs into Nydir’s ear:
“Warn them! Now!”
Nydir let out a commanding cry that pierced through the rolling thunder. Girault reared back just in time; his mount spread its wings; they caught the edge of the turbulence, catapulting them fifty yards backward. All that acquired speed, nullified. Girault’s screams flickered in and out between peals of thunder as he passed Sautiet and spun behind him. His griffin called for help. Sautiet swore into his scarf. He hesitated to change his course: he might already be a dead man flying; there might be nothing left to do to save Girault or himself. Or maybe there was a decision to be made—and he was too cowardly to make it.
“Report back to command!”
This order had cut through the wind. The rider turned in his saddle; Captain Lanne was swimming upstream, trying to catch up with Girault, who was now just a blurry spot. Two or three moments later, they had both disappeared into the clouds. Sautiet knew he wouldn’t see them again.
Ahead, Néra had slowed to match Nydir’s pace. Griffin wings folded, practically side by side with Sautiet, she threw her words across the howling void between them.
“I know a crevasse; follow me! I’ll raise my fist; three seconds, then go flat!”
Sautiet nodded reflexively. The information came to him in bursts, some of the words being stripped away by the wind. He injected his deductions into the gaps in the sentences. Néra must have spotted a crevasse earlier in the day; she wanted to lead them there to take shelter until the end of the storm. The surface of the eye was getting closer and closer. They would hit it any second now. Néra was proposing they turn blindly into the fog. She must have known exactly where the crevasse was, how high they were, and how far they had fallen—but how could she?
Sautiet nodded a second time. He wasn’t sure about the plan, but he was sure of his fate if he didn’t have any. Néra huddled against her griffin in response. Aveline slid in front of Nydir, piercing through air resistance as easily as a dagger through a throat. Her gray feathers twirled for a moment in front of Sautiet’s eyes, then they entered the hurricane. Or rather, the hurricane welcomed them into its belly.
Hail spattered everywhere on the rider. He heard the impacts on his breastplate, on the edges of his helmet, the metal that clanged with each scratch. He saw the leather of his gloves peeling off like a fruit; he felt the blows on his knees, the cuts under his scarf. A more vicious hailstone slashed his cheek with a cold, burning wound. Sautiet didn’t feel it bleed; the wind acted like a compress. The rider tried to gasp for the rare pockets of air that might still exist, but it was like suffocating in emptiness. Another hailstone struck the right lens of his flight goggles, no bigger than a pebble, way faster than a slingshot. Sautiet’s neck whipped back from the impact. He closed his eyes, protecting himself with his arm as if it could help in any way. No sooner had he readjusted that a third hailstone ricocheted off the frame of the goggles. A fourth one hit the left lens. Cracks appeared. Something grazed his eye. Wind seeping through. Sautiet stifled a groan, covering his left lens with his palm. Farther down, Aveline’s gray feathers turned white under the brushstrokes of lightning. He had to follow her. The storm crackled between unconnected points, between incalculable coordinates. At random, lightning struck without cause or consequence. Electricity-spawned eels that stretched, writhed to bite anyone who came within range. Néra subtly deviated from her trajectory before recentering—Sautiet remained in her wake without understanding what instrument guided her. Her griffin did a barrel roll to the right; an explosion of light flared where her body would have been.
Intuition. Intuition, or witchcraft.
Néra finally raised her arm. Focused on her route, without even making sure Sautiet had received the instruction, she lowered herself to reduce her air resistance. Two seconds passed. Aveline traced a figure that Sautiet could never have imagined—let alone attempted. The griffin converted all her vertical momentum into a nearly right-angled curve, and executed it so smoothly that she had almost disappeared into the distance when Nydir initiated his own maneuver, on the third second. Sautiet’s insides compressed; his heart seemed to bounce in his chest. A tingling numbness gripped his hand as lightning struck just two wing beats to their right. He felt his wrist tremble, his fingers seized by spasms. Griffin and rider moved forward with no better indicator than Aveline’s tail, which wavered between tangible and ghostly. For twenty yards, then fifty, then a hundred. They flew until the wall of the hurricane abruptly ceased, until, three yards ahead—they would never make it.
The riders emerged from the clouds three yards above the crevasse, one yard too high, and the opening itself was no more than a yard and a half wide. It was hopeless: how could Néra have accurately assessed their altitude with such precision? The fact that they were so close already was nothing short of a miracle; the gods had exhausted themselves on their case. Sautiet and Néra would not make it through. But Aveline gracefully banked left, pivoting on her axis as her rider lay flat against her. And so, they vanished out of the fog.
Aveline was the most acrobatic griffin of the unit; Néra was one of their best pilots. Nydir and Sautiet, on the other hand, were a trebuchet projectile hurtling toward a wall. And the rider could not see himself breaking through the mountain’s solid rock. Sautiet twisted his hips abruptly to redirect his griffin, pulling sharply on the reins; Nydir struggled to slow down, his flank brushing against the slope. They were too heavy. The griffin could not retract his left wing before the collision.
“No, no, no, n-!”
Sautiet heard the rock crumble, the bones dislocate. His vertebrae cracked like a young ash tree under an axe, but it wasn’t him who had broken. His griffin howled, his distress echoing throughout the stone he had foolishly challenged. Nydir lashed out in vain, clawing at the cliff in search of a grip, but only dust slipped through his talons. The griffin careened into the tumult of the hurricane. Unable to stabilize himself, he spread his right wing, which swelled under a gust of wind, further throwing off his balance. They spun amid the dance of lightning. Chaos multiplied in Sautiet’s fissured lenses. Shapes no longer made sense; colors no longer made sense; up and down no longer made sense. The rider heard himself gasping into his scarf, whimpering when a hailstone grazed his skin. He was an hourglass with blood for sand. Sautiet no longer knew in which direction to fall, losing all sense of time. He was on the verge of blacking out from the sheer force of being pushed around; his vision darkened. Finally, a glimmer of clarity shone in a corner of his heart. Perhaps the very one that had eluded him earlier: Nydir would never recover with Sautiet’s inert mass on his back.
“I must—I must…”
Sautiet groped painfully at his thigh. His fingers wrapped around the handle of his dagger. At this altitude, their odds were zero. He was screwed, like a log tied to his griffin. If he could free Nydir of his burden, if he could give him that one last chance to survive…
His legs no longer sent any sensation back to him. Sautiet wedged his blade between his foot and one of the saddle straps. He began to cut. The royal army spared no expense on leather—a hoarse cry of rage rose from his throat. One strap severed. Then the other foot. Sautiet was out of breath; his right hand wouldn’t stop trembling. He screamed his frustration once again. His voice echoed as if from far away, detached from his own body. The strap gave way, his weapon almost slipped out of his numb fingers. He felt dizzy. A rider wasn’t supposed to get dizzy.
“Only four straps left. Four. Straps…”
But his dagger slipped from his hand. And reality slipped away from his consciousness. A black veil enveloped him.
He awoke on a warm mattress. Under a frozen blanket.
Sautiet shook himself. His head felt heavy on his neck, as if it were filled with lead. He tried to move his left arm—pain lanced through his elbow. The rider sat up; the rustling of snow reached him vaguely. Muffled. He palpated the downy feathers underneath him. Nydir. Sautiet clumsily used his left fingers to pinch his right glove, in an attempt at removing it without straining his injured arm. He palpated Nydir again. A relieved sigh escaped his dry mouth.
“Praise Vanaronh,” he thanked the heavens before telling Nydir. “You’re alive.”
Sautiet took off his goggles. His left eye remained sealed shut. They had crashed into a thicket. Around him, the northern forest rustled just as it always had, just as it must have a century ago. Just as it had before the storm. Sautiet looked up. He could see no trace of the black cotton beast that had struck the squadron and swallowed it, not even a scar in the sky or a tear proving its remorse. Above, the pine branches had shed their white concealer. Nydir must have recovered from the updrafts that had slowed them down, headed straight into the canopy, cushioned by maybe one or two snow banks… The rider thanked Vanaronh again, but it must have taken more than one god to survive that. He undid the remaining straps and dropped to the ground. A quick examination of Nydir—the griffin had lost consciousness. No apparent wounds. Normal pulse, slow like a drum. His broken wing wasn’t at a weird angle. It was better to let him rest as much as this fall could provide.
A gaze suddenly weighed on the back of Sautiet’s neck. Then a noise caught his attention at six o’clock. He turned around, drew his sword in one swift motion, and aimed it toward a bush.
“Who goes there?”
His voice was a croak that died in the mantle of conifers. His blade had shifted out of its axis in the crash; its clatter betrayed the tremors that were running through his wrist. He would have been unable to slay a wolf, but perhaps a marauder lurked there. What if Girault was right? What if there was indeed an orog shaman in these woods? Sautiet swallowed.
“I am an officer of the royal army,” he reminded the presence uncertainly.
He no longer really believed it himself at that moment. Fatigue had weakened his arm. His sword emitted a high note as he aimed again at the bush. Sautiet waited. He waited until the muscles of his thighs cramped.
A serene breeze caressed the thicket. He sheathed his weapon.
“Néra.”
Sautiet limped for a hundred and fifty yards to the edge of the thicket. The cliff faced him, and he saw then that a landslide had blocked the crevasse, where Néra had taken refuge. Bitterness, relief—the young man didn’t even know what to feel. A whole layer of sandstone, collapsed to the height of a tower, with a thickness at least several yards deep. Nothing could breathe underneath it anymore. Sautiet allowed himself only one hope—that the griffin and her rider had not suffered. He had failed to help Girault; he had failed to follow Néra; he had failed to sacrifice himself for his griffin. Fate had smiled at him; Glory had mocked him three times and forced him to live as a coward. He found himself on his knees in the snow, his head heavy with regrets. The wind was gaining strength again, dusting scrollwork of powdered snow where it met the ground. Sautiet had meditated for a quarter of an hour when the gaze weighed on him again, on the back of his neck. He turned, his sword raised, one knee still on the ground and the other leg tense. He thought he saw a bright color—a red gleam, or perhaps…
The officer held his breath.
A squirrel leaped from the bush, two or three steps away from Sautiet. Flame-red fur, cream-colored belly. It tilted its head to one side and blinked at him. The rider released his breath, and that was enough to send the little creature fleeing. Sautiet sat down in the snow and removed his helmet. The crisp air lifted a lock of his sweat-matted hair. He closed his good eye, took a deep breath. Listened to the birdsong that had already resumed, with his superior’s last order revived in his mind.
“Report back to command.”
Sautiet opened his eye. Leaning on his clenched fist, he stood up, absorbing himself in contemplation of these mountains that he was rediscovering as if for the first time. Beyond the reach of his sight, a gray speck refused to dissolve in a sea of white. Ramparts stood among the desolate acres of bare rock. The fortress of Norrasq awaited the return of the second squadron of the fourth combat wing. The young man’s jaw clenched. At least the coward could tell how the brave had perished.
And Nydir would need him, more than ever, to come home in one piece.
Sautiet set off.