Page 161 of Griffin Food

My tears fall in earnest. I press against his chest, feeling his heart pound beneath my cheek.

“She’d only been working in the kitchen a month, stolen from a farm far away during one of their raids where they top up the thrall ranks. Molly was just fourteen summers old when she caught General Adharde’s eye.”

Bitterness laces his tone. “I didn’t know her well. Not at all, truth be told. But I remember her eyes that day, when General Adharde picked her from the line-up and had his men take her away. The next time I saw her was when I was rounded up and taken to join a raiding party working in the food and supply wagons. Only she didn’t look anything like the young kitchen maid I’d once known. Now she was dressed in silk with a gold collar around her throat. And her eyes were as vacant as the rocklings… Fourteen fucking summers… And I knew what they did to them. How they drained their blood over and over until they were nothing but a husk. And other things too… and she was just a fucking child.”

He shakes with the potency of his rage.

I’m shaking too. For Molly, for Fenix, for the many others who suffered the same fate.

“They must have miscalculated something… Or got caught off guard. The griffins came. Tore their rocklings apart and sent the general and his men scattering back into the portal.”

“He abandoned Molly there and the rest of us expendable humans. The bastard. And I’m glad he did. For once he crossed the portal, the glamour upon her was gone… It was Atlas himself who tore the collar from her throat.”

I’m fighting back the sobs now as his fingers stroke gently through my hair.

“Aye, it took her a while to heal. But the people of these lands are good and always ready to find homes and places for people such as Molly and me. She found a place working in Acton Trussell.

“My path took a different turn. As I found out that day, I could hear the griffins. All griffins. And that is not an ordinary thing.” The smile is back in his voice. “I was a surly bastard, full of anger at the world, along with a hunger for dark fae blood… I used to call in at Acton Trussell, where Molly lived, whenever I could and check in on her. A few years later she’d up and wed a local baker and, well, as they say, the rest is history—for they went on to have a whole brood of kids… and grandkids.”

He glances down at me. I see genuine warmth in his eyes as he swipes my tears away with his thumb.

“Grandkids?” I am trying to reconcile the timelines. He speaks as though it were a long time ago, and I realize I don’t know how old Fenix is.

“She lived a long and full life,” he continues. “Had she stayed with the dark fae, I doubt she’d have lasted more than a few years before her mind or body broke. But she was a strong lass. A strong woman. And that is a testament to her resilience that she put her past behind her to be a wife and a mother.”

“She is gone now?”

“She is.”

“You made a vow to her?”

“Not in a sense that she would ever know. But inside.” He taps his chest. “I vowed to myself that one day, General Adharde would pay. And Atlas must have seen something in me. He worked me hard, gave me a focus and a place here at the eyrie. Trained with the young apprentices, rode griffins, and when the time came, I was taken to meet the sleeping griffins.”

“That is how you met Galeor?”

“I felt him almost at once. Stirring for me. Although it was ten years later before he finally roused. Chose me. And our souls bonded… I am young for a griffin. Barely over a hundred turns old. Time moves differently for our kind. Just as it will now for you, Rafe, and Lark.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you for telling me. I’m glad that I know.”

All this time, I thought Fenix was the simplest of my mates. I could not have been more wrong.

Chapter Fifty-Four

Violet

The eyrie has settled into its quieter rhythms.

The wounded are healing. The villages are rebuilding. The dark fae have retreated beyond their portal, and the wolves have returned to their packlands with Callum at their head and an alliance sealed that will outlast us all. The corridors no longer ring with the sound of boots at a dead run. The bell has not tolled in eighteen days.

I have counted every one of them.

I know I should feel relief. I do—in the way that one feels the absence of pain after a long illness. A negative thing, defined by what is no longer there rather than by anything present. The people of the eyrie move through their days with a lightness that tells me they feel it differently, that for them the silence is full rather than empty.

I am trying to learn how to feel it that way, too.

Atlas finds me in the library after supper, sitting before an open book I have not turned a page of in an hour. The moment his eyes land on me, his wings manifest, creating a magnificent fan at his back. Lark is at his side in direwolf form, ears up and alert.

Atlas doesn’t ask what I’m thinking about. He simply closes the book for me, tucks it under his arm, and holds out his hand.