Dry fern crunched softly under Rose’s hooves. Away from the river the trees turned to pine, dry needles mixing with the laurel and buckbrush of the understory. It was far easier going than the swamps they’d been stuck in, and the canopy light enough that they could actually see the sun again.
In all it was a far more pleasant prospect than their past weeks of travel, and with the obstacle of the Baltimare behind them it was if a weight had been lifted from her back. Perhaps not a large weight, for they still had many miles to go and there were gryphons at the end, but she was still breathing more easily. And it was nice that Gérard wasn’t completely withdrawn.
But cathartic as that had been, it only served to refresh how alone she was out here, even with Gérard. And how much talking helped. She was beginning to suspect he had insisted on it for her sake as much as his, given how familiar he had to be with death and its aftereffects. Like the hints he’d given her about his past, there was probably more purpose there than not.
He’d told her about all his dead, and more, but she still had a pair to go. And they were a pair, which might have been one reason Gérard’s very last tale had struck her so. She glanced over at the gryphon beside her, his limp neither worse nor better, but got no clues as to his mood. After her cry he’d been more reserved than usual, as if afraid of setting her off again. Or as if he had no experience in comforting people.
Which was probably true.
Then she shook her head, realizing she was being just as bad by not saying anything. “Gérard,” she said, and his attention snapped to her as it had the other times she’d used his name.
“Yes, Rose?”
“Thank you for having me talk about my friends. It helps.”
“Yes,” he said, agreement and acknowledgement at the same time.
“The last two...are kind of like Arvel and Gwyn. They’re paired.”
He tilted his head at her, inviting her to continue.
“Well, Scarlet and Sharps - Sharp Eye - were sort of an item.” A smile flickered across her muzzle and was gone. “It was so ridiculous. Scarlet grew up in the Royal Palace itself, but Sharp Eye was from a frontier town. So she was this gentle, high-class mare, and he was a rough wilderness archer. And they just locked on each other.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Well, you have to understand. A lot of unicorns, especially those from the Palace, like to pretend they’re still in charge, as they were in the distant past. Or somehow better than the other races. And the frontier towns are like this.” She nodded at the pines around them. “Wild and dangerous. Not cultured at all.”
“Much like me, then.” His ears flipped back and then forward again as he looked sideways at her.
She surprised herself with a brief burble of laughter. “Maybe a bit. So Sharps...well, he wasn’t rude, but he wouldn’t exactly fit in at court. You’d do better, I think. Anyway, Scarlet had the power to be a combat mage, but she just couldn’t stand the idea of hurting anything. Sharps, though, he had to keep Corral safe. But they respected each other. And more.” Rose rolled her eyes. “They thought they weren’t obvious.”
“I cannot imagine how it could stay unremarked.” He swiveled his ears in her direction. “Your group was close in much the same way a wing is, and we had no secrets from each other.”
“They were adorable,” Rose agreed. “We all thought so.” But she couldn’t smile over it, because they were gone. The grief was more of an ache than a stab, now, and a distant sense of exhaustion slowing her steps. Gérard gave her fifteen or twenty seconds, circling around a bush, before breaking into her thoughts.
“You mentioned their different backgrounds, but they were unicorn and earth pony. Is that not an issue? Do races mingle?”
“Oh, it’s more common to stick with your own, but couples that cross tribes aren’t that unusual. I-” She stopped abruptly.
“What is it, Rose?”
“I was just going to say - Celestia, it’s been ages - that I used to have an Earth Pony coltfriend myself. Iron Bar. One of the sweetest stallions I’ve ever met, I swear.”
“A blacksmith, by the name?”
She nodded, her shadow bobbing ahead as a gap in the canopy let the setting sun through onto her back. “Yes. From a long line of them, actually. Things like that tend to run in families, you know. It got serious for a while, too. He really was a wonderful pony.”
“What happened?” Gérard asked quietly, clearly expecting something terrible.
“Oh, it just didn’t work out, in the end.” She gave him half a smile. “I don’t know how it works with gryphons but it does happen that way sometimes for ponies. It was nothing bad, it’s just...well, I have to be somewhere I can be a pathfinder. And with Iron Bar...I couldn’t. Not really.”
“He was shaped wrong.”
“What?” Rose looked over at him, and his ears flicked briefly.
“It is an old gryphon thought. People are shaped differently. Some are rocks, for the world to dash itself on. Some are mirrors, to reflect the world, or talons, to rend what is before them. And a rock needs water, to carry it from place to place and polish it smooth. A mirror needs a candle, to illuminate it. A talon needs a strong and guiding arm. Without the proper companion, you are less than you should be.”
“That’s...I like that actually.” That little bit of philosophy seemed to say more about gryphons than most of what Gérard had told her. “So what shape am I?”
“Tch.” He clicked his beak, thinking about it. The seconds stretched on to a minute or more, and she looked at him with some concern. She hadn’t meant it that seriously.
Finally he answered. “You are shaped like a gryphon.”
She stumbled on nothing at all and stopped to stare at him. A half-dozen thoughts sprang to the fore, but only one made it out. “Don’t do that!”
“What, startle you?” He cocked his head at her, his ears focused on her and his eyes glittering with amusement. “I thought we agreed it was only fair.”
She snorted. “Okay, I’ll grant you that. But you really need to explain that one to me.”
“You strive. You know who and what you are, you are assured in yourself, and you know you must labor to be what you are against what the world is. And that is what a gryphon should be.”
“Hmm.” He was far too earnest for her to take it lightly. She didn’t think he was quite right, apart from the obvious fact that she wasn’t a gryphon, but she had to admit it wasn’t without substance either. “Then what shape are you?”
“Tch…” He shook his head. “I do not know anymore. I have lost it somewhere along the way.”
Rose frowned at him. That didn’t seem quite right, given how self-possessed the gryphon seemed. But then, she’d already noticed there were two Gérards - the assured, confident warrior, and someone teetering on the edge of an abyss. His answer belonged to the second Gérard, but she wasn’t sure why. “Well, perhaps we can find it again, then.”
“Yes.” It was, again, agreement and acknowledgement both. They continued east.
The spots of sunlight on the ground shrunk and vanished as the sky purpled, the sun vanishing somewhere behind them. Rose stopped them in an almost-clearing, where a few chunks of sandstone broke the carpet of laurel and needles, setting up the tent as Gérard dug a firepit. She expected to see him go off hunting, since he’d snapped down the last of his meat, but instead he simply watched as she built a small and careful fire.
“So,” he said at last. “Nerys.”
Rose put aside the buckbrush sprigs she’d collected. If Gérard felt like saying anything at all about such a difficult topic, he deserved her absolute attention.
“I began courting her the moment I came of age,” he said. “And I was not the only one. She had many suitors simply for being the daughter of Aida, and many more on her own merits. She was much like her mother - brilliant, beautiful, and sharp as Aquila’s own talons. Not so much a fighter, you understand, as a commander. A leader.”
She nodded, though he probably wasn’t seeing her. He’d said only a little about Aida, but it was enough to know that she had to be an extraordinary gryphon. It wasn’t much surprise that her daughter was, too.
“After, oh, years, she finally chose me.” He snorted softly. “At the time, of course, it seemed inevitable. At this distance, I am not sure why I was the one, how I could possibly stand out in that crowd. But we were both so young and foolish, back then.”
She had some idea why he might have been chosen, if it had been his own project to learn Equestrian. Or given his keen, if occasionally upsetting, intellect. “How long were you married?”
“Sixteen months.” He didn’t seem to notice Rose’s wince. “I will not claim every day was bliss. I am not so deluded. But, we were happy.” Now he did turn to look at her. “You must understand, Rose. The gryphon clans and houses test each other all the time. It is how we gauge strength. So a raid is merely part of life. You take what food you can carry, and maybe a trophy if one is foolishly unguarded, and laugh at whoever you snuck past as you fly away. Even if you get in a fight, it is not in earnest.”
“But that didn’t happen with Nerys.” She could see the shape of the story now, and wasn’t particularly looking forward to the conclusion.
“No. One of my fishers warned me there were raiders approaching. But I was not in time. By the time I arrived Nerys was dead and the house torn apart.” He waved vaguely with one forepaw. “Even now I do not know why. It was buried under too much hate and violence. I went mad for a time. Then, knowing from the warriors who had seen them that it was House Assan, I did my utmost to destroy them.” Gérard sighed, and rubbed at his beak.
“There were so many interlocking agreements and obligations and alliances that in three months the whole Eyrie had dissolved into war. I do not think it would have lasted for long, in the end, but where I was breaking things apart, Aida was putting them back together. In half a year she had united most of the clans. But for House Assan and its allies.”
Her eyes were fixed on him. He sounded tired rather than grieved, not stumbling over his words or shouting them in anger. And he had continued past the moment itself, telling about her death and what it meant rather than about her life.
“Kolaire Assan swore he would join his house to her alliance if I were to abandon my campaign, admit my wrongs, and surrender. It was an impossible bluff of course; I was only doing what was honorable and Nerys was Aida’s own daughter. She would have ignored it. But he made the mistake of saying it when I was present.
“It was the proper gryphon thing to spit in his face and go on to crush him. To take my vengeance and find justice for Nerys. But...Aquila granted me one moment of crystal clarity, even callow as I was then. I could destroy him, and return to an empty house in an Eyrie no different than before, or destroy myself and perhaps create something she would have wanted.”
Rose found she wasn’t even breathing.
“I surrendered.” He sighed and clambered to his feet. “I shall go hunting now, Rose. I do not believe there is anything dangerous close by, but keep yourself safe.”
Wordlessly, she watched him vanish into the twilight. She was more than a bit muddled after that, not entirely sure how to take his story. It gave her a clear picture of Gérard speaking up after Kolaire had issued his challenge, striding up to him. But no, he wouldn’t have gloated. There had been no triumph in his words, just weariness.
In the end, his story hadn’t been about Nerys herself, but what she had meant to him. And something more that she didn’t quite understand yet. The story had an air of confession about it, as if exposing some sin.
“Celestia,” she breathed, as she realized perhaps he was. From what he’d said, there were few gryphons who would have seen that surrender as anything but cowardice. Or even betrayal; he must have lost no few friends to that decision. When Gérard said he had destroyed himself, that was exactly the word he had meant. It didn’t explain the intervening eight years, or what he was doing here, but it was almost certainly why there were two different Gérards. And why his shape had become lost to him.
She chewed on the buckbrush and watched the fire. By now, she should have found her way around the walls that she kept running into with Gérard, but it was more that he had a whole race and culture and history that she could only glimpse through a tiny lens. It was only now, with that story, that she’d really grasped how little she’d seen and how much there was.
Time stretched on, and the sky faded toward black. Stars poked through the velvet here and there, but, as had been the case for the past three years, there was no moon. Which she was privately grateful for, after the long winter under that silver eye. The wind turned cool and eventually she retreated to the tent, keeping an eye on the embers of the fire through the open flap.
She’d really never considered before how he found his way back from hunting, given that he was, as professed, no pathfinder. It had to be solely by scent and sight and memory, doubling back on his own trail and looking for the beacon of a fire. Past the scent of blood, no less, if he didn’t stumble across a stream. It seemed a lonely enough hope, and she crept back out more than once, only half awake, to poke up the fire before the embers died completely.
Eventually he did reappear, looming suddenly out of the night, and she was glad to see him despite the way her stomach cringed at the smell of death he carried with him. He cocked his head at her, looking somehow even more tired than he had when he’d left. “Could you not sleep?” He inquired, his calm and formal tones at odds with his disheveled appearance.
“I wanted to keep the fire alive,” she explained. “In case you needed it to find your way back.”
He blinked at her slowly, lids going down and then up. “Thank you, Rose,” he said. “But you need not worry. I know your scent, and the sound of your breathing and of the tent in the wind. I can find you so long as I am within a mile or so. Further, if I’m downwind.”
Her face froze into a sort of non-expression for an instant. Even carrying the scent of blood, she’d somehow forgotten that Gérard was a predator and a hunter, and the idea that he could tell her breathing from the rest of the forest sounds, or could track her by scent from a mile away froze her spine. And she had committed to walking into an encampment full of them. “Oh,” she managed as she waited for her heart to start beating again.
His head tilted slightly as he regarded her. “I did not mean to frighten you, Rose.”
She took a deep breath. “Don’t apologize for what you are,” she scolded him. “It’s not your fault, or mine, that you’re a predator and I’m not.”
“As you say,” he conceded, and Rose yawned, exhaustion crashing down on her as the rush of fear ebbed and faded.
“And you need to go out earlier. I refuse to believe you need less sleep than I do.”
His head tilted back in the other direction and his eyes glittered, his tail twitching. She could have sworn he was stifling a laugh. “Of course. Is there anything else, Rose?” There was an odd edge of almost-challenge in his voice, but she was too tired to try and dissect it.
“Actually, yes. Something about your story confused me. How old are you, exactly?” She had thought he was starting on his fourth decade, at least from the way he spoke and moved, but that didn’t quite match up with the timeline he’d given her.
He raised his eyebrows at her but answered without hesitation. “I am in my twenty-ninth year.”
“What?” She gaped at him. “That’s ridiculous. You’re younger than I am! I’ll be thirty-two next month.”
“And you don’t look a day over thirty,” Gérard murmured with a flick of his ears, then shook his head. “Forgive me, Rose, but I have always thought it is a matter of how hard one has lived their years, rather than how many.”
“Mm.” She found it hard to argue with that. The three and a half years since the sun had simply not risen during the Longest Night had been longer and harder than the rest of her life combined. Then she yawned again. “I think I’m going to climb into my bedroll before you manage to surprise me with something else.”