Georgy, the Prince of Yelets, was huge. Vsevolod hadn't seen any adult griffon before. He had no idea how big he might end up when he'll grow up again, but he had his doubts that he'll ever be that big. Or that fit, for that matter. This one was a warrior, and it showed. He also wasn't half-eagle, like Helga, but instead, half-owl. His front resembled great Eurasian eagle-owl, and his rear was akin to snow leopard, with white fur, black dots and long bushy tail. He was also cheerful as a kid on a New Year's party.
The reason for his cheer - as well as for his presence in the hospital - was that now, when Vsevolod was finally awake enough to speak, he was to be punished for his participation in the Great Hunt, one most forbidden activity of griffinkind after living alone in the wilds. He was already found guilty, the wolf head removed from his hindquarters was proof enough. Now, the Prince had to choose the punishment. As Podorozhnik explained, the Prince wasn't a title for a ruler, the town had an elected mayor for that. Instead it was more like a chief of combined police and self-defense forces. He also was often called upon as a judge and a tax collector. Unfortunately, the unicorn had little time to prepare Vsevolod to the meeting, and so his explanation was mostly about the office of the Prince, not about the griffon holding the title himself.
Georgy moved into the room as a happy avalanche, taking up what little space there was with his formidable body and filling the remaining gaps with his commanding presence. Helga gave him only one glance and stopped moving. Vsevolod wasn't sure that she even blinked once for the entire time the Prince was in the room. Thankfully, Podorozhnik told Georgy that she was still too weak to talk, so he wasn't even looking at her. Vsevolod, on the other hand...
"Greetings, my boy!" happily roared the huge griffin, grabbing one of Vsevolod's claws and almost shaking it off his body. "Heard you are criminal today, eh? Going to big scary forest all alone? Risking life and limb to prove that you are real warrior? The shame, boy, the shame!"
For someone not knowing the language, the whole chiding sounded as if the Prince suddenly decided to award Vsevolod with the keys to the city at the least, not to punish him for a serious crime. Younger griffin had some trouble getting the real meaning himself - while Georgy wasn't as bad in Russian as Teplovoz, he still had rather thick accent and, at times, switched to more 'modern' language without noticing.
"Can't leave that unpunished, now can we?" continued the Prince, sitting down and looking at Vsevolod with keen interest. "First time I have to punish someone so young for this. You got potential. You got big future! If you ever decide to join my druzhina, you are welcome! Of course, think about growing up a bit first, but even now we can find a job for you. Now, sorry to cut it short, but duty calls! Get well!"
With that, the huge griffin stood up, winked at Vsevolod, handed him a familiar looking wolf head, and left. When the doctor returned to the room several minutes later, the shocked griffin still sat stunned on his bed, trying to process what had happened.
"Good old Gosha is too much for you, it seems?" asked the unicorn, chuckling, while he went to Helga to check on her bandages. "He's a bit too much for the most, but really nice guy when you get to know him. With some quirks, sure, he's a local after all. He seems to like you, and you should think about the offer. It's a good job for a griffon, and the only one that allows your kind to be out of town often."
"But... punishment?" asked Vsevolod weakly, inspecting the wolf head. It looked like it was carefully worked on by a good taxidermist - cleaned of the parts that can rot, stuffed with something and sewed shut. It was almost ready to be mounted on a wall. It also looked lifelike enough to cause him to wince from a sharp pang of pain in his flank.
"Wait, you... of course you don't, where was my head!" sighed Podorozhnik, absentmindedly stroking Helga's head, producing content purr from the feral. "Your punishment is that from now on you are considered an adult by every griffon. You have proven that you can care for yourself and protect yourself from the world around you, so there's no point in you being a child. "
"That's a punishment?" blinked Vsevolod, putting the wolf head away and turning to the unicorn. "You said it's one of the worst crimes, and that's it?"
"It's more than enough. As a child, you had the right to ask for a certain amount of care from the town. A place to sleep, food, education - children get those if they don't have parents. Now that you are an adult, you had lost that right. You'll have to work, pay taxes, and answer for your crimes as a proper citizen. You are not allowed to marry, though, that is forbidden until you are fifteen. You are also not permitted to leave the town unless you are in a group of three or with a non-griffon. If you do, your new friend Gosha would hunt you and drag you back... and believe me, he's very good at it. Remember that when running away."
"Why would I run away?" asked Vsevolod, a bit shocked on how sure Podorozhnik sounded about that.
"Because from my observations, you like to be alive," shrugged the unicorn, finishing his check up on Helga and turning to the younger griffin. "I've spent some time yesterday talking with ponies in town and... You see, Yelets is a nice place, especially in summer, but beside me there's only four other Returns in it. That's counting yourself. I can understand you, but I've lived sixty years being a human and a vet. The local breed is, on the other hoof, a most xenophobic bunch. Funny, considering there's at least five different species living here, and that's if you count all five kinds of ponies as one. They have their reasons, but that won't help you any."
Vsevolod was feeling his eyes getting wet as he tried to suppress sudden tears. After all his experiences in the forest, he was finally in a place he could call his new home... and now it was taken away from him. Yes, there was an option to abandon Helga to the raging crowds and live here, but he knew he couldn't do it. Sapient or not, she was the only true friend he had in this new, brutal world. She nearly died protecting him. Leaving her to die was out of the question. Other thing was not, so he asked:
"How... how we escape?" His voice trembled, as the tears were threatening to burst through his resistance.
"When your feral friend is healthy enough, you will wait until I get drunk again, steal some supplies and run away in the dark of the night," answered the stallion with a smirk. "You would also mention something about returning to your family in the far north, beyond the Forbidden City, to cover your real escape route to the south-east. Of course, for this entire time you and your nefarious older sister will fool poor gullible me into believing she's too weak to move, so I won't let our dear Prince talk with her. You see, I failed to mention to him that you are a Return. He thinks that you are from one of the other towns, probably Istra. There's a lot of griffins there and their young finish their Hunt around here pretty often."
"Isn't that illegal?" asked Vsevolod, forgetting about his problems for a moment. The matter of the Great Hunt bothered him since Teplovoz first mentioned it, and up until now he never got any explanation of what it is, despite being just 'punished' for doing it.
"Of course it is!" smiled Podorozhnik, fishing the booze bottle from under Helga's bed and settling in for a story. "Every single griffin is drilled on how bad it is from the moment of their birth. Pretty much every day they are reminded, that going into the forest, surviving there on their own, braving untold dangers, fighting other predators..."
"So, how many manage to hold?" by that point Vsevolod was pretty sure where it was going.
"None!" the good doctor exploded in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. "If you meet a griffon that had no Great Hunt by the age of twenty, it's a Return that was at least thirty before returning. But there's more to it!"
"What more can be there?"
"There's three ways to complete the damn thing. First one is easy, about a half of the participants use it. They freeze to death, starve, meet the Deer or someone else who kills first and asks questions never. They never return. Brutal as it is, it saves us from griffon overpopulation, since your kind are notoriously fast breeders. Second one is get to a village or town on the brink of exhaustion or be saved in the forest by someone. It is considered failing it, the punishment for that is usually a good flogging. You may bet that the ones with a flank sore from the failure would try again. Then, there's a third option. After two or three weeks the hunter gets bored in the woods and returns to the town bringing some kind of a trophy to prove their achievement. Usually, it's a head of a fox or a racoon, they are known to be hard to catch for a catbird. That is considered a sign of maturity, though, normally they still do the flogging part. Wemithi is making two thirds of his profits from bandages during the winter."
"Wemithi?"
"Town's pharmacist. Real miracle worker. I think, that's the only reason they let him stay at all - locals are scared of zebras for some reason." Podorozhnik took another sip from the bottle. "Speaks in hexameter, though. Funny, but hard to understand. Speaking of which, I think you may need to learn the modern language if you expect to make your daring escape plan to succeed. You were able to fool Gosha, griffons are known to prefer the Old Speech anyway, but most of the Nomads don't speak it at all. If you want to deal with them, and you will want to deal with them when you get to their territory, you'll need to be able to talk to them."
In the next few days Podorozhnik spent some time teaching Vsevolod the language. It wasn't too hard. It was Russian at its core, but the meanings of some words went far off, while the grammar took a hit of what seemed to be Japanese. Vsevolod's former education proved to be helpful, and Helga, while sleeping all day otherwise, was always awake for the lessons. It never seemed like she's understanding anything, yet she was always ready to chirp some kind of commentary for almost every sentence of Vsevolod, while pointedly ignoring any of Podorozhnik.
Her recovery was proceeding much faster than Vsevolod would've expected, but as the doctor said, it was normal. His own recovery was going smoothly as well. In a week's time the only things that reminded him of the encounter with the wolves was a bit of a limp and two sets of scars looking almost like a rough drawing of a wolf head. The only visitor they had besides the good doctor was the nurse - a young white earth pony filly, barely of Helga's age, who was so shy that Vsevolod wasn't able to get two words out of her.
Naturally, by the end of the first week of confinement to the small room, both griffins were bored out of their minds.
Helga wasn't showing it much at first - she hardly had the way to, being unable to move. But every day the bandages on her got more scarce, the wounds closed and the scars faded unnaturally fast. It became more and more clear that it was only a matter of time before she tries to escape the confinement. She slowly checked every corner of the room, dragging Vsevolod with her to what was probably the weak spots. She looked out of the window every five minutes and poked at the door. By the end of the week the only way to stop her attempts to ram the door and flee was for Vsevolod to grab her and start scratching on her many scars - that brought the wild catbird into a state of bliss, making her purr loudly and completely relax. So when Podorozhnik announced that the day has come, Vsevolod was almost glad to be thrown out into the winter again.
"Tonight I'll return very, very drunk," explained the doctor in the morning. "Who knows, maybe I'll stay over at Wemithi's, I do that when I'm too drunk. You'll have to ravage the kitchen a bit, just don't go overboard. I'll leave your bag with some food on the table, just make it look like you grabbed all of it from the cupboards. The antler will be there too, if you need it. There will be a big snowfall this night, so don't worry about the tracks. You know the rest, so good luck on your journey."
With that, the unicorn turned to leave, but was stopped by Helga tugging on his tail. Her face scrunched in serious effort, she closed her eyes and chirped, shook her head, chirped again, and then, quietly, nearly unintelligibly spoke:
"Thank... you."