The Griffin's Feather (Dragon Rider 2)

the greatest source of intellectual interest; the greatest source

of so much in life that makes life worth living.

Sir David Attenborough

Not many buildings in this world can make themselves invisible. But the main house in MÍMAMEIÐR merges so completely with the forest, the earth and the sky that most visitors don’t see it until they are standing right in front of it. Ben always felt as if he were approaching a living creature made of wood, stone and glass, and it enjoyed hiding from him. And who knows, maybe the house really was alive. After all, a troll had built it.

The troll’s name was Hothbrodd, and all the buildings in MÍMAMEIÐR had been built to his specifications. Usually Hothbrodd even sawed up the planks and beams himself, and he spent weeks ornamenting the façades with artistic carvings. This morning he was up early, cleaning the carvings over the entrance of the house with a knife that looked even more fearsome than Hothbrodd himself. The carved dragon winding its way over one of the beams was a very successful portrait of Firedrake, but there were also Great Krakens, centaurs, and fossegrims playing their fiddles on the façade. Hothbrodd could carve the image of every creature on this planet.

‘Drat those mist-ravens!’ said the troll crossly, as Ben and Twigleg stopped beside him. ‘One of these days I’ll wring their grey necks if they don’t stop leaving droppings all over my carvings!’

Hothbrodd towered almost a metre above even fully-grown men, but Ben was used to the troll’s height by now. After all, he was best friends with a dragon. Hothbrodd’s skin was as rough as the bark of an oak tree, and Ben had learned from him that, contrary to all the stories about them, trolls were not just very strong but also very clever. ‘A

lthough fjord trolls,’ Hothbrodd might have added, ‘are just as stupid as everyone says.’ His opinion of human beings was no better. Hothbrodd preferred talking to pines, beeches and oaks (though he did make an exception for the Greenblooms), and the things that he created from the wood of those trees would make anyone believe in magic. But however you liked to explain his art, it was thanks to Hothbrodd that the buildings in MÍMAMEIÐR were as unusual as their inhabitants, and that was true above all of the main house. In many places the outer walls were made of glass, and the troll’s knife had covered the beams and joists framing the large panes with such intricately twining patterns that Ben was constantly discovering new creatures among them. There was surely no house more magical anywhere in the world.

Ben remembered the house where he had been born as vaguely as he remembered his birth parents. They had both died in a car crash soon after his third birthday, and Ben spent the next seven years in a building claiming to be a ‘home’, although the children living there would certainly never have called it that. The word was spoken under its roof as seldom as the words mother and father. Why talk about something that you didn’t have, especially when you longed for it so much that the mere idea made you feel sick? In Ben’s childhood, mothers and fathers had been creatures as unreal as the dragon he met when he was eleven. At some point he had gone to live with foster parents, but they had been even worse than the home. Ben had run away from them – and from then on he hadn’t let himself dream of a family any more – until he had met the Greenblooms. Maybe you have to bury your dreams to make them come true.

Ben’s adopted parents, as Barnabas and Vita Greenbloom liked to call themselves, had devoted their lives to protecting the rarest beings in the world from human greed and curiosity. That didn’t make them rich. When Ben moved in with the Greenblooms, they had been living in a house much too small for them in the north-west of England, where Ben shared a room with his new sister Guinevere, six snoring hobs, and a few grass fairies who had almost fallen victim to a neighbour’s lawnmower. But then, one day, a cigar box containing ten flawless jewels had been left on the doorstep, the gift of several grateful stone-dwarves whose village the Greenblooms had evacuated before it was blown sky-high to make space for a new road. And Ben’s adopted parents had at last been able to put their dream of a refuge for fabulous creatures into practice. They had built MÍMAMEIÐR not in England but in Norway, partly because their fabulous guests would pass unnoticed more easily in that country’s remote forests – and partly because it was where Barnabas’s ancestors came from.

Ben saw that Hothbrodd was not the only one up and about already when he stopped beside the troll. A dozen little nisse children were sitting rapt at his feet, admiring his skill with his enormous knife. Hothbrodd was always surrounded by nisse and impet children – an alarming sight in view of the troll’s gigantic boots – but so far none of those tiny creatures had come to any harm.

‘Hi, Hothbrodd,’ said Ben, while Twigleg, sitting on his shoulder, politely hid a yawn behind his hand. ‘Do you know what’s happened? The mist-raven who sent us here looked suspiciously happy.’

Hothbrodd frowned, and scraped raven droppings off the nose of a carved impet. ‘News of some kind from Greece,’ he grunted. ‘And yes, I think it was indeed rather bad news.’

Ben exchanged an anxious glance with Twigleg. Greece… Vita and Barnabas had discovered a Pegasus couple there just under a year ago. And the other day Vita and Guinevere had set off to see how they were doing.

Ben left his muddy boots with the leprechaun who lived in the coat cupboard beside the front door, and went into the house that he loved more than any other in the world.

The portraits and photos on the walls of the entrance hall showed friends and colleagues of the Greenblooms. Some of them had creatures of legend and fable among their own ancestors, although it often wasn’t obvious. Suspiciously pointed ears, a cow’s tail, webbing between the toes… all those features were easily hidden. Even a hint of fur on the face could be explained away as an annoyingly strong growth of stubble. Accounting for the beak of Professor Buceros and Dr Eel’s gills was more difficult, and so those two turned up only for meetings of the inner circle of FREEFAB (the name that Ben and Guinevere had given their parents’ organisation; Vita and Barnabas preferred to describe its members as ‘protectors’ of fabulous species). Under Dr Eel’s photos, a family of flying Watobi pigs that a friend of the Greenblooms had rescued from poachers in the Congo were asleep in a dog’s basket. The scaly tail of a photomeleon showed under the coat cupboard, and two feathered frogs were looking down at Ben from the chandelier. How could anyone fail to love MÍMAMEIÐR?

‘Control Centre’ – Barnabas Greenbloom disliked the term that the mist-ravens used for his library, although in many ways it deserved the name. It was the largest room in the house, and two walls were covered with books right up to the ceiling, which was exactly right for a library. The outside wall, however, was glass, so that you felt as if the books were standing among the trees outside. In winter you could look through their bare branches and see the nearby fjord, but on this rainy May morning the branches bore the fresh green leaves of springtime, and they were teeming with crow-men and tomtes who built their dwellings among the nests of buntings and leaf warblers.

The smile that Barnabas gave Ben was as warm as ever, but Ben could tell just from looking at him that something really bad must have happened.

A dozen screens hung on the fourth wall, and the films on them showed the protectors of fabulous creatures from all over the world, talking about those that they had entrusted to the care of the Greenblooms. All the screens were dark except for one, which showed Guinevere in the remote Greek valley where her parents had discovered the two Pegasi. The sound and picture were so bad that, yet again, Ben wished Barnabas would invest one of the jewels still remaining from the dwarves’ gift in new cameras and computers. But Barnabas always pointed out that it was better to go carefully with the money from the jewels, in view of all the refugees that came to MÍMAMEIÐR, and he was right. All the same – ‘frogspawn and bird poo!’ as Hothbrodd would have cursed – the picture was so poor that Guinevere might have been standing on another planet. What she was saying, however, drove away all thoughts of better cameras, and reminded Ben that there were much worse things to worry about.

‘We’re assuming it was a horned viper,’ she said. ‘It’s dreadful, Dad! Synnefo may well have trodden on its nest by mistake. The venom worked much faster than with humans. Ànemos is beside himself!’

Ben looked at Barnabas in dismay. Synnefo was the Pegasus mare, Ànemos was the stallion. The two of them were probably the last of their species, and everyone in MÍMAMEIÐR remembered the excitement when Lola Greytail, their best news-gatherer (and the only female rat aviator in the world) came back from Greece with photos of a nest and three new-laid Pegasus eggs. Hothbrodd made his way through the door and looked anxiously at the screen, which now also showed Vita. Ben didn’t call Vita Greenbloom Mother, any more than he called Barnabas Father, although he loved them dearly. But they both seemed to be so much more than parents: they were his friends, teachers and protectors.

Ben had seldom seen Vita looking sadder. Her eyes, like Guinevere’s, showed that she had been crying, and Vita didn’t cry easily.

‘We can hardly persuade Ànemos to eat, Barnabas!’ she said. ‘He’s half-crazy with grief! And he knows, as we do, that he could lose his children as well. It won’t be simple to keep the eggs warm in the Norwegian spring, but I think the only hope for the foals is for us to bring the nest and Ànemos to MÍMAMEIÐR. Guinevere agrees with me.’

Guinevere nodded vigorously. Many people were surprised to find how much the Greenblooms valued the opinions of their children. ‘Remarkable, isn’t it?’ Barnabas had once commented. ‘As if it wasn’t obvious that a person’s age often has little to do with their intelligence. I might even claim that in many cases, unfortunately, stupidity and pig-headedness get worse with every birthday!’

The Greenblooms set so much store by working with their children that Ben and Guinevere were taught at home. And they had wonderful teachers: Twigleg taught them history and ancient languages (a very important subject if you are dealing with beings who could easily be thousands of years old). Dr Phoebe Humboldt, who taught them about the nature of fabulous creatures, had spent four years in a sunken ship off the Ligurian coast, studying sea-nymphs and mermen. They learned geography from Gilbert Greytail, a white rat whom Barnabas had persuaded to leave the city of Hamburg with its warehouses, and move to MÍMAMEIÐR to make maps showing the original homes of all known fabulous beings. One of Ben’s few human teachers, James Spotiswode, tried to teach them mathematics, biology and physics – about as easy as convincing wolves that it is a bad idea to gobble up impets – but as Professor Spotiswode rewarded Ben and Guinevere for every natural history problem that they solved successfully by giving them lessons in robotics and telepathy, he had two very enthusiastic students. In short, the pair of them were learning what they needed to know in order to devote their lives, as their parents did, to conserving all the creatures who, without their help, might be in danger of existing only in the pages of books of fairy tales.

‘Keeping the stable warm won’t be a problem.’ Hothbrodd took a piece of wood out of his pocket and began carving a lizard from it. ‘The woolspinner oaklings can pad the nest and the stable walls.’

Barnabas nodded, although he didn’t look entirely convinced.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Hothbrodd will get the stable ready, and I’ll ask Undset to be here when you arrive. I shouldn’t think she’s ever treated a Pegasus before, but maybe she can at least help to keep Ànemos alive.’

Holly Undset was a young veterinary surgeon from the neighbouring village of Freyahammer, and she had already given medical treatment to countless guests at MÍMAMEIÐR. It hadn’t been easy to find someone who could be relied on to keep silent. Many hunters would have paid a fortune for the information that there was a hidden place in Norway where such rare prey as water-horses and dragons could be found. But Holly Undset was such a passionate opponent of wolf-hunts and bear-hunts that one day Barnabas had invited her to MÍMAMEIÐR.

When the screen on which Vita and Guinevere had given their bad news went black, there was a depressed silence in the library. Even Hothbrodd had lowered his knife. Photos of the Pegasus nest were propped against the backs of the books on one of the shelves. Ben went over and looked at the three silvery eggs. They were smaller than hens’ eggs. It had s