The Griffin's Feather (Dragon Rider 2)

‘Don’t mention the dragon,’ he whispered. ‘Remember: the griffins mustn’t find out about him! And jackal scorpions may not be especially clever, but they have very keen hearing.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Magic Time

I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird

that has broken out of the egg.

J.M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy

Magic time. That was what Guinevere still called it many years later: those two days when the silver eggs for which their father had flown to the other side of the world revealed their secret, and she lost her heart to three tiny winged foals. Guinevere even forgot what she was counting down as she made crosses on the calendar on the stable door. Suddenly only the entries that she wrote in the boxes mattered: Saw a tiny face on the other side of the shell for the first time. The third foal is coppery red like its father. The white foal has a copper blaze on the forehead.

The time when Ànemos avoided the stable was over. The Pegasus visited the nest so often that in the end Vita had a flock of indignant geese and swans standing in the living room. Only when the temperature of the eggs, as taken by Guinevere, was a little lower than usual did Ànemos overcome his longing to watch the tiny figures moving in shells that were becoming more and more translucent.

‘They need names,’ Guinevere told him, when they had been driven from the stable once again by two hissing swans. ‘What will you call them?’

‘Synnefo. Ouranos. And Chara.’

The answer came so fast that Guinevere had to smile.

‘Well, Guinevere Humangirl?’ Ànemos nudged her breast with his soft muzzle. ‘All right, I admit it! I’ve been thinking about their names for a long time. Don’t you like them?’

‘Oh yes, I do, I do! Those are wonderful names.’ And something else was wonderful: the way the Pegasus was suddenly trotting as lightly out of the stable as if he were made of pure joy.

‘Well done, Vitasdaughter!’ Raskervint told Guinevere. ‘He didn’t need a centaur. A Pegasus wants human friends! And what could warm his sad heart better than a human girl who knows all about fabulous creatures, and has inherited her parents’ courage and warmth?’

Guinevere stammered her embarrassed thanks, and felt sure that she would never be paid a greater compliment in her life. She was very glad that Vita had asked Raskervint to stay until Ben, Barnabas and the others came back.

‘Why, of course I’ll stay,’ the centaur had replied. ‘You don’t think I want to miss the birth of three Pegasus foals, do you?’

Yes, it was a magic time. And there were still four days white and empty on the calendar on the stable door.

‘That’s not long, Guinevere,’ wh

ispered a voice inside her. But she didn’t want to listen to it. What was happening was simply too wonderful.

Everything would be all right.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Too Late

Walking with a friend in the dark is

better than walking alone in the light.

Helen Keller

One of the buttons from Ben’s jacket! Trodden deeply into ground that was still damp after the rain. Twigleg wiped tears from his eyes.

‘Pull yourself together, humpelkluss!’ said Lola, inspecting some crushed snail shells. ‘It’s a button, not his dead body!’

Twigleg was very good at reading tracks, as Ben often said, but compared to Lola he felt like a child just starting school, proud of himself if he could so much as stammer out the alphabet.

‘Our feathered friend is right,’ she said, looking up at the trees under which the tracks left by Ben, Barnabas and Hothbrodd abruptly ended. ‘It was monkeys who dragged them away, no doubt about it.’

She bent down and picked a couple of pale brown monkey hairs out of a fern. ‘Macaques, I’d say.’