David Farland - Sons of the Oak

“As for you, I want you to fly to Beastmaster Thorin’s ranch and warn Jaz that Fallion is in trouble. He’ll be needing your graak. Give it to him. He’ll need it to fly back to the hideout. Understand?”

Draken nodded, then leapt onto the back of the graak. With a cry it rose into the air.

Shadoath followed a pair of golaths along a wooden bridge, until they reached a point near the fortress where it just fell away.

“This is where you lost them?” Shadoath asked.

“Yes,” a golath answered, its voice emotionless. “Fast they were, and cunning fighters. They shot arrows, and pricked at us with spears. Gone they are, I think.”

Shadoath peered over the bridge. One of her most valuable warriors lay broken below, on rocks stained black from blood.

Ahead of her, Shadoath could see the little island fortress. There were still a dozen graaks nesting among the white trees. In the full sunlight, it was a dazzling sight.

“So you saw children flying away from here, heading inland?”

“Yes, yes,” the golath answered. “All of us spotted them, we did.”

“Which way?”

The golath pointed almost due east, into the trees.

It had to be Fallion. She and her men had searched the city, and come up empty.

“Search the forest,” Shadoath said. “Look for any trace of them- footprints, smoke from a fire.”

The golath lowered its eyes in acknowledgment.

Shadoath backed up, then raced along the bridge toward the fortress. Ahead, a portion of it had been cut away. Sixty feet of rope bridge now dangled uselessly to the stones below. But with her endowments of speed and brawn, Shadoath sprinted up to a speed of ninety miles per hour, then leapt high in the air, seeming almost to glide across the span as she hit the bridge on the far side.

Ahead, a wooden door was locked, a bar wedged across the inside.

Shadoath slammed a mailed fist into it, shattering the bar. The door fell open, and Shadoath entered the fortress.

She found harnesses and bridles inside a crude tack room, then came out.

The graaks were nesting, each of them sitting in a bowl formed from sticks and soft seaweed. They rested atop leathery sand-colored eggs with flecks of brown and white.

The mother graaks could not be coaxed from their nests, Shadoath knew. They were good mothers. But the males could be tempted. They were used to hunting for food for their mates at this time of the year, and quickly grew restless.

She found a nest that still had a pair of graaks, and then bridled the male.

She peeled off her mail, left it lying in the nest.

Shadoath was a petite woman, not much heavier than a child. She’d be able to ride a graak for a few miles at a hop.

She leapt upon its back, and urged it into the sky. It leapt forward clumsily, the branches in its nest crunching and snapping under their combined weight. At last it launched forward over the edge of the nest.

It seemed to fall a dozen feet before its wings caught the air and it lumbered upward.

The graak was small for a male, and Shadoath could feel it strain as its leather wings flapped heavily, gaining purchase in the sky.

Then it was airborne.

She aimed it to the east, let it fly above the ocean for a moment, and above the trees, giving it its head.

My mount may have seen which way the children went, Shadoath thought. It knows the paths in the sky. Let’s see if he will lead me to their hideout.

To her delight, the graak thundered toward the trees for a few minutes, then dove toward a broad expanse, a place where limbs and branches had been cleared, creating a hidden flyway.

She was hot on Fallion’s trail.

Fallion winged away from Garion’s Port, flying slowly, stopping every few miles to let his graak rest, letting his huge mount take its time.

He had come up out of the flyway just moments ago, exiting the stonewood. His troops were flying low above the trees, following the curves of the valley.

A graak is so large that it can be seen hundreds of miles away by a vigilant far-seer. But it can only be seen if it is flying in plain view. Fallion’s troops were expert at flying unseen. Their mounts now were winging over a river valley, the graaks skimming just above the treetops. Flying thus did more than keep the graaks hidden. The warm thermals rising up from the woods coupled with the dense air at lower elevations let the graaks’ wings get a stronger purchase in the air, fly more easily.

Fallion looked all around. Hillsides rose up in every direction. His troops would remain unseen.

The sun was a golden ball in a hazy sky. Far ahead of him, perhaps eight miles, the young Gwardeen flew toward the hideout in a staggered line, each upon the back of a graak.

At the edge of the stonewood, Fallion let his mount perch in a tree and rest. He waited for a long while, listening for sounds of pursuit. He heard none.

It was twelve miles back to the city. Following the children on foot so far would have been all but impossible. The stonewood was almost impenetrable. The huge roots of trees lay in a tangle on the forest floor.

Perhaps a powerful force warrior might manage to follow us, Fallion thought.

But the flyway was meant to baffle such pursuers. It led through dense foliage, over bogs filled with quicksand, up steep cliffs, and wound this way and that so that even if a pursuer spied them from below, he would not know their true direction.

Still the danger was very real. If Shadoath’s scouts spotted them, they could follow the children like bees to their hive.

The only way that Fallion would be able to keep the kids safe would be to have them stay hidden.

Back toward the city rose billowing clouds of smoke. Shadoath, it seemed, had set fire to the ships in the bay, perhaps even to the city itself.

Below him, tangles of stonewood gave way to smaller white gums with stands of leatherwood.

Ahead of him the wind had sculpted the deep red sandstone mountains into bizarre and beautiful configurations, and at the base of the mountains he could see blue-green king’s pine on the ridges.

Here, the landscape opened up into stony fields. There were no farms, no tame herds grazing on the hills, but he spotted various animals found only on Landesfallen-gentle burrow-bears that looked much like young bears from back home, but they had gray hair and ate only grass. The burrow-bears watched him fly overhead as they grazed, unperturbed by the sight of humans or graaks.

There were scores of rangits, lying in the shade of fallen gum trees, that would jump up and leap away, the whole ground trembling as they did, for they tended to jump and land in unison.

There were smaller poo-hares, creatures related to rangits that were the size of large hares, but which hopped much more quickly than any hare.

He saw spiny anteaters that swung their heavy tails like clubs; and once he even spotted a rare arrowyck, an enormous flightless bird nearly twice as tall as a man, a cruel carnivore that could crush a burrow-bear in its heavy beak.

Ahead was a stony mountain of red rock, sculpted by the wind. It thrust up from the trees, and its sides-formed from petrified sand dunes-looked almost as if they had stairs carved into them. Natural ridges in the stone created a stairway that rose up and up.

The Gwardeen had come up into a relatively narrow canyon, and the mountain lay straight ahead. They had already circled it, so that their climb could not be seen from the west.