A Stone's Throw (The Gryphonpike Chronicles Book 3) Read Free Page A

misting over us.
    A different cry, deeper and longer, rose up from the side and I dragged another arrow out of my quiver, expecting a new adversary or renewed attack. Instead, the remaining few warakin pulled back, turning as soon as they felt it was safe to do so and fleeing back into the long grasses. Turning my head, I saw a larger, darker warakin watching us from out of bow range. The odd cry had come from it, I guessed. With one last long look at us, the warakin leader turned and followed the remains of his pack.
    The assault had to have lasted only scant minutes, judging by the angle of the sun, but my arms felt blood-pumped and heavy as relief hit me. A pile of dead bodies smoked beneath Rahiel and Bill. Azyrin plunged his falchion into a still-twitching corpse.
    “Looks like they are actually moving away,” Rahiel called from her higher vantage.
    “For now,” Azyrin said.
    “Showed those furlumps what’s what.” Makha smiled wearily. She hadn’t even had a chance to pull her armored hood up for the battle. She brushed at some blood on her maille. “Glad this stuff does its job.”
    “Look,” Drake said. “I’m sorry I didn’t mention this. Seemed unlikely with such a big territory that we’d even run into them.”
    “They are very territorial, moron.” Rahiel flew closer. “You ever pull something like this again, I will turn you into a rabbit. And then sell you as a pet to some spoiled merchanter’s wife.”
    “Again,” Drake said with a tiny, apologetic smile. “Don’t you mean ‘I’ll turn you into a rabbit, again’?”
    “Yes!”
    I finished pulling what arrows I could find out of the dead beasts and moved down to the stream to clean the worst of the blood off. Fade followed and plunged his head into the shallow, cold water, shaking droplets everywhere afterward. He licked my hand and I risked a wave of nausea to stroke his ears.
    “The point is,” Drake was saying when I moved back up the little hill to them, “I don’t think they’ll bug us again. And if we follow that stream north, we’ll reach the bigger stream that flows by the sunken hill.”
    “Let us go on, then,” Azyrin said.
    “Fine,” Rahiel muttered. She smoothed her skirts out over Bill’s back and they took off into the air again.
    Bending down, I ran my fingers through the fur covering one of the dead warakin. It was coarse but thick. Pity there wasn’t enough time to skin the bodies. They would stay out here and rot, slowly torn apart by insects and scavengers. Flies were already circling the drying blood. So wasteful. There had been a hint of intelligence in that big warakin’s eyes. I could only hope he or she would learn from this encounter and steer the pack clear of people in armor in the future. So much killing over what? Territorial instinct?
    “Come on, Killer.” Makha rolled her shoulders as she turned to her husband. “Nice warm-up. I feel much more awake now.”
    Chuckling, Azyrin slung his arm over her shoulders and kissed her cheek. Makha blushed, shoved him away, and set out after Drake. I smiled at the look they shared. They might pretend nonchalance, but after an intense fight like that, I knew they were glad to see each other uninjured and still standing. Much the same way that Fade often bumped my hand or hip with his huge fuzzy head after a fight. It was the reassurance of touch, the gesture that said “hey, still here, still okay”. Some communication even a curse can’t stand in the way of.
     
    * * *
     
    “Sunken hill?” Rahiel yelled over the roar of the waterfall. “More like sinkhole.”
    It was nearly midday before we found the ruins. The large stream that ran into them fell away in a waterfall down into a pit that was at least a hundred feet deep and twice that in width. Orange and green algae coated the striated grey stone walls of the sinkhole. Standing across from the plunging stream and blinking cold spray from the waterfall out of my eyes, I could just make out the