The Griffin's Flight Read Online Free PDF Page B

back, making sure it was secure. Once he’d checked the campsite for anything that might have been left behind, he approached the griffin as slowly and respectfully as he could.
    “Can I get on?” he asked.
    Skandar regarded him for a moment, then crouched low to the ground and waited.
    Arren climbed onto his back, being careful not to pull out any of his feathers, and settled down in the space between his neck and wings. It had taken a lot of persuasion to get the griffin to agree to this; to begin with Arren had had to put up with being carried in Skandar’s claws like prey. In the end, though, he’d explained to Skandar that carrying him on his back would both let him fly faster and leave his talons free.
    Riding a griffin was harder without tack; Arren leant back as Skandar straightened up, and then put his arms around the griffin’s neck and held on as tightly as he dared. Skandar made a short, rough dash across the clearing and then leapt, his wings opening wide. They beat hard at the air, lifting the pair of them in a brief and unstable prelude to true flight before he found his balance and settled into a glide.
    Arren relaxed his grip and sat back a little. Riding a griffin wasn’t as easy as it looked; human beings were heavy, and griffins weren’t built to carry large burdens over long distances. Making a sudden move or leaning too far in any direction could unbalance a griffin in flight, and that could have all kinds of unpleasant consequences, from making the griffin lose control and fall or collide with something, to simply causing it to become angry and refuse to carry such an inept rider any further. Fortunately, Arren had been trained and was fairly competent in the air. And over the last few months he had had a great deal of practice.
    The sun was well up by now, and as Skandar flew high over the treetops, its light reflected off the silver feathers that covered his front half. He was not all black; no griffin was entirely one colour. But his furred hindquarters were: Arren had noticed that even the pads on his back paws were black. The rudder of feathers on the end of his tail was white, and his wings were mottled with black, silver and white. His scaly front legs and his beak were black, and so were the two pointed tufts of feather that grew over his ears, but the feathers on his neck and chest were silver. Arren had never seen or heard of a griffin with this sort of colouration; silver was uncommon though not unheard of, but as far as he knew there had never been a black griffin anywhere.
    When they had first met, Skandar’s feathers had been thick and strong and his fur glossy with health. But the time he had spent caged behind the Arena had changed that. Now there were two rings of pale, weak scales on his forelegs—scars left by the manacles he had worn—and there was a patch on his neck where the feathers had not yet finished regrowing after the collar had rubbed them away. And there were scars and bald patches on his hindquarters and chips in his beak, relics of his many fights against both humans and griffins.
    One of them had been against Arren himself.
    Skandar’s condition made Arren feel slightly ashamed, but he knew that he, too, was far from a picture of health and perfection.
    At twenty years old—he had celebrated his last birthday in prison—he was tall and lean, almost gaunt. He’d always been thin, but months of poor and sporadic food supply had made him even thinner. His face was pale and angular, with a raised, twisted scar on one cheek that looked almost like a tear track. He had curly black hair that had grown long and wild and permanently tangled—much to his dismay—and he had a pointed beard, which had also become unkempt and needed trimming. His eyes, too, were black—cold and glittering and wary—and the ragged robe that was his only garment had once been black as well, though now it was stained and grubby. It had no collar, and thus there was nothing to hide the