Swooping and diving, I careened away from the camp.
Already my head began to clear, and I felt better. Lighter. Freer.
I had just risen from the surface of the ocean, where I had been skimming the waters with my jaw, when I saw another large winged animal in the sky high above me. It came from the direction of the distant Hearthlands, now a white crust on the horizon, fringed in dirty gray cloud.
Knowing that this was another dragon—either fire, or ice—I made haste toward its smaller silhouette, and quickly gained on the… the… harpy?
But harpies didn’t come here. At least, they didn’t come here of their own volition. They preferred to be high above sea level, even if they did enjoy arctic temperatures. The nest on that cliff at Beggar’s Hole had not been a surprise to me. There were probably more of them further north, a prospect which would bring the countrymen of any such inhabited land to a shudder. A harpy didn’t simply roam outside of its desired territory… unless it was under orders.
Harpies were created to be the earthly emissaries of the dark gods, not born like I had been born, nor would they die as I would die, age as I would age, or produce young as I would produce young. Having been molded by higher powers—what the people of Earth would call “Hades” or “Satan” or “Loki”—they were naturally inclined to taking orders, and needed little persuasion to torment a target. They were made to be that way, and it was uncertain if they had been fated to be filled with vitriol, or if such a fate had filled them with vitriol. Either way, they were a nasty business to encounter, and had almost killed me once before. The night of my first kiss with Penelope…
I leapt down from Nell’s roof, onto her widow’s walk, and she whirled, eyes wide with shock. I imagined that I looked quite a fright: my hair more wild than usual, amber eyes bright and intense. Almost getting killed by a pack of harpies would do that to you; no matter how strong you were, four of the winged demon women were still worthy adversaries, particularly in an ambush. I had a scrape down the left side of my cheek, left by one of their electrical talons, and my lip was swollen and busted, having smashed into a rock on the cliffside. I still wasn’t sure if I’d merely come too near to the nest and disturbed them, exciting their ire… or if they had been acting under orders.
“Hey,” Nell breathed, striding to me as naturally as a magnet moves for its counterpart. She reached out to touch my wound, but then hesitated. “Hey, are you okay? What happened?”
“It’s nothing.” I dismissed the marks with a shake of my head, hoping she would leave it alone. We hadn’t yet broached the topic of mystical creatures, and how they would, on occasion, leak into her world. How she was looking at one right now. “You look like a queen.” I reached out to touch her cheek, wiping away an icy tear. “I hope that wasn’t for me.”
“I—I just—I don’t know, Theon,” she said. “I guess it was, maybe, in a way. I mean—men stay for a little bit, and then they go. They want to touch your hair, even save your life… but then they don’t talk about anything, they have secrets, nothing they say makes sense, and I have no idea who you are, to be totally honest, you could be anybody, and you just disappear, so if you disappeared tomorrow—”
“I won’t,” I promised her, taking both her arms in my hands. Her pulse quickened beneath my fingertips.
“What happened to you tonight?” she whispered, distracted by my slight wounds. She had no idea how much worse it could have been. A lesser man—a human man—would be certainly dead tonight.
But I only shook my head.
“More secrets,” she announced.
One of my hands moved to cup her cheek and I leaned closer. “I’ll show you everything,” I said in a hush. “Just give me a little time.”
“I don’t want this to be like everything else,” she whispered up to me, her eyes glinting with despair.
But I smiled. “Be careful what you wish for,” I whispered back, snaking my hand into her whipping hair and pulling her into my arms.
Suffice it to say, harpies were not creatures anyone, even myself, should approach—except, of course, in situations of desperation.
My eyes narrowed, and my wings pounded the night air harder as I chased the silhouette over the ocean between the ogres’ island and what remained of The Hearthlands.
It was dark, but in the moonlight… was she brown? Were her feathers mottled auburn and chestnut? Had I not met her before on the beach of Beggar’s Hole, Maine? On the night that Penelope O’Hara’s father had ejected me from her home, saying that my heritage was a line of “tired tripe”?