Free Lance of Earth and Sky (The Chaos Knight Book Two) by Erin Hoffman Page B

empire,” he managed not to sigh, “in any way I can, your majesty.”

    Relief and exhaustion washed over Vidarian as he sighted the door to his rooms. He knew that the numbness in his skull signified shock; if he consciously brought the thought of war against Qui or shapeshifting sky steeds to the fore, raw terror would lance down his spine, debilitating. But left alone, the panic submerged beneath that blessed buzz of nothingness, at least for now.
    He opened the door, intent on falling immediately into the lavish bed. But someone had other plans.
    A woman's legs, crossed elegantly at the knee, emerged from the shadow of the sitting room. His first thought was that he'd come into the wrong room by mistake, or she had—but perched on those slim knees was the pup, tongue lolling, sparks firing lazily from its crest, absurdly happy.
    Beyond them, taking up all of the space between the sitting room and the bed, was the largest gryphon Vidarian had ever seen.
    The creature was black from head to tailtip, speckled with points of light—not white , but light , as in stars. As he watched, convinced his eyes were playing a trick on him, he saw a comet streak across the gryphon's left wing. Its eyes glowed the faint gold of distant suns.
    Hard as it was to tear his eyes away from this, the woman favored by the pup was also unnaturally large, not just in height but in every dimension. And her eyes were darker than the deepest shadow, with neither white nor pupil. Her clothing was like none he'd ever seen, her mannish trews made of what appeared to be liquid metal, and her blouse a dizzyingly patterned affair of black, yellow, and green silk, marbled like an exotic insect.
    He still might not have recognized her until she giggled. “Poor, poor Vidarian,” she said, and her voice set his head spinning for the third time that evening, heard as it was outside his head, rather than in. “We've been so hard on you.” She stroked the pup, who leaned into her touch. Vidarian scowled at him, and his ears wilted soulfully.
    Don't blame him, she said in his mind, smiling, revealing unnaturally white teeth. Haven't you missed me?
    “I've been—busy.” Vidarian felt behind him for the other armchair and sank into it.
    “Oh, so have I!” The Starhunter stood and spun around with the pup in her arms, causing him to bark. She set him down on the carpet and proceeded to caper, dancing around the pup and laughing as he leaped and swatted at her with his paws. Then she spun toward the gryphon. “See?”
    Vidarian looked at the gryphon again, trying not to be distracted by the twinkling of the stars on its feathers.
    Then it spoke.
    “They trapped me in ice,” the gryphon rumbled, its voice three times deeper than any human's, with a quality that vibrated Vidarian's breastbone and threatened to turn his knees to jelly. “ Ice. ” Then it laughed, an even stranger sound, a kind of clucking wheeze. “Kind of ironic, really.”
    Being locked in ice for two thousand years has made him rather cranky.
    “I can imagine,” Vidarian said, after two false starts around a dry throat. “You know—the rest of your kind—” he wondered if they really qualified as “his kind,” but barreled onward—“they don't speak…physically…anymore.”
    The gryphon blinked, eyelids casting patches of darkness over the golden sun-glow of its irises. “Fled entirely into telepathy, then? How odd.”
    A knock at the door set the pup barking madly again, spiking panic through Vidarian's veins. He stood and scooped the pup up in his arms, where it shocked him by accident, and then filled his mind with abject apologies. When he finally managed to convince it to stop barking—it shocked him twice more, but the jolts were decidedly losing force now, thank fortune—he turned back to the Starhunter and her gryphon.
    But they were gone.
    Get rid of him, the Starhunter said, and a shadow on the far wall moved, a slender hand making a very impolite gesture at