buried somewhere under the emptiness of his heart and mind. But it stayed where it was and let him go on living in a hollow, pointless kind of way. All he could really think about now was home. He wanted to see Flell again, and his parents. And he had some vague notion that if he could get back to his house then everything would be all right again.
When the trio of wagons arrived from Lansdown, Arren helped the bearers load the black griffin onto one of them. The cage was lashed down with rope and covered with a large piece of sackcloth, and boxes of supplies were stacked around it to stop it shaking too much. A second wagon was reserved for the griffiners; it was covered and contained bedding for the three of them to sleep on. The third one was packed with straw and was for the griffins.
There was no room in either of them for Arren. He elected to sit on the back of the supply wagon, where there was just enough space for him to lie down, albeit uncomfortably. Once everything had been loaded up and the inhabitants of Rivermeet had been thanked and given money for their trouble, the procession got underway.
Arren sat on the splintery wood at the back of the wagon, listening to the griffin shifting restlessly in its cage, and watched the village slowly recede into the distance. A small place. Not a particularly interesting one, either. I’ll come back, he thought. I swear I’ll come back one day. To see you again.
He could just see the field where he had buried Eluna, visible between the houses. He was leaving her behind, he realised. He was abandoning her.
For a moment he was seized by a wild impulse to jump down from the wagon and run back to the village and beyond it to the field, but he didn’t move. It was in that instant that the full impact of what had happened began to dawn on him.
Arren bowed his head and started to cry.
The journey passed miserably. No-one paid much attention to Arren. Even his fellow griffiners seemed to be avoiding him, as if they were embarrassed to talk to him. He didn’t try to seek out their company, or talk to any of the wagoners or the mounted guards who rode alongside the procession. It rained for most of the way, and the cover over the supply wagon wasn’t quite able to shelter him completely, so his clothes and blankets were constantly damp. When they stopped for the night at various inns along the way, he quietly refused to go indoors and remained at his post. It wasn’t that he particularly cared about guarding the griffin, he realised eventually. But the prospect of being with other people did not appeal to him. All his life, people had known he was a Northerner as soon as they looked at him, and he had always hated it. Even when they didn’t say anything, he could tell what they were thinking. It was in the way they looked at him. In these places, people didn’t know of him. He didn’t know how they would react to his presence, and he wasn’t interested in finding out.
And then, at last, Eagleholm came into sight. Arren heard the driver of the supply wagon point it out to one of the guards, and stood up to look ahead to where the mountain jutted up from the landscape. They would be there before nightfall. He sat back down again.
The rain had stopped, and the damp ground was steaming slightly in the heat from the returning sun. Arren crossed his legs and scratched his chin. He’d forgotten to take a razor with him to Rivermeet, and by now he’d grown quite a thick thatch of stubble. He hated that. It made him feel grubby and unkempt. But he supposed he would have looked untidy even if he was clean-shaven. At Rivermeet he’d been given some fresh clothes to wear, but they were too large for him and had picked up quite a bit of dirt along the way. I must look ridiculous, he thought miserably.
Thunder rumbled overhead. Behind him, the black griffin shifted and bashed its beak against the bars of its cage. It had spent most of the journey drugged, but when it was awake it spent a lot of time thumping on the wood around it. Arren didn’t know why. It wasn’t vigorous enough to be a