Cover

Title

Dedication

For my parents

Chapter 1

There was a mountain.

Not a pointed, snow-capped peak like the one you’ve just imagined.

No. More a solid slab of rock. A giant volcanic loaf, pushing up out of the ground, its top cloaked in mist. Millions of years old, hundreds of feet high. Hard as iron, smooth as glass, unforgiving as death.

And halfway up it, on a ledge no wider than the palm of your hand, stood two figures. Woman and girl: mother and daughter, even, judging by their matching green eyes, copper-brown skin and shoulder-length tangles of hair, matted and braided into warriors’ locks.

Above them, the rockface yawned away to the summit, somewhere in the candyfloss mess of clouds. Below them was a fall on to knife-edge shards of broken stone. A long fall: one in which you would have plenty of time to think of how you were about to burst open like a rotten tomato, and exactly how much it was going to hurt.

There were no ropes or ladders to show how they had come to be there, standing side by side on that tiny wrinkle of rock. The mountain face was silky smooth all around: impossible to even think about climbing.

Yet there they stood, toes curled over the edge, backs pressed against the stone, the girl with her head bowed, nodding as if being given a lesson, the mother gesturing with her hands, making them swoop and turn through the air.

‘Are you ready?’ the mother said, reaching back to grasp the hood of the fur cloak she wore.

‘Of course,’ said the girl with a shrug that meant she probably wasn’t but was trying hard to fake it.

‘Then let’s go.’

The mother pulled her hood over her head, revealing the ears and nose of a russet-furred fox. The rest of the cloak fell over her shoulders: a strange mix of scales and feathers, as if the skins of several animals had been stitched together.

Then, as the cloak covered her body, there was a changing. A folding, as the outline of her human body shifted and shrank, wrapping itself in the animal hide and becoming something other.

One minute, an adult woman stood on the ledge, the next there was a griffyx. An ancient creature – long lost to the world except in myths – it looked like a mix of fox, dragon and eagle. Head and snout of fur, body of scales, feathered wings and a thick brush of a tail.

The creature paused for a heartbeat, staring at her daughter with those same green, flashing eyes her human form had owned. A brief nod of the head, and then the mother griffyx spread its wings and dived from the ledge, plummeting downwards, becoming a speck in the time it took to blink.

‘For Tree’s sake,’ muttered the girl, watching the winged beast disappear. ‘I’ll never catch her now.’