Gauntlet Fall (The Gauntlet Book 1)

  Gauntlet Fall

  (The Gauntlet, Book 1)

  by

  Maddy Edwards

  Copyright © 2017 by Maddy Edwards

  Cover Design © Alchemy Book Covers and Design

  This novel is a work of fiction in which names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, places, or events is completely coincidental.

  License Notes

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  the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Contact Maddy Edwards

  Books by Maddy Edwards

  Chapter One

  “Three, four, five,” I muttered under my breath. The sun was rising and had just started to send daisy-colored beams of light through the boards of my ceiling. I blinked several times and started my count again. The minutes were trudging on, one after another, not in the least hurry to get on with it, as I was.

  From below there came a scraping sound that made me pause. My cousin’s wolf dogs wanted out, now. That was my job, but I wasn’t permitted to leave my bed until five, even on days like today.

  Since the war there had been stillness, a silence, as if people believed that if we didn’t move too quickly or too loudly, we would stay safe.

  But if that were true, why didn’t the foreboding ever dissipate?

  Griffin Gliding happened once a year, and today was the day, the only day of the year when the sun had to share the sky with other gold against the blue. After the griffins had passed, gloriously flying high on invisible currents of air, several shiny cars would dot the countryside as they drove west, also once a year. The entire town came out to see the animals and the machines.

  Around our village, the only cars we usually saw were ancient, rusted wrecks. The real cars that raced past after the griffins flew by made those rusted versions come to life in my mind. The town was a whirl of mechanical motion once again.

  We provided the food, they the protection, why confuse the deal? Just once a year, but no more.

  Either the fields were hoed and sown or we all stared bleary-eyed upwards. Mucking about staring at griffins didn’t do folks like us any good one way or the other.

  But they were such beautiful creatures, expansive wings of white and bronzed yellow spread wide, as big as the roof of the barn I was currently supposed to be asleep in. My heart started to beat faster just thinking about those great Mythical animals charging over the countryside, and the silver cars following in their wake.

  My cousin’s son Lowell was too young to understand what the griffins meant, or to appreciate why today was the most important day of the year. But he still loved the party the village held. My cousin’s other child, Arabella, was too busy knitting and primping to even think of those shiny silver cars. Besides, girls weren’t strong enough for that sort of thing, so why should she worry her head over it?

  It just wasn’t fair.

  Why did boys have a way out and girls did not?

  Pure brute strength was not all that mattered in the world. Grace and power and smarts mattered too.

  Whenever I got too uppity, Mrs. Hufton, my cousin, slapped me upside the ear until it smarted and turned red along with my face. I would cover my bruised appendage with my hands and disappear back to the wolf dogs.

  Five o’clock! My feet hit the rough wooden floor and I felt several splinters poking up. Gingerly, I lifted my foot and stepped once, then again.

  The cold morning hit my face at the start of Gauntlet Fall. I was off like a shot.

  My broken and desperate mother had left me with my cousins years ago, promising to return. She never did.

  I still looked for her, and my older brother too, this year especially. This of all years was the most important. Henry would have been twenty-two; surely this was the year he might ride the griffins himself.

  The village was still quiet, though there were more people awake than usual preparing for the exciting day to come, a woman washing up in a gently glowing window and the milkman with his goats, softly coaxing them. I picked my way around a rusted-out truck that had been scavenged to the bone. To the left of it was the pile of old televisions and lamps. The telephone poles had long since been burned in the war effort, but coils of old telephone wire could still be found abandoned in the woods, curled and rusted red, the color of a few of the fall leaves that were starting to peek through the green.

  “Hi.” Julet didn’t startle me as he stepped out from the woods; we had planned to spend this day together. He hefted a bow and grinned, his curly brown hair brushing his shoulders and his brown eyes lighting up.

  “Who gave you a bow?” I demanded.

  “Took it from Pa’s rack this morning,” said my best friend proudly, examining it as if it were treasure.

  “Can you shoot it?” I asked skeptically.

  Julet’s face fell. “No, but it’s better protection than nothing. What if those shiny cars come this way and we have to fight them off?”

  “Right, then you can throw it at them. They’ve never come this way,” I said. “They wouldn’t bother. What do we have that they want?”

  Julet’s chin stuck out dangerously. I knew that look.

  “This could be the year,” he said. “Isn’t that what you believe too?”

  I lapsed into silence. He knew me too well.

  Ignoring his question, I kept moving, giving a sharp whistle so the wolf dogs would know to follow.

  I stepped through the brambles, careful to use the leather-covered part of my forearm to push the tiny spikes away from my face and my friend’s. Leather was the one
extravagance my cousin afforded me, but she knew it was necessary. After the dogs had attacked me, my cousin had to do something to protect me. Even this village would talk if she let me die gruesomely. Instead, she just hoped I’d slip and fall to my death in a horrible accident.

  So I wore a thick leather gauntlet of the finest quality, and no dog bite would penetrate it.

  The dogs hadn’t bitten me since that first time anyway, but I wasn’t about to tell my cousin that.

  I held the brush back until Julet had made his way through. His bow got caught on a tree branch and he sprang backwards for a few seconds to untangle the string. Then he gave me a rueful grin.

  Proudly, he held out a cup for me to see. I came to a dead halt.

  “Ice cream?” I whispered.

  “There’s tons in the village today,” he said, his eyes brightening even more.

  “That you have to pay for,” I pointed out. Food was plentiful in our village, mostly because we acted as a conduit between the North and the West. All roads led through Salt Landing, and all kinds of food stayed there, at least some of it. We were farmers. Chickens and the occasional goat and pig were our mainstays.

  None of that surplus of food made its way to me, though.

  In return for my keep, my cousin made me take care of the dogs, and I got none of the special food that regularly arrived in the village.

  Julet’s eyes sparkled as he pulled something from behind his back.

  “Two ice creams,” he said with a grin.

  I gave him a small smile in return but shook my head.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  Julet was used to my tricks and was having none of it. “Today you will! I had plenty of money to buy them! To make it up to me you can climb Old Ben and get me acorns.”

  This was an old argument. Whenever Julet wanted to give me something I couldn’t repay him for, he asked me to climb the biggest tree in the forest—we called him Old Ben—and bring down acorns for him, the ones that could be found only at the very top.

  “Okay,” I said, my fingers itching to take the tiny cup.

  Laughing, he handed it over. I grabbed it greedily and we fell into step side by side, eating our treat.

  Julet had three sisters; they were the reason his family was still intact. Julet worked the fields every year, harvesting. He didn’t need an adventure, he liked the simple life.

  Now that we were off the road I felt better. Too many people were out today; for all I knew, the whole village had gathered. My cousin’s household never got in on the excitement. She and her husband would show up at the last minute, wrinkle their noses, and watch silently.

  Today was like a festival day, with baked goods, dancing, music, and parties. Everyone wore their finest clothing and came out with bottles of beer and wine, plus homemade cheese and freshly risen bread.

  The air was filled with the thick smell of freshly cut flowers, swirled together with fallen leaves and melting apple stew and thrown back out into the crisp fall air.

  My best friend was worried about me because of my older brother Henry. It had been six long years since he’d left and five since my mother had done the same. My brother had left for glory, my mother grief.

  Julet was worried because Henry had gone to be a Griffin Glider, and today was the big day.

  The sun was higher now, turning the land bright, a world blanketed in daisies. A perfect day for a Griffin Glide. It never rained on the days when the griffins came.

  A great building falling; debris scattering across the land, scraping over grass and obliterating bushes and fields and gardens: that was how the Wipe Out was described to those who were too young to remember it. The aftermath was clear. The old way of life was held in memory as if in a picture. We could see it, but we could never reach it.

  That’s how I was starting to feel about my life with Henry, and it made me afraid that I would forget him entirely.

  “He told you not to worry about him, remember? He gave you his necklace and said, ‘Don’t worry, Sis.’ Right?” Julet pushed.

  I took a great breath and let it out slowly as my fingers wrapped around the necklace. Henry was almost all I had in the world, and now, after the years of his absence, forgetfulness was starting to lap at the edges of my memory.

  My hand shot up to my throat and I felt my airway tighten, as if the necklace was a serpent coiling around my windpipe.

  “Maybe if Henry comes back, so will Mom,” I said quietly. But I said it with my back to Julet so I wouldn’t see the pain on his face. He knew my mother wasn’t coming back and so did I. But Henry . . .

  My mother had always wanted kids, but she couldn’t find a man to have them with, as she told it. She couldn’t, that is, until she could, when a bruised and injured warrior staggered into town. My mother wanted to marry him, but he wouldn’t.

  Even so, they had two children.

  And then he disappeared.

  Henry was born when she was thirty and I came along six years later. While she was pregnant with me was when my father left. She never uttered so much as a word about him, not his name or his origin or even the color of his hair.

  I remembered sitting on a friend’s knee when I was little while Henry played with rocks and colorful little stones and the friend’s mother talked about my mother. She said that the happiest she’d ever seen my mother was the day she found out that she was pregnant with Henry.

  My older brother was the light in her world and everyone else’s, including mine.

  I looked up and up to my big brother as if he was a dragon soaring through the sky.

  I worshiped him and was endlessly curious about all his exploits and pursuits.

  I spent my childhood trying to keep up with him, a goal I never achieved.

  For his part, he mostly hung out with a gang of local guys and had little use for me.

  But sometimes I got lucky. When his buddies had to go home for dinner and cleanup and hauling, Henry still needed a sparring partner. He was obsessed with success, and he knew it would only come through his fighting ability. Those were the evenings when Henry taught me how to fight.

  Then he left for good, and from morning until night I dreamed of following him.

  He had done the bravest thing imaginable, and I wanted to be just like him.

  It broke my mother’s heart when he left.

  Listless and weeping, she had begged him not to go.

  “And leave another in my place? There is no higher honor than to fight for our country! We are all sons and we all dream of going to Harknell Hall and running the Gauntlet. I can show them what we’re made of! We aren’t just country folk! No one ever looks at villages from the North; they imagine that all of us are weak, but we’re not! The North is strong! We are even strong enough for Harknell.”

  My mother’s tear-swollen eyes flicked to me and then away, as if she couldn’t stand the sight of me. In that instant I saw it in her face. She’d rather it were me leaving than Henry.

  I squared my shoulders.

  I would not cry.

  The only reason she took me to my cousin’s at all was that she’d promised Henry she’d take care of me, but she couldn’t take care of me and she knew it. When we didn’t hear from Henry after his departure for Harknell she went looking for him, despite all of us begging her not to. There were no provisions, and the roads weren’t safe. None of that mattered to my mother, who imagined me safe with her family while she did everything she could to find Henry.

  She never did.

  Or if she did, she never came back to tell me about it.

  Chapter Two

  “Do you think they’ll drop any feathers this year?” Julet asked as we climbed.

  “Have they ever?” I breathed.

  “Well, no, but they keep flying over every year,” said Julet.

  “They’re never going to drop a feather here.” I felt certain of this.

  “Did you know that every year the griffins drop feathers in the West?” asked Jul
et.

  “Of course they do. Those are the ones who go to Harknell Hall,” I said.

  “Yeah, every year the griffins accurately predict some of those who will run the Gauntlet. Everyone knows that if a griffin chooses you with his feather you’re destined for great things,” Julet continued, unaware that I was rolling my eyes.

  “Anyway, if they did drop one here it would mean you were chosen. You’re the best of the best. I would scoop it up for sure if I saw a gold griffin feather on the ground,” Julet said.

  The griffins glided over every year. Every year, the townsfolk hoped that one of the griffins would shed a gold feather, and every year the legend grew.

  No griffin had ever shed a feather over Salt Landing.

  “We’re almost there,” said Julet as the dogs swirled around us, biting at each other playfully. They didn’t have any problem fighting through the bramble, and Julet and my dogs were used to each other by this time. My friend had a limp. He didn’t like it when I mentioned it, but we moved more slowly because of it.

  The hill was getting steeper. We were about to have the best view in all of Salt Landing. The air was cold in my lungs and I wanted to use my hands to push off from my knees as I moved upward, step by step, but Julet wasn’t doing that, so I wouldn’t either.

  “You going to be able to climb Old Ben today?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said with ragged breath. My legs were throbbing.

  He laughed, but the sound was short. Julet’s energy too was taken up with the effort it took to climb higher.

  “Look at the view,” he cried at last, delighted.

  “It’s always the same,” I said, breathless. I never understood why people got so excited about pretty views; they were there every day. Shaking my head at Julet’s foolishness when there were practical matters to attend to, I gave in and braced my hands on my knees. I could outrun a pack of dogs, but only for a short time. Endurance has never been my strong suit.

  Julet’s finger was already pointing behind us, toward the valley of Salt Landing. From where we had climbed I could see all the brightly colored tents and the merriment of the villagers as they broke out the good bread, the good cheese, the good wine.