The Year of Wild Skies

Chapter 1: The Bastard of the Stables

The griffin screamed at dawn, and Nyla Sorrel woke with straw in her hair and the taste of last night's stolen ale still burning the back of her throat.

She rolled off the narrow cot in the tack room, bare feet hitting cold stone, and pressed her forehead against the frost-rimed window. Below, the racing stables of Highreach sprawled across the mountain's second terrace like a city within a city—paddocks and exercise rings and the long, sloping track that plunged toward the valley before curving back up along the cliff face. Above, the peaks of the Ironteeth Range bit into a sky the color of bruised plums, and somewhere in the military aeries carved into the highest rock, a griffin was losing its mind.

The scream came again. Not the hunting cry she'd grown up hearing—this was raw, furious, a sound like tearing metal that vibrated in her sternum.

"Shut that beast up!" hollered old Torben from the next room, his voice thick with sleep and decades of pipe smoke.

Nyla pulled on her boots and her leather vest, not bothering with the laces. She'd been dressing in the dark since she was six years old, when the stable master had decided that a bastard daughter with no family name and no prospects was at least good enough to muck stalls. Twenty years later, she was the fastest jockey in Highreach, could gentle a warhorse in an afternoon, and still slept in the tack room because nobody had ever thought to offer her anything better.

She didn't mind. The stables smelled like home—hay and leather and the warm, animal musk of creatures that didn't care whose blood ran in your veins.

The griffin screamed a third time, and this time the horses answered, stamping and whickering in their stalls. Nyla cursed and jogged out into the predawn cold.

Highreach was a city built vertically, carved into and onto the face of Mount Vael like a vast stone honeycomb. The lowest terraces held the markets and the slums; the middle terraces the merchant houses and guildhalls; the upper reaches the noble estates and the military garrison. And at the very top, accessible only by a switchback stair cut into the living rock, the Aeries—where the Skyborne Lances had once housed their war-griffins before the corps was disbanded thirty years ago.

Nyla had never been up there. Bastards didn't climb that high.

But the sound pulled at her like a hook in her chest, and she found herself climbing anyway, past the barracks where soldiers were stumbling out in various states of undress, past the officers' quarters where lamplight was already burning, up the final stair where the wind hit like a fist and the world fell away on three sides to reveal the vast, dizzying sweep of the Highreach valley.

The Aeries were enormous—natural caverns widened by generations of stonemasons, their mouths open to the sky. Most were empty, their perches crumbling, their feeding troughs dry. But in the largest cavern, lit by the guttering remains of a dozen torches, a griffin was destroying everything it could reach.

It was magnificent. Silver-grey feathers darkening to storm-black at the wingtips, a body like a great cat sculpted from muscle and fury, golden eyes that caught the torchlight and threw it back as molten rage. It had shattered its perch, overturned the water trough, and was currently in the process of disemboweling a training dummy with talons the length of Nyla's forearm.

Three handlers stood at a careful distance, armed with catch-poles and the grim expressions of men who knew they were outmatched.

"That's Gale Strider," said a voice beside her, and Nyla turned to find a young soldier she vaguely recognized—one of the garrison runners who sometimes came to the stables with messages. "Half-wild. They caught her in the high passes two months ago. Nobody can get near her."

"Why are they trying?"

The runner's eyes went wide, as if she'd asked why the sun rose. "Haven't you heard? The Lances are reforming. The Talons are hitting the eastern passes—three caravans raided in the last month, a border post burned. The Council voted last night. They're reopening the Skyborne Lances, and they need riders."

Nyla stared at the griffin. Gale Strider had finished with the dummy and was now pacing the cavern with a predator's restless grace, her tail lashing, her beak opening and closing on sounds too low for human ears.

"They're holding trials," the runner continued. "Anyone can compete. Well—anyone of Highreach blood."

"I'm of Highreach blood," Nyla said, though she wasn't sure that was technically true. She was of Highreach *mud*, born in the lower terraces to a mother who'd died before she could name Nyla's father. She had no family crest, no military training, no formal education beyond what the stable master's wife had taught her with a primer and a switch.

But she could ride anything alive.

The runner looked her up and down—the straw-flecked hair, the scarred hands, the leather vest with its missing laces—and had the grace not to laugh. "Trials are in three days. Sign up at the garrison hall."

Nyla watched the griffin pace. Gale Strider paused, turned her great head, and looked directly at Nyla with those molten-gold eyes. The gaze held for one heartbeat, two, three—and then the griffin made a sound Nyla had never heard before, a low, questioning trill that vibrated in the stone beneath her feet.

One of the handlers glanced back. "Did she just—"

"She's never done that before," another said.

Nyla's heart was hammering. She'd spent her whole life around animals, and she knew what recognition looked like. Not tameness—recognition. One wild thing seeing another.

"Three days," she murmured, and went back down the stairs with the griffin's trill still humming in her bones.

---

The garrison hall was a cavern of polished granite and military efficiency, its walls hung with the faded banners of the old Lances—each one bearing the sigil of a griffin in flight, rendered in gold thread that had long since tarnished to brown. Nyla stood in line behind forty-seven other hopefuls and tried not to feel like a fraud.

The competition was exactly what she'd expected: the sons and daughters of noble houses, broad-shouldered and well-fed, wearing riding leathers that cost more than Nyla earned in a year. A few soldiers from the garrison. A handful of horse-cavalry officers looking to trade up. And Nyla, smelling faintly of the stables, with her name written on the sign-up sheet in the careful, slightly uneven hand of someone who'd learned to write late.

The registrar looked at her entry and frowned. "Nyla Sorrel. House?"

"No house."

"Sponsor?"

"No sponsor."

"Military rank?"

"I'm a jockey."

The registrar's pen stopped. He looked up, and his expression was the one she'd been collecting her whole life—the particular blend of pity and contempt reserved for people who didn't know their place.

"The Aerie Trials are a military selection process, not a horse race. Candidates are expected to demonstrate aerial combat aptitude, tactical acumen, and—"

"The posting said anyone of Highreach blood." Nyla kept her voice level. She'd learned long ago that anger gave people an excuse to dismiss her. "I'm of Highreach blood. I can ride. I want to try."

A murmur ran through the line behind her. She didn't turn to see who was smirking.

The registrar sighed, stamped her form, and waved her through. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

Nyla took her stamped form and walked into the preparation hall, where the other candidates were stretching, sparring, and sizing each other up with the studied casualness of people who'd been competing since birth.

She found a corner, sat down, and began wrapping her hands with strips of leather. She'd learned this from the stables—you wrapped your hands before you worked with anything that could bite, and griffins could definitely bite.

"You're going to need more than hand wraps."

The voice was low, precise, and carried the particular authority of someone accustomed to being obeyed. Nyla looked up.

The man standing over her was tall and lean, with close-cropped dark hair and a face that looked like it had been designed for giving orders—strong jaw, straight nose, grey eyes that assessed her with the efficiency of a quartermaster cataloging supplies. He wore the deep blue uniform of the Highreach military, three silver bars on his collar marking him as a squadron captain.

"Bastian Quist," he said, not offering his hand. "I'm overseeing the trials."

"Nyla Sorrel." She kept wrapping. "I'm competing in them."

His mouth thinned. Not quite a frown—more the expression of someone who'd found a math error and was deciding whether it was worth correcting.

"You're the jockey."

"I'm the rider."

"There's a difference between sitting a horse and bonding with a griffin. A horse won't tear your arm off if it doesn't like you."

"Neither will a griffin," Nyla said, "if you know what you're doing."

Something flickered in those grey eyes—irritation, or possibly interest. He studied her for a moment longer, then turned and walked away without another word.

Nyla watched him go. He moved like a blade—no wasted motion, every step deliberate. She noticed the other candidates giving him a wide berth, the way horses moved around a dominant stallion.

*Squadron captain,* she thought. *Already bonded, already proven. And he thinks I'm a joke.*

She finished wrapping her hands and smiled to herself. She'd been the joke her entire life. It had never stopped her from winning.

---

The night before the trials, Nyla went to the lower terraces.

The Copper Bell was the kind of tavern that didn't ask questions—about your name, your blood, or why you were drinking alone on a cold night when you should have been sleeping. Nyla liked it for exactly that reason, and for the fact that the barkeep, a broad woman named Sorcha, poured honest measures and didn't water the whiskey.

"Heard you signed up for the griffin trials," Sorcha said, sliding a glass across the bar.

"News travels fast."

"In this city? A bastard trying to join the Lances? That's not news, love. That's entertainment."

Nyla drank. The whiskey burned going down, and she welcomed it—a different kind of fire than the one that had been building in her chest since she'd seen Gale Strider in the aerie.

"They're going to eat you alive up there," Sorcha continued, not unkindly. "Those noble brats have been training for this since they could walk."

"I've been riding since I could walk."

"Horses. Not griffins."

"A ride's a ride."

Sorcha gave her a look that said she knew better, but she refilled the glass without argument.

Nyla drank slowly, watching the tavern fill up around her. Lower-terrace people, mostly—miners and dockworkers and the various hustlers who kept the city's underbelly functioning. A few of them nodded at her; she was known down here, the fast girl from the stables who could outride anyone and outdrink most. A woman at the end of the bar caught her eye and smiled—dark-haired, sharp-featured, with the calloused hands of a stonecutter. Nyla smiled back, felt the familiar pull of want, and then looked away.

Not tonight. Tonight she needed to be sharp.

She'd always been like this—hungry for people the way some were hungry for food or gold. Men, women, it didn't matter; what mattered was the spark, the challenge, the moment when two bodies figured out how they fit together. She'd had lovers, briefly—a farrier's apprentice with gentle hands, a merchant's daughter who'd tasted like cinnamon, a soldier on leave who'd pinned her against a stable wall and made her forget her own name. None of them lasted. Nyla was too much—too loud, too fast, too hungry, too unwilling to be the quiet, grateful bastard the world expected.

*Too much.* The words followed her like a shadow.

She finished her drink, left coin on the bar, and walked back up through the terraces to the stables. The city was quiet at this hour, the wind carrying the distant sound of the griffins in the aeries—not screaming now, but the low, rumbling calls they made to each other in the dark.

Nyla stopped on the switchback stair and looked up. The sky above Highreach was enormous, unpolluted by the smoke of lowland cities, and tonight it blazed with stars so thick they looked like spilled milk across black stone.

*Wild skies,* she thought. *Tomorrow I fly in them or I don't. Either way, I'm done being small.*

She slept that night with the window open, and the griffin's call threaded through her dreams.