![]() ![]() Such a long face! Don’t concern yourself a feather-tip about that poor horse, shining claw of my foot’s delight, for it opened like a generous man’s gut beneath Ceecee’s teeth and talons and not a hunk went to waste. She decided to eat his stallion instead and consult her sisters about the rest. Plump as a partridge and blank-eyed as a bullfrog, tempting to be sure, but one could never be too careful. Perhaps, she thought, he was some sort of poisoned decoy set out by a village witch to ensnare them. He smelled fine, but his lack of attention concerned her. Whrrrrrrrrr? she said to herself, cocking her head askew. Even the most distracted farmer or heedless young stag could feel eyes on the backs of their necks before the teeth and claws came a-calling. Never for the slightest second did the Prince notice he was being followed, which confused poor Ceecee, out hunting while her sisters slept, to no end. “The wolves and the bandits in these parts aren’t that spry, surely?”Īcross a muddy river criss-crossed with three-toed tracks (“What large chickens they have here!”) and over a bridge scored with toothmarks (“Do the locals never take care of these things themselves? Must it always be the gentry?”) and through a bone-littered fen (“A plague must have recently passed.”) he trotted, right up to the edge of the forest where the knobby-kneed cypress trees grew. “What an overreaction!” he laughed to himself. He rode by peasants toiling in the fields wearing masks on the backs of their heads and thought, “how quaint and fashionable! I shall have to have one of my own made!”Ī little further still and he came to the edge of the settled lands, where the villages were ringed with stockades taller than steeples. He blundered across fields and through open gates like a stunned sheep, never stopping to consider whether it was allowed or advisable. ![]() If you know a blessed thing about royalty, however, you’ll have already guessed that he had bothered doing no such thing. Now, the King’s subjects knew all about this particular forest, and avoided it like the plague, and if the Prince had thought to ask them they could have easily told him why this was so. We’ll hang a title around his neck-first and only son of a king, so rich and privileged he never even bothered to try devouring his siblings in the nest-and we’ll set him a-riding aimlessly through the forest on a nice plump horse, wandered off from a royal hunt. We shall give him a headful of hair as golden as a stolen egg’s yolk, skin as pale as a hatchling’s tooth, and eyes of a glorious ferny green. Let us set a snare in the path for our three beautiful raptor sisters. But happy makes for a short story, love of my gizzard, and an uneventful one to boot. Happy was the trio-oh, aye, happier than liver and shrieks and the final pounce, warmer than blood and sun-drenched stone. Her favorite thing in all the world beside her sisters was raw woodsman. She was the smallest of the three and the most dangerous for it. The last to emerge-the others had considered setting upon her egg before it finally began to crack-was SSSSSS, or Ceecee. She was quiet, good at sneaking, and fond of the way fireflies buzzed and glowed and crunched in one’s mouth when snapped up on a balmy summer evening. Second to claw free of her shell was RRRKIISH, known henceforth as Betty. She was oldest by approximately six minutes and cleverest by her own assessment. The oldest was called SKRRKITTTT, which, roughly translated into something human vocal cords can pronounce, means Allie. They lived in a wood together, they stole sheep and cattle together, and all in all, there was no tighter-knit hunting pride of matriarchal dromaeosauridae between the mountains and the sea. Once upon a time, long, long, long, long, long, long, ago, there were three raptor sisters, hatched beneath a lucky star. ![]()
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