Frank nocked an arrow. He took aim, but the gryphon shrieked so loudly the sound echoed off the mountains. Frank flinched, and his shot went wide.
“I think that’s a call for help,” Percy warned. “We have to get out of here. ”
With no clear plan, they ran for the docks. The gryphon dove after them. Percy slashed at it with his sword, but the gryphon veered out of reach.
They took the steps to the nearest pier and raced to the end. The gryphon swooped after them, its front claws extended for the kill. Hazel raised her sword, but an icy wall of water slammed sideways into the gryphon and washed it into the bay. The gryphon squawked and flapped its wings. It managed to scramble onto the pier, where it shook its black fur like a wet dog.
Frank grunted. “Nice one, Percy. ”
“Yeah,” he said. “Didn’t know if I could still do that in Alaska. But bad news—look over there. ” About a mile away, over the mountains, a black cloud was swirling—a whole flock of gryphons, dozens at least. There was no way they could fight that many, and no boat could take them away fast enough.
Frank nocked another arrow. “Not going down without a fight. ”
Percy raised Riptide. “I’m with you. ”
Then Hazel heard a sound in the distance—like the whinnying of a horse. She must’ve been imagining it, but she cried out desperately, “Arion! Over here!”
A tan blur came ripping down the street and onto the pier. The stallion materialized right behind the gryphon, brought down his front hooves, and smashed the monster to dust.
Hazel had never been so happy in her life. “Good horse! Really good horse!”
Frank backed up and almost fell off the pier. “How—?”
“He followed me!” Hazel beamed. “Because he’s the best—horse—EVER! Now, get on!”
“All three of us?” Percy said. “Can he handle it?”
Arion whinnied indignantly.
“All right, no need to be rude,” Percy said. “Let’s go. ”
They climbed on, Hazel in front, Frank and Percy balancing precariously behind her. Frank wrapped his arms around her waist, and Hazel thought that if this was going to be her last day on earth—it wasn’t a bad way to go out.
“Run, Arion!” she cried. “To Hubbard Glacier!”
The horse shot across the water, his hooves turning the top of the sea to steam.
XLIII Hazel
RIDING ARION, HAZEL FELT POWERFUL, unstoppable, absolutely in control—a perfect combination of horse and human. She wondered if this was what it was like to be a centaur.
The boat captains in Seward had warned her it was three hundred nautical miles to the Hubbard Glacier, a hard, dangerous journey, but Arion had no trouble. He raced over the water at the speed of sound, heating the air around them so that Hazel didn’t even feel the cold. On foot, she never would have felt so brave. On horseback, she couldn’t wait to charge into battle.
Frank and Percy didn’t look so happy. When Hazel glanced back, their teeth were clenched and their eyeballs were bouncing around in their heads. Frank’s cheeks jiggled from the g-force. Percy sat in back, hanging on tight, desperately trying not to slip off the horse’s rear. Hazel hoped that didn’t happen. The way Arion was moving, she might not notice he was gone for fifty or sixty miles.
They raced through icy straits, past blue fjords and cliffs with waterfalls spilling into the sea. Arion jumped over a breaching humpback whale and kept galloping, startling a pack of seals off an iceberg.
It seemed like only minutes before they zipped into a narrow bay. The water turned the consistency of shaved ice in blue sticky syrup. Arion came to a halt on a frozen turquoise slab.
A half a mile away stood Hubbard Glacier. Even Hazel, who’d seen glaciers before, couldn’t quite process what she was looking at. Purple snowcapped mountains marched off in either direction, with clouds floating around their middles like fluffy belts. In a massive valley between two of the largest peaks, a ragged wall of ice rose out of the sea, filling the entire gorge. The glacier was blue and white with streaks of black, so that it looked like a hedge of dirty snow left behind on a sidewalk after a snowplow had gone by, only four million times as large.
As soon as Arion stopped, Hazel felt the temperature drop. All that ice was sending off waves of cold, turning the bay into the world’s largest refrigerator. The eeriest thing was a sound like thunder that rolled across the water.
“What is that?” Frank gazed at the clouds above the glacier. “A storm?”
“No,” Hazel said. “Ice cracking and shifting. Millions of tons of ice. ”
“You mean that thing is breaking up?” Frank asked.
As if on cue, a sheet of ice silently calved off the side of the glacier and crashed into the sea, spraying water and frozen shrapnel several stories high. A millisecond later the sound hit them—a BOOM almost as jarring as Arion hitting the sound barrier.
“We can’t get close to that thing!” Frank said.
“We have to,” Percy said. “The giant is at the top. ”
Arion nickered.
“Jeez, Hazel,” Percy said, “tell your horse to watch his language. ”
Hazel tried not to laugh. “What did he say?”
“With the cussing removed? He said he can get us to the top. ”