Darian’s Tale Trilogy

Contents
Owlflight
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Owlsight
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Owlknight
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Epilogue

Owlflight

One

The air was warm, the summer day flawless, and Darian Firkin was stalling, trying to delay the inevitable, and he knew it. He had hopes that if he just lingered enough on this task of wood gathering, his Master might forget about him - or something more urgent than the next lesson might come up before Wizard Justyn got himself organized. It was worth a try anyway, since the very last thing Darian wanted on this fine sunny day was to be cooped up in that musty old cottage. It was worth any amount of physical work to be saved from that fate.
He took a deep breath of the balmy air, laden with the scent of curing hay, damp earth, and growing things, and added another cut quarter-log to his burden of three, the bark and rough wood catching on his shirt and leaving bits of dirt and moss smeared on the sleeve. Would four be enough to qualify as a load? Probably. He headed for the cottage.
Justyn’s cottage decayed on the edge of the village, on the side farthest from the bridge and the road, closest to the Forest. The village itself was a tight little square of cottages with three finer houses, all arranged in neat rows around the village square; the fields farmed by the inhabitants of Errold’s Grove stretched out on either side along the riverbank, but on the back side there was nothing but a single field of corn and a small meadow where goats and sheep were kept in the winter. Behind all of that was the forest. If he paused for a moment and listened, it wasn’t at all difficult to hear the voice of the woods from where Darian stood - all the little rustling and murmurings, the birdsong and animal calls. Sometimes that was a torment, on days when Justyn set him some fool task that kept him pent in the cottage from dawn to dusk.
He put down his burden on the pile at the side of the dilapidated cottage and returned for more.
He carefully selected three small pieces of chopped wood from the large communal pile; the woodpile lay at the back of the right-hand side of the village of Errold’s Grove. He tucked them under his arm and carried them toward the rick-holder at the side of Wizard Justyn’s tiny cottage. Every day that it was possible, the village woodcutter went out with a team of oxen to find and bring back deadfall from the Pelagiris Forest. He never went far, but then, he never had to; the trees in the Pelagiris were enormous, with trunks so big that six men could stretch their arms around one and not have their fingers touch, and one fallen tree would supply enough wood for the whole village for a month. Every time there was a storm, at least one tree or several huge branches would come crashing down. The woodcutter did nothing at all but cut wood; no farmwork, no herding. The villagers supplied him in turn with anything he needed, and since he had no wife nor apprentice, the women took it in turn to cook for him, clean his little hut, and sew, wash, and mend his clothing. The woodcutter was not a bright man, nor one given at all to much thought, so he found the arrangement entirely to his satisfaction - and since the villagers never went into the Forest anymore if they didn’t have to, it was entirely to theirs as well.
Darian wished they had apprenticed him to the woodcutter instead of the wizard, but he hadn’t had any say in the matter. After all, as an orphan who had been left to the village to care for, he should be grateful that they gave him any sort of care at all. At least that was what they all told him, loudly and often.
The cottage was hardly longer than the wood-rick, built strongly at one time, of weathered, gray river rock with a thatched roof of broomstraw in which birds twittered all spring and summer long. That twittering was the first thing Darian heard every morning when he woke up. It was an adequate enough - little cottage by the standards of the village, but it seemed badly cramped to Darian, and always smelled slightly musty, with an undertone of bitter herbs and dust. No one ever cleaned it but Darian, so perhaps that was the reason for the aroma. He didn’t really despise the place, since after all, it was shelter, but it didn’t really feel like the home the other villagers and his Master tried to convince him it was.
When he reached the cottage and the upright supports that would hold exactly one measured rick of wood between them, he set each piece down on the half-rick already piled there with exacting care, distributing them with all the concentration of a fine lady making a flower arrangement. Only when they were balanced precisely to his liking did he return for another three logs. He listened carefully for any sound of life inside the cottage, for after Justyn had told him to replenish their fuel, Darian had left his Master muttering over a book, and Darian had hopes that Justyn might get so involved that he wouldn’t notice that Darian was taking a very long time to fetch wood from a few yards away.
There was no sound from inside the cottage, and Darian ambled off slowly, making as little noise as possible until he was out of easy hearing distance. The village was fairly quiet at this time of day, with most people working in the fields. Only a few crafters had work to keep them in their workshops at this time of year; most of the things that people needed they had to make for themselves these days, or hope that someone else in the village had the skills they lacked. Leather and fur were available in abundance, but the tanner worked hides mostly in the fall, and there was no official cobbler since Old Man Makus died. The blacksmith did all metal work needed, and with forty-odd families to provide for, he generally had enough work to keep him busy all of the time. The miller was also the baker, keeping flour and bread under the same roof, so to speak. He baked almost all of the bread and occasional sweets for the village, so that only one person would have to fire up and tend an oven. Women would often put together a stewpot or a meat pie or set of pasties for the evening dinner, and take it to him to put just inside the oven in the morning. Then they could go out to work the fields, and fetch the cooked meal back when the family returned for dinner. The womenfolk of Errold’s Grove did their own spinning, weaving, and sewing, mostly during the long, dark hours of winter, which was when the men made crude shoes and boots, mended or made new harnesses and belts, and carved wooden implements. Once every three or four months, everyone would take a day off work to make pots, plates, storage jars, and cups of clay from the banks of the Londell River, and in a few days when those articles were dry, the baker and the woodcutter would fire them all at once. Those went into a common store from which folk could draw whatever they needed until it was time to replenish the crockery again. The only things that had to be brought in from outside were objects of metal that required more skill than the blacksmith had, such as needles and pins, and bar-stock for the smith. Virtually everything else could be and was made by the people living here. The village was mostly self-sufficient, which was a source of bitter pride, for no one wanted to come here anymore. Errold’s Grove could have dropped off the face of the world and no one would miss it.
I certainly wouldn’t, Darian thought with bitterness of his own.
He had to pass through one of the busier corners of the village to reach the woodpile, going around both the smithy and the baker. The savory scent of bread coming from the door of the bakery told the boy that Leander was removing loaves from the big brick oven that took up all of the back half of his shop. As for the smith, he was obviously hard at work, as the smithy rang with the blows of hammer on anvil, there was a scent of hot metal and steam on the breeze, and smoke coming from the smokehole in the roof. Leander wouldn’t pay any attention to Darian as he passed, but there was a chance that the smith might.
The smithy was a three-sided shed, the forge in the middle, the anvil toward the front. There was a fat old gray plowhorse waiting patiently for his feet to be attended to, tied to the post outside the smithy, and its owner, a man called Backet, watched as the smith hammered out a new shoe for it. Blacksmith Jakem, a huge, balding man with an incongruous paunch beneath his leather apron, paused in his work to watch Darian pass by, his eyes narrowed. Darian ignored him, as he usually ignored the adults of the village when he thought he could get away with it. Jakem didn’t think much of Darian, but that was hardly out of the ordinary. Darian didn’t think much of Jakem either. As he made the return trip with his three small logs, the smith hawked and spat into the fire.
“Ain’t nobody works as hard as a lazy ‘un,” he said loudly to the farmer sitting on a stump beside the forge.
“That’s the plain truth,” Old Man Backet agreed, taking off his hat to scratch his head. “Lazy ‘un will work twice’s hard as anybody else, tryin’ to avoid working at all.” He cast a sly look at Darian as he replied, to see if his words had struck a nerve.
Darian continued to ignore them; so long as the adults didn’t address him directly, there was a certain amount of immunity that being only thirteen gave him. He’d learned some time ago that a retort would only earn him trouble with his Master. Not that Wizard Justyn had ever laid a hand on him - but the reproachful lectures on how much he owed the villagers of Errold’s Grove and how little he repaid their care were worse than a beating.
Nobody ever asked me what I wanted, not once. Nobody gave me a choice. If I’d had a choice, I wouldn’t be here now - and no one would have had to think about “taking care of me.” I’d have offered to work just enough to get a tent and some supplies, and I’d have been off to try on my own. Now I’m stuck here enduring useless blathering from a senile Master and carrying firewood like a dog in harness.
He made three more such trips - ignoring the adults at the forge each time, although it certainly it did not escape his notice that the force and frequency of the smith’s blows increased each time he passed. If Jakem wanted to wear out his arm trying to impress upon Darian what so-called “industrious labor” looked and sounded like, it wasn’t going to bother Darian any.
Besides, if he told the smith why he was making such a production out of the simple task of fetching wood, he’d only get another tongue-lashing, and maybe a cuff on the side of the head into the bargain. The smith had a notoriously heavy hand with his own offspring, and if provoked he might well use it on Darian.
As Darian put his scant armload of wood down at the end of the third trip, the voice of doom emerged from the interior of the cottage.
“Darian, leave that for now and get in here. It’s time for your lesson.”
It was actually a fairly pleasant, masculine voice, a bit tired-sounding and querulous, but not too irritated or scolding. Nevertheless, if Darian had been a dog, he would have dropped his head and ears and tucked his tail down. “But the firewood - “ he protested, knowing that the protest would do him no good, but making it anyway.
“The wood can wait; I can’t. Come in now, Darian.”
Darian drew his brows together in a sullen scowl, but obeyed the summons, leaving the sunshine and the fresh air for the closed-in gloom of the cottage. He tried to leave the door open to admit a little breeze, but Justyn frowned and motioned to him to shut it behind him.
He waited with resignation for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. The only light in the cottage came from a trio of very small windows in three of the four walls; even though the shutters stood wide open, they still didn’t admit much light. Wizard Justyn waited for him at one end of the scarred and battered table taking up most of the right side of the room, which served as kitchen, dining room, workroom, and study, all in one. At the rear of the room was a set of rungs hammered into the stone of the wall that served as a ladder to the loft where Darian and his Master slept. Most of the rest of the wallspace was taken up with shelves, badly-made bookcases that leaned perilously toward each other, like drunks propping one another up, and several appalling pictures of famous mages. Darian’s father, who’d dabbled in painting, had once said that a good engraving or print was worth twenty bad paintings, and Darian could certainly see why. They made his eyes hurt just to look at them, but unfortunately, there was no way that he could avoid looking at them.
Most prominent was the best of the lot, a heroic portrait of a person not even a terrible painter could ruin entirely. His noble features and intelligent eyes made up to a small extent for the stiff daubs of his costume. Shown seated at a table from about the waist up, the great Wizard Kyllian, a Fireflower Mage, looked every inch the powerful sorcerer, right down to his familiar, a sleek and smug-looking striped creature at his elbow that might have been a cat, or might not have been. It was difficult to tell if Grimkin was something other than an ordinary feline, or if the painter had taken the same liberties with cat anatomy that he had with human. Arranged on either side of this portrait were the pictures of Herald-Mage Elspeth, Darkwind Hawkbrother, Quenten of White Winds and the powerful Adept Firesong, all of whom Wizard Justyn had allegedly seen and spoken with before he arrived here to serve Errold’s Grove. Darian was more than a little dubious about that claim. For one thing, how could a broken-down fake like old Justyn have ever gotten near enough to the legendary Elspeth and Darkwind to have seen them at close range, much less spoken to them? And if he had, how could he ever have thought that the horrible daubs on his wall in any way resembled them? They hardly even resembled portraits of human beings! The picture of Elspeth showed her atop her Companion, in an unreasonably heroic pose, both hands upraised with what were supposed to be bolts of lightning coming from her hands. But the “lightning bolts” looked more like sickly pale-green snakes, the Companion looked like a lumpy cow, the face of the Herald-Mage like a blob of dough with two currants stuck in for eyes and a slash of orange carrot for a mouth. She apparently had twisted legs, no neck, and enormous, pillowlike breasts. The Herald’s uniform and her Companion weren’t even white, they were a disgusting muddy-yellow sort of color, as if the painter hadn’t been able to afford a pure white pigment. Or maybe he’d used a cheap varnish that had yellowed as it aged. Darkwind at least looked human, but the bird on his shoulder had more in common with a fat chicken ready for the pot than any hawk that Darian had ever seen. The rest of the portraits were pretty much on the same level of skill - or lack of it - the firebird posing with the Adept was so ineptly done that most of the villagers thought it was supposed to represent a goose and had wondered aloud out of Justyn’s hearing why a mage would have such a silly familiar. As for Firesong’s mask - the Adept was never seen without one - it looked like a child’s drawing of a sunflower, and if everyone didn’t already know that it was a mask, a reasonable person could have thought the painting was of some fabulous monster.
It was painfully obvious that no woman had ever touched this cottage since the day Justyn moved in. Darian had gotten used to it over the last six months, but there was no doubt that it was a worse-than-typical aged bachelor’s study. Littering the leaning and badly-made bookcases were an assortment of cheap and flashy “magical” implements, a few tattered old books, a lot of unrecognizable but definitely dead animals which were allegedly “preserved” in some way, several spider webs, a couple of cracked mugs, the upper half of the skull of some largish animal, an apple core, and a great deal of dust. Darian had tried to clean the place up when he’d first been sent here, out of pure self-interest, but being told sharply to leave things alone on numerous occasions, he’d lost interest in cleaning up anything but his own little corner around his pallet in the loft.
Sitting right in front of Wizard Kyllian’s portrait on the top of a tipsy-looking bookcase was a beat-up and scruffy old black tomcat currently engaged in cleaning his hind leg, which stuck stiffly straight up into the air as the cat’s tongue rasped at the thin fur. This was Justyn’s familiar, or so he claimed. It certainly matched its Master, for a less-graceful cat Darian had never seen. It seemed to share the villagers’ contempt for its Master and his apprentice, ignoring both of them with a disdain more in keeping with the pampered pet of a princess than of a patchy-furred mongrel of indeterminate age, with a broken tail and chewed-up ears.
Carefully placed in a rack on the wall was a rather plain looking, partially split walking stick with a bit of crystal embedded in the top which Justyn said was his “wizard’s staff.” That, along with four chairs (none matching) and the thick, warped oak table with a book under one leg keeping it straight, comprised all of the furnishings of the room.
The table was covered with jars and bottles, the remains of last night’s dinner in stacked-up plates that had been shoved out of the way, bits of scribbled-on paper, burned-out ends of candles, and one empty wine bottle. Darian glanced with guilt at the stack of dirty dishes; he was supposed to have cleaned them up this morning, but he had been in such a hurry to get up and out before Justyn thought of giving him a lesson that he had neglected that duty entirely. Now he’d have to scrub them with sand to get all the dried-on gravy off them, and he’d have to do so before they could eat or they wouldn’t have anything to eat tonight’s dinner on. At least he’d remembered to take the turnip pasties over to the baker in time for them to go into the oven. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d forgotten and they’d had to make do with bread, raw turnips, onions, and sometimes a little cheese.
But the mess evidently didn’t bother Justyn at all; when Darian had first been apprenticed to him, the place had looked much the same. The day he’d moved his things in, Darian had been strictly forbidden to touch anything on any of the bookshelves without specific permission, which frankly led Darian to believe that old Justyn wasn’t certain what was on those shelves himself. It had occurred to him that Justyn was afraid that if Darian cleaned and organized things, the boy would ruin the wizard’s best excuse for not getting magics done immediately when people asked him for them. Hunting for this or that ingredient or piece of apparatus was a good excuse for stalling, and as Darian knew from his own experience, if you stalled long enough, people sometimes forgot their requests.
“Sit,” Justyn ordered. Darian slumped into a seat across from Justyn, taking the chair that wobbled the least. There was a plate with an apple on it right in front of his chair, and sitting where he could watch both the apple and Darian was Justyn. With a resigned sigh, Darian stared at the apple while Justyn stared just as intently at Darian.
He looks like a real rag-bag today, Darian thought critically, looking down at the wrinkled, winter-stored apple. He looks as if birds were nesting in his beard. Is this pan of his act, or is he getting even more senile? Justyn was about the most ill-kempt male in the village, his only wealth that of his untidy  beard. He had three or four shabby and patched robes, all pretty much alike, with badly-made, lopsided, Esoteric Symbols sewn on them by Justyn himself. If you looked closely, you could see little rusty spots where Justyn had stabbed his thumb with the needle and bled on bis work. He kept them clean, Darian had to give the old man that much credit, although he was always spilling things on them that made stains that never would come out, rendering the garments into a mosaic of blotches of various faint colors. It was difficult to tell how old the mage was; his hair and beard were gray rather than white, with a few streaks of darker color in them, and his brownish eyes, very sad and tired, were sunken so deeply beneath his shaggy eyebrows that it was difficult to see the wrinkles at the corners. He could have been any age from forty to ninety, and since no one in the village knew anything of his history before he came to Errold’s Grove in the company of a Herald on circuit, his true age was anyone’s guess.
“Well?” Justyn said, showing a bit of impatience. “Are you going to just sit there wasting time, or are you going to actually do something?”
With another reluctant sigh, Darian stopped merely staring at the apple and began concentrating.
He narrowed his focus until the apple filled his vision and his mind, simultaneously relaxing and tensing. He concentrated on the apple being above the plate, as if an invisible hand held it there. As he concentrated, the apple began to wobble a little. The movement was so slight that it could have been caused by someone bumping the table itself, except that neither he nor Justyn had moved.
After a long moment of tension, he felt something inside himself relax.
Slowly, agonizingly, the apple rose, still wobbling, but now doing so in midair. It hovered about the width of his finger above the plate surface. Sweat broke out all over his forehead in beads, and he felt the pinch of a headache starting just between his eyes. And behind the concentration, he seethed with annoyance and impatience. This was a stupid waste of time; he knew it, and Justyn knew it, but Justyn was never going to admit it, because that would be admitting that he had been wrong about Darian, and Justyn would die before he admitted that. What on earth good would floating an apple about do? Would it bring in more crops? Chase away sickness? Bring prosperity back to the village?
The answer, clearly, was “no” to all three questions.
Behind Justyn, the cat finished his grooming and began coughing, making gagging and strangling sounds. Darian struggled to maintain his concentration, but the wretched creature’s noise was more than he could ignore.
The apple wobbled and dipped, as Darian’s control over it began to unravel. The cat hacked again, more violently than before, until Darian was certain it was going to cough up a lung this time and not just another wad of hair.
It was too much distraction, and he lost the “spell” completely. The cat spit up a massive, moist hairball with a sound that made Darian’s stomach turn, just as the apple thumped down on the plate.
Darian swore furiously under his breath at the cat, the apple, and a fate that conspired to make a mess even of things he despised. The cat sniffed, coughed once more, jumped down, and limped over to the fireplace where it curled up on the ash-strewn hearth.
Darian gave the cat a look that should have set its fur on fire if there had been any justice in the universe, and glowered at the apple. If he’d had half the power Justyn swore he had, the apple should have exploded from the strength of that glare. The fact that it didn’t only proved to him that his Master was a fraud and was trying to make him into another fraud. What is the use of this? he asked himself angrily. What’s the point? If a stupid cat can break a spell, how is anyone supposed to get anything done by magic? It’s stupid, that’s all it is, it’s just as pointless as everything else in this village!
“Try again,” Justyn ordered him, with a kind of weary disgust that angered Darian even further. What right did that old fake have to be disgusted with him? It wasn’t his fault that he had no magic! And as far as that was concerned, Justyn had no room to find fault with Darian on that score!
How long has it been since he did anything with real magic? I bet he couldn’t have kept that apple in the air any longer than I did!
Anger and frustration rose to the boiling point, and instead of doing as he was told, he swept his arm across the table in front of him, knocking apple, plate, and anything else in the path of that angry sweep off the table and onto the floor with a crash. The plate didn’t shatter, since it was made of pewter, but it made a lot of noise and acquired yet another dent. As Justyn opened his mouth to scold, Darian shoved his chair away from the table, sitting there with his arms folded over his chest, glowering, silently daring Justyn to do his worst.
Justyn visibly pushed down his own temper. “Darian, I want you to try again,” the wizard repeated, with mounting impatience. “And since you won’t do it properly, you can pick that apple up off the floor and put it back on the table with your mind - yes, and the plate as well! A bit more hard work will teach you to control your temper. A mage can’t ever lose his temper, or - “
“Why?” Darian snarled defiantly, interrupting the lecture on self-control that he had heard a hundred times already. “Why should I use my mind to float fruit around? There’s no reason to! It’s faster and easier to grab it like any normal person would!” And just to prove his point, he bent down and seized apple and plate and banged both down on the wooden tabletop. “There! Now that’s what a person with plain common sense does! You don’t have to muck around with these stupid tricks to get things done!”
Now, of course, was the moment when Justyn would launch into a lecture on how in magic one must practice on small things before one could expect to succeed in the larger, how he was being immature and childish, and how very ungrateful he was. Next would follow how it was criminal that he refused to obey, that he had such a wonderful gift and was apprenticed to a wizard who would teach him skills, and didn’t appreciate his easy circumstances when instead he could have been bound out to a farmer or the blacksmith - 
Darian knew it all by heart and could have recited it in his sleep. And it wouldn’t make any difference if he protested that he didn’t want to be a wizard, that he hadn’t asked for this so-called “wonderful gift,” and that he didn’t see what was so wonderful about it. Justyn would ignore his protests, just as everyone else had, and did, and always would. For some reason that he did not fathom, every other person in the village was astonished that he didn’t appreciate being farmed out to the old fake.
But just at that point, there were sounds of thumping and a grunt of pain outside. Harris and Vere Neshem, a pair of the local farmers, staggered in through the door with Kyle Osterham the woodcutter supported between them, his leg wrapped in rags stained with fresh, red blood. Darian jumped immediately out of his chair and moved aside for them, shoving the chair in their direction.
“He was chopping up a stump and his footing slipped,” Vere said, as they lowered Kyle down into the seat Darian had just vacated. “Bit of a mess. Good thing we were close by.”
Since Justyn served Errold’s Grove in the capacity of a Healer far more often than that of a wizard, Darian had seen men who were worse wounded stagger in through the door, but Kyle’s leg was a bit of a mess. Surface cut, he noted critically. Ax blade probably hit the shin bone and skinned along the top of it. That’d peel back a lot of skin, but it’ll heal quickly as soon as it’s stitched, and it won’t leave much of a scar. Lucky if he didn’t break the shin, though. It would bleed a lot, and hurt a great deal, but it was hardly life-threatening. He edged out of the way a little more and got nearer the door.
Justyn rummaged through the shelves behind him, grabbing rags, herbs, a needle and fine silk thread, a mortar and pestle.
“Darian, boil some water,” he ordered, his back to the room as he hunted for something he needed.
But now Darian was in no mood to comply. This little incident only confirmed what he had been thinking. The people of Errold’s Grove didn’t need some fool who could suspend apples in the air, they needed a Healer, sometimes a Finder, sometimes a Weather-watcher, but not a wizard, and they never had needed a wizard in all the time Darian had been here. Most especially, they didn’t need him. It would make more sense for one of the girls to learn everything Justyn could teach about herbs and simples, distilling and potions, setting bones and stitching skin. So Darian just stood there, ignoring Justyn’s order, radiating rebellion and waiting for their reaction.
One of the farmers glanced at him with censure written clearly on his face. “Justyn,” he said in an overly loud voice, “is there any help you need?”
Justyn, who had been muttering to himself as he mixed herbs in the mortar, got flustered and distracted at the interruption. He had to dump the lot of what he was grinding out into the tiny fire, and start again. The fire flared up with a roar and a shower of multicolored sparks, and both farmers exclaimed in startled surprise, taking everyone’s attention off Darian.
That was all he needed. For once, Darian was not going to stand around and wait for people to give him stupid orders. Taking advantage of the distraction, the boy edged around behind Vere and made good his escape, sliding quickly out of the door before anyone noticed he was gone.
That’ll show him! That’ll show all of them that I’m not going to be treated like I have no mind of my own! I’m not a slave, and I never agreed to any of the things they‘ve done to me! They don’t give me the regard they‘d give a rooster; why should I stay and be insulted and made to do things I hate?
He didn’t want to be caught, though, so he moved around to the back of the cottage, plastering himself against the wall and ducking under the windows until he reached the side that faced the forest. He was just underneath the open window when he heard Justyn say in an exasperated tone of voice from which all patience had vanished, “Will you please boil that water, Darian? Now, not two weeks from now - “
But Darian was out of reach of further orders, and as he paused to listen to find out if either of the farmers was inclined to volunteer to go look for him, evidently Justyn looked around and saw that for himself, for there was a muffled curse.
“Useless brat,” the first farmer muttered. “We should have ‘prenticed him as a woodcutter to you, Kyle.”
Vere gave a snort. “He’d be just as useless there. Lazy is what he is. You oughta beat him now and again, Justyn. You’re too soft on him. Them parents of his spoiled him, and you ain’t helping by bein’ soft on him.” There was a clatter of metal as someone put the kettle on the hook over the fire.
Vere’s brother seconded that opinion. “Them two was useless to us and dangerous, Justyn. It’s in his blood, an’ you oughta beat it out of him, else he’ll bring somethin’ out of the woods that none of us’ll like.” Darian, lurking right beneath the window, heard every word too clearly to mistake any of it, and his stomach seized up inside of him as both fists clenched in an unconscious echo of the knots in his gut.
They were at it again. In front of him, or behind his back, they never let up, not for a minute! He felt his anger boiling up again, felt his face getting hot and his eyes starting to burn with the misery of loss he had vowed never, ever to show. He wanted to storm right back inside and confront both of those miserable old beasts, but what good would it possibly do? They’d only say to his face what they’d just said to Justyn.
With a strangled sob, he wrenched himself around and ran off - not into the village, but into the woods beyond, where the villagers were too cowardly - unlike his Mum and Dad - to go.
His feet knew the path, so he didn’t need to be able to see to find his way to one of his many hiding places. That was just as well, since unshed tears of anger and grief kept him from seeing very clearly. Darian wasn’t old enough to remember a time when things had been other than hard here at Errold’s Grove, but until last year, he had been happy enough. He hadn’t spent much time in the village itself, and although he hadn’t had any playmates, he hadn’t felt the need of them. Solitary by nature, he enjoyed the mostly-silent companionship of his parents.
Errold’s Grove lay on the very far western edge of Valdemar; nominally it was part of Valdemar, but the people here seldom saw a Herald more than once a year, and of late it had been longer than that between visits. Not that a Herald would do Darian any good, but the Heralds’ absence made the villagers feel neglected and forgotten, and that made them even harder on anyone who didn’t conform.
And Darian would never conform. He hated the village, he hated the people who saw no farther than the edges of their fields and wanted nothing more. He wanted more; he was stifling for want of freedom, and felt as if he were starving on a diet of confinement and mediocrity. He’d been out there where these villagers feared, and he remembered it far more vividly than anything that had happened to him in this dull little huddle of huts. Once he’d traveled the deep Forest he was never the same again, and he didn’t want to be part of this insular flock of humanity.
He ran like a hare through the field of corn behind the cottage, bare callused feet making little noise on the soft, cultivated earth. Nobody stopped him; the tall green corn hid him from view, and if they heard his running feet, they probably thought it was one of their own children coming back from an errand. A moment later, Darian burst into the shadows of the Forest at the edge of the fields and slowed once he was in the shelter of the undergrowth. He took a moment to orient himself, then twisted his way through the brush and sought refuge in his favorite tree, one of the enormous Forest giants that ringed the village and kept it in shade for most of the day. He climbed as swiftly as a squirrel or a tree-hare and as surely; even blinded by tears he had no trouble finding his hiding place where the great trunk split in two, forming a cup that a boy could easily curl up in and still have room for a few possessions. Beneath him lay the village, a cluster of about fifty buildings on the forested side of a bridged ford on the River Londell right on the edge of the Pelagiris Forest.
It went on forever in three directions, climbing hills, plunging into valleys, and crowning the huge bluff that rose above the river downstream of the village, with only the Londell halting its march toward the heart of Valdemar. The hard-won fields carved out of the forest were tended and fertilized with the greatest and tenderest of care, for it took terrible effort to gain a foot of clear ground from the trees, and there was always the chance (so it was said) that the Forest would decide to take revenge for trees that were cut down rather than falling down naturally. The Forest had always been a fairly uncanny place according to the old granthers and grammers of the village, but since the start of the mage-storms it had gotten very much stranger and far more dangerous.
A Herald had come - the first he had seen - three months after his unwanted apprenticeship to Justyn had been decided for him. The Herald had been light-skinned, with a long blond braid of hair, and looked all the paler because of the white outfit and matching riding coat. With him, of course, had been his Companion, a white horse that was more than a horse - it was more like a dreamer’s ideal of everything a horse could be, with lambent blue eyes, a long mane and hide that stayed impossibly clean, and silvery hooves. The Herald had explained that the strange things that were happening were called “mage-storms,” and they were caused by the magic of the world being disturbed a very long time ago. They had been told that the greatest mages of the world had united under Valdemaran leadership, and were working to prevent any major catastrophes. The Herald had answered the few questions posed by the villagers, looking to the white horse and then back. Darian had wondered at the time if he was the only one of the group, Justyn included, who felt like the white horse and the Herald were communicating with each other through then-looks and subtle gestures. The Herald would have gone on, but several of the older folk of the village hauled him away to explain more, out of Darian’s earshot. Since that took Justyn away as well, he was perfectly happy with that, and went off then to spend time alone in this very place of refuge. By the time he’d emerged, the Herald and his Companion had gone, and there hadn’t been one through here since.
According to Justyn, the fact that Errold’s Grove was relatively near Lake Evendim meant that they got the worst of the mage-storms. Huge circles of land and the creatures in them either changed completely or warped and twisted out of all recognition. Monsters appeared, things worse than the worst nightmare or legend, and unfortunately there were no friendly Hawkbrothers nearby to chase away or kill them - not that the people of Errold’s Grove particularly trusted the Hawkbrothers. At one time these people had made a good living out of going into the Pelagiris Forest and collecting some of the strange plants and fungi that grew there for use as dye-stuffs, and that business had occasionally brought them into conflict with the Hawkbrothers. Traders had come far out of their way for those dyes, and that had encouraged some people to go in deeper, in search of any other things that traders might find valuable. Of course, the deeper in they went, and the more they looked for ancient treasures instead of mosses and fungi, the more likely it was that they would wander into Hawkbrother lands and be warned off, often at the point of a drawn weapon. Once or twice, outsiders had come hunting treasure as well - and their bound bodies would later be found neatly arranged on the Forest edge, without a single copper piece or trinket missing, awaiting discovery and burial. Each such discovery would discourage deeper incursions for a few months, but there were always greedy outsiders ready to dare the Hawkbrothers for the sake of treasures, and their fates were a warning to the dye-traders to stick to their business and leave whatever “treasure” was out there alone.
Nevertheless, there was enough and more than enough of legitimate “quarry” to tempt the people of Errold’s Grove out into the Pelagiris until things started getting out of hand. The village had been quite prosperous, with visits from Heralds twice and three times a year, a fine wooden bridge over the Londell built by the order of the Crown, and even a pair of Valdemaran Guards stationed to watch the bridge and keep the peace on the road. There were still two sturdily built guardposts here, one on either side of the bridge, to prove that Errold’s Grove had once been considered an important border town.
But war had come, war with Hardorn, and the Guards had been taken away to serve elsewhere, never to return. Now the only way that the people of Errold’s Grove could keep the road open was to run their own volunteer patrols over it. Then things had somehow gotten mixed up with magic as well, and so far as the people of Errold’s Grove were concerned, order and their old way of life had all but disappeared.
First had come the physical storms, worse than anyone had ever seen before, that washed out the road in places, flooded the village twice, and buried it in yards of snow for most of the last several winters. Then had come the mage-storms to batter them all along with the physical storms, and all anyone from Valdemar could do after the Herald’s initial warning was to send a messenger with a map that showed what places were going to change, and when. That was no great help, when all the places were out in the wild Forest and no one could get out there to chase large animals away from the danger zone. So the animals became monsters, or maybe the monsters were brought in by the magic; no one was really certain. The only thing that everyone in Errold’s Grove could agree on was that now it was far too dangerous to leave the village and its fields. You never knew if or when you might disturb something that was canny enough to follow you back home. People stopped going into the Forest, and the dye-traders stopped coming, since there was no longer anything here to trade for, or even worth the peril to investigate.
Cowards! Darian thought, angrily scrubbing the tears from his eyes with his knuckles. Other people kept going in! Other people weren ‘t so scared of their shadows that they gave up!
People like his parents, for instance. . . .
Darian’s parents had been trappers, as had many generations of his ancestors on either side. But when it became too dangerous to actually live in the Forest, they had made Errold’s Grove the base of their operation, carefully working a territory with cautious respect for the Hawkbrothers’ claims and the new strangeness that the mage-storms brought with them. Some of the creatures that arrived on the wings of the mage-storms had handsome pelts of unusual colors, and traders would pay a lot for them. Other changes had occurred in the normal species of the Pelagiris that had made improvements in color or texture of the furs of animals native to the Forest, and for these, too, traders would come. Then, although they were not as expert as the villagers had been, they would look for the dye-fungi when time permitted, thus bringing back a bit of the prosperity that had left on the storm-winds.
They were careful! Darian silently told the village. They knew how to be careful! They would never, ever have let anything follow them here, no matter what you think! They always made certain to use traps that any truly intelligent species would spot, just to keep their consciences clean, but even with that caution they had brought in some incredible prizes. Darian had often gone with them, for during the winter they would both be out together for weeks at a time. He loved the Forest, and even at its most dangerous, he had never been as terrified of it as the villagers were now. It was right to be cautious around the Forest, but it was stupid to be afraid of it - after all, it wasn’t the Forest that was so dangerous, it was the things living in it, and as long as you were careful, there was nothing to worry about! Any fool could see that!
And how could anyone let fear blind him to so much of wonder and beauty?
“Dari, listen,” his mother would whisper, and he would cock his head to listen for the new sound that had caught her attention - perhaps the liquid trill of a new bird (or was it a tervardi?) - or the bell-like tone of a hammer-jay. Whatever it was, once he caught it, he would look to her, and see the pleasure shining in her eyes as she listened, too. Then she would tell him what it was they had just heard, and spin him tales of the little lives of the creatures of the forest, tales far more wonderful than anything in those dusty books the villagers thought so important.
“Dari, look,” his father would say, pointing to something wonderful - a soaring hawk, the sunset light glowing red and orange on a towering cloud, a doe with a fawn only minutes old. And then his father would show him how to follow the hawk and watch it stooping to a kill, what the fiery sunset portended in the way of weather, and how to find the fawn when she hid in the grasses to doze while her mother went off to drink or graze. He would stand an excited witness to the hawk’s victory, sit in quiet contentment until the last red rays of the sunset faded into blue dusk, or creep up to whisper to the fearless fawn, being careful not to touch it lest its mother scent him and reject it, even though his hands itched to stroke its soft pelt.
He still loved the Forest, loved the green silences, the huge trees, the sounds of it. He couldn’t get anyone else in the village to see what drew him there; when he tried, they looked at him with suspicion and even a little fear, just as they had looked at his parents.
But he could have borne even that, if he still had them. Dad - Mum - why didn’t you come back? Why did you leave me alone? Why did you let the Forest take you away from me?
The pain returned, greater for having been bottled away beneath his anger and rebellion. His eyes flooded with tears, his throat knotted, and he pounded his hand against the bark of the tree until his knuckles were raw and scraped. Loneliness filled him until there was no room for anything else, except for anger at the insular villagers who hadn’t even bothered to mount a search party when his parents didn’t return. It didn’t matter to these fools that the exotic furs his Mum and Dad brought back had been the only thing that kept traders coming to the village! Oh, no - because they went out into the Forest, everyone was just certain that something would follow them back into the village, something too big and monstrous to get rid of! There hadn’t been a particle of evidence that something like that had any chance of happening, but it didn’t matter; his Mum and Dad had been watched like criminals every time they came back from a trapping run. And they’d felt it; how could they not have? So they would go back out more and more often, spending less and less time in the village. And maybe that was taking on too much risk in the middle of the mage-storms. Maybe that was why, after an agony of waiting, he knew that they wouldn’t come home this time.
They’d left him behind because there was going to be another mage-storm coming, and Justyn and some of the others had persuaded them not to risk his safety along with their own. He’d protested, but they’d slipped off during the night, leaving him with the innkeeper as they usually did. By the time he woke up the next morning, they were gone, and the wind and snow had obliterated their trail. He’d tried to follow, but had been forced to turn back.
He waited and waited, going out every day to watch for them, sure each dawn that he would see them coming in laden with their prizes.
But this time he had watched in vain, for they didn’t return.
Darian was left to the village to care for, and it hadn’t taken them long to figure out how to dispose of him. Within a day or two of being certain that Darian’s parents were never returning, the village elders had quickly apprenticed him to Justyn. Justyn had long been after his parents to bind Darian over to him as an apprentice; Justyn had told them that he had the Mage-Gift, and that it had to be trained or it would be dangerous. Mum and Dad only laughed at him and told him he was a silly old fool if he thought a boy could be dangerous to anything or anybody. But the villagers had been only too ready to believe in the danger, and only too happy to get him disposed of - and more than once there’d been intimations that “disposed of” is exactly what he’d be if they detected any connection between him and these weird times. They told him then, and they continued to tell him frequently, that he should be grateful to them for seeing to his care, and for persuading his parents to leave him behind on that last trapping run. They never stopped telling him how grateful he should be, in fact. There was even a hint behind it all that it was a good thing that his parents had been lost - because now he, Darian, would no longer find his own life at risk in the Forest.
The tears welled up again.
Needless to say, he wasn’t grateful.
I helped them! They said I did! When they set the traps, I was the one up in a tree, watching and listening for danger - when they needed an extra set of hands, I was right there, and when they were tired, I was the one who was still fresh enough to tend to dinner or build the fire up. Maybe that hadn’t been true back when he was just a little boy, but it had been the past couple of years, and there was no denying it. They’d been able to concentrate on the work at hand instead of having to keep one eye on the work and one watching for peril or approaching weather.
And - maybe - that was why they hadn’t come back.
That was the stuff his nightmares had been made of for the last year. He kept thinking of times when he’d been there when they’d needed him - when they needed a third set of hands on the rope in a blizzard, when he’d spotted large carnivores stalking the camp - even when he’d been up a tree and had seen the signs of a bad storm coming up without warning. Had a pack of some magic-twisted horrors ambushed them, attacking them until finally their defenses were all gone? Had a terrible storm overwhelmed them? Had it been simply accident, the falling branch, the hidden crevice, the slip in the dark that left one or both of them crippled and helpless? Was that why they didn’t return? Because they’d counted on his eyes and ears to warn them, his extra hands on a knife or a bow to help fight off danger, and he hadn’t been there? He’d never been bad with a knife, and he was even good with a short bow . . . could it have made the crucial difference?
Or was it something else? Had they been caught by bandits, eager to steal their precious furs? Had there been an avalanche, or had one or both of them fallen through the ice while crossing a river? Horror of horrors - had they been caught in a Change-Circle and Changed themselves? Were they out there even now, rooted to the spot as half-human trees, or wandering in some shape not even he would recognize?
He couldn’t shake the conviction that if he had been along, they would have all come back to the village as usual. Somehow, some way, his mere presence would have made the difference. He knew better than to try and tell this to anyone in the village; he’d tried once to tell Justyn, and the old wizard had told him that he was overreacting, that whatever had happened to his parents had nothing to do with him. After that, he had kept his guilt and fears to himself.
But he couldn’t help but think that if he had been along, his parents would have had that extra set of hands and eyes that would have kept them safe, and brought them through whatever it was that took them away.
And that was what made it all the more horrible.
Here, in this refuge, away from the fools who didn’t understand, he could let his real feelings out.
Why? he cried in silent anguish, face turned up to the canopy of leaves, both fists grinding against the back of the tree, Why did you leave me? Why didn’t you take me with you? Why did you leave me all alone?
His body shook with silent sobs, and tears coursed down his cheeks, soaking his patched and much-mended shirt. It was too small in the arms for him by far, but he wouldn’t let anyone take it from him, nor would he give up the leather vest that went with it. She had made him the shirt, and he had cut and stitched the vest, and those two articles of clothing were all he had left of them.
Why? he asked them again and again, until there was nothing left in the world but sorrow and guilt. Why did you leave me alone?
Finally, his body trembling in every fiber, he collapsed in on himself, curled into a ball, and sobbed, muffling the sound of his weeping in his arms and the bark of the tree. He wept himself dry and exhausted, until there was no more strength left, even for a single tear.
Before Justyn was satisfied that Kyle’s injury was no longer life-threatening and was as clean as one herbalist could make it, there was a great deal of blood spilled on the stone floor of his cottage. It wasn’t the worst wound he’d ever tended, but it was definitely one of the messiest. Justyn had finally stopped the bleeding with a compression bandage, and after liberally dosing the woodcutter with brandy and poppy-powder, began stitching the wound closed with a curved needle and fine silk thread. Kyle was a stolid enough fellow, and in a way it was a blessing for both of them that he was so very insensitive (and, one might as well say it, stupid), for he didn’t seem to mind the ugly wound and the stitching half so much as the two farmers who’d brought him in. Vere and Harris grimaced every time Justyn put a stitch in, and Harris, who had no livestock at all but a few chickens, relying on the loan of his brother’s oxen to plow his own land, was looking a bit green about the face. Kyle had just sat quietly, as if he were a good plowhorse waiting for a new shoe to be fitted. The brandy and poppy concoction made the muscles of his face go slack and relaxed, and he leaned back in his chair, propped up by Harris and Vere, blinking sleepily whenever the needle went in.
I could be generous, Justyn thought. I could suppose that he’s in shock by now. Except that he hasn’t any of the symptoms of being in shock.
Such stolidity in the face of serious injury had been the hallmark of some of the mercenary soldiers Justyn had tended in the past - the long gone past, so removed from what he was now that it might be the past of another person altogether. There were just some men who never felt much of anything, either physical or emotional. In general, they got along well with their fellows, and they made good enough soldiers, for although they never displayed the least bit of incentive, they always obeyed orders without question. And, if a woman didn’t mind being the one to make all the decisions, they made perfectly amiable husbands and fathers. Certainly their phlegmatic temperament never led to beatings or other abuse. There had been times when he envied them that easy acceptance.
Virtually everyone in the village was cast from the same mold, and it wasn’t at all difficult to tell that Vere and Harris were Kyle’s cousins. All three of them were husky, light-haired, and brown-eyed, but Harris and Vere were darker than Kyle, and Kyle had features that were much more square. Justyn sometimes wondered if the reason he and Darian had never quite been accepted by the villagers was a simple matter of appearance; both he and Darian were thin and dark, in stark contrast to everyone else here. Or at least, he amended mentally, I was dark until my hair started going gray.
“He’s gonna be laid up a couple of days,” Vere said with irritation, his thick brows furrowing in a decided frown. “That means we’ll have to spare someone from field work to keep an eye on him so he doesn’t get into trouble, all juiced up with that poppy like he is. Can’t you magic him, ‘stead of sewing him up like usual?”
“I’ve told you before,” Justyn said patiently, manipulating the needle through a particularly tough patch of skin, “I’m not a Healer, I’m an herbalist, a surgeon, and a bone-setter. I would have to use a complicated magic spell to do what you suggest. Whatever it was that the Heralds did to end the mage-storms fractured all the magic, and left it scattered around like a broken mirror. It takes a long time to gather up enough shards of power to work any spells. It’s very tiring, it exhausts all the magic that’s nearby, and then, if you really needed some magic to be done in the case of an emergency, I wouldn’t be able to do it. What if something bad came out of the Pelagiris, and I couldn’t protect the village? You wouldn’t want that now, would you?”
The farmers both shook their square, shaggy heads, but they also looked skeptical and cynical, and Justyn could hardly blame them. After all, no one in Errold’s Grove had ever seen him work anything involving powerful magic, and they had no reason to think he could do anything much.
And they have every reason to doubt me, he admitted to himself, taking another careful, tiny stitch and tying it off.
“Besides,” he added as an afterthought, “you can get Widow Clay to watch him. She can’t work in the fields with that bad leg, but she can still weave baskets, or knit and sew while she keeps an eye on him, and who knows? She might decide that he’s better than no husband at all, and then your wives won’t have to cook and clean for him anymore.”
Justyn felt a bit badly that he was talking about Kyle as if the woodcutter wasn’t there, but in a sense he wasn’t. He’d had enough poppy and brandy that he wouldn’t recall a thing that had been said once the drugs wore off. And even if he did, Justyn rather doubted that he’d take offense at any of it, since worse things had been said in his presence that he never took offense to. He felt no guilt whatsoever about setting up Widow Clay, however. The good Widow had been setting her cap at him of late, and that was something he wanted to put an end to by whatever means it took! The last thing he needed was some meddling woman coming in here and “setting his life to rights.”
Both the farmers brightened at that idea, and they didn’t say anything more about magic. Instead, they exchanged the kind of cryptic sentences that almost amount to a code among close kin, and Justyn gathered that their conversation had something to do with a plan to persuade the Widow Clay that her best interests lay in dragging Kyle over the broom. Justyn rather doubted that Kyle would mind if she did; he’d probably accept being married with the good - natured calm with which he accepted having his leg stitched up. As for the Widow—well, she'd have nothing to complain about in Kyle.
Justyn continued to sew the two sticky flaps of skin together with tiny, delicate stitches a woman would have envied, but the meticulous work was not engrossing enough to keep his mind off the past.
The irony was, at one time he would have been able to mend a minor wound like this with magic, using magic to bind the layers of skin and muscle together, leaving the leg as sound as it had been before the injury. Granted, his grasp of power had been minor compared to the great mages like Kyllian and Quenten, but at least it had worked reliably— and what was more, it probably would be working better after the end of the Storms than the magics of those who were his superiors in power. He had never used ley-line magic, much less node-magic, and the loss of the ley-lines would have made little difference to him. He had been a hedge-wizard, one of those who practiced earth-magics, with a little touch of mind-magic thrown in for good measure, and he had served in the ranks of Wolfstone's Pack, a mercenary company recruited by Herald-Captain Kerowyn to aid Valdemar and Rethwellan in the war against Hardorn. His had been a minor role in that Company; using the earth-magics to tell him where the enemy was and how many his numbers were, helping patch up the wounded, helping conceal their own men from the enemy and his mages. Kerowyn's Skybolts had worked with the Pack in the past, and they were one of the few mercenary Companies she felt sure enough of to trust in the treacherous times when Ancar still ruled Hardorn. All that had been explained very carefully to the members of the Pack, as had the risks and possible rewards, and the Company had voted unanimously to take the contract. After all, it was Captain Kero they were talking about; no one who took the same side as she did ever found himself working for people he would really rather have lost down a mine shaft. And usually no one found himself facing a situation where foreign commanders were spending mere lives like base coin that they couldn’t get rid of fast enough.
Justyn had only just hired on with the Pack, and he’d been eager to see some real fighting, to get right into the thick of things. But he had quickly discovered that the place of a junior mage, a mere hedge-wizard, was going to be back with the support-troops.
And foolish me, that wasn‘t enough excitement for me.
He tried to volunteer every time they called for able bodies, but wisely the commanders kept passing him right over - until they came to the desperate running battles with Ancar’s troops that decimated their own ranks and left the commanders little choice but to put a weapon into the hands of anyone they could spare and hope for the best.
Justyn had been a good enough archer, but his mind-magic had given him an edge; as long as he got his arrow going in the right direction, he could think it into a target. With a bow in his hands, he impressed even the archery-sergeant, and so they kept him with the archers, and he got more than his share of excitement. Until his first battle, he’d thought that actually killing someone might be a very difficult thing, for he would be thinking his arrow into the body of a man, not a straw target - but then when he saw what he faced, there was actually a grim and melancholy sort of pleasure in it. “Hell-puppets” were what the other fighters called Ancar’s line-troopers; conscripted and controlled entirely by blood-magic, Ancar had depleted the countryside for fighters, and had raised the power for the spells that controlled them by killing their families in cold blood. When Justyn killed one of the troopers, it was actually a longed-for release for the poor clod.
Spell-bound and spell-ridden, for most of them that arrow came as a blessing, taking them out of Ancar’s hands and on to a place where their loved ones were probably already waiting. Ancar had not used his people well, to say the least, and Justyn found himself sending prayers along with each arrow.
And as for the officers and mages commanding Ancar’s troops - there was great pleasure in ridding the world of creatures so depraved and sadistic. And perhaps it was wrong for him to feel pleasure in killing even something as vile as Ancar’s toadies, but he couldn’t find it in his heart to regret taking even one of them out of the world.
And fighting was a great deal more exciting than grinding herbs, lighting campfires, and sealing wounds. When the archery-sergeant had halfheartedly given him the option to go back with his old group, he’d declined.
And, to be honest, I felt more like a man. I was actually doing something, and other men, other fighters, praised me for it. How could I go back to work among the cooks and the mule-drivers?
It wasn’t only the members of the Pack who praised him, either. He’d met several of the Valdemarans in the form of some of the Guard when they’d picked up a stray squad or two along the way, the sadly-depleted remnants of a Valdemaran Company that had been holding the line before the Pack came to reinforce them. They thought he was a fine soldier, and said as much as they all shared exhaustion and the rare hot meal between engagements.
Heady stuff for a young fool, I suppose.
“Wonder where the boy went?” Harris said idly, interrupting Justyn’s thoughts. Justyn had the needle clamped between his teeth and couldn’t answer, but the question was rhetorical, for the man answered it himself. “Probably ran off into the woods. My boy’s seen him running off there before. I’m telling you, Justyn, there’s bad blood there, and you’d better do something about it before he gets more than himself into trouble.”
Justyn really wasn’t paying much attention, lost in his own thoughts as he was, and the half-conscious grunt he made in reply seemed to satisfy the man. At the moment, he really didn’t want to think about young Darian, though he was getting an increasing number of complaints from the villagers that he wasn’t keeping the boy under firm enough discipline.
No, his thoughts were in the past, at the moment, drawn there by the task of stitching up something that could have been a wound made on purpose, rather than accidentally.
If I hadn’t been so young, I would have realized from the state of the Valdemaran Guard and the fact that my own commanders were willing to risk a mage in the front lines that something was very, very wrong.
What had gone wrong was that they were all trapped on the wrong side of the enemy lines, and only the fact that they had good commanders had gotten them as far as they had gone. He had learned later that the Guard and Pack Captains had agreed on a last-ditch dash for the Border at a weak spot in the enemy lines, hoping for a combination of surprise and overconfidence to bring them all through. And the ploy worked - 
Except that for it to work, someone had to hold the rearguard, and the most logical group was the mixed archery squad guarded by a handful of swordsmen.
They fought their way back toward Valdemar, step by step, until the only barrier between them and safety was a river with a single wooden bridge. One man with a bow could hold the enemy off long enough for everyone else to get across - and by that time, he was considered the best shot in the group.
So, of course, like a young hero who hasn’t quite grasped his own mortality, I volunteered.
That was when he learned the great and vital truth about being a bowman.
When you run out of arrows, you can do virtually nothing against a man with an ax.
He had fended off attacks for a few moments with his bow and knife, getting some painful wounds in the process, and the last thing that he remembered was watching the flat of the ax blade descending in strangely-slowed time toward his head.
He had awakened in the infirmary tent; after his heroic efforts, there hadn’t been a man in the decimated ranks willing to allow him to go down without trying to rescue him.
But his skull had been cracked like a boiled egg, and it had only been good fortune and the fact that Wizard Kyllian was present at that very site that had kept him alive to thank his rescuers.
Kyllian himself was too old by then to take part in any battle-magics; he had confined himself to instructing the new Herald-Mages and to helping the Healers when their own ranks grew too thin, for Fireflower was a School that produced mages who were equally versed in Healing and mage-craft. Reputed to be a great friend of Quenten, the head of the White Winds School at Bolthaven, Justyn really didn’t know why he’d chosen to come North when the Valdemarans sent out a call for mages through Quenten. Perhaps it was some need of his own that drew him there, or some urge to leave the sheltered confines of the Fireflower Retreat. He didn’t confide his reasons to Justyn, who was just one among many of the patients that he pulled back from the soon-to-be-dead and into the land of the living.
It was obvious almost at once that Justyn was not going to be any good for fighting anymore; the blow to his head addled his vision enough that he would never be able to accurately sight an arrow again, and he simply had never had the strength of body to be a swordsman. Nor did he ride well enough for the cavalry.
But there was still magic - the magic he’d despised, that suddenly seemed desirable again.
But like a lover scorned, his magic had left him as well. Much of what he had learned, the blow to his head had driven from his memory; he had trouble Seeing mage-energies with any reliability, and the mind-magic he had was so seriously weakened he could no longer lift anything larger than a needle for more than a few moments.
He had gone in a single instant from hero to a discard. And what would he do with himself outside of the mercenary Companies? He had no skills, no abilities, outside of those of the magic that was now mostly gone from him.
When he was able to get out of bed and care for himself, the Healers turned him loose to complete his recovery on his own, and the Pack gave him his mustering-out pay and their good wishes. The Captain expressed his regret, but pointed out that the Pack couldn’t afford anyone who couldn’t pull his own weight, and suggested that he might find employment somewhere as a server in an inn, or the like.
A server in an inn? Was that what he had come to? All at once, he couldn’t bear the idea that he must give up all of his once-promising future to become a menial, a drudge, another cipher with no future and no prospects. That was when he had approached the great wizard, hat in hand, like a beggar, and asked for advice.
He must have fairly radiated despair, for Kyllian had sent away the people he was talking with and took him into his own tent, sitting him down and presenting him with a cup of very strong brandy.
“I suppose you think that your life is over,” the great wizard had said, wearily but kindly. “And from your perspective, that’s an appropriate response. I understand you put on a fairly brave show out there.”
He had flushed. “Brave, but stupid, I suppose - “
“Depends on who you would ask. Your fellow mages, now, they would say it was stupid, I’m sure, risking your Gifts as well as your life in physical combat - but the fellows you shot covering fire for would have a different opinion.”
He had been rather surprised that Kyllian remembered the details of how he had been injured, but there were more surprises in store for him.
“So, you’re brave enough to die,” Kyllian had continued, watching him closely. “But are you brave enough to live? Are you brave enough to learn skills that will get you little gratitude, brave enough to practice them among people who will probably despise you and certainly won’t believe your tales of battle heroics, but who nevertheless will need what you can do?”
What could he answer, except to nod mutely, having no notion of what that nod was going to get him into?
“It wasn’t magic that saved you, boy,” the old man had told him bluntly. “It was simpler stuff than even you are used to practicing. Bonesetting and flesh-stitching, herbs and body-knowledge, patience and persistence and your own damned refusal to be a proper hero and die gloriously. Do you know what’s happened, out there in the hinterlands of Valdemar?”
He had shaken his head; obviously, how could he have known? He wasn’t a native of the place - 
“Well, I do, because the Healers come and wail on my shoulder about it at least three times a day. There are no Healers out there now; they’ve all been pulled east to take care of this mess. Even the old wisewomen, the herbalists, and the beast-Healers have turned up here; anyone that could travel has come here, where the need is greatest. That leaves vast stretches of territory without anyone that a sick or injured farmer can turn to - not an earth-witch, not a hedge-wizard, not even a horse-leech. No one. And people are going to die of stupid things like coughs and festered wounds unless people like you take the time to acquire a few more skills and go out there to help them.” Kyllian had eyed Justyn shrewdly. “And I can virtually guarantee it will be a thankless proposition - but you’ll be doing a world of good, even if no one is willing to acknowledge it.”
“Why do you care what happens to the people of Valdemar?” he’d asked, with equal bluntness. “And why should I?”
The old wizard had smiled, an unexpectedly sweet smile that charmed Justyn in spite of himself. “I care - because I don’t care what land people own allegiance to, so long as they are good people. And I suppose I care because of the philosophies that made me choose the School I chose. Ask any Healer of whatever nation how he feels about Healing a man from another land, even one that is his enemy, and he will look at you as if you were demented for even asking such a foolish question. Healers don’t see nations, boy. They see need, and they act on that need. That is why I care.”
“And why should I?” Justyn had repeated.
“Why did you volunteer to hold the bridge?” was all Kyllian asked, and although Justyn had not quite understood the question then, discovering the answer had formed a large part of his life from then on.
But at the time, given his utter lack of anything else he thought he could do, and the fact that the great Wizard Kyllian certainly seemed to want him to volunteer, that was what he had done.
First, though, he needed to begin a new course of learning. He had apprenticed himself to the leeches and herbalists and wisewomen on the battlefield, absorbing their knowledge of matters other than the injuries of combat when they weren’t all up to their elbows in blood and body parts. He acquired herbals and other books, brought what was left of his magic up as far as he could, and when Herald-Mage Elspeth and Hawkbrother Darkwind and Adept Firesong did whatever it was they did to end the war with Hardorn, he was there for the celebration of victory, then volunteered his services to both the Healers and the Heralds. After all, he was at least a little bit of a mage, as well as a certified bonesetter and herb-Healer, and Selenay of Valdemar had decreed that Valdemar still needed mages. Kyllian had been right, and he was assured that Valdemar could use anyone with either of those skills, and desperately. Ancar’s mages hadn’t confined their attentions to killing Valdemaran fighters; they’d made a point of going after the tents of the Healers and other noncombatants, contrary to every accepted convention of war. Far too many of the Healers and leeches who had volunteered were not going back to their homes again.
Those services that he offered were gratefully accepted, and the Healers sent him off so far into the West that he wasn’t certain he was still on a map of Valdemar. A whole string of folk went, most with about as much magical power as he had, and some with less; a Healer and a Herald went with them and found them towns and villages who wanted and would support folk like himself. The last village on the list was Errold’s Grove, and it was here that he found that Kyllian had been only too right. People had already died needlessly of stupid things - a compound fracture gone septic, a winter epidemic of fever, an infected foot. The people here needed him and wanted him, and the Healer and Herald went back to Haven to look for more volunteers to fill all those empty places where Healers had once been.
At first, things hadn’t been as bad for the village and the villagers as they were now. Traders still came for the dye-stuffs, and there was both ready money and the goods coming in from outside to spend it on. The villagers had seemed impressed by the little magics he could still do, such as finding lost objects and predicting the weather. He had been given a house and was promised that, like the woodcutter, all his needs would be taken care of. A strange and scruffy black cat had simply appeared one day, a cat that seemed unnaturally intelligent, and he took it as a good omen, that he had gotten himself a proper familiar, that his magic might once again amount to more than the wherewithal for a few parlor games. He set about looking for an apprentice to teach, and saw the light of magery dancing in the eyes of a young child, the son of a pair of fur trappers. He had every confidence that he would one day be able to persuade them that their boy should have a chance at a better life than they held, and get young Darian for his apprentice. It seemed as if the gods were finally smiling on him again, and he rechanneled his ambitions into another path. If he could not become a great mage, he could train one. It didn’t take having the Talent and the Gift to be able to train the person who did. He transmuted his dream into the dream of being the mentor to a powerful magician, and thought that he would be content.
But then the mage-storms began, and his fortune dropped along with that of his village. When one or two monstrous creatures invaded the village, no one wanted to go out into the Pelagiris Forest and encounter more - and since the dye fungus wouldn’t grow outside of the Forest, that pretty much put an end to the dye-trade. With no money and no traders coming in, the villagers were forced to become self-sufficient, but self-sufficiency had its cost, in time and hard physical labor. The narrower the lives of his villagers became, the less they in their turn were willing to forgive. The demands on him became greater, and he was less able to meet them. And when Darian was orphaned and was bound over to him by the villagers, the boy reacted in exactly the opposite way he would have expected - not with gratitude, but with rebellion.
That, perhaps, was the worst blow of all. The boy had seemed so tractable with his parents, so bright, and so eager to learn! And with bis parents gone and no relatives to teach him a trade or care for him, he should have been relieved and grateful to get so gentle a master as Justyn, who never beat him, never starved him into submission, never really scolded him.
Justyn was nearly finished with Kyle’s wound, but the problem presented to him in the shape of young Darian was nowhere near as easy to deal with.
Was it only that the villagers were right, that the boy had bad blood in him? Just how “bad” was the “bad blood,” if there was such a thing? Was it insurmountable? Should he give up, and see the boy bound over to the smith, perhaps? Certainly the smith would not tolerate the kind of behavior Darian exhibited now - but how could that be fair to the boy?
Was it only that he was strong-willed and stubborn, unwilling to turn bis hand to another path when the one he had been on was closed to him? It would have been natural enough for him to plan to follow in his father’s footsteps, and certainly there was every indication that he knew quite a bit about the business of trapping and preparing furs. If it was only that, could his stubborn nature be overcome? Surely Justyn could make him see reason - the Forest was too dangerous to go out in, now, and the deaths of his parents should prove that to him, if only he could be made to acknowledge the fact. If two people with all the experience and caution they displayed could not survive there, Darian had no chance of prospering, and surely Justyn could make him understand that.
Was it that he wanted everything to come to him easily, as magic came to those in children’s tales? Was he too lazy to work? If that was the case, Justyn wasn’t sure how to remedy it, but that didn’t seem right either. The boy wasn’t actually lazy, but look at what he’d said this afternoon: that he didn’t see any reason to expend a great deal of effort to do something much more easily accomplished with normal means, and perhaps it was only that Justyn hadn’t been able to persuade him that those little exercises were the only way of building his ability and control to handle anything bigger.
Or was there something else going on, something that Justyn didn’t understand?
Justyn could see some things for himself - the boy didn’t like being made to feel that he was somehow “different” from the other children in the village. Perhaps part of his rebellion stemmed from the fact that his Talent for mage-craft was bound to set him farther apart from the others. Given the contempt with which the villagers regarded Justyn, he had no reason to assume that they would give him any more respect if and when he became a mage.
And he certainly reacted badly whenever his parents were mentioned. But his parents, too, had been “different,” very much so. The entire village had regarded them with suspicion and displeasure, anticipating that they would only bring more trouble than they were worth with them eventually. Some of the villagers had not been entirely certain that Dalian’s parents were human - the argument was that no human would ever choose to go out into the Pelagiris when there were safer ways of making a livelihood. A fallacious argument, to be sure, but the folk of Errold’s Grove seemed to have a grasp on logic that was tenuous at best. But was it that Darian wished his parents had been the same as everyone else, and he was angry that they had been “different” and had made him “different” by default? Or was there some other thought going through his mind?
“Bad blood, and reckless, that’s what’s in that boy,” he heard with half an ear, and it occurred to him at that moment that every time anyone in the village so much as mentioned Darian’s parents and lineage, it was with scorn and derision, and the certainty that “no good would ever come of those folks.” Why, no wonder the boy reacted poorly! Every time the boy heard himself talked about, it was with the almost gleeful certainty that he would come to a bad end, or be nothing but trouble. As reluctant to show any sort of feeling as he was, still, for Darian those words must seem like a blow to the face, or more to the point, to the heart.
Still, one would think that the boy would feel a little proper gratitude. Justyn certainly treated him well. He was hardly overworked, he had plenty of free time to himself, enough to eat, proper clothing to wear, and a comfortable place to sleep. There was no telling if he’d had all those things with his parents, but one would think he would be happy enough to have them now.
Wait, think a moment. It is one thing to feel gratitude, it is another to be told over and over again just how grateful you should be, if only you weren’t too much of a little beast to be appreciative. He’s only a child, he can’t understand how much of a burden one extra mouth to feed is for the people here. Folks with children would have to work that much harder to feed and clothe him, folks whose children are grown expect to be taken care of in their old age, not become caregivers all over again. He hadn‘t any skills that were useful to the folk here when he was left in their hands, so he wouldn‘t contribute anything toward his own keep for months or even years - but how is a child supposed to understand that?
And as a child, his parents were naturally everything to him, the center of his young life, and being told they were idiots and deserved to get swallowed up by the Forest must surely make his blood boil. He must feel impelled to defend them, and yet since he was a mere child, he would be considered impudent and disrespectful if he did.
Another thing that Justyn had noticed about him was that he had a great deal of difficulty in remaining still and concentrating. Perhaps that was characteristic of all young boys, but most were apprenticed to learn skills that involved physical work, not mental work. The boy had a restless heart, and the truth of it was that he was not well-suited to insular village life. He spent most of his free time, not with the three or four boys near his own age, but out in the “forbidden” Forest; whether he was just wandering, or exploring with a purpose, Justyn didn’t know, but he certainly seemed to prefer the company of trees and birds to that of his own kind.
And there are certainly times when I don’t blame him for that.
Justyn tied off the last of the stitches, and clipped all the threads as short as possible so that they wouldn’t catch on something.
“Now,” he said to all three of them, although he wasn’t at all sanguine about Kyle understanding anything he said. “I know you’ve heard this before, but it bears repeating. You all three know what happens when a wound goes septic. Kyle, please realize that if you let this wound sour, at best, you would be very, very sick and I would have to open up the wound, drain it, and cut or burn out part of the infected tissue. It would hurt a very great deal, both while I was doing it and afterward. You’d have much worse than a scar, then, and it would take much longer to heal. You would probably end up with a limp, or even lame, if the infection grew bad enough.”
Kyle grunted and nodded his agreement, his brown hair flopping into his vacant brown eyes. He brushed it away, and although the motion was slow, his hand was steady, arguing for a certain level of sobriety.
“Now pay attention to what I have to tell you,” he insisted. “You may have heard this before when someone else was hurt, but chances are you don’t remember it as well as you think you do. Harris, Vere, I am counting on you to remind Kyle of all of this.”
“All right,” Vere agreed, looking as if he felt put upon. Harris just grunted, clearly bored with the entire procedure. Knowing the two as he did, Justyn figured that Vere would try to remember to tell Kyle everything, and Harris would do so only if he happened to think about it.
Justyn sighed, and hoped they wouldn’t forget what he was about to tell them. At least Kyle’s constitution was so robust that he could take a little neglect. “Once a day, the wound is to be washed in wine, just as I did before I closed it, and allowed to dry in the air.”
“Right,” Kyle said vaguely. “Wash, and air-dry. Don’t bandage it wet.”
“After it is dry, then put the salve I have given you on it, and put a dressing made of fresh, clean cloth over it. Don’t put bear fat, or goose grease, or tallow, or river-weed, or anything else your granny used to use for wounds on it. Do you understand that? Forget your granny’s and your mother’s famous remedies, and stick with mine. Trust me on this, and remember that the Heralds sent me here for just this reason. I’ve seen and treated more wounds like this than there are people in the village.”
“Just the salve you give him,” Vere sighed, as Kyle nodded so earnestly that Justyn had some hope that the man might actually remember what he’d been told.
“At night, before you sleep, I want you to change the dressing again, with fresh, clean cloth. I want you to have all the rags you use for dressings washed thoroughly in boiling water and hung to dry in the sun.” Sometimes he wondered if they’d pay more attention to the things he told them to do if he gave them some kind of nonsense to say over each task, as a kind of charm against sickness. But no, he was afraid that if he did that, they would trust in the charm and forget cleanliness. How could he get them to believe that there were invisible animals living in filth that made wounds fester, if he couldn’t get them to believe in him?
Thank the gods they at least knew the signs of infection and gangrene. “Examine the wound carefully each time you change the dressing, and if you see anything wrong, come to me at once. Remember, you’re watching for infection, and that can include swelling, red streaks coming up or down your leg from the wound, skin that’s hot to touch and more sore than it should be. Understand?”
“Come to you at once,” Kyle repeated, nodding vigorously.
“All right,” Justyn said, and sagged back in his chair. He waved a hand at them. “You can all go now.”
Harris and Vere each took one of Kyle’s arms and heaved him up out of his chair. Justyn didn’t offer him any more of the precious poppy-powder; he didn’t have much, and he had to save it. There was no telling when the next trader would come with the powder he’d ordered almost a year ago.
Rather surprisingly, Kyle made it erect without too much in the way of a wobble, and he didn’t lean on the two farmers nearly as much as Justyn thought he would.
The benefits of an iron constitution and a head like a granite boulder, I suppose, he thought dispassionately. He’d probably have healed up all right without me, which is likely what Vere and Harris will be telling each other.
He leaned back in his chair and massaged the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. Kyllian had been right; this was a place where he - and a successor - were desperately needed, and it was a place where they would get little thanks and no credit for what they did. People honored the spectacular, not the everyday. Raise a dead man and bring him back to life, and they would hold you in awe. Keep him from dying in the first place with a little simple hygiene, and they ignored you.
What was he to do? He had known what he was up against when he arrived here. And what was he going to do about a successor? If he couldn’t somehow bring the boy around, he would have to find someone willing to do the hard work without any magic at all.
Women tended-to be more community minded than men, and in this village at least, they were used to taking on the more objectionable of community tasks; perhaps he ought to check among the girls and see if any of them were willing to learn all he could teach them about bonesetting and herbs and the like. It wouldn’t hurt Darian to see that he had a rival for Justyn’s tutelage. That might get him interested again when nothing else seemed to.
The only problem with that idea was that it would be hard for a young girl to get a mature man to listen and obey her when it came to following instructions. That had been the idea behind sending a man here in the first place.
If only I could regain my magic! If I could impress the people here, that might bring Darian around. If he just thought that he had a chance of being seen with respect as long as he learned what I have to teach, that might change his attitude.
He turned his attention to the apple sitting on the plate on the end of the table where Harris had put it. He narrowed his focus and concentrated on the fruit, as he had so often and so easily, feeling a now-familiar headache arc across his head, just behind his right eyebrow. He didn’t remember the blow that had felled him, but he fancied that it had felt a lot like that stabbing pain.
He willed the apple to rise. This time! Surely this time!
It wobbled a bit on the plate, but did not move.
Still, he continued to concentrate on it, and it rocked faster and faster but still refused to rise, until” the pain behind his right eye was enough to blind him. With a sigh, he dropped the apple with his mind, and it stopped moving.
“I’m an old fraud,” he said out loud. “I’m a failure and an old fraud, my apprentice hates me and hates magic, and you - “ he looked at his cat, which was licking itself again “ - probably aren’t even a familiar. And even if you are, you’re a failure, too. If a whirlwind came out of the sky and swallowed us all up, no one would ever notice, that’s how unimportant we are. What do you think of that?”
The cat went on cleaning itself, sticking a scraggly, flea-gnawed leg straight up in the air, arse toward Justyn. He chuckled bitterly, for the cat’s silence seemed the only fitting comment.

Two

Even grief as profound as Darian’s could not be sustained for too long, and after lying exhausted in his hiding place for a time, other feelings began to penetrate his sorrow, all of them maddeningly persistent, and utterly ordinary. It was irritating - which in itself was irritating - to have stupid things like a nose that was sore and stuffed up from crying, and an ant crawling up his leg inside his breeches, intrude on something as profound as his grief. But that didn’t stop them from intruding. His arms and legs felt cramped, his hands stung where he’d pounded them against the bark and scraped them, and one hip hurt, jammed as it was against the hard bark of the tree. Finally he decided it was time to leave. He sat up, his eyes sore and dry, and peered down through the branches to see if there was anyone about to catch him when he climbed down.
There was no one working in the field below, and from the fact that the long shadows of the trees had crept over the village, he’d been up here a while. He guessed that the women who usually worked in the bean field had probably left their work to go prepare dinner for the men and children. The wind was in the wrong direction for him to catch aromas coming from the village, but it was a good bet that if he could smell anything, it would be the mingled aromas of stews, soups, pies and pasties, same as always.
I wonder why they bother making individual dinners.
Surely it would make more sense just to make one big pot of stew for the whole village, he thought, with a touch of contempt. After all, everyone in the village uses the same half-dozen recipes. I don’t think anyone has ever tried to make anything new since I’ve been here.
Perhaps it was that, as difficult as things were, there were still some who were more prosperous than the rest, who could afford a little more meat and spices in their food, and who made sure to enjoy that distinction from everyone else whenever the opportunity presented itself.
As if by sharing a bit of spice with everyone else they’d lose the chance to lord it over their neighbors, he thought sourly. The half-dozen “well-to-do” families were the ones who seemed to go out of their way to complain about his behavior. As if they didn’t already have the best houses in town, and can even pay somebody else to cook and clean for them!
Still, if it was mealtime, he’d probably better be getting back to Justyn. There were still dishes to scrub, and the pasties to fetch from the baker, or the old wretch would probably forget to eat, and then Darian would get the blame if Justyn got sick. Sometimes he wondered how Justyn had gotten along before he came - but then he realized that the women had taken care of him, the same way they cared for Kyle. So the villagers had gotten something out of apprenticing him to Justyn; they’d been able to stop cleaning up after and cooking for the Wizard. No wonder they’d been in such a hurry to get him bound over!
I’ll have to clean up after Kyle, too, if I don’t want to have to eat dinner in a room that looks like someone had butchered a pig there. Justyn is such a slob! How can he be so concerned with keeping wounds clean, and live the way he does? Wrinkling his lip a little with disgust, he stretched his arms and legs until the cramps went away, then climbed slowly down the side of the tree opposite the village. He didn’t want anyone to catch sight of him if he could help it; he’d already lost a couple of hiding places by being careless.
Here on the edge of the fields, where there was more sunlight, growth of bushes and vines was especially heavy, giving him cover that allowed him to get into the field without being seen. Already the air was hot and drowsy with midday heat, and hidden insects buzzed and droned on all sides of him. The ground here smelled damp; someone must have opened up the irrigation pipe for this field. He pushed through the dense underbrush until he came to a field of pole beans, and made his way through the rows of tall, tent-like arrangements of poles covered with climbing bean vines. They made a jagged hedge that was difficult to see through, and extended well over the top of his head. Eventually the field ended, and he reached the outskirts of the village on the northern side. He reentered Errold’s Grove near the firing pit for pottery and the storage shed where the finished pieces were kept. He didn’t see anyone, although the sounds of dinner being served and eaten were coming from every open window.
It must be later than I thought. He still didn’t feel much like hurrying, though; his bout of grief had pretty much killed his appetite, and with a bit of pique, he decided that Justyn could wait. If his Master was hungry, his Master could go fetch his own dinner from the baker, and clean a plate or two himself for a change.
He made his way slowly along the paths between the houses, kicking a round rock through the dust, nursing his grievances. The ordinary sounds of people who liked each other eating together only made him feel more abused and put upon, because he knew what those people must be thinking and saying about him. Vere and Harris had certainly recounted the tale of his defection to their families by now, and their wives had probably shared the story with others as they brought water from the well, or went to fetch dinner from the baker. So now everyone knew that Darian had shown his “true face” again, and they would be feeling very smug indeed. By suppertime tonight, he’d be the main topic of evening lectures to the family.
They’ll be looking at their children, and telling each other, “Thank the gods he isn’t like Darian!” or “My boy would never act like Darian.” Huh. As if they really had any idea half of what their precious children get into when they aren’t watching.
And the very next person he encountered would probably stop him in order to remind him of how ungrateful and unnatural he was. Every time he got into trouble - and “trouble” seemed to have a wide definition for these people - people would go out of their way to give him their own version of the lecture he’d already heard a thousand times or more - the sermon on how kind Justyn was for taking him in and apprenticing him without an apprenticing fee or any kind of familial relationship. Again. And again.
At least Justyn himself usually left that part out, perhaps because he remembered only too well how he had pestered Darian’s parents every time they came into Errold’s Grove. Darian could recall at least a dozen times that Justyn had come to his Mum and Dad, separately or together, to urge on them a plan of apprenticing him into Justyn’s service. There had been a great deal of fuss made about how dangerous it was for someone with Darian’s “potential” to remain untrained in his magic. Darian remembered his Dad once telling his Mum that Justyn was trying to frighten them into giving Darian over to him, and that she shouldn’t let the old man alarm her.
If Darian could not get away from whoever had decided to deliver the usual lecture, the haranguer would then go through the litany of Darian’s many character flaws and deficiencies, and the only variation was in how much emphasis an individual placed on a particular flaw. This part was actually useful; Darian had noticed over the course of several of these lectures that people tended to stress the flaw that they were most prone to themselves. For instance, the rudest man in the village, Old Man Gulian, tended to harp on how rude Darian was, and Erna Dele, who never spoke or showed a thank you for any favor and always expected more than she got, would go on at great length on how he didn’t appreciate what he was given. He learned a lot by listening to what people thought they saw as deficiencies in him.
Regardless of who was giving the lecture, it always ended with a homily on gratitude, obedience, and humility. That is, how he should daily demonstrate how grateful he was to everyone in Errold’s Grove by thanking all and sundry on every occasion for their generosity toward him - how he should show that gratitude by instant obedience to anything anyone wanted of him - and how he should be properly humble and prove that he knew his place in the scheme of things by groveling before everyone he came across.
How I should be so happy to have been permitted to become a bound-over slave that I should demonstrate that gratitude with humble servitude to anyone over the age of fifteen.
“It takes a village to raise a child,” was the old proverb, often quoted to Justyn when someone came to complain about Darian, and it certainly seemed as if everyone in the village had his or her own ideas of the proper way for Darian to behave!
Each time he heard the lecture, he was sorely tempted to kick the orator in the shins. He never did, though, because there was always that doubt that they might all be right and that he was in the wrong. After all, everyone here seemed to be in agreement on his behavior and worth except he himself, and after all, he was only a boy. What if he was entirely in the wrong? What if he was a bad person? What if he did deserve to be punished - what if Justyn was too tolerant of his behavior and he really deserved to be disciplined?
What if the reason his parents got swallowed up by the Forest was because he was a bad person, and this was how the gods had chosen to punish them for how he turned out?
That was the possibility that gave him a cold lump in the bottom of his stomach, and made him squirm with distress whenever he thought of it.
And that, of course, just made him want to be loud and wild and try some of the magics that Justyn talked about, just to show them all that he was not to be trodden underfoot like a weed and he was not going to take all their lectures and disapproval lying down.
Which, of course, always got him into more trouble. In fact, it seemed as if ever since he’d arrived in this place, he was in trouble to one degree or another - or thought to be in trouble.
And it wasn’t fair! The other boys pulled as many pranks as he did, or more - they were just slier about it, and they didn’t get caught because no one was trying to catch them the way everyone seemed to be trying to catch him.
Hellfires! he thought rebelliously. When everyone’s watching you all the time to catch you doing something wrong, they’re going to get you, no matter how hard you’re trying to do right!
And meanwhile, just because everyone in the whole town expected Darian to be the one who made trouble, that meant they weren’t going to catch their own boys at it, and Darian would get the blame for things they did. It happened all the time, and even when he could prove he hadn’t had anything to do with the mischief, no one ever apologized to him or made things up to him. They just said that he deserved to get into trouble for all the things he did that he hadn’t gotten caught at! Now, there was a prime bit of logic!
And just suppose the beans got pecked a bit by birds, or a deer wandered in and ate some of the young corn, things that he couldn’t possibly have any control over - why, that was all the fault of his Dad and Mum. It was the Pelagiris-beasts come to take revenge on the village for the terrible trappers who had invaded the Forest. Even the most normal of beast depredations was always blamed on some monster from the Pelagiris that had followed Dalian’s parents back to Errold’s Grove. Though what self-respecting monster would pull up carrots and eat them, or trample down a hill of beans, or pick at ripe strawberries - well, that was beyond him. Must have been a monster with a singularly vegetarian appetite.
Funny how they all forget those coats and rugs and bedcoverings they all have that Dad and Mum traded for food and supplies, he thought sourly, looking up from his rock and noting one of those bedcoverings hanging out on a line to air. A soft shade of subtle cream it was, too, with markings and mottlings of a darker shade of pale brown. Quite a handsome fur, thick and warm, and probably a fine thing to have on the bed in the dead of winter. Darian even remembered what the beast had looked like when they’d caught it - a terribly dangerous beast, it was, completely unable to defend itself, much less attack anyone. It had looked like a huge hassock; with four tiny little legs and a head the size of an apple all stuck on a body easily the size of a fat cow, and certainly much wider. If anything had been born to become a tanned hide, that thing surely had been. It was a wonder it had survived long enough to be trapped in the first place.
Poor Justyn hadn’t even gotten the benefit of having furs traded to him in return for taking Darian as an apprentice. He didn’t get anything at all, not even other peoples’ cast-offs, and he was the one who probably deserved some kind of repayment the most. Widow Clay of the bad leg that kept her from hard physical labor had been appointed to make him bedcoverings, which she knitted from odds and ends of yarn that she unraveled from worn-out sweaters or scrounged from leftovers or other projects. She also made quilts of scraps that no one else wanted because they were stained, or faded and threadbare, or too drab to be desirable, even as a patch for a quilt. Poor Justyn! He always got the tag-ends of everything. He was the last person in the village to get a share of meat, of clothing, of anything. Who-ever’s turn it was to supply him always gave him what they didn’t want. Take now, for instance; there was an abundance of turnips, beans, and peas, so their meals featured either turnips, beans, or peas, depending on how the donor herself felt about those vegetables. Mostly, they got turnips, and he was not looking forward to the time when the squash ripened.
Now his mood turned to guilt, as it always did at this point, for the worst part of it was that in his heart he knew he was being treated fairly; well-housed and well-fed, and Justyn, though short-tempered and appallingly sloppy, was fundamentally kind.
He kicked his stone back and forth, from his left foot to his right, making slow progress in the direction of Justyn’s cottage. He kept his eyes down on the path and his stone, for it was just possible that if any adult saw him doing this, they would think it was some ridiculous exercise that Justyn had set him, as it certainly would look too tedious to be a game. Justyn had set him tasks that looked sillier in the past, and the one thing they all had in common was that they were tedious.
It’s not so bad with Justyn, and I wouldn‘t mind so much if I was learning something useful. It’s just that he keeps insisting that this magic stuff is good for something. I’ve heard the stories and I’ve seen the bad art on his walls. He’s talked about great mages and even one or two Hawkbrothers, and told me about their great spells and “weaings.” But so far I haven’t seen him do anything that couldn’t be done easier by plain old ordinary hands. For that matter, a lot of what Justyn did was accomplished by mundane means, and old Justyn sure didn’t get a lot of respect, wealth, or even appreciation. So why would anyone want to be a wizard in the first place? What’s the point of being a wizard if you get taken for granted and paid only in what no one else wants? If I was learning something like being a fighter, a warrior - something that was useful and got respect - well, things would be different.
The old man was good at small spells and minor healings; simple magics that made life better and safer for the villagers. But nobody really seemed to notice just how much he did for them; they acted as if he was supposed to be at their beck and call for the most minor of trivialities, and on the whole they treated him very little better than Lilly, the barmaid at the inn. Justyn just accepted that treatment, as if it was what he expected and deserved.
That isn’t doing either of us any good, if it comes right down to it. He doesn‘t get respect, so I never will either - but he also doesn’t ever do anything to make people think he was important. And any old wisewoman knows almost as much as he does about healing and medicines.
Everything Justyn did or wanted him to do seemed to involve a great deal of stupid, plodding, repetitive work. So what good was magic, when all it did was make for more hard, tedious work? He knew why the villagers didn’t respect Justyn’s magic - wasn’t magic supposed to be spectacular, instantaneous, and take one’s breath away? Wasn’t that the way magic happened in the tales? When the village was buried in snow, shouldn’t Justyn have been able to clear the snow away from the paths and the doors with a snap of his fingers? Shouldn’t he be able to hold back floodwaters with his will, or make a well by wishing it there?
Shouldn’t he have been able to keep people safe when they went into the Forest to make a living? After all, that was how the people of Errold’s Grove were supposed to make a living - shouldn’t a proper wizard be able to make sure they could still do it, no matter what those mage-storms brought? That may have been what earned their scorn - when the monsters came, Justyn wasn’t able to do things that let the village prosper despite their presence.
If they’d thought that he was going to be able to get rid of any monsters that came in from the Forest, people wouldn’t have been half as hard on Dad and Mum . . . in fact, they might have helped them out a bit that last winter, when running the traplines was so hard.
And if people had been pleasant to him and his parents, if they’d been able to prosper on their own, maybe his Dad and Mum wouldn’t have felt as if they had to go out into the Forest as often or for as long. They might still have been here, if they hadn’t felt so unwelcome in Errold’s Grove.
He shook his head angrily to keep from crying all over again. He had to think hard to be able to get a breath; he felt as if he were in a constriction trap, and the trap kept getting smaller every day. I don’t think I can bear too much more of this, he thought, but this time the thought had more of a feeling of desperation behind it. I’ve got to get away; I’ve got to figure out how I can take care of myself, and get away from here. This place, these people - they’re trying to make me just like them, and I don’t want to be like them! Wanting everything just alike is what’s killing them all, they just don’t realize it.
There had to be more to life than the kind of life the villagers were living - a dull, pedestrian, day-to-day existence. When he wasn’t being badgered, he was being bored to death.
Every day is exactly like every other day. Only the weather and the seasons change, and even they don’t make that much difference, unless there’s something like a flood or a blizzard. Or a monster or something they think is a monster. Or maybe a Herald comes along once a year at most. It’s always the same food, the same gossip, the same things going wrong or right. Nobody ever does anything just for the sake of doing it, and nobody ever dares try anything new.
There were times when he thought that even the appearance of a monster from the Pelagiris Forest would be preferable to the day-in, day-out sameness. It might wake up some of these people, show them that there were more important things than complaining about one small boy.
No one ever makes songs or tales about people plowing their bean fields. What’s the point of living on the edge of a perilous and magical place like the Forest if you don’t go looking for adventure in it? Or if not adventure, why not just - life? People used to go looking for adventure - or for mosses and other dye-stuffs, anyway - but now they would rather hide in the village and pretend the Forest wasn’t just beyond their carefully cultivated fields. They’d rather do without prosperity than take a chance against danger, and Darian could not understand that.
My folks went out looking for adventure; maybe there is something in my blood. Only it isn’t bad blood, it’s just - I don’t know. I just know if I don’t do something different soon, I’m going to burst. I don’t know how these folks stand living like this. Maybe they don’t burst because they’re hollow.
He looked back over his shoulder at the Forest with longing. He always felt more contented when he was in there, and the temptation to keep going, to keep on looking to see what was beyond the next stand of trees, behind the next patch of undergrowth, was often overwhelming. It always felt as if there was something exciting out there waiting for him, if he just went far enough in.
And maybe Dad and Mum are still alive in there, somewhere. . . .
His belly wrenched. He was thinking that again, as he had for ages, and he still could not let that hope go. Until someone found proof otherwise, he would always be certain that they weren’t dead, that they were trapped or imprisoned somewhere, waiting for someone to find them. As long as he could believe that, he couldn’t give up, and he had something to hold onto in the middle of the night, when he woke up and found himself beneath a thick, thatched roof instead of the open sky, or tent canvas, or forest canopy.
That hope faded a little more with each passing day, though. It got harder to believe they were still alive somewhere, when there was never any trace, either of what became of them, or of a force or person that could have imprisoned them.
Maybe when a trader comes, I can get him to take me with him. I could work for him until we get somewhere where there are more people, then I could join the Guard. I bet I’d be a great fighter - in fact, I bet I’d be one of the best fighters there ever was! He was easily one of the best bowmen in the village; more than half the time he’d been apprenticed it was his skill that put meat in Justyn’s stew, and not the “gratitude” of the villagers.
Then again, all the wars were supposed to be over now, and maybe they wouldn’t need fighters. Well, that was all right. I could remind people about the furs and the dyes that used to come from here - I could get them to put together an expedition to explore the Forest, that’s what I could do! I know all Dad’s trapping trails; I could be famous for opening up the Forest!
Or maybe he could just work for the trader until he had enough put by to buy his own supplies and traps. He could go out into the Forest himself, and become as good a trapper as his Dad was. He remembered his Dad saying more than once that he was doing the villagers a favor by trading those furs for “kind” instead of “cash” and that the traders never gave but a fraction of the worth of the fur. If I took my furs to a big city myself, I could get a lot of money for them. I could get rich - and I’d probably be famous, too.
As for the people of Errold’s Grove, well, when they saw how he was prospering, maybe they would stop cowering in their houses like rabbits in a burrow, and dare the Forest themselves again.
I haven’t seen that many monsters, and most of them weren‘t dangerous if you kept your wits about you. I’ve never seen any “forest spirits” or “vapor demons” or anything you could even mistake for something like that. Hellfires, I haven’t even seen Hawkbrothers, and I know they‘re supposed to be out there somewhere - so how dangerous could it be now that the mage-storms are over really? I’ve probably spent as much time in the Forest as anyone here, and I just don’t think that hiding in your house and pretending that the Forest isn’t there is going to do anyone any good.
He looked up slyly for a moment, and realized that he had managed to kick his stone up to the back of the inn - or what served as an inn here in the village. It really wasn’t much more than another cottage with two rooms, one large room full of benches and tables, one a kitchen, and a loft above the kitchen where the owner slept - it was owned by Hanbil Brason, who brewed the beer and dispensed it to the men who gathered here of an evening, and in earlier years besides selling beer and food, he at times had sold floor space at night to passing traders. Nowadays, when there wasn’t much in the way of coined money in the village, Hanbil sold his brew by tally - you brought in a bushel of barley, a bunch of hops, a dozen eggs, some pork or chicken, and he would reckon up how much in “real” money that represented and put it on a tally-stick for you.
Then you drank and ate until you used up the tally. Hanbil was the only man with whose tallies no one argued, because he was the only source of beer, and his was the only place in the village where men could gather to complain about their wives in relative peace.
He was aided in his endeavors by Lilly, who served beer and meat pasties, cleaned and washed up, and dispensed some other unspecified services that caused the good wives of Errold’s Grove to frown and pronounce her “no better than she should be.” Whatever that meant. It might have had something to do with the fact that she wore skirts kilted up above her knee, extremely tight bodices, and blouses that continually fell off one shoulder, showing a great deal more of her than the wives liked. Lilly was no girl; she was older than some of those wives, and really no prettier. The women had no cause to feel any jealousy about her looks. But they did, and they took some pleasure in snubbing her at every opportunity. However, like poor old Kyle, folks said she was not especially bright, so she didn’t seem to take any notice of being slighted. Or if she noticed, she didn’t care; maybe having the approval of the husbands was worth the snubs of the wives.
Darian had some doubts about that; he didn’t think it was that Lilly was stupid at all. He thought it was probably more the case that she was so resigned to her lot and position that she just didn’t think about it anymore.
The boys said she was also not quite bright enough to count past ten - anything more than ten was simply “a lot” - and as every child in the village knew, if there were more than ten pasties or fruit pockets cooling on the windowsill, Lilly would never notice one missing. Once again, Darian had doubts, for he’d seen her taking in the plates of cooled baking with a slight smile when one or more was missing. He had the feeling that she knew very well that the baked goods were gone, and that she rather enjoyed the fact that bold children were snitching Hanbil’s goods.
And since Hanbil was notoriously parsimonious when it came to his share of the support for Justyn, Darian always considered it his duty to filch something to eat from the inn when he got the chance.
This was his day of golden opportunity. Lilly must have been out berrying on the old road this morning, for there was a line of fine, golden-brown berry-pockets cooling in pans on the windowsill and just beneath it, sitting on upturned buckets so she could reach them from the window. Juice oozed from them enticingly, and there were at least two dozen of them.
Darian sidled up to the window and took a quick glance around to see if anyone was watching, but the area was deserted, and he could hear Lilly talking to Hanbil up in the loft. He snatched, and ran, juggling the pocket from hand to hand to keep from getting burned, while his mouth watered with anticipation.
A moment later he was safe in a spot he often used for strictly temporary hiding, the hollow behind some juniper bushes under the window of what passed for a shop in Errold’s Grove. Nandy Lutter and her husband used to buy their goods from traders, but with fewer and fewer coming through, they had to go fetch their own goods. They were the only people in the village who ever went up the road to the outside world. Once every three months, Derrel Lutter would hitch up his horse to his wagon and drive off across the bridge with a wagon full of whatever he and Nandy had traded for over the previous three months. When he came back, he would have the things that the village could not make for itself, and he and Nandy would set them up in the shop, and make trades over the next few months. They brought in things like needles and pins, ribbons and colored thread, sugar-loaves, spices, and salt. They were two of the Errold’s Grove elite, and as a result, Nandy had gone to the effort of planting things around their house that were pretty, but impractical, as a means of displaying their wealth. She had beds of spring bulbs, flowering trees that had no real fruit, rose vines, and evergreen-holly and juniper. The latter were planted against the side of the house, and the hollows against the wall where the branches had died back for lack of sunlight made a good hiding place. That was where Darian went when he’d filched a pie; better to get under cover, eat it quickly, and dispose of the evidence at once. They couldn’t accuse you for having a blue tongue; you could claim you’d been berrying yourself.
He wriggled into place just below a window, and proceeded to nibble delicately at his treat so as not to waste a single crumb. For such a poorly regarded woman, Lilly was a remarkably good baker, and her efforts certainly surpassed anything Darian could produce. The pastry was flaky and light, perfectly browned and crunchy, the filling sweet and juicy without being too runny. He took a great deal of satisfaction, not only in the fact that he’d cheated Hanbil out of something, but out of the fact that taking it by sleight-of-hand had been a great deal more efficient than trying to get it by levitation or some other daft method Justyn might have suggested. I don’t need his stupid magic to get what I need. I can do anything I have to do with my two hands and my wits.
The more he thought about it, the more discontented he became. This was no life for anyone with any courage or ideas! This was no place for anyone who wanted something besides a place to sleep and steady meals and - predictability! Errold’s Grove was dying, or dead, and no one had noticed it but him. And he had to escape before he died, too.
Nandy and another woman were talking inside, but he didn’t pay any heed to them until the tag-end of a sentence caught his attention. “ - that old fraud who calls himself a wizard.”
“I don’t know why we give over anything to support him,” the other woman replied querulously. “It’s not as if he was like Kyle, and useful.”
“I’ve said as much to my husband,” Nandy replied with an air of triumph. “I’ve said to him that there’s nothing that man could do that one of the girls couldn’t learn. Take Ida’s Saffy - “ she chuckled cruelly, “ - and the gods know there isn’t a boy in Errold’s Grove who would.”
“Nandy!” her visitor exclaimed in mock shock. “Now how could you say a thing like that?”
“Twenty years old and not married, a face like a horse and a body like a washboard? It’s only plain speaking,” Nandy retorted, with obvious pleasure. “Now look, my man could take her up when he next goes off to the city and leave her at the Healer there. He’ll train her for nothing, we’ve already asked. In a year she comes back, and we can send that good-for-nothing fraud off to swindle some other village. Saffy could go back to living with her parents, just like before, but then she’d go from being a burden to a blessing. The rest of us could pay for her services as we need them, not before, and there won’t be that drain on everyone, which is purely cruel. And now there’s two to feed, him and that useless, feckless, bit of bad blood that he calls an apprentice.”
“Well, it isn’t fair,” the other agreed. “If you’re never sick, it doesn’t seem fair to have to keep giving over food and clothing and all. Of course, he does do Finding, and Weather-watching - “
“And a careful person don’t need a Finder, and as for Weather-watching, we got along well enough without it before.” Nandy pronounced that as the end of the argument. “As for the boy, well, I don’t doubt that if he doesn’t manage to bring the Forest down on us all as his rootless parents tried to do, he certainly won’t amount to anything. He hasn’t the intelligence of Kyle and he’s as shiftless as Lilly, and the sooner we’re rid of both of them, the better off this village will be.”
Nandy and her customer moved away from the window at that point, and Darian couldn’t hear anything but the murmur of voices.
He sat where he was, not out of shock, but suddenly struck by a sense of hopelessness so deep he couldn’t have moved if his life had depended on it. Now they grudged even the scant food they provided him - they were going to turn him out to fend for himself as soon as they could get away with it. And they were going to do the same to Justyn, too - but of course, Justyn would have a year or so to try to find a new place to go, because they couldn’t do without him until Saffy was trained. It sounded as if - supposing Nandy had her way - they were going to just throw Darian out as soon as Nandy could get enough people to agree with her. And Justyn at least had some skills he could barter for a new place somewhere. Darian had nothing except the clothing he’d brought with him, the ability to shoot a bow, and whatever he could convince folks he could do.
So what am I supposed to do? Go live off the Forest, with no supplies and no weapons but my bow and few arrows? It was one thing to plan to become a great hunter and trapper when he was older, and had built up all the things he needed to properly live in the wilds - it was quite another to know that he was going to be cast out to make shift for himself with nothing whatsoever to help him. No point in asking Justyn for help either - the old wizard would have a hard enough time finding a new place for himself.
Maybe I should just run away now, and get it over with. If I go now, maybe I could steal enough to keep me alive until I get to the next town. That’s Kelmskeep, I think. Isn’t it?
Assuming he could find the next town; he’d never been there, and he didn’t know how far it was, or if he could get there afoot. People said it was downriver, but how far was it? Could he get there on his own? And if he could, would anyone want him when he got there? Assuming he didn’t run into something else first, like maybe Hawkbrothers. It used to be that you wouldn’t run into them unless you trespassed in their territory, but that wasn’t the case anymore, or so their yearly Herald had said. Now they could be anywhere in the Forest according to the Herald; they were supposed to be much better at doing the new kinds of magic than anyone else was, and the Herald had been rather vague about just what these bands of roaming Hawkbrothers were supposed to be doing. Nor had he been able to tell the villagers how the Hawkbrothers would react to any strangers they met in the Forest.
Of course, as long as he stayed on the road, he would probably be all right, but what if he couldn’t? He’d have to eat and drink, and that would mean going into the Forest to hunt for food and water.
Well, he had warning now. If a trader came by before Nandy got enough people together to agree to throw him out, maybe he could get the man to take him along. Or maybe the Herald would come soon, and he could beg help there - and hopefully, the Herald wouldn’t decide that the best “help” would be to persuade the villagers to give Darian “one more chance.” That “chance” would last only as long as it took for them to get rid of Justyn, and then he’d be out on his ear, too.
Now so thoroughly depressed that the filched sweet lay like a leaden lump in his stomach, seeing no future now but a choice between uncertainty and endless drudgery, Darian crawled out of his hiding place and slunk like a beaten dog back to the dubious protection of his Master.
The short distance to the other end of the village seemed shorter than usual - and Justyn was waiting for him outside the cottage when he came into view of the building.
Darian knew by the set of Justyn’s chin and the look in his eye that it would do him no good to tell his Master what he had overheard. At best, Justyn would dismiss it all as idle gossip, betray his hiding place to Nandy, and hand him over to her for punishment. At worst, Justyn would assume he was making it all up in an effort to avoid punishment.
In either case, nothing would happen until it was too late for Darian.
Justyn had evidently pondered Darian’s punishment for some time, and had come up with something both appropriate and suitably quelling.
“It’s about time you decided to show yourself,” he said, his face set in a fearsome scowl. “I used the last of my mycofoetida oh Kyle, as you would know, if you had been here, as you ought to have been. I had to clean up his mess, and then clean up the dishes from last night that you were supposed to have attended to.”
Darian just hung his head and looked at his feet, saying nothing. There was nothing much he could say, after all. Justyn was right; he should have been there. If he had been there, Nandy would have less ammunition to use against him. There was little doubt that he had caused all of his misfortunes all by himself.
“So, since you happen to like roaming around in the Forest so much, you can just go out there and collect enough mycofoetida to fill this basket.” Justyn dropped the basket contemptuously at his feet, without waiting for him to reach for it.
Darian winced, and picked the basket up without a word. Mycofoetida was a fungus, a particularly noxious shelf-fungus with a perfectly nauseating aroma when fresh-picked. The aroma faded to nothing within a few candlemarks of being gathered, and when dried and packed in a wound, it was a powerful preventive against infection. But for those few hours, it was best that both fungi and picker stayed away from anyone else. It grew best on live tree trunks where there was a fair amount of indirect light, which meant that you didn’t have to go far into the Forest to find it. Only Justyn knew how to dry it, prepare it, and use it properly, so only Justyn ever went after it.
It was not a choice task, to say the least. Justyn knew how to gather it without losing the contents of his stomach, but Darian didn’t, and he doubted that Justyn was going to impart that information in his current mood.
He was right. Justyn also dropped his bow and quiver of arrows at his feet. “Since you’re going to be out there for some time,” the wizard continued, “you might as well hunt. Bring back something for our dinner tomorrow. If I have to look at another turnip, I may start breaking plates.”
Darian stooped again, gathered up the bow and arrows, and turned, still without saying anything. As he slouched away, he thought he heard Justyn mutter under his breath, “And it would serve you right if the Hawkbrothers got you.”
That last almost made Darian break into hysterical laughter, it was so incongruous after the things he’d just overheard, for it was a threat that was always being given to naughty children: “You’d better be good, or the Hawkbrothers will get you!” Even Darian’s Mum had said it playfully, now and again, when he’d been into harmless mischief. Of all the things to tell him now!
As he trudged openly between the rows of corn, heading for the Forest, he sighed and slung his quiver over his shoulder. People always talked about Hawkbrothers, as if they were all male, and no one had ever said anything about seeing a woman of fheir kind. Was that why mothers said that Hawkbrothers would get a naughty child? Were there no women, and did they kidnap children to replace their numbers?
No, that didn’t make any sense - they were supposed to be allies of Valdemar, and your allies didn’t go about snatching toddlers. Maybe they might ask the Heralds for orphans to adopt; that would be perfectly all right, since the Hawkbrothers were certainly capable of protecting children and caring for them, but it wouldn’t make sense for them to out-and-out kidnap little ones. Not that you could convince anyone here of that. After all, the Hawkbrothers were foreign, and as everyone here knew, you couldn’t trust foreigners.
Still, given how no one here wanted him, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if the Hawkbrothers did carry him off. At least it would be an adventure. Maybe they would know something about what had happened to his Mum and Dad - or they would be willing to help him try and find out. After all, they were supposed to know everything there was to know about the Pelagiris, and they actually lived in and off of the Forest itself, never needing any kind of supplies or help from outside. Not even his Mum and Dad had been able to do that. Maybe his best bet would be to try and find Hawkbrothers, instead of trying to avoid them.
But given the way my luck has been running, if I run away and try to find them, there won’t be any of them for leagues around, he thought dispiritedly while he shuffled toward a copse of trees. Everything I touch falls apart. Even Justyn would have been better off if he’d never seen me. Hellfires, I bet he really doesn’t want me around anymore. He’d probably be grateful if I just disappeared.
He hunted for the fungus in a rather halfhearted fashion as he tried to formulate plans that didn’t fall apart the moment he considered what opposition to them he might encounter. One thing he knew; even if nobody in the village wanted him around, the moment he tried to run off, they’d go after him. It wasn’t logical, but it was the way they did things. It didn’t matter if the outcome was what they wanted, whatever happened had to be accomplished under their control.
Take the case of Ananda’s rooster, for instance. Ananda Pellard had an old rooster that was the most evil-minded, aggressive bird Darian had ever seen. She couldn’t catch it to trim off its spurs, and it would attack anything, even grown people, inflicting some painful punctures on children. Ananda always said that she ought to put it down, but it was obvious she was afraid to try and catch it to kill it. One night something plucked it out of the tree it roosted in - Ananda said she heard it squawk, and in the morning there was only a pile of loose feathers with blood on them. Probably it had been an owl, and you would have thought that everyone would be glad that the nasty old bird had been taken care of.
But no. Nothing would do but that the men sat up for the next several nights to try and kill whatever had come in to get the rooster. Darian wouldn’t have been surprised if it had only been Ananda who was upset - after all, it was her bird, and even a tough old rooster made perfectly good soup - but it seemed as if half the village was annoyed, and all because what had happened hadn’t been under their control.
So if he ran away, even though none of them wanted him there anymore, they would be angry and upset and sure to send someone after him to catch him and bring him back. So whatever course he took, he had to be somehow certain of being able to elude pursuit.
None of this made any sense, of course, but nothing was making any sense anymore.
He honestly, truly, tried to keep from going too far away, but he couldn’t find any of the shelf-fungus growing near at hand, and he really hadn’t expected to. The last time he’d hunted for the stuff, he’d had to climb so far up tree trunks that Justyn had been alarmed, and he knew that it wouldn’t grow farther up than he’d gone, since there was too much light. So, since it needed a great deal of indirect light, and that meant the edge of the Forest, he finally decided to work his way along the riverbank.
It was a slow process; he hunted tree by tree, looking for fungus at ground level, then peering up along the trunk to see if there was any higher growth, then finally climbing to see if what he had spotted was the kind of fungus he wanted, or something else. And that was probably exactly as Justyn had planned, too, for Justyn knew more about where things grew on the edge of the Forest than Darian did. He must have climbed twenty trees before he found a single growth.
By that time, at least, he had worked out something to try to keep the fetid-smelling juice off his hands when he broke the piece off. He wrapped several layers of leaves over the place where he held the fungus to break it off, and immediately discarded them once the fungus was safely in the basket. Although it still smelled terrible, he managed not to get any of the smell on himself.
He was up a third tree, when he gradually became aware of a great deal of noise and shouting from the direction of the village. He craned his head as far as he could around the tree trunk, and nearly fell off the limb he was sitting on.
There was smoke rising from the village, and from the road beyond it - he saw people, made small by the distance, trying frantically to catch loose horses, or heading toward the river with bundles on their backs and children stumbling along behind, moving as quickly as they could.
A moment more, and he saw the red of flame flickering on the other side of the river, light glancing off something very bright and metallic, and the shouts turned to screams.
A single thought formed through the shock. Something was happening. The village of Errold’s Grove - somehow, for some reason - was under attack!
What am I going to do with this boy? Justyn thought, as he watched Darian slouch his way through the corn, heading to the edge of the woods. The boy vanished from sight within moments - and he wasn’t trying to hide, this time. No wonder he could evade virtually any watcher! Why, he didn’t even make the stalks move as he passed through them - if you didn’t know he was in the field, you’d think it was empty.
Justyn sighed heavily, went back into the cottage, shut the door firmly behind him to discourage visitors, and sank into his chair. He didn’t want to see anyone else today, unless it was a tearing emergency. All morning he had been receiving visitors eager to give him their own idea of what he should do about Darian’s latest infraction, and some of the speakers had voiced something stronger than mere opinion. It was clear that if he couldn’t get Darian turned around, there were those who would take care of the situation for him.
Most of them wanted him to dismiss the boy, and didn’t really care what happened to him after he was dismissed. He wouldn’t be allowed to stay here, that was certain. The villagers didn’t like the way their children were reacting to his presence - or, more specifically, his actions. “He’s a disruptive influence,” was how Derrel Lutter, the shopkeeper, put it. “He doesn’t fit, an’ evejy part of a village has to fit.”
Widow Clay had dropped by on the pretext of having her bad knee looked at, and had been more to the point. “The other children think he’s some kind of hero. Or at least, they think he’s somebody to look up to. If he’s allowed to sass his elders and get away with it, every young’un in Errold’s Grove is gonna start doin’ the same,” she’d pointed out. “So unless you want to be the reason for a lot of spanked bottoms and soapy mouths, you’d better get that boy to act like something other than a savage. Folks have given him a certain amount of room, on account of losing his parents and all, but they’re out of patience.”
And the woman was perfectly right. Although he held himself aloof from the other children in the village, Darian was a profound influence on them and even Justyn had noticed it. They envied his freedom, freedom to run off and do what he wanted, and freedom to speak his mind even to an adult. They all wished that their parents had been as adventurous as his, and when he was willing to talk about it (which was not often) they hung on every word of his stories about living in the Forest. Any one of them would happily have traded places with him, even though life with Justyn was hardly one of exalted status. And when they could get away with it, they flat-out imitated him. The most coveted item among the village children at the moment was a tooled leather vest like Darian wore; that was what virtually all of them, of both sexes, had requested as birthing-day presents. Justyn had actually considered that attitude a healthy one, and he had secretly hoped some of it might rub off on the parents. It had been something of a half daydream of his. If their elders got some spine back, and decided to stop fearing the Forest and go back out to do what had brought prosperity to the village in the first place, then the place would stop stagnating. It might even prosper again, and they would discover that there was nothing so terrible in the Pelagiris after all. They would stop denigrating Darian’s parents, and might even stoop to consulting him about the Forest, which would raise both his status and Justyn’s in the eyes of the village.
Even if Darian’s influence had only been on the children, they looked likely to go out and do what their parents feared to. Errold’s Grove would prosper again; perhaps not this year, or the next, but in the future.
That was the good influence; in the meantime, the children were as prone to imitate Darian’s sins as his virtues. So Darian was likely to cause another uproar when word of this day leaked out to the children. Without a doubt, there would be a brief plague of children sneaking out on their appointed tasks to play truant, and defying their parents when taken to task.
That had not been in any of Justyn’s half-formed plans.
He sighed, then rested his aching head on his hand. It seemed that nothing he had thought of for Darian was working out in the way he had hoped.
Perhaps if I proved to him what his behavior is doing in setting an example, and a bad one, among the other children ? He’s not an unreasonable child, and he wouldn ‘t want to get the others in trouble. That might do the trick; perhaps Justyn had been going about this all wrong. Darian had been treated as a sort of miniature adult by his parents; he’d had a great deal of independence with them. He was used to relative freedom and the responsibility of deciding what he was to do for himself, but Justyn had been treating him as a directionless child.
Justyn tapped a little marching rhythm on the arm of his chair with his free hand, and frowned as he thought. I should sit down with him, I think. Instead of lecturing him, or going on about how much he owes us, I should point out to him - no, that’s wrong. That would be treating him as a child again, and although what he is doing is childish, I am no longer certain his motives are entirely those of a child. Instead of telling him anything, perhaps I should begin by listening to him. If I can get him to tell me what has been going through his mind these many months, perhaps we can work out the best way to proceed together. And - perhaps I should tell him my own story, and let him see why I am teaching him the way I am. That might be the way to get through to him.
Lost in these thoughts, and unexpectedly wearied from the stress of dealing with all those unhappy visitors, Justyn closed his eyes. Just for a moment - just to ease them. One moment turned to two, and two to many, and without intending to permit himself the luxury, he dozed off, dreaming of a repentant apprentice, now willing to be taught and to take on the responsibilities of a proper student . . . then he reached the point in sleep where his dreams themselves faded away.
Justyn was so deep in slumber that it took several moments for the sound of the alarm bell in the village square to penetrate his consciousness. When it did sift through, it brought him awake with a start. It took another few moments for him to collect his thoughts and realize what it was that had awakened him, it had been so long since that particular bell had been rung. The last time had been due to a flood - but what could possibly be amiss this time? A quick glance out the window showed that there was no sign of a storm, and the village had been so quiet that Dalian’s peccadillo was the worst thing to disturb the dull routine of the day. What had happened to change that?
His heart pounded uncomfortably at the sudden awakening. He struggled up out of his chair, every joint protesting violently at such sudden movement, and got his walking stick down off the wall. He opened his door on pandemonium. Outside beyond the nearest houses in the village square, there was a babble of voices, the noise of many people running to and fro. He heard many people shouting, and there was panic in their tones; he hobbled out his door to see folk streaming toward the center of town from the fields. He joined them, alarm giving him more energy than he’d had for many a day. By the time he reached the square, most of them had beaten him there. Some had already heard the news, which must be terrible indeed to judge from the way they were pelting back to their houses, faces pale and eyes gone panicky and full of fear. Others had already been to their houses and were returning, with hunting bows, boar-spears, and rusty old antique weapons in their hands.
A monster? Bandits? Surely not war - who would we be fighting? The Hawkbrothers? No, that’s not possible. Surely there is some other explanation - 
Derrel Lutter stood beside Nandy, who was still ringing the bell with wide-eyed determination. Her hair had come undone and flew in wild tendrils all about her face. Beside Derrel was a stranger holding the reins of a tired horse, whose clothing showed the effects of a hard ride, and whose face was pinched with terror he was trying not to let loose.
“Don’t try to fight, you fools,” the man shouted over the bell and the shouting, his voice cracking with strain. “Run, I tell you, run! I tried to tell you before, and you didn’t believe me! This isn’t some band of brigands, this is an army, and you haven’t a chance against it!”
Bewildered, Justyn looked around and saw Vere coming back to the square with a determined scowl on his face and a boar-spear in his hands, and seized his arm. “What in the name of heaven is going on?” he shouted.
Vere thrust his chin at the stranger. “That there’s a feller from Riverford Farm, big estate upwater where Derrel does some trading,” he shouted back. “Derrel vouches for him. Came riding in ‘bout mid-dinner. Says a gang of men and monsters came storming in and massacred everybody in sight; says he was out with the herds and managed to get away on his horse and make a run for it. He wasn’t too clear on what he’d seen, not then anyway, so we figured it was bandits, and Tom Kalley rounded up the militia.” The man paused when he saw the look of noncomprehension on Justyn’s face. “He mounted up, and led ‘em out, just like always. Wasn’t nothing to frighten the women about, he thought, so nobody told ‘em except for the ones whose men hadda go; men’d just go out, turn ‘em away from the village, and send a messenger over to Lord Breon. You know we ain’t never had no trouble before. We figgered Riverford just been caught out, that’s all. Too bad for them, but we were ready, see?”
Justyn shook his head, not yet understanding the cause for such a high level of panic. The Errold’s Grove militia never had experienced any trouble discouraging bandits from coming after the town. It didn’t make any sense!
Vere wasn’t through yet. “One of them - just one - came back a short bit ago; his horse was foundering, and it dropped and died right after he tumbled off. The rest - they’re gone.”
Justyn gaped at him. The militia - twenty men in all - were well armed and quite adequately trained, and their ability to fight on horseback had given them a considerable edge over bandits, who were generally afoot and even when horsed did not know how to fight as a group. When the Guard had been forced to leave to go to the front, the Queen had no intention of leaving them defenseless; she had sent spare horses and arms, and someone to train volunteers from the village in fighting. Their Herald had supervised the training, and had seen to it that the trainer left instructions on drilling and practices, which the militia undertook with religious regularity. One of the duties of their Herald was to make sure that they stayed in training, and the occasional bandits only gave them incentive to continue that way. Justyn had watched them, and they weren’t bad - and the level of their expertise was obvious in the fact that they had handled every bandit group that they had come up against. How could they have been wiped out so easily?
The stranger grabbed Nandy and took the bell-rope out of her hands by force, so that the clangor finally stopped. “Listen to me - Listen to me!” he shouted, and the cries and screams stopped as abruptly as the cessation of the bell peals. His words fell into the sudden silence like cold, round stones into a pool.
“You heard the boy - your men are dead,” he said forcefully, and a woman’s hysterical sob pierced the quiet, only to be muffled by her neighbor pulling her head into the shelter of her shoulder. The stranger ignored her. “You can’t do anything for them; you can only save yourselves, and there’s not much time to do that. Send someone downriver to Kelmskeep and Lord Breon, someone on a fast horse or in a swift boat and do it now. The rest of you, grab what you can, and run, as fast and as far as you can. This is no bandit horde, I’m telling you, I know because I saw them. This is an army; it’s men and monsters, and it looks like a demon is leading them. They killed everyone at Riverford that resisted, and they’ll do the same here.”
Now Justyn saw that young Ado Larsh, barely seventeen and the youngest member of the militia, was sitting on the platform beside the stranger; there was a bloody rag acting as a bandage around his head and one eye, and another binding his arm. He looked white, in deep shock, but nodded in confirmation of everything the man said.
“What about those who didn’t resist?” Widow Clay called out sharply. “What happened to them?”
Someone else growled, and a few of her neighbors cast her angry looks, but she gave them back look for look. “There are some of us,” she pointed out, “who can’t run. Myself and Kyle, for two. What happened to those who didn’t resist?”
The stranger shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t wait around to see. But I can tell you that from the smoke that rose up behind me, it looked to me like they put every building on the estate to the torch, and I can only hope there wasn’t anyone in those buildings when they went up.”
“Th-th-they’re m-m-moving f-f-fast,” Ado stammered. “C-c-can’t b-be f-far b-b-behind.”
There was silence then, nothing but silence. Clearly, no one knew what to do next, and if no one took charge, in a moment, there would be nothing but blind panic. People would be caught between trying to hide and trying to escape, torn between saving possessions and getting away quickly, and managing only to confuse matters further. If someone didn’t tell them what to do, nothing would be done at all, and they would all die stupidly and uselessly.
“Right. I’ll take over from here,” Justyn heard himself say into the deathly hush. People turned to see who had spoken, as if they didn’t recognize his voice. Maybe they didn’t; this was the first time he had spoken with real authority in years.
He pulled himself up as tall as he could, and pushed through the crowd with the aid of his staff until he got himself up on the platform. Their faces turned up to meet his, all of them white and shocked, all of them looking for an answer from anyone - even him. Well, as it happened, he had one for them. A bit of murmuring started, and he quelled it with three sharp raps of the end of his staff on the boards beneath his feet.
“This is war, and war is what I came out of.” He looked around to see if there was any disagreement. “Some of you may not have believed my ‘war tales,’ as you called them, but they were as true as the fact that I’ve seen how armies operate. I know what’s coming and I know what I’m talking about. The stranger is right - you aren’t fighters, anyone who had any real training here is dead. You have no experience of anything but dealing with a few bandits, and I tell you now there is no way you can defend yourselves, let alone the village, against an army of trained and organized fighters.”
He had their full attention now, and since the majority of those below him were women and children, not men, there were fewer who were disposed to argue with that assessment.
Which is just as well, since it’s an honest one.
“Your best bet is to try to escape, or try to hide. Anyone who wants to take a chance on staying - I’d suggest you go to the riverbank as far from the village as you can and stay together,” he said briskly. “Don’t take anything of value with you; armies like this are paid in loot, and if you stand between them and their loot, they’ll kill you. If you have valuables with you, they’ll kill you to get at them. Let them have what they want - if you all survive this, you can petition the Crown for relief and get it. If you go hide yourselves beside the river, have nothing they want, and look as harmless as possible, once they’re done working out their battle-lust in looting, they’ll get around to finding you and they probably won’t kill you. Probably. That’s all I can promise you out of my military experience - they might just want loot, and they’ll leave you completely alone, never looking for you; or they might decide to make slaves - or something - out of you. If you have young children, take toys and sweets to keep them quiet. When the enemy soldiers find you, grovel, beg, bow your heads to the ground and plead with them and don’t stand up until they tell you to. With luck, they won’t find you at all, with a little less, they’ll let you go, and with a bit less than that, you’ll end up serving them.”
He didn’t say what else might happen; this was not the time to turn the women hysterical. If they hadn’t already thought of it themselves, there was no point in bringing the subject up.
“But at least we’ll be alive,” Widow Clay declared, and began to hobble determinedly toward the river. Justyn gave her credit for good sense; she didn’t even look back at her cottage, much less go back to try and save anything. She simply set her sights on the river and in putting as much distance between herself and the approaching trouble as possible.
“The rest of you do as you were told - take boats or horses if you have them, go afoot if you don’t, and run, now. Don’t stop to take anything with you; every moment you waste packing valuables is a moment when you could be putting as much distance between you and here as possible. Don’t let your jewelry cost you your life. Go to Kelmskeep; it’s fortified, and should be able to hold off a siege.”
A few moved to follow the widow, and before anyone else could start, he rapped his staff on the platform again. “As for me,” he trumpeted, in a pretty fair imitation of his old sergeant’s parade-ground voice, “I’ll hold the bridge against them. I’ve held bridges before, and this one only needs one warrior - or wizard - to hold it long enough for a considerable delay. The rest of you take the time I buy for you and run for Kelmskeep or put some furlongs between you and here. Lord Breon has a real garrison of veteran fighters, and he also has ways of getting word out in a few hours to the Guard. He can protect those of you who reach him long enough for the Guard and the Heralds to get here, relieve a siege, and drive the enemy out of Errold’s Grove. If you can spare a moment, set fire to your hay and your outbuildings as you run - the smoke will help hide you and might alert others out there that there’s trouble. The fire will confuse the enemy and keep them occupied a little longer. They might stop long enough to try and put it out, or they might run into burning buildings thinking there’s loot and get themselves crisped. Whatever you do, if you get caught, don’t fight back. Fall to the ground and beg for mercy. They’re trained, you’re not - and there will be many of them for every one of you. Now move!” he finished, in a bellow that startled them all out of their poses of shock. “You haven’t much time! Save your lives! Now! “
As he had expected, they were all so happy that there was someone who could take charge of the situation and tell them clearly what to do that no one argued with him. They simply scattered - some to follow Widow Clay, some to their boats or for their horses, some headed straight for the woods on foot, perhaps planning to take cover there and follow the river road to Lord Breon’s estate. He walked slowly and calmly toward the bridge, and as he passed the inn, he saw with a mingled sense of admiration and irony that Lilly had her own strategy for surviving. She had loaded a wheelbarrow with a small keg that could only be brandywine, some mugs, and a mattress, and she was headed obliquely toward the river on the upstream side of the village. It was fairly obvious to Justyn that in this situation at least, Lilly was not as stupid as everyone had thought she was. She had a fair idea what an invading army would do with a woman, and she was going to see that the ones who found her had a reason to protect her and keep her out of the hands of their fellows. Able-bodied and used to hard work, she would probably go far enough away from the others that when soldiers found her, there would only be a few of them, and someone who acted like a cooperative, would-be camp follower had good odds of surviving this encounter. She might even find one man strong enough to hold off the others, and willing to act as her protector, which was the best any woman could hope for in a case like this one. He wished her good luck, silently.
As if she had somehow heard his wish, she turned and looked back at him. He couldn’t hear her completely over the noise of the fleeing villagers, but he read the words on her lips.
“I know what you mean to do. Gods bless and keep you, Wizard Justyn.”
She turned away, but before her face was completely averted, he saw tears starting up in her eyes. Tears? For me? With astonishment, he felt a kind of weight lift away from his shoulders and a new strength and dignity enter him; he drew himself up and continued his stately progress to the bridge.
No one else paid him any attention - but no one else even thought to question his plan, to recall that only a few hours before, he had been the unregarded, scorned old fool who couldn’t even manage to discipline a young boy. That was just as well, because he did have a plan, and he knew it would work. He might not have much magic left, but he had enough for one last trick, and it would delay pursuit long enough . . . long enough.
Long enough for Dorian to get deep into the Forest. Thanks to the gods that I sent him off candlemarks ago! He’ll see the commotion, and he’ll run, like a sensible lad. There’s nothing holding him here, after all, and I suspect that he’s been tempted to run away more than once. This will just give him the excuse he needs. He has his bow; he knows the woods, it’s summer, and he has enough control of magic that his power can help him a little. He knows where Kelmskeep is, if not how to get there. I think he’ll be all right.
He went to the middle of the bridge - if the people behind him knew it, a good magic place, suspended among three of the four elements: air, water, and the earth that the wood of the bridge had grown out of and was rooted in. He grounded his staff on the wood of the bridge, and began drawing power out of the world around himself. It was a slow process, but he had time - and besides, all that he gathered was only intended to add to the power within himself. Normally, he would not be able to tap into much of that - 
Well, this situation is not exactly “normal.”
As he began, the old black tomcat ambled up, and sat down neatly at his feet, just as calmly as if he were sitting down at the hearth, waiting for dinner.
Justyn looked down at the cat, bemusedly. “I wish I knew what you really were,” he told the cat. “I wish I knew if you were just an opportunist, or a real Pelagir familiar. It might not make much of a difference to this situation, but - well, it would to me.”
Halfheartedly, he tried to shoo the cat away, but it refused to leave his side, and he gave up. Small, aged animals fared poorly in situations like this one; it would be better off with him. The cat looked up at him with one eye, truly a jaundiced look if there ever was one, yawned hugely, and turned his attention toward the road.
Justyn took his cue from the cat, and saw a plume of dust rising above the treetops. The enemy was coming - whoever the enemy was. And as had been warned, it was coming swiftly.
Justyn took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment, reaching inside himself for calm and certainty. When he opened them again, a heartbeat later, he was ready.
This will be a very short confrontation.
Darian was out of breath by the time he reached the village; Justyn wasn’t in the cottage, the flames he had seen were from haystacks and sheds, and when he saw Vere throw a flaming brand into the thatch of his own cottage, he realized that the villagers themselves had set their property aflame. Everywhere, people were fleeing as if for their lives; in the confusion it seemed as if there were hundreds more folk than actually lived in the village, and he wondered if they had all gone suddenly mad. He coughed in the acrid smoke, and stood poised in the midst of the chaos, searching for someone to tell him what was going on.
Someone seized his arm; he automatically started to wrench away, when as he turned, he saw it was Kyle, the woodcutter. “You gotta run and hide in the woods, boy!” the man shouted over the noise of fire and fleeing people, shaking his arm for emphasis. “There’s trouble on the way, big trouble - fighters, an army, more’n we can handle!”
He dropped Darian’s arm and hobbled off toward the river, using a stick as a crutch, leaving the boy staring after him, blankly.
Trouble? More than they can handle? What was that supposed to mean?
As Kyle had held him, the last of the villagers had left the confines of the town; nothing impeded him but the refuse of what they’d left behind in their wake, and the fires and smoke. Pigs, goats, chickens, geese, and even cattle milled in the street, evidently turned loose by their owners. He ran up the path toward the bridge, jumping over dropped bundles and dodging the confused and panicky livestock and fowl, certain only that whatever was coming, it would be coming from that direction, since it was away from that direction that everyone was running.
It never occurred to him that Justyn might not have run away with the rest of them until he got around a house and could see the bridge - and Justyn was standing, straight as a post, in the middle of it.
The old cat sat calmly at his side, and Justyn had grounded his “wizard’s staff” on the wood of the bridge, for all the world as if it was a real magical staff and not just a glorified walking stick. His back was to the village; all his attention was on the road on the other side of the bridge.
Something was making a very large dust cloud on the road, a dust cloud that approached the river - and it was coming on uncomfortably fast.
Darian stood stock still, and stared. He felt like a fly in amber - feet frozen where he had stopped, able to observe, but unable to move or speak.
The dust cloud neared, approached the bridge; now he saw what made it.
People. People carrying weapons. And Things, also with glittering weapons in their hands. A great many of both.
They were arrayed in evenly spaced ranks, armed and armored identically and heavily - or at least, more heavily than anyone in the village militia or the Guard that Darian had ever seen had been. The sun reflected brightly off shiny pike-heads and helms, off shields and axes, all very strong and new-looking. They were led by something much larger than Kyle, and quite clearly not human, who was sitting on an animal that was clearly not a horse. The differences between the humans and the Things weren’t subtle; if someone had taken a bear and given it the tusks of a boar, that was what the human-sized Things looked like. They didn’t wear much in the way of a helm, but it didn’t look as if they really needed a helm, which was frightening in and of itself. They had small, red eyes, hairy muzzles, and low brows underneath their helmets. The humans looked - like humans. Only mean, and cold, as if they didn’t much care about anything.
The large Thing was something of a different order altogether. Where skin showed under armor, it was a sort of flat, dead, greenish color, like mud with river-algae mixed in. Its face was flat, with a wide nose that had slits instead of nostrils. Its mouth was another slit, lipless, and when it opened its mouth, Darian saw that all of its teeth were pointed. Its eyes were a flat, dull gray, with tiny pinprick pupils, as if it preferred darkness to light. The creature it rode resembled nothing so much as a huge lizard with fat, kneeless legs and a long, fat tail. The mount didn’t need armor; it hadvgrown its own.
The leading Thing halted, and the entire army behind it came to a dead stop as it held up its hand. It looked at Justyn, at the cat, and back to Justyn. Darian expected it to laugh at the temerity of one silly old man trying to stop them all from coming across that bridge, but it didn’t laugh. Instead, it narrowed its eyes and glared at Justyn, without saying a word.
Justyn simply stood there, calmly, as if he saw such things every day, as if keeping them from crossing the bridge was no great matter.
Darian’s heart raced; there was a roaring in his ears, and he had broken into a cold sweat. His stomach was doing flips, his throat was knotted, and he shivered like an aspen leaf. He wanted to run to help Justyn, to drag him away, to shout at least - but he couldn’t do anything. Nothing in his body would answer to his will; he could only stand and watch, numb with fear.
Justyn seemed to grow taller for a moment; and his ragged robes gathered around him of themselves like a royal garment. He looked, at that moment, just like a real wizard, the kind they made songs about and painted portraits of. He looked like Wizard Kyllian.
Like a hero - 
The Thing lifted the reins of its mount, and the lizard put one ponderous foot after the other onto the bridge, its head swinging from side to side with each pace, and the first lot of bear-things followed until it and the entire first rank of creatures was crowded six-deep behind it on the bridge. Justyn simply stood there, unmoving, until the muzzle of the lizard was barely the length of his staff away from his face.
Justyn bowed his head in a momentary nod.
Then, with no warning, the entire bridge and everything on it vanished into a sheet of flame.
Darian screamed, but his cry of horror and dismay was lost in the sound of the explosion. The concussion of the blast knocked Darian off his feet and stunned him for a moment; when he scrambled back up, there was no sign of Justyn or even of the bridge, just a roaring torrent of fire stretching over the river that reached from one bank to the other.
Darian didn’t think, couldn’t think - but his body wanted to live, and knew that the only way to make sure that he lived was to run. So it did, and it carried Darian along with it, even though his heart cried to join Justyn in the flames.
He jumped a hedge-row and before he’d hit the ground, the hedge disintegrated and blew past him in pieces. He tumbled onto his left side and cried out, but he couldn’t hear himself. Darian’s vision narrowed to what was before him, losing his peripheral awareness, his mind obsessed only with being on his feet again and running for all he could gain.
He ran as he had never run before, hardly conscious of anything but picking the path in front of him. Bits of flaming debris from the bridge flew through the air and landed in his path, in the thatch of intact cottages, setting them afire. He scattered a flock of chickens before him, as tongues of flame licked at him and smoke blew into his eyes confusing him and making it hard to see as he choked and coughed. He didn’t rightly seem to be in control of his body at all; he was carried along, a stunned passenger in a vehicle that had its own ideas about what it was going to do. It wasn’t as easy running through the village as it usually was - there were fires everywhere now, and debris and more of the things that the villagers had dropped as they escaped littering the usually orderly pathways. He had to double back and circle around obstacles, so that his path through the village to the safety of the forest took on the twisted quality of a nightmare.
There was a lot of noise behind him, shouting and splashing, and as soon as he broke free of the houses, he turned for an instant and discovered that the enemy had found the ford that the bridge had replaced. They had come up along either side of the burning bridge, flanking the village, and were already running up the riverbank, cutting him off from the woods.
But there weren’t many of them yet, they were all human, and they were spaced quite far apart. He was most of the way across a field of waist-high wheat when the first one spotted him and shouted.
The shout acted as an added incentive, not that he had needed one. But somehow he managed to put on another burst of speed and shot past the two men nearest him, bursting through the underbrush and into the woods.
Here he was at an advantage, for he knew the paths, and they did not. It wasn’t possible to shoot at anything moving as fast as he was, for the paths twisted and turned, with foliage making it difficult to get off a clear shot. He heard men floundering through the undergrowth for a while, but after a bit, they gave up their pursuit of him.
He continued to run through the thick green Forest, pelting headlong down the path, his feet thudding in the dirt. By now his initial burst of energy had worn off; his lungs and legs burned, and he had no choice but to slow his mindless dash. Once he lost his momentum, he woke out of his trance. Strength just ran out of him, he had to slow, and then, finally, to stop.
He bent over double in the middle of the path, hands braced on both his knees to keep them from collapsing, panting and sobbing at one and the same time. He wanted to scream, to weep and never stop, to run until he came to the edge of the world, to run back to the village and fling himself against the entire army.
He hadn’t the strength to do anything but take huge, gasping breaths that burned his lungs and brought a stitch to his side.
He could not believe what he had just seen, and yet the scene was etched into his memory as indelibly as if the fires Justyn had called up had scorched the image there.
He still couldn’t think clearly; conflicting emotions warred in his mind for the upper hand. Rage grappled with heart-shattering grief and kept him from breaking into helpless tears. Fears warred with confusion and kept him from going on, despair battled with determination and urged him to crawl into the nearest hole to hide. Where was he to go? What was he to do? How was he to get away from these madmen? For madmen they must be; why would anyone in his right mind want to attack an impoverished, dying backwater like Errold’s Grove, a place where so few people had even a single copper coin to their names that most of the village transactions were run on barter and tally-sticks?
A single small, sane voice spoke up amidst the confused babble of thoughts in his head. Get off the path, stupid! If they’re still following you, that’s how they’ll come!
He straightened up with difficulty, trotted a few, stiff paces farther along the wall of underbrush, and wriggled through a set of vines whose springy tendrils would snap back behind him, rather than breaking, leaving no trace of his passage.
Unless, of course, they have some sort of tracking beast, the voice reminded him. This is no place to hide. Collect your thoughts, and think of something better.
He wriggled underneath some bushes and huddled there, breathing hard, each breath stabbing the bottom of his lungs like a red-hot poker, and listening. There was plenty of noise behind him, but nothing immediately around him.
Where did I get into the woods? Through the wheat-field; that was on the back side of the village, next to the corn and away from the bluff. So I won’t be striking the river if I keep on this way, but I also won’t have to climb. Will these people have a tracking-beast? Do armies have such things with them? He hadn’t seen any dogs, but that didn’t meant they weren’t there. He tried to remember what, if anything, Justyn had said about the armies he had been with, but he couldn’t recollect enough. Now he regretted not listening to the old man’s stories; they’d seemed so irrelevant at the time, but now - !
Now I only hope I have more time to regret not listening to him!
His next thought was to climb a tree, but he dismissed it immediately as a bad idea. If the enemy had a tracker, he’d be trapped. No, he had to get as far away from the village as possible.
And then what?
One thing at a time; get away first, worry about what comes next after you’ve gotten away.
He stayed where he was until his sides and legs didn’t hurt as much, listening cautiously for sounds that meant pursuit. That didn’t just mean the sounds of someone coming down the path behind him; it meant the lack of normal sounds from the small birds and animals nearby, and the warning calls of birds that had been disturbed by intruders, cries that would come from higher up in the trees.
There was nothing immediately around him but silence broken only by a few faint rustles and mutters, and he decided with some reluctance that he ought to go back to the path. It was true that anyone hunting him would have to use it, but it was equally true that he would make much better time if he didn’t have to fight his way through the undergrowth. His passage would be quieter, too.
I can wait until I’m deeper into the Forest before I get off the path. A bit farther on, the undergrowth thins, and I can move through the trees a great deal easier.
That would make for another danger, though. Thinner undergrowth would mean a better chance of being spotted if the enemy had also gone off the path. Just because he knew the Forest, it didn’t follow that the enemy was ignorant of it.
Nevertheless, sitting here only made being caught more likely. He shook off his doubts, wriggled out of his cover as branches and twigs caught at his hair and clothing, and found his way back to the path he had abandoned, trying to make a minimum of disturbance to the underbrush.
His tough, bare feet made no more sound on the path than the falling of a leaf, and he trotted along with an arrow nocked to his bow, all senses alert, for what seemed like an eternity. His nerves strained to the breaking point, so much that he shivered, like a nervous hare, and started each time a birdcall broke the silence. Every deeper shadow seemed to hide an enemy, and every cracking twig might be the sound of a heavy foot.
What’s ahead of me in this direction? He thought about the path for a while, and decided that one of his storm-shelters was - a pile of rock slabs in the middle of a rock-strewn clearing, with enough room under three of them piled together for him to squeeze himself and a small fire beneath. According to the villagers, at some point - farther than any of them had ever cared to go and farther than he had been able to penetrate - it became Hawkbrother territory. Well, weren’t they supposed to be Valdemar’s allies? Shouldn’t they do something about these invaders? If he could get away, maybe he ought to try to find them.
If he could get away from the invaders in the first place. A posthumous revenge was not going to be very satisfactory from his point of view.
The undergrowth thinned, as he knew from past explorations that it would, and he put his arrow back in the quiver, fastened the cover over it, and unstrung his bow, slinging it over his shoulder. Now that he could see for some distance, he knew that he no longer had much of an advantage with his bow - if he saw an enemy now, it would not be a case of surprise at short range, and the enemies were armored. He might be the best shot in the village, but a small-game bow had no chance against armor. His only chance of felling one of these men would lie in a lucky shot through the helm-slit, and today did not seem a good day to trust his luck.
He picked up his pace into the lope his father had taught him for covering the greatest amount of ground with the least effort. Now it was possible to see for some distance under the trees; what growth there was here was composed of thin, delicate bushes with slender leaves, a few sparsely-leaved vines with stems as thick as his leg, and some pale-green weeds liberally festooned with prickles. There wasn’t a great deal of cover, and it was the huge tree trunks themselves that blocked vision. He got off the path, and under the trees, hoping that he would be able to see trouble before it saw him.
A few furlongs farther on, he ran into the enemy’s second line. He literally ran into it; a patrol of three mounted men - he rounded a huge tree trunk and suddenly there they were, their horses shying away from the unexpected intruder.
That was all that allowed him to escape them. As they fought their startled horses, he dodged between two of them, and ran, darting in and around the trees, feeling the place between his shoulder blades crawl as he expected an arrow to hit there at any moment.
After the initial surprise, they seemed to treat his appearance as something of a joke. He couldn’t understand their language, but their laughter was plain enough - cruel though it sounded. Evidently they thought that hunting him was going to be an entertaining way to pass the time. As he ran and dodged, hoping to get to his rockpile and hide, they pursued him without putting their horses into a lather, and before too many moments had passed, it was obvious to him that they were making a game out of herding him before them.
He glanced back once or twice and saw that they’d taken off their helms and gorgets and both were dangling from the pommels of their saddles by the straps. That only allowed him to see their faces more clearly, and what he saw in those brief glances chilled him. These were cold and hardened men, who were getting a great deal of cruel amusement from playing with him as a cat plays with a terrified mouse. They clearly thought he was as soft as one of the villagers and wouldn’t last long before tiring - and they had every reason to believe that. He was skinny and looked younger than he was, and they were on horseback. If they could get him running in a straight line, they could easily tire him out and run him down.
So he wouldn’t run in a straight line, and he would try to get to his rock pile, where horses couldn’t go without breaking an ankle. Once he got wedged into his hole, he could draw his knife and keep them at bay.
And then what?
Well, maybe they’d get tired of trying to pry him out. At the moment, this was his only hope, faint though it was.
He dodged around a tree, waited until they thundered past him with his back pressed against the bark, and then made a dash for another temporary obstacle in the form of a patch of vines. He dove into those, rolled beneath them and came out the other side while they were still hacking their way through the stems with their swords. Now he saw the sign that he was nearer his goal than he’d thought - a tall, standing stone, shaped like a finger pointing straight upward. He dashed for that, ducked around it, dove and scrambled beneath a bush as one of the men charged him with an incomprehensible shout. He made it through to the other side of the bush, and scrabbled to his feet again to make the last dash for the rock pile.
The men bellowed laughter as they chased him; he threw himself flat as they charged down at him, then picked himself up and made a scramble over the last couple of furlongs. They overshot him and had to pull their horses around in a wide circle to avoid riding them into the treacherous footing of the rocks. His heart was pounding so hard it rivaled the sound of the horses’ hooves, and all he could think about was that narrow triangle of dark that meant his hiding place. If he could get in there, he’d be hard to get out - 
He scuttled over the rocks, the stones shifting under his feet and making him slip and fall, bruising palms and knees. The crevice was close, almost within reach - 
A shadow fell over him as his hand actually touched the first of the great stone slabs that formed his shelter. He flinched away, tried to throw himself to the side, but it was too late.
His heart literally stopped, and a dark film passed over his vision.
A hand seized the collar of his shirt and hauled him upright, dangling him in the air in front of the crudest face he had ever seen in his life. The man’s greasy hair was braided back in a tail and bound around the forehead with a dirty, red scarf. He had cold, flat brown eyes, like dead pebbles, his right eyebrow was split by a scar that continued on down his cheek. His teeth were broken and discolored, his beard untrimmed and full of tiny bits of straw. He held Darian up and shook him, roaring laughter.
Darian stopped breathing.
He was the biggest man Darian had ever seen, bigger than Kyle, and every muscle of his arms and legs under the sweat-damp, dirty skin was rock hard. And a great deal of those arms and legs showed beneath the metal corselet and thigh guards - the armor was very nearly too small to protect him adequately. He said something to his two companions, and chortled, shaking Darian again. He smelled, too; bad breath and rank sweat, and rancid grease all combined to make him stink like a sick and unclean animal.
Darian’s mind went blank. He hung limply in the man’s grasp, waiting for whatever the men was going to do to him. Whatever it was, it would probably be very bad.
The other two remained on the horses at the edge of the rockfield, shouting encouragement to their fellow. Whatever he planned to do, they obviously approved of.
Darian wondered if it would hurt for very long.
Please, he pleaded silently, hoping some god would listen. Let it be over quickly.
At that instant, the shaft of a white-feathered arrow appeared in the man’s throat, as if conjured up by his prayer. The man’s eyes bulged, blood sputtered from his lips, and his hand came up to claw at the arrow that Darian hadn’t even heard pass over his own shoulder.
Three
Snowfire k’Vala, a Hawkbrother of the k’Vala clan, had only twice or three times before this mission ever been inside the border of the land called Valdemar. He considered himself only passably, and imperfectly, acquainted with the customs of these Valdemarans. He thought of himself as a good scout, an excellent hunter, and an indifferent mage of no better than Master level, but not any kind of an expert on their affable foreign allies.
But he did know this much: law-abiding mounted Valdemaran fighters of whatever ilk did not chase young boys afoot without a very good reason. They certainly did not chase such boys in the manner of a cruel game, taking pleasure from the child’s obvious fear, nor would they do so with clear intent to harm him.
Therefore, when Hweel, his bondbird, came flying silently out of the treetops, projecting urgent images of just that into his mind, Snowfire did not need to ponder diplomatic contingencies to make a decision.
Hweel made one of his rare calls, warning him that he was coming down. The bird’s call was a long, profound bass note like a thunderous breath, deeper by far than that of a more common hoot of an owl of normal size and breeding. Snowfire held up his arm with the heavy, wrist-to-shoulder leather gauntlet on it, and prepared for Hweel’s landing. As Hweel dropped out of the canopy with his wings spread wide to slow his glide, Snowfire braced himself. He had to; Hweel was easily three or four times the size and mass of most bondbirds, and twice the size and mass of a normal eagle-owl. Even with no intent to harm, simply landing came as something of a shock to the one Hweel was landing on.
Feet the size of Snowfire’s hand closed relatively gently on his arm upon impact, and through a triple-thickness of leather, he still felt their potentially-lethal strength. Snowfire endured the buffeting of Hweel’s wings for a moment as the bird steadied himself; then Hweel folded his massive pinions and settled on Snowfire’s arm. Snowfire stared into the round, golden eyes and opened his mind fully to his bondbird.
Hweel showed him images from above, of course, but every detail was unnervingly sharp. There were three well-armed but ill-kempt fighters on horseback, apparently patrolling through the tall trees. Through Hweel’s memory, Snowfire saw a thin boy with a bow, and not much else, suddenly blunder in among them. The boy ran, the fighters followed, making a game of letting him stay just far enough in front to make him think he might escape, taking pleasure in herding him.
:Guide me,: he told his bird, and with an effort that drove a short grunt from him, he cast Hweel up into the air. The bird spread his wings, and with powerful downstrokes, drove himself upward.
:What passes?: his mount asked, tossing his long, curved horns and tilting his head so that the intelligent eyes faced Snowfire.
:Nothing good,: Snowfire replied, dismounting. He told the dyheli stag who was his partner to go back to the others with a message that he had been detained and why, then got his bow and quiver down from the roll tied to the dyheli’s cream-colored saddle pad that nearly matched the stag’s creamy coat.
:Are you certain you wish to do this afoot?: the stag asked, flicking his ears with aloof interest.
:No point in making it obvious that I’m not of k’Valdemar,: he replied, stringing his bow with a little effort. :Besides, if these ruffians see you, they’II probably shoot you for meat.:
The stag snorted with affront and disgust. :Barbarians, then, and ignorant,: the stag replied. :I will tell the others.: And with that, the stag leaped easily and gracefully away, heading unerringly for the encampment. He made scarcely a sound as he ran; the dyheli were masters of their environment, the deep Forest.
Snowfire followed Hweel, nocking an arrow to his bow, making even less sound than the stag. Like the dyheli, the Tayledras were masters of the Forest.
The others were expecting him to return to their base camp with game soon; dealing with this situation would probably not take long to resolve. But having sent the dyheli Sifyra back with word of what he was doing, if he did not return within a reasonable time, some of the others would come after him, and Sifyra could lead them to the right place.
Half of being clever is making certain you are not being stupid. That was a Shin’a’in proverb, and one of his favorites. He might not be one for swift thinking, but he seldom put a foot wrong. Perhaps Nightwind, his lady love, preferred Most battle plans do not survive the initial encounter with the enemy, but she had associated with the gryphons for too long for some of their cavalier and devil-may-care attitude not to have rubbed off.
Snowfire kept every sense alert, now that he was afoot and alone on the ground. He noted every deeper shadow beneath the canopy of the enormous trees here, notedathe tenor of birdsong up in the canopy itself, drank in the scents of forest litter, searching for the aroma of newly-bruised greenery. Hweel did not see everything; it was perfectly possible that there was an ambush waiting here somewhere.
Hweel flew silently up through the lower branches of the canopy; Hweel could fly silently, because he, unlike every other bondbird in the ye’dorkandan k’shulah was a short-eared eagle-owl. Owls flew with no betraying sound at all unless very close, thanks to their soft-edged feathers. And unlike most owls, the eagle-owls were equally adept at day or night flying, making them ideal bondbirds for a scout or hunter who might find himself moving by day or night. Yet there were few of them among the Tayledras of k’Vala, for there were only four breeding pairs in the entire Vale at the moment. Snowfire considered himself incredibly fortunate that Hweel had chosen him as his bondmate.
In such a circumstance as this, he felt even greater gratitude. No one would see Hweel unless Hweel chose it to be so - and that would be a bad thing for the one making the sighting, as it would probably be the last thing he saw. The talons of a Tayledras-bred eagle-owl could pierce the skull of a goat, so great was the pressure behind them, and what they could do to a goat, could easily be done to a man. Unlike his lesser kindred, Hweel was intelligent enough to pick distinct targets for his talons - such as vulnerable eye sockets. Although Snowfire had not yet needed to put such killing power to the test against a man, Hweel had already proven himself valiant and valuable against the Changebeasts loosed by the mage-storms.
:Hurry!: Hweel Sent urgently, and filled Snowfire’s mind with the image of a brute of a man pursuing the boy across a pile of rocks, laughing. The man was afoot now, having left his horse at the edge of the rockfield.
Snowfire broke into a swift but cautious run. He did not want to betray his presence by either noise or movement, so he dashed from the cover of one giant tree trunk to the next, keeping himself well out of sight.
He reached the edge of the clearing just in time to see the man in question catch the boy and haul him up by the collar. Howling with laughter, he held the boy limply from his hand; he was big enough that the boy’s feet dangled some distance off the ground. The boy was as pale as ice, clearly terror-stricken. There were two other men very nearby, mounted on horses, also laughing. Even from here, Snowfire caught an unpleasant scent of rancid grease and stale sweat.
Snowfire eased into the cover of a brush-covered boulder held in place by the massive roots of a nearby tree. Between the mottled shadows at the edge of the clearing and the camouflaging effect of his scout gear, that was quite enough cover to keep him invisible.
One of the mounted men called to the one with the boy; they did not speak Valdemaran, but one of the mountain dialects of the north.
“You caught your rabbit, Cor, now what are you going to do with him?” called the first one.
Snowfire held down his anger; the boy wasn’t hurt yet, although he clearly expected something terrible to happen to him. A mountain barbarian doesn’t normally kill an unarmed captive; they do take slaves, though.
“He’s too small for a work-slave, but he’s pretty enough,” said the other mounted man. “You gonna keep him for a body-slave?”
A body-slave? Do they mean what I think they mean?
“Maybe, if there ain’t enough women to go around - “ the one holding the boy called back, laughing even harder.
That was all he ever said again; filled with fury at his words, Snowfire acted on impulse as he rarely did, rose out of the shadow of the trunk he hid behind, and fired. The arrow, fletched with owl feathers, flew as silently as Hweel, and as surely, burying itself in the soft tissue of the man’s throat.
Even as it was still in the air, Snowfire had pulled a second arrow from the quiver at his belt and was sighting it. The man made a gurgling sound, and reached frantically up, pawing at his throat with his free hand, as the second arrow sped to join the first.
A second arrow appeared beside the first one, and the enemy fighter lost all interest in Darian, letting him go to claw at his throat with both hands. Fortunately, when his captor dropped Darian and began staggering back a little, making hideous noises, Darian was still limp.
The boy made a “soft” fall on the hard slabs of rock and somehow his body acted for him again, and he quickly rolled out of the way of the toppling soldier.
Get up! he screamed at himself. Get up and run, while you have the chance!
As Darian scrambled to his feet, scraping himself on the rough surface of the rocks, he instinctively turned to look in the direction from which the arrows had come.
For just an instant, and no longer, he saw a strange-looking man in the shadows of the forest on the other side of the rock pile. He was dressed in mottled green-and-brown clothing, and although he didn’t look old, and certainly didn’t act old, his long, oddly-cut hair that was braided in a few places and dyed, had stark silver-white roots.
He had an arrow nocked at full draw on his bow, and he loosed it, just as Darian heard something whistle past his ear from somewhere behind him. He ducked to the side, instinctively. One of his tormentors had returned an attack to the bowman from the woods.
The stranger uttered a brief exclamation as a fighting knife buried itself to the hilt in his arm. He dropped out of sight; vanishing, so far as Darian saw, and behind him Darian heard a harsh cry, a startled snort, and the sound of something heavy falling.
He turned again to see that the second enemy fighter, who had still been mounted, had fallen off his horse, an arrow through one eye. The soldier lay on the ground twitching his hands. His head jerked once as he died, then the body was still. The horse shied, but moved only far enough to join the other dead fighter’s horse. Both of them paused a moment, then started cropping the thin grass, as if there was nothing whatsoever the matter.
What are you doing, standing in the open? Hide, stupid, hide!
Darian scuttled into hiding, behind a boulder, in shock at the sudden reversal of his fortunes. Where had this strange man come from? Who was he? And why was he helping him? This was all happening much too fast - 
Never mind that, scolded that sensible voice in the back of his head. There were three, there’s still at least one alive. Where there were three of those brutes, there are probably more. Do something!
Prodded into action, Darian picked up his dropped bow - by some miracle it hadn’t been broken in all of the tumbling and rolling - and quickly strung it. Opening his quiver and getting an arrow of his own nocked, he peered cautiously around the boulder.
From where he was, he could see two more of the enemy coming cautiously on foot along the side of the rockpile. Where had the second one come from? He took a quick glance around the other side of his boulder toward the last place where he had seen the stranger, and making a quick estimate, figured that his rescuer could not see these two new foes from where he was now. Injured as he was, he might not be able to defend himself.
So I guess it’s up to me.
Suddenly, he felt strangely calm. His stomach stopped flipping about, his hands stopped trembling, and everything took on a crystalline clarity around him, the colors deep, the edges sharp and defined.
Taking a deep breath, he stepped around the side of the boulder, and pulled his arrow back as far as he could, sighting carefully on the head of the man in the lead.
Snowfire cursed aloud with sudden pain as a flat knife, thrown by one of the two still mounted, buried itself in his biceps. He dropped, glad he had already loosed the arrow.
The blade had penetrated deep, but by luck had gone in more or less with the grain of the muscle. As he pulled the knife from his arm and discarded it, he was rewarded by the sound of the man’s body hitting the ground.
So much for being able to pull my bow for a while. I’d better get the boy and myself out of here before it comes to hand-to-hand. My climbing stick is still with Sifyra, and a match between a war ax or sword and a hunting knife is usually a short one.
He pulled a pressure bandage from the emergency pouch at his belt and wrapped it tightly around his arm, temporarily sealing the injury. A brief caress of power melded the end of the bandage into the wrap; the large magics were difficult these days, but the very smallest still worked reliably, making him often glad that he was of no higher power than a Master. He had always depended on the use of small magics, not large, and the loss of the ley-lines and the nodes was of no great import to him.
But he didn’t have much time. There was at least one fighter still alert and active out there, perhaps more, and he himself was now wounded and not capable of drawing a bow without breaking the wound open and making it more serious than it already was. And, also to the point, he had just dispatched two of the enemy with arrows that shouted Tayledras, as clear to read as if he had branded the corpses with the sigil of k’Vala.
So he had three things to do now. Rescue the boy, take care of the betraying arrows, and get both himself and the boy out of there before any more enemies appeared.
:Two come,: Hweel said, showing him where and how fast they were moving. Both had abandoned their horses, and were creeping toward him, afoot, and separated. :Two more, but from farther. They heard the pursuit of the boy, maybe. They do not hurry, but will come soon.:
:Can you protect me while I move toward the boy?: Snowfire asked in return.
The reply was not so much in words as in feelings, a sense of contempt that he had asked so simple a thing. Content in knowing that Hweel would stoop on anyone who got within striking distance of his bondmate, while he in turn worked his way toward the boy, Snowfire began easing his way to the other side of the rockpile. His wounded arm kept sending lances of fire up his shoulder, but he had hunted and fought with worse, and since it wasn’t bleeding badly now, he knew he could afford to ignore it until he was in a safer position.
He kept himself as much under cover as he could, but through Hweel’s eyes he saw that the boy had gotten himself under the concealment of a boulder and was in the process of stringing and readying his own bow.
Good, he thought with some satisfaction. So he’s not helpless, and he’s no coward - and he can think and plan for himself. He isn’t counting on me to come to his rescue beyond what I’ve already done.
Nevertheless, he couldn’t be allowed to take a shot. At the moment he was being ignored as insignificant while the fighters concentrated on Snowfire as the real enemy. That puny little small-game bow didn’t have enough power behind it to do much damage, unless the boy got a lucky eye shot. All that would happen was that the two fighters still within striking distance would stop ignoring him and count him as an enemy, and there was no doubt that they would not hesitate for a moment to kill him. While he was unarmed and only trying to flee, their customs counted him a noncombatant. The moment he raised an arm against them, he was a fighter, since their own boys entered a warrior-society when no older than this boy.
Snowfire got to the boy just as he stepped out of cover and prepared to fire. He reached out and grabbed the boy by the collar with his good hand and yanked him down into cover.
Again, poor lad - he must feel like a kitten being mauled by now.
Quick as a thought, before the boy could cry out, he muffled the boy’s mouth with his other hand for a moment, and put his finger to his lips, miming a message of “silence” the way Valdemarans did. The boy’s eyes were as wide and round as a pair of fat plums, and for a moment, as blank as mirrors with the shock of so rude an “introduction.” But he recovered quickly, obviously guessed at what Snowfire wanted, and nodded vigorously. Satisfied, Snowfire let him go, and he quickly got his feet and hands beneath him, and backed into hiding beside the Tayledras.
:Hweel, where are they?: he silently asked his bird.
The owl showed him; the two nearest enemy were crouched under cover of a bush, at nearly the opposite side of this rocky clearing. The other two had left their horses - which pleased Snowfire - and were making their way on their bellies to join the first two. None of them had bows, which pleased Snowfire even more.
They must be planning to jump on me all at once, he decided. The only problem for them is, I’m not where they think I am.
He thought for a moment, measured distances in his mind, and formulated a plan.
:When we run, spook the farther horses,: he told the owl, and motioned to the boy to stay where he was. He took three arrows from the boy’s quiver and wriggled his way to the first body, where he replaced the two Tayledras arrows with the boy’s.
Then he worked backward to the second body, and did the same with the last arrow.
It was a good thing that he’d picked barbless game-arrows when he blindly drew in the heat of the moment; they had broad heads, but tapered back to the shaft and were in fact meant to be easy to draw out. Barbed, man-killing arrows, on the other hand, were meant to be difficult to remove from a wound. His hunting arrows came out with very little trouble, and he inserted the boy’s arrows with no problem. With such optimal targets, someone with his level of skill would have been just as lethal with the light Valdemaran arrows as his own. The fact that the boy’s bow wasn’t heavy enough to have given the arrows the power to penetrate as far as they did was of no significance, for the enemy had seen him and knew that he had made the shots, not the boy. He only wanted them to think that he was Valdemaran, not Tayledras.
The closer view confirmed his guess that these were northern barbarians, wearing bear-tokens, and surely smelling much worse than even the filthiest of animals. You would think that they would emulate the cleanliness of their totems - but no.
Satisfied now that he had removed all the traces of Tayledras activity that a likely-uneducated soldier would recognize, he carefully worked his way to within sprinting distance of the horses belonging to the two men he’d killed, and took a deep breath.
This would be their only chance of getting out of there without having to get into hand-to-hand combat with at least one of the enemy. He would have one opportunity for surprise, so his plan had better work right the first time. He made another survey of the area through Hweel’s eyes, waited for his moment - and sprang.
Darian had been so taken by surprise by the stranger’s appearance that for a moment he had just stared blankly at his rescuer while the man held one hand firmly over his mouth. The man held a finger against his own lips while staring penetratingly into Darian’s eyes. Darian had never seen eyes quite so intensely blue before. Meeting their gaze was like falling into an icy pool, and it took his breath away just as surely. After a moment, Darian realized that he was miming for Darian to be quiet.
He nodded vigorously; after all, the last thing he wanted was to draw attention to both of them! Satisfied, the man released him, and Darian got his arms and legs underneath him and scuttled his way back into deeper cover, with the stranger between him and the enemy.
The stranger had already bandaged his knife wound, which astonished Darian. But after a moment, it was obvious why he had done so; he hadn’t wanted to leave a blood-trail, and the binding would make his arm at least partially usable for a while.
Now what? he wondered, as the stranger mimed for him to stay where he was, and keep very still.
He nodded again to show that he understood, and to his continued surprise, the stranger took three of his arrows out of Darian’s quiver, and began working his way, very flat to the ground and snakelike, through the rocks. He kept going until he came to the body of the man who’d first grabbed Darian.
Darian couldn’t see what he did there, but a few moments later, he came back into view and slithered his way to the body of the man who’d thrown the knife at him. Now Darian had the advantage of elevation, for the rocks where he was hiding were a bit taller than the Forest verge where the man had fallen from his horse, and he was able to see what the stranger did. Fortunately, those same rocks blocked the view of the enemy across the clearing.
To his puzzlement, Darian saw him carefully work his own arrow out of the wound that had killed the enemy, and insert Darian’s arrow in its place.
Now - why is he doing that?
He didn’t have long to puzzle over the question, for as soon as the stranger had finished his odd task, he tucked his own bloodied arrows sideways into his belt, gathered himself, and leaped like some great cat for the reins of the nearest horse.
The second horse shied and bolted, pounding off into the forest, but the stranger had the first one caught by the reins. The horse reared and danced, but the stranger held him firmly, and as soon as the beast had all four hooves on the ground, he swung himself up into the saddle before Darian could blink.
Without thinking, Darian stood up as the stranger wheeled the horse around on its hindquarters and dug his heels into its sides. It surged forward toward Darian, and the stranger leaned over its neck, stretching a hand out for him. Darian instinctively reached toward the stranger, who grabbed his arm, hand firmly around Darian’s elbow, as they plunged past. With a grunt and a gasp of pain, the man pulled Darian over the front of his saddle, and sent the horse racing off into the deeper Forest. This was by far the least comfortable way to ride that ever existed. The saddle-bow drove into his stomach, pounding breath out of him in grunting gasps, and Darian could not see much, but he glimpsed enough between bruis-irigs to know that he was heading deeper into the Pelagiris than he had ever dared go alone.
The boy had good instincts; he could not have reacted better if Snowfire had outlined the plan in advance for him. He stood up automatically when Snowfire leaped for the horse; Snowfire managed to get the reins in his good hand, not his bad one, so when the horse reared and tried to bolt like its mate, he was able to hold onto it. The moment the horse had all four hooves back down on the ground, Snowfire flung himself into the saddle.
Since the boy was perfectly positioned for a pickup, even to the point of having one arm extended, Snowfire dug his heels into the horse’s side and urged it into a leaping run. The boy was close enough that the horse had not gotten any kind of speed up before it reached the lad; Snowfire leaned down from the saddle, seized the extended arm, caught the boy’s arm at the elbow (ignoring the pain from his wounded arm) and hauled him up over the front of the saddle like a sack of meal. It was a good thing that the boy was so small and thin, or Snowfire wouldn’t have been able to manage the feat; as it was, he felt his wound break open under the bandage and tear, and a surge of warm wetness saturated the bandage just after the searing of renewed pain.
Two more strides, and the horse was in full gallop; meanwhile the pounding of hooves told Snowfire that Hweel had managed to spook the other two horses into panicked flight, hopefully without being seen by the distracted soldiers. That should delay pursuit nicely.
Good. By the time those brutes manage to catch their mounts, we‘II be long gone and the other horses will be too lathered to follow at any kind of pace.
Nevertheless, Snowfire was not about to slacken his pace, especially not here, where the ground cover was so thin and sparse that the horse could gallop safely through it. Snowfire guided the running horse in among the trees, allowing it to set its own speed. At the moment, it was so spooked by his appearance and his cavalier handling, that it just wanted to run, and he was disposed to let it. He simply used reins and weight to control where it was going, weaving his way in and out among the massive, columnar trunks, his main effort bent toward herding it in the direction of the stream he and Sifyra had passed on his way here. As soon as he thought they were well out of reach, he planned to slow the beast and take it into the streambed to break their trail.
Gradually, at about the moment when he was ready to slacken their pace, and he was quite certain the boy was long past ready, the horse slowed of its own will. Hweel had been trailing behind them, keeping watch on their backtrail, and had reported no followers. Now he sent the owl back to see if the barbarians had managed to organize themselves. He hoped not; he hoped they’d cut their losses and report to whoever was in charge of them that a huge force of Valdemaran warriors had used a child to lure them into an ambush. He rather doubted that they’d tell the truth, not with two dead and then-horses run to exhaustion and nothing to show for their efforts.
By the time they reached the stream, the energy and excitement that had sustained him had worn off, and his wound was bleeding freely. It had soaked right through the bandage and was going to make a right mess of his tunic if he didn’t do something about it soon. Hweel reported no pursuit at all - the horses were evidently not at all fond of their masters, and were nicely evading capture. The men didn’t have anything with them to tempt the horses into allowing them near enough to grab the reins either, which was certainly a mistake on their part.
That argued further for their being barbarians out of the northern mountains. They weren’t used to horses or riding up there, and wouldn’t have figured out that if your horse didn’t like you, he wasn’t disposed to coming back to you once he’d gotten rid of you, and if that happened, your only chance of catching him was to have something the horse wanted on your person.
The horse he was on didn’t much want to wade into the slippery streambed, but Snowfire used a little Mindtouch to persuade it, muttering to it absently, reminding it with images and feelings how good the cool water would feel on its hot legs. Finally, it stepped gingerly down into the water, and Snowfire allowed it to pick its way carefully among the rocks.
Interestingly, the boy hadn’t so much as uttered a sound in all that time, and he didn’t squirm or show any sign of discomfort, though he had to have been beaten raw by now. Snowfire hoped that his Valdemaran was equal to dealing with the child; he had picked it up mind-to-mind from one of the Guards at the next-to-last site his group had worked, but until he tried to talk to the boy, he wouldn’t know if it was equal to communicating with a possibly terrified child.
Of course, if the boy allowed, he could rectify that quickly enough with another mind-magic session. That was how he knew some of the dialects of the northern barbarians; he’d picked them up from a bold fellow who actually went up there to trade for furs. Snowfire had gotten a great deal of information from that hardy soul; he’d learned, for one thing, that once the barbarians accepted a person as a bona fide trader, he had near-immunity among them. “It’s an extension of their traditional immunity granted to tale-spinners and history-singers,” Shan had told him, and laughed. “But I suspect that it stems more from their greed for pretty baubles and fine fabrics than it does from any real interest in news of the outside world. At least they’re bright enough to know that if they kill the trader who brought the goods, there won’t be any more to follow him.”
The question in Snowfire’s mind was, what brought northern barbarians down into Valdemar? He hoped that there were only a few of them, and not an army. There had been trouble on the northern borders before, and that was when they knew that it was guarded by the Forest of Sorrows. If they had learned that Sorrows was no longer tenanted. . ..
Well, he would concentrate for now on the immediate problem; what to do with the boy, stopping his bleeding, and getting back safely to his base camp.
Snowfire pulled the horse to a halt after they had ridden for several furlongs through the streambed itself. By now the horse was cool enough that he could allow it to drink, and he really needed to rebandage that wound before the blood loss became a serious impediment to his performance. He got them all over to the stream bank, coaxed the horse up onto solid ground, let the boy get off, then dropped off the horse’s back himself.
What he really wanted to do was to lie down, but he wouldn’t be able to do that for a while. His arm hurt like fury, and besides needing to get the bleeding stopped, he wanted to get some cool water on it to ease some of the pain. There was only so much pain-dampening he could do, after all, on limited endurance. Tayledras scouts were durable, but he had just been through a fight, and the aftermath of a fight could leave anyone feeling as if they’d run the length of the Pelagirs,
He looped the horse’s reins around a branch with his good hand, and tied them off, giving the beast just enough slack that it could get a drink and snatch at a few bites of grass. Poor thing - it looked at him with astonishment (perhaps because he’d given it that freedom, or perhaps only because he hadn’t beaten it yet) and then buried its nose deep in the cool water. Then he knelt beside the streambed and carefully unwrapped the bandage from around his upper arm.
He let the wound bleed a little more while he put one end of the bandage under a rock in the sparkling clear stream, letting the swiftly-flowing, chill water wash it out for him. Then he splashed water on the wound, giving it a little rudimentary cleaning, and made certain that it wasn’t any more serious than he had thought.
It wasn’t; it was just a very simple penetration wound, and not a nasty-looking one as deep wounds go. There didn’t seem to be anything left in it, no signs of poisons visible, and as he had recalled, the knife had not seemed dirty or rusty. He reached into the water for the bandage to redo the job one-handed. It never even occurred to him to ask the boy to help.
Before he could do anything else, the boy was already at his elbow and had taken the bandage out of his hands. In a moment, he had wrung it as dry as possible and seized his arm.
“Please to hold still, good sir,” the boy said, carefully forming the Valdemaran words as he looked directly into Snowfire’s eyes, as if he thought he could give the sense of what he said if he simply spoke slowly and clearly, and locked gazes with his rescuer. Then again, if he had a touch of mind-magic, that might work; Snowfire had not lowered his own shields, so he couldn’t have told whether the boy possessed such a thing.
“Yes. Surely - “ Snowfire said, too much taken aback to argue. Was the boy in training to be a Healer? It certainly seemed as if he might be. But if that were the case, why was he not in the pale green of a Healer-student?
Using some clean, dry moss picked from a rock beside the stream as a pad, the boy rewrapped the bandage with the deft hands of an expert, putting exactly the right kind of pressure at the proper angles on the wound to hold it closed again. When he came to the end of the bandage and looked at it for a moment in puzzlement, Snowfire took over, and sealed the end of the bandage down again with magic.
And to his surprise, he felt the boy following what he had done with his own mind.
“Oh!” the lad said, sounding surprised. The next words were blurted, as if he spoke before he thought. “So magic is good for something - “
Then he clapped his hand over his mouth, his face, a comic mask of dismay.
“The littlest magics are usually the most practical,” Snowfire said mildly, in accented Valdemaran. He cleared his throat carefully. “I am Snowfire k’Vala, Scout of the Tayledras - or as you say, Hawkbrothers. I return now to my own people, in a place we have made for ourselves.”
The boy ducked his head awkwardly, but his eyes were alive with mingled curiosity and apprehension. “My name is Darian,” he said simply. “Darian Firkin. And - ah - thank you. I thought they were going to - kill me.”
“I do not think that what they had in mind for you would have been pleasant,” Snowfire said carefully, unsure of how much or little to tell the lad. He might well be much older than he looked; he had very old eyes for such a young face, and the face itself was a mask of politeness behind which something else was hidden. “Have you any place you need to go, or a place of safety that I may take you to? Or would you care to come with me to a safe haven?”
The boy held his breath, and slowly the polite mask shattered and fell. He crumpled, sobbing, apparently completely overcome by sudden, overwhelming grief.
Snowfire did not need to be an Empath to read that there was something dreadfully wrong, something triggered by mention of safety, or a safe place to go. He decided on his own that the best place for both of them was back with his little band. Whatever had gone wrong had evidently been horrible, terrifying; it likely had a great deal to do with those barbarians, and was probably something that he and his people urgently needed to know about.
But there was a more immediate need: to soothe the child enough so that he could ride without falling apart. The sooner he got back to camp, the better.
Snowfire had never had a little brother, but he had played the role of confidante and helper a time or two in the past, to warriors, mages, and younger scouts. “Hush, now,” he soothed, putting his good, though leather layered, arm about the boy’s shoulder - close enough to give emotional support, not so close as to be intrusive. He knew before the boy did, by the imperceptible tensing of the lad’s muscles, when he was coming too close, and backed off a bit. “Here, you may come with me, and we will go to my people. I promise, you will be quite safe enough with us. Eh? Then, when you are rested, you will talk to us, tell us what happened. Perhaps we can help. Even if we cannot, we will see to it that you are safe. Warm and safe and well-fed.”
The boy only nodded, and Snowfire mounted, lending the boy a hand so that he could swing up to sit behind the saddle instead of being carried like so much baggage. The boy must have ridden this way before; he put his foot carefully on top of Snowfire’s, trusted his weight to Snowfire’s arm, and got himself up behind the Tayledras with a minimum of awkwardness. And there he sat, his arms around Snowfire’s waist to hold him in place. His sobs had ended, but as he held tightly to Snowfire’s waist, the Tayledras felt him shivering, and not with cold, but with suppressed emotion and shock. He was very near a breaking point, and Snowfire wanted him to be safely in the hands of someone who could deal with his trauma before he came to that breaking point.
Nightwind was an Empath as well as a trondi’irn, and she would be the best person for the child at this moment.
Snowfire clucked to the horse, which lengthened its stride readily into a slow canter. Evidently it already preferred Snowfire over its previous masters.
It seemed as if this was something more serious than a single boy and a few sadistic barbarians. Perhaps this situation was more than his little group could deal with; after all, they already had quite a bit on their plate.
After the danger from the mage-storms had ended, magic had been shattered like a broken crystal; the matrixed pattern of ley-lines and nodes was gone as if it had never been, and the energies that had once flowed in them were spread evenly across the face of the land. This had left the more powerful mages at something of a loss, but the Tayledras already had a plan in place to deal with such a contingency. They were a long-sighted and patient people when it came to making and fulfilling plans. They would move with urgency when speed was called for, or could wait for generations to lay something in place.
Magic flowed, like water, and like water it would not remain spread out over the land for long. If left to itself, it would form its own rivers and pools - or ley-lines and nodes - or it could be guided into paths that could be carved for it. The sooner those paths were established, the sooner it could be persuaded to follow those paths, and would flow as it had before - and the less likely it would be that stagnant pools would form, warping creatures and plants as had happened before, in the Pelagirs, after the Mage Wars were ended. There were many more Tayledras now than there had been then, with a great deal more experience, and now that there was no geas laid upon them by the Star-Eyed to cleanse the land, they were free to go out into it and rectify the situation before it became necessary to do those cleansings.
More to the point, since no creature ever acts against its own best interest (even though they may act in enlightened self-interest) if it was the Tayledras mages who reestablished the ley-lines and nodes in a matrix, they would be able to arrange and key them so that it did themselves and their allies the most good. But, conversely, if they left an area unmanaged, it would be altogether likely for other mages to come in and arrange things to their liking.
This was the reason for the groups of Tayledras traveling about now, dealing with Changebeasts, working to link the local magics up with the greater systems already established. The Crown of Valdemar had not only given its blessing to the massive venture, but had funded their needs and ordered support to be given by Guard, Herald, and citizen, with free passage papers and more. That the now-legendary Tayledras Adept Darkwind had the ear of the Queen in the matter had not hurt a bit. Altruistically, the Hawkbrothers and their chosen allies were able to rid the land of some very unpleasant creatures. Realistically, they were creating a matrix that better supported their own Heartstones than even the original had. In the future, it would assure them of more than adequate power for virtually anything they wished to do.
Could it be that some other, rival mages had decided on the same plan?
Of course it could, he told himself. In this case, it wouldn’t take an Adept to see what the advantage in it would be. It would only take a perceptive Master, in fact, or someone very educated in the nature of types of magical energy and its tendencies, to plan out a local scale version of - gahhh. Snowfire, you need help, your mind is wandering. Deal with the situation in the here and now, and discuss the implications of your speculations over a good meal by the fire later on.
Well, the best thing he could do now would be to get the boy to a place where he could feel safe. Perhaps after some food and calming, this young Darian could bring himself to reveal what had happened. Surely in Nightwind’s hands that would not be long in coming.
Whatever it was, Snowfire was certain, there was going to be a great deal more to it than appeared on the surface.
Snowfire was so deep in his own thoughts that it startled him when the boy spoke. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” came the muffled voice from behind his back.
He considered the language carefully before he replied. He did not want to answer the wrong question and give the boy the impression that he was being uncooperative. “Myself, specifically?” he asked. “Or my people? There are more of us here, not far from here, as I told you.”
“Your people,” Darian answered, and Snowfire felt him take one hand off of Snowfire’s waist; he sniffed, and Snowfire fished in a pouch at his belt to give the lad a bit of unused bandage to wipe his nose with. “Th-thank you,” the boy said carefully.
Interesting that his own thoughts had just been on that very subject, of why the Tayledras were here.
“We are a very special group of Tayledras - your people call us Hawkbrothers, usually - and we are here for a number of reasons which all mesh together. What know you of the mage-storms?” he asked. “I ask this, because it is relevant to why we are here.”
He felt the boy shrug. “Not much,” Darian admitted. “They upset the weather a bunch, made things bad around here, turned monsters loose. I guess they made it hard for mages to work.”
Snowfire thought for a moment, and decided that the most complete, if abbreviated, explanation would certainly not be amiss, and would fill up the time until the moment they arrived at the camp. And besides, it might help keep his mind off how his arm hurt. “I will go back to the very beginning, then - to the cause of it all. Once, so many hundreds of years ago that most of that time is lost even as a legend, there were many of what we know as the Great Mages. These were Adepts so powerful that they had the ability to actually create new creatures that had never existed before, to change the weather, or to make the rocks run like water.”
“Was that where the monsters came from?” Darian asked, as Snowfire paused.
“Some of them created creatures that you would take to be monsters, I am sure,” Snowfire told him, craning his head around to smile at the boy with encouragement. “But I think that the monsters you speak of were all created later - and I am coming to that. One of these Great Mages was very evil, and he made war on the rest. In the end, there was only one left to oppose him. That one invented a kind of weapon that was so terrible that he swore he would only use it if he himself were dying. He made two of these - and when the time came that he was, indeed, dying, killed by a slow poison delivered by an assassin loyal to the evil mage, he sent one into the hands of the evil mage himself, and triggered the other in his own place.”
“Why?” Darian asked. Snowfire suppressed a smile at that oldest of childrens’ questions.
“Because,” he said patiently, “the way that this weapon worked was to release all of the magic contained within every object within a certain area. It released all of the magic in the good mage’s Tower, at the same time as the other released all of the magic in the evil mage’s stronghold. Now, think for a moment about how powerful these two men were, and think how much magic must have been released. Why, in the case of the good mage, his very Tower had been built with and relied upon thousands of magic devices. Then think what must have been contained in that Tower, and around it.”
The boy pondered that for a moment, then shuddered convulsively. “That - must have been big. And awful,” he said, in a subdued voice. “Worse than a forest fire.”
“Much worse,” Snowfire assured him. “Where the good mage once lived is now the Dhorisha Plains; where the evil one lived is now Lake Evendim; since both those places were strongholds among hills, that should give you an idea how dreadful it was. I assure you, nothing that was caught inside where the bounds of the Plains and the Lake are now survived. That Cataclysm completely reshaped the world, it was so powerful. And the effects of two of the weapons being triggered simultaneously were worse and more complicated than the good mage had ever dreamed possible. Having two of them go off created theirs? mage-storms, and those, in their turn, created the Pelagir Hills and the Pelagiris Forest.”
“Huh.” The boy digested that. “I thought they - just were. I thought the Forest had always been like that.”
“They were created by the cataclysm and the mage-storms that followed,” Snowfire replied. “And it was longer ago than I think you would dream possible, and the Pelagirs extended far out beyond what is now Valdemar. Now, the Tayledras were given a duty, and that was to set things to rights in the Pelagirs, and in return were given the secrets of how to control and confine very powerful magic. And the odd thing is that we were very nearly done with that task, when the mage-storms returned, and they returned because not only did they reshape the world, they made an echo of themselves back across time, exactly like the waves of a stone tossed into a quiet pool will reach the shore and reflect back again.” He paused. “Do you see what I am saying?”
Thousands of years of history compressed into a few sentences, but if he is really interested, there are plenty who will teach him the tale in its fullest.
“Not really, altogether,” Darian admitted honestly, “but enough so I think I’m following the story right. So the mage-storms we had were the . . . echoes of the ancient ones? That would be why they made monsters like the first ones did?”
“Exactly,” Snowfire said with encouragement in his voice, thinking as he did so, that this was a good thing to be talking of, for it gave the boy something to engross his mind. Snowfire had a growing suspicion that the barbarians had attacked his home, and that he was the only one to escape, if not indeed the only one to survive. He would figure that out as soon as he had time to think about the attack at all, and he would need to grieve eventually, but it would be better if he did so in a safe place.
For now, I will keep his mind on the strange Hawkbrother, so that he does not think too much about what has happened to him. I cannot afford to cope with a hysterical child right now.
“The new Storms were bad in effect, but worse in potential,” he continued. “And they were building up to a second Cataclysm, because they were a reflection of the originals, which was why they grew stronger instead of weaker. We are not precisely certain what that new Cataclysm would have done, but several folk determined to prevent it, and succeeded.”
“That would be Herald-Mage Elspeth, Adept Darkwind, and Adept Firesong, right?” the boy asked, as if he had suddenly made a connection for himself.
“Yes! Yes, and some others as well.” Not all of them human, or even by common standards, alive, he thought with a little amusement. But he can learn that for himself later. No point in piling strangeness upon strangeness. I am impressed, that he would know those names. “I must continue to shorten the story a great deal more, but if you wish to know all of it, you have only to ask. I will say only now that they did prevent it, they did stop the Storms and have made it so that they will not reecho at some later time, and that the result of this was to change all the magic as we knew it.”
“They - broke it, didn’t they?” the boy responded, surprising him. “They broke magic like breaking a plate, so it shattered into pieces.”
“In a sense.” He tried to think of another water analogy. “If you could imagine magic as all the streams, and rivers, and lakes in the world, and suddenly all the water has been sucked out of them, and has rained down evenly everywhere. You could walk on what used to be the bottom of a lake that would have drowned you, just after it happens, or you can divert the rainwater to a new place you want filled, but the rain continues to fall. That is what has happened, and that is one of the two things that brings us here at this time. We are cutting new rivers, if you will, and making new lakes. And we are once again putting things to rights, getting rid of the Changebeasts that the Storms created.”
“And when you’re done - magic will be where you want it to be, and work the way you want it to, won’t it?” the boy asked shrewdly. “That’s what you get out of it. Your special magic will work again.”
Such an unexpectedly clever observation startled a laugh out of Snowfire. “I must admit,” he replied, with reluctant admiration, “you are quite correct. Not that this is a secret, you understand. And not that this means that no other mages will be able to use their powers. Things will simply work the way that everyone was used to them working, and everyone who has the ability will be able to use them as of old. Except, some people theorize, more efficiently.”
The horse had slowed to a brisk walk, but Snowfire could tell that it was tired, and its pace was quick enough to suit him. He let it set its own speed without correcting it, poor thing. It was probably used to being ridden to within a breath of foundering, and a little decent treatment would work wonders with it.
“So why are you doing this - the Hawkbrothers, I mean,” Darian asked. “Couldn’t anybody do this - like the Herald-Mages or the Fireflower mages or something?”
“They could,” Snowfire admitted. “And in some places, they probably are. We are doing it here because we know how, because there are very few Herald-Mages and even fewer who are at all powerful enough to do these things, and because there are also Changebeasts and other Changes in these same areas that need attending to. So we are paid by you, our allies of Valdemar, to do work that we are used to doing, and we are serving our own purposes at the same time. We, in our turn, are getting much-needed goods and foodstuffs for our people for our payment, so we are well content.”
No point in explaining too much more. That there were still Vales was something of a miracle, and was due entirely to the superhuman efforts of Tayledras mages to shield their Heartstones during those final Storms. But without the ley-lines to feed the Heartstones, there was much less power coming in than going out, and the Tayledras back in the Vales were having to be very conservative, even frugal, about what they did and did not do with the power contained in the Stones.
That was the main reason why these parties had been sent out; to make certain that as many of the “old” ley-lines as possible were reestablished - and to see to it that an “adequate” amount of power was sent back to the Stones. That was the request of the First Council of Elders - that it be “adequate.” Just what “adequate” meant was being left up to the discretion of the Adepts leading each team.
It means, “don’t be selfish,” I suppose. And if there really aren‘t that many mages in the area who would need node-energy, then what’s the point of allowing it to pool in nodes for Adepts who don’t exist?
“I suppose a bad mage could divert a lot of that power away for himself right now, couldn’t he?” the boy asked aloud. “Like a selfish farmer damming a stream so that only he can use the water for his crops.”
“I must say, Darian - I am impressed. You are very perceptive. Yes. That’s another reason why we are here,” Snowfire conceded. “If we establish the ley-lines - the rivers - we can make sure that it will be available to anyone who needs to use it. But if a selfish or bad mage got to a place first, he could lock all that power away for all time. So we aren’t just working for our own sake.” He chuckled gently. “After all, eventually there will be mages in Valdemar who will need to use that power, and they would be rightfully annoyed if we had arranged things so that they could not get at it.”
“I ‘spose they would,” the boy acknowledged. “Would things have gone back to the way they had been if you left them alone?”
“That, we don’t know,” Snowfire admitted.
“But they went that way the first time, so why wouldn’t they go back?” Darian persisted. “I mean, it’s really hard to change the course of a river; I heard of people who tried, and each time it went right back the way it had been, in its old bed. So, wouldn’t things be the same if you left them alone?”
“Even if they would, there are still the Changebeasts that need dealing with,” Snowfire reminded him. “And the one thing that still could happen if we don’t interfere is that a bad mage could lock the power away from everyone else. We can’t leave that to chance.”
“I ‘spose not.” Darian sighed, and didn’t ask any more questions.
Snowfire made a note to tell Adept Starfall what the boy had said about it being difficult to change the natural course of a river, and how that might apply to the ley-lines. It was something he doubted that the Adept had wanted to consider deeply, and it could spell trouble at some point in the future.
:Any problems?: he asked Hweel, who was still wafting along in their wake, branch to branch every thirty or so horse-lengths, keeping a wary eye on things behind them.
:All quiet,: the bird replied. :Hungry.:
He considered how far they were from the clearing, how many times he had undertaken to break the trail, and how long it might take the barbarians to catch their horses. He concluded it was safe enough for Hweel to take the time to go catch something.
:Hunt,: he suggested to the bondbird, who needed no second invitation. Hweel had heard the call of a covey of quail some little distance back, and was eager to see what he could do about helping to control the population.
Owls often seemed more purposeful about their hunting than hawks, or more especially, the falcons. It was no great amount of time later that Snowfire sensed the burst of visceral bloodlust that meant Hweel had gone in for a kill, followed swiftly by triumph and accomplishment. A little longer, and Hweel was back in the air and catching up, now with a full stomach, radiating satisfaction. For a bird Hweel’s size, a single quail was a reasonable meal, but not a full day’s ration; the owl would probably go out again at night to hunt if Snowfire didn’t provide him with something.
The horse was not nearly as swift as a dyheli, especially not with a double burden, and the light coming through the trees had taken on a distinctly red hue when Snowfire reached the outskirts of the encampment. He whistled the recognition call for the outermost sentry, and a moment later, spotted the flash of a suntail hawk-eagle’s creamy breast in the branches above him. Three of the scouts were bonded to suntails, so it could have been any one of the three who were standing watch, but he thought it was Eere, Skyshadow’s second-year bird.
:Go in ahead,: he told Hweel, wearily glad that it was a suntail and not one of the forestgyres, who were fond of teasing the big owl. Not that they would ever harm Hweel, nor would Hweel ever retaliate with anything more than an irritated beak snap, but Hweel was a ponderously serious bird in many ways, and being teased put him in a bad mood. Just at the moment, having his bondbird grumbling and hunched in a tree was a situation Snowfire didn’t want to be forced to endure on top of his other pains.
His arm hurt more and more as they rode, and given a choice, he wanted most to see Nightwind and have it tended to, then drink his weight in pain-killing tea and sleep for about a day. The last of his energy ran out shortly before they reached camp. Fortunately, the boy had been cooperative and quiet during most of that time, and his questions and conversation had been polite and subdued the rest of the time. Perhaps he had sensed that Snowfire was not feeling up to conversation.
The horse took them through some truly spectacular territory, and he wished vaguely that he was feeling good enough to appreciate it. Ancient trees with trunks the size of entire houses stretched toward the sky, their roots firmly embedded in the sides of steep, boulder-strewn hills; rocks thrust themselves out of the soil in fantastic and baroque formations. Tiny, threadlike streams sparkled and danced over rocks in the valleys, or threw themselves headlong down the rocky cliffs and hillsides in exuberant waterfalls that were more spray than stream. Anywhere that the dense foliage overhead allowed a ray of sunlight to penetrate to the ground, other plants flourished - a patch of luxuriant grass studded with flowers, a gnarled bush with glossy leaves, or a graceful young scion of one of the giants that loomed overhead. This was the season of birdsong, and their calls fluted through the shadows from every direction. A fresh, warm breeze carried the faint scent of forest flowers and evergreen on its wings. The only problem, so far as Snowfire was concerned, was that his throbbing arm got in the way of being able to enjoy his surroundings. At the moment, they were something to be endured rather than enjoyed, until landmarks would tell him that he was nearing the camp.
Finally, with grateful relief, he saw just the landmarks he was looking for, and soon he was riding down a long rift that would open up into the valley that his group had turned into as near a Vale as was possible for so temporary an encampment. Nature had provided a fine little valley with tiny springs trickling out of the hillside at the back, which the current dwellers had diverted into a series of three pools; what nature had not provided, the Tayledras had fashioned, constructing temporary, ground-built ekeles with stone, spools of cord, windfallen tree trunks, carefully tended vines, and the canvas of their tents as roofs. When Adept Starfall found this place to be nearly ideal for his purposes, a bit of extra work made the camp into a place of more comfort and more security than mere tents would have permitted. It made more sense that way; with strong, secure walls about them and a few creature comforts, they all rested better, had more privacy, and felt healthier and happier for both, which allowed them to do their work without missing the comforts of the Vale too much. The spring-fed pools gave them one for drinking water, one for washing, and one that could be heated with dozens of fire-warmed stones (or, for those with the Gift, with magic) for soaking weary bodies. They would be here for as long as it took Starfall to impose his will on the newly forming magic-matrices, and for as long as it took to find and deal with any Changebeasts that were still in the area - probably into fall.
Snowfire was very glad for those creature comforts waiting for him, especially the hot pool. He certainly felt that he had earned them.
A fellow called Sunleaf, who was bonded to a forestgyre, had an interesting sort of magic with plants that allowed him to bend them to his purposes and accelerate their growth in a way that was quite remarkable. Outside the encampment, he had coaxed bushes and vines into a thickness and luxuriance that hid the camp from sight, and within it, he had made vines grow in screens that divided the area up and gave a remarkable amount of privacy, and got vines to grow over each ekele, shrouding them in cool green that hid the structures beneath an avalanche of leaves. It looked, in fact, as if they had moved into a place that had been abandoned to the forest for decades, instead of one that they had just built.
Snowfire sensed the boy’s interest as they rode into the valley and toward the little welcoming party of three that awaited them. It was a small welcoming party, and Snowfire blessed the Adept’s good sense, as it was composed of only Tayledras who would not alarm the boy - the Adept himself, the gentle trondi’im Nightwind, and the youngest of the scouts, Wintersky, who was something of a protege of Snowfire’s, and shared his ekele. Of course, Wintersky mostly had the ekele to himself, since Snowfire spent a great deal of time with Nightwind. None of the three could possibly frighten the boy, who’d had enough fright for one day, though Starfall looked very imposing, and probably more like the boy had imagined a Tayledras to look than Snowfire did. Wintersky wore the same scouting-garb that Snowfire did, but Nightwind and Starfall showed the other faces of Tayledras life in their dress. Starfall wore the trailing robes, jewelry, and embroideries of someone who does not expect to be covering a great deal of territory in wild forest, and Nightwind the comfortable, colorful, loose garments of someone who does expect to be doing a great deal of physical and practical labor, but who does not have to worry about fading into the landscape. Starfall’s waist-length hair hung loose, with a minimum of ornaments braided into it, Wintersky’s hair was dyed in leaf patterns and confined in a single tail, and Nightwind’s was still dark, for she practiced little magic and had never lived in a Vale with a Heartstone to bleach her hair. She was, in fact, not k’Vala at all, but k’Leshya, the “Lost Clan” of the ancient days, come up out of the farthest West.
But at the moment, all Snowfire could think of was how glad he was to see them all. He slid down off the horse and found his legs unexpectedly wobbly; he managed to save himself from embarrassment by holding for a moment to the pommel of the saddle, and offered the boy his good hand as an aid to get down.
Darian smiled at him wanly. “You don’t look so good,” he said, with that blunt frankness of a child who hasn’t yet figured out that one doesn’t always have to voice what one observes. “I can manage to get down myself.”
And he did, but his legs were just as wobbly as Snowfire’s when he slid off the horse’s ramp and landed on the ground - though in his case, it was probably from a mixture of fatigue and unaccustomed riding than from pain.
“This is Darian k’Valdemar,” Snowfire told the others, in Valdemaran. “He’s never seen Tayledras before, and he knows nothing of us. Darian, this is Adept Starfall, who is our Elder and the leader of this group. This is trondi’im Nightwind, who is going to patch up the tears in your hide as she does for the rest of us who have the misfortune to ran through brambles.”
Darian rubbed some of his scratches with a bit of self-conscious embarrassment, even though some of them were deep and he had many braises as well.
“And this is Wintersky - “ He looked askance at the younger man, who grinned at Darian and finished the sentence.
“Wintersky, who will share his quarters with you and Snowfire, unless you prefer to camp alone in a tent, or have us make some other arrangements.” The young man winked. “I pledge you I do not snore. My Valdemaran is the best of all of us save the mighty hunter Snowfire, so I thought I’d volunteer our ekele. It’s always better to have people about who know your tongue fairly well. Snowfire does snore, though.”
Darian was clearly getting overwhelmed; his eyes looked a trifle glazed, his face was pale, and his expression bewildered. “I don’t mind, I mean, that would be good - whatever you like - “
“Whatever it is that I like is that you are to come and be tended, and be eating and drinking, and be then sleeping,” Nightwind said firmly, taking the boy in charge with maternal authority. The boy yielded to her with relief and gratitude, and she ushered him off.
“I’ll report in brief, and then I need to be tended, eating, drinking, and then sleeping after you’ve gotten the full report,” Snowfire told the Adept, as Wintersky took the horse and led it away to be watched by the dyheli herd. “Hweel saw the boy being chased by northern barbarians. Bearclan would be my guess, but they were all wearing identical armor, and I don’t much care for what that implies.”
“Neither do I,” Starfall said, his brows furrowing.
“Their tattoos would have told me more, but things were rather impolite at the time, and I didn’t stay around to request a viewing from those remaining.” Snowfire noted Starfall’s lips twitch as he tried not to smile at the understated and offhand manner Snowfire was taking with the tale.
“How impolite?” Starfall asked.
“Only two casualties. Not even a minor quarrel by Bearclan standards. Hardly more than an ordinary drunken brawl-though I did make sure to substitute the boy’s arrows for mine; I didn’t want to alert them to our presence. Still - one of them had caught the boy by the time I got there, and he and his colleagues were exchanging pleasantries that implied they had been . . . improving some Valdemaran settlements.” He dropped his tone of levity. “I think that the boy belonged to the latest one, though I have not yet questioned him at all. I wished an Empath to be present when I did.”
Starfall lost all trace of humor at that. “So, you have barbarians in identical armor, what amounts to something more serious than a little banditry, and all this a good bit farther south than we should expect to see mountain tribes. I shall check my maps, but. . . .” Starfall shook his head. “I do not like this, Snowfire.”
“Neither do I, since the barbarians don’t move in groups larger than a dozen without having a shaman-mage along with them.” Snowfire had been letting what he knew about the northern tribes dig itself out of his memories during the last part of the journey; he was better at recollection when he allowed the memories to surface on their own. “And they don’t use horses as a rule, yet all of the barbarians I saw were mounted.”
“This isn’t sounding very promising.” Starfall bit his lip for a moment. “Well, the best thing that I can do is to move the progress I was making on ahead. It won’t take more than a day or so, and I’ll have the matrices set up and completely in my control; I’d like to see the mage that can get it out of my hands then.”
“I wouldn’t,” Snowfire replied. “But if there was someone able to do that, he’d have challenged you already, so the worst we’ll have to deal with is someone your equal. I think we can do that.”
“And I think you’d better have someone look at that arm while you get some hot food inside you,” Starfall pointed out. “Your stoicism is respected, but not required. Go, you can make a more detailed report after you’ve rested and gotten properly patched up - and by then, the boy will be rested, too, and we can find out why barbarians on horses were chasing him.”
Now that his initial report had been made, he had the relief of the discharge of duty, and a great weariness descended on him. He decided that the best place for him was in his shared ekele. Fortunately, it was one of the nearer structures; he rounded two vine screens, and there it was, looking like nothing so much as a leafy hummock. He parted the vines with his good hand, and found that Nightwind had already preceded him there.
He had taken weather-felled limbs and constructed a fine log home, octagonal in shape, with a roof of sod held up by logs and willow withes woven into fine mats. The snug dwelling would probably serve as well in winter as in summer, except that he would have to fill in the bottom rank with sod; he had left off the bottom rank of logs on four of the eight sides so as to allow the movement of air through the place. A cool breeze came in at the level of the floor and went out at the smoke hole in the middle. It had been a great deal of extra work to make this ekele, but he reckoned it had been worth the work. A lantern with a mage-light in it hung from one of the ceiling logs. His sleeping place and Hweel’s perch were on the far right as one came in the door, and Wintersky’s sleeping pad and Tiec’s perch were on the left. That left a cooking place in the middle, and any gear they shared near the door. Now there was a third sleeping place at the rear, with the boy sitting sleepily on it and Nightwind beside him.
Snowfire saw at once that someone had left a young rabbit on Hweel’s perch, which meant Hweel would not have to hunt tonight. Pleased by the courtesy, he slipped back out before Nightwind noticed he was there and called Hweel to the fist.
The owl dropped down on his arm with customary aplomb, and ducked his head as Snowfire brought him in. This time, the boy, who did not seem to be noticing much, reacted very strongly and positively to Hweel.
His mouth formed a silent “Oh!” and his eyes went round, but there was no sign of fear in him. Nightwind noticed the lad’s reaction, and smiled over her shoulder at Snowfire.
Snowfire took that as an invitation to come closer. Darian stared at the huge owl with intense interest. “Is that your bird?” he whispered, as if he was afraid that he might startle the owl. “I heard Hawkbrothers had birds, but I didn’t know they were that big! He’s - he’s amazing!”
Snowfire flushed a little with pleasure; he was not proud of much, but he did take a certain pleasure in having so magnificent a partner as Hweel. “Yes, he is, isn’t he?” he agreed. “His name is Hweel, and he was watching out for us, flying behind us in the trees, all the way back. Would you like to touch him?”
“Can I? He won’t mind?” Darian looked quite as if Snowfire had given him permission to shake the Queen of Valdemar’s hand.
“Hweel is excessively vain, and extremely fond of scratches, and if you are going to offer him plenty of admiration and caressing, he will be your friend for life,” Night-wind said with mock severity.
Hweel clacked his beak at her, then softened the rebuke with the soft “huuur” an adult would give a nestling.
“Go ahead,” Snowfire urged.
Darian reached hesitantly to touch Hweel’s breast-feathers, but the owl had other ideas. Quick as thought, he leaned down and butted his head against the outstretched hand, and before he knew it, Darian was scratching the top of the owl’s round, densely-feathered head.
“He’s so soft!” the boy exclaimed with delight.
“Don’t be afraid to give him a good scratching,” Snowfire told him, as Hweel stepped down off the gauntlet to the floor, and made his odd little sideways sidle up to the boy. “You’ll have to work to get through all the feathers on his head.”
The owl closed his huge eyes in bliss as Darian scratched with more vigor, and shoved his head practically into Darian’s chest. Snowfire was delighted, both with the boy’s reaction and with Hweel’s, and for the first time he entertained the thought that if the boy had nowhere else to go, he might wish to join k’Vala.
Well, it is enough for now that he is not terrified of the bondbirds, and that the bondbirds take to him. Either would be amazing enough, but having both is wonderful. We can worry abolit what is to become of him when we have a better idea of what he has involved us in.
Nightwind allowed the boy some time to caress Hweel, and before either of them tired of the sport, she Mindspoke to the bird, :Enough. He will still be here in the morning, and so will you. Right now, he needs to sleep.:
As Hweel heaved a great sigh of regret, she said virtually the same thing to the boy. “Sleep, it is time for; you and Hweel will be here both when sun rises.”
Reluctantly, the owl raised his head and the boy took his hand away, but before he could take it entirely out of range, the owl reached out with his powerful beak and gently nibbled Darian’s fingertips.
“That is a high compliment,” Snowfire told him, as the boy glanced at the Tayledras for an explanation. “He doesn’t offer that particular sort of ‘thank you’ to just anyone.”
Darian looked dazzled, and as Hweel waddled toward his perch with an owl’s awkward and ungainly ground gait, Snowfire got one of the larger body-feathers, about the size of the boy’s hand, from a little basket he had woven of pine needles and tacked to the logs on his side to hold molted feathers. He lifted Hweel up to the perch - given the owl’s huge wingspan, he preferred that Hweel not use his wings inside the ekele - then gave the feather to Darian. The boy took it with shy thanks, and occupied himself with stroking and examining it.
“That was neatly done,” Nightwind complimented him. “I was having trouble getting him to relax enough for the drug I gave him in his tea to work. I want him to be drowsy when you and Starfall question him.”
“Thank Hweel for cooperating so nicely,” Snowfire replied, as she pushed him over to his own sleeping pad and began unwrapping the bandage on his arm.
“I already have,” came the calm reply, and then Snowfire endured a few bad moments as she examined the wound and gave it a thorough cleansing. Once it was clean, however, she was quick to put a numbing salve on it, so that when she stitched it up for him, he scarcely felt the prick of the needle. The boy watched them intently, but with a detachment that Snowfire thought was probably thanks to the drug.
“I am very concerned by the little I have sensed from this boy,” Nightwind told him. “He is quite traumatized, and on the whole, I am concerned about what will happen to him when he allows himself to feel the emotions he is holding inside.”
“I got the impression that he doesn’t show half of what he is feeling,” Snowfire confirmed, as Starfall tapped the doorframe lightly, then entered.
“He keeps things to himself, I think,” she told Snowfire. “His griefs are many, and not all concerned with whatever led him to us; once he allows one to be free, the others may come flying out. That will be good for him, but it will be a hard time as well.” She looked troubled. “I cannot tell you if your questions will trigger this release. They may, or they may not.”
“Whether they do or not, we need to know why Snowfire found him in the predicament that he was in,” Starfall pointed out. “And the sooner we know, the better.”
“Darian, now that you have eaten and rested, we would like you to tell us what happened to you,” Snowfire said in his best Valdemaran.
The boy nodded; he looked awake, but not entirely alert. “Those men that were chasing me - there were fighters like them that attacked Errold’s Grove,” he said plaintively. “I guess the militia went to stop them, but they probably didn’t have a chance.”
“How many men?” Starfall asked quickly. “What were they like?”
“It wasn’t just men, it was some kind of monster, too, and - I didn’t actually count how many there were, but they were in ranks of five, and I saw ten times five ranks and I know I didn’t see all of them,” Darian said, growing agitated, as Nightwind put a steadying hand on his arm. “There were just a lot - an awful lot. I was out in the woods, getting some tree-fungus that Juh - that we needed, and I saw smoke and fire and came running back. When I got there, everybody was running away, and this whole army was on the road to the bridge. They had lots of armor, and all kinds of pikes and swords and things, and not all of them were men, they were kind of half bear and half man! And there was another thing, a monster or a demon or something, that wasn’t anything like a man at all, and it was leading them - it was riding on this big lizard. J - “ A spasm of pain swept over the boy’s face, and Snowfire made a mental note to find out who or what began with “J” that the boy avoided talking about so carefully. That might be the key to releasing some of that pent-up grief. “The bridge got - destroyed - set afire to keep them off, but they came across the river anyway. That’s when I ran, and I got away from the first lot, but those others were deeper in the forest and came after me when they saw me.”
Starfall and Snowfire exchanged looks. This did not sound very good.
“Did the others of your village get away from this army?” Snowfire asked. “Did they have somewhere to go for help?”
The boy frowned for a moment, then shrugged. “I didn’t see anybody get caught,” he said finally. “And I guess they must have run to Kelmskeep. Lord Breon has got a whole garrison of his own, and Kelmskeep’s fortified, they say. He has messengers and things he could send for the Guard, so that’s probably where everybody went.”
“Now, what about the men who chased you?” Snowfire asked. “How did that happen?”
The boy winced with chagrin. “I ran into them,” he admitted. “I didn’t think there was any way they could have got ahead of me, and I ran into them, ‘cause I wasn’t looking for anyone. They came after me, and I headed for that clearing ‘cause there’s places in there I could’ve hid, and they couldn’t have brought their horses over those loose rocks. But one of them caught me, and that’s where you showed up, and that’s all.”
“That will do; I’ll have the others gather, and we can discuss this when you are ready,” Starfall said, as he got to his feet and headed for the door of the ekele.
“I’ll be there as soon as the boy is asleep,” Snowfire promised, and turned his attention back to Darian.
“Hweel won’t have to hunt for himself tonight, so even though Wintersky and I will be gone for a little, Hweel will be with you,” Snowfire told him, then asked the one question that was still puzzling him. “Darian, did you really intend to go after those two barbarians with your rabbit-bow?”
“I had to,” Darian replied sleepily. “I knew you were hurt, and I didn’t think you’d seen them. I knew I couldn’t do much unless I got a lucky shot, but maybe I’d distract them, and for sure they’d make a noise, so you would know that they were there.”
“Well, that was good planning,” Snowfire told him, and was rewarded with a sleepy smile that faded into drugged slumber. He waited until he was certain that Darian’s sleep was too deep to be easily broken, then got up to go outside, leaving Hweel to keep a vigilant eye on the boy.
:Watch and guard,: he told the bondbird, keeping things simple. People had been known to have odd reactions to drugs, and children in particular were prone to sleepwalking after a severe trauma. Snowfire was not in the least deceived by the boy’s apparent calm; Nightwind said that there was great emotion ready to burst out at any moment, and he believed her. :Find me if something happens.:
Hweel roused his feathers and huured his agreement. Now that he was full of rabbit, he was quite content to stay in one place with a foot tucked up beneath his breast-feathers.
Snowfire joined the rest of the group around the small fire that Nightwind kept feeding with herbs to keep the insects away. He accepted a mug of cool water from the spring from Wintersky with a nod of thanks, and took his place in the council session that had formed.
“I’ve told the others what the boy told us,” Starfall explained, as firelight flickered and cast odd shadows on his face. “And the very first question I can think of is whether we should involve ourselves at all.”
“I don’t think we can, to tell you the truth,” replied Wintersky regretfully. “I mean, this sounds like an army! And we have how many? Not quite twenty humans, twice that in the dyheli herd, a couple of hertasi and a gryphon. We aren’t exactly equipped to be fighting battles either.”
The fire popped and hissed, blending with the sound of movement of something large, like the sussuration of canvas across canvas.
“I would sssay that one grrryphon isss worrrth an arrrmy, but I rrreluctantly concurrr,” a deep voice rumbled from the shadows behind Nightwind. “It only takesss a sssingle arrrow.”
“It isn’t just an army of men, but of Changechildren as well, and that means a mage is deep in it somewhere,” Starfall put in. “Unless what the boy saw were just costumes or disguises, and I can’t imagine why barbarians would bother wearing disguises.”
“It sounds to me as if someone managed to reconcile a great many Bearclan septs,” Snowfire mused. “Maybe - well, this is a wild surmise, but from what I know about the northern tribes, they attach heavy religious and emotional significance to their totems, and a lot of emphasis is put on taking on the attributes of those totems. Now, what would happen if a mage came along, perhaps in the guise of a shaman, who could give them physical attributes of their totems?”
“He’d own the clan to the point of being able to reconcile all the feuds between the septs,” Starfall said flatly. “And there was someone who managed that, once.”
“Yesssss.” The shadow behind Nightwind rose, and loomed up over her head. “Yessss, therrre wassss. And we all know hisss currrsssed name.” The shadow resolved itself into a shape, and the shape into a creature, a creature with the mantling wings and head of a raptor, but a raptor of enormous size, and with four limbs instead of two. “He wasss called Ma’arrrrr.”
“I don’t think we’re in any danger of seeing another Ma’ar, Kelvren,” Nightwind soothed. “It’s all right.”
But Starfall frowned. “Perhaps. And perhaps not. I can’t help but think that this is a rather nasty coincidence, these barbarians, presumably led or backed by a mage, suddenly moving into territory where no one has yet established a matrix for magic. The difference between a Ma’ar and a petty tyrant is largely a matter of power.”
“All the more reason for you to form and hold the matrix,” Snowfire replied firmly. “That will have to be our first priority, it seems to me. If the boy is correct, most - if not all - of his people escaped. Surely one will reach Lord Breon, and he can take care of the military problem from there.”
“That would be best,” Starfall replied, but with a little reluctance. “We are hardly the group best suited to taking on an army.”
“But think of what it would have meant if sssomeone had ssstopped Ma’arrr when he wasss gatherrring the trrribesss,” Kelvren urged, his eyes glinting in the firelight. “Would it not have been worrrth everrry sssacrrrificssse to do sssso?”
“We can stop any mage just as easily by holding the magic energy of this area away from him,” Snowfire replied. “I think we should concentrate on getting that done first. By then, we should know if the Valdemarans have taken care of the military situation themselves.”
“And if they have not?” Kelvren persisted.
“We’ll deal with that when we come to it,” Starfall said firmly, ending the debate.
The gryphon folded his wings, feathers making a cloth-on-cloth sound as they slid across each other intq precise order. “Verrry well. I will be - rrready. And if they do rrre-memberrr Ma’arrr and hisss waysss - “ Kelvren reached for a log of firewood and purposefully splintered it into several pieces merely by squeezing it. “ - then I will ensurrre that they rrrememberrr grrryphonsss asss well.”

Four

Darian woke in the morning feeling as if his head weren’t working quite right. It was difficult to put his thoughts together; he seemed to be taking a very long time to get even a single thought to form. He stared for a long time at the wall that was a hand’s breadth or two past his nose, and wondered why the rough texture didn’t look the way it should. Why did each rough-sawn plank look rounded? And why wasn’t the wall itself slanting toward him as it formed the peak of the roof? His mind moved slowly and his thoughts felt fuzzy around the edges. And what was wrong with the light? It was greenish, and it was much darker in the loft than it should have been.
It couldn’t be just turning dawn, because he never woke up that early. Maybe it’s going to rain? Justyn hadn’t Fore-Seen any rains, though, and that was one thing that he could do right; his weather-watching was always accurate.
He’d had the strangest dream, too - that the village had been attacked by a whole army. There was fire, a lot of fire in the dream, the whole town had been on fire. It had been more of a nightmare. Darian shivered and tried to remember more. There was a lot of him running, and monsters chasing him, then more running through the forest, then horrible men on horseback chasing him - getting rescued by a Hawkbrother and an owl, a huge owl - 
A pretty strange dream, too. When would I ever see a Hawkbrother? Never in a thousand years. And who would ever bother to attack Errold’s Grove with an army? What could they possibly want? Beans and turnips? Or maybe chickens - He had to shake his head at the way he was trying to make sense of a dream. Anything can happen in a dream, of course - one of Widow Clay’s chickens must have started laying silver eggs with golden yolks. Or maybe Justyn ‘s spells finally worked and everyone was suddenly rich, and that was why an army came.
Then he rolled over, and saw that he wasn’t in the loft, but in a strange, octagonal hut made of rough logs - windowless, and with vines over the door. There was a huge owl, the same one he thought he’d only “dreamed” about, blinking sleepily on a perch to one side. At that moment, he realized with a plummeting heart that it hadn’t been a dream at all. It had all been real, horribly real. Errold’s Grove was gone - or if not gone, it was in the hands of an army of violent strangers, and everyone he knew had fled in fear of losing their lives.
In one moment, he went from sleepy and laughing at himself to despair. His insides became cold; a lump rose in his throat that was half grief and half fear, and his thoughts spun dizzily with nowhere to go. He still couldn’t quite remember all that had happened, and the way his thoughts kept spinning didn’t help. There was something about Justyn - and his mind shied away from the thought, as if he didn’t want to remember, as if remembering would be the most horrible thing that had happened to him.
The village had been taken - but why? What could anyone possibly want with a little town that was on the verge of drying up and blowing away? If there were a single gold coin in the place, he would be surprised. A few of the women had jewelry, silver and silver-gilt, but he was sure there was not enough in the whole village to fill a hat. The women depended on their needlework to brighten their apparel.
Most ornaments were made of carved and painted wood, plaited straw, beads and beadwork, copper, and bronze, and not a single precious stone in the lot, just turquoise, agate, and colored quartz. There simply was nothing worth looting - and even if you cleaned out every bit of beer and liquor in the place, by the time you parceled it out among all the soldiers, there wouldn’t even be enough to get them mildly intoxicated!
This is insane; nothing is making any sense. I should be home, I should be in the loft, not here. Wherever “here” is. . . .
But if he wasn’t in the loft in Justyn’s house, where was he?
I’m with the Hawkbrothers - he remembered. This house belonged to them. What were they going to do with him now? He remembered, with a dreamlike vagueness, that they had asked him questions about what had happened, but they hadn’t given him any idea what they planned to do. Where was he going to go if they didn’t want him to stay? Could he get them to take him to Kelmskeep? But then what would he do?
Thoughts of Kelmskeep led him back to the village. Kelmskeep must have been where all the villagers were trying to escape to, and that was why they were running without trying to take anything. They could make Lord Breon’s lands in a few days or a week or so - it would be a hardship, but this was summer, and no one would die of exposure or thirst. But what had actually happened to the rest of the villagers? How well-planned had that attack been? Had those horrible fighters caught anyone else? How could they not have? If there had been four men on horseback ranging out that far from the village to catch those who tried to escape, mightn’t there be more?
No matter what the town did to me - they never hurt me on purpose, they just wanted me to be like them. They never did anything to anybody, they don’t deserve to have those awful men get hold of them!
What would happen to them? The man who caught him hadn’t killed him right off, but what would he have done when he learned that Darian didn’t have any money and didn’t know where any was? Darian had only vague notions of what enemy soldiers wanted, based on what bandits wanted. If you didn’t have money for them, what would soldiers do? How could you satisfy them if you didn’t have what they had come for?
Now Darian’s vivid imagination portrayed all manner of terrible things that could have befallen the folk of Errold’s Grove, and he grew more and more agitated as he thought about their possible fates.
The owl turned his head then, as if it sensed something was wrong. It opened a pair of enormous eyes completely and fastened its gaze on him. He found himself locking eyes with it. It clearly was not afraid of him, and strangely enough, he was not afraid of it, although it was easily large enough to hurt him quite seriously, if not kill him, if it took the notion to attack him. In fact, the more he looked into its huge, golden eyes, the calmer and quieter he felt. It was so strange, and warm-feeling, and it made every thought seem to slow down. It was almost as if the owl was putting its wing over him and sheltering him, and telling him that everything would be all right. . . .
Then the owl blinked, and the spell was broken. The bird yawned hugely, snapping his beak shut with a loud click. Darian yawned along with the owl, then watched as the bird shook its tufted head so fast it blurred, and felt as if he had to laugh a little at the sight.
The curtain of vines over the door to the hut parted, and a shadow blocked out the light for a moment. By the long, braided hair and the odd clothing, the newcomer had to be a Hawkbrother. As the Hawkbrother came into the light, he saw that it was the one who had rescued him yesterday. He was very tall, with long hair that had white roots, and was dyed all over in patterns of pale and dark brown, golden brown, and bark-gray. His square, chiseled face was very friendly, with many smile-creases at the corners of his mouth. His blue eyes contrasted oddly with his weathered, golden skin. He wore clothing in many shades of brown leather and closely-woven fabric, and his left arm and shoulder were completely encased in a sleeve of padded leather.
Snowfire. His name is Snowfire. And his owl is Hweel.
That was when Darian remembered a calm and friendly voice telling him that this hut was Snowfire’s, and someone else’s too, and as he took another quick glance around he saw two sleeping pads like the one he was still on, and a scattering of other belongings. There was a second perch on the other side of the room across from Hweel’s - although no one had actually said anything about a second bird - but there wasn’t a bird on it. From the size of the perch, the bird must be half the size of Hweel, and he wondered what kind it was.
“Well and good,” said the Hawkbrother, standing just inside the door and looking at him in the friendliest possible fashion. “It seems that you are awake at last, though I am certain you needed to sleep. It is difficult to tell what time it is in this ekele, I know. You have slept entirely through breakfast, and it is now time for lunch. Would you care to eat anything?”
The Hawkbrother had a very odd accent and his phrasing was a little strange, but Darian had no trouble understanding him. I thought they had their own language; didn‘t Justyn tell me that? Somehow Snowfire must have learned Valdemaran from someone, but Darian thought he remembered him talking with - a woman? - in some other tongue.
“Thank you. I’m - not sure if I’m hungry,” he replied vaguely, knowing he should say something in reply, but unable to come up with anything appropriate. What did you say to someone who’d saved your life? How many times were you supposed to thank them for it? Did the Hawkbrothers have some special significance attached to saving someone’s life? It wasn’t the sort of thing covered in The Booke of Manners that Widow Clay insisted he read - 
For that matter, The Booke of Manners seemed to give the impression that everyone in the world was Valdemaran.
The Hawkbrother - Snowfire, yes, that was right, he was sure now - came up and sat down beside him on a folded-up blanket. Snowfire’s arm was bandaged, and obviously stiff and sore from the way he held it, and Darian felt very guilty all at once. After all, if he hadn’t gotten into trouble, Snowfire wouldn’t have gotten hurt rescuing him. “I’m sorry about your arm,” he said awkwardly, blushing. Should he beg Snowfire’s forgiveness for getting him into difficulties?
“My arm?” Snowfire looked surprised, then shrugged, as if it meant nothing to him. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. It’s hardly a serious injury.”
“It doesn’t look good,” he persisted. “I mean, it must hurt an awful lot, and you won’t be able to use a bow until it heals up some.”
“Oh, I have had worse insect bites,” Snowfire said nonchalantly. “Truly, it is nothing for you to concern yourself about. It does give me an excuse to laze about the camp while others go out and do my hunting for me!”
“It’s just, if I hadn’t been there, you wouldn’t have gotten hurt rescuing me - “ he began. “But I was so scared, I couldn’t think, and after Justyn - “
And then, as if those words had been a trigger, he suddenly remembered everything that had happened yesterday - the fight with Justyn, running off, returning and being sent out as punishment - coming back in time to see Justyn - see Justyn on the bridge - 
 - see Justyn sacrifice himself - one moment, standing there, facing down that Thing, the next moment, seeing nothing of the bridge except a sheet of flame.
Some barrier he had not even been aware of let go at that moment, and there was nothing he could do to stop what happened next. Darian felt all the blood draining from his face, leaving him cold and empty; he trembled, then simply fell apart. A thousand unformed regrets triggered the avalanche, and they tumbled together with self-recrimination, simple grief, guilt, and mourning. They held him so paralyzed that he could not even move, he could only shake and stare at Snowfire with a sea of unbearable sorrow flooding him and choking his throat - 
Snowfire somehow saw it, or part of it, for he murmured, “Ah, poor fledgling! Let it go, let it out - “ and put his arm around Darian’s shoulders in a gesture completely natural and fraternal. And that was enough, just enough, to release the flood entirely.
He flung himself into Snowfire’s shoulder, and howled. And Snowfire held him, firmly and comfortingly, and let him cry himself out. There was nothing awkward and self-conscious about it; the Hawkbrother just let him cry until he had no more tears left, as if he let total strangers cry on his shoulder all the time. For the first time since his parents disappeared, Darian had someone to cry with, someone to share his grief with. It helped. It was amazing how much it helped.
Finally, after what seemed like days, the torrent of tears turned to a stream, the stream to a trickle, and the tears at last stopped altogether. It left him with an ache still in his heart, a burden of guilt pressing down his soul, and a void of loss he could never have expressed in words, but he was too tired for the moment to continue his mourning.
“So, who was Justyn?” Snowfire asked with careful gentleness. “Besides the one who held the bridge so your people could escape.”
“Justyn was - was the wizard,” Darian managed, as Snowfire let him sit up and handed him a real handkerchief. “I was - he was my Master, and he was teaching me, or he was supposed to be.” He flushed a painful crimson, even to the tip of his ears, which burned as if he had gotten frostbite. “I wasn’t a good apprentice,” he admitted with profound shame and grief. “I kept running off, and I didn’t want to practice the way he wanted me to.” But there was a tinge of resentment, too, and he couldn’t help voicing it in his own defense. “But, Snowfire, no one ever asked me if I wanted to be a wizard! They just said I had the Gift, so I had to be one! I wanted to be a hunter and a trapper, like - like my parents - “ He would have said more, but his throat closed again.
Snowfire was silent for a moment. “I do not know you well, Darian,” he said after a moment. “But I think that you must have had a reason for running off and not practicing those magics.”
Darian shook his head, still flushing, and took refuge in one of the phrases the adults of Errold’s Grove had always seemed to hate. “I dunno,” he mumbled. Every time he said that, the adult he was talking to always replied with, “What do you mean, you don’t know? How can you not know why you’ve done something? You did it, didn’t you? Then why did you do it?” The reply of “I dunno,” always seemed to trigger an angry interrogation which only got angrier as he retreated farther into himself.
Snowfire, however, did not challenge that phrase. “Perhaps someday you will know how to say what you felt, what your reasons were,” he murmured encouragingly. “I would like to know, when you can tell me. It is just hard to say with words. Sometimes, one can feel a reason without being able to say what the reason is. We all feel that.” He sighed. “So - Wizard Justyn is the one who blocked the bridge against the army. Then he set the bridge afire, and perished in the flame?”
“I think - “ Darian began, then stared at Snowfire with his mouth dropping open. “I didn’t say anything! How did you know what happened to Justyn?” For a moment, wild tales of how Hawkbrothers could read one’s thoughts swept through his mind.
“I am a mage, too,” Snowfire reminded him. “If I had been in his place, and brave enough, and desperate enough, it is something that I would have done. It is something that all those who have that Gift know that they may someday need to do, if the situation is hopeless and the need great enough. And those who have given of themselves in that way - are much honored for their bravery and nobility of spirit.”
Darian swallowed and took a deep breath, while Snowfire nodded, to reinforce his words. Someone as strong and exotic as a Hawkbrother, honoring Justyn? If only Justyn could have heard it when he was alive. “He was trying to keep those fighters back,” Darian said, grief clenching his stomach as he once again found himself holding back tears. Justyn - this Hawkbrother was saying that Justyn had been brave and noble! “I think he must’ve told everybody to run while he held them back. I think that’s why no-one was fighting. I think he told them not to fight, because he knew they couldn’t fight an army, and he was buying time for them to get away.”
“He probably was, and that was the wisest course for everyone.” Snowfire put a finger under Darian’s chin and lifted it, so that Darian was looking straight into his eyes. “I want you to listen to me and believe me, Darian. What you described to us last night was definitely a very large and organized group, and perhaps as you thought, an entire army, of well-trained fighters. If Justyn determined that the best course was for people to run, he was right. There is absolutely nothing your people could have done against them, except be killed. That is the way armies are. It is what they do, it is why they are armies. They are made so that all that can stand against them is another army. Running was not only the best option for your people, it was the only option for them. They were not being cowardly; they were accepting the gift that Justyn offered to them. And I will tell you something else; I think that if they had known in advance that the gift included his life, they would not have accepted it, and they would have insisted that he escape with them.”
“But - I’m supposed to be a mage - I should have been there, helping him - “ Darian was overwhelmed with shame and guilt, so much so that he was not certain he had spoken aloud until Snowfire shook his head.
“Darian, you will not come into the full potential of your ability for at least another two, perhaps three years,” the Hawkbrother replied. “Maybe more. And even then, you could not use that potential without several years of training, study, and practice. Even if you had begun training seriously three years ago, you would not have been ready to help Justyn now. You would have been of no more use to him than - than if you were going to be a fighter, and he was an older warrior. Your strength as a mage is something that you must grow into, as you would grow into your strength as a fighter. There is a perfectly good reason why armies do not field ranks full of younglings your age - and it is the same reason why you would have been of little help to Justyn even if you had been training to your utmost.”
“Yes, but - “ Darian began, then stopped, unable to articulate why he was so certain that if he had been there helping Justyn, the old wizard would still be alive, only sure that it was so.
“You feel differently, and I cannot convince you otherwise.” Snowfire shrugged a little. “There is no arguing with a feeling; I wish that there was. But Darian, you cannot take on guilt for every bad thing that has happened! Put the guilt where it rightly belongs, at least - for if someone had not decided that it is easier to steal from innocents instead of earning their desires, that army would not have appeared on the road to Errold’s Grove in the first place! If there is blame to be placed, then place it squarely on the back of the aggressor who is leading these fighters, whoever he is! It is he who deserves to be punished, not your people, and not you!”
Darian was struck by the good common sense of that, and felt a little of the burden he was carrying inside ease. “I - I guess you’re right.”
“I know I am,” Snowfire said firmly. “And I know that you are feeling very strange and worn. But now, I have something difficult that I must ask of you. Adept Starfall and I asked questions of you last night, when you were very tired, but we need to ask more of you now that you are well awake and thinking. And the sooner we can ask you these things, the fresher they will be in your mind. Do you think that you can manage such a thing for us, when you are clean and fed?”
Darian’s heart sank. He really did not want to go over all of yesterday’s horrible events, but he knew that, he really needed to say “Yes.”
“I - yes,” he replied, in a small voice.
“Good, and you are being quite brave to face what you will have to remember,” Snowfire told him, so earnestly that he did not doubt that Snowfire actually meant the words, and wondered at Snowfire calling him brave. “Now, I will explain to you why we are going to need to know very many tiny details. My people are allies of your people, and we have taken on certain responsibilities. We are, all of us, mages - some with less power than you have at this moment, and some, like Starfall, with a very, very great deal more - but all of us are mages. That makes my people very different, and it makes us very desirable to other mages.” Snowfire bit his lip as he looked down at Darian for a moment, as if he were debating something, and then his expression settled, as if he had decided to let Darian hear more confidences. “There are - ways - that a mage can use another mage, even if that other is an unwilling prisoner. That is why we must be careful that we do not fall into the hands of mages who are working evil.”
Darian shivered all over. Was that why that huge fighter who’d caught him hadn’t killed him? Vague and ill-defined pictures flitted through his mind, all of them ugly.
“We are only a very small party of Tayledras,” Snowfire continued. “We must know as much about this enemy as possible. We need to know if we can and should attack him ourselves, if we should merely interfere with him but let your Valdemaran fighters deal with him, or if we should actually hide from him. Do you see why we must do that?”
Perhaps one of the other boys from Errold’s Grove would not have, but Darian did. He nodded. “I can see it wouldn’t make any difference if you waited, so long as everybody got away,” he replied. “I mean, what’s the point of risking yourself for a bunch of old houses? Right? It isn’t as if the people couldn’t rebuild, or even move.” He bit his lip. “Maybe now they’ll be willing to settle somewhere else. They surely weren’t prospering there.”
“That is correct,” Snowfire said, looking relieved. “Your Queen once said something both wise and profound when she ordered the evacuation of the Eastern Border - that it was not the land that was Valdemar, it was the people. It is not the houses that were your village, it was your people. If the people have survived, then the village has, regardless of whether or not the houses are still there.”
Darian nodded solemnly. “They could even still call themselves ‘Errold’s Grove’ if they wanted to.” He toyed with a bit of fringe on the blanket that had covered him last night. “I would understand if you decided not to fight - them - right away. I mean, as long as everybody got away all right. And if there’s a mage with these fighters, you probably shouldn’t let him know that there are more mages here - “
“There is certainly a mage behind them somewhere,” Snowfire interrupted. “Perhaps more than one. Those bear-men you saw could not have been made that way without a mage. And Darian, quite frankly, if there are no people who are in need of rescue, the very best thing that we can do is to stay away from those fighters.”
“Why?” Darian asked, a little surprised at his vehemence.
“Do you recall what I told you about what the Tayledras are doing in your land? How we are making the channels for magic to flow in?” Snowfire waited expectantly, his head tilted a little to one side.
Darian closed his eyes for a moment, then nodded as memory-fog cleared. “And . . . you said that you were doing that so that a bad mage couldn’t get the magic locked away from everybody else and. . . .” He suddenly felt a number of things fall into place in his mind. “Oh! Since there’s a mage there, he might try and lock the magic away!”
“I am almost positive that is exactly why he is here,” Snowfire said grimly. “I frankly cannot imagine why the enemy would attack your little village except for that purpose; if a special place for gathering magic is nearby, he would have a ready-built headquarters from which to work, and a food supply already gathered. And that is why it is our first and best duty to prevent him from accomplishing that task.”
Darian sighed. He could certainly see Snowfire’s point, and as long as everyone was safe, what would the Hawkbrothers accomplish by fighting? Hadn’t he just been thinking that there wasn’t anything worth bothering about in Errold’s Grove? Hadn’t he just told Snowfire that it might even be better if the people went somewhere better to resettle?
Still, the idea of a bunch of fur-covered bullies just coming in and taking everything and not being made to pay for it made him angry. And after what Justyn did - 
No, Justyn couldn‘t have thought he was saving the village, just the people. He must have known that there wasn‘t a chance of saving anything else. So I shouldn‘t get all worked up over them taking the village.
“Darian, are you ready to help us?” Snowfire asked, interrupting him midway through his attempt to sort out his feelings.
“I guess so,” he began vaguely, and before he could have second thoughts, Snowfire had gotten him out of the hut, through a little maze of vine-covered barriers, and he was suddenly confronting, not one or two, but ten or twelve of the Hawkbrothers, each of them with his or her own bird perched on a shoulder or arm. They sat together in a sunny, circular clearing with a tiny stream running along one side. They’d taken their seats either on the ground, or on natural objects such as boulders or pieces of log. All of them were clearly waiting for him, and as Snowfire sat him down in the middle of this half-circle of people, and stood discreetly aside, Darian felt himself to be the uncomfortable focus of their interest.
Although all of the people here had the same sort of green-and-brown clothing that Snowfire wore, no two costumes were alike, and although many had heavy leather gloves on one or both hands, none of them wore the same shoulder-to-wrist gauntlet that he did. All of the birds were enormous, and of the breeds that Darian recognized, these individuals were twice and three times bigger than the ones Darian knew. There were three people with large hawks with vivid rusty-orange and golden-yellow tails, two with thin and nervous hawks with yellow-orange eyes and pale, almost pinkish breasts, three with falcons that looked just like forestgyres, two with ones that looked like peregrines, one with a slate-gray bird with aggressive, reddish eyes that must have been a goshawk of some sort, and one with a huge, clever-looking crow. No one else had an owl of any kind. The birds all watched Darian with interest and intelligence, and Darian had the peculiar feeling that they heard and understood every word that was being said.
Another person came around a screen of vines, a most impressive and exotically-dressed man with waist-length white hair, who had a white falcon with pale brown markings perched on a pad on his shoulder. This person’s robes were so elaborately cut and layered that it was obvious he could never have gone scouting about through the forest as the others did - so this must be the Adept that Snowfire had been talking about. Something about him seemed very familiar, and as the Adept spoke quietly with Snowfire and one or two of the others, Darian finally remembered why. He’d met this man last night, and the man had questioned him with Snowfire’s assistance, because his Valdemaran hadn’t been anywhere near as good as Snowfire’s. This was Starfall, who must be a very powerful mage indeed, if the deference the other Hawkbrothers showed him was any indication.
As Darian found himself to be the focus of all those eyes, avian as well as human, he began to recall how often he managed to get himself into trouble - and that was with people he knew! How could he hope to do anything other than get himself into worse trouble with these folk? And what must they think of him for running away the way he had? Surely they must think he was a dreadful coward at best, and at worst - 
At worst, they must think he was good for nothing except to get them into more trouble. His heart sank, and he began to feel utterly worthless. What good was he? What good had he ever been? Surely these people could only wish him gone out of their lives.
He began to be a little bit afraid of them, too. Oh, Snow-fire seemed approachable and normal enough, but the rest of these folk - well, they were the mysterious and dangerous guardians of the Forest. Who knew what strange customs they had? What if they decided to make him disappear? After all, if he disappeared, there would be less trouble all the way around.
Snowfire and the Adept finished their conversation and came over to Darian, and took seats beside him with him placed between the two of them. That took him aback; he’d expected to be sitting alone, surrounded by strangers, all of them interrogating him. But it seemed as if Starfall and Snowfire had made themselves his advocates, of a sort.
“We’d like to begin now, if you are ready?” Snowfire said, phrasing the words as a question.
“I guess I am,” Darian replied, a bit shaken.
“Some of our scouts do not know your tongue at all, and most do not know it as well as I do,” Snowfire told him, by way of explanation. “So. They will ask the question, and I will act as translator - or I will clarify what they are asking. I would like you to think back to just before you saw the signs of the attack. Had you seen or heard anything in the past few weeks to make you think that there might be such an attack?”
Darian shook his head. “No,” he said truthfully, then added, “but the people don’t go out of the village much, and especially not into the Forest. So they might not see anything. Justyn - “ his voice quavered, “ - Justyn wasn’t much good at ForeSight. He could see the weather all right, but never anything on the ground. That was how we got caught by a flood last fall - the rain that caused it was way up north, he didn’t ForeSee it, and of course he didn’t ForeSee the way it would make the river rise.” He shook his head. “Everybody was so afraid of the Forest that they wouldn’t stir past the fields if they could help it, and nobody was due to go over to one of the other towns for trading for a while.”
Snowfire translated, and some of the scouts discussed what he had said among themselves. “Are towns there, to your north?” called out one.
Darian had to think hard about that one - Justyn had been making him memorize maps, but he had a poor head for it. He had much better luck in remembering things by means of landmarks than by arbitrary marks on a piece of paper. “I don’t think so,” he said, trying to be honest. “That is, I think that the ones north of us are all a lot farther east as well. I think - “ He closed his eyes, and tried to visualize the map he’d been studying. “I think that the border here kind of sticks out in a bump pointing west, and we’re at the tip of the bump.”
There was more discussion, and some sketching in the sand. “Let us go forward then, to the time of the attack,” Starfall said carefully. “When did you first know that there was something wrong?”
“I was up in a tree, looking for mycofoetida fungus,” he replied. “I was pretty high, because we’d kind of harvested everything that was near the ground and near the town. So the first thing I saw was that there were big fires in town.”
One of the Hawkbrothers with a forestgyre said something to Snowfire, who relayed the question. “So the attack had already begun?”
Darian shook his head. “No - no, not yet. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew something had to be wrong, so I left the basket and ran back to town, and what was burning, mostly, was haystacks and sheds, and just a few of them. And I saw Vere - that was one of the farmers – setting a fire himself. I guess they were burning things to keep the bad people from getting them.”
Now discussion among the scouts lasted for some time, before another called out a question that Snowfire translated. “What did the army look like? Exactly? Can you remember any numbers?”
He shuddered at that one, but he had expected that it would be coming, and he closed his eyes and tried to picture the scene at the bridge. “There was Justyn on the bridge,” he said slowly. “Then there was the big monster with the little monster riding on it. Then there were some of the bear-men - they were five across the road, and I think four lines of five - then behind them was a bunch of human people with tall spears - “ He tried so hard to visualize the scene that he began to get a headache. “I couldn’t see behind them very far, but there were a lot of them. They were lined up on the road five across, and - I remember so many spears sticking up in the air that it looked like a burned forest was on the road, for as far back as I could see.”
He opened his eyes at the murmur of surprise, but now attention was completely off him for the moment, as the Hawkbrothers discussed possible numbers represented by what he remembered. From their worried faces, he gathered that the implications weren’t good.
“Were all the bear-men on the bridge?” Starfall asked him quietly.
“I think so,” he said, just as quietly. “But I don’t know for sure, because I ran. Some of them might have jumped into the river, and some of them might have gotten out of the way.”
“And some might have been farther back in the ranks,” Snowfire pointed out.
Starfall sighed and nodded agreement. “Did you see anyone that - “ He groped for words for a moment, then said something incomprehensible to Snowfire.
“Did you see anyone who looked like a mage?” Snowfire asked, then raised one eyebrow as if aware of the useless-ness of such a question.
“I didn’t see anyone wearing fancy robes, or who looked like he was doing any magic,” Darian replied, trying to be as exact as possible. “The thing on the lizard acted more like - like - somebody who was in charge of things, but not really in charge of everything, if you get my meaning. He acted like somebody who had to answer to somebody else. And when he got caught in the fire, the rest of ‘em acted like it was no great thing that he wasn’t there. Like maybe they were getting orders from somebody behind them.”
Darian was doing his best to answer the questions to the fullest, but the more he had to think about Justyn, to see the scene in his mind, the worse he felt. He was doing his best to hold back tears, but it wasn’t easy.
And it didn’t get any easier. “Where were the rest of your people at the time the bridge was destroyed?” Starfall asked.
“Gone,” Darian told him glumly. “They were all running away from the village when I was running toward it.”
“And you turned to run when the bridge was destroyed?” That was one of the scouts, a very young man whose face Darian remembered from last night.
He hung his head, not liking to think what they must believe of him for running. “Yes,” he admitted, flushing hotly, from the top of his head on down.
“And where were the enemy then?” the young man persisted. “Still on the other side of the river?”
Darian looked up, surprised to see that there was no open scorn in their faces. “No - “ he told them. “No, some of them were on the other side when I got out to the fields. I guess they must have forded the river, or something, but they were working their way through the fields, I guess to keep people from escaping.”
“And you eluded them?” came the question.
“Well,” he admitted, “there weren’t many of them. And I - ran away.” Admitting that to all of those people was one of the most difficult things he’d ever had to do, and he felt tension build up suddenly inside him. “I had to!” he cried out, the words forced out by the tension, “I had to! I couldn’t help Justyn. I didn’t know what else to do!”
And then, unexpectedly, he lost control of himself and burst into tears again, and felt another overwhelming wave of shame for losing control of himself, which ironically only made him cry harder.
Starfall patted his shoulder sympathetically, but evidently was not prepared to leave him alone. “I am sorry that we must ask these questions, Darian, but we need the answers. Now, do you remember how many men you saw on your side of the river, and if they were entirely human? An accurate number?”
The questioning went on despite his distress, becoming more and more detailed. Several times he lost control again and began to cry; each time the Hawkbrothers waited politely for him to regain control of himself, then continued from where they had left off.
Finally, though, they had exhausted everything he could tell them about the enemy army - for such, they were all agreed, it was. The questioning turned to another subject, one even more trying for him to face, because the subject was himself. Some of the scouts had gone off, leaving only Starfall, Snowfire, Wintersky, and two others, but the five of them were inexorable in their questions. If all the villagers were afraid to go into the Forest, why was he out there? Why was he not afraid of the Forest? What had happened to his parents? Why had he been signed over to Justyn’s care by the rest of the villagers? Why did the villagers have any say in what was to happen to Darian? Why didn’t Darian want to be a mage? Did he think there was something wrong with being a mage? Did he often run off? What did Justyn do when he disobeyed? Was he thinking of running away at the time of the attack? How did he feel about what Justyn did on the bridge?
It was the last question that undid him. It was bad enough having to admit how often he had gotten into trouble, and worse admitting that the reason he’d been sent out of the village was as a punishment for running away from a duty, but to be asked how he felt about seeing Justyn sacrifice himself - 
Again, he started to cry, but this time he couldn’t get control of himself once he started. Snowfire even tried to soothe him, saying that he wasn’t at fault - but he knew that he was, and he was certain that, in some strange way, he should have been able to do something. But all he had done was to run away, like the coward he was.
“You weren’t there, you don’t know, you didn’t see what I did!” he wailed, his voice breaking with hysteria. “You don’t understand! I’m a coward, I’m a rotten, lying coward, and it’s all my fault!”
And with that, he ran, stumbling and half blinded with tears, out of the clearing, in the direction he’d been led from.
He couldn’t think of what to do, but when he found himself back in front of Snowfire’s hut, the darkness inside seemed a good place to hide himself in, and he blundered in. The owl was gone, it was very quiet, and he crumpled into a miserable heap on the sleeping pallet, crying so hard that he thought he would never be able to stop.
“Now I feel guilty,” Starfall murmured to Snowfire, as the child stumbled out of the gathering space, choking on his sobs.
Snowfire sighed. Nightwind had warned him last night that scenes like this would occur, and probably several times. “Nightwind thinks there are emotional hurts that he has not dealt with, except by avoiding them,” he told the Adept. “She said last night that he was suffering from other troubles, things that perhaps occurred some time ago. She was quite sure he would not even mention them unless he was prodded into it.”
“Well, it seems that one of those hurts was the loss of his parents,” Starfall said, and ran his hand through his silver hair. “Poor child. I would feel terrible if something happened to mine - he must feel dreadful.”
“It seems obvious to me that he has not been allowed to properly mourn for them,” Snowfire pointed out. “These people who took him in seemed to want to make him ashamed of them. Children may be resilient, but - “
“But not that resilient,” Starfall interrupted, his mouth set grimly. “And although these Valdemarans may have meant well, it is said by our cousins that ‘The road to disaster is ordered by the righteous, planned by the well-meaning, and paved with their good intentions.’ I think that, although Dar’ian has many faults, as do most younglings, they were viewed in an exaggerated manner. On the whole, they were in a fair way to ruining a fundamentally good child.”
Snowfire could only nod, for he was in perfect agreement. How can good people manage to so mishandle a boy? he wondered. Was it only that they refused to see he did not fit in their constrained lives? Or were they only trying to be “cruel to be kind,” never realizing they were only being cruel, and their kindness missed the mark altogether? “I will see if Nightwind thinks she should come help with this latest outbreak,” he sighed. “I hate to press the boy, but even if we are going to do nothing more than avoid any contact with these barbarians, we still need his knowledge of the area, and we need to know everything he has seen.”
Starfall frowned at that; Snowfire reflected that in many ways, he was made of sterner stuff than the Adept. Well, Starfall might be the heart of the expedition, but Snowfire was its hands - and it was his job to keep the heart safe. Finally Starfall could contain himself no more.
“I don’t want to destroy the child just to extract information!” Starfall protested, then colored. “He - I apologize; I know you would never countenance any such thing. It is just that I am not used to having children flee my presence in tears.”
Snowfire smiled wanly. “Darian’s fragility has an unnerving effect on all of us, and that effect is redoubled by the burden of what he has told us. Two days ago, we were engaged in simple duty; something routine, not unmixed with pleasure, I think, and a duty we were completely prepared to handle. Now, suddenly we have a mysterious enemy of unknown ability appearing to threaten us, without prior warning of any sort. It is quite enough to make anyone feel tempted to indulge in a fit of strong hysterics. I know I am tempted.”
Starfall stood up, shook out his robes, and tossed back his hair. “I hope you will not think badly of me if I leave the boy in the hands of you and Nightwind - “ he ventured. “I feel as if I am playing the coward myself by doing so, but - “
“But you have other things to do that involve the welfare of more than one boy,” Snowfire reminded him. “And you may think me ruthless in some ways, but if it meant preventing the rise of another Ma’ar, or even another Falconsbane, I would not hesitate to sacrifice myself, the boy, and anyone else I could get to volunteer.”
“I think you would have a surprising number of volunteers,” Starfall replied. “And you are right; I do have a task to complete that cannot wait, regardless of my personal feelings. I am going to leave things in your hands, as usual. Now, more than ever, I need to get those matrices established.”
“You might consider locking the power to yourself,” Snowfire suggested, and as Starfall looked surprised, even shocked, he added, “There are no other Alliance mages living here to require access to it, you can key the rest of us into it if you really think it is necessary. This may prevent trouble. What can be locked securely can always be unlocked - but it cannot be stolen. That is one way to make sure this new mage cannot get at it, and one way to make sure that, if worst comes to worst, he must keep you alive. That would give time for help to come, should disaster befall and you come into captivity.”
“You have a point,” Starfall acknowledged, looking troubled and just a little queasy. Starfall had never had to face a situation like this before, and Snowfire felt very sorry for him. For all that Tayledras were sturdy folk, not all had grown up prepared to face an enemy in life-or-death struggle, and Adepts especially tended to stay toward the power management side of magic. “I’ll consider it. I would not have thought it possible for a mage to work Changes on humans under our current conditions; if he can do that, he may be able to do other unpleasant and unexpected things. That being so - he may be able to bypass anything but a true personal lock.”
As Starfall walked off in the direction of his “workplace,” Snowfire was left to contemplate the smaller problem of Darian.
He’s going to have to cry himself out again, and he hasn’t yet gotten to the point where he’s going to consider my failure to appear at his side as an act of desertion. In fact, he may just be grateful to be left alone. Better to consult with Nightwind first - and possibly with Kelvren. The gryphon had managed to get himself wrought up to a high pitch of excitement at the notion that he might be the one to confront a second Ma’ar - as unlikely as that was - and it might do Kel some good to have something else to think about. Something like one small boy, parentless and friendless, with an apparent affinity for winged things.
So, the next obvious place to go was the rock at the rear of the valley where the gryphon liked to sun himself between scouting forays. And since he’d already been out once this morning, making certain that the barbarians had not gotten too close to the Tayledras’ perimeter, he would definitely be there.
The spring that watered this valley had been made to serve many creative purposes; its water had been divided into several channels that gave everyone access to a thread of stream at the very least. Tayledras liked the sound of running or falling water, and preferred to live in the midst of it. Lacking the lovely, secluded spaces of a Vale, everyone in the team had made up for - or hertasi had made up for - that lack by creating a scrap of water garden for him- or herself. Some had constructed tiny pools with a single water lily or a stand of reeds and a tiny singing-frog, some preferred miniature waterfalls and gurgling brooks filled with stones, and Nightwind had made a clever little aqueduct and water wheel that powered an ever-changing series of frivolous and colorful whirligigs. But the greater part of the water could be diverted to fill two pools, one to be used only for washing, the other for swimming. The former was emptied when the water was dirty into a sand-filter so that the water that sank into the earth was cleansed. Since there was no natural hot spring here, the Tayledras were making do with a steambath. Kelvren, being a fastidious, gryphon, made use of the swimming or washing pool on a daily basis, but could not be persuaded into the steam-hut.
Kelvren’s daily bath was an occasion of much splashing and generally emptied the pool. When every feather on his body was soaked, he would shake himself out, thus ensuring that anyone and anything near by that was not already drenched would receive a fair share of the spray. Then he would flap laboriously to a smooth rock high above the pool, one of the few places in the valley that received sun for most of the day. There he would sit and preen until he considered every feather to be perfectly groomed, at least in a serviceable manner; after that his trondl’irn could do decorative and restorative tendings in the evening.
By checking the angle of the sun, Snowfire reckoned that Kelvren would be about halfway through the grooming process and damp, but not wet. Gryphons, being more complicated and imperfect creatures than the bondbirds, occasionally suffered some deficiencies, and one of the more common was a tail gland that produced an insufficient quantity of oil to keep the feathers healthy and weatherproof. That was Kelvren’s problem, and it was one of Nightwind’s duties as his trondl’irn to make up for that lack. So she would be with him, adding touches of very light, fragrant oil to the shafts of his larger feathers with a small artist’s paintbrush. After that, it was his job to preen it into the barbs. An odd task, but then, caring for gryphons evidently involved a great many odd tasks.
Snowfire walked down the winding paths that threaded the encampment with a lengthened stride that allowed him to move quickly without appearing to hurry. He soon reached the end of the valley and as he came around the last vine curtain and out into the full sunlight beyond the trees, he saw Nightwind sitting beside Kelvren on the gryphon’s favored perch. She was the only person in the entire group who had the same raven-wing-black hair as their Shin’a’in cousins, along with the golden complexion and intense blue eyes. She was not tall, but she held herself so well that she gave the impression of being taller than she was. Her finely-sculptured face reminded him a little of a vixen. She did indeed have a tiny paintbrush in one hand, and a pot in the other, all her attention concentrated on the primaries and secondaries of the wings he had stretched out over her lap like a great, feathered blanket. It looked for all the world as if she were gilding or painting the great bird.
In fact, she could have been painting him; for special occasions, besides wearing body- and leg-jewelry, the gryphons often had their feathers bleached, then dyed or painted, and sometimes strings of beads or bells were attached to the base of the tail-covert feathers or along the shafts of the crest-feathers or primaries. She had told Snowfire that this, too, was one of her skills - an uncommon one among trondl’irn. Kelvren was excessively proud of the fact that his attendant was so skillful a feather-painter. Snowfire himself had never seen a gryphon so decorated, and frankly, could not imagine it. The whole idea seemed very bizarre to him, as if Hweel should suddenly express a desire to be transformed with colors, like a firebird or a scarlet jay. But gryphons, being highly intelligent, had an appreciation for artistry and a particular eye for ornament. Since they were in a very real sense living sculptures by a long-lost master artist, Urtho, they felt rightly that they were canvasses for beauty to be worked upon. Snowfire wondered wryly if Urtho had bred them for vanity, or if this trait had been an “accidental” feature of these created creatures.
He hailed them both; Nightwind responded with a wave of her brush, and Kel with fanning the opposite wing from the one being tended to. He rounded the pool - as he had expected, Kel had pretty much emptied it, and it was now refilling from the spring - and climbed up the path to their rock.
“I take it from your expression that the situation is not exactly a good one?” Nightwind asked, as he sat down beside her with his back to the sun.
“In a word, correct,” he said, as Kel cocked an ear-tuft at him. He quickly summed up the most salient points of the questioning, and Kel snapped his beak and flattened his head-feathers.
“Not good,” the gryphon surmised. “It appearrsss that this trrruly isss an arrrmy, and not jussst a child’sss exagerrration. An arrrmy of rrreasssonable quality, asss well. Well arrnned, well trrrained.”
“And there is a high probability of a mage among them or leading them,” he reminded the gryphon. “My guess would be that he is leading them. And to be honest, we don’t have the strength to risk a direct or even indirect confrontation.”
Kelvren growled, but nodded reluctantly. “I do not like it, but you arrre, unforrrtunately, corrrect. But I sssshould like to venturrre a sorrrtie orrr two, ssstrrrictly ssspy missss-sionsss. At night, perrrrhapsss? With Hweel to guide, I am a good night-flyerrr.”
Snowfire gazed at the gryphon with surprise and admiration. “Now that is one of the better ideas I have heard today,” he replied, very pleased with the idea. “Hweel needs a certain amount of mental guidance, and you should have a backup, so that could be my role. I think I could manage that without needing to use a weapon.”
“That’s good, because until that wound is healed, you won’t be doing anything like shooting a bow,” Nightwind said, rather pointedly.
“I think,” Snowfire replied, with a bit of impatience, “that I am perfectly capable of figuring that out for myself.”
“And what about the time you went climbing right after a concussion, last year?” she asked.
He ignored her, which appeared to cause her a great deal of amusement. “Hweel and I could go in together as far as that clearing where I rescued the boy,” he said to Kelvren. “Then you and Hweel could go on alone. We can get some idea from the boy how near the trees grow to the village, but my impression was that you could easily use them as cover quite close in.”
Kel nodded, clearly satisfied by having something constructive to do.
“Now that you mention the boy,” Nightwind put in, “how badly did he take to being questioned?”
Snowfire winced. “Well, he left the meeting in tears, if that tells you anything.”
“No more than I expected,” she replied with a shrug. “Did he happen to let anything out that would give you a hint to those other emotional burdens he’s carrying?”
“Some of his background. His parents were trappers, and apparently disappeared a year or so ago. The people of his village were afraid of the Forest and have been since the mage-storms brewed up some nasty creatures out there. Evidently the encounters they had with the monsters gave them some severe shocks. So the villagers disapproved of anyone who would go into the Forest on a regular basis, claiming that the Storm-Changed monsters would track such people back to the village to attack them.”
“So what happened when the parents didn’t come back?” Nightwind asked. “What made the villagers take him in?”
“Guilt, maybe,” Snowfire hazarded. “He was apprenticed to the village mage, who evidently was not very good, and didn’t get much respect. Dar’ian did not really want to be a mage himself. And the villagers did their best to persuade him that his parents brought their fate on themselves.” He assumed that Nightwind could make her own assessment from those rather bald facts, probably much more accurately than he could.
“Oh, no - “ she said, looking at him with all traces of amusement gone. “No wonder he’s a tangle of unhappiness inside! I hardly dare think of what he must be going through.”
“I do need your insight,” he reminded her. “You are the only Empath among us, you know.”
“I’m not trained in sorting out human emotions,” she protested, then made a face. “I know, I’m making excuses. Emotions are emotions.”
“But among my peoplesss, ourrr emotional sssolutionsss arrre much morrre dirrrect,” Kel pointed out with a chuckle.
“And your emotions were modeled on your maker’s, which were quite human. Point taken. Now, let me think a moment.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “I’m going to assume that he had a strong and positive bond with his parents, so we have the obvious trauma of losing them, and the not-so-obvious trauma of not knowing what really happened to them. He could even be coping with the loss by inventing reasons why they might still be alive, which is only delaying the mourning period.”
“That sounds reasonable,” he agreed. “The people of his village strongly disapproved of his parents themselves as well as their profession. I don’t imagine too many days went by without Dar’ian hearing how reckless and dangerous his parents were.”
“Which made it imperative to him to defend them, except that defending them would be disrespectful of the adults in the village, who would in turn punish him in some way, never thinking that this was telling him that he either had to disassociate himself from his patents - “
“Not likely. Hrrrr,” Kel rumbled.
“Or take on the same disapproval. It also told him that it was inappropriate to mourn them, since presumably he was now in the care of much ‘worthier’ people.” She shook her head fretfully. “I wish people would think before they do things like this to children! All right, so before he has lived a single day with these people, he has been given the message that they disapprove of him, it is wrong to care deeply about the parents he loved because they didn’t deserve it, and he is to be grateful to people whose ways are utterly at odds with his. That’s a fine way to begin a new life, isn’t it?”
Snowfire coughed, and scratched his head. “There isn’t a great deal I can add to that statement,” he said awkwardly. “Nightwind, pardon me for saying this, but you seem very - direct - for an Empath. The k’Vala Empath was more - how should I put this? - diplomatic.”
“The k’Vala Empath is one of your Elders,” she chuckled. “Besides, you aren’t the one whose emotional turmoil is under discussion. I might be more diplomatic with you.”
“Get back to the sssubject,” Kel grumbled, “orrr the two of you will begin courrrting behaviorrr again, and I will have to sssprrread thisss oil myssself while you ante posssturrring.”
“Oh, excuse me,” she mocked him, dabbing a bit of oil on the tip of his beak in a lightning-quick stroke of her brush. “Since you insist - now, you say he has Mage-Gift and was apprenticed to a rather ineffective village mage, but did not actually want to be a mage?” At his nod, she pursed her lips. “Again, I am going to assume that he liked his Master. So, his Master is of low status and meager ability. He has been bound to this man, regardless of his own preferences. And he has, no doubt, been told how grateful he should be for having been so bound. So - the message he has been given is that he is so worthless he is now forcibly associated with a low-status individual. Because they believe he obviously is incapable of making a logical decision, his own preferences are of no bearing on the situation. Because they tell him he is too ignorant to make his own choices, his future has been determined for him whether or not he likes it, and because he cannot understand why he should be pleased and gratified with the situation, he is obviously morally and mentally deficient.”
“Starfall quoted the Shin’a’in about the road to disaster,” he observed.
She massaged her temples with her fingers, looking pained. “I know that one. You know, it is a very good thing that there are none of them available for me to strangle, for I would be very tempted to do so. I am also very tempted to suggest that what happened to that village seems very like a proper retribution for what they loaded upon this poor child! But, of course, that would be making a moral judgment based on limited information, about another culture.”
“And that would be wrrrrong,” Kel said, with an ironic tilt to his head. “Ssso of courrrsse you could not possssibly do that, unlesss it werrre sufficiently enterrrtaining.” The gryphon half-rumbled, half-burbled a laugh, and received a poke in the side in return.
“Well, now I have some clearer idea of what I will probably be walking into when I go root him out of my ekele,” Snowfire sighed. “Mind you, I have no doubt that the boy is as full of mischief as a gryphlet, is quite convinced that he knows better than any adult born, and is stubborn, willful, and rebellious. Just exactly as any other boy his age would be. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if these folk intended to create a situation designed to bring out the worst in him, they could not have been more effective.”
“That would be my conclusion, Snowfire,” Nightwind agreed, and dropped a thistledown-soft kiss on his forehead. “Now, go and see what you can do to turn the child around. You have a knack for that which astonishes me. For someone who claims to have no ability as an Empath, you certainly handle young creatures well.”
“Let’s hope it is a knack, and not just a streak of good luck,” he replied, and stood up. “And as for you, old bird,” he continued, looking to the gryphon, “I should think a distraction would do him some good, and you are the most distracting creature I can think of. Would you care to help me out with him?”
“Why not?” the gryphon agreed genially. “But - not immediately. I think he isss likely to indulge in morrre weeping, and I have only now gotten my featherrrsss drry.”
“Vain bird,” Snowfire told him with mock severity, and took himself back down the path to his ekele, leaving Night-wind and Kel together on the sunning rock.
He had no doubt that Kel was waiting to get Nightwind’s advice about how the gryphon should handle the boy, and not for any specious reason about drying feathers. That was fine; they should, ideally, have different approaches. After all, they couldn’t both play “elder brother.” Let me see; Starfall obviously is better suited to the role of “respected elder” - and when Dar’ian sees that a mage is the highest statused person in our group, that might make him change his mind about magic. Nightwind may be waiting to see if he accepts her as “mother surrogate” - it would be better if he made that choice. I think he is a little too clever to accept her if she puts herself forward in that role, and I know she knows it could be trouble if she tried to force it on him. The gryphon being the gryphon, he will no doubt take the role of “mysterious wonder” or “entrancing enigma” and play his appearance for all he can, to work in advice we could not give.
As he continued to plan out several possible approaches to take, he reached the door of his hut and carefully parted the curtain of vines. The boy was huddled up on his pallet with his face to the wall - and somewhat to Snowfire’s surprise, the owl, who was normally rather aloof, had come down off his perch and was on the ground beside the boy with one wing stretched over him as if Hweel were sheltering a nestling.
The owl turned his head and fastened his great golden eyes on Snowfire as the Tayledras entered. Instead of words, Hweel Sent emotion, a complicated flavor of distress and protectiveness.
:Boy hurts. Inside, loss. Shelter lost, caring lost. Pain, but no blood.: Hweel finally articulated.
:I know,: Snowfire replied simply. :I’ll do the best I can for him.:
Hweel relaxed immediately, as if certain, now that Snow-fire understood and had promised to help, that Snowfire could solve all of the boy’s complicated problems. Sometimes Hweel’s absolute trust in his bondmate’s ability to solve any problem was as irritating as it was touching, but Snowfire took great care never to convey that irritation.
Hweel relinquished his place on the boy’s pallet, waddling over to be lifted up to his perch, and once the owl was back where he belonged, Snowfire took up the place Hweel had vacated. He touched Darian’s shoulder carefully.
“Dar’ian,” he said, quite calmly. “I came to see if you were feeling any better.”
His immediate answer was a sniff, but Darian at least sat up. “N-no,” the boy replied, his voice hoarse.
Snowfire suppressed a chuckle, which would have been taken amiss. At least the lad is honest! “I’m sorry to hear that; no one wanted to upset you, least of all Starfall. He is quite personally distressed that you were made so unhappy by our questions; his last words to me were that he is not accustomed to having children run from him in tears.”
Darian rubbed his reddened eyes and sniffed again, but looked up at Snowfire with mingled surprise and disbelief. “Why should he care? It doesn’t matter how I feel - “
“But it does,” Snowfire interrupted. “It matters a great deal. Adept Starfall is a great favorite among the children of our Vale; he is accustomed to being liked for his kindness as well as respected for his wisdom, and it makes him feel badly if someone is hurt by his actions or words.”
“I’m not worth worrying about,” Darian mumbled, looking down at the ground. “There’s no reason why he should think about me. There’s no reason why any of you should think about me, you’re all important people. You’re all these amazing warriors and mages, you can do things that nobody back in Errold’s Grove would believe, and I’m - I’m just the worthless troublemaker nobody else wants.”
Snowfire nodded to himself mentally as the boy’s words echoed what Nightwind had already surmised.
“I’m sorry to hear you say that, since I don’t in the least agree with you. I truly hate to spoil a friendship by beginning it with a quarrel,” he replied lightly, and was rewarded once again with Darian’s glance of dumbfounded astonishment.
“How can you say that?” the boy asked, incredulously. “There isn’t anybody in Errold’s Grove who’d believe their ears if they heard you say that!”
“Why, what would they say?” Snowfire asked, ingenuously.
“That - that I’m ungrateful, disrespectful, and I don’t know my place,” Darian said, in what was very nearly a growl, turning his gaze away from Snowfire’s face and back down to the ground.
Snowfire made a noncommittal sound. “And why would they say that you’re ungrateful?”
“Because after all the effort they’ve gone to in order to make sure I had someone to take care of me, and have food and shelter, and the trouble they’ve gone to in order to see that I was going to learn a useful trade, I’m not grateful, and I don’t know my place,” Darian muttered, his voice full of resentment.
Snowfire shifted his weight, and took a more comfortable pose, giving himself time to think out his answer. “It seems to me,” he said carefully, “that you already had the grounding in a very good trade, that being the one that your parents followed. It seems to me that - provided you liked that trade, of course - you could, with a little effort, have found someone else in that trade to take you as half-trained apprentice, and thus you would have supplied your own food, shelter, and Master. So I fail to see why they should think you should consider yourself beholden to them for what they did. After all, the choice of caretaker, lodging, and trade was theirs, not yours, and you had never asked them to undertake it on your behalf. If someone cooks food I do not care for and offers it to me when they know I am not hungry, should I be grateful to them?”
“Some people would think so,” Darian replied, but his spirits seemed a little higher.
He shrugged. “Then some people are foolish, and that is their problem, not mine, nor should it be yours. However, there is this to consider; would any of their children, at your age, have been able to do as you would have done had they waited to let you try?”
“No,” he admitted. “They’d have been pretty helpless. They’d have had to get a relative to take care of ‘em and sort things out for them.”
“Then wouldn’t it be reasonable to say that they were taking care of things for you as their own children would have needed care?” Snowfire waited for Darian to make the next leap of logic.
“I guess so.” Darian didn’t say anything else, but Snowfire could tell he was thinking about something. I hope it’s that he can see why they would expect him to be grateful, even though he wasn‘t obliged to feel gratitude. Poor lad. He was a tervardI being brought up by hertasi, who didn’t understand why he wanted to live at the tops of trees instead of a nice, safe burrow deep in the ground. And he didn’t understand why he should be grateful that they kept giving him the room farthest from the exit!
“Well,” Snowfire said at last. “Why would they say you were disrespectful?”
“Because I pretty much told them what you just did,” Darian said with some wonderment, so surprised to hear his own thoughts echoing from Snowfire’s mouth that he was hard put to keep his eyes down on the ground.
“Well, if you told them in approximately the same words that I used, I can understand being called disrespectful,” Snowfire chuckled. “You might consider cultivating a more diplomatic approach to avoid conflict in the future. But what is this about ‘knowing your place’?”
Darian looked up at him from beneath a pair of fiercely knitted eyebrows. “I guess I wasn’t humble enough,” he replied. “Old Justyn, he just let everybody treat him like the whole village’s servant, and I guess I was supposed to act the same.”
“Really?” Snowfire did not let his expression of friendly interest slip. “Perhaps, though, it wasn’t that they treated Justyn as if he were a servant, but as if they had become so accustomed to his services that they took him for granted?”
“Maybe.” Darian’s fierce expression eased a little. “I suppose that was it. I guess when you do things for people and they get used to you being there, it’s natural to kind of get taken for granted.”
“Exactly true.” Snowfire nodded calmly. “That is why, from time to time, our Vale Healer goes out into the deep Forest to meditate and refresh his spirit. When we have to do without him for a while, we notice again how much he does. Of course, if any of us were to have a genuine emergency, he would return, but that rarely happens. When he comes back, he is invigorated by his rest, and we are properly appreciative of all he does. Now, that your Master did not do this is as much his own fault as the villagers’. Our Shin’a’in cousins have a saying, ‘To treat a person like a carpet, it is necessary that one do the walking, and one allow himself to be walked on.’ “
Darian actually smiled a little, and rubbed his reddened nose with the back of his hand. “That’s a funny saying. But I guess I see the point.”
“It seems to me,” Snowfire continued, with perfect calm, “that the people of your village could have used a deal more exposure to the wider world, and were stubborn and loud in their refusal to change their ways.”
Now Darian laughed out loud. “That’s a funny thing for a Hawkbrother to say!” he replied. “Hellfires, you people never even came out of the Forest till just a little bit ago! Most people thought you had feathers instead of hair!”
“That would be the tervardi, not the Tayledras,” Snowfire chuckled. “And again, the cousins say, ‘It takes a mule to repeat a mule’s bray,’ which is to say, the one most likely to recognize a fault is the one who suffers from the same fault. Hmm?”
“I guess so.” Darian grew quiet and thoughtful, and Snowfire wondered if he had caught the second lesson - that a great deal of the trouble between himself and his guardians lay in the fact that neither of them cared to compromise the vision they had for Darian’s future. A clue that he just might have came a moment later, when he asked plaintively, “Do I have to be a mage?”
“That is a good question, Dar’ian. Well, you have the Gift, and it seems reasonable to train it, so that it is at least under your control,” Snowfire replied judiciously. “Having a Gift is a bit like having a very large and active dog. Think about the large dogs you have been around in your life, from pups to adults. If you do not train a dog to obey you - what happens?”
“He jumps all over people, steals what he wants, maybe bites someone.” Darian nodded, as if the analogy made sense to him.
“But if he is trained, even if you do not go to the extent of training him for - say - pulling a cart, or searching for lost children, he will stay out of trouble. That is why you should at least train your Gift. Otherwise, like the dog, it is likely to break loose and do something unanticipated, usually at a bad moment.”
Darian sighed and propped his chin on his hand. “It’s just that, before you did that stuff with the bandage, I couldn’t see much you could do with magic that you couldn’t do with a pair of hands.”
Snowfire stretched and thought quickly. He needed to find something that would convince Darian to undertake real training, which would mean a great deal of hard work.
“Well, in the long run, you are correct. If I wish to know something happening at a distance, I could work the magic to find it out, or I could go there and find it out for myself. If I needed to hide myself, I could work the magic to do so, or I could wear the correct clothing and learn to move without making a sound. Now - I could not call lightning by myself, for instance, but the Artificers of Valdemar have a powder that will certainly leave a large hole and make one think that lightning was called. So you are in the right of it. But - the black powder does not work in the rain, sometimes the right clothing still would not conceal a watcher, and it is not always convenient to go off on a journey to learn what is going on somewhere.” He spread his hands wide. “You see? It is good to know how to do things without magic, but it is good to know how to do them with magic as well. It gives you more options than just one or the other.”
“Justyn couldn’t do much,” Darian said meditatively. “Magic, I mean. Something was wrong with his head, he said, and he couldn’t do magic like he used to. I don’t know.”
“That may have been as much the result of the mage-storms as anything else,” Snowfire replied. “With the way that magic was scattered, he may not have had the power to do the things he used to - and that may be why he lost some of the respect that he had in the past. And also - we do not know why, but a small number of mages were affected by the Storms. Some lost ability, some gained it. He may have been one of those who lost it, and that is hardly his fault. Do you fault a man for no longer chopping wood when he has lost a hand?”
“But he figured out ways of doing things that needed getting done, without magic!” Darian protested.
“And that is certainly to his vast credit, I have no argument with you. It is too bad that your villagers were so certain that something done by magical means is intrinsically more valuable than something done any other way that they forgot that the value lies in the accomplishment, not how it was done.” Snowfire decided enough had been said on that issue. “Well, that, after all, is how it is said that carnival sharpsters manage to separate the gullible from their earnings, by accomplishing the ordinary with so much flash and tinsel that their victims forget that they are seeing nothing but a gaudy illusion overlaid on the absolutely commonplace.”
Darian looked so puzzled by that last remark that Snowfire reminded himself sharply that he was only dealing with a young lad, no matter how clever the boy sounded.
“I don’t know what that means,” the boy admitted honestly, impressing the Hawkbrother even more.
“It matters not, Dar’ian, we can talk about it another time. We have time to be friends. But for now - “ He led Darian, gently and by careful questions, to talk about his parents.
He discovered that Nightwind had been correct about Darian’s close and affectionate relationship with his parents. He also learned that, as she had surmised, he still held to the hope that they were still alive somewhere.
He saw no reason to disabuse the boy of that hope. Certainly his guardians had made that attempt, and failed, and after all, what harm did it do him? That hope had probably sustained him, rather than harming him in any way, and had helped him to keep his spirit intact. That was hardly a bad thing.
Finally he persuaded Darian to come out of the ekele, get something to eat, and continue answering questions.
“You will feel better with a meal inside you,” Snowfire assured him, as he led Darian to the central cooking area. “I know that I always do. I would also like you to meet the rest of us one at a time, rather than facing all of us in a group. That cannot have been comfortable.”
Darian averted his eyes for a moment. “It felt like - like I was in trouble again, and you - you people are pretty scary,” he murmured uncomfortably.
Snowfire mentally berated himself for not seeing that beforehand. “I apologize, Dar’ian, but that is how we always conduct our information-meetings. When people must know some crucial intelligence, we all come together to hear it and ask questions, then folk go off to think about the situation, then return some time later to discuss possible strategies. You were not in trouble - but you were the focus and the most important part of the meeting.”
Darian flushed, and Snowfire decided that the subject had better be changed. “Never mind,” he said. “Let’s get food.” By that time they had reached the cook shelter, which had clay ovens constructed on the spot for baking, open fires with tripods for pots and spits for roasting small beasts and birds whole, and grills over coals for fish. Snowfire spotted the hertasi Ayshen taking fresh, hot bread from one of the ovens, and headed straight in that direction, for there was nothing he loved so much as hot bread. It was only when he noticed that Darian was no longer beside him that he turned to see the boy staring at the little hertasi with an expression of horrified surprise.
“Dar’ian?” he asked, puzzled. “Is something wrong?”
Darian’s face was as pale as a cloud. “What - is - that?” he whispered, as if he was afraid to make a sound lest the hertasi suddenly leap at him and rend him with claw and fang.
“That is Ayshen, a good friend of mine, and a wonderful baker,” Snowfire said, deciding that the best approach would be to be completely matter-of-fact about the hertasi. Did the Valdemarans have no hertasi in their land? Evidently not, judging by Darian’s pinched expression. “His mate Drusi makes a better stew, but no one can rival his bread, and his meat pies are worth suffering any hardship to earn! Come, I’ll introduce you.”
Darian could hardly hang back after that, and he trailed along after Snowfire with wide eyes and a set look of determination on his face. “Ayshen!” Snowfire hailed. “I am about to perish of famine, and our young friend Dar’ian k’Valdemar has not even had breakfast. Surely you can take pity on us and feed us!”
Darian obviously understood none of this - probably not even his name, given that Snowfire had given it the Tayledras pronunciation - but he could not misunderstand the tone of friend-to-friend that Snowfire used. Nor could he misunderstand the similar tone with which Ayshen replied to this sally.
“Shame on you, Snowfire. I thought the hatchling was in your charge! You are supposed to feed hatchlings, don’t you know that? Are you trying to stunt his growth through starvation so that you will no longer be the runt of this pack of humans?” Ayshen swiftly tore one of the steaming loaves in half, then tore each half in half, lengthwise. Onto two of the quarters he laid juicy slices of venison he carved from a roast over one of the fires, knife flashing in his blinding speed. He topped the meat with some mouth-watering concoction of his own, made of finely chopped herbs, wild garlic, and watercress from a set of nested simmering pots. Then he restored the top quarters of each, and handed one to each of them. Darian took his gingerly, unable to take his eyes from the hertasi’s lizardlike face.
Ayshen was a k’Leshya hertasi, and did not suffer from the painful shyness shared by all of the Pelagirs hertasi, including his mate. So he was neither offended nor alarmed by Darian’s reaction.
“The boy has never seen one of us, eh?” Ayshen chuckled. “No worries. I mind me the time I saw my first Haighlei; I thought my eyes would pop out of my head. To me, the idea that you humans had hide colors that wildly different just set my brain afire.” He turned to Darian, and cleared his throat.
“To hearth, bed, and bread, be welcome,” he said in slow and uncertain Valdemaran.
Darian jumped, but held onto his meal with both hands, and made an awkward little bow. “Thanks be to the keeper of the house; my hand is at his service,” he replied in the formal manner.
Ayshen chuckled. “Tell him he shouldn’t have said that - I need a dishwasher today! You were on the roster, but with that bad arm, you can’t lift pots. It’s probably why you got the wound, as an excuse.”
Snowfire obediently translated, and a slow smile crept across Darian’s face. “I wouldn’t mind - if he really needs the help,” the boy said shyly. “I used to do all the dishwashing for Justyn - and - I could pay you back a little by taking your place.”
The glance he gave Snowfire had more than a shadow of hero worship to it, but Snowfire knew how to deal with that. “If you have no problem in taking my place, I would be grateful,” he replied and made a face. “On the whole, I don’t mind washing dishes; it’s preferable to a lot of other camp chores that I won’t escape because of my bad arm. And I will miss out on the special treats Ayshen keeps for his helpers.”
The ploy worked; he not only established that he was grateful to Darian for volunteering, but that the job of dishwasher brought with it some extra rewards.
It was arranged that Darian would report to Ayshen after the evening meal; with a bit of trial, they determined to both of their satisfaction that Ayshen could direct the boy with a bit of mime and a great deal of pointing.
That certainly went well, Snowfire thought with satisfaction, as he led Darian off in the direction of the dyheli grazing grounds. He is resilient, I must give him credit for that. Now that he has the concept of nonhuman partners planted in his mind, I’ll show him the next set.
* * *
Darian had hardly known what to think when he first saw the hertasi cook, Ayshen. The creature had looked - at least at first - so very much like the horrible Thing that had been leading the enemy fighters!
But Snowfire hadn’t been afraid of Ayshen, and the hertasi himself had been very kind - as Ayshen had put together a lunch for the two of them, and as Darian had gotten over his fright enough to look closely at him, it was obvious that he wasn’t very much like the enemy Thing at all. Darian found himself volunteering to act as a dishwasher, and even more surprising, found himself looking forward to the task. At least now he would be able to accomplish something useful here!
It was so odd, though - feeling an urgent need to be useful.
“So - what’s a hertasi, anyway?” he asked Snowfire around a mouthful of bread.
“They are, so we believe, one of the creations of that same great mage who ended the Mage Wars,” Snowfire replied. “As you saw, they are descended from lizards, and they share many characteristics with lizards. Cold sends them into a stupor, and extreme cold could kill or injure them very badly. They act, more or less, as our helpers; they cook and clean for us, make clothing, act as the assistants for artisans - when they are not, themselves, artisans as well. In return, we give them the protection of our Vales and scouts and things that they need. They tend to live in colonies, although they take single mates. They are one of the five nonhuman races that we Tayledras associate and work with.”
“Five?” Darian could hardly believe it. “There are five kinds of - of - things that you have around your Vales?”
“As equal partners and helpers and not always in the Vales. The tervardi, or Bird-people, the kyree, or Fur-brothers, and the dyheli, or Straight-horns, usually live outside our Vales. The hertasi and the gryphons in our Vales entwine their lives with ours; the others live entirely separate lives from ours, and only become partners with us where there are specific tasks that are better done with all our peoples.” Snowfire was so matter-of-fact about this - as if he were telling Darian how the Hawkbrothers arranged to get things from traders, or worked with the Valdemaran Guard! Darian found his head swimming. First, two-legged, intelligent lizards, and now this!
“In fact,” Snowfire was continuing, “we have dyheli with us as well as hertasi on this journey. They have volunteered, in token of their separate alliance with Valdemar, to act as our mounts and burden bearers. Selenay has offered, in light of the fact that they are grazers and most of the Pelagirs are forested, to sponsor colonies of dyheli into some of the unused grazing lands on the western border, and our dyheli are also along as scouts to investigate this possibility. We could say that, as grazers, they wish to find if the lands and available grasses and plants suit their tastes.”
Darian giggled at the word play. “What - what do these dyheli look like?” Darian asked. “I mean, I’ve heard stories, about some of the things in Hawkbrother lands, but I’ve never seen any.”
Snowfire smiled. “That, my friend, you are about to see for yourself. Look there - “
He pointed as they came around another of the ubiquitous vine curtains - and there, in a sunny meadow, was a small herd of something vaguely like deer with ghostlike coloration of pale beige and cream.
At least, they had four legs, hooves, and two delicately curved, unbranching horns on their heads. But the heads themselves were much larger than that of a deer, the enormous brown eyes looked more forward than a deer’s did. But the biggest difference was in the shape of the skull; a small and delicate muzzle, comparatively speaking, but an elongated cranium, something that could easily contain a brain the size of a man’s.
As he and Snowfire stood at the edge of the clearing, every dyheli head came up, the humans were examined closely, but swiftly, and then every dyheli head came down again, back to the important business of grazing.
Darian blinked at them in awe; he was no stranger to the concept of an intelligent, four-legged creature. After all, he was a native of Valdemar, and you’d have to have the brains of a wheel of cheese not to know all about Companions. But these creatures were so - different.
“Do they talk?” he asked in a whisper.
“Not like the hertasi do,” came the reply. “The dyheli speak mind-to-mind. Some of us find it difficult to speak to them, as some of us are better at Mindspeech with non-humans than others.” Snowfire smiled down at him. “I happen to be one of the lucky ones; I find it as easy to speak with them as I do with you. Easier, in fact, for I am not translating into a foreign tongue.”
Darian turned his attention back to the dyheli. “I wonder if I could learn to talk to them,” he mused out loud.
:Why not simply try?:
“Because I don’t know if I can - “ he began, then realized that Snowfire had not spoken aloud.
In fact, the voice he had heard had been entirely in his mind - and had not been Snowfire’s.
One of the dyheli had raised his head again, and was walking toward them, his eyes centered on Darian. The delicate creature had no expression to read, but the voice in Darian’s head was warm and amused. :It is a great advantage to speak this way, little brother,: the dyheli stag said to him. :It requires no translators, and it is very, very difficult to lie or be lied to. It tends to make all things level, as it were.:
Darian stared up into the stag’s huge, brown eyes, and didn’t realize that he was holding his breath until his lungs began to ache. Belatedly, he took a gasping breath of air, as Snowfire chuckled at his expression.
“Tyrsell tends to be a bit more direct than I do,” he told Darian. “I would have waited to test you for Mindspeech, but his approach is to simply try it and see if you can Hear him. Well - I suppose this means that now I shall have to teach you to use that Gift - “
:Oh, not immediately; his natural shields are good enough to hold for now,: the stag replied lazily. :And if it comes to that, I’m as good a teacher as you are. Better, maybe - I’ve had more practice at it.:
“Are you volunteering?” Snowfire asked, as Darian felt his mind reeling under this latest revelation.
:Why not? The boy could use a competent teacher,: the stag replied teasingly. :Actually, and more honestly, young Darian, you need a teacher with a little less to attend to than our friend Snowfire. I have more time to spare than he.: The stag lifted his head to look up into Snowfire’s face. :But, I think, Snowfire, that it would be a good thing if you let me give Darian your language now. It would be better for him if he did not require a translator.:
Then, for several moments, the stag and Snowfire looked into each others’ eyes, and Darian sensed that they were exchanging words that he couldn’t “hear.” Snowfire was frowning, as if he didn’t agree with what was being said. Finally, though, the Hawkbrother sighed and nodded.
“Dar’ian,” he said carefully, “I was going to work a very small magic that would allow you to understand our tongue - but as my friend and herd leader has just reminded me, he can do the same thing without magic, and with fewer problems. But - there are some things that will also happen that you might consider problems.”
“Like what?” Darian asked immediately. Having people talking over his head and not being able to understand them had been making him very frustrated, although he had been too polite to say anything.
“It might hurt a little. It will definitely be a shock to your system. You might get some of his memories as well, or mine, since he will be taking the language of the Tayledras from my mind. They’d probably crop up in your dreams, and they might be disturbing. You already know that I am used to fighting. My friend is also a warrior - he has to be, or he couldn’t lead the herd - and he knows how to use his weapons.” Snowfire glanced at the dyhelfs horns significantly.
“I don’t care - I mean, I’d really like it if he could do that,” Darian said quickly. Just at the moment, the idea that he might finally be able to understand all the people chattering around him made him almost sick with longing.
:Then look into my eyes, young one,: the dyheli commanded, and without another thought, Darian obeyed.
Time slowed, then stopped.
He came to himself lying flat on the grass, gazing up at the blue sky, feeling very much as if someone had kicked his feet out from underneath him.
“I did warn you,” Snowfire said, holding out a hand to help him up - and as Darian took it and clambered clumsily to his feet, lightning flashes and glitter dancing in his eyes, he suddenly realized that the language had not been Valdemaran.
“So you did,” he agreed, and to his delight, he realized a moment later that he had replied in the Hawkbrother tongue without thinking about it. He felt the back of his head gingerly, but the ground had been nicely cushioned with grass, and there was no knot on his skull, which was a good thing. He did have a headache, though, which felt as if someone had taken the top off his skull, looked inside, stirred the contents up a bit, and then replaced the skull top and left him lying in the grass.
“Are you quite all right?” Snowfire asked him, with concern.
“I think so, but I’ve got a headache,” he admitted as he rubbed his temples. “It doesn’t seem to want to go away.” Then he realized that he had not yet thanked Tyrsell, and he flushed.
“Thank you very much, sir,” he said, turning hastily to the waiting dyheli, and bowing a little. “I hope I don’t sound as if I’m complaining, because I’m not! Being able to understand people - “ He groped for words.
:Being able to understand people will prevent you from feeling like such an outsider,: the stag said smoothly. :You have quite enough troubles without that added to your burden. Being able to understand their words will help you to understand them. And you are quite welcome; be sure to come to me when you have time for a lesson in Mindspeech. Until then, I hope you learn to enjoy being among us. It is the way of a herd to encompass and support.:
Darian said that he would, reflecting that at least a dyheli would not be able to smack his fingers with a rod like the Widow Clay who had taught him his letters had. The stag nodded and moved back toward his herd, flowing over the grass in a way that hardly resembled walking.
Darian steadied himself against Snowfire for a few long minutes. His head felt compressed, twisted, and then expanded again to a size larger than his skin could hold. There were words for things he had never seen inside his mind now, and images associated with rituals and crafts, and trees and plants, and women and men, and clothing and tools, and names for all of them. There were even some images of things he did not want to understand, and a few that he didn’t think he was quite old enough for. There were even names for tastes he had never tasted, and feelings his body had never known. Darian would have felt disassociated and frightened enough to scream, if it weren’t for the effect of hopeful wonderment these new words were having upon him. So many great things had now touched him, and were a part of him, and there was a spark inside him - now that he had names, he wanted to learn the meanings.
“Well, if you have a headache,” Snowfire said gently after a few minutes, “then this will be a good excuse to go find Nightwind and introduce you to the third species that is with us on this expedition.” Snowfire patted him on the shoulder and rubbed at Darian’s back a bit, companionably. “Nightwind can get you a soothing-potion, and you can meet Kelvren.”
“Who’s Kelvren?” Darian asked, both curious and a little apprehensive. His headache had subsided from the worst disorientation, and he tried to remember what the other non-human races were that Snowfire had mentioned. One was kyree, and one was tervardi - 
“Oh, I think you’ll like him a great deal,” Snowfire said with a chuckle. “Though you mustn’t let him intimidate you. He won’t try to intimidate you, it is simply that sometimes, his people do, just by being themselves. Kelvren is - a gryphon.”

Five

Snowfire had been struck speechless when Tyrsell offered to “give” Darian the Tayledras language. Just what is he planning, here? he asked himself - not with any suspicion that Tyrsell intended any kind of wrong, but because of what that “gift” would entail. For one thing, Snowfire certainly hadn’t expected the dyheli to make any such offer, and for another, it was definitely an offer of far more than appeared on the surface.
:What do you think you’re doing?: he asked the stag. :Not that this isn‘t a great deal more expedient, but the boy has no idea what this is going to mean to him!:
:That is precisely why I suggested it,: Tyrsell replied calmly, blinking as lazily as if he had suggested a change of grazing spots. :In this case, it is quite true that although what he does not know about what we’ll have to do is not going to hurt him, what he doesn’t know about the Mind-Gifts is, and if by taking a few shortcuts we can keep his own budding abilities from harming him - and, not so incidentally, us - where’s the wrong?:
:The wrong is in the deception,: Snowfire told him severely. :You’re deceiving him into thinking this is something very simple.:
:What deception? He won’t care about what we have to do to put the knowledge in his mind, he’s only interested in the results.: Tyrsell, as was the case with most of the dyheli, had a slightly different perspective on morality than humans did. To Snowfire’s mind, this was one of the two-edged swords of being allies with nonhumans. Dyheli focused on expediency, hertasi saw no harm in meddling in private affairs because hertasi had no such thing as a “private affair,” and gryphons were downright bloody-minded at times.
:And he is rightly concerned only with results, too,: Tyrsell continued. :We know that the fact is that we’ll have to establish links and shields in order to get that knowledge into him, but that’s of no concern to him. He could care less, and since those links and shields are not only not going to harm him, but are actually going to help him, I think that the fact that we‘II have to put them in place without his actual consent is irrelevant.:
Snowfire couldn’t put into words why he objected to the dyheli’s high-handed assumption that mucking about with someone else’s mind didn’t matter as long as the results were good - but he Sent his feelings about it as forcefully as he could.
Tyrsell remained calm, switching his tail to ward off some troublesome flies as he continued to bombard Snowfire with impersonal logic, his eyes warm and serene above the dark cheek-stripes that made his face look like a painted mask. :Let’s look at this from the position of efficiency. Can you really afford the time, effort, and energy it would take to give him the language magically? Of course not. Can you keep shepherding him around and translating for him? That’s equally absurd. Can you explain to him what links and shields are in a way he‘II understand right now, given that you are not only working with someone who doesn’t have the understanding of Mind-Gifts, but are having to translate from your language to his? Not a chance. So, by doing this, you free yourself for other work, you give him some much-needed autonomy, and you keep him from being overwhelmed if his Gift of Mindspeech suddenly decides to develop. What would you, what could you do if it decided to flower overnight at a time when you were off on a scouting sortie or trying to fend off those barbarians? Expect Wintersky to take care of it? He’s barely into controlling his own Mindspeech as it is! Leave it to Stariall? And just how is he supposed to hold the matrices at the same time? Nightwind’s Mindspeech is rudimentary; she hasn’t the tools to teach a beginner. And who else is there he will trust?:
Snowfire frowned, but he had to admit that Tyrsell was right. :You come perilously close to amorality,: he told the dyheli.
:Never. My morality is just that of the herd, that the herd is more important than a single member; and when it comes to it, your morals are the same. Didn‘t you just say that if it would save the world from another Ma‘ar, you wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice yourself and the boy and anyone else?: Tyrsell held his head up and looked Snowfire right in the eyes, challenging him stallion to stallion, daring him to deny what he had told Starfall not more than a few moments ago.
:I said, I’d sacrifice volunteers - : he replied weakly, but Tyrsell had him, and they both knew it. :You win,: he admitted. :This time.:
:And next time, you may.: Now that the challenge was over, Tyrsell was perfectly amiable again. :Don’t worry so much about winning arguments, my friend. Concentrate on keeping the herd intact and in good health.:
Darian was pathetically eager to have the ability to understand those around him, and from the little Snowfire could sense from him, he would have been willing to get it at almost any cost. That soothed his raw conscience a little. After he’d given his immediate consent, the boy waited expectantly, eyes focused on Tyrsell’s, for the magic to happen.
:Get ready to catch him,: the dyheli warned, and reached out to seize the boy’s mind. This was the greatest Gift the herd leaders had; the ability to overwhelm any mind not heavily shielded - and many that were - without any damage to that mind whatsoever. This was how a herd leader could guide his frightened followers to safety when they were hysterical with terror and unable to think or reason. He could seize as many as a dozen minds at once or even more, and use those he controlled to guide the rest of the herd behind him. Dyheli never seemed to resent this, perhaps because herd morality was as deeply a part of them as individuality was for Tayledras. This was how the herd leaders were chosen. Instead of grappling horn-to-horn as their distant ancestors had, they fought mind-to-mind, and the strongest mind, or the one with the most endurance, won the right to father the next generation and guide this one.
A moment later, Snowfire caught the child as he collapsed, all his joints suddenly gone loose, every muscle limp. He laid Darian down carefully in a spot of sun on the grass, and lowered all his own shields, joining his mind as intimately to Tyrsell’s as he ever had to Hweel’s. More so, perhaps, since that melding was so natural a part of a dyheli’s mind.
With the two of them working as one, the speed with which they built temporary shields around Darian’s mind was literally that of thought. Then Snowfire formed a deep link to Darian below the level of thought itself, so deep that the boy would never know it was there, and never detect any difference in the way he felt. While he held that link wide open, Tyrsell went to work on Snowfire’s memories. The herd leader extracted, not only the language of the Tayledras, but the knowledge of the language, and placed it carefully into the boy’s own memories, building it up from the level just above instinct, the way that a baby learns. Now Darian would not have to think to translate - he would have the Tayledras tongue as if he had been bilingual from his very first word.
In this fashion, Tyrsell’s way was infinitely better than the spell and Mindtouch that Snowfire had used to learn Valdemaran. Snowfire made a mental note to one day ask Darian - once the boy really knew what he was consenting to - to allow Tyrsell to reverse the process, and give Snowfire such a sure knowledge of the language of Valdemar.
Tyrsell was swift and certain; there was something about the way that a dyheli’s mind worked that (when they had Tyrsell’s particular Gifts) made them instinctive geniuses at laying in language-paths. In the time it took Snowfire’s heart to take three, slow beats, Tyrsell was done. He withdrew his mind first, leaving Snowfire to close all but the deep-link path behind him, and setting the shields he had laid in place to fade as the boy took over his own shielding needs. Darian would hear and understand any deliberate Mindtouch on the part of any dyheli or Tayledras, but no one could force his mind open, or really do anything other than talk with him. And Darian would never hear unwanted thoughts intruding on him if his ability to Mindhear suddenly became more than the close-range, rudimentary ability he had now.
As Snowfire withdrew and made some swift observations of the boy’s potential Gifts, he realized that such a thing was far more likely than he had thought when Tyrsell first proposed this operation. Perhaps it was the sheer number of traumas that the boy had passed through, but - well, going abruptly from “normal” to wide open was a very real possibility.
And it was a good thing that Snowfire had the deep-link in place. At that level, he would not eavesdrop on the boy’s private thoughts, but he would know if Darian was in distress, he would know if any of the boy’s potentials suddenly opened up, and he would be able to track Darian if he somehow got separated from the Tayledras encampment.
Tyrsell had certainly noticed the same things, and very diplomatically did not say “I told you so.” :A neat piece of work,: was all he said, and about that moment, the boy awoke - probably with a splitting headache. Still, Snowfire thought, not without sympathy, the spell would have given him as bad a headache, and maybe worse.
Darian’s words and actions confirmed that diagnosis, but he still remained polite enough despite the pain to thank Tyrsell for his efforts. Snowfire noted with pleasure that he spoke Tayledras with the unconscious ease of a native.
Tyrsell lost all interest in the boy now that the work was complete; that, too, was typical of dyheli, and because Snowfire was used to it, he wasn’t at all offended. Darian was too preoccupied with his headache to notice what could have been considered very rude behavior, but was really only more dyheli “expediency.”
But the boy all but forgot the pounding in his skull when Snowfire told him that he was about to meet a gryphon.
“A gryphon?” Darian asked incredulously, his eyes lighting up with absolute delight. “A real gryphon? Here?”
“A real gryphon,” Snowfire told him, smiling a little at his wide eyes. “Nightwind is only incidentally acting as our Healer; her main job is to be Kelvren’s trondi’irn.” Since that word was not Tayledras, but Kaled’a’in, and not part of the language as Darian had “learned” it, Snowfire explained it. “A trondi’irn is a special attendant for nonhuman creatures, although usually it is only the gryphons who need such help. They do all the things that the gryphons cannot - it is very difficult for gryphons to manage fine manipulations with talons, for instance - and they take care of the little ailments that nonhumans fall prey to. Because they understand these things so well, if they are attending to only one nonhuman, they often double as the Healers for small expeditions such as ours. Back in the times of long ago, a trondi’irn would often manage the needs of a very large group of gryphons or other nonhumans, but that is no longer the case.”
Darian nodded earnestly, but it was very obvious that his mind was not on Nightwind and her duties. “Is he really as big as they say?” he asked eagerly. “Is he really as big as a house? Can he really fly? Does he eat whole horses in a bite?”
Snowfire chuckled. “Oh, gryphons are not as large as all that, but if they spread their wings wide, I think it is safe to say that their wingspan is easily as big or bigger than a house. And although they do not eat whole horses in one bite, they do eat quite a lot. Kelvren has to do a great deal of hunting to keep himself supplied with meat.”
“Can he talk?” Darian asked next, practically skipping in eagerness to see the marvel. “Will I hear him thinking at me like Tyrsell?”
“No, he speaks Tayledras very well, although he tends to have what we call a ‘gryphonic accent.’ You’ll see what that means in a little.” Snowfire patted the boy’s shoulder. “He really is looking forward to meeting you.”
By this time they had wound their way back to the clearing, and as Snowfire made that last statement, a deep voice spoke from the shelter of a shadowy bower immediately ahead of them.
“Ah, but isss the young gentleman quite prrreparrred to meet me?”
A deeper shadow rose out of the rest, and strolled forward into the sunlight, then posed perfectly in the best possible light. Kelvren looked truly magnificent, and knew it.
Darian’s eyes widened, and he stared at Kelvren with all the fascination of a Kaled’a’in messenger-bird with a shiny new toy.
Darian had not yet gotten used to the wonder of being able to talk to Snowfire in the Hawkbrother tongue without having to think about it, when a deep, resonant voice speaking out of the shadows just ahead of them captured all of his attention. He and Snowfire were standing in a rare patch of brilliant sun in the middle of the clearing that he had been taken to for the meeting; ahead of them, the shadows were so deep and black by contrast that he might have been peering into a well. When he tried to make out who or what was speaking, the contrast defeated him.
“Ah,” said the voice, a rumbling bass with odd overtones, “but isss the young gentleman quite prrreparrred to meet me?”
A moment later, part of the darkest shadow detached itself from the rest, and moved forward into the sun. And although it was not as big as a house, it was entirely large enough to satisfy Darian.
The creature that moved into the sunlight was a glistening golden brown with a hint of metallic gold at the edges of each of his perfectly-defined feathers. His head, broad and handsome, with jaunty ear-tufts, had a definite eagle look about it, and at a guess, the folded wings would easily span the length of a house, if not more. Both front and rear feet ended in formidable talons, each as long as Darian’s hand. He sported a wide leather collar adorned with delicate scrollwork attached to an equally handsome body-harness with a chest-plaque, the front yoke of which had a matching leather pouch attached. As he stared down at Darian, looking every bit as haughty and regal as Darian could have wished, he took the boy’s breath away. He was, in every way, a wonder, and Darian could not have taken his eyes off of him if the earth had fallen away beneath the boy’s feet.
Once he had come fully into the sun, the gryphon didn’t move, which was probably just as well. Darian’s heart was pounding with excitement, and he had a shivery feeling as he looked at that huge beak and those cruel talons that his excitement could easily turn to fear.
“I think you’ve made a conquest, Kel,” Snowfire laughed, his eyes crinkling at the corners with merriment.
“Asss it ssshould be,” the gryphon replied, raising his head a bit higher with such unconcealed vanity that Darian, too, was startled into a laugh. And the gryphon joined in their laughter, proving that he was not unaware of his vanity and the absurdity of it.
“Darian, this is Kelvren Skothkae, who is an unranked gryphon-scout of the full k’Vala gryphon-wing,” Snowfire told him, his eyes sparkling. “Kel, this is Dar’ian Firkin k’Valdemar.”
“Unranked?” Kelvren replied, cocking his head to one side speculatively. “Perrrhapsss now - but I think ourrr wingleaderrr had bessst look to hisss posssition, or think about rrretirrring. I intend to make a grrreat name forrr myssself on thisss expedition.”
“You’ve certainly said so often enough,” Snowfire teased, and Kelvren snapped playfully in his direction, then turned his head pointedly toward Darian, pretending to ignore Snowfire.
The boy found himself the focus of those huge, piercing eyes, and suddenly understood why rabbits froze when hawks caught sight of them.
“And what think you of ourrr little family?” the gryphon asked. “Arrre we all you had thought we would be, when you thought of Tayledrrrasss?”
“More,” Darian was able to say honestly, and with unfeigned enthusiasm. “I - I think that you’re all just - just - unbelievable!” He shook his head carefully, to avoid making the headache any worse. “And you, sir, you’re just like seeing an amazing tale come right to life in front of me! I never thought I’d ever get to see a real gryphon in my whole life, and I never, ever, thought a gryphon would be as - as - as wonderful as you are!”
“Rrreally?” the gryphon purred, and Darian could tell that he was very pleased. He even preened a little. “Well. Thank you! I hope I can jussstify that impresssssion.”
“You could prove how great a tracker you are by finding Nightwind,” Snowfire suggested, with a twitch of his mouth that showed he was trying hard to keep from laughing.
“Pah, that takesss no trrracking,” Kelvren replied dismissively. “You will find herrr at the pool, wherrre I left herrr. I believe ssshe is waiting forrr you and wissshesss to sssee thisss obssserrrvant young brrrancherrr.”
“And you? Are you coming with us?” Snowfire asked.
“I am ssstarrrved, and if we arrre to underrrtake that sor-rrtie tonight, I mussst eat now ssso I am crrrop-light but enerrrgizsssed.” With that, the gryphon spread his wings, which were even larger than Darian had imagined; as Snowfire took Darian’s shoulder and pulled the boy back to the edge of the clearing, Kelvren made one or two experimental wingbeats that sent wind whipping around both of them.
Then, leaping grandly into the air with a thrust of his wings that was vastly more powerful than his trial, the gryphon took off, creating a veritable whirlwind within the confines of the clearing, and sending dust and stray leaves surging into the sky in his wake.
Darian stared after him with his mouth dropping open in amazement. Wings pumping rhythmically, the gryphon surged up above the treetops, then vanished above the foliage.
Snowfire laughed, then patted him on the shoulder. “He did that for your benefit, you know,” the Hawkbrother said with amusement. “He could very easily have gone to the mouth of the valley and taken off from there. In fact, it would have taken him a lot less effort - but gryphons seem to love to impress an audience, and you are the only one of us who isn’t used to seeing him take off and land. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he tries to find out where you are before he comes in for a landing, and arranges to make a dramatic entrance in front of you.”
“Are all gryphons like that?” Darian asked, still dazzled.
“Most of them; endlessly cheerful, considerably vain, but able to make fun of themselves. Oh, and beautiful, of course, but we try not to say that too often in front of them; they’re conceited enough as it is,” Snowfire chuckled, his shoulders shaking a little.
Darian’s eyes began to water from staring so long into the bright blue of the sky, and his head throbbed in protest. He moved quickly back into the shadows, and Snowfire must have noticed the grimace of pain he couldn’t repress, for the Hawkbrother gestured him to take a particular path leading out of the clearing and set off down it himself. Darian followed him willingly now, recalling that Snowfire had said something about Nightwind having some way of getting rid of that pounding ache.
The way that the paths here twisted and turned around little groves and vine-covered huts and tiny water gardens made him very confused, and made this place seem much larger than it probably actually was. It was very bewildering, and Darian had quite lost his way when they came out into sunlight again, at the side of the smaller of two pools of water. This was clearly the end of the valley; a short, cliff cut out of the rocks of the hills rose before them, with steep, tree-covered slopes on either side. A spring emerged from the rock at the base of the cliff, feeding the two pools and a stream which led from them into the tangle of the Tayledras encampment. One of the pools was considerably smaller than the other, being just large enough for - say - a gryphon to bathe in.
“This is where you will bathe,” Snowfire said, pointing to the smaller pool. “You see the sluice there? Lift the lever when you are done, and the dirty water will drain away - then drop it, and lift that lever, and new water will flow into the pool from that larger one. Don’t worry about trying to find bathing things. Just come here and start to undress; a hertasi will see you and there will be soap and towels beside you before you are finished disrobing. Your clothing will disappear as if by magic, and clean clothes will be waiting for you when you are done bathing.” Snowfire smiled at his expression of surprise. “Now you see why we hate to travel without our hertasi friends.”
“I dunno,” Darian said dubiously, looking down at the pool and then out at the spring that fed it. “It looks awfully cold.” Of all the things he hated most, he hated cold baths - which was mostly all he got, since everybody else in the village had precedence over him at the bathhouse.
“Ah, I forget you cannot heat your water with magic - or can you?” Snowfire looked at him quizzically.
He shook his head, and regretted doing so almost at once, as his head protested. “Not that Justyn ever taught me,” he replied.
“Well, can you call fire?” the Hawkbrother persisted. At Darian’s cautious nod, he looked satisfied. “It is the same, only spread out over the water and not concentrated on the kindling. I would ask you to try it, but I think you had better wait until I find where Nightwind has gone.”
He peered around the clearing, and then left Darian to nurse his head beside the pool while he went off to investigate some of the places at this end of the valley that were not immediately visible. Darian stared at the surface of the pool and wondered why on earth Justyn had never taught him how to heat water. It would have made a great many winter baths more bearable.
But maybe he didn’t know how, Darian told himself, trying to be fair. I mean, it could be that only the Hawkbrothers know about this sort of thing. It isn’t all that logical to think you can use the same magic that calls fire to heat up water - fire and water are opposites, right? So maybe it wasn‘t his fault he didn‘t know.
Just then, Snowfire appeared, parting the trailing branches of a huge willow, and holding them aside to let Nightwind pass through them. Of all of the Hawkbrothers that Darian had seen thus far, she was the only one who didn’t have snow-white hair, or hair dyed in patterns of pale cream and various shades of brown. Her hair was as black as a raven’s feather, and she wore it in a heavy knot at the nape of her neck, with little wisps escaping from it. Her eyes, set under a pair of brows as curved as a falcon’s wings, were a darker blue than the others, and her skin was just a few shades duskier. Her clothing was a bit different, too; nothing he could put a finger on, since he hardly cared what he wore from one day to the next, but something he definitely noticed - and on the breast of her tunic was a peculiar silver badge, rather like the wings and head of a bird of prey. He thought perhaps he had seen it before, and then he realized that he had - in the center of the chest-piece of Kelvren’s harness. Perhaps it signified that they weren’t actually Hawkbrothers, but were - his new memories supplied the word - Kaled’a’in.
She had a basket over one arm, and a friendly smile on her lips, and held out one hand to him which he took in reflex. “I don’t know if you recall me from last night,” she said, her speech betraying a faint accent, as opposed to the way his new memories told him that Tayledras should sound. “I’m Nightwind, in case you’ve forgotten or this ruffian forgot to mention my name, and I understand you have one demon-rending headache.”
“Well,” he said, feeling suddenly shy. “It does hurt.”
“I can certainly understand that,” she replied, and put her basket down to take his face in both hands, turning his eyes into the light and examining them. “Yes, indeed, I can certainly understand that. However, I think I have a remedy for you; it’ll taste vile, but it will work.”
She let go of him to rummage in her basket, as he had to laugh a little at her honest directness. “I like your claim better than Justyn’s; he always said that his potions wouldn’t taste that bad, and the more he said that, the worse they’d taste.”
“You can do that to younglings a few times before they stop believing you, and then you’ll never get them to take their medicine,” she replied, holding up a stoppered clay bottle with a little frown. “I always say things will taste worse than they do, and then they’re always surprised; follow that up with a honey-candy or a bit of other sweet, and they take their doses without much of a fuss.” She paused to uncork the bottle and sniff. “This is what I want.” She looked at him and smiled. “Are you going to need a sweet after your dose?”
“Not unless that stuff is going to linger in my mouth all day,” he replied, as manfully as he could.
“Not after a good drink of cold water.” She handed him the bottle. “Take a good stout mouthful and swallow it fast.”
He held his breath, braced himself, and did as he was told. The stuff wasn’t as bad as some of Justyn’s potions, many of which seemed to contain mycofoetida, but it was very strong-tasting, more sour than bitter, with an astringent bite. He swallowed it before he had a chance to gag, and found she was holding out a cup full of water, ready to exchange it for her bottle. He drained it, and passed it back to her; she tucked it and her bottle back into her basket.
“Well?” she asked. “How bad was it?”
“Not as bad as I thought, but - gleah! Nothing I’d drink for pleasure.” He shuddered. “How did you make that stuff, anyway? Justyn always brewed teas and tisanes.”
“This is tea - concentrated, so one swig is as good as a cupful,” she told him. “These concentrated versions have to be pretty fresh, but things like the headache potion are needed often enough that they’re used up before they go weak. I also make some preparations - distillations as well as decoctions - with spirits of wine as the carrier, but those tend to be very powerful.”
“And,” Snowfire added helpfully, “they taste so much worse that none of us ever want to drink them unless we absolutely have to.”
“I - I think I’d like to learn how you make them,” Darian said, a little surprised at himself, and feeling his ears heat up as they reddened with embarrassment. “Maybe I can help.”
“Then I’d be happy to show you,” Nightwind promised, looking a bit surprised at him herself. “I always like to have extra medicine on hand, and I never have enough time to make all that I want. Now, I want you to sit down for a moment until that medicine takes effect. I don’t think you’ll have an unusual reaction, but it’s better to wait a moment and see.”
Darian obeyed, although he didn’t expect to feel anything more than he did with Justyn’s medicines. He just hoped this potion would make some of the pain go away quickly, without slowing him down too much. Justyn’s potions generally didn’t do too much unless he drank so much he went from “sick” to “asleep” without much warning. At the moment, it felt as if someone inside his skull was trying to pound his way out.
“Look - “ Snowfire said, pointing up at the sky. “There’s a gyre; it must be one of ours, it’s too big to be one of the wild ones around here.”
Darian followed his pointing finger, squinting, until he made out the gray-and-white bird against the gray-and-white clouds, a dot moving so fast that Darian wondered how Snowfire could tell it was a forestgyre, much less that it was bigger than the wild ones. “Are the wild ones around your Vale as big as the bondbirds?” he asked with surprise.
“Most of them are bondbirds - or of bondbird stock, anyway,” Snowfire replied, still watching the bird, shading his eyes with his hand. “There are usually far more birds around the Vales than there are people to bond with, because we need a large breeding pool of each species to keep the stock healthy. The adult birds are polite to us, though rather standoffish, unless as adults they decide that they want to bond rather than continuing to be wild. Sometimes that happens, especially in the larger species, like eagle-owls and hawk-eagles - “ He winced. “And, Goddess help us, bondbird eagles themselves. We have two species of eagles that are bondbirds, the Black and the Golden, and a color-morph of the Golden that looks red - they almost never bleach out white, since I’ve never known an Adept-class mage to fly one. Not too many people of any sort fly eagles for that matter; not too many can carry one. They aren’t as greatly oversized, proportionately, as the smaller species - bondbird merlins are about the size of wild tiercel peregrines, just as an example - but they are very, very big and heavy. There is one, and I mean one k’Vala Tayledras who flies a Black eagle, and he’s the blacksmith. That should tell you something.”
Darian thought about the shoulders on the smith at Errold’s Grove, and how much he could carry and lift, and nodded solemnly. He tried to picture carrying a bird bigger than Hweel, and couldn’t. It must be like carrying a barrel of flour on your shoulder, he thought. “How does someone get a bondbird, then?” he asked curiously. Not that he thought he’d ever get one, but it was more likely than being Chosen by a Companion.
“Either an adult picks you out, or, more often, the adult parents pick you as the bondmate for one of their offspring. If the adults are bonded to someone, they let that person know who the eyas is going to, and if that person has experience with downy baby birds, very often they co-parent with the eyas’s new bondmate. If not, they wait until the little one is fledged, and lead him to you.” Snowfire turned his attention from the sky to smile at Darian. “That’s how I got Hweel; he blundered down out of a tree behind his parents, landed tail over head, fluffed all his feathers, and told me with the solemnity of a Kal’enedral that he was ready for me.”
“Does anybody have more than one bondbird?” Darian asked, wishing he could have seen that moment.
“Sometimes. One of us has an owl and a merlin for day and night scouting, I know of someone with a whole flock of ravens, and there are others. And sometimes your bond-bird’s mate may decide she wants to bond with you, too.” Snowfire raised an eyebrow. “Hweel says his mate is considering it, bonding with me, that is.”
“Hweel has a mate?” Darian replied, feeling oddly excited at the idea, though he didn’t know why. “Where is she?”
“Back at the Vale, teaching the youngster to hunt. I wouldn’t have left if there were still young in the nest, but by the time we were ready to go, the young one was fledged. Eagle-owls lay their eggs in deep winter; they’re hatched and fledged by the time most birds are going to nest, and once they’re no longer in the nest, they don’t need their father unless there’s more than one to teach to hunt.” Snowfire crossed his arms over his chest, and gave Darian a measuring look. “Now, you’ve spent plenty of time in the forest, can you guess why they’d do things that way?”
“Uh - “ Darian thought hard. “They build up for egg-laying in fall, when there’s a lot of dumb young animals on their own for the first time. Then they sit the eggs in winter, when there isn’t quite as much to eat but they also aren’t going to have to eat as much, then they have babies to feed in deep winter when there starts to be winter-kills and cold-kills lying around?”
“Good!” Snowfire applauded. “Then, obviously, it’s a good time to teach the youngsters to hunt when there are litters of very young and extremely stupid young rats, rabbits and squirrels about - not to mention the odd snake or duckling.”
“Do you have a bondbird?” Darian asked Nightwind, curiously.
She broke into peals of laughter. “Mercy, no!” she managed after a moment. “Trust me, the gryphons are more than enough for any poor trondi’irn to keep up with! Besides, with my temperament, I’d likely end up with something like a raven or a crow, and a bird with that much mischief in him would never be able to resist snatching at gryphon ear-tufts and jewelry, and there would never be any peace! How is your head?”
“It’s - fine!” he said in surprise, realizing that his headache had vanished without his noticing.
“That’s good, because you promised to help Ayshen with washing-up, and he’ll be expecting you about now,” Snowfire reminded him. “Now you’ll be able to talk to him - you might just go up and remind him of your promise and surprise him. There isn’t anything about the Tayledras that Ayshen doesn’t know - “
“ - and there isn’t anything that he isn’t dying to gossip about - “ Nightwind interjected wryly, with a tilt of her head.
“ - so if there is anything you want to know, and you feel awkward about asking one of us, go ahead and ask him,” Snowfire concluded, with a wink.
Darian gave a sigh of relief at that; there were things he wanted to know, but he’d felt uncomfortable about talking to Snowfire about them. It wasn’t that Snowfire wasn’t kind, and it wasn’t as if the things he wanted to know were at all personal, it was just - well - they felt like stupid questions, and he was embarrassed to ask them of Snowfire. I look bad enough, with him having to rescue me and all, he thought. I don’t want him thinking I’m so dumb that I’m going to be nothing but a bother to him.
“If you want to get back to Ayshen right now, just follow the path and only take right-hand turns,” Nightwind added helpfully. “When you’re done, well - by then, the rest of the scouts will have thought over what you’ve already told them, and I suspect someone will come fetch you for another round of questions. And this time, you won’t feel as if they’re talking over your head!”
Darian beamed at her. “Thank you!” he told her, both for the directions to Ayshen’s kitchen, and for understanding how horrid it had been to hear all those people chattering away, being certain they were talking about him, and not being able to understand a word of it. Suddenly eager to find the gossip-hungry hertasi and barrage him with a deluge of questions, he shyly took his leave of both the adults. Feeling as if he had been freed from a leash, he sped off down the path, always taking the right-hand turns, until he found himself at his goal, only a little winded. The hertasi, who was mixing something in a large bowl, looked up at him in some surprise - probably because very few people ever ran anywhere in this tranquil-seeming place.
“Hello, Ayshen!” he said cheerfully, taking great pleasure in the way the hertasi’s eyes widened with surprise at his perfect Tayledras. “Here I am, just like I promised!”
“You and Tyrsell are in a conspiracy over the boy, I know it. The two of you agreed to do something with him,” Snowfire said - trying not to sound too accusing - as soon as the boy had run off. “Just what have you two done to him? And don’t try to play the innocent with me; no child who’s just had his teacher go up in flames before his eyes and his entire village overrun by bloodthirsty barbarians can go running happily off to wash dishes!”
Darian had become cheerful - too cheerful - right after Tyrsell laid in the Tayledras language on his memory. Tyrsell was quite good enough to have meddled further with the boy’s memory without Snowfire noticing. Snowfire had seen the change in the boy’s behavior at once; he lost the haunted look that was in his eyes and started acting like a child on an adventure.
“Tyrsell has put a little ‘forgetfulness loop’ in his mind at my suggestion,” Nightwind told him with her usual forth-rightness. “Whenever he starts to get frightened, anxious or stressed, he will forget what he was getting upset about. He’ll know that his mentor is dead, objectively, but when the memory of that fact starts to make him upset, he’ll get distracted and then temporarily forget the fact. It’s strictly a palliative, and it will go away in a few days, but we can’t have a hysterical boy upsetting Starfall, you, and other key people while you’re deciding what to do about this situation. Furthermore, as an Empath and the only Healer you have, I can’t devote all my time to him.” She looked him straight in the eye, as challenging as the dyheli had been. “I went to Tyrsell this morning before you saw him and suggested it. That was why he was so eager to volunteer his services.”
“I’d wondered,” Snowfire growled, not at all happy with the way his opinions had been subverted.
“I didn’t see a choice,” she told him flatly, with what Wintersky called her “take no prisoners” expression. “My only other course of action was to keep him sedated, and that would be very bad for him. This way, he has a chance to absorb the situation without thinking about it for a few days, then try and come to terms with it - gradually, instead of all at once. And by then, you all should know more about what’s going on; you’ll be able to tell him where his people are and what Valdemar is going to do about the attack. He’ll be able to make some choices for himself with a reasonable amount of information, and we’ll see how he’s fitting in and what we’re going to do with him.”
Snowfire knew he was going to have to accept whatever she told him she’d done - not only because it was already an accomplished fact, but because he was not a Healer and an Empath, and his opinions really didn’t matter. However, having Nightwind make the decision was a bit more palatable than Tyrsell; Nightwind might primarily treat non-humans, but she herself was human, and her reasoning came out of her human experience.
“All right,” he said with resignation. “I can see why you decided the way you did, and this is better than keeping him drugged. And I know why you didn’t ask me first, because I would have argued with you.”
“And last night, I was in no mood to argue with you; my intentions were in the other direction entirely.” She grinned at him and fluttered her eyelashes coyly in a way that drew an unwilling laugh out of him. “As for the headache potion, that was all it was. Now, if you need to question him more about the attack - “
Snowfire interrupted her with a shake of his head. “I don’t think so. What we’ll need are descriptions of the village, where things are, at least for now. Kel and Hweel and I are going to do a little scouting there tonight, just to see who and what’s still there.”
She nodded. “Then there should be no problem; his memories of the village before the attack are going to be perfectly clear, just don’t be surprised if he blanks out in describing the things he thinks are damaged. He’ll probably completely forget the fact that the bridge was burned, for instance.” She licked her lips and twisted a strand of hair around her index finger as she paused for a thought. “In fact, he’s very likely to act and talk as if the whole town is still intact, so don’t correct him.”
“I won’t. You say in his deeper thoughts he’s still going to be aware of what happened, though?” At her nod, he sighed, and gazed out over the pool for a moment, collecting his thoughts. If he’s got it in his deeper memories, those are what usually come out in dreams. “Well, we could be looking at some interrupted nights, if he starts having nightmares.”
“If he does, we’ll move him into the Bower, and I’ll deal with it. He’ll very likely have them, and in some ways that would be good; if he does, they will mean he’s absorbing and coming to terms with the experience on the deeper level.” She didn’t seem at all adverse to having the boy in the “Bower,” the half-cave in the rocky cliff where she had built isolated facilities for those who were sick or injured. Well, if she didn’t mind having her sleep disturbed, Snowfire was not going to try to argue her out of it.
So he shrugged. “Once again - you are the expert; I am not. And much as I enjoy your company, I have a scout’s meeting to gather - “
“So go gather it.” She paused, resting a hand against the side of his face and making him look deeply into her eyes so he could not miss her sincerity and her regret. “Kechara, if I didn’t have to balance a potentially dangerous, even explosive situation against this boy’s needs, I wouldn’t have made the decisions I have. But if I didn’t also have his welfare in mind, I would have told you to pack him up and send him off with Wintersky and a couple of dyheli to the nearest large settlement. I think that for now at least, he will be better treated among us. Now, I must be off, too, so go find your scouts.”
They parted, with Snowfire feeling a little better about Darian’s welfare than he had been. When it came right down to it, the boy could not be in better hands.
It’s been a long day, Snowfire thought, as he laced up his climbing boots by the light of the fire. And it’s going to be a long night.
Darian was safely asleep, and so, most probably, were the current inhabitants of Errold’s Grove. It was time for that little scouting run.
Little? Not so little. I’ve never run a sortie against an army before. But it’s not as if I don’t have the experience to carry it off. Snowfire had been an active scout since he was a mere fourteen winters old, although he hadn’t been permitted in the field against human intruders for the first four years. So how much different can they be, I wonder, than a large bandit gang?
Across the fire from him, Nightwind was getting Kelvren ready. Kelvren’s eyes pinned with excitement, the pupils contracting to a mere nothing, then widening until there was nothing showing but pupil, then contracting again. In the firelight, the effect was particularly striking; his eyes looked as if they were flashing with a gilded light as his golden irises appeared and disappeared. Nightwind calmly tightened his harness at all points, checking his gear, making certain that the amplifying metal lacework-headband of the teleson set was properly in place under the feathers on his head, and that it wasn’t going to distract him in any way. Kelvren’s Mindspeech wasn’t particularly strong, and this little bit of metal filigree that looked so much like one of his favorite ornaments would help him reach Snowfire without effort.
Snowfire was already outfitted for a nighttime sortie; his costume of soft blacks and grays was much like his daylight scouting gear except for color - or rather, lack of it. He had streaked his face with random stripes of black-and-gray paint, and before he braided it, he had dusted his hair with a charcoal-colored powder that would cling until washed out. He wore black gloves and soft, black boots made for climbing; his climbing staff was in its sheath on his back and his throwing-darts in a bandoleer across his chest. There was a knife at his belt and another in each boot, thin and incredibly strong rope with a grappling hook coiled in one pouch at his side, a strangling-wire in another, and a darker version of his leather arm-guard strapped in place over his clothing for Hweel to land on in case he needed to. He probably wouldn’t; Snowfire intended to be up in the tree-tops, and there should be plenty of places for Hweel to land without choosing his arm.
A small herd of three dyheli waiting patiently at his elbow would carry him as far as the clearing where he’d discovered Darian, or farther if it seemed safe; that way he would leave no footprints. A herd of animals would leave tracks that were much less suspicious than a single animal. The plan called for the dyheli to wait for him at the clearing until he returned. Kel, of course, would fly, leaving no tracks at all.
“Think you’re ready for this?” Nightwind whispered as she passed him, crossing to Kel’s left side to continue her checks. He winked; he knew what she meant. He had made night sorties as a scout countless times, but this was Kelvren’s first “offensive act of war.” That was why the young gryphon was so excited; he was about to prove his mettle, and he could hardly wait to get into the air. Hweel, by contrast, was so utterly calm he seemed bored.
Kel was as well-trained as any Silver Gryphon ever turned out by the Kaled’a’in, and since Nightwind seemed completely confident in his abilities, Snowfire was prepared to be just as confident. After all, she had been a Silver for several years before Kel even began his training; she’d seen a great many gryphons wear that stylized badge, and she had once said that the Silver Gryphons had ways of weeding out the unsuitable a long time before they ever put on the badge and harness of a full Silver.
Nevertheless, Snowfire hoped that Kelvren wouldn’t wear himself out with excitement before they ever got to Errold’s Grove.
Snowfire gave his own equipment one last check, swung himself up onto the back of Sifyra, and turned to Kel. “Ready, partner?” he asked.
The gryphon gave a quick, eager nod. “Rrrready!” he replied. Waiting none too patiently for Snowfire’s hand signal, he launched himself skyward, followed a moment later by Hweel. Snowfire’s little group of Sifyra and two mares followed at a careful trot. Dyheli had much better night-vision than horses, but the dark shadows beneath the trees could easily hold unpleasant surprises; there was no point in risking broken legs or ankles.
There was another reason for a more leisurely pace - Snowfire rode bareback. Since Sifyra and the mares would pretend to be a set of wild grazers, it would not do to have something as obviously unnatural as a saddlepad strapped to his back. Not for the first time, Snowfire wished silently that dyheli could manage the same smooth gaits as Companions allegedly could. Like all dyheli, Sifyra had a prominent spine, and Snowfire expected to know the position and size of every vertebra in intimate detail before the ride was over. One of his fellow scouts had once described the dyheli as “backbones covered with hair, balanced on four springs,” which was about as succinct a description as Snowfire had ever heard.
If they’d been able to travel at a walk instead of a trot, and if they hadn’t been going into dangerous territory, the ride would have been stunningly beautiful. As impressive as these woods were by day, at night they were far lovelier, at least in Snowfire’s opinion. Of course, he could have been biased in that direction by flying an owl.
The moon was at its full and well up, so soft, silvery shafts of light pierced the canopy and illuminated patches of ground all around him. The night was anything but still; insects and frogs called or sang, and an occasional bird pierced the forest with its call, harsh or sweet. Other birds high overhead called complainingly as their sleep was disturbed, and bats flitted like bits of the darkness itself in and out of the shafts of moonlight, chasing the moths drawn to dance there.
Snowfire was also aware of two other minds linked with his own - the ever-present dignity of Hweel, and the unfamiliar exuberance of Kel.
:We’re waiting for you at the clearing,: Kel Sent back, and Snowfire sensed that he and Hweel were perched side by side in the concealing boughs of a great tree on the farther side. :There’s no sign of any trouble, or any guards.:
Hweel confirmed Kel’s observation without words, turning his head and peering through the darkness so that Snowfire could see for himself. It was very strange to look through the owl’s eyes; from Hweel’s point of view the place was as brightly-lit as daylight, although the colors were very faded. The bondbird’s eyes were so much keener than a human’s that Hweel had no trouble focusing on tiny details far below him on the ground. The barbarians had packed up their two dead and left no real traces of the fight behind, except for a bit of disturbed rock and scuffed earth.
Hweel’s keen sight and hearing alerted him to the smallest movements and faintest of sounds, even so small as a rat or a mouse would make, so if there had been anyone left as a sentry out here, Hweel would have spotted him without any trouble. So, the barbarians had not posted watchers out this far from the village. Did that mean they had simply looted it and left?
I don’t think so; there wasn‘t enough there to loot. I think they had some other purpose in coming there, and that Starfall is right about what that purpose is. They‘re here for power, and perhaps to establish a stronghold here on the border of Valdemar.
Motive was irrelevant right now, though; he was out here to learn facts, not speculate on motive. :Go farther in,: he told Hweel. :Go in until you’ve spotted a sentry, then come back.: Here was another advantage of flying an owl; sentries would neither hear nor see him, and that meant Hweel was never a target in night-stalks. That gave him a degree of security that those who flew other birds didn’t have.
Hweel took off obediently. Snowfire stopped Kel before he could follow. :Wait for Hweel to come back; I want to get as near as I safely can before I take to the trees. It might be easy for you two to flit about, but I’m going to have to work to get in as far as the first sentry.:
Hweel returned in fairly short order, and as Sifyra paced swiftly through the trees, Snowfire let the dyheli set their own path as he concentrated on what Hweel had seen.
He directed Hweel and Kel to move nearer to the village, and gave Sifyra the landmarks to look for just as they came to the edge of the rock-strewn clearing. It seemed to his impatient soul to take forever to reach the tree where Hweel and Kel waited, and he knew it seemed like twice that to them. They were ready to go, and Kel probably felt that they hardly needed him.
Well, that’s where those who are inexperienced differ from old hands. I’m Kel’s backup, whether or not he thinks he needs one.
He pulled out his climbing staff as Sifyra approached the giant trunk, and swung the bark-hook at the body of the trunk with his left hand as Sifyra actually came alongside. The hook bit solidly into the bark of the trunk, and he pulled himself up and off Sifyra’s back and onto the rough bark of the tree with his one good arm. As his feet cleared Sifyra’s back, he sank his right palm-cleat into the bark and used the rough soles of his climbing boots to further brace himself in place. As soon as he had a palm grip and secure footing, he swung the bark-hook up for his next step, and worked his way up the trunk like a tree-hare, and nearly as fast. Because he had chosen a tree with rough bark, he was able to keep most of his weight on his legs rather than his arms, but by the time he got to where the others were perched, his hair was damp with sweat and his muscles burning with fatigue.
Kel and Hweel were a pair of oddly-shaped shadows crouched together amid the warm semidarkness here in the boughs. The other two were not too impatient when he reached their bough, a branch as broad as a highway and as easy to walk on. By that time, Sifyra and the mares had found a patch of grass and were pretending to graze on it, with one wary eye out for hunters. “Take me to where the first sentry is, and I’ll stop there,” he told the other two. “Then you can go on; if something goes wrong for you and you can’t fly, I can take out the sentry before he knows there’s anything going on, and leave a hole in the line.”
Kel nodded. “That isss a good plan,” he acknowledged, with a little surprise in his voice. “I had not thought of having to passs ssssentrrries’ss on the grrrround.” Hweel just roused his feathers, ready to be off. This time Kel dropped off the bough first, but Hweel, being smaller and more maneuverable among the branches, was leading the gryphon before the latter had taken more than two wingstrokes.
Hweel was actually guiding his bondmate as much as the gryphon. Now Snowfire followed them by “walking the tree-road,” balancing along the branches, and moving from tree to tree by following Hweel to the intersections of branches and jumping from one to the next with the aid of either his grappling hook and rope, or his climbing staff. It was easy enough to follow the boughs, and when he needed a better look at a crossing, he examined it through Hweel’s eyes. This, in many ways, was the part of his duties that Snowfire lived for. There was something about doing all this in near-darkness, with the scent of bark and leaves all about him, the sounds of insects and frogs far below, that made all of his senses come alive. He felt as if he could see with his skin, and as he concentrated on the placement of each footstep, it seemed as if he and the forest were a single living entity.
He had been doing this since he was old enough to walk, as had most Tayledras, and he didn’t even think about the risks anymore, though occasionally Kel would pause and perch to watch him, the gryphon’s mind fairly radiating pleasure and surprise. This was just something Tayledras did, and it was largely how they were able to travel undetected through the forest. It was hard work, certainly, and required a great deal of planning and concentration, more so since he had only one “good” arm, but he was never afraid, any more than he was when walking on the ground. At this level in the canopy, branches tended to intersect when they were about as big around as his waist; they were still broad and easy to walk on, with very little sway. Higher up - well, things would have been more of a challenge.
He was pleased that he detected the movement of a sentry on the ground below only a little later than Hweel did; he slowed at that moment, and crept forward, making no noise at all, until he reached the trunk of the tree he was in. Then he settled down with his back to the trunk to wait, concealed from detection from below by the bulk of the branch.
Not that any barbarian would think to watch the tree canopy, even if he heard a noise above him.
Now Hweel and Kel went on; as soon as Snowfire was settled in place, he closed his eyes and opened his senses to the owl, concentrating most of his attention on what the bondbird heard and saw.
For a little while, that consisted mostly of branches going past, with occasional backward glimpses to make certain Kel was following. But then, the growth up ahead vanished, and Hweel swooped up to land on a branch overhanging open fields. A moment later, Kel landed beside him, and the two of them looked down at the village of Errold’s Grove.
There seemed to be very little damage; only a single house, a couple of barns, and a handful of sheds were burned, although those had been allowed to burn to the ground and there was nothing left of them but piles of blackened rubble with a timber or two sticking out of the ashes. The bridge, amazingly enough, was still there - at a single place in the middle, the timbers of the floor had been replaced with a patch of newer wood, obvious because it shone whitely in the moonlight. Evidently the fire that Justyn had called had been put out before the bridge suffered much permanent damage. There was no other sign of conflict.
Hweel could not smell the remnants of smoke from the burned-out buildings, for owls had no sense of smell, but he could taste it in the back of his throat, and he sneezed as it irritated his nostrils. Snowfire felt his own nose itch in sympathy.
There were a lot of horses in makeshift enclosures at one side of the town. The houses were dark, not a single light showing anywhere, and from the chimneys, a little smoke trailed out, showing that the fires were banked until morning. There were no tents, no sleeping forms in bedrolls out in the open. However, there were more of those makeshift enclosures everywhere, and they were full of livestock. Evidently the barbarians were all sleeping in houses, barns, and sheds, displacing the animals into the open. Obviously they didn’t care if the livestock broke loose or strayed during the night, probably because those animals were all destined for the cookpot sooner or later. To the conquerers of Errold’s Grove, those animals represented a resource for the present, not the future.
The house nearest them looked as if it might have been Justyn’s cottage. Unlike the rest, it had no cottage-garden, and it seemed to match what Darian had told them about the place.
:There’s something odd over there - : Kel swooped ahead of Hweel, intent on getting a closer look at whatever it was that he’d spotted.
That was when the two - things - crawled out from an airspace beneath the very house at the edge of the village that Snowfire had been examining through Hweel’s eyes.
:Wyrsa!: Snowfire warned Kel - but they weren’t wyrsa, or not exactly. They had a similar look to them - as if someone had crossed a dog with a serpent, getting something with a hound-shaped body, scaled skin, with the head a melding of viper and canine with sulfur-yellow eyes and fangs. But the wyrsa Snowfire knew had the look of emaciated greyhounds, whereas these two - 
Well, the big one was the size of a pony and had the blocky, muscular look of a mastiff, and the little one was the size and general configuration of a terrier. Whatever they were, they didn’t match the wyrsa that Snowfire was familiar with.
Furthermore, they seemed to know exactly where Kel was.
The little one started to make a kind of high-pitched keening sound as it followed Kel’s flight, eyes gazing intently. It trotted after the gryphon, the bigger creature trailing behind, the smaller continuing to emit the whining keen. With every passing moment the sound grew louder, and it would not be too long before the creature’s masters heard it and came to see what the matter was.
Kel looked down at the two creatures with some alarm, and ducked into the forest canopy to try and lose them. :If I hide from them, they‘II probably lose interest in me and go away,: he told Snowfire, coming to a soft landing on a massive branch screened from view from below by foliage. Hweel swerved to follow them, coming down from above Kel’s perch. :They can’t possibly smell me, the wind’s not in their favor, it’s in mine. Can wyrsa follow a scent?:
Snowfire watched them trotting along, with the little one still making that annoying, whiny noise. :Evidently no one told them that they’re not supposed to be able to find you,: he suggested, as the two creatures broke into a lope and wound up directly beneath Kel, looking up at him. :And yes, wyrsa can follow a scent trail very well indeed.:
Kel suddenly slammed his shields up, locking Snowfire out of his mind with no warning whatsoever, and flung himself off the branch in a steep dive.
Snowfire slipped quickly into Hweel’s head, acutely aware of how helpless he was to stop the gryphon - and he didn’t even know what Kel planned to do!
Assuming he even had a plan - 
Through Hweel’s eyes, he saw the gryphon burst through the foliage at an angle so steep it looked as if Kel was falling. It took the two creatures below him completely by surprise, too - they both froze where they were for an instant, and that was an instant too long.
At the last possible second, the little one broke and ran, leaving the bigger one to stand its ground. That was the worst thing it could have done; it gave Kel the chance for a tail-chase, and the gryphon snapped open his wings so abruptly that Snowfire winced, knowing how much the move would hurt. Kel had made the classic aerial maneuver of trading height for speed; fast as the little monster was (and it was greyhound-quick), Kel was faster.
He hit it with outstretched talons and bound to it, bringing it to the ground and pulling it to his beak; before it could turn its own teeth or claws on him, Kel had snapped its neck, and just to make sure it was dead, gave it a doglike shake.
By now the bigger creature was charging Kel from behind, but this time Snowfire could do something; he had already directed Hweel to attack the bigger creature’s head and eyes. Even if those scales armored it, the eyes would still be vulnerable, and it would stop to protect them.
Hweel went into a dive of his own, intending to make a raking pass from behind. He hit the creature’s head just as it had covered about half the distance between the tree and Kel, Hweel’s talons scraped across the scales without penetrating, but the silent and unexpected attack from behind disoriented the creature and it stopped, whirling, to face whatever had struck it.
But of course, Hweel was already out of reach, and his attack had given Kel a chance to recover. The gryphon launched into the air, dangling the body of the smaller creature from his foreclaws, pumping his wings laboriously for a few moments, then going into a relatively shallow glide beneath the branches.
The larger creature snarled with rage, and followed; Hweel followed it, flying just above the lower branches.
Kel glanced back over his shoulder to make sure the monster was still following him. When it began to lag a little, he dropped lower and slowed a bit, dangling the body of the little creature tauntingly just out of reach. That seemed to drive the big one insane with fury, and it would redouble its efforts to reach him.
Now Kel opened his shields just a little, and Snowfire seized the advantage. :Just what do you think you’re doing?: he demanded, trying not to project the thought with the edge of incipient hysteria that he certainly felt.
:Leading the Big Dog away so I can kill it quietly,: Kel replied, sounding amazingly cool.
:I don’t suppose anyone told you that wyrsa have poisonous fangs and claws, did they?: he asked, just before Kel slammed his shields shut again, locking him out. He tried not to curse with frustration.
At least I got the warning in, he consoled himself, and continued to watch through Hweel’s eyes. He figured that Kel would repeat the same dive and tail chase he’d used to kill the “Little Dog”; he didn’t expect what Kel actually did, and neither did the “Big Dog.”
Kel suddenly slowed and went for height again, but at the top of his upward-reaching arc, he flung the body of the “Little Dog” at the “Big Dog” with all of his strength.
Snowfire had forgotten that the structure of the gryphon’s forelegs actually allowed him to throw things if he chose, and certainly the “Big Dog” hadn’t anticipated any such thing. The carcass hit the larger animal dead-on, and sent it tumbling end-over-end, and then Kel went into a dive.
If he’d stayed on the ground to meet it, the fight would have been equal, with Kel having the advantage of size, but the “Big Dog” having the advantage of speed and poison. But Kel had no intention of getting within reach of those fangs and claws; he made dive after raking dive, pounding the thing with fisted talons that sent its head into the forest floor, and raking it with open talons with enough speed behind him to penetrate even the tough scales that protected it.
Dive after dive he made, choosing to rake or strike based on what the monster itself was doing and how well it had recovered from the previous hit. Snowfire held his breath and even the normally stoic Hweel was excited, gripping the bough he had chosen with enough power to drive the talons through the bark and deep into the wood.
It began to seem as if the thing was indestructible; it had taken a dozen blows that would have shattered the skull of a lesser creature, and as many raking strikes that left furrows along its head and back. Wyrsa were known to be tough, but this monster was tougher than any wyrsa that Snowfire had ever fought. Now Snowfire saw the wisdom of leading it away; had this combat taken place anywhere near the village, Kel would have had an unwelcome audience in very short order.
What’s he doing? Snowfire wondered, fretting. It was obvious to him that Kel had a plan, but what was it? Surely the gryphon could see for himself that his worst blows just weren’t having the effect he wanted!
In fact, the monster had worked itself into the partial shelter of a bush, and in a moment, Kel wouldn’t be able to reach it at all.
Abruptly Kel did a wingover and another steep dive, heading deliberately into the bush! Snowfire flung out a hand and stifled a cry of dismay.
Kel crashed into the bush - and brought it down on top of the creature, pinning it completely to the ground with so many branches that it was unable to move at all!
Kel stood up, still atop the bush, holding it and the creature pinned beneath it to the ground. Then, in a manner that was almost insulting, it was so casual, he began breaking twigs and branches with his beak until he exposed the nape of the creature’s neck. He contemplated it for a moment, as if choosing exactly the right place. Then his head darted forward savagely, and he bit through scales, hide, and ultimately, spine, sawing with his beak until the spine was completely severed.
He stood atop the beast still, until its final convulsions were over. It took a very long time.
Finally the body went flaccid, and Kel cautiously opened his shields again.
:I’m sorry,: he said apologetically, but behind the veneer of apology was a seething cauldron of satisfied bloodlust, the euphoria of conquest, the thrill of victory. :There is an old lesson of Tadrith Wyrsabane‘s first combat with a litter of Changed wyrsa, that could sense and eat magic. When these followed me, I suspected that they were following the “scent” of magic, and I didn‘t want to give them a chance to get any farther than just the scent.:
:Apology accepted,: Snowfire replied immediately. :And congratulations; you were truly magnificent!:
:I was, wasn’t I?: The reply was made with as much wonder as pride, and Snowfire chuckled under his breath. :Well, if Hweel could come help carry the body of the Little Dog, I can take the Big Dog, and we can drop them somewhere that they’ll never be found. Is wyrsa meat poisonous?’:
:Not that I know of,: Snowfire told him after a moment of thought. :I never saw dead scavengers around the carcasses, anyway.:
:Then we’ll dump them in a crotch up in the canopy,: Kel decided immediately. :Their masters will never find even a bone, then, and it will give the scavenger-birds a good meal or two.:
So that was what they did, he and Hweel laboring heavily up into the canopy until they were well screened from the ground, leaving the two bodies wedged tightly into forks in neighboring trees. Perhaps eventually bones would fall down, but not until every scrap of flesh had been picked away or eaten by insects and larvae, and by then the matter of their masters should have been settled.
Afterward, both owl and gryphon rested while they conferred with Snowfire.
:I honestly didn’t see anything that would make me think there were still any villagers there,: Kel told the Tayledras, as he cleaned the monsters’ blood fastidiously from beak and talons. :I will grant you, we weren‘t overhead long, but I can’t imagine where they would put the villagers if there were as many fighters as the boy thought.:
Snowfire thought back on the brief look that he’d had through Hweel’s eyes, and tended to agree. :We know they‘ve fixed the bridge, and that most of the buildings are still intact; we know that the enemy is still in possession of the place because of all the horses we saw. That’s really what we came to find out. If you want to go back, I’m certainly ready.:
Kel sighed, and spread wings which were probably starting to ache. He’d put his flying muscles through a great deal of abuse, and just about now was when they would start to complain. :I think we ought,: he replied, trying to sound reluctant. :I hate to admit it, but I’m not good for much more.:
:Oh, I think you could rise to the occasion if you had to,: Snowfire said encouragingly. :But I see no reason why you should have to. You were mighty enough tonight. Let’s go home.:
:Very well,: Kel replied, and took off - carefully - gaining altitude until he was above the treetops.
Snowfire began the slower process of making his way toward the clearing where the dyheli waited.
But Kelvren could not contain his pleasure in silence. :You know, I really was good tonight. Wasn’t I?:
Snowfire sensed a certain wonder behind the boast, and smiled. :Definitely,: he replied with warmth, too busy picking his way through the canopy to give a more elaborate reply.
But Kel didn’t seem to mind; he was still intoxicated with success - and mostly talking to himself. :I was,: Kel sighed with content. :I really was. . . .:

Six

Snowfire kept having to hide his smile the next day when he encountered Kel; the young gryphon was so pleased with himself - not in any truly vain way, but simply full of joy and astonishment at his own daring deeds. He had probably been a great deal less sure of himself at the time than he had pretended. In fact, he reminded Snowfire of a certain young Tayledras after his first successful mission, some few years ago. It was odd how certain things transcended the boundaries of species.
Nightwind, of course, had made a great fuss over Kel; over both of them, actually, but she was more demonstrative with Kel. So when, after greeting the gryphon, he’d gone to her to ask her to make sure he hadn’t done any damage to himself, he also asked her why she’d been so effusive.
“I was beginning to think you were being a little too enthusiastic,” he told her. “You know, the way doting mothers make a great fuss over a child who’s done something perfectly ordinary? I don’t mean to try to teach you your job, but Kel’s old enough to see through that sort of thing.”
“Gryphons, especially young ones like Kel, are a lot more fragile than you’d think,” she told Snowfire, as she checked his arm wound and rewrapped it. “They need a great deal of encouragement before they become secure in making their own judgments. It’s a fledging sort of thing; they really go through several stages of fledging, and the most critical is in learning to trust their training and make their own decisions instead of waiting for orders from someone else.” She sealed down the end of the bandage with a firm finger. “He really was very clever to remember Tadrith Wyrsabane, and the Changed creatures he encountered. I can promise you that not one in a dozen of the gryphons I’ve tended would remember a tale that old. Tadrith is ancient history, and the young ones tend to dismiss history out of hand.”
Snowfire thanked her with a smile, then stretched out along the rock rimming the larger pool to soak up the sun. That was his prescription for muscles aching from his unbalanced climbing last night. “I think he may be trying to model himself off this Tadrith,” he suggested. “It’s just a thought, but the way he Mindspoke the name suggested something of the sort to me last night.”
Nightwind unwound her hair from the knot at the back of her head, and shook it free; it fell in rippling waves to her waist. “I can certainly think of worse examples, and gryphons that have tried to follow them. Well, for one thing, trying to model himself off Skandranon would be a very bad thing to do. We don’t have any stories of Skandranon as a young, rash, and fallible gryphon, only those in which Skandranon succeeds beyond anyone’s wildest dreams and pulls off another miraculous, heroic coup. By this time there is so much myth associated with the Black Gryphon that trying to emulate him would be impossible, and failing would be devastating. No, he could do a lot worse than try to copy Tadrith Wyrsabane; by the time Tadrith was growing up, White Gryphon was well established, and we have plenty of tales about how difficult it was for him to make a name for himself in his father’s shadow.”
Snowfire rolled over on his stomach, and she began working on his back muscles without his having to ask. He sighed with content - and occasionally grunted in pain - as her hands worked out knots and sore spots. He decided to change the subject - he really wasn’t in the mood to discuss gryphonic myth. “About those little monsters - “
“Yip Dog and Attack Dog?” she said; the terms were so strange he wasn’t certain he’d heard her correctly, and craned his head around to give her a puzzled look. She giggled at his expression. “That’s what I thought of when Kel described them to me. The little one was like the small dogs one of the Haileigh peoples created. They’ve made pampered, spoiled pets out of a breed that was supposed to be alarm-dogs; very small, very fast, very annoying. When they see a stranger, they swarm him, yipping; we call them Yip Dogs, and when I reminded Kel of them, he agreed that the smaller creature was exactly like a Yip Dog.”
“Huh. Good enough name for it,” he replied. “So you think this Yip Dog was meant to raise alarms?”
“I’m sure of it - and I’m sure Kel was right. From his description, it detected the aura of magic that is a part of every gryphon.” She sounded quite positive, and after a moment of thought, Snowfire was inclined to agree tentatively with that conclusion. He couldn’t think of any other reason why it would have been able to find Kel in the heavy cover of the forest canopy.
“Do you think, perhaps, that it was intended to raise an alarm against people screening themselves magically, or using magic to disable sentries? Or was it set to catch mages trying to use magic to get past magical alarms?” he asked curiously.
“I can’t think of a better reason to have them,” she told him, as she bore down hard on the small of his back. “After all, they don’t know that the mage-storms are over, and a mage-storm could disable a magical protection. Animals, on the other hand, sleep more lightly than humans, and they aren’t disabled when mage-energy is disrupted. Fortunately, Kel followed his initial impulse, which was to go away from the place the Yip Dog was guarding. Otherwise, I think the whining might have escalated to something a lot louder. That’s what the real Yip Dogs do; if you stay near what they consider to be their territory, or worse, try to approach it, they get positively hysterical.”
“And the other - obviously the term Attack Dog suits it.” Snowfire rested his chin on his folded hands to keep it off the hard rock beneath him. “In fact, that’s probably why they were paired. If whatever the Yip Dog was warning about kept coming, the Attack Dog was to hold it where it was until the masters came.” He grinned a little. “It must have been awfully puzzled about how to get at Kel!”
“Fortunately for us, the masters didn’t consider a sortie by air.” She kneaded his shoulders vigorously and he grunted. “Does that hurt?”
“Yes, but don’t stop. No, you’re right about that. They must not know there are Tayledras anywhere about, and they’ve never encountered Kaled’a’in before. All I can say is, it’s a good thing we didn’t have any human scouts on this one.” The more he thought about it, the more grateful he was. Tayledras scouts would have sent birds in, seen nothing to worry about, and might perhaps have been tempted to come down out of the trees and go in afoot to recconoiter. They would never have been able to escape the fast-moving monsters - and only an eye-shot would have killed the beasts, given the way that Hweel’s talons just skidded off the scales.
“The Yip Dog was probably alerted by physical attributes such as scent and sound as well as by magic,” she agreed. “It wouldn’t be very bright to have them sound alarms only for the presence of magic.”
I’m just glad there were only two of them. “I saw them through Hweel’s eyes, and the things did look like wyrsa,” he told her, wondering if she had any more insights gleaned out of Kaled’a’in history for him. “Or rather, it looked as if their ancestors could have been wyrsa. Now, that triggered a dream last night of all kinds of creatures that looked as if. they also could have been bred from wyrsa, and that made me wonder when I woke up this morning if the being that Darian described as a ‘demon’ and the creature it was riding could have had wyrsa ancestors.” He cocked an eye back at her.
“That must have been one hell of a dream,” she observed. “I’m glad I didn’t share it. Still.” She paused to work on a particularly bad knot in his neck, and he clenched his teeth to keep from yelping. “The story says that the wyrsa Tadrith fought were definitely intelligent. And there is no reason whatsoever that there couldn’t have been more of them created somewhere else. Or at least, more wyrsa Changed in different ways. The beasts aren’t exactly stupid, so it’s not that great a jump to significant intelligence.”
“Intelligence enough to realize that it would be to the monster’s advantage to cooperate with a human?” he hazarded. “And given that we have a mage with these barbarians who, we assume, already knows how to make Changechildren - “ He took a deep breath as she let up on his shoulders a bit. “You see where this is going.”
“Yes, and I don’t like it. But it does make it all the more imperative that we concentrate on keeping Starfall safe rather than messing about with these people and alerting them to the fact that we’re here.” He felt her hands starting to tremble. Was the imperturbable Nightwind actually afraid?
She should be. Intelligent, humanlike versions of wyrsa! That is a truly frightening thought.
“How did Darian sleep last night?” she asked, abruptly changing the subject herself.
“Wintersky says he had a couple of nightmares, but nothing that even woke him. That’s enough, thanks.” He rolled back over and let the sun work on his chest muscles. “I don’t know what tonight will bring, but so far - I’m going to assume that minor nightmares are good, but the ones that send him out of sleep screaming in hysterics are bad?”
“As a general rule; we don’t want him assimilating too much, too fast.” She stretched herself out on the rock beside him “Ah, that feels good. He’ll probably have a hysterical one in a few nights, though. That is, if what Tyrsell did fades out at the rate I think it will. It might go more quickly; he’s a boy with a strong will, and that’s likely to make him fight what we put in place.”
Snowfire sighed. “Wonderful. Well, if he gets too hysterical for me to handle, remember your promise.”
She laughed. “Big, brave Tayledras warrior worried about a little boy’s nightmares?”
“Big, brave Tayledras warrior needs his sleep, or. he isn’t going to be much good at protecting annoying little Kaled’a’in trondi’irn,” he growled, cracking open an eye to see which side of her was uppermost, and smacking her on the rump when he had a target.
That, of course, led to her rolling him into the water, and him pulling her in, and a conversation that had nothing whatsoever to do with Darian, Kelvren, or wyrsa.
Darian woke screaming from a nightmare of fire, to find a sleepy, yawning Snowfire kneeling at his pallet, shaking him gently. “Easy, Dar’ian,” the Hawkbrother was saying, as if he had been saying the words over and over for some time. “It’s all right; you’re just dreaming. Wake up, little brother - “
There was a lot of light around; where was it coming from? “I’m - awake,” Darian said, feeling dazed and confused, and still full of a sourceless grief and fear. “I’m awake - “
“Good.” Snowfire smiled, but he had to put up a hand to cover his mouth as it turned-into a yawn. That was when Darian saw the source of the illumination, after Snowfire moved. There was a very dim globe of light hovering just at Snowfire’s shoulder, and Darian stared at it, distracted for a moment. It startled him, but Snowfire didn’t act as if it was something strange.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to it.
“My mage-light,” the Hawkbrother replied casually, as if he conjured such things all the time. Perhaps he did - and Darian just hadn’t been awake at the right time to see them. He had been so exhausted these last couple of days that he went to sleep almost as soon as the sun went down. “Would you like it a little brighter?” A heartbeat later, the glow intensified a measurable degree.
“You can make those?” he said, staring at it. “Really? Justyn couldn’t - “
Then all at once, as the sound of his own voice screaming Justyn’s name echoed in his memory, his fear and grief had a source; his throat closed up, and he fought back tears. A man shouldn’t cry; tears were useless. They hadn’t brought back his parents, had they? “Justyn’s dead, isn’t he?” he whispered, closing his eyes to hide the pain. “He’s really dead.”
“Yes, little brother, he is,” Snowfire replied quietly, with an odd inflection in his voice. Darian opened his eyes, to see the Hawkbrother looking down at him with - what? Pity? Understanding? He couldn’t tell; he hadn’t seen anyone in Errold’s Grove wearing either expression around him.
Just then, over on the other side of the hut, Wintersky snorted in his sleep, turned over, and mumbled. That seemed to make up Snowfire’s mind about something.
“Here,” he said, getting to his feet, and holding out his hand. “We shouldn’t wake Wintersky, and I don’t think you’ll be getting back to sleep soon, so let’s go for a walk.”
Darian hesitantly accepted the outstretched hand; Snowfire pulled him to his feet, then turned toward Hweel’s perch and held out his arm to the huge owl. He wasn’t wearing his arm-guard, and Darian gasped and winced as Hweel stepped onto the bare flesh - but the owl barely closed his feet around the arm and half-spread his wings to keep his balance instead of maintaining it by gripping the arm.
Snowfire turned to give him a reassuring smile. “Remember, Hweel isn’t an ordinary owl; I’m only going to take him outside to let him step up onto the roof. He can be very soft-footed when he needs to be for me.”
Yes, but if he gets unbalanced and can’t save himself, he may forget what’s under those talons - Mindful of that possibility, Darian stepped in front of Snowfire and held the curtain of vines aside so that the Hawkbrother wouldn’t have to juggle vines and owl at the same time. With a nod of thanks, Snowfire stepped out into the night, with the mage-light trailing at his shoulder. Darian followed him.
Once outside, Snowfire raised his arm just enough that Hweel could move onto the end of an exposed roof-beam. Hweel stepped off his arm carefully, settled his feathers, looked all around, in that bizarre way only owls could. His head went nearly all the way around, then he settled on a direction, crouched down, and pushed off, flapping hard, vanishing silently into the darkness. Snowfire turned, just as silently, and after a backward glance at Darian, walked slowly along the path.
After a breath of hesitation, Darian caught up with him. Wintersky had given him what he called “sleeping clothes” - that was a new idea to Darian, who generally slept in that day’s shirt and put on a clean one in the morning, but he’d obediently changed into the odd garments every night. He saw now that Snowfire wore very similar clothing; a draped, pullover shut of some light, loosely-woven, cool material, and drawstring trousers gathered at the ankle made of the same stuff. Darian felt a little like a ghost, walking barefoot through the sleeping camp in the pale garments.
Ghosts . . . how many ghosts haunted Errold’s Grove now? One, at least. Or would Justyn have stayed to haunt the place?
“What are you thinking?” Snowfire asked quietly, hardly above a whisper.
“I was thinking - about Justyn,” he replied, feeling sorrow again rise to close his throat.
“I think that he must have been a very good and brave man,” came the quiet reply. “People of his sort do not need to linger, haunting their old homes; ghosts are those who left things undone, and I cannot think he left anything undone that truly needed doing.”
“Where - “ He couldn’t manage anything more.
But Snowfire must have guessed his question. “Having had no personal experience of one who has gone, I cannot give you firsthand evidence,” he replied, as one hand somehow came to rest on Darian’s shoulder as a comforting weight. “But - well, I know enough folk who have, whose word I trust, to make me certain that we do not simply cease to be. But as for the nature of the path he took, the faith we Tayledras profess tells us that each path is different, according to the belief and the nature of the one who takes it.” He paused. “I am not certain what your people believe, but would you care to hear what one who had been a Herald supposedly told one of my people?”
“I - yes,” Darian said, after a moment. One who had been a Herald? But Heralds don’t quit being Heralds, so - 
“He said, or so I was told,” Snowfire replied, interrupting Darian’s thoughts, “that when a Herald dies, he is given three choices. One is that he may return again as a Herald-to-be, the second that he return as a Companion, and the third is that he have some time in a place where all his desires are granted. I suspect that your teacher has been given the same choices.”
Darian blinked as his eyes blurred, and felt tears coursing down his cheeks. “I hope - I hope whatever he picked, he got a lot of magic!” he choked.
Snowfire’s hand closed briefly on his shoulder. “I think that he must,” the Hawkbrother replied. “In fact, I cannot imagine anything else.”
That was too much for Darian, and he lost his last shreds of control. He stumbled, and started to sob, and found Snowfire holding him just the same way as his father used to when some childish grief overcame him. Darian forgot that he was supposed to be a man, forgot that men didn’t cry - forgot everything except that he had failed to help Justyn, he had failed to help bis father and mother, and now they were all dead and he was utterly alone.
He cried silently as he had learned to do since his parents’ death, sobs shaking his frame, leaning on Snowfire, who simply held him and rocked a little from side to side, saying nothing. And only when the worst of his terrible grief had passed, did it dawn dimly on him that he really wasn’t alone after all. . . .
Finally, there were no more tears left, and Snowfire let him go at the exact instant when he thought of pulling away, more than a little embarrassed.
“Don’t be ashamed for allowing yourself to feel, little brother,” came the quiet words. “You should rather feel sorry for those who do not. They are either cripples - or very sick in soul.”
As he stared at the Hawkbrother in astonishment, Snowfire patted his shoulder. “I think that a midnight swim might be a good thing for both of us,” he said, and gave Darian a gentle push to start him moving again.
Darian was in a bit of a daze, and it seemed as if they only took a few steps farther before they came to the two ponds, their water reflecting the stars and a sliver of moon above them. Snowfire simply stripped off his garments and plunged in; after a moment of hesitation, Darian copied his example.
He had expected the water to feel cold, but he had been standing in the night air long enough that it was only pleasantly cool. He swam back and forth on his back, staring up at the stars, letting his mind empty of everything. He didn’t stop until his arms and legs were tired and he was beginning to feel a little waterlogged. Only then did he stop to tread water, and saw Snowfire was back on the bank, putting on his clothing, the mage-light still hovering near him, but much brighter now.
He paddled back to the same place, and looked up at a towel being held out for him to take. He dried himself off, and started to look around for his discarded clothing, but it wasn’t where he’d left it. Quickly, he wrapped the towel around his waist, wondering what had happened to it, when Snowfire noticed his confusion and pointed. There, neatly folded on a rock, was a fresh set of garments.
“Hertasi,” was all Snowfire said, as he turned his attention to carefully braiding his long hair. Quickly, Darian slipped into the clean clothes, and used the towel on his own hair to cover his uncertainty about what to do or say next.
“The sense of loss never leaves, little brother,” Snowfire said in a perfectly normal tone of voice. “But it does grow less over time, as long as you permit yourself to feel. If you bottle it inside, it only eats at you, until you are hollow and full of nothing but grief - ”
“How do you know?” Darian blurted, feeling unaccountably angry - then he could have beaten his head against a tree for snapping at Snowfire so.
But Snowfire didn’t snap back; he just finished braiding his hair and looked at Darian quizzically. “Who told you that Tayledras are immortal?” he asked. “Whoever he was, he was misinformed.”
Darian hung his head, his cheeks burning. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I didn’t mean. . . .”
“You didn’t think,” Snowfire corrected, with a kindly tone in his voice. “And given the hour and the circumstances, I can hardly fault you. You are tired, in every way. Much longer, and I will be snapping in an ill-tempered snarl myself,”
Darian flushed even hotter, if that was possible. “I can’t imagine you ever doing anything wrong!” he stammered.
To his surprise, Snowfire chuckled. “Oh, Dar’ian, do not ever allow Nightwind to hear you, or she will fill your ears with the myriad ways and times in which I have transgressed!” He rolled his eyes skyward. “I cannot even tell you which is worse - that she never forgets, or that she is right far too often - or at least, thinks that she is!”
To his surprise, Darian found himself smiling a little, for he had certainly heard the men of Errold’s Grove making the same complaints in the “tavern.” “I guess all ladies are like that. The ones at home - “
He stopped in midsentence. There wasn’t any “home” anymore. And as for the men who frequented the tavern, he had no idea where they were or what had happened to them. Were they even still alive? Shouldn’t he be getting help for them? What was he thinking of, lolling about in ponds like this, when he should be helping the people of Errold’s Grove? How had he managed to forget the rest of his people?
“What’s the matter?” Snowfire asked, breaking into his silence.
“I should - what am I still doing here?” he asked, feeling a frantic urge to do something, and not knowing what he could do. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other in a nervous dance. “I’ve got to go somewhere, got to get help. Why am I still here? I should be out there, trying to get somebody to help us, not here, enjoying myself!”
Before he could yield to that urge and just run off into the darkness, Snowfire seized his elbow, and somehow the mere touch calmed him. “Dar’ian, listen to me, and please believe me,” the Hawkbrother said urgently. “Hweel and Kel and I have been to your village, the second night after you came to us - we saw no signs that your people had been killed, and none that they had been captured either. We are fairly sure they must have escaped completely. You can be at ease, for it seems likely that they have already found help!”
“But you’re not completely sure?” Darian asked, wanting to believe, and not sure that he dared to. “You think they’re all right, but you - “
“I could not be completely sure without going into the village and looking into all the houses,” Snowfire interrupted, and added, “I think you will agree that this would not be a very wise course of action.”
“Uh - probably not,” Darian replied, trying to think where people could have escaped to.
“We think that they probably went down the river,” Snowfire continued. “There is a place there with fortifications - some great lord’s holding, we think?”
“Kelmskeep,” Darian replied automatically, “Lord Breon’s manor.” And somehow, just being able to identify the place made him lose some of that feeling of frantic urgency. “What did you see when you went back? I have to know! What if they didn’t get away, how would you know?”
“Then sit here, and I will tell you.” Snowfire gestured at a rock that seemed perfectly sculpted to act as a chair, and took another like it. “I do not know if you have been told this, but a Tayledras can see through the eyes of his bond-bird. I remained near where we found you, in the boughs, on the same line as the sentries. Hweel and Kelvren went on, since it would be far less likely they would be detected than a human, and it would be far easier for them to escape if they were sighted.”
Darian nodded, leaning forward tensely to better hear Snowfire’s soft voice.
“The bridge crossing the river had been repaired, and it appeared that few of the buildings had actually been burned, mostly a handful of sheds. There were livestock in crude enclosures in the fields, and many, many horses in better enclosures there also.” Snowfire tilted his head and brushed a strand of hair out of his eyes, as Darian flinched at the thought of cows pastured in the young crops. “Why do you wince?”
“They’re eating the crops,” Darian explained, thinking with pain of all the work that the villagers had put into those fields, only to have those animals devouring the food that should have gone to feed the village over the winter. “There won’t be anything to last until spring.”
“The barbarians of the north - which is what I believe these are - do not farm much; they are mostly hunters. Crop growing is a task for women and thralls, and the men don’t trouble themselves with where food other than meat comes from.” Snowfire seemed lost in thought for a moment, then came to himself with a shake of his head. “This tells me that the barns are empty of livestock, and there must be something else in the barns. I count the horses, knowing that northern barbarians are not great horsemen, and that there will be a dozen men who fight afoot for every rider. I decided then that the barns must be full of those soldiers, and the houses are full of the riders, who are of higher rank. Guessing at the numbers by the number of horses, I would say that there was no room in the village for your own people, and there are no people sleeping out in the open. So, I think they must have escaped.”
“And then?” Darian persisted. “Then what happened?”
“Then Kelvren was discovered, and he and Hweel had to leave.” Snowfire shrugged eloquently. “So do you think I am right?”
Darian tried to think, but he could not imagine where the villagers could be - other than escaped - if they weren’t in their own homes or in the barns. “I guess that must be right - “ he said, and suddenly found himself yawning. “But why can’t you attack these people? Aren’t you supposed to be Valdemar’s allies? Aren’t you going to help?”
“If we thought that your people were in danger, we would, regardless of the danger to us,” Snowfire said firmly, “But, Darian, just what do you propose we should do? You know how few of us there are, and you had a glimpse of how many the enemy has in his ranks.”
“But magic - “ Darian protested. “You can use magic - “
“Not as yet,” Snowfire told him. “Not in any way that will balance our small numbers. First, we must see if your people summon their own aid; it would be foolish, wouldn’t it, if we tried to attack and failed, only to see an army of your people come the next day?”
Having seen what the enemy could do, Darian had another word for it than “foolish.” He gulped, thinking of what a real battle must look like. Not merely one man with a-wounded arm, but many people hurt, even killed. And it wouldn’t be strangers dying, it would be people he knew. The thought made him sick to his stomach. “I think that would be a bad idea,” he replied weakly.
“On the other hand,” Snowfire continued, in that same, reasonable tone of voice, “if we wait long enough, the enemy will relax and drop some of their defenses. Even if help from your land does not come at once, we may well have an opportunity to do them a great deal of harm - perhaps even enough to drive them away. That sort of fighting does tend to make the best use of our abilities.”
“With magic?” Darian asked hopefully. Surely if even Snowfire, who said that he was inferior as a mage, could do things even Justyn couldn’t - what could Starfall do?
“Well, you told us that there was a mage with these people,” Snowfire began.
“I did?” Darian blurted.
Snowfire nodded. “When you told us of the creature riding the lizard - and the men with the aspects of bears. Only a mage can work such changes, which meant that there must be one among them. Well, you know what has befallen magic and you know that our task is to reestablish order in the patterns of magic. This means that Starfall must, before all else, seize control of the magic here.”
“So that the other mage can’t get it!” Darian exclaimed.
“Exactly so. Then, once we have control of the magic energy, he will be weaker. That is the good aspect.” Snowfire frowned. “The bad aspect is that this means Starfall will be busy holding the power, and unable to do other things he would otherwise - such as watching the enemy from afar or protecting us from the enemy’s magic. And in the meantime, the enemy mage is not having to hold the power-matrix, and he is free to act. None of the rest of us are his equal, and I do not know that we could be, even acting together. So - we will ensure that some message comes to your people, calling for help, and meanwhile we will wait to see what happens.”
Wait and see. Wasn’t that what Justyn was always harping about? Patience.
But this time, rushing into things is going to get people hurt and killed. He sighed, and nodded his head.
“I guess that’s what you’ll have to do,” he said reluctantly. “But - “
Whatever he had intended to say was interrupted by an enormous yawn, and he found himself blinking hard, trying to keep his eyes open.
“Hold the thought, little brother,” Snowfire said, and got up. “Whatever it is can wait until morning. For now, sleep is waiting.”
Darian stumbled along in Snowfire’s wake, trying to keep his thoughts in order. There was something about Starfall holding the magic - something important - 
But whatever it was, it didn’t last past putting his head down on the pillow.
When he woke up, his memories of last night and the nightmare that had awakened him were waiting for him. Snowfire, however, wasn’t.
He went through most of the day, doing whatever chores the hertasi or Hawkbrothers asked him to, without once seeing his new mentor. He guessed that Snowfire must be out doing his job, scouting, and that made him feel a little better. Something was being done; it might not be obvious to him just what it was, but clearly the Hawkbrothers were not lounging about looking decorative.
He helped Nightwind groom Kelvren after the latter returned from his own scouting foray, making certain that the enemy wasn’t getting too near their encampment. Kelvren told him more of the night-sortie, especially the combat with the two smaller monsters; it was exciting, but scary, too, when he thought how Kelvren could have been hurt. Now all those old stories about battles and fighting took on an entirely different complexion when he thought about these people he knew being in the middle of all the hewing and smiting and all.
The notion of seeing Kel sick with poison - of Wintersky with some terrible wound, bleeding into the dirt - it was horrible. Not that he hadn’t seen nasty injuries, because obviously he had, but to think of such things being inflicted by other people on his friends, and on purpose, to hurt or kill them - well, it was just entirely different from seeing the results of an accident, and it was hard to wrap his mind around the idea. Not just hard - ugly. It made him feel horrible inside to realize that people could actually want to hurt other people. Oh, there were plenty of times when he’d wanted something nasty to happen to other people, but the wish was always vague and ill-defined, and what he’d wanted was for something to happen to them, not that he wanted to inflict a hurt.
But - I think I could have hurt those men who were chasing me. He considered it a little more. I know I could have hurt them. I was ready to shoot them. He recalled quite clearly how he had felt at the time - coldly calculating an eye-shot, as if the men were nothing more than tree-hares he was hunting for the pot.
But they were going to kill me and Snowfire. And they attacked the village. And for no reason! Or, not for no reason, but not for any good reason.
When he finished with Kel - who had really enjoyed being able to tell someone about his fight - Wintersky caught him before anyone else did.
“We need to get the hawk furniture in order,” Wintersky told him, “and you’re the only one free,” without any explanations of what “hawk furniture” was, or how to get it in order. Instead, the youngest of the Hawkbrothers left him in the charge of a painfully shy hertasi in someone else’s hut, the entire left side of which was full of - hawk furniture.
Which was not little chairs and tables for birds of prey, as his imagination had devised, but the bits and pieces of hawk equipment needed for the bondbirds.
For all their intelligence, bondbirds were still hawks, and a hood slipped over their heads would let them sleep in a noisy and brightly-lit room. “Darkness - makes them sleep,” the little hertasi whispered, cupping her hands over her eyes by way of illustration. “If the bondmate needs to be awake, the bird must still sleep - to feel well, they must sleep from dawn to dusk.”
She showed him how to clean the hoods, made of hard, but extremely thin leather, odd bulges over the areas of the eyes to keep from touching the lids. Then, when he had cleaned them, she showed him how to repair those that were damaged. Most often, it was the braces, the leather thongs that held the hoods shut at the back, that were damaged, broken, or worn out. That was easy to fix, once he saw the odd way in which they were laced, so that a Hawkbrother could tighten or loosen the hood with one hand and his teeth. But sometimes what was damaged was the welt of leather protecting the raw edge of the bottom of the hood, or the ornamental knot on top, which was supposed to be used to take the hood off and put it on. The hertasi let him repair the simplest of these, but for the really complicated repairs, such as restitching the eye-covers, she insisted on doing the work while he watched. It was fascinating, for he would not have thought that such stubby little fingers could take such delicate stitches.
Most of the bondbirds didn’t need restraints, such as jesses, but all of them wore the bracelets on their ankles that the jesses fitted through. The bracelets were good for other things, for tying a light string onto, for instance, that a bird could carry up and over a high branch, so that a rope could be pulled up afterward. So the hertasi taught him how to cut and oil such bracelets - then how to make leather- or rope-wrapped and padded perches as well. Hawks took wall- or floor-perches of tree limbs wrapped in leather, while falcons, it seemed, required perches made of upthrust sections of stump, like upthrusting rocks, but padded so that the talons of a sleeping bird had something to grip. Care of the feet, it seemed, was all-important, and sharp talons were hard on wrapped perches. Perches had to be made to withstand hard use, but not made of things that would bruise or abrade the feet; bruised or cut feet could infect, leading to a state called “bumblefoot,” which in turn could cripple a bird if not adequately treated.
He learned more about birds of prey in that morning than he had ever learned in his life, and when he and the little lizard were done, every bit of equipment that could be mended, had been.
Then it was time for lunch, and time to help clean pots for a bit.
It occurred to him after lunch, as he stood beside a-half barrel with his arms up to the elbow in warm, slippery, soapy water, that he had seldom worked this hard with poor Justyn. But this didn’t bother him at all, and that was the odd thing.
Maybe it’s just - it’s just that no one shouts at me, or tells me what a terrible, ungrateful child I am, he concluded. It’s not so bad to work when no one is scolding you.
Of course, he’d never had such interesting work before, which might have been the reason. Ayshen always had funny or fascinating things to tell him while he scrubbed pots, and mending the hawk furniture had been something entirely different from anything he’d ever done before. It wasn’t hard to get through a chore when someone was chatting to you and making jokes, and when the chore required concentration and delicacy, time just flew by.
And as for helping to tend Kelvren, well, he had felt positively honored. It had been an amazing thing, to touch the gryphon’s huge feathers, and make sure the killing talons were pinprick sharp and immaculately clean.
Odd, he thought, as Ayshen left him alone for a moment, to tend to the bake ovens, I thought Kelvren was so old, older than Snowfire, but it was almost as if he was my age. I wonder how old he really is? There was no way of telling with a bird, of course. They didn’t exactly show their age in any way that he could recognize.
I like it here, he thought, with yearning, as he watched Ayshen’s back. I wish I could stay.
If only there was some way that he could! When things got back to normal, would anyone at Errold’s Grove ever want him back? Was there the faintest chance that the Hawkbrothers would want him with them?
And what if things never got back to normal? What if no one wanted to go back to the village? Would the Hawkbrothers be willing to give him a home?
Last night Snowfire kept calling me “little brother.” Is that just something he calls every boy, or - 
“Dar’ian!” Wintersky popped up behind his back, and he yelped in startlement, dropping the bowl he’d been scrubbing back into the water. Wintersky jumped with amazing agility right out of the way, and didn’t even get a single drop of water on himself. He laughed, and clapped Darian on the back. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to creep up on you like that, it’s just habit. Snowfire wants you for a moment, if Ayshen doesn’t mind.”
“Not at all,” the hertasi said without turning. “He’s done twice the work of any of you clumsy-handed louts. He can consider his work done for the day.”
“Why, Ayshen, I am crushed!” Wintersky mocked, and threw Darian a towel to wipe himself down with. “Come on, this won’t take long.”
Wondering what Snowfire could want, Darian followed the younger Tayledras with increasing curiosity. He became even more puzzled, and a little uneasy, when Wintersky brought him down a very narrow path into a part of the encampment where he had never been before. It was heavily overgrown, cool, dim, and so quiet he could hear himself breathing. The path ended in a place completely overshadowed by the branches of the oldest and largest willow Darian had ever seen, with the usual log hut built right up against the trunk of the tree, which was easily as big around as the hut itself. No grass could possibly grow here, but that lack was more than made up for by the thick moss carpeting the area. Sitting on a bow perch beside the door was a handsome cooperi hawk, watching everything with alert, reddish-yellow eyes.
Waiting for Darian were Snowfire and Starfall. The Adept looked very tired, as if he had been working all night, and Darian wondered if he had gotten any rest at all. They must be taking me seriously enough that Starfall is working himself as hard as he can to keep those people from getting at the magic. That was oddly reassuring.
“Dar’ian, I understand you have been a great deal of help to us,” Starfall said, by way of a greeting.
Caught off guard, Darian shrugged. “I guess so. Have to earn my keep, don’t I?” He winched a little, inwardly, for his words didn’t sound very polite, but Starfall didn’t seem offended.
“We do expect all of those in our own group to do their share if they are not disabled,” the older man said gravely. “We are not so well-equipped that we cannot use another pair of hands. In fact - “ he cast a glance at Snowfire,” - we could use that pair of hands on a more permanent basis, if that would suit you.”
Darian stared at him, quite certain that his new-won ability to understand Tayledras must be faulty.
Starfall persisted, grave but earnest. “Our impression is that you do not feel any truly strong ties to those of your people that remain. Is that impression true?”
He shook his head a little, hardly able to believe what he was hearing. Was Starfall making the offer that he thought? Starfall was clearly waiting for an answer, and Darian was startled enough to give him stark, unvarnished truth. “Uh, I’d say they’d probably be happy to see the last of me right now,” he admitted, shamefaced. “With no Master, I go back on the village to care for, and I don’t think any of them would care to apprentice me now.”
Bet they could find all kinds of excuses not to, in fact, he thought with sudden bleakness, for how could Starfall take that as any kind of a recommendation?
“Then, would you care to remain with us?” Starfall asked, watching his face intently. “Snowfire has offered to take you as his younger sibling, and that is all that I need as Elder.”
“But there is a condition,” Snowfire said warningly, before Darian could burst out with an astonished and immediate acceptance. “You must agree to - to ‘apprentice’ to me, in the matter of magic, at least for as long as I have the ability to teach you. You may outstrip me; I do not yet know how strong your Gifts may be, and if that happens, you must go to a real teacher, Starfall, by preference.”
“And we shall be gone from our home Vale for some time, several years, perhaps, working to establish the ley-lines and nodes all through the northern part of Valdemar,” Starfall added, watching him closely. “So you will not actually see our Vale until our work is done. If you were hoping for exotic surroundings, well, our surroundings will be less and less exotic all the time that we are out. That is another reason for us to want you with us. It would be good to have someone who has a native’s command of this tongue at our disposal.”
Darian stood rock-still, thinking furiously. So, that was to be the price of being given a place here - that he must continue the tedious study of magic. Of all the things he wanted to learn, surely that was the last on the list!
But perhaps he was doing Snowfire an injustice. Justyn was hardly the best teacher in the world, and as a practitioner, he was even worse. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if he was studying with someone who actually knew something.
And even if it was just as tedious and boring as it had been with Justyn, well, wasn’t that a small price to pay to be where he was actually wanted?
And Snowfire says he wants me for a brother? Me? They want me to be a real Hawkbrother?
He made a real effort to contain his excitement, but it surely showed. He stifled his urge to shout, and somehow managed to turn a grave face toward the Adept.
“I would like to stay, very much, Elder,” he said at last, with a little bow to Starfall. “I am honored that you ask me, and I certainly accept! I promise that I will do all that I can to help everyone here, and I will try to be more patient in learning magic.”
Starfall smiled, and motioned him closer. Taking his hand, the Adept placed a pendant into it. It was a hawk-talon, mounted in silver; the mounting was decorated with a blue moonstone and strung on a beaded chain. “Welcome to k’Vala, then, little brother,” he said warmly, as he closed Darian’s hand around the talon. “You must wear this as a token of your acceptance into the Clan, as Nightwind does. You both bear the talons of my father’s great suntail hawk-eagle, Skyr, who shared my father’s labors as a Healing Adept and went to white at the age of only four. I know that you will be worthy of the token, even as Nightwind is.”
Snowfire took the talon from Darian’s nerveless fingers and put it around his neck. Darian looked up at him, trying to find the right words to thank him, and failing completely - but Snowfire acted as if he had already said them.
“You have labored long and hard already, and I am not minded to begin your lessons with one today, little brother,” the younger Hawkbrother said as he clasped and released Darian’s shoulders. “Why not go out into the forest for a time? It will cool your mind and help you think.”
If there was one thing that Darian agreed with, it was that he needed some time to think this over. He nodded. “But - do I need to have someone with me?” he asked, hoping that the answer would be “no.”
Snowfire shook his head. “That horse that we stole is in need of exercise,” he suggested. “Go take it about for a while. You will be safe enough, riding, and you won’t have to worry about dyheli chatter in your mind.” The corner of his mouth twitched a little, suggesting to Darian that although the remark was intended as amusement, Snowfire had suffered “dyheli chatter” in the past.
As he hesitated a moment, Starfall nodded at the entrance to his little sanctuary. “Off with you, young one. I am the one most needful of your elder brother’s skills at the moment. We have some tricky work ahead of us before we can rest this day.”
Perhaps yesterday such a dismissal would have made Darian sullen and resentful, suspecting that they were getting rid of him so that they could discuss him. But now - now he had no such feelings. If Starfall said they had work, then they had work, and he would only get in the way. He stammered his thanks to both of them, and turned and ran, his heart hammering with so many mixed feelings that he couldn’t sort them out properly.
He already knew where the horse was; in the pasture, being guarded by the dyheli herd and kept from straying. He guessed that the tack would be in a hut he knew was used for storing things with no immediate use, and sure enough, it was. He hadn’t saddled many horses in his life, but with the help of two amused dyheli who kept the nag from running off half-equipped, he managed to get all the gear on in the proper manner. It wasn’t that the horse was at all ill-tempered, it was more as if it expected bad treatment; it didn’t fight him, but if it could get away without being saddled and bridled, it would be very happy to do so.
The horse sighed with resignation as he clambered into the saddle, his stomach aching reflexively as he recalled the last time he’d ridden the beast. But it seemed tractable enough, and it moved out of the entrance to the valley at a calm walk.
Darian was used to finding his way in the Forest, and had no fear that he was going to get lost. He set a general course southward, but otherwise let the horse have its head, and it ambled on beneath the trees while he let his own thoughts wander. They tended to stray into mere contemplation of his surroundings; it was so easy to let his mind go blank as he admired a golden shaft of sunlight piercing the green gloom, then saw with surprised delight a single flower basking in its warmth like a precious jewel displayed for his admiration. It was more comfortable to contemplate the majesty of the enormous tree trunks rising in a never-ending vista of columns all around him than to contemplate his own future. And the liquid notes of birdsong dropping tranquilly down through the boughs were infinitely preferable to the discords of his past.
Everywhere he looked, he saw things that his parents would have drawn his attention to, if they had been there. Summer was not a time to trap for furs, so his summers in the past had been spent in exploration. Here in the hills, wonderful and magical spots seemed hidden in every valley. Sometimes it was a sparkling stream burbling over a stone-filled bed. Sometimes the stream poured down the side of the hill in a series of exuberant waterfalls. He caught sight of a pair of does with their fawns, grazing in a tiny pocket of meadow, surrounded by moss-covered boulders. Once they passed a fallen tree that supported an entire community of plants and ferns on its decaying, moss-covered side.
All was well for some time; the horse, given no commands, chose to eat as much as he walked. He meandered from one sparse bit of grass to the next. The grass beneath the tree canopy was thin and tended to grow in widely-spaced, wispy clumps; thick growths of fern and moss were more common here than grasses, and the horse disdained both. Darian let the reins hang loose on the horse’s neck, engrossed in his own increasingly troubled thoughts.
Those thoughts weren’t really coherent; too much had happened to him for coherency. He had the vague feeling that perhaps this was the root of what bothered him - events had taken him so completely by surprise that he wasn’t acting anymore, he was reacting.
At least before, when anything happened to me, it was generally because I’d already done something to make those things happen, he thought. And it was usually something that I knew would make trouble. It was true he hadn’t had a lot of control over his own life, but at least he’d had some, and he’d had choices, even if it was only the choice to resist what other people had in mind for him.
But now - fate or chance was hitting him with one hammer blow after another, not even giving him the time to reel back from one blow before slamming him with the next. Being invited to join the Hawkbrothers was the first thing that had happened in days that involved any choice for him.
And now that he’d accepted, he felt strange. There was a creeping sense that he had betrayed the people of Errold’s Grove in some way, and yet at the same time he resented the fact that he felt that way. What right had they to claim his loyalty? Why should he chain his fate to theirs?
There was guilt, too, a great deal of it, and he wasn’t at all sure what to do about it. What had happened to the folk of the village? He hadn’t made any real effort to find out. Surely he ought to at least do that. And no matter what Snowfire said, how could anyone be sure there was nothing that he could have done that would have saved Justyn? Maybe if he’d been beside his master on that bridge, the way any good apprentice would have been, the outcome would have been different. All right, so he didn’t have any real magic yet, but he’d learned a lot at the side of his parents, and maybe he would have been able to do something that would have saved them both. I could have jumped off the bridge when he set it afire, and dragged him along with me. I can swim, even if he couldn‘t. Or - His mind buzzed with a hundred absurd things he might have done, or could have done, or thought he could have done, and all of them just made him feel guiltier.
He became so engrossed in his thoughts that he didn’t realize that the horse had stopped eating and was sneaking through the forest at a fast, if furtive, walk, until he saw a landmark he recognized with a start. He knew then that they were getting far. too close to Errold’s Grove for comfort and made a grab for the reins.
But the horse was an older hand at this game than he was; with a flip of its head, it tossed the reins out of reach, and increased its pace. Darian didn’t have to be able to read its thoughts to know what they were - the beast had scented its herdmates, and it was going to get back to them by whatever means it took. The blacksmith had explained once why all the horses in the village were kept in a single herd; horses weren’t happy alone, and even though the Errold’s Grove “herd” wasn’t a breeding herd, the lack of a stallion was no impediment to the horses’ comfort in each other.
This horse probably felt the same about the rest of the horses he was used to being with, and no dim memory of mistreatment was going to overwhelm the urgent need on his part to get back to the safety of the herd. Darian considered trying to throw himself out of the saddle, but the horse was going faster now, and suddenly the ground seemed very far away to a boy who’d never done more than steal rides on the innkeeper’s old pony. With the horse moving, he didn’t know how to get himself out of the saddle and onto the ground without breaking something. So he just held grimly to the saddle, gritted his teeth against the jolting, and prayed that they wouldn’t run into any enemy sentries.
The trees cleared away up ahead, and Darian felt his heart stop with terror as he thought they were almost at the village. But the horse hesitated as the tree cover thinned, and Darian managed to seize the reins before the recalcitrant beast managed to bolt into the middle of town.
But then, Darian realized that the daylight ahead of them was not the daylight of the cleared fields. Somehow the horse had managed to come out of the forest at the top of the only bluff that overlooked the village. How it had managed that, Darian had no clue, but once he dismounted and led the horse cautiously to the edge of the bluff, he had as good a view of the village as if he’d been sitting in one of the trees.
But what he saw made his skin crawl, and filled him with the desperate feeling he had to do something, along with the knowledge that there was nothing he could do.
In the distant fields were people, people he recognized, toiling like beasts in the heat of midday. Hitched to plows like oxen were the biggest men of the village, sweating beneath the blows of a whip held in the hands of a stranger. Behind them, guiding the plows through the fields meant to be sown with late-ripening crops, were the women, who were also chained in their places. Others worked, chained at the waist in pairs, beneath the watchful eyes of more strangers. These men weren’t wearing the armor that Darian remembered, but he knew they must be the same men who had invaded the village.
As to why men were being used to pull the plows instead of oxen, well, the smell of roasting beef coming up the bluff certainly provided a reasonable explanation. There were no oxen now, and the horses had probably been confiscated to serve the army.
How many of the villagers had been recaptured? Enough, evidently, to provide field-slaves for their conquerors.
Darian found his hands clenched on his bow without any memory of reaching for it. He could sneak in closer, get a position up in one of the trees, and start picking off guards. They weren’t wearing armor; they’d be easy shots - 
I could kill all the guards I see and they could escape, I could lead them to the Hawkbrothers - 
Right. He could kill all the guards that he could see. How many more men were there that he couldn’t see? If they’d gotten to the point this quickly of killing and eating the oxen - tough meat at best - 
Anger flooded him next, anger at the Hawkbrothers. Why hadn’t they told him the truth?
It faded as quickly as it came. They hadn’t told him, perhaps, because they didn’t know themselves. It was entirely possible that this was the first day the villagers had been put to work in the fields. Why should the enemy have put them out? It would have been more logical for them to take their captives away; sell them, perhaps, or put them to work in their own fields back in the northern mountains.
Unless, of course, they had decided to stay.
He couldn’t do anything here, and this was information that the Hawkbrothers didn’t have. He had to get back, as quickly as he could.
It’s not cowardice to go. I can’t do anything by myself, and Stariall and the rest need to know what’s happened here.
Carefully, he backed the horse into the heavier cover before he mounted. He considered his next move carefully. He hadn’t really been paying attention when the horse took off on its own. Somehow, if there were sentries (and there probably were) the horse had managed to thread its way past them without being spotted. So if he could retrace the horse’s path, he could do the same.
Finally, finally something he could do right! He felt a grin stretch his mouth, an expression that had not been on his lips since his parents died. If? Say rather, how quickly. The day he could not track a shod horse in the soft earth of the forest floor would be a day when he renounced his heritage and asked to be apprenticed to a clerk!
He had to cast around a bit before he found the clear trail; it had gotten a little muddled when he finally got control of the reins back from the stubborn beast. But once he found the trail, the rest was easy.
He soon saw how the horse had gotten up onto the bluff without his realizing it; the beast had wound a zigzag course up the slope, taking the ascent so gradually that he hadn’t known they were climbing. He was tempted to cut straight down, but reminded himself that the horse had managed to avoid the sentries this way; it wouldn’t be a good idea to take what appeared to be a shorter path only to run into one of the enemy.
The horse didn’t want to be ridden away from its mates, and fought him for a good long time, which didn’t make finding the path more difficult, but did take up more valuable time. It was sunset by the time that Darian got to a point where he was fairly certain that there were no enemies to watch out for. By then, the horse was tired enough to stop fighting, which was just as well, because Darian’s temper was frayed to a thin strand, and he was in no mood for further nonsense.
With a clear path ahead of them, Darian finally got some revenge; he smacked the horse’s rump with his unstrung bow, startling it into a tired gallop, and headed for the Hawkbrother encampment as fast as the miserable beast would go.
Weary and aching, Darian found himself the center of another Council, but now he understood what was being said, which was certainly an improvement over the last time.
Hweel had met him outside the valley, and Snowfire at the entrance; Darian had feared anger or reproach for being gone so long, but to his surprise, Snowfire had been perfectly calm right up until the moment he had gotten within speaking distance and blurted, “I’ve been to Errold’s Grove! They’re all slaves!”
Snowfire’s expression had changed completely in that moment, and Darian found himself swept off the horse and into the middle of a Council that was assembled so hastily that people actually came running to the clearing while pulling on tunics or holding half-braided hair in one hand. Hertasi simply appeared with boots, shirts, food, hair-thongs, or anything else that had been forgotten, and vanished again. One of them left a bowl of stew, bread, and tea at Darian’s hand without him ever actually seeing the food left there, just the flash of a departing tailtip.
As firelight flickered on the concerned faces of his Hawkbrother hosts, he alternated bites of stew and gulps of tea with words of explanation.
The only person missing from this council session was Starfall, but although no one said anything, Darian guessed from what wasn’t said that Starfall had more than enough problems of his own.
Finally the others stopped firing questions at him and began a worried discussion among themselves. Darian turned his own attention to the remains of his meal, too tired and hungry to really think of anything else. As he wiped the bowl with his bread, Wintersky came and sat on a rock beside him.
“I hope you don’t think we deceived you, Dar’ian,” the young man said, leaning forward earnestly. “After the way that Kel and Hweel were caught by those magic-sniffing creatures, we didn’t want to risk anything or anyone that might set off more such guardians, and someone kept us from being able to use scrying to set a watch on the place magically. And it didn’t seem advisable to risk being seen ourselves - the enemy doesn’t know we’re here, and if he did, he might decide to attack. We were certain that all the barbarians had were houses, some stock, but never people. If we’d had any idea that those barbarians had your people, we’d have risked more to find out for certain, then to do something for them - “
“I know!” Darian interrupted, just as earnestly. He scratched his head, and gave Wintersky an anxious smile. “I was mad at first, but, well, I had a lot of time to think on the ride back. I trust your word; I know that - if you say you would have done something, if you’d known what was going on, then you would have.”
“We should have made sure.”
Darian looked up, and saw Snowfire standing over him, his eyes expressionless and flat, shadows flitting over his face as the light from the fire shifted and changed. “We should have made sure,” the Hawkbrother repeated harshly. “That was a mistake on our part. I’m sorry, Dar’ian.”
Darian shrugged awkwardly. “Wintersky was explaining - and I’d kind of figured some of it out myself. You thought everything was all right. And you and Starfall were busy,” he reminded his mentor shyly. “You told me yourself, you have to fix the magic so no one else can get at it - “ Suddenly, the thought he’d set aside last night came back to him. “Snowfire, how are you doing that? Are you making just - uhm - what’s the word - nodes the way they used to be?”
Snowfire’s expression changed, and he looked down at Darian with speculation. “Not exactly. Why?”
Darian licked his lips, and wondered just how stupid he was going to sound. After all, compared to what the Hawkbrothers knew, he didn’t know much of anything about magic, really. But still. . . .
“There’s definitely a mage with the enemy, right?” Darian asked. “I mean with them, at Errold’s Grove, not just working with them or behind the attack.”
Snowfire nodded. “I cannot imagine how they could be blocking our scrying if there wasn’t.”
“And the mage is going to want that power - he’d have to want to grab for it.” He bit his lip, hoping that he wasn’t going to make a total fool of himself. “And I guess if there was a big source of power, he’d try to get to it, right?” Before Snowfire could answer that, he asked another question. “And there are way too many of those enemy soldiers for us to fight, right?”
Snowfire looked both guilty and relieved. “Far too many for us to take in direct confrontation,” he acknowledged. “Yet - I do not know how we are to free your people, otherwise.”
“But what - what if you baited a big trap for them?” Darian asked. “What if you made a big source of magic, made it show up all of a sudden? Wouldn’t the mage send out men, maybe a lot of them, to try and take it over?”
“Or loot it,” Wintersky suggested, his sleepy eyes brightening. “If you moved it around a little, he might get the idea it’s portable and send his fighters to loot it for him. He might think it was an artifact someone had found.”
“And I know traps, lots of traps,” Darian offered in eager triumph, holding out one hand as if he was offering his knowledge as a gift. “My parents and I, that’s what we did. A lot of the animals we trapped were as big as humans, or bigger. We could take a lot of the enemy out with traps, without ever needing to send anybody closer than bowshot. You set a trap that blocks them from going back the way they came, then you make sure that they can’t get back without having to go through all your other traps. That’s called a channeling trap. Maybe we could even fix things up so that the enemy has to divide up into small groups. Why, if we did that, we could just have one bowman up in a tree near each trap, and what the trap didn’t take care of, he could!”
Snowfire looked at him, and beamed with the most wonderful expression Darian had ever seen.
Respect.
And what was more, others among the Hawkbrothers, who had overheard the conversation, were looking at him in the same way - and those who had been too engrossed in their own conversation to hear were whispering questions to those who had. In another few moments, they were all looking at him that way, and silence replaced the murmur of voices in the clearing.
“Just how many traps do you mean, when you say lots of traps, Dar’ian?” asked Rainwind, a scout only a little older than most of the rest. He stood up and joined Snowfire, a man who was a little more weathered, a little shorter, and a little stockier than Darian’s mentor. “We know some, obviously, but trapping is not the way we usually deal with things. We are more direct and, to be honest, more accustomed to having a superior force. What traps we do use are for snaring game, not stopping soldiers - “ He shrugged.
Darian blinked, and made a quick mental survey of the traps he and his parents had used for large, dangerous, clever animals. “I know by heart maybe six or eight major different kinds that would work against a man - or several men at a time,” he said finally. “Maybe more; we might be able to adapt others I know by disguising them, or we could combine some. I grew up making traps in this part of the Pelagiris. Some of what we caught were probably smarter than these barbarians.”
Someone whistled through his teeth with admiration.
“So you’d already know how to adapt the designs to use the local cover!” Snowfire exclaimed, his whole body taking on a new animation.
Darian nodded. “Entirely using found materials, too,” he said earnestly. “We only carried basic tools with us when we went out trapping, and adapted what we found at the different locations. The most we ever carried were some metal triggering devices and those were mostly just time savers. I can show you some examples of the traps I know if you can stand to watch. I’m not just talking about different kinds of pit-traps. I know how to set a pit-trap to get a lot of people instead of just one or two, I know of snares and drop-nets that will get more than one, a couple kinds of channeling-traps, deadfalls with wood, deadfalls with rock, ankle-traps, leg-breakers, foot-piercers - “ He began rattling off the kinds of traps that could be set in such a way that wary enemy soldiers wouldn’t see them until it was far too late, and the eyes of his listeners either widened or narrowed according to the nature of the listener. The others rose to stand around him, until once again he was the center of a circle of listeners. “Trapping is just a different kind of hunting. My father said that it was hunting while absent, using the ultimate in disguise - not actually being there!”
“If we can do this - if we could lure a good number of their people out - “ Snowfire murmured to himself, as his eyes widened.
“If you can lure them out and we can channel them past the bluff, or through a couple of other places where there’s only one way to go, I can show you where and how to rig a deadfall that will block their way back!” Darian assured him. “There is one place where the river is very deep and dangerous and the path beside it is narrow, and if you can weaken one of the overhangs, we can drop a large piece of the bluff just behind them at that point. Then they’ll have to go the way we channel them.”
“And that will be a gauntlet of further traps.” Snowfire’s lips thinned with satisfaction. “It is cruel, perhaps, but have they not earned such an ordeal?”
“Yes!” Darian responded fiercely. Nodding heads showed that the others agreed with him.
“Show us!” demanded one of the others; paper and a charcoal stick appeared when Rainwind left the group and returned with them in his hands, and Snowfire conjured a mage-light to give Darian brighter and steadier illumination than firelight. Darian hunched over the first sheet, drawing a map.
“Here, here’s the village, and here’s the bluff, and here’s where the bluff goes up to the riverbed; far enough from the village that they just can’t call for help.” He sketched in the landmarks with a careful hand. “Now, if we rig a deadfall here, when it’s triggered, it’ll completely block the way back. It’s all sandstone through there; too dangerous to climb the rockpile, or at least that’s what they’ll think. Their only choice will be to climb the cliff, swim the river, or keep going.”
“What’s to stop them from swimming the river?” Wintersky asked. “Some of them did that when they attacked your village and the bridge burned.”
“Us,” said Ayshen, as he strolled into the firelight, his sharp teeth set in a grim smile. He had one of his enormous cooking knives in one hand. “Forgive me, Snowfire, but this may be the first time in my memory that there has been a combat where hertasi might be of service. We can swim like fish - how do you think we catch them, so big and so fresh? - and any clumsy human foolish enough to be in the same water with us will not live to learn his mistake.”
“Or if he does, it will not be for long,” added another hertasi in his shadow, who then ducked shyly out of sight.
“If they stay out of sight, the enemy won’t even know what’s attacking the swimmers,” Rainwind pointed out. “They’ve never been here before, for all they know, that part of the river could be inhabited by gigantic, man-killing Changed fish. They’ll have no reason to think of traps at that point,”
:I fancy we can be of service in the woods.: Tyrsell was nowhere in sight, but it was obvious he had been listening to the Council talk. :Exactly how, I am not yet sure, but certainly we will be useful in some capacity. I will have to see the territory, first.:
“If nothing else, perhaps the dyheli could drive the enemy into further traps,” offered Daystorm, a female scout. “It would be useful to have them in a panic, fleeing from the sound of many hooves. And again - it would just look like animals. It seems to me - “
“Go on,” Snowfire urged, when the other hesitated.
“Well,” she said. “It seems to me that we ought to keep things looking like it’s accident or Changed animals as long as possible. If we do that, they won’t actually be looking for traps for a while.”
“Eventually - “ Snowfire began.
“Oh, eventually, a trap will look like a trap, of course,” she admitted. “But it would be very useful to have them thinking that fate - or the Forest - has suddenly turned against them.”
“And therrre isss, of courrrssse, myssself,” Kel put in gravely, sounding quite calm - but the pinning of his eyes gave away his excitement. His wings were extended a little, as if he wanted badly to be in the air at this very moment.
“Not if they have bows,” Snowfire replied sternly. “You are hardly arrow-proof. And in the air you are a very large target, especially in the day. So was Skandranon.”
Kel’s only reply was a snort, but it was obvious that Snowfire was going to stand firm. “I am the scout-leader, and you are tacitly working under my command, Kel,” he reminded the gryphon. He didn’t add anything else, but Kel sighed.
“Very well,” the gryphon said, giving in. “Commanderrr.”
“We have an advantage,” Snowfire continued. “Many of us are Master-level mages; we can help create these traps with magic at a low enough level that working this magic will not immediately attract the attention of the enemy, especially if we shield what we are doing. So we can work quickly, much more quickly than if we did this with hands alone.”
Darian studied his crude map. “I wish we could get them all with a single deadfall here,” he muttered, and looked up hopefully. “Could you bring down that much rock?”
Snowfire sighed. “Before the Storms, it would have been possible, with a waiting crack-spell, which would create a split at an angle that would cause a slide, when it was triggered. Now - no. That kind of spell, on that scale, wouldn’t remain stable long enough with the way mage-energy is in flux - it depends upon tension through its length. We will probably be able to catch the tailmost rank with what crack-spells we can set, but no more.” Now the Hawkbrother joined Darian in close examination of the map. “It might even be worthwhile to do nothing more than block their way. As Daystorm pointed out, so long as they think the fall of rock is accidental, they will simply carry on with their original mission, and worry about finding a new way back when they’ve obtained what they were sent after. We don’t want them swimming the river, of course, but other than that, we could leave them alone for a while. We could lead them quite a merry chase before we start eliminating them with traps and tricks.”
Kel laughed, a deep, rumble. “In fact, my frrriendsss, we could let them marrrch unhinderrred and make a night-camp - and rrremove theirrr sssentrrriesss one by one. Sssi-lently, if posssible.” He examined his talons critically, and held them up, shining redly in the firelight. “Think of the consssterrrnation when the next watch came up, but the onesss to be rrrelieved werrre - poof! Gone!”
Snowfire looked up at him sharply, with one brow raised. “You,” he said severely, “are an evil creature.”
:I like it,: Tyrsell countered. :That would be a place where we could be useful. It is no difficult thing for one of us to come upon a man silently and unseen.:
“I like it, too,” seconded Ayshen. “We might be able to help there, if we aren’t too tired from swimming. Three or four of us could swarm a sentry, and he’d never hear or see us coming.”
“If we did that,” Windshadow pointed out. “If we triggered the deadfall, set up the traps, and left the harrying to our hertasi and dyheli allies, we could go in that same night and get the villagers out. Even if the barbarians have a way to get messages back and forth, it won’t do them any good. The leader in the village is going to be preoccupied with clearing the blockage, not watching his back, and the leader in the expedition is going to be busy with shadow-fiends picking off his men one by one.”
“That would also be dividing our forces,” Snowfire objected, then sighed, and scratched his head. “No, it wouldn’t really,” he corrected himself. “The hertasi would be of limited use in a raid on the village, and the dyheli would serve only as targets.”
:True, and I would refuse that assignment if you were to give it to me,: Tyrsell replied calmly. :This plan plays to all our strengths. Perhaps Kel could come with us?:
“I can go along as well,” Nightwind offered. “Tyrsell ought to command the group, but I’m not bad with a bow, you know. Kel and I could work together.”
Snowfire looked as if he was thinking about the proposition very hard, and finally nodded. “It’s the best division of labor,” he agreed. “And the best use of the limited number of fighters we have. Dar’ian can tell us and show us what to do, and once the traps are all in place, we can set the plan in motion.” As Darian looked up at him anxiously, Snowfire patted his shoulder reassuringly. “That will take no more than half a week. Surely your friends can hold out for a few days, can’t they? I know they were being mistreated, but they weren’t in any danger of being handled brutally, were they?” Darian wasn’t certain, but he nodded anyway. It won’t do any good to rush in there before we ‘re ready, he reminded himself. A few more beatings aren’t going to make that much of a difference. Even if it does make a difference - this is better than their alternatives.
“It’s settled, then.” Snowfire said decisively, then shook his head. “I wish there were another way, but there doesn’t seem to be.” He pointed to Wintersky and Windshadow. “You two go scout with your birds and make us some good maps of the area tomorrow; figure the best direction to herd the barbarians, and where to get them to make a camp, after we block their path behind them.”
The Hawkbrothers nodded, and Snowfire turned his attention back to Darian. “Now,” he said. “About those traps. . . .”
Hours later, hands still smudged with charcoal, Darian stumbled back to the ekele, thinking longingly of bed. He stopped just long enough to wash his hands and face before stripping off clothing that still smelled of horse, getting into a clean set of night clothes, and lying down on the pallet. He was keyed up enough that he didn’t really think he’d be able to fall asleep quickly, but he was either better at relaxing or much more tired than he thought, because he didn’t even remember closing his eyes.
He woke as Snowfire and Wintersky came in, whispering about something, and propped himself up on one elbow to blink at them. “I’m awake,” he called softly. “Anything I should know about?”
“We just worked out tentative placing for your traps, and ways for the hertasi to trigger them,” Snowfire told him, raising his voice to a more normal level. “I didn’t expect you to be awake, but I’m glad you are. You made all the right choices today, and you deserve credit for doing so.”
“Right choices?” Darian repeated, puzzled.
“Oh, you could have gone charging right into the village, thinking you could free your friends, but you didn’t,” Snowfire said, his voice muffled in the folds of his shirt as he pulled it over his head. “You stayed long enough to make detailed observations, then you came straight back here. You didn’t waste time with accusations and carrying on when you got here, you simply told us what you knew and then offered constructive suggestions. In short, Dar’ian, you behaved in every way as a man and a warrior, and I am very proud of you. We all are.”
Darian felt his neck heating up and averted his eyes. “Ah,” he stammered, “thank you. I - I don’t want anything bad to happen to anybody, and - “ He gulped, and decided to tell the rest of the truth. “The horse brought me out on the top of the bluff, not down at the edge of the village. If I’d been closer, I probably would have done something stupid. But there was no direct way down from there, and, well - that’s probably why I stopped to think.”
“You still made the right choices.” Snowfire sat down on his pallet, blinking at him with eyes that looked as large and dark as Hweel’s. “That is an important thing for you to know.”
“Heyla - it’s going to be an early day tomorrow, and the night is only getting shorter for all your talking,” Wintersky pointed out, a little crossly. “We do not all fly owls, here.” He was already lying on his sleeping pad, and he glared pointedly at the mage-light above Snowfire’s head.
Snowfire chuckled, and the light blinked out. “Good night, Wintersky,” he said. “And good night, Dar’ian.”
“Hmph,” Wintersky replied, mollified. “Good night.”
“Good night,” Darian said softly. He lowered himself back down onto his pillow, and the next thing he knew, Wintersky was shaking his shoulder, and it was morning.
The day wore on, filled with explanations and examples of trap placement and construction. Around him, there were the sounds of wood being chopped, branches split, and snippets of conversation in Tayledras. Darian caught himself feeling like he was playing, once, while he bent and notched saplings for lashing-traps. He felt a pang of guilt, since after all he was engaged in acts of war, to cause pain and even death to those who had done the same to his village.
My village? I suppose they are, when all is counted up. They weren’t the people I would have chosen to be with, but they were better than - alternatives.
Yet, making traps was at least something familiar, from a better time in his childhood. It brought back wistful memories of his parents.
He sighed, thinking about them while he tied off his fourth or fifth lasher, then hacked away steadily at a branch as thick as his upper arm. Things would have been so much better if they were here with him now. His mother always seemed to know the right things to say, or how to touch in just the perfect way to put him at ease. His father was always so strong and capable, with a quick smile.
“Dar’ian?” a timid voice asked from below a bush. Two small, pebble-scaled hands held out a cup of water from under the cover, and nothing else of the hertasi could be seen. He wiped his brow and murmured a thanks to his largely-unseen benefactor, then drank the cup dry. In a blink, after setting the cup down, it was gone, and a second hertasi voice spoke from behind another bush.
“Dar’ian, the stakes you requested are stacked on the east side of the red boulder. We hope they will be enough. We go now to prepare the vines.”
Then there was the slightest rustle of leaves and the sound of scuttling through underbrush, and Darian was alone again. Well, I’d better see how many they managed to get done.
I’m getting nowhere on this branch, and my arms hurt. If we can’t have enough of these traps ready to stop the soldiers, we might only wind up injuring them enough to enrage them, not discourage them. Darian sheathed his knife and started off toward the place the hertasi had told him of. Hertasi were amazing to him - shy ghosts with astonishing speed and industriousness. What were their parents like? He found it hard to imagine them having families like his, or the Tayledras. And what about the. . . ?
At that moment, a large shape detached itself from the shadows of the thicket surrounding the red boulder. Darian froze in place and then relaxed, exhaling sharply when he saw the shape resolve itself into golden-tipped feathers, the hook of an aquiline beak, and the flip and flash of a huge wing refolding against a feathered body. The gryphon stalked out, looking directly at Darian. He seemed impossibly huge even at this distance, yet Darian knew that was only a trick of the mind.
He caught himself blushing, wondering how long he’d been under the creature’s scrutiny. Kelvren looked down, picked from several clear spots for the most comfortable, and sat down, waiting for Darian to approach. The gryphon’s chest rose and fell quickly as he apparently recovered from some physical effort or other, and his gaze appeared to soften the closer Darian came to him.
“Grrreetingsss, Darrr’ian,” Kelvren rumbled as he dipped his beak in a nod. “I have jussst completed brrringing the ssstakesss the herrrtasssI have made. They arrre behind the rrred blouderrr.”
Darian nodded self-consciously. “I heard. I mean, one of the hertasi told me that’s where they were - I didn’t know you’d brought them, though. I hope there’s enough of them.”
Kelvren’s eyes sparkled and a moment later he wryly said, “I think therrre will be - enough.” Then he raised his head, flicking a tufted ear, and blinked a few times before opening his beak. Kelvren paused, roused his feathers, and bluntly asked Darian, “What trrroublesss you?”
Darian frowned. “Was it obvious?”
Kelvren clucked. “If you werrre not trrroubled, I would sssussspect you of not being human. But you arrre trrroubled, ssso, Changechild you arrre not. Ssspeak.”
“All right. Do - you have parents?” Darian asked the gryphon.
“Chah!” Kelvren barked. “No, I wasss borrrn ssspon-taneousssly of an arrrtissst’sss drrream and a villain’sss nightmarrre.”
Darian blushed. “I’m sorry. It was a stupid question. Of course you had parents.”
Kelvren raised his beak up to point at the sky, then looked back to Darian. “If you mean, do I know my parrrentsss and rrressspect them? Yesss. Verrry much ssso. And do I misss them now? Yesss. Verrry much ssso.” He took a step toward the red boulder, and Darian followed. “One doesss not out-grrrow the feelingsss of fledging, jussst the intensssity of the feelingsss. It isss the way of thingsss.”
Darian was incredulous, and stopped in his tracks. “You? You miss your - mama and papa?”
The gryphon walked on without pause and rumbled only, “Don’t you?”
Darian caught up. “Well, yes, but you’re a gryphon - “
“And you arrre a human, and we werrre crrreated by humansss, and live with humansss, and learrrn frrrom hu-mansss, and we arrre farrr morrre like you than you know. Why ssshould humansss have exsssclusssive rightsss to any anxsssiety?”
Darian had to laugh at that. “I guess you’re right. You probably share your gryphon anxieties with us humans, too!”
The gryphon nodded firmly and winked, stopped a few steps after reaching the boulder. “It isss only fairrr, afterrr all.” He pointed his beak, ana Darian was astonished at what he saw.
Stacked in bound bundles of twenty or more were sharpened stakes, in different thicknesses, piled as high as he was tall. There must have been hundreds of them, if not thousands.
Maybe this plan would work after all.
Snowfire had always considered himself to be in fine shape, but the need to favor his wounded arm was throwing everything off a little, including his balance, and as a result, he ached with unaccustomed strain. A full day of work on man-traps had been more than enough to show him that he probably ought to be in better condition than he was. He was stretching and twisting his good arm as he approached Starfall’s clearing and ekele, hoping to ease some of the aches.
Hweel was already ahead of him, waiting on a spare perch beside Starfall’s cooperi hawk. Snowfire carried a rough meal of cold sliced meat, flatbread, and wild berries wrapped in a napkin. Ayshen was not cooking today, for he was needed to help set the traps, and although he would not have complained had he been asked to cook a supper as well, no one wanted to place that double burden on his too-willing shoulders.
Nevertheless, they all had to eat; it would be cold meat, greens, and flatbread for as long as those lasted, and after that, each of them would be in charge of his own food. That was not exactly a hardship for a Hawkbrother; rabbits and tree-hares were plentiful and the birds more than willing to share a catch with a bondmate. Snowfire had already decided that he would see that Starfall ate and drank; if Starfall’s young bird failed to make a kill out of inexperience, Hweel was such a fine hunter that he could have supplied the needs of six people, not just three.
He found Starfall sitting cross-legged in the center of a containment shield in the clearing beneath the willow branches. The Adept’s eyes were closed, but he sensed Snowfire’s presence as soon as the scout arrived, for he motioned to his visitor to sit and wait without ever taking his attention off what occupied him. Obediently, Snowfire did just that, taking weary pleasure in watching the way the light filtering down through the branches changed from pure gold, to reddish gold, to dark red, and finally to the blue of dusk. The clearing could have been in the heart of the deep Forest, it was so quiet and peaceful here, and Snowfire was content merely to rest both mind and body while he waited for the Adept to complete his current task.
He did not even conjure a mage-light; he didn’t want to disturb either Starfall’s concentration or the delicate balances of power within the containment shield. So the ball of blue light that appeared above his head was the Adept’s, not his, and was Starfall’s way of telling him that the work was over for now. There was no outward change to the figure within the shield, but a few moments later the shield dropped away and Starfall stood up, stretching.
“Here,” Snowfire said, handing him the meal. “Ayshen said I was responsible for making sure you eat. So what sort of progress have you made?”
“The enemy mage is trying to consolidate power for himself, and he’s trying to work his way through all of the locks I put on the lines,” Starfall confirmed. “From the way he’s working, trying to bludgeon his way through, I think he’s under the impression that it’s crude work, possibly done by that master of young Dar’ian. I don’t think he realizes that there is still an active worker about, and I know he isn’t aware of me.”
“As long as he keeps thinking that, I’ll be pleased,” Snowfire replied, helping himself to some of the berries.
“I have the bare hint of a power-point out along the river,” Starfall continued, laying a slice of meat neatly on a slice of bread, and roiling them up rogeiner. I strengthen it gradually, as you are setting up the traps; he’ll notice, but it won’t be enough to tempt him. But once the traps are done, I’ll remove it and put it on a dyheli; then I’ll pour enough energy into it that it will look tasty, and I’ll have the dyheli move it farther down the river along the river path. At the same time, I’ll build an illusion around it of a heavily armed caravan moving away. I want to create the impression that the river has uncovered a talisman or artifact, and that someone found it and is carrying it off.”
“Even if that isn’t what he thinks, he’ll still assume the caravan has something tasty and send his fighters.” Snowfire nodded with satisfaction. “It’s a good ruse. Just make sure your illusion won’t be broken.”
“It shouldn’t be; I’ve gotten a dyheli doe to volunteer to carry it.” Starfall applied himself to the food. “I’m linking the power-point to her once she gets into position, but not before. I don’t want to have a moving power-point to attract his attention until then. And once we’re done, of course, I’ll gather it back in and use it as the core of the Heartstone.”
Snowfire swallowed, and raised his eyebrows. “So you are going to make a Heartstone here?”
“A small one,” Starfall confirmed, as he finished his first meat roll and built a second. “Not powerful enough for a Clan Vale, and at any rate, it will take a long time before it has accumulated enough energy to be useful. It will be four or five years before anyone could use it to create even a small Vale.”
Snowfire was not at all sure he liked the idea. He’d thought of several objections when Starfall broached the plan, and those objections hadn’t changed. “Still. A Heartstone out here? Why? And who are you going to link into it, besides yourself?”
“Why? Why not?” Starfall responded, apparently surprised that Snowfire would object at all. “Sooner or later the k’Valdemar will produce a mage that can use a Heartstone - or we will want an outpost here. You have all complained at one point or another about the lack of civilizing amenities here; well, a Heartstone will make those things possible, eventually.”
Snowfire grimaced. “And meanwhile? Wouldn’t it attract unwanted attention?”
Starfall shook his head and took on a little of that arrogance that seemed to come with being an Adept. “Oh, do trust me to know my business, Snowfire; by the time I am finished with concealing it, only another Tayledras Adept who knew that it was there would be able to find it.”
“I hope you’re right,” Snowfire replied. “Never mind; what more can you tell me about this enemy mage?”
“He’s certainly strong enough to be an Adept, or whatever these barbarians call such a thing.” Starfall folded and refolded the napkin pensively. “If it came to a fight, he’s not a match for me, but he would exhaust a great deal of my resources in defeating him. I don’t want to have to do that, and to keep from coming into direct conflict, I will have to be subtle. Subtlety requires time and concentration, rather than power. He’s powerful enough that it is going to take all my attention to keep him from breaking the illusion, finding our encampment, and tapping into the new matrix of ley-lines and nodes.”
“Which means when we move against the village, you stay here.” Snowfire nodded. “I rather thought you’d say that. I can leave someone here on guard, if you like.”
“Why not Nightwind and Kel?” Starfall suggested. “She’s a good shot, and he’s worth five fighters in intimidation alone.”
“And it would keep him out of close combat; now that is a good idea.” Snowfire felt a bit more cheered. He’d been trying to think of a way to keep the gryphon from flinging himself into situations where he’d be a target rather than an asset, and this was perfect. Put him in the air and Nightwind at the valley entrance - put a couple of hertasi and dyheli in the valley right here, around Starfall’s ekele, acting as bodyguards - that would work very well. No matter how clever enemy fighters were, they wouldn’t get past the combined senses of a gryphon, hertasi, and dyheli. If somehow there was a concerted attack by a formidable group instead of an incursion of one or two fighters, Starfall would have warning, covering fire, and time to escape.
And Kel would rightly see this as a trust and an important assignment - which it was - rather than an attempt to keep him out of combat - which it also was.
“How are the traps coming?” Starfall asked, as Snowfire ran through his mental roster of hertasi and dyheli and made some tentative selections.
“Not so badly that anyone is getting frustrated, and not so well that anyone is nervous, thinking that things are going too well. The hertasi are approaching it with their usual zeal, and they’ve been making enough trap parts that Kel’s had to struggle to keep up with carrying, even with dyheli helping,” Snowfire told him, and picked up a small twig to draw in the dirt with. “Here’s where the main deadfall will be, along the river. We got that done first, before sunrise this morning. We found a place where a flood undermined the sandstone of the bluff and cut under it a little farther; if there wasn’t a magical prop holding it up now, it would be down in an instant. There is going to be more than enough stone blocking the path that they aren’t going to want to go back that way. This morning, we cut a path and aged it, then made things so difficult on either side that they aren’t going to want to leave it.” He sketched in the path, leading away from the river. “We put in a log bridge over this ravine here that is going to fall apart as soon as anyone puts a foot on it. They’ll either have to rebuild the bridge or make a strenuous climb down and back up; in either case, they’ll be tired, and it’ll be dusk by the time they reach this clearing.” He made a circle and tapped it with the twig.
“Then that is where they’ll stop,” Starfall eyed it with interest. “And that is when the hertasi and dyheli begin removing sentries and other woods-wanderers?”
“And while some of them are doing that, the rest of the hertasi will be setting the traps we set up today along the trail they came up from the river on.” Snowfire grinned at Starfall’s look of surprise. “Exactly. No matter which way they try to go in the morning, they’ll run into man-traps. I didn’t see any reason to give them an unhindered path in any direction. By that time, they’ll already know they’re under attack, so there’s no point in putting a lot of effort into making traps that will look like accidents. When they trigger these traps, they’ll know it’s something left for them by an enemy.”
“Good so far,” Starfall mused. “But you can’t get all of them with traps. So?”
“So the man-traps themselves form a channeling-trap. Tomorrow when we set everything up, we’ll be leaving one easier direction - here.” He drew a sweeping arrow toward a patch of green moss. “They’ll come out into the clear, with no place to go for cover and a ravine at their back. It ought to be no difficult thing for the hertasi to pick them off with bows.”
“And at any rate, by the time the survivors struggle back to the village, the rescue should be long over. I like it.” Starfall nodded decisively.
“Even if the mage at the village can communicate with the fighters out here, they won’t be able to get back in time to do him any good. It’ll be the middle of the night, and the woods will be full of hertasi with knives and traps just waiting to be sprung.” Snowfire nodded, feeling very pleased with himself. “And to avoid leaving a trail back here to the encampment, we’re going to try to get the villagers across the bridge and take them downriver to that Kelmskeep place Dar’ian told us of. I think if anyone follows us, it will be that way, and I hope there will be a force to meet us from the Valdemarans.”
“I have sent a message to Lord Breon of Kelmskeep, that reached the place today,” Starfall confirmed, but then frowned. “The thing is, I do not know if it will be heeded or even seen by the man himself.”
“How did you send it?” Snowfire asked.
“A written message, delivered by raven to the gatekeeper this morning; Raindance saw it through the bird’s eyes. She said he seemed startled.” Starfall shrugged. “It took the bird this long to reach Kelmskeep; the best we can hope for, I think, is that an escorting force meet you on the way.”
Snowfire sighed, well aware that the Adept was right. Best to count on what they had, not what they hoped they would have.
“Well, I leave all the magic doings in your capable hands,” he said.
“And I will leave the rest in yours.” Starfall stood up and stretched, and walked back into the center of the clearing, where he took his seat again and closed his eyes. A moment later, the containment shield had sprung up around him. Snowfire whistled to Hweel, who was still gossiping with the cooperi, and the great owl launched himself into the air to follow him back to the main encampment.
:What were you two chattering about?: he asked his bird. :You don’t usually have that much to say to the day birds.:
:Mates,: Hweel said shortly, then elaborated. :He may be young, but he has a mate. He has two fledges this year, now flying strong.:
Snowfire sensed that there was more. :And?: he persisted.
:They come, all five. His mate, mine, three fledges.: Hweel’s mind-voice was tentative, as if he was afraid that Snowfire would object to the arrival of his mate and young.
That was the last thing on Snowfire’s mind. Although he wasn’t bonded to Hweel’s mate Huur, she worked with Hweel so effectively when she wasn’t tending youngsters that he might just as well have been. And having a clumsy fledgling around wasn’t a bad thing as long as you could keep the youngster close to the camp.
:I’ll be glad to see them,: he replied, and sensed the relief in Hweel’s mind. :lt was clever of you to have his mate come with yours; the fledges will have protection by day and night on the journey.:
Hweel huured, a contented little sound of pleasure from which his mate got her name. He liked being praised, and he had greatly missed his mate, so knowing that Snowfire would welcome her arrival made him doubly happy.
It would be no bad thing to have a couple of unbonded birds along with the expedition either. They would make excellent camp guards, and if the unthinkable happened and someone lost a bird, there would be possible replacements at hand.
Enough; concentrate on the immediate problem, he reminded himself. He needed to collect Darian and some paper and a charcoal stick; it was time to make a detailed plan of how to get into and out of the village.
He’d left Darian about to take his turn in the bathing pool; by now the boy should be clean and ready for something to eat. Snowfire was terribly proud of him, for Darian had worked as hard as any of them, and had mastered his frustration admirably when someone didn’t quite understand what it was he wanted for a trap. The boy had matured a great deal in the last week, though it was clear every so often that he was still a boy.
When this is over - he needs some time to play and be young, Snowfire concluded to himself. But right now, well, none of them could afford to be anything other than mature and responsible.
He collected more meat and bread from the stores; the berries were gone, but when Ayshen heard who this next meal was going to, he pulled Snowfire aside and passed him a honeycake surreptitiously. “The hatchling didn’t get enough the last time I made them,” Ayshen said, as if daring him to challenge the statement. Since Snowfire had seen Darian stuffing himself with the coveted sweets, and knew Ayshen knew he had, it was clear that the hertasi had taken very strongly to the boy.
“I’ll make sure he knows who sent it,” Snowfire replied, and carried the treasure off. He’d seen Ayshen watching the boy out of the corner of his long eye; evidently this was the hertasi’s way of rewarding hard work.
He met Darian on the path, hair damp, dressed in fresh clothing. “Here, I brought you something to eat,” Snowfire said, holding the napkin out to him. “There’s a honeycake in there from Ayshen.”
“There is?” Darian looked as pleased as if it had been a lump of amber. “I love Ayshen’s honeycakes! Where can we go so I can eat, and help you with those maps of the village you wanted at the same time?”
“Let’s try the council clearing,” Snowfire suggested. “There’s a game place there that no one is going to be using tonight. We’ll have a drawing surface there.”
Darian nodded, his mouth already full of bread and meat. He followed Snowfire to the clearing and at the far side Snowfire took over the game place, a flat sheet of rock balanced on a stump that served as a table, and two more stumps, one on either side of it. He took the taller of the two, and Darian took the shorter, as he spread out the first sheet of paper and took out a scribing rod. “All right,” he said, making a diagonal line for the bank of the river. “Here is the riverbank. Let’s start there.”
“Put one edge of the forest here, and one here,” Darian suggested, pointing with a sticky finger. “And the bridge would be here.” He devoured the last crumb of his cake and licked his fingers clean while Snowfire sketched. “Right, now put the back edge of the forest there. The road goes from the bridge to the center of town, and stops there. Here’s the mill, with the waterwheel there. There’s the forge.”
Snowfire was agreeably surprised at the lad’s clear and precise ability to remember and place everything in the village, but there just weren’t enough adequate areas of cover to sneak a number of people in without getting caught.
“. . . and here’s where the aqueduct starts,” Darian was saying, and the words brought him out of his thoughts with a jolt.
“Aqueduct?” he said, suddenly interested. “What aqueduct?”
“We use it to bring river water to the fields in summer,” Darian explained. “See, it goes around through the middle of the planted fields, then to the cistern house and the watering trough in the center of town.”
“And where does it stop?” Snowfire demanded. “What’s it made of?”
“It stops at the river, I guess,” Darian said, confused by the sudden barrage of urgent questions. “There’s a water-lifting wheel beside the mill that brings water up to the aqueduct and that brings the water out of the river down to the fields because it’s always sloping down from where it starts. As for what it’s made of - hollow tree trunk, mostly. It’s covered to keep trash out of it.”
“Is it big enough for a man to crawl in?” Snowfire persisted.
“Oh, certainly - and I see what you want to do!” Suddenly Darian was all smiles. “It’s absolutely big enough for a man to crawl inside. What’s more, even though we use it all summer, I doubt that anyone’s tending to it now. I can’t imagine a bunch of barbarians thinking to irrigate the fields, and I doubt that anyone in the village is inclined to help them by telling them that the fields need water.”
“So it starts at the river?” Snowfire asked. “Where, precisely?”
Now Darian’s face fell. “I don’t exactly know,” he confessed. “It’s all overgrown there; I know it’s somewhere near the mill, but not exactly. At least, I don’t know what the place looks like at night. It’s real tall, though, because otherwise it wouldn’t be able to slope down to the fields.”
“But if we can find it, we can get right into the heart of the village undetected.” This was exactly the sort of thing Snowfire was looking for. “Dar’ian, your memory is so good, surely you can remember where the aqueduct starts!”
But Darian shook his head unhappily. “I know what it looks like, but I can’t tell you where to find it,” he confessed. “I only remember that it’s near the mill, not in it.” He looked up at Snowfire hopefully. “I could guide you, though.”
Snowfire frowned. “I don’t want you anywhere near possible fighting,” he objected.
“But if you won’t let me guide you, how do you expect to convince people you aren’t a different kind of enemy?” Darian asked shrewdly. “None of them have ever seen a Hawkbrother, and they’ll probably be frightened of you!”
That was something else Snowfire hadn’t thought of, and he hated to admit it, but the boy was probably right. Still, it went against the grain to permit someone as young as Darian anywhere near combat.
He argued with the boy for some time, and in the end Darian had more good, sound reasons why he should go than Snowfire had counters for them.
“All right,” Snowfire sighed. “You can guide us. But just to a place of safety, mind! You aren’t to rush in and try to help if there’s fighting. You’ll only get in the way, and you might make someone lose his concentration and his life.
“I promise!” Darian agreed, his eyes shining.
Snowfire only hoped that both of them - and ultimately, the village and the Hawkbrothers - would not regret this decision.

Seven

Now, in some ways, came the worst part. All of the traps were constructed and set, and now came the waiting. Daystorm had her birds over the village, while Starfall created his “bait,” and the nagging question was, would their foe take it?
If he closed his own eyes, Snowfire could picture the scene as clearly as if he himself were there. A flock of five crows perched in a tree above the rooftops of Errold’s Grove, an unusually silent gathering, but no one in the village seemed to notice either their presence or their silence. Through their eyes, Daystorm watched the activity in the village below. Two of the crows were bonded to her, the rest were the offspring of her original pair, but all were willing to lend her their eyes and wings, especially when the activity at hand promised to be entertaining. Snowfire occasionally envied the Tayledras who bonded to crows and ravens; the birds had tremendous senses of humor, and as a matter of course, when the original bird took a mate, the mate also became his or her bondbird. Sometimes Hweel’s sober dignity was a little wearing, and he would have welcomed the raucous hooliganism of a band of crows; he would also have welcomed having both halves of a pair as his bondbirds. He sometimes worried that having an unbonded mate gave Hweel divided loyalties.
Last night the dyheli doe Pyreen had taken her place upriver, carrying the double burden of an illusion of a heavily guarded caravan and the newly-strengthened power-point. She had remained stationary until daybreak, then moved slowly southward, mimicking the plodding pace of heavily-laden mules. By then Daystorm’s birds had already been in place to see if the mage somewhere below would take the bait. Tentative experiments had proven that either the mage could not sense anything different about the bondbirds, or that there was enough magical energy in the form of his own Changed fighters to mask the magic of the birds and their links to their bondmates. To Snowfire’s mind, that only confirmed his impression that it had been Kelvren that the “watchdogs” had reacted to, and not Hweel.
Daystorm was simply sitting quietly with her back braced against a tree at the side of the Council circle, with an eager audience waiting around her. She took it all in stride, including the audience; there was very little that rattled this experienced scout. She sat so quietly that she could have been a painted statue, for her chest rose and fell so slowly that it would be very difficult to tell that she was breathing. Her hair, shorn short on the sides, cut into a stiff crest on the top, and braided in a long tail down her back, never moved in the fitful breeze that came with sunrise, contributing to the statuelike illusion.
Finally she broke the silence. “There’s some activity around the Lutters’ house,” Daystorm announced. “Someone just dashed out. Now - he’s going around to all the houses of the village at a run. He’s pounding on the doors and shouting something at each house. Now there are men coming out of the houses, one out of each, walking fast toward the Lutter house.”
Well, that confirmed the guess that whoever was in command of this force had taken over the Lutter house, which - although it was not the largest - was definitely the finest house in the village, according to Darian. Lutter had been one of the dye-merchants, was still the only merchant in the village, and was possibly the wealthiest man in Errold’s Grove before the Storms. By now, of course, his store of ready cash was used up, but his house and the contents were still the finest in the village.
So, naturally, the place would be taken by the most powerful person in the invading forces, and that person appeared to be the mage. That was good to know, but it did leave several questions unanswered. There was a question of who was in absolute control - was the mage the definitive leader, or did he serve a military leader? Was there more than one mage, and if so, how powerful were the others? So far, no recognizable mage had come within view of any of the birds.
“Just the usual, now,” Daystorm announced. Snowfire sighed; after several days of observation, they had a good idea of the usual daily schedule. Once the sun rose, the villagers were roused from sleep by the slavemasters - they had all been crammed into the threshing barn, which was the least weathertight of all of the village buildings, serving merely to keep rain and damp away from grain while it was being threshed from the stalk. Men, women, and children were all housed together, and at a rough guess, the barbarians had managed to round up and take most of the villagers prisoner. Everyone, old and young, regardless of physical condition, was expected to work in the fields or do menial tasks. The numbers didn’t add up exactly, but there were probably a few “special” slaves in the houses, serving the barbarian leaders and elite fighters, and thus, exempt from field work.
“The fighters are coming out to practice.” Every morning the fighters had limbering and practice sessions before they ate. The fighters were mostly housed in the barns, though some of them had taken over the houses that those of higher rank didn’t want, cramming two and three times as many people into each dwelling as the houses had been intended to hold. But, from all Snowfire knew of their way of life, they were used to cramming themselves together like wolves in a winter den, and probably didn’t think they were suffering from overcrowding. After the practice sessions were over, and the morning meal distributed and eaten, the leaders would pick out men for hunting parties and fishing parties, and the rest would be drilled in formation-combat. That was quite unlike the barbarians Snowfire knew of, who fought as individuals rather than groups. This signified a new and disturbing development, and something that would have to be looked into when he had the time.
If I ever have the time. Well, he’d made notes on all of this, and if everything went wrong, Starfall would take those notes with him as he escaped to safety.
Daystorm collected more of an audience as the morning passed; after all the preparations, the Tayledras were on edge and eager to get into action. Ayshen had somehow found the time to bake more flatbread, and hertasi were passing around rounds of the stuff wrapped around bits of honeycomb. Snowfire took one and munched it without ever taking his eyes off Daystorm’s face.
She took one without ever opening her eyes, but then, she had always had an extra sense where sweets were concerned. “They’re calling the fighters in to eat. Still nothing from the Lutter house.”
“I wish we dared send a bird down to the roof to see if it could overhear anything,” Wintersky muttered to him. Snowfire nodded agreement; he would have given a great deal for a set of ears in - or on - that house.
In no way would he have ever endangered a bird by putting one there, however. Some of the barbarians knew what Tayledras birds looked like, for there had been conflict along the northern ranges with barbarians before this. Even if it somehow escaped notice that the bird in question was much larger than normal, well, bored barbarians with bows tended to make targets out of anything that moved.
Including each other - they seemed to find it howlingly funny to shoot blunted arrows at each other, with the intended target trying to dodge and the bowman trying to hit in an embarrassing and potentially excruciatingly painful place. Snowfire had spent a great deal of time in the past few days, watching their antics through Hweel’s eyes.
He had noted that they seemed to have done a pretty thorough job of looting the village, not that there was much to take. Clothing that didn’t fit or that was for a child or a female was either cut up or put to other purposes. Tools that weren’t needed for immediate field work had already gone to the forge, presumably to be remade into weapons. Food and drink were gone, of course, and there were rapid inroads being made on the ripe stuff in the fields; any objects of metal had been melted down, either to be made into ingots or into arrowheads. Livestock had either been eaten or would be soon, except for horses, which had been taken for the mounted fighters. Anything valuable was presumably in the hands of the leaders by now. There wouldn’t be a great deal for the villagers to salvage when this was over. Hopefully they would be grateful just to escape with their lives.
“Ah! We’re getting some activity!” Daystorm exclaimed. “The leaders are coming out of the house - now they’re heading for the fighters. They’re shouting orders. Most of the fighters are running back to the barns, except for a couple who are going to the houses. Oh, they’re coming back with the leaders’ armor, and here come the rest of the fighters with theirs. Everyone is getting into armor. No, that’s not quite right. Everyone except the mounted fighters is getting into armor - they’re getting ready to send out a raiding force. I think it’s working, Snowfire. He’s taking the bait.”
“Sounds to me that since your illusion only shows pack-animals, he’s keeping his mounted troops behind,” Rainwind observed shrewdly to Snowfire, leaning over and speaking in a low voice to avoid disturbing Daystorm.
“That would make sense,” Snowfire agreed. “It would be best not to risk them on this. He knows that his foot troops can easily overtake a pack-train, and why take the chance of losing a mounted fighter who is much more expensive to replace than a foot soldier? It’s what I’d do.”
“Right, they’re all getting into formation, strapping on their armor,” Daystorm reported. “And packs. They’re taking light overnight packs. So the mage has a pretty good idea of how far the target is likely to get before they reach it.”
Snowfire nodded with satisfaction. That was good; it meant that the mage wouldn’t think anything of it when his troops didn’t make it back by nightfall.
Daystorm continued to report on preparations, and then finally said the words he had been waiting for. “This is it. They’re moving out, and they’re taking the river road, exactly as we wanted them to.”
“Excellent!” he exclaimed. It was time for the next stage, but he didn’t have to tell the others that. Daystorm would leave her crows standing sentry at the village, but Wintersky’s bird would pick up the departing troops as they reached the river. Hweel had already passed word of the departure to Sunstone (or rather, Sunstone’s falcon); Sunstone was stationed at the bluff and would trigger the avalanche blocking the road. Wintersky would count them and pass the number on to Sunstone. Sunstone would wait until the last ranks were in view, then let the stone bluff fall. They had agreed that, although it would be a fine thing if they actually caught some of the enemy under the rock-fall, they wouldn’t actually try for anything more complicated than blocking the path behind them all. It would be a disaster to have even one of the enemy fighters left on the village side of the blockage, for he would return to get help, and the mage would detect the telltale traces of magic in the fallen stone.
So, the rock would fall, the enemy force would be whittled down. They would soon find that the riverside path that had been so easy to follow deteriorated into a hellish nightmare of washouts, slippery rockslides, and narrow ledges where only one man at a time could pass. The river itself was swift and deep there, and anyone who fell in would fall prey to Ayshen and his friends. Nor would bodies bob to the surface with obvious knife wounds, for Ayshen had weighted ropes to keep them on the river bottom. All that anyone above would know was that those who fell or jumped in were pulled under and never reappeared. That should thoroughly discourage would-be swimmers.
When a path leading inland appeared, it would be welcomed with relief, and the steep ravine with its derelict bridge would seem no great obstacle until the men tried to cross it. Only then would they learn that the sides of the ravine were crumbling clay and gravel, and the bottom was a morass of sticky muck as deep as a man was tall, or perhaps even deeper. It hadn’t always been that way, but ever since Snowfire opened up a spring at the bottom, it was. As difficult as it was to climb down, it was even harder to climb up. They probably wouldn’t lose any men to the climb, but they’d be wet, filthy, and exhausted before it was over.
Meanwhile, the rest of the hertasi and the dyheli were all in place, waiting for the exhausted and demoralized enemy troops to get to the spot chosen for the ambush. The hertasi were making the place look very attractive without making it look like a trap. Signs of old campfires and just enough deadfall wood piled up would leave the impression -that others - perhaps the very caravan they were following - had camped here before. There was a clear, cold spring near enough to the campsite that someone should stumble over it, and between that ready source of water and the wood already at hand, the situation should be too tempting to resist.
But that would be for later tonight. Now it would be another long wait until the enemy troops marched past Sunstone, late this afternoon.
Now that everyone knew the enemy was on the move, the group waiting around Daystorm broke up. Snowfire looked up to find Darian at his elbow, waiting patiently for the scout to notice him.
“What is it, little brother?” Snowfire asked. “Do you wish to change the plan for tonight?”
“No!” Darian exclaimed. “No - I mean, I - I am afraid. I’m scared, but I don’t want to back out or anything. I just - I just need something to do.”
Snowfire understood only too well the need to have “something to do” before a planned engagement, but he was at a loss to think of anything. Finally he had an inspiration. “Please - practice those exercises in magic I have shown you,” he said earnestly, “and try to think of ways in which they could be used tonight. We will need every weapon at our disposal; remember what I said about the way that a small application of magic can be used to a great effect.”
Darian grimaced a little, but nodded and trailed off to find a quiet place in which to practice.
Hweel, Hweel’s mate Huur, and their young fledgling watched him move off with unblinking gazes. Then Huur yawned hugely, her youngster did the same a moment later, and both of them shut their eyes and hunched their heads down to sleep. They had arrived last night, and were probably exhausted. They had certainly eaten hugely of the bounty that an excited Hweel had provided for them.
Hweel practically radiated contentment as he sat beside his mate and their bumbling youngster. Huur was considerably larger than Hweel, as was usually the case with birds of prey, and Snowfire paused to consider whether he really wanted Huur to bond with him. After all, Hweel was quite a burden; Huur would be worse.
Well, it wasn’t within his power to decide one way or another. It was the bird’s decision, not his. And meanwhile, Hweel was overjoyed to have her beside him and that was no bad thing.
Snowfire had his own ritual of preparation to begin. He had things timed to a nicety, so that his hours would be occupied and his mind would not be idle to make up scenarios of disaster.
First, he ran through his own magic practice, though he didn’t have to think of ways in which small magics would be useful in tonight’s raid, for he had plenty of experience along those lines. All the while he practiced, he sat across from Daystorm, with one ear cocked in case she said anything about activity in the village. He put himself through his paces, pushing to speed up the time it took for him to work a particular piece of magic, by even a fraction of a breath. That was always what he worked toward; it would be useless to try for more power, for he had reached the limits of his ability there - but it was always possible to try for more speed.
By the time he was done, it was about noon; he left Daystorm’s side just long enough to collect food for himself, Daystorm, and Starfall. He left Starfall’s ration just outside the containment shield, though Starfall was so deep in concentration that the Adept never noticed he was there. That was all right; the food was covered and would keep, and Starfall’s bird would keep pests from carrying it off. Then he took Daystorm’s ration to her, and the scout accepted it with thanks.
“There’s nothing unusual going on at all,” she said, tearing off a strip of dried meat with her strong, white teeth. She looked very much like a fox when she did that, and Snowfire wondered if she knew it. “The only thing going on is that the mounted fighters are all practicing, mostly on each other. I think they’re pleased that the foot soldiers are gone; it gives them more space to practice in.”
“That’s probably true,” he agreed, and grinned. “Let’s hope they forget it’s practice and take out a few of their own.”
She laughed, and he turned his attention to his bondbird. :How close are they to the trap?: he asked Hweel, who was in contact with all of the bondbirds.
;Close,: Hweel told him, and showed him what Rainwind’s falcon saw from high above, so high that the men below her would not see even a speck in the sky overhead. It would not be long now until the first of the troops reached the undermined section of bluff.
“They’re getting close,” he said aloud to Daystorm. “Keep a close eye on the Lutter house; if this mage has any way of communicating with the other troops, we’ll find out about it soon.”
He held to the vision of the river road as seen through the eyes of the circling falcon, watching as the antlike, foreshortened figures crept along at a maddeningly slow pace. The falcon knew exactly where the fall was to take place, and centered her circle on that part of the bluff. There was no way to communicate with Sunstone, but part of Snowfire ached with tension, hoping he would not drop the rockfall too soon. The tiny figures crawled onward, completely unaware of what waited for them. Half of them were past the bluff now, with most of the rest beneath the area where the rock would come down. Most of the rest - 
Not yet, Sunstone, not yet. Let them pass - 
Now they were either past the fall area, or within it, but there was always the chance that the rock would not fall as they thought, letting one or two escape.
Not yet, not yet - 
There! The last of them was past the halfway point!
A little puff of dust at the base of the bluff was all the warning Snowfire had; Sunstone had released the fall.
It began slowly, as these things always did; a trickle of rock from the top, a rumbling sound, then the first signs of the slide. Most of the enemy fighters reacted immediately; they looked up, and ran downriver, away from the village. Three hesitated, started to run toward the village as Snowfire bit off a curse. Suddenly, as a few rocks hit the trail in front of them, they paused, and reversed themselves. But that hesitation was fatal; in the next instant, they were buried beneath a cascade of dirt and rock that ran out into the river. A huge cloud of dust rose and obscured everything, even for a falcon’s sharp eyes, and Snowfire waited impatiently for it to clear.
Finally the strong breeze from upriver cleared it away, and he saw that there would be no passage back across that fall for anyone. They had managed to drop far more than he had estimated across the roadway; until it all settled, it would be insane to try and climb it. The enemy fighters milled around the edge, as if wondering whether they should make some attempt to rescue their three companions. Evidently they decided against it, or their leaders did, for after a bit more confused meandering, they formed back up into ranks, and moved out along the river again.
Snowfire broke contact with the falcon with a feeling of fierce pleasure. “The first stage worked perfectly!” he told Daystorm. “Any sign from the mage that he knows what happened?”
She shook her head. “Nothing at all out of the ordinary,” she reported. “You ought to check with Starfall, though. He might have noticed something.”
That was an excellent idea, and he was not at all loath to follow it. He brushed the dust off his trews and loped up the trail to Starfall’s ekele, hoping that the Adept was not too lost in his work to speak to him.
As it happened, Starfall was just finishing the last of his rations, and greeted Snowfire with a wave of his hand. “We’ve dropped the bluff; it worked perfectly, and they lost three in the rockfall,” Snowfire reported. “Have you noticed anything from the mage?”
“Only that he’s trying harder than before to take control of the lines and nodes from me,” Starfall replied. “He’s getting aggressive; I think he’s getting extra energy from his fighters. Are they doing anything unusual?”
“Only the mounted ones are left; Daystorm says they’re practicing against each other, and that’s unusual, because there isn’t a lot of room for them to practice ordinarily.” Snowfire cocked his head to the side. “From what I saw, the mounted fighters are the least disciplined. Would that be enough to generate extra energy for him?”
“Probably; it isn’t a lot, but these days, when there isn’t a lot of energy to be had, a mage would grasp at anything.” Starfall blinked, and rubbed his eyes. “At least he isn’t practicing blood-sacrifice.”
“I’ll say this much for the barbarians; so far as I know, they don’t tend to stoop to that. They’ll use the power generated by slaughter on a battlefield, but they won’t practice blood-sacrifice. Or at least, not of humans.” He grimaced. “Let’s hope this lot runs true to form.”
“Dar’ian would never forgive us if anything like that happened,” Starfall muttered, and shook his head. “Well, he’s due for another try, and I need to be on guard; keep me informed if you can.”
Starfall raised the containment shield again, and sank back into his trance. Snowfire left him with his falcon standing watch and returned to Daystorm.
“I think you can drop the close watch on the village,” he told her. “Starfall says the mage hasn’t reacted to what we did at all.”
She sighed with relief. “Oh, good. If I don’t get myself stretched out, I won’t be any use for the raid. I’ll leave the hooligans in place; I don’t need them here, and they’ll call me if something catches their attention.”
“Good plan,” he said approvingly, and went to check on the others.
Wintersky had taken charge of building their packs; each of them would carry an identical load of climbing staff, short bow, arrows, and throwing darts. The idea was not to get into combat, if they could avoid it; the idea was to free the slaves and guard their backtrail. Snowfire wished he had some other sort of magic than the type he had; it would have been so useful to be able to turn water into drugged brandywine and arrange for the remaining barbarians to find it!
Seventeen Tayledras and one adopted boy would be the whole of their army; Nightwind and Kel would remain behind to guard Starfall, with five dyheli and three of the most timid of the hertasi. Wintersky had finished seven of the packs, with ten more to go; he was checking each and every weapon with utmost care as he packed it, and there was a small pile of rejected arrows beside him. Snowfire didn’t interrupt; he had the job well in hand.
Seventeen against how many? We must be mad. Yet if they could just avoid rousing anything or anyone, the odds of pulling this off were good. Or at least, they weren’t insurmountable.
Time to check on someone whose optimism more than equals my pessimism. He left Wintersky and took the path that led to the pools and Kelvren.
The only quiet place to practice was beside the bathing pools, and Darian was more than tired of repeating his tiny magics over and over when Kelvren provided a welcome interruption.
“What passsesss, brrrancherrr?” the gryphon called, as he flew low over the pool, craning his neck to the side to keep his eyes on Darian. When Darian waved at him, the gryphon executed a slow and graceful gliding turn, then backwinged to a perfect one-claw landing on the rock edge of the pool beside Darian. Darian had to duck his head and shield his eyes against the dust storm kicked up by the gryphon’s wing-beats, but he grinned a greeting anyway.
“Nothing much passes except time, and that’s passing too slowly!” he complained, as the gryphon settled himself with a couple of crisp wing-flicks. He noticed that Kel had a bundle in his right front talon, which he placed on the ground behind the rocks, just out of sight. “I want to do something, not just sit here!”
“I agrrree,” Kel responded readily. “But I happen to have sssomething you can do. Do you sssuppossse you could give me a hand with grrrrooming? Nightwind isss bussy prrepar-ring herrr weaponsss, the herrrtasssI arrre all gone orrrr busssy, and I am no grrryfalcon, to have handsss that hold toolsss well.”
Help Kelvren? In a heartbeat! Darian was absolutely thrilled to be asked, and jumped to his feet, prepared to do anything that Kel requested. “Do I need to get anything special?” he asked anxiously. “The feather-oil or anything?”
“Not featherrr-oilsss,” the gryphon replied, “I have ever-rrything we’ll need. Thisss will be battle preparrrationsss.”
With his foreclaw the gryphon picked up the bag which he put down in front of Darian. He opened it and spread out the contents on the ground. It contained the usual brushes and combs, but also held files, a thin and flexible chest protector that was clearly made to fit over the chestplate on Kel’s harness, and a set of sharp metal claw-sheaths. “Thessse fit overrr the talonssss,” Kel said, indicating the metal sheaths. “You’ll have to file my talonsss to fit; they arrre a bit longerrr than they werrre when I wasss fitted with thessse.”
Darian picked up the set of three files and the right-side set of sheaths and went to work, as Kel advised and corrected what he was doing. He found that if he sat just under the gryphon’s chin with his back against Kel’s chest, they were both able to see what was going on clearly and were more comfortable. It was very pleasant, sitting there with his back against the feathery warmth of his friend, working diligently with the files on the shining black talons. He could almost forget why they were making these preparations. He couldn’t help thinking what the other boys Of Errold’s Grove would say if they saw what he was doing now. Wouldn’t their eyes just pop! They wouldn‘t believe what they were seeing! Imagine, me, helping take care of a real, live gryphon! Why, next thing, I’ll be helping trap a snow-drake or something.
The talon-sheaths fit over each claw and were held in place with a glovelike web of fine, strong leather straps. The workmanship was really ingenious, and the articulation was perfect. The sheaths didn’t really extend the length of the talons all that much, so Kel would still be able to walk, land, and pick things up. When Darian finished fitting the whole contraption to Kel’s right leg, the gryphon had what was effectively a set of four single-edged knives on the end of his leg. Not only did each sheath taper to a point as sharp as a needle, but the first third of each had a real sharpened edge for slashing.
Kel flexed his foot, and looked at it with a mixture of pride and chagrin, his huge golden eyes blinking slowly as he admired the shining metal now covering each talon. “Harrrd to walk in, thessse, becaussse of all the damage. You don’t want me anywherrre nearrr a tent, forrr insssstancsse. Sssstill. They prrrotect my rrreal talonsss; metal won’t brrreak the way a talon can. And obviousssly, - a weapon can’t chop one off.”
Darian nodded soberly, and set to work on the left-side set. I’d hate to see how awful it would be if a talon did get chopped off. He could bleed to death! Much better to have the sheaths, even if they were a bit awkward to wear. When he finished, Kelvren reared up on his hindquarters and made a few experimental slashes in the air. “Perrrfect!” he said with a gleeful sparkle in his eyes. “You may ‘be my trrrondi’irrrn any time!”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Darian replied, blushing with awkward pleasure. “I don’t know a fraction of what Nightwind knows, and anyway, any of the hertasi could have helped you just as well. Let’s get this chest thing on you, all right?”
“Sssurrrely,” Kel agreed, dropping back down to all fours. “It goesss onto the harnessss - ssssee the bucklesss? Then the neckpiecssse wrrrapsss arrrround the thrrroat.”
The protective armor would never withstand the blows of a sword or ax, but it would protect against arrows; it was made of overlapping articulated plates of a light, strong metal totally unfamiliar to Darian, backed with a thin leather that was the toughest such substance Darian had ever seen. Unlike the talons, which were a satin finished, highly-polished silver, the chest protector was a matte black and would not betray Kel by reflecting light. The whole thing didn’t even weigh as much as a single ordinary breastplate for a smallish human - but then, it would have to be light if Kel was going to fly while wearing it.
When Darian finished buckling it onto the harness, Kel gave himself a tremendous shake to settle it, and had him tighten two or three straps, then shook himself again.
“Urrrr,” he said, clicking his beak meditatively. “Not the mossst comforrrtable thing to wearrr. But then, I have hearrrd the human Sssilverrrsss sssay the sssame of theirrr arrrmorrr.”
“It could be worse, you could have a helmet and a stomach plate and things,” Darian pointed out. Kel shook his head comically.
“I think not!” the gryphon exclaimed. “I would not be able to walk, much lessss fly! Thisss isss bad enough, and I would not wearrr it had Nightwind not insssisssted. I fearrr it looksss rrridiculousss.”
“Well! You look tremendously warlike to me,” Darian told him, stepping back to admire him from a little distance. “Very impressive. Terrifying, in fact.”
“Oh, do I?” Kel exclaimed, ingenuously pleased. “Terrri-fying? Trrruly?”
“Truly,” Darian told him. “If I were the enemy, I’d take one look at you and run, I wouldn’t stick around to find out what you could do to me.”
And the gryphon did make a daunting sight, with the metal breastplate and neck guard forming what appeared to be a seamless black shell over his chest and neck, one claw upraised, and the metal talons gleaming wickedly in the sun. It was no exaggeration to say that Kel would probably have frightened any of the Errold’s Grove militia members into scuttling back to the village, metaphorical tail between his legs.
But would he have the same effect on the barbarians? The plain truth was, virtually anything the militia thought of as a “monster” had sent them scuttling back to the safety of the village. What did he know about fighting? Only what he’d heard and read in books.
I just hope we never find out, Darian thought, keeping his doubts to himself. I’d rather not know than have those barbarians turn up here.
“I think if I was Starfall, I would feel completely secure with you on watch,” he said aloud. “I wouldn’t need anybody else.”
“Rrreally?” Kel arched his neck, and his eyes pinned with excitement. “You arrre too kind. I am only a verrry juniorrr Sssilverrr.”
“I agree with him,” Nightwind said, emerging from the shadows of the path. “You look quite formidable, Kel. Starfall will feel quite secure with you on guard, and rightly so. You’re going to do a fine job.”
Kel’s neck arched a little more, and he practically purred. “Thank you,” he said. “I hope yourrr confidencssse is jussstified.”
Nightwind smiled. “I’m a trondi’im, remember? I’ve served quite a few gryphons in the past. I have no doubt of it.”
In Darian’s opinion, Nightwind herself looked just as formidable as the gryphon; she had a breastplate made much like his, with gauntlets to match, a light helm, and a bow that Darian would never dream of being able to string, much less draw. He couldn’t see the business-end of the arrows she carried in a quiver at her belt, but he had no doubt that they were more of the nasty, man-killing type that the Tayledras were using tonight.
Her hair had been braided back tightly into a no-nonsense knot at the nape of her neck, and there wasn’t a single extraneous bead or feather on her spare, uniformlike costume. Like Kel, her breastplate had a badge embossed on it, and he peered at it curiously.
She noted where his eyes went, and smiled. “This is the badge of the Silver Gryphons,” she told him, the fingers of one hand lightly caressing the edge of the emblem. “Kel and I are both Silvers, the only ones in the group. I don’t think they quite realize yet what that means.”
“Why isn’t anyone else?” he asked.
She chuckled. “Because we are the only two Kaled’a’in here,” she told him. “We aren’t Tayledras at all - or rather, the Tayledras used to be Kaled’a’in, but - “
The gryphon waved a claw, interrupting her. “You arrre confusssing him,” Kel chided. “Darrr’ian, it isss sssimple. Long ago therrre wasss one people, the Kaled’a’in. When the Cataclyssssm wasss overrr, that people wasss sssunderrred. The Kaled’a’in Clan k’Lessshya wasss farrr separrrated frrrom the otherrrsss, and thossse within it did not even know if the rrresst had ssssurrrvived, sssso they went to sssaferrr landsss, wessst and sssouth, and became the allliesss of the Black Kingsss. Forrr the otherrrr Clansss it was differrrent. Theirrr homelandsss werrre dessstrrroyed, ssso they found when they went to look. The otherrrsss quarrrelled overrr the ussse of magic - thossse who wanted to continue the ussse of it became the Tayledrrrasss, and thossse who wissshed to ssshun it became the Sssshin’a’in.”
“But - because your people weren’t fighting over whether or not to use magic, you stayed Kaled’a’in?” Darian asked, scratching his head. “But if your people went so far away, why are you here?”
“Because we decided that the moment was right to come back north and see what time had made of the lands we left,” Nightwind told him, and smiled ruefully. “Little did we guess that we’d end up being here at the beginning of another Cataclysm! At least some of us managed to prevent this one, anyway. Kel’s version is a very abbreviated one, and at some point, you’ll have to hear the whole story.”
“Prrrobably frrrom one of the kyrrree hissstorrry-keep-errrs,” Kel said, meditatively examining his steel-sheathed talons. “Becaussse asss sssoon asss they learrrn you do not know the tale, you will have no choicsse but to hearrr it!”
Nightwind burst out laughing as if Kel had said something terribly funny. Darian couldn’t make out just what the joke was, but laughed politely anyway.
“Well, the point is that only the Kaled’a’in have the Silver Gryphons,” Nightwind continued, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “They serve a lot of the same functions that your Heralds do; peacekeepers, border guards, and as the Kaled’a’in militia. Some day I’ll tell you why things turned out that way, but the fact is that of all the people on this expedition, Kel and I are the only true warriors. Mind you, some of the others, Snowfire in particular, have seen combat - but we’re the only ones actually trained as warriors.” One corner of her mouth quirked in an ironic smile. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think Snowfire quite realizes that about me. He still thinks I’m just an Empath and Kel’s attendant. We haven’t had to get our battle gear out before this.”
“Not that it matterrrsss,” Kel added. “Thisss isss what we prrrrobably would have volunteerrred forrr if he hadn’t asssked usss. I am a bit larrrge to hide in a waterrrr-courrrse.”
“And we are the best sort of guards he could have on Starfall,” Nightwind finished. “That’s one of the things we’re trained for; there is always a set of gryphons acting as bodyguards to our chief ally among the Black Kings.”
But a new set of dazzling possibilities had opened up to Darian. “Could I be a Silver some day?” he asked breathlessly.
“Now that is an interesting thought,” Nightwind replied, looking at him with surprise. “I never considered that possibility. Yes, I suppose you could; you’re far too young right now, but once you’re at the age where we accept candidates, you could train as a Silver, if you still want to be one.”
“Being a mage would be an advantage,” Kel added, his eartufts pricked forward with interest. “Magessss in the Sssilverrsss learrrn combat-magicsss; verrry ssspecializssed ssstuff. It would mean anotherrr ssseverrral yearrrs of sss-chooling.”
Now that was a daunting thought. More training? But it might be worth it.
“You certainly don’t have to make up your mind right now,” Nightwind said, before he could even begin to consider the ramifications of the offer. “Let’s get through this, then finish up this expedition. By the time we get back to Tayledras territory, you’ll have a better idea of what you want to do. And if that includes joining the Silvers, Kel and I will see that you get a chance to apply and train.”
He stammered his thanks, and helped Nightwind pack up the grooming utensils, aware in a dazzled fashion that he had gone in the past few days from having no choice in his future life to having a bewildering array of choices.
He did not remain dazzled for long. First we have to get through this. Then I have to make sure that no one in Errold’s Grove thinks he still has any claims on me. Then - then I have to learn how to be a mage and a Hawkbrother. The enormity of the tasks still ahead of him sobered him quickly.
He glanced up at the sun, and judged that someone would probably come looking for him shortly. “I ought to go find Snowfire,” he began,
“Snowfire has already found you,” Nightwind chuckled, and pointed over his shoulder. He turned and saw the senior scout coming out into the sunlight by the side of the pool.
The Hawkbrother eyes widened in surprise at the sight of Kel and Nightwind, though his lips curved in a slow smile. “Welladay!” he said, with appreciation in his voice. “I find all three of the folk I needed to gather, and all in one spot. Very efficient.”
“Pure coincidence,” Nightwind pointed out. “But as you can see, we are ready to take our posts.”
“Whenever you’re ready,” Snowfire told her, with a little salute. “Unless you can think of anything you need to know, I’ll leave you to handle the business of guarding Starfall as you see fit.”
Darian had the feeling that Snowfire had intended to give Kel and Nightwind some careful instructions, and on being confronted by a pair of properly equipped professionals, had quickly revised his plans.
“Thank you for your confidence, Snowfire,” Nightwind said, without a hint of her usual irony. “I hope we will prove worthy of it. Now, I take it that you have come to fetch’ your guide?”
“I have,” he said, and turned his attention to Darian. “I hope you are ready, little brother, because we need to set off soon if we are to be in place after dark.”
Darian nodded, unable to trust his voice, for he knew that the fear rising within him would make it shake. Even if he wasn’t brave, he didn’t want Snowfire to guess. I have to go through with this. I let Justyn down; I’m not going to do that to Snowfire.
“Come, then,” the Hawkbrother said. “Nightwind, Kelvren, wind to thy wings.”
“Good hunting,” Kel said, as Nightwind sketched a salute to both of them, with a sly wink to Darian. That made him feel a little better; he managed to get out a proper farewell and followed in Snowfire’s wake to where the rest of the Hawkbrothers were gathered. His heart was in his mouth, and he felt queasy, but what needed to be done would be done.
For the most part, the journey was a blur to Darian; the Hawkbrothers set a pace he would never have been able to match if he had not been riding the horse stolen from the barbarians. He could not for a moment imagine how they managed to keep up that steady lope for furlong after furlong. With Hweel and Huur providing “eyes ahead,” they kept up the grueling trek long after sunset, and finally came to a halt somewhere in the deep woods after full darkness fell.
“Dar’ian, you must get off the horse now,” whispered Wintersky, who had been holding the beast by a lead rope to prevent it from bolting off the way it had the last time. “We will turn the beast loose here, for we are now going down to the river.”
Darian dismounted stiffly; the horse’s trot had not been a comfortable gait, especially not for someone who never had been much of a rider. Wintersky untied the rope from the horse’s bridle, and used it to flick the beast on the flank. With an indignant squeal, it trotted off into the darkness, leaving them all standing beside one of the enormous trees. Beneath the whisper of wind in the leaves above, Darian heard the sound of the river; it couldn’t be too far off, then. They were very near their goal, the end of the aqueduct that carried water to the village.
“Come,” Snowfire whispered; somehow he had replaced Wintersky at Darian’s side. “Do not fear to keep up; we must go slowly now, avoiding the sentries.”
As gruelingly swift as the pace had been before, it was now just as agonizingly slow. The Hawkbrothers moved from cover to cover, slipping in and out of the shadows like silent shadows themselves, and far quieter than Darian was. Darian winced every time he stepped on a rock or a twig, for the sounds he made sounded as loud as shouts in the relative peace of the Forest.
But there were other things making sounds out here; he was amazed to realize how loud deer were, as they came across a pair of does and a fawn, feeding. He’d always thought that deer moved silently, but they tramped through the sparse underbrush as noisily as he.
At last they reached the river itself, with no signs of sentries that Darian could see. But then, what did he know? Hweel, Huur, and Snowfire were probably the only ones who would know where sentries were, and the point was to avoid them.
The brush along the rocky riverbank was much thicker than under the heavy shade of the great trees; they had more cover to hide in, but there were more branches to snap, leaves to rustle, and rocks to trip over. Wintersky found a game trail that wound in and out of the bushes, often requiring that they go on all fours to keep their heads below the covering undergrowth; Darian discovered that he had his hands full just following in his wake without making too terrible a noise. The river here did not make enough sound to mask their passage; though swift and deep, there were no rocks or deep bends to cause even a ripple along its tranquil surface. A chilling, damp breeze rose from its surface, penetrating Darian’s clothing.
It seemed to Darian that they had been moving so long that it must surely be dawn, and yet by the stars it could not possibly have been much later than midnight when he felt Snowfire stop and crouch under the shadow of a bush. He stopped as well, then felt Snowfire’s hand reach back and tug at his shoulder. Obedient to the signal, he crept forward to peer out at whatever it was that Snowfire was looking at.
“Is this the place?” the scout breathed into his ear. He squinted, and peered out into the darkness, straining his ears as well as his eyes when the dark bulk ahead of him failed to resolve into anything he recognized.
It was his ears that told him they had reached their goal; a rhythmic splashing, the creaking of wet wood, the steady trickle of water. They had reached the aqueduct, and the water wheel that fed it.
He put his mouth to Snowfire’s ear. “This is the place,” he whispered.
Snowfire nodded, and motioned to him to be silent. He froze where he was, and tried to ignore the three or four insects that decided to negotiate the new piece of territory - his legs - that had suddenly appeared in front of them. He was just glad that Snowfire had given him a handful of aromatic herbs to rub all over himself before they left, for most of the insects had left him alone tonight.
Finally, after what seemed far too long a time, Snowfire motioned him forward, and slipped out into the open himself.
Now, for the first time in days, Darian found himself on totally familiar ground. The wooden aqueduct hung above their heads, dripping fairly steadily; he followed the sounds of dripping until his outstretched hands encountered the ladder that led to the first clean-out door up above.
He took a chance that one word wouldn’t betray them.
“Here!” he whispered harshly, and was suddenly surrounded by seventeen Hawkbrothers.
He scrambled up the ladder and felt for the catch that released the door. The aqueduct wouldn’t have worked for a week if it hadn’t been covered to keep leaves and trash out; nevertheless, things did manage to get in, and moss and algae grew in the trough. Hatches had to be made to permit occasional cleaners - usually older, more responsible children - to scrub the troughs. To avoid accidents with overcurious or adventurous younger children, the catches were reasonably tricky. Darian had already served one stint as a cleaner; that was how he knew where the catches were and how to open them.
He had a moment of panic when the mechanism jammed and refused to open, but after some desperate prying and jiggling, it broke loose and let him lift the hatch up. With a sigh of relief, he lifted the heavy hatch off to the side. Darian listened for a moment to the cold water running inside, and permitting himself a shiver, climbed in.
He was immediately soaked to mid-calf in very cold water, but he knew that before they reached the village, he’d be soaked clear through. He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into the tunnel formed by the trough of the aqueduct and the arch of the roof above it. As he crawled forward into the darkness, he felt someone immediately behind him.
Now they were all relying on him to pick the right branching. The right one would bring them out in the village, to the village cistern house right beside the horse trough. The wrong one would send them out into the fields somewhere.
None of the left-hand branchings, he reminded himself. Those all go out to the fields. As he crawled, he tried not to think about his surroundings. It was so dark in here that he couldn’t see even a glimmer of light. It was cold, there was water up to his chest and the roof of the aqueduct pressing into the back of his head. And someone hadn’t done his job, because the floor was slimy with algae. He tried to remind himself that it could have been worse things, but as he started to shiver, that thought wasn’t at all comforting.
It’s the second right-hand branching. I’m sure of it. But the longer he crawled, the less sure he became. Was it the second? He’d been crawling an awfully long time, and he’d only come to one place where the aqueduct opened up to the right. What if he’d missed it? What if he’d gone too far? What if they were already crawling off over the fields of barley and turnips?
Then, just as he was beginning to panic and thinking about trying to get everyone to crawl backward so he could recheck where they’d been, his hand encountered emptiness and water where the wooden wall had been. He stopped, and reached back with his foot to signal that they’d come to the turning.
He felt a hand grab his foot and squeeze; he moved into the right branch, and continued the crawl forward.
Here, at least, the cleaners had done their job. Slime gave way to clean wood under his palms, and he sighed with relief. This must be the correct branch; it was the only one that got scoured religiously, for it not only fed the horse trough but was the main water supply for the whole village.
But now he had new worries. He froze; suddenly they were no longer alone.
He heard the guards before he saw signs of them; heard their voices echoing toward him down the hollow wooden tube. He froze in place, afraid that they had already caught the sounds of hands and knees shuffling through the water above their heads. In another moment, he saw little flickering bits of light reflected in the water, coming through cracks and crevices in the aqueduct cover. They’re going to hear us. They have some magic, or another Yip Dog, that will sense the Hawkbrothers. They have a real dog that will smell us up here! It was all he could do to keep from shouting in panic as the lights drew nearer, as he felt the walls pressing in on him. He began to shiver even harder, and clenched his teeth tightly to keep them from chattering.
Then, miraculously, the lights and voices passed right on by.
He hardly believed it at first, and only a sharp prod from behind got him going again. Twice more, lights and voices approached and passed, and twice more they all froze in place, waiting, shivering in the cold water.
At long last, his hand encountered the end of the aqueduct. They were in the cistern house, where the aqueduct spilled into a storage cistern which in turn led to the horse trough outside the cistern house. He hung onto the end of the trough, and lowered himself down into the cistern, being careful not to make more of a splash than the water pouring into the cistern already made.
One by one, the rest of the Hawkbrothers followed, first into the cistern, then, shivering and chilled, onto the floor of the cistern house beside him.
“I want you to stay here,” Snowfire said in his ear. “Keep out of sight. You’ve done all you need to.”
He nodded, his teeth clenched to keep them from chattering. He couldn’t have replied if he’d wanted to, for he was shivering too hard, and not just with cold.
“He shouldn’t stay here,” hissed someone else. “There’s no place to hide and only one way in or out, and if anyone comes in here after water, they’re going to find him!”
Snowfire growled, but reluctantly agreed. “Let me have Hweel check the stable.”
Silence then, except for the sound of falling water and occasional voices outside the cistern house. Darian was in a constant state of terror lest some drunkard stumble to douse his head and find them all there. At long last, Snowfire spoke again.
“Dar’ian, go to the stable,” he ordered. “Hweel says that there are no humans quartered in there, nothing but horses. You should be safe enough at this time of night, and it’s halfway between the threshing barn and here. We can get you on our way out of the village.”
Darian just nodded, and waited while the others slipped out, two and three at a time, his gut clenched tight all the while.
How am I going to get out of here? he asked himself, once the last of them were gone. I can’t move and hide like they can! Somebody is going to see me for sure!
As if to underscore that fear, he heard precisely what he had feared most to hear - the sound of three or four drunken men approaching the cistern house, talking loudly in some foreign babble.
Were they coming here? Where could he hide? Could he get inside the cistern? Would they see him if he did? As he felt blindly about for the edge of the cistern, his hand encountered a bucket that had been left behind, and suddenly a plan burst in on his mind in a blaze of illumination. Quickly, he grabbed the bucket, filled it at the cistern, and just as the men reached the door, he opened it, trudging openly out into the square with his heavy, sloshing bucket.
Exactly as he had hoped, the men ignored him. He was just another slave, and a child at that, insignificant and unworthy of a moment’s thought. They shoved past him, and as he trudged away, he heard them splashing and choking in the water, trying to sober themselves up.
Ugh. It’s a good thing that from there, the water goes to the horse trough. But if I was a horse, I wouldn‘t want to drink it after they’d had their dirty heads in it.
He continued to trudge toward the stable, carrying the bucket-handle in both hands, hoping that no one would notice his long knife at his side, the only weapon he had with him. Snowfire wouldn’t let him have anything else, and at the time he had thought it a pitiful excuse for a weapon, but he rather doubted that these people allowed their slaves to have anything as dangerous as a knife.
At last he reached the shelter of the stable. He put down the bucket, opened the door, picked the bucket back up and slipped inside. Just in case Hweel had been mistaken, he wanted an excuse to be here, and a bucket of water was a perfectly good excuse.
But it was black in there, without even a night-lamp. That meant that there was nothing, and no one waiting, except for horses.
He waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark, listening to them stamping and blowing, breathing in the scent of horse sweat and hay. Once he could see a little, he walked up to the nearest stall. Each of the stalls had an outside half-door, so that the upper half could be left open for ventilation, and in this weather the upper doors were left open all night so the horses got air. The beast on the other side of the stall door seemed far too large for the stall he’d been put in. Darian stared at him in awe; he was huge, bigger than any horse he’d ever seen before, and a true war-horse. Every stall in the small stable was full, and it was quite clear why the barbarians had put their beasts here instead of using the place to quarter more fighters. These horses must easily have been worth a small fortune apiece. They were certainly worth more than a simple foot soldier, or even a squad of them.
Darian put his bucket down and closed the door, then felt for the ladder built into the wall beside him and climbed up into the loft where the hay was stored, moving carefully and feeling for each rung to keep from making any noise. He would have a good vantage point and a comfortable place to wait as well.
Both loft doors were open to the night air, and he,: got down on his stomach and wormed his way over to the one that pointed in the direction of the threshing barn. Loose hay covered the floor to the depth of his knees in the middle, and his neck on either side. Mice skittered about in the hay; in the silence he heard two of them fighting, voicing their anger in tiny squeaks.
He settled in with his nose barely poking up above the sill of the door, and strained eyes and ears, trying to penetrate the night. The plan called for the Hawkbrothers to get to the threshing barn, remove any guards that were there, and free the villagers. Wintersky and Raindance would lead them through the village, across the bridge to the road on the other side of the river, and upriver to Kelmskeep; Snowfire and the others would form a rear guard to deal with pursuit.
Nothing in the plan called for actually attacking the barbarians, except in the person of the guards watching the captives. At the time, Darian had been disappointed, but now he was relieved. Trapped inside the cistern house, he had suddenly become aware that he was one young boy surrounded by many, many, strange, hostile men who would not think twice about killing him. Once again, he felt his insides go to water, felt the fear he had experienced when the barbarian army attacked. This was not the time or place for a confrontation, and now he was glad that Snowfire had already made up his mind about that.
I just wish someone could have told the enemy so we‘d be sure that they would leave us alone - 
Suddenly, the peaceful night was split by flashes of red, orange, and green light and a roar as deafening as the worst thunderstorm he’d ever lived through. Darian stifled a yelp and winced away from the door, but immediately reversed himself and peeked back over the top of the sill. Something awful must have happened out there - 
It was all coming from the direction of the threshing barn, and he knew with a thrill of dread that the enemy had not gone along with the plan of avoiding confrontation.
More brilliant flashes of light lit the village below, followed by more tfiundering noises, and men boiled out of the nearby houses like so many angry hornets streaming from a disturbed hive.
His heart pounded, and there was a metallic taste in the back of his mouth. He began to sweat, and had to clench his hands on the sill to keep from jumping up and running out there. What do I do? Where do I go? Nothing in the plan told him what to do now - 
Don’t panic. Think of something! He didn’t dare move from where he was, and yet there must be something he could do! If I can stop some of these men, delay them - if only I had a sling, or a rope to trip them with! What had he learned? How to raise things - how to heat water and call fire - how to sense magic and - 
Wait a minute; if I can raise things, can I keep them down? Too late to guess, he just had to try; spurred by fear and excitement, he reached out with his tiny spark of magic toward one of the barbarians running below him, and momentarily glued his toe to the ground.
The man tripped and fell heavily, taken too much by surprise to fall properly, and Darian heard something break with a dry crack - though whether it was a bone or a weapon, he couldn’t tell. The man staggered to his feet, dazed, and stumbled off; he was clearly not in a condition to fight now, and might not be for a while.
Encouraged, Darian did it again, and once again, it worked, sending the man crashing headlong into the ground and driving all the breath from his body. This one was stunned, and only moved feebly rather than trying to get up. It took him a long time to get to his feet and lurch away.
Darian tried the trick again, and yet again, with equal or better success. It was working! He was doing something!
If only he knew what was going on out there - 
There was more light, real fire this time, rising above the roofs of the nearest buildings, the harsh smell of smoke, and the sounds of shouts and screams in the distance where the barn stood. He could not tell what was going on, except that the quiet raid had become a full-scale confrontation, and that was not good.
There were no more barbarians where Darian could see them, and he realized belatedly just how exposed his position was. He wormed his way back into the loose hay, pulling it up over himself until there was hay all around him to the depth of a pitchfork’s tines; he could still see out the loft door, but now he was peeking out from under the hay like a mouse in a burrow.
He got under cover just in time; someone with a mage-light following him ran toward the stable, and by the long robes the man was wearing, he was not one of the Hawkbrothers, nor one of the barbarian fighters.
The stable door slammed open as Darian lost sight of the man, then slammed shut again. He heard a thud, the creak of wood and a voice uttering what sounded like curses, and heavy steps on the ladder. He was shudderingly grateful for the cover of the hay, as the mage-light popped over the side of the loft, and the entire loft lit up as brightly as day.
More heavy steps, a shadow passed over Dalian’s hiding place, and the man stepped into Darian’s line-of-sight. He blocked about half of Darian’s view, but Darian had a very good view of him. Tall, a bit less muscular than the barbarian fighters, but just as shaggy and bearded, he wore an outlandish reddish-brown robe, with a design pieced into it in dark brown leather. It appeared to be the stylized head and forequarters of some beast, but what, Darian couldn’t tell. There was a pendant around his neck that swung into view as he turned; a sun-disk, with the rays in metal but the disk in black. An eclipse?
All his attention was centered outside, which was a very good thing, as Darian was in plain sight from where he stood if he chose to look in that direction.
Is this the mage? It must be. What’s that pendant mean?
Is it magic? Darian tentatively stretched his new “magic-sense” toward the man.
And he was all but “blinded.” He shielded himself again, as he’d been taught, and lay there, dazed. I think this is the mage, all right.
And the man was doing something; he had his hands cupped in front of him, and he was muttering. And from a point just below them, Darian heard an ominous, deep sound of growling, and the noise of very heavy feet shuffling away.
He’s - he’s got monsters! He’s turning monsters loose! The Hawkbrothers had no warning of this - bad enough that they were facing half an army, but no one had thought about facing monsters, too!
He had to do something. He had to! He couldn’t let Snowfire down, the way he’d failed Justyn! The man was still muttering, probably calling up another monster. Darian couldn’t wait any longer.
With a yell, he leaped out of the hay, pulling his knife at the same time.
The man turned, quick as a thought, but only in time to keep from getting knocked out of the loft door. Darian hit him with a shock, his right shoulder nearly wrenched out of its socket as the man deflected it. They both went down in the hay, with Darian on top; he tried to bring up his knife to finish things, but the man seized his wrist, and rolled to the right. Now Darian was underneath; the man tried to get the knife away from him, bashing his hand down uselessly into the soft hay, his knees digging into Darian’s stomach. Darian squirmed, trying to break his hold and get away, and the man held off Darian’s knife hand with his right and got his left around Darian’s throat and began to squeeze.
He couldn’t breathe. His throat was agony, his chest fek as if it were going to burst, his blood pounded in his ears. He writhed and twisted, clawed for the man with his free hand, kicked and thrashed, while the man held him down and throttled him.
Dalian’s mouth opened, but nothing eame out; his eyes felt as if they were going to pop out of his head, his ears and face burned, and he couldn’t hear anything but a roaring. His vision went red, then began to tunnel, until all he could see was the man’s impassive, bearded face, and that was starting to black out.
Then, with no warning, the man let him go and flung himself backward.
Darian rolled out of the way, coughing and gasping, and looked up to see Huur attached to the man’s scalp, flapping her wings furiously and digging bloody furrows along his forehead with her talons.
She must have come in the hayloft door - she saved me!
The man was screaming at the top of his lungs and flailing at the bird with his fists; she in her turn battered him with powerful strokes of her wings, disorienting him. Belatedly, Darian realized he had to get out of there. She hadn’t managed a killing hold, she couldn’t hang onto him forever, and once she let go, he was free to go after Darian again. Darian scrambled for the ladder and slid down it, with his feet braced on the outside of the uprights and his hands slowing him. He had lost his knife somewhere - he didn’t know where, but right now all he wanted was to get away.
But the door was closed, and the bar was down across it. The mage-light dropped down into the stable, and the man stopped screaming; Huur must have let him go.
Please, please, don’t let her be hurt!
The horses were all frantically stomping and neighing, upset by the commotion and wanting to take their agitation out on something or someone. The mage would be down there any moment - 
Where can I hide that he can’t find me?
There wasn’t much room in the tiny stable - and with the horses ready to kick anything that stood in their path - 
The horses! Yes!
He darted along the center aisle, throwing open the doors to the stalls as he went. The horses hadn’t been tied, and once they felt space behind them, they kicked and backed out into the aisle, then proceeded to fight with each other, milling and squealing, and providing a barrier of large and angry bodies between Darian and the ladder. Just as he opened the last stall, he spotted the mage’s feet on the ladder, and he saw a pitchfork leaning against the back wall. He seized it, and darted into the last stall, dangerously close to the horse that was vacating it. Fortunately, the horse was more interested in getting a piece of one of his rivals than in stomping Darian into the straw.
This stall had no half-door at the back, and neither did the one opposite it. There would be no escape that way.
As he cowered in the back of the stall, pitchfork clutched in his trembling hands, he heard the mage’s voice roaring over the squealing and bugling of the fighting horses, and the thud of hooves on wood. He heard the louder sound of the stable doors slamming open, and then the noise of a riding whip on flesh and the thunder of hooves receding. The mage had opened the stable doors and was driving out the horses. Soon he would come looking for Darian.
I’ll only get one chance at this - Darian broke out into a cold sweat, shaking all over, but his mind seemed strangely sharp and clear, and as he watched the lighted space of the open stall door, he saw the last of the bulky shadows vanish, leaving only the long shadow of a man.
The mage-light’s behind him.
He watched the shadow, and listened to the footsteps, waiting for the moment when the mage would be’just around the corner of his stall.
The man was thorough; he checked every stall, while Darian’s heart pounded and his gut churned. He’s looking at the opposite ones first. When he first gets up here, I’ll have just that long while he checks the other one - 
He saw the shadow’s legs, the body silhouetted on the wall; he braced himself, and with the next step, the mage himself appeared framed in the stall door.
Darian charged, screaming.
This time he caught the mage entirely by surprise, driving him into the wall and pinning him there. He looked terrible, with great gouges bleeding down into his face and his robe wet with his own blood - but he was obviously far from finished. One tine of the pitchfork held an arm pinned between it and the next tine, one pierced the man’s clothing at his side, although Darian couldn’t tell if it had caught flesh, and one was buried in the wood of the back of the stall.
But the mage wasn’t dead - and he wasn’t done with Darian yet.
There was an insane rage in the man’s eyes; he foamed at the mouth, and he clawed at Darian with his free hand. Failing to reach Darian, he grappled with the shaft of the pitchfork, and tried to wrench it away, while at the same time, he pushed away from the wall. There was blood seeping into the mage’s clothing, but this was obviously not a fatal wound.
If he could get off the wall, he could free himself.
Darian panted, bracing his feet in the dirt of the stall floor, and hung on with the strength of desperation. Why wouldn’t this man die?
Bit by bit, the mage pushed Darian back, struggling in eerie silence. Bit by bit, Darian’s feet slipped, and he scrambled to reestablish his hold.
If the mage got loose, he’d kill Darian - then he’d kill Snowfire and all the others. Then he’d go after Nightwind and Starfall and Kelvren. And all because Darian had failed.
“No!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. “Not - this - time! “
With a last burst of energy, he drove the mage back, and felt a surge of elation.
But the madness left the man’s eyes for a moment, and the mage screamed something guttural. The handle of the pitchfork burst into flame, splintered, then crumbled away, leaving Darian standing with a handful of kindling and ash. The mage plucked the metal tine out, and cast it to the ground contemptuously.
Darian stared, frozen.
The mage laughed, and reached out, his fingers curling into a claw.
Darian ducked and rolled to the side. He came up running, or trying to, heading for the open stable door.
Behind him, the mage screamed something else, and the door slammed shut in his face; he hit it, unable to stop in time, and dropped to the floor.
The mage laughed again, and Darian rolled over, his back to the door, and his hand fell on the bar that had held it shut. He didn’t even think; he just grabbed it, and came up swinging.
He caught the mage on the side of the head, once again catching him by surprise. The man reeled back, and Darian swung again.
This time the mage caught the wooden bar and wrenched it out of Darian’s hands, throwing it aside.
Darian dove underneath the man’s grasping hands, gambling that the wound in his side was too painful for him to move easily. He somersaulted and came up on his feet on the other side; the mage was between him and the door again. He looked frantically about for a weapon, any weapon.
His eye fell on the forged tines of the pitchfork as the mage turned.
This time he didn’t dare fail. It didn’t matter if he died; he couldn’t fail the others.
He snatched up the tines, braced the rounded end against his chest, and charged again, but this time with every last bit of strength, and every bit of his weight, holding back nothing.
He drove the larger man back against the closed door; felt the tines hit flesh that yielded, resisted, then gave with a wet pop. The man screamed horribly; he flailed at Darian and a terrible blow to the side of his head knocked him away, stunning him; he fell to the ground as everything went dark.
He couldn’t move, couldn’t see anything.
Am I blind? With a convulsive shudder, he managed to move, to get to his knees, but he still couldn’t see anything. Everything was dark.
Then, with a creak, one of the stable doors swung open, and vague and flickering red light outside proved that he wasn‘t blind after all. It was the mage-light that was gone.
But the mage was still moving. In a moment, he might get up again. He was hurt, but by no means dead yet.
Darian’s right hand was wet, as was his sleeve, and as he moved it, his fingers touched his abandoned bucket. He grabbed it and lurched to his feet, staggering over to the mage who stared up at him in the changing light, spittle at the corner of his mouth.
He gave the man no chance to act; he brought the bucket down on his head as hard as he could. If the man wouldn’t die, at least he wasn’t going to stay awake for long!
He hit the mage a couple more times for good measure, then left the bucket upturned over his face and staggered, exhausted, out into the open. He didn’t care who or what saw him at this point. He stood in the middle of the dirt path, swaying on his feet, wondering where he should go next. The shouting had decreased; who was winning?
Then he sensed something gathering at his back; something oddly familiar. Magic - but - where and when had he sensed something like this before?
Magic - like - For some reason the sensation called up a memory of Justyn, but Justyn had never had enough magic for him to sense like this - 
Except the day he destroyed the bridge!
Fear gave him energy he thought he didn’t have; he sprinted for shelter, any shelter, heading for the nearest building as fast as his feet would carry him. He reached it just as the stable behind him exploded into flame, the shock of the blast knocking him into the side of the cottage. He saw fireworks behind his eyes for a moment, and had all the wind knocked out of him. He struggled to breathe, lying on his side, trying to make his lungs work again.
He didn’t stay that way for long; when his eyes cleared and he got a few good breaths, he picked himself gingerly out of the remains of a flower garden. He looked around, and things were pretty much the same as they had been. With a single exception, that is. What was left of the stable blazed fiercely, as if it had been soaked in oil.
Darian went looking for Snowfire and the others, but didn’t have to go far to find them. No sooner did he round the corner of the house than he saw the entire cavalcade approaching - the Hawkbrothers, battered and injured, but all still alive, followed by the villagers.
The villagers of Errold’s Grove were a far different group of people than they had been a half moon ago. They had clearly been kept on short rations by their captors, and just as clearly had been worked to exhaustion. They were filthy, unkempt - precisely the kind of folk that they themselves would have turned away from the village as vagabonds. Clothing, dirty, torn and tattered in the course of hard labor, had not been changed, cleaned or mended in all the time they’d been captives. Some of the men showed signs of beatings; all looked as wary and spooked as the horses running freely among the houses.
But Darian had no eyes for them; with a joyful shout, he ran to Snowfire and the others, who answered his shout and surrounded him, babbling questions, while the villagers stared at him with wide eyes. The villagers recognized him, yes, but this was not the same Darian that they had scorned and disregarded before.
“One at a time!” Snowfire ordered, and some of the babble subsided. “Dar’ian, we were surprised by a group coming to claim some of your people. We were attacked. We took shelter in the barn, and were promptly put under siege. What saved us was that the elite fighters that were left here had been drinking, and simply didn’t fight together at all well. We were holding our own, until we were attacked by a - a bear-creature. It must have been summoned and controlled by their mage. It broke through our defenses and killed three of your people and injured several of us. We are sorry - there was just nothing we could have done to save them, though we tried. Then, the creature suddenly went berserk, as if it was no longer under control, and turned on the barbarians! They had to fight us and it at the same time; they killed it, but seemed to lose heart and retreated - then there was a tremendous roar and flames shot into the sky, and their retreat turned into a rout! What happened here?”
“It was the mage,” Darian said, too tired to feel even a flicker of pride in his deed. “I saw him making magic and I knew I had to do something. I think he’s dead; I think he did what Justyn did at the bridge.”
He told the tale as quickly as he could, in as few words as possible. He was a little afraid that Snowfire and the rest might not believe him. After all, who was he to claim to have destroyed a powerful mage? - but they accepted his tale at face value. And the results were there for all to see, so perhaps it was not as difficult to believe as he had feared.
“You were one thing he would not have been concerned about,” Snowfire said thoughtfully. “He would never have believed that a single young boy could be a threat to him, not even when he had the evidence of that threat slashed into his own body. He should have known better. We all know that the smallest creature can become dangerous when driven to desperation.”
“I couldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for Huur,” Darian said hastily. “She is all right, isn’t she?”
“One broken feather, and a ruffled temper, which she has flown off to cool,” Snowfire assured him, and looked around at the wide-eyed group of villagers surrounding them. He switched to stilted Valdemaran.
“I believe we hold Errold’s Grove, and need not fear the return of the barbarians tonight,” he said, raising his voice. “I believe it is safe enough to stay and sleep, and in the morning, begin to rebuild. If you will go to your houses, we allies of Valdemar will secure the place against intruders.”
Still shocked and bewildered, ready to listen to anyone who offered a voice of authority, they trailed back to their houses by twos and threes. Snowfire divided the Hawkbrothers into three groups of five, leaving out the two worst wounded, to take night-watches. “Is there anyplace you can go to rest?” he asked Darian, with a hand resting lightly on his shoulder. “Would anyone give you bed space? You have done more than enough for one night!”
Darian felt each and every separate bruise aching, thought longingly of Justyn’s little cottage, once despised, and nodded.
“Go then,” Snowfire said, giving him a gentle shove. “I will see that you are awakened in the morning.”
Already those not on the first watch were putting out the fire in the blazing stable; soon concealing darkness hid the signs of battle, leaving only the acrid scent of smoke in the air. Darian trudged toward Justyn’s cottage, wondering what he would find there.
What he found in the light of a single lantern was signs of recent occupation; the furniture was gone, probably broken up for firewood. The contents of the shelves lay piled in a corner, discarded as worthless, including all the bad paintings of famous mages, and there were bedrolls spread across every available bit of floor. He wrinkled his nose at the smell of sweat, burned food, and unwashed bedding; he took the time to throw all the bedrolls out the door and open the windows. The fireplace hadn’t been swept in ages, and it seemed that when the barbarians finished eating, they tended to pitch what was left into the fire, for it was littered with bones and burned crusts - hence the odor of burned food. Darian climbed the ladder to his loft bed, and discovered it was the one corner of the house that hadn’t been touched, probably because his little bed was too short for any of the barbarians.
With a weary sigh, he tumbled into bed, leaving the lantern to burn itself out.
It was the sound of horses and men’s voices that woke him in the gray light of dawn, and before he was even properly awake, he tumbled down out of the loft and emerged from the cottage with a poker in one hand, ready to do battle all over again.
But it wasn’t the barbarians who had returned; the noise was the arrival of a rescue expedition. Men on horses milled around the square, all of them wearing Lord Breon’s colors and badge; more men afoot were rounding up loose livestock and confining it in hastily-built corrals. Darian put down his poker and scratched his head, watching all the activity with a sense of bleary bemusement.
After another moment, he quietly got himself a bucket of water and used it to clean himself up, wincing as he scrubbed a body that was black and blue from neck to knee. Once clean and marginally presentable, he went back out and joined the milling people, picking up what had happened this morning by listening to fragments of conversation.
Lord Breon had gotten Starfall’s message and had gathered his men to respond to it - but on the way, he had encountered the thoroughly demoralized barbarian foot soldiers, and had fought an unequal battle with them. Then, having defeated the barbarians, he had been stopped by the rockfall, and had been forced to find a place to ford the river to get to the road on the other side. By this time, of course, they were certain that they would find Errold’s Grove occupied by a hostile force, and had only hoped to catch the remaining barbarians by surprise. Ready for battle, they had clattered over the bridge a little before dawn only to encounter the sentries; after learning that the town was in friendly hands, they had made enough noise to wake up most of those who were sleeping.
When Darian wandered in, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand, Lord Breon himself was in earnest consultation with Snowfire, with townsfolk standing awkwardly about, still looking dazed and bewildered, though most of them had cleaned themselves up and found more presentable clothing. They formed a sad contrast with their once-respectable selves, however, and looked rather as if they had grabbed whatever would fit with little regard for the sex or size their garments were originally intended for.
Snowfire spotted him and hailed him with relief. “Here! Little brother! Your command of the tongue is better than mine, come and help me with this!”
Not at all reluctant, Darian ignored his bruises and aching bones, and trotted to Snowfire’s side, feeling flushed,with pride. When Snowfire was at a loss for words, he translated. Lord Breon, a neat and handsome gentleman of middling age and height, clothed in a businesslike suit of riveted armor, brown of hair and eyes and beard, took the Hawkbrothers completely in stride. But Darian’s fellow villagers started every time any one of them moved suddenly, and kept circling warily around the birds. To Darian’s relief, he caught sight of Huur, Hweel, and an awkward-looking youngster dozing on the rooftree nearest Snowfire, where they had evidently been most of the night, with Daystorm’s bondbird corbies keeping the natives at a respectful distance.
“My Lord Snowfire,” Lord Breon said when they were finished, a look of profound respect in his eyes, “you have certainly kept things well in hand here. I am sure that the Queen herself will want to thank you eventually.”
Snowfire shrugged. “We are allies, are we not?” he pointed out. “And if you had not intercepted the foot troops before they returned, we should probably have been forced to defend ourselves from them as we marched these folk toward your holding and safety. Now they need no longer seek shelter among your people.”
“Beggin’ your pardon!” Lutter spoke up, interrupting him. “But we need to know what we’re to do now.”
The man was a far cry from his former, prosperous self. He had changed his clothing, but it hung on him loosely, and his middle-aged face bore signs of both fresh and not-so-recent bruises in purple, black, green, and yellow.
“What are you to do?” Lord Breon looked at him askance. “Why, pick up your lives, man, what else?”
“Pick up our lives?” he replied, aghast. “What are you talking about? How can we pick up our lives? There’s nothing left here! The barbarians took it all - what they didn’t eat, they destroyed! We’ve no crops, no food, no herds or flocks, how are we to get through the winter?”
Dorian snorted with contempt, and all eyes turned toward him. Snowfire looked at him curiously, Lord Breon with surprise, and Lutter with astonishment turning to anger at having been interrupted by the village scapegrace.
“I’ll tell you what you’ve got!” Darian said hotly, amazed at their stupidity. “You’ve got your homes back, you’ve got a pile of weapons and armor that ought to be worth something. You’ve got a dozen or more real warhorses that are each worth the price of a good house, and you’ve got a whole lot more regular horses, too! You’ve got mules and two wagons, whatever was in those wagons, and you’ve got the whole Peligiris Forest to hunt dye-fungus in. You can buy food again, you don’t have to grow it! What are you complaining about?”
“And you’ve got this.” Lilly, the barmaid, came up dragging someone’s once-fine coverlet, made into a crude bag, across the ground. She let the comers fall, revealing a mixed pile of coins and jewelry. “I couldn’t tell whose was whose,” she continued. “So I just piled them all together, but I know that most of this didn’t come from Errold’s Grove.”
It certainly couldn’t have, since a great deal of the jewelry was of gold. No wonder the bundle had been too heavy to carry!
“Shcar had all this in his room,” she continued. “And I thought that when you get done picking out the bits that belong to you, Lord Breon could arrange to sell the rest and buy new stock for everybody who lost beasts and fowl.”
“What about the stuff you’re wearing?” asked a woman, shrilly, and only then did Darian look up to see that Lilly was bedecked with several heavy gold bracelets, chains, and odd-looking pendants.
Lilly flushed, but looked angry. “This is mine,” she replied fiercely. “I earned every bit of it!”
“Oh, earned it, did you?” the woman snarled. “At your ease, in comfort, while the rest of us sweated out in the fields? Earned it, did you?”
For once, Lilly stood up for herself, pulling herself up tall and staring the woman down. “Yes, earned it! Earned it by waiting on Shkar day and night, doing things I don’t even like to think about, keeping him and his bullies looking at me and thinking about me instead of you, making sure that every time their eyes started wandering toward your pretty little daughter, Stella Harthon, that they got pulled back toward me. How did you think it happened? By magic? I fought for all our sakes with the only weapon that I knew would work against them! And now I’m keeping what I earned from them, I’m taking it, and I’m going to go and buy a real inn someplace else where nobody is going to look down her long petty nose at me again!”
Darian flushed with anger as he saw sour and angry faces among the women still, in spite of the fact that the pile of loot in the coverlet was vastly more valuable than what Lilly wore. How greedy can they be? he wondered.
But Lutter coughed, and said to Lilly, red-faced, “You’re right, girl. You’ve earned it. And you’ve earned the right to take it and yourself someplace else if you want to. But if we’re going to get the dye-trade going again, we’re going to need a real inn - “
Lilly interrupted him, shaking her head, though her demeanor softened. “No. If I go elsewhere, I’ll be Lilly, the respectable innkeeper. I can never be that if I stay here. I’m leaving. Besides,” she chuckled weakly, “when I leave, it’ll give your wives a bad example to show their girl-children.”
“I would like to ask you some questions about your time among those men,” Lord Breon said with delicate tact. “You knew the name of one of the leaders, for instance.”
“Shkar,” she said, and shrugged. “I didn’t learn much of their tongue. They didn’t need me for language lessons, and what they wanted they could get by pointing.”
“Nevertheless, you may know more than you think you do,” Lord Breon persisted. “If you’d care to come back with me, after I’ve learned what I can from you, I’ll gladly provide an escort to wherever you choose.”-
“That suits me.” She turned abruptly arid went to stand among Lord Breon’s men, who, after a stern look from Lord Breon, did not leer or make suggestive comments but simply made a place for her.
“In the meantime, the woman is right,” the Lord continued, surveying the pile. “Between the loot there, and the horses, you will have more than enough to rebuild what was lost. I’ll trade ten cattle or twenty adult hogs for each warhorse this minute, sight unseen, for instance. Or you can take them to the horsemarket and try your luck there.” He raked his eyes over the crowd. “You’ll have to agree on equal shares, as you all suffered equally, so far as I can see. It will take a great deal of work, but in the end, Errold’s Grove will be as prosperous as it was before.”
There was some muttering, especially among those who had been the most well-off before the invasion, but finally everyone agreed.
“Now, as for Darian,” Lord Breon began.
Snowfire interrupted him this time. “With all respect, we have already taken him into our clan,” the Tayledras said, and Darian’s heart leaped. “We do not consider him a burden.”
But evidently some word of what Darian had done had gotten to the villagers, for there was an immediate protest. “But he’s our mage! We are going to need a mage!” exclaimed Lutter in dismay. “What if someone like these barbarians comes back?”
“You need a trained mage, which Dar’ian is not,” Snowfire replied sternly. “He must be trained, and you have no adequate teachers. Nor are you likely to get any, considering how long it took to get you the first one.”
“But he can heal - “
“As I believe some of you once pointed out, any of your young people could learn to do, apprenticing for six months with a Healer.” Snowfire’s mouth twitched at the dismay on certain faces; Darian had to hide his face lest his own expression give him away. “I suggest you do that. Perhaps, if at some time, a generous offer is made, you may tempt another mage to come and take residence here. Until that time, I fear you shall have to learn to watch your own borders and defend yourselves.”
But Darian felt a twinge of guilt as he looked at the real fear in the eyes of some of them. Terrible things had happened here, things that people would never speak of, but which would shadow their dreams for the rest of their lives. They would never feel truly secure again.
“What is it, lad?” Lord Breon asked, seeing the doubt in his own eyes. “What is it to be? Do you go with the Hawkbrothers, or do you remain here?”
He looked from Snowfire’s calm eyes, to Lord Breon’s worried ones, and back again. “I - I have to be trained, first,” he said, echoing Snowfire’s words. “And I’d rather it was with my friends than anyone else. But - “ He shook his head, and tried to put into words the idea he’d had. “But - this place is right on the border, right on the edge of Hawkbrother lands and Valdemar, right? Shouldn’t there be someone who was as much a Hawkbrother as a Valdemaran, right here all the time, to make sure that there are never any misunderstandings?”
Lord Breon looked astounded, and Snowfire impressed and pleased. He hurried on. “And Lutter is right. Errold’s Grove is going to need a real mage, sooner or later. The Peligirs haven’t gotten less strange, even after the Storms; if there was a mage here, he could look at stuff that was brought out and tell if it was good for anything besides dyeing. Other things, too. So - couldn’t I do both?” He turned pleading eyes to Snowfire. “Couldn’t I go with you, learn to be a mage and one of the Clan, then come back here and maybe make a little Vale where Tayledras would always be able to come?”
“It would be a hard life, and often lonely, being neither of this world nor that,” Snowfire said softly in the Hawkbrother tongue. “But you are correct, that there is a need for such a person. Especially here, where there is - scope for a great deal of misunderstanding.”
“Then that’s what I’d like,” he sighed. Then he laughed a little and shook his head. “Hellfires, I never could take the easy way with anything!”
“I am glad that you made that choice, little brother,” the scout replied, and switched to Valdemaran. “That is a good plan, and a generous one. You shall come with us and be trained, and when you are ready, you shall return here and be a living example of the Alliance. You shall make for us a haven for our kind, and a place where those of Valdemar will find help when it is needed.”
Sighs and smiles all around, but Snowfire wasn’t finished yet. “And since it is a plan that shows wisdom beyond your years, I shall do as Hweel and Huur asked me, though you are not quite yet of an age for such a joy and a responsibility.” He smiled. “After all, usually in matters of this sort, our winged ones are far too wise to be bound by convention.”
He whistled and held up his gauntleted arm - but instead of Hweel coming in to land on it, the youngster woke up, hooted loudly, and blundered in to his fist. Before Darian had a moment to think, Wintersky grabbed his left hand and slipped a shoulder-length glove over it, then held it up. The youngster made a clumsy hop from Snowfire’s fist to Darian’s, and looked deeply into Darian’s dazzled eyes as Snowfire laughed with delight at his expression.
“H-hello,” Darian stammered, beside himself with so much joy and excitement that he shook. “What’s your name?”
:Kuari,: the bird said solemnly in his mind. :l am Ktiari. I like you. We’ll be bondmates. Yes? They want it, too: The owl didn’t move his head, but Darian knew that they meant Hweel and Huur, sitting side-by-side up on the rooftree. :I like mice. I want to hunt mice. Bring you some, too?:
“I have the feeling that Hweel and Huur have decided that this will ensure your place within the clan, little brother,” Snowfire said in Tayledras, with suppressed laughter in his voice.
Darian didn’t care; the trust he sensed in Kuan’s “voice” won his heart as nothing else could have. With gentle care, he reached up and scratched the youngster’s head at the eartufts, as he had seen Snowfire do for Hweel.
:Oh, I like that. I like that better than mice. Do that a lot.:
Kuari closed his eyes in ecstasy, all but melting under the caress, and butted his head into Darian’s hand.
“I told you,” Daystorm muttered to Snowfire, in a whisper Darian probably wasn’t supposed to overhear. “The boy’s a natural with the birds. He’ll be fine.”
Yes, I will be fine, he thought, his heart so brimming with joy and contentment that there was no room in it anymore for anger, resentment, or grief. Yes, I will. I’ve got a family, adventure, a worthy goal. I’m home. I’m finally making my own home.
Darian looked up, and out at the villagers, who were conspicuously silent. “One last thing,” he said boldly. “I won’t even consider returning until there is a portrait of the great mage Justyn displayed in a place of honor in Errold’s Grove.”
He paused a moment, then added, just to make sure, “A good portrait.”
Then Darian, Hawkbrother of Valdemar, turned his full attention to his new bondmate’s soft feathers, and the shared bliss that came from being with each other.
Maybe the young owl’s flight was not all that graceful at the moment, but in time, with support and guidance, he would be a master at whatever he tried. In time, so too would Darian, and he would be at home wherever he went.

Owlsight

One

“Keisha?” When Keisha didn’t answer, the fluting voice calling her name in the distance grew noticeably impatient. “Keisha!”
Keisha Alder ignored her sister Shandi’s continued calls; she was in the middle of a job she had no intention of cutting short. The sharp smell of vinegar filled Keisha’s workshop, but she was so inured to it that it hardly even stung her nose. Shandi could wait long enough for Keisha to finish decanting her bruise potion, straining out the bits of wormwood with a fine net of cheesecloth. Keisha wrinkled her nose a little as the smell of vinegar intensified; the books said to use wine for the potion, but she had found that vinegar worked just as well, and there was no mistaking it for something drinkable - unless your taste in wine was really wretched. A cloth steeped in this dark-brown liquid and bandaged against a bruise eased the pain and made the bruise itself heal much faster than it would on its own, so despite the odor the potion was much in demand. She needed so much of it that she always had several jugs or bottles of the finished potion in storage, and more jars of it in various states of preparation. It had to steep for six weeks at a minimum, so she tried to empty one jar and start another once a week.
Keisha held her hands steady; she didn’t want to waste any of it in spillage. She even wrung the cheesecloth dry, then reached for a stopper whittled from a birch branch and her pot of warm paraffin. As soon as the last drop was sealed into its special dark-brown pottery jug, and the jug itself placed safely on a high shelf, she knocked the soggy fragments of herb out of the wide-mouthed jar, added two handfuls of freshly crumbled dry wormwood, and poured in vinegar to the top. Footsteps behind her warned her that Shandi had come to the workshop looking for her, so she wasted no time in tying a square of waxed linen over the top of the jar and setting it at the end of the row of nine more identical jars.
She turned to face the door, just as Shandi stepped across the threshold into the cool gloom of the workshop, blinking eyes still dazzled by the bright sun outside. Although not dressed in her festival best, Shandi was, as always, so neat and spotless that Keisha became uncomfortably aware of the state of her own stained brown breeches and far-from-immaculate, too-large tunic. Shandi wore a white apron embroidered with dark blue thread, a neat brown skirt, and a pristine white blouse with the blue embroidery matching the apron, all the work of her own hands. Keisha’s tunic and breeches were hand-me-downs from her brothers, plain as a board, indifferently shortened, and both had seen their best days many years ago.
But what else am I supposed to wear for working with messy potions, dosing sick babies, and sewing up bloody gashes? she asked herself crossly, annoyed at herself for feeling embarrassed. This isn‘t some tale where everyone wears cloth-of-gold and tunics with silk embroidery! Shandi would look pretty sad after a half day of my work!
“Keisha, are we going to the market or not?” Shandi asked impatiently, then screwed up her face in a grimace as a whiff of vinegar reached her.
“We’re going, though I don’t know why you want to go so badly,” Keisha replied, hoping she didn’t sound as irritated as she felt.
“Dye,” Shandi replied promptly.
“No, thank you, I have too much to do right now,” Keisha said impishly, grinning as Shandi first looked puzzled, then mimed a blow at her for the pun.
“You know what I mean!” Shandi giggled. “You never know what the hunters are going to bring in, and I’m still looking for a decent red, one that won’t fade the first time someone looks too long at it.” She smiled. “You know I need to have you along. After all, you know so much more about these things than I do. And you’re better at bargaining; I’d be sure to get cheated, and then you’d be annoyed because you weren’t with me to save me from a sharp trader!”
Keisha’s irritation had vanished, as it always did around Shandi. No one could stay irritated with her sister for long; Shandi’s nature was as sweet as her innocent face, and she played peacemaker to the entire village of Errold’s Grove. Keisha and Shandi were almost the same height, with the same willowy figures, same golden-brown hair and eyes, and almost the same features, but in all other ways they were as different as if they had come from opposite sides of the world. Sometimes I think when the gods gave out tempers, they gave me all of the thorns and her all the rose petals. “You’re right, of course, I would be annoyed.” She rinsed her hands in lemon-balm water to remove the vinegar smell and any lingering trace of wormwood - poison, if ingested - and dried them on a clean rag. “And I should have remembered about the red. How many of the girls have you promised embroidery thread to?”
“Only three - Hydee, Jenna, and Sari. I wouldn’t trust the rest with red. They’d be sure to do something tasteless with it.” Shandi’s bright brown eyes glowed with suppressed laughter. “Ugh! Can’t you imagine it? Roses the size of cabbages all around the hems of their skirts!”
“Or worse,” Keisha said dryly. “Roses the size of cabbages over each breast. Lallis is not exactly subtle.” And she’s always looking for a way to bring attention to her “assets.” Not that anyone needs help in seeing them. You could hide half the village in that cleavage, and a quarter of the village would be oh-so-happy to stay there! “I’m all done for now, let’s go before someone decides they have a bellyache and comes looking for a posset.”
Side by side, Keisha and her sister strolled down a neat, stone-edged path between the houses, heading toward the village square. Once a week, the village of Errold’s Grove held a market day, and those from outside the village and no particular interest in seeking further - and possibly more lucrative - venues took full advantage of it. For some people, it simply wasn’t worth the effort to travel long distances just to make more money from their goods; they’d rather that other folk did the traveling and took the extra profit. As had been the case in the past, there were plenty of traders willing to do just that, so the weekly market was usually visited by at least one far traveler from spring to early winter. And three of the quarterly Faires - Spring Equinox, Midsummer, and Harvest - brought traders in their dozens.
Errold’s Grove was more prosperous now than it had been in its earlier heyday, with dozens of trappers and dye-hunters working the forest and hills. None of them was actually from Errold’s Grove; the villagers were still far too wary of the forest to be tempted by the possibility of profit hidden in its depths. But the Hawkbrothers were here now, and to some people, their presence meant increased safety or, at least, a smaller likelihood of being eaten by misshapen monsters. So the dye-hunters and all the people who supported and profited by them were back, as well as a new class of folk who actually specialized in trapping the strange new creatures created by the Change-Circles. The population of Errold’s Grove had swelled to half again more than the village had ever held before.
They even had their own temple and priest, so now the children of the village got proper lessons in the winter, instead of being home-schooled or taught by one of the old women. For most of the children, that was a mixed blessing, as the priest took his duty seriously and wasn’t as easily distracted as a mother or as prone to doze off as an old granny.
They still didn’t have a fully trained “official” Healer, though, and Keisha served in place of one, wearing her ordinary clothing rather than even the pale-green robes of a Trainee. Healers were in short supply still, and so far, there hadn’t been a real need to have one posted to Errold’s Grove. Lord Breon had a Healer, and according to Healer’s Collegium, he could take care of anything here that Keisha couldn’t.
Though never selected for her Gift by a fully trained Healer in the approved and official manner, Keisha had begun showing her talents at the age of five, by taking care of the ills of the stock on the farm, then moving on to patching up the childhood hurts and illnesses of her brothers and sisters. It got to the point where they came to her instead of their mother, since Keisha’s remedies were far more likely to set things right and taste better than their mother’s book of recipes from her granny.
Things might never have gone any further, but fear of the Changebeasts and longing for other human company together drove Keisha’s parents to resettle in the village. That had happened a few months after the barbarian invasion when one family decided they’d had enough of Errold’s Grove and a house fortuitously fell vacant. Not long after that, once she widened her circle of “patching up” to the rest of the children and their pets, the villagers discovered Keisha’s talent, and a concerted effort began to turn their new citizen into a fully educated, fully stocked, fully prepared Healer.
As she and her sister passed the home that had drawn them here - now silent, with the rest of the family out working the fields and tending the stock - Keisha grinned a little. Maybe if her parents had known what was going to happen, they wouldn’t have been so quick to leave the farmstead! Her mother and father hadn’t stood a chance against the will of the village, and they’d lost Keisha’s labor at the farm before they knew what had happened. They might have tried to fight to keep Keisha (and her two sturdy hands) theirs alone, but the arrival of a Herald on circuit put an end to any thoughts of making the attempt.
That golden moment was a cherished memory, the point when Keisha became something other than “ordinary” in her parents’ eyes. The Herald - oh, he was fine to look at, all white and tall on his silver Companion. . . . He took one look at me that went right down to my bones and declared, in a voice like a trumpet, “ This girl has the Healer’s Gift.” Much to Keisha’s bemusement, before he left for the rest of his circuit, he had arranged for Lord Breon’s Healer, Gil Jarad, to give Keisha instruction. Several weeks later a trader delivered into her hands copies of every book used by the Trainees at Healer’s Collegium, courtesy of that august body, and a polite note reminding everyone that the books were worth, not a small fortune, but a rather large one. Enough to buy half the town, and theft or harm to the books counted as a crime against the Crown! With the books had come three sets of the pale-green robes of a Healer Trainee, lest anyone doubt her acceptance. Keisha still preferred not to wear them, though; it seemed a pity to get them as stained and dirty as they would be if she donned them for her regular work.
No more weeding and mowing for her; the letter that came with this library told her that she was expected to study those books any time that she wasn’t tending the ailments of man or beast, or brewing medicines for same. She already had the skills needed to make most medications and had lacked only the knowledge of what herbs were needed - the books supplied that, with good pictures to guide her when she went hunting for them in the forest and fields, and detailed instructions for each preparation. Along with the books came a box of seeds for those herbs that did well under cultivation, all carefully labeled with planting and growing instructions. It was obvious that she was expected to become self-sufficient, and quickly.
For a while, Keisha had used the kitchen of the family home for her workroom - and her mother had seen that as a possible way to discourage this new career.
Mother should never have complained about my “green messes “ in her kitchen, telling everyone she was afraid I was going to poison the family, Keisha thought, with just a touch of self-satisfaction. I know she thought that the Council would agree that I should stop, but it had the opposite effect!
In fact, the Council didn’t wait for her to complain directly to them; the moment the Village Council got wind of the complaints, they assigned Keisha her own workshop, a sturdy little stone building that had once been the home of the village savior and hero, Wizard Justyn. They even went so far as to make a special day of preparing it for her, organizing a village-wide cleanup and repair of the place, presenting her with a cottage scoured inside and out, roof newly thatched, all the bits and pieces still littering the interior taken out and broken into kindling. She had only to say where she wanted workbenches and shelves, and they appeared; had only to ask for a place to lie down and a fine feather bed and a pile of pillows and quilts showed up in the sleeping-loft. The people of Errold’s Grove had learned their lesson about treating a Healer right, having had to do without a Healer of any kind for so long after Wizard Justyn died.
Heady stuff for a fourteen-year-old youngster, she thought wryly, from her distant vantage of eighteen. I’m surprised my head didn ‘t get too big to fit a hat. She waved at the blacksmith’s oldest apprentice as they passed the forge; he waved absently back, but his eyes - as all the eyes of any male over the age of thirteen - were on Shandi. I suppose the only reason it didn‘t was that I was too busy to get a swelled head.
She had been busy every waking moment, in fact; when she wasn’t studying her books, she was out in the forest gathering medicinal plants, on her knees in her new garden cultivating herbs, or making preparations for Healer Gil to examine. At last, when Gil was satisfied that her skill at producing medicines was the equal of his, he stopped inspecting her results before allowing her to use them and started teaching her how to use the knife and the needle, how to set bones and restore dislocated joints as he did.
Unfortunately, the one thing he can’t teach me is how to use my Gift, and the books are not very useful there either. Healer Gil’s Gift was not very strong, and he relied on his skill with the knife and his truly amazing knowledge of herbalism for most of his cures. Keisha would have been perfectly happy to do the same, but Healer Gil kept insisting that she make use of this Gift that she didn’t understand. . . .
Gradually, though, what with all Gil had to do, his visits had shortened, and the intervals between them lengthened, until now he came to Errold’s Grove no more than once every moon and never stayed longer than half a day. He even trusted her now to experiment with new preparations, something that made her so proud she practically glowed every time she thought about it!
That was why Shandi wanted her to come along on this hunt for the elusive true red dye. Her knowledge of herbs and other plants extended into dyes, and she had a knack for telling which ones would fade, which would need too much mordant to be practical, and which would turn some other, less desirable color with age. Some dyes could even be used as medicine, so Keisha never lost a chance to explore their possibilities. In a village where every person had some specialty, however small, Shandi was the one who supplied everyone else with common embroidery thread the equal of anything a trader could bring in. Her threads, whether spun from wool, linen, or raime, were strong, hair-fine, and even; her colors were true and fast. So even as the villagers gladly paid Keisha for tending their ills (knowing that she had to pay for the medicines and supplies she couldn’t make, grow, or find for herself), they even more gladly told over their copper coins for a hank of Shandi’s thread.
The village square was the site of the weekly market, with the square closed to all but foot traffic, and stalls set up along all four sides. Besides the usual things found in a village market - produce and foodstuffs - Errold’s Grove had specialties of its own to boast of. Along with the dye-hunters had come dye-traders and dye-buyers, who purchased bundles of plants and fungus and things that defied description, then leeched or cooked out the pigments and pressed them into little cakes for sale. The buyers seldom left Errold’s Grove, preferring to act as middlemen and sell their dye-cakes to traders, but they were by no means reluctant to sell a cake or two to their neighbors. The tanner also put some of his unusual furs on offer at this weekly market, giving villagers first choice of what the hunters brought him.
In addition, now Errold’s Grove had its own potter, who was an artist in his own right, using some of the new and strange pigments and foreign earths from the Change-Circles and a variety of modeling and carving techniques to make ordinary clay pots into things almost too beautiful for use. There was, alas, no glass blower as yet, though there were rumors that one might be coming soon; most glass came from the Hawkbrothers or from traders.
The miller’s son had begun experimenting with paper making a year ago, and now his efforts were on sale roughly every other market day, alongside inks Keisha had taught him to make from oak galls and soot, small brushes he made from badger hair, and pens he cut himself from goose quills. So now it was possible for lovers to exchange silent vows, for thrifty wives to keep account books, for those with artistic pretensions to inflict their work on their relatives, and for everyone to write to relatives far and near. That last item alone, that tiny token of civilization, made Errold’s Grove seem less like the end of the universe and more like a part of Valdemar. When it was possible to communicate, however infrequently, with those outside the confines of Lord Breon’s holdings, people didn’t feel forgotten anymore.
Then there was the Fellowship.
Keisha nodded a friendly greeting toward the Fellowship booth, and the soberly clad woman tending it smiled and nodded back, her smile widening as Shandi’s footsteps suddenly (and predictably) lagged and her eyes went to the delicate wisps of fabric draped temptingly over a line at the back of the booth. The Fellowship, a loose amalgamation of a dozen families related only in their religious beliefs and a firm commitment to peace and a life with no violence or anger in it, had arrived in Errold’s Grove two years ago with their herds, their household goods, and their readiness to work and work hard. Within months, they had built an enclave of a dozen stout houses and barns enough for all their animals; within a year, traders were coming especially to buy what they produced.
For what the Fellowship specialized in was producing remarkable textiles: lengths of tapestry-woven fabric; intricate braids and other trims; and a very few simple garments such as shawls and capes - woven, knitted, knotted, and braided of the beautifully spun and dyed wool from their herds.
The creatures providing the wool were no ordinary animals. The Fellowship had goats with coats so long and silky that it was a pleasure to touch them, sheep with wool the texture of the finest thistledown, and a special variety of chirra. They were a little smaller and had a sweeter, more delicate face than those used as winter pack animals, and they possessed a coat of wool that when woven was softer than the finest sueded deerskin: light, dense, and so warm that one had to wear a cloak of it to believe it. These animals all needed more tending than their mundane counterparts, so much so that it was likely that few folk would be willing to put that much work into their care. Nevertheless, it was obviously worth it to the folk of the Fellowship, since traders came from as far away as Haven itself to purchase items such as their chirra-cloaks and blankets, their intricately patterned fabrics, and their “wedding” shawls, wraps of knitted lace so fine and delicate that they could be drawn through a wedding ring. Keisha had heard that it had become the fashion for the highborn of Valdemar to present one of these shawls to daughters of their houses to mark a betrothal, or for a suitor to offer one in token that he intended to ask for a woman’s hand.
Well, what was desirable for the highborn of Valdemar was also the heart’s desire of every girl of marriageable age in Errold’s Grove - and the folk of the Fellowship were pleased to make it possible for these less-than-highborn suitors and parents to grant those yearnings with special prices for the folk of their home village. Small wonder Shandi’s eyes and feet were drawn to the booth; she had three current suitors, all hotly pursuing her (and completely unsuitable in their father’s estimation), any one of whom could give her the reason for selecting such a shawl and pointing her choice decorously out to him.
“Shandi - ” Keisha called her wandering attention back with a touch of exasperation. “Look, let’s see if there’s a red dye first, then you can go look at shawls while I see if anyone’s brought medicines or herbs that I can use.”
“All right,” Shandi agreed, though with an audible sigh. Satisfied that she had her sister’s attention for at least a little while, Keisha and Shandi made the rounds of all three dye-sellers’ booths, looking for that so-elusive red.
Keisha deliberately went to Baden’s booth last; he was - in her opinion - the most honest of the three. As they neared his booth, he twinkled at Shandi and crooked a finger at her. They hurried to his counter.
“I think I may have something for you young ladies,” the cheerful, weather-tanned man said. “I’ve only been waiting for our good Healer’s expert opinion on it.” He nodded at Keisha, who flushed.
He cleared bundles of dried fungus off the counter and reached beneath it, bringing out a cake the size of his hand and as black as dried blood, together with something that looked like a seed pod made of dried leather. He placed hands with nails from beneath which no amount of soap and water would ever remove the traces of dye on the counter. “Here’s the dye, and here’s the thing it comes from; now you tell me if this is going to be as good as I think it is.”
Keisha crumbled a bit off the cake, smelled it, very cautiously tasted it, and tried dissolving it in a cup of water he provided. It didn’t dissolve, and she raised an eyebrow at the dye-merchant, who only grinned.
“Won’t dissolve in water, nor in water and soap,” he said in triumph. “Here - ” He tossed out the water, and poured a bit of clear liquid into the cup from a stoppered bottle It appeared to be thrice-distilled spirits, by the potent smell, and very nearly made her drunk just to sniff it. She dropped a crumb of dye in and was rewarded by a spreading crimson stain.
“Let me add a bit of salt for mordant, and you see for yourself what this stuff does.” He brought out another cup and poured water into that, then obliged her with some scraps and threads to try in the dye.
The samples they dunked in the dye became gratifying shades of scarlet, and no amount of rinsing in the water he’d provided would take the color out. As Shandi sucked in her breath with excitement, Keisha brought the threads up to her nose until she was nearly cross-eyed, examining every crevice and crack to see if the dye was “taking” evenly. Finally, she pronounced judgment.
“I think it will fade eventually, but it will take years as long as you keep the color out of the sun,” she told both the merchant and her sister. “Dyeing with distilled spirits will be tricky, maybe dangerous, what with the fumes being flammable - worse for someone doing large batches of thread and yarn than for you, Shandi - but this is probably the best red I’ve ever seen.” She turned her attention to the “pod,” and picked it up to peer at it. “Just what is this thing?”
“A snail,” the merchant said gleefully. “And no one would ever have noticed what secret this little creature held if Terthorn hadn’t tried to cook them in white wine. I’m the only one he told, and I got him to promise me an exclusive market.”
Shandi had to laugh at that. “So Terthorn’s famous palate and cooking experiments finally have some use! I suppose we should just be glad he didn’t try to cook them in red wine!”
The dye-merchant laughed, “Oh, now he’d never have done that! Haven’t we heard him say a thousand times that no one with any real taste would cook snails in red wine?”
Keisha’s thoughts were more practical. “So exactly how much are you going to part us from for this wonder?” she asked dubiously. She knew it wasn’t going to be cheap; not as strong a red as this, nor one as colorfast. She also knew Shandi would take it at any price, and was just fervently glad that it was this merchant who had the supply, not one of the other two.
“For you, Shandi, I’ll trade it weight-for-weight in silver.” Keisha tried not to wince, but the price was fair. If he had any sense, when he got the stuff into civilized lands, he’d trade it weight-for-weight in gold.
Shandi grimaced, but didn’t argue when Keisha didn’t. “Fair enough,” she said bravely, and dug out four silver coins, placing them on one side of his scales. He crumbled dye into the pan on the other side until they leveled off equal, then winked again, and crumbled a bit more into the pan. He pocketed the coins, then tilted the pan of dye into a paper cone, tapping it to get every crumb into the container. With a little bow, he handed the precious packet to Shandi, who twisted the open end of the cone tight and put it carefully into her pouch.
“I’ll tell you something else, young ladies,” he said, as they were about to move on, “I haven’t looked any further than to get the scarlet. If you can tell me how to get a deep, fast purple as good as the red out of that, I’ll halve the price if you give me an exclusive from here on.”
Keisha’s eyebrows both went up. “Really,” was all she replied, but her mind was already on changing the mordant, adding other possible ingredients, experimenting with double-dyeing with indigo.
Barlen’s look told her that he’d all but seen her thoughts written on her forehead. “If anyone can do it,” he continued with a wave, “you two can. Oh, and Keisha, you ought to go talk to Steelmind; he came to market by himself, and I think he’s got some seeds you might be interested in.”
“Really!” she exclaimed, as Shandi headed straight for the Fellowship booth, one hand protectively cupped over her pouch. “Thanks, Harlen!”
“No problem.” Another villager approached the booth, and Barlen turned his attention to the potential new customer. Keisha moved along to the shaded arbor next to the new Temple that the Hawkbrothers used as a booth when they came to Errold’s Grove.
Normally Hawkbrothers only appeared for the quarterly Faire market days, and when they came, they came in force, with a half-dozen bead-and-feather-bedecked traders and their fierce-looking birds of prey. They took over the arbor and put up a pavilion as well, and traders buzzed around them like bees at a honey pot, for the things they brought, though (aside from a few items) never predictable, were always fantastic. Sometimes it was lengths of silk fabric in impossible colors and patterns, sometimes it was trims and ribbons made of the same silks and silk embroidery thread that girls saved for their wedding dresses. They had been known to bring jewelry, glassware, odd spices and incense, vials of scent and massage oils, rugs sometimes, and, once, simpler variations on their own tunics and robes. Those items that were predictable were always welcome: ropes and cording much stronger than anyone else could make and much lighter, too; hammocks made from that same cord; amazing feathers; furs unlike anyone else brought; leather tanned so that it was as supple and soft as their silks; rare woods; and carvings in stone, ivory, and wood.
But sometimes, one called Steelmind came by himself, bringing strange ornamental or useful plants, herbs, and seeds. Keisha liked him, for all that he never said one word more than he absolutely had to; she also liked his bird, a slow and sleepy buzzard who was perfectly happy to accept a head scratch from her.
Sure enough, Steelmind had tucked himself and his bird into the depths of the arbor, with bare-root plants (roots carefully wrapped in damp moss) and an assortment of well-grown seedlings in small plugs of earth arranged beside him. His blue eyes brightened when he saw Keisha, and he waved - a welcome and an invitation to sit, all in the same gesture.
“Barlen says you have some seeds?” she said, giving the bird his scratch before settling on the turf beneath the arbor, her tunic puddling around her. She bent over to look at the plants he’d brought, and recognized the bare-root ones to be young rose vines.
Roses! She tried to imagine what Hawkbrother-bred rose vines would be like, and failed. She resolved to take at least one of them home with her - maybe more. Mum - would love a climbing rose going over a trellis at the front door - and it would be nice to have one plant in the herb garden that isn ‘t useful for anything!
She felt the same avariciousness that Shandi must have felt over the dye - if there was one weakness she had, it was for her garden. . . .
“It is spring, so mostly I have flower seeds and seedlings and these - ” he gestured at the rose vines, but she sensed he was teasing her.
“Mostly?” she replied.
“Our Healer suggested a few others before I left,” Steelmind said and smiled, an expression that transformed his face and made it obvious that he wasn’t much older than she was. He laughed a little. “Actually, it was stronger than merely suggestion.” He rummaged in a basket at his side and brought out fat little packets of tough silk, sewn at the top to resemble tiny sacks of grain. Each one had a symbol painted on it in a different color. “This stops pain, this stops cough, this is a balm, this stops itching from insect bites and rashes. There are instructions in each packet on growing and use.”
“They work better than what I use now?” she asked skeptically.
He shrugged, and the beads woven into his hair clicked together. “Different, that’s all I know. Better? I don’t know, I’m not a Healer, and we do not know what you have to work with. No worse, certainly. And I have been given orders that if you want them, your price is - nothing. Healer to Healer, is what I was told.”
Nothing? They do trust me to know, what I’m doing! And that these herbs were different from those she had been using - she knew from her own experience that a medication that one person responded well to might not work on another - and might make a third sicker. That was the peril of working with herbs. “I’ll take them, and thank your Healer very sincerely for me,” she replied. “And how much for the rose vines? It will be nice to have something in my garden that isn’t for healing people.”
“And who is to say that a rose cannot heal?” He smiled and named his prices, they haggled amiably, and settled on a price that didn’t leave either of them feeling cheated.
She gathered up her spoils - two rose vines, which would make everyone happy - and gave the bird a second scratch, which he seemed to expect. Then she left the arbor to go find Shandi and tear her away from the Fellowship booth.
Or try, anyway. If she got to talking embroidery and dye with the attendant, nothing less than a miracle would take her away before the sun went down.
Keisha squinted against the bright sunlight, and peered up the street as a flock of crows flew overhead, yelling cheerful insults at the village below. As she had half-expected, Shandi and the Fellowship woman were deep in conversation. Keisha shrugged her shoulders and sighed, wondering if it was going to be worth the trouble to try to pry Shandi away. If so, she had the choice of looking very rude and bossy and actually getting the job done quickly, or spending far more time than she wanted to and looking polite and courteous. If there had only been Shandi to consider, there would just be a few sharp words and it would be done with . . . but she really didn’t want to look boorish in front of a member of the Fellowship.
It was a short internal debate. There’s no point. If she finished her chores, I’ve got no call to tell her how to spend her free time. And if she hasn’t, she can take the consequences herself. Shandi’s one fault was that she tended to “forget” things she had to do when she disliked them. When they were younger, it had been Keisha’s task to supervise her and see to it that the “forgotten” chores were done - because if Shandi didn’t do them, Keisha would have to pitch in later. Mum’s idea of a proper form of incentive for me to be an ogre. But I don’t have time to spare to pitch in now. I’m not her keeper, no matter what Mum thinks, and Shandi’s sixteen and old enough to take the consequences by herself.
She ambled slowly up the street, enjoying the novel sensation of having people around her who were not in discomfort or pain - who were, in fact, entirely contented. Lately, it had become uncomfortable for her to be near people in any sort of distress, as if she shared their feelings. . . . She’d fancied once or twice that it was the sort of Empathy power that she heard told of in stories, but dismissed the thought quickly. Things like that didn’t happen to ordinary people from little towns like Errold’s Grove, and her Gift was an extraordinary enough fluke.
It wouldn’t be too long until Spring Equinox Faire, and the booths of those who sold their goods to the far-ranging traders were stuffed full, while the booths of those who depended on those same traders to bring them goods from outside were getting mighty empty. The dye-sellers, the folk who bought up a great deal of the Hawkbrother trade goods, and the Fellowship would all send most of their stock with the traders when the Faire was over.
The blacksmith needs metals, the baker needs spices and sugar, the girls are craving glass beads, laces, and ribbons, I need things I can’t get here - 
Healer Gil Jarad would be just as happy if she didn’t have to rely on those medicines, though. That was one subject on which they didn’t, and probably would never, agree. He couldn’t tell her how to use her Gift - more importantly, he had no way to oversee her and tell her what she was doing right or wrong, the way he could with medicines and the knife. How was she supposed to use this so-called Gift effectively, or even safely?
I suppose it would be quite useful if I could make head or tail out of those texts, she thought glumly, as she neared the Fellowship booth and Shandi. It’s almost as if they were written in a code that is perfectly understandable to everyone but me!
And I am feeling far too sorry for myself! Determined not to spoil what was a perfectly fine spring day, Keisha decided to stop thinking, and simply enjoy.
Alight breeze brought a hint of incense from the Temple, which joined harmoniously with the fresh flowers some of the stallkeepers used as decoration. The sunshine warmed her with the promise of a fine spring to come. The annual village-wide spring cleaning had taken place only a few days earlier in preparation for the Spring Faire, and as a consequence, the entire village was as charming as a highborn child’s toy. Streets had been swept of all the winter accumulation of junk and debris, houses and fences were newly whitewashed, market booths all neatly mended. What a perfect scene this would be for a painter or a tapestry maker to reproduce, she thought, just as she came even with Shandi. This is how the highborn think all our villages look, all the time. Still, she shouldn’t be so cynical. It really is pretty - the red shutters, the pale gold of the thatched roofs, the rainbow colors of the flowers everywhere, the handsome white horse posing right at the end of the street - 
 - white horse ? There were no white horses in Errold’s Grove!
Keisha shook her head and looked again, but the vision didn’t go away; instead, it drew nearer. There was a blue-eyed white horse decked out in blue-and-silver riding gear at the end of the street nearest the bridge - and he was coming straight toward the market square. There was purpose in each and every step he took. He had no rider.
And - was he looking at her?
You had to have lived in a. cave all your life not to know what a blue-eyed white horse was, and meant, in this kingdom. This was a Companion, and alone like this, with no urgency in his demeanor, he hadn’t lost his Herald, nor was his Herald in trouble. No, he had to be on Search.
And that meant he was looking for a new Herald-well, Herald-trainee - the person to whom he would be bonded for the rest of both their lives.
It seemed that the entire market saw the Companion at the same time that Keisha did. Everyone stopped talking, and the silence that fell over the square was broken only by the soft chiming of bridle bells and the matching overtones of the Companion’s deliberate steps. He knew very well that all eyes were on him, too - he arched his neck and lifted each hoof so high he might have been on parade.
Keisha froze; out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Shandi had done the same. The Companion was looking neither to the right, nor to the left, and there were only two people of reasonable age for him to Choose from in the direction he was moving. Of course, Companions had been known to Choose full adults in the past, but it wasn’t usual. No, the only two people likely to be Chosen in this village who were present at the moment were Shandi - and Keisha.
For a moment, Keisha was stunned, too shocked to think. This was not supposed to be happening! But as the Companion moved closer, she wrenched herself out of her shock with a grimace, as dismay washed over her.
Don‘t you dare, she thought with annoyance bordering on anger at the Companion. Don‘ tyou dare try to Choose me! Her hands balled into fists as she stared into his eyes, willing him to hear her. Don’t even think about Choosing me! I have responsibilities here, you dolt! People here need me for what I can do, and I can ‘tjust ride out of here and leave them! Listen to me, you fool! Don’t - 
Maybe staring into his eyes had been a mistake.
She felt the rest of the world vanishing around her as she fell into those twin pools of sapphire. But before she could drown in them, she bit her lip to bring her back to herself and hurled her denial at him.
I. Am. Not. Expendable! she thought, working up real heat at the thought that anyone, even a Companion, could march into her life and proceed to reorder it for her. I. Am. Not. Going!
She sensed surprise. Pick somebody else!
Now she sensed - amusement? Why amusement?
Her anger evaporated.
The eyes turned away from her, let her go. Had they ever really held her, or had that only been her imagination?
She didn’t get a chance to think about it, because movement beside her caught her attention. The Companion stood quietly, and now it was Shandi who walked with slow, entranced steps toward him.
She looked like a sleepwalker, and Keisha stifled the impulse to grab her arm and keep her where she was. Still. . . I’m not her keeper. If this is what she wants, she should try to make it work. She’s old enough to make up her own mind, just as I am, and live with whatever comes of it.
Although, it looked as if consequences were the last thing on Shandi’s mind right now.
Shandi stopped, just a step away from the Companion’s nose, and slowly reached her hand forward, as if she feared to touch him. Keisha waited, heart pounding, biting her lower lip. The Companion made short work of Shandi’s hesitation, craning his neck forward as his bridle bells chimed, and putting his nose in her hand. Then they just stood there for a long, long time, and Keisha’s breathing seemed very loud in the silence.
Then, as Keisha’s nerves wound tighter and tighter, like an overtuned harpstring, the spell - or whatever it was - finally broke. They both moved, the Companion tossing his head and sidling around so that his stirrup and saddle were in easy reach. Shandi reached for the cantle, then turned to her sister with eyes brimming with wonder.
That snapped everyone else out of their tense silence, and before Shandi could speak, she was surrounded by friends and neighbors, all of them contributing to a conglomerate of babble that sounded like a shouting match between a flock of hens and a gaggle of geese. As far as Keisha could make out, none of them had anything very intelligent to say, but they were all very intent on saying it.
Through a gap in the crowd, Shandi peered entreat-ingly back at her sister; Keisha sighed and pushed her way past everyone else to reach her.
Shandi paid attention to no one else, holding out her free hand entreatingly. “Keisha, I didn’t mean - I mean, I want to go, but I didn’t ask - I mean, I didn’t intend - ” Shandi was doing a good job of babbling herself, and Keisha reached out and gave her shoulders a friendly shake.
“Of course you didn’t mean for this to happen, you ninny,” she half-scolded, half-cajoled. “Choosings aren’t planned, everyone knows that - and it’s not as if you’d gone and made an appointment for this hairy beast to show up! I mean, if you could simply decide to be a Herald, what would be the point? Herald would be like any other job. You get Chosen because you’re the right person to be a Herald, you know that.”
And I, most certainly, am not!
Was it her imagination, or did the Companion swing his head around and wink at her, just as she thought that?
Oh, there’s probably a fly buzzing around his ears.
“But Keisha, I have to go, I mean I have to go now, and - ” Shandi looked at her, pleading with her to understand, tears brimming in her eyes and rolling slowly down one cheek.
“And if you didn’t have to go now, you know that Mum would find a thousand reasons why you couldn’t go, ever. I know that; Havens, probably everybody in town knows that.” Keisha tried to smile, but it was a great deal more difficult than she had thought it would be. “Shandi, that’s why it happens this way - I’ll bet that, otherwise, every single mother in Valdemar would have a thousand reasons why her child couldn’t go haring off into the sunset just on the say-so of a big white horse!”
“But - but - ” Shandi’s expression was painfully easy to read. Fix things for me, her eyes pleaded. This is more important than anything in my life, but I can’t go if you don’t promise to fix things forme!
Keisha closed her eyes for the briefest of moments, no more than a blink, stifled a sigh, and nodded. Just like always - it looked as if she was going to have to “pitch in” after all, and help clean up the mess. . . .
But that’s not being generous, and if it was me - oh, if Shandi could have substituted for me, I’d be at Healer’s Collegium now.
“Go,” she urged her sister, and meant it. “Go, and go now. I’ll take care of everything.”
Shandi believed her; Shandi always believed her. With a sigh of relief and a sudden smile like the sun emerging from a thundercloud, she kissed Keisha, hugged her tight, then fumbled loose the strings holding her belt-pouch to her belt. “Here - ” she said, pressing it into Keisha’s hands. “Take the dye, see what you can do with it, maybe it’ll be good for a medicine.” Then she turned away and mounted the Companion’s saddle with such ease and grace that it looked as if she’d been doing it all her life, never mind that she’d never ridden anything before but their aged pony. The Companion clearly was taking no chances; he gave Shandi no further chances for farewells or regrets. He danced a little, shook his harness, and pivoted in place on his hind feet. That got people to move out of his way, and pretty briskly, too. He moved out at a fast walk, allowing Shandi time enough only to wave good-bye before breaking into a canter at the end of the street. In no time at all, they were over the bridge, then lost to sight as the road was hidden by trees. Keisha let out the sigh she’d been holding in - and the exasperation. While the rest of trie villagers gathered in knots, still babbling with excitement, Keisha felt the weight of yet another burden fall on her shoulders. Let’s see - one hysterical mother, three heartbroken suitors, half a dozen friends left forlorn and a little jealous - I can handle that. I hope,
Keisha stood with her back to the wall in the warm, soup-scented kitchen, and wished she were anywhere else but there. Sidonie Alder had reacted to the news that her youngest daughter had been Chosen as a Herald precisely as she would have if Shandi had been abducted by barbarians. This made no sense, of course, but Keisha hadn’t expected anything else.
She tried not to wince when Sidonie’s voice rose to new and shriller heights. “I can’t believe you just let her go like that! How could you just stand there and let her be carried off?”
This was only about the hundredth time Keisha’s mother had repeated that particular accusation, and it didn’t look as if she were going to stop thinking Keisha was the villainess of the situation any time soon. Each time Sidonie uttered another outburst, before Keisha had a chance to say anything sensible in reply, she broke down into hysterical sobs and cast herself into the arms of her husband or one of her two oldest sons. This time it was her husband’s arms where she sought shelter from her traitorous offspring. He patted her back and said consolingly, “Now, Mother, you know that’s how it is.
Keisha couldn’t have done naught. That’s how they always do these Choosing things, I suppose, so they can make a clean break and all.”
“But she’s only a baby! She can’t take care of herself all alone!” was the inevitable reply, followed by a fresh spate of tears. Keisha wisely kept silent this time, since anything she’d tried to say until how had only brought on another outburst; her brother Garry was injudicious enough to put in his two bits.
“Aw, Mum, she’s not so little as all that!” Garry protested. “She’s old enough to take care of herself, and anyway, you know them Companions see to it the kids they Choose are right and tight. You’d have been losing her pretty soon, anyway. She’s had three beaus, an’ like as not, she’d have been married in a year or two - ”
Oh, no. Now he’s given Mum something else to weep about, Keisha thought with dismay.
She was right. “Now I’ll never see her wed!” came the wail, muffled by her husband’s shoulder. Keisha swallowed, as her stomach roiled. This was beginning to make her sick - literally.
But her father had a thoughtful look on his face, and it was pretty clear that he was thinking there was another side to all this, one that had a lot of advantages besides the obvious. Female Heralds, if they wed, generally married other Heralds; on the rare occasions they married outside the Circle, it was with men who asked nothing more of them than their company outside of duty, usually Healers or Bards. So if Shandi married, there would be no dowry to raise. If she wed, it would be with someone who would live far from Errold’s Grove - so there would be no need to put up with a son-in-law he disliked (and he disliked all three of Shandi’s suitors, each for a different reason).
The obvious reasons for being pleased about the situation were many, and he’d already brought them up to his wife, as had Keisha. Their daughter was going to be a Herald; they’d be the parents of a Herald. People would look up to them, they’d have new importance in the village; people would listen to what they said, even ask their opinions on matters of importance. Oh, of course she was going to be doing work that was often dangerous, but not for years yet, and it still wasn’t all that safe here in Errold’s Grove - after all, what if the barbarians came back?
Keisha could tell that her father had clearly come to the opinion that this was no bad thing; his thoughts might just as well have been written on his face for Keisha to read.
“Mum, she’s going to be fine,” Keisha said, once again, as her mother’s sobs quieted. “When have you ever heard of a newly Chosen Trainee coming to grief on the road? She’s going to be a very important person now, and people will look up to you because she’s your daughter. We might even get invited to Court someday and see the Queen! And if she decides to get married, what ever gave you the idea that she wouldn’t come here to do it?” This time - finally - this attempt at comfort wasn’t met with another outburst, and Keisha continued as soothingly as she could. “Mum, she’s going to be in the safest place in the world for at least four years - you just don’t get any safer than Herald’s Collegium. I mean, think! It’s right inside the Palace grounds! Think about that! Your daughter is going to be living on the Palace grounds, and not as a servant either! She’ll be back every long holiday, you know she will. After all, you couldn’t keep her away. Which one of us always throws herself into the holidays, hmm? Shandi, of course! Just because she’s going to be a Herald, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t love her family!”
Oh, but I’m getting very close to not loving my dear family right now. . . . All of this excitement had given Keisha a pounding headache; she felt as if all her nerves were scraped raw and someone was pouring saltwater on them. Her stomach was so sour she probably wouldn’t be able to eat any supper. But Shandi was the baby - my baby sister, the one I looked after and picked up after - and if I didn ‘t have to help calm Mum down, I’d probably be the one bawling like a bereft calf right now. I can’t do that, and make sure Mum gets through this and starts to look on the bright side - 
But right now, given the least sign that her mother was getting over her hysterics - or at least that some of her mother’s friends were going to come help console her - Keisha would be only too happy to get out of the house and go somewhere - anywhere - else.
Evidently she had been good enough and patient enough that for once her unspoken prayers were answered. As if the thought had been a summons, relief came bursting through the kitchen door at that very moment.
“Sidonie! Ayver!” Three of the neighbor women came bursting into the kitchen like a force of nature, all three of them managing to squeeze in at the same time, not waiting to be invited inside. “Is it true? A Herald? A Healer and a Herald in the same family, how proud you must be!”
A Healer and a Herald! she thought, startled for a moment by the phrasing. Oh, my - bless them for noticing!
Like the people in the market, they were all talking at once, but since there were only three of them, they didn’t step all over each other’s sentences so much that it all turned into a confused gabble. They surrounded Sidonie and Ayver, faces flushed with excitement at being so close to the great event. “Oh, Sidonie, just think! Our little Shandi is going to be so important!”
Sidonie took her face out of her husband’s shoulder, and though it was tear-streaked and red with weeping, it seemed that the arrival of her friends pulled her the last few steps out of hysteria. She wiped her face with her apron, and began to look more like her normal self.
Keisha deemed it practical at that point to remove herself.
But she hadn’t gotten more than a single step out the door - in fact, she was still standing on the threshold - before she ran into another of the Fellowship women, one whom she knew well. Alys was in charge of the health of all of the herds, and as such, she and Keisha had spent plenty of time together dosing the animals for a variety of illnesses and other problems. This afternoon Alys looked hesitant as she approached the house, and great relief spread over her blunt features when she saw that Keisha was just leaving.
“Oh, Keisha - I’m sure this is a bad time, but that chirra I was worried about has definitely got wet-tail - ” she began; Keisha didn’t give her a chance to say more. She took Alys’s elbow and pointed her toward the workshop, just as she spotted four more women bustling in their direction, heading for the Alder house.
“It’s always a bad time when a beast gets sick, you ought to know that!” she said, making a joke out of it. “They never choose reasonable times to have problems! No worry, I’m going to be the last creature Mum thinks about for a while. Not only will I not be missed, I can make you up what you need in no time; you’ve caught it early, so you should have a cure by tomorrow.”
The more distance she got between herself and the house, the better she felt, and chatting with Alys about the beasts of her herds was such a commonplace matter it could not have been a better antidote for the hysteria she’d just endured. Alys was a calming person to be around anyway; she had to be, as the animals she worked with were quick to sense agitation and become upset themselves. She was older than Sidonie by a year or two, sturdy, brown, and square, with a friendly face and open manner. Like all the women of the Fellowship, her workday clothing was fairly drab, not unlike Keisha’s, except that the tunic and breeches were of a better fit and not hand-me-downs.
The two of them entered the workshop, and Keisha began pulling down the boxes of herbs she needed as Alys went on about the most recent births. The sharp and pungent scents of herbs filled the air as Keisha worked, and the cool of the workshop allowed her headache to ease. It occurred to Keisha that Alys’ arrival provided not one, but two excellent excuses for staying away from home for a while. After all, it was spring, and that meant insect season; in particular, the fleas and ticks that would infest the Fellowship herds, given half a chance. So as soon as she had finished the wet-tail potion Alys needed, but before the woman could pull out her purse to pay for it, Keisha made her an additional offer.
“Look, this year I’d like to get ahead of the bugs instead of trying to catch up with them after your beasts are scratching themselves raw,” she said, trying to be as persuasive as she knew how. “Why don’t I make you up some batches of that repellent dip we talked about last year and a good supply of the kill dip. You can try the repellent right away, and if you see it isn’t working, you’ll be able to dip them all again with the kill before it gets to be a problem.”
Cautious, and frugal as always, Alys wrinkled her forehead and bit her lip cautiously. “That would be very helpful, but - ”
Keisha already knew what she was going to say; at the moment, the Fellowship’s coffers were pretty bare. They wouldn’t have made any major sales to traders since the Harvest Faire two seasons ago. “We’ll just make it a credit against a shawl trade later for one of my brothers - at least one of them is bound to settle on a girl by Harvest. Or if you’d rather, when the traders get done with you at Spring Faire, you can pay me then.” She grinned and held out her hands. “I’d rather have you on credit than have to deal with an infestation like we had three years ago!”
Alys shuddered and nodded agreement. The Fellowship folk normally didn’t much care for credit, but as Keisha had known it would, the mere mention of that horrible flea infestation made the difference. It had taken weeks to clear up, and worse, the poor beasts had yielded inferior fleeces that year. Between the cost of the dips and the loss of quality fleeces, the Fellowship’s steward had been beside himself. Alys had already been beside herself; anything that caused her beasts pain caused her anguish, too.
And since the dips are all made from things I can harvest in the woods right now, rather than things I have to pay for, I can afford to extend them the credit.
No sooner agreed than done; making up the batches of sheep dip ate up enough candlemarks that by the time Alys left, both arms laden down with baskets packed with jugs, the Alder home was full of friends and neighbors to the point where another body could not possibly have squeezed inside. Afternoon sun gilded the kitchen wall as Keisha stood out in the yard and listened for a moment; from the general emotional tenor of the cacophony, Sidonie had gone from grief to pride - 
As it should be.
 - and now the gathering had all the signs of turning into an impromptu celebration.
But Keisha still didn’t want to be anywhere near it. And she didn’t want to have to deal with the three heartbroken boys either, for all three suitors would be bound to show up on the doorstep of her workshop, looking for consolation. At least, she didn’t want to deal with them right now.
But since I’m out of flea-wort, lerch buds, tannim bark and elo root now, I have the perfect reason to go harvest some. And, if they think I am sulking because my sister was Chosen and not me, well then, let them think that.
Maybe it will make some of them do something nice to comfort me. That way I can get some reward I can call “appreciation” to make up for the times my generosity was taken advantage of in the past.
With a big basket over one arm and harvesting tools in the pockets of her tunic, she set off to the woods to do just that. She took the long way round, using the path that skirted the edge of the fields rather than cutting straight through. Young plants were just starting to show whether they’d be successful or not; the weak ones were ready to be weeded out, and the strong ready for a bit of manure. She exchanged some sort of greeting with everyone working out there as she passed; it was impossible not to. The good thing was that since she was carrying her gathering basket, it was obvious that she had work to do, and there were only a limited number of candlemarks before dusk fell. No one would delay her when it might be medicine he would need that she’d be gathering.
Self-interest isn ‘t that bad a thing, when it comes down to it. We all tend to do things in self-interest, even - maybe especially - when we can couch it in terms of nobility and self-sacrifice. And look, Shandi gets the pretty white horse and a room at the Collegium while I get Errold’s Grove’s sicknesses and complaints.
The farther she got from the village, the better she felt; she felt her steps growing lighter once she entered the woods proper. Her stomach calmed down, and by the time she reached the lerchbush thicket, she was humming under her breath, and her headache was just about gone.
This probably isn’t the last time I am going to feel like there’s been some kind of injustice over Shandi being Chosen and not me - even if I don’t really want to be Chosen anyway. Besides, I have my own Gift and some appreciation, from some folks anyway. Valdemar wasn’t founded on things being fair in life, it was founded on coping with the unfairness of life. The tradition continues, Herald or not!
The lerchbush was a hardy creature and didn’t react badly to having a few of its buds pruned away. A woodpecker trilled just over her head, and as she carefully held each branch and pared every third bud off with a tiny knife, the rich, green scent of lerch sap spread on the air and she drank it in with pleasure. Each bud went into the hempen bag she had tied to her belt. She dabbed each “wound” with pitch from an unstoppered jar, to seal it and keep insects and fungi from infesting the branches as Steelmind had taught her. Taking care today means plenty tomorrow. That’s what he’d said, then smiled, as if at a joke only he understood.
When her bag was full, she tied it off, put it in the basket, and went in search of flea-wort, a kind of shelf-fungus that grew on the fallen bodies of winter-killed trees. For that, she had to seek out trees that were too rotten to use for firewood, whose deaths were due to insects or rot, and not storm.
When she returned to the village, basket full, it was already dusk and the sky had just begun to blossom with stars in the east. The village itself seemed oddly quiet, the houses dark and deserted. Only the faintest threads of smoke came from chimneys that should have been showing evidence of suppers on the hearth. She was puzzled, though not alarmed, by the quiet, until she got into the vicinity of the Alder home. Then it was quite obvious where the people had all gone!
An enormous party - a kind of extemporaneous Spring Faire in advance of the actual date - had invaded the house and the lawns and gardens of all the neighbors around it. She watched in some bemusement as her normally sober neighbors acted like adolescents on holiday. The house itself must have been packed to the ceiling, since there were people spilling out the door, and the celebration perforce had spread into the yard.
Evidently all of Errold’s Grove rejoiced in the Choosing of one of their own.
Well, she thought, it’s the most important thing to happen around here since the barbarians. That wasn’t exactly pleasant! Afterward, well, even though things came out all right in the end, I imagine no one was in any mood to celebrate anything. What was there to be happy about, after all? That only one relative was killed or that only half the house burned? That Lord Breon or the Hawkbrothers were there at the rescue ? Well, all right, perhaps that, but the circumstances eclipsed such elation. By the time any survivors could think clearly, their rescuers were long gone. This cause for the whole village to celebrate is well-timed.
Controlled campfires burned in the pottery bowls prescribed for fires within the village bounds, warming the folk gathered around them against the growing chill in the air. Some people were toasting sausages and the like on the ends of sticks, just exactly as they would during the Faire. From the wildly varied scents on the breeze and the way everyone seemed to be eating, guzzling, or both, every neighbor had contributed to the impromptu celebration by adding to the provender.
There would be no heartbroken former suitors showing up looking for comfort tonight, at least. A celebration was the last place any of them would want to be. They were probably brooding by the river somewhere, or weeping over one of Shandi’s ribbons - 
Or they‘ve given her up completely, and they‘re chatting up one of the other girls at the party right this moment. When it came down to it, that was the likeliest.
Pausing for a moment in the shadows just outside the circles of light cast by the fires, Keisha pondered just exactly what she wanted to do. Did she really want to be engulfed by a party tonight? Was she in any kind of mood for a loud, boisterous celebration? Granted, she was happy for Shandi, but it wasn’t the type of emotion that drove her to go to a party.
No, she told herself immediately. No, I do not want any part of this. Mum, though, is in the best of hands, and a celebration is just what she needs. It ‘ll turn her right around.
Already, her head gave her faint intimations of what would happen if she allowed herself to be drawn into the commotion. A quiet night in her workshop, then a little reading before going to sleep - that sounded much more attractive than being plied with wine, babbled at, and staying up until the dawn. As for trying to find a corner of the house where she might be able to get some sleep, that looked pretty impossible.
So she reversed her steps and went straight to her workshop, closing the thick door firmly behind her. The heavy stone walls closed her in comfortably, effective blocking out noise. She sighed with content and relief, and felt her headache fade completely. It didn’t take long to get the fire going again, and it was the work of a few moments to get the kettle ready and swing it over the fire to boil.
While she waited for her tea, she bundled the herbs and hung them up from hooks in the ceiling to dry, then spread the buds in a drying tray and hung the tray from brackets over the window. By the time she had finished clearing up, the water was ready for tea, and she washed her hands and set to fixing it with a good appetite.
She kept a stock of food at the workshop in case she missed a meal at home, and there was more than enough for a fine dinner. Dinner was toasted bread and cheese, with roasted chick peas, and a satisfying and hearty tea with honey. She read a little while she ate, enjoying the luxury of being able to do so - but most of all, she cherished the quiet.
After she tidied up, she spent another contented candlemark or two putting together more of the common remedies she never seemed to have enough of, with special attention to those for headache and queasy stomach - for there were bound to be plenty of those after tonight’s indulgence.
She changed her mind about reading further, though, after she climbed up into the loft to her cozy feather bed. Instead of reading, she reached over to the shelf beside the bed and picked up her cross-stitch embroidery - at the moment, it was the makings of a fancy blouse. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy pretty things, after all, it was just that they were very impractical for someone in her vocation. . . .
On the other hand, she didn’t always have to be working, and there were enough celebrations to warrant having pretty clothing. Over the winter, with Shandi’s help, she’d picked out a light brown linen for a festival skirt, a lighter beige for a blouse, and had charted out a very pretty pattern in browns and golds for both. The skirt was done; now she was working on the sleeves and neckline of the blouse. It wouldn’t be finished for Spring Faire, but it probably would be for Midsummer. Cross-stitch - regular geometric patterns, that is - was very soothing, she had found. It allowed her mind to drift to other subjects, and sometimes as she worked, she was able to come up with answers to problems she needed to solve.
As she worked her needle through the linen tonight, she found herself wondering where Shandi was, right at the moment.
Would she be at an inn, I wonder? Or would that Companion take her to a waystation instead? In either case, Shandi would make herself at home. No one could resist her smile and her open friendliness, so she would be a welcome guest at an inn - doubly so, as newly Chosen. She’d probably be treated like a person of importance, and wouldn’t have to lift a finger for herself. If, on the other hand, she was at a waystation, she’d have herself tucked up snugly in no time at all. From all that Keisha understood, waystations were well provided for; Shandi was more of a housekeeper and cook than Keisha was. It was not as if Shandi would have to sleep out-of-doors, supperless.
That might be why the Companion was in such a hurry to leave, Keisha realized. They probably had a long way to go before they came to either an inn or a waystation! That would be a good thing to remind her mother of tomorrow, if Sidonie felt slighted that Shandi had left without waiting to say good-bye.
By now, I’ll bet Shandi is probably wishing she waited long enough to gather up her work basket! she thought with a chuckle. I’ve never seen her sitting down without something to work on in her hands. Well, there ought to be at least one trader from Haven here at the Faire; I’ll box up all her handiwork and send it off to her with him. With luck, I may be able to send her some scarlet thread as well.
Would she be lonely, all by herself in a little way-station? Probably not; she’d have the Companion, after all, and everyone knew that Companions and Heralds had a special bond that was as close as anything two humans could have. I wonder if she can Mindspeak to him? I wonder what that would be like? Marvelous, but maybe a little scary; at least, that’s what she thought it might be like for her.
Did Shandi miss Keisha? I certainly miss her already. Brothers just aren‘t the same as sisters. It was hard to think of what things would be like without her. . . .
She found herself nodding over her work, so she folded the blouse pieces carefully, putting them away in her work basket and stowing everything on the shelf beside her bed. She blew out her candle, and curled up - 
 - and even as she wondered if Shandi was awake or dreaming, she fell asleep.

Two

Morning broke clear and cool, with shreds of fog drifting above the fields and birds singing with all their hearts in the thatch of Keisha’s roof. The faint hint of wood smoke mingled with fresh air laden with the perfume of spring flowers and the tang of new leaves - normally she woke to the odor of cooking porridge or pancakes. Keisha’s nose, which was all that was peeking out from under the covers, was cold; she preferred to sleep with a window open. The birds woke her, and her cold nose twitched at the unaccustomed aromas; all the rest she saw from the small open window in her loft-bedroom.
She stretched luxuriously and snuggled underneath her down comforter and blankets, enjoying the simple pleasure of lying abed for as long as she cared to. Had she been at home this morning, she’d have been rudely jarred awake before dawn by the noise of five clumsy young men stumbling about the house, getting fed and ready to go to work. They couldn’t seem to accomplish this simple task without a great deal of hunting for boots and clothing, accompanied by shouting questions to each other concerning the location of those articles. Once awake, there was no point in even trying to go back to sleep, since Sidonie would come roust Keisha out to help with household chores before she joined her husband and sons on the farm.
Instead of being jolted awake, Keisha had been serenaded awake, and after dawn, not before. Instead of being hauled off to wash dishes - or, dear gods, pick up after last night’s enormous party - she had enjoyed absolutely undisturbed sleep.
Of course, the penalty for this is that I have to make my own breakfast and heat my own wash water, but I think that’s a fair trade. Given that Shandi was gone, there would have been twice the work to do on a normal morning, and after the celebration last night, well, the amount of cleaning up didn’t bear thinking about. And would Sidonie even consider taking care of the cleanup gradually, say, by putting off things like floor washing and yard cleanup for a few days? Not a chance.
Sidonie would insist that it all be done at once. Well, with neither Shandi nor Keisha there, maybe she’d finally get the boys to do their own share of the work - after all, each one of them made more mess than Shandi and Keisha put together.
It certainly wouldn‘t hurt them to start taking care of themselves. Maybe they’d start being more careful if they had to take care of the consequences of their own laziness.
That was a satisfying thought.
Well, what have I got left here to wear? How long ago did I bring things over? She took a quick mental inventory; since the last time she’d brought in cleaned smocks and breeches, she hadn’t had any major injuries to deal with, so all three outfits were still here. Good.
She always kept at least one spare outfit here in case she got particularly bloodied; Sidonie had an aversion to seeing her daughter come in with bloodstains on her clothing, though she had no such problem with the same stains on her sons. Why was that? Sidonie had no fear of blood; she’d been born and raised on a farm. She was a farmer’s wife, and the spillage of blood was part of farm life. Besides, women weren’t exactly strangers to blood themselves.
She sat up a little more and wrapped one of her blankets around her shoulders. As she propped her knees up, one possibility came to her.
You know, it occurs to me that Mum’s problem is less with bloodstains and more with the notion that it isn‘t ladylike for a girl to do things that would get her hands bloodied on a regular basis. I mean, even at slaughtering time, Mum doesn’t get into the butchering until the carcasses have been bled out and gutted.
That brought up some new things to think about; with Shandi gone, Sidonie would only have one female child to concentrate on rather than two. Now, that meant more than simply having the number of domestic helpers halved. Shandi had been as dainty and ladylike as her mother could have wished, relieving Keisha of the need to be either of those things. Now, though - 
Now she’s going to be at me to get a suitor, to act like a proper lady, to start having children. Besides all the chores, she’ll want me to spend my free time doing needlework and making pretty clothes, putting together a dower-chest, not studying my books or making medicines.
She groaned softly. It seemed that Shandi had saved her from more than she ever realized. Just by being there and being what she was, Shandi had kept their mother’s attention fixed on her, leaving Keisha freer than she would be now.
I’d thought my life was complicated before!
It was so hard to balance all the demands that were made on her. If they had their way, her parents wanted her to help with the domestic chores, the farm work, get married, have children. As far as the people of Errold’s Grove were concerned, the villagefolk wanted her to concentrate on nothing but their injuries and ailments, or the hurts and illnesses of their animals.
Not that I don’t prefer the animals, when it comes to that. They don’t spend most of their time complaining! But that was unkind; of course people complained, it kept them from feeling quite so afraid. When they were sick or hurt, they lost control over their very selves, as they perceived them, and had to rely on the skills and tools of someone else - so it was only natural that they would complain. Up to a point, the more they complained, the more frightened they were known to be.
Past that point, they’re too paralyzed with fear to do anything. I guess I should be grateful that they ‘re still complaining. Handling the dead is worse than listening to the living.
Healer Gil, on the other hand, never lost the opportunity to let her know that he still felt she should be at the Collegium; that he had no real confidence in her ability to get beyond herb- and knife-Healing if she didn’t go.
Well, he’s got a good point there. I am making no headway with those books. How I wish that old Wizard Justyn was still around! Surely he could have helped me make sense of those pages!
Perhaps she would have to go, but who would take over for her? Could she train someone like Alys?
Oh, no one would take this on who wasn‘t a volunteer, and if anyone had been willing to volunteer before, they wouldn’t have needed me. As for Alys, she’d made it quite clear that she was in no way willing to extend her services beyond the animals in her charge.
Not that I blame her. She is far more reticent and shy than I am.
Now how was she to reconcile all these differing plans for her future? Obviously, someone was going to be angry with her, no matter what she did.
Something else occurred to her as she worried at her thoughts like a puppy with a bit of rag. This was the first morning in months when she hadn’t woken up with the claustrophobic feeling that her entire family was closing in on her. It always seems as if they’re right beside me, breathing over my shoulder, even when they ‘re in the next room. Now that might have been because the cubby she had shared with Shandi was scarcely bigger than a closet. . . .
But it might not. People are all beginning to irritate me lately. How many times have I gotten away from someone feeling as if they’ve been rubbing my nerves raw? How many times have I wanted to shove them away? For that matter, how many times have I been feeling as sick as the person I was treating until I got away from them?
Not that she was all that comfortable around people; that had always been Shandi’s gift. Shandi could make a friend out of a stranger in the space of a few words; unless Keisha was giving explicit instructions to someone or bargaining with a merchant, she always felt tongue-tied and awkward with strangers and friends alike. She actually preferred to be around the sick and injured, in a way, because then she had complete control over the situation.
For that matter, you couldn‘t really say that I actually have friends, not like Shandi’s. For me, a friend is someone I can get along with, like Alys of the Fellowship - but you don’t see her inviting me to dinner or sharing confidences.
She had to chuckle a little at that, despite the morose turn of her thoughts. Sharing confidences, indeed! And what sort of confidences would Alys be likely to share? Stories about the love lives of the chirrasl
Still and all, maybe that was why she got along better with Alys than her neighbors or her family. Neither of us is very good with people. Animals are simpler, I suppose. Animals certainly have less complicated emotions, and are never upset when you say the wrong thing.
In the thin, clear light of dawn, she saw yet another whole new side of Shandi that she hadn’t really expected; Shandi as her guardian. In retrospect, Shandi had spent a lot of time protecting her from having to deal with other people in day-to-day matters.
A thousand memories came flooding back, of Shandi responding to silent summons or unspoken entreaties as if she heard them, and taking the attention of others off Keisha with a word or a laugh.
And Shandi spent a lot of time keeping Mum and Da from worrying at me.
How had she not noticed, all this time? And now what was she going to do without that protection?
She frowned at herself for being such & coward. Cope, that’s what I’ll do. I’m a big girl.
She would just have to steel herself and learn how to interact socially with other people. She wasn’t stupid, after all, she could learn.
For a moment, though, it almost seemed as if her best option wouldbe to travel to Haven in Shandi’s wake and enroll in Healer’s Collegium!
Oh, yes, and just how am I to do that? I’ve nowhere near enough money to travel that far, and there’s no magic Companion to carry me off and see that I don’t get into trouble along the way - 
No, that was a specious argument, and she knew it. Lord Breon would not only give her the money to travel on, he’d probably assign one of his guards and two horses to take her there. And if he wouldn’t - she had only to get as far as the nearest House of Healing, and the Healers there would see to it.
That was the trouble with arguing with herself - she had to be honest. She chuckled sourly and adjusted her blanket. I’m so bad with people I can’t even win an argument with myself.
All right, the obvious problem of leaving her people without someone at least marginally qualified to help them, was an excuse. She had to face it; the real reason she didn’t want to go was - 
I don’t want to leave, to go off somewhere among total strangers for at least two years, to some huge city where I would be totally lost.
The very idea made her skin crawl. All those strangers, and nowhere she would know to go where she could escape them! All those strangers. . . oh, gods. No, and it’s no good to say that at least Shandi would be there, because she’s going to be at Herald’s Collegium. She’ll be so busy becoming a Herald that she‘d be just as far from me there as she is now.
She just was not like her sister; she didn’t make friends easily, and she never would. She’d get so tongue-tied with the people at Healer’s Collegium that they’d probably think she was feeble-minded! It could be months before I managed to say anything sensible to strangers. And I’d be so lonely. . . .
The larger the crowd around her, especially of strangers, the more she withdrew and wanted to hide. The only time she didn’t feel that way was when she was on ground familiar to her - actually, or metaphorically. She was able to make desultory conversation with people she knew, with strangers in her own home, or if the topic had to do with things she already knew. At the Faires she invariably hung around the outskirts; at celebrations - well, generally she did exactly what she’d done last night, go to bed early. I’m just no good at social chitchat, I suppose.
She was absolutely certain her own nature would condemn her among the expert teachers at Healer’s Collegium. Until they actually gave me something that I already knew how to do - I’d look like a right idiot, I know it. And worse, I’d sound like one, too. She could just imagine being called on in a class to recite something from a lesson - it would be worse than when she’d had her lessons with the other village children! The old woman who’d taught them had soon learned not to call on Keisha for any recitations; any time she’d wanted to know what Keisha had learned, she’d have Keisha write it out.
But that was here - they wouldn‘t give me that kind of special consideration at the Collegium. How could they? I’d be nothing special there, just another student, not someone they were going to rely on to tend their ills.
Shandi, on the other hand, would be fine in Haven even without the Companion. That’s what Mum doesn’t understand about Shandi; everyone likes Shandi at first sight and goes out of their way to help her. They always have, and probably always will. That’s why she has so many suitors; they all think they’re in love with her just because she smiles at them and they‘re enchanted. They don’t realize that they feel that way because she’s just that way and can’t help being so nice to them that it makes them feel as if she’s nice only to them. Shandi has always assumed the best of everything, everyone, and every situation, and more often than not, they live up to it.
Keisha shook her head, and reckoned that she must have been born somber, or at least, without humor. Without humor, I suppose; I never can see what most jokes are about. Havens, I generally can’t tell when someone is telling a joke! And no one seems able to figure me out, that I don’t really enjoy noise and carrying on like everyone else seems to.
Even her mother complained constantly that Keisha was far too inscrutable, and that she could never tell what Keisha was thinking or feeling, not that Keisha always wanted her to be able to do so. If Mum knew what 1 was thinking - oh, would I ever get in trouble.
But she also complained that Keisha was always taking everything too seriously. So did her brothers. And so, for that matter, did her father, even though he seldom complained about or even commented on anything.
Am I putting people off? I suppose I must be.
Well, just look at the difference between the number of suitors Shandi had and the number - none - that Keisha had. There’s no other reason why. Shandi and I look an awful lot alike - we share similar features, the same hair and eye color, and her figure is no better than mine. Oh, granted, she does generally dress better than I do, but I’ve worn pretty things without getting the attention she gets. It has to be that I’m putting people off.
Now she had to ask herself as she often did - Am I jealous of Shandi?
She thought back over the selection of young men available in Errold’s Grove and shook her head, thought about the sort of things that Shandi and her friends did for amusement and knew she’d be utterly bored. No, I’m absolutely not jealous! There’s only so much discussion of bodices and embroidery patterns that I can stand. And as for coquetting and flirting about - why bother?
No, it was just another sign that she just didn’t fit in with other people. Without Shandi’s vivacity, animation, and sunny smiles, Keisha attracted about as much attention as a piece of furniture. Which is, after all, the way I prefer things. How would I get anything done if I had young men mooning around after me the way they follow Shandi about? What a nuisance!
So she wasn’t entirely unhappy with the situation. Not entirely. It would have been nice to have one friend, or one suitor. Someone sensible, someone she could actually have a conversation with, someone who had an interesting life of his own.
Well, this is wasting time. I’ve been slothful long enough. She threw off the blankets and flung open the lid of the chest that shared the loft with her bed. Quickly she got out clean clothing, and just as quickly scrambled into another oversized tunic and worn pair of breeches, shivering in the chilly air.
She half-climbed, half-slid down the ladder to the main room, ducked her head under the pump at the sink and performed a shivery wash-up, then stirred up the fire. In a reasonable length of time the room was warm, and a decent breakfast of bread and butter and tea was inside her. She put three eggs on to boil, picked out a withered apple to finish her breakfast, and with a grimace of determination, opened the book still on the bench to the last place she’d gotten stuck.
It was time to go to work.
She was interrupted four times before she gave up, still baffled by references to “shields” and “grounds.” Once it was because she had to take the eggs off to cool, three times because children came knocking on her door with injuries. By then she was hungry again, and threw together a salad of young greens from her garden to eat with her eggs.
When she’d washed up afterward, she tidied up the workshop, then looked around and sighed. She couldn’t put it off any longer; she had to go back to the house.
Bother.
Knowing that with all the work last night’s celebration had generated, Sidonie would still be at home, her conscience goaded her into going back to pick up some of the work. I can’t say “my fair share,“ since I wasn ‘t generating any of the mess, but it’s not fair to leave Mum with all of it, I suppose.
With reluctant steps, she made her way back through the village, to be greeted at the door with the expected, “Where have you been?” from her mother at the sink, up to her elbows in soap and water.
“Working, Mum, and studying.” She didn’t feel any guilt over that - after all, that was her job! - and although she didn’t put on a defiant air, she did face her mother’s eyes squarely.
Sidonie sighed. “Well, next time the entire village decides to celebrate something, I hope they choose someone else’s house. I’ve been here all day, and I’m beginning to think we ought to move back to the farm.”
“Well, I’d have to stay here - ” Keisha began, and her mother interrupted her.
“I know, and that’s why I haven’t said anything to your father.” Sidonie rinsed a plate and stacked it with the rest to dry. “Go clean up the yard, would you? I’ve been that busy in the house, I haven’t had time to get to it.”
Since that was a better job than washing dishes by Keisha’s way of thinking, she was perfectly happy to go back outside and take care of the tidying up.
It was rather amazing, the amount of trash people could generate. Portable fireplaces had just been tipped over and the cold coals and ashes dumped before their owners carried the fireplace home, for instance. Sticks used to toast sausages were just littered about, and bits of kindling, the odd kerchief or scarf, and a wooden cup. The village dogs had already taken care of discarded food, and what they hadn’t gobbled up, the crows had - good enough reason to put off clean-up! Keisha worked her way methodically across the yard; coals and kindling went into the Alder’s own kindling stack, ashes were scooped thriftily onto the flower border, and other folks’ belongings placed on a window ledge where the owners would presumably find them. She swept gravel back onto the path, put ornamental stones back along the border, and put the tiny plot of herb garden back to rights. Where markers had been inadvertently knocked over or flattened, she replaced them, where sticky stuff - of unknown origin - had been spilled, she dusted a little ash over it so it wouldn’t attract insects.
She’d just finished when her mother emerged, bearing a basket full of wet clothing. Sidonie thrust it into her hands and bustled back into the house without a word.
Oh, dear. I suppose she’s pretty irritated with me.
Better say nothing, then, and stay out of further trouble. She took the heavy load of clothes and set it down next to the rosemary hedge.
Sidonie had her own order of things, one that was not to be deviated from. Keisha followed that order as faithfully as any medicinal recipe. She spread shirts and underthings on the top of the hedge where the sun would bleach them; since today there was little or no breeze, there was no need to pin each garment to a branch to keep it from flying away. Stockings and breeches she pinned to the clothesline with wooden pegs her brothers carved during long winter nights - but they had to go on the section of line that would be in the sun. Anything embroidered or made with colored cloth went on the line in the shade to preserve those precious colors.
When she did her own laundry, everything went on the line, regardless, but Sidonie felt that the shirts and other white things got more sun if they were laid flat on the hedge.
Not that it would matter all that much with my clothing!
Sidonie came out twice more with baskets full of wet clothing; by the time Keisha was done, there wasn’t a single bud or stem visible on the hedge and clothing on the line had been double-pinned, two garments sharing the same space. When Keisha brought back the third basket empty, Sidonie met her at the door with the Alder’s lone bit of carpet and a brush.
No need to ask what that was for either. Keisha took it downwind of the drying laundry, out to the railings of the neighbor’s fence, and laid it over the top rail. She brushed and beat the bit of rug until no more dirt or mud would come out of it and her arms were tired.
She brought both back, and this time her mother accepted them with a smile. She smiled back, relieved. Evidently she’d performed enough penance.
“Here - go sweep up,” Sidonie told her, handing her the broom. “I seem to have all our dishes and most of our neighbors’ as well - ”
And Sidonie would never return so much as a cup if it was still soiled. Keisha ventured an opinion.
“Mum, why aren’t the boys helping you?” she asked, digging the broom into the cracks of the wooden floor to dislodge crumbs that would attract mice. “They make more than their share of mess, and it wouldn’t hurt them to help.” At Sidonie’s quizzical look, she added slyly, “And they’re stronger; they could really do a good job of scrubbing.”
“Oh, they’re such clumsy louts,” Sidonie began, but she sounded doubtful this time, and Keisha took advantage of that doubt to press her point home.
“I wouldn’t trust them to do dishes, or to wash good clothes, but they can’t hurt anything scrubbing floors and walls or washing sheets and their own clothing. Maybe if they had to scrub their own clothes, they wouldn’t be so quick to get stains all over them.”
Her mother laughed. “Isn’t that the pot saying the kettle’s black?” she asked gently.
Keisha snorted. “At least my stains come from work, not drinking wine and beer with my friends - and what’s more, I do scrub my own, I’ve never asked you to do it, not since I started this Healing business.” She warmed to her subject. “What’s more, I never get stains on my good clothes!”
“You never wear your good clothes,” Sidonie pointed out.
“Because I’d get stains on them,” she countered. “And I do wear them, just not every other day to impress some girl! I just think they’d be more careful if they knew they’d be the ones doing the work.”
This time, instead of dismissing the idea, her mother actually looked as if she was thinking about it - and thinking about the fact that half her work force was gone, and the other half - as she’d discovered this morning - was not always reliably available. “You might have a point, dear,” was all she said, but Keisha was encouraged. “Would you go pack up Shandi’s things for me? Ruven of the Fellowship says that there will be a trader for their shawls and trims coming straight from Haven and going straight back after the Faire, and he’ll take Shandi some packages, probably in exchange for her embroidery threads.”
“Then I’ll give him a little more incentive,” Keisha told her. “Shandi and I had gotten some scarlet dye; I’ll go ahead and make up some thread, you know how hard it is to get scarlet, and that should seal the bargain.”
“Oh, now that would be a help,” Sidonie replied, brightening, since as Keisha knew, the trader would probably ask for a coin or two as well, and this would save the Alder household from having to part with those hard-earned coins. “Just - try not to get your hands all red this time, dear.”
Keisha pretended she hadn’t-heard that last as she went to the back of the house to the little cubby-bedroom she shared with Shandi. After all, it had been ages since the incident when she dyed her hands with red ocher, and how was she supposed to know the stuff had to wear off? It had been her first experiment with dye for Shandi!
Shandi was so neat that it didn’t take long to make her things up into a few tightly packed packages. Keisha left her a generous supply of embroidery threads for her own use but kept out the rest to use to bargain with the trader. Shandi’s friends would just have to find another source for their threads from now on - Or they can spin their own and pay me to dye them.
She also kept all of the undyed spun thread; not only was she going to dye as much of it scarlet as she could tonight, but she intended to make that experiment with overdying in indigo and see if that didn’t make a purple.
I’ll have to dry it in the workshop, though - and without afire. In fact, I’d better dye it before dark so I don’t have to use a candle. The fumes could be dangerous.
She was just as glad that she was the one doing this batch of dye and not Shandi. She wasn’t certain she could have impressed on Shandi just how dangerous those fumes could be in close quarters. None of the dyes Shandi had used until now needed anything but water and a solvent followed by a fixative, and none was poisonous unless you were stupid enough to drink it.
But my medicines can be very poisonous. The bruise potion, for instance, or the joint-ache rub; they could both kill you if you weren‘t careful.
She paused for a moment to admire Shandi’s undyed threads, the wool, the linen, and the special baby chirra-wool that she got from the Fellowship. No one in the village could spin a tighter, smoother thread than Shandi, and no one made thread better suited to embroidery. Shandi’s threads were not inclined to knot, break, or catch; that was why everyone liked them.
But Audi is almost as good - and this will just give her incentive to do better.
When Keisha had finished, there was just enough daylight left to do the dyeing that she’d decided on. She took the hanks of undyed thread, left the packages on Shandi’s bed, and headed out the door at a fast walk before Sidonie could recruit her to help with dinner. “I’ve got something I have to do, Mum!” she called as she went out the door. “I’ll be back for dinner!”
She got herself out of shouting distance by breaking into a run as soon as she let the door slam behind her - thus making it possible to claim that she hadn’t heard Sidonie, if a reproach was to come over dinner.
She closed the door of her workshop behind her and leaned against it for a moment, conscious of a profound feeling that she had reached a sanctuary, and guilty for having that feeling.
Then she dismissed both emotions, caught up in the excitement of having something new to experiment with. The pouch with the dye in it waited in a patch of sunlight on the workbench, and she had the rest of the afternoon before her.
She quit only when it was getting darkish and the fumes from the dyeing thread made her feel as if she’d drunk three glasses of wine and then hit herself in the head with the bottle. By then, the last couple of hanks came out noticeably lighter than the others, which meant that the dye was losing strength.
That’s all right, she thought as she hung them to dry with the rest, along the line where she usually hung bunches of herbs to dry. They‘ll either be a nice rose-pink, or I can use them for that overdying experiment. She had more than enough thread to make the trader willing to seal the bargain, and she’d used up three-quarters of the dye to do it. If Shandi’s friends complained, she had enough dye left to dye their spinning, which wasn’t good enough to tempt a trader. Thar’s a reasonable compromise, I think.
She’d been careful to dye equal amounts of all three kinds of thread, too - linen for embroidering on light fabrics, sheep’s wool for tapestry work on canvas, such as highborn ladies indulged in, or for embroidering woolen clothing and leather, and chirra-wool for work on heavier fabrics than linen.
She made sure all the windows of the workshop were open before she left; by morning the fumes should be gone and the threads dry. Her work was probably not quite as perfect as Shandi’s - for her sister would make certain that every skein in a dye lot matched, and discard the dying solution as soon as the color showed any sign of weakening - but as rare as a good scarlet was, she doubted that would matter. As she left the workshop, she was gratified to see that she had managed not to get any of that scarlet dye on herself.
She’d thought about discarding the dregs, then thought better of it, sealing the bowl with another placed upside-down atop it. If those last skeins came out pink, it might be worth the trouble to keep dying, letting the color grow fainter and fainter, as long as it stayed colorfast. Shandi did that with indigo, and the girls loved being able to do subtle shadings with the results, producing flowers that looked real enough to pick.
Dinner was already on the table when Keisha arrived, and there were no reproaches for her from Sidonie when she pulled up her stool and helped herself to bread and soup.
Her father picked up what was obviously a conversation in progress before she arrived. “Na, then,” he said, looking pointedly at Tell, the middlemost of the five boys. “It’s about time you started helping out your Mum, like. You’re of an age, and you think she’s been put in the world to be your servant? Not likely, then.”
Keisha kept her head and eyes down and ate quickly. The expressions on her brothers’ faces had ranged from astonished to offended, sullen to rebellious. This did not bode well for her.
“What about Keisha?” asked Rondey, the oldest, whose expression had been the offended one. “She’s a girl, and it’s her place - ”
My place? Oh, really? Keisha thought, anger rising.
“Keisha was here doing her share and yours today, for you were lazing about with your friends this afternoon,” Sidonie snapped. “Trish saw you, so you needn’t deny it and say you were working.”
“And as for talk about place, I’d like to know where you got ideas like that,” Ayver said, with some heat of his own. “There’s no places in this family unless I put you in it, and I won’t hear any more nonsense like that, talking about your sister that way! It wasn’t you that was Chosen, was it, and maybe now your mouth has just given us the reason why!”
Keisha risked a glance out of the corner of her eye and saw Rondey redden to the same glorious scarlet hue that she’d dyed into the threads.
“As to places, you might take thought, you boys, as to who’s going to be doing your cooking and cleaning when your Mum is gone and your reputations keep any girl from wanting to take you as a husband, hmm?” Ayver chuckled, and Sidonie continued that line of thought.
“Oh, indeed, let me tell you that there isn’t a girl in this village who’d wed a man who’s likely to treat her as his private servant!” she snapped. “And as for me - I may well stop keeping house before I die - I won’t be spry forever, you know! Your good Da knows how to care for himself, but you lazy louts can count on it that he won’t be waiting hand and foot on you!”
“So there you have it, lads. No choice for you.” Ayver chuckled again, quite heartlessly, and Keisha almost choked on her soup, suppressing a chuckle of her own. “You’ll be doing your own wash and picking up from now on, and each of you will take, a turn at the dishes and cooking supper. If you don’t want to cook, you can buy a meat pie or pasties from the baker, or pay a neighbor to make us soup. If you don’t like having to share the chores, you’re free to find some other household that will take you in, or live in the woods.”
The groans that arose from his words were heartrending, but Ayver’s word was law, and the boys knew it. Keisha finished her portion quickly and took her bowl to the sink; much as she disliked doing dishes, she decided it would be politic to volunteer tonight, and began on the soup pot and cooking utensils already waiting there.
Evidently the boys hadn’t figured out that she was the source of their new chores - or else they were hoping for an ally - because they were decent to her when they brought her their bowls. That was certainly a relief! And Sidonie’s quick hug when she brought the rest of the dishes was a welcome surprise.
“I know you’ve been worked hard, lovey, and you haven’t complained about it till now,” her mother said in her ear. “And it isn‘t fair, not when the town depends so much on you. You’re a bit young to have that on your shoulders, and I keep forgetting that you’re more than just my little girl. And I know you kept getting lost in Shandi’s shadow - that wasn’t fair either.”
Keisha had often wished she could go off into the woods to live as a hermit, but not at that moment. She flushed, and smiled at her mother. “It’s all right – now that the boys are going to pitch in to help,” she said. Then an awful thought occurred to her. “You aren’t really going to make them cook, are you?”
Sidonie laughed. “If they give up one night in the tavern, they’ll have enough to buy us all supper for that night,” she pointed out. “And if they really want to cook, I’ll be overseeing everything to make certain what comes out in the end isn’t going to poison us.”
“Oh, good.” Keisha heaved a sigh of relief and rinsed the last spoon. “Oh - I got you a rose vine from Steelmind yesterday; I’ll plant it tomorrow. Where do you want it?”
Sidonie beamed and gave her another hug. “And I just this afternoon thought about putting up a trellis by the bedroom window, and I was wondering what to train on it! There, please, lovey. Going to study before you go to sleep?”
“Of course,” she replied with wry resignation. “What else?”
“Then you might as well take the kitchen candle with you,” her mother replied, and kissed her on the cheek. “Good night, sweet.”
She took the proffered candle and went to her little cubby, now strangely empty without Shandi, but scented with her favorite herbs. She studied until her eyes grew too heavy to keep open, then blew out the candle and pulled the blankets over her head to block out the snores and grunts of her brothers. Tonight as she fell asleep, her thoughts were not of Shandi, but about the old wizard, Justyn. She’d never seen him; they were too far out in the country for a child to come into town and she’d never been sick enough to need his attentions. She wished that she had known him.
For all that her parents loved her, they still didn’t really understand her. It’s the feeling - the feeling I have that’s so strong, that I have to help people. Like seeing two ends of rope and wanting to tie them, just because they are there, as if they are somehow incomplete until I join them. It’s as strong as needing to breathe or eat, and they just don’t grasp that. I can’t help myself, I never could; when someone is hurt or sick, I have to help them no matter what. She had the feeling that he would have understood her, though, or else why would he have stayed and stayed during all the years when he was disregarded?
He had that feeling, too, he must have. Oh, how I wish he were here now, to teach me all the things I don’t know!

Three

Hooves made very little sound on leaf-littered forest floor, which was a welcome change to everyone from the steady clicking of dyheli hooves on roads packed rock-hard from generations of use. And after four years of so-called “normal” forests and entirely domesticated Valdemaran fields, Darian Firkin was glad to see a forest that looked normal to him.
It’s so good to be on home territory again! Trees so tall you can’t see the tops from the ground, with trunks so big it takes three men to circle them. This is more like it! He didn’t crane his neck and gawk upward the way a “foreigner” would, but all the same he was very aware of how high the trees above him reached, simply by virtue of the fact that he had to look up before he saw any branches springing from the huge trunks standing all around him. Darian had grown up on the edge of the Pelagirs, and what the Valdemarans seemed to think of as proper-sized trees looked like saplings to him. Most of his life had been spent in the forests with his trapper parents, rather than in his home village of Errold’s Grove, and he felt as comfortable among trees as did his adopted Hawkbrother-kin.
Oh, it’s very, very good to be home. Now I don‘t feel as if the sky is going to swallow me up. Despite the pleasure he took in his surroundings, he remained alert. The rest of the team rode ahead of Darian; he usually rode tail-guard, and took his responsibility seriously.
They were all on their way home now - not to Errold’s Grove, at least not immediately, but to k’Vala Vale. This little group of Tayledras - one of many, be it added - had taken on the task of spending four years away from their Vale for the purpose of cleansing some of the northernmost Valdemaran territories of pockets of “trouble” left over from the mage-storms that had swept the entire world a few years ago. Darian had personal experience of the Storms and of their results, most of which were anything but beneficial, and he could see why the Valdemarans needed help with it. “Trouble” could take many forms: bizarre creatures warped and twisted from ordinary animals; dangerous animals “imported” from some other far lands within the area of Change-Circles; even pools of magical energy with the potential to affect anything that fell into it. And while they were at it, they were establishing new ley-lines and nodes, or reestablishing old ones, so that magical energies, just like rainwater, could again flow into and through convenient channels.
He smiled to himself, shrugging the quiver on his back into a more comfortable position; it tended to ride down a little. Not that they wouldn‘t establish their own, eventually, but I rather fear my adoptive kin have a passion for neatness in magic. It was no accident that the ley-lines and nodes established in or near Tayledras territory all fed into Tayledras Heartstones, for instance, instead of messily running this way and that without any consideration for the convenience of the would-be users.
For, as all mages knew to their sorrow, the mage-storms had disrupted everything, spreading magic, much like a fall of freezing rain, evenly across the face of the world. For the most part, magic collected in nodes or stored in objects had been dispersed as effectively as all the rest - some few reservoirs had been shielded and saved (most notably, the Heartstones of the Tayledras Vales), but when the Storms were over, those reservoirs no longer had sources to replenish them. By reestablishing the ley-lines, mages of the level of Master and above would eventually have reliable and powerful sources of energy to tap into.
“Eventually” though - that was the key. It would take time for enough magical energy to trickle into those channels and collect again. For now, as Darian’s very first teacher had told him, the powerful magics that Adepts and even Masters had been able to perform were things of the past - there just wasn’t enough readily available, amassed energy available to perform them. He had heard it spoken of as “fog” by Starfall - sure, there might be enough water in a barn-sized mass of fog, but it did you no good if you wanted a drink of water.
Well - that’s almost true. If three or four mages got together and pooled their personal power, you could do one fairly impressive piece of work. But you couldn‘t hold it for long, and the mages would be useless for a week after. Or worse, they‘d be dead, which is certainly a scandalously wasteful use of mages and one which the mages would probably object to. The faint sound of a twig snapping behind them made him swivel to peer back along their trail, only to see a deer in the far distance stare back at him, then bound away out of sight.
By Adept Starfall’s way of thinking, even leaving mages exhausted and drained was just a little too expensive a price for a temporary achievement. Darian tended to agree, at least in principle, though he could think of a few occasions when it might be worth it. On the whole, he preferred Starfall’s precept that it was better and more effective to use small magics cleverly than big ones clumsily.
:Kuari?: he Mindcalled to his bondbird. :Anything back there but deer?:
:Fox. Tree-hare. Was squirrel. Tasty, too.: Kuari’s mind-voice was overlaid with sated pleasure, but it wasn’t as intense as it would have been if he’d stuffed himself.
:Do me a favor and circle a bit, then come back to the line.: Something had caused that deer to come out of cover - it might have been the animal’s own curiosity, but if it wasn’t, Darian wanted to know the cause.
Kuari gave willing assent, and Darian’s thoughts returned to their original track.
After helping to defeat a barbarian army that had decimated the countryside and occupied Errold’s Grove, Darian had been formally adopted by Mage-Scout Snowfire as his younger brother, arid had left the area he’d known all his life to follow his new kindred. The Tayledras as a whole had made a treaty-agreement with Valdemar to cleanse their land in return for payment; each Clan and Vale that sent one or more teams out would decide just what form the payment for their team would take. In the case of k’Vala, it would be in the form of raw materials, such as wool, linen, metals, and the like - especially metals. Tayledras disliked mining, and without the magical means to bring metals to the surface, mining was the only way to get them. As to why it was the Tayledras and not the Valdemarans themselves that were cleansing the land - well, as Darian had learned, the Valdemarans were unaccustomed to magic use in the first place, and in the second place, the Tayledras were uniquely suited to the task. In the first set of mage-storms, in the wake of the Mage-Wars of Urtho and Ma’ar, the Tayledras had taken on the task of cleansing the lands at the behest of their Goddess, and had been given unique traits, skills, and knowledge to enable them to do so. Interesting that they managed to come up with a tradition of running off strangers at knifepoint all by themselves, though, and not at the Goddess’ orders, he thought, casting an amused glance at his adoptive brother’s back. Well, some people take their jobs more seriously than others. I wonder if the Shin‘a‘in are just as bloodthirsty?
The other reason lay in Valdemar itself. In the time of Herald Vanyel, a spell had been set that prevented knowledge of “true” magic from taking hold in the minds of Valdemarans - along with another, guaranteed to send any “true” mage mad if he worked his powers within the borders of Valdemar. Those spells were gone now, of course (they would never have survived the mage-storms, even if they hadn’t been taken down deliberately), but centuries of living without real magic had left the Valdemarans without many mages of their own.
Darian understood that mages were being trained at the capital of Haven, under the auspices of Adept Darkwind and Herald-Mage Elspeth, among others - and like Darian, not all of those were Heralds - or even human. They were taking things slowly, however. There were many pitfalls to avoid, not the least of which was to make very certain that no ally got the impression that Valdemar was trying to build itself an army of mages!
There was talk of establishing a fourth Circle, a Mage Circle, just like the Bardic Circle, Heraldic Circle, and Healer Circle, and a proper and separate Mage’s Collegium. I don’t know how far they’II get with that one, though. Some of the teachers are bound to be mages from established schools; will they be willing to give over students into something like that? Then again, the point was to instill ethics into young mages from the beginning, and what sane mage would argue with that?
Well, that was all complicated political matters, and not of much interest to him at the moment. Right now he was just glad to be riding beneath the shadow of his much-loved trees, with the familiar pine- and fallen-leaf-scent of home all around him. One of the Heralds they had worked with during their task had once been on the circuit that included Errold’s Grove, and had told Darian that the huge trees of the Pelagiris always reminded him of the huge columns of the Great Temple of Vkandis in Karse. It struck Darian, then and now, that this was a particularly apt description; the hush beneath the trees, with the calls of birds so high above, and shafts of golden sunlight piercing the occasional breaks in the foliage always filled him with peace, pleasure, and a touch of awe or wonder. He couldn’t imagine a temple or cathedral of any kind that deserved the name that wouldn’t evoke a similar set of feelings.
The group followed a faint but discernible path in the shadows of those trees, riding not the horses of the Valdemarans, nor the Companions of their Heralds, but dyheli, strong and slender deerlike creatures with twin, curving horns and a formidable intelligence. They were, in fact, not beasts of burden, but allies of the Tayledras and their equals in intelligence. Though they did not bond with a particular person in the way that a Companion would bond with a Herald, they did express preferences in riders, and Darian’s mount was, oddly enough, the king-stag of the herd, Tyrsell.
One would think that the king-stag would be carrying one of the two leaders of the group, either Adept Starfall or Snowfire. . . .
:Now why should I do that,: Tyrsell asked ironically, :when you are so very much lighter than they?:
The dyheli turned his head a little on his long neck, so that one wickedly amused golden eye looked back at Darian. He wasn’t at all surprised that Tyrsell had been following his thoughts; dyheli in general were the strongest Mindspeakers of any creature alive, and the king-stags were the strongest of the strong. Dyheli had no concept of the privacy of thoughts either; so they had no scruples about “eavesdropping.”
Not that Darian cared; in their way, dyheli were so alien in their thinking that having Tyrsell privy to his thoughts was no more embarrassing than sharing them with his owl, Kuari. Certainly he had linked minds so often with Tyrsell that he never really bothered to shield against him. By this time he was so used to sharing his thoughts with dyheli that it came as second nature, as natural as breathing.
:Because it wouldn’t be true?: he suggested. :I’ve been growing, you know. I’m not the skinny little brat you used to carry around like a leaf. I’m almost a match for Snowfire now.:
Tyrsell tossed his head with amusement - down, not up, or he’d have impaled Darian on a horn. :Almost, indeed! You may be his match in height, but not in muscle, youngster, and you by no means weigh as much as he does. But you are right, it would not be the entire truth. What is the duty of the king-stag?:
:To drive the herd from danger, to take the rear and guard, to stand and fight enemies off,: Darian replied promptly.
:You are one of the stronger Mindspeakers, you are light, and you are a fighter. You and I have linked minds many times in battle. If danger comes on us, you are the most comfortable with me, and are the best combination of skills to pair with mine to keep your herd and mine safe.: Tyrsell’s logic was, as usual, impeccable. Darian could combine his mental strength with Tyrsell’s to overcome panic in the herd, he was a match for any bowman in the group but Snowfire, so playing rearguard was a logical choice for him, and he and Tyrsell had proved more than once in close combat that their skills added together made them formidable foes. Darian was still flattered and pleased, because the same could have been said of some of the others, too.
:Your Mindtouch is unobtrusive, and when you are thinking, your Mind-voice is pleasant to listen to,: Tyrsell added. :The others sometimes babble most annoyingly, or obsess over trifles. You only obsess over things of importance.:
That pleased him, too. He took a certain pride in being able to think well; it was a skill Justyn had tried to teach him, and he wanted his abilities to reflect well on his old teacher.
In spite of the fact that I didn’t value him while I had him. But that was a thought and a shame he kept to himself, under shield. It was his grief, and his alone to expiate.
By now Kuari must have circled on both sides of our backtrail - He sent a wordless, soft touch back to his bondbird, who responded immediately.
:Any thing?: he asked.
:Deer, quiet, go from grass to water,: was the reply.
Darian was glad to hear that; anything on the backtrail would have spooked the entire herd, so evidently his group had crossed the deer’s game trail at the time when they were moving purely by coincidence.
But there was someone else who’d like to know about a herd of deer behind them. :Stay with the herd, Kuari. You’ll have company in a bit.: He cast his thoughts upward, changing the “feel” of his Mindsending to that of another friend.
:Kel! Kuari’s got deer in sight, on our backtrail.:
He got an instant response; the young gryphon was in a growth spurt, and always hungry.
:Deer!: Kelvren exulted. :Oh, yes!:
That was all he got, as Kelvren sent his thoughts winging after the owl’s. Kelvren was up ahead of them, and higher in the tree canopy than Kuari. If there was any skill that Kelvren had gained above and beyond any other gryphon, it was the ability to move through the high branches of the great trees with barely a wingbeat. In a moment, though, he would be winging back above the canopy until he came up with Kuari. Then, using the owl’s information, he’d dive blind through the screen of foliage just like a goshawk going for a rabbit in the brush, and with any luck, he’d get a deer before the deer knew he was there. Otherwise, he’d be in for a tail-chase.
Kel could catch a deer in a tail-chase, it just wasn’t his favorite form of pursuit - though the injuries that often resulted from tail-chases gave him plenty of extra attention. He’d much rather make a clean kill, and a quick one; chases were a waste of energy.
Faintly, from behind him, came the noise of something large crashing through the branches, and Kuari’s excited hoots. Kuari loved watching Kel hunt; all bondbirds were far more social than their raptor ancestors, and took pleasure in each others’ company and successes. Breeding that trait into them had been imperative, since without it, Kuari would have happily made a meal off of any of the other birds in the company. Kuari’s talons could easily pierce a cow’s skull; he’d make short work of another bird.
:Two! Two!: Kuari projected excitedly into Darian’s mind. :He got two!:
:Two?: Tyrsell chimed in, impressed. :By the horns of the Moon-Doe, that’s amazing!:
If Kelvren had managed to kill two deer at once, there was no point in letting them go to waste. “Snowfire!” he called ahead. “I sent Kel on the backtrail after a deer, and it seems he’s gotten two instead of one.”
Snowfire turned, stared at him to see if he was serious, then broke into astonished laughter. “I had no idea he was that hungry!” He called ahead to the rest of the team. “Wintersky! Raindance! Peel off and go back until you find Kel, he’s made a kill too big for him to carry.”
A short time later, two of the team rode past Darian with a wave, their mounts at a brisk trot, two riderless does from the herd trotting beside them. While Kelvren stood guard, and their own birds circled above as extra protection, they’d field-dress the two deer, strap each to a rough travois, then rejoin the rest. To make it easier for them to catch up, Snowfire slowed the team to an amble. This wasn’t the first time that Kel had made kills too large to eat at once or carry, but it was the first time he’d made a double-kill.
Nightwind is going to be very proud of him, Darian thought warmly. He’s going to be just as proud of himself! Gryphons, after all, were praise-driven, and what they didn’t receive from others they often enough filled in for themselves.
Roughly a candlemark later Raindance and Wintersky came trotting back, the riderless dyheli now each dragging a travois with the somewhat-mangled carcass of a fine young buck strapped on it. That would slow them all down, of course, but it wasn’t that long until they were going to make camp, so the prospect of fresh meat would more than make up for it. Kel would dine tonight on one deer, the team would have part of the other, then Kel would get the remains for his breakfast. It took a lot of meat to feed a gryphon, though fortunately he usually managed to supply it himself. In lean times, breads were used to supplement the meat, mostly to provide mass, and luckily for everyone who would have had to hear his complaining, Kelvren had acquired a taste for bread anyway. Hungry gryphons were grouchy gryphons.
There were no more breaks in the routine of travel until the light beneath the trees had begun to redden and grow dimmer, a sure sign that the sun was about to set. By then, the advance scouts had found a suitable camping spot and those with lighter burdens and the unburdened dyheli had gone on ahead to prepare the camp, leaving the rest to come in at their own pace.
That, or so Darian thought, was one of the advantages of being the rearguard. By the time he reached camp, it was a camp; the tents were all set up, a latrine pit had been dug, water fetched, and Ayshen, the chief hertasi, had everything ready to make dinner for the entire team. Since the job of rearguard was to make a circuit of the camp before coming in himself, the rearguard never had to do any of the camp chores.
Some nights, in the winter, for instance, when he was frozen from his nose to his toes, or in the pouring rain, that was a hardship. Being the one who had to make certain that all the territory within their perimeter was clear under those circumstances, with dinner scents on the breeze, was assuredly a hardship. Not tonight, though.
He dismounted and let Tyrsell go on into camp, to put himself into the capable hands of the hertasi to have his minimal tack removed. No dyheli would ever subject himself to the indignity of a bit and bridle; however, they did allow a modified hackamore, similar to that worn by Companions, and a saddle-pad to cover their protruding backbones. As Darian knew from painful personal experience, riding a dyheli without that saddle-pad was much like sliding naked down a cliff, but not nearly as comfortable.
He and Kuari made the circuit of the camp without incident, marking good places for sentries with something unobtrusive, natural, but unmistakable to any of the Tayledras - feathers, usually wedged into the bark of a tree.
When he got back into camp, the first set of sentries had eaten a light snack and were ready to go out. They’d get a second meal when they came back in, but, no Tayledras would stand sentry with a full stomach; it was too easy to doze off.
Ayshen had his dinner ready and waiting for him: a savory butterflied venison steak and journey-bread, with some mixed, unidentified shoots and greens. Ayshen and the other hertasi knew the forest and what it could provide as well as they knew the patterns of their own scales; they foraged as the team traveled every day, and Darian never knew what they would come up with. They always had something green and growing in addition to meat and bread, even in the dead of winter, for Ayshen took great care with the diet and health of his “charges.”
Darian knew better than to leave so much as a scrap of that green stuff on his plate, too. Ayshen would show no mercy to anyone who didn’t eat what was given him.
Darian sat down to eat in the blue dusk beneath the trees; he polished off the last scrap in full dark. He was the last to eat, and brought Ayshen his empty plate just as the hertasi cleaned the last of the pans.
“We are not far from the Vale now,” Ayshen told him with a toothy grin. “One day, two at the most. Then you will see! Nothing we passed through in Valdemar compares!”
“Nothing we passed through in Valdemar was bigger than two or three villages put together,” Darian reminded him. “We were not exactly traversing through the height of Valdemaran civilization, you know.”
“Oh, indeed.” Ayshen chuckled. “You will see.”
Darian laughed, and slapped the little lizard-creature on the back. “I’m certain that I will,” he agreed. “But for tonight, all I want to see is my bed.”
He wouldn’t have thought, back when he was Justyn’s apprentice, that simply riding all day long would be tiring. After all, it was your mount that did most of the work, right?
Well, that turned out to be only partially true; riding was more work than Darian would have imagined four years ago. Riding literally from dawn until dusk was enough to tire anyone out - riding as tail-guard was exhausting mentally as well as physically.
So he wasn’t joking when he told Ayshen that all he wanted to see was his bed. He continued to share a tent with young Wintersky; it was a tent made for three, but only the two of them used it now. Snowfire had long since made his union with Nightwind a formal one, which just gave Wintersky and Darian more room.
Wintersky sat beside a small campfire in front of their tent, contentedly toasting a stick. Darian sat down beside his friend and took another dry twig, breaking it into tiny bits and casting each bit into the heart of the fire. “Ayshen says we’ll be at the Vale in the next day or two,” he said, and Wintersky nodded.
“Probably late tomorrow,” he replied. “Everybody’s pretty anxious to get home. My guess is that they’ll roust us out before dawn and tell us to eat in the saddle.”
“Which is why you’re roasting a stick to calm down so you can get to sleep quickly,” Darian finished for him, and yawned. “Believe me, I don’t need that to get me to sleep.” Then he snickered. “Poor Snowfire - he and Nightwind won’t get much chance to cuddle tonight!”
Wintersky snorted and elbowed him; Darian elbowed right back, and both made moon-calf faces at each other so that they both broke into peals of laughter.
As the two youngest members of the team, they spent a great deal of time together, got into a certain amount of mischief together, and despite coming from such different cultures, had far more in common than Darian had found with the boys his age in Errold’s Grove. Darian really felt by now that he was part of a family, with Wintersky the brother he had always wanted.
They chortled themselves breathless, paying no attention to the quizzical looks of some of the other Hawkbrothers; Wintersky tossed his stick into the fire, Darian followed it with the remains of his, and they both went straight to bed. Wintersky’s bird was already asleep on his perch inside the tent, Kuari dozed in the branches of the tree above them. Although most owls were nocturnal, the eagle-owls were comfortable in darkness or daylight; their size gave them a hunting advantage in the daytime, and their night-sight and silent flight the advantage after dark. Kuari could adapt his sleep schedule to suit his bondmate.
As Wintersky had predicted, hertasi rousted them out while it was still as dark as the inside of a cold-drake’s belly in an ice cave. They weren’t given a lot of time to ready themselves, either. Hertasi were efficient under any conditions, but Darian had never seen them work quite so quickly before. The camp was down and packed up by the time he had Tyrsell saddled, and Ayshen must have known last night that this was going to happen, because one of his helpers came by with pastry-wrapped venison that Ayshen must have put to baking in the embers of the cook fire the night before. Darian actually got to eat his without being in the saddle; no one had told him he had a new assignment, so he, was tail-guard again this morning. Tail-guard’s morning duty was to make sure the camp was clear, that all the fires were out, that nothing had been left behind. So he ate his meat-roll and drank his bittersweet, hot kava while everyone else bustled about, getting their riding order straight, then started the day’s trek - still in the dark. Darian was entirely unsurprised to see that Snowfire had lead-duty; with not one, but two owls as bondbirds, he was the only logical choice for a ride in total darkness.
As soon as the last dyheli cleared the camp, Darian summoned up a mage-light and made a thorough inspection of the site. This time he uncovered evidence of the hasty departure in the form of a couple of misplaced small articles of clothing and adornment, a bit of trash that needed burial, and one fire that had not been thoroughly extinguished and still smoked. These small tasks attended to, he mounted Tyrsell, and with Kuari following in the trees, he caught up with the rest.
He banished the light as soon as he drew up with the rearmost rider - Sunleaf, whose forestgyre dozed on a perch incorporated into the saddle-bow in front of him. Riding in the darkness like this, the team now depended on the eyes and ears of only three birds and Kelvren to protect them. Even Daystorm’s flock of crows rode - two on the saddle-bow perch, two on the horns of her dyheli Pyreen, and the rest on the horns of any other dyheli that would let them.
With nothing to look at but the vaguest of shadows, Darian was acutely aware of every calling insect, every time a bird chirped or squawked its sleepy protest at being disturbed, every crackle of dead leaf or rustle of undergrowth. None of this made him at all wary or nervous; he’d grown up in forest like this, and these were all normal night sounds. He’d be alerted only if they stopped, or if a sudden burst of noise betrayed that something had disturbed the sylvan sleepers.
Kuari was perfectly composed - and perfectly full; he’d eaten well last night, and would not need to eat again until tonight. He wasn’t tempted to hunt, not even by the flocks of drowsy birds he passed beneath. What Kuari saw danced like a ghost-image in front of Darian’s eyes, a double-vision that did not disconcert him in the least now, though it had taken him months to get used to it.
The air was very still, not a breath of breeze; it was cold, and smelled of damp, old leaves, and fog. It felt heavy, somehow; morning before dawn almost always felt like that, as if it was just possible that the sun might not rise, after all.
It was difficult to judge the passing of time; Kuari would rise above the treetops once in a while, to take the measure of the dawn, and for what seemed to be the longest time he saw nothing but darkness and stars.
Finally, though, the strange sense of heaviness lifted, ever so slightly. Kuari lofted through the leaves to catch the first brightening in the east, and the first tentative notes of the birds’ dawn chorus drifted down to the travelers below.
Sunleaf’s forestgyre roused all his feathers with a quick shake - still more heard than seen - as those first notes brought him out of his doze. Gradually, faint light filtered down through the trees; at first the light was so very faint that everything seemed painted in shades of black and gray, but as the sun rose, the light brightened to a thin, dusty rose, and color came back into the world.
Up and down the line of riders, birds were shaking out their feathers, stretching their wings, preening and yawning. Then, one by one, they hopped onto their bondmates’ gauntleted arms to be tossed into the air.
The crows were the first, and taunted the others as lazy loafers with their derisive claws as they rowed up into the canopy. Stung by the good-natured insult, the younger birds followed immediately. The older birds were too seasoned to be tempted into flight by a pack of delinquents before they’d warmed up their muscles; there was plenty of stretching and flapping before the rest took to the air.
Two enormous shapes lofted silently toward the line beneath the lowest branches, one from ahead and to the right, one from the left. These were Hweel and Huur, Snowfire’s bondbirds; that meant that Snowfire had dropped back and someone else with a fresher bird had taken over the forward position. There were three dyheli in the herd with peculiar saddles - more of a perch, than a saddle - and no reins. These were for Hweel and Huur, and sometimes Kuari, who were all far too large to sit a perch in front of anyone. It was all Darian could do to carry Kuari on his shoulder or give him a short and temporary ride on his gauntleted arm; the eagle-owls were big, and awfully heavy. On Snowfire’s advice, Darian had built up his arms and shoulders with a great deal of lifting and carrying and wood-chopping in order to be able to support the weight of his friend.
It’s just a good thing that nobody with us has real eagles as a bondbird, Darian thought, as he watched the eagle-owls disappear somewhere up ahead, presumably making a landing on their mounts. Snowfire had once told him that the only person in k’Vala to have a true eagle and not a hawk-eagle as a bondbird was the black-smith! All bondbirds were easily twice, even three times, the mass of their wild counterparts. Darian could hardly imagine how large a true bondbird eagle must be. . . .
The morning passed uneventfully, and so did the afternoon, except that the break for lunch was hardly more than a pause while more pastry-rolls were passed out to the riders and nosebags of grain to the dyheli. They all ate on the move, something that until now had been done only during wretchedly cold weather, to enable the team to get to shelter faster.
It was late in the afternoon that the biggest bird Darian had ever seen in his life swooped down out of the trees and screamed a greeting as it passed over the heads of everyone in the team. The wingspan alone was so wide not even Huur could match it; more than the height of a mounted man, easily.
All the bondbirds set up a deafening chorus of replies, converging on the riders from every direction, and taking to their perches to go into full, wing-spread display. The huge raptor that had triggered the cacophony made another pass over the heads of the team, this time flying from the rear to the frontmost rider, then disappearing into the branches again.
:Darian, you can stand down.: The mind-voice was Snowfire’s; no point in trying to shout, he wouldn’t be heard. :Remember the eagle I told you about, that’s bonded to a blacksmith? That’s her; we’re under k’Vala guard now. You can relax.:
Darian took a deep breath and let it out in a low whistle; the birds were finally quieting down and settling. So that’s a bondbird eagle? If I were dyheli, I think I’d make her walk!:
As dusk fell, there was a distant glow through the trees ahead of them, and just as the last light of day faded from beneath the trees, the next lot of escorts met them.
This was a veritable stampede of dyheli, first an avalanche of young stags and does, then followed by the older does and their fawns, with five king-stags bringing up the rear. They poured around the line of riders, the youngsters frolicking, the older dyheli trotting up to rub noses with friends, and the king-stags making straight for Tyrsell. Judging by all the vigorous head-nodding going on, the king-stags went into an immediate six-way conference, one which would probably last for several days. After all, Tyrsell was an ajnbassasor to Valdemar in his own right, one looking for riew grazing lands for dyheli, and he had negotiated his own set of treaties with various Valdemaran populations through the medium of different Heralds.
Unburdened dyheli separated from the group and joined the massed herds, who all cleared off, heading back to the Vale. That left room for the next lot of greeters, a flood of hertasi. They seemed to appear out of nowhere - as hertasi were wont to do. There were probably a few hundred of them, but it seemed as if there were a couple of thousand at the least. When they had finished swarming the team and disappeared back into the darkness, there was not a single scrap of baggage left anywhere in the line, for they had stripped it from every burdened dyheli, leaving them free to run ahead as well.
Then came the first of the wonders that would leave Darian breathless for most of the evening.
Lights approached the line of riders, lights bounding along just below the level of the first branches. As the manycolored lights neared, Darian identified them as mage-lights, but they were carried - or rather, pulled along - by bondbirds. Mage-lights weighed nothing, of course, but how wonderful to see the bondbirds, each trailing a different colored sphere in its wake!
The birds with the team again set up their greeting display, and the birds from the Vale remained with the team, lighting their way home, perched overhead in the lowest branches. As Darian passed the birds at the rear, they flew ahead to the front of the team and took up new perches.
Then, as the light ahead grew stronger and stronger, they came to the entrance to the Vale itself, and the crowd of friends and relations waiting there for them. A cheer went up as the long-absent team broke through the cover of the forest.
Now, for the first time, Darian saw Hawkbrothers in all their festal glory, and he was, to put it mildly, dazzled. No one on the team had brought any sort of “fancy” garments with them - though Hawkbrother clothing had been exotic enough to Darian’s eyes - so he’d had no idea what he was going to see. No wonder Ayshen had warned him that he’d be surprised!
Men and women alike dressed in spectacular costumes - what one wore seemed to be more a reflection of his or her personality than gender. Long pale hair was beaded, braided, feathered, dyed, and cut in the most amazing styles. They didn’t look real, somehow, yet they surged forward like any group of folk meeting with people they’d been parted from for too long.
But, of course, no one came forward to greet him. . . .
Now, for the first time in years, Darian felt very much the outsider, and painfully alone. A young hertasi skittered up and took his bridle, looking up at him expectantly. Tyrsell lifted his head up, and the small hertasi was lifted off the ground for a moment, squawking at first, then emitting a long burble of laughter as he was lowered back down. Older hertasi appeared on each side, sharing the laughter. He dismounted from Tyrsell’s saddle and let the hertasi strip his friend of tack and carry it off. Then Tyrsell himself stepped away, leaving him even more alone with all of the meetings and greetings swirling around him.
“Dar’ian!” Snowfire pushed his way through the crowd, with an older man and woman in tow, his face alight. “Here - Mother, Father, this is Dar’ian Firkin, k’Valdemar; Dar ‘ian, this lady is my mother, Dawnmist, and this is my father, Heartwood.” He grinned. “Yours, also.”
The two Tayledras smiled warmly and each held out a hand. Darian took them, tentatively at first, then with the dizzying sensation that he was settling into something real and solid and welcoming. His loneliness evaporated, and with a wonder-filled grin he entered k’Vala Vale with the rest of the Tayledras.
From the moment that Dariari passed through the impressive vine-covered entrance td k’Vala Vale to the moment that he fell asleep, he was half afraid to blink lest he miss some new wonder. Now he knew why Ayshen had been so smug!
Just past the faintly visible barrier that protected the Vale from outside weather, he stepped into an entirely new realm.
The barrier distorted some of what lay beyond it, and cloaked the rest, so that from the outside it appeared that there was nothing beyond it except more ordinary forest. But when he passed through it, feeling a faint tingle as he did so, he saw what it had concealed.
Before him lay a softly curving path that wound deep into an exotic garden within only a few paces from the entrance - but it was not at all dark, for light glimmered and gleamed through the foliage. He followed the path to its first turning; mage-lights were supplemented by fantastic lanterns in glowing colors - round, square, oblong, in the shapes of flowers and leaves, stars and the phases of the moon. The lanterns hung from decorated poles crafted of carved wood on either side of the pathway. Some of these poles were carved with vines twining about them, some in the shapes of fantastic animals and birds, some decorated with geometric shapes or abstract curved lines. The path itself, “paved” in tiny pebbles of river gravel, was bordered in larger, water-smoothed rocks and was intersected at frequent intervals by a tiny sparkling stream that danced and laughed over similar stones. Where the path crossed these streams, it led over charmingly carved bridges, no two alike. The stream wasn’t so wide that the bridges were needed, they were simply there because they were attractive.
Unlike the forest outside, where undergrowth was sparse, here plants, bushes, and even smaller trees throve to the point of luxury. Blossoming vines formed screens and curtains, flowering bushes poured scent onto the breeze. More flowers, closed now in the fragrant half-light along the path, gave promise that day would bring even more beauty. It was noticeably warmer here, the same gentle warmth of a summer night rather than the cool of a spring evening. Frogs and crickets sang in little pockets of shadow, and overhead, nightingales poured out melody into the darkness above the lanterns.
But that was only the beginning of the wonders. As Darian followed Snowfire and his parents deeper into the Vale, other sounds overhead made him look into the branches of the huge trees. It was at that point that he realized that the trees were even bigger than the ones outside the Vale - and that they held dwellings cradled in their huge boughs! The branches were as big as the trunks of the trees that he was used to. So high up were these living places that at first he had taken them for more elaborate lanterns.
So these were the famous ekele of the Hawkbrothers! Darian marveled at the highly individual “nests” resting above. Once again, so far as he could tell, no two were alike; some showed lights and movement, some were dark - and lights twinkling further up the trunks suggested that there were still more of these ekele higher up. The mere thought of how high they must be made him dizzy. Staircases spiraled up the trunks, showing how the Hawkbrothers gained access to their homes, and the staircases were just as ornamental as anything else Darian had seen so far.
No wonder everyone is in such good shape - they have to be, just to go to and from their homes!
“We’ve been in this Vale for a very long time, Darian,” Snowfire said over his shoulder. “Longer, I think, than any other Clan has been in one place. Three, four generations at least, I think, and our people are very long-lived; it’s more than enough time to really make this Vale into a work of art - a place none of us wants to leave.”
“I can certainly see why,” Dalian replied, dazed. That was when they passed the last screening of vine and came out into the open.
This was clearly the center of the Vale. There stood the Heartstone, right in the middle - 
It was a tall, smooth spire of natural rock, something like an enormous stalagmite, and of the same creamy alabaster color and texture. It glowed warmly, welcomingly, as if it, too, was a kind of lantern. Stepped, fitted stones partially encircled it, and kept it clean of debris.
It also glowed and pulsed to his Mage-Sight, so brightly that he had to block that part of his abilities.
“About three years ago we finally got enough power coming into the Heartstone to put up the Veil again,” Snowfire’s father said with satisfaction, as they all paused for a moment at the edge of the clearing. “There’s still not enough to power nearly as much as we used to do, but we’re the first Clan to get their Veil up.”
Not nearly as much - I almost hate to think what they used to do! was all Darian could think, as the Heartstone seemed to pulse in time with his heart with all the power it held. It was magnificent, awe-full in the strictest sense of the term. He had never in all of his life Seen that kind of power before, and he rather doubted that he would ever See its like again. Certainly not in his own little Vale. It would probably take generations before his own Heartstone ever accumulated this level of power.
Snowfire sighed, lifting his face to the Heartstone as one starved of light would raise his face to the sun. “Oh, it is so good to be back within the reach of a Heartstone again!”
For a very long time Darian simply couldn’t look away from the wonder, though he did not make the mistake of using his Mage-Sight again; when he finally did look away, it was with the realization that this was what his team had been trying to reproduce in a crude form in every long-term camp they’d made.
Here was the source of the little stream they’d followed, and now it was clear that many more little streams took their water from here to run through other parts of the Vale. To his right lay a spring-fed series of cascades that in turn led into a cool, clear pond with colorful fish drifting just beneath the surface. A multitude of water-lilies and other water plants throve there, and a series of steps cut into the side showed that more than just the fish were wont to swim there.
Next to this was an herb garden, as ordered and mathematical in its layout as the rest of the Vale was not, though there wasn’t a straight line to be seen there. It lay in the quarter of this clear area directly in front of Darian, as the pond was in the quarter to his left. He had overlooked it at first in gazing at the Heartstone directly beyond it, perhaps because it was so - ordinary. It looked exactly like every other large herb garden he’d seen over the course of their travels, in the courtyards of all of the larger temples and Healers’ enclaves. Neatly laid out in a curving maze, every herb had its own little patch, each patch’s growth trimmed off in edges as straight as a rule. Nothing grew taller than his waist; most growth lay between his ankle and knee.
To his right was a cluster of low buildings, beautifully integrated with the landscape to the point that they even had hanging plants and flowers growing on their flat roofs. At first glance he had taken them for an unusually regular stone formation, in fact.
“The hot spring and the main soaking and bathing pools are on the other side of the Heartstone,” Snowfire told him, “And I don’t know about you, but after today’s ride, that’s the first place I want to go.”
The mere thought of relaxing in a hot pool made his aching limbs all declare in favor of the idea, so he just nodded and followed Snowfire and his parents around the fascinating Heartstone and past a screening of tall, jointed plants with stalks as thick as his calf and graceful leaves that formed a solid walljhiding all beyond them.
Once past that screen, a cojnplex of interconnected pools on multiple levels stretched out in front of them, some so small they could only hold two or three people at once, some big enough to hold the entire team, hertasi included. It looked, from the amount of steam rising from the water, that the hottest pools were on the highest level, the coolest on the bottom. It also appeared that everyone in the team had the same idea as Snowfire, for they were all up to their chins in hot water - this time actual, instead of metaphorical.
Nightwind waved at them from a middle level, her hair piled high on her head and held there with wooden skewers, her face flushed and damp from the heat. Snowfire waved back at her and climbed the rocks to join her - but Darian had already picked out which of the pools was hottest and headed straight for it, forgetting everything but how good that water would feel.
Of course, after being with Tayledras for four years, he shed his clothing at the edge of the pool as a matter of course and eased himself down into it, knowing that hertasi would gather up the clothing and that towels and replacements would materialize when he needed them. The water was just as hot as he’d hoped it was; too hot to stay in for long, which was probably why he had this small pool to himself, but it was just what his aching muscles wanted.
The polished, sculptured sides of the pool formed seats of varying heights. He shifted around until he found one that allowed him to lean back with just his head above the water and relaxed into the smooth stone, eyes closed, until even he could no longer take the heat.
He didn’t want to leave just yet, though; there were still aches that hadn’t been soaked out. So instead of abandoning the pools altogether, he moved down to another, not so warm. In fact, in contrast to the one he’d just left, this one felt positively tepid. He remained there until it, too, felt too warm, then moved again, joining Nightwind and Snowfire and several more of the team and some strangers in a community soak.
The others were involved in a rambling conversation that seemed to consist of trading stories of what had gone on in the Vale in the team’s absence for stories of what the team had done. Darian simply slid into an unoccupied seat and listened, adding a word or two if he was spoken to directly, but otherwise just listening.
But finally, one of the strangers turned to him. “What think you of all this, new Wingbrother?” the young woman asked him, her eyes sparkling impishly.
He shrugged, at a loss for words. “Amazing. Just - amazing.”
“Well,” another girl drawled lazily, “there are things in other lands that equal or surpass a Vale, but on the whole, this is a fine place to live.”
“So says a former dweller in White Gryphon!” laughed the first. “High praise indeed!”
So this was another of Nightwind’s people, a Kaled’a’in! Darian wanted to ask a hundred questions, but felt too shy and tongue-tied to voice any of them. The first girl saved him from having to make any conversation.
“If you are hungry, Dar’ian, and I think you must be, since the rest of your team ate like famished wolves when hertasi brought them food, there will be more provender over yonder, in the building nearest us.” She pointed with her chin at the group of buildings. “There always is; we often must keep irregular hours, so the her-tasi keep foods out that do not readily spoil or suffer growing cold or warm.”
“Thank you,” he said shyly, relieved that he would not have to ask what he should do about the hunger-beast awakening in his belly - but she was not quite finished.
“You will also find sleeping places there for those who are not used to ekele or who have not built one of their own,” she continued. “Those are our guest houses. Simply look until you find one that no one has taken, and make it yours. The heritasi will bring your things there.”
Grateful that he would not have to interrupt Snowfire and act like a very little brother indeed, he blushed, and thanked her again.
She giggled, as did the other girl. It was the Kaled’a’in who spoke next, poking her friend with her elbow.
“Snowfire’s messages home about the barbarians and his new Wingbrother were so fulsome and interesting that Summerdance here wanted to meet you as soon as you all returned,” said the Kaled’a’in wickedly. “So she thought she could manage to casually be your guide to the Vale!”
That was too much for Summerdance, who whirled, seized her friend’s head in both hands, and shoved her under the water. Her friend came up spluttering, but mostly with laughter.
Summerdance turned to Darian with a flushed face, and he thought quickly, hoping to find a way to salvage the situation. Simple gratitude and politeness seemed the most effective and direct approach.
“That was very kind of you, to think of how a stranger might be so confused here, Summerdance,” he told her. “Especially as I am certain you have many tasks of your own to tend to, and it could be irritating to find yourself saddled with an idiot!”
“Oh, but I already am,” Summerdance replied sweetly, staring pointedly at her friend, “And in contrast to poor, defective Nightbird here, why, even the most imbecilic stra - ”
She didn’t get to finish the statement, for Nightbird returned the favor by dunking her.
As Summerdance came up gasping for air, the situation might have escalated, had not a silver-haired elder called out lazily, “Enough, my children. You know the rules - take your romping to the swimming pools and the waterfall. If you wish to remain here, save your revenge for later.”
That quelled both of them for the moment, though their merry eyes boded mischief to come. Summerdance managed to conquer her blushes, and Darian politely pretended that she had never been embarrassed. “So those buildings there are for guests?” he asked. “I had the impression that Tayledras didn’t particularly encourage ‘guests,’ yet you have many of those buildings.”
“Well, we’ve kept to ourselves, but times do change, you know, and we are not going to lag behind them,” Summerdance replied as she pulled her soaked hair out of her eyes and began braiding it back, with Night-bird’s help.
“The truth of it is that we Kaled’a’in descended on them six years ago, and they had to build us guest houses,” Nightbird added. “Since then, most of us have either made our own dwellings or moved in with congenial Tayledras, so the guest quarters are open again.” She tied the braid she was working on with a bit of cord. “There! Reasonably tidy.”
“And the rest of the truth is that now we have no need to discourage visitors, so when there are those brave enough to dare the fearsome Hawkbrothers in their lair - ” Summerdance bared her teeth in a mock-snarl and crooked both hands into claws, “ - we reward them by giving them a decent bed.”
“It’s only fair,” Nightbird finished, getting in the last word.
Darian looked from one girl to the other and back again. “Are you sure you aren’t sisters?” he finally said. “You certainly sound like it.”
Both girls dissolved in laughter, which spread to the half of the occupants of the pool who’d chanced to overhear the remark.
“So we have been telling them since Nightbird arrived, youngling,” the elder said; still chuckling. “I’d be wary of them if I were you. Whdre these two tread, trouble follows.”
“Us?” Nightbird cried indignantly.
“Never,” Summerdance declared. “We’re harmless.”
“Innocent.”
“Absolutely.”
The elder rolled his eyes, but said only, in the driest voice imaginable, “Indeed.”
Summerdance looked stricken. “But, Father - !”
“Save it for one who did not see you born, when you came into the world with mischief grasped in both hands,” the elder interrupted, closing his eyes and leaning back into the embrace of the hot water. “Now let a poor old man soak his bones in peace.”
Nightbird snatched at a towel, and stood up. “Come on, friends, no one appreciates us here. Let’s just get dressed and show Dar’ian around a little!”
Summerdance was not at all reluctant, so Darian found himself shortly clothed in the loose-fitting, cool garments that the Hawkbrothers favored for lounging, with each arm being held by an extremely attractive young lady as he was steered toward the guest houses.
“Have you actually got weather in the Vale?” he asked curiously, seeing that the strangely built houses had proper roofs under all their foliage.
“Controlled weather,” Summerdance said proudly. “Though before we had enough power back to put the Veil back up, we had regular weather in here for a while. All we really do is keep things warm; if it rains out there, it rains in here - if it snows out there, it rains in here.”
“Why keep rain out?” Nightbird continued from the other side. “The plants still need it, and besides, most of us like rain, as long as it’s warm.”
“And in the summer, we never let it get too warm in here,” Summerdance added. “No droughts either. Though we try not to let any droughts happen outside - with trees the size of the ones in the Pelagiris, an uncontrolled forest fire would not bear thinking about. We arrange for controlled fires of course, to keep the forest healthy, but the forest has to be well-watered before we dare do that. That’s why, when we were doing without, we gave up the Veil so that we could keep doing weather-magic.”
Darian nodded, with a shiver. He and the team had helped to fight a forest fire, the first he’d ever seen, and Summerdance was right. A forest fire loose among the great trees of the Pelagiris would be nothing short of a holocaust.
There were no doors on these buildings, only a living screen of leafy vine, which Summerdance parted so they could all walk inside the first building of the group. The walls were half-structure, half artwork; windows of colored glass gave way to carved panels of wood which in turn gave place to living walls of braided tree trunks and vines, all of it lit by lanterns rather than mage-lights. There, as promised, was a table spread with simple foodstuffs: breads, fruit, cheeses. They all helped themselves, and poured drinks from covered pitchers of cool juices, then took their loot to a grouping of several fat cushions on the floor. There were proper chairs and tables, more groupings of cushions, and even a couch or two, but the girls clearly preferred to sprawl on cushions.
In between mouthfuls they told him about the Vale, saving him from having to make any conversation at all. He made interested sounds from time to time, but otherwise kept his mouth full and closed. He heard more than he could store away in his memory about the Vale itself, who was partnering with whom, who was quarreling with whom, who had designs on whom, what projects were going, stalled, stupid, or planned - in short, it sounded exactly like a village, with all the village gossip. Only with much better scenery and clothing!
Even the strangest people have familiar habits, he thought wryly, and let them chatter on until he was comfortably full.
Then he sat up a little straighter and began to insert some questions of his own.
“Where did the dyheli go?” he asked first, for he hadn’t seen a single one since they’d all disappeared with the massed herds. “The all vanished together when we got here.”
“They have their own big meadow at the far end of the Vale, farthest from the entrance,” Summerdance told him. “I’ve got my ekele in a tree on the edge of the meadow.”
“And Kelvren? Where’s he?”
“With the rest of the gryphons, in the cliffs above the Vale; that’s where I live.” That was Nightbird, of course - and suddenly something clicked in Dalian’s mind.
“You’re Nightwind’s sister!” he exclaimed. “The trondi’irn apprentice - that’s why you got letters from Snowfire!”
For some reason that revelation seemed excruciatingly funny to both girls, as they burst into laughter again. “I told you he’d figure it out all by himself!” Nightbird chortled.
“Well, I never said I doubted you - ” Summerdance retorted.
Darian turned to her, and stared at her in thought for a moment. “You can’t be Snowfire’s sister, because he’s an only child. Are you a cousin?”
She mimed shooting an arrow. “Dead in the black! Oh, it is so nice to know that Snowfire wasn’t exaggerating how smart you were! Not bad, not bad at deduction at all!”
“Not that most people in the Vale aren’t related in some way or other,” Nightbird pointed out. “But they’re very near cousins; Dawnmist’s brother and Heartwood’s sister are her mother and father, so she’s what we call a double-cousin. I hope that’s not too confusing.”
“Not at all, remember, I come from a little village, and practically everyone there is related to everyone else in some way,” Darian smiled. “I think I can keep it all straight.”
Now it was their turn to ask about Errold’s Grove, and his tiny, prosaic little village was at least moderately interesting for them - but what they really enjoyed was hearing about Valdemar in general. Some things he had to answer truthfully with the preface of “I’ve never seen this myself, but I’ve been told that - ” They seemed utterly amazed that people could live without any magic at all for hundreds of years, and were just as fascinated to hear what had taken the place of that magic.
“I feel sorry for people who have to live without weather control,” Summerdance sighed, as he described a four-day blizzard he and the team had endured. “Even though we had it, for a while we had to save the energy for things that were really important, and it was horrible. It was worse being in the Vale without weather protection! I don’t ever want to see snow on my ekele steps again!”
“I know how you feel,” Nightbird agreed. “I thought I would never get warm, the whole winter.”
“People are used to it,” he pointed out. “Not having seasons would seem strange to them. And there’s some enjoyment in it - Errold’s Grove used to have a Winter Faire with all sorts of special snow and ice games and sports, and I met some people who really love the snow. They’d be horrified if they had to do without it.”
“There’s something to be said for a good, rousing thunderstorm,” Nightbird agreed. “Especially when you’re snug inside.”
“Maybe - ” Summerdance sounded doubtful. “I still draw the line at snow, though.”
Darian yawned, covering his mouth hastily with his hand, but Summerdance was instantly all contrition.
“Oh, bother, here we’ve kept you up nattering at you, and you’re probably perishing fp get some sleep!” she exclaimed. “Look, just what kinc| of quarters do you like anyway?”
“Dark,” he said promptly. “No hammocks. I still haven’t gotten used to sleeping in anything that moves. But mostly as dark as possible; one thing I don’t suffer from is fear of being shut in.”
Summerdance glanced at Nightbird, who nodded. “I think I know just the place,” she said, “And no one’s taken it since the Kaled’a’in hertasi all dug their own burrows. Follow me.”
He did; she led him through the building complex - they were all linked together, apparently - to a long, low-ceilinged structure made up entirely of cozy, rounded sets of rooms. There wasn’t a straight line to be seen, and as Nightbird had promised, none of them showed any signs of occupation.
“These give most Hawkbrothers the shivers,” Nightbird told him, as Summerdance lingered just outside the complex. “Doesn’t bother me. White Gryphon is full of lairs and dens like this, and the hertasi and kyree prefer them. This place is actually dug right under the hill, so it’ll be quiet enough.”
“It’s not what I’d choose to live in permanently, but right now . . . this is perfect,” Darian told her with satisfaction. “I could sleep for a week in here.” Again, a huge yawn caught him quite off-guard. “Excuse me! And from the way I feel, I probably will sleep for a week! Do you know, they got us up and in the saddle way before dawn, and we didn’t stop even to eat. I’ve done harder riding on this trip, but nothing that was longer.”
“Better not sleep for a week, though, or you’ll miss the celebration,” Nightbird warned him, and then waved her hand in a shooing motion at him. “Go pick out a set of rooms, then, and I’ll tell the hertasi where you are. Rest well, Dar’ian.”
“And to you, and thanks.” He raised his voice a little so it would carry to the doorway. “Thank you, Summerdance! I hope I’ll see you both tomorrow!”
She laughed, and so did Nightbird. It seemed to be a common response for them. “Just try to avoid us!” Summerdance replied, and the two of them sauntered away, leaving him alone in the building.
He picked a single room at the back of the complex; it was simply furnished. There was a low bed with clean, folded bedding waiting on it, a single lantern on the floor beside the bed, and nothing else. However, the room did have a heavy curtain he could drop down across the entrance to shut out the light. There wasn’t much to shut out, just the two lanterns illuminating the “corridor” connecting all the rooms.
He took one of the dry splinters beside the lantern and got a flame from the lantern nearest “his” room, then lit his own lantern so that he could see to make up his bed. By the time he’d smoothed down the last of the covers, his baggage had appeared on the floor behind him. Hertasi, of course; by now he was used to the way they would make things “appear” and “disappear” in complete silence, including themselves. Those abilities had proved useful in more dangerous contexts, too; hertasi made wicked strike-and-run fighters, for all their small size. The packs looked shrunken; he had no doubt that they’d extracted his dirty laundry, and that by the time he woke up tomorrow, his clothing would be waiting just outside the curtain, cleaned and mended.
Havens, they‘ll probably have put together an entire new wardrobe for me by then, he thought, climbing into bed and stifling another yawn. Ayshen made more than a few remarks about that during our mission. What incredible creatures they are!
Then he blew out the lantern, closed his eyes, and never felt his head touch the pillow.
He woke slowly, and at his own pace - which was a bit more leisurely than he’d been,able to manage when he was with the team. He heard a second creature breathing in the room with him, and by the faint scent of raptor-musk knew that Kuari had found him after his bondbird’s own homecoming. Mindtouch told him that Kuari was deeply asleep and probably would not wake for another few candlemarks.
Which is hardly surprising, considering how hard he worked yesterday. It wasn’t the first time that Kuari had figured out where he was by Mindtouch, then made his way to his bondmate, walking if he had to.
Kuari definitely deserved his rest, and Darian had no intention of disturbing it.
What was it that the girls said about not sleeping a week? That l’d miss the celebration? He chuckled softly, as he had a pretty good notion just what that celebration was going to be about. Not the homecoming; any “celebrations” for that reason would be between and among families and friends. Although Tayledras enjoyed a good festival as much as anyone, successful completion of what was essentially a fairly simple job by Hawkbrother standards would not warrant a Vale-wide party.
But he certainly knew what did.
Starfall warned them, but they wouldn’t believe him.
Nightwind and Snowfire had given in to the inevitable two years ago and become formally mated, much to Kelvren’s delight - deciding that they would much rather have a small, intimate ceremony with the closely bonded team. Starfall, however, had warned them both that neither Snowfire’s parents nor Nightwind’s Kaled’a’in kin were going to be cheated of “their” celebration. He had told them that it would probably signal an excuse to turn out the entire Vale and they had scoffed at the very idea, but it sounded as if Starfall was right.
I bet the Elders even make the two of them pledge all over again! Well, maybe this time Snowfire wouldn’t be so nervous about the whole thing. He’d kept fretting that Nightwind would change her mind at the last moment. After being pledged for two years, by now he ought to be sure of her!
Darian stretched, and consulted his stomach, which informed him that getting breakfast wasn’t going to be an emergency. And for once, he wasn’t waking up with a kink in his neck or a rock imprint in the middle of his back. I think I am really going to enjoy living in a Vale for a while!
He got up quietly, pulling back the curtain just enough so that he could see to dress. And there, next to the curtain, were two evenly stacked piles of clothing; one of his old things, neatly mended, and another of entirely new garments, such as he would never have dared wear in Errold’s Grove. These were genuine Tayledras garments, not the scout clothing in relatively drab colors that they’d all worn in Vademar so as not to startle the natives or betray themselves to the monsters they were hunting.
Darian loved bright colors, and always had. Given a choice, he’d have dressed as gaudily as any mountebank, so he was absolutely delighted to see the second pile of clothing waiting for him. Without hesitation he chose a pair of loose breeches in a dark blue silk, a shirt in a lighter blue, a sash woven in blue and silver-gray, and a knee-length suede vest in a shade between that of the breeches and that of the shirt. Soft, low boots of black deerskin took the place of his riding boots, and he stepped out of the guest rooms and into what he now thought of as the Great Room feeling quite the Hawkbrother dandy.
There was no one there at the moment, so he took a little food with him and went in search of Starfall or Snowfire, munching as he walked. He soon realized, however, that his dress was quite conservative compared with some of his Tayledras kin. For one thing, he didn’t have a single bit of jewelry or so much as one feather braided into his hair - and for another, there wasn’t even a thin edging of embroidery to lys shirt and vest, much less the overall patterns of embroideries some of them sported.
On the other hand, maybe he wasn’t quite ready for all that finery - 
Well, maybe just one or two feathers and a bit of trim.
There were two kinds of hertasi living in the Vale, as he well knew; the Tayledras, who were mostly shy and invisible, and the Kaled’a’in, who Were mostly very visible and quite outgoing. When he finally spotted one of the latter - one not in the middle of some other task, for interrupting it would have been very rude - he asked it where Starfall and Snowfire might be found. In that amazing communication all hertasi shared, as if they didn’t merely have Mindspeech but actually shared a single mind, it told him after a moment of contemplation that Snowfire was engaged in private business, but Starfall was available, and where to find him.
“Many thanks,” he told it, as it looked up its long snout at him, its big eyes much graver than Ayshen’s ever were. “And please thank the others for their care of my baggage and wardrobe last night. I really didn’t have anything suitable for the Vale.”
Now the little lizard-creature’s eyes took on a sparkle of merriment. “The things we brought will do for now” it said, deprecatingly, “but when we come to know you, we will have something truly suitable for you later.”
Then it trotted off; Darian knew better than to try to tell it that there was no need to go to any more trouble, because it wouldn’t listen. Hertasi were like adolescent girls when it came to clothing, but with largely better taste and much better execution. Nothing made them happier than to dress humans up, as if their charges were so many oversized dolls. Their nimble fingers fairly flew through embroidery, and what was most remarkable of all, they never had to trace a pattern on the cloth beforehand. They replicated their designs or the patterns that others gave them as perfectly as the original.
Perhaps giant dolls are what we are to them in a way, he thought with amusement. And dressing us up is their hobby. I have the feeling that I’m going to be turned into a Tayledras peacock whether I’m ready for it or not, especially if there’s a celebration coming.
He followed the hertasi’s instructions with care, though it was all too easy to be distracted here. Every turn in the path brought something new: a huge tree trunk with a spiraling stair; boughs loaded with ekele; a tiny, private pool; a miniature water-garden complete with waterfall, lilies, and a colorful fish or two; a sculpture in stone or wood; a living sculpture in plants and flowers. It was all wonderful, and every new sight brought with it the wish that Justyn could have been there to share it with him.
At last he reached his goal - Starfall’s ekele, which was not in one of the huge trees that supported several in its branches, but was situated in a tree of more modest proportions and had only Starfall’s dwelling in it. The base of the tree sheltered a garden planted entirely in flowers of the most subtle and delicate shades of white and the palest of pastels, with a stream and a cascade trickling through it. Starfall himself sat on a low stone bench, enjoying what was either a late breakfast or an early lunch, his falcon in the air above him, playing a game of “tag” with a smaller bird.
This was a game that Darian had seen before, especially between two very agile, swift flyers. Each bird had a streamer of paper attached to one bracelet; the object was to keep your opponent from snatching pieces of it. The bird that lost every bit of its streamer first was the one who lost the game.
Starfall waved Darian over as soon as he emerged from the cover around the path. Darian walked across a lawn of grass as plush as a carpet and as thick, and joined him as Starfall’s bird ripped off a bit of his opponent’s streamer with an outstretched talon.
“I won’t ask you what you think of our home; your eyes said it all last night,” Starfall said, offering Darian a plate of small, savory meat pies. Darian politely took one, but only nibbled at it. “I have got a question for you, though; do you want a few days to settle in, or do you want to get to work right away? You have a great deal to learn in the way of magic, and now that we are in the Vale, it will be much easier to teach you.”
“I’d like a few days first, sir,” Darian replied. “Though if I’m going to have more teachers than just you, I’d like to meet them informally and talk with them a little before we start. I wouldn’t - ” he hesitated, choosing his words with care. “I wouldn’t want to have anyone teaching me who didn’t approve of my being here.”
“Nor any conflicts with personality; that can be disastrous in the teaching of magic.” Starfall nodded. “I think that can be arranged without too much difficulty. I will not be your primary teacher; I have taught you all that I can. You’ll have three temporary teachers, and I can certainly arrange for you to meet with them first. Eventually, though, you are going to need a whole new kind of teacher to match your talents, and I am afraid that you are not going to have much choice on that score. You need to learn from a Healing Adept, and there are not very many of those available to teach you. Healing Adepts, when teaching in their own path, never take on more than one student at a time, and we will have to find one who has not got a student at the moment.”
Darian’s heart sank a little at that, but he resolved that he would manage to get along with whomever Starfall found for him, for it would be poor repayment for all that the Tayledras had done for him to quarrel with the teacher they assigned him.
“I actually have someone in mind,” Starfall went on, watching Darian closely. “And I think this might be the best possible combination of student and teacher if he’s free - but I won’t hear from him for a while.”
“In that case,” Darian said bravely, “I hope that he is free. I trust your judgment.”
In the meantime, his mind buzzed with questions. Just what was a Healing Adept? Was he going to be an Adept when he was finished with his learning? How hard was it to learn? Who was this person that Starfall spoke of with such caution? Wasn’t he in k’Vala Vale?
“In the meantime,” Starfall went on, “we will continue your lessons as best we can. One thing that you can do, even while you are settling in, is simply to observe. One day soon - certainly before the year is out - you will be returning to your new Vale near your old village; what you do with it in the beginning will set the character of the place for all time. You should begin thinking now and planning now, even though many of your plans will not come to fruition in your lifetime.”
Darian nodded, for he had already had some thoughts along those lines. “Yes, sir,” he answered. “Is there anything else I should do?”
“Only that you should get to know the folk about you - and if you see a way to make yourself useful - ” Starfall stopped, and smiled. “Well, I know you, and I know that I needn’t tell you that. Enjoy a bit of a holiday; I think we will resume your studies after the celebration, for if you are going to take a break before you begin, there is going to be no point in starting anything before then.”
Since those words were clearly a dismissal, Darian thanked him, and left him alone again.
But from the twinkle in Starfall’s eyes when he mentioned the “celebration,” it was obvious that Darian’s guess was right.
And just wait until Nightwind and Snowfirefind out!

Four

How can a ceremony be so solemn and so unrestrained at the same time? Darian wondered, though he made very certain that his thought was tightly under shield. It wouldn’t do for anyone to “hear” him; especially not now.
He’d been standing here for what seemed like half the day, though it couldn’t have been even half a candlemark. As Snowfire’s nearest junior male relative, he had found himself drafted for what he could only think of as a High Temple Ceremony, with every bit of ornamentation and trimming a notoriously ornamental people could fabricate for the occasion. He was right up in the center of the circular raised platform that had been erected yesterday in the dyheli meadow, that being the only cleared place big enough to hold everyone. He wasn’t alone, of course; he was one of the “wedding party” along with Snowfire and Nightwind, three k’Vala Elders, Nightbird, and six independent witnesses unrelated to either of the two being joined.
Now, given the length and seriousness of the ceremony, and the importance everyone attached to it, the logical assumption would be that both the participants and the assembled Clans watching it would be as sober as presiding judges and solemn as a Herald in full formal array.
Wrong.
Even though the audience was quiet, so quiet Darian heard the occasional cough or shuffling of feet, they were all grinning from ear to ear, and it was obvious that they were barely repressing their exuberance long enough for the ceremony to conclude. Everyone seemed to consider the whole thing to be a grand joke at the expense of the long-suffering mated pair, and the best reason ever created for a no-effort-spared, Vale-wide festival.
The long-suffering aforementioned pair were not told what was in the offing until well after the preparations were complete, and it was obvious that the thing would take place even if the two main participants had to be carried to the Pledging Circle, bound hand and foot and gagged. There had, in fact, been a suggestion that holding the ceremony under such conditions would be rather amusing, though Snowfire leveled a glare at the person who’d made that suggestion that was so intense he was probably still putting balm on his burns.
One way or another, it was clear that Snowfire and Nightwind were not going to escape k’Vala’s plans for them. So they agreed to go through with it all, with acute embarrassment, but what Darian considered to be astounding good grace.
The wedding garments alone must have taken months to complete; if the hertasi enjoyed dressing up their human charges as if they were big dolls, this time they had dressed their subjects up as if they were a pair of sacred images!
Take Nightwind: part of her hair had been piled up on the top of her head and secured with beaded and bejeweled combs and skewers, while the rest was in braids entwined with more beads, tiny crystals, silver charms and silver chains. At the moment there was only a single feather in her hair - one of Kel’s, set in a silver-and-crystal clasp. Her robes, sky-blue and embroidered with silver gryphons (both realistic and representations of her badge), had a train so long it needed its own attendant to manage it, and sleeves that trailed along the ground nearly as far as the train. She probably wouldn’t have been able to move if Nightbird hadn’t been there to help carry and arrange the train. Around her neck were two necklaces. The first, a slender silver chain that encircled her neck so that its pendant lay in the hollow of her throat, was a simple one and the twin to one that Darian wore. The pendant was a hawk-talon, mounted in silver and accented with a blue moonstone. The second was a huge silver pectoral collar of thin flat strands twisted and twined about each other in a way that had made Darian dizzy when he’d tried to trace their routes earlier; her badge as a Silver Gryphon nestled into the front as if the collar had been made to accept it - which, obviously, it had. Her final ornament was a belt that fitted about her hips and hung to the ground in front, made of more flat silver strands which matched the pectoral collar.
Nor did she outshine Snowfire. His robes, though lacking the overlong train, were otherwise similar. Also in sky-blue and silver, his featured owls embroidered on them, and a silver-ornamented sleeve-glove that extended to his shoulder. He wore a pectoral and belt no less magnificent than Nightwind’s, but differing from hers in that his featured enormous blue moonstones cut to resemble the moon in her several phases instead of Silver Gryphon badges. Both of them wore blue-dyed deerskin boots with silver trimmings - not that anyone could actually see them under all that finery.
To Nightwind’s left stood her sister Nightbird and Kelvren; to Snowfire’s right stood Darian and, on a single enormous stand, Hweel, Huur, and Kuari, side by side. Had their bondbirds been smaller, both Darian and Snowfire would have been carrying them, but the weight of the eagle-owls rendered that impractical.
Nightbird wore a scaled-down version of her sister’s robes; with no train, sleeves that reached only down to the ground instead of trailing out behind her, embroidery only on the hems of the skirt and sleeves, and an embroidered belt instead of a silver one. Her jewelry was limited to her Silver Gryphon badge at her throat and a couple of silver hair sticks with pendants of blue moonstones. Darian, however, wore something entirely different from Snowfire’s outfit, although it was in the wedding colors of silver and blue.
Instead of a long, floor-length robe with hanging sleeves, he had on a blue silk shirt with a sliver-embroidered placket, long sleeves gathered into silvenembroidered cuffs, and a band of silver embroidery at the hem of the shirt. Like Snowfire’s robes, the embroidery on his shirt was of owls. The long shirt was held in at the waist, like a gathered tunic, with a silver belt worked with more owls. Beneath the shirt he wore absolutely plain blue silk breeches and boots similar to Snowfire’s, and over the entire outfit, he wore a blue, floor-length silk-velvet vest.
It was the vest that had touched and pleased him and brought a lump to his throat when he first saw it, for the hertasi had duplicated in silver the embroidery that his mother had done on that cherished but long-outgrown leather vest she had made for him.
Darian carried Snowfire’s weapons, his bow and quiver, climbing stick, and short sword and daggers. Nightbird carried Nightwind’s. This was supposed to show that both were warriors in their own right, and expected to defend each other on an equal basis. A rather nice touch, Darian thought, especially since there were no other weapons anywhere in sight - other than the occasional belt-dagger. Warrior to warrior, man to woman, mage to Healer, it was a good pairing.
The six witnesses were arranged behind all of them in a half-circle; consciously or unconsciously, they had each dressed in a different rainbow color and had arranged themselves in rainbow order - purple, red, orange, yellow, green, blue. The three Elders, one woman and two men, all with silver-white hair, all wore green with gold embroidery - one with a motif of suntail hawks, one with cooperihawks, and the third with peregrine falcons. None of the Elders or witnesses was closely related to either Snowfire or Nightwind; this was according to custom of long standing.
The audience - as much as Darian had been able to see of it - had turned out as splendidly arrayed as the witnesses and the Elders. It wasn’t all humans either, for there were plenty of hertasi in embroidered vests and sashes or curiously cut robes, dyheli bedecked with flower wreaths and ribbons, and gryphons in jeweled harnesses. There were kyree in attendance as well, but they flatly refused to bedeck themselves in anything, and amid the riot of color their gray fur left them blending with the shadows.
The ceremony began with the leftmost of the three Elders speaking first.
“Here stands before us this day, Nightwind k’Leshya, warrior, trondi‘irn of the Silver Gryphons, Healer among the Kaled’a’in,” Elder Leafspear declaimed. “Here stands before us Snowfire k’Vala, warrior and mage, co-leader of the first expedition into Valdemar, well known to all of us. These two wish to join together in sight of our clans, to be as a living bridge between k’Leshya and k’Vala. If there be any here who object to this joining, give tongue that we may hear and consider what you have to say.”
He waited a moment, but of course there was no objection - though Kel looked around so fiercely that anyone who might have considered doing so would instantly have reconsidered the idea as a very bad one. Perhaps that was the idea behind having such firm friends stand on the platform with you. . . .
“For this joining, Nightwind k’Leshya pledges to remain here, far from her birth-home, to bring her skills to k’Vala. For this joining, Snowfire k’Vala pledges to give her home, hearth, and hand, that she never feel the loss of her birth-home and all she has left behind. For this joining, the Elders of k’Vala and k’Leshya have sworn to honor these pledges in their stead, should ill luck befall either.”
He paused again for effect, then continued when virtually everyone nodded in agreement.
“The Vale is more than this place and its Heartstone; if the Heartstone were no more, if we sought another home, where we were would still be k’Vala. There is no k’Vala without the people; there is no Clan without all of us. Our strength is in our bonds to one another, and to make another bond strengthens us all. To make a bond between two so near in heart, yet so different in origin, makes both our clans stronger.”
When he was done, the rightmost Elder, Rainlance, picked up as smoothly as if they were one person and not three.
“This bond, this joining, is not meant to be a fetter. A joining is a partnership, not two people becoming one,” the second Elder said, though not as sternly as Starfall had said it the first time they took their vows. “Two minds cannot fuse, two souls cannot merge, two hearts cannot keep to the same time. If two are foolish enough to try this, one must overwhelm the other, and that is not love, nor is it compassion, nor responsibility. You are two who choose to walk the same path, to bridge the differences between you with love. You must remember and respect those differences and learn to understand them, for they are part of what made you come to love in the first place. Love is patient, love is willing to compromise - love is willing to admit it is wrong. There will be hard times; you must face them as bound warriors do, side by side, not using the weapon of your knowledge to tear at each other. There will be sadness as well as joy, and you must support one another through the grief and sorrow. There will be pain - but pain shared is pain halved, as joy shared is joy doubled, and you each must sacrifice your own comfort to share the pain of the other. And yet, you must do all this and manage to keep each other from wrong actions, for a joining means that you also pledge to help one another at all times. You must lead each other by example. Guide and be willing to be guided. Being joined does not mean that you accept what is truly wrong; being joined means that you must strive that you both remain in the light and the right. You must not pledge yourselves thinking that you can change each other. That is rankest folly, and disrespectful, for no one has the right to change another. You must not pledge yourselves thinking that there will be no strife between you. That is fantasy, for you are two and not one, and there will inevitably come conflict that it will be up to you to resolve. You must not pledge yourselves thinking that all will be well from this moment on. That is a dream, and dreamers must eventually wake. You must come to this joining fully ready, fully committed, and fully respectful of each other.”
Now the third Elder, Silverswan, took up the thread of ceremony - and a silken cord of silver and blue. Night-wind extended her right hand, and Snowfire his left, and the Elder bound them together with the cord.
“Now you will no longer fear the storm,” the Elder said, in ringing tones, “for you find shelter in each other. Now the winter cannot harm you, for you warm each other with love. Now when strength fails, you will be the wind to each other’s wings. Now the darkness holds no danger, for you will be the light to each other’s path. Now you will defy despair, for you will bring hope to each other’s heart. Now there will be no more loneliness, for there will always be a hand reaching out to aid you when all seems darkest. Where there were two paths, there is now one. May your days together be long upon the earth, and each day blessed with joy in each other.”
With their hands still bound together, Snowfire carefully took a silver hair clasp he had been holding in his right hand, one with two feathers hanging from it - one of Hweel’s and one of Huur’s - and clasped it onto the elaborate construction that was Nightwind’s hair. At the same time, she fastened a similar clasp with one of Kel’s smaller feathers into his hair with her left hand. That had been a rather clever touch; Nightwind had no bondbird, of course, but everyone agreed) that her bond with Kel certainly was of the same order: j
Then, the ceremony finally over, they turned to face the crowd and as the witnesses parted so that the audience could see them clearly, raised their bound hands above their heads.
The cheer that erupted literally shook leaves and blossoms out of the trees, showering them both with fragrant petals. More flowers flew at them from the audience and dropped onto their heads from the talons of bondbirds, who seemed to take a great deal of pleasure out of picking a target and hitting it. Flowers were everywhere, the air so thick with them that it looked like a blizzard. Nightwind and Snowfire were exempt from the pelting, but Darian had to put up a hand to fend off all the blossoms intended for his head. Beneath the storm of flowers, the pair paused long enough for a rather heated kiss - a sure sign that though they’d been bonded for two years, they hadn’t become bored with each other!
No one could have possibly enjoyed a party in those cumbersome ceremonial outfits; however, the Tayledras had long since solved that problem. The six witnesses stepped forward and removed the cord holding the pair’s hands together, cutting it into six pieces and each taking one as a physical token that the marriage had been made. Should they ever decide to dissolve the joining, the six pieces would have to be retrieved and burned in another ceremony. Once the ceremonial cord was taken off their hands, Nightwind and Snowfire simply touched hidden clasps and stepped out of their outer ceremonial robes, leaving them in the hands of the witnesses, who had been waiting to take them. They didn’t have to hold the garments for long; in a moment, previously invisible hertasi whisked them away - to be shortly displayed on stands during the celebration for the admiration of anyone who wanted to examine them. From this moment on, the robes became the heirloom works of art they truly were, and would be displayed on the walls of Snowfire’s ekele. Now looking far more comfortable wearing shirts and breeches just like Darian’s, they joined the throng of well-wishers. Meanwhile, more hertasi materialized among the crowd with trays of every kind of finger food and drink imaginable. Ayshen appeared at Darian’s elbow to take Snowfire’s weapons, the three owls flew up into the boughs so that the perch could be removed, and a group of musicians took over the ceremonial platform. Darian was amazed to see that one of the musicians was a creature that could only be a member of the tervardi, the bird-people. He’d never seen one until now, for although the tervardi were traditional allies of the Tayledras, there was no colony of them near k’Vala Vale.
Darian tried to stare without staring; he could not tell if the tervardi was male or female, but if coloration followed the same pattern as in birds, and if the feathers weren’t painted as some of the gryphons’ were, then it was probably male. Its head, covered with scarlet-and-black feathers with a hint of a crest, had a definite beak rather than lips. The arms were feathered as well - wings, but nonfunctional ones, too abbreviated to be of any use even in gliding. There was a broad, feathered tail, and it wore a type of wrapped garment that left the tail free.
The musical group consisted of the tervardi, two hertasi playing drums, and four Tayledras who played harp, gittern, flute, and some sort of horn, respectively. It was soon evident, once they struck up a melody, that the tervardi was their vocalist.
It was also evident why; no human voice could duplicate the haunting sounds that emerged from the tervardi’s fluttering throat as it broke into song.
Havens! Darian thought, listening with his mouth agape. No wonder they never sing for anyone but Hawkbrothers! They‘d be carried off before you could say “soprano “.’
“There was a thriving trade in tervardi entertainment-slaves in the distant past, until the survivors managed to gather under the protection of’the Vales,” a voice said softly behind him. He turned, to’find himself gazing into the eyes of a second tervardi, this one drably plumaged in black and red-brown. Well, “drab” compared with the first one’s black and scarlet; her markings were quite lovely, and if he hadn’t already seen the male, he’d have thought her quite striking.
The enormous eyes, so dark a brown as to seem black, gazed back at him with no expression that he could read. “It was easy for the slavers to get what they wished from us,” the female (the singer’s mate?) continued, her voice a softer version of the singer’s though no less melodious. “After all, what male would not sing, when his captors threatened to torture his mate and female chicks if he refused?”
She saw that I’m not born Tayledras, and she’s testing me - but what should I say? “What song could sound sweet under those conditions?” he countered, after a moment of blankness. “Whoever would order such an atrocity had no heart. The only songs worth hearing are those sung in happiness and freedom.”
He had only thought that he could not read the tervardi; now he realized that she had the same feather-language as the bondbirds. When she first spoke, her feathers had been slicked down with tension; now she relaxed, the feathers around her beak puffed up, and her face looked rounder and softer than it had a moment ago.
“You speak wisely for one so young,” she replied, ith trilling chuckle - or a chuckling trill. “What bird fly you?”
“Kuari, fledged of Huur and Hweel,” he replied promptly, and held out his arm, with a quick Mindtouch to Kuari himself. He braced himself for the weight as Kuari came in, and ducked his head a little to avoid the impact of those huge, silently powerful wings. The only warning that Kuari was near came when the wind his wingstrokes created made a second storm of all the flower petals scattered about.
His arm strained as Kuari settled gently on the guard, and the great talons closed carefully about the leather. The tervardi trilled something at Kuari, who cocked his head to listen, then replied in a series of soft hoots like those made to nestlings. Then he closed his eyes and reached out with his beak to preen a strand of Darian’s hair.
The tervardi chuckled again and relaxed further, her facial feathers puffed up so that her beak nearly disappeared. She held out a four-taloned hand - three long claws and one short and opposed, exactly like a thumb. Darian took it without fear.
“Rrrillia k’Treva,” she said.
“Darian Firkin k’Valdemar k’Vala,” he replied.
“A long name,” she observed. “You have not changed it in Tayledras fashion?”
He shrugged. “I thought about it, but - Tayledras take new use-names when they change, and I haven’t changed, not really. I’m still Darian, with more knowledge and more memories, and a bit more common sense, I hope. I have more skills now, and I’ve got more friends. But when you come down to it, I’m still myself. I’ve grown, but I haven’t changed.”
“Then wear the name you are, Darian Firkin k’Valdemar k’Vala,” she told him firmly. Suddenly, with the lightning change of topic he was to come to associate with tervardi, asked, “And what think you of Sarrrsee’s singing?”
He waved his hands helplessly at that. “Unbelievable!” he finally managed, “Indescribable! I could listen to him all night!”
“Well, with pauses for refreshment, that opportunity you will have, passager,” she said, clearly very pleased with his reaction. “Indeed, on so romantic an occasion, we are to sing courting ballads, we two. And that, for outsiders to hear, is rare.” .
He bowed, hoping that also would please her. “Then I hope you will allow me to than you in place of my brother Snowfire and his mate, who will be enchanted - and overwhelmed - by the honor you do them.”
Now she laughed aloud, a silvery gurgle of sound, and spread her arm pinions. “Oh, you are wasted among the mages, passager,” she crowed. “Such delicate speeches mark you as an Elder afore the time!”
She didn’t give him a chance to reply to that, turning away instead and taking the platform with the other musicians.
Somehow, the group of musicians managed to go from the first song straight into the next without pause to consult one another - although it was entirely possible they were using Mindtouch instead. The second melody must have been one of the “courting songs,” for first the male sang, then the female, trading melodies and replies until the two strains joined in unexpected harmonies. Darian gathered Kuari to his chest and absently scratched the owl’s back and neck - much to Kuari’s pleasure - while he listened with his eyes closed to be able to better concentrate on the music.
This song came to a definite end with a moment of silence followed by applause and cheers. Darian opened his eyes again to see the two tervardi bowing slightly in acknowledgment - and the female looked directly at him and deliberately winked before turning her attention back to the rest.
The musicians launched into a piece that was purely instrumental, and Darian gave Kuari a boost back into the air so that he could rejoin the other bondbirds in the canopy. Then he wandered off, intending to find something a little more substantial than the tiny savories being handed around by the hertasi. He hadn’t eaten since he woke up; Ayshen had kicked him out of bed far too early, and he’d been running errands since. He’d really felt too keyed up to eat anyway, but now that everything was safely over, and nothing disastrous had occurred, he was starving.
And a couple of tiny bites of sausage-stuffed pastry weren’t going to take the edge off his hunger either.
The most logical place to look first was the guest lodge - and going there had the added advantage that he could take off his wedding finery and put on something he wouldn’t have to worry about ruining. Once he made his way to the point where the crowd thinned out a little, he made decent progress to the far side of the Vale - although the temptations to stop were many. Besides the group of musicians from k’Treva Vale that included the two tervardi, there were other musicians from k’Vala scattered here and there, carefully positioned so that no group’s music interfered with the music from another individual or group. Darian passed three individual musicians and two groups on his way to the guest lodges; the groups had set up in spaces big enough to allow for dancing. One group was playing a slow-paced, couples dance, and the second a faster, heavily syncopated group dance.
As he had suspected, the hot pools were in use, though as it was early in the day, they were not heavily crowded. It was a bit of a surprise to see the number of people swimming, though.
That isn’t my idea of what you do at a wedding - well, maybe I’m just being provincial.
Wonderful aromas met his nose before he even reached the door of the guest lodges, and the tempting array of food spread out there made him waver in his resolution to change before he ate. Only the fact that his favorite foods were always the messiest to eat made him stick to it, even though the scents seemed to follow him down the corridors and into his room to taunt him.
He changed quickly, retaining only the new silver belt from his wedding costume, andssprinted back down the corridors, tracking the scents with his nose in the air like a hungry hound.
A short time later, blissfully nibbling on a square of pastry wrapped around a filling of finely chopped nuts and honey, he felt ready to join the rest of the Vale. He strolled out into the open and started back toward the dy-heli meadow.
Darian stopped long enough to listen to one of the solo musicians, then obtained something to drink from a passing hertasi and went on to his destination. Arriving just in time for the tervardi to begin singing again, he sat himself down near the platform on the soft grass and proceeded to lose himself for some undefined length of time while the music created fantasies in his mind.
When he emerged from the spell that the music cast on him, he found that he had company. Beside him, with her blue eyes still filled with the dreams that tervardi singing sent into her mind, was Summerdance.
He had not seen her for the last few days, but that was no great surprise, as they had both been working on the wedding preparations and their errands hadn’t overlapped. In addition, she was apprenticed to Steelmind, the specialist in plants who was the caretaker (among other things) of most of the garden spots in the Vale, including the herb garden. As a consequence, she hadn’t had any free time over the past three or four days.
He was happy to see her at last, and glad that he had hanged into what had been his “best” outfit until he got the one for the wedding. She certainly looked spectacular, gowned in something silken that flowed over her, a waterfall of luminous fabric in several shades of green. She wore as ornaments a collar of braided gold, silver, and copper wire, with strands of crystal beads and feathers braided into her black hair.
She smiled at him, and nodded her head at the platform. “What do you think?” she asked. “This is the fourth time I’ve heard this group; they travel among the Vales, and we try to get them to come once every year or so, but this is the first time they’ve come for a pledging.”
He tried to come up with enough superlatives and failed. “It’s the kind of singing you hear in dreams and know you can’t reproduce when you wake up,” he said finally. “There’s nothing like it.”
“And nothing more beautiful, except when a tervardi flock sings in chorus, and I’ve only heard that once,” she agreed. “I had to go to k’Treva for that, but it was worth the journey. I got to see them dance, besides singing. Do you dance, at all, in Valdemar?”
“Every chance we get,” he laughed. “But if you’re asking if I, personally, dance - I do, and I learned a couple of dances from the team while I was with them, too. Is this an invitation?”
“Well, the group is taking a break, so there isn’t anything going on here for a while,” she pointed out. “And it’s a lot more fun to dance when you have a partner. Round dances are all right for children, but couple dances and group dances are livelier and more interesting.”
“That’s the truth,” he agreed as he stood up, then extended a hand to her to help her to her feet. He took the lead, since he knew where the dancing circles had been set up, and as luck would have it, the first one they came to was just starting a new set as they arrived.
He soon saw how she had gotten her use-name; she as quick, graceful, light on her feet, and evidently untiring. He had no intention of quitting before she was ready, and found himself panting and with a raging thirst by the time the musicians paused for a break themselves. He was half afraid that she’d suggest finding one of the other dancing circles, but she took pity on him. Laughing, she led him to the side of the circle and left him for a moment, only to return with cool drinks for both of them.
He didn’t know any of the people they’d been dancing with, but they all knew who hie was - not so difficult since he was the only outsider in the Clan! With his brown hair and eyes he couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else, not when the only variation on blue eyes, golden skin, and black hair among Tayledras or Kaled’a’in was the blue eyes, golden skin, and white hair of mages who’d worked with Heartstone and node magic.
Oh, not quite true - some scouts, if they had white hair, dyed it in patterns spring through autumn to camouflage themselves. But none of them had plain brown hair.
For the most part, his erstwhile dancing partners were just as winded as he was, and the hertasi circulating among them with more of the refreshing mint-flavored drink soon found themselves emptyhanded. Summerdance was the only one who still had breath to talk; she introduced him to the other dancers, but he promptly forgot most of their names. He had just about caught his breath and cooled down when the musicians began again and she drew him back into the circle for another round.
It wasn’t until after the third round was complete that she professed herself tired, and by that time his legs were getting wobbly. When she suggested a hot soak, he was only too happy to agree.
But when she led him, not in the direction of the communal pools, but down a tiny, vine-shadowed path that threaded between trees away from the sounds of celebration, he started to wonder if she had something more than a soak in mind.
Steady on, he told himself. She just might want some privacy rather than the mob.
But things were certainly promising to be interesting. . . .
She stopped at a place where the path appeared to end, and parted a curtain of flowering vines. On the other side of the vines lay a bubbling pool, one fed, obviously, by the same hot springs that fed the communal pools. Beside the pool on a small stone bench was a thick pile of towels - well, why not? It wasn’t as if they were going to get rained on in the middle of a Vale!
“Here, isn’t this better than jostling for a space with everyone else?” she asked, as she slipped unselfconsciously out of her dress and into the pool without making so much as a splash. He lost no time in following her example; the water was deliciously hot, and all of his tired muscles melted under its influence.
Ah, there is no comparison with Errold’s Grove! he thought blissfully, as he closed his eyes and slumped until his chin touched the surface of the pool. Here I am, entirely alone with Summerdance, no one will care what we do or don’t do - she’s of age, I’m of age, that’s all there is to it. Back home, if anybody found me with a girl like this, her father would be hunting me down with a pack of male relatives and her mother would be making wedding arrangements.
He took a peek out of one eye at Summerdance; apparently she wasn’t as inexhaustible as she’d been at pains to appear, for she was relaxing in the water with the same expression he’d been wearing. Beads of moisture collected on her forehead, and the hair around her face started to curl in the heat and damp.
“Where are we, exactly?” he asked, having only a vague notion of how far they had gone.
“At the farthest end of the Vale. My ekele’s up there.” She pointed straight up, and he followed her pointing finger with his eyes. Squinting upward through the rising team, past vines and foliage obscuring everything, he made out a bit of staircase against a trunk, and what might have been a piece of floor. “I got tired of having to tramp forever to get a hot soak - or to have to tramp forever after I got a hot soak. When we got a reasonable amount of magic back, and I got to pick something I wanted, I picked this.”
“Good choice,” he said, closing his eyes and leaning back again.
But not before he’d managed to find a fresh blossom growing within reach.
Now came the moment for internal debate. So, do I offer her a flower? In Tayledras terms, especially in a situation like this one, offering Summerdance a flower would express without words not just his admiration for her, but that he wanted to share decidedly more than just her platonic company. Chased, rather than chaste, as the saying went. It wasn’t that he was debating whether he wanted to offer her a flower, he was debating the etiquette of it. This was her pool, beneath her ekele; her territory, so to speak. So, did he make the first overture, or would it be polite to wait and see if she did? But what if she was waiting for him to express an interest? What if she would be disappointed and hurt if he didn’t make the offer?
Of course, all this might be innocent, simply companionable. But among the Tayledras, being offered a flower didn’t imply acceptance, and she could always turn him down.
I’m thinking too much. He reached out and picked the flower without opening his eyes, held it for a moment, then turned toward her. “Ah, Summerdance?”
He opened his eyes as he spoke.
Only to stare at her, seeing that she had just turned and was offering him a flower at the same moment.
They stared at each other for a long breath, then broke nto helpless laughter, leaning into each other’s arms for support.
Then, when their laughter faded, they found other things to share.
Sunset, normally all but imperceptible beneath the huge trees, was spectacular from Summerdance’s ekele high in the boughs of a tree on the edge of the clearing - and they were both in a position to appreciate and pay attention to the sight by then. Still, neither Darian nor Summerdance was prepared to end the celebration quite so early, so they collected themselves and their belongings and rejoined the dancing just as dusk fell. Special illuminations had been planned for after dark, effects that required magic, and Darian was happy to see that they appeared on schedule. Even though he wasn’t in charge of the entertainment, he had something of a proprietary interest in it.
The main event was a display of underwater lighting, with constantly changing colors, beneath the cascades of one of the more elaborate waterfall-arrangements. It had three levels of falling water, with each of the three levels subdivided into additional cascades, all plunging into a small, but deep, pool, frequently used for acrobatic play and roughhousing. No one swam there tonight. Mage-lights glowed behind the falling water from within recesses in the rocks, and one in the bottom of the pool turned the foaming water into a froth of light. The clever mage who’d planned this was at hand to control the changing colors, so that no sequence was ever repeated.
“You know,” Summerdance remarked, as they spotted Nightwind and Snowfire among those admiring the cascades, “I think it’s just as well that they already got their real pledging over with while all of you were out there - ” she waved her hand vaguely in the direction of Valdemar. “If this had been their real pledging instead of an excuse for an enormous party, they’d have been missing all of his, or else they’d feel as if they had to pretend to enjoy it when all the while they really just wanted to be alone together. As it is now, this is just a celebration that happened to involve them, but it’s more like an anniversary party. So they can relax and enjoy it along with everyone else.”
He realized at once that she was probably right; once Nightwind and Snowfire had given in to popular demand, they’d really managed to be quite relaxed about the entire occasion, far more relaxed than anyone else was, in fact. “Very perceptive!” he exclaimed. “I wouldn’t have thought of that, but I think you’re right!”
Summerdance shrugged. “I know my cousin,” she pointed out. “Look how utterly calm he’s been since they got out of their robes, and how he’s relaxed and gone along with the fun! They know their pairing is solid and is going to last. They don’t feel as if they have to prove how happy they are together to an audience of well-wishers, and now that the ceremony is over, they know they don’t have to be the center of everything anymore.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was you who was the trondi‘irn in training and not Nightbird,” he teased, as the lights beneath the waterfall cascades changed slowly from blue to purple, en masse. “How did you figure all that out?”
She elbowed him. “Just because I’m apprenticed to Steelmind, that doesn’t mean I think like a plant,” she chided. “How do you think he got the use-name of Steelmind, hmm? He watches everything and everyone, and doesn’t say much, but when he does, it’s worth listening to. He’s quite good at figuring people out, after all that observation. I’d like to think I’ve been learning that from him, too.”
“I think you can bet on it,” he told her seriously, and was rewarded with a sparkling smile. “I also think you’ve got to be getting hungry by now.”
“And you’re observant as well, or else you heard my stomach growling; let’s see what new goodies have been put out. There’s bound to be supper dishes by now.”
She dashed off, casting a glance behind to see if he was following, and he responded to the challenge. They raced each other down overgrown, little-used paths to the guest lodges. Summerdance had a distinct advantage because she knew the Vale so well, but he had longer legs, so they burst out of the undergrowth neck-and-neck, and found themselves part of a goodly crowd of equally hungry folk crowding into the entrance to the main hall.
By now Darian’s appetite had returned with a vengeance, and the wonderful aromas nearly drove him to distraction. A real meal had been spread out this time, with hot and cold dishes to choose from, instead of just snacks. Darian motioned Summerdance to go in ahead of him, feeling as if he would make a poor showing if he let hunger overcome manners. They took plates made of flat bread from a stack waiting at the side of the table, and heaped them with their choices; at Summerdance’s urging, Darian took portions of things he didn’t recognize. They stood together for a moment, looking around to see if there was anyone here that they knew, then spotted Nightbird. She sat in the middle of a congenial group of young men and women, most of whom were strangers to him. A few of Nightbird’s companions were younger than Darian was, but most were about the same age.
As soon as they’d spotted her, she noticed them, and waved them over. They found a couple of unused cushions and sat down with the rest of the group.
“Everyone, this is Dar’ian,” Nightbird said, giving his name the Tayledras pronunciation. “Dar’ian, pay attention,” she continued, with a giggle. “I’m only going to introduce people once!”
He paid quite careful attention to their names as Nightbird introduced her friends, and fixed names properly with the faces in his memory.
Meanwhile, he ate, enjoying all the new flavors. It was all quite different, except the thick slices of meat - and even that was spiced in a way he’d never tasted before. Round puffs of pastry proved to be breaded and fried slices of vegetable, a green paste that Summerdance had greeted with enthusiasm was probably from another vegetable of some kind and made a fantastic garnish on just about everything, little red. squares were not sweet, as he’d expected, but crisp and jjeppery. He wished he’d taken more of the flat round bread; it was wonderful when wrapped around the meat.
He spent more time listening than talking; for one thing, it was the first time he’d seen so many of his age in one place. For another, he was interested in what they did, since no one was ever idle in a Vale to his knowledge.
This was where he got some surprises. He had somehow gotten the vague idea that most Hawkbrothers were mages - that Snowfire and the other scouts were the exception. In a few moments, he learned that his perception was backward.
“So what’s your next assignment?” Nightbird asked a group of three sitting close together in a way that suggested close friendship rather than an amatory grouping.
“You’ll laugh,” said one of the two girls. “Mushroom hunting. The morels are coming up now, and the cooks want plenty.”
Nightbird didn’t laugh, she shrugged. “You can’t always be the ones patrolling the border,” she pointed out with inescapable logic. “Especially not with seven scout groups in training at the same time. You were just lucky on your first assignment, and got the exciting one. Besides, the cooks aren’t the only ones who want morels!”
“Exactly so,” agreed an older boy. “As I can tell you from my training last year. We spend more time hunting game and finding fungi than we do in patrols - and much, much more time in boring, uneventful patrols than in actually fighting anything dangerous.” He laughed. “As Whitehawk says, ’six weeks of boredom punctuated by half a candlemark of sheer terror.’ I think I’ll volunteer for the next Valdemar expedition; at least they saw some action.”
“Wouldn’t mushroom hunting be more in the line of hertasi?” Darian asked.
“Not really,” the boy replied. “The hertasi have plenty of work here in the Vale, and we can hunt mushrooms and check up on the territory inside our border at the same time. Despite what they might tell you, they can’t do every thing!”
Darian discovered from the subsequent conversation that a little less than half of them, male and female both, were scouts or scouts-in-training - a generic job that included hunting and gathering foodstuffs found growing wild in the woods outside the Vale as well as patrolling the boundaries of k’Vala territory. Two were mages - farther along in their studies than he was, but since they had begun earlier, and had certainly applied themselves better, that was only to be expected. One was a weaver and worker with textiles, which rather surprised him, as he’d gotten the impression that the hertasi did most of the crafting work.
But when he ventured to ask, he found out that the “trades,” so to speak, were practiced by as many Tayledras as hertasi. “Isn’t that dull compared with being a scout?” he asked tentatively.
The weaver laughed. “You heard the others. Now that we’ve got most of the nasties cleared out, and it’s easy enough to discourage poachers, it’s scouting that’s boring! I love what I do, and my teacher is Silverbird, the weaver who made the wedding robes. How could anybody be bored, learning to weave works of art like that? I even get to spend as much time in the woods outside the Vale as any scout, because I’m also working with Azurehart, the dyer, and we’re always looking for new colors.”
“It’s just as good doing metal work,” added another. “The hertasi haven’t got the strength to make anything large, or anything out of iron or steel. If you want a sword with a proper blade of twelve-folded steel, it has to be one of us who makes it - and who could get tired of that sort of work?”
“The hertasi can’t blow glass either. It’s too dangerous for them to get that close tp.(the furnaces,” said a girl with a profusion of scarlet-anoli-gold glass beads strung on the hair of one side of her head. “The glass work has to be done by humans.”
The others chimed in with similar praise for their professions, and he now learned that most of the Hawkbrothers of k’Vala were actually craftspeople, with only minor abilities at magic. In this little group alone, there were the weaver and smith, both in training, as well as Nightbird who trained to care for the gryphons, Summerdance who was going to be a plant worker, and the girl glassblower and a young man who was already a practicing fletcher. A Vale was truly a largely self-sufficient organism; certainly as self-sufficient as Errold’s Grove had ever been.
After they’d all finished eating, the group somehow stayed together, and went off to virtually take over one of the dancing circles. At that point, Summerdance found a partner with as much energy as she, and relinquished Darian’s company to Nightbird. Since Nightbird had not yet heard the tervardi sing, and Darian’s lessons had not included the complicated couple dances the others were performing, he went with her back to the platform and happily sat through two more sessions of their music.
Finally, though, the long day began to catch up with him, and he caught himself yawning.
“I’m ready for more dancing,” Nightbird declared, when the music group took another break. She glanced over at him, caught him in mid-yawn, and giggled. “You look more like you’d rather be asleep.”
Since she’d carefully said “asleep” and not “in bed,” he took the comment at face value and not as another invitation. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand and grinned sheepishly. “Well,” he temporized, “I was up at the break of day, and running from the time my feet hit the ground.”
She laughed. “I’ll tell you what; partner me for one dance set, and then we’ll see how you feel.”
He nodded agreement and helped her to her feet; they wound their way across the Vale until, quite by accident, they came across a third dance circle and joined it. This one, populated by people of Snowfire’s generation, wasn’t quite as rowdy as the one that Summerdance had gravitated to, but it was lively enough for Darian.
Once again, these were dances that Darian had not learned, but they were easy enough to follow. This was a cross between a couple dance and a round dance, with each couple performing the moves of the set in turn while the others kept time, clapping. The dancers put Nightbird and Darian at the end of the line, which gave him seven chances to learn the next move before he had to do it. The dances moved briskly, with some pretty acrobatic moves as the dances grew more complicated with each new tune. There was quite a lot of twirling, turning, and lifting one’s partner, and Darian found himself running out of energy after a while. So did Nightbird, too, evidently; after that one set of dances, she retired from the field, declaring herself defeated by her own lagging energy. “I’m for a swim,” she decided after a moment. “What about you?”
A swim seemed like a good idea; a fine way to cool off after all that dancing. Conveniently enough, the large swimming pond turned out to be just on the other side of the trees and bushes screening the dance circle; Night-bird just led him around the corner, and there it was.
There were other people at the swimming area who’d had the same idea, but the place was quiet and only dimly lit with flickering lanterns with colored paper shades, and no one seemed bothered by two more joining them. Single swimmers drifted across the still surface with leisurely, slow strokes, barely making a splash, or floated on their backs, feathering the water with gentle movements of only their hands.
Nightbird slipped out of her gown while he was still letting his eyes adjust tdjthe relative darkness, and she plunged into the water without a backward look. He peeled off his clothing and followed, taking sensuous enjoyment in the silken feeling of the cool water on his hot skin. He concentrated only on making as little sound and turbulence as possible, to preserve the tranquil atmosphere.
Darian crossed the pond a few times, then the last of his energy ran out completely. Spotting a pile of towels and robes at the side of the pond, he climbed out, dried off, and helped himself to a loose, comfortable robe from the piles beside the pool.
Most of the other swimmers were gone, leaving the quiet pond, the soft light, and the sound of music drifting over from the dancing circle. Darian yawned. I don’t want to go to bed yet - but I’d like to find a place to lie down and rest for a little bit without getting in anyone’s way.
It occurred to him that there should be several lounging places here, tents made of insect netting draped over frames with flat cushions inside, just large enough for one or two to rest in after swimming, or for child watchers to sit in while keeping an eye on little ones playing in the pond. After a moment, he found several, tucked into a curve of foliage. They were all empty, and he parted the netting and settled himself down inside one, feeling luxuriously indolent but no longer sleepy - or so he thought.
The next thing he knew, it was quite light outside his shelter, and there were hertasi moving about, picking up the odd plate, cup, or pair of breeches left beside the water. He felt entirely rested, so he must have slept soundly and well - so soundly that, whatever had gone on around him, it hadn’t disturbed him in the least.
And, as he had expected, Kuari had found him. Apparently baffled by the enshrouding folds of the insect netting, the eagle-owl perched on the frame of the shelter, vaguely visible through the fog of netting.
He found the opening in the net and fought clear of it, shaking the frame just enough to wake Kuari. The bond-bird opened one eye halfway, then roused all his feathers with a pleased expression when he saw that it was Darian and he was awake.
:Hunt?: Kuari asked eagerly, his huge golden eyes staring unblinking at Darian. :Real hunt, not stupid coop birds?:
:Poor Kuari. It has been a while since we went hunting, hasn’t it?: he said with sympathy that was in no small part induced by the fact that he himself felt very good. :Come on, I’ll get changed. You go see if you can get Kel to go along, and we‘ll go for a real hunt. :
Kuari hooted with enthusiasm, and shoved off from the frame, which threatened to topple over as he left it. Darian saved it from imminent collapse, then gathered his robe around him, picked up his clothing from where he’d left it, and trotted for his quarters.
When he emerged from the door of the guest lodges, clean and dressed in one of his old sets of scout clothing, with a bow and quiver in his hand and a light pack on his back, Kelvren and Kuari were waiting for him. Kuari was fluffed up and standing on a branch with one foot tucked under his feathers, and Kelvren posed in a beam of sunlight.
The young gryphon had actually grown a bit since Darian had first met him four years ago, adding muscle to his chest and legs. His head had matured as well; definitely aquiline, it no longer had that faintly “unfinished” look that young eagles and adolescent gryphons shared.
Every gleaming, golden-brown feather was neatly in place, from his ear-tufts to the tip of his tail; his talons were freshly honed, and his bright eyes gleamed with sheer delight in living. Obviously, though others might be suffering from a little too much self-indulgence last night, Kel wasn’t one of their number.
“Wind to thy wingsss!” Kelvren saluted him genially, his eyes flashing with good humor and eagerness. “And I hope yourrr courrting wass asss ssssuccesssful asss mine!”
Darian laughed; Kelvren was as much a hedonist at heart as any other gryphon, and as frankly uninhibited. “And if it was?” he asked.
“Then neitherrr of usss will have complaintss about ourrr homecoming,” Kel replied with a wink. “Kuarri sssaid we hunt; that iss a good thought. Nothing much getss done the day afterrr a celebrrrration, even the herrr-tassi do not do much but pick up a bit. No one cookss, mealss will be what wassn’t consssumed yessterday. Sssince I will make my own kill, I will make my own choice, and it would be good to get sssome frrresssh wild meat.”
“That’s essentially what Kuari said, and I’m all for it.” Darian hefted his bow and quiver of arrows by way of confirmation. “Where should we head for?”
“Norrth of the Vale entrance,” Kel replied promptly. “I hearrd good rrreporrtss of the hunting in that dirrrection.”
“I packed up some of the leftovers from the feast for myself, so we don’t have to come back until dark - how do we post word of where we’re going?” When he and Kel had gone out hunting together back in Valdemar, that had been the inflexible rule - post where you are going, and be back no later than a candlemark after dark. That way, if something happened to you, people would know that you were overdue, and what direction you’d been heading when you ran into trouble.
“I alrrready did,” Kel assured him. “With Firrrelance the chief trrrrondi‘irrrn, with Peluverrr, the seniorrr grrryphon, and with both theirrr herrrtasi. Ssso sssince you have prrrovissionsss, we can go!”
He was obviously itching to be on the wing, because as soon as he had finished speaking, he launched himself up into the sky, sending clouds of dust and debris in all directions. Darian was used to his impatience by now, so he sent Kuari up after him with a nudge of his thoughts, then followed both of them afoot, a little eager and impatient himself.
“Ahhhhhh - ” Kelvren spread his wings and legs out in the sun, flattening himself against the soft meadow grass, and started to get the glazed, half-conscious look he always wore when he was seriously sunbathing. He looked drunk, or drugged, or stunned, or - 
“You look like a gryphon-rug,” Darian observed, layering meat, cheese, watercress, and sliced peppers between two rounds of the flatbread he’d first tasted last night. He set out more of the honey-and-nut pastries on a broad leaf, and propped his flask of cool spring water beside them. Kelvren turned his head just enough to give him a disgusted look.
“What a vile notion,” the gryphon replied. “Wherrre do you get thossse perrrverrrted ideasss?”
Darian took a hearty mouthful of his meal, and made a point of chewing it thoughtfully before he swallowed it and responded. “Mostly from the fact that you’ve flattened yourself out until that is exactly what you look like. The only other comparisons I could make would be a lot less flattering than that one. The only thing round about you right now is your crop.”
Since an entire young wild pig now resided in that crop, it might well bulge. Kelvren had not only been successful, he’d had just enough of a chase to give him some excitement, followed by a fine, clean kill.
Kuari had been just as successful, snaring an unwary tree-hare, and he drowsed on top of a stump in the shade of a small tree on the edge of this clearing.
The meadow itself, formed when one of the enormous Pelagiris trees toppled over and took several of its brethren with it, made a fine glace for everyone to rest. Darian was going to come home just as much of a mighty hunter as the others, though he had no wish to eat his catch raw. He had four fine young brush-grouse, a delicacy that everyone enjoyed; he intended to present Starfall with one, Snowfire with two, and keep the fourth for himself. There was no reason at all why he couldn’t roast it on a spit for dinner tonight; he knew how to cook, and maybe Summerdance might be interested in sharing his meal. She’d probably want some of the handsome feathers, too, so he’d remember to save them.
He’d hung them to bleed them out; he’d field-dress them before he put them in his now-empty pack. Kel and Kuari would probably clean up after him when he did.
That would be later in the afternoon; for now, they would sunbathe and enjoy their holiday, because tomorrow, Darian’s education in magic would begin in earnest, and he expected to have few holidays for some time to come.
He finished his meal and washed it down with spring water. Off in the distance, birds sang and a couple of crows yelled at each other; in the meadow, crickets and spring-frogs vied to see who could chirp the better mating calls. Darian lay back in the soft grass and shaded his face with a fallen, leaf-covered branch he’d stuck in the earth at his head,
“So you had a lady-friend last night, did you?” he asked lazily. “Do I know her?”
Kel revived from his trance, pulled in wings and legs, and brought his head up. “Do I know yourrrss?” he replied.
“Probably. Summerdance?”
Kel chuckled. “And yourrr courrting wass ssuccessful.” It wasn’t a question. He sounded knowing, and Darian raised his own head to look at his friend with suspicion.
“And just what do you know?” he demanded.
Kel examined his right front foot and daintily preened a talon with the tip of his beak. “Oh, jusst that Nightbirrd and Sssummerrdance arrre besst frriendsss and often nearrrr my lairrr. The otherrr day they werre therre, and both sspeaking - hmm - ssspeculatively about you. Gryphonsss,” he added wickedly, as an afterthought, “have verity keen beaming.”
“And what did they say?” His own ears burned, but he couldn’t help but be interested. Kel wouldn’t be teasing me if it wasn’t good.
Kel’s eyelids drooped lazily. “Who am I to rrreveal a lady’sss sssecretsss?” he demanded. “That would be un-gentlemanly.” As Darian rose, outrage at being led on and impatience warring for supremacy on his face, Kel made haste to add, “I can sssay that they werrre flatterrring, and that Nightbirrd generrrousssly sssuggesssted that, sssince herrr sssisssterr might be a little too interrresssted in the matching of herrrssself and you - given that Snowfirrre issss yourrr elderrr brrrotherrrr - well, ssshe conceded the field to Sssummerrrdance, who hasss no such complicationsss with relationsss.”
Darian subsided, his ears and neck now so hot that he really didn’t want to hear anything more. “We had a good time,” he replied lamely. “What about you?”
Kel chuckled again; if there was a way to embarrass a gryphon on the subject of “courting,” Darian had yet to find it. “Ah, my parrrtnerrr wasss the lovely and lisss-some Arrrkeyla. Trrruly a magical crrreaturrre! Ssshe isss of my yearrrr in the Sssilverrrs, and told me afterrr that ssshe wissshed to make my homecoming trrruly memorrrable.” He sighed, and stretched out his talons, digging them into the grass in blissful happiness. “Sssuchalady! Bright of eye, ssswiftof wing, andsssso ssskilled! We matched each otherrr in the airrr, ssstrroke for ssstrrroke, rrracing againsst the moon in courrrting flight. Once we werrre alone, out of sssight of the otherrsss, ssshe - ”
“Kel, I don’t really need thfe; details!” Darian interrupted, his embarrassment redoubled, if that was possible. “I’m just glad you had a good time together.”
Kel cast an annoyed glance at Darian, and now finally noticed how fierce his friend’s blushes were; Kel’s annoyance melted away under his amusement. “You could sssay that. You could alssso ssssay that the sssummerrr sssun cassstssss reasssonable light, and be asss accurrrate. I tell you - ”
“Kel!” he said forcefully. “I believe you. You don’t have to say anything more!”
Kelvren’s gurgling laugh did nothing to ease his embarrassment, but at least the gryphon was appeased enough to drop the subject.
“I hearrd that you arrre expected to take yourrr Vale sssome time afterrr Midsssummerrr,” he offered, after Darian’s blushes finally cooled a bit.
Darian seized the change of subject gladly. “That’s what they’ve told me,” he confirmed. “Of course, it won’t really be my Vale until I’m a lot older, but everyone seems to take it as written that I’ll eventually be the one in charge there. They want a permanent presence in residence before the first snow falls, so I expect they’ll be sending a group out there as soon as they think I’m ready.” He paused for a moment, then added, “Want to come along? We’ll need a good team, but one that’s committed to permanent residence.”
“I would be affrrrronted if you hadn’t asssked me, and I would have been forrrced to find a way to enssurrre you did!” Kel exclaimed. “I am all but cerrrtain that Nightwind and Sssnowfirrre intend to be parrrt of the grrroup. They ssshould have one grrryphon, at leassst.”
“Well, I was wondering if you’d want to leave here so soon,” he teased, “After all, when your courting is going so well - ”
“And I am harrrrdly rrready to sssettle and nesst build!” Kelvren shot back. “I have no intention of choossssing a mate until asss many ladiesss asss possssible arrre contending forrr the honorrr. Besssidesss, the new Vale at Errrold’ssss Grrrove is not ssso farrr frrrom herrrre that a lady could not fly in forrr a visit - orrr a gentleman rrrre-turrnthefavorrr!”
“Point taken,” Darian conceded. He rubbed at an insect bite and wished that the time for departure had actually been set; then he’d know how much time he had here and could make some plans of his own. “I wonder if this new teacher that Starfall wants for me is expected to come with us? For that matter, I wonder if Starfall’s been able to get him to agree to be my teacher! I haven’t heard a word, so far.”
“Hmm. I have.” There was no mistaking that tone in Kelvren’s voice; he was quite ready to tease Darian all over again. He would have to be coaxed for every revelation.
“So what have you heard?” Darian decided to play along; Kel loved to tease and be teased in return.
“I have hearrrd - that the teacherrr in quessstion wasss reluctant at firrrsst, but agrrreed.” Kel considered a talon with a thoughtful expression that was entirely feigned.
“Why was he reluctant?” Darian did want to know that much; was it because he was essentially an outsider to the Tayledras?
“Becaussse he wissshed a holiday frrrom ssstudentsss. Ssso I hearrrd. Ssstill, Ssstarrfall convinced him.” Kel stretched his neck out and laid his head down in the grass. “I gatherrr that Ssstarrfall hasss sssome connection with him. Rrrelativesss, perrrhapsss. Enough to be of influence.”
“Have you heard anything else about this teacher?” Like his name ? Darian added silently. It would be nice to know his name and clan.’
“That he isss held in high rrrregarrrd. I think hisss clan isss k’Trrrreva.” Kel rumbled something indecipherable in pure contentment.
“How about his name, O gryphon whose hearing is so keen?” Darian countered. “Surely you managed to overhear that!”
“Rrrrr.” Kel lifted his head and looked at Darian sheepishly. “I did - but mussst confesss I cannot rrrremem-berrrit!”
“You forgot his name? Oh, come on, featherhead, you can do better than that!” Darian cried. “You can’t be that forgetful!”
“Well, it wassss in the middle of the celebrrration, and I had otherrr interressstsss,” Kel protested weakly, flattening his ear-tufts in chagrin.
“Oh, so you let a pair of bright eyes and a flirty tail drive everything important to your best friend right out of your memory!” Darian countered, in mock-disgust. “What kind of friend are you anyway?”
“Absssolutely and without apology! I do have my prrriorrritiesss! But I did not forrrget everrrrything imporrrtant!” Kel protested, flattening his ear-tufts down so far they became invisible.
“Only the most important part!” Darian threw up his hands. “Remind me never to ask you to tell a joke, you’ll probably forget the point of it.”
“You would not underrrssstand ssssophisssticated humorrr,” Kel grumbled back.
Darian sighed. That was certainly just his luck - and it wasn’t Kel’s fault, after all. It wouldn’t be all that long before Starfall would tell him the all-important name of his new teacher, and Kel did remember that the reason the teacher had been reluctant had nothing to do with Darian.
“Hey, it’s all right,” he said, his tone softening. “You can’t remember everything, not when there’re a hundred people talking in your ear and a full-blown party going on. At least now I know that this teacher is going to be here, and that Starfall isn’t going to have to find a second choice. That’s the really important part.”
Kel’s head rose, and so did his ear-tufts. “Well, now that thissss teacherrr comesss, what do you plan to do? It isss clearrr that the Elderrrsss of k’Vala intend you to be theirrr ssspokesssman to Valdemarrrr herrrreaboutssss orrr they would not be trrraining you to be Elderrr to a Vale. Ssso it rrreally will be yourrr Vale and you would be wissse to make long-terrrm plansssss forrr it, and yourrrsssself.”
“I know; Starfall has made that pretty clear.” He laughed. “And I’ve been thinking about it off and on for a while - not to mention every night before I go to sleep. If you don’t mind listening, I can tell you what I’ve figured out so far.”
Kel’s ear tufts were jauntily high again, and he nodded. Darian took a deep breath, and began.
“First of all, we should have enough people that we can defend the place until help comes if we have to - but not so many that it’s anywhere near the size of k’Vala.” He brushed a beetle away and continued. “This isn’t going to be so much a Vale as an embassy, as I see it. So I don’t think we should have many more people than our original team - except, of course, if you do decide to nest with some charming thing, and she’s agreeable to joining us.”
Already he spoke of “us” as if he had his little outpost built and settled! He’d have laughed at himself, except that after all his thinking and planning, it really seemed as if it existed.
“Anyway,” he continued, “we don’t want to have so many people that Lord Breon thinks of us as a possible threat, or that we Tayledras have designs on his holding and estate.” He’d spent a lot of time thinking this over, and felt that Kel would understand why that was so important. Breon could become a real stumbling block if he wasn’t treated correctly, and with respect. “There’s another thing - we don’t want to make ourselves into Lord Breon’s social rival either.”
“Do you mean, sssetting up a kind of Courrrt of ourrr own?” Kel asked, cocking his head to the side. “I can ssssee wherrre that could put his nossse out of joint, ssso to ssspeak.”
“Exactly. We want to keep him on our side, completely, because he’s the nearest highborn.” He was glad that Kel saw what he was getting at so quickly.
“I know about touchy highborrrrnsss,” Kel chuckled. “With the Black Kingsss our nearrr neighborrrsss and alliesss, we have ample opporrrtunity to ssstumble unwittingly into offense!”
“I’d also like to establish a real Healer’s enclave at our Vale,” he continued. “That would take some pressure off Lord Breon’s Healer and earn the gratitude of the local Valdemarans without doing anything to compete with Lord Breon. The presence of Healers - well, that basically shows people we’re peaceful and intend to stay that way.”
“Had you any thought to trrraining magesss therrre?” Kel asked curiously.
“Other than our own people?” He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Herald Elspeth and Adept Darkwind have built a Mage Collegium at Haven where they can keep a careful eye on those with Mage-Gift who aren’t also Heralds. They did that for a reason, Kel. I’m not sure that Valdemar trusts mages even now, and to have someone teaching mages in Valdemar without the sanction and the oversight of the Heralds could be trouble.”
“Urrrr. Bessst we not offend therrre eitherrrr. I sssee what you mean.” The gryphon roused all his feathers and shook. “Sssso, assside frrrom not offending anyone, what plansss have you?”
“I want to make our Vale into the place where people come to resolve their differences,” he said, his eyes alight and his voice alive with enthusiasm. “All kinds of people. I want it to become a place where everyone knows they’ll be safe to work things out without any outside influences. I want it to be the place where Hawkbrothers come when they need to work things out with Valdemarans, or where Lord Breon brings people who aren’t comfortable being in his manor. We could do really good things, Kel!”
“I agrrree!” Kel’s enthusiasm rose right along with his. “Urrr, would I be the only grrryphon in this Vale? Unless I should find a lady, of course.”
“Well, you’d certainly be the one with the most experience and seniority,” Darian temporized. “I wouldn’t bring in anyone who wasn’t junior to you.”
“That would incrrreassse my ssstatusss consssid-errrably!” Kel’s beak gaped with delight; Darian had suspected he’d get that sort of reaction.
“I’d like you to be the chief gryphon of the Silvers there,” Darian told him fondly. “Frankly, I don’t see why it shouldn’t happen that way. I suspect that the others may not realize what kind of an opportunity we will have until it is too late.”
“Asss it ssshould be.” Kel chuckled. “Afterrr all, they have had theirrr chancesss, and they ssshould let otherrrsss take risssskss of theirrr own.”
“In other words - if they’re so fond of the comfort of the Vale that they can’t see opportunity hiding behind a little temporary hardship, then they don’t deserve that opportunity.” Darian laughed, and Kel burbled with delight. “Let’s talk about this on the way home,” he added, getting to his feet. “It won’t take me a moment to clean these birds.”
“Anotherrr good plan,” Kel agreed. “We mussst sssee jussst how many morrre we can make!”

Five

Keisha kept her eyes down and bit her lip to keep from giggling as she passed her two youngest brothers. Of all the things that she thought she’d ever see in her lifetime, this was certainly the least likely of them! Here they were, up to their elbows in soap and water, doing their own laundry in the yard in full sight of everyone!
I have to admit they‘re going about it the right way, too, she thought as she opened the gate and hurried off to her workshop. Theirs is a better system than Mum ever had.
Her mother had always washed the clothing in the house, then brought the baskets of wet clothing out to hang on their lines in the sun to dry. The boys, however, had a different system. Instead of using the sinks in the house, they’d had the cooper make them two half-barrels on legs, with stopcocks as in a wine barrel in the bottoms for drain holes. One half-barrel was for washwater, the other for rinsing. They had a fire going in the fire pit with a tripod and a kettle over it, burning trash as well as heating the water for washing. The barrels held easily twice as much as the sink, maybe more, which meant that stubborn stains could soak while they scrubbed other garments. One boy scrubbed, the other rinsed, wrung, and hung, and they traded jobs each time they drained the tubs and refilled them with clean water or water and soap.
From the determined way in which they were scrubbing, they were doing a good job of it, too. I think they’re going to get the clothes done in half the time it takes Mum, Keisha thought with admiration. They‘re faster than she is, and stronger; they‘ll surely get half a day on the farm if they want to. Of course, the fact that their brothers are paying them to do their clothes isn’t hurting their feelings at all! Who knows - maybe they’ll start getting business from people outside the family and have a trade of their own!
Keisha assiduously did her own laundry; it wasn’t that difficult to manage with only the clothing for one person. Just like keeping the workshop clean, it wasn’t a lot of work as long as you kept up with it.
She had underthings that she’d left soaking in the sink overnight as a matter of fact, and she intended to do a batch of tunics as soon as she rinsed out the underthings. That was why she was in a hurry; she wanted to have her laundry out of the way before anyone came to her with a complaint.
She reached the workshop without being intercepted, and shortly had a neat line of white things drying in the garden. The tunics went in to soak in the same bleaching solution that she’d had the underwear soaking in - she’d decided that it wasn’t going to hurt to try to bleach out the old stains, even if it removed all of the old color as well. Now that she was doing a little of the dyework that Shandi used to, she was getting more and more interested in doing something with the same substances that had caused those stains in the first place.
One of them had been a very quiet gray-green; not the same, rather attractive new-mint color that the trainee Healer-tunics had been, but if she could bleach all the stains out and redye the tunics that color - 
It wouldn’t be a bad thing to get people used to seeing me in green. I could ease into it. Besides, sooner or later I’ll have to wear the trainee uniforms, and the moment I do, I just know I’ll get them stained, too.
Maybe she could get herself used to being in green at the same time.
Meanwhile, while the tunics soaked and her experiment in bleaching worked - or didn’t - there was the garden to tend.
She left all the windows open as well as the door, even though it was a little nippy, for the bleaching solution gave off fumes she was suspicious of. In her oldest and shabbiest tunic with a canvas smock over it, she went into the herb garden and knelt down beside the rows of seedlings, a bucket beside her.
Immediately, she felt good: calm, happy, and productive. The garden had that effect on her nearly every time she worked in it. These sprouting shapes under cones of cheesecloth loose enough to allow them sun but heavy enough to protect from frost and heavy rain were from the new seeds she’d gotten from Steelmind. Since she hadn’t known what they were going to look like when they came up, she had very carefully dyed handfuls of splinters and stuck one into the ground right next to each seed before she covered it with earth. Now as she worked beside each row, she pulled out anything sprouting that didn’t have a colorful little splinter beside it. Of course, this was far more work than anyone would want to do normally, but it was only for these new plants. Her perennials, of course, were already well-grown, and it was no work to pick out the annuals she knew from the weed sprouts.
I’m just glad these new ones are all perennials, she thought, as she pulled out sprouting weeds that were barely visible and dusted them into her bucket, replacing the cones over her precious new seedlings as she worked. There will only be one season of this kind of care.
She pulled weeds until her back ached, and her hands had grime ground under all the nails. Then she judged that she’d done enough, and called it a done task. She dumped the bucket of weeds onto her compost heap and took the empty bucket into her workshop.
The fumes weren’t as bad as she’d expected, and the experiment in bleaching was a qualified success. Once she’d rinsed out the tunics and wrung them dry enough to dye, she looked them over carefully and judged that the dye she’d prepared would probably cover the faint stains that were left. Even if if didn’t, she wasn’t any worse off than she’d been before.
The dye itself simmered in a big pot over the fireplace; she’d left it there all night to strengthen. Now she built up the fire a bit and dumped the first tunic in, stirring it with a peeled stick until it reached the color she wanted. Shortly after that, a line of gray-green tunics flapped beside the line of white underthings, and Keisha had replaced the pot of dye with one of soup fixings.
That was when she got her first patient of the day.
A knock on the doorframe made her look up, as Ferla Dawkin came in with her five-year-old in her arms, blood splattered liberally all over both of them.
By now, Keisha was a shrewd and instant judge of situations. Ferla wasn’t hysterical, wasn’t running, wasn’t even out of breath. Therefore, the situation wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it looked.
Ferla’s words confirmed that. “If you’re not busy, Keisha, Dib’s gotten into a fight - ”
“Bring him over to the fire and lay him down on the rug,” she said, and his mother put the boy down while Keisha got clean rags and a fresh bucket of water. The boy had been quiet right up until the moment that Keisha sat down on the floor beside him; then he set up a howl like a Pelagir monster before she’d so much as touched him. He was a sorry sight, face red, blood in his hair and oozing from his nose and mouth, angry tears running down his fat cheeks. Keisha ignored the tears and the howling, she was used to them; she went straight to work, gently washing off the blood until she could make an accurate assessment of the damages.
“Well, Ferla, he’s lost a tooth, he’s got a nosebleed, and he’ll have a fine black eye in a bit, so I’d say he was the loser in this battle,” she finally told the anxious mama. “Here, Dib - ” She made him lie down on the floor and pinched a rag over his nose. “You lie there and we’ll see if we can’t get your nose to stop bleeding. Who’d you take on?”
“Maffie Olan,” came the muffled reply. “He called me a dumbhead.”
“Well, that’ll teach you to ignore people who are bigger than you are when they call you names, won’t it?” she asked matter-of-factly as one big brown eye gazed at her around the rag held to his nose. “Do you know what I used to say when my brothers called me a dumbhead?”
“Huh-uh,” the child replied.
“I’d say, ‘It takes one to know one, so what are you, then?’ Try that instead of tearing into a bigger boy next time.” She winked at him. “Maffie’s not so dim that he can’t work that one out for himself, and it’ll make him madder than you. Remember, if he comes after you and hits you first, then he’s a bully picking on you littles, and you can tattle to his mum, for she won’t put up with Maffie turning into a bully. And you know his mum will tan his hide for him.”
“Keisha!” the mother said, half laughing and half aghast. “Is that anything to tell him?”
She cocked an eye at Ferla. “All I know is it worked for me. My brothers stopped calling me names because they got tired of getting a licking from Mum that was worse than anything they dealt out to me. They couldn’t complain either, because they’d started it by name calling.”
Her bit of advice had certainly silenced the child anyway; he seemed to be pondering it as they waited for his nose to stop bleeding. When Keisha judged that it had been long enough, she had him sit up and cautiously took the rag away from his nose. There was no further leakage, so she got up and mixed him a quick potion; chamomile for the ache in his eye and nose, marsh-mallow and mint to counter any tummy upset from swallowing blood, and honey and allspice to make it into a treat.
“Now,” she said, handing him the mug. “Here’s a sweetie for being brave and doing what I told you.” His face lit up, for every child in the village knew that when Keisha told them something was a “sweetie,” it was worth eating or drinking. She never lied to them about the taste of a medicine; if it was bad, she told them, and advised them to get it down fast so they could have a sweet to take away the bad taste.
He seized the mug and happily drank down the contents. She made up a poultice of cress and plantain, and gave it to his mother.
“Have him lie down a bit more with this on his eye, and when he can’t keep still any longer, let him go play. It’s a pity about the tooth, but at least it’s a baby one.” She looked down at Dib, who stared solemnly up at her. “And mind what I said about fighting.”
“Yes, Keisha,” the boy said, with a look as if he was already contemplating mischief, as his mother helped him to his feet. The two left with Dib trotting sturdily along beside his mother, battered but unrepentant.
Keisha went out to check her drying laundry and found it ready to bring in; a distant growl from above made her glance quickly up at the sky to the west, and she frowned when she saw how quickly clouds were building in that direction. Thunder-towers, for certain sure. No telling how long it would last, either; a spring rain could be over before sunset, or linger for days.
She gathered in her clothing without folding it as she usually did; she just unpinned it from the line and dumped everything in the basket, anxious to beat the rain and get her things inside the workshop. She made it inside before anything came down, but the first drops started plopping into the dust just as she closed the door. It was as she was doing the folding inside the workshop that she heard thunder rumble again, much nearer, then heard the rain suddenly strengthen, rattling the thatch and pelting the path outside.
A moment more, and it wasn’t just a few drops, it was a downpour - a downpour without much thunder, just more growling now and again. There wasn’t much wind, which didn’t augur well for the storm blowing past in a hurry. She shut all the windows as some rain splashed inside, then lit her lanterns to ward off growing darkness; when she cracked the door open and peeked out, what she saw confirmed that this was not going to be a simple cloudburst, over quickly.
Not with the amount coming down, the slate-gray of the clouds overhead, and the relative lack of lightning and thunder.
I’m glad the seedlings are up and they’re in drained beds, she thought with a sigh. And I’m glad I put those gauze cones over them to protect them. This is likely to last for the next three days. If she hadn’t put the cones over them, her precious new plants would be flattened before sunset.
With that in mind, she considered going out now and collecting some foodstuffs; she might be spending a lot of time in the workshop or tending flus and colds. I’d better; I can’t just live on vegetable soup.
Getting out her waterproof rain cape, she put the hood up, slipped on a pair of wooden clogs, bowed her head to the storm and plodded out into it. Beneath the hood of the cape, she watched her footing; already the rain had pooled into some deepish puddles - deep enough that her clogs wouldn’t keep her feet dry if she blundered into one. As she came to the hedge around her house, she looked up, wondering if her brothers had the sense to bring the clothing in. The line at her house was empty, so her brothers had saved their laundry from a drenching, but the righthand neighbor hadn’t been so lucky. Tansy Gelcress struggled with wet clothing, flapping rain cape, and a basket she didn’t want to put down - Keisha couldn’t simply go into the house with that going on next door. She stopped long enough to help Tansy gather in her things, then went on up the path to her own house.
Everybody will be coming home - they can’t work in the wet. I’ll get the fire going, so they have a warm house to come back to. She built up the fire in the kitchen, then surveyed the kitchen stocks, deciding what her mother wouldn’t mind her taking. Ham, cheese, eggs, butter, a jug of cider - that‘ll do. I have beans, flour, basic staples at the shop. I have a quarter of a loaf of bread, and I’ll be out enough that I can get more bread from the baker. We’ve plenty more of what I’m taking at the farm; she can send Da after more if she needs to. People will start bringing barter stuff like eggs and milk around here as soon as I start handing out cough potions. That was part of the arrangement with the village, after all; since Keisha wasn’t a single male who needed to be cooked for and looked after, the family got foodstuffs on an irregular basis. Things usually started appearing when Keisha had done a lot of work in a short period of time.
Gathering her spoils up into a basket and covering it with a fold of her cape, she went out into the storm again, only to see the neighbor waving frantically at her from the door of her house.
She splashed across the yard, fearing that someone had already gotten sick.
But Tansy handed her a bundle wrapped in a clean dishcloth. “I made seedcakes, and I thought since you’ll probably be busy in this nasty weather that you might like to take some to your workshop to nibble on in between emergencies,” she said as she patted Keisha’s hand. “There, just a little thanks for being a good neighbor.”
“Thank you,” Keisha replied, touched and pleased, and a little dumbfounded. “Thank you very much. They’ll be appreciated - ”
“Now don’t let me keep you standing here, go!” the woman told her, making a shooing motion. “I don’t want to be the one responsible for drowning you!”
Keisha left, making her way through the growing runnels of water, protecting both sets of provisions under her rain cape. People are noticing! They’re really noticing what I do! It wasn’t just a reward for helping with the laundry; the neighbor had specifically said “I thought you’d probably be busy in this nasty weather.”
Somehow, she felt immensely better than she had a few moments ago and quite ready to meet whatever the weather brought with a steady spirit.
The wind picked up, sending the edges of her cape flapping, and there was a definite edge to it that there hadn’t been before. It was getting colder, and that wasn’t good.
Cold-teas, sore-throat syrups, cough syrups, fever-teas, herb-and-garlic packets for chicken soup - she started cataloging all the things she was going to need as soon as she got through the door. Her workshop seemed doubly cozy after the bitter weather outside; she shook out her cape and hung it up, then slipped her clogs off and padded around in her stockings, knowing that she’d have to put the clogs back on as soon as someone called on her. Quickly stowing her provisions in her food cupboard, she put beans to soak for soup tomorrow; if the rain lasted, tomorrow would be the day when the first colds made their appearance, and she’d be busy all day.
She took long enough to eat her vegetable soup with sliced bread and butter; if things got bad, it might be bedtime before she had another chance to eat. Then she set about inventorying her cold medicines, and putting together batches of whatever she thought she’d need more of.
Her hands flew as her mind worked; was it likely that anyone would get caught by flooding? With the way this rain was coming down, it was a possibility, though people tended to be pretty sensible about rising water this time of year. It was only in the summer that people got lazy, were too busy, or were having too good a time to pay attention to the possibility of flash floods.
Last year had brought a fine honey harvest and she had plenty stocked away for making soothing syrups. With a surplus of extra jugs, she’d gone ahead and made more decoctions of comfrey, lobelia, hyssop, and horehound than she usually did. Now her preparations paid off; it didn’t take long for her to mix those four ingredients, chamomile, and lemon-balm tinctures, plus the honey, for cough syrup. Work didn’t stop just because people got colds; it was up to her to make certain they could do their work even with one.
Late afternoon brought the first of the emergencies; people might be sensible about flooding, but unfortunately, cows were as stubborn and stupid as rocks. Some of the water-meadows started getting knee-deep and several folk had to wade in to lead their cattle out - the floods were too deep for the herd dogs to work in, so each fool cow had to be caught and led to safety by hand. So a handful of people came home chilled to the bone and blue around the lips - and Keisha was there with hot medicinal teas and packets of preventative herbs to go into the evening soup or stew. No harm if the rest of the family got the medicines either; all that would happen was that everyone would get sleepy earlier, and go off to bed. A warm bed was the best place anyone could be on a night like this one.
The cattle had to be treated, too, for the results of their boneheadedness, so out she went to three different farms, making sure each silly cow got her drench.
Keisha had her villagers well-trained; at the first sign of a sniffle, mothers came to the door for syrups and teas for their littles. There was a steady parade of them just after suppertime, as children who’d gone out healthy came home sneezing, because they would play in the puddles and not come in until they were as soaked and blue as the men who’d rescued the cattle.
These weren’t the things she charged for; she’d early come to the conclusion that if she took her “pay” for run-of-the-mill Healing in the things the villagers were already supplying her, it was more likely that they’d come to her early rather than waiting until the illness was truly serious. Doses with enough sleepy-making potential to make people stay abed a candlemark or two longer when they were mildly sick would keep them from getting sicker - keeping a cold at the level of sniffles and coughs in a child kept it from turning into something that could kill. She’d charge the farmers for the cattle-drenches, but only after the rains were over, and only because they had asked her to give the doses herself.
Then again, she thought wearily, after she’d trudged back to the shop from what she hoped would be the last call of the night, I can get the stuff down their throats without themfighting me; when they do it, more of it goes on the cow than in it, poor things.
Absolutely, positively, no point in going home to sleep; everyone knew that in weather like this, she’d be at the shop where everything she might need was at hand. I’m just glad I got the laundry done, she told herself, as she closed the door behind her, and surveyed the wreck of her workshop. I hope they give me some time to get this cleaned up in the morning before they haul me out again.
She followed her own prescription and added a packet of her herbs to the last of the soup before she ate it - as she’d anticipated, she hadn’t had a chance for a meal after that first bowl. The she put the beans, seasoning, and some ham into another pot and put that over the fire to cook all night. She managed to wash up the dishes and the first soup pot, but ran out of energy, and took two seedcakes and a mug of cider up to the loft where she snuggled into her bed, leaving them on the little table beside the bed for a quick bite if someone pulled her out in the middle of the night.
But that night, at least, her sleep was unbroken, and the cakes and cider made a perfectly good breakfast. It was an unexpected luxury to eat breakfast in bed, with the rain drumming down on the roof outside and the savory aroma of bean soup filling the workshop.
She didn’t linger long, though; she was up and washed and clothed quickly, dressing for the weather. No telling when she’d be called out again.
I could do myself a big favor by getting baskets ready to snatch up, she decided, and lined up four on the workbench. Into one went standard remedies for minor human ailments, and into the second the same sorts of things for animals. Into the other two went medicines for more serious complications. She didn’t think she’d have to use the one for people - but the Fellowship beasts were so sensitive - 
She’d no sooner finished the fourth basket when someone knocked on the door, then came in without waiting for a reply.
It was Alys, from the Fellowship.
Keisha grabbed the fourth basket without waiting to hear what brought her. “It’s the sheep, right?”
Alys nodded. “Cough,” she said anxiously. “It’s odd, a dry, hacking sort of cough.”
“Hah!” Alys didn’t recognize it, that was clear, but Keisha did. Her own family flock had gotten the illness in a rainy spring like this one. She turned to get a different jar of heavy concentrate down off the top shelf and put it in her basket as well. “No worries, I’ve got what we’ll need; they’ll be fine as long as we get them warm and dry and get my stuff into them. Come on.”
She swung on her rain cape and slipped her feet into her clogs, heading straight out the door. Alys followed, her brow creased anxiously.
“How are we going to get them dry and warm?” she asked. “They’re soaked to the skin!”
Keisha stopped in the doorway and made a mental inventory of the Fellowship buildings, and realized Alys was right, there was no way to get the sheep under cover on Fellowship property. But there was the village threshing barn, empty and unused at this time of year, and with the favors the Fellowship had done the village, they were certainly owed a favor from the village in return.
“Get your dogs and herders and bring all the sheep up to the threshing barn,” she ordered. “We’ll use that until the rain is over. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure it’s right. I’ll meet you there.”
Alys took her word as good, and trotted off through the puddles toward the Fellowship holding. Keisha stopped just long enough at the Mayor’s house to confirm the right of the Fellowship to use the octagonal barn until the rains were done - so long as they supplied fodder for the sheep and cleaned up after them.
Keisha hurried to the barn and let down the oiled canvas interior sides that shut out the wind and rain when need be. The canvas hadn’t come cheap, but in the rush of prosperity following the sale of the barbarians’ looted goods, it had been a sound investment. Now the barn could be used for many purposes in all weathers, even in the dead of winter - it became a tight, weatherproof and windproof tent with a fine shingled roof and seven external supporting walls of wood. It was a tight squeeze, but you could even hold a Faire in there.
The eighth wall, the one opposite the door, was of stone and did not have a canvas cover, but that was the very last thing it needed.
By the time she’d done lacing all the canvas panels together, the poor, sodden sheep showed up, bleating and coughing pathetically. No doubt about that cough; Keisha had heard it before, and the illness “felt” the same as soon as she touched her hands to one of the sheep.
“Bring them in, then start squeezing the water out of their fleeces,” she ordered, as Alys and four more Fellowship shepherds hustled their charges into the barn. “When you’ve got them all as dry as you can, bring clean straw in here for them to bed down in. I know it’ll seem like a waste, but trust me, I want it belly-deep for the sheep in here. They have to get warm and stay warm, or you might start losing lambs.”
Nods all around, neither questions, nor arguments. Keisha went outside to start a fire in the big oven built into the eighth - stone - side of the barn.
The door of the oven faced the outside; inconvenient to say the least, but entirely necessary when you realized that the floor of the barn would be covered in flammable things like straw whenever the barn was in use. There was always a huge pile of wood under a cover next to the oven; it would be a while before the stone wall heated up enough for the warmth to build up in the barn, but that was all right. This would solve the problem of getting the delicate sheep warmed clear through.
And if any other animals start looking seedy, they can be brought here, too. She reminded herself to tell the Mayor that on her way back to her workshop. Once the fire was going well, Keisha stacked logs all around it, and went back into the barn.
With the only light coming from a couple of storm lanterns the shepherds had thoughtfully brought with them, it was pretty dim, but Keisha knew the contents of her basket well. Before very long, she had the water skins she generally used to dose animals full, and had the concentrated cough potion mixing with the water inside. As each poor sheep was squeezed relatively dry, she took it from the hands of its helper over to the stone wall where one of the lanterns hung.
There, she looked deeply into its confused, frightened, eyes, and told it without words that it was safe, that she would be helping it, and that if it drank what she gave it, the nasty cough would stop. Then she promised that there would be warmth, dry straw to lie in, and peace for as long as the rain fell. She filled her mind with those images of warmth and safety, until she felt the sheep relax under her hands and saw the eyes lose their fear.
Then she eased the sheep’s mouth open, and slipped the neck of the water skin past the back of the tongue. How she could tell that she’d gotten enough of a dose into each sheep, she couldn’t have said in words; she only knew that something told her when she’d poured exactly the right amount down its throat.
That was when she let the sheep go; it would wander off and join the rest of the dosed flock making beds in the straw that more of the Fellowship folk were spreading”on the floor.
This was tedious work - not hard, except for those drying off the sheep, but tedious. “Talking” to the sheep without words was tiring, too - Keisha wasn’t sure why, but it took something out of her. The good part was that about the time she was half through, the stone wall began radiating warmth, so the second half of her task was accomplished in relative comfort.
When she turned the last of the sheep loose - and now none of them was coughing - she stood up with a little groan and put the now-flat water skins back in her basket. Alys waited patiently to hear what other orders she had.
“You’ll have to keep the oven stoked, and if anyone wants to bake something in it, or put in a casserole or something, let them, that’s part of the bargain,” Keisha told her. “Mayor said you’ll have to supply your own fodder.” She already knew she didn’t have to tell them to clean up after themselves; when the sheep left this barn, you’d be able to eat off the floor. “Now, what your little beauties have got isn’t exactly a sickness, not yet, anyway.”
“It’s not?” Alys said, puzzled.
Keisha shook her head. “It’s some Pelagirfungus, like ergot, but it grows on sheep-sorrel instead of wheat, down near the roots. Heat and freezing kill it, that’s why you won’t see it in summer or winter, and it needs a warm spring with a lot of rain to start. Which we’ve had.”
Alys nodded. “But we’ve had warm springs with lots of rain before.”
“You’re still all right so long as the ground stays dry, not soaked like it’s been. Then what it needs to spread is a cold rain in the middle of the warm spring.” She shrugged. “Here’s where I don’t know why, it just does. Otherwise, it just sits down at the roots of the sheep-sorrel and your sheep will crop right over the top of it and never come to harm. Since this is a lung sickness, maybe they have to breathe something in. All I know for certain is that if you don’t have the fungus in your fields, your sheep will be all right, and if you don’t have a cold, steady rain, your sheep will be all right - and if you bring your sheep off the fields where the fungus is until after it’s been raining for a day or so, you’ll be all right. Our sheep got it a time or two, and it knocked them down hard; I’m afraid yours would be in trouble if I hadn’t got the stuff into them that kills the rot that they breathe in. Now, though, with heat and good food and the medicine, they’ll be strong enough to fight it off and come out fine.”
Alys looked relieved, and nodded. “The chirms all went into their barn and wouldn’t come out as soon as the rain started, and the goats are in their shelter - and none of them are coughing. It was just the sheep that kept grazing in the rain.”
“Then the chirras and goats won’t have any trouble from this, but mind what I told you from now on; either get rid of the sheep-sorrel or the fungus, or keep animals out of those fields as soon as it starts to rain in the spring.” Keisha stretched, easing cramped arm and back muscles.
Alys looked around the barn at her contentedly drowsing charges, and sighed. “I suppose if there’s anybody else that needs the space here, we’re to make room for them?”
“I won’t allow an animal in that has something yours can catch,” Keisha assured her. “It might happen that we need the room, but this place is big enough that you won’t have to vacate.”
Alys and the other shepherds looked satisfied with that. Alys had something of her own to offer. “If someone gets flooded out, remember we have extra beds at the Fellowship, all right? It’s only fair, with us getting to use the barn and all.”
“I’ll tell the Mayor, and thanks in advance,” Keisha replied. “You won’t need me anymore, so I’d better get back to where people can find me.”
She waved good-bye to the other shepherds, as they settled themselves in for as long as the rain lasted, the dogs making nests in the straw around the flock of sheep. It could be worse for them, Keisha thought, as she faced the storm, bowing her head under the frigid deluge. They could have to watch the sheep out in this mess. At least they’ll be warm and dry, even if they do have to feed the oven and haul over fodder and straw.
And in the long run, it was a good thing that the sheep were here and not in the field; only about a quarter of the ewes had lambs at their side, the rest were still all heavily pregnant. Sheep always picked the worst time to lamb, and it was even odds that they’d decide to drop in the middle of the storm. If there were any problems, there wouldn’t be any hunting about on storm-drenched hillsides to find the missing ewe!
They might not lose any this year, if they all decide to drop while they’re in the barn; that would be a blessing.
When she got back to her workshop, there was a patient waiting for her, huddled in the chair by the fire. And it was Piel, one of Shandi’s most romantic and least-sensible suitors, who was, if possible, the very last person she wanted to see. She tried not to let her resignation show.
No need to ask what brought him; his red nose and swollen eyes, steady sneezing and rasping cough told the whole story. “Oh, Piel,” she sighed, putting her hands on her hips and shaking her head. “You are a right mess, aren’t you?”
“I subbose id’s by own fault,” he wheezed miserably, blowing his nose on his handkerchief. “I wad oud on our hill, and when id starded do rain, I wad thinging so hard aboud her thad I didn’ nodise - ”
“I promise you that it’s all your own fault,” she said severely. “You are more than old enough to know better than to play a fool’s trick like that, and Shandi wouldn’t thank you for catching pneumonia and dying! Only idiots in ballads get sick and pine gracefully and painlessly away for love, Piel. I can guarantee that pneumonia takes longer and hurts a lot.”
“Bud - somedimes I thig id wouldn’ be a bad thig - ” he said forlornly, his voice trailing off, as she turned away and got some of her stronger medicines.
“Oh, you don’t, do you?” She was not going to let him wallow in self-indulgent misery, not in her workshop. “And just how would your parents feel about that? How would Shandi, may I ask? Just how do you think I’d explain that to her, that I let you die of a stupid chill? Idiot! It isn’t as if she left you for another suitor! And it isn’t as if she flew off to the moon!”
“Bud she mid as well be on da moon!” he cried plaintively. “Why wadn id you thad wad Chosen instead ob her? Why couldn id hab been you? Nobody’s in lob wid you!”
“I will have none of that nonsense here!” she told him briskly, turning around with a particularly nasty-tasting potion in her hand. She was in no mood for any of this, and he had, by the Havens, earned a good scold. “First off, if I had been Chosen, who would be taking care of you this minute? Second, it’s none of your business, and nobody asked you who should and should not be Chosen; you leave that to the Companions. Third, if you’re so desperately in love with Shandi, you’d do far better by spending your time thinking of a way to make a good livelihood in Haven where she is, than sitting around on hills moping! Showing up in Haven in a good suit of clothing with the money in your pocket to take her to a fine inn for supper would charm her and finally impress my father. Dying stupidly would not, and moon-calfing about on hills in the rain when other folk are working doesnotl”
Not that I expect him to exert himself that much, she thought scornfully, for she shared her father’s opinion of Piel. The fellow was in love with the idea of being in love, and with Bardic notions of romance, not really in love with Shandi. It’s easy to lie around on hills and weep. And it impresses other fools with how deep your feelings are. One month from now, he ‘ll be desperately in love with one of Shandi’s friends, or one of Lord Breon’s maids at the keep.
“Here,” she said abruptly, thrusting the mug at him. “Drink this. All of it. Now.”
He looked from the mug to her face, saw no hope of reprieve, and gagged it down. It was truly awful, and she’d made no effort to sweeten it.
“Now go home, get into bed, and sleep,” she ordered. “When your mother gives you soup and tea, don’t play with them, drink them - I know she’s already got the medicine she needs for you, she came to get it last night.”
Piel gave a long-suffering sigh, and draped himself with his rain cape as if it were his shroud. She saw him to the door, and nobly refrained from slamming it behind him.
The rest of the day was spent in dosing similar illnesses - and in listening to the complaints of the sufferers. Most of the complaints were actually more fretful and pathetic than anything else; neighbor Tansy pretty well summed them up when she came for cough syrup.
“I wish young Darian would get back here and set himself up like he’s supposed to,” she grumbled. “Even if he couldn’t have sent this storm elsewhere, he’d at least have been able to warn us about it, and he’d be able to tell us how long it’s likely to last!”
When darkness fell, she finally made a dinner for herself - a good one, not just the soup but a nice slice of fried ham and some scrambled eggs and toast. The only thing she’d had all day was those seedcakes and a couple of bites of soup in between patients, and she was so hungry she was close to being nauseated.
She didn’t let her irritation with Piel spoil her meal either, though she’d been damned annoyed with his self-indulgent bleating. The sheep didn’t make that much of a complaint, she told herself, as she took careful sips of the hot soup. And as for that business of “why weren’t you Chosen, nobody is in love with you - ” Ooh, I could have strangled him if I weren’t so tolerant, and he weren’t a patient!
The rain still hadn’t let up, though it had lessened a bit. A storm this big will probably get Haven, too. I wonder how Shandi is doing? It was too soon for a letter, but Keisha couldn’t help wishing one would come.
I wish I had someone else I could talk to. She sighed and took her dishes to the sink to wash. If I’d been Chosen, I’d have my Companion - 
Fantasy, foolishness. There was never a chance that she’ d have been Chosen; any hesitation on the part of the Companion had been her imagination. Why would any
Companion Choose me ? she thought sourly. Not only is nobody in love with me, nobody even likes me. There wasn’t a chance that Companion would have Chosen me; Mum and Da named me right. “Keisha,” that’s me, the tree all over thorns and no fruit worth anybody’s effort. If people didn’t need me so badly, they’d never come near me.
Uncomfortable thoughts, uncomfortable feelings, and she knew if she didn’t get her mind off them she’d sink into a well of self-pity as deep as Piel’s.
So she picked up one of her Healing texts and put her mind into study, until she was so tired and sore of eye that she practically crawled up the ladder to her bed.
After four days, the rain finally stopped; the sun put in a brilliant appearance in cloudless skies, and a dry, warm breeze made colds - or at least, complaints of colds - disappear. It never failed to amaze and amuse Keisha that a couple of sunny, warm days in spring or fall could make everyone forget about feeling ill. Unless, of course, they were very ill indeed.
Piel did not put in a second appearance, nor was he anywhere in the village when Keisha was about, which either meant he had taken Keisha’s lecture to heart and was actively seeking a way to make his living in the greater world (not likely) or that he so feared another tongue-lashing that he wasn’t going to come anywhere near her (far more likely). The sheep got over their illness, and there were many more to herd out of the barn than went in, for many of the pregnant ewes took the opportunity to drop lambs. The folk from the Fellowship took such good care of the threshing barn that the Mayor declared they could make free use of it whenever they had another such emergency.
In short, everything was back to normal.
Everything but Keisha herself, that is.
Since the onset of the storm, she’d felt edgy most of the time. Whenever she treated a patient, she’d start to reflect the emotional state of that patient herself, and it wasn’t pleasant. The only reason she’d even known that she was being influenced in that way was because she’d been perfectly calm and contented on the third morning of the storm, and had her mood utterly reversed by the first patient to enter the door. Once someone left, she was fine, but while they were in the same area she had to keep a steady head and remind herself that she was not the one feeling rotten. It was worse if she had to touch the patient; that opened her up to all manner of things she didn’t understand and did not in the least like.
This was making things unexpectedly uncomfortable at home. Rain made the trip to and from the farm pure misery, made chores at the farm a burden, and kept all the boys in the house when they weren’t at the farm. Cooped up like that, for lack of any other amusement, they picked fights with each other. When the boys argued, she found herself getting angry for no reason at all; when her mother got upset, her eyes threatened to overflow. She discovered that beneath her father’s calm exterior, he often suffered from a tensely knotted, aching gut, by experiencing these things herself. That, at least, was useful; she took him aside and convinced him he needed her help unless he wanted to start spitting up blood one day. At least he stopped suffering and felt immensely calmer after following her prescriptions, even if she didn’t.
Four days after the storm ended, Lord Breon’s Healer Gil arrived for his monthly visit. He was late by a day, but she’d expected that; he’d probably had the same sorts of patients that she’d had - maybe more serious, since Lord Breon’s men were duty-bound to be outside no matter the weather - and to rescue any of Lord Breon’s folk who’d gotten themselves into difficulties.
She was replacing her depleted stocks of already-prepared medicines when he tapped on the doorframe and walked on in. She knew both the tap and the step, and even if she hadn’t, she’d have known it was him by the feeling of steadiness and patience that he always brought with him. He might be a cranky curmudgeon on the outside, but inside he was the steady rock on which all hysteria drove itself in vain.
At that moment, however, she needed both hands and her eyes to get her comfrey and lobelia concentrate into its jug. “Welcome, Gil,” she greeted him without turning. “Give me a moment, will you? I have both hands full.”
Gil helped himself to one of the two chairs and she heard him sit down. “Am I?” he asked. “Am I welcome, that is?”
Hmm. Is he expecting a fight out of me? If so, why? She put the jug up, then measured her herbs and put the finished mixture into a steeping bag, tying the drawstrings tight. No point in starting a new batch now, but she’d have it ready to go when Gil left. “I haven’t killed anyone this month, directly or indirectly, and I don’t have any plans to do so today, so of course you’re welcome,” she retorted, turning to greet him properly. “Mind you, I was tempted once or twice during the rain, but I managed to contain my feelings.”
Gil was a withered little raisin of a man, whose normal movements were so deliberate that it shocked people when, in an emergency, he moved with the speed of a hummingbird. His hair was an iron-gray, his legs bowed, his eyes small and black and seemingly able to see whatever it was you most wanted to keep secret. He didn’t look like a Healer; he looked like a weatherbeaten old horse tamer, and, in fact, he did tame horses using a Shin’a’in method he’d learned on Lord Ashkevron’s estate of Forst Reach where he’d grown up (where horse tamers were honored and very, truly needed). Children and animals trusted him immediately, and he had the no-nonsense aura of competence and authority to make even Lord Breon’s most battle-hardened fighters listen to and obey him. There couldn’t have been a better Healer for that particular position in the entire Kingdom, even if his Gift was so weak it was negligible.
“I see you’re wearing Greens now - so to speak,” he continued, raising his eyebrows. “Not exactly orthodox color, though.”
She brushed her hand down the front of her tunic selfconsciously. “I thought I’d use some old clothing of my own for a dye experiment before I ruined those nice uniforms the Collegium sent.” She shrugged. “Why use those new uniforms for work when I have plenty of old things that can take a beating?”
“You know, a uniform isn’t there to make you conform, it’s to reassure your patients as a symbol. Heralds know that; that’s why they wear Whites; people wouldn’t take them half so seriously if they didn’t show up in uniforms. I take it that with the rains you had the usual crop?” he asked, looking her up and down, still with that penetrating expression on his face.
“And one young idiot,” she replied with a laugh, and sat down and told him about Piel. He grunted with disgust when she described how Piel had gotten sick and soaked in the first place, and broke into a cackle of unexpected laughter when she told him the lecture she’d read the romantic fool.
“Bright Havens, I wish I’d been here!” he chortled, slapping the arm of the chair with his hand. “Sounds to me as if you’re getting your proper attitude, young lady. If people won’t give you the authority and respect you need to make them listen, then by the gods, take it! You can apologize after they’re better. What good’s a Healer that no one listens to? That was where poor old Justyn got into trouble; he was too soft on people.”
“Well, all I can say is I’m grateful that Piel hasn’t decided he’s lifebonded to Shandi. He’s quite enough of a wet mess as it is, and I swear to you, even if he was shaved bald he’d have more hair than wits. Why Shandi ever encouraged him in the first place, I’ll never know.” She sighed, and ran both hands through the hair at her temples in exasperation. “Maybe it’s just that she was too kind, and afraid to break his heart. Other than young Piel’s crisis, the Fellowship’s sheep got that dry cough I told you about, and the preparation you recommended cleared it up in them as fast as it did my folk’s flock.”
“Just watch that particular medicine in the early stages of pregnancy, it tends to make cattle miscarry, and it might do the same in sheep,” he cautioned. “Late stages, no problem, but the first month - ”
“If it’s a choice between possibly losing the sheep or losing the lamb, I think most people would prefer the latter, but I’ll be sure and give them that option if the situation comes up,” she promised. “But that might be the reason why so many of the pregnant ones decided to drop lambs in the barn - which was a fine thing as far as their keepers were concerned.”
“Heard anything from your sister yet?” he asked, changing the subject so quickly that she immediately suspected an ulterior motive.
She shook her head. “It’s a little too soon, I’d think,” she replied, watching him with care. “I should think they’d have her so busy at first that she’d be going from the moment she got up to the moment her head hit the pillow.”
I wonder why he’s asking ? Is it curiosity or something more?
“And I should think she’d want her sister with her so much that she’d be sending you letters three times a day,” he began. She held up her hand, stopping him at that point.
“Don’t start.” she said shortly. “I won’t listen, and we’ve been through this a hundred times. How would you cope with me gone? You couldn’t, and you know it.”
“But you have the Gift, and I can’t teach you to use it,” he countered stubbornly. “We’ve tried, and I can’t tell you what you need to know, and so far you haven’t made any progress with the texts either.”
“Then we’ll wait until someone with the Gift can come here to teach me for a couple of months,” she retorted, just as stubbornly. “Right now I’m doing as well or better than Justyn did for all of his training at the Collegium, and right now, that’s what this village needs and can’t afford to do without. Whatever happens here, I can at least buy time for a fully trained, fully Gifted Healer to get here. And you have to admit that in some cases that’s all you could do!”
Gil shook his head, but he gave up the argument as a lost cause yet again. He was silent for a space, then scratched his head uneasily. “I’m just afraid that if you keep on like this, your Gift is going to get you into trouble,” he said at last, sounding far more worried than she was used to hearing from him.
“How - how could I get into trouble?” she asked, uncomfortably certain that she already knew the answer.
“I’m not sure - since my own Gift is so trifling, they never went into details,” he said, frowning with concentration, probably as he tried to recall his long-ago training at the Collegium. “I just remember that they told me an untrained Gift has the potential to cause the owner problems.”
She wondered guiltily if she ought to tell him about her strange new sensitivity, and how her nerves always seemed to be raw and open to other people. But if I do, he‘ll probably find a way to pack me off to Haven and then what would happen? No, I can get through this. It can’t be too long now before someone is sent here to show me what to do. Half the Healers in Valdemar aren’t trained at the Collegium, and they do all right! I can manage. I have to.
To keep him from somehow getting the information out of her, she took him around to see those few of her patients who were still abed, and the now-healthy flock of Fellowship sheep. The Fellowship had put them in a pasture along the edge of the river, an easy walk from the village, and quite an enjoyable stroll in the warm spring sunshine. A feeling of laziness crept over her as they came up to the fence and propped their arms up on the top rail, the wood rough and warm under her hand. He leaned over the fence looking as relaxed as she had ever seen him, watching the silly beasts graze and wearing a small but contented smile.
“I have to admit something to you, young Keisha,” he said at last, after they’d both listened to a woodlark sing until it flew off. “I envy you this part of your practice, and I am very glad that you aren’t one of those who thinks herself too valuable to waste time tending animals.”
“If one of those ever gets around me, they’ll get an earful,” she chuckled, totally relaxed now that the only human anywhere around was her mentor. “If our job is to see to our people’s well-being, how can we ignore the well-being of their animals? If their beasties fail, they’ll starve, and how’ve we done our duty then?”
“Good point, and one I’ll remember the next time I need it.” One of the sheep looked up at them, and for some reason known only to it, decided to come over to the fence to see what they were doing there. Gil reached over the fence to the animal, let it sniff his fingers, then buried his hand in its woolly head, scratching around its ears. The sheep went cross-eyed with bliss, and Keisha giggled at its expression.
“The shepherds tell me they’ve always been marvelously tame, but it’s been really pronounced since the rain,” she told the Healer. “I think they were reminded that many of them grew up in boxes next to warm stoves, so now they’re almost like pets - which makes me glad they’re wool-sheep and not mutton-sheep.”
“There is something to that,” he agreed. “Seems like a betrayal to raise a creature as a pet, then eat it. Most chickens being an exception, of course.”
Keisha laughed; she’d been pecked by too many hens and chased by too many mean roosters to disagree with him. “Most chickens can’t be pets; they’ve got less brains than Piel, if that’s possible,” she pointed out. “Since you’ve got your fingers in it, what do you think of the wool in its natural state?”
“Why do you think I’m scratching her? It’s as much for my pleasure as hers; I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything so soft.” He finally stopped his ministrations with a gentle pat on the top of the sheep’s head; just as well, for the ewe looked ready to fall over at any moment. He looked her over with a measuring gaze as she shook her head until her ears flapped, then went back to grazing. “Just about shearing time, isn’t it?”
“Just about. The Fellowship always waits until they’re sure the cold weather is over before they take that protection away. I’ve told you how delicate this lot is.”
“Yes, but obviously worth it. The shawls wouldn’t be half so desirable made out of ordinary fleece. That reminds me; Lord Breon’s son Val plans to pick out a shawl this Midsummer Faire, or so Lord Breon tells me,” Gil offered. He caught Keisha’s interest immediately. If the son and heir of their liege lord was getting married, the whole village would want to know all about it, and as soon as might be.
“For whom?” she asked. “Anyone we know?”
“Some sweet young thing at the keep where he fostered until this spring.” Gil chuckled. “I’ve got the notion that Lord Breon had that in mind when he fostered Val there in the first place. With eight daughters to choose from, there was bound to be something that would take.”
“I’ll tell the Fellowship about the shawl first,” Keisha replied, already deciding who she’d tell first, and in what order, so as not to upset the delicate ranking order in the village. “They’ll probably want to do something special for Val, and they’ll want every moment of time to plan it.”
“Yes, do that - but I won’t tell him they’re making a special shawl for him. He’s got it set in his mind that he has to pick the thing out - as if there’s a special magic to what he’d pick only he and she would appreciate properly or some other romantic nonsense.” Gil shook his head. “He’s been listening to a lot of love ballads lately - he and that lovelorn lad of yours have that much in common. Sometimes I think Bards do more harm than good.”
“Well, they give us all something to dream about, I suppose,” she said doubtfully, then returned to the practical aspects of the courtship. “Meanwhile, I think we can all arrange that he gets his special shawl without knowing it’s his special shawl, if that makes any sense.”
“Complete sense.” He looked up at the sun, and pushed away from the fence. “And if I’m to get back before sundown, I’d best collect my horse and be on my way.”
They parted amiably enough at the pasture, and Keisha returned to the haven of her workshop. She still had plenty more to do while there was a relative lack of illness and injury, and just now nothing would tempt her back into the proximity of people. She felt relaxed, and she wanted to hold onto the feeling as long as she could.
She truly dreaded having to go back home; lately at least one of the boys would have some sort of unpleasant dream each night, and although the dreamer never woke up and never remembered the dream, she did and it woke her up. The workshop was far enough away from the rest of the houses that nothing ever reached her here, and it would be so good to go to sleep knowing that the only thing disturbing her would be her own nightmares, if any.
It would be so nice to have a good night’s sleep again, the way I did during the rains, she thought fretfully. I wish I could just live here and be done with it.
Then - I wonder why I couldn’t just do that ?
She abruptly sat down in the chair Gil had used. All right, I’ll be methodical. The reasons why it would be difficult are - 
Mum would object, firstly.
True enough, but she could point out that now no one else would get roused in the middle of the night just because someone needed her. Besides, it wasn’t as if she were going to be living out at the farm, or somewhere else out of sight and alone. She’d still be near at hand, quite near enough to keep an eye on.
I’d have to start doing my own meals.
Yes, but she did that sometimes anyway. The memory of the Fellowship’s communal meals popped into her head, and she realized that she could easily trade some of the routine health care of their flocks for the right to eat with them. Other than that - she could start taking a little more of her fees in food-barter. It could all be worked out.
I’d be by myself. Mum will say that people might talk.
Now, if it had been Shandi who’d wanted to live in the workshop, that would have caused a scandal. Shandi was pretty and had suitors, and people would certainly start to gossip. For this purpose, Keisha’s prickly personality gave her all the protection she needed, for there wasn’t a young man in the entire village who had ever showed any interest in courting her, and they surely wouldn’t start just because she was living alone.
And what’s more, Rafe can move into the cubby Shandi and I shared, and that will break up the quarreling with Torey. For that reason alone, Papa will back me up on this.
But it was easiest to get something done if you didn’t stop to ask permission first - so before anyone came home from the farm, she decided to get all her things and move them over to the workshop. Move now, and argue about it later.
She went straight home, and working quickly, had everything she could truly call hers piled on both beds. Clothing, of course, that was the largest pile; the carved wooden box Papa had made to hold her jewelry was on top of the pile of underthings. She ran her fingers over the smooth wood of the top, following the familiar course of the curls and whorls he’d incised there.
Beside that were her two dolls; all the rest of her toys had been handed down to her brothers as she outgrew them. One was a faceless, battered, and much beloved rag-doll; worn out with loving and much play, but too much adored to be discarded. Beth had been the subject of many an adventure, many a peril, and so much hugging that the stuffing was permanently squeezed out of her middle. She had been rescued by Heralds and Hawkbrothers from every hazard imaginable, from forest fires to slavers- - then, as Keisha’s interest in Healing strengthened and grew, had not only been rescued, but had been cured of every illness and injury possible, and some that would have been the death of any lesser creature. Her embroidered mouth was stained with all the potions that had been pressed to it; her goat-hair braids a little matted from the compresses tied to her head, and every limb had been stitched and restitched with sutures for imagined wounds. Keisha gave her a self-conscious little kiss, and put her down again.
The other doll, an immaculate and beautiful porcelain-headed lady-doll that she and Shandi used to practice on when they were first learning sewing skills, was in near-new condition, for Anestesi had been a gift to a much older Keisha than Beth. In fact, Shandi and Keisha still used this doll to work out a new cut for a gown or the like.
She picked it up and smoothed down the folds of the last gown they’d sewn for it, a dainty creation for Shandi on the occasion of her being chosen Harvest Queen last fall. Of course, the doll’s gown was a patchwork of scraps with a network of chalk lines and other marks on it, which gave the gown a rather odd look - but Shandi had looked like real royalty. . . .
Yes, both dolls would definitely have to come. They could share the loft with her bed; that way no one would see them and tease her about them, and Beth could reassure hurt little ones.
Next, basketful of toiletries. Scent, lotions, the cosmetics she and Shandi had created that Mum would have had a fit over, had she known about them - no doubt there; these had better come too. At least now she’d have some privacy to experiment with those cosmetics without anybody finding out. And if Mum discovered them, I hate to think what a scene it would cause.
All of the extra sheets and blankets came next, but there was really no need to take them.
I’ll leave the bedding, I’ve enough at the workshop, and if I need more, I can barter for it. She stowed it all under the bed where it had been kept before.
Embroidery basket, knitting basket, plain-sewing basket - all of her handicrafts stored in baskets, making them portable enough to take along anywhere. Shandi had come up with that idea, and now Shandi’s baskets were somewhere between here and Haven in a peddler’s wagon.
Yes, yes, and yes. I’m still going to need my baskets. I’ve got all that wool to knit up if I want a new sweater this winter.
A pile of fabric - which had mostly been Shandi’s choices, but which Shandi was hardly going to need now, seeing as how she would spend the next several years wearing Trainee Grays exclusively. Keisha had kept the pile of fabric when she’d sent on Shandi’s clothing and handiwork baskets. Will I have time to do any sewing for myself? Well, probably. And colors that suited Shandi would also suit Keisha. True, the fabrics would do for new shirts for the boys, but when was Mum going to have time to sew them? She hesitated, then added the pile of fabric to the growing list of things she was taking. I have plenty of things that I can wear to work in, but not much else. It might be nice to have a pretty gown or so.
Rag bag - 
Definitely. No one can have too many rags.
The big box of odds-and-ends she was always meaning to do something with - brilliant feathers, a cured snakeskin, seeds that looked as if they might make good beads, half finished bits of carving and crafting - 
Maybe I’ll get some of that done.
Eventually she had it all sorted through, and decided that three trips would do to get it all to the workshop. On the second, neighbor Tansy came outside with a basket of wet clothing and looked at her with a surprised expression.
“Keisha!” she called, before Keisha could escape out of earshot. “Have you fought with your parents over something? Is something wrong? Why are you moving?”
Keisha paused and peered around her burden, licked her lips nervously, and said, “We haven’t quarreled, but - Tansy, with Shandi gone, the house is just too small to hold all those boys and just me. Besides, I’m in the shop more than I’m here.”
Tansy looked relieved, and nodded. “That’s the truth, and I’ve been saying to my Olek that you must feel like a kickball, in there with all those rowdy boys and no Shandi to make them behave like gentlemen. Well, good, as long as you haven’t gone and had a fight with your Mum or Da. I’ll remember you’re on your own, and bring you over a bite to eat now and again.”
Keisha flushed, and smiled. “Thank you, Tansy. That’s more than I’d expect.”
“Oh, it’s no more than we did - or should have done - for Wizard Justyn, bless his brave soul.” She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the statue in the square. “I won’t keep you, dear - and I hope you enjoy a night without having to listen to your brothers for a change!”
“Oh, Tansy - ” Keisha laughed,” - they snore so loudly I’ll probably still hear them!”
When she returned for the third load, Tansy was back inside her house, and she brought over the last of her things with a feeling of profound relief.
The relief deepened into pure content as she stowed her belongings away - clothing into the clothes-chest in the loft and the wardrobe-cupboard downstairs, fabric up on a shelf where it wouldn’t get dirty, one workbasket in the window seat, one in the loft, and one beside the fire. The dolls sat side-by-side in state on her bed, and all the rest of her possessions fitted into nooks and corners as if they’d belonged there all along.
Now it looked like a home. Her samplers and embroidered tapestries were on the wall, a lap rug lay over the back of the fireplace chair, embroidered cushions softened seats, and her blue glass vase sat on the tiny table where she ate her meals.
And it was hers, all hers, with the stamp of no other hands on it.
Wizard Justyn would never recognize the place, she thought happily. Not that she had ever seen it when Justyn was in residence, but some of the village women had given very succinct and pungent descriptions. They all boiled down to one word - one which made a world of sense to women, though it baffled men.
Bachelors.
Justyn had been a bachelor, and an old one at that. Bachelors didn’t clean up after themselves, for some unknown reason - nor did they really allow anyone else to clean up after them. The place would have been a right mess when Justyn lived here, with shelves crammed full of dusty oddments, clothing lying about on the floor or draped over a chair where the wizard had left it, and dirty crockery filling the sink.
Now, every perfectly straight and level shelf held its proper contents arrayed sensibly. The big table that had taken up most of the space was gone, replaced by her tiny table, a short stool, and a couple of comfortable chairs. A tall stool stood beside her clean, orderly workbenches, the floor was swept, the hearth clean, and enough firewood to take care of the fire for the entire evening stacked in a log holder beside it. Kindling was in a bucket beside that, not scattered across the hearth. The biggest of the two windows had been deepened, and a window seat built into it. Her embroidered Windrider hung over the hearth, her first and second samplers on either side of it, and her Moonlady up in the loft over the window. Braided rag rugs softened and warmed the floor. All the food was stored out of sight in a closed and mouse-proof cupboard. There wasn’t a crumb to tempt mouse or insect anywhere to be seen.
On the “domestic” side of the cottage, shelves were laden with her personal books, handiwork, linens, and other purely personal belongings. Here, the wardrobe and cupboard resided. On the “Healer” side, shelves were burdened with more books, prepared medicines, raw materials, bandages, the knives and probes, needles and Tayledras silk and catgut of her trade. This was where the workbenches were, and the sink with its pump. The fireplace divided the two “sides,” and beside it was a rolled-up pallet, where she could treat anyone who couldn’t stand, or needed sewing up. That way the victim couldn’t thrash around and fall off a table or bed - and what was more important to her, if he was delirious or uncooperative, she could sit on him to hold him still if she had to.
Acres and acres, and it’s mine, all mine! She giggled, remembering the punchline to a salacious joke she wasn’t supposed to have overheard.
Everything was as neat and clean as soap and water could get it, including the loft where her bed was.
And that, of course, would be another change. I remember when we cleaned this place up. Dirt had actually packed into the corners!
Still, that was a little uncharitable, for Justyn had kept his own treatment areas clean. It was just that - 
Well, bachelors don’t seem to realize that dirt gets under things and into corners where you can’t see it. Bachelors think that as long as it’s not gritty underfoot, the floor’s clean.
It was time to think about making supper - 
Or going to talk to the Fellowship. I think I’ll be lazy.
As she closed the door behind her, she realized that there was something gone from her - resentment. And another thing - a feeling of being desperately crowded.
It’s because now I don’t have to share anything, that’s what it is. Not the washbasin, not the chores, not a room. Bright Havens! I can choose to share, I don’t have to! I’m going to have privacy! Real, and total, privacy! She couldn’t remember having had complete privacy in her entire life. It was such an astonishing thought that she couldn’t think of anything else right up until the moment that she knocked on the door of the Fellowship’s Hall, their main building.
She recognized the old man who answered the door as the “Eldest” - not really a leader, but the oldest man of the founding family, the grandfather of Alys. As such, he had the authority to make simple bargains for the
Fellowship such as the one she had in mind without putting it to a vote.
“Eldest Safir,” she said, with a half-bow. “I have a proposition I would like to put to you.”
“Then please enter, Healer,” he told her, his expression carefully neutral. She entered and followed him into the communal hall where they all took their meals. At his invitation she sat down on a bench; he sat on one opposite her.
“May I hear your proposition, Healer?” he asked politely. “I cannot say yet if I may consider it alone, or the Fellowship as a whole must debate it.”
“I understand that, Eldest,” she replied, just as soberly. “It is a minor proposal - and simple. The Fellowship currently owes me for certain medicines and treatment for the sheep during the rains - I should like to barter that credit for a certain number of meals taken with you.”
The old man’s brows had furrowed during the first part of her statement, but rose to his hairline in surprise as she finished. “Don’t you have your own family?” he blurted.
“I have irregular hours, and it came to me today that we have far too many people stuffed into a single small house,” she said with a smile. “We all agree that I am fully adult, so I moved into my workshop, to free some space for my brothers. Since I will no longer be contributing to the family income, it seems wrong to take bread from their table.”
“I can see that.” He pondered the proposal while she waited patiently. “And I am certain that you already know of our custom of the hearth kettle.”
“Actually, Eldest,” she smiled, “I was counting on it.”
The “hearth kettle” was a kettle of soup or stew always kept on the kitchen hearth, so that anyone who was hungry could be fed. One of the Fellowship’s customs was that anyone who begged charity was granted three meals and a place to sleep with nothing in return asked of him - and the kettle also served a useful purpose for people whose lives were built around their animals, and who thus, at certain seasons, would also have “irregular hours.” Keisha could always count on getting a bite from the hearth kettle, day or night.
“Well, then - ” Now the old man smiled broadly, and Keisha knew she’d won him over. “What if I say that we will barter unlimited meals in return for all routine care? Not emergencies or unexpected illnesses, like the sheep just had, but all the routine health checks and medicines and tonics and so forth.”
She saw no point in bargaining further; this was exactly what she wanted. “Then I would say that the bargain is set.” She held out her hand.
He took it, and shook it three times to seal the bargain. “Will you stay for tonight’s dinner? We’ve egg-pie.” He raised his eyebrows again. “My wife Alse’s egg-pie.”
She sighed happily at the mere suggestion, and smiled at him. “Eldest,” she said with complete truth, “For your wife’s egg-pie I would arm-wrestle a bear.”
She returned to her cottage - her cottage, not her workshop anymore, and the mere thought filled her with proprietary pride - carrying a basket of warm rolls for breakfast and with the satisfied content of having had a truly fine meal. Alse had a way with spicing and adding chopped bacon and greens to egg-pie that raised the humble dish to something suitable for the table of the Queen herself. There could not have been a better omen for the start of her bargain with the Fellowship than that first meal.
She put the rolls away and lit two of her lamps, then went out into the garden to cut a few blooms for her vase. With lamps shining brightly and flowers on the table, she felt happier than she had for months.
And instead of studying, tonight she gave herself a holiday of sorts. With a small fire to warm the room, she picked up her knitting; with luck, she’d finish the back of the tunic tonight. That would leave the front and both sleeves to do before winter, which was hardly an insurmountable task.
She listened to the songs of crickets and tree-frogs, the murmur of voices in the houses nearest hers, and the distant rushing of the river. There were no shouting boys, no clumping boots - nothing but peaceful quiet.
Why didn’t I do this sooner? I’d have had far fewer headaches!
Perhaps because Shandi had kept peace in the house - or as much peace as anyone could. But surely at some point even Shandi had gotten tired of playing peacekeeper. . . .
Maybe that’s one reason why she was so ready to ride off to Haven. That, and Mum. Mum didn’t really want her to grow up, I think. Poor Mum: like it or not, children do, and there’s nothing to be done about it.
So, it could be that Shandi had done both of them a favor, by making the break clean and quick. Yes, and me, too. IfShandi’s grown up, I’m more than grown.
Was this how Shandi felt now, on her own, making her own decisions, having a place she could truly say was hers and no one else’s? If so, Keisha was glad for her; it was a fine feeling, and one she would be glad to share.
I hope she has a room of her own at that Collegium place. She certainly deserves one at this point.
She’d always been an early riser - more from necessity than virtue, it was true, but a Healer didn’t have much choice in the matter - and it had been a long day. She found herself yawning over her work just as she bound off the knitting, and realized that there were no noisy boys to keep her awake if she tried to go to sleep “early.” She lit a lantern in the loft, blew out the two downstairs, and banked the fire for the morning. As she went back up to the loft to change for bed, she sent a silent prayer of thanks to whatever deity had put this notion of moving into her mind. And if it’s the spirit of Wizard Justyn, who didn’t want his cottage to stand empty most of the time, thank you, too!
Once the hurdle of breaking the news to her mother was over and done with, the move was going to make life easier. Much, much easier.
Now if the mysterious Darian would just return to care for the magical needs of Errold’s Grove, life here would be just about perfect.

Six

Once, back when he was enduring his lessons with Justyn, Darian would have been conscious of nothing except how uncomfortable he was at this moment - either too hot or too cold, sitting on a rock or on a sharp branch. He could always find something to distract him from his hated lessons in magic, lessons he considered useless. That was a long time ago, far distant in time and maturity, or so he hoped. Now, none of those possible discomforts mattered, and if you asked him about the temperature or his surroundings, he’d tell you honestly that he hadn’t noticed.
Especially at this moment, a moment of epiphanal breakthrough, when intense new experience overwhelmed every other consideration.
“There!” said Healer-Mage Firefrost in triumph. “Now you see it, you feel it, don’t you?”
Darian “stared” at the slow, smooth flow of energy that was literally all around him; it had taken days of coaching, but now, at last, he was able to do what Starfall had not been able to teach him - was in the over-world of energy, a world overlying the “real” world and a part of it, yet with its own separate life and rules. He used Mage-Sight at a deep enough level to actually watch the passage of life-energy from living creatures to the tiny feeder lines, and from there to the ley-lines, and on to the nodes. Every mage knew that energy flowed in that way; it was one of the first lessons in energy control - but only certain types of mages could actually see it happen at the level of individual blades of grass and insects no bigger than pinheads. Most mages couldn’t actually detect mage-energy until it had collected in the threadlike initial runnels, leaving them with the impression that the energy took the form of a web, rather than an all-pervasive flow. More than that, as Firefrost said, he felt it, a sensation entirely new to him and yet as familiar to him as his own heartbeat - exactly like the faint pressure of sunlight on his skin. Healers saw and felt the same thing according to Starfall; so did minor mages like earth-witches and hedge-wizards - these were the energies that they used, for they were unable to handle anything with more power than a small runnel. This energy was tedious to accumulate and granted them a relatively low level of power, but it was omnipresent. An earth-witch never had to search for a ley-line, and for a while after the mage-storms, hedge-wizards could accomplish more than Adepts, who had never been forced to learn all of the minor magics that needed only the merest whisper of power.
Experimentally, he moved to one of the little runnels collecting the flow - nowhere near large enough to be called a ley-line - and sensed the pressure increase when he interposed himself in the flow.
“It feels good, doesn’t it?” Firefrost said with satisfaction. “I always think it feels like bathing in sun-warmed silk.”
He nodded absently; it both felt and looked good, a warm amber glow the exact color of the light near sunset on a cloudless summer evening, and a sensation of being slowly revitalized.
“If you go somewhere that the energies are distorted or marred, you’ll feel that as well,” Firefrost told him. “It will make you sick, and you’ll learn to tell what’s wrong by how it affects you. Right now you need most to learn to snap in and out of Mage-Sight and Mage-Sense accurately and infallibly, so that if you ever do come across such a place, it won’t entrap you. Now that you have the trick of Seeing this level, your assignment will be to practice exactly that until I think you’re ready for the next step.”
“Can the good magic entrap you, too, with not wanting to leave that feeling?” he asked.
“Not if you’re mentally healthy - no more than you’re entrapped at the feast table,” she replied. “Once you’re ‘full,’ you’ll feel willing to leave.”
The mage did - something. Darian couldn’t quite tell what it was, but it felt a little like a static spark arcing from the mage to himself, more of a shock than pain, but enough to bring him back to the ordinary world with a startled gasp.
“This is why you need a Healing Adept to teach you properly,” Firefrost said, still sitting serenely where she’d been all along, cross-legged in the shade at the edge of the meadow where he and Kel had picnicked. “Starfall is a fine mage, experienced and full of wisdom, but he cannot see and sense the earth-energies in the way a Healer-Mage can, he cannot move about in the realm of pure energy the way we can, so he could not teach you how to access them. I am a Healer-Mage, but I can only take you so far - you have the potential to become a Healing Adept, and your teacher should also be at that level, if you are going to reach that potential.”
Darian nodded; he also sat where he had been all along; his “movement” in the overworld of energies had all been with something other than his physical body. “I think I know why you brought me here, too,” he said shrewdly. “Even though most of the mages have been teaching me in the safety of the Vale, if I’d made the breakthrough there, I’d probably have been blinded.”
Firefrost beamed at him, her young-old face suddenly wreathed in the wrinkles of her proper age - well over seventy. Smile-lines, mostly; Firefrost was a very cheerful person. “Very good! Yes, and I advise you to practice and learn to control this type of Sight in a safe place outside the Vale until you’ve gotten it well in hand. So many ley-lines come into the Heartstone in the Vale that you would be blinded if you can’t dim things down for yourself. And you’d have a headache for a week that would make you wish you were dead!”
Darian was still conscious of that faint pressure of energy; he realized that he always had been, he just hadn’t known what to call it. “So this is why some places in Valdemar made me sick until we cleaned them up!” he said wonderingly. “That’s why Snowfire and Starfall would watch me so closely - they couldn’t feel where things had gone wrong, and they used me to find the places for them!”
Firefrost nodded, and her approval warmed him clear through. “And you understand why they had to do that, don’t you? Or now are you feeling misused?”
That was the last thing on his mind. He shrugged. “They didn’t have much choice, did they? I mean, they did have a kind of choice, they could have used dowsing or some other way to find the bad places, but it was so much quicker to use me - and besides that, it didn’t cost them anything in magical energies of their own. They wouldn’t have risked me if they didn’t think that we could all do what we did without any harm to me.”
He couldn’t resent being “used”; not after the way he’d been vehemently angry with them over using up energies they could ill afford in order to accomplish things that he had been able to do at far less expense. He’d essentially offered himself for whatever need they had at that point, so there was no reason to resent the fact that they’d taken him up on the offer!
“This - this form of the Gift that you have - is very similar to the Earth-Sense of some monarchs,” Firefrost went on in her low, age-roughened voice. “They can’t actually see the energies most of the time - not unless they are also mages - but they feel them. They can also feel what is wrong with the energies of their land at a distance, which can be very useful. The monarchs of Rethwellan have it, the highest of the Priests of Vkandis have it, the Son of the Sun Solaris has it, and the new King of Hardorn has it. In the King of Hardorn’s case, though, it was - imposed on him. With his consent - though I sometimes think he didn’t know what he was consenting to.” She raised an ironic eyebrow. “There is an ancient earth-religion sect of that land that still retains the full knowledge of the Earth-Taking ceremony, and has managed to give Earth-Sense to every monarch of Hardorn except the late and unlamented Ancar.”
“Will I be able - Scratch that. I will be able to do what Starfall did about cleaning places up, but faster and more easily, won’t I.” He made it a statement, but was pleased to see Firefrost nod. “It’ll be like Healing for a Healer; instead of having to figure out what’s gone wrong, I’ll already know by how it affects me, and because of that I’ll know how to fix what’s wrong and get it right the first time, instead of fumbling around using trial and error.”
“It will be quite natural to you - as will some other things, such as moving and acting in the overworld of mage-energies, once you’ve gotten the proper instructor. And you will be able to accomplish things I can only watch and admire, if you ever have access to enough energy.” Firefrost sighed. “Still, we all have our abilities, and - ”
“And anyone who can reverse the effects of frostbite has no reason to feel self-conscious,” he replied, daring to interrupt her. “Any Healer can save what there is left of the damaged tissue, and so could most mages - but anyone who can restore and rebuild all the damage that has already occurred has nothing to be ashamed of!”
That was how Firefrost had gotten her use name at the age of fourteen, when she was newly come into her abilities. While she was scouting the boundaries of k’Vala, a blizzard too huge to be steered away had swept across the forest and everyone who could was out scouting for those who might have been caught in it. She had been the only person anything like a Healer to come upon a family of tervardi taken by surprise by the storm. She had not only saved them from freezing, but had almost completely reversed the effects of the profoundly crippling frostbite (or “firefrost” in the Hawkbrother tongue) that they had suffered. By the time the help she had called for arrived, most of the damage was Healed, and no one suffered anything worse than a little superficial scarring at the extremities.
“I sometimes suspect that the only reason I could was that I didn’t know I couldn’t,” his teacher said, only half in jest. “Still. . .”
“Still, a little magic used with precision and at precisely the right time is better than a great deal of magic used sloppily and clumsily, too late or too early,” he said firmly. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that!”
“Very well! The student rightly rebukes the teacher!” Firefrost laughed, throwing up her hands as if to fend off a blow. “Now, I would like to see if the student can evoke his Mage-Sight in the realm of the overwork without the coaching of his teacher!”
“I hear and obey,” he said, bowing a little at the waist, and sent his mind down that peculiar “twist” that Firefrost had shown him.
Once again, the world around him was overlaid with the overworld of energies. This time he had a kind of double vision, with the real world showing through the flowing energy-fields, and he decided to see if he could narrow his focus - 
Even as he thought that, in a dizzying rush that “felt” exactly as if he were diving off a cliff into the river, he found himself contemplating the life-forces of a single blade of grass. Except that he was far, far “smaller” in perception than that blade of grass!
Oh. My. The slender stem loomed “over” him like one of the great trees of the Vale. As he gazed “upward,” his mouth falling open, he tried to take in the immense complexity of this seemingly insignificant bit of flora, and failed.
I think my brain is overflowing! He tried to break free of the fascination and couldn’t - tried again and still couldn’t - and gave a wordless cry for help to his teacher.
With another of those startling shocks, he found himself looking only at the real world again, from his proper perspective, and sighed with relief.
“Next time, ask before you do something like that,” Firefrost told him sternly, crossing her arms over her chest, and giving him a harsh glare. “That was not what I asked you to do, was it?”
“I didn’t know I was doing it until I’d done it,” he admitted shakily.
She shook her head, the fine silver hair escaping from its braids with the movement and floating in fly-away strands about her face. “Now you see why you need a Healing Adept to teach you. It’s entirely possible that you could get yourself into something that I can’t get you out of! In the future, tell me what you think you want to do before you’re in the overworld, all right? With someone of your potential, a wish often becomes fact before you have the least idea what’s going on.”
He felt very tired, all at once, and certainly he and Firefrost had put in more than enough work for one day. It had taken all afternoon before he’d learned that twist that brought him into the overworld. “Can we stop now?” he asked meekly. “I’m getting worn out.”
Firefrost lost her stern glare and smiled ruefully. “And so you should be - and it’s my fault for letting you go back in when I knew you would be getting tired. Just run through those primary exercises I showed you, and we’ll go back to the Vale.”
Now that he knew what they were for, the “primary exercises” in energy manipulation were far easier than they’d been earlier this afternoon, and he ran through them accurately, if not quickly. For the last one, he guided energy from the tree he sat beneath to a particular runnel rather than allowing it to flow into several as it would normally have done, and this time nothing escaped his “herding.”
“Clean,” Firefrost approved. “Very clean. I couldn’t have done it better. Let’s get ourselves back home, shall we?”
He got to his feet and aided Firefrost to hers. She was as much Starfall’s senior as Starfall was Darien’s and, until Darian arrived, the only Healing-Mage that k’Vala had. She had greeted his arrival with relief - and pleasure, when she learned his potential.
She was the kindest and most patient of his three teachers, although Starfall ran a very near second. If his unknown Healing-Adept teacher was half as easy to get along with as Firefrost, Darian thought that he would count himself lucky.
The other teacher, Adept Darkstone, was much more difficult to like. He gave Darian his full attention, true, and was absolutely punctilious in giving Darian the most precise and accurate instructions, but it was all done without any feeling whatsoever. Darian still didn’t know a thing about Darkstone’s background, not even something so minor as which tree his ekele was in, and he’d been getting lessons from the Adept for a week.
The one thing that he did know was the single thing Darkstone made clear at the very beginning; the Adept was entirely against the idea of working with Valdemarans in any way. He did not want outsiders in the Vale, around the Vale, or even aware that the Vale existed. He wanted Hawkbrothers to be a frightening presence in the forest, a glimpse of eyes in a shadow, the warning arrow out of nowhere.
Darkstone wasn’t the only Tayledras who felt that way, though all the ones that Darian had met so far had treated him with distant courtesy at least. There was, after all, a tradition of Tayledras accepting the occasional outsider into their ranks and Clans. The thing that this particular faction opposed was the wholesale “adoption” of Valdemar on the same basis as the Kaled’a’in.
Hard as it was to believe, there was even a faction that didn’t want the Kaled’a’in in k’Vala Vale! Their reasoning was a bit obtuse, along the line that “if the Goddess had wanted k’Leshya back with the Tayledras, the Goddess would have led them to us after the Sundering.”
Useless to argue that this was precisely what had happened - if a bit later than they would have preferred. This lot no more wanted trondi’irn and gryphons in Tayledras Vales than they wanted Shin’a’in and their fighting mares in Tayledras Vales.
Fortunately, Firefrost was as amused by them as they were outraged by her - and she had power and seniority in the Council over most of them.
Even if she didn’t, she could probably reduce them to gibbering just by chuckling at them, tickling them under the chin, and telling them to “run along and learn to play nicely with the new children.” He began to see that there were a lot of advantages to age, some of them enough to provide compensation for losing some of the advantages of youth!
In deference to Firefrost’s age, they’d ridden here on a pair of dyheli rather than hiking on foot. The two does had wandered off somewhere, but Kuari had kept track of one, while Firefrost’s snow-white peregrine had followed the other. Now, without prompting, the birds came winging back, flying under the level of the branches, while the dyheli does sauntered along behind at a brisk walk. Darian offered his linked hands to Firefrost; with a half-bow of her own, she stepped into them, and he boosted her into the well-padded saddle, then hopped onto the other waiting doe. Firefrost avoided the elaborate robes some of the mages - Darkstone for one - liked to wear, and the intricate hairstyles as well. Long, easy-fitting tunics and loose trews of silks in simple colors were what she preferred, and she kept her hair in two braids or a coiled braid at the nape of her neck. Today she wore green, with a necklet of rainbow-moonstones, a single white primary from her bird fastened into her braids.
“The other day someone asked me why I hadn’t changed my name for a use-name,” he told her, as they rode side by side. “I told them it was because I felt like the same person. Does that make sense to you?”
“Perfectly sound, good sense,” she replied with a laugh. “Really, Dar’ian, the reason we change our use-names in the first place is because the ones we’re given as children don’t fit us when we become adults. Think about the use-names for the children you’ve heard - Bluefeather, Littleflower, Honeyfawn, Jumpfrog - who’d want to be saddled with something like that as an adult?”
“Huh - or as an adolescent!” he countered, from the lofty vantage of eighteen. “So how do people get their adult use-names? Yours was given to you, right?”
“Yes, and if you manage to do something notable at about the time you’re ready for an ‘adult’ use-name, that’s usually what you get. Sometimes you get tagged with something notable that happens when you’re ready for a new name.” Her eyes crinkled at the corners with amusement. “That’s how Starfall got his - it was at a Midsummer celebration, and he’d climbed to the top of a cliff overshadowing the main swimming pool at the Vale we had back then. This was on a dare, you see - the usual male foolishness over a girl - and he jumped from the cliff into the pool at precisely the same time as an extremely bright shooting star flashed overhead, mirroring his fall, even to the same angle. So -’starfall’ he became and has remained.” Her eyes crinkled up even more. “And the funniest thing about it is that because he was diving at the time and had all of his attention on the dive so that he wouldn’t break his silly neck, he never saw the falling star that gave him his name!”
“Steelmind?”
“He never forgets anything, and proved it by reciting to one of the Elders a speech he had made that was precisely contradictory to the position he supported at that moment.” She laughed. “Potentially embarrassing, but he didn’t do it in public. Nevertheless, the Elder in question told everyone that the boy had a mind like a steel cage - nothing that got locked into it ever escaped.”
Darian grinned. “What about Darkstone?”
“His personality,” she responded promptly. “Pessimistic, unchanging, and cold as a stone. And believe it or not, he chose it himself. It was an affectation when he was young; he liked that particular aloof image. Now he couldn’t change it without more effort than he’s willing to put in.”
“Wintersky? Raindance? Summerdance?”
“All juvenile names; they haven’t gotten use-names yet, and their childhood names weren’t so silly they were in a hurry to lose them.”
“Hmm. Would anyone label me with a use-name that I don’t like, but am stuck with?” He could think of a number of unpleasant possibilities.
“People can try, but if you refuse to respond to their name for you, it’s considered good manners not to persist. You know the proverb - ’It isn’t what you call me, it’s what I answer to that counts.’ “ She nodded with understanding at his obvious relief. “As long as you feel you are Dar’ian and continue to respond to that name, no one will force you to accept another.”
At this point he certainly couldn’t foresee ever wanting to take a use-name. Not even if I were to do something really impressive.
“Do remember if you do take a use-name that, after you’ve had it for many years, it becomes a great effort to change it again,” she cautioned. “Usually something very dramatic has to happen before the change sticks in people’s minds. I can’t think of more than two or three people who’ve successfully gone to a new use-name later in life.”
By then, they’d reached the entrance to k’Vala, and they discussed when and where they would meet for his next lesson. Once inside the Veil they dismounted and thanked the dyheli for their help; Darian escorted his teacher to her ekele, one that was quite low to the ground, by Tayledras standards. There he left her in the hands of her hertasi helpers, and decided to see if Nightbird or Snowfire and Nightwind had eaten dinner yet, as he was in the mood for some company.
I’ll try Kel’s sunning rock, he decided. That always seemed to be the place one or more of them ended up.
Since he was in a very good mood, it came as an abrupt shock to him to walk straight into the middle of a fight between Snowfire and his beloved. He simply rounded a curve in the path, walked out into the open near the group of boulders that several gryphons liked to use for sunbathing, and there they were - 
Oh-oh.
“ - and no one is going to dictate whom I talk to!” Nightwind said, clearly and precisely, just as Darian stopped in his tracks. Her eyes, dark with anger, were the color of a thundercloud and looked just about ready to produce lightning. Her hands were clenched, her knuckles white, and her posture as stiff as an iron rod. For his part, Snowlake was actually white with rage, his eyes had gone to a pale gray, and his jaw was set so hard that Darian expected to hear his teeth splintering at any moment.
It was even more of a shock to Darian since they were arguing in a place so very public. They’d argued before, even in his presence, but never where anyone could just walk into the middle of the spat.
They were both using those sharp-edged, oh-so-civilized tones that meant they were really, really angry. They were both so caught up in their fight that neither of them paid the least attention to what was going on around them; he could have been a leaf, for all the attention they paid to him. Kel, wise young gryphon that he was, must have fled the moment the fight began.
Darian was taken so much by surprise that he froze where he was - and it looked as though he wasn’t the only one who’d been caught off-guard and trapped by the altercation. Nightbird stood with her back to the trunk of a tree, looking very much as if she were bound there and not much caring for it, on the other side of the line-of-battle from Darian.
“Look, I told you what he said - and to my face!” Snowfire said between clenched teeth, his face set, his eyes blazing with white fire. “He’s lucky I didn’t call him out in front of the Elders for it! That’s reason enough for you to avoid him.”
“No, it isn’t. And who are you to choose my friends for me?” Nightwind shot back, matching him glare for glare. “I am not going to give up friends I’ve had all my life, just because you can’t get along with them! He was my scouting partner all the way from White Gryphon, and I’m not going to act as if he’s come down with spots just because you got your precious masculine pride a little bruised! You don’t own me, and the last time I looked, the Tayledras didn’t keep slaves!”
That was more than enough for Darian; he managed to catch Nightbird’s eye and made a little motion with his head in the direction of the path. She nodded violently and edged around her sister until she got clear of the pair, then made a dash for safety. He grabbed her hand as she reached him, and they both beat a quick retreat up the path.
“What was all that about?” he asked as soon as they were out of earshot and felt as if they could slow down to a walk. “And how did you get caught in the middle?”
“Lessons with my sister, with Kel serving as the willing client,” she said, a little out of breath. “Snowfire came charging into the middle of it without so much as an ‘excuse me’ and began ranting about a friend of hers.” She paused, then said carefully, “And if you don’t mind, I’d rather not name names.”
He waved a hand at her. “Don’t worry, I’d rather not know!”
“Well, the fellow in question is pretty well known among the Kaled’a’in for saying stupid things without thinking and regretting it later,” she replied. “I guess that’s probably what he did this time. That, and I think there’s some jealousy there, too, since he used to be Nightwind’s partner, like she said, and the fact that she’d chosen to take someone else as her mate came as a nasty surprise.” Nightbird looked very, very worried, though she didn’t say anything more, and Darian had a fair idea why. She hadn’t seen her sister for four years, and probably thought this represented a truly serious rift between Nightwind and her mate.
“So he’s been brooding about it and maybe today he was out-of-sorts and he said something rude to Snowfire.” Darian nodded. “And I bet Snowfire was out of sorts, too, so Snowfire was in no mood to be forgiving.” He sighed, then smiled reassuringly at her. “Don’t let this worry you. I’ve seen them fight before, you know. They don’t do it often, it’s always when both of them are on edge or feeling sensitive about something, and they always make it up afterward. Truly. Couples do this sort of thing; Nightwind says it’s because you can’t live life so much a part of each other without eventually doing or saying something that’s too irritating to ignore.”
“Really?” Nightbird lost some of that anxious look.
“Truly,” he told her firmly. “I’ve been caught in the middle of explosions just like that one. They’ll make it up. Especially if you can get whoever it was to come apologize. To both of them, if you can manage it.”
“Me?” she squeaked. “Why me?”
“Because you carefully didn’t tell me his name.” Darian was amused to see the expression on her face when she realized she was caught in a trap of her own making. “Besides, I’m not a Kaled’a’in, and I am Snowfire’s little brother. I’m expected to be on his side. You, on the other hand, can go tell this fellow that he’s a blithering idiot and deserves to have Kel drop him into the lake from treetop height, and get away with it.” He put a little coaxing into his voice. “Look, you all but admitted that the fellow deserves it, and you are awfully good at dressing fools down in a way that rubs their noses in it. You’re also awfully good at making them admit that they were idiots.”
“I am, aren’t I. I wonder if that’s an undiscovered power, the Gift of Insult.” She looked thoughtful for a moment, then smirked. “You’re right this time. I’m the logical choice, and what’s more, I can make him feel so guilty about causing a fight at the same time I’m dressing him down that he’ll be begging me to help him make an apology.” She grinned suddenly. “I have every right to be the one to make him feel guilty, too - since I’m the one who got caught in the middle! You know, Sister always says I know how to work people around so well I ought to become a kestra’chern instead of a trondi’irn. I just tell her that it would be no fun if I had to do it professionally.”
“There you go!” he encouraged her. “Tell you what, I’ll arrange some dinner for both of us, you go give him what he’s got coming, and then come meet me at the far end of the lake and tell me what happened. I promise to heap admiration upon you.”
“It’s a bargain.” She strode off, determination making her spine stiff, energy giving spring to her step, without looking back - probably because she was already rehearsing in her mind exactly what she was going to say. He chuckled a little, and went in search of food that would put her in a very good mood.
She liked finger-foods - because what she liked was variety without getting filled up - so he hunted in a couple of the places where hertasi put out dishes for those who preferred to “graze” for dinner. When one of the hertasi learned what he was doing, things became a little easier, and he waited at the appointed spot with a special basket with a warm stone in the bottom of it to keep the steamed dumplings, sausages, and spiced fish-cakes hot, and a second basket with a chilled stone for the sliced vegetables, dipping sauce, and special rolls Nightbird particularly liked, made of boiled grain, thinly sliced fish, vegetables, and spices all rolled in seeds. Sweet spring water in a glass bottle chilled in the same basket, and hot tea in a pottery jug stayed warm in the first basket. And when Nightbird arrived, looking just a little smug, he rewarded her efforts by opening both baskets, handing her a huge leaf to use as a plate, and giving her first choice. Wonderful aromas rose from the first basket, and the contents of the second had been so artfully arranged by the hertasi that she actually paused to admire the creation.
She went straight for the chilled grain-rolls, which was what he had thought might happen. That was perfectly all right with him, for he had no idea how anyone could eat the things; he helped himself to vegetables and steamed dumplings, and did not press her for details until after she’d had her first roll.
“Well?” he asked archly.
“He should be groveling in front of both of them now,” she said with supreme satisfaction. “And since they were already at the kiss-and-apologize stage when I left him with them, it should be even more gratifying for Snowfire. My sister will probably be exasperated with him, but she’ll forgive him, so all will be well.”
“I told you they’d get over it pretty quickly,” he reminded her. “Havens, with any luck, Snowfire and this mysterious fellow will actually become friends out of this.”
She nodded because her mouth was full, swallowed, and said, “That’s what I’m hoping, though it may actually take both of them trying to pound each other to powder before that happens. Why do some men have to be such idiots?”
“Ask Tyrsell,” he suggested. “Seems to me there’s a lot of king-stag stuff going on there.”
She snorted, and tried a dumpling for variety. “Well, I hope I never get caught in the middle of one of their fights again. It was so civilized, but so angry, it gave me chills! How can anyone fight like that?”
“I don’t know; I think it must be something they’ve worked out. It’s pretty astonishing to watch, actually; not pleasant, but astonishing. I’ve never seen anyone argue that way before.”
“Where do they get the self-control?” she asked, her brow wrinkling. “What have you seen them do?”
“It’s what they don’t do. They don’t call names or make personal accusations. They get what’s making them angry out first thing, and you’d swear that they’re a short step away from killing each other! But then, they get into why it made them angry, they actually take turns and try not to interrupt, and then - and I think this must be the important part - go into exactly how bad this made them feel. And at that point, the fire just goes out of the fight! They get things sorted out, then apologize, get things more sorted out - then things are actually better than they were before the fight, I think, because they’ve made another compromise with each other.”
Nightbird’s eyes widened at that. “My! I think maybe I’d better not get joined to anyone, after all. I don’t think I could manage that! It sounds like an awful lot of work to go through just to stay with someone.”
He licked his fingers clean of juice from a dumpling. “Maybe they couldn’t either, at first. I’m sure they had fights before the one I got caught in. I guess . . . if you’re going to get mad about something, it’s better to get it out than let it sit inside and steam.” He laughed wryly. “I tend to steam, and it got me in a lot of trouble, because things would build up and then let go without warning and I would really get it!”
She bit her lower lip. “Uh-huh,” she agreed. “That’s my problem, too. Maybe we’d better make a vow just to stay friends. I have the feeling that we could really do damage to each other, if we started getting really intimate then got angry with each other over something important.”
Oh, hellfires. But she’s right. If we started getting very, very close, that’s exactly what would happen. “Don’t make vows about the future,” he warned. “But you’re right, and we could make a pledge that we’ll try to just stay friends for that reason. Bargain?”
“Bargain,” she replied solemnly. “Besides, we’re practically related, and that feels too much like incest! Want to head over to Summerdance’s ekele and see what she’s doing? Maybe we can get a game-group together - or maybe you can get Firefrost to tell us some juicy old gossip!”
“Good idea,” he agreed, and in a short time they had polished off the last crumb and packed up the baskets to take back to the hertasi at Summerdance’s ekele.
When he returned to his rooms later that evening, it was with some surprise that he found Snowfire waiting there for him, sitting on Darian’s bed and sharpening one of his knives. Snowfire rose as soon as Darian entered and stopped short at seeing him there.
“I hope you’ll forgive my invading your rooms, but I wanted to apologize for making things unpleasant for you this afternoon,” Snowfire began.
“Accepted,” Darian said instantly. “It sounded as if you had plenty of provocation. But - ”
He stopped, not sure he had the right to make the observation that had just occurred to him.
“But?” Snowfire asked.
Darian sat down, feeling awkward. “Is it just me, or are people getting into a lot more quarrels here than we did out in Valdemar?”
“Hmm. Yes, and no.” Snowfire rubbed the side of his nose. “The thing is, the team we had put together - the team you joined - was made up of people who all knew each other well, well enough to make a lot of effort at getting along, but purposefully not so close that personal problems could arise. And we had a great deal to do, so we were often too busy to pick quarrels. Here,” he gestured, palms up. “Here there are a great many more people, and when there are that many people, not all of them get along, not all of them have the same opinions on important matters, and for that matter, not all of them agree about what an important matter is! So there are conflicts, which are going to cause factions and quarreling.” Now he smiled. “And, to my mind the most important factor, we all have a fair amount of free time! That’s time we can use to brood about wrongs, to decide we’ve been insulted - and to pick quarrels for no particular reason. I’m no less prone to that than anyone else.”
Darian had to laugh at that. “I guess that’s something all peoples have in common, then,” he agreed. “When there isn’t a crisis going on, there are going to be some people who want to make one; when things aren’t dramatic enough, they feel impelled to create drama. And the more stress you’re under, the fewer stresses you notice.”
“We’re no different from the people of your village in that way, little brother,” Snowfire admitted. “At least not that much different. At any rate, I am sorry you walked in on our argument, and so is Nightwind. We both owe you and Nightbird apologies and thanks for your constructive plotting. I’m glad you’re picking up the hertasi habit of benevolent conspiracy. So again I apologize, and thank you for deciding to stay involved.”
“I’ll accept both only if you promise to try to remember that whoever it was is an insensitive moron - or at least he is according to Nightbird - and try to keep your temper next time.” Darian tried to look stern and Very Adult, but had a hard time keeping a straight face over this blatant role reversal.
Snowfire saw the joke and managed to act meek. “I will,” he whispered, bowing his head. Then he lost control and started laughing. Darian joined him.
“I will make that promise, but I have an ulterior motive,” Snowfire admitted. “Nightwind swears that if he does something like that again and I’ll just report it to her calmly, she’ll give him the tongue-lashing of a lifetime and I’ll get to watch.”
Darian made his eyes widen. “Oooh, I am impressed. Promise to tell me all about it, if she does! Or better yet, get her to invite me, too!”
“Now who has too much spare time?” Snowfire asked, slapping him on the back as he stood up. “Maybe I ought to ask Starfall to find you a fifth teacher!”
Darian tried to think of a good retort, but his mind went blank, and Snowfire took the opportunity to bid him good night and walk out the door.
The next morning, Darian steeled himself for his usual lesson with Darkstone, but when he arrived at the shielded area where he usually met his teacher, Darkstone was nowhere to be seen. Instead, Starfall, Snowfire, and Firefrost were all waiting for him there.
“What is it?” he asked, searching their faces and finding worrisome traces of concern there.
Firefrost seemed to be spokesperson by mutual consent. “How upset would you be to have to leave the Vale?” she asked, “You’ve made some friends here, perhaps close ones. . . .”
“Not so close that I’d have a broken heart over leaving,” he replied, wondering what was going on. “Have I offended anyone? Darkstone, maybe? Am I being asked to leave?” If that was the case - A chill gripped him, and his stomach clenched.
“No, absolutely not, nothing like that!” Firefrost actually laughed, destroying his fear before it got started. Then she sobered, and gestured to Snowfire. “I think you’d best explain what is going on.”
“We’ve had gryphons on long patrols to the north since that clash with the barbarians,” Snowfire explained. “We - by that, I mean k’Vala - assumed that if one group has found a way through the mountains, others might well, too. That’s what seems to have happened; there’s a barbarian group coming slowly south; very slowly, not much like an army, though. They have women and children, and large wagons - they’ve even got some herd-beasts as well.”
Firefrost chuckled. “I wish you’d had a chance to hear the gryphons go on about those herd-beasts, the greedy things! Apparently these creatures are to ordinary deer what warhorses are to ponies, and there isn’t a one of the scouts but wants a chance to sink his beak into one!”
“The gryphons are more certain that these people are not dangerous than I am, or the other Elders, for that matter,” Starfall amended, with a worried frown. “Yes, they might settle down; yes, they might never reach either Valdemar or k’Vala lands. Nevertheless, they are heavily armed, and they are taking the same general route as that first lot. So the Elders of k’Vala want your Vale in place, fortified, and manned as soon as possible.”
“In fact, we have gyrphons flying hertasi in to get buildings up for us before we even get there,” Snowfire interjected.
Huh! This was moving awfully fast for him. Well, now I’m glad I gave Snowfire that map of ideas for the Vale! “You could do this without me,” he offered tentatively.
“We could; we’d rather not. You are Valdemaran, and you have a perfect right to establish a holding in unclaimed Valdemaran lands, but we don’t,” Firefrost said briskly. “If we’re challenged, you are our answer.”
“You’re also known to the village and to the local Lord,” Snowfire pointed out. “You’re fluent in both our tongues. We are going to alter our plans and have an armed force living in this Vale; you can at least help Starfall explain why we’re bringing in fighters without either causing a panic or arousing suspicion of our motives.”
“You’re not bad with your tongue, boy,” added Firefrost wryly. “I’ve heard you. And you’ve got the benefit of an honest Valdemaran face.”
Darian laughed a little at that. “Well, I suppose that’s some sort of qualification!”
“You’re also a good fighter, if it comes to that, and a scout and trapper,” Starfall said soberly. “If we assume that these barbarians are coming south. On the whole, we would rather find that it’s possible to negotiate with them. Your local Lord may have other ideas. He may want to drive them back. In either case, we can’t do anything without having a strong base to work from.”
Darian nodded, now just as sober as his teacher. “I’d be a poor student if I hadn’t learned that by now. Yes, I want to go now, the sooner the better. It sounds as if we need all the time we can get. I’d be really disappointed if you didn’t take me, danger and all! But I’m going to go hoping that this turns out to be a false alarm.”
Firefrost ruffled his hair in the way only a very elderly woman can get away with. “I thank the Star-Eyed that you have the good sense to know this isn’t an adventure.”
Darian licked his lips, as memories of four years ago flashed through his mind. “Experience, Elder,” he said honestly. “Not necessarily good sense.”
“Experience will do, and don’t misjudge your very real good sense,” Starfall corrected. He looked satisfied, and a bit more relaxed than he had been. “Snowfire, Firefrost, and I will put together the settlers for the new Vale. I’d like you to sit down and see if you can come up with anything you think we would want from a Valdemaran point of view. As you said, the sooner we’re in place, the better. If we can, we’ll be leaving with a pack train within a few days, and your new teacher will just have to catch up with us.”
They sent Darian off to go make his list, and it wasn’t until he was sitting down with pen and paper that he realized he still didn’t know the name of the new teacher, who now would “have to catch up!”

Seven

An entire week went by before anyone in her family even noticed that Keisha wasn’t sleeping in her room at all anymore, a week during which she enjoyed the best stretch of sound sleep she had ever experienced in her life. There weren’t even any midnight emergencies to disturb her, and gradually people who came for treatment figured out that she had made the move a permanent one. In fact, she began to wonder if everyone in the village knew except her family!
Predictably enough, it was her youngest brother, Trey, who first poked his nose into the vacant room and discovered that not only had the bed not been slept in, but that Keisha’s things were all gone. Trey had been the one who had to be threatened with a near-death experience to keep him out of his sisters’ room; he had the curse of insatiable curiosity combined with incredible mischief and the apparent desire to make the lives of his sisters difficult. Such a combination doomed him to a never-ending round of conflict within the family, conflicts from which he always emerged beaten, but uncowed. Keisha suspected he would have played similar tricks on his brothers, except that they’d have boxed his ears for his efforts. At least, when he teased his sisters, he could count on the fact that his worst punishment would come from his mother or father, and probably would only involve physical labor in the form of punitive chores.
This was normal behavior for a boy between the age when he was no longer willing to play with girls and the time when he discovered that girls were fascinating and desirable creatures. Keisha knew that, though it didn’t stop her from chasing him out with a brandished broom more than once. Shandi had been known to mutter from time to time that if she had her way, Trey wouldn’t live to grow out of his pranks.
Somehow, though, Trey did survive, and when he invaded his sisters’ domain, he was careful not to let them find out about it.
At this point in his life, Trey was far more interested in the girls his sisters could get to dance or spend time with him, and he had mostly grown out of his bad habits, but some things, like curiosity, are not the sort of traits that a boy grows out of. Neither is opportunism; instead of going to his parents with his fascinating discovery, Trey came straight to Keisha.
He walked right in through the open door of her cottage with a hint of a swagger; fortunately for him, Keisha had no patients at the time, or he’d have gone right out again on his ear, just on the basis of his smug expression. I know something, his face said, as plainly as if he’d spoken it. And I bet it’s something I can get advantage out of.
As it was, she was amused, rather than annoyed; he thought she wouldn’t want Mum and Da told, and he had no notion that she didn’t give a pin whether he told or not. Still, as first to discover the vacancy, he would benefit, and that would probably satisfy him.
He had taken particular pains with his appearance; his light brown hair was slicked back with water, his shirt neatly tucked into his trews, his face so clean that it was shiny. Evidently he intended to impress her - which meant that he had actually thought things through, for a change.
So Trey is the first to notice. That’s not bad. And he’s been planning to see if I want to buy his silence. You know, if he’s actually started to think before he acts, he may actually survive to adulthood!
“Say, Keisha, all your things are gone from your room,” he said without preamble.
“I know,” she replied calmly, continuing to roll strips of laundered and bleached cloth into bandages, the task she’d been doing when he barged in. “I’ve moved in here; I’m tired of waking Da or Mum up when I get called out in the middle of the night, and I’m very tired of all the noise. You barbarians are bad when you clomp around in the morning, but the worst is the snoring. One of these nights, the house is going to vibrate apart, and the roof will fall down on you all.”
Trey ignored the insult, concentrating on the only important piece of information she had granted him: that the move really was a move, permanent, and not just for the summer. “Does that mean you aren’t coming back?”
“Not only that,” she confirmed, “but I’ve packed everything up that I didn’t take with me and gotten it out of the way, up in the attic. I take it that you want to take possession of the room? Be my guest. I don’t need it, and neither does Shandi. When Shandi comes back for visits, she can sleep over here; I’ve space enough.”
He grinned. “That’s what I was hoping you’d say! You’re sure, now?”
“Very sure.” She kept her expression as placid as a grazing sheep. “It’s about time I set up on my own, anyway. People will give me more respect if I have my own household.”
“And I can have the room?”
“Absolutely.”
He didn’t jump for joy, but he might just as well have, given,the expression on his face. “Thanks, Keisha! You’re a good ‘un!”
“You’re welcome,” she responded, but he hadn’t waited to hear her; he’d pelted out of the cottage and up the path as fast as his feet would carry him, with the obvious intention of having himself in full possession of the precious cubbyhole before any of his brothers knew it was vacant. Possession being nine-tenths of the law, it would be very difficult for them to evict him, and if he worked fast enough, he could even get one of the two beds disassembled and out before anyone came home, thus giving himself a room without anyone sharing it.
The longer he remained in undisputed possession of the room, the less likely it would be that he could be ousted from it, so it was also in his best interest to keep any of his brothers from finding out that Keisha wasn’t going to use it anymore. Eventually, of course, they’d notice the change in occupants, probably within two or three days, but in the meantime, Keisha’s absence would not be mentioned by Trey. By that time, both of them would be too well entrenched in their respective places to move.
That gave her another three days of peace and quiet before Sidonie appeared at the door, time that she used to her advantage. Keisha had already made certain that her reason for setting up in the cottage had been firmly planted in the minds of every gossip in Errold’s Grove. She’d made it clear how much more convenient this arrangement was for everyone, and she had the cottage so clean that not even the most fanatical housekeeper could have found fault with it.
Sidonie walked straight in, just as Trey had, in the early morning just after Keisha had cleaned up after breakfast. This time Keisha sat in her favorite chair with bqth hands full of a sock, a wooden darning egg, a blunt needle, and wool yarn. She was in the middle of mending, which gave her an excuse to stay where she was as her mother strolled around the cottage, not speaking at all, but examining the place minutely, as if she had never seen it before. Sidonie’s expression was closed, arms crossed over her chest, but Keisha knew that her mother could not hold in her feelings for long. “Well,” she said, finally, “you’ve certainly made yourself at home here.”
But her daughter had gotten a week’s grace in which to decide exactly how she was going to handle the inevitable confrontation, and even though her stomach knotted and her head began to throb with tension, she kept her face calm and her manner casual. “I started thinking after Shandi left, thinking that the house could do with a few less people in it. Bright Havens, Mum, the boys would crowd Kelmskeep, much less our place! Then I thought of other things. There was no need to keep disturbing you and Da with my night calls, since I have this place,” she explained, keeping her voice warm and slightly amused. “I haven’t been much help around the house in the last six months, what with all the patients I’ve had, and with Shandi gone, it seemed as if it would be easier on you if I were to take care of myself. Now that the boys are doing their share of the work around the house, you really don’t need my help at all, anymore. This arrangement should be more convenient for everyone.”
“Convenient?” Sidonie’s voice got a bit shrill, and her control over her expression slipped. Strangely enough, she looked a little frightened as well as upset. “Convenient for what? You aren’t old enough to be living by yourself, and right at the edge of the village, too, out where who knows what could happen to you! What will everyone think? Here you are, all alone, no one to chaperone you - people are going to talk! They’re going to say we drove you out, or that you ran away, that we’re wretched parents to let you be on your own in the first place!”
Keisha laughed, startling her mother into silence. The laughter was strained, but Sidonie was too full of her own emotions to notice. “Talk? Good gracious, Mum, what are they going to talk about? No one is going to think that you are bad parents, and if there had been a fight, you know that the neighbors would have overheard it! They didn’t, so obviously there wasn’t one.”
“You can’t be living alone!” Sidonie insisted. “There’s no one to protect you here.”
Keisha shook her head, and wished that she hadn’t. “I doubt that will ever be a problem. No one ever comes here that isn’t sick or hurt. No one would dare hurt me. The rest of the village would have his head on a plate. As for this cottage being on the edge of the village, well, that hardly qualifies as isolation! If I even whispered for help, the neighbors would hear me.”
“Maybe you don’t think that living out here alone is going to cause people to gossip,” Sidonie said darkly, “But - ”
“Mum, there’re no ‘buts’ about it,” Keisha interrupted, wanting to get the unpleasant scene over with. “Not when anyone in the village can come here at any time of day or night, knock on the door, walk straight in, and see that I’m quite alone. You forget what I am - people have every right to come here whenever they need help. I have less privacy here than I did at home! If I were carrying on an illicit love affair, moving here would be the worst thing I could do!”
“Keisha!” Sidonie cried, shocked.
“Well, it wouldr she insisted. “If I’m not here, it’s going to be noticed right away, and people are going to want to know where I am and look until they find me! There is no way that I could go off for a romp in the hay-fields, Mum; sure as I did, someone would get sick or hurt, and the whole secret would be all over the village. And I can’t have a young man here without someone eventually walking in on it! So there you are. Not only am I chaperoned, I have the entire village as my chaperone!” She shrugged. “Besides, as you well know, I haven’t any suitors. I doubt that there’s a boy in the entire village who thinks of me as a girl. I’m the Healer, and for them, I’m about as likely a source of romance as a tree stump.”
“Maybe, but you still aren’t old enough to be on your own like this,” Sidonie replied stubbornly.
“I’m old enough to be married, with a family, and you’ve said as much yourself,” Keisha countered, as her stomach soured and her neck muscles knotted. “So I’m old enough. I have all the proper domestic skills, and I can take care of myself quite neatly. Well, look around you. If you see anything amiss, I’d like to know.”
“But what are people going to say about us, about your father, about me?” Sidonie’s voice was no louder, but there was a definite edge to it. This, then, was probably the source of her anxiety. “They’re going to say that we drove you out, that we were such wretched parents that we fought, that - ”
Again, Keisha interrupted. “They’re going to say what they’ve been saying for the past week, that I am a very considerate daughter to see that not only were night calls disturbing you, but that I was afraid that some folk hesitated to call me out because they didn’t want to wake the rest of the household just to get me. I’ve made a point of telling everyone who noticed that I was actually living here that this was the reason why I moved. They’ll say that only someone who was raised right would be polite enough to want to save her parents from such disturbance, and at the same time make herself more available to the village than she was before.” She chuckled, shocking her mother out of incipient hysteria. “And if you don’t believe me, ask Mandy Lutter; she’s all but taken credit for the idea herself. She’s got half the village convinced that it was a chance remark from her that made me see it would be easier for people if I moved to the cottage.”
“Oh,” Sidonie said weakly, all of her arguments overcome.
Keisha’s own symptoms of stress began to ease, and she felt that she was winning the confrontation.
“Mother, love, I’m hardly living away from you when the house is all but next door,” she pointed out, a little more gently. “How big is the village, after all? If it will make you feel better, I’ll make sure and come home for dinner as often as I can. If you need me to help, you’ve only to ask, and you know that. If I really wanted to leave you all, I’d let Gil arrange for me to go to Healer’s Collegium. I’m here, aren’t I? And haven’t I said all along that I’m not going to the Collegium? I promise you, I haven’t changed my mind.”
She would have said more, pressing home the point, but just then two young men came in, supporting a third, whose arm bent at an entirely unnatural angle at the shoulder joint. Keisha dropped her mending and forgot everything she was about to say, forgot even her mother’s presence, until it was all over and the dislocated shoulder was back in place again. By then, of course, Sidonie was gone.
But she had simply slipped out, so Keisha had won; or at least, her mother had gone off to think about what she had said. Sidonie was perfectly capable of thinking clearly when her emotions didn’t get in the way.
So when she’s thinking dispassionately about what I told her, I will win. Keisha sighed, the last of her tension ebbing. It hadn’t been nearly as bad as she’d thought it would be.
A dislocated shoulder didn’t create nearly the mess of the average wound, and there was very little to clean up after the young man had gone. Keisha put the room to rights again, returned to her chair, and picked up her mending, but her mind was still on her mother.
It would probably be a good thing if I showed up at supper - or before, actually, with some fresh herbs or salad greens. That way I’ll just show that I meant what I said, that I’m not actually leaving the family, I’ve just put a little distance between us.
She finished the mending, took care of several children with insect stings and some ugly thorn scratches, then spent the afternoon dosing some horses for worms. As suppertime neared, she finished that task, returned home, and went into her garden to gather a peace offering.
She entered the kitchen with her basket of clean salad makings, expecting to find her mother there. But Sidonie wasn’t at the house, she’d gone out to the farm, according to Trey, who was in charge of the evening dinner. He welcomed Keisha, her offerings, and her help with pleasure, and the two of them put together a good warm-weather meal of soup, bread, and salad in short order.
Sidonie came back arm-in-arm with her husband, sun-browned and smiling under the rim of her work hat, and greeted Keisha with calm pleasure. That told Keisha something important: that her mother had checked with Mandy Lutter, that most notorious of village gossips, and what she had heard had pleased and reassured her. Mandy was not likely to withhold anything juicy about anyone, not even to the subject’s mother.
So everyone is saying what a good girl I am to be thinking of my family and of the village’s welfare, she thought with conscious irony. Mandy and the rest are all seeing how convenient the arrangement is for them, no doubt. Well, it is convenient for them - and I don’t mind if I get a few more midnight calls than I would if I was still living here. They can say whatever they like about me. As long as it makes Mum and Da feel better about this situation, that’s all that matters to me.
She sat down with the rest to dinner, Sidonie having greeted her bonus of salad with a smile of thanks, and discovered that as of this afternoon, there was another topic entirely to interest everyone in the village. She had taken second place to a much more entertaining subject.
“I saw Mandy Lutter today, while I was on my way out to the farm. For once, there was a good reason to get Mandy’s mouth going,” Sidonie said, once the soup had been ladled out and everyone had started on the meal. “I won’t tease you and make you guess what her news was, though. It’s too exciting for that. Young Darian Firkin is coming back at long last! He’s going to come back, just as he promised Lord Breon, and there’s going to be a mage here again! Can you believe it?”
For a moment, Keisha drew an absolute blank as to who “Darian Firkin” was, but only for a moment. She blinked in surprise; the young boy who had been Wizard Justyn’s apprentice had been gone for at least four years, and she honestly hadn’t expected him ever to return, no matter what he’d promised. Why should he? He’d been adopted by Hawkbrothers, he’d gone out to see the world, what could possibly tempt him to come back here except that old promise? “Back where? Here? Is he going to set up in Errold’s Grove?”
And for one, panicked, admittedly selfish instant, she thought, Ami going to have to give the cottage back? Oh, Havens, no. That can’t be the reason Mum is so pleased!
“No, no, not here, not the village,” Sidonie corrected, waving a chunk of bread vaguely at the window. “He’s going to have a place outside the village, he’s going to have a lot of those Hawkbrothers there, and of course they wouldn’t feel comfortable living right in the village. But he will be within easy fetching distance of Errold’s Grove. If we need his skills, we’ll be able to get him.”
Thank goodness. . . . My refuge is still mine, was Keisha’s relieved thought.
“Most people wouldn’t feel comfortable with those bloody great birds about, staring at their hens,” Ayver pointed out with a laugh. “So it’s just as well he isn’t planning on moving back into Errold’s Grove. Don’t forget, he’s got one of those huge birds himself, so even if his friends didn’t want to stay here, if he did, that bird would be here, too. Poor hens and ducks would likely never lay again for sheer nerves.”
“Where, outside the village?” one of the boys wanted to know. “How far from here?” They glanced at each other, and Keisha thought she knew the notions dancing in their heads. Hawkbrothers - there were all sorts of things the Hawkbrothers knew or could do, and anyone who got friendly with them stood a good chance of picking up some interesting information and skills. If this place they were settling was close by, a fellow had a chance of slipping over there now and again without being missed from his work.
Sidonie shrugged. “Mandy had no idea - just somewhere outside the village, but on this side of the river. Far enough away that it won’t bother us, near enough that he’ll be able to work magic for us when we need it.” Her eyes widened, and she smiled broadly. “Think of that! We’ll have a real mage again! The Hawkbrothers will be mages, too, of course, but they’ll have their own concerns to deal with; Darian will be our mage.”
“A Weather-Watcher,” Ayver said in satisfaction. “Damn, it’ll be good to know when there’s a monster storm on the way! Be even better if he’s gotten to be a Weather-Worker. We won’t have to fret about a lot of things, I reckon.”
Sidonie sighed happily. “I’ll feel safer, that’s for certain sure. Oh - and Mandy says he’s going to have at least one gryphon with him, to come live at this place he’s building! Think of that!”
A gryphon? Keisha felt her own eyes widening. For as long as she could remember, she had wanted to see a real gryphon, and now it appeared she was not only going to see one, she’d probably get to see one on a weekly basis! If this gryphon was going to patrol for danger from the sky, his flights would have to take him over the village at least that often.
Those were all the facts that Sidonie had gotten; the rest was all speculation, and Keisha could do that on her own. While the others chattered, she ate the rest of her meal without tasting it, and after helping with the dishes, went out looking for more solid information.
She didn’t have to go far; she simply followed her ears, A gaggle of folk had gathered in the village square just in front of the inn, and the murmur of their voices drew her to the gathering. The lantern over the inn door was lit, and underneath it, on the wall where anyone could read it, was an announcement with Lord Breon’s seal at the top.
So this has come from Kelmskeep! That makes it official. How wonderful! Whatever Lord Breon has sent over will be solid truth, and no guessing.
Keisha couldn’t get anywhere near the posted message herself, but that hardly mattered, since the priest, Father Benjan, was reading it out loud for the benefit of those whose reading skill was limited to the ability to keep an inventory. He’d evidently gone through it at least once already, for some of those who had gathered here were going off to their own houses, while newcomers pressed closer. Keisha had arrived just in time to hear it all from the beginning.
“This is all under Lord Breon’s seal, see, there it is on the top, and it came over by messenger just this afternoon,” he was saying as Keisha got within earshot. His voice was a little hoarse now, from all the repeating. “What it says, with all the fancy language pared off, is that Mage Darian Firkin and some of the Hawkbrothers from Clan k’Vala are fulfilling the promise they made back when Darian left with them. They’re coming to settle outside the village, about halfway between us and Kelmskeep. They’re planning to stay permanently, and there’s going to be more mages than just young Darian living at this settlement, but they’ll probably all be Hawkbrothers except him. There’s going to be one gryphon at first, maybe more later on. There’s no date for when they’ll be settling in, just that it’ll happen by Harvest. What they’re doing is building a kind of Hawkbrother village, they call it a ‘Vale,’ and it’s going to be a place where people besides Hawkbrothers are welcome. They plan to keep an eye on all of us as part of their treaty with Valdemar, and the gryphon is going to be here to give us warning of anything nasty coming from a distance. This is going to be what Lord Breon calls a ‘formal presence inside Valdemar.’ What he means is that these people will be Hawkbrother envoys here, and that’s going to give us a lot more attention from the Queen.”
“Well, that’ll be grand!” the blacksmith called out. “You think maybe they’ll be giving us our Guards back?”
“There’s nothing about that here, but then Lord Breon wouldn’t know what they’ve decided in Haven,” Father Benjan replied. “At a guess, I’d say it’s likelier than not. Attention from the Crown is probably going to mean at least that much. Who knows? Maybe they’ll give us our own regional Herald in permanent residence. Maybe some mercenary guards because of the added trade.”
There were little murmurs of relief all through the crowd, and no need to guess why. Those who had been here for the barbarian invasion - which was universally called “The Great War,” for it had certainly seemed like a war to this isolated place - had never quite gotten over it. Folk coming in from the Pelagirs were always closely questioned for any signs that the barbarians might be coming back, as were traders and travelers out of the north. No one quite had the courage to question the Hawkbrothers, but it was generally assumed after their initial intervention they would certainly give warning to Errold’s Grove, if warning were warranted. Still, having someone here to give that sort of warning sooner would allow everyone to sleep easier at night.
Keisha walked back through the soft, warm dusk to her cottage, half listening to the crickets singing and trying to think out all the possible things this could mean to Errold’s Grove - and by extension, herself.
One thing’s certain, she thought, as she settled next to the fire with the rest of her mending. People are going to suffer less from nervous complaints. Between the gryphon and the mages keeping watch for trouble, the folk of Errold’s Grove would no longer have to be quite so vigilant. I bet I get a lot fewer requests for nerve tonics and sleeping possets.
By her reckoning, they would almost certainly get those Guards back - mind, they might well be men that were one step short of retirement, but they would be Guards all the same. If there was going to be a Hawkbrother embassy, for certainly that was what this “Vale” thing was, the Queen would want an armed presence in the trading-village nearest it.
And a lot more traders will start coming, I bet. If they‘re certain to contact Hawkbrothers every time they come to our market, they‘ll come more often and start requesting specific things of them in the way of trade goods. More traders would mean more prosperity; that, too was a fine thing for the village as a whole.
More prosperity means more people coming here to settle, though, and that means more injury and illness. Surely, surely someone would see that Errold’s Grove needed a fully trained Healer! I’d even share the cottage, if I could just become the Trainee instead of the primary Healer. . . . That could solve all of her problems at once - but only it someone in the Healers Circle decided that Keisha wasn’t capable of handling the increased work.
But what if they think I am? Then things aren’t going to change at all. . . .
She sternly told herself not to panic ahead of time. No getting upset. She wasn’t going to think about it. No use in creating trouble where there wasn’t any. She’d be like the silly girl in the story, crying over lost sheep she didn’t have, bought with the money from hens she hadn’t yet hatched, from eggs her two little half-grown chicks hadn’t yet laid!
When she finished the last of the mending, she went out into her garden and took a seat on the bench there, looking up at the stars. A warm breath of a breeze carried the scent of honeysuckle past her, as crickets sang nearby and a nightingale in the Forest declared his love for his mate. The moon was a slender nail-paring of a crescent, and Keisha shook her hair back, letting the breeze cool the nape of her neck.
Her thoughts circled around to the returning prodigal. I wonder what Darian Firkin is like. “Firkin” isn’t a name from around here. She’d have a general idea of what he looked like if she knew his family, but it seemed to her that she remembered he was an orphan. That’s right, that’s why he was apprenticed to the wizard in the first place. Whenever people talk about him, they talk about a boy, but he’s at least my age by now. Eighteen at the least. That’s a young man, not a boy.
He’d be old enough to do all the things people expected of him, she would think.
So by now he’s a mage, and he’s got a Hawkbrother bird. He‘ll have traveled more than everyone in the village combined! He’ll certainly have seen more of Valdemar than anyone here, except maybe Lord Breon and his family and liegemen. They hardly count, though; we never see them except at Midsummer and Harvest Faire. He should make quite an impression when he gets here, especially when people realize he isn’t a young boy anymore.
She smiled wryly. There was one thing that was as predictable as the sun rising; every unattached young woman in Errold’s Grove would be setting her cap for him. How could they not? He wasn’t so homely as a boy that anyone made note of it, so he could hardly have grown into an ugly young man - and he would not only have the cachet of being a new, unknown male, but an exotic and a traveler!
The older folks might be thinking of him as a boy still, but the girls are going to add up years and figure he’s of courting age. There’s going to be a lot of sewing and embroidery going on for the next few months, she decided. I wish Shandi were here! She’d be right in the middle of it all, and tell me all the tales!
Personally, she was just anticipating finally seeing a gryphon, maybe hearing it speak. It would bring a touch of excitement to the skies over the village if she could look up from time to time to see the enormous wings passing overhead, or see a momentary gryphon-shadow against the moon! That was all the magic that she needed in her world!
The gryphon was a certainty; she considered other possibilities that the Hawkbrothers might bring. So the other thing this means is that if Hawkbrothers are coming to settle, they’ll be bringing more of their medicines and treatments. Would they bring a Healer?
Now that was worth getting excited about. The Hawkbrothers were mages, everyone knew that, so any Healer they brought with them would - must! - have the secret to unlock those puzzling texts of hers!
Steelmind’s from k’Vala; their chief Healer sent seeds through him to help me. So they already know that I’m here. Healers always work with other Healers, that’s part of the Clan. So if they bring a Healer with them, it’s bound to be someone who knows all about using Healer’s Gift and it’s bound to be someone who‘ll at least give me enough help to get me on my feet!
This could be the solution to all of her problems; never mind Darian Firkin, and even the gryphon. Now she could hardly wait to meet the Hawkbrothers and learn if they did have a Healer among them!
Whatever it takes, I’ll find the way to get him to teach me!
She laughed out loud in relief, as a burden she had carried so long she hardly noticed it anymore lifted from her shoulders. No more mysteries, no more making excuses to Gil! It would only be a few short moons, and she would be learning the last skill she needed to consider herself & real Healer!
With the lifting of the burden, after the initial feeling of giddy pleasure, came a sense of relaxation. A few moons? She could wait that long.
And meanwhile, there were babies coming, childish illnesses to dose, broken bones to set, gashes to stitch. She would have her hands full enough to avoid fretting between then and now.
She went to bed and slept the soundest sleep she’d had in years, waking with the birds, feeling as if she had been Healed.
That day, after a round of children who’ d gotten bellyaches from eating too many half-ripe berries, she went out into the garden for some fresh mint. As she stooped to pick the pungent leaves, a strange shadow crossing the ground in front of her made her glance up.
It was a gryphon. It couldn’t be anything else.
It wasn’t alone either; there were more of them, carrying baskets suspended between pairs of them. She couldn’t make out what was in the baskets, they were too high, but there was no doubt of what they were.
Keisha stared at them until they vanished over the trees, tending vaguely upriver, where the Vale was alleged to be. She all but forgot the mint in her hands until they were gone, and she realized she had crushed it.

Eight

The news that a new invasion of barbarians had been sighted changed everything, turning what had been leisurely planning into a spate of frenzied activity. Gryphons carried basketloads of hertasi to the new Vale to get it ready in advance, as the rest of those who had volunteered or been specifically requested to populate the place packed up their belongings and prepared to make the move to their new home. By the time everyone arrived, there would be quarters waiting for them; somewhat more primitive quarters than they were used to, to be sure, but living spaces that could be improved upon and enlarged until they met the standards of those accustomed to living in a long-established Vale. After all, it wasn’t even Midsummer yet; there were three more moons of warm and sunny summer weather to go, and another couple of moons before things got uncomfortably cold. A Vale full of hertasi and humans working together would have fine living quarters put together long before then, and the only improvements after that would be cosmetic.
Darian alone of all of them didn’t have much to pack, so he was ready to go long before anyone else was. He tried to lend a hand to some of the others, but his help was always politely declined. That gave him time that he tried to fill as best he could, studying hard with Firefrost, working on further plans for his Vale, and (for a while, at least) spending as much time as he could spare from both those tasks with Summerdance.
He paid very close attention to his feelings about her and tried his best to decipher hers for him; he didn’t want to leave without her if what tied them together was closer than mere friendship. Their dalliance on the night of the wedding had been an entirely new set of experiences for him, and like a child with a new tooth, he felt as if he had to probe his feelings constantly to see what they were.
He might even have convinced himself that he and Summerdance were meant for each other as permanent partners, if it hadn’t been for the fact that she didn’t act any differently toward him than she did toward any other young man whose company she enjoyed. In fact, when it came to the company of young men, she was a great deal like the tiny blue butterflies that shared her use-name of Summerdance, going from flower to flower (or boy to boy) without spending very long with any of them. So, after careful consideration, he came to the somewhat reluctant conclusion that if a romance between himself and Snowfire’s cousin were ever to happen, it probably wouldn’t occur until after she got a new use-name - if then.
He consoled himself with their friendship and her very clear enjoyment of his company. If he was not to be her great love, at least he was still a love! No sooner had he come to that conclusion than he found that was just as glad that she didn’t have any special feelings for him because she kept introducing him to friends, who apparently wanted to give the “Valdemar Hawkbrother” a memorable send-off! Life was very interesting during that time, and he simply enjoyed his new-found popularity, knowing that when his special teacher arrived, he would have little, if any, time for a personal life.
For a time, it seemed as if the Hawkbrothers were never going to get themselves organized enough to make the move. Then, suddenly, everything was organized, packed up, and ready to go. The announcement came late one afternoon, taking him by complete surprise.
He had returned from a lesson with Firefrost, followed by dinner, and was about to change for a hot soak followed by bed, when his room was invaded by a swarm of hertasi. Before he knew what was happening, the hertasi were carrying off his belongings and double-checking to make certain nothing would be left behind. Then they vanished, leaving him alone with the single set of clothes he pried out of their eager, stubby talons. He got his soak, all right, but only because he had changed into one of the communal lounge robes - he didn’t have any other clothing left but what he needed for the next day! He soaked until he thought he was relaxed enough to sleep, returned to his room, laid out the set of his old scout gear that the hertasi had left him and fell into his bed for his last night in k’Vala as anything but a visitor.
The next day, he was awake before the hertasi came to fetch him, too excited to sleep anymore. He’d had dreams all night long about the new Vale and the journey to get there - and more ominous ones about his new teacher, who seemed to be a combination of Darkstone and everyone in Errold’s Grove who’d ever disapproved of him. He took his time over breakfast, once he realized that the sun wasn’t in the sky yet; it might be a while before he enjoyed the kinds of food available in k’Vala. Ayshen was going to be in charge of the hertasi there, though, so even if it wouldn’t be possible to replicate the feast-day delicacies of the wedding celebration, it would still be good food.
Finally a hertasi came to tell him that everyone was gathering to leave, and he mounted Tyrsell’s saddle for the first steps of the journey with the unsettled feeling that he wasn’t ready for all this.
What am I doing ? I’m not a leader. How am I going to take charge of a new Vale? Maybe I should change my mind - maybe I ought to be staying here - 
But he shook off that momentary panic with self-derision; that was specious. He wasn’t going to be in charge for many years to come, not until Starfall, Nightwind, and Snowfire, the new Vale’s Elders, judged him ready to take his place with them. He had a lot to learn between then and now. They’d consult him, of course, especially on matters involving Errold’s Grove, Lord Breon, and Valdemar, and they’d involve him in discussions, but he wouldn’t be a leader for a long while.
Eventually I’ll go back to Errold’s Grove; I wonder how they’re going to react to me? He wasn’t a boy anymore. In fact, if his memory served him correctly, he’d be a match for most of the men in the village. He was a better fighter; he’d been taught to fight in every style from bare-handed to bow, and with the men who’d been trained to be the village Militia all dead, there was probably no one left in the village who had been taught to fight. Not of the original villagers, at least. According to the Tayledras who went there to trade, the village had grown considerably since he’d left.
Nevertheless, he was a warrior, and that ought to give him a certain cachet and respect.
You know, to a certain extent, I’m actually Lord Breon’s equal - or his son Val’s, anyway. Now that was certainly an intoxicating notion, but in the hierarchy of Valdemar, it was true. The new Vale would qualify as a lord’s holding, and he was the heir-apparent to the leadership position.
:I hate to interrupt your introspection,: Tyrsell said dryly in his mind, :But just about everyone has left. I’d wait until you were done with your mental soliloquy, but then I’d have to gallop to catch up, and I don’t believe you ‘d enjoy that.:
He came to himself with a start. Tyrsell was right, the last of the laden dyheli herd had lined up to pass through the entrance of the Vale, and it was time for the rear-guard - himself and Tyrsell - to get on their way.
:Uh - thanks,: he said with embarrassment, as Tyrsell took his place at the end of the line.: I promise, I won’t do any more woolgathering.:
:I should hope not,: the dyheli stag replied with dignity.
As he and Tyrsell passed through the Veil, Kuari dropped off the branch on which he had chosen to perch and winged silently past them, into the uncontrolled, mist-wreathed forest outside. At this time of the year, the first couple of candlemarks before and after dawn brought floating streamers of mist up out of the ground to circle among the trunks until the heat of the day drove them off. There were no such mists inside the Vale of course, except on the rare occasions when the Elders decided that mist would make a pleasant “effect.” It was cooler out here, too, understandably damper, and the first thing he noticed when he came out through the Veil and took his place at the end of the group was the absence of flower scent. Flowers bloomed constantly in the Vale, day and night, regardless of season, but not out here. It was too late for spring flowers, which were all that bloomed in a heavy forest; spring was the only time that enough light reached the ground for blossoms, except in places where there were clearings. So the perfumes he had become accustomed to were replaced with the metallic tang of fog, the earthy taste of decaying leaves and needles, and the faint musk of the dyheli.
Tyrsell led a new herd, much bigger than the previous one, composed of his original core and most of the adolescent and young adult dyheli from the other herds of k’Vala. This gave some much-needed population relief to the k’Vala home-herds, and a much-needed outlet for the youngsters. It also greatly increased Tyrsell’s status - both that his herd was three times the size it had been, and that he was considered capable by the other king-stags of controlling so large a herd. Darian had been suitably impressed when he’d been told; this new herd established Tyrsell at the very top of herd hierarchy, a kind of dyheli Great Lord of State.
Because of the size of this herd, and because gryphons had been ferrying baggage and would continue to do so as long as there was baggage to ferry, there had been no need for anyone to have to leave anything behind. All in all, this would be a relatively easy resettlement, as orderly as any migration from an old Vale to a new one.
Except that we can’t just step across a Gate to get there, more’s the pity. It would take a week, roughly, of dawn-to-dark riding to get there, and he had no doubt that Snowfire meant that quite literally. They would rise before the dawn and not make camp until after dusk.
Still, it wasn’t anything he hadn’t done before, and he fell back into his habits of rear-guard, habits that fit him as comfortably as a well-worn and supple hawking glove.
:We’re about to be relieved of duty,: Tyrsell said suddenly, on the last afternoon of the journey, as they passed beneath trees that had changed very little with the passing of a mere four or five years. The dyheli pricked his ears forward, and Darian turned to see a figure riding back along the line of baggage-laden dyheli, coming toward them. A moment later, he recognized Nightwind, and waved at her. She waved back, and when she got into conversational distance, told him, “Kel and I are going to take rearguard; we’re just about at the new Vale, and Snowfire and Starfall thought you two might like to enter at the head of the line instead of the tail.”
:Well! That’s a courteous thought!: Tyrsell said with approval. :Thank you; I know I would prefer it.:
“Me, too,” Darian agreed self-consciously. He sent a brief thought to Kuari, then relinquished his duty to Nightwind.
By going into a hard canter, he and Tyrsell came up to the front of the line well in time to go through the titular entrance side-by-side with Starfall and Snowfire. He felt a swell of pride so powerful that he flushed as they gravely made space for Tyrsell to fit between them.
There was no entrance as such, no Veil, for there was as yet no real Heartstone, only a kind of superior node anchored in a physical rock formation. But the hertasi and the few Tayledras who had preceded them had set up two rough pillars of stone on either side of the pass that let them into their valley, to mark where the Veil would one day be.
And they had done some subtle defensive improvements as well, although you would have to know what you were looking for to find them. They had made the sides of the hills far steeper, making it very difficult for an armed force to get into the new Vale by climbing the hillsides. There were well-camouflaged guard points on those hillsides, and anyone who tried to invade that way would shortly be full of arrows. But to look at them, there was nothing more unusual here than exceptionally steep rock formations, formations that had probably been this way since the beginning of the world.
No swarm of dyheli and hertasi met them this time; the hertasi were probably working hard on the building. But Ayshen, who had gone on ahead, did meet them, standing in the center of the path, actually bedecked in his formal costume, bowing ceremoniously to all three of them.
“The hertasi of k’Valdemar Vale welcome you to your new home, friends and brothers,” he said ceremoniously. “May there always be as much pleasure here as you bring with you.”
Starfall smiled, and bowed in return. “Your welcome doubles our pleasure, my brother,” he replied. “It is good to be home.”
Starfall dismounted, which seemed to be the signal for everyone else to do the same. “Allow me to guide you to your new ekele,” Ayshen said, and without waiting for a reply, led the way up the path that looked increasingly familiar with every step. It wasn’t one of the paths in k’Vala - but it also wasn’t the path that Darian remembered.
Someone had been hard at work on the plantings, someone like Steelmind, who could coax plants into amazing growth spurts in a very short period of time. Although by no means as lush as k’Vala, there were the vine screens, plantings of exotics, and tree sculptures that Darian had come to think of as “proper.” The path twisted and turned, crossing over the little stream he remembered, with rustic bridges and artistically placed stepping stones providing dry-footed crossings. From time to time, Ayshen stopped, and pointed out a dwelling of one sort or another - most of them proper tree-built ekele, though the trees never supported more than one, and access was by means of a rope ladder more often than a staircase. When he stopped, those who found the place attractive would pause long enough for a discussion of who was the most taken with the situation. The discussions never lasted too long; one person (or two, if it was a couple) would remain, the dyheli with the appropriate baggage would remain, and everyone else would go on. Starfall quickly took possession of an ekele built in the tree where his old camping place had been, and no one disputed him. Then Ayshen stopped in front of what appeared to be a vine-covered mound.
“This was your original camping place, Snowfire,” he said. “And I wondered if either you and Nightwind or Darian would have a preference for it.”
“Have you made an ekele in the cliff where Nightwind and Kel originally camped?” Snowfire asked.
Ayshen nodded. “Actually,” he said with evident pride, “I designed that one, and it’s built both on the cliff and in the cliff - rather like an ekele without a tree, with a balcony outside. But I thought I’d offer you this first.”
Snowfire laughed. “You needn’t have bothered; it sounds like a White Gryphon home, and I already know what Nightwind will want. How about you, Darian? Do you want this site?”
Although he wondered a little just what was underneath that mound of leaves - which certainly seemed bigger than the primitive hut that he remembered - Darian knew one thing for certain. This place was on the ground, and there were going to be storms in this Vale for some years yet. It would take a long time to power up the new Heartstone to the equivalent of the k’Vala Stone. And until k’Valdemar - whose idea had that name been? - was sealed against the weather and the seasons, he did not want to live in a tree that would sway in a storm!
“I’ll take this,” he said instantly. “If no one else likes it better than I do.”
Snowfire laughed again, as did several others. “Little brother, I doubt that anyone here but a kyree or a hertasi would care for a dwelling on the ground the way you do,” Ayshen said genially. The dyheli carrying Darian’s baggage separated from the rest, and the group went on, leaving Darian in solitary possession of his new home.
The first thing he did was to take the baggage off the patient dyheli so that they could go off to graze or rest. As they paced off with the click of carefully-placed hooves, he turned his attention to the ekele.
It took him a moment to find the door, and it was a door, now, a good, solid, wooden door with a handle, not a mere screen of vines. When he opened it, he stared in open-mouthed disbelief at what lay behind it.
This place could not be more unlike the hut that had once stood here. Beneath the vines were solid walls, as thick as his forearm was long, at least. Outside, they were the same color as the vines; inside they had been whitewashed. The floor had been covered in flat paving stones, cunningly fitted together so that a sheet of paper could not fit between them, and sealed with grout. There was a stone fireplace in one wall, real windows with glass in them in the others. The windows were fairly well covered by the leaves and didn’t let in much light, but there were skylights in the remarkably thick roof that took care of that deficiency. Like most Tayledras dwellings, there wasn’t a straight line to be seen, for all the walls and even the doors and window frames curved. Instead of furniture, there were window seats, low tables, thick rugs of fur and fleece, and cushions everywhere.
A door in the same wall that held the fireplace led to a second room, but Darian waited to bring his baggage inside before he explored further. When he did, he discovered that the fireplace was shared with this room, which was a sleeping chamber, quite windowless and without a skylight, with a bed built into the wall and chests woven of willow branches for clothing. There was yet another door leading out of this room, and his curiosity took him onward.
Much to his delight, it was a bathing chamber, as he had found in the guest houses in k’Vala, with a pipe leading into a spacious tub, another into a washbasin, and a water-flushing “necessary” that would be far more comfortable to use than a privy! One of the first things he had learned from Snowfire was how to use magic to heat his bath water, so even the cold water coming from the stream in midwinter would be no problem. Light came from another skylight, and someone in a fit of whimsy had built containers to hold plants all around the edge of the skylight and planted flowering vines in them. Now as long as he could remember to water them, he’d have a touch of k’Vala here all year long!
The thick walls would keep this place warm in the winter and cool in the summer, the vines screening the skylight would keep out direct sun in the summer, but when they lost their leaves, would allow warm sunlight to penetrate in the winter. There was no direct light in the bedroom, exactly as Darian preferred. If he had designed the place himself, it could not have suited him more - and all of this, hidden under an innocuous mound of leaves!
He unpacked his baggage quickly, stowing it away wherever things seemed best to fit. What little furniture there was matched the ekele perfectly, being formed of bent, polished branches with the bark removed, or woven of willow withes. And as he put the last of his belongings away, the thought hit him with the suddenness of a lightning strike that this was his own home! He shared it with no one, it wasn’t a guest house, this was his, entirely his to decorate as he chose, to clutter as he chose (or rather, as much as the hertasi would let him), to change as he chose.
My own place. . . . Bigger than the cottage he had shared with Justyn, and far, far superior to that dark little hovel.
Dear gods, I think I feel grown up!
That was certainly the measure by which people judged in Errold’s Grove. You weren’t an adult until you had a house of your own, however tiny and poorly built. Until then, you were a child, and subject to the orders and whims of the adults in whose house you lived.
He sat down in one of the window seats and took a deep breath, savoring the moment.
Then he went out to find Snowfire and see this peculiar cliff house of his.
He knew where Nightwind and Kel had set up housekeeping, of course, so he headed for the lake at the end of the valley and the cliffs overlooking it. Kel was already in residence, stretched out on a ledge near the top of the cliff in the sun, overseeing a line of hertasi carrying baggage up a stair that had been carved out of the living rock. At the top of the stair was a balcony with a low stone railing. A dark recess behind it probably represented the door into the new dwelling. The ledge Kel had draped himself over had a similar dark recess behind it, and belatedly Darian realized that this must be his home as well.
He followed the last hertasi up the stair, and tried not to think about how far down it was as he climbed, nor how much he wished that there was a railing on the staircase. Though the railing about the balcony ledge was no more than knee-high, he was very grateful for its presence.
There was a door cut into the rock, and windows, too; that was all he had a chance to see for the moment, as Kel greeted his arrival by leaping to his feet and bounding over to the balcony from his own ledge.
“Isss thisss not a marrrvel?” the gryphon chortled. “Ayssshen isss a geniusss! Except that it isss a lake beneath us and not an ocean, and the rrrock isss grrray, thisss could be White Gryphon! I feel entirrrely at home!”
“And so do I,” Nightwind echoed, as she came out onto the balcony. She was smiling broadly and held out her hand to Darian. “Even Snowfire is happy - ”
“Snowfire is more than happy,” the Hawkbrother interrupted her. He stepped right up to the edge of the balcony and peered down. “Not only is this as high up as any good scout-ekele, but I think I can dive into the lake from here.”
“Don’t you dare!” cried Kel, Nightwind, and Darian all together.
“Why not?” he asked, turning away from the ledge, wearing a grin that was the equal in mischief to his cousin Summerdance’s.
“You’ll break your silly neck, that’s why not,” Nightwind said tartly. “It’s not deep enough, and the cliff slants out, not in. There is at least one thing you don’t have to do to keep up with Starfall.”
“Yet,” added Ayshen from the doorway, “there’s plenty of time to dig it deeper at this spot.”
Nightwind threw up her hands in exasperation, as all three males, Darian, Kel, and Snowfire, now went to the edge to look down at the sparkling waters of the spring-fed lake with speculation.
“I don’t think so,” Darian finally said. “You’d have to dive out too far. Nightwind is right, there’s too much stuff you could hit on the way down.”
“That, too, could be changed in time,” Ayshen said agreeably. “But we do have many other tasks that will take precedence.”
“Far too many tasks,” Snowfire confirmed, with a sigh. “And by the time we have the resources, I’ll probably be telling my offspring why they shouldn’t dive off from here. Nightwind will never forgive me if I remove the obstacles in their path.”
“You can count on it,” his mate said darkly, a hint that a laugh would be out of place at this moment, so Darian choked it down.
Instead, when everyone but Kel went back inside, he followed. Kel took up his place on his ledge again, stretching out in the sun with a huge sigh of contentment.
Inside, the walls had been whitewashed just as the walls of Darian’s home had been, and for the same reason, to make the rooms brighter. The windows were larger than Darian had expected, but instead of glass, had that odd transparent substance, tougher by far than glass, that served as windows in tree-ekele. It occurred to Darian that his skylights must be made of the same substance, in case of a hailstorm.
The furnishings were similar to his own, though there were more pieces of furniture and fewer piles of cushions. Someone had managed to carve a fireplace out of the rock, though Snowfire was perfectly capable of warming the whole home with magic if he had to.
“The bedroom is as dark as a pit,” Snowfire said, as Darian glanced at a further doorway. “Not that this is bad, mind you. I’ll just have to get used to it. I do admire the bathing room, though, Ayshen, and I do not want to think of the amount of work it took to get piped water up here.”
“The water comes down, from a cistern of rainwater, until you exhaust it. Then the amount of work will come from your muscles on the pump, my friend,” Ayshen grinned. “No free-flowing water without a full Heart-stone, you know.”
“It’s worth it, and by the time I’m too old to pump water, we’ll either have a full Heartstone or I’ll be able to delegate the task to the children.” He laughed. “I also appreciate the thick walls of solid stone between the master bedroom and the others. That is one advantage one does not have in an ekele, being able to shut out the shrieks of sibling rivalry or playtime!”
Darian grinned. Well, it looked like Snowfire really was settling down, if he was making plans and statements that included future children!
“Why do you think the cliff houses at White Gryphon are such desirable property?” Nightwind responded. “Ayshen, is the rock at the back sound enough to continue to cut new rooms?”
“Quite sound,” Ayshen replied. “You’ll be able to get a nursery and at least three bedrooms back there before you run into flawed material.”
“Hmm.” Nightwind’s eyes lit up, and Snowfire looked positively gleeful. Darian blushed a little, decided that he’d seen enough, and went back outside.
“Come overrr and ssssee my lair!” Kel called from the ledge. There was a narrow walkway connecting the balcony to the ledge, about as wide as the stair had been, but Kel clearly preferred to leap from one to the other, showing off his agility.
Well, a slip doesn’t have the same consequences for a creature with wings.
Darian practiced discretion, and used the walk as Kel rose to his feet. Darian was a bit surprised to see that Kel’s lair had a door and windows very like Snowfire’s.
For some reason, he had gotten the impression that a gryphon would live in something very like a cave. When Kel opened the door to the eyrie, using a latch made for a gryphon’s talons, he was soon disabused of that notion.
This place was only a single room. “Forrr now I need only thissss rrroom,” Kel said. “When I find the apprrro-prrriate mate, I will enlarrrge my eyrrrie with a nurrrssse-rrry asss well.” There was no furniture, only enormous cushions covered in furs, leathers, or extremely tough and colorful fabrics. There was also no fireplace, and it was quite clear that the place would be illuminated by mage-lights, not lanterns,
“Why mage-lights?” Darian asked. “I thought we were keeping magic use to a minimum.”
“Grrryphon feathersss are flammable,” Kel pointed out, “Ssso I will get to make ussse of magic to heat and light my lairrr. Kyrrree, having no handsss, will have theirrr firrresss tended by herrrtasssi, but the rrrisssk to a grrryphon isss too grrreat to have an open flame about.”
“This could be very cozy,” Darian observed, trying out one of the cushions, and finding it yielded just enough to make it a good seat. “The view from here during a storm should be fantastic!”
“I expect ssso,” Kel agreed with contentment. “It isss-ssso at White Grrryphon. I have enjoyed many sssshowsss of lightning frrrom the balcony therrre.”
Darian resolved to get up here some time when a storm was due; if there was one thing he loved, it was storm watching. Ayshen entered at just that moment, having left the happy couple to arrange their own belongings in peace, and Darian lost no time in telling him what a wonderful job he had done in designing the cliff home and the eyrie. Ayshen couldn’t blush, but he enjoyed the praise, switching his stubby tail a little and stretching his mouth in a grin.
“Well, I do not design costumes, nor artwork, nor furnishings,” he said modestly. “My talent is only equal to partitioning space, as it were.”
Kel snorted. “Parrrtitioning ssspace, indeed! Well, I have told you alrrready that you arrre a geniusss, and I ssshall not botherrr with anotherrr attempt.” He turned to Darian. “You ssshould sssee what thisss fellow callsss ‘parrrtitioning sssspace’! He had no chance to ssshow hisss talent in k’Vala, but he isss the chief desssignerrr herrre.”
“Did you design my place, too?” Darian asked, seeing a similarity in the proportions of his home and Snowfire’s. “It’s wonderful, perfect! I couldn’t have anything better! How did you know what to do?”
“I did design it,” Ayshen confirmed. “And, I admit, it was with you in mind. I am glad you like it, I tried to remember what it was that you liked and disliked about various ekele in k’Vala.”
“I’m just curious about one thing,” Darian continued. “How is it made? It’s not rock, but - ”
Ayshen laughed. “You may not believe it, but I will show you later. Willow withes and earth, little brother! Willow withes and earth! It is the easiest way to build that I know of; it holds in cool or heat, and is altogether an ideal way to make a shelter, so long as you seal the walls well.”
“Earth?” Darian did find it hard to believe. “But wouldn’t it just turn to mud in the first rain?”
Ayshen shook his head. “No, I promise you, we build that way in White Gryphon and learned it from the Haighlei, and it is much wetter in their kingdoms than here. We weave the walls, inner and outer, and support them with timber, then pack the space between with earth rammed hard. Then we make a mix of powdered lime and sand and other things into a thick paste, and apply it upon inner and outer walls to make them waterproof. The roof is similar; the drawback is that we cannot alter a dwelling so made, we can only add to it. Windows, doors, and recesses must be built in from the beginning.”
Darian knew better than to doubt the hertasi, but the idea of a house as sturdily made as his being constructed of such flimsy materials as willow withes and plain earth seemed fantastical to him.
And yet, what could be more practical?
“You will get a chance to watch and help in such a construction,” Ayshen promised. “There are many things that we must still build here, and most buildings on the ground will be made this way.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” he replied.
Ayshen laughed again. “You may regret saying that when you are in charge of a ram!” he cautioned. “But now I must go see to food preparation.”
“And I mussst go to hunt my food,” Kel chimed in.
“Then I guess I’ll go see if I can be useful to Starfall,” Darian said, and he followed Ayshen down the narrow stair, while Kel took the more direct route out by leaping from his sunning ledge into the wind.
Darian did find himself on the business end of an earth ram the very next day, for the first of the large buildings that everyone wanted put up was the one that would contain the “seed” of a new Vale. The walls had to be reinforced with rock as well as timber, for such a large building, and even with every free hand in k’Valdemar working, the walls rose with painful slowness. It was literally painful, in fact; most everyone went to bed each night with an aching back, neck, and arms, for the earth between the inner and outer walls had to be pounded until it was nearly as hard as rock, itself. Now Darian could readily believe that his house would last far past his own lifetime.
But with so many people at work, the walls were actually finished in a mere week, enclosing quite a large space of land near the lake. Water was brought up from the lake and fed into a channel at the top of the building, to flow into a series of pools and waterfalls exactly like the hot pools at k’Vala. It flowed out again through a channel at the base of the building, and from there to a purifying sand-and-charcoal pit.
Once the water began flowing, the Hawkbrothers scoured the forest for fallen trees, seasoned, but not rotten, and brought back huge beams and support pillars for the roof. Once these were in place, large squares of the skylight material were seated between the beams, and sealed against leaks. Now the communal pools were ready for their living occupants.
Tayledras with the gift of accelerating the growth of plants, including Steelmind, went to work with the seeds and seedlings the gryphons ferried over from k’Vala. When they were done, although the growth was a bit sparse, the building contained a miniature Vale, quite large enough to hold all of k’Valdemar’s current inhabitants at once. The colorful little chattering messenger-birds of the Kaled’a’in flew freely in here, as did the hummingbirds that the Tayledras used for the same purpose. A little magic would be used to heat the waters; a luxury, but one that everyone agreed was the sort of thing that made life much easier than it would have been otherwise.
The waiting Heartstone, now fully awakened, had been fed passively by the newly formed ley-lines for the past four years, and Starfall was pleased with the amount of power that had managed to accumulate in that time. There was certainly enough to set up the soaking pools, magical sentries and protections, and basic shields. Darian helped with that as well, feeling rather proud of his ability to contribute to the magical well-being of his new Vale.
Next up were communal kitchens, buildings for the sick, for mass laundry, and facilities for those whose ekele - most of them, as it turned out - did not have bathing rooms like Darian’s. Putting such facilities in treehouses was a great deal more difficult without magic - so until there was magic, those who preferred tree dwellings would have to do without. If they had not had Ayshen’s expertise, Darian suspected that neither he nor Snowfire and Nightwind would have had their own private bathing rooms either, but he kept his suspicions to himself.
The hertasi and kyree already had their dens and lairs dug into the hillsides, and lined with ceramic tiles for cleanliness and comfort so nothing more needed to be done for them, but the dyheli needed a winter shelter, so that was the next building to go up, also made of rammed earth. They didn’t mind an earthen floor, however, so their building was finished quickly.
Then, with all of the immediate needs taken care of, it was time to make a call on the neighbors.
The initial greeting committee wasn’t to be a large one. It consisted of the three Elders: Starfall, Snowfire, and Nightwind, of course. To that group were added Ayshen, for the hertasi, a handsome neuter called Hashi (his real name sounded like a sneeze) for the kyree, Tyrsell for the dyheli, and, last of all, Darian. It was Darian who had pointed out that they would make a much more favorable impression on Lord Breon if they came to him, rather than the other way around, so instead of waiting for Breon to come calling, the first thing they did, once the initial settling in was over, was to put that in motion.
A messenger went to Kelmskeep to ask if they might come to present their respects; he returned the same day with a message of welcome, and an invitation to visit in three days. The reply was phrased formally enough to show that Breon took them seriously, but informally enough to show that he was ready to be friends. So their first impression was a favorable one.
“It’s good that he said three days,” Darian told the others, with confidence. “More than a week would mean that he didn’t think we were important enough to postpone other business, and two days or less would mean he didn’t think we were important enough to have business that we have to clear away.” Then he laughed. “Looks as if all that business about manners that got hammered into my head is going to turn out useful! I certainly never thought it would!”
“Why not?” Snowfire asked. “Courtesy is always appreciated.”
“Because it was all taught out of this musty old book meant for people like Lord Breon’s heir, Val. Highborn people who have to know all the etiquette of official visits and all that. Why would a wizard’s apprentice from a backward town like Errold’s Grove need that stuff?” He shook his head.
So now, after rising before dawn and riding at a swift pace, possible only because they didn’t need scouts to secure the way, they were at the gates of Kelmskeep before noon. This was Darian’s first actual sight of Lord Breon’s manor, and in spite of seeing plenty of wonders in the Vales, he was impressed.
It was a fortified manor only in the sense that Lord Breon’s ancestors had put up some high and formidable stone walls around the manor and its grounds, walls three stories tall with room for men to walk around on top of them, and observation towers at each corner. Inside the walls, the crenelated walls of the manor sat within manicured gardens. They were rather too confined and geometric for Darian’s taste, but as well-tended as any he’d seen in Valdemar, though no match for the gardens of k’Vala.
Lord Breon, his wife, the Lady Ismay, and his son Val were all waiting for them, with a token guard of two bored-looking fellows in Breon’s livery. The Tayledras had taken pains with their costumes, and now Darian was very glad that they had all put out the effort, for it was obvious that the Lord and Lady had dressed as for an important occasion. Lord Breon, whose hair had gone to salt-and-pepper gray, wore a fine saffron linen tunic with bands of embroidery at the cuffs and hem, and his crest embroidered on the breast, with matching breeches. His wife, gowned in the same saffron linen, with a matching headdress, also wore amber-and-silver jewelry; rings on both hands, bracelets, necklace, belt. Val was dressed a bit more casually in a plain brown linen shirt, open at the neck, with a sleeveless leather tunic and trews, but it was clear from his scrubbed face and wet hair that he’d interrupted whatever he’d been doing at the time for a wash-up and change of clothing.
The group rode up to their hosts, and at Snowfire’s nod, dismounted as one. Darian stepped forward to make the introductions.
“My lord,” he said, with a little bow. “May I make you known to the Elders of k’Valdemar Vale - Starfall k’Vala, Snowfire k’Vala, both of whom who you met before when we were at Errold’s Grove, and Snowfire’s lady, Nightwind k’Leshya.”
Lord Breon bowed and waited for Darian to finish the introductions.
“Here also is Ayshen k’Leshya, who represents the hertasi, Tyrsell k’Vala, who speaks for the dyheli, and Hashi k’Vala, who speaks for the kyree.”
The next three members of the greeting party stepped forward and bowed as Darian introduced them, so that Lord Breon would have name and species linked with the appropriate creature. He did not appear to be surprised that these were “animals,” so he must have been forewarned. He bowed to them as well; Tyrsell and Hashi nodded their heads gravely, and Ayshen executed a graceful court bow.
“Kelvren k’Leshya, the Silver Gryphon chief, is out in the north scouting, and you will meet him later. And lastly, I will relate what Tyrsell and Hashi say, if you wish, for they are Mindspeakers. They can speak into your mind, if you would rather - ” Darian paused, and Lord Breon coughed.
“Ah, if you don’t mind, I would prefer for you to translate, young sir,” the older man said. “I’ve had one experience with that, and - well, I’m a plain man, with plain ways, and that was just a bit too uncanny for my taste, personal preference, no offense intended.” He coughed again, giving Darian a penetrating look. “And you are - ?”
“Darian Firkin k’Vala k’Valdemar, my lord,” he replied steadily, keeping his gaze even as well.
“Darian? Darian? Lord and Lady, youngster - I wouldn’t have thought it!” Lord Breon laughed with surprise. “Look at you! We send off a skinny waif that a good wind would knock over, and he comes back the equal of Val! Well met, young man! And welcome home!” To Darian’s surprise, Lord Breon grabbed his hand and pumped it vigorously. “Damme, but it’s good to have you back! We’ ve all felt the lack of a mage sorely since you’ve been gone!”
“Ah - thank you, sir,” Darian replied, rather at a loss as to what else to say. Starfall saved him, stepping smoothly to the fore as Lord Breon let go of Darian’s hand.
“Lord Breon, we are keeping everyone standing here in the sun, and there is much we would like to discuss with you this afternoon. Have we somewhere that we could all adjourn to?”
Starfall placed a slight emphasis on the word “all,” and Lord Breon’s eyes flickered to Hashi and Tyrsell.
“As it’s a fine day, the inner court would be very pleasant and private,” he replied, so quickly that if Darian hadn’t seen his eyes flicker, he’d have thought Lord Breon planned that venue all along. “Val and my Lady will be joining us, of course.”
“Absolutely,” Starfall replied. “The more minds, the better the decisions.”
Val looked startled at that, and Lady Ismay appreciative. Evidently Val was not used to being included in his father’s counsels, and Lady Ismay was all too used to being dismissed as insignificant by menfolk. “If you gentlefolk will come with me, then,” Lord Breon continued, “We’ll settle ourselves in the court, and Ismay can rejoin us after she informs the servants what is toward.” He turned toward the two bored guards. “And you fellows can be about your business. Mind that you tell the Weaponsmaster that I dismissed you on seeing that the wicked Hawkbrothers were not about to fall on us and murder us.”
Both men laughed, as if hearing the tagline of a joke, and sauntered off, leaving the k’Valdemar party to follow Lord Breon.
He guided them along the paths of the precisely manicured garden, around the side of the manor, until they came to a small archway leading deep under the second floor. At the other end of the tunnel, sun and greenery looked very enticing, though Darian noted the series of strong portcullis gates and drop doors, and the murder holes in the ceiling above. Anyone who thought this would be a weak point in the manor’s defenses would have a rude surprise, shortly before coming down with a serious case of death.
They emerged from the dark tunnel, blinking in the sunlight, surrounded by flowers.
Here in the “inner court” was what was often called “the lady’s bower” at other Valdemaran manors. The more delicate and frost-sensitive plants and trees were here, and in addition to these, there was a profusion of roses and lavender, lilies and hyacinth. A little less manicured than the gardens outside, flowering vines trained on trellises overhung nooks with inviting cushions in them, rose trees, quince trees, cherry and apple trees showered the grass with petals. Trees were espaliered against the warm stone walls. All of this surrounded a pool full of waterlilies and slow, lazy golden fish. Here and there a bit of forgotten handiwork showed that this was a favored retreat for Lady Ismay and whatever young women attended her.
It made a fine place for a conference, too. Soon after everyone settled down, the Lady herself appeared, with servants bearing the components of a picnic lunch. Nor were Tyrsell and Hashi forgotten; for Hashi there was a bowl of neatly cubed raw meat (probably so that no one had to watch him tear his food from the bone), and for Tyrsell, a large basin of sweet-feed. The bowl and the basin were both of ceramic, clearly from the kitchen and not the stable, serving bowls with Lord Breon’s crest glazed onto them. Both Hashi and Tyrsell expressed their pleasure through Darian.
Once food was handed ‘round, Lord Breon dismissed the servants with a gesture and got down to business.
“I’ve been kept abreast of the situation,” he said. “Though since the message came by bird, there wasn’t as much detail as I’d have liked. So there are more barbarians coming this way?”
Starfall nodded. “We have little more in the way of detail than you, but there is one difference from the last time. These people include women and children as well as the warriors, and herds of various cattle as well as war mounts.”
“Sounds as if they’re planning to stay wherever it is that they’re going.” Lord Breon frowned. “We have a bit of a quandary here. It’s the official Royal policy that peaceful groups be allowed to settle on unoccupied lands, and there is plenty of that hereabouts. At the same time, though, the last lot of these folk to come down out of the north were anything but peaceful. Do we defend ourselves with a quick preemptive strike, or do we wait and see what they do?”
Darian kept his mouth shut although his own feelings were quite clear. He would much prefer an attack, enough to send these people back where they came from. He could tell by the look on Val’s face that he felt the same.
It was gratifying that Lord Breon treated them all as allies and equals right from the beginning, though. Darian hoped that his advice had something to do with that.
“We should take our time in considering, my Lord,” Snowfire said smoothly. “They aren’t within the distance that a gryphon can fly in half a day, and they are traveling slowly, so we will have that time.”
“Huh. What we really need is more information,” Lord Breon agreed. “I don’t like walking into any situation blind.” He laughed suddenly. “As you said, we have the time, and there are other things to discuss. For example, what sorts of building materials are you short of, and what are you prepared to trade for them?”
The discussion moved into less martial matters, from trading for building supplies to dyheli grazing grounds, and the need to keep hunters out of them unless escorted by Tayledras. Darian spoke for Tyrsell and Hashi, and occasionally for himself, and when the meeting was concluded and Lord Breon expressed his intention of making a return visit, Darian, at least, came away with a feeling of accomplishment.
“I need your help for an ekele,” Ayshen told Darian, a few mornings after the visit to Lord Breon. Breon’s people had brought a train of wagons with some of the building materials that Starfall had negotiated for, and Darian thought Ayshen might have been waiting for these for a particular project. “I already have Wintersky and Whitethorn, and that will be enough for the things that hertasi have trouble with.”
“Gladly,” Darian replied, bolting the remains of his breakfast. “Whose is it?”
“Your teacher’s and his entourage,” was the surprising reply. “He will be here shortly, or so Starfall says, so there is some need for swift work.”
“Did Starfall tell you who my teacher is?” Darian asked eagerly, for Starfall had been singularly closed-mouthed about the identity of this mysterious being. No matter how often Darian asked - or how often he tried to catch Starfall off his guard with the question - the mage would only answer, “You’ll see soon enough.”
“No,” Ayshen replied, indifferently. “He only told me what sort of quarters your teacher would need to feel comfortable. Does it matter?”
Darian sighed. “I suppose not. Well, what have you got in mind for me?”
“Pounding earth, for the moment,” was the predictable reply.
So Darian found himself on the top of yet another embryonic wall, ram in both hands, pounding away for all he was worth.
But although this dwelling was for one or two occupants, it had a great deal in common with the great common hall with its multiple pools. This place, too, was evidently to have multiple, cascading pools, judging by the work the hertasi were doing on the interior.
But there was more building going on in the tree above - and that was curious. Why would there be two dwellings here?
Gradually, as the walls in the ground-level portion rose, Darian saw the skeleton of the dwelling coming together. This was to be a very special place, half tree-dwelling, half on the ground.
By the second day, Darian began to wonder about this teacher of his - for what they were building, by k’Valdemar standards, was a veritable palace. On the ground was a tiny version of the communal hall, with the same transparent roof, exotic plantings, and a collection of three small pools. The floors were all tiled, and the pools as well. There was a bathing room, and two other chambers that did not share the transparent roof, chambers that looked a great deal like his own bedroom, though what purpose these chambers were to serve was unclear to him.
In the tree above, was a standard ekele - to the k’Valdemar standards, that is, with thick insulation against winter’s cold. And yet - not quite standard, for where others were making do with walls of rough plank until they had time to carve and polish the interiors of their ekele to their liking, this place boasted fine walnut paneling, with moldings of carved oak. Everywhere were touches of care that had not been given to the dwellings of other folk. Even more telling - once the ekele was finished, hertasi began moving in furnishings that looked newly made, yet did not move any personal belongings.
All of this preparation did nothing to ease Darian’s anxiety, for the newcomer must surely be important if so much time and effort was going into his dwelling!
When the place was finished, it was a tiny jewel of comfort and luxury, with the ekele above joined to the chambers below by an enclosed stair. And no one in the entire Vale showed any envy of the unknown who was to occupy it.
Darian did not have to endure the suspense for long. That very afternoon, his mysterious teacher arrived.
“You’re to come to the Vale entrance at once,” was all the hertasi would say. “Please. And dress well. Starfall wishes this.”
Then it ran off, as if it had been sent on more than one errand. Probably it had, so Darian made certain that he was reasonably well-groomed and hurried to the entrance marked by the twin pillars of rock. Starfall was already there - and so were Snowfire, Nightwind, Ayshen,
Kel, Tyrsell, Hashi - virtually everyone of any importance in fledgling k’Valdemar.
Suddenly Darian wished he had taken the time to change his tunic. Not that it was dirty, or even shabby - but he wished he’d put on the armor of fine clothing before he came to this meeting.
It was too late now, for in the distance, tiny beneath the huge trees, dwarfed by the enormous trunks, were two figures mounted on dyheli.
A snow-white bird flew over the head of one, a bird that simply could not be a raptor. Its tail was too long, and even at a distance it didn’t look or fly like anything Darian had ever seen before.
It flew acrobatically, as if it flew purely for the joy of flight. Yet there was a palpable tie between it and the rider it hovered over, as if the bond between it and the rider was visible and tangible.
There was something odd about the rider’s head - 
A moment more, and Darian knew what it was. No human face was that flat - or that colorful. The rider wore a mask.
Another moment, another furlong nearer, and Darian saw more details. Long silver hair, hair that probably fell to the rider’s waist when unbound, had been made up into a single long braid for travel, now tossed over his right shoulder. The mask, of painted leather, covered the entire face - and it represented the face of the bird flying above him.
Darian only prevented his mouth from dropping open by force of will. Oh, no - it can’t be - 
The rider’s costume was as fantastic as his mask, yet completely practical for a long ride, the ride from k’Vala to k’Valdemar, for instance. The garments were cut and pieced together to imitate the plumage of his white bird; it was truly an uncanny imitation.
The other rider, in his way, was just as striking as the first. His long hair, also braided, was a shining black with a single silver streak running from the temple. The cut of his riding gear was unmistakably Kaled’a’in. After several months in k’Vala, Darian knew the difference between Tayledras and Kaled’a’in styles at once. He was amazingly handsome, but there was nothing about him that suggested that he was either a warrior or a mage - or vain. Whatever his craft, it seemed likely that his only reason for being there was as company for the mage. Was this the so-called entourage?
Darian’s thoughts had come to a complete standstill, and he could only stay where he was, staring. The two riders completed their leisurely approach, and the first dismounted directly in front of Starfall.
“Well, Father, here I am,” the rider said, in a voice rich with amusement. “You have managed to drag me here entirely against my own better judgment, and if I did not know you as well as I do, I might be asking you what made you think this youngster was worth the effort of hauling me up from the south.” He cast a sidelong glance at Darian, and behind the mask, one silver eye winked broadly. “However, since I know you, I shan’t ask that particular question. This, I take it, is young Dar’ian?”
“It is, indeed,” Starfall replied, in a voice so like the rider’s that it was obvious they were related. “Dar’ian, this is your new teacher, Adept Firesong k’Treva, and his mate, kestra’chern Silverfox k’Leshya.” Only then did he step forward, and he and his son embraced with much hugging and back pounding.
Darian managed to scramble enough wits together to step forward and make a deeply formal bow. “This is - beyond an honor - sir - ” he began, searching frantically for appropriate words, feeling heat rising in his face and ears. I must be blushing as red as a scarlet jay, he thought, increasing his embarrassment.
“You won’t say that when you come to know me, youngster,” Firesong said, with a voice so solemn that Darian would have been tempted to believe him, had he not seen the wicked amusement in the eyes behind the mask. “I am a notorious taskmaster, and I have every intention of working you until you drop, then reviving you and putting you through the mill all over again.”
“Yes, sir, whatever you wish, sir,” Darian replied automatically, and quickly stepped back, hoping that the other folk would forget about him for a while. He suddenly felt as awkward as an elk-calf, and only thirteen years old again.
Dear gods! How did this happen? How could I be the student of one of the greatest Adepts in a dozen countries?
He slowly regained a little composure as people did appear to forget him; father and son embraced again, Starfall introduced Firesong and Silverfox to everyone else present, and the entire group drifted toward the interior of the Vale. Darian followed quietly behind, listening, but not saying anything.
“Oh, I didn’t bring all that much up with me,” Firesong was saying, in answer to a gentle jibe by his father. “We’ve got some wardrobe, and the more portable of Silverfox’s kit. The rest is relatively light, but bulky, and the k’Vala gryphons will be bringing it along at some point. After all your emphasis on speed, I didn’t want to slow things down bringing baggage by dyheli.”
“We have prepared your ekele as you requested, Firesong,” Ayshen put in, showing deference, but not servility. “I hope that you and Silverfox are both pleased.”
Silverfox, who until that moment, had not said a word, laughed softly and clapped Ayshen on the back. “I remember your talent at design and construction from White Gryphon, Ayshen. I have no doubt that you have not only granted our every wish, but anticipated needs we had not even thought of.”
Darian, meanwhile, felt his mind slowly coming back to him. No wonder no one would tell him who his teacher was supposed to be! He’d have been so terrified he probably would have run all the way back to k’Vala, or even farther.
And Starfall was Firesong’s father. Well, that explained a few things. How Starfall had managed to get someone as famous - or infamous, depending on your point of view - as Firesong k’Treva to come be the teacher of poor, lowly little Darian, for one. Gods save me, how can I ever manage to be worthy of this kind of attention? he thought in a haze of confusion that bordered on panic.
Just as he began to seriously consider that run to k’Vala, Firesong’s companion dropped back from the rest.
“He mumbles in his sleep, you know,” Silverfox said conversationally.
“He what?” Darian replied, baffled. Where did that come from?
“He mumbles in his sleep, he has a terrible weakness for candied yams, and he can never remember where he leaves things. He’s human, Dar’ian. He’s not a superior being, he’s as fallible as anyone. I know that at this point, this doesn’t seem likely to you, but I assure you, it’s true.” Silverfox placed his hand gently on Darian’s shoulder, and Darian felt himself relax, despite his anxieties. “I can also promise you that in spite of all of his protests to the contrary, he was quite eager to come here and teach his father’s cherished protege. Firesong just likes to be coaxed.”
“I - I’d think that after everything he’s gone through, he deserves coaxing, sir,” Darian replied shyly and was rewarded by Silverfox’s dazzling smile.
“And I agree with you entirely.” Silverfox chuckled, patting Darian’s shoulder. “I would agree with you even if I were not understandably prejudiced on his part. Don’t fear him, Dar’ian. Listen to him, learn from him, but do not fear him.”
The strange white bird floated down to land on Firesong’s shoulder; he reached up absently to scratch its crest, and it climbed down from its perch to nestle in his arms, head tucked blissfully under his chin, crooning. A firebird - Darian now recalled. Firesong’s bondbird is a firebird. The horrid painting that had been on Justyn’s wall flashed into his mind, and the blob on the painted Firesong’s shoulder that everyone in Errold’s Grove had thought was a chicken or a goose.
A good many things now made perfect sense - the special arrangement of heated pools, for instance. Everyone knew that the reason Firesong wore masks was because he had been terribly scarred at the end of the mage-storms. Presumably, he was shy about exposing those scars to anyone but the closest of companions - and you couldn’t wear a mask to soak in the pools, you’d ruin it. Silverfox might well feel more comfortable in a ground dwelling, especially in a storm when the tree would sway and toss - hence the extra rooms below.
And both of them were giving up a considerable level of luxury to come here, only for the purpose of teaching Darian. Under other circumstances, it would have been perfectly reasonable for Firesong to insist that Darian be sent to him. No wonder so much effort had been spent on building his ekele!
And of course, who wouldn’t want to impress the fabled Adept Firesong with the finest ekele it was possible to build? No matter how poor it was, compared to what he had left, at least it would be clear that they had tried.
But when Firesong came to the new ekele, he stopped, and turned to his father. “Surely this is not ours - ” he began.
His voice reflected surprise, not disdain.
“It is,” Starfall replied, a hint of satisfaction in his voice. “We may not have a fully-charged Heartstone, or a Veil to hold back the weather, but we have power enough and skill enough to give you comfort. You will find your own pools here below, a bathing room, a steam room, and a room for Silverfox to receive clients.”
“I am mostly retired, but I still do take massage clients,” Silverfox said smoothly, as Firesong choked. There had been something implied that Darian didn’t understand, but he had a good idea that Kel could tell him - and would.
“I have well-insulated the ekele, Adept Firesong,” Ayshen said diffidently. “I do not think you will find any chills or drafts this winter.”
The Adept seemed charmed, pleased, and just a little surprised. “I am not sure what to say,” Firesong replied at length. “Except to thank you, thank you all. You have more than made us welcome.”
“Oh, I am certain that you will find plenty to complain of,” Starfall laughed. “But until you do, I hope you find your new ekele satisfactory! And on that note, we will leave you to settle in.”
As Darian was about to leave, Firesong turned to him and summoned him with a crooked finger. “Come up with us,” the Adept said. “I would like to talk with you a little.”
Darian swallowed, felt his mouth go dry as old snake-skin, and obediently followed the two into the ground-level of the structure. They paused long enough for a glance around the pool room; Firesong nodded as Silverfox exclaimed in pleasure.
“When the plantings get their full growth, this will be enchanting,” Firesong observed warmly.
“I cannot believe that they have gone to such trouble for us,” Silverfox replied, shaking his head, then he laughed. “Well, perhaps they have heard tales of your famous plaints when you lived in Valdemar, and had none of the niceties of a Vale at your disposal!”
“That could well be,” Firesong agreed, with as much humor as Silverfox. He found the staircase and began climbing it, with his partner and Darian close behind.
Darian had not seen the ekele since the furniture was moved in; as he entered behind the other two, he saw that not only had furnishings been put in place, but there were beautifully woven rugs on the floor and hangings on the walls.
Silverfox went briefly to the window, then looked back at Firesong. “I think I will see the chambers on the ground first. If there is a storm, I still do not care for being in the boughs of a tree.”
“Only one who was raised in a tree could, ashke, so if there is a storm, I can understand,” Firesong chuckled. “For that matter, if there is a storm, you may find me joining you below!”
Silverfox saluted them both and then descended the stairs noiselessly, and Firesong gestured to Darian to take a seat. Gingerly, Darian sat down on a chair woven of willow withes, and Firesong took another just like it, placed opposite him. The Adept leaned back in the chair, relaxing as the withes creaked, settling beneath his slight weight, but Darian remained sitting straight upright, back and shoulders staff-stiff. He had no idea what to expect, and wondered desperately what Firesong expected of him. He couldn’t look away from those silver eyes.
“So,” Firesong said, after he’d watched Darian carefully for a time. “Being a mage, becoming an Adept - was this your idea, or someone else’s?”
“If I’d had a choice, you mean?” Darian hazarded. “In the very beginning?”
Firesong nodded.
“If I’d had a choice originally, I’d just be a trapper, like my parents,” Darian said softly. “After my parents died, I was apprenticed without anyone asking me what I wanted. I’d rather have been apprenticed to the village woodcutter. I didn’t want to be a mage, I didn’t want anything to do with magic. I couldn’t see any use for it.”
To his great surprise, Firesong burst out laughing so hard that he started to cough and had to get control of himself before he could talk again. “You couldn’t see any use for it!” he rasped out at last, shaking his head, and dabbing at his eyes with a silken handkerchief. “Well, at least I won’t have to disabuse you of dreams of easy glory! But I forget. You never saw any really powerful magic, did you?”
“Not with my original master,” Darian replied truthfully. “Once the mage-storms began, I don’t think he could do much of anything; he certainly couldn’t change, steer, or even predict the weather, and that might have impressed me that magic had some uses. That was Wizard Justyn - ”
“Justyn, Justyn . . .” Firesong muttered, eyes intent as he concentrated. “I think I may have met him once. Name sticks in my mind.” He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “I think I have it. It would be right after the end of the Ancar-Falconsbane debacle, I think. Mercenary-mage, got a head wound doing something ridiculously heroic, lost most of his powers and got talked into using what he had as a Healer out where they didn’t have one. Someplace in the middle of nowhere - very nice nowhere you have here, by the way. I love what you’ve done with the place. He was part of a group of similarly retrained folk, not a big group, though. Darkwind, Elspeth, and I met with them before they got sent out to new posts. Your Justyn wound up out here, obviously. Am I right?”
Darian’s mouth fell open; he couldn’t help it. Firesong had just told him more about his own master than he himself had known! He could only nod in astonished confirmation, and felt embarrassed that he had known so little about Justyn.
So he really did meet the people he claimed he had! And we never believed him.
“How did you know?” he asked. “How could you remember after all this time?”
Firesong shrugged. “I can’t help it; I almost never forget a face or a name, but I can’t remember where I left my boots. Well, at least I won’t have to disabuse you of any grandiose schemes for becoming a Wizard-King; that’s a relief anyway. Tales notwithstanding, I’m afraid there aren’t many kingdoms going without claimants. What have you done and learned while you were with Adept Starfall and Mage Firefrost? How have they been educating you?”
Darian told him as succinctly as he could; it really wasn’t difficult since he and Firesong shared the same kind of magical education. Firesong listened, nodding from time to time, and said at the end, “You’ve had a good, solid education, but that’s to be expected with my father teaching you. You said that originally if you’d had the choice, you wouldn’t have chosen magic. What about now? If I could remove it from you, is that what you’d want?” Then he said something else that shocked Darian. “I can, you know. That’s one of the things a Healing Adept can still do, and I suspect that’s one of the reasons why Father wanted me here. If having this power really bothers you, still, I can take it away.”
Once again, Darian was caught off-guard by the unexpected question, and answered without thinking. “Ah - no, not now. It seems as if it’s something I should do.” He shook his head, unable to come up with anything that sounded right. “I guess I haven’t thought about it, about having a choice, I mean. There didn’t seem to be one.”
“There is a choice,” Firesong said somberly. “And I want to give you one. An informed choice. There’s something more I want to show you, before you make that choice.”
Before Darian had any idea of what the Adept was up to, Firesong had reached up - and removed his mask.
Darian blinked, but did not turn away or lower his eyes. In many ways, the scar-seamed face behind the mask was not as horrific as it could have been. It certainly wasn’t pretty, or rather, the fact that it was the ruin of something that had once been handsome was actually painful to think about. The silver eyes looked out of a randomly patterned set of shiny, tight patches divided by thick, red scars, something that was nearly another mask. It wouldn’t give nightmares to children - 
Not screaming nightmares, anyway. Maybe bad dreams, though.
“There is often a price to wielding great magic, Darian,” the scar-twisted lips said. “This was mine. Envoy Karal paid with his sight. Two more of our party paid with their lives. I was very, very lucky, when it came down to cases. I could easily have died as well, had I not been protected by one of those who did. I had - thanks to the gods, who sent Silverfox - learned that there were far more important things than having a pretty face, and losing it didn’t destroy me. I was beautiful.” The scarred lips smiled. “I still am. I don’t wear masks for my own sake, but the sake of others, so that they need not feel pain that I myself no longer experience. But, Darian, had I not learned things about what is important by then, this minor price could have been a very major one. Have you thought about that, the possibility that you, too, might be asked to pay a great price for power?”
While Darian sat in silence, Firesong put his mask back on again.
“What about not using it?” he asked finally. “There’s a price for inaction, too. The trouble is, usually other people get caught in paying it as much as you do. At least, if I keep this Gift and use whatever power I have, I’ll be making the choice to act instead of just standing by and wringing my hands.”
Behind the mask, the eyes closed for a moment. “That is a good answer - and, I might add, one I’ve not heard before. It should have been obvious you aren’t the kind of young man to choose inaction.”
The silver eyes opened again, and there was a smile in the voice. “Young Dar’ian Firkin k’Vala k’Valdemar, you have passed my test. I will be quite pleased to have you as my student and to teach you all I can, until you have achieved everything possible within the limits of your Gift, or you drop from exhaustion. Have I passed your test as well?”
Slowly, Darian nodded. “I think . . . you won’t be an easy teacher, but you’ll be a good one. I think. . . we can get along.”
Firesong chuckled. “You’d be surprised at how few people realize that is important for teacher and pupil! One more thing, before I let you go for the day. If ever there is something that you are afraid to tell me, do not hesitate to confide it in Silverfox. That - in part - is his profession, to be a trustworthy confidant,”
“I will, sir,” Darian replied, knowing a dismissal when he heard one. He stood up, and as he was about to leave the room, Firesong motioned to him to stay.
“Dar’ian, I have one request.” He sighed, and Darian wondered if he’d done something wrong already. “Do me the very great favor of never calling me’sir’ again. Don’t call me ‘Master’ either. Call me Firesong.” His eyes grew mournful. “Being called’sir’ makes me feel so old!”
“Yes, s - Firesong,” Darian replied quickly. “But I’ve come to respect those who are wiser than I am, and I only meant it as a compliment.”
“Hmm. Well, in that case, I’ll let it pass, once in a while.” Firesong replied.
Darian went out the door and down the covered stair, unable to tell if Firesong was serious or had been teasing him.
He decided to walk at the edge of the small lake that lay just beneath the cliff housing Kel’s aerie and Snowfire and Nightwind’s home. Darian was so preoccupied with sorting out his thoughts that he practically walked into Snowfire and Nightwind.
“Dar’ian, wake up!” Nightwind called, startling him into looking up. She smiled at him, and he smiled back sheepishly.
“Sorry,” he said, coming over to join them; they were dangling their feet in the water like a couple of youngsters. “I was thinking. I was just - well - I was talking to Firesong, or he was talking to me, I mean, and I have a lot to think about.”
“Hmm. I should imagine!” Nightwind replied. “I know Silverfox, of course - a very fine kestra‘chern, by the way - but I’d never met Firesong. I must admit to you that when I heard who your teacher was going to be, I was not anticipating being as impressed as I was.”
“You, too?” Snowfire said with astonishment. “I knew his reputation, and I rather thought he’d be something of a pain. I figured he’d have a tantrum when he saw his ekele, and as for training Dar’ian, no matter what Starfall said, I thought he’d be very haughty about it.”
“He’s not like that at all,” Darian began.
“I agree, I agree!” Snowfire replied hastily. “I agree completely! I don’t know what’s happened to him since he made that particular reputation, but he certainly doesn’t deserve it anymore.”
“I know what’s happened,” Nightwind replied, with a cynical half-smile. “Silverfox is what happened. He could humanize a monster.”
A step behind Darian, and Nightwind’s sudden blush, made Darian look around. Silverfox had just stolen up upon them in time to hear that last remark, and his grin at Nightwind’s embarrassment was full of mischievous charm.
“So, do you have any monsters you need tamed?” His grin widened. “Less of that is my doing than you might think, my dear,” he said genially. “Behind all those exquisite masks is a very real and generous man whose humanity has never been in doubt. He simply had to reconcile himself to the fact that he didn’t have to wear the masks on his heart, only his face.”
“Come here, you wicked creature,” Nightwing replied, leaping to her feet and holding out her arms. “Give me a proper greeting!”
“So little Nightwind still wants a hug from Uncle Silverfox?” the kestra‘chern teased. He did go to her and give her the greeting hug she wanted, though, and then clasped hands with Snowfire.
“I am very pleased to meet you, may I add,” he went on. “We stopped long enough at k’Vala that I managed to hear of your joining with my old friend, and I was quite anxious to meet the fellow capable of swerving her from her childhood vow never to wed anyone at all!”
“Silverfox! I was only twelve!” she objected, laughing.
“You seemed quite serious at the time, my dear,” Silverfox replied, and turned back toward Darian, who was edging away, thinking that he was intruding. “Please, Dar’ian, come join us. I had come specifically to talk to you a little more.”
“You’re sure I won’t be in the way?” he asked.
Snowfire and Nightwind both beckoned, and Silverfox smiled. “Not at all. A great deal of what I wanted to discuss with you concerns these two, as well, since I am told they are your oldest friends here. And it is about Firesong. I should like you three to know more about him, as he will be a part of k’Valdemar for some time to come. Perhaps longer than even he anticipates.”
Snowfire raised a quizzical eyebrow. “You think he might stay?”
Silverfox only shrugged. “I cannot predict. I can only say that until a reason for him to leave should manifest, he will remain, and if none does - ”
“Interesting.” Nightwind found another soft spot on the bank to sit, and invited Silverfox to take her earlier perch. “So what is it that has turned your Firesong into a paragon?”
“Time, trials, and being forced to work with a fraction of the power that he was used to having,” Silverfox said casually. “No more Great Magics for him or for anyone; every bit of magic has to be carefully planned to gain the maximum benefit from the minimum of power. That has forced him to be patient, careful, restrained. He can no longer afford to act on impulse - almost a shame, since he had turned impulsiveness into an art form.”
“In short, he grew up,” Snowfire snorted, then blushed. “I’m sorry. That was entirely uncharitable.”
“Not entirely wrong, but very uncharitable,” Silverfox agreed. “I ask you to try to recall that his reputation was made in the days when he could afford to send up a Gate just because he preferred not to ride a single day’s journey. And no small part of that reputation was caused by his own insatiable urge to tweak the noses of others - so to speak.” Silverfox trailed his fingers in the water meditatively, then added, “He still has that sense of humor, but he has learned to express it in ways that are more - humorous.”
“I detect your delicate hand there,” Nightwind chuckled. Silverfox’s only response to that was an odd look.
“I told him that I thought we’d get along all right, sir,” Darian offered. “I still do, and I think I like him, too.”
“Good! That was what I was hoping to hear you say,” Silverfox applauded. “Have you any questions?”
“Ah - one.” Darian decided to just come out and ask it. “What exactly is a kestra‘chern, and why did Firesong choke when Starfall mentioned your clients?”
Nightwind suddenly developed a fit of coughing; Silverfox quelled her with a look.
“A kestra’chern is predominantly one who comforts, Dar’ian,” Silverfox said, taking care with his words. “That is the profession. The least that a kestra’chern does is to supply ease, a distraction, and an absolutely trustworthy confidant. The best of us are in part Healers - Healers of the mind and spirit, rather than of the body, although we have some skills there, and are often asked to help Healers when they are shorthanded. Sometimes that leads to some very intimate contact, for sometimes it is easiest to lead someone to open his heart when he has been intimate in body. That is not always, or even often, the case; it truly depends on the kestra’chern.”
Darian was perfectly capable of reading between the lines; but he also thought about Lilly, how she had used her crude skills to keep the barbarians occupied with her and away from the village girls - and he made a mental note to tell Silverfox about her at some point.
“As for why Firesong choked - ” Now Silverfox grinned. “Starfall initially had a - how shall I put this? - a somewhat narrow and distorted view of my profession, and said some misguided things about my relationship with Firesong.”
“Starfall nearly had a litter of kittens,” Nightwind said rudely. “And what he said doesn’t bear repeating. Needless to say, several of your k’Leshya compatriots had some choice words with him when we found out.”
“Oh - oh!” Now Darian understood Firesong’s reaction - hearing his father go from disapproval to calmly mentioning a room for Silverfox’s clients - 
I think I’d have choked, too.
Snowfire snickered. There was no other word for the sound he made. “Don’t misunderstand me,” he said, “I admire Starfall immensely, but he has been known to get pig-headed about some things.”
“So you will recognize the same trait in the son,” Silverfox said smoothly. “I am glad, however, that there are no misunderstandings now; we have a full plate, which will be fuller yet if those threatened barbarians should appear.”
They all nodded, but it was Darian who broke the silence that followed that statement. “I’ve put it off long enough, I guess,” he said, mostly to Snowfire and Nightwind. “I’d better take care of one last thing before I discover I haven’t got the time for it.”
“What’s that?” Snowfire asked.
Darian made a face of distaste. “Tomorrow I’d better put in an official appearance in Errold’s Grove.”

Nine

Keisha kept herself busy, trying not to miss Shandi too much. Midsummer Faire came and went (Keisha stayed away, except for a single trip around the traders’ booths), with no further signs from the mysterious Hawkbrothers and the absent Dorian Firkin except for the frequent overhead flights of gryphons, sometimes bearing burdens, sometimes not. Lord Breon’s son came to the Faire representing his father, “selected” the wedding-shawl that had been especially made for him (with no indication that he realized his selection had been carefully steered). Valan of Kelmskeep assured everyone that, yes, the Hawkbrothers were in the process of setting up their settlement, and yes, Darian Firkin was with them. As to when he would reintroduce himself to Errold’s Grove, that, Val didn’t know. He had seen them, met with them on several occasions, even been to their settlement, so he could at least testify to that much.
Keisha didn’t much blame Darian for not showing up immediately and putting himself at the disposal of the village. If she were in his position, she’d give them a great deal of time to settle themselves down before she came to visit. The village of Errold’s Grove was entirely too keyed up about the return of their peregrinating son for her liking.
Fortunately, the excitement of Midsummer Faire, with Val in attendance, twice the usual number of Hawkbrother-traders, and several entirely new traders up out of the south, gave the villagers plenty to spend their excitement (and money) on.
Keisha wouldn’t have stayed so much away from the Faire, but after the first few candlemarks, she discovered that she couldn’t tolerate the press of people. She retreated to her workshop, discovered during the excitement of the games and contests that even that wasn’t far enough, and removed herself to the woods until the contests were over. Increasingly, Keisha suffered from headache, upset stomach, general nervousness when she was around two or more people - and she had no idea how to make it stop. Her best shelters were her workshop and the forest, and of the two, she preferred the forest, for in her workshop she was easy to find, and during the Faire people seemed to think it was their duty to coax her to attend.
She kept away from her family, too, as much as possible. In fact, even the outwardly peaceable Fellowship folk were something of a trial to be around, for beneath their placid exteriors lurked a stew of complicated emotions. Evidently there were some members of the group for whom a placid life and an absence of outward conflict was more of a trial than arguments would have been! Fortunately, she could get her meals without having to stay at the table.
She salved her conscience by providing her family with food instead of her physical help - greens and herbs from her garden, other foodstuffs from the bounty given her by her patients. They seemed to fear that now that she was on her own, she was in serious danger of starving to death. Every day saw a rough, temporary container plaited of green reeds or made of giant leaves stitched together left on her doorstep, containing something to eat - a loaf of fresh bread, a round pat of fresh-churned butter, fresh-picked vegetables, a meat or berry pie, a half-dozen eggs - if it was edible, it generally ended up in a basket on her doorstep. Sooner or later the bounty would probably dry up, but while it continued, sharing it with her family soothed the pangs of conscience for “deserting” them.
It was just that at the moment, it was harder than ever for her to be around them. Two of her brothers were trying to court the same girl, which led to a great deal of masculine head-butting, snorting, and prancing around the dinner table. The youngest two were in the stage of adolescent revolt, which meant a great deal of conflict with her father. Her Mum was worried because they’d gotten only two letters from Shandi, and both were very brief. Keisha wasn’t at all surprised, considering the daily round of chores and classes Shandi described! Shandi wasn’t spoiled, but she’d never had to work this hard in her life! There seemed to be a great deal of book-learning, too, which was not Shandi’s strongest suit.
Be fair, Keisha. She’s not a dunce either. She would just rather do handiwork than bookwork.
At least they’d done the wisest thing at that Collegium, so far as Shandi’s chore-assignments went, and put her to work on sewing and mending for her share of the daily work. By now they had probably discovered that with Shandi’s nimble fingers on the job, they didn’t need to assign anyone else the sewing tasks!
Mum worried, though, and that made Keisha’s stomach ache, which made it impossible for her to eat, which made Mum worry more, and - well, Keisha began to look for reasons to be away from the dinner table.
It certainly is convenient how many little accidents occur around dinnertime.
In fact, it was getting so she could find those little accidents before anyone came to fetch her - granted, though, she was looking for them. But when it came to baby’s colic or mother’s burned hand, brother’s tumble from a tree, father’s work-related blisters or sister’s bad sunburn, Keisha had never been so attentive to the needs of the village. Small wonder she was getting little gifts left on the doorstep.
In the afterglow of mingled pleasure and exhaustion that followed the Faire, the only topics of discussion among the villagers were Val’s betrothed, the pledging of two of the village couples, and the resounding success of trading. For the moment, they had forgotten to fret about Darian and the Hawkbrothers, the weather, the harvest, or the level of the river. All of these were safe enough topics not to cause argument, and laden with contentment rather than worry; Keisha woke on the third morning after Midsummer, looking forward to a few more days without headaches.
She was out in her garden when the unusual sound of hoofbeats on the path behind her made her look up - to find herself staring up at a strange, deerlike animal with long, curved horns and a Hawkbrother on its back. She gaped at him stupidly, her mind gone blank.
“Heyla!” the rider said, cheerfully, in very good Valdemaran. “I am looking for someone of authority in Errold’s Grove to deliver a message to. Some children sent me here.”
That, at least, brought her out of her daze. She stood up, wiping her hands on her garden-smock. “The Mayor is probably checking the irrigation mill,” she said, thinking out loud. “I know the priest is visiting a sick farmer. Will I do? I’m sort of the Healer.”
“Assuredly,” the Hawkbrother replied. “It’s simple enough. We of k’Valdemar Vale are finally settled in, and I was told to say that the Elders of the Vale and Mage Darian will come tomorrow to present themselves as new neighbors to you. They told me to tell you that there is no need to make a great event of this, or special preparations. We waited until after the Faire so as not to disrupt your celebration.”
She stared at him for a moment, before stammering a reply. “Ah - that will be fine, wonderful!” she managed.
“I’ll go find the Mayor and let him know right now! Who shall I say gave the message?”
The rider had already given some subtle signal to his mount; it was ten paces back up the path before she got out the last word of her reply. The rider called back over his shoulder.
“I am Wintersky k’Vala - and thank you for taking the message for me!” His beast leaped into a gallop, and he vanished into the forest.
She didn’t wait any longer herself; the Mayor needed to hear this right away. She tore off her smock and left it in the middle of the garden, pelting down the path toward the river as fast as her feet could carry her.
She intercepted the Mayor and the blacksmith on the path leading to the river. They were their way back from their weekly inspection of the mill that kept the vegetable fields nearest the village irrigated - the ones on the other side of the river, being at a lower level, could be watered naturally. She waved her arm wildly at him as soon as she saw him and increased her speed; he stopped immediately, a look of worry jumping into his eyes.
She might have been running, but not long enough to be the least winded. She didn’t wait for him to ask what was wrong. “A message came from the Hawkbrothers, sir!” she called, as she came to a halt on the path in front of him. “The new ones, the ones with Darian Firkin! They’re coming here tomorrow to meet you!”
The worry changed immediately to pleasure. “Finally!” he exclaimed. Then the worry returned. “But tomorrow? How can we make proper preparations with such short notice?”
“The Hawkbrother - he said he was Wintersky k’Vala - said he was told to tell you that this isn’t a formal meeting, that you aren’t to make a big fuss over it - ” But she saw she might just as well have been talking to a wall and stopped trying. The Mayor was off in a tangle of plans and preparations, and probably wouldn’t believe that the Hawkbrother had said any such thing. In fact, he broke into a trot, heading straight for the village square, probably with the intention of gathering every person of importance in Errold’s Grove to see what they could put together for a “proper” greeting committee.
The blacksmith was right behind him, too, but heading for his home. The news was about to spread through the village by the fastest means possible. He was going to tell his wife, who would promptly start the news going in all directions. Wives were better than Heralds and Companions at getting any news of any kind spread.
Which meant that Keisha could go back to her garden with a good conscience.
I only hope it‘ll continue to stay my garden, she reflected, worried. Darian can’t possibly want the cottage back. No, surely not. He’s living with the Hawkbrothers.
Everyone in the village was awake before dawn. From the great oven of the village baker (who was also the miller) came the scent, not only of bread, but of roasting meat. From dozens of hearths rose equally appetizing smells. From the other huge oven at the threshing barn came the aroma of cake and pie. Errold’s Grove was going to give a feast for Darian and his Hawkbrothers whether they wanted one or not.
As soon as the first dawn light pierced the morning sky, groups of children streamed past Keisha’s cottage, heading for the forest, their voices shrill with excitement. They came back within a candlemark, laden with boughs of greenery and bunches of long, trailing vines. Keisha followed them and joined the older children in decorating the square with the greenery, while all the tables and benches that had just been taken back into houses after the Faire were brought back out again and set up in the square itself.
By midmorning, most of the preparations were complete; food that didn’t need to be warm had been brought to the Temple for later serving, the bowers and decorations were up, banners and flags flew from windows looking out on the square, and a small boy, giddy with pride at his important assignment, was up in the Temple tower, watching for the first sign of the Hawkbrothers.
Keisha’s only symptom so far was a knotted stomach and a faint headache; those she could bear easily enough, so she remained with the rest of the village, waiting in the square. After two false alarms, at midmorning the shout went up from the tower.
“They’re coming!” the boy shrilled. “Oh, there’s a lot of them! And they’re riding on deer!”
Keisha’s stomach lurched, and she faded back into a doorway, while the Mayor gathered up his cronies and hustled them up onto a low platform left over from the Faire at the end nearest the Temple. Moments later, the visitors rode into the square.
A spontaneous cheer burst out, making their mounts start. The visitors seemed pretty startled, too, at least to Keisha’s eyes, but they kept their composure in spite of all the noise. She saw two of the ones in the lead - a thin, but good-looking young man about her own age and a dignified, craggily handsome older man with long, silver-white hair - put their heads together for a quick consultation. The young man gestured discreetly at the platform, the older man nodded, and they led the entire group toward the waiting Mayor.
The Mayor stood nervously clasping his hands as they approached him and his group. The cheering died down when the visitors dismounted and made the last few steps afoot.
The Mayor had probably memorized a grand speech, but his efforts were entirely set at naught, for the first words out of his mouth were “By Haven, Darian! Is that really you? You’re - bigger!”
The younger man laughed and held out his hand, clasping the Mayor’s firmly. “Boys have a habit of growing up, Lutter,” he replied, his warm, deep voice very amused. He shook the Mayor’s hand. “What are you, Mayor now? Good for you; I’m not surprised. Congratulations!”
Mayor Lutter flushed, and plainly made the decision to discard his planned speech, since the atmosphere of great dignity and importance he had been trying to establish was spoiled anyway. “Good to have you here again. Now, who are these fine folks?”
Darian introduced them, and Keisha took careful note of their names. The older man was Starfall k’Vala, an Adept, clearly one of the men in charge, and dressed in a tunic and breeches of exotic color and cut. A fellow who was dressed like the Hawkbrothers she was used to seeing was identified as Snowfire k’Vala, and a lady with night-black hair and sharp blue eyes as his mate, Nightwind k’Leshya. She was given the title of trondi’irn, whatever that was. But the next two to be introduced had every eye in the village fairly popping from its socket, Keisha’s included.
“This is Healing Adept Firesong k’Treva, and the kestra’chern Silverfox k’Leshya,” Darian said proudly, gesturing to the pair. Silverfox would have startled almost anyone in Errold’s Grove with his appearance. His black, silver-streaked hair was so long it touched the back of his knees, and he wore it unbound, flowing as loose as a maiden’s. His elaborately brocaded, sleeveless vest of green and teal could only be silk, as were the emerald shirt with its wide sleeves, and the matching, tight-fitting breeches. Keisha yearned to examine the silk brocade more closely, and his leather knee-boots fit so smoothly they must have been tailored to his legs alone.
But Silverfox paled in comparison with Firesong . . .
Firesong’s silver hair was just as long as Silverfox’s, but he sported a braid on either side of his face, with strands of crystal beads, silver chains, and tiny bells braided into them. His shirt of emerald green was embroidered all over in a pattern of blue, green, and silver feathers. Its pendulous sleeves reached down to his knees, and it was held in close to his body with a silver belt in the form of two birds, whose tails flowed together at the back and whose beaks hooked together in the front. He wore loose-fitting silk breeches tucked into green boots with silver ornaments down each side. But the crowning touch, the object that set him apart from everyone else, was the mask that he wore, completely covering his face.
It seemed to be of metal, and yet it was far too flexible to be of that substance. Patterned in glittering silver, with touches of shining emerald and sparkling sapphire, its ornamentation echoed the feather-embroidery of his tunic, giving him the look of a fantastic bird.
It was the mask that did it, that told her that this was the Firesong, the famous Adept who trained Princess Elspeth, who helped save Valdemar in the Great War, who then helped save it again from the mage-storms. . . .
“I am quite pleased to visit this place,” Firesong was saying, pretending to ignore the fact that he was the center of everyone’s gaze. “I understand that the wizard who helped to save your village was someone I had the honor of meeting a very long time ago. Justyn, wasn’t it?”
Keisha wondered why that casual remark would make Mayor Lutter pale, but the man regained his composure after a moment of coughing. “Ah, yes, Wizard Justyn - he was young Dalian’s first Master - that’s his statue, there, facing the bridge, you know - seemed the most appropriate place - least we could do to honor his memory - ”
Mayor Lutter pointed, and naturally everyone turned to look, in spite of the fact that most people here were as familiar with the statue as they were with the members of their families. Of course, from this angle, all anyone saw was the back of the statue, but at least it was evident that the statue was a pretty good one. It should be, considering it had been done by the same artist who made all the religious statues hereabouts, and not by the fellow that Mayor Lutter originally wanted to hire, a dauber who usually carved and painted inn signs. Lutter had been overruled by nearly everyone. Keisha saw Darian nod to himself, with a pleased little smile.
Mayor Lutter still seemed shaken. “Ah - you sent word not to make any special preparations - but we couldn’t - you know - we’ve prepared a feast in your honor - ” he stammered. The women waiting near the Temple took that for an order, and started bringing out dishes. Things were a bit confused for a moment, then the Mayor’s wife Mandy took charge and got everything set to rights and organized. Tables and benches placed on the platform were quickly covered with clean white cloths, and the visitors were guided to their seats. Everyone else scrambled for seats down below, as the young women and wives appointed as servers began bringing out food.
Keisha would have taken this opportunity to slip away, but Mandy Lutter wasn’t having any of that.
“There you are!” said the reedy voice as Keisha tried to ease her way out of the crowd. Mandy’s thin, hard hand seized her arm, and the Mayor’s wife pulled Keisha up toward the platform. Keisha wanted to jerk her arm free and run off, but that would have been unbearably rude, so she allowed Mandy to hustle her up onto the platform and into a seat.
“This’s Keisha Alder, our Healer,” Mandy proclaimed. “I’m afraid she’s a bit shy.” Keisha moved to protest, but was stilled by Mandy’s sharp glance.
Keisha looked cautiously about, and discovered she’d been seated between two of the visitors; Darian was on her right, and the lady with the black hair was on her left. And curiously, as she got control over her own nerves, she realized that the nausea and headache she’d been suffering from ever since she woke up were - gone!
“ - Kel will be arriving a little later,” the woman was saying to the Mayor. “He wanted to run his morning patrol before coming here, and that seemed like a wise course to us.”
Keisha wondered who “Kel” was, but she didn’t get a chance to speculate, for Darian addressed her just as the woman went on to talk about the bondbirds.
“I’ve been told that you have the old cottage that I used to share with Justyn,” the young man said, with a friendly enough smile. But immediately Keisha worried. Did he want it back?
“ Ye-es,” she replied carefully. “No one was using it - you don’t mind, I hope?”
He chuckled, and his eyes crinkled at the corners. “Why should I mind? It’s nice to know it isn’t sitting empty, or worse, fallen into a ruin. I just hope you’ve managed to make more of it than we did.”
“People fixed it up for me. They fixed the walls, the roof, everything,” she told him, and hesitated a moment. “I don’t suppose you’d want to see it, would you?”
His face lit up with his smile. “Actually, yes I would, quite a bit. I was trying to think of a way to ask you if I could.”
“I will - if you’ll let me see the gryphon up close!” she said, suddenly thinking of a way to achieve her own wish.
Now Darian laughed. “Let? Havens, when he comes in from patrol, you’ll have a hard time keeping him away! If there’s one thing that Kel loves, it’s an audience.”
That led her to questions about gryphons in general and Kel - or “Kelvren” as his name really was - in particular. Darian was perfectly willing to answer them, and while he was talking, she didn’t have to.
Darian was a vast improvement over her brothers, both in manners and appearance. He never interrupted, passed platters without being asked, offered food to her before taking some himself, and never heaped his plate with the best cuts. He used knife and fork properly, didn’t wipe his mouth on his cuff, and didn’t make sarcastic or cutting remarks, even when Mayor Lutter was holding forth with great pomposity on things he obviously knew nothing about. When that happened, he just exchanged looks with others of his party, and hid his smile by turning his head.
As for appearance - well, Keisha didn’t blame the rest of the girls for competing to serve him, nor did she blame them for their posing, their flirtatious glances, their outright adoration in some cases. He was really one of the best-looking young men she’d ever seen, and the leather Hawkbrother clothing with its fringes, beadwork, and tooling only gave him an exotic touch that was very attractive.
He seemed completely oblivious to their attempts to catch his eye, though. Mature and self-possessed, he managed to pay attention to Keisha’s questions and to the discussions that the Hawkbrother Elders and the village officials were having at the same time. She was used to having to listen to more than one conversation at the same time, since she often had two or more people babbling at her about an illness or injury, but she’d never known anyone else to have that gift.
Well, maybe he’s too busy with that to pay any attention to the girls. Or maybe he’s used to admiration. At least he doesn’t seem vain about it, if he is.
“The bondbirds are mostly in the trees around the edge of the village right now,” he said, in answer to her last question. “No reason to call them in, and too many strangers make some of them nervous. Firesong is enough strangeness for all of you to handle, I think!”
“You have a bird, don’t you?” she asked.
“Of course! I couldn’t be a Hawkbrother without one!” he laughed. “His name is Kuari, and he’s an owl. He’s fledged of Snowfire’s two birds. When we’ve got lots of space, I’ll call him in if you’d like to see him. He is really far too big to call into a crowd.”
“What’s it like, having a bondbird?” she asked curiously. “Is it something like having a Companion?”
“Huh. A bit, I’d guess. The bond strengthens with time; in the beginning, you have to work to talk to them, but after a year or so, they’re always in your head and you’d have to work to keep them out - assuming you’d want to.” He raised his eyebrows. “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to, though. They’re so different from humans that it isn’t like having someone eavesdropping on you.” He warmed to his subject. “Their needs are very different from a human’s, and their interests - it’s only because they are bred to be extremely intelligent that they have much in common with us at all. Have you ever been around ordinary birds of prey at all?”
“Not really,” she admitted. “In fact, the only raptors I’ve ever seen up close have been a couple of bondbirds, the ones that come with Hawkbrothers who’ve brought things to trade.” She offered a slow smile. “I really like Steelmind’s buzzard, he’s so calm.”
He chuckled. “You haven’t missed much with ordinary raptors. Oh, they are beautiful, graceful, and amazing to watch, but there isn’t much room in those heads for anything except hunting, breeding, and survival skills. They’re very focused. That’s the way Nightwind puts it. Bondbirds are less focused, but they do have intelligence and the ability to socialize, and not just with us. They play games and socialize with other bondbirds, and not just of the same breed. They have to be able to do that, or they couldn’t work together - and too many of them would be on the dinner menu for the biggest of them, if they didn’t have that ability to tell friend from food!”
She stifled a laugh. “I never thought about it that way.”
“Believe me, it’s quite true.” His attention wandered for a moment, as he caught part of one of the other ongoing conversations. It was only for a moment, though, and it came right back to her. “When you see the size of Kuari, you’ll understand. Honestly, I’m not strong enough to hold him for long without something to help support his weight.”
That candid remark surprised and charmed her. She couldn’t imagine any of the young men she knew admitting they weren’t strong enough to do something.
By this time, the meal was just about over; the last of the dishes were whisked away to make way for bowls of fruit and pitchers of wine. “Would you like to see the cottage now?” she asked, and when he hesitated, she assured him, “There won’t be any serious talk going on yet. Mayor Lutter won’t want any real discussions of anything happening in front of the whole village.” She listened a moment to the Mayor’s current topic, the past Midsummer Faire. “He’s on the Faire. The next thing will be the harvest, and the number of traders he expects. He’ll be priming your people for suggestions later about what they might bring to trade on a regular schedule. You can see the cottage and be back before he gets onto the next thing.”
“That sounds fine, let’s slip off.” He rose from his seat at the same time that she did. He set out in exactly the right direction, and it took her a moment to remember that he had lived here for years, so of course he would know where the cottage was!
“Well,” he exclaimed, as they approached the workshop. “You were right about people fixing it up. It certainly never looked this good when I lived here.”
She felt a bit of pardonable pride, for it was a neat little place now, with the stone walls scrubbed and morning glories and moonflower vines climbing up the trellises she’d built on either side of the door. The thatch had been patched and freshly trimmed last fall, too, and this spring she’d painted the shutters white.
“Show me around the outside first,” Darian urged. Always happy to show off her garden, Keisha took him around to the back.
“Oh, this is good,” he exclaimed, as the garden came into view. “What have you got here?” Without waiting for her reply, he walked carefully around the beds, identifying plants aloud. “Feverfew, wormwood, basil, thyme, lobelia, comfrey - ” Keisha was impressed, for she would never have thought he’d have any knowledge of herbs. “I must say, I’m glad Justyn didn’t have all this.”
“Why?” she asked, startled.
“Because then I wouldn’t have had so many excuses to go out into the forest,” he replied with perfect logic. “Keisha, you’ve done some remarkable things here. This is wonderful from the point of view of having supplies at hand.”
“And to trade,” she pointed out. “I’m able to get some things by swapping with traders that come here. Perfume oils are popular, and dyes, of course.”
“Of course.” He took another long look around the garden, nodding. “So, why don’t you show me what you’ve done with the inside?”
His grin as soon as he entered the door made her flush with pride, and she was very glad she’d cleaned everything thoroughly last night. “Good job. Really good job. You’ve made this place into a fine home and workshop.”
“I had help,” she began shyly, but he shook his head.
“I see one person’s hand everywhere,” he began, but a tap on the doorframe interrupted him.
The Hawkbrother woman - Nightwind - stood there. She said something quickly in the Hawkbrother tongue; he nodded and turned back to Keisha.
“Nightwind says that Lutter wants to speak with me, and she wants to have a word with you,” he told her. “Right now, she says - while things are still quiet.”
“Me?” she squeaked, surprised once again. “Why?”
He shrugged helplessly. “I suspect that’s to be between Nightwind and you. I’ll see you later, when Kel comes in.”
With that, he slipped past Nightwind, who entered and closed the door behind her.
“You need not look so apprehensive,” the woman said, in slow, careful Valdemaran. “I think that this may be a very welcome conversation for you.”
Keisha swallowed, and recalled her manners. “Will you sit down? Can I offer you something to drink?”
“After that feast?” Nightwind laughed. “Thank you - but no. I shall sit, however.”
She took one of the two chairs at the cold hearth; warily, Keisha took the other.
“I have spoken with Healer Gil,” Nightwind said, with no warning, and Keisha stifled a groan. “Nay, do not look so stricken! I am a kind of Healer, as is Adept Firesong; we believe that together we can supply the teaching that you lack.”
Before Keisha had time to react, Nightwind went on. “You do not know how close you came to turning into a hermit,” she said soberly. “You have been feeling unwell around others, have you not? That is because you have never learned to shield.”
“Shields? You know what that means?” Keisha was too excited by this to be annoyed and embarrassed now. “I haven’t been able to make any sense out of what was in the books, and I knew it was important, but Gil couldn’t explain and - ” She stopped herself, took a deep breath, and told herself to calm down. “So that is why I get upset when other people are upset?”
“Exactly.” Nightwind relaxed just a trifle. “And you will be getting your first lesson from me, right now. I put a shield around you at the feast; now you will learn to make your own.” She studied Keisha’s face. “I think you will learn quickly, and it is a good thing that you are a Healer, rather than an Empath. You already are grounded and centered.”
Those were two more terms that hadn’t been explained in the Healers’ texts. “What does that mean?” she asked, determined to indeed begin her lessons at once.
“When you are working here, when you are in the forest - you feel a strong connection to the earth, do you not?” Nightwind asked, and Keisha nodded eagerly.
“I’ve never even dreamed of flying,” she confessed. “I dream about being a tree, a really huge tree, with roots going all the way down into the heart of the earth.”
“Empaths must learn to ground and center themselves, to create that connection to the earth,” Nightwind told her. “Healers - those with the Gift - are born with it. They just have to learn to identify it, strengthen it. So - first, I will take the shield from you, and I wish you to do just that. Find that tie and wait a moment. I will touch your mind with mine, and show you the strength of the earth about you, and how to pull that strength into yourself.”
Keisha was too excited now to be apprehensive; she had always enjoyed learning, and now she was about to be given the keys to mysteries that had frustrated her for years. She closed her eyes and sought that still, deep place within herself where her tree-dreams came from. It was easy enough to touch, but a moment after she did so, something strange happened.
There was something - someone? - there as well. Something that wasn’t her.
:Good,: she heard, startled, inside her head. :So you have exactly the sense of self that you need already! And you are hearing me in words?:
Cautiously, she tried to form her reply in the same way she “heard” it. :Yes. What is this?:
:This is Mindspeech, so besides being a Healer, you are also a Mindspeaker. That is not always, or even often, the case. It will make things easier for both of us.
Ah, let “me“ come closer, and touch “me “ so that you see through “my” eyes.:
Keisha forced herself to relax as the alien presence somehow moved closer to her, and then - 
“Oh, my!” she exclaimed involuntarily; her eyes flew open, and she felt disoriented, seeing things in the strangest kind of double-vision, herself looking at Nightwind looking at herself - 
She didn’t have to be told to close her eyes again; she squeezed them shut as her stomach churned. Nightwind also closed her eyes, making things easier. . Nightwind waited patiently until her insides settled, then opened her own eyes. :Now, see what I am seeing? This is just the surface of the world. This is how a Healer sees it, with the Oversight.:
The world was suddenly alive with light, all colors of light; to Nightwind’s eyes, Keisha had a halo of emerald green, the seedlings growing on the window ledge had a similar halo of light, though weaker. Keisha had a sudden flash of memory. She had seen the world like this before, but she had rejected it as an hallucination.
“Let me try by myself!” she demanded, and Nightwind pulled away. She opened her eyes and, with a mental twist, brought this new kind of vision into focus.
It worked! With a gasp, she saw the world about her as a web of light and energy. She got up and went to the window that overlooked her garden; it was unbelievable! And not only could she see the light, but - 
“I can tell which plants aren’t doing well!” she exclaimed.
“And if I were ill, you would see that,” Nightwind agreed. “Now I want you to touch the place where the light is strongest - no, with your mind, not your hand! Touch it, and bring it into yourself. Here, watch me.”
Obediently, Keisha used this new sight to watch her teacher; it took some time before she caught the trick of what Nightwind was doing, but when she tried it tentatively, she had yet another surprise.
Not suddenly, but slowly, gently, a warmth and well-being began to fill her, in a way that defied description. The closest was to sitting by a warm fire on a cold night, or in the sunshine on a spring day after a long, hard winter. It was not a rush of feeling. This was more like the easy misting of a good, soaking rain, permeating the thirsting earth. It filled places she hadn’t known were empty until now.
Nightwind said nothing, waiting as Keisha sat with closed eyes, very nearly in a trance. Finally it was Keisha herself, feeling that she had been “filled” to capacity, who opened her eyes and spoke.
“What did I just do?”
“What every Healer does; you replenished yourself from the earth,” Nightwind told her. “Now, the next thing you need to know, and urgently, is how to shield. This will put a barrier between you and other people. If you are going to stay sane, you will have to make this as much a part of you as breathing, and only let it down when you want and need to, in order to sense what is wrong with a patient. Now - here I put an artificial “edge” around you. See it?”
It was a “thickening” of the glow around her, as thin as a piece of paper. Keisha nodded.
“Now take your own energy, and put it there. Make it into armor - make it tough, flexible, and strong. Concentrate! Make it tough enough to keep me out of you. I will begin pushing on it, and you must keep me out.”
Impossible to describe in words, except the ones that Nightwind had just used - but very real and very palpable - Keisha “felt” the barrier she was creating. As she made it stronger, she “felt” something outside of it, pushing on it; in response, she poured more of her energy into it. She sensed it trying to tear a hole in the barrier, she responded by doing something she couldn’t even have described, making the outside slippery, too slippery to catch hold of. The presence outside changed tactics, hammering blows on barrier; rather than hardening it, she responded by making it elastic, giving under the blows and absorbing the force.
Nightwind laughed, and the force vanished. Keisha waited.
“That was very good for a beginner,” Nightwind said, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “In fact, I suspect that you have been doing something all along, learning how to partially shield just under the pressure of the people around you. That would also be typical for a partly trained Healer. Leave the barrier in place, Keisha. You need it.”
Keisha had been about to try to make the barrier go away, and obediently left it alone.
“Now drop your Oversight; just look at the world again.”
Keisha had to close her eyes to do that, but after a moment of effort, when she opened them again, the world went back to looking normal. Nightwind smiled cheerfully.
“This will be much easier than either of us thought,” she assured Keisha. “So - pack up enough for a trip of a few days. You will be coming back to k’Valdemar Vale with us.” She actually grinned as Keisha’s mouth dropped. “Oh, you are about to receive some very intense training! And do not worry about your village; we will make certain that if you are needed, we will have you here in time to help. And this is a better compromise, I think, than sending you far away to the great Collegium. Yes?”
Keisha could only nod dumbly. After all, hadn’t this been what she wanted? Now she would actually get the training she needed without having to leave the area.
But going to live with Hawkbrothers - She could hardly imagine it. And what would the villagers say?
Mum is going to have a litter of kittens.
“I am going to rejoin the rest of our group,” Nightwind told her. “I will inform your Mayor and so forth that you will be coming with us when we leave.”
Well, at least I won’t have to!
“I will tell him that this is also at the orders of Healer Gil and Lord Breon,” Nightwind added, and her eyes twinkled with suppressed laughter. “I suspect that will put an end to any objections before they start. Pack carefully. Take only what you think you most will need and will not find in our Vale. We will take care of most everything, even clothing, if you like. I will come get you when we are ready to leave.”
With that, Nightwind rose and left, leaving Keisha feeling as if a real wind had blown in, turned everything upside down, and left again.
But, oh - it felt so good!

Ten

Keisha decided that the most important things to pack were her books - the ones that had baffled and frustrated her for so long. Hopefully Nightwind would be able to explain them as well as she had explained shielding She wrapped them carefully, then packed up enough of her clothing for a few days, and as an afterthought, added her workbasket. She doubted that she’d have any time to do any fancy work, but if she found herself with time on her hands and nothing to do, she’d be angry at herself for not bringing it.
That didn’t take very long, and she looked around for anything else to take with her. Plants? Seeds? Presumably the Hawkbrothers had plenty of medicinal plants of their own - 
The Herbal. We can compare notes, and if they don’t have some of my plants, we can get young plants out of the garden when they bring me back.
So into the bag of books went the Herbal, and she considered bringing a gift with her. After all, that was the only polite thing for a guest to do, bring a guesting-gift. But what could she bring that they didn’t already have and plenty of it? “
The scarlet dye! After all, everyone liked a good, strong scarlet, and she had a brand-new cake, bought at a very generous discount, besides the ample portion left from her experiments. She wrapped the cake carefully in paper then in a scrap of cloth, and tucked that in with the rest.
With nothing more that she could think of, she went out to set up the garden to take care of itself for a few days. She and the potter had an arrangement. All of the big storage jars that came out of the kiln with hairline cracks became hers, and she tested them to ensure that the leaks were very slow indeed. Then she moved them into the garden and placed them at intervals along the rows of plants. Normally she kept them covered and empty, but if she knew she was going to be busy for several days running, she filled them with water and left them. The slow leaks would drip water into the ground, keeping the plants watered without her needing to ask someone to tend them.
Tedious as the job was - well, it was time to fill the jars, then transplant all the seedlings she had in the cottage into the garden. At least it would fill the time and keep her from chewing her nails, waiting.
The jars were full, and she was mindlessly arranging and rearranging her shelves when Nightwind finally tapped on the door again.
“Are you ready?” the woman asked as Keisha turned to face her. Keisha licked dry lips and nodded.
“It’s almost sunset. Are you really going to travel in the dark?” she asked, not quite certain of the journey ahead of her.
“Darkness doesn’t make much difference to the dyheli,” Nightwind replied, as Keisha took up her bundled belongings and hurried outside.
“Are we going to follow dyheli?” Keisha asked, right on Nightwind’s heels.
“No, dear, we’re going to ride them,” the woman said, managing somehow not to sound patronizing. Keisha halted abruptly when she realized that the entire group was right at her doorstep, patiently waiting for her. Her usual hesitation around strangers came back redoubled. She felt too frozen to move with all those eyes on her, but Darian came to her rescue, taking the bundles from her hands before she could drop them, smiling encouragingly at her. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to your dyheli,” he said, taking her hand and giving it a little tug to get her moving. As soon as she took the first step, he dropped her hand again, as casually as he had taken it. She followed him to one of the horned animals, who looked at her with interest from intelligent brown eyes. “Keisha, this is Meree,” he said, exactly as if he was introducing two people. “She’ll be taking you to k’Valdemar Vale.”
:You have a quiet mind,: said a clear voice in her head. :I shall enjoy bearing you.:
Keisha felt her eyes widening. “She talks!” Keisha blurted without meaning to.
Darian, bless him, did not laugh at her. “Just like a Companion,” he said cheerfully, “though dyheli talk to anyone that they choose to, and Companions normally only talk to their Heralds. You’ll like Meree, she’s very interested in herb-Healing. You might know some things growing around here that she doesn’t, and vice versa. You’ll have plenty to talk about as you travel, at least.”
The notion of trading herb-knowledge with a deer almost made her laugh nervously, yet she kept it back. But after all, why not discuss herb-knowledge with someone who happened to have four feet instead of two? Certainly she ought to warn Meree about the sheep-sorrel fungus.
Darian made a cup of his hands, and boosted Keisha up into the saddle; there were stirrups, though they were loops of leather rather than metal, and she had a little trouble getting her feet into them. He fastened her belongings behind the odd saddle; the dyheli did not have a bridle or reins, only a kind of handle at the front of the saddle for her to slip her hand into. She hadn’t ridden enough to feel comfortable even on so familiar a creature as a pony, so she did just that, immediately.
Darian swung into a saddle on a handsome stag with such effortless grace that she felt embarrassed that she had been so clumsy. But after all, she consoled herself, he’s been riding around Valdemar for four years; he ought to be good at this.
:Don’t worry, child,: Meree said sympathetically into her mind. :Tayledras are masters at making people feel selfconscious. They don’t mean to, it just happens.:
Oddly enough, the remark made her feel a bit better, and she settled herself, trying to get the feel of the saddle.
That seemed to be the signal to move out; Darian hadn’t even settled into his saddle, and the entire group launched off with a great leap, at a pace that left her hanging on for dear life. She’d expected an easy amble. Instead, it was a bounding lope that bounced her backward and forward, throwing her alternately toward the dyheli’s rump, then toward the wickedly dangerous horns. This - can’t be comfortable for either of us - 
:Move with me,: came the patient voice in her head. :Here. Like this.:
This was unlike the way that Nightwind had simply touched her mind; the dyheli seized her mind in a gentle but implacable mental grip, and she found her body moving under someone else’s control for a few moments. It happened too quickly for her to panic; she took note of the way her body now felt, how it moved - for she could feel, even if she didn’t have control - and just as abruptly, Meree released her.
It took a few moments for her to get herself properly coordinated, but once she got the knack of it, everything fell into place and she began to enjoy herself. She was going far faster than she herself could run, with the wind of their passing in her face and hair, the forest all around her. She felt the dyheli’s powerful muscles moving under her legs and hands, and the thought came to her that Meree was far stronger than she looked.
By the time she was comfortable with riding, they were well into the forest, far enough that she didn’t immediately recognize exactly where they were. They might even be past the areas she was familiar with by now. It was already dusk beneath the trees, a thick, blue dusk with a flavor of its own, of old leaves, crushed evergreen needles, a touch of damp and the scent of sap. Overhead was the sound of wings; as she looked around, she saw that many of the riders had a perch built onto the fronts or backs of their saddles, and their birds perched there, taking the movement of the dyheli as easily as the movement of a branch in the wind. If they weren’t asleep, they were comfortable and relaxed.
So if the bondbirds were down here, with their riders - what was flying above?
:Kel. The gryphon,: Meree answered. :He’s the one you hear. There are three owls as well, but you won’t hear them; owls fly silently.:
“Can you hear everything I think?” Keisha asked, feeling a little nettled at this intrusion on her thoughts.
:You aren’t shielded, so of course I can. I’ll stop if you want me to.: Meree sounded perfectly indifferent, as if such a thing wouldn’t matter to the dyheli, but maybe that was just Keisha’s own shading on the answer.
Good question. Would it matter? Meree was unlikely to gossip about Keisha’s innermost thoughts, after all.
:Your innermost thoughts are of very little interest to me. Now, if you were a member of k’Valdemar herd, it would be different, but gossip about humans is, at the most, not even entertaining for one of us.:
Keisha had a vision of a pair of dyheli with their heads together over a back fence, kerchiefs tied over their horns, gossiping like a pair of Errold’s Grove matrons, and giggled. That destroyed any annoyance she’d been feeling, and she attempted to frame her answer in thought, rather than speech.
:What about “gossip “ about plants ? Do you know about the fungus that grows on sheep-sorrel?: Speaking this way was easier than she had thought. Instead of having to say “sheep-sorrel,” and then attempt to describe it and the fungus, she found she could just picture them clearly.
:Sheep-sorrel, yes, but what of this fungus?: Meree replied, and they were off, with both Keisha and Meree becoming more and more animated as the ride progressed. Keisha learned about half a dozen plants that she recognized, but hadn’t known uses for; Meree learned even more from Keisha. Meree referred to things not only by how they looked but how they tasted. Keisha wished she had her Herbal handy. She wanted badly to make some notes in the blank pages.
:We can go over this later, when you can write and draw,: Meree promised.: You will have the time, I will see to it, and I will not forget what you want to record.:
Keisha realized she had learned more about the Gift of Mindspeech in a few hours conversing with Meree than she had gleaned in all the books sent her by the Collegium. For instance, along with that simple statement came attached information, that the dyheli, as a species that had no way of recording information, relied entirely on trained memory, so much so that Meree literally could not forget unless she chose to, or a stronger mind took the memory from her. That another race, the kyree, also trained their memories in the same way. This extra information just tagged along with the rest, like lambs behind their ewe, but just popped up in Keisha’s memory as she examined the statement.
The idea made Keisha dizzy; imagine having entire libraries of knowledge right in your mind, instead of having to look things up! How could anyone manage all that? How did Meree keep it all straight?
:Look and see,: was Meree’s reply, and she obligingly opened her mind to Keisha without a second thought. Keisha could only bear a few moments, but it was fascinating, with all the information neatly arranged in a flexible web, so that many trains of thought would lead to a particular bit of knowledge, each bit led to others that were related, and new bits could be fitted in without stress.
Like game trails in the forest, she thought, dizzied, as Meree closed off her mind again.
:Very like,: Meree agreed, :Now, have you come across anything as a cure for wet-tail?:
By that time it was so dark that Keisha couldn’t see anything, and she allowed herself to trust to the Hawkbrothers around her and not worry about what might lie out there under the cover of shadows. The conversation with Meree was fascinating enough to keep her attention, so much so that the time passed without her noticing how long the ride had been, until Meree said, :If you look ahead, you will see the beacons atop the two rock spires that mark the entrance to k’Valdemar Vale.:
She rose a little in her stirrups to look past the rider ahead of her - and sure enough, there were two blue-white lights in the distance, shining beneath the branches of the trees, with huge clouds of bugs swarming around them, winking in and out of sight as the light reflected from their wings. Now and again, something larger flashed through - a bat, taking advantage of this insect feast. As they neared, she saw that the lights were not as bright as she had thought; they only seemed that way in contrast to the darkness. Nearer still, and she realized that they weren’t lanterns or any other sort of light that she knew; they were round balls, about the size of her fist, perched somehow on the tops of two rough-hewn pillars of rock about three times the height of a man.
This was certainly nothing like Errold’s Grove!
The dyheli slowed as they neared the pillars, until they were moving no faster than a walk. :You will soon see hertasi, so do not be alarmed,: Meree warned, and the image of the hertasi came to Keisha along with the name. She was glad for that warning, for she would certainly have been alarmed otherwise! A manlike lizard with rows of sharp, pointed teeth that walked on its hind legs would qualify as a monster by Errold’s Grove standards, and probably a dangerous one at that. But when the little lizard-people crowded around the arriving riders at the entrance to the Vale, she managed to smile at them, albeit a little nervously.
Darian joined her as soon as Meree stopped moving, and helped her to dismount. She completely lost her nervousness in the unexpected pain of her legs as she swung her off-side leg over the saddle and tried to slide down to the ground. Her legs absolutely refused to bear her weight, and they hurt. Only hanging onto the saddle and Darian’s support kept her from ending in a heap on the ground.
“Ooooh!” she groaned indignantly. “What happened? I thought I was in good shape!”
“You are,” Darian said with sympathy. “You just aren’t a dyheli-rider yet.” He held her steady as her legs wobbled under her, and she took a couple of tentative steps away from Meree.
“I guess I’m not any kind of rider,” she replied, as one of the lizards took her bundles and the dyheli’s tack, and Meree moved off. Finally her legs stopped rebelling - though they were still horribly sore - and she was able to hobble without assistance.
The lizard whispered something musically to Darian; he replied in the same language, and it scampered off with her things before she could stop it.
“I’ll take you to the guest lodge,” Darian offered. “That’s where the hertasi is taking your bundles.”
“It has a bed, I hope,” she groaned. There must be wonders all around her, but at the moment she was in no condition to enjoy them.
He laughed. “I think you need a soak in hot water more than a bed.”
The idea of a hot bath was heavenly - but - she thought she remembered something about the Hawkbrothers and communal bathing, which did not appeal to her at all.
“I have an offer for you,” he said, interrupting the thought. “My home is nearer than the guest lodge - and you aren’t used to the customs of our hot pools. I’ll set you up with a private bath and go on to the lodge and see everything is ready there for you. Then I’ll come back and get you.”
Disrobing in a stranger’s house and taking a bath there? And not just a stranger, but a strange male? Her mother would be scandalized, but again, this wasn’t Errold’s Grove. The promise of a hot bath - and the state of her sore muscles - decided her.
Besides, even if I were as pretty as Shandi - which I’m not - at the moment I’m sweaty, dirty, and staggering. That’s hardly enticing.
“Thank you! You are the most considerate person I have ever met!” she said fervently.
“Oh, you should meet some of the others before you say that,” he replied lightly. “Here, come this way.”
Other than the two pillars, so far she hadn’t seen any signs that this place was inhabited. As she followed him up a twisting path, she still didn’t see any kind of housing, though the path itself was man-made and very ornamental, with a sparkling little stream crossing it several times, all manner of fragrant flora, and baroque lanterns hanging from carved posts.
“I thought you were settling here,” she said. “Where is everyone?”
“Up there,” he pointed, and she looked upward toward the trunk of the tree he indicated.
“There’s a house up there!” she exclaimed involuntarily, stopping and staring in fascination. Warm rounds and rectangles of light betrayed windows, and through the branches she glimpsed bits of walls and floor, and a stair spiraling around the trunk.
“An ekele,” he corrected. “Almost everyone has an ekele; Hawkbrothers prefer to roost.” He grinned. “The exceptions are the hertasi, who’d rather burrow, the kyree, who like caves, the k’Leshya Kaled’a’in like Nightwind, who like homes built into the sides of cliffs, and me.”
She was relieved to discover she wasn’t going to have to climb one of those twisting staircases. With the way her legs felt, she wasn’t certain she’d be able to make the trip!
“And here we are,” he announced just then, gesturing grandly at a tall mound of leaves - a mound with windows glowing warmly beneath the leaves, that is. He opened an otherwise invisible door, and they stepped into one of the oddest, and yet most inviting houses Keisha had ever seen.
There wasn’t a single straight line in it, though, and that was a bit disconcerting. “One of the hertasi designed this place,” he said, as he led her through the first room (which was so neat and clean she could hardly believe it belonged to a male), a second (obviously a bedroom, and a bit more cluttered), and into the third. There was a single oil lamp turned low, hanging from a wall-sconce; he turned it up, and busied himself with a metal spout in the wall.
The whole room was tiled in white, pale blue, and pale green ceramic; even the ceiling (what there was of it) was tiled. Most of the ceiling was actually a window! And around the four sides of this window were boxes with vines growing in them.
Sunken into the floor was a tile-lined bath tub; Darian had just turned a spigot and put a plug in a hole in the bottom of it, and water poured in. Clear, clean, and very chilly-looking, the spray made her shiver.
Darian watched as the water filled the tub, and turned the spigot again when it was within a thumb-length of the rim. But then, before Keisha could ask him how the water was supposed to be heated, he held his hand out over it.
Something was happening, something she felt, rather than saw, until she closed her eyes and did that little trick with vision. Then she saw light-energy moving from Darian to the water, but what did that mean?
Wait, it was getting warmer in this little room, and more humid! A moment later, she knew where the heat was coming from, for the water in the tub had started to steam.
“Try that with your hand and tell me if it’s hot enough,” Darian said, just as she blinked, and lost the Oversight. She knelt at the side of the tub and gingerly put her hand in.
A little more and it would have been too hot. “Definitely,” she told him. He grinned.
“I like it a lot hotter, but I’m used to the Hawkbrother pools. Now just wait a moment, and I’ll bring you something to wear when you get out.”
He ducked into the bedroom, and came back with a loose, gauzy shirt and breeches of the same materials. “You can keep these, they’re too small for me now.” He opened a wicker-work chest next to the tub. “Clean, dry towels are in here.” He turned and pointed to a series of stone boxes at the side of the tub. “Gourd sponges are in there, a scrub brush, and soap; there’s a couple of different scents, so you’ve got a choice. I’ll be back in a while.”
He didn’t wait for her reply; he just left, and she heard the outer door close after him. She peeked out, just to make sure that he’d really gone, but the little house was absolutely empty except for herself.
Well, there was no point in letting the water cool! She stripped to the skin and eased gingerly down into the hot tub, which was long enough for her to stretch completely out and deep enough that the water came up to her chin. Immediately, the heat eased the sore muscles of her legs, and she sighed and relaxed against the sloped, tiled back of the tub.
If anyone had told me about what this place was like, I would never have believed them. Would she be too spoiled by this Vale to want to go home again?
I could put some comforts together with help. A bathing room of her own, for instance, wouldn’t be too difficult to add to the cottage. The potter could make the tiles. If I built an oven underneath the tub, instead of sinking the tub into the floor, I could heat my own water. A rainwater cistern on the roof would give me water for the tub, or I could tap into the irrigation system. Or I could pump it from the well at the sink and carry it. The cistern would be the least work. That would be a good way to warm someone up who was badly chilled, too. A reasonable excuse for me to ask for help building it. She grinned to herself. No, she probably wouldn’t be so spoiled she wouldn’t want to go back, not as long as she could figure out ways to reproduce the aspects of this place that she liked!
When she’d soaked long enough that she thought she’d be able to move again without moaning, she finished her bath with rosemary soap, and allowed the water to drain. Darian’s old clothing, lightly scented with juniper, was a bit big on her, but it was so good to put on clean clothes that it didn’t matter. She rolled up the waistband and arms, so she didn’t look too much like a child playing dress-up.
She decided to wait for him in the outermost room, and bundled up her old clothes and took them with her. When he arrived, he looked pleased to find her there. “Your room is ready in the guest lodge, and the hertasi are bringing you something to eat there, in the morning. That will be easier for you than trying to find our dining hall right off. You can leave your clothes here, if you’d like,” he added. “The hertasi will clean them and bring them back to you by morning.”
“I could get to enjoy having hertasi doing everything,” she sighed, as she laid her clothing to one side.
“It’s a good trade for them, and for us,” he agreed, as she followed him out onto the dimly lit trail. “They get safety, protection, and share our food and supplies, and we get their service. Out there they wouldn’t have a chance; cold slows them down, they’d make prime prey for the slave trade, and they’d wear their little lives away trying to grow enough food to stay alive. In here, they don’t have to worry about any of that. We even have a festival twice a year to thank them, where we take care of them and give them gifts.” He grinned. “They are very tolerant of our cooking, but twice a year is all they can stand.”
“How are you getting food and supplies?” she asked curiously.
“Trade and hunting,” he replied promptly. “There are some things we grow for ourselves, but staples we trade for; it makes more sense for us to grow very exotic and rare things than to try to cultivate acres of wheat. We’ve already set up a pact with Lord Breon, for instance; he’s quite pleased to be getting some of our goods in trade for flour and so forth. And here is the guest lodge.”
They had just gone around a twist in the trail, and there, beneath the shade of an enormous tree that supported an ekele around its trunk, was a building similar to Darian’s little home, with rounded walls and a tiled roof.
The main difference seemed to be that this place was not screened by a growth of vines, and that it looked to be bigger than Darian’s. Young vines at the base of the walls promised that soon this building would be camouflaged, too. “There are six rooms here for now, though you’re the only guest,” Darian told her. “We went ahead and put you in the first one.” He opened the door as he spoke, and ushered her into a kind of common room, lit by another oil lamp, with several doorways radiating from it. The nearest was open, with a light inside. “There will be more lights around here when Lord Breon gets our lamp oil to us. Nightwind or Firesong will send someone for you in the morning.”
She yawned hugely, covering her mouth in embarrassment. “I was going to ask you to introduce me to the gryphon and your owl, but I don’t think I can stay awake that long.”
“That’s what the morning is for,” Darian replied genially. “You go get some sleep; after your first dyheli ride, I’m sure you need it. Sleep as long as you need to.”
He left her alone in the building, which now seemed much larger than it had a few moments ago. She entered the lit room, and found that her things had been unpacked, the clothing hung neatly on a bar mounted to the wall, or folded and set in a basket beneath the hanging clothes. The books were all stacked on a table next to the bed with a quill pen, ink, and paper; the only other thing on the table was the lamp. Her workbasket waited beside the table. It was all rather spare, compared to Da-rian’s home, but then this was only supposed to be guest quarters.
The bed, however, looked soft and inviting, and she climbed right into it without undressing to find it was as comfortable as it looked. She thought about getting up and changing into a sleeping shift, but it was too comfortable; she didn’t want to do anything but blow out the lamp, and fall into dreamless sleep. So that was precisely what she did.
When she awoke the next day, it was with a feeling of excitement and anticipation that was enhanced by an aroma so mouth-watering that her stomach growled loudly and insisted she must get up and get dressed to investigate the source. Light filtered in through the gauze curtains of the window over the head of her bed. She leaped out of bed, and changed out of the clothing she’d borrowed from Darian (which had been wonderfully comfortable to sleep in) and into one of her Healer-trainee uniforms. That was mostly what she had packed for this trip; she felt a little selfconscious about them, but they were the best clothing she had (bar her festival clothes), and she really was a Trainee now. Still brushing her hair and barefoot, she opened the door to the common room, and on a table was the source of the fragrant aromas; three rounds of bread that, by the scent, were stuffed with something. Beside the plate of bread rounds stood a cup and pitcher of cold, sweet tea.
The first roll she bit into was still warm and stuffed with onion-and-sage spiced sausage, the second with rosemary-spiced vegetables, and the third with berry jam. She ate every crumb, and drank half the tea. When she had finished her meal, she noticed a familiar-looking pile of neatly folded fabric on a chair near the outer door; sure enough, it was yesterday’s clothing, clean again.
Now what? she wondered, and finally brought out her workbasket, opening the outer door to let in some fresh air and signal that she was awake and ready to go to work. She was left in peace for a little, and had come to the end of a pattern when a faint scratching sound made her look up.
One of the lizard-creatures stood in the doorway, and it nodded when it saw that she had noticed it. Now in the daylight, she saw it more clearly; with its huge, expressive eyes and intelligent look, it was unexpectedly appealing.
In fact - it’s awfully cute, she thought, softening toward it.
She put her work away and stood up; the lizard beckoned with an outstretched talon, and she followed it out into the Vale.
She was glad that Nightwind had sent a guide; the place seemed to be a maze of little paths. Eventually the trees ahead thinned out and disappeared, and they emerged on the edge of a small lake with a cliff on the opposite side. The lizard vanished, and Keisha looked around in confusion.
“Over here!” Nightwind called, waving from atop an expanse of rock. Beside her lounged the gryphon.
Keisha walked toward them, slowly, taking it all in. The gryphon was perhaps the most stunning creature she had ever seen, barring Firesong. His head had a definite eagle look to it, though he had a pair of real, feather-tufted ears. His feathers were a gleaming golden brown, with gold markings, and he was huge. His bright gold eyes were fixed on her as she approached; they were like enormous rounds of tiger eye stone come to miraculous life.
“Darian reminded me that you wanted to meet Kel,” Nightwind said as she neared. “So, this is Kelvren, our resident senior gryphon. Kel, this is Keisha Alder, the Healer of Errold’s Grove.”
“I am pleasssed to make yourrrr acquaintancsse,” the gryphon said politely, bowing his head.
“And I, yours,” Keisha replied, with a little genuflection of her own.
“My title, my job, is trondi’irn, which means that I primarily take care of and Heal those who are not human,” Nightwind went on. “Especially the gryphons. Kel and I have been partners in that way since we were both accepted into the Silver Gryphons. In a small group like this one, I also Heal the humans - when we grow larger, we will have separate Healer and trondi‘irn, though they will both be expected to work together and assist each other.”
Keisha nodded, but couldn’t think of a response. Nightwind patted the rock beside her, inviting Keisha to join her. Keisha climbed up and sat down, with the gryphon within touching distance of both of them. There were long, stiff feathers, much like guard hairs, around the nostrils and eyes. The great beak was polished or waxed, gleaming in the sun. Like a raptor, he had double eyelids, the inner one probably to protect his eyes during a fight or a kill. He had a spicy-sweet scent to him, a hint of ginger and cinnamon, which rather surprised her. He wore jeweled ear studs in each ear, and the shafts of each crest-feather had been decorated in jewel tones and gold leaf to match the ear studs.
“You aren’t maintaining your shield,” Nightwind observed. “You are going to have to get into that habit; any time you think about it, make sure it’s there! If you’re checking it a hundred times each day, that’s not too many. Use a mnemonic if you have to; associate the checking with something you see a lot of - fallen leaves, stones in the path.”
Already feeling guilty, Keisha put her shield up, and Nightwind nodded.
“That’s better. Now, I’m going to ask you some questions, because I suspect that you have already done some things with your Gift that you aren’t really aware of doing, and I want to find out what they are.” She began to question Keisha closely, asking her all sorts of odd things. Had she ever known what was wrong with a human or animal by just looking? Had she ever found herself knowing that she had given a human or animal enough medicine without measuring? Had she ever felt drained and tired after helping someone, even though she hadn’t done a great deal of physical labor?
The list of questions went on and on, some seemed quite senseless, but others were surprising, because Keisha had felt, or done, those things and hadn’t known how or why.
Finally, Nightwind was through, and she looked down at the notes she had taken with a waxboard and stylus. “You’re using your Gift with animals, rarely with children, never with adults,” she said. “You’re using it mostly to determine what exactly is wrong with them, and what dosages of medicines are sufficient. You are not using your Gift to Heal without medicine. That’s about normal, for someone who’s untrained, but who is developing a powerful Healing Gift.”
She seemed to be waiting for a response. “It’s nice to know that I’m normal in something, at least,” Keisha replied dryly, and Nightwind laughed.
“I’ve asked Kel to help me this morning, in part because I’m intimately familiar with him, and in part because the way he’s put together is going to give you some surprises.” She raised a brow, and Kel chuckled. “Remember how I touched your mind, and you saw through my eyes yesterday? Lower your shield, and we’ll do that again, but this time we’ll be looking at Kel using Healing Oversight.”
So began the most intense morning that Keisha had ever spent in her life. She learned that there were many kinds of Oversight, many ways of using it, and how to use all the kinds that she had. Specifically, she began to learn how to use it to discover what was wrong with someone, whether it was injury or illness.
“But I’m mostly treating either familiar animal diseases, or humans who can tell me what’s wrong,” she protested.
Nightwind raised that eyebrow again. “Oh, indeed? What about someone who is unconscious? Someone with multiple injuries who isn’t aware of all of them? A child too young to talk? Do you always treat just the obvious symptoms without looking for anything further?”
She dropped her eyes and had to admit that this was exactly what she had been doing.
“That’s acceptable for a beginner, for a Trainee, but you can’t stay a beginner forever,” Nightwind said, softening her rebuke. “At some point you’re going to have to function as a full Healer, and the sooner that can happen, the better.”
By the end of the morning, Keisha had a dull headache unlike anything she had ever experienced before, and Nightwind called a halt to the lessons. “For this afternoon, I think you should go through your texts and see if now you understand some of what confused you before,” her teacher told her. “The headache you have now is due to using that part of your mind and Gift that you haven’t exercised before - rather like riding muscles!” Keisha giggled a little at that, and Nightwind smiled. “So this afternoon should be devoted to your books, and when your headache eases, I’d like you to start examining people and creatures around you in this new way. Stop when it starts to hurt again, but the more exercise you give this talent, the stronger it will become, and the easier to use. And remember to keep your shield up otherwise!”
Keisha felt dizzy with all the orders, but nodded anyway.
“Now we’ll go get something to eat; I’ll show you the common dining hall.” Nightwind slid off the rock; Keisha followed her. “Kel, thank you, we’re done with you. Go fly your patrols.”
“Happy to be of ssserrrvicsse,” the gryphon said genially, then took straight off from the rock in a thunder of wings that sent dirt and bits of debris flying in all directions.
Nightwind also gave her the clue to following the paths - which turned out to be absurdly simple, once you knew it. Paths leading to the entrance had reddish markers which were often colored stones beside the path, paths leading to private residences had black markers, paths leading to the water had greenish ones, paths leading to the buildings housing the common areas - dining hall, kitchens, laundry, baths, and soaking pools - had gray markers. The paths themselves were made up of substances reflecting their “key” colors - bark, pebbles, sand, and so forth. “Just follow all the gray paths, and eventually you’ll come to what you’re looking for,” Nightwind told her. “The guest lodge is on a gray path, too.” Where paths met, there were marker stones in the appropriate colors, so sooner or later, no matter how lost she got, she’d eventually be able to straighten herself out.
The dining hall turned out to be one of the few wooden buildings in the Vale, a long, low structure that was nothing like Keisha imagined it would be inside. One single room, with the ceiling supported by slender pillars; there was no real sign of what the room’s function should be, it could have been used for any purpose required. Instead of rows of tables and benches, there were a few tables with stools, a great many cushions, some couches, and some individual chairs. Part of one corner had been built up with three raised tiers, also covered with cushions. At the far end, food had been laid out for people to help themselves, which they did, then taking their choices to sit however they chose to eat.
“There is almost always food here, even between meals, but hot food is only served at mealtime,” Nightwind told her, as she directed Keisha in getting a wooden platter and helping herself. “Things tend to happen in a Vale that upset schedules, so there are plenty of folk missing the regular meals who need feeding at any given time.”
They found seats - Keisha felt much more comfortable eating at a table - and Nightwind began asking her questions about herself. Keisha discovered that she and the trondi’irn had more in common than she would have guessed. Both of them had a swarm of male relatives to put up with - in Nightwind’s case, it was a horde of cousins, rather than brothers - and both had younger sisters that they liked and missed enormously. “Though Nightbird may come here anyway - but not until her training is finished.”
Both of them seemed to have the same slightly cynical outlook on life as well. Nightwind had a better sense of the absurd, though, and Keisha wished she had Nightwind’s ability to see humor in things. It looked to her as if Nightwind got more enjoyment from things by not taking them too seriously.
“I have to get back to work,” Nightwind told her, when they’d finished eating and put their platters in the bin for dirty dishes. “Keep following this gray path, and you’ll eventually come to the guest lodge.” She frowned slightly. “At some point in the next couple of days, I’ll have to get Tyrsell to give you our language; the hertasi for the most part don’t understand Valdemaran. If you see Dar’ian and your headache is gone, tell him I said that.”
“I will,” she promised, though she couldn’t imagine how she was to learn a language on top of everything else. She wandered the gray path, enjoying the sights, and eventually did come to the guest lodge. With a sigh, she went inside and obediently got out her texts.
To her delight, a large part of the things she had not understood did come clear, although the texts often used slightly different terms for things than Nightwind did. Oversight, for instance, was called Mage-Sight or Healing-Sight. Now that she knew some of the basics, though, she was amazed at how much the texts actually told her, occasionally explaining things better than Nightwind had.
She became so absorbed in her studies that she barely noted the passage of time until she found she was straining to read, looked up, and realized that it was growing dark. More than that, her foot was asleep, and she was starving. She put the book down, and decided to get some dinner on her own.
She walked to the dining hall through a dusk lit softly by lanterns and scented with the perfumes of night-blooming flowers. A different sort of fragrance coming from the dining hall made her move a bit faster, though, and she shyly took her place amid a tangle of strange Hawkbrothers to get her platter and fill it. With a little searching, she found a quiet corner out of everyone’s way, and sat there, watching and listening to the strange music of their unfamiliar tongue.
She was just about to leave when she (almost literally) ran into Darian. He caught her by the elbow as she passed him, with a contagious grin for her when she realized who it was. “Working hard?” he asked, with a wink.
She made a face. “Hard enough to get a headache,” she replied, sighing. “I wish I’d known this was going to be so difficult.”
“Well, that’s good, it means you’re stretching new talents,” he told her, without a hint of pity. “Almost everything worth doing is hard, at least at first. Do you still want to meet Kuari?”
“Absolutely!” She remembered then what her teacher had told her. “Oh, and Nightwind said to let you know if I saw you that she wanted - someone - to give me the Hawkbrother tongue.”
“That would be Tyrsell,” Darian identified, nodding, so that a wisp of hair dropped into his eyes and he brushed it back with an absentminded wave of his hand. “Tyrsell is the king-stag of the dyheli herd; he’s the one I was riding yesterday.”
A dyheli teaching her a language? “That doesn’t seem right. They don’t talk, I mean, not aloud,” she responded, with a frown. “How can he do that?”
“Oh, you’ll understand soon enough - still have the headache?” he asked, and she shook her head. “Good; let me bolt something down, and I’ll take you to the dyheli meadow. The sooner you have Tayledras, the better. The hertasi mostly don’t understand Valdemaran.”
“That’s what Nightwind said.” She followed him as he got bread rounds that looked very like her breakfast this morning, and waited while he inhaled his dinner.
“Sorry about my manners,” he said between bites. “I got used to eating quickly, because things are always happening quickly around a Vale.” He grinned again. “Maybe that’s why we take our leisure so seriously, because most of the time we’re madly scrambling to get things done. You’ve got to keep a balance in life, so that you can enjoy your pleasures completely, and then go and enjoy your work completely. Heyla, when you rest well, you work better, right?” She nodded.
He led her down another series of twisting paths, coming out into a moon-gilded meadow full of the horned dyheli. One was patiently waiting for them where the path met the meadow. He wasn’t all that much bigger than the rest, but there was a sense of power about him that Meree hadn’t had.
:Darian has told me that Nightwind wishes you to have Tayledras-tongue,: rang a solemn voice in her mind.: Will you lower your shield for me?:
She’d been diligent in remembering to check that she had it up, and lowering it was a little like relaxing her grip on something. She sighed as it came down, feeling something inside her head relaxing as well. Will I ever really do this without thinking about it?
Tyrsell stood over her, a silver statue in the moonlight. :Now sit, please. This will not take long.:
Obediently she sat down on the grass. A moment later, she found herself looking up at Darian from a prone position, with her head aching all over again and no notion how she’d wound up lying down when she’d been sitting just the heartbeat before.
“Sorry about that,” Darian said apologetically. “If I’d warned you what was going to happen, you’d have tensed up, then it would have been harder on both you and Tyrsell. I know exactly how you feel right now - this is how they gave me the language years ago.”
It took her a moment to realize that he was speaking in the Hawkbrother language - and she understood it.
“How does he do that?” she asked, sitting up, and rubbing her head. “How can he shove a language into my head when he doesn’t actually speak it?”
Darian shrugged. “I don’t know exactly how; being able to take over someone’s mind like that is a special dyheli Gift. The king-stags use it to control the herd if they panic.”
“It feels like he ran the whole herd through my head!” she complained; Darian chuckled, and she got the sense that Tyrsell was amused as well.
“I know; I remember all too clearly how I felt after my turn, and it took me months to get comfortable with all the new concepts that showed up in my head along with the words. Come on, I’ll show you back to the guest lodge and get a hertasi to bring you a headache-potion.” He helped her to her feet; she had the presence of mind to turn to the dyheli before they left.
“I hope I didn’t seem ungrateful. Thank you very much, Tyrsell,” she said carefully. “This is going to make things endlessly easier for all of us.”
:You are welcome, and thank you for your courtesy; it will serve you well with my people,: the stag said. Then he turned and walked calmly off into the moonlit meadow, just as if he hadn’t just worked something very like a miracle.
“How are you coming with your studies?” Darian asked her as they turned back onto the path.
“The good news is that I haven’t got anything to unlearn,” she replied, one hand to her aching temple. “The bad news is that I have a lot to learn in a short time. From what the books say, I think it was a good thing Nightwind made her offer. I would never have worked this out on my own.”
“You might have,” he offered, surprising her. “After all, somebody did. There had to be a first Healer.”
“I suppose so.” The books had also told her just how close she had come to losing control of her Gift, and what that would have meant. No wonder she had thought longingly of becoming a hermit! She had very nearly been forced to do just that, in order to stay sane!
“Nightwind is awfully kind, and a lot more encouraging than I thought she’d be,” Keisha continued. “And the best thing is that Nightwind says that I was right all along to say I couldn’t go to the Collegium. She says that even untrained, I was doing things that Gil can’t, and that my primary duty was to the people I take care of.”
“I can see that.” The lights of the guest lodge appeared ahead of them, and just as Keisha noticed them, a hertasi also approached them on the path. “Do you want to make the request?” Darian continued, “Or shall I?”
“I’d like to,” she decided. When the hertasi neared, it seemed to sense that she was going to say something, and stopped, waiting attentively. “If you would be so kind, I have just been given this tongue by Tyrsell the king-stag, and my head hurts dreadfully,” she told it. It hissed with sympathy.
“I know just the thing, Keisha-Guest,” it replied. “Shall I bring it to the lodging?”
“Please,” she replied with gratitude, and it whisked away so fast it almost seemed to vanish.
“Very good!” Darian applauded. “You’re going to make a Hawkbrother yet!”
She thought about that, after Darian left her and the hertasi had come and gone with her headache medicine. She hadn’t really considered “becoming” a Hawkbrother, but Darian had, so obviously outsiders could. Could she come to serve both the Vale and the village as a Healer, in time?
It was at least as intriguing as becoming a Herald, like her sister.

Eleven

Kuari roused all his feathers with a full body shake, then tucked up a foot and closed his eyes. He knew Darian wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while.
“Well, what do you think of our little Healer?” Nightwind asked Darian as they gathered to meet with Lord Breon and Val. The Valdemarans had taken to coming over with the wagons full of trade goods rather than asking the Tayledras to come to Kelmskeep. Darian had a notion that this was as much because both Lord Breon and his son were fascinated with the new Vale as it was to save the Tayledras the inconvenience of making the trip.
“I think she isn’t ‘little’ at all,” Darian responded, deciding that Nightwind was fishing, and he wasn’t going to take the bait. “She’s the same age as me.”
Nightwind laughed. “Point taken. I think she’s going to be quite competent, she’s easy to get along with, and I wish I could persuade her to live here instead of Errold’s Grove. We could certainly use her.”
“I don’t think there’s any way you could get her to forsake the village,” Darian replied thoughtfully, pulling his hair behind his ears. “She takes her responsibilities awfully seriously.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean she should give up tending the villagers,” Nightwind corrected, shaking her head. “I just don’t think they need to have her there to handle every hangnail and black eye. She could get there from here within a candlemark by gryphon-carrier, and for anything less than serious she could visit once or twice a week, easily enough.”
He had to laugh at that; Nightwind sounded as if she’d already decided for Keisha, and if he understood Keisha at all, he doubted she cared for anyone making up her mind for her. “I don’t know; you’d have to persuade her first. At least they’re taking her more seriously than they did Justyn, and they’re treating her quite well.”
“Having to do without can make people astonishingly appreciative,” Nightwind said dryly. The conversation might have continued in the same interesting vein, but at that point, the voices of several people in discussion drew nearer, and in a moment he and Nightwind were joined by the rest. Bondbirds flew in to roost ahead of their bondmates; Hweel and Huur took perches near Kuari and began preening each other, while Aya joined Starfall’s bird, who had been there all along. As Aya settled himself, the rest of the group entered the garden.
They met in Starfall’s garden beneath his ekele, a miniature version of the various garden spots within k’Vala Vale except that all of the plants here were cold-hardy, either evergreens, or plants that would have a leafless, dormant period during the winter. Right now, of course, they were flourishing mightily, coaxed into accelerated growth and quick maturity by Steelmind and some of his apprentices. Tough vines had been woven and trained to form the frames for comfortable seats, holding cushions stuffed with dried grasses and fragrant herbs. Canopies of more vines shaded the occupants, while tall shrubs, climbing plants, and young trees gave the place privacy. A tiny waterfall plunging into a pool filled with young fish sent cooling spray into the air and lent the soothing music of falling water to the setting - though thanks to some of the bondbirds, the pool had to be restocked regularly. Yet, with that art that was the hallmark of the Tayledras, all of this carefully contrived work of man seemed to have been magically wrought by nature.
By common consent, most meetings with Lord Breon were held here. The hertasi provided anything in the way of refreshment that might be needed, shade and water cooled the air, and no one really wanted to be inside on days of good weather. Meetings weren’t held in bad weather, because a delay in the arrival of the Valdemaran trade supplies meant nothing, and if the weather was going to be bad, why risk the chance of accident or spoilage? With so many mages here in k’Valdemar, it was a simple matter to read the weather, then make certain that Lord Breon got warning of any storm that could not be delayed or hurried on.
It was a pity that the discussions here in this oasis of tranquillity had little to do with peace and growth.
“I have word back from the capital,” Lord Breon said, when they were all seated. Besides Nightwind and Darian, the usual participants from k’Valdemar were all in attendance; Ayshen, Kel, Starfall, Snowfire, Hashi, and Firesong. “They are sending us the small force we asked for, under the direction of a Herald with experience in diplomacy.”
Two hertasi made the rounds, offering cool drinks, and vanished when everyone had been served. Starfall nodded, and his face betrayed the relief he felt. “I am glad to hear that, the more so because of what Kelvren saw on his patrol this morning. Kel?”
“Yesss.” The gryphon took up the thread, sitting up very straight, intense and serious. “I have ssseen the barrrbarrriansss. They arrre at the farrrrthessst point in my patrrrolsss. They continue in theirrrr patterrrn.”
This was no news to Darian or Nightwind, who’d heard it directly from Kel before the meeting. Ayshen had no expression, Snowfire looked resigned, and behind his mask, there was no telling what Firesong thought.
Lord Breon nodded; after all, he had probably been expecting to hear this for some time. “That would be, making a fortified camp, remaining until the hunting and grazing are down, then moving on?”
“Exactly ssso,” Kel agreed, bowing his head in Lord Breon’s direction. “And asss rrreporrrted, they do have childrrren, women, old people. Even babesss in arrrmsss, and prrregnant women. Not what I would call an arrrmy.”
Lord Breon frowned as if this wasn’t altogether good news. “But it is an invading and occupying force, especially if they are sending out scouts ahead of the main group, and intend to keep the noncombatants in a protected camp while the fighters deal with any resistance.”
He does have to think of these things, Darian reminded himself, and took note for the future. Some day, presumably, so would he.
“It’s also the pattern of nomadic herders, like the Shin’a’in,” Snowfire pointed out, to cover all possibilities. “They may not even know there is a settlement anywhere near. It simply could be that they’ve depleted their old grazing grounds too much to recover in a single season - or that all the magical weather disruption of the past decade has caused a drought in the north.”
Lord Breon nodded. “Also true - but really, we can’t have them coming into Valdemar or the Pelagirs and establishing new grazing grounds without asking permission first. It is our land, after all. The Crown says that in accordance with our long-established tradition, if they are peaceful and agree to settle, we are to welcome them, but they will have to follow the law!”
“True enough,” Snowfire agreed. “If we ignore them and let them proceed as they wish, we simply send a message that whoever else wants to flood down here will meet no resistance and no law! If we choose to let them remain here, it must be by treaty, with agreed-upon limits, and on our terms.”
“I think we ought to fight them!” Val burst out. “Why should we let them just wander in and take over? Why should we even tolerate them near our border? They’re barbarians! Why should we want them here at all?”
“We don’t intend to let them wander in and take over; haven’t you been listening?” Darian suppressed impatience with an effort. “Look, I have the most reason of any of us to want to fight these people. Remember what they did the last time they came here! They hurt and killed people that I knew, people I cared about! If it were up to my feelings, I’d lure them all under a cliff and drop it on them, pregnant women, grandmothers, babies and all. But those feelings should have nothing to do with this - and there are women and children at least in that group that had nothing to do with what happened the last time and certainly don’t deserve to be judged by me. For all we know, this isn’t even the same tribe. They may know nothing about what happened years ago. They could be peaceful. They could be running away from the same lot that overran us!”
Val cast a glance at him that was part contempt, part incredulity, but since the rest were all nodding agreement, including his father, Val said nothing more. Darian had the feeling that the subject wasn’t finished, though, and he’d hear more from Val about it.
Starfall let his gaze rest on Darian, but Darian had the feeling his words were meant for Val. “The greatest leaders in both our histories were always those who understood the motivations of those they faced,” he said. “When you understand why they move, then you know what to offer, and what to withhold.”
The discussion continued as if Val’s outburst had never occurred. “I think we ought to first contact them in a way that impresses them,” Firesong said thoughtfully. Today his mask was of thin, pale doeskin that fit like a second skin - giving a more uncanny impression, somehow, than any of his more elaborate masks. “A show of strength of all kinds, if you will. We should make it quite clear that we can handle anything they have, with ease.”
“I tend to agree,” Lord Breon said, looking keenly at Firesong. “Quite. I assume you mean a display of magic will be included in this?”
“That, and the bondbirds - perhaps some of our other allies.” Firesong turned toward Snowfire. “Didn’t you say that these tribes have totemic animals? If we include apparently wild animals in the display, it might gain us a great deal of respect spiritually as well as physically.”
“As far as I know, they do, and they attempt to imitate the behavior of those animals. Bringing the birds - even the dyheli and kyree - could very well impress them. The last lot had a bear-totem, and their shaman had managed to partially Change them to match that totem.” Snowfire’s eyes took on the sharp look that meant he was thinking quickly. “If they have another such, we will need to get the upper hand magically at once. Creating Changechildren in these days - ”
“Or he managed to partially control the Change within a Change-Circle,” Firesong pointed out, and both Snowfire and Starfall looked startled, then slowly nodded. “That could have been simply a matter of caging bears in the same Change-Circle as the warriors he wanted to Change, and hope that a melding took place. Just because he had specifically Changed people doesn’t imply great power or control. Master Levy is still taking a survey of the Circles to discover if there is a pattern there, one as to which Circles were exchanges of territory, which created monsters, and which simply melded the animals that were already within them. It wasn’t,” he added dryly, “a priority at the time they were occurring to find that kind of pattern, but it might have occurred to others to look for one.”
“But if there was a pattern, and the barbarians noticed it - ” That was Ayshen.
“Or they simply took their chances, and it worked once,” Darian put in. “Given the behavior that we witnessed with the last lot, that wouldn’t be out of character. The shaman didn’t seem too worried about wasting lives. He’d have been perfectly happy with a single success, and one success would be all he’d have needed to impress the rest.”
“There is that,” agreed Starfall, as the rest who had been involved in that confrontation seconded Darian’s observation. He sighed. “And it is an interesting thought, but it doesn’t explain why this lot has women, children, and oldsters along. Oh, why won’t these people stay home?”
“Because we have something they want,” replied Firesong, with inescapable logic. “And they think they can just take it away from us. They’re not interested in challenging us to a game of riddles to win it, or a Bardic contest, or paying for it. That’s why we call them barbarians.”
The rest chuckled, though the attempt at humor was a little strained, and so was the response. Even Val laughed uneasily.
“Now, we don’t know yet whether they’ll challenge us, or offer us something in trade, or give tribute,” Ayshen pointed out. “Still - better we be more careful than less.”
“The main thing now is to delay them if they come too close, I think,” Lord Breon offered. “Which brings us back to Firesong’s show of strength. Once the reinforcements arrive, we’ll have a better idea of what their tactics will be, and exactly how forceful we’ll have to be in order to impress them.”
“And just how large our reinforcements will be,” added Snowfire. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to back our show, and not have to resort to bluff. Bluffing makes me very nervous.” He shook his head. “You know what the Shin’a’in say: ‘Bluffs either cost you half or twice.’ Kel, tomorrow I want you to do a thorough count, if you can. Noncombatants, people who might fight, real warriors, and what their herds are.”
Kelvren nodded, hissing agreement. “It will delay me. I will not rrrreturrn until nearrrrly ssssunssset.”
Snowfire waved that caution away. “That’s all right, if you can manage to accomplish it. We need those counts to make reasonable decisions.”
Kel snorted contemptuously. “If I can manage? I am not one of thossse elderrrly layaboutsss at k’Vala, you know! Fearrr not, I ssshall have yourrrr countsss, and they will be acurrrate in everrry detail!” He paused. “I will be sssseen, howeverrr. Fly high though I will, the sssize and body-ssshape will differrr frrrom a merrre eagle - asss it sssshould be.”
Darian’s lips twitched, and he watched Nightwind hide a smile. Oh, gryphons! How dull life would be without them!
“Now, just to change the subject briefly,” Starfall interjected, before anyone could laugh at Kel and hurt his feelings. “How is our trade balance with you, Lord Breon?”
“Dead even, with this load.” His face relaxed, but Val took on a look of boredom, rolling his eyes upward. It was obvious that Breon’s son and heir would much rather have been discussing possible battle plans. “Is there any way we could get some of that patterned silk from you?”
Starfall pursed his lips, thoughtfully. “We aren’t set up to make any here yet, but if we don’t have what you want in stores, I don’t doubt we can get it made up from k’Vala. What did you have in mind?”
“It isn’t me, it’s my lady.” He looked sheepish. “The wedding, you know. She’s got a notion that we should all have new wedding clothes in the same patterned silk, but different colors. I don’t think she cares what pattern, but I’d look damned silly in flowers.”
Val groaned, his attention recaptured. Darian didn’t blame him; it was his wedding, after all, but his mother was obviously arranging it to suit her liking, not his. Poor bride! It obviously didn’t matter what her taste was either, for Val’s mother was making all the decisions. “Not flowers! And not rabbits or cute little baby anything, or - ”
“How about a simple geometric?” Nightwind interjected before Val could wax eloquent on the subject of what he didn’t want. “Or water patterns? Or leaves? Feathers?”
“Feathers would be good, or leaves, or water patterns,” Val told her, relief suffusing his features. “As along as it doesn’t make a girl squeal, ‘Oh, that’s adorable,’ it’ll be all right.”
Oh, dear. Obviously some of the arrangements have been getting that response. After taking part in the joining-ceremony and vetoing a few such arrangements himself, Darian had sudden sympathy for poor Val.
Nightwind laughed. “I think we can manage,” she promised. She studied Breon and his son. “I think, a rich golden brown for your side of the wedding, and - what’s the bride’s coloring?”
Val started to get a love-struck look in his eyes, and Breon caught it. He interrupted swiftly before Val could go into a flowery description. “She’s brown-haired, fair. Pinkish fair.”
Val looked indignant at such a callously abbreviated depiction of his beloved, but Nightwind sailed on, settling the question of color for the benefit of trade.
“Blue, then, for the bridal party. We’ve got good silk dyes for both those colors, and both are popular with us. If we don’t have something here, k’Vala will have it in stores. Silk is light, especially silks for a warm-weather wedding; I can ask for a gryphon to fly them straight to Kelmskeep. It will be a good excuse for Kelvren’s lady-friend to fly in for a visit.” She cast a sly look at Kel, who contrived to look as if he hadn’t heard her, but twitched his tail and shifted his hips. “Tell your good lady she’ll have her fabrics in a week at the very most.”
No one mentioned that in a week they might be facing off against the barbarians.
Worry about that when we know what we’re facing; no point in getting ahead of ourselves. Besides, taking care of wedding arrangements will keep noncombatant minds off the barbarians.
“And you’ll want - what?” Breon asked.
“Same as the last time. Our needs don’t change much. Have your seneschal or factor negotiate with Ayshen for the price,” Starfall said offhandedly, and Breon nodded with satisfaction. Since k’Valdemar had already presented Breon with the Vale’s official wedding present (an exquisite set of colored glass goblets in sufficient quantity to allow the young couple to hold a reception for the Queen and her entire Council, brought for the purpose from k’Vala) he wasn’t looking for anything but a reasonable trade.
“Right. Now, barring a war with barbarians, we’ve got Harvest Festival coming up at the same time as the wedding. What had your people planned to bring to the Faire?” This was the signal for a far more mundane discussion, and Kel excused himself - and so did Val and Darian. Darian chose a direction at random, and Val followed him.
I think I’m about to hear more from the would-be warrior.
Val’s thoughts had obviously turned back to the barbarians, and he accosted Darian as soon as they were out of hearing of the adults. “Say, Darian - you’ve fought before, right?”
Darian made a sour face. “Fought the barbarians the first time around, and had some skirmishes with bandits in Valdemar. That’s fighting people - we took out some Changebeasts in Valdemar, too, but that isn’t what you meant, is it?” He continued walking, and Val kept right up with him.
“No, I meant combat. Real fighting. The clash of sword on sword, the thrill of meeting man to man, facing your enemy and bringing him down - ” The cliches poured from Val as his face grew more and more animated. He obviously suffered from a surfeit of heroic ballads and tales. Darian decided to quash him. It wasn’t that he disliked Val, that was far from the truth. If anything, he liked Breon’s heir too much to let him go down that particular path of delusion.
That path leads to an early grave, given bad odds.
“I’ve done that,” he said flatly. “You want to know what it’s like?”
Val nodded eagerly, his earnest face alight.
“All right. Here, sit down.” They’d come as far as the lake while talking, and Darian gestured to a boulder. He took his seat on another, and gave careful thought to exactly how he was going to say his say. “First off, this isn’t a duel, it’s a combat. No rules. Do you know what that means, at all?” When Val shook his head, he continued. “It means that the enemy is going to try to kill you before you can get close to him, so he’ll be flinging mucking great rocks at you, shooting at you, doing everything he can to keep you from getting close. He would much rather kill you from a distance, given the choice. If you get stuck with an arrow or knocked out by a rock, he’s going to rush at you and try and whack something off while you’re down and helpless, because it’s easier to kill you then. If you don’t get taken out by flying objects, every fellow on the other side is checking out the people coming at him, and he’s going to try to make sure that he is bigger than you. If you’ve got fancy armor or weapons, he’s going to want them, too, so his best bet is to cut a leg out from under you or whack off an arm and leave you lying there, screaming and bleeding to death. The other thing is that he’s a greedy bastard, and anyone who looks even slightly important is going to have a lot of people coming at him, all at once, all trying to be the one to get that fancy sword and armor. If he can’t manage to cut off a limb, or at least cut it half off, he’ll try to bash in your skull because that’s the second easiest way to kill you. There’s no fancy swordwork going on; there’s no room for it, you’re mashed in with a bunch of other people, all whacking away. Meanwhile, as you’re trying to keep him from doing awful things to you, and trying to do awful things to him, you’re stepping on and stumbling over all the poor beggars who didn’t manage to keep that from happening. They’re bleeding, screaming, and dying; if they don’t have fancy armor, their guts are spilling out and you’re stepping right in them. Some of them are people you know. Some of them are friends. Some might be relatives. And you’ll be seeing them as nothing more than things you don’t want to fall over.”
Val’s face had gone rather sick, which Darian was extremely grateful for. Breon’s son - thank all the gods! - was intelligent, and had imagination. That was probably why he’d gotten all caught up in the idea of adventure in fighting in the first place. That imagination would save him from his misguided notions of honor and glory, if Darian had any say in the matter.
“When it’s all over, if you’re on the winning side, you’re absolutely sticky with blood, ready to drop with exhaustion, and every place on your body aches. Hopefully the blood you’re covered with is other people’s; if some of it’s yours, this is when you realize just how much even a little wound hurts. If you got a big wound, if you aren’t on the ground already, or you aren’t dying, you generally fall down when everything’s over, screaming with the pain. You could have broken bones sticking through your skin, and you’re seeing parts of the inside of yourself you never wanted to see. If you are really, really lucky, someone recognizes that you’re an important fellow and gets the Healer to you in a hurry. If not, you’ll be lucky to get yourself to the Healer’s tent somehow to wait for candlemarks while he works his way down to you. This is also when the excitement and fear and so forth that carried you through wears off, and you start to remember that you stepped in your cousin’s face, you saw your uncle’s head caved in, and you’re not sure if your best friend is still alive. There’s stuff besides blood on you that used to be parts of people. That’s when you look around, see all the dead, dying, and wounded, and you throw up. Practically everyone else who never fought before - and some who have - is doing the same thing. That’s what real combat is like.” He stopped for a moment. “Oh, and after a fight, Healing takes second place to wound closure, so you may wait days or weeks before that wound in your leg that was cauterized closed - burned closed with a red-hot poker - gets properly Healed up.” Val licked his lips, which were just a shade greenish.
“It’s not like that in - I mean, I’ve never heard anyone talk about it like that.” He seemed shaken, but not inclined to doubt Darian’s word. Darian was quite glad he’d made a point of never exaggerating in front of Val; this was turning out as he’d hoped.
Darian shrugged and tried to look weary and worldly-wise. “That’s because no one wants to remember those parts, but ask your Weaponsmaster, and let him know you want to know what it’s really like on a battlefield, before, during, and after the battle. If he’s honest, he’ll tell you the same things I did.” He thought of something else. “If you want, I can get one of the dyheli to give you the memory. They were in on the forest-battle four years ago.”
“Oh.” Val remained silent, looking out over the lake for a while. Darian let him stew things over; he needed some time to get his mind wrapped around Darian’s blunt description. But Val had, out of incredulity, gotten a dyheli to give him a memory of k’Vala Vale. He hadn’t believed the descriptions he’d heard of it, until he’d experienced Tyrsell’s memory, and he knew that Darian would never have offered him access to a memory of combat if it wasn’t as vivid - or more so - than Darian’s own description.
Actually, given that the dyheli aren’t predators, their memory is going to be a lot nastier than my description. Bloodletting offends every instinct they’ve got.
“I wondered why Father, and you - ” Val shook his head and looked mortified. “I came very close to making a serious mistake. I have to apologize to you.”
“Thought I was a coward?” To Val’s obvious surprise, Darian grinned. “I’m not offended! I used to think the same things that you did about fighting. Honor, glory, adventure, fame, all that stuff. Probably everybody does, until he does it himself. Maybe a mercenary’s children know better, and probably anyone who’s had a fight go over his land does, but unless you’ve seen it for yourself, how can you know?” His grin turned cynical. “Well, think about it, how could they get us bone-headed youngsters go out to get bits hacked off if they didn’t make it sound glorious?”
Val managed a sickly sort of smile himself. “You’ve got a point.” He blinked, as if something had just occurred to him. “Now that I think about it, battles almost never happen in empty land, do they?”
“Not unless somebody manages to force it that way, no,” Darian replied. The fellow was thinking, all right! “Obviously, we’re going to try to choose the ground ourselves, but we may not get to make that choice.”
“So Father isn’t going to want something like that rampaging through the village, or over the crops, ruining them - ”
Darian decided on a final ghoulish touch. “Imagine trying to eat crops that came up the next year in a field where people died! Crops fed on blood!”
Val shuddered. “I’d - rather not.”
“So we bluff them, or negotiate with them, or - well, Firesong, Snowfire, and your father have a lot of ideas, I expect. They’ve all fought before, and they’ve got all the reasons in the world to make peace first, if it can be done without making a bad bargain.” It was Darian’s turn to look pensively out over the lake. “Believe me, if it were up to me - These people, or ones like them, killed Justyn right in front of me. They hurt a lot of people I knew, and killed a couple. They tried to kill me, twice, and they nearly managed it. I’m the last person to want them to get off easy, but - ” He shook his head and looked back at Val. “If we force them to fight, things will almost certainly be bad, and more people I know will be dead or hurt. I don’t want revenge half badly enough for that.”
You know, I think Justyn would be very happy to hear me say that.
Val nodded, very slowly, and Darian decided to change the subject so that they could part on a good note. “So, tell me about this girl you’re marrying! When does she get here? What is she like? How did you meet her?”
Since Belinda was obviously a subject Val could wax eloquent on for hours, this was the best thing he could have done. Until Lord Breon came to fetch his son for the trip home, Darian heard so much about Belinda that he suspected he could write a book - or at least several pages - about her many virtues. Val was completely smitten.
When Breon did come to get Val, though, the handclasp Darian got from the younger man, coupled with the thoughtful look and the nod they shared, let him know that Val had not forgotten the earlier subject. As Breon and his son rode off on the trail back to Kelmskeep, Darian felt quite proud of himself.
Firesong came up beside him at that point. “You look like a cat that’s gotten into the cream,” he said. “What have you been up to?”
“Convincing Val that fighting in battle isn’t the way the Bards sing about it.” He glanced sideways at Firesong to see how the mage would react.
Firesong laughed aloud, crossing his arms over his chest. “Good for you! I knew you had more sense than he did about that particular subject, but I didn’t know you’d take it on yourself to talk to him.”
“Somebody had to. I’d as soon not see his bride become a widow, you know?” He turned to Firesong, and grinned. “I’d have felt responsible.”
“Good,” Firesong nodded. “You are responsible. It’s when we stop feeling responsible for each other, for the people we know we can affect, that we become the barbarians.”
Firesong waited, and Darian sensed that there was another Talk with his Teacher in the offing. On the whole, he didn’t mind those, except when Firesong seemed to expect an unreasonable level of magical expertise from him, given how short a time he’d been studying with good teachers. One of those had been just yesterday, in fact. Firesong had shouted impatiently at him, and he had left the lesson abruptly rather than lose his temper.
Firesong cleared his throat, and Darian put on an attentive look. If there was any chance his teacher would actually apologize, he wanted to encourage it.
“Silverfox gave me a bit of a lecture this morning, before the meeting,” Firesong finally said, actually sounding sheepish. “When you do something that is exceptionally mature, like taking on young Val and disabusing him of the notion that battle equals painless glory, I start thinking of you, not as a student, but as a potential peer. I get both of us in trouble when I do that, because then I expect a similar level of skill in mage-craft. I expect that’s what happened last night.”
He glanced at Darian out of the corner of his eye, and Darian just nodded, warily. He didn’t quite trust himself to actually say anything yet, but this was certainly a promising start.
“I got very impatient with you last night, and that was wrong of me. Silverfox very properly reminded me that you are someone who has not had the benefit of working with unlimited energy, and that you are a real youngster, not an adult like the people I’m used to training. You act like them, but you simply haven’t got experience.” He tossed his hair back over his shoulder, a habit Darian noticed he had when he was nervous. “The Herald-Mages I’ve trained have almost all been in their twenties, or even older. I keep forgetting that you’re only eighteen, and at the same level of teaching I was when I was only twelve or fourteen.”
Now Darian gingerly cleared his throat. “One year with poor Justyn, and four years working with teachers who are not Healing Adepts doesn’t equal the kind of education you had, no. But you are right in that sometimes I just am not grasping what’s going on. You were wrong in thinking it was because I’m too stubborn to admit my way is wrong; what you expect me to do simply doesn’t occur to me.” He flushed, thinking about how angry he’d gotten; the accusations still stung because they were so unjust. “You’re supposed to be my teacher, and it isn’t fair to force me to guess answers I can’t possibly reach! I think it might be because I’m not really Tayledras, and I’m not used to thinking and seeing things as so intimately interconnected. Hellfires, your entire religion is built around that!” He scratched his head and managed a sheepish grin of his own. “Maybe that’s why I got so hot and walked out of the lesson. It wasn’t until I cooled down that I was able to figure out what you were saying, and put it to use.”
“Maybe you should wear a crest of Valdemar on your forehead to remind me,” Firesong suggested facetiously.
He snorted. “Don’t tempt me, if wearing one would prevent another dressing-down like last night! Teach me, or don’t, but don’t play guessing games with me! That’s all I ask.”
Firesong’s posture conveyed a certain amount of discomfort - possibly because Darian had hit on several of the things Silverfox had evidently chided him about. “Silverfox has promised to sit in on our lessons if you don’t mind, and throw things at my head if I start getting unreasonable. And I wondered if you’d mind if we included that little Healer for the next couple of days? Having her there will keep me on better behavior, I suspect - and according to Nightwind, she could do with some of the same lessons you’re getting.”
“Having both Silverfox and Keisha there is all right with me,” Darian said instantly, hoping he could keep himself from betraying the fact that he would welcome Keisha there for more reasons than just sharing the lessons. He was more than a little interested in Keisha, yes indeed, and he wouldn’t mind the opportunity to see more of her at all!
“I’d also like to get the two of you working together now, so you can mesh your skills under my eye and not have to try it on your own,” Firesong continued, at last looking more at ease. “I work with Healers all the time, but the first time you try is often full of pitfalls. It’s like trying to do the kyanshi couple-dance when all you’ve ever done is children’s round-dances.” Darian sensed a sudden grin behind the mask. “Just thought you’d like to know what you’re in for.”
He rolled his eyes. “Thanks,” he said dryly. “All I have ever done magically is children’s round-dances, you know! And now you want me to attempt a fiendishly complicated display piece that not one couple in a hundred ever tries!”
“Nonsense,” Firesong dismissed. “Neither the magic nor the dance is as complicated as they look, which is part of the problem. Don’t worry, that’s why I want you to do it under my eye. I’ll walk you through it, and you’ll be amazed how quickly you pick it up.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Darian replied dubiously. “I suppose you’ll want to try this tonight?”
“Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.” Firesong clapped him on the shoulder. “Tonight I plan to go over what I attempted to hammer into your thick skull last night, since you so obligingly told me you’d gotten the trick of it.”
Oh, hellfires. Now I’m in for it, and I don’t have any excuses. “Yes, Firesong,” Darian sighed. “I’ll be at the work-circle at sunset.”
It was morning, but there was no real reason to leap out of bed, and Darian liked having the leisure to lie in the dark, thinking and listening to the birds twitter in the vines. After the magic lessons of last night, shared with Keisha, he had a lot to think about.
She’d been attentive, very careful, with a fine, delicate mental touch. Much to Firesong’s amazement, they had meshed powers almost at once, with the same surety of mental “hand” reaching for “hand” as long-time partners.
Firesong had at least been polite enough to keep his comment of :Oh, so you like girls, do you?: strictly Sent to Darian, but he hoped that Keisha hadn’t noticed his sudden blush.
He’d been impressed - and although Keisha had not shown any such emotion on the surface, Darian could tell that beneath her calm exterior, she had been very close to tears of relief and joy.
Well, she’s spent a long time not knowing how to use her Gift, and not only being able to use it, but to know she can ask someone else to augment her power, must be just exhilarating.
He stretched and turned over on his side, with the scent of fresh linens and herbs tickling his nose. He could not imagine why other people had told him that Keisha was prickly. Serious, yes, and maybe too serious, but she’d had responsibility shoved at her for so long that she probably hadn’t learned how to have fun. But prickly?
Yet, so far, Val, Nightwind, Healer Gil, and even Lord Breon had warned him that Keisha was touchy, difficult to get to know, and held people at arm’s length. He just didn’t see any of those things in her - unless, if by “touchy,” they meant that she didn’t have any sympathy for fools, if by “difficult to get to know” they meant that she didn’t talk about things she wasn’t sure of, and if by “keeping people at arm’s length” they meant that she was shy. She was certainly shy. That seemed a little odd in someone who had such a mob of siblings, but maybe she’d learned to be very self-contained because of that.
People in Errold’s Grove respected her, but she didn’t have any suitors. She didn’t even have anyone he would have called a close friend. The young men of the village didn’t even seem to think of her as a girl.
All the better for me. If they can’t see how pretty she is, that’s their problem. On the other hand, maybe it’s a bit difficult for anyone to think romantically about the person who’s patched you up after doing something really stupid, and threatened to hold your nose and pour medicine down your throat when you‘ve had a sick stomach.
He grinned into the dimness. He could just see Keisha doing that, too!
His pleasant thoughts were abruptly interrupted by the uncharacteristically rude entrance of a hertasi, who burst in through the front door. “Dar’ian! You are needed!” it cried as soon as the door flew open.
He thrashed his way free of his covers, and flung himself out of bed. “Where?” he asked, stumbling into the room. “What’s the matter?”
“The outsiders come! The Vale pillars - the others wait there - ” it said, and whisked out the door again, presumably to rouse other folks.
The outsiders come ? Well, it can’t be an enemy attack, or there would be a lot more shouting going on outside. Besides, I don’t think even a hertasi would refer to an enemy attack as “the outsiders come.” With that in mind, he took some care in dressing, though he did so quickly, and left his weapons behind.
When he reached the two pillars at the entrance, there weren’t too many of “the others” waiting; just Kel, Nightwind, and Snowfire. “What’s going on?” he asked, combing his hair with his fingers and confining it with a headband. He’d combed it properly before he left, of course, but all his efforts at looking neat had been destroyed when he ran.
“Kel spotted an armed force with a pair of Heralds leading it heading this way as he started out on patrol this morning,” Snowfire said, as Kel nodded. “He came back to tell us, and I sent hertasi around to wake you all up.” To Darian’s chagrin, Snowfire looked as if he’d been up for hours, and had gotten the hertasi to give him a complete grooming while he waited for folk to muster out. How did he manage to do that?
“So our reinforcements are here? Why are they coming here, instead of Kelmskeep?” Darian asked, attempting to neaten himself up.
“They’re coming from Kelmskeep; at a guess, they overnighted there, and Lord Breon sent them on to us this morning,” Nightwind hazarded. “We’ll find out soon enough.”
A drowsy-eyed Firesong joined them at that moment, yawning behind his mask, followed by Starfall. Firesong had thrown on a loose robe, and was still in the process of belting it about his slim waist. His hair showed signs of having been hastily braided, and his eyes still looked sleepy. “Ugh,” Firesong said with distaste. “Military types! Why on earth they should think that it’s admirable to shake everyone awake at dawn or before, I can never understand!”
“The forrrce isss larrge enough to sssatisssfy you all, I think,” Kel put in, ignoring Firesong’s complaints with amusement. “I counted overrr a thousssand.”
“I hope Breon sends some supplies with them,” Starfall said thoughtfully. “That is a lot of hungry mouths to feed. Well, we’ll manage, we generally do.”
“I suspect that would be why he isn’t bivouacking them at Kelmskeep,” suggested Nightwind, with one hand on Kel’s neck and the other on Snowfire’s arm. “Well, we have room; I’m sure they brought tents, and we can camp them out here if there isn’t enough room in the Vale itself.”
“For one thousand to fifteen hundred?” said Ayshen, who with Tyrsell and Hashi was the last to join them. “No problem.” He turned with a flourish of his tail, and issued orders in the hissing hertasi language to another of his kind that had trailed deferentially along behind him. The other bobbed an agreement and scampered off. Hweel raced in beneath the branches, heading straight for Snowfire, who extended his arm and braced himself for the weight as Hweel landed.’they’re within sight,” Snowfire reported, while Hweel transferred half his weight to Snowfire’s protected shoulder.
And so they were. Darian peered out into the forest. The first of the reinforcements, tiny in the distance and further dwarfed by the giant trees, came into view on the road. They were easier to see, perhaps, because in the lead were two Heralds, white uniforms and white Companions making them doubly visible.
They moved at a brisk pace, which showed that they were in good shape. As they neared, just at the point where Huur was visible as an escort, flapping lazily along just above the heads of the leaders, Firesong suddenly laughed out loud.
“What?” Starfall asked sharply, casting a glance at his son.
“Nothing to worry about,” Firesong replied, his voice overlaid with humor. “I just recognized someone I know very well.” By this time, the group was within calling distance, and he stepped forward.
“I might have known you’d be unable to resist a fight, you terrible woman!” he shouted. “If you were a Hawkbrother, we’d name you ‘Fire-eater.’ Aren’t you ever going to retire?”
“Not while things stay interesting!” the righthand Herald called back, a woman with a long blonde braid streaked with silver, whose easy grin matched her light words. “Firesong, you useless popinjay! What are you doing here?”
“Corrupting our youth, of course,” Firesong replied, backing up a pace and clapping his hand on Darian’s shoulder. “I’m tired of perverting Hawkbrothers, I thought I’d start on Valdemarans. This is Dar’ian, my latest victim.”
The Companions halted, the mixed troops behind them came to parade-rest, and both Heralds dismounted from their saddles with agility that gave the lie to the silver in their hair. The woman clasped Firesong’s hand first, followed by the man.
“My friends, permit me to introduce you to the redoubtable Herald-Captain Kerowyn and Herald Eldan,” Firesong said, waving his free hand at them.
Darian’s mouth dropped open. First, the famous Firesong, and now the equally famous Kerowyn? Who would show up here next? The Queen herself?
“Heralds, these are the Elders of k’Valdemar Vale,” he continued. “My father, Starfall k’Vala, dyheli kingstag Tyrsell k’Vala k’Valdemar, Eldest hertasi Ayshen k’Leshya, kyree envoy Hashi, Scout-Captain Snowfire k’Vala, trondi’irn Nightwindk’Leshya, Silver Gryphon Kelvren, and my pupil, Darian Firkin k’Vala k’Valdemar.”
Kerowyn saluted them all. “A very great pleasure, which, in spite of what Firesong implied, I hope remains a peaceful pleasure. These are your Crown reinforcements.” She waved at the waiting troops behind her - not all men, Darian saw; at least half of the mounted fighters were women. “I bring one mounted company of two hundred seasoned fighters out of my own Skybolts, and two green companies of regular Guard infantry at five hundred each. That’s twelve hundred fighters in all, with three full Healers and their six apprentices, and supply wagons and support personnel.”
Some faint worry lines eased from Snowfire’s face. “If twelve hundred fighters can’t keep things under control here, we’ll need an army, not reinforcements. And if Herald-Captain Kerowyn can’t get the most out of every trooper she has, then you can stew my boots and serve them to me for dinner.”
Kerowyn laughed, and shook her head. “Oh, I’m no miracle worker, but I think we’ll do all right, provided we use our heads. Have you a place where we can pitch camp?”
“Bring your people with me, Herald-Captain,” Ayshen spoke up. “I’ll show you where to camp, and the amenities that you and your people can share with us. We can discuss other arrangements on the way.”
“Good; thank you.” She nodded at Eldan, then made a hand signal. The troops snapped to attention. “I’ll see to the troops. Eldan will meet with you now, and you can brief him.”
“I had bessst get to my patrrrol,” Kel said instantly. “I will make hassste and bring you the latessst intelligence.”
He made good on his word, leaping into the air and clawing his way into the sky with tremendous wingbeats. None of the Valdemarans was startled, though several watched him with admiration; They might be green, yet they must be from some area where they had seen gryphons before now.
Eldan and his Companion joined the Elders, while Kerowyn mounted hers and took her place at the head of the troops. Darian and the rest all moved off the trail to allow the troops to file past. Darian watched them, thinking how odd it was, that under other circumstances, he might have been one of them. If I’d run off, or if the village had sent me off to Lord Breon instead of apprenticing me - that could be me, carrying a pike and my pack. Huh.
“Are you getting on all right?” Eldan asked Firesong in an undertone. “We haven’t had any news of you more recent than last summer.”
“Actually, not at all bad,” Firesong said lightly. “We get along, Silverfox and I. You and the lady look well.”
“Couldn’t be better; we’ve got four perfectly capable Weaponsmasters now, and she didn’t see any reason why they couldn’t take the trainees without her looking over their shoulders. Karal’s teaching some classes, if you can believe it. Things are so calm between Valdemar and Karse that his diplomatic skill is scarcely needed, so he’s teaching Karsite culture and language.”
“Wonderful! He must love it.” Firesong sounded genuinely pleased. “An’desha is up to his eyebrows in shamanistic business, and I’ve never seen him happier. I left him in Kata’shin’a’in, helping to weave a new history-tapestry.” He straightened, and looked about. “Well, we can catch up later; now we should deal with business.” He bowed a little to Eldan. “So, Herald Eldan, would you and your Companion care to join our council for an explanation of what’s going on?”
“That I would, Healing-Adept Firesong,” Eldan replied, with the same odd mingling of seriousness and humor that Firesong displayed. “Lead on.”
Twelve
It took most of the day to get the reinforcements settled in their encampment. They were entirely self-sufficient, having their own cook, tents, and supplies, but everyone agreed that being able to use the Vale’s facilities made their camp seem downright luxurious. They were not in the least shy about stripping and plunging into the hot pools, men and women together, and at any hour of the day or night one was as likely to encounter a clutch of Valdemarans there as a group of Tayledras. Most often, the two groups mingled; the so-called “green” troops were green only in the sense of not having seen real combat, for they had trained and bunked with the Skybolts, and had Skybolt senior officers. Those who couldn’t handle the accepting and flexible manners of Kero’s troopers had long since been weeded out. Tayledras and Guards got along very well, with the troopers holding to the attitude that, once on someone else’s home ground, you played by their rules and not by what was called “good manners” and “appropriate behavior” at home. “Stay polite and respectful and ask before you touch,” was the watchword in the camp, and as a result, everyone got along remarkably well.
The next day Lord Breon and Val arrived for a real council of war, bringing with them their Weaponsmaster, who was Lord Breon’s second-in-command. With a storm threatening, they met in the common dining hall, taking up roughly a third of the available space. By common and unspoken consent, since this was hardly a secret council, anyone of the officers of sufficient rank who cared to listen in could do so as long as they stayed quiet.
“What’s this Captain Kerowyn like, personally?” Lord Breon asked Firesong, as the assembled council waited for Kero and Eldan, who were the last to arrive. Today Firesong’s mask seemed to be made all of fresh green leaves. Tayledras and a few of Kero’s officers lurked around the periphery of the group, and Darian saw a couple who were clearly Skybolts smile at that question.
“You’ll like her,” Firesong promised him. “Kero can be counted on not to jump to any conclusions and not to fight unless she has to. She’s very straightforward, never hedges her answers or gives you the answer she thinks you want unless it’s also the true one. She’s got - oh, decades of practical experience; before she came to Valdemar and was Chosen she was a mercenary captain with her own company in Rethwellan - the Skybolts, the same group that came up here with her. So, like most mercenary captains, she doesn’t believe in wasting her limited resources, her fighters. She plans things, she doesn’t just charge in and hope for the best.”
Darian saw nods of agreement from the Guards, and heard a great many murmurs of approval from the Hawkbrothers.
Lord Breon also nodded and seemed satisfied, at least to Darian. “That’s exactly the kind of person we need for this situation. Now, I take it that Herald Eldan is more of the diplomat?”
“Yes; they make a good team that way.” Darian definitely heard good-humored affection in Firesong’s voice. “Kero’s too blunt to make a good diplomat. They’ve been together since Kero was Chosen, and Selenay prefers to keep them as an official team, since Kero would probably find a sneaky way to accomplish the same thing without actually disobeying orders. You’ll like him, too.”
Just then, Kerowyn and Eldan showed up, but only Eldan was wearing Whites. Kero had changed into something of the same cut as a Herald’s Whites, but it was all of gray leather, well-worn and practical, but not white, by any stretch of the imagination.
“I thought you were a Herald!” Val exclaimed, obviously without thinking before he opened his mouth.
He really has a problem that way, Darian noted. Does he ever think before he speaks?
“I am. I’m also officially on war-duty as of this moment, and I am not wearing one of those ‘oh-shoot-me-now’ outfits while I am in the front line. Eldan gets to be the obviously important person - he’s the diplomat, and he won’t be in the front line of fighting as long as I am in command unless he changes into something inconspicuous first.” She cast Eldan a significant glance, which Eldan ignored. This was evidently an argument of long standing between them. “I’m the one in charge if there’s fighting, and I’d better stay hard to hit if I’m going to stay that way.” She managed a very thin smile. “If this outfit is good enough for Weaponsmaster-Herald Alberich, it’s good enough for me.”
“That doesn’t sound very . . . heroic.” Val was either oblivious to the effect his blurted comments were having, or today he was just letting his thoughts go straight to his mouth without pausing to examine them. He wasn’t usually this clumsy. Darian winced inside, waiting for the rebuke.
But Kero actually softened a little. “My dear boy, I have been fighting for all of my adult life. I don’t have anything to prove anymore. I never did when I was a mercenary; if a merc doesn’t live, he doesn’t get paid. Heroics are for the young with nothing to lose.” Then she raised an eyebrow and added dryly, “When it comes down to cases, Eldan’s job is more important than mine. Diplomacy is much more economical than combat, unless you just happen to have a lot of people and no food to give them. Think about it, son. Think about it in terms of these green and fertile fields, and all the people who live on them - and the possibility that these new people are very, very hungry.”
Distant thunder growled, and it grew darker in the dining hall. Hertasi went about quietly lighting lamps.
Val finally figured out that he had been very rude and inconsiderate - and worse, perhaps, from his point of view, he’d exposed himself as inexperienced and immature. He blushed a brighter scarlet than Darian had ever managed and looked down at the table.
So much for Val’s love affair with heroic ballads. What I didn’t kill, Kerowyn flattened. But Kero was already getting down to business, and Val quickly got caught up in the plans along with everyone else.
“All right then, gryphon - Kel, right? - Kel, give us the numbers, then we’ll have something to work with.” Outside, thunder rumbled, warning that the storm was upon them. The first drops of rain hit the roof heavily.
“Of rrreal fighterrrsss, five hundrrred and twenty-two. Of old men, old women, youngsssterrrs old enough to take a weapon, and women without babesss, fourrrr hun-drrrred and eighteen. Of ssssmall childrrren, babesss, nurrrsing and prrregnant motherrrrsss, and crrripplesss, two hundrrred and forrrty-one.” Kel sounded very sure of himself and added, “I counted in many passsssesss, until the numberrrsss alwayssss came out the sssame.”
“Good for you - wait, did you say cripples?” Kerowyn stared at the gryphon incredulously. “Are you serious? There are crippled people among them?”
Kelvren had to wait as a flash of lightning followed immediately by an enormous peal of thunder drowned out any attempt at discussion. The rain began in earnest, drumming down on the roof with the promise that this would not be a mere cloudburst.
“Yesss. Mossst arrre childrrren, but sssome are adultsss.” He scratched an ear-tuft slowly and thoughtfully. “I thought that sssseemed odd, myssself.”
“Most barbarian societies that I’ve ever heard of wouldn’t allow their cripples to live, much less cart them along on a cross-country trek,” Kero said, tapping her lips with one finger. “Unless, of course, the cripple had a special skill that was vital to the tribe but didn’t require mobility. Obviously, no child would qualify to live in that way. What’s going on here?”
Darian decided to speak up. “That doesn’t sound anything like the first lot of barbarians that came here. They killed their own wounded.”
“In-ter-est-ing.” Kero drew out the word, intoning each syllable as if it was a magical incantation. “Well. What else can you tell me, Kel?”
“That the way behind issss blocked. The ssstorm we have now isss jussst the firrrssst of many to come - ssso sssay the weatherrrr sssignssss and the weatherrr-watcherrrssss among the Tayledrrrasss.” Kel nodded at Snowfire who gave silent confirmation. “The rrriverrrsss to the norrrth arrre flooded. The tribe cannot rrrretrrreat.”
Darian listened to the rain on the roof, and thought about hundreds of people trapped by rain-swollen rivers. How were they handling it?
“That is not good; we can figure that if these people aren’t desperate now, they will be when we confront them with no way to retreat.” She looked around the table, making certain that she met everyone’s eyes. “They’ll not only be desperate, but trapped, if we fight them, we can count on them fighting to the last man, woman, and child. We’ll win, but it will be expensive, and we’ll end up with a gaggle of barbarian children and cripples to take care of afterward. This is, of course, assuming that the mothers don’t kill the children to prevent them from falling into our hands, which is very likely. Think you can handle having to sort through and bury a lot of dead babies?”
Darian felt his stomach lurch, and everyone else looked rather grim. Val was white, probably his imagination working again.
I don’t like these people, but I don’t hate them that much.
Kero nodded. “I thought not. Good, we will pursue diplomacy until there is no chance whatsoever that we can make it work. Fighting will be the last of a very long list of choices. Are we agreed? Aye for those who are.”
There was no dissension, and when Darian checked the expressions of the onlookers, there wasn’t any discontent there, either. Some of the Tayledras, and a couple of the Guard, looked dubious, but no one disagreed. More thunder rolled outside, and the windows lit whitely as lightning passed somewhere above.
Now I see why Kero didn’t mind having people listen. This is better than having rumors running wild through camp.
“Eldan, I yield the table to you,” she said, sitting back in her chair, with her arms folded comfortably across her chest. “If I’ve got anything to say, I’ll just raise my hand like the rest.”
Eldan chuckled, as if this was a joke only he and she understood. “Right enough, Kero. The first step in a diplomatic meeting is the first contact. Does anyone have any ideas there?”
Lord Breon cleared his throat. “We talked about it some, already. Figured we’d come in looking strong enough to squash any offense without thinking about it, but holding our hands to give these people a chance to speak for themselves. Show of magic, show of strength, even bring in the birds and the nonhuman allies to impress ‘em with our totem animals.”
“That’s a good plan; I think anything subtle is a waste of time,” Eldan replied, with an approving glance around the table. “There is one thing I would like, as a ‘just in case.’ I’d like to evacuate the village - ” he consulted a paper, “ - ah, Errold’s Grove. I’d like to send the evacuees to Kelmskeep for safety.”
Lord Breon protested in alarm. “Wait now, in the middle of growing season? There’ll be things that need harvesting soon - and herds - and - ”
“Whoa!” Eldan held up his hands, cutting Lord Breon short. “I didn’t say everyone. Evacuate those who are too frightened to stay, children, women with babies, the elderly. Basically, anyone who can’t move in a hurry or will panic if trouble comes. This time we have warning, and we’ll have time enough to clear the rest out if there’s fighting and if it looks as if it will move in the direction of the village. All right?”
Lord Breon frowned, but agreed grudgingly. “I don’t think you realize how much work everyone has in growing season, though,” he grumbled. “This is going to leave my farmers and small-holders mightily short-handed.”
Darian saw Kero and Eldan exchange another look, and Eldan’s slight shrug. “I think your farmers and smallholders will be grateful that their families are somewhere safe, my lord,” Eldan soothed. “And if you are worried about the harvest, perhaps some of our fighters could pitch in to help. They won’t be doing anything here but drill, and some of them might appreciate the change of pace.”
Darian thought of something that might be an incentive. “There must be twenty pretty girls in that village with no husband-prospects, and there’s a perfectly good inn there as well.”
Kero grinned and winked at him.
“There, you see?” Eldan spread his hands. “We’ll take our volunteers from those who grew up farming. At that rate, you can even have the mothers with young children as well as those with babies evacuate. In the event that the whole village needs to be cleared out, we’ll have a rearguard in place to hold the road behind!”
Lord Breon sighed heavily. “All right. It’s a damned good idea, and I’ve no doubt m’lady can keep the whole lot of ‘em busy helping with wedding froufraraw.”
“Kelvren, can you fly a long sortie tomorrow?” Kero asked, as if struck with a sudden thought. “I’d like you to see if there’s any pattern to the barbarians’ migration.”
Kelvren slapped his foreclaw to his chest in what Darian thought must be a salute. “Cerrrtainly.”
“Right.” She looked around the table. “Can anybody think of anything else for now?”
“Only that we should make this meeting a daily one,” Snowfire said, and smiled apologetically at Lord Breon. “Sorry, my lord, but unless you prefer to let us deal with this without your opinions or wishes, your lady will have to do without you for a while.”
“My lady told me to pack my bags,” Lord Breon replied and grinned. “She reckoned Val and I were in for an extended stay. Gods forbid that fighting comes that far, but she can command my personal troops as well as I can, and as for setting up for refugees and a siege - she’s as good or better than I am. That’s one reason why I wed her in the first place.” Val looked startled, as his father bowed to Starfall and Snowfire. “ ‘Fraid I’m going to have to beg quarters from you, gentlemen, and camp-space for my men.”
Keisha felt as if she had somehow fallen into someone else’s life. Here she had gone along for years, with nothing more serious than sick sheep and broken bones to take care of, and nothing more worrisome than trying to work her way through those damned indecipherable texts. . . .
And now?
She was living in a Hawkbrother Vale, taking lessons from one of the most famous mages in the world - well, in Valdemar, anyway - learning how to do things that weren’t even in those texts. And if that wasn’t enough, now there was an army in residence, with no less than three full Healers and six apprentices, all perfectly willing to give her extra lessons and advice if she thought she needed it. She had seen more new people at once in the last few days than all of the people she’d ever seen in her life added together.
“Not that you really need much advice,” observed Gentian Arbelo, the most senior of the three. He was also the oldest, bald as an egg, and the thinnest healthy man Keisha had ever seen. “You have all the basic herb-knowledge so solidly there’s no point in questioning it, and you could teach us a few things about the local cures. As for using your Gift - ” he shrugged. “It’s more a matter of practice and getting comfortable with it than needing any advice or lessons. Still, if you want to sit in when any of us work, we’ll be happy to link minds with you so that you can see exactly how we do things.”
“Please,” Keisha responded immediately, hoping she didn’t sound as desperate as she felt. “Please. I need experience, and I’m horribly afraid I won’t have much time to get it.”
“There is that,” agreed Nala Karcinamen, the junior Healer. “If there’s fighting, well, we’re going to wish we had double our number.”
The middle, a robust and cheerful man, of middling height, brown hair, eyes, and beard, who called himself Grenthan Miles, made a face. “Piff! This is Captain Kero we’re talking about! If there’s a way to get this settled without crossed swords, she’ll find it, her and Eldan both. Meanwhile, this is an army, they’re always beating on one another, and that means bruises and cuts. Likely, there’ll be at least one serious fight with a broken bone if we sit about for more than a fortnight. We’ll have hangovers, upset stomachs from overstuffing, all manner of minor troubles. There’s nothing better to practice on, m’dear, and if you botch it up a bit, there’s no serious consequences.” He grinned first at Keisha, then at his two colleagues. “We’ll take her on the rounds and let her use her Gift on ‘em with us as safety. She’ll get practice, we can use the time for some full exams, and that’ll keep every mother’s child in this mothering army up to strength. What do you say to that?”
Nala looked dubious, but Gentian nodded. “Good idea. In fact, it would be a good idea for all the apprentices.” His grin, buried as it was in a bright red beard, was doubly infectious. “By the gods, we’ll spoil those soldiers, though! They’ll think this is how we should always treat ‘em!”
Keisha flushed, her cheeks hot, and Nala gave her a penetrating look. “Have you something you’d like to say, Keisha?” The plump and motherly gray-haired woman looked more like someone’s grandmother than a Healer who’d followed armies literally all her life. She seemed to understand Keisha’s shyness, and how hard it was to volunteer information.
“Just that - I do know some remedies you may not, mostly for common things - and they don’t all have to have - painless Healing.” She flushed even more, her cheeks so warm they were painful. “You want to discourage people from pretending to be sick, right? Or complaining of truly trivial problems? The medicines aren’t very pleasant, but they are very efficient.”
All three Healers burst into delighted laughter, lessening her blushes. “She’ll do, she’ll do!” Gentian crowed. “Oh, yes, she’ll do!”
“You’re sure you want to be here?” Kerowyn asked Keisha as they reached the outskirts of Errold’s Grove just after suppertime - a time chosen when everyone would be home from the fields.
“They know me; you’re outsiders. They know I wouldn’t say anything that can be ignored. If I’m here while you tell them the bad news, they won’t be so inclined to try to pretend it isn’t true.” Keisha really didn’t want to be there, but she knew she had to be; among other things, she figured she might as well get the inevitable confrontation with her parents over and done with. They were going to want her to evacuate with the others, and obviously she couldn’t do that.
“The best thing to do is to ring the bell in the square,” Keisha went on, thinking out loud. “If we ask Mayor Lutter to assemble everyone, he’ll try to find some way of putting it off - or worse, he’ll only assemble people he thinks are important.” She gave Kerowyn a helpless shrug. “He’s good enough at arranging Faires, but I wouldn’t trust him to make any decisions in a case like this, much less make the right ones. He’ll think first of how to keep his own status high and keep getting appointed Mayor, and not concentrate on anything useful. My guess is that he’s been keeping the fact that the barbarians were coming this way a secret. The only ones who probably know are the town council members.”
Kero snorted and looked absolutely disgusted. “Politicians! Always butting in where leaders are needed! No fear, I know the type, and I can handle him easily enough.”
Just ahead, people wandered the village paths in the late-evening sunlight. Some were women, gathering to trade gossip, some were young people, mostly couples, and children played in the yards as they rode in, Kerowyn on her Companion, and Nightwind and Keisha on dyheli. Kerowyn had changed back to her Whites - grudgingly, but Eldan had said severely that her authority as a Herald might be needed to get people to act instead of dithering. There would be no difficulty with riding back after darkness fell, since the dyheli and Kero’s Companion had excellent night-vision, and there was going to be a full moon.
As soon as the children spotted Kero, they ran back to their houses, shouting with excitement. Gods, this is an awful lot of excitement for Errold’s Grove. People are going to be talking about this year for decades, Keisha mused, as folk began to gather beside the road, their faces full of expectation. “Maybe we won’t have to ring the bell, after all,” Keisha ventured, seeing the number of people appearing on their own.
“Good; I want to alert people, not scare them witless.” Kero’s Companion Sayvil stopped, and Kero stood up in her stirrups. “Listen, people - I want everyone in Errold’s Grove assembled in the square, right now! You littles - yes, you and you and you - go to all the houses and fetch everybody.”
The children she pointed to ran off, squealing with excitement at being given an important mission by a Herald. “The rest of you, follow us to the square, unless you know of someone the children won’t likely find.”
Kero took the lead, followed by Nightwind and Keisha and a parade of chattering, excited people. The noise alone will probably bring people out, Keisha thought, as the crowd behind grew larger with every step they took.
The square had been cleaned out since the “reception” for Darian and the Hawkbrothers. How long ago was that? Just days, maybe a fortnight, but it seems like a year. There was nothing in the way of structures there at all, except the Hawkbrother bower near the Temple.
“Don’t dismount,” said Kero, as their three mounts halted, with Kerowyn between Nightwind and Keisha. “We’ll use the height to our advantage. Anyone want to bet how long it takes for this Mayor of Keisha’s to appear, demanding that we go through him?”
“He’s not my Mayor,” Keisha protested, and at that exact moment, Mayor Lutter appeared at the edge of the crowd, face red, shoving his way through to the center.
“What’s going on here?” he demanded, as he came up to the nose of Kero’s Companion, Sayvil. “What’s the meaning of this?”
Sayvil looked down her long nose at him, and deliberately sneezed wetly in his face. As he jumped back (as far as he could, given the crowd), wiping his face with his sleeve, Kero’s lips twitched. “The situation with the approaching barbarians the Hawkbrothers told you about has escalated, Mayor Lutter,” Kerowyn said, loudly enough to be heard clearly by at least a third of the crowd. “I’m here to give Crown orders for Errold’s Grove.”
That set up a buzz, as the folk in the front exclaimed in alarm, those in the back asked what had been said, and those nearest Mayor Lutter seized on him, demanding to know why he hadn’t told them about approaching barbarians. This kept him very busy trying to make up an explanation, as Kero had probably intended.
People continued to collect, as Kero waited patiently. When it appeared that no one else was going to join them, she stood up in her stirrups, surveyed the group with an impassive face, then abruptly signaled for silence.
Amazingly, she got it; even the increasingly agitated cluster of people around Mayor Lutter quieted down. The Mayor, glad enough for the respite, mopped his sweating face with his other sleeve.
“I am Herald-Captain Kerowyn, commander of the Skybolts,” Kero announced. As a murmur again rose, she continued, ignoring the sound. “I see some of you recognize me; those of you who do can make your explanations to everyone else later. Apparently your Mayor has not passed on some information he received some time ago, so I’ll repeat it in brief. Northern barbarians have been approaching this area for some time; at first it was unclear whether they were going to stop short or continue until they came to Errold’s Grove, but they show no signs of stopping, so we are assuming they will come here.”
Interestingly, although Kero’s words were practically guaranteed to cause panic, no one moved or even said anything. It might have been Kero’s stern gaze; it might also have been that she had some rudimentary Empathic control over the crowd. Or, if she didn’t, perhaps Sayvil did. At any rate, no one ran off, or even moved much.
“There are some significant differences between this group and the last,” Kero continued. “The most important of which is that this group contains women, children, old people, and even cripples. That suggests that they are not a conquering army, but rather migrants, nomads, or even refugees; people of that nature can be negotiated with. Nevertheless, the Crown is taking your safety very seriously, and I am in command of three companies of Guard troops that include some of my own Skybolts, who will make certain that you are protected.”
A spontaneous, and very relieved, cheer arose, which Kero permitted to continue for a moment before raising her hand again. As before, she got silence.
“Meanwhile I have advised Lord Breon to let everyone who wants to evacuate Errold’s Grove. I suggest that mothers with infants and small children do so, all children below the age of fourteen, all older folk, and anyone else who doesn’t feel safe. I realize that this will cause some hardship, so since we wanted some troops stationed here anyway, those troopers will help out in the fields to replace people who evacuate.” She allowed her gaze to travel across the crowd, slowly, so that she at least gave the illusion of meeting each and every eye. “There you have it. Lord Breon has agreed to accept the evacuees at Kelmskeep, and whatever you want to bring with you, go ahead and do so. This is not an emergency evacuation, and you can take as much time to pack up and move out as you need to, within reason. I’d say four or five days is within reason.”
“Do you think the barbarians will come here?” shouted one of the Fellowship folk.
Kero shook her head. “To be honest, not really. However, I want all possibilities covered, and if my judgment proves to be totally wrong - and it could, the gods know it’s happened before - I don’t want anyone here who is unable to run like a rabbit if trouble shows up. My recommendation is basically that the able-bodied and healthy can stay, but everyone else should go.”
Keisha chose this moment to speak up. “I’ve been at the Vale, which is where all the news is coming. This is real, and if it were my family that had a grandma or baby, I’d not only tell them to go, I’d help them pack and escort them to Kelmskeep. Since my folks can all not only run like rabbits but can bite when cornered - ” she noted several weak grins in the crowd, and stronger ones from her brothers,” - I’d say it’s safe enough for them to stay until the Herald-Captain tells them otherwise.”
Anyone who might have been wavering until then was convinced.
Kero waited a moment, then asked, “Anyone have any questions?”
“Only of Mayor Lutter,” said one voice, with a decidedly grim note in it. Murmurs of agreement followed.
“Right. You will have several more chances to ask me things, myself, or one of my lieutenants. There’ll be an officer stationed with the men who come here to help out, and if he or she doesn’t already have orders that cover any question you might have, they’ll have authority to make a decision.” She took a slow, deep breath, and looked satisfied with the results of her speech. “Carry on, decide who’s going, take your time. I’ll send the first batch of men over tomorrow, and if you don’t feel confident about getting to Kelmskeep by yourselves, some of them will provide an armed escort over. This isn’t an emergency. Yet.”
At this point, the only excited and agitated people were the ones around Mayor Lutter; Keisha felt rather sorry for him, but he had brought his troubles on himself.
But she saw her mother and father making their way toward her, moving slowly through the crowd with determination on their faces, and she braced herself for what was to come.
“You are going to Kelmskeep,” stated her mother, as soon as she was close enough, in the tone that warned she would accept no other answer from her daughter.
But it wasn’t her daughter who sat the back of a dyheli, not here, not now. It was the Errold’s Grove Healer, who knew that there was a perfectly good Healer at Kelmskeep, but if she left, there would be none at Errold’s Grove at a time when one would be needed urgently. Furthermore, the Errold’s Grove Healer knew that if it came to a conflict, her place was with the other Healers caring for injured fighters, not huddling behind walls of stone, far from any conflict.
So - “No,” said the Healer of Errold’s Grove, just as firmly.
Her mother and father simply stared at her. No wonder. I may have disobeyed, but never in anything major, and I’ve never refused them to their faces. Keisha hardened her shields as well as her resolution; no matter what they said or did, she had no intention of being dissuaded.
“What do you mean, no?” demanded Ayver and Sidonie in chorus.
“I believe it’s my duty to remain either here or at the Vale, where I am needed, and not in Kelmskeep, where I am not,” Keisha replied, in a level and moderate tone. “So I will not be going to Kelmskeep.” She was deeply grateful that Kero told them all to stay mounted; the height-advantage she had gave her an advantage in authority as well.
Her father began to get a bit red in the face, himself. “No daughter of mine -”
“I am your daughter only after I am a Healer,” Keisha countered, hoping that she sounded calm and reasonable. “My first and most important duty is as a Healer. Once she’s a full Herald, you wouldn’t even think to tell Shandi to stay out of danger, would you?”
The trouble is, I’m afraid they would. . . .
Even through shields, she could tell that she had just set the spark to the tinder. There was going to be a very ugly outburst in a moment; she braced herself, cringing inside.
“Pardon,” Nightwind said, stepping in before either parent could send down thunder and lightning. “But Keisha is eighteen, is she not?” At Sidonie’s automatic nod, the trondi’irn continued. “Then by your own laws, she is two years past the age when she can legally make her own choices.”
“That she is,” Kero said cheerfully, bringing her own formidable personality in on Keisha’s side. “She can marry, be apprenticed, take on business or a debt, choose whatsoever profession she wishes, no matter what your desires are.”
“But she’s a child!” Sidonie wailed. “She can’t possibly make any kind of rational decision!”
“By your law, she ceased to be a child two years ago,” said Nightwind quietly. “By our law, she ceased to be one four years ago. And by demonstration of responsibility, she ceased to be one at least that long ago.” She smiled, a smile full of pity and sympathy. “Lady, your child is in no sense a child, and has not been so for years. She was simply too dutiful to remind you of that fact, but now her higher responsibilities have forced her to that point. Don’t force her to hurt you just to prove she’s long since grown up.”
Suddenly Sidonie’s face crumpled, though at least she didn’t burst into tears. Keisha swallowed, with the revelation of how difficult it must be to let children grow up; it was all there, in her father’s shocked and stricken look, in her mother’s heartsick eyes. She began to waver; was she wrong in standing against them?
But Kero was not going to let the situation decay. With a wicked gleam in her eye, she stepped in again. “I must remind you,” she said, in a voice as devoid of pity as Nightwind’s expression was full of that emotion, “I am in charge of this situation, and in my opinion you would be seriously interfering with the best interests of Valdemar by trying to persuade one of my Healers to cravenly abandon her post. It could even be construed as treason,” she added thoughtfully.
“Oh,” Ayver said, his face blank with shock. Sidonie took a few moments more to see what Kero was getting at, but when she did, her expression went just as blank as her husband’s.
Now it was Kero’s turn to soften, a little. “You’ve been good enough parents to raise not only a child Chosen but another who sees her duty as a Healer as more important than her own wishes. Now be good enough parents to let that child live up to her potential.”
Ayver was the first to recover. “Just promise that she’ll be taken care of!” he said to Kero, with the fierce glare of any thwarted father.
“I am Herald-Captain Kerowyn, and I always take care of my people,” Kero told him with supreme dignity. “You have my leave to inquire from any of my people how they are cared for.”
There seemed nothing more to say at that point, and with that bee in their ears, they beat a hasty retreat. Dusk had faded into darkness, and they were swallowed up by the night before Keisha could call them back.
Keisha let out the breath she’d been holding in, and looked at both Nightwind and Kero with gratitude. She couldn’t believe how quickly the confrontation had ended, although she wished with all her heart that it had been less painful for her parents. “This isn’t the first time you’ ve held off angry parents, is it?” she asked Kerowyn, who laughed.
“No, it’s not,” she agreed. “And you should see them when their baby-child is going to go hit people with sharp things, instead of Heal them of the aftermath!” She shook her head reminiscently. “Hate to do it, but a child has to grow up sometime in their parents’ eyes, and better they should blame me than their own flesh and blood.”
“Well, thank you, thank you both,” Keisha sighed. “I almost gave in to them; I probably would have, if you hadn’t helped.”
They all turned their mounts away from the dispersing gathering, and headed back toward the Vale just as the full moon appeared above the trees, gilding their path with silver. “I don’t think you would have,” Nightwind said, after a long silence that took them right to the edge of the night-darkened forest. “But don’t feel ashamed that they made you feel as if you were going to.” Now Keisha heard the smile in her voice. “Parents always know what strings control your heart and soul. After all, they are the ones who tied them there.”

Thirteen

This was, of course, not the first time that Darian and Snowfire had gone scouting an enemy encampment. The easiest way was the path they had chosen - through the treetops. The easiest way was also the safest; getting themselves into a tree near the barbarian encampment, and letting the owls make overflights while they used their owls’ eyes to observe. Snowfire sent out both of his birds, but Darian only had Kuari to keep track of. This, of course, meant that Snowfire had twice the work of Darian, but Snowfire might have been happier if Darian hadn’t insisted on coming along in the first place.
He had only agreed because they had a limited time to work in, and needed as much information as they could get.
Darian put his back up against the curiously smooth bark of his tree, and concentrated on the noncombatants, the women, girls, and young children, who were gathered around their own fire. Snowfire sent Huur and Hweel to single out those who seemed the most important in the clan, and to look for a shaman or mage. Darian didn’t know what Snowfire was seeing, but from his point of view, much as he hated to admit it, these people were nothing like the arrogant barbarians of years ago.
As Kuari actually perched no more than a few feet above the heads of a gathering of women and children, he took note of a wealth of details through the owl’s sight. For instance, there was one decoration repeated over and over in their clothing and ornaments - a cat. It was some sort of great hunting-cat, and the colors it was portrayed in were whites, grays, and blacks, giving it a ghostlike appearance. Decorations included stylized cats in profile in every conceivable position, cat faces, cat eyes, and cat paw-prints. As ornaments, he counted cat furs, cat teeth, cat skulls, and cat claws. This, then, was probably their totemic animal.
So much for the decorations of their lives. Now for the substance.
In this much, this batch of barbarians was similar to the last - the sexes were strictly segregated. Women, girls, and small children below the age of puberty grouped around one campfire, sharing one meal, the adult males crowded around another, sharing a different meal, with more of the choice cuts of meat. Snowfire was concentrating on the adult males, so Kuari and Darian ignored them.
Whatever dinner the women had was long since eaten, though the men were still chewing away; the only signs of it were the cracked and gnawed bones in the fire, the two pots filled with coals to burn out the residue of food left in them. One thing did surprise him. The women did not seem particularly cowed or slavish; they chattered among themselves, scolded rowdy children, sewed hides into articles of clothing or decorated the finished clothing. If this isolation was an indication that they were considered inferior creatures by the men, there was no sign that they were kept that way with beatings and brutality.
As Kel had reported, though, there were several people, mostly children, who seemed afflicted with a curious paralysis or wasting disease. These victims lay quietly on furs beside the fire, occasionally rubbing emaciated limbs as if to ease a constant ache. An arm might be afflicted, or a leg - never both legs or both arms.
On the other hand, how could a child survive long with such a profound affliction in a nomadic clan? Even in Valdemar, people with paralysis had difficulty in simply staying alive. He had the sense, gained mostly from the way that women would look at the afflicted children and sigh, that there had been other children who had been stricken worse than these - and had not survived.
He gleaned all he could, noting that not all the women were making or decorating new garments. Some were working on weapons, fletching arrows, fitting heads to spears. Yes, those things could be used for hunting, but they could also be used for war. Just how many spears and arrows did the tribe need for hunting, any way?If nomad tribe can’t afford to carry much; why make so many weapons when there are hectares of raw materials all around them? He could understand stockpiling spear tips, arrowheads, but not whole weapons. Spears in particular were clumsy and hard to transport for people who had no wagons; why bother making entire bundles of extras?
Because they expect conflict, that’s why. Can’t stop to fletch arrows or fit a point to a shaft in the middle of a fight.
Finally he figured he had gleaned as much information as he could from simple observation, and called Kuari back in. As the great eagle-owl landed on the lirnb beside him, a huge branch wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side on it, he looked over to the next branch to see how Snowfire progressed. Huur was already there, sitting quietly beside her bondmate, and from the look of it, Hweel would not be far behind. Darian began carefully stretching muscles and getting ready to move out.
It wasn’t long before Snowfire whistled the quiet signal that meant it was time to retreat, and Darian followed the scout’s lead through the upper limbs of the trees, moving along the branches of the great trees as surely and silently as if they traveled forest paths. Where limbs crossed, they used their climbing staffs to hook the branch of the next tree, either to pull themselves up, or lower themselves down. Even in Valdemar, Snowfire had drilled his “younger brother” in this tree-walking, and no matter that the trees there were no more than a tenth of the size of those in the Pelagiris. A Hawkbrother was as at home in a tree as any Valdemaran was on the ground. That was the real secret of their ability to move invisibly through the Forest, though to Valdemarans it might as well have been magic.
They didn’t descend to the earth again until they were far from the encampment. Two dyheli waited impatiently in a clearing to carry them further toward safety. With the moon on the wane, the dyheli were only moving shadows below to Darian’s eyes, but to Kuari’s, the thick darkness made no difference. With Kuari to guide him, Darian followed Snowfire down to the ground; the dyheli (not Tyrsell, but a swift runner all the same) was at his side as his feet touched the moss. Faster than thought, Darian was in the saddle, and the dyheli bounded away, no more than a pace or two behind his herdmate.
There was neither the time nor the leisure for either of them to talk, not with the dyheli at full gallop. Darian hung on, most of his attention with Kuari, who scouted the back-trail, watchfully making certain that barbarians had not somehow detected them. Huur and Hweel scouted ahead, serving as their guides as the moon set and the darkness thickened further.
Darian had made so many similar rides in the last four years that his senses were keenly attuned to the signals that meant real danger. He no longer started, hand to weapon, at every little sound. The farther they got from the encampment, the more he relaxed - insofar as it was possible to do so. The mission had only begun; it would be a very long night before it was over.
We got away with our spy-out; that’s a decent omen. So far, so good.
The war council wasn’t waiting for their report in the Vale. Tonight was the night of confrontation, and the barbarians weren’t as close to the allies as that. Their own war band had an encampment of their own, near enough for an effective strike at the barbarians, but hopefully far enough away that the barbarian scouts wouldn’t detect them.
The dyheli slowed to a walk as they neared the periphery of the camp. With Darian just a pace behind him, Snowfire answered three low-voiced challenges before the dyheli brought them to a shallow cave in the hillside facing away from the barbarians, and into a circle of firelight reflecting off faces that looked up at their approach. This cave was the only spot safe enough for a fire and offering enough privacy for the war council.
Once they were out of the saddle and settled in among the rest, taking seats cross-legged on the soft sand floor, Darian reported his findings first. Snowfire listened as intently as the others, although, except for the identification of the clan-totem, there wasn’t much real information there. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more,” Darian ended, on a note of apology. “But at some point we’ve got to get hold of one of their people - maybe a child - and get their language. There’s too much I missed by not understanding their conversation.”
Snowfire then made his own report. “I didn’t see a mage or a shaman anywhere among the men, nor did I see a special tent, or any of the sort of equipment and paraphernalia that a shaman or mage would require,” he said, eliciting a nod from Firesong. “From the little of their speech that I understood, I believe that they call themselves the “Ghost Cat” clan. If what I heard is true, they believe their totemic animal actually led them here. I also understood that they are terrified of the Change-Circles, and will make any detour to pass around them, and that corresponds with what Kel has observed. They don’t seem to be aware of the existence of Errold’s Grove or k’Valdemar Vale; as far as they are concerned, this is completely unknown, probably empty territory. I saw some preparation for fighting, but not what I would expect if they planned a major assault. In my opinion, they are ready to fight, and will if they see the need to attack or defend, but it did not look to me as if they planned to go to war.”
Kero nodded, and looked first into Sayvil’s eyes, then nodded at Eldan. “Then we should go ahead with our plan. We come in, show superior abilities, and try to awe them. I’ll have the Skybolts in place as backup for the contact party, but they won’t show their faces unless the contact party has to be rescued. Sound right to everyone else?”
Darian followed Kerowyn’s glance around the circle; there was no dissension, but he didn’t expect any at this point. After all, they’d been over and over this plan so many times that they had, he hoped, worked any flaws out of it.
“Let’s do it,” Firesong said. “Before I lose my nerve.”
He’s joking, Darian thought as they all stood, and shivered. I wish I could.
Now it was time for Tyrsell to join the group, but as Firesong’s mount, not Darian’s. Darian would remain with the Skybolts as advance scout, ready to mount a rescue, should that become necessary. This did not make Darian feel any better; he could not help thinking about all those well-made arrows he’d seen being fletched, and imagining his friends facing a hail of them.
Kerowyn would not be with the contact party either; that was Eldan’s place. Like Darian, Kero had a different place to fill. She would be with her troops, waiting in hiding, hoping she wouldn’t be needed.
She isn’t any happier about that than I am. Kerowyn hadn’t said anything, certainly hadn’t done anything, but there was no doubt in Darian’s mind that she would gladly have accepted any excuse to get Eldan out of the contact party.
But there were only two Heralds, and Eldan was the diplomat of the two; it was, as he had gently reminded Kerowyn, his place to be conspicuous, at least for the moment.
Kelvren, who was so excited by his part in this that his hackles were up, was to be the crowning piece of the display. Whether or not these people were familiar with gryphons from afar, they could never have seen one up close, and to have Kel come swooping in out of the dark would be a considerable shock.
With Eldan and his Companion in the lead, Snowfire and Firesong flanking him riding dyheli, and followed by a good-sized escort of mounted Skybolts, the party’s size should be enough to surprise the barbarians. Appearing suddenly and unexpectedly out of the night was a time-honored tactic of the Hawkbrothers; it worked as an effective way to intimidate interlopers more often than it failed.
Darian hoped that tonight would not be counted as one of the failures.
Lord Breon had wanted badly to be included as one of the party, and had only been dissuaded from his intention by Kerowyn. The Herald-Captain had pointed out that it was her duty to protect him, not the other way around, then added that she didn’t know the territory around Kelmskeep half so well as its Lord; if it came to a running fight, she needed his expertise. So Lord Breon was also going to be an observer, and probably would be fretting inside as much as Kero or Darian.
The darkness was their friend, not the barbarians’. With the aid of the three owls, they moved into position without disturbing the few sentries, much less the sleeping camp. The barbarian sentries were posted within sight of the dying campfire anyway, too close to the camp to be an effective ward against a force like theirs.
As Kero arranged her own fighters, positioning Darian and Kuari as lookouts, the others moved closer still, just barely out of the barbarians’ sight, as near as they dared.
Darian stayed where Kerowyn had placed him, in another tree, halfway between her people and the camp. It wasn’t as safe a perch as it might have seemed; one of the things that the contact party was going to produce was a lot of light, and he would make a tempting and easy target if anyone spotted him.
In a situation like this one, the Gift of Mindspeech was all the more valuable; everyone knew when everyone else was in place and ready, with no clumsy signals that might be misheard or not heard at all. Without that warning, he might have been so startled as to lose his balance when the contact party made their initial move; as it was, he winced involuntarily when the group revealed their presence.
It must have been a hundred, a thousand times worse for the barbarians.
For them, there was no warning. In one moment, they slept peacefully, the forest sounds of crickets and frogs, the occasional bird call, no different than any other night. In the next, it must have seemed as if the heavens and earth opened up at once.
With a great flash of light and a corresponding blare of horns - supplied by Kerowyn’s people - the contact party “appeared” out of the dark as if they had suddenly burst through a Gate or were conjured by some other magical means. With mage-lights burning fiercely above them, with the owls flying at head height on either side of the group, they galloped up to the very edge of the camp. At the last moment, Starfall and Snowfire held up their hands, and the owls landed neatly on the gloves. The whole camp was roused, of course, but very few had the temerity to burst out of their tents, and fewer still to brandish the weapons they’d seized.
Giving them no time to recover from the first shock, the second descended from the dark sky - Kelvren, in full panoply, his wings providing a thunder of his own as he landed in front of Eldan.
Darian had to give the barbarians credit for bravery; they were shaking, as pale as snow and plainly terrified, but they stood their ground.
Yes, but can they stand the third shock?
A deep and angry “voice” shouted inside Darian’s head - and in the heads of every other creature present that hadn’t shielded against it. Darian had put up just enough of a shield to keep the voice from being painful, but he wanted to hear what Tyrsell said. For this was Tyrsell’s contribution, his ability to Mindspeak to anyone and anything, and if the barbarians weren’t familiar with Mindspeech, this might well be the most frightening shock of all.
:Who are you, invaders? How dare you intrude on us?: Tyrsell demanded. :Why are you here? What excuse have you for invading our lands, stealing our game, devouring our grazing? Why should we not destroy you at this moment, and leave your bones to lie in the dust as a warning to others?:
There was no telling how the barbarians would take this - how they would even “hear” it and interpret it - but this was the best that any of them could come up with, providing equal parts of threat, intimidation, and opportunity for explanation. Firesong produced appropriate stage-dressing as Tyrsell Mindspoke, sending up fountains of light on either side, as his firebird made a similar entrance to Kelvren’s. Aya plunged down from the treetops, showering false sparks as he flew, then coming in to land on Firesong’s outstretched hand.
Darian held his breath, watching the barbarians for dangerous behavior. When it was apparent that the contact party was waiting for an answer - waiting angrily, but still waiting and holding their hand - people ventured from tents, milled around a little, talking nervously, then centered all their activity on three men in particular.
As the contact party continued to wait, standing as rigid and unmoving as a group of statues, those three men walked cautiously to the edge of the camp, clutching their weapons.
No eclipse-amulets! That was something Darian had been watching for particularly - the mage (or shaman) who had led the first barbarian invasion had worn one, and Darian had gotten the impression that it was worn by the leaders of a rather nasty magical cult, even by barbarian standards. If he’d gotten even a glimpse of another one like it, he was going to call a retreat!
But no; the three leaders - a wiry man with grizzled hair and beard, and two younger, much more muscular fellows - had donned quite a bit of jangling jewelry before they ventured forward, but anything like an amulet was cat-headed or cat-shaped.
The one with the gray hair spoke loudly and slowly, with a great many gestures that didn’t mean anything to Darian. Meanwhile, the other two shook rattles and brandished, not weapons, but brightly painted rawhide shields.
:He asks if we are demons of the darkness, and if we are, says that the other two are powerful shamans who will drive us away.: There was no doubt of Tyrsell’s grim amusement with this situation. :Firesong, why don’t you be your theatrical self while I answer him?:
Firesong raised Aya over his head while Tyrsell stepped up beside Kelvren. The firebird threw off a veritable waterfall of false sparks, which rained down on his bond-mate, as Firesong conjured another mage-light in the palm of his other hand.
:Fools! Demons of the darkness shun the light, not court it!: Tyrsell “shouted” contemptuously. :We are the keepers and guardians of this land, and we demand that you answer to us for your invasion!:
Nervously, the two would-be shamans dropped their painted shields as ineffective, and took up spears instead. The leader, however, waved them back, and addressed the party again.
:He says that if we are not demons, then he demands that we meet him in daylight.: Now Tyrsell’s mind-voice held a grudging admiration. :Pretty brave fellow, to stand up to us like this.:
Whatever the answer was from the contact party, Darian didn’t hear it; he only got Tyrsell’s third (and final) announcement. :Because we are just, we give you leave to defend your actions, and time to choose your words with care,: Tyrsell said sternly.: Look for us by dawnlight.:
The party backed up, one slow step at a time - then there was another explosion of purposefully blinding light and blare of horns - and when silence and darkness descended again, the party had “vanished.” At least, they had as far as the barbarians were concerned.
In actual fact, of course, they simply rode or flew away, but with their eyes dazzled and ears ringing, the barbarians wouldn’t have seen that.
Darian waited until the allies were safely behind the Skybolts’ lines before making his own move - which was to return to the barbarian camp to see if he could make out what their reaction was.
Although he couldn’t understand a word they said, some things were clear enough. The children and most of the women were absolutely terrified, but not all. Several hardy souls among the women rallied - and railed at - their more timid sisters, suggesting to Darian that the older ones had seen magic before and knew the difference between show and substance.
And they aren’t afraid of magic, which means. . . what? That it’s never been used successfully against them?
Among the men, only the younger ones were cowed; virtually all the males of Dalian’s age and older had gotten over their shock and gathered around the three leaders, deep in a council of their own. And once the hardier women had calmed the rest, they joined the council circle as well!
It was possible for Darian, watching through Kuari’s eyes, to infer some things - most notably, a sense of caution, in the intonations of those who spoke, in the postures of those who listened. Finally he decided that he had seen and heard enough, and retreated behind his own lines.
“They’re not as scared as we’d like,” he reported, as he dropped down out of the tree into the midst of his own war council.
“But not aggressive either?” Kero asked quickly.
“Not aggressive, at least not at the moment,” Darian confirmed. “They’ve seen showy magic before, I’d bet on it.”
“On to the next phase, then,” Snowfire said. “We approach at dawn, and see what they have to say for themselves.” He looked up at the tree branches above his head. “Dawn isn’t that far off; we won’t have long to wait.”
In the mist and still, pale gray of dawn, the contact group approached the barbarian camp once again - this time without the lights and noise. They stopped a bit further away, however, just out of arrow-shot range, where Kelvren joined them.
A cautious deputation approached from the encampment, but not immediately. From the haggard faces and dark-circled eyes, it appeared that the barbarians had gotten no more sleep than the allies. Once again, Darian was in the tree branches, but hidden better this time, and without Kuari. The eagle-owls had no advantage during daylight, except for show; Darian was here to satisfy his own restlessness, not as a primary scout. That duty had gone to Wintersky, Ravenwing, and their bondbirds.
It appeared that at least they were going to be treated as important enough for the barbarians to put on their best finery, for the deputation jingled and clattered with every approaching step. In their own way, they are impressive, he thought, peering through his screen of leaves. The oldest man - possibly the chieftain - had donned a fur cloak of the pelt of a huge cat, with the fully preserved head of its original owner acting as the hood. Their leather tunics and breeks were as well-constructed as Tayledras scout gear, and though they jangled with amulets and jewelry, and their decorations were a bit garish for Darian’s taste, they were no worse than the Shin’a’in, who had never seen a color they didn’t love. But they weren’t wearing armor, and there was still no sign of that eclipse-amulet Darian recalled only too well. Unless they were supposed to be sacrificial lambs, they weren’t expecting to meet with physical force in this parley.
This time, the allies intended to wait for the barbarians to speak first, so they waited with expressionless faces, still mounted, as the strangers approached. They, in their turn, stopped well short of the contact party; the leader cleared his throat ostentatiously when no one spoke, mind-to-mind or otherwise, and began what sounded, from the measured cadences, like a prepared speech.
:This is the Clan of the Ghost Cat,: Tyrsell interpreted, and with that name, images - of a huge, fierce, and reclusive predator, and of something else, a fleeting shadow by day, a call in the night, a trusted presence that guided. . . . :They claim their totem animal led them here, and by that sign from their gods, they say it is their right to stay. I must admit, as a defense, it has the benefit of being unique and probably unprovable.:
After a pause to confer, Tyrsell replied. :Whether or not that is true, you are in our land, where our gods hold sway, and our laws decree the measure of what is and is not to be.:
This time the leader went on at some length, with many broad and flamboyant gestures. :He wants to know by what right we claim this land; says that there are no boundary markers, no claiming poles to show that we speak the truth. If this land was ever settled by the hole-dwelling people and diggers-of-dirt - that is us, by the way - it has been abandoned for decades and should belong to anyone for the taking.: The leader’s voice grew bolder, possibly because the contact-party hadn’t struck him down. :He has no idea that it is me doing the talking, by the way. He thinks it is either Firesong or Starfall. Kelvren impresses him, but he thinks Kel is something we’ve tamed.:
Kel remained unruffled, fixing the speaker with his unblinking gaze.
:Now he tells us how huge and strong his clan is, how many warriors they have, how many battles they fought.: Tyrsell paused a moment. :This is partly a bluff; something - a disease - drove them out of their own lands, and they ran rather than face a foe they had no hope of beating.:
This time Darian heard Starfall’s reply. :Tell him his own numbers,: the mage said, with grim humor. :Let’s see how he reacts to the fact that we know his strength down to the last baby.:
Tyrsell did just that, and Darian had the satisfaction of seeing the barbarian leader shaken. But he recovered quickly, and spoke again. :Now he says that we should know that even the babies of his Clan are fighters, that if we come against them and try to force them out of the place their totem has brought them to, even the babies will take up bows and swords and slay our men.: Tyrsell pawed the ground, roused in spite of himself. :There’s no doubt; he means to stay, and he’ll make it cost us dearly to be rid of him. His people are desperate, and that’s dangerous.:
Darian hadn’t needed that last admonition; he knew for himself just how dangerous a desperate person was.
:We do not need to use the spear or the sword to rid ourselves of pests,: Tyrsell replied loftily, and Darian sensed Firesong’s hand in his phrasing. :As any should know who once had the misfortune to dare the Killing Trees of the north. We had hoped that the foolishly bold and suicidal had learned to keep a wary distance from our lands by now.:
The leader barked an artificial laugh, and made his counter. :He says that the so-called Killing Trees did not prevent his passage, and implies that this means his magic is stronger than ours.:
There was a stirring in the distance, and for a single moment, Kero’s troops showed themselves before blending back into the shadows and undergrowth. This did affect the barbarian leader; he had not gotten long enough to count heads, for Kero had timed the moment so that all he had was an impression - an impression of great numbers.
:You managed to avoid the Killing Trees by passing to the west, and your boast is hollow as an old reed. Magic is not our only weapon,: Tyrsell said with great boredom, :It is only the easiest to use.:
The leader remained silent now, as his underlings whispered urgently in his ear.
Tyrsell did not wait for them to formulate a reply, not when the negotiations had just turned in the favor of the allies. :Here are our fighters, our magic, and our gods barring your way - but we are a generous people, and compassionate to those who are willing to serve. These lands have no current tenant, it is true; what have you to offer us in return for leave to remain?:
If anything, that startled the leader even more than the presence of the troops. His posture full of confusion, he made an abrupt gesture, spoke a few words, and retreated with his party.
:He wants to go discuss this with his people,: Tyrsell said uneccessarily.
Back in camp, with Wintersky spying on the barbarians and Kero’s sentries keeping careful watch, Tyrsell gave them a fuller account of what he had read in the barbarians’ thoughts.
Darian fought back a yawn, clamping his jaws on it. It seemed an eternity since the last time he’d slept, and with his excitement and fear wearing off, he felt a bit lightheaded with weariness.
:You all know, of course, that without taking his mind in such a way that he would know I had done so, I could only read what came to the surface of his mind?: Tyrsell began, as a preamble.
“If we didn’t before, we do now,” Kero replied logically. “So, what information came along with those surface thoughts?”
:This Ghost Cat - I am forced to believe it is either a very powerful hallucination, or it is very real: Tyrsell shook his head in irritation as a fly buzzed around his ears. Darian fought another yawn. :I am quite serious; and I am inclined to think that it would be difficult to hallucinate such a thing during the course of a migration lasting moons.:
Firesong and his father exchanged sharp glances, and Kero and Eldan did the same. “That puts an interesting kink in our plans,” Kerowyn ventured. “But until this Ghost Cat shows itself to me, I’m leaving it out of the calculations for now. What else?”
:The disease I mentioned. The three of us managed to get bits and pieces of the whole story.: Tyrsell sounded proud of himself and his underlings, as well he should be; that would be a difficult proposition to read from the surface thoughts. Darian wondered about this Ghost Cat;
Firesong had told him about the two Avatars that helped his friend An’desha - could this Ghost Cat be something like them? And if so, then what did that mean for the Tayledras and Valdemar? :There was a tradition of an annual gathering of clans and septs of clans every Midsummer, and the last year it ever took place, it was held in Ghost Cat territory. Just as a matter of caution, they always avoided Change-Circles, but as we know, other clans don’t. Someone from Blood Bear Clan found a Circle and went into it - and came out with more than he‘d expected.:
“The disease,” Snowfire stated, without surprise. “We were afraid something like this would happen, and we took precautions against it - ”
“Obviously they didn’t,” Kero said dryly.
:Exactly so. It ran through the assembled clans like a wildfire. They call it “summerfever,” since it disappears in winter, though they don’t know why.:
“Is this disease the cause of the crippled children?” Snowfire asked.
:It is. It begins as coughing, sneezing, chills and fever, then becomes a wasting disease. It kills more often than not, as the chest muscles waste away and breathing becomes impossible, or as full paralysis sets in and the victim is helpless to keep up; only the very lucky survive.: Tyrsell was uncharacteristically sober; evidently he found the images that had come with that knowledge to be disturbing. :Usually death from disease comes to the old and weak or the young and helpless. This death does not pick and choose in that way. Enough fighters died in the first sweep that every clan feud was called off, but new outbreaks have occurred every summer since then.:
Darian wasn’t sleepy anymore; whether he was picking up images from Tyrsell, or his own imagination was working hard, but he had seen those children lying beside the fire. . . .
“All right, but why come here?” Firesong asked.
:Their shaman was one of the victims, but before he died, he told them that a sign would lead them to a place where they would find healing and an end to the sickness. And after he died, the Ghost Cat appeared, and led them south. That was when their lore-keepers recalled that we of the south reputedly have many powerful Healers.:
“Oh, really?” Eldan’s eyebrows rose, and he turned to Starfall. “Was this Cat a revenant, do you think? Or an avatar?”
Great minds follow the same path, Darian thought.
“It could be,” Starfall said cautiously. “But we shouldn’t discount either. Well, now we know why they avoid Change-Circles.”
:Before he died, their shaman declared that their own gods and magic were helpless against this “plague from outside” and that “they must look outside for help.” They aren’t down here purely by chance, following the Ghost Cat. They’ve heard of the Valdemaran-style Healers, as I said, and have come looking for some. Their initial intentions were to kidnap some and coerce them into helping, if they had to.:
“Huh,” Kero snorted. “They don’t know Healers very well, do they?”
Darian had to agree with that.
:However, confronted by our strong force . . . that doesn’t seem like too good an idea anymore.: Tyrsell’s sides heaved with an enormous sigh. :And that is all I can tell you.:
“I think we’d better bring the Healers in on this,” Darian put in, with visions of more crippled children in Errold’s Grove. “How do we know we won’t catch this fever?”
“We don’t, and that is a damned good point,” Kero responded. She rose - but halfway to her feet, was interrupted.
“Captain! Visitors!” One of the Guards entered the cave and saluted Kerowyn smartly. “Two to see you, urgently, Captain!”
“I didn’t send for anyone,” Kero began crossly, as she straightened. “And I’m certainly not expecting anyone.”
“I know you aren’t, Captain Kerowyn,” said a high, young, female voice. “I came here on my own.”
Around the edge of the cave stepped a young woman dressed in Heraldic Trainee Greys, and trailing her was her Companion - who had a distinctly hangdog and guilty look about him. Darian cast a quick glance at Kerowyn’s Sayvil, who was glaring at the new Companion with much the same expression that Kero was using with the Trainee.
Darian knew an incipient explosion when he saw one, and he was quite glad that he wasn’t standing in the footprints of either the pretty young woman or her Companion.
There was something about the girl that was naggingly familiar to Darian, even though he was certain that he had never seen her in his life.
“I also brought my sister,” the girl continued, undaunted. “And since you just now mentioned Healers, I can’t help thinking that my premonition was accurate.”
She beckoned, and around the same edge of the cave, looking nervous and determined at the same time, stepped Keisha Alder.
Keisha hadn’t had a moment to think from the time that Shandi scooped her up until the moment they both intruded on the war council. Much to Keisha’s relief, Darian rose and worked his way over to her, and both of them escaped from the council as quickly as they could. The fierce interrogation that Kero was putting Shandi Alder through was also an extremely uncomfortable and public grilling. No less public - though silent - was the similar set of coals that Shandi’s Companion was being hauled over by Sayvil.
“Your sister must be crazy. I can’t believe she ran away from the Collegium,” Darian said, shaking his head.
Keisha just sighed. “I can’t either - though to give her credit, she didn’t exactly run away.”
Darian gave her a quizzical look. “So what did she do?”
He found a place for them both to sit. Keisha was only too glad to sink down onto a cool stone and stretch her aching legs out. Riding pillion, even on a Companion, was about as uncomfortable as riding a dyheli.
“She bullied them into letting her come back, if you can believe that! She said she had some sort of premonition, and since she obviously wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, they gave in!” Keisha thought incredulously about the Shandi who had left Errold’s Grove, Shandi the peacemaker, Shandi the gentle, and shook her head with disbelief. “I hardly recognized her - ”
“Start from the beginning,” Darian interrupted. “I want to hear this in sequence.”
Keisha took a deep breath, and began at the beginning - just after dawn this morning. “I was in Errold’s Grove. Nightwind told me to spend half my time there since I’m supposed to be the on-station Healer now, and I’m supposed to take care of anything that happens to the volunteers, now that most of the other Healers are here with Kerowyn. I’d just checked the camp at morning call for anyone sick - no one was, but I always check - it was just about dawn. Then one of the sentries reported a Herald coming. We expected Eldan, of course, so I stayed to see what had brought him there. Obviously, we thought something might have happened out here. And out of absolutely nowhere, up comes Shandi, acting as if she had every right to be there and not at the Collegium where she belongs!” She couldn’t keep her indignation to herself; it crept out and colored her last sentence.
Darian cocked his head to one side. “Are you aware of how much you sound like your mother?” he asked dryly.
She flushed. “I suppose I do; well, being someone’s big sister tends to make you feel that way. Anyway, she somehow managed to bluff the lieutenant into thinking she had orders to find Herald-Captain Kerowyn. She found out where you all were, and before anyone could question her about anything, she just scooped me up and kidnapped me! She says she had a premonition that she and I had to be here for some reason, and that was why the Collegium let her go.”
“Do you believe her?” Darian asked.
She hugged her knees to her chest, and rested her chin on them. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “If it was anyone else - but it’s hard to think of Shandi as - as having premonitions I’m supposed to believe in.” She rubbed the side of her head, easing the ache in her temple. “I mean - Shandi, of all people! She never showed any signs of anything like that before!”
“People often don’t, not until they’re Chosen anyway,” Darian reminded her.
“She says her Gift is ForeSight, but that it isn’t properly trained yet, so all she gets is bits and pieces. I just don’t know.” Keisha rubbed her tired eyes, and wished that this had happened to anyone but her.
“Can you think of any other reason why she should come pounding up here?’ Darian asked, reasonably. “And can’t you think of a lot of reasons why she would avoid doing so if she could?”
Keisha had to smile at that. “Well,” she admitted, “now that you mention it. If Mum and Da got word she was here, they’d have a worse fit than they did over my staying. She’d never hear the end of it. And as for the Captain - ” she shuddered. “ - I’d rather die than have to explain something like this to Captain Kero.”
Darian spread his hands. “There you have it. I’d trust that premonition, personally. Everything she told you sounds perfectly logical to me. I don’t think her Companion would have gone along with this if she had been making it up, do you?”
Keisha nodded, slowly, and felt a little better. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”
The only thing is, she said her premonition involved me. I don’t like the sound of that. . . .
Darian interrupted her worrisome thoughts. “Now, would you like to hear what we’ve been finding out, since it seems that you’re going to be involved?”
Keisha nodded, and when Darian was done, she remained silent, thinking everything he’d told her over carefully. “This Summer Fever,” she ventured. “I don’t like the sound of it. It sounds more dangerous than the barbarians.”
“Why?” he asked, puzzled.
“They’ve had a few years to get used to it - I’ve never heard of anything like it down here,” she told him, feeling a little chill in her heart. “If it got loose here, it could go through us like a wildfire.”
“We have Healers,” he objected. “Surely they can do something first.”
“You have to know what you’re up against, how it works, before you can fight it,” she pointed out. “Otherwise it’s like fighting an enemy blindfolded. Sure, you can flail around with a sword and hope you hit something, but you’re more likely to get hit yourself first.”
He winced. “I see your point.”
“That’s not all that bothers me, but it’s the main thing,” she continued, wondering if he would understand how she felt. “I think you aren’t going to like this, but I think we have to help them.”
As he’d described the children with their withered limbs, she’d felt that old familiar tug, that insistent call to do something. The only difference was, now she had the tools to act on that call.
“What do you mean by that?” Darian asked sharply.
“I mean, I’m a Healer now, in everything but the robes. It’s part of the vow. I have to help where there’s need, and you can’t deny that these people need help!” She watched him closely, begging with her eyes for his understanding. “Don’t you see? That’s why Healers are what we are. We don’t take sides, we just help, no matter what!”
She watched strong emotions flit over his expression, watched him fight down an immediate retort and give his anger a little time to cool. “I know it sounds crazy, even disloyal, but you can ask any of the others, and they’ll tell you the same,” she said softly.
“I don’t doubt you,” he said brusquely, “But I think it’s madness.” He smiled crookedly. “Maybe that’s why I’m not a Healer. Still. . . you did say that in order to deal with this sickness, you have to know what it is you’re fighting and how to combat it, right?”
She nodded.
“And I’ve never heard of a fever or a plague that would stay politely in one place or attack only certain people - no matter what some priests would claim. So if you’re going to be able to battle it when it finally decides to jump to our side, I’d rather you did your flailing around on patients that aren’t Tayledras or Valdemaran.” He turned his hands palm-upward and shrugged. “Chauvinistic of me, but there it is.”
“It’s a point,” she agreed, relieved that he had conceded the potential conflict. She already had the germ of an idea in her head, but for it to succeed, she would need him. She stood up. “First things first, though. Let’s go see if Captain Kero left anything of Shandi. I want to know more about this premonition of hers than she told me on the ride.”

Fourteen

They spotted Shandi, sans Companion, walking toward them through the camp as they returned to the cave Keisha was glad that the Herald-Captain hadn’t significantly damaged her sister; in fact, Shandi was remarkably composed for someone who had just faced the redoubtable Kerowyn on the wrong side of a situation.
Nevertheless, she was clearly glad to see Keisha and Danan, and equally glad to be taken off to Darian’s campsite. “Whew!” she said, collapsing on Darian’s bedroll and stretching out flat, both eyes closed. “I’ve faced off against Cap’n Kerowyn with a weapon, and I never wanted to do that again, but getting a dressing-down from her is a hundred times worse!” She opened one eye and looked up at both of them. “Whose bed am I taking up anyway? Yours? You’re Darian, the half-Hawkbrother, I presume?”
“Right on both counts,” Darian said, his mind still clearly elsewhere, but his tone quite cool and unimpressed with Shandi’s casual attitude. “And I presume that the Herald-Captain has informed you just how dangerous this situation is that you’ve casually barged into without so much as a ‘by your leave’?”
Keisha was astonished; she had never heard a young man take that tone with her sister! They usually couldn’t keep themselves from near-servility, but Darian had just done a little dressing-down himself, had come within a hair of sounding angry with her, quite as if she were his little sister and not Keisha’s! There was no doubt that the comment was intended as a rebuke, and Keisha hadn’t ever heard a young man rebuke her sister since Shandi had turned ten!
Shandi sat straight up, also taken aback by Darian’s tone. “She did,” she replied, nettled. “She also gave me leave to remain, on the basis of my premonition and the Collegium’s acceptance of it, as long as I understood I was under her orders, absolutely and without exception or excuses.”
Darian leveled a look at the Trainee that was just as severe as Kerowyn would have wanted. “She means it, and we’ll back it,” he told her flatly. “If you’re ordered out of here, you will go, even if I have to knock you out and tie you onto that Companion of yours. And don’t think you can hide somewhere if you’re ordered out either; you can’t hide from the eyes of our birds or the noses of our kyree, no matter where you go or how cleverly you think you can conceal yourself.”
“I’ve no intention of disobeying orders!” Shandi snapped back, eyes flashing and her temper beginning to show. Keisha stepped in before it turned into a quarrel.
“I’ve got to know more about this premonition,” she said earnestly. “You didn’t give me anything to make any kind of judgment on.”
“I don’t have that much myself,” Shandi replied in irritation, still annoyed with Darian and giving him a dagger-laden glare. “All I got was a few flashes and a feeling - a flash of me, one of you, one of him, though I didn’t know who he was at the time, and a very, very strong feeling that I had to be where the Captain was, so strong that I was halfway to Companion’s Field to get Karles before I came to my senses. That’s it.”
“That’s all?” Darian asked incredulously. “And on that basis the Collegium gave you leave to come to a battle zone? Are they crazed?”
“So far I’ve had a grand total of four days of training in my Gift,” Shandi said tartly. “It’s not exactly under my control, all right? I have to make do with what I get. It was good enough for the Senior Herald at the Collegium.”
“Now why am I so certain that the Senior Herald at the Collegium didn’t even know that we’d contacted the barbarians yet?” Darian shook his head in disbelief, but didn’t challenge her any further, which made Keisha grateful. Shandi didn’t lose her temper often - at least, the Shandi she knew didn’t - but when she did, the results were often spectacular. At the moment, that was one spectacle she’d prefer not to witness.
Darian took a deep breath, closed his eyes a moment (probably counting to ten, or invoking patience), and then opened them again. “You’re probably tired,” he said. “You must have ridden like a madwoman to get here as quickly as you did. Why don’t you get some sleep while I make sure someone gets a billet set up somewhere else for me? A bed’s a bed, and I don’t care where I sleep.”
Shandi heaved a great sigh and lay down again. “Thanks. Sorry to be so sharp - I am pretty tired - ”
She closed her eyes, and didn’t so much fall asleep as pass out; she did it so quickly that Keisha realized she must have gone without sleeping - except in the saddle - for her entire journey. Darian obviously realized it, too; he managed a little smile, and took Keisha by the elbow, leading her silently away through the rows of tents.
“You’re the only one of us that looks like she got any sleep last night,” he observed, when they were out of earshot.
“I probably am,” she replied, noting with concern the deep shadows under his eyes. “That was awfully good of you, to give up your bedroll to her.”
He waved the compliment aside. “It’s just a bedroll, the hertasi can move my things elsewhere, and they will as soon as I - Heyla!” He interrupted himself, as a hertasi poked its snout out of a larger tent. It waited expectantly while he hissed something at it, bobbed its head, and ran off.
“There,” he said with satisfaction. “I’ve got myself a new bunk with Wintersky, and you one with the Healers - which I’d better take you to, so you can all get your heads together over this Summer Fever thing.”
“Thank you,” she replied, feeling more confident than she had since Shandi carried her off this morning. “Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems more important to me than the barbarians fighting with us.”
“And maybe you’re right,” was Darian’s thoughtful reply. “After all, there’s always the tactic of bottling them up in their camp and starving them into submission, but a line of fighters isn’t going to keep a plague inside their pickets. Listen, I hope you weren’t of fended by the way I treated your sister, but - well - ” He scratched his head, then shrugged. “I’m not impressed. She strikes me as used to getting her own way a lot, pretty immature, actually. Honestly, she hasn’t half the brains and good sense you have.”
“She’s probably so tired that half her brains aren’t working,” Keisha pointed out. “Besides, she’s not used to boys who treat her like - like - ”
“Like a brat who’s getting away with something she shouldn’t?” Darian offered, with a half smile. “Like a spoiled village princess who expects fellows to melt just because she looks at them with those sweet, brown doe-eyes? Oh, please!”
Keisha was so surprised by his answer that she simply stared at him for a moment. “Well - she is so very pretty - ”
“Not prettier than you,” Darian said bluntly. “And you have a great deal more than being pretty, if you’ll pardon my saying so. A Hawkbrother could turn a mud-doll into a beauty; we aren’t that impressed by prettiness alone.”
For all his bluntness, he started to blush as he said that, and looked quickly away as she continued to stare at him in further astonishment.
“Right, here’s the Healers’ tent,” he said quickly, waving at the large tent pitched at the end of the path they were on. “You go right on up. The hertasi will have told them you’re coming. I’ll find Wintersky’s billet and get a nap myself, before something else happens.”
Still blushing, he left her and made a sharp turn to the right, as she watched him hurry away with bemusement.
Then she shook herself into sense, and made straight for the Healers’ tent and business. Granted, it was entirely a new and rather delightful feeling to have a young man tell her she was pretty, and blush over her, but this was neither the time nor the place to get moonstruck.
When she got within earshot of the tent, she heard the debate already going on inside; she pushed open the flap, and was greeted immediately.
“Keisha!” Nala called with relief. “Good, we need all the minds on this that we can get! What do you know about this wasting disease?”
The Healers had arranged themselves in a rough circle in the middle of the large infirmary tent - which at the moment had no patients in it. Nala and her apprentices squeezed over on the bench they were using, and Keisha took her place beside them. She detailed everything that Darian had told her, and then added, “Tyrsell the king-stag is the one who had direct contact with the chieftain’s mind; would you like him to come give us everything he got?”
“That would be extremely helpful,” Gentian said thoughtfully, not at all disturbed by the notion of having the dyheli dump a basketload of mental images directly into his mind.
Keisha turned in time to see a hertasi coming into the tent with what must be her bedroll. In Tayledras, she asked it if Tyrsell could be invited to the tent, and why.
“Easily done, Healer,” it answered, with a bow of profoundest respect, and left the bedroll on the tent floor to answer her request personally.
“I believe that we must assume that this illness is both contagious and a grave danger to us,” Nala said, as Keisha turned her attention back to the group. “Remember the description, that it first went through the barbarians like a wildfire? Now we can expect them to have built up some immunity, but we have no such protection at this point.”
Grenthan mopped his brow and the back of his neck with a kerchief. “You surely know what the villagers and even Lord Breon would insist on, if we let it be known that we consider it very dangerous,” Grenthan said reluctantly. “They’d want us to surround the camp and burn them and it down to the ground.”
“That’s unacceptable!” Gentian snapped, rounding on his fellow Healer as if Grenthan were an enemy. “We cannot condone anything of the kind!”
“I don’t advocate that,” Grenthan protested, his hands up as if to ward off a blow. “I’m just telling you what Lord Breon would say!”
“But we have no cure, no treatment,” Nala pointed out. “We don’t even know what we’re facing. Where does the Oath put us? Are we to serve everyone, or the greatest good? Are we to try to save outsiders at the possible expense of unleashing a plague on thousands of our own, innocent people?”
“I don’t think that there is any doubt that we are to serve everyone, friend and enemy alike; the Oath is crystal clear on that point,” Gentian replied stiffly. “I can’t imagine how you could interpret it otherwise.”
“You can’t serve anyone if you’re all dead,” Keisha said slowly, and shook her head. “We don’t even know how this thing spreads. You could all be infected by now; for all we know, Eldan and the rest brought it back with them from their parley, and it’s only a matter of time before we all get it.”
Instantly, their faces all went blank; she waited while they searched within themselves for signs of infection of any kind. It didn’t take very long, they were so used to doing so, and the looks of relief told her that at least that fear was groundless.
“So it isn’t instantly contagious. Still - ” She let the sentence hang in the air, not needing to add, “it could have been.” She let the thought sink in, then continued. “I can’t see how we have the right to expose our own folk just so we can treat these strangers.”
“We won’t get anywhere by not treating it,” Nala said, at last. “The question is, how? From what you told us, these barbarians would welcome us if we just marched straight into their village!”
“And they might equally slit our throats if we couldn’t provide instant cures,” Grenthan countered, fanning himself with his sleeve, as the air inside the tent became close and warm. “Yes, I agree, we must act, but I don’t relish the notion of putting myself so completely at their mercy, which might well be nonexistent. Look, I do agree with the Oath in principle, but I have serious reservations about applying it to a pack of folk who eat their meat raw!”
At that moment, the hertasi returned, with Tyrsell at its side. Keisha quickly explained what she wanted, and the king-stag readily agreed.
:Do brace yourselves, please,; the dyheli said calmly. :You are unused to this, and it will be something of a shock to your minds.:
The experience wasn’t anywhere near as traumatic as getting the Hawkbrother language, but the “lump” of memory-images hit each of them with a palpable impact, much as if they’d been struck by a stone, leaving them reeling for a moment. Keisha managed to stammer thanks; Tyrsell nodded gravely in return and left the tent without a word, giving them all the peace to sort out the jumble of sights and sounds, emotions and visceral sensations that came with the memory fragments.
The three experienced Healers actually sorted things through a lot faster than Keisha would have thought, possibly because they were all used to sorting through the chaos of a battlefield. Of the six Healer Trainees, three felt unwell and had to go lie down, and the other three sat blinking owlishly and a little stunned during the rest of the discussion. Keisha had been ready for the experience, and was the first to recover, waiting for the rest to make what they could of what they’d been given.
“This definitely isn’t anything we’ve seen before,” Grenthan acknowledged. “At a guess, it spreads through direct contact, the way a cold does.”
“I think it might be less contagious than a cold,” Nala added thoughtfully. “Otherwise, everyone would have been struck down when it first appeared. And I think that low temperatures, winter-chill, probably kills it, or at least makes it dormant - after all, these people spend their winters in tents in a chillier climate than we have - did any of you get that memory? Of the way they go from fall to spring without ever once getting out of their fur clothing, not even to couple? They must smell to high heaven, but that might be why they don’t catch the disease in winter. It can’t spread through the frigid air, and there’s nothing I’d call physical contact during the cold moons. It could spread through flea-bite, I suppose. Fleas hibernate, when the cold doesn’t outright kill them.”
“I did get those memories,” Gentian seconded, and shuddered. “The cleanliness of these people leaves a great deal to be desired, at least in winter.”
“Well, given how cold it gets, I can’t see that I blame them,” Grenthan said diplomatically. “It’s also beside the point, which is the question of what we are to do.”
“I’ll tell you what you won’t be doing,” said a wrathful voice from the open tent flap. “You won’t be marching into a barbarian village, giving aid and comfort to plague carriers, not while I’m in command here!”
Kerowyn strode into the center of their circle, and glared at all of them with impartial impatience. “What’s more, if any of you try, I’ll personally have you bound hand and foot and tied to a tree to prevent you from going anywhere! Dear gods, why am I being saddled with a wagonload of idiots? Where is your sense? Where is your loyalty?”
“Our loyalty is to our Oath, as it should be,” shouted Gentian, who had gone red in the face with anger as Kerowyn spoke. “Captain, I might remind you that it was a Healer who stuck to his Oath many years ago who kept you from becoming a cripple!”
“Healers don’t take sides,” Nala seconded, with a little less volume, but no less force, and a glare just as fierce as Kerowyn’s. “That’s the Oath, and a good thing, too!”
“Damn you, people, what about the rest of us?” Kerowyn shouted right back, her eyes so cold with rage that they sent chills down Keisha’s spine. “Just what are we going to do if you all get sick and die, and the barbarians decide to make a fight of it anyway? What are we supposed to do if they decide you aren’t trying hard enough to cure them, and figure to encourage you with a bit of creative torture? Or slit your throats, because you couldn’t help the ones already crippled?”
“What idiot would assume all of us would go into the camp?” Grenthan countered with derision. “Great Lord, since when have Healers ever abandoned a post they’d been assigned to?”
“The same idiot who heard you discussing just that would naturally make that assumption,” Kerowyn snarled right back.
“Whoa!” Keisha shouted, jumping to her feet, and bringing the entire shouting match to a halt. When they all turned to stare at her, she fought down the impulse to run out of the tent, swallowed, and sat down.
“We can’t go into the camp, Herald-Captain,” she said in a more normal tone of voice. “We’d already decided that. We don’t know these people or what they’ll do, we don’t know their language, customs or superstitions, and we have no way of predicting anything they might assume. All we do know is that they have legends of Healers, and as we are aware, legends are difficult things to live up to.”
“Not to mention that not even an idiot puts himself completely into the hands of people who already considered kidnapping and coercion,” Gentian said gruffly. “Cap’n Kero, some of us have been with you for a very long time, and the very last thing we’d do is leave you in the lurch. What we do agree on is that our Oath demands that we try to help these folk, and that the Oath comes first, even before our loyalties. And vow wouldn’t have it any other way. There’ve been plenty of your people who’ve been cared for by the Healers on the side opposite yours, and you know it.”
“The other thing we agree on is that this disease is enough of a danger to Valdemar that we don’t dare ignore it and hope it sticks to the barbarians,” Nala said stiffly. “Whether you like it or not, we can’t leave until we’ve found a treatment, and we can’t do that without treating the barbarians.”
“Even burning the camp and its occupants might not stop it,” Keisha put in, softly but shrewdly. “Since we don’t know how it spreads at all, some of the biting insects might well be carrying it now, and it will be only a matter of time before it spreads to us. We really do have to find a cure, or at least a palliative.”
Kerowyn looked very sour indeed, but conceded their points. “Just promise me that you won’t do anything until after you’ve consulted me,” she added, with a look that told Keisha that if they didn’t agree, she would follow through on the threat to truss them up like dinnertime fowls.
She got that promise - from everyone but Keisha, and Keisha could hardly believe it when she didn’t seem to notice the omission.
“I hope it spreads by fleas,” sighed Nala when Kerowyn had left. “Dear and gracious gods, I hope it spreads by fleas, the way Boil-Plague does. Fleas, we can do something about, but who can stop the air from flowing?”
Keisha got up for a moment and took a quick peek outside the tent. Then she returned, as the others watched her curiously. “I actually have an idea,” she said diffidently. “If you want to hear it.”
“Go right ahead,” Gentian urged. “At the moment, we’re dry.”
“If we could get the barbarians to send one of the sick people out, one of us could go into quarantine with the sick person. That way no one would be at risk except a single Healer.” She swallowed, then continued. “I figured I’m probably the best one to do that; you can’t send an apprentice, and you know that. You all say I have a really strong Gift, you all agree that I’m as good as any of you with herbs and medicines. I’m the obvious choice because I’m the easiest one to replace.”
That started another argument entirely, with all three of them coming up with whatever they could think of to deter her from any such idea. The strongest argument against her plan was that she didn’t have experience in using her Gift, especially not against something deadly. “Oh, I agree that you’ve done very well so far,” Gentian half-scolded, “but that was against tiny infections, colds, belly-aches! Not against a fatal illness, not against some thing no one has ever seen before!”
Keisha shrugged, pretending indifference. “Diseases work the same whether they’re mild or serious,” she pointed out. “A tiny infection and a rotting limb are the same. It’s just a matter of degree.”
“The idea does have merit, though,” Nala said, after keeping her own counsel while the others argued. “It would keep infection from spreading to the rest, and it would keep the Healer out of the hands of the barbarians. I’ d be willing to try treatment on that basis. We’ve survived plenty of plagues before this; what’s one more?”
“And just how are we going to get a volunteer barbarian?” Grenthan asked shrewdly.
“We could ask?” Keisha suggested timidly.
No one laughed at her, although she more than half expected them to.
“Well, the barbarians have obliged me by falling in with my second choice of tactics,” Kerowyn sighed, as Darian belatedly scrambled into his place in the council-circle, feeling much better for a good, long sleep. “Your Hawkbrother scouts reported that they were building up walls around their camp and fortifying them; I sent a deputation out to them to see what they’d do. They didn’t meet my people with arrows, but they also didn’t show so much as the tips of their noses.”
“Grand,” groaned Lord Breon. “We’ve frightened them, and now they aren’t going to move one way or the other.”
“Not without a visitation from their miraculous Ghost Cat, is my guess,” Kerowyn agreed, and ran her hand along the top of her hair. She cast a speculative eye at Firesong, who shook his head.
“Don’t evsn start on what you’re thinking,” he warned. “I wouldn’t create a Ghost Cat illusion for anyone under circumstances like this. Firstly, I don’t know how it’s expected to behave, and secondly, what if it is an Avatar? Are you willing to risk the anger of a god? I’m not! Not even one who’s working outside his own lands!”
“It was a thought,” she replied wistfully.
“A bad one,” he countered, leaving no room for further argument. “Why don’t you just set up a siege and hold them in place until they give up and surrender?”
“They do have to eat, so they are going to come out at some point, but a siege under these conditions is far from ideal,” she responded. “It certainly wasn’t what I had in mind. And only their gods know what they’re planning in there; it could be anything. Remember, only a third of our troops have seen combat. All of theirs have.”
There’s that sickness of theirs, too; what if part of their plan is to somehow spread it to us ? What are we going to do then? Darian was worried, and he wasn’t the only one, for he heard Lord Breon confide to Eldan in a whisper, “I wish I could just pour oil on that entire nest of vipers and burn them out.”
“Perhaps we’re pushing them too hard,” Eldan said aloud, in reasoned, measured tones. “After all, these people have been through a very great shock in meeting us; they’ve had their lives threatened, and they’ve seen that we have animal spirits of our own. We meant to intimidate them; we may actually have intimidated them so completely that they feel they are in a corner. What we should do, I think, is to give them time. We need to cultivate patience in dealing with them. In fact, I think we ought to pull back all our visible troops, and leave only the birds as sentries.” He smiled thinly. “They’ve seen that we have birds who might well be totemic spirits with us; the birds standing sentry alone should be enough, because now they will never know when a bird is one of ours or just a simple forest creature.”
Kerowyn shot him a strange glance, as if she hadn’t expected that from him, began to open her mouth, then closed it again, looking very thoughtful. “That’s got some merit,” she said, after a moment. “What do the rest of you think?”
Darian kept his mouth shut; he had an idea of his own, and he wasn’t going to broach it. What he didn’t reveal, he couldn’t be forbidden to undertake.
“Personally, I think that’s reasonable,” Starfall spoke first. “It’s not as if we’re under an arbitrary deadline to get this solved. We can afford to be patient with them.”
“If they bottle themselves up, their own Summer Fever may solve the problem for us,” Snowfire added.
“Harsh,” Starfall said, “but true.”
“Maybe you aren’t under a deadline, but I’ve got Harvesting coming up, and my lady has a wedding planned. She’s going to take it poorly if it’s got to be delayed because we’re playing nursemaid to a lot of greasy, fur-wearing barbarians,” Lord Breon muttered, but he made no further objections.
“They’ve come out of a terrifying situation, and just when they thought themselves safer, were met by more frightening people.” Eldan spoke as if he had thought this over already. “If we meet them with mercy, who knows how they will react? They could become the best allies Valdemar has ever had! Our ancestors were refugees, just as they are - and who knows, maybe our own forefathers were closer to being greasy fur-wearing barbarians than to us, their descendants.” He cast a glance at Lord Breon who had the grace to look a little ashamed. “We have never refused a refugee because he came with a burden of powerful enemies, and even though the enemy this time is a disease, I don’t see why that should change our attitude.”
“Give them at least three or four days,” Firesong urged. “That’s my counsel. Who knows, but maybe they’ve bottled themselves up to invoke this Cat Spirit of theirs, and if it is the Avatar of any reasonable deity, it should tell them to be sensible and go along with us!”
“Oh, surely!” Kerowyn replied, with more than a touch of sarcasm. “I don’t know how many gods you’ve had to deal with in your time, but being sensible has not been on the agenda of many of the ones I’ve come across.”
“Perhaps not sensible according to your needs and desires, Captain,” Snowfire said with absolute politeness. “But I’m certain it was sensible to those who worshiped those gods - always providing, of course, that the ones interpreting the gods’ will were honest. Case in point - Karse before Solaris.”
“Huh. Good point.” She sat down and looked all around the circle. “So, pull back and patience it is. Anybody have any objections?”
Clearly there were none that anyone thought worth mentioning, so Kerowyn declared the meeting at an end, and she and Snowfire left to meet with their respective troops and scouts and give them their new orders.
The debate in the Healers’ tent had gone on for most of the day, and showed no signs of stopping. Nightwind had joined them, as the only representative of the Hawkbrothers, and she had concurred with the consensus that something would have to be done about the Summer Fever and quickly, before it crossed to the allies.
“It’s summer now,” Keisha pointed out. “What if another outbreak starts among them? What do we do then?”
“We’d have to impose some sort of quarantine, I suppose,” began Grenthan.
“That could be difficult if we’re in the middle of armed conflict with them,” Nightwind said dryly. “Just how would we enforce it? Insist that only healthy people be allowed on the battlefield? Hold inspections for fever and sneezes before anyone can fight?”
Keisha choked back an involuntary laugh at the absurd image that conjured up; no one else seemed to find it funny, except perhaps Nightwind herself.
“I wonder - ” she started to say, then stopped.
“What?” asked Gentian, who had become the default leader at this point.
“Well, I just wonder why these northerners don’t have any real Healers of their own?” she continued, flushing, thinking that it was probably a stupid question. “I mean, the shaman seems to have done herb-Healing and that sort of thing, but no one uses the Gift. . . .”
Apparently no one else thought it was a stupid question, because a wary silence descended on the group. Finally Nala cleared her throat uneasily.
“In Karse, before Solaris, they used to test children for the Gift of Healing and sacrifice them if they were too old or too strong-willed to be indoctrinated into the priesthood,” she said slowly. “You don’t suppose that these barbarians do the same thing, do you?”
“In Karse they also sacrificed children with Mindspeech, on the grounds that it was a mark of demons,” Gentian reminded her. “But the use of Mindspeech didn’t frighten these people. And I have very clear images from Tyrsell’s gleanings that the shamans have never used the Healing Gift in the way we do. I suspect that Healing is a Gift they either don’t possess or don’t recognize.”
“If they thought it was an evil thing, they wouldn’t be looking for Healers,” Nightwind added. “No, I don’t think this is a case of doing away with children showing the Gift. Anyone with an untrained, unused Gift of Healing would just go off by himself to get away from the things he started to pick up from everyone else, and that’s hardly unusual behavior among these folk. From what I’ve gleaned, people split off from their clans all the time, either because of feuds, or jealous protection of a good hunting range, or basic dislike of others in the clan.”
One of the apprentices cleared his throat; this was a young man Keisha would have picked for a scholar, not a Healer. “It makes more sense in a society like theirs for people who don’t fit to go off on their own. They’ll never find a mate, and dissension weakens the group.”
A scholar’s reasoning if ever I heard it, but he’s right.
“Still - wouldn’t at least a few of them learn what the
Gift meant?” Nala asked. “I’ve known plenty of self-trained Healers.”
“But those self-trained Healers knew not only that there was such a thing in the first place, but what it meant and what signs to recognize it by,” Nightwind replied. “Not only that, but think of what their lives are like, particularly now! With that much pain and illness all around them, children with the Gift might well shut themselves down completely just out of instinctive self-defense. They’d probably do so long before any other real signs manifested. It’s happened that way before, and if you don’t know that the bad feelings you are getting are coming from other people or that they mean that you can actually help those other people, you’d welcome anything that made them go away.”
“There are times when I’d welcome it now,” Nala put in wryly.
At that point, Darian arrived, with a message that made all of their debate moot, at least for a few days. “May I interrupt you?” he asked, poking his head inside the tent, and bringing with him a breath of cooler air.
“Be my guest,” Gentian responded. “You aren’t interrupting anything that hasn’t been talked to death by now. We’re arguing in circles.”
“The barbarians have shut themselves up in their camp, and the war council has agreed to pull back and let them settle for a couple of days anyway.” He joined the circle, squeezing in next to Keisha, who obligingly moved over for him. “The thought is that maybe we were a bit too good at giving them a scare, and that they may need some time to stew things over and figure out that we don’t want to wipe them out. Well, some of us don’t. Anyway, no one is going to do anything for the next day or two, or even three. Thought you’d want to know.”
“That gives us some breathing room,” Gentian said with obvious relief, then looked around the circle. “Go think about these things, and we’ll talk them over tomorrow. Maybe a little sleep will give us a new direction.”
Keisha already had a direction in mind, but she was going to need Darian’s help to make her plan work. She waited while the others went their separate ways, then said, before Darian could leave, “I’d like to get your opinion on something. May I borrow a little of your time?”
“Of course!” he agreed, eagerly enough to give her a little thrill of pleasure. “Let’s collect some dinner, and we can talk while we eat.”
At that point she realized that the chava and vegetables that had been passed around the Healers’ conference had worn off a very long time ago, and she was only too happy to follow his lead.
He seemed to want real privacy as much as she did, for he found a place near the brook that supplied water for the camp, practically on top of a set of fist- and head-sized water-rounded rocks that broke up the flow, where the babbling waters effectively masked low-voiced speech. “I have an odd feeling that our minds are running along the same lines,” he said, managing to get his dinner eaten while avoiding talking with his mouth full. “So, what did you have in mind?”
She stared at the water for a moment, phrasing her plan in her mind. “I think we ought to try and catch a barbarian,” she replied. “First of all, we need to be able to talk to them in their own language. We can’t do anything by just going through Tyrsell, not really. Maybe they’ve experienced Mindspeech before, but talking to them in their own language would make them feel more comfortable.”
“You are either reading my mind, or we’re reasoning along exactly the same lines!” he exclaimed, with muted surprise. “And you are absolutely right, that’s precisely what we need to do. I had it in mind that we weren’t going to really learn what’s going on in their camp unless our watchers knew their tongue. But you have something more in mind than that, don’t you?”
“We need to find out directly whether or not this Summer Fever is in their camp, and just what they expect a Valdemaran Healer to be able to do about it,” she told him firmly. “At that point, we’ll have a basis for negotiations, don’t you think?”
“Negotiations or not, we do need to know if there’s anyone that can spread the Fever to us, absolutely.” He toyed with a bit of bread, his expression so opaque that Keisha couldn’t read it.
“We aren’t going to get any of that from the leaders; they probably have some stupid code about fighting honor, and they’ll certainly have their status tied up in warfare. We’ll have to catch someone ordinary, someone who isn’t a fighter, who’d be perfectly happy if there wasn’t a battle, or at least wouldn’t be looking to start a fight,” she continued. “An old man, or a woman, perhaps.”
“Or a child.” He mulled that over, while she held her breath, hoping that his answer would be the same as hers. “Whatever, it should be someone who’ll sneak out of the camp alone, so with you, me, Kel, and Tyrsell at most, we can overpower him long enough for Tyrsell to get the language.”
“Exactly!” She beamed at him. “I guessed you’d be clever enough to see that - and willing to have me along to help!”
“Willing? Havens, I can’t see trying this without you. Kel can subdue someone, but we’re going to have to immobilize our man, and Kel’s claws aren’t dexterous enough for that.” He grinned back. “Now this is just what I meant about you having good sense, with courage to match it!”
She flushed and looked down at her stew bowl, eating very rapidly while she tried to subdue her blushes.
“When do you want to try this?” she asked. “And - I know you’re not enamored of her, but I think we ought to bring Shandi in on this, too. She’s very clever, and she’s another set of hands.”
“What about that Companion of hers?” he replied, skeptically. “I’m sure she wouldn’t give us away, but what’s to stop him from tattling to Kerowyn’s Sayvil?”
She covered her mouth with her hand, embarrassed at her own stupidity. It was just so alien to think of Shandi with a Companion! “Oh, I completely forgot about him - No, you’re right. We shouldn’t bring her into this. Karles would have to tattle to Sayvil, especially after the way that Sayvil dressed him down. And what Sayvil knows, Kerowyn will soon find out. Companions are pretty bad about keeping any secrets but their own.”
“Well, as to when - we can try tonight, have Kuari keep a watch on the camp and let us know if anyone from the women’s fire sneaks out.” He scratched his head, thinking. “My guess is, the women will probably try to get out under cover of darkness to fetch water, and some of the older children might have some snares out in the forest they’ll want to check. With our people withdrawing, they aren’t going to be quite as willing to do without fresh food and water when there’s no apparent danger. I know I was perfectly capable of running snares when I was only seven or eight; I can’t see why they wouldn’t be able to. During a siege, every little bit of food is valuable, and a boy might well get manhood status by daring to go outside the palisade to bring in rabbits.”
She considered that; although she didn’t like the idea of trying to run about in the dark, she could see that this would offer the best opportunity. “We’ll have to catch our quarry far enough away from the barbarian camp that help won’t be able to come,” she said cautiously. “It’ll have to be so far that even if our prey raises a fuss, she won’t be heard, for there’s no point in taking the chance that someone would mount a rescue. It could get touchy when someone vanishes out in the forest, you know.”
“With any luck, the barbarians will think that a forest monster caught her,” Darian replied, with just a touch of callousness. Then he looked faintly apologetic at his own attitude. “Oh, I know that sounds bad - it’s just that I still can’t help but think back, and want some kind of revenge.”
She nodded, fully able to understand his feelings. “Revenge doesn’t get you anything productive, though. And it tends to breed more of the same.”
“Yes,” he sighed. “You know, sometimes it’s an awful lot of trouble to be a civilized, reasonable, passably good person.”
She thought back on all the times when she’d been tempted herself to just lash out at the world - the things she could have inflicted on poor, stupid Piel, for instance - and nodded. “I know,” she replied, with profound understanding. “Believe me, I know.”
“If we’re going to keep doing this, we’ve got to get a kyree on our side,” Keisha whispered to Darian, as they crept, slowly and with many pauses for Darian to check with Kuari, through the undergrowth near the barbarian camp. She had made it very clear to him that she had no intention of climbing through the trees, and with some reluctance, he agreed that she was probably justified in refusing. She didn’t have the skills, the practice, or even Kuari to lend her his sight; she’d be going blindly, depending on Darian, and hoping she didn’t make a fatal false step. The tree route would be extremely difficult by daylight, but impossible for her at night. No matter how much she trusted Darian’s competence, she didn’t trust it that much.
Kel was with Kuari in the trees above, Tyrsell trailing along with them below. And thanks be to all the gods, Shandi is still sleeping like a bag of rocks, or she ‘d have found out what we were going to do, I just know it.
Keisha had thought she was used to moving through the woods, but it was a different proposition in this thick, damp darkness. Sudden noises startled her, twigs caught at her clothing and her hair, and she couldn’t seem to go three steps without making noises that sounded very loud to her. Darian was able to slip through the undergrowth as easily and noiselessly as a bit of mist; by contrast, she blundered through everything in her path like a blind calf.
Nervous sweat plastered her hair to her scalp and her shirt to her back, and it was a tremendous relief when Darian’s hand on her wrist signaled a halt, and they crouched in the shelter of some bushes. “Kuari says there’s someone sneaking out of the camp right now,” he whispered. “It’s not a warrior, so this might just be our best chance at getting what we need. It looks as if he’s coming this way, so we’ll just stay where we are and let Kel ambush him.”
He? Well, as long as it isn’t a fighter, it should still be all right. We should still be able to handle him if Kel takes him down.
She nodded, hardly able to believe their luck. She’d assumed that they’d have to spend many nights like this - that this one was probably going to be nothing more than a rehearsal for an opportunity to come. But she reminded herself not to count on anything, and suppressed the nervous excitement that made her hands tremble and stomach clench. They didn’t have a captive yet.
“I don’t believe this - ” Darian whispered a moment later. “He’s still coming straight for us!” He paused, and puzzlement crept into his voice. “He’s following something. Kuari can’t quite see it, but there is something there. Maybe a pet escaped and he’s trying to catch it?” “A hunting dog, more like, too valuable to get away,” Keisha suggested. But out of nowhere came a strange shiver of premonition, a certainty that of all things, a dog was definitely not what was out there.
But Darian seemed satisfied with that explanation - or if he wasn’t, he didn’t say anything to her. “If it brings him this way, it’s fine with me,” he said fervently. “He’s already too far from their camp for anyone to hear if he yells; a bit more, and he’ll be so far out that the bondbirds watching the camp won’t notice anything either.”
“Even better!” That was something that had worried them both, that they’d give their plan away the instant Kel made his capture, and they’d be in trouble with their own side before they got a chance to see their plan through.
“In fact,” he added, with growing excitement, “it looks like Kel is going to be able to bring him down practically at our feet!”
Try as she might, there was nothing to really see in these dark woods except variations in the degree of darkness. She already knew that she could peer out there until she got a headache, and still see nothing. As time crawled as slowly as the ant making its way up her leg, Keisha swatted at insects and tried to be as quiet as possible while doing so, straining her ears for any sound that might signal the approach of this stranger. But when such a sign came, it wasn’t a sound but, much to her astonishment, a sight.
Out beneath the trees, out on the edge of vision, she saw light. Something out there moved lithely from bit of cover to bit of cover; something very large, and very pale, shimmering with a ghostly iridescence so faint that for a while she was half certain that the effect was nothing more than her own imagination or eyestrain. The only reason she noticed it in the first place was its movement. It certainly wasn’t human, nor was it a dog, or any other beast Keisha recognized. She didn’t get a good look at it; either it was adept at hiding itself, or it changed shape from moment to moment.
Was this what their quarry was stalking? If so, they owed it a debt. . . . 
Just when it seemed that the creature was getting near enough that she’d be able to identify it, it faded into a wall of shadow, and vanished completely, while the hair on the back of her neck stood up in atavistic alarm.
But it had been visible long enough for the young barbarian following to get exactly where Kelvren wanted him.
From somewhere up above came a blood-curdling screech; the slight shadow making his way carefully through the undergrowth in the wake of the ghostly light froze, still balanced on one foot. Then he made a break for it, but it was too late.
Everyone had told Keisha that seeing Kelvren make an attack was one of the most thrilling spectacles imaginable. It was too bad that it was far too dark for her to see anything except a pair of shadow-wings for a fraction of a second, followed by a tremendous crash in the undergrowth.
“I have him!” Kel crowed happily, over the sound of hysterical screams. “Now come and tie him up!”
Darian conjured a mage-light in one hand, and stared into the sullen eyes of their captive. He looked to be just around Darian’s own age, perhaps a little younger. He was angry, frightened, and Darian would not have given a copper bit for their lives if he got a weapon in his hands.
Physically, he was a little shorter than Darian, with weathered, scratched skin that would be pale beneath his tan, and a shock of unwashed, tangled black hair. His eyes were as black as his hair, and his teeth, clenched in a grimace, had the canines filed to points. They’d tied his hands behind him, and his feet together, and sat him up against a tree trunk while they moved on to the next part of the plan.
He wasn’t going to cooperate in any way whatsoever, not that Darian cared. He doesn’t have to be cooperative in order for Tyrsell to get his language. Darian looked up at Tyrsell, who had watched the entire proceedings with intense interest. “Are you ready?”
:I am. I rather doubt that he is, however.: The dyheli snorted.:And you, Healer, are you ready?:
“As much as I can be.” Poor Keisha looked horribly nervous; this must have been so foreign to her, even though she had already undergone the process once.
“I know it’s no help to say this, but if you can relax, this should be relatively easy for you,” he told her with as comforting a smile as he could manage. “The first time is always the hardest; you’re used to it now, and you’ve had lots of practice in Mind-Gifts. It’s generally the fact that you’re resisting something so entirely new that you instinctively fear it that gives you the worst headache.”
She blinked at him as if that hadn’t occurred to her. “Oh,” was all she said, but as the hostile eyes of their prisoner went from him to her and back again, she visibly relaxed.
:Well done,: Tyrsell said with approval, and then they were both lying flat on their backs, staring up at branches and leaves reflecting the mage-light, as Kel and Tyrsell watched them with interest. Darian didn’t have more than a touch of headache this time; he hoped Keisha had fared as well.
Her first words seemed to indicate that she had. “Forty-one words for snow?” Keisha exclaimed in disbelief. “Why would anyone need all those words for different kinds of snow? Snow is snow!”
“All I care about is the words for ‘what the hell do you people think you’re doing here?’ “ Darian replied as he sat up, pleased to discover that he still had no more than a vague ache behind his forehead to show for this latest language acquisition.
The young man had not fared so well; he was still out cold.
:I took the liberty of giving him Tayledras, but not Valdemaran,: Tyrsell informed them loftily. :That way he will understand some of the negotiators and can act as a translator, but you will still have a language he does not know so that you can speak freely before him. Besides, it was a useful way to keep him from getting into mischief until you awoke.: The king-stag wrinkled his nostrils with his head high, testing the air. :If you have no further need of me, I will be off.:
“No further need, but we couldn’t be doing this without you. Thank you, Tyrsell,” Darian replied with feeling. :You are most welcome. I hope that your plan succeeds.: Tyrsell slipped away into the darkness, leaving them alone with the young barbarian who was just waking.
“What did you do to me?” he demanded angrily, his face contorting with the pain of his headache. “Is this some demon-born torture you’ve worked on me?”
“No,” Keisha said, “it only feels like one.” As the young man’s eyes widened to hear her speak his own language, she continued. “Our magics enable us to take what we wish from your mind, and it seemed useful to have command of your tongue. So, as you can see, there is nothing that you can keep secret from us, but taking your knowledge exacts a toll in pain from you and we would spare you that; you can suffer more of this, or you can answer our questions. The choice is yours.”
“Personally, I’d answer her,” Darian added sternly. “Or you’re likely to wish someone would kill you to be rid of the pain in your head. The more we take, the worse it will get.”
His face paled, and he appeared to wilt - and without that sullen, defiant expression, he looked several years younger than Darian.
“What do you want to know?” he asked, defeat written large in his expression.
“Your name, first,” Keisha said. “Hywel, son of Pedren, son of Hothgar the Ugly, son of - ” he began, obviously quite prepared to recite a lineage back to the beginning of his tribe.
“That’s enough!” Keisha interrupted, stopping him. “Hywel will do.”
“So, Hywel, why have your people fortified their camp?” Darian asked, keeping his stern expression. “We offered to treat with your people, but they are rejecting our offers with apparent hostility.”
“Because we are not fools!” the youngster retorted. “You threaten us, you come upon us with magic and warriors. Are we to simply lie down and allow you to slaughter us? Why are you so hostile to us? We had heard that the peoples of the south were hospitable and welcomed strangers!”
“You mean ’soft,’ don’t you?” Darian asked cynically, and the young man flushed, then paled. “Well, you’ve found out differently. We’ve seen your kind; we know what to expect from you. Four years ago, one of your clan war parties came down here, looting and killing, making slaves and worse out of my folk, ruining what they didn’t steal! Why shouldn’t we meet you with fighters and magic? We should have met you with fire and the sword for what you did the last time!”
He started to warm to his subject, but the young man interrupted him, with a curious look on his face. “Why do you say it was my people who did this to yours?”
“You’re from the north,” Darian replied stubbornly, anger burning in the pit of his stomach. “You look the same, barring a few decorations.”
“There are many Clans and tribes in the north, and most of them look the same to an outsider,” Hywel retorted, eyes flashing. “Nevertheless, they are not all the same. My people have done nothing to yours. It was not my people who put yours to the sword. My people,” he added proudly, “do not trade in, keep, or make slaves. Our fighters do not make up war parties to loot the wealth of others. I do not know which of the marauding tribes brought harm to you, but we are not them.”
That simple statement brought Darian to a halt; it had never occurred to him that the tribes of the north could be as different as, say, Valdemar and Karse.
“My Clan is Ghost Cat,” Hywel continued, with such pride that Darian was surprised. “And we are very like our totem. We are solitary hunters, we have our own herds. Our fighters are not thieves - they serve and protect the Clan from those who would steal our wealth. We prefer being unseen, like the Cat. None fight more bravely when we must,” he continued with bravado, “But we do not seek conflict. We walk by ourselves, seek our own path, and all places are alike to us.” He tilted his head to one side, looking at Darian curiously. “What totem did your enemies follow?”
“A bear,” Darian replied, wondering how much of Hy-wel’s speech to believe. “And the shaman bore the sign of the eclipse.”
Hywel’s eyes nearly popped with surprise. “And you drove them off? Indeed, you are either lucky beyond belief or god-touched! That is Blood Bear, and they live for battle; when they can find no enemy, they fight among themselves! Most Clans avoid them at all cost; they have even violated Midsummer Truce in one of their rages!” He dropped his voice to a whisper and looked anxiously from side to side. “Some of their warriors gained the aspect of the Great Bear itself, by venturing into the Forbidden Places with their shaman. This I know, for I saw some of the Bear Warriors, when I was still at the women’s fire. It is said that they are the ones who brought the Summer Fever out of the Forbidden Places, which they dared to enter in their madness and their search for further unnatural powers and monstrous servants.”
That seemed to clinch it; the entire speech rang of the truth, for Darian hadn’t mentioned the half-bear warriors, or the lizardlike creature that had served as one of the leaders. Further, the youngster could not possibly know that they knew about Summer Fever and how it began. That brought Darian to a momentary standstill, at a loss for what to ask next, his anger running out of him.
Keisha, however, was fully prepared to take over.
“What brought you out here in the darkness?” she asked sternly. “Why were you skulking about like one who would do ill? Were you planning to steal from us?”
“No!” Hywel said indignantly. “We are Ghost Cat, not thieves! I would not soil my honor by theft!”
“But if your people had closed themselves into their camp, why were you outside the walls, and at night?” Keisha persisted. “Did you mean to spy upon us?”
He stared at her, stubbornly, but with fear at the back of his eyes.
“I can, and will, take the knowledge from you,” she threatened. “Do you give it to me freely, or would you care to have your pain redoubled and have me gain it regardless?”
He closed his eyes, and whispered miserably, “For my brother. I came for my brother. He has the Summer Fever, and I prayed to our gods to send me a sign, to send me a guide to find one of the Wise Ones who can cure all ills. The fever has taken two of my brothers already, and I think to lose Jendey would kill our mother. I prayed and fasted, and tonight, the Ghost Cat that has led us for so long appeared to me, and led me - here - ”
Darian felt chill mixed with awe - for there had been that strange, ghostly shape leading the boy, and it had vanished utterly just before they caught him.
And what if this is the handof their god, leading him to us because of Keisha ?
He exchanged glances with Keisha, and she changed to Valdemaran. “This is a little too spooky,” she said, shaken. “I saw him following - something. Kuari saw it, too, didn’t he?”
“I know. I guess you saw what I saw?” At her nod, he shivered. “Now what?”
“If a bout of fever has started in the camp, the odds are that it’s going to cross over to us,” she replied. “But - this might be what I was hoping for. Earlier today I suggested to the Healers that if we could get a single victim outside the camp, we might be able to find a treatment without being under threat ourselves.” She shrugged. “What do you say about letting him bring his brother out, and letting me take a chance with him? I wouldn’t be in their power, and he wouldn’t dare hurt me, not after what we’ve done to him.”
“We could just go back and let the Healers make sure we haven’t caught it - ” But that would be throwing this gift back in the face of the god, who clearly intended that he and Keisha should do something. He didn’t think that would be a very politic move at this point.
“Besides,” Keisha continued, with a grimace, “There’re two more things going for this idea. First of all, this is a child we’re talking about; not even Lord Breon would object to helping a child. Secondly, we obviously have to decide right now, and we can’t afford to wait around to ask for permission. Hywel isn’t going to have a lot of time to sneak in, get his brother, and sneak back out again - and this may well be the last time he can get out.” The grimace turned into a crooked smile. “It’s easier to beg forgiveness than get permission, so I think we ought to figure on begging forgiveness.”
“You’re sure you want to go through with this?” Darian asked dubiously, trying to think of good reasons to veto the notion, but fairly sure that anything he could think of, she’d have a counter for.
She sighed. “I don’t want to, but I have to. I can’t explain it any other way, except to say that this is something that I have responsibility to handle. I was given the Healer’s Gift; it’s my duty to use it.”
But he already understood; hadn’t he said essentially the same thing to Firesong?
He drew his knife, and Hywel tried to shrink back, clearly expecting that he was about to be murdered. But when Darian slit his bonds instead and stood up, he remained seated, staring up at Darian and rubbing his wrists.
“Go!” Darian snapped, gesturing with his knife. “If you want a Wise One for your brother, go now and bring him back here - just you and him, and no one else! We have a hundred eyes in the night, and if you bring anyone else, we will not be here, and your brother will die.”
Hywel’s expression changed, from fearful to hopeful and back again. “Is this true?” he breathed, “Do you mean this?”
“Do you believe in the guidance of your Ghost Cat?” Keisha asked softly. “I am a Wise One.”
That was enough to decide him. He sprang to his feet. “You will never regret this!” he cried. “Never! I will serve you all my days, and my spirit will defend your children and your children’s children after I am ashes!”
With that, he turned and ran off into the dark, running as surely as if his feet had eyes, and the eyes in his head were those of an owl.
Darian looked askance at Keisha. “Did we do the right thing?” he asked, suddenly unsure.
“Oh, yes,” she replied, staring into the darkness after Hywel. “We did the only thing we could all live with.”

Fifteen

“I have an idea,” Kelvren said, a few moments after Hywel had vanished into the darkness. “I hearrr the strream not farrr frrom herrre. Go therre, and wait forrr my rrrreturrn.”
He took to the air, leaving the two of them alone. Da-rian listened for a moment, then moved off to the right, the mage-light bobbing along over his head. Keisha followed him, and within a few moments, heard the sound of the stream herself.
Darian brought them to a spot on the banks of the stream, a larger version of the freshet beside their camp, which tumbled noisily over flat rocks in a series of small waterfalls. Here they found a place where moss made a thick, soft carpet beneath their feet, kept well-nourished by the spray from the stream. Keisha sat down with a sigh, and Darian did the same. “Are you sure you’re up to this?” he asked, worried for her sake. “This isn’t anything like you’ve done before.”
She licked her lips, and stared off into the darkness for a moment, wearing an expression that suggested she was testing her own resolve. “I know. And I’m not sure. But the rest of you can’t do without Nightwind, Gentian, Grenthan, and Nala, and the apprentices aren’t even as far along as I was two years ago. I thought that learning to use my Gift was going to be hard, and it was at first, but only at first. It was a lot like riding; once I knew what to do and what it felt like to do it right, it was just a matter of exercising those muscles until they were strong and didn’t hurt anymore - and I’ve been doing that a lot, as much as I could stand. Plus, I can talk to Jendey, and it’s going to be scary enough for him to be handled by a stranger. It would be worse if they couldn’t even speak to him. If not me, who else?” She made a face, as she thought of the endless wrangling in the Healers’ tent earlier that day. “Besides, the others would want to debate this idea for hours, and all the time this little boy would be getting sicker. I need to stop this fever as early as possible.”
Darian rubbed his tired eyes. “I wish there were some other way, but I can’t think of anything.”
“Neither can I.” She cocked her head to the side, listening intently, as she heard the sound of labored wing beats. “Is that Kel?”
It was, and he carried a clumsily wrapped bundle. “I have prrrovisionsss, a tent, and yourrr herrrb-bag, Keisssha,” he said smugly, once he was down on the ground. “Alssso, bedrrrollsss. You can make a little Healerrr’sss tent might herrre, and bessst of all, no humansss will know that thessse thingssss arrre misssing until you tell them, Darrrian.”
“How?” Darian asked, staring at the bundle. “How did you manage to get all that?”
Kel looked even more smug, if that was possible. “I have my waysss.”
Keisha hugged his neck, much to his pleasure, before seizing the bundle. Darian helped her untie it and get the tent and camp set up. It was a very small tent, barely big enough for two people, but if the weather turned it would keep Keisha and her patient dry and sheltered. It wasn’t long before they had everything set up, with a tiny camp-fire to keep the mage-light company, and there was nothing more to do but sit and wait for Hywel’s return.
“I wish I’d brought handiwork,” Keisha sighed, fidgeting with her medicine-bag, pulling things out, looking at them, and putting them back in again. “Even mending. Something to keep my hands busy.”
“You could ssscrratch my crrresst,” Kel suggested brightly. “It isss verrry lucky to ssscrrratch a grrryphon’sss crrresst.”
“Is that true? We’re going to need plenty of luck,” Keisha replied, as Kel stretched out his head in her direction.
“It isss well known,” Kel assured her, as Darian kept back a laugh at Kelvren’s bare-faced ploy to get a scratch. “A long and trrreasssurrrred trrradition.” Kel’s eyes glazed with pleasure as Keisha’s dexterous fingers rubbed the sensitive skin under his feathers. “Ahhhh,” the gryphon sighed. “Don’t you feel luckierrr alrrrready?”
“We’re going to have a chance to test that tradition,” Darian said, jumping to his feet as Kuari alerted him. “Here comes Hywel with the boy.”
Boy? Closer to a toddler, rather. When Hywel ran up to them, panting with exertion, the little one he carried in his arms could not have been more than five or six years old at the most. Keisha waved Darian away and took the fur-wrapped burden from Hywel herself.
“Don’t come near us,” she warned, before Darian could move to help her. “There’s no point in two of us being exposed.” She laid the boy down on one of the bedrolls. “How long has he been sick?” she asked Hywel.
“A day, no more.” He stroked his brother’s damp forehead with surprising tenderness. “You see, already he is lost in fever, and that is not good. It is those whom the fever takes hard and early - who - die - ” The last three words came out sounding strangled, as Hywel choked back what could have been a sob. He rubbed his eyes fiercely, as Darian stood well off, feeling distinctly awkward and useless.
“Hywel, you stay with me; all I need is an extra pair of hands, and if Jendey wakes up, he’ll be easier with you here.” She looked up from the boy, and shrugged. “You and Kel might as well go back and tell them what I’ve done. I’m sorry to have to leave you that unpleasant chore, but you can always tell them that I did it before you had any idea what I was planning.”
“Oh, and try to lie to Firesong and Starfall? Digging a well with my teeth would be easier, and a lot less painful.” He smiled crookedly. “No, we’re in this together, and I’d better get back and get it over with.”
He wanted to ask if she was going to be all right and knew it was a stupid question. “Remember all ihat luck you just got,” he said instead, feeling horribly helpless.
“I will,” she said, as she put the child down on one of the bedrolls, but it was clear that her mind was on the boy and nothing else, and he was just distracting her.
He started to leave, then turned back. “I don’t want anything to happen to you, Keisha,” he managed, and stopped himself before he said anything ill-omened.
At that, she looked up and smiled with surprising warmth. “Thank you,” she replied softly. “Now go, because I don’t want anything to happen to you either. Don’t let the Herald-Captain eat you alive!”
Knowing then the best way to help her would be to obey her, he left, but slowly, looking back over his shoulder until he couldn’t even see the light from the tiny campfire anymore.
Oh, this is a very sick little boy, she thought, taking the child into her arms. He was so fevered that heat radiated from him. Keisha’s first act was to unwrap the child from his bundle of furs, strip him of his sweat-sodden clothing, and wash him down with cool water to bring his fever down a little. Fever was a good thing in principle, but this boy’s fever was so high that he was in danger of going into convulsions unless she cooled him.
She sponged him a second time with something that killed body-insects, wrapped him briefly in the furs so that the fumes would work on whatever bugs he carried, then unwrapped him and sponged him a third time with plain water. If fleas did carry the sickness, she’d just protected herself.
That done, she dressed him in one of her old shirts and bundled him into the bedroll. “Take those furs and things out of here and put them out somewhere to air for about five days,” she ordered Hywel. “Either that, or, bury or burn them.”
She heard a choked-off sound, as if he were about to object, then silenced himself. A moment later, he and the filthy furs were gone.
Only a day! I’ve never seen a fever progress so quickly. She waited impatiently for Hywel to return as she checked reflexes in Jendey’s arms and legs. Whatever this illness was, at least the paralysis and wasting hadn’t set in yet - or at least it hadn’t set in so much that there was a noticeable difference from healthy reflexes.
Deep down inside, she was afraid, horribly, desperately afraid - but she buried that fear in work. As long as she could keep working, she could keep the fear at bay.
Hywel returned as she checked Jendey’s breathing. “When this fever kills - how does it do so?” she asked, frowning as she listened to the lung- and heart-sounds through a hollow tube she placed on his chest.
“It smothers,” he said simply. “You fight for breath, but there is no strength in the chest, and it smothers.”
Paralysis of the chest muscles? That would make sense. So what do these things all have in common ?
Could the fever be attacking the network of nerves that told muscles when to move and how? That network came from the spine, even the newest Trainee knew that. There were fibers that were said to carry orders from the brain to the spine, and out to the muscles, as well as carrying sensation back to the brain, just as blood flowed from the heart out to the body and back. Accidents and wounds had proved that if you cut them, paralysis and loss of feeling was the result - so could this fever be killing or damaging them to get the same effect?
She seized a silverpoint and a notebook from her medicine-bag and wrote down her speculations. If what she tried failed, and if she succumbed to this fever - at least the next Healer would have a little more to go on.
“What are you writing?” Hywel asked, with awe in his voice.
“Spells,” she said briefly, which seemed to impress him further. “Tell me all you know about how the Summer Fever started.”
He didn’t seem taken aback that she asked the question, and she made notes as he talked. “It was the Midsummer Gathering,” he said obediently. “It was held that year in Ghost Cat territory. I was still at the women’s fire then, so it was, oh, many cold seasons ago.”
Oh many indeed, I’m sure, she thought, guessing his age at fourteen. Three, maybe four at the most. Around the time the first lot came down here.
“Blood Bear was there, and that was when I saw the Bear Warriors, who were as much bear as man,” he continued. “Our fighters brought back tales that they had monsters at their fires also, some as slaves, and some among the warriors, and that there was boasting around the men’s fire that they had brought only half their numbers, for the rest were out raiding. We shunned the Forbidden Circles, for the Ghost Cat had sent warning dreams to our shaman, but the Blood Bear shaman scoffed at our dreams, swore that such places brought power and strong spirits, and he and more warriors went a-hunting Forbidden Places.”
“So they brought back the Fever?” she asked, as she put down the silverpoint and selected carefully from among her medicines.
“Not at once, no,” he told her. “They brought out strange animals like small, hairy people who chattered like magpies and howled like dogs. These, I did not see, but my father told me of them. They tried to make slaves out of the beasts, but the creatures were weak, acted sickly and odd, and soon died. A few days later, the fever began.” He shrugged. “That is all that I know.”
So this came from contact with sick animals from the Change-Circle! That makes a little more sense. She finished mixing her draught of medicines with juice and honey, and carefully raised the feverish boy, putting it to his lips. He was very thirsty, in spite of being mostly out of his head. He sucked at the cup eagerly and perhaps because of the sweet taste, drank it down to the last drop.
He’s getting dehydrated; I have to get more liquid into him. She filled the empty cup with cool water and repeated the process until he turned his head, refusing further drinks. She smoothed back the damp, black hair from the flushed forehead; this child was so different from the littles of Errold’s Grove, yet so very much the same, with a mother who would mourn his loss deeply, and a brother who loved him enough to do anything to save him.
She made him as comfortable as she could, finished her note taking, then turned to Hywel. “I am going to work magic to read his fever,” she said sternly, fighting down panic that threatened to paralyze her. “You must not interrupt me - ”
“Na, you go to the spirit-world, I know,” he said wisely, interrupting her. “Just as our shaman did. If our shaman had not been struck down with the first to suffer Summer Fever, he would have chased the Fever-Spirits with the good spirits he brought back. I have seen him walk with the Ghost Cat in the spirit world, many times; I will guard you when your spirit travels from your body as the warriors did for him. Have no fear.”
As good as explanation as any, she thought, when she recovered from the startlement she’d felt at his easy acceptance of what she was going to do. At least he knows what to do.
There was no time to put it off further; she had done everything she could for the boy with hands and herbs. Despite doubts and soul-numbing fears that she had hidden from both Darian and Hywel, she must rely on a Gift she had only recently learned to use. Now only her Gift could help him further; she settled herself at the child’s side, and sank into Healing Trance.
She was aware at first only of herself, because she was still within the shields that she had managed to make secondnature and automatic. To her own inner eye, she radiated a pure, clear, emerald-green light, contained within a skin of radiant yellow. Taking heart from this, she reminded herself that this was something she had done before; the job was larger, but no different than fighting simpler illnesses. She took the shield-skin inside herself, absorbing the energies, and fixed her attention on the living creature nearest her, the muddled and roiled energy-bundle that was the sick child. Even at this distance, it was obvious to her Oversight that the boy was dreadfully, dangerously ill. To examine the nerve-net she would have to sink deeper than she ever had before, and look more closely. Examining the surface would tell her nothing.
She moved herself to hover over the boy, then slowly let herself merge with him. Her awareness passed through the skin, a protective envelope of sickly pink energy, damaged here and there by the tiny scratches and cuts any active child could get in playing, and which also had its share of insect bites, which appeared to her as inflamed half-spheres, glowing a sullen red. There was no sign of major infection in the skin, however, and she passed on without soothing the insignificant hurts, saving her strength for a greater foe.
His muscles were next, muscles that were well-developed for a child so young; tough and strong, flexible ropes that twisted and sent off sparks that meant pain as Jendey tossed in fever. There was something deeply amiss here, but it was not within the muscles themselves.
So far, I’ve guessed right. Just to be certain that she had not missed something, she did not sink further to examine the nerves quite yet.
Instead, she went to the torso as she had been taught, to make certain that the source of his sickness was not in the organs, and began with the heart. An infection of the organs could have been pouring paralyzing poisons into Jendey’s blood, poisons that affected the nerve-net, but which originated elsewhere.
At this time, there was no sign of strain or irritation there either, nor in the gut - but the lungs were congested and irritated, displaying the sullen red glow of inflammation. But they were, as yet, no more serious than a bad cold.
But there was definitely something desperately wrong, for all the body’s defenses were mobilized. All along the paths of the blood, the body’s defensive armies swarmed, healing energies flowed, yet they traveled to no central battleground, as if they were confused and could not find a target.
Just as confused and desperate as I am. . . .
She shoved away the thought. Failure was not an option.
She turned her awareness to the spine, sank deeper yet, looking for the black miasma of damage, the sullen murk of attack.
Then she found it - and nearly withdrew, appalled at the magnitude of the problem she faced.
The enemy was tiny, tiny, but numbered in countless millions. It subverted the child’s own body to create millions more selves with every passing moment. No wonder this fever could not be fought with herbs and medicines - it overwhelmed by sheer numbers, killing the child in the act of spawning more selves from his very substance!
But she had seen this kind of enemy before - just not so virulent, and not centered in the nerve-net and spine. At least she knew the enemy’s face now - and she knew how to combat it, provided she had the strength.
She drove down her fear, fear that threatened to send her fleeing back to her own body, all her work left undone. She gathered her own energies, and lashed out at the enemy with lances and light shafts of purest emerald green. The enemy swallowed her energies and millions of attacking creatures perished - a little damaged, but only a little, and in the next moment, the multitude surged back to life and strength.
Now it didn’t matter; now there was nothing but action.
This was the moment when she should have been afraid; she should have given up. But now the instinct of the Healer had her in a grip that drove everything else out of her mind; she was caught in the battle, and could not have pulled away if she wished it. She had been warned of this suicidal drive for self-sacrifice, the trap that the strongest Healers were all too prone to fall into, and if there had been another Healer there, he would have pulled her out. It was too late - 
Thought had been squeezed into a tiny compartment cut off from action, crammed in with the terrible, ice-cold fear. Nothing existed for her but the enemy hordes - and the energies with which she lashed them, heedless of what the energy drain was doing to herself.
And more; energy drained from her faster than she could replace it. This was a battle she was doomed to lose - and when she lost it, the enemy would move to take her. But she no longer cared.
You know, this would probably be going better if we hadn’t awakened the Captain out of a sound sleep.
One lantern illuminated the inside of the tent the two Heralds shared; birds twittered outside, expecting the dawn. Inside, Kerowyn made her feelings known, while Eldan had made himself vanish, in a sound diplomatic move.
“You did what?” Kerowyn shouted, with incredulous wrath, when Darian finished his report. Darian stood his ground, backed by the Valdemaran Healers, by Nightwind, and by Firesong; they made quite a crowd in Kerowyn’s tent, but didn’t quite spill out into the open.
He was backed by them, but he had insisted on doing his own talking. “I did this, and I’m not a coward who hides behind other people when it comes to standing by what I did; I can defend myself,” he had told them, and had been rewarded by the approval in the eyes of both Nightwind and Firesong.
He felt a little sorry for Kerowyn’s officers, who by now, if they had intended to sleep until true-dawn, had been denied that opportunity by the shouting. And if it hadn’t been that he’d never been so sure in his entire life that he had done the right thing, he might well have bolted.
“We had a tactical opportunity that wasn’t going to come along again, Herald-Captain,” he said steadily, looking straight into her eyes and refusing to be intimidated by her fury. “Furthermore, you may be in command of the assembled fighters, but I’m not one of the fighters. I’m a mage, and not one under your command. I’m a mage with four years of field experience, as well, and I am accustomed to being expected to think for myself. We had our primary objective. We’ve gotten the language, which Tyrsell can now take from his own memory and give to anyone else. Keisha and I took the opportunity that was presented to us precisely because, in terms of personnel, it offered a substantial gain - versus, at worst, the minimal loss of a single noncombatant. We had the boy in a vulnerable position, and a moment of opportunity to extract a single fever victim, a moment that was rapidly vanishing. Neither of us is a good enough Mindspeaker to contact superiors for advice. There wasn’t time to do anything but act.”
Talk to her in tactical terms, was what Firesong had advised him. Don’t talk to her in terms of Healer’s Oaths or humanitarian motives. Give her gains versus losses. I’m not saying she won’t see and appreciate the humanitarian motives, just that she’s a commander first, and that’s how she’s going to react. Once she finishes reacting to the insubordination, she’ll move right into thinking and analyzing.
Firesong was right; as she listened to him, the scowl faded to a mere frown, and the frown to a grimace. Finally she threw her hands in the air.
“All right,” she acknowledged. “I can see that. I just thank the gods that I don’t have anyone else in my ranks who’s got the curse of thinking for himself.”
“Yes, you do, Kero,” Firesong said mildly. “You generally make them into officers if they manage not to get themselves or anyone else killed.”
“You can make yourself useful by finding that dyheli and having him drop that language into Eldan’s skull,” she replied sternly to Firesong. She waited for his nod and withdrawal from the tent, then turned back to Darian. “You are going to stay here and give me every single detail of what you saw, heard, and did.”
“What about us?” Gentian asked, with a wink for Darian that told him he’d won this round.
“Back to your Healer business,” she said, making shooing motions with her hands.
Everyone else spilled out into the gray light of false-dawn, wasting no time in putting some distance between themselves and their commander.
Nightwind stayed with Darian, and Kerowyn didn’t object. When everyone else had left the tent, she wearily waved at them to sit; there were only three places to do so in her tent and she was already occupying the only chair, still dressed in the old shirt and hose she wore to sleep in, her hair coming undone from its braid. So he took a seat on a small campaign chest, leaving the stool for Nightwind.
He went back over the night’s events in excruciating detail, leaving out nothing, not even the changes in Hywel’s expression. He also did not leave out the alleged Ghost Cat, although his description was as vague as his own sighting of the thing had been. When he had finished, Kerowyn brooded in silence for some time, her fingers automatically undoing and rebraiding her hair. Despite the fact that Darian knew they had been right to act as they had, the tension in the tent built until he thought he couldn’t bear much more. Granted, he wasn’t under Kerowyn’s direct command, but she could order him back to the Vale, and the Tayledras would probably enforce her orders.
Finally: “Dammit, you did right,” she growled as she bound up the end of her braid. “I don’t like it one bit, but you did right.”
The tension snapped, replaced by the feeling that someone had removed the weight of a horse from his back.
“Captain, if anything had been different, if Hywel had been less cooperative, if the victim hadn’t been a small child, if that ghost - or whatever - hadn’t been leading him out in the first place, we’d never have done what we did,” he replied with feeling. “I swear.”
“It’s that so-called Ghost Cat,” Kerowyn said, chewing her lower lip. “That’s the thing that’s - Bothering me isn’t the word, it’s a more spooky feeling than that. It’s not like some shaman’s trick or wishful thinking. It seems as it every time it shows up, it guides these people properly, and I have to wonder if it can - and will - do more than that. You say you saw it, Tyrsell says he thinks it’s real - and whenever anybody so much as mentions it, I get a shiver down my spine that I can’t stop. I’ve had that same shiver before. . . .”
“And?” Nightwind prompted alertly.
Kerowyn smiled crookedly. “Let’s just say that it’s a sign of one of my Gifts.” She turned back to Darian. “It’s a good thing that you aren’t under my command, because even if you are right, this is way too close to insubordination for my comfort. However, you aren’t, and that lets me out of having to find a way to discipline you for exercising your brains without orders.”
“Yes, Herald-Captain,” he said, and deemed it wise to say nothing more.
“Now you go make yourself useful and try not to get into any more trouble,” Kerowyn ordered. “I’d like to talk to this lady for a bit.”
Darian left, with the distinct impression he’d had a narrow escape indeed - but also with the nagging feeling, which grew with every moment, that there was something of critical importance that he had left undone.
He got no chance to think about it, for the situation that had been at stalemate just a moment before suddenly avalanched down around their ears, with no prior warning whatsoever.
“Oh, hellIires” came the exclamation from behind him. Kerowyn suddenly shot out of her tent as if her hair were on fire, followed by Nightwind who was moving just as quickly. She sprinted up the path and grabbed Darian by the elbow, startling him into an undignified yelp.
“I need you - now!” she said, as Nightwind grabbed his other elbow. Before he could even blink, the white bulk of Kerowyn’s Companion thundered down on them from out of nowhere, and Kero and Nightwind literally threw him up on Sayvil’s bare back. A heartbeat later, Kerowyn was up behind him, and it was a good thing that he had automatically grabbed a handful of mane, because the Companion launched herself into an all-out gallop as soon as the Herald’s rump touched her back.
He clung with hands and thighs, the wind of their passing whipping through Sayvil’s mane until it lashed his face and eyes unmercifully, leaving tiny, stinging welts. He’d heard of the legendary speed of a Companion, now he got a firsthand experience, which would have been breathtaking, if it hadn’t been so terrifying.
In a much shorter time than he would have dreamed possible, they were among Kerowyn’s fighters and Kero slid down off Sayvil’s back, leaving him still perched there in confusion. Just beyond the screening of trees and bushes, someone shouted in a voice torn by anguish, fear, and rage.
“What’s the situation?” she demanded, as one of the fighters separated from the rest and saluted.
“Things were dead quiet, then all of a sudden there was a ruckus in the camp,” the scarred and weathered veteran reported brusquely. “Lots of shouting, carrying on, women wailing. Then the men started raising hell over there, and the Chief comes tearing through the barricades and starts waving weapons around and shouting at us.”
“You!” Kerowyn slapped Darian’s leg to get his attention. “We’re looking for Tyrsell - but until then, what’s he saying?”
Belatedly Darian realized that he understood the shouting perfectly well, and paused to listen to it.
What he heard made his jaw drop.
“Well?” Kero demanded. “ What? “
Darian licked dry lips. “He says we sent child-snatching demons into his camp last night, and he wants us to bring back his sons right now. Or else - ”
“Never mind. I can guess the ‘or else.’ “ Kerowyn swore softly. “And it’s just our bad luck that your little friends happened to be the Chief’s offspring - which obviously, the older one didn’t bother to mention.” She chewed on her lower lip, then turned her gaze to her Companion. “Sayvil, go take him back to camp, then get your tail back here; this is no place for him. By now Tyrsell’s given Eldan this language, and we’ll see if his silver tongue can lie us out of this mess when he gets here. And we’ll pray that Keisha can come up with a cure, fast”
Sayvil didn’t wait for Darian to object; she all but launched herself out from underneath him, and only a quick grab for her mane kept him from tumbling over her rump.
He had the presence of mind to slide over her shoulder as soon as she reached the edge of camp where his first tent still stood and slowed a little; he hit the ground running to absorb his own momentum and it was a good thing that he did. She didn’t stop, not at all; she just pivoted on her hind hooves and galloped away again, leaving him panting in the path behind her, staring after her, absently recognizing that there was another Companion standing behind him.
Gods - now what do I do ?
“What in hell is going on?” a voice shrilled behind him.
He whirled, to find Shandi, clad only in a knee-length shift and barefoot, staring at him out of confused and terrified eyes. Her sleep-tangled hair had fallen half over one of her eyes, and she shoved it out of her face with impatient fingers.
“The camp’s gone crazy, Karles is frantic, and Keisha’s gone and there’s something I - we - have to do with her!” she exclaimed, sounding more than a little frantic herself. “What’s happening? Where’s my sister? What is it we have to do?”
As quickly and succinctly as possible, Darian explained the events of the last twelve candlemarks. He got a little shrill toward the end, himself, and Shandi stared at him with a blank expression, while her Companion fidgeted and pranced with anxiety.
She hit her forehead with the butt of her palm, muttering to herself. “You - me - Keisha. What do we have in common?” Balling both hands into fists and pressing them into her temples, she squeezed her eyes shut and her features contorted with pain. “What in hell do we have in common? Why am I here? Why do I have to be here?”
Gods! he thought bitterly, thinking that she meant that she didn’t want to be there. Why couldn’t she be another Healer? Then at least she‘d have been of some use to - 
From out of the thin morning air, the answer came to him, in the dryly amused voice of his teacher, Firesong.
He ran to Shandi and shook her shoulders with impatience. “Can you work with Healers?” he demanded. “Have you?”
Her eyes sprang open and she gaped at him. “Yes, of course - ”
As they stared into each others’ eyes, they all but shouted in unison. “That’s it!”
For the second time that morning, Darian found himself clinging to a Companion’s bare back, this time with Shandi behind him. Karles must have taken directions straight from his memory, for the Companion wove his way through the forest unerringly, and at speeds that would have guaranteed an accident had he been anything but a Companion. He had only time to call to Kuari - 
:Find dyheli! Find Tyrsell! Bring him where we were last night and quickly!:
Then there was no time for anything but hanging on.
When they burst into the little glade where the tent was pitched and flung themselves from Karles’ back, Hywel jumped to his feet with his dagger drawn, then stopped himself just short of attacking them. Darian paid the boy no attention. His eyes looked only for Keisha, and when he saw her, he exclaimed in shock.
“Damn!” Shandi swore. “She’s lost! Darian, link with her, now!”
He didn’t have to be told. Keisha was a ghostly white, she trembled where she sat, and it looked as if they hadn’t reached her a moment too soon. She was caught, trapped in battling a disease she couldn’t conquer - if she’d had more practice, she would know how to break free, but of course she had never Healed a life-threatening illness before.
Darian flung himself down beside her and grabbed one hand, as Shandi did the same on her opposite side; they threw their spirits into linkage with hers as swiftly as if they had done so every day for their entire lives.
There was a rude shock for a moment as they jockeyed for position, and then they melded into a seamless whole. He poured energies spun out of the life all around them into the fading Healer; Shandi did the same, but her energies came, not from around her, but from her Companion. Neither of them saw what Keisha saw and fought, but they felt the battle going on within the boy, and Keisha’s renewed strength as she threw off the intolerable burden of exhaustion, gathered her resources, and flung herself back into the fight.
And for a moment, Darian felt her soul-tearing fear that even this would not be enough.
He willed more than energy into her; he willed courage, and the memory of that anguished voice crying out, demanding that his sons be returned to him.
Whether that was the reason or not, at that moment, the tide of battle turned. Keisha began to gain ground against the fever. Shandi and Darian held steady, and with a last desperate outpouring of power, Keisha broke the fever’s hold!
Shandi dropped out of the meld; Darian held longer, as she chased down the last traces of the illness and burned them away. Only then did he separate himself from her, and return his focus to the ordinary world.
“We’re still not done,” Shandi said grimly, as he opened his eyes and caught Keisha as she half-collapsed against him. “There’s a war about to start out there!” She turned to Hywel. “Your father thinks we’ve sent demons to kidnap you and your brother, and he’s got every intention of cutting his way through us to get to you.”
Hywel’s mouth and eyes went round - and Darian’s estimation of his intelligence took a giant leap upward. “Take Jendey!” he cried. “Take him up before you on the Spirit Horse! We will follow with the Wise One!”
Hywel placed one hand on Karles’ forehead as Shandi threw herself on the Companion’s back; Karles snorted and nodded vigorously. The young northerner bent and picked up his brother - sleeping deeply, too deeply to stir, but without the hectic flush of fever in his cheeks, and no longer tossing in delirium. Shandi reached down for the child, and cradled him in front of her, seizing a handful of mane to keep herself steady.
Karles shot off; Hywel leaned down to help Keisha to her feet. She was still coming out of Healing Trance, blinking at them with bewildered eyes, her legs as shaky as a newborn fawn’s.
“Hywel’s the Chief’s son?” she murmured, proving that although she looked no more than half-aware, there was little wrong with her mind or her ears. Darian draped her arm over his shoulder, as Hywel did the same on her other side. “Why didn’t you tell us?” she asked, turning her gaze on the young northerner.
“I did not think of it,” was his honest reply. “For us, to be Chief’s son is to be no different from any other man. It does not mean that I will be chosen as Chief. I am just another hunter of Ghost Cat.”
“Obviously your father doesn’t see things that way,” Darian retorted.
The call of an eagle-owl rang out above their heads, startling all of them. :Bondmate, they come!: Kuari called in his mind, as the hoof-beats of several dyheli at the gallop reached their ears.
Tyrsell skidded to a halt on the moss, with Pyreen and Meree right beside him. Darian helped Keisha up onto Meree’s back, then aided the slightly reluctant Hywel onto Pyreen. This was no time to worry about the mere discomfort of naked dyheli spines. “Don’t grab the horns, grab the neck-brush!” Darian ordered, as he clambered onto Tyrsell. “And hang on tight!”
Dyheli weren’t quite as swift as Companions, but they came a close second; they caught up with Karles and Shandi, who had inexplicably stopped at the edge of the cleared area containing the Ghost Cat encampment.
Then they saw why the others had stopped.
There were two heavily armed forces in that clearing, forces who had been about to face off against each other in a battle for blood. Both sides had weapons drawn, and there should have been a fight going on at that very moment.
The two reasons why that wasn’t happening were planted in the clear space, separating the two groups of fighters and holding them apart.
Both reasons were white, one glistening in the sunlight, one ephemeral as fog. Both reasons stood side-by-side in unity, holding off the fighters loyal to them by a force of will so strong that it might just as well have been a solid wall a hundred feet high.
One was Eldan’s Companion.
The other was a huge shape, faintly glowing, that could have been an enormous feline.
Just as Darian, Hywel, and Keisha arrived, lining up beside Karles, the ghostly feline turned to face them all. It regarded them with an unwinking gaze, as the faces of the northerners turned to see what it was looking at.
Stunned silence - then, with a roar of joy, the Chief flung down his ax and shield, and hurtled toward them, arms outstretched, his men a scant pace behind him, cheering themselves hoarse.
Only Darian continued to watch the Ghost Cat, so only he saw it wink at him, slowly and deliberately, before it faded entirely from view.
Three days later, the morning sun overtopped the trees and golden light illuminated a scene that could not possibly have seemed likely the last time Darian had been here.
Where two armies had faced off, an open-sided pavilion stood; within it, a table and two chairs, one holding Chief Vordon of Ghost Cat Clan, the other Herald Eldan of Valdemar. Around the pavilion, an impromptu festival was going on, as northerners and Valdemarans, Hawkbrothers and Lord Breon’s folk cautiously mingled, slowly learning one another’s languages. Those who had already undergone “torture by Tyrsell” acted as willing translators.
Darian finally felt as calm as he looked, and had actually managed to catch up on his lost sleep. It hadn’t been easy, though; he’d been much in demand by Ghost Cat and Kero’s forces both, though not nearly as much as Keisha. She was their heroine, their savior, practically their saint - right up until the point where she got tired of it all and tartly informed them that they were an affront to her nose, and if they really wanted to do something for her, they could all take baths, right now.
The subsequent rush for the stream had been something to behold - as were the newly-scrubbed Northerners, their skin bright red from being scoured so hard.
They still treated her with respect, but after that with less awe, which was something of a relief to everyone.
“ - the Wise Ones cannot be disturbed on a whim, or frivolously,” Eldan said as Chief Vordon nodded. “So the Sacred Houses of Healing will be secret.”
“Of course,” Vordon agreed, as if nothing pleased him better.
Well, we’re making reasonable demands here. I bet Vordon would show a different face if we demanded all the first-born sons as hostages, say.
“The Holy dyheli will conduct the Wise Ones from their Sacred Houses to your camp,” Eldan continued, after a glance at Tyrsell. “The Holy dyheli will carry your need to the Wise Ones.”
“Naturally,” Vordon replied, shaggy head bobbing.
“Did he figure this out in advance, or is he making it up as he goes along?” Darian whispered to Keisha as they stood solemnly on the Valdemaran side of the negotiation pavilion.
“Making it up, I think, with some help,” Keisha whispered back. “Heralds are very good at improvising.”
So far, Valdemar and the allies were doing very well out of these negotiations. Things were particularly advantageous for the dyheli, for the “holy” dyheli were getting the protection of Ghost Cat’s warriors, shelter for the winter in barns that Ghost Cat pledged to build, and grain in the winter from Ghost Cat’s stores. Virtually everything Eldan asked for, Vordon was agreeing with: care for the dyheli in exchange for access to the Healers; a set territory in exchange for alliance with Valdemar and the Hawkbrothers, with Ghost Cat guarding the borders against other northern clans. They even agreed to settle and learn to farm in place of their nomadic life of hunting and grazing.
They couldn’t be more unlike the last lot in that. Blood Bear Clan would rather have slit their own throats than take up farming. First, though, they ‘d have done their best to slit ours.
There had been some disappointment when the other Healers had examined the survivors of the last bouts of Summer Fever, and had been forced to confess that they could not reverse what movement and strength had already been lost. That disappointment had been overpowered by the relief of knowing that Summer Fever would never kill or cripple again.
Darian kept a steadying arm around Keisha’s waist, under the excuse that she was still weak and not entirely easy on her feet. She let him - under the same excuse. He didn’t think he was going to miss Summerdance nearly as much as he had anticipated.
He had every intention of taking things slowly, though. This wasn’t a Vale, and Keisha Alder wasn’t Tayledras. And I’m not stupid. Offend the local Healer? No thank you! What was it Nightwind said once? “The ones who know how to put you together also know how to take you apart!” Besides, he liked Keisha’s friendship; he didn’t have nearly enough friends to risk losing one to bad manners.
The northerners hadn’t even been the least reluctant about improving their bathing habits after Keisha’s initial scolding; as it turned out, they had more wistful tales about a valley full of hot springs that they had been driven out of by a stronger clan, and traditions of steam houses that they hadn’t been able to build in far too long. They knew all about flea-killing herbs, but since such things only came into their hands at the Midsummer Gathering by means of trade, they’d had to do without since the first attack of the Fever. Grenthan and several of the hertasi were already constructing a Valdemaran-style community bath house and steam house for them at the edge of the village, and Keisha’s gifts of fleabane and rosemary had been greeted with cries of joy from the women. In short, these barbarians, at least, were not nearly as barbaric as their appearance had led everyone to believe.
Even Kelvren was happy, for he had an entirely new set of humans to ooh and aah over him.
And we have this all settled before Harvest Faire and Val’s wedding - which makes absolutely everyone happy!
Darian felt full of warm contentment and dared to believe that k’Valdemar Vale was going to be hailed as an immediate success. Which makes me look awfully good. And which should put Kel’s status up a few points as well.
Thinking of Kel, Darian took a look around for him - and soon saw him, the center of a group of awestruck women, who admired his handsome feathers and timidly touched the talons he offered for their inspection. Darian strained his ears - and discovered, with no surprise, that the gryphon had already gotten Tyrsell to bestow the Ghost Cat language on him.
But when he heard what Kel was saying to the women, he nearly choked, and had to work very hard indeed to keep a properly solemn expression, one in accordance with the gravity of the making of such an important treaty.
For Kel had some treaty ideas of his own.
“It isss good luck to ssscrrratch a grrryphon’sss crrressst,” Kel told the enraptured group.
“It is?” said the boldest of the lot - Hywel’s sister, if Darian recalled correctly. She reached out immediately and began gently scratching Kel’s outstretched head.
“Oh, yesss,” Kel sighed happily. “It isss well known; an old and trrreasssurrred trrradition!”

Owlknight

One
A shrill whistle caught Darian’s attention, and he looked up and over the lake of k’Valdemar Vale, shading his eyes with his hand. As he expected, he saw Snowfire waving at him from his “balcony,” three-quarters of the way up the side of the cliff that edged the far side of the lake.
Actually, it would have been more accurate to say that he saw a tiny figure with white hair waving from the balcony - at this distance he couldn’t have said for certain that it was Snowfire. It wasn’t Nightwind, though; her hair was still raven-wing black.
The sky above the cliff shimmered with a light, pearly opalescence, although it was perfectly possible to see the clouds and blue sky beyond the new Veil, a magic shield that protected k’Valdemar.
I would never have believed we’d get a Veil so quickly, he marveled once again. If anyone had told me that the Heartstone would support a Veil this soon, I would have told him he was wildly optimistic. It wasn’t a full Veil, which would have excluded all weather; this simply kept things at a constant, pleasant temperature, no matter the season. Rain came through, and snow fell to the ground as rain once it passed through the Veil, so they still got some weather. They couldn’t do without roofs yet.
He whistled back at Snowfire, and waved his arm in the direction of the Council House, the newly built structure that housed all Joint Council sessions. It wasn’t much of a structure; now that the Vale had protection, it didn’t need to be much of a structure. It had “walls” of wicker work covered in vines, a roof that was half skylight and half slate, a floor of natural turf which flourished in the light. For furniture, in deference to the Valdemar contingent of the Joint Council, there were chairs and a table, but the chairs were of woven grapevine and wicker with soft cushions, and the table was a compass-rose shape of tree-trunk sections, topped with three rising layers of polished wood with one section for each member of the Council. The Tayledras of k’Valdemar, of course, felt no need for formal furniture, and neither did the tribesmen of the Ghost Cat clan.
Up on the cliff, Snowfire waved both arms back, signifying that he understood the Council was gathering. He disappeared into the dark opening in the cliff face behind him, presumably to fetch his mate, Nightwind. His errand of notifying Snowfire and Nightwind completed, Darian Firkin k’Vala k’Valdemar turned back and entered the shaded and secluded pathways of his Vale, heading for the Council House himself.
An odd and sometimes seemingly contradictory combination of qualities was Darian. A Journeyman-level Mage, from a land which did not have such things until very recently - a citizen of the country of Valdemar, yet also a Hawkbrother of the once-secretive Tayledras, adopted into the clan of k’Vala - even his clothing reflected those contradictions.
He wore soft fabrics of Hawkbrother manufacture; the loose trousers, gathered at the ankle, that both sexes wore, and the wide-sleeved, open-collared shirt that was also a staple among the Tayledras. Good, strong dyes were readily available in the Vale, so the rich gold of his shirt and brown of his trousers were commonplace inside the Vale, though not necessarily in the Valdemaran lands beyond.
But the embroidered, fitted vest he wore, though not of Valdemaran manufacture, was definitely of the local style. Of light brown leather lined in darker brown silk, it was embroidered in a motif of owls. Once again, contradiction - the cut of the vest was Valdemaran, the motif was clearly Tayledras.
So there it was, contradictions implied in his very dress, contradictions that sometimes confused others, but never confused him. For all the contradictions, Darian was comfortable in his dual citizenship, and sometimes took an impish delight in how uncomfort-able it made others.
He looked up at the sound of a crow’s catcall just above his head, laughing when he saw a falcon playing “tag” with a crow, flying in and out of the branches. In open air, the falcon would have had the advantage, but not in among the trees. The streamer trailing from the falcon’s bracelets was less than half its original length, but the crow still had most of his streamer, and mocked the falcon enthusiastically. Both were bondbirds, of course, the specially bred, highly intelligent companions of the Hawkbrothers, and the falcon seemed to be taking his imminent defeat in good humor. Crows took just about everything in good humor; of all the birds bred by the Hawkbrothers as bondbirds, the crows had the liveliest sense of humor. Ravens were more sardonic, most of the falcons tended to be quick-witted but extremely focused, hawks a little slower but more deliberate, and owls somewhat ponderous in their thinking. Darian’s own bondbird was an owl; in fact, it was one of largest birds in the Vale. Kuari was an eagle-owl, a bird which dwarfed all other birds except the bondbird eagles. Since there were no Tayledras with eagles in this Vale, Kuari and his parents Hweel and Huur were the largest birds here.
Now that the temperature was under control, the flora of the Vale was in the process of undergoing a shift from what had been native to this place to plants and even trees that could only be found in Tayledras Vales. There were more flowers; they were not necessarily bigger, but they bloomed all year long, their subtle perfume filling the air. The leaves of these new plants were enormous, and not just green - veins traced scarlet pathways, and pinks, oranges, and even blues made patterns that resembled flowers, enormous insects, or abstract collages on their surfaces.
It would take a very long time before this Vale looked anything like k’Vala, several generations, perhaps, but the beginnings were there, and Darian took a great deal of pleasure in seeing them. As he walked along the sand-softened pathway, he glanced up now and again, catching brief glimpses of new ekeles in the enormous trees. The treehouses of k’Valdemar were a bit more inventive than the ones in k’Vala; perhaps spurred on by hertasi creativity, there were experiments in Hawkbrother housing going on up there. Not all of them were successful, but the failure rate was low, and failures were never disasters. If one plan didn’t work out, would-be home builder and hertasi just put their heads together and tried a new direction.
All this building had been spurred on by the existence of the Veil, making it possible to have ekeles that took full advantage of the constant balmy conditions. The hedonistic Tayledras loved it. So did those ubiquitous residents of established Vales, the hummingbirds and messenger-birds. Strictly off-limits as dinner or snacks for the predatory bondbirds, these feathered gems frolicked fearlessly from the ground to the treetops. The messenger-birds sported feathers of every hue possible, and in combinations that sometimes made Darian blink. Their natural voices were a bit shrill, but fortunately the heavy foliage tended to disperse and muffle their joyful shrieks. The voice they used to repeat messages was a bit more pleasant, a kind of hoarse chuckle, and when they chose to permit someone to scratch or tickle them, they would chortle and chirp their pleasure in a way that was quite funny.
A flock of the messenger-birds hurtled overhead, screaming with delight, apparently in pursuit of the falcon and the crow. A hummingbird hovered at a flower cluster just beside the path, paying no attention to Darian as he walked by.
He should have been contented; there should have been nothing more he could have wanted. But underneath, he was restless and uneasy.
Perhaps it had been the dream he’d had last night, that had sent him up out of sleep with a feeling of something threatening. He couldn’t remember it though, that was the problem. All he could recall were the eyes of the Ghost Cat he had seen so long ago, and an odd sort of raven with the same kind of eyes. . . .
It’s probably just that I’ve gotten used to crisis, he told himself wryly. Once you get to the point that you watch for signs of crisis everywhere, totally innocuous events seem like grave portents. I should be glad that the worst crisis is where we’re going to put the latest batch of “pilgrims” to the “Holy Dyheli!”
That was an ongoing problem; every new group that made it down from the tribal lands of the North seemed to arrive with the potential to spread a new and different illness. Keeping them all quarantined from Ghost Cat and from each other until their ailments were identified and a cure devised required the tact of a diplomat, the organizational ability of the Kingdom Seneschal, and the tactical ability of a general. Although those qualities were not all combined in a single person, among them all, the Council members managed, though there had been a few-emergency sessions in the past.
The meeting planned for today, however, was the routinely scheduled monthly meeting. Lord Breon and his son would be there for Kelmskeep, as would the Chief and Shaman of Ghost Cat for the Northerners, representatives from Errold’s Grove, and from all the races resident at k’Valdemar Vale. Darian didn’t figure he’d hear anything more exciting than progress reports - perhaps some complaints or requests from farmers.
The vague murmur of conversation mingled with the rustle of leaves reached him before he actually saw the Council House. He stepped past the vine-covered, wicker-work screen shielding the entrance, and joined the others in a “room” that seemed very much an extension of the lush forest outside.
Of the representatives for k’Valdemar, only he and the snow-haired, aged Starfall were present at this moment; Nightwind and Snowfire and the others were presumably on their way. Lord Breon and Val had arrived last night, staying overnight in the guest lodge, and now were in their chairs chatting comfortably with Chief Vordon and Shaman Celin of Ghost Cat. Hertasi moved about the table, putting beverages and light snacks within reach of the Council members on the topmost tier of the table. No one shuffled papers on the lowest table tier today, which was a good omen for a short meeting. The table itself was in the shape of an open rose seen from above, with the layers in trimmed wood forming the petals. The original concept had been for a square table, yet someone had observed that only allowed for comfort for four parties. The way things had been going who knows how many more powers might come to stay in this area!
The Lutters were no longer the ones making the decisions for Errold’s Grove - oh, they thought they were, but the real work was done by the Village Council, and two representatives from that body were the new glass-maker, Harrod Dobbs, and Barda of the Fellowship. Harrod was always glad of an excuse to come to the Vale for a chance to use the bigger glass furnaces here and trade tips and lessons from the Vale glass-makers. There was very little overlap in what he produced and what the Vale artisans did; Harrod only rarely made anything that wasn’t utilitarian, as the demand for glass bottles and jars and common drinking vessels would always exceed his output. Still, he liked to turn out a nice set of goblets now and again, and most of what the Tayledras produced was lampwork and blown glass, so he was able to teach them molding techniques. The latest result of that was a series of small, flat medallions to hang in a window that they called “sun-catchers,” formed of colored glass, with a decorative impression molded into each. They were an adaptation of an Eastern style, very popular within the Vale; whether they would become popular outside it had yet to be determined.
The nonhuman members of the group, Kelvren, Ayshen, Tyrsell and Hashi, had not yet appeared either - but just as Darian took his own seat and exchanged greetings with the rest, the hertasi entered, followed by the king stag and the kyree.
And right after them, Snowfire and Nightwind appeared. “Sorry we’re running a bit late,” Nightwind apologized, pulling her ebon hair away from her finely honed face. “Kel will be here in a minute, too - we had to pry the baby away from him and get her put down for her nap.”
As if that had been a cue, the wicker walls shook with the thunder of enormous wings outside, and leaves blew, and Kelvren the gryphon joined the group, shouldering past the screen. He shook his dark brown feathers to settle them after his flight (and the baby Moonshadow’s sticky hands) and looked around.
Ayshen, the leader of the lizard-folk called hertasi, sat beside Nightwind on her left. The Kaled’a’in smiled a welcome and swept her trailing sleeves out of the way for him, and he put the tray of her favorite berry tartlets he had brought on the top tier of her table section. To her right sat Snowfire, and the section of Tayledras concluded with the silver-haired mage Starfall, the eldest of the group. Then came Darian, then Lord Breon’s sturdy son, Val, then the Lord himself. Between Lord Breon and the two Ghost Clan representatives sat Barda and Harrod. The dyheli stag Tyrsell stood beside Kelvren the gryphon along the back wall. Val’s arm was in a sling again; he’d probably managed to sprain it at fighting practice.
“It ssseeemsss everrryone isss herrre,” Kel said genially, and arranged himself along the wall, lying down on the turf out of the way. Hashi the kyree lay down next to him. “Good! I am sssorrry I was delayed. Who will ssstarrrt?”
“Actually, I will,” Lord-Breon said, looking uncommonly cheerful. Although his hair was threaded with gray, no one in his right mind would ever challenge Breon to a fight; he kept his well-muscled fighter’s frame in top trim. “I have some excellent news to start the Council session with - we’re getting our own, permanent, resident Herald-Mage!”
“No, really?” Snowfire exclaimed, blue eyes widening, as the others murmured their surprise. “When did you hear this?”
“Just before we left; news came by messenger.” Lord Breon was extremely pleased, and well he should be. Giving this corner of the world a resident Herald meant that Queen Selenay and her Council judged the land that held Breon’s keep to be of significant importance. That meant Breon’s status had risen from that of a minor noble to that of a key landholder here in the Northwest.
“Actually,” Breon continued, with a shamefaced glance at Starfall, “I probably ought to have told you last night, but - ”
“But there was no point in repeating the story half a dozen times, when you could tell us all at once,” Barda said bluntly, her plain, no-nonsense face showing no annoyance at all. “So, please, give us the details!”
“The Herald-Mage we’re getting is a fellow called Anda; I gather he was trained by the mages that came in with the Princess and her lot, so he’s got some experience in the war.”
That got Kelvren’s attention. “Trrruly?” he exclaimed. “Trrrained forrr warrr-magic?”
“That’s what they told me, Kel; you’ll have to ask him yourself if you want to know more.” Breon nodded at the gryphon, whose ear-tufts were sharply erect with interest.
“Skandranon Rashkae wasss a warrr-mage.” Kelvren turned his head sideways to speak to the kyree who no doubt already knew, and the king stag who likely didn’t care. “I could be one like him, with a good teacherrr.” Hashi licked Kelvren’s beak. Tyrsell just stared briefly at the gryphon, his expression typically unfathomable, then turned back to face Lord Breon.
“War-trained though he is, the Heraldic Circle feels that his experience in dealing with mages of so many different cultures will be useful here among us. I’m told that since the war he’s been riding circuit on the Karse and Hardorn borders, so he’s been running liaison with Sunpriests and Imperials. But that’s not the whole of the news - he’s bringing your Shandi back with him!”
Darian’s eyes widened in surprise equal to Snowfire’s. “Already?” he said cautiously, wondering if Shandi had somehow gotten herself in deeper trouble than she could get herself out of. It had been three years, perhaps less, since she had gone to the Collegium; surely she couldn’t have gotten her Whites yet!
“Already,” Lord Breon said with satisfaction. “The girl’s got her Whites - not the record, maybe, but she’s ready for other duties. Anda hand-picked her himself as his assistant, so she’ll be groomed for permanent service here!”
“Breon! That’s excellent news!” Barda said heartily, beaming at him. “I hope she’s as happy with the posting as her parents will be! Well, heyla, with all this increase in attention, perhaps we can see some funding for better roads and a second bridge!”
“I don’t know why she wouldn’t be,” Breon replied - and behind his back, Val rolled his eyes at Darian, who smothered a grin. Val and his lady were about to take Breon’s place at Court, and Val could hardly wait to get away, out from under his father’s well-intentioned restrictions. Not that Val was going to be irresponsible when the parental ties were severed - he wasn’t the adolescent who’d yearned for “the clash of sword on sword” two years ago. It had been Darian who’d seen how he chafed under the burden of being “only” the son, but it was Starfall who’d suggested that Val would make an excellent representative for his father at Haven and the Court.
That Lord Breon had embraced the suggestion so readily told Darian that he himself hadn’t worked out what to do with a young man full of energy and ideas with nothing to do.
“I want Herald Anda to meet you, Val,” he said, turning to his son, who quickly assumed a more appropriate expression. “But as soon as he’s settled in, it’ll be a good time for you to leave; any later and I might not be able to spare you a proper escort.”
Val grinned back at his father. “I’d have been disappointed if you’d asked me to go to Court before he arrived,” he assured his father. “If there was ever an excuse for a Tayledras celebration, this will be it!”
Snowfire grinned, and Kel chuckled. “What an excellent suggestion, Val!” Snowfire said facetiously. “We would never have thought of that, we are so completely serious-minded. We’ll take it under advisement!”
Val knew the Hawkbrothers too well now not to recognize the teasing for what it was, and just grinned back. “I’d be happy to advise you on the menu as well,” he suggested.
Nightwind raised an eyebrow. “Not that you would ever volunteer to cook any of the proposed menu,” she said dryly.
“You beat me to it,” chimed in Ayshen.
“You wouldn’t even suggest that if you had ever tasted his cooking, lady,” Lord Breon replied with an exaggerated shudder. “I won’t even let him make tea when we are out on a hunt.”
Val opened his mouth to protest, then realized that he might get himself into something he didn’t want, and shut it again. Darian smirked.
“Well, before we get into too many celebration plans, I’ve got a protest to lay before the Council,” Barda announced. “Ard Kilmer and Fern Holl are not happy with Ghost Cat at the moment, and they want me to make a formal objection.”
Chief Vordon looked surprised. “What could this problem be?” he asked. “Not Boys’ Raids again, surely?”
He was referring to the last protest against Ghost Cat, when boys wanting to earn their Manhood status had begun raiding villagers. Everything that was taken was returned, and the items taken were all of little value - but the fact that those items had come from inside people’s homes, and had been taken in the dead of night, had been more than a little unsettling to the good people of Errold’s Grove. They did not like the idea of “half-wild barbarian boys” creeping around in their homes while they slept, and who could blame them? After all, their daughters might be next to be stolen, and the daughters might not want to be returned!
The Chief and Shaman, after long consultation with the Council, had agreed to a new way of earning Manhood tallies that would demonstrate even more raiding skill than snatching things from villagers. Now the boys who wanted to count coups had to slip up close enough to a sleeping dyheli to put a handprint in paint on its side. Tyrsell liked this game; it forced the herd to regain some of the alertness it had been losing since life at k’Valdemar was so unchallenging. The young bucks of the herd appreciated it as well, and had taken to “counting coup” back, sneaking up behind a stalking boy and giving him a sharp nudge with a horn to his backside.
“No, not Boys’ Raids,” Barda replied. “They’ve heard your folk have been buying their chirras with intent to breed, and they’re afraid you’re going to challenge their market.”
“Fair is fair, Barda,” Lord Breon protested. “They wouldn’t have any room to protest if it was someone else from their village that was raising chirras in competition.”
“I know that,” Barda replied irritably, “but it’s my job to present the protest. So I have.”
“If they are so concerned, they could sell us only geldings,” Chief Vordon rumbled, “And then we will take our trade goods elsewhere. Our people came here hungry. The memory of crying bellies has not left us. We seek to breed those animals, so we will have enough food to keep a reserve. If they do not consider our value as peaceful neighbors they help feed, then we will seek out others farther away who will sell to us.”
“That could get ugly.” Val whispered to Darian.
:Competition keeps the breed strong,: was Tyrsell’s only comment.
The Chief looked to Lord Breon for further support, and possibly advice, and Breon was not loath to give it. “I move that the protest is noted but not valid - they’re only protesting because they think the Chief won’t know it’s groundless and they think they can get a settlement from the Council for nothing. In fact, I move the protest be dismissed. All in favor?”
A show of hands (and talons, paws, and hooves) all around - including Barda’s - made it unanimous without Chief Vordon having to get involved at all.
Since Lord Breon was the one on record as putting it to the vote, and countering the protest, it was unlikely that anything more would be said by the two farmers.
Barda sighed. “That was the stickiest bit. Market prices are down, but they can’t blame anything but the good crop of early vegetables. The Fellowship wants to send a parcel of wedding shawls with your boy as presents to people he thinks might do us some good.”
“You mean bribes, don’t you?” Vordon asked slyly.
“Anybody who understands bribery can’t be that much of a barbarian,” Val whispered.
“Presents, bribes, whatever.” Barda shrugged the insinuation away. “We aren’t asking for anything specific, and I certainly don’t want him to go giving them to tariff-officials, or anything of the sort. These are a different design that we’re hoping will catch on, and we’re looking for someone who’ll give us a decent price for the privilege of exclusivity. We made too many agreements back when the village wasn’t as prosperous with traders who are making a great deal of money from our work. We aren’t going to go back on those agreements now, but - well, you know.”
Lord Breon turned to Val. “Think you can handle that?”
Val took his time in answering, his dark brows knitted as he thought. “If you don’t expect results immediately,” he said at last. “If you trust me with this, I need to take my time with it. And I’ll want the use of a couple as outright gifts from Kelmskeep to important people.”
“That’s reasonable,” Barda agreed. “In fact, that might well whet the right appetites, if you give those gifts out first. Nothing like having someone with influence take a liking to your work for getting traders interested. It’s always better for the buyer to come to you.”
“Done, then,” Val said instantly, and another agreement was concluded.
“We want someone as - ” Chief Vordon searched for the word he wanted and finally leaned over and whispered something in Starfall’s ear. Starfall whispered back, and Vordon straightened. “As agent,” he said carefully. “For our goods. Someone who bargains well.”
Barda nodded. “I didn’t want to mention this before, because I didn’t know how your people would feel about it, but I’ve been thinking you could get better return if you had someone in the village working for you.”
Harrod bobbed his round head earnestly, and his lank, blond hair fell into his eyes. “My wife will do it, if you like,” he offered diffidently. “She’s sharp enough that the Lutters complain all the time about the prices they have to pay for jars. If you’d rather pick someone else, though, just say so.”
“No, no, your wife-mate will be good,” the Chief said instantly, giving Darian the feeling that he’d been on the wrong end of a bargain with Harrod’s wife himself a time or two. “Honest and - what was it? - sharp. Good.”
The rest of the meeting was concerned with other such things; requests from the village for Tayledras products and that Lord Breon supply the new village militia with some replacement arms, since the blacksmith of Errold’s Grove, though good with ploughs and hinges, knew little of arms and armoring. The kyree wanted permission to dig emergency lairs in the bluffs along the river near the village, and the hertasi wanted help from Ghost Cat on a fishing expedition. Most meetings were like this, where the details and difficulties of three cultures living in the same area got taken care of and smoothed over. Sometimes there were arguments, and twice there had been a point when Darian thought things might come to blows, but somehow everything got sorted out under the eyes of the Hawkbrothers. They’d even established a Council common treasury as the means of paying for things that all factions needed, and to pay off aggrieved parties if there was no other way to settle a dispute. The cash was anything but petty, but they were all in agreement that when time and diplomacy could not solve a problem, sufficient payoff would. As he had hoped, k’Valdemar was proving to be a neutral ground where the territory’s difficulties could be dealt with. The fact that it was the most pleasant and most relaxing place of all the possible spots where meetings could be held helped tremendously to get things settled peacefully. It was no accident that the Vale had turned out that way either. Tayledras were past masters at the strategic use of pleasure and comfort.
There weren’t going to be any serious arguments today, that was clear enough. Darian suspected that the imminent arrival of this Herald might have something to do with that. Barda had been awfully quick to drop the Errold’s Grove protest, and even voted against it herself - perhaps because she knew that if she supported the protest, it would certainly come up again in front of the Herald.
No one wants to look bad in front of the important stranger, he thought, with a mental smile. As if he won’t have had to deal with arguments just as petty, or even more so, before this. Of all of them, Darian had the most experience with Heralds; when k’Vala had helped the people of Valdemar clean out some nasty pockets of trouble left over from the mage-storms, he’d been the one, as the only Valdemar native, who spent the most time with their Heraldic liaisons. Stories came out over the campfire, often very funny stories, and Darian had about as good an idea of what it was like for a Herald on circuit as anyone who wasn’t himself a Herald.
“Is that it, then?” Lord Breon asked, looking around the table. “Everything taken care of?”
“As much as we can in one meeting,” Harrod replied, and Starfall nodded his agreement to that.
“Well, then, I have a proposition to make. We can take it as read that we’re going to have a bloody great celebration to welcome Heralds Anda and Shandi, right?”
Starfall laughed. “And you can take it as read that k’Valdemar will host it. No one else has the facilities - unless it was held outside, and it’s springtime, and you know what that means. Mud.”
Breon made a face. “Rain. Mud. Guaranteed. If it doesn’t rain on the welcome, it’ll rain on Spring Faire. At least if it rains in the Vale, it’ll be a warm rain.”
“I think we can even spare the magical energy to keep rain out of the Vale for a single day,” Starfall replied evenly. “A little borrowing from some other sources should make up the difference. Clearly, though, you have a request for the plans?”
Breon cleared his throat. “You all remember that I made Val a Knight when we decided he’d go to represent us at Court? Did I ever explain why?”
Snowfire wrinkled his brow in thought as the Errold’s Grove representatives looked blank; they hadn’t sat on the Council at the time. “Not that I recall. I thought it was simply something your people did from time to time.”
“We-e-ell, yes, in a way. A Knighthood confers rank - like Chief, or Warchief, Baron, or Elder. Not equal rank to those, but similar in concept,” Breon explained, using examples familiar to everyone around the table. “Most rank in Valdemar comes with land attached, though - Knighthood is the only one that doesn’t. It matches the ones that do, however - it’s meant to serve as notice to other people that the Knight is someone to be honored and respected, someone with the power to make decisions. It goes to younger sons who won’t inherit, for instance, or someone like Val who is going to serve as a representative for his parents. But it can also be used to reward people who’ve distinguished themselves; there’re Knights in the Guard, for instance. It’s a way of ennobling someone who’s not highborn and make them equal to the nobles.”
“All right,” Nightwind said. “So?”
“So I’d like to make young Darian a Knight of Valdemar.” Lord Breon sat back in his chair and enjoyed the various reactions of the rest of the Council.
Darian paled. He was too surprised - and concerned - to take any notice of the others. His first reaction was elation, but immediately following that was worry. “Lord Breon,” he said, before anyone else could voice their opinion, “I appreciate the honor, but why? And - I’ve already got other commitments; I am adopted into the Tayledras, and I couldn’t take any oaths that would conflict with that - ”
Breon shook his head. “No troubles there, lad. There’re a fair number of Valdemaran Knights that are envoys of other countries - well, there’s the Karsite ambassador, Karal, for one. The oaths you swear aren’t even in the name of a specific god; the phrasing is ‘by all I hold holy and dearest’ and you basically swear to defend the defenseless, uphold the right, that sort of thing. You’re the real liaison between Valdemar and the Hawkbrothers - but without some sort of title, I’m afraid this Herald might overlook you.” He gave a shrewd glance at Starfall, who nodded slowly. “Make you a Knight, though - and do it as part of his welcoming party - well, it’ll say without saying anything out loud that you rank equal with him.”
“Asss it ssshould be,” Kel rumbled.
“I take it, then, that he’s to be stationed within the Vale?” Starfall asked.
Breon nodded. “See what I’m working at, here? It’s an honor, oh my yes, but I don’t want a bunch of city-bred softheads thinking that they can make up for all their neglect by sending us a Herald, or even a Herald-Mage.”
“And if he is expecting to be stationed in the Vale. . . .” Starfall ruminated on that for a bit. “If Darian is his equal, then it is clear that he is in the Vale as our guest, and not as anyone who has any real authority over us.”
Breon looked satisfied, but said nothing. He didn’t have to. So far as he is concerned, the Joint Council is the only body with any right to make decisions around here, Darian reflected. He doesn’t intend to give up the tiniest speck of his authority and autonomy to Haven bureaucrats, and he figures Starfall and Vordon feel the same way.
He was probably right - definitely right, so far as Starfall was concerned. Vordon would side with what benefited his clan.
And as far as I’m concerned, that is right too. Darian understood completely what Lord Breon meant, when he’d spoken of the neglect that this part of the country had suffered. Granted, there had been an excuse for it - the war with Hardorn had drained Valdemar of every able-bodied fighter, putting them out on the front lines - but excuses didn’t make things right, and one Herald-in-residence wasn’t going to make up for it.
“Then I would very much like to accept the offer, Lord Breon,” he replied firmly. Breon smiled broadly.
“Hah!” the Shaman said, getting their attention. “If you make this Knight-business, we will make Darian-of-the-Owl a Clan-brother! Yes, and at the same celebration!”
“An excellent idea!” Snowfire said with enthusiasm. “A very good idea! Let Herald Anda be on the right footing with all of us from the moment he arrives!”
Now Darian was more than surprised, he was stunned. “But - ” he began. Isn’t this an awful lot of commitments to make? Can I honestly honor them all?
Snowfire chuckled, and made a gesture that was supposed to be reassuring. “It’s all right, Darian; Clan-brother is the equivalent of Wingbrother. The ceremony is a bit different, but you’ll enjoy it.”
Darian gulped down his protests. If Snowfire, who had spent more time with the Ghost Cat Shaman than all of the rest of them combined, said it was all right, then he would have to take his word for it.
:While we are at it, perhaps my herd ought to hold the rite that makes him the king stag’s prime doe,: Tyrsell said into their minds, his tone as dry as old papers. :Then again - perhaps he wouldn’t enjoy that particular ceremony.:
Darian blushed a furious scarlet. Lord Breon, Val, Barda, and Harrod, who had no idea what Tyrsell meant, looked blank. But the Tayledras and the Ghost Cat representatives, who had an altogether too healthy taste for the bawdy, laughed themselves into exhaustion. Even Kel howled with laughter.
And Darian was not about to offer the confused ones any kind of explanation. Not then. Not ever.

Two

As soon as the meeting was over, Darian was co-opted by Starfall and Ayshen. He’d expected it; the burden of planning for this celebration would fall on Ayshen’s shoulders, with Starfall handling the rest of the details. Ayshen had no more notion of what would serve to “honor” a Herald than a fish would know how to honor a bird. Starfall had worked with Heralds, but had only a sketchy grasp of what one would expect socially.
Darian was used to the appearance of the hertasi after all these years, but he took a moment to consider what the Herald’s reaction might be. Ayshen was a typical specimen of his race; he came to just about chest-high on a human; his blunt, lizardlike head boasted a formidable set of teeth, a rounded cranium, and eyes set so that he had binocular vision, like an owl or a human. His tough hide, covered with pebble-scales, was a healthy blue-gray. His stubby hands and feet had talons that he had used to good effect in the past. What would Herald Anda make of all that - when the owner of these attributes was also the chief cook for k’Valdemar?
Shandi will have warned him, he reminded himself. Besides, anybody who partners with a talking horse shouldn’t look crosswise at a talking lizard - especially if he wants second helpings.
So Darian allowed himself to be dragged off to Ayshen’s little “den” - a quasi-office space behind the main kitchens, from which he ruled over all things domestic in k’Valdemar. He had maps and models of the entire Vale, with a complex of hertasi tunnels marked out in pale blue - for, like a good general, Ayshen kept careful track of the terrain. His offices had been built, along with the rest of the kitchens, from rock dug from the cliffs. Those who live intimately with forests are uniquely conscious of the devouring power of fire, and there was as little that was flammable in the kitchens as was possible. Water, flour, and sand were near at hand in the event they would be needed to smother any errant flame. The chief piece of furniture was Ayshen’s desk; low, and suited to his size. Besides Ayshen’s desk chair, there were three adjustable stools with hinged seat backs; Starfall and Darian each took one, revolving it until it was comfortable for them to use.
Not that it was any hardship to be ensconced in the hertasi den. Though the aromas of the evening’s supper offerings mingled into a single mouthwatering perfume that would have driven a hungry man mad, Starfall and Darian were not left for a moment to suffer that particular torture. They hadn’t even sat down before hertasi came out of the kitchen bearing platters of their particular favorites, all the tastier for being fresh from the cookstove and oven.
It’s a good thing that Tayledras live in trees, Darian thought, as he juggled a hot filled pastry from hand to hand until it cooled. Otherwise we’d all be as fat as geese ready for market!
Starfall did not look as if he had ever lived on anything more substantial than air, but Darian knew that beneath his fancifully embroidered and cut robes, that body wasn’t thin - it was lean, lean and hard, and superbly conditioned. It took great physical conditioning to handle node-magic; a mage that was flabby in body was likely to be flabby of mind as well. Starfall’s silver hair wasn’t the result of age, it was the result of handling and using node-magic, and the slightly tamer magic of Tayledras Heartstones, all of his life. Starfall would find it no great task to run up the stairs to the highest ekele in the Vale, and run back down again within moments.
“We’ll have a feast, of course,” Ayshen stated, shoving aside recipe books and menus. “You can’t have a celebration without a feast. But should we have high tables and all that? I’m not certain there’s anywhere central that we could set up that many tables.”
“Have the usual sort of Tayledras feast, with food set out all over the Vale, Ayshen,” Darian recommended soothingly. “One thing, though; have a set of our clothing done up in white - Herald’s Whites for inside the Vale. Leave them out in the guest lodge for him.”
“Good notion,” Starfall seconded, nodding, with the customary soft clattering of his hair beads. “Welcoming ceremony first, then we take him to the lodge to get settled. He won’t feel as out of place if he has time to change into clothing of our style.”
“He’ll like our sort of feast, I think; he’ll expect something different, and I think he’d be disappointed if he didn’t get it,” Darian told the hertasi. “Besides, I’m sure Breon will have his own welcoming feast after ours, and he’ll get all the etiquette and high tables he wants there.”
Ayshen’s body language showed relief in the relaxation of his tail and stubby-taloned fingers. “So be it, then. If different is what he’s expecting, we can supply that. What do you say to setting up a particular place just for this Herald fellow - a short platform with food-tables nearby, of course - and move entertainment in and out. We could put him in the Council House, for instance. We’ll have the new roof trim done by then, and it is a good central location.”
“That would be a good idea,” Darian replied, as Starfall nodded. “I remember how easily I got lost the first time I was in k’Vala. When he gets tired, the guest lodge is right on the same path, within shouting distance. Is the deck on the guest lodge finished yet?”
“It will be by the time the Herald arrives; they’re putting the finishing touches on it now,” Ayshen replied without even consulting his schedules. “This afternoon they’re sanding the hand-rails and setting the steps. Tonight the greenery will be placed.”
“We’re the hosts; it would be courteous if we all came to him, rather than trotting him about from entertainment to entertainment,” Starfall agreed. “We can arrange things so that the people he will need to know spend a good portion of time with him in the beginning, then anyone who is curious can come to meet him. Will that make preparations easier for you, Ayshen?”
“Oh, yes, and after I’ve had a look at him, I can decide which hertasi to assign to him.” The hertasi sighed. “Only one fancy, decorated serving table to set up. The rest of you never notice my artistic efforts anyway.”
“We do,” Starfall insisted. “You just overwhelm our ability to praise with a superfluity of talent!”
Ayshen simply gave the Mage a withering look by way of reply. “So - how does this strike you - we have the actual welcoming ceremony at the entrance of the Vale. Everyone will fit there easily enough since the weeds were cleared out last season. Then, we take the Heralds and our other guests to the Council House and feed them. We let them talk for a while, and when it sounds as if the talk is running out, I run in some entertainment. Then a little more food - and so on, until he gives up for the night. We can pick foods that will make him drowsy quickly, which reduces the amount of entertainment needed on such short notice. He’ll leave to doze after just a few hours.”
“Which will be long before any Tayledras would give up,” Darian laughed. “That sounds perfect, Ayshen.” He grinned wickedly. “Then, the next day, when he’s been properly softened up for us, we give him to Tyrsell and have him stuffed with our language, Ghost Cat’s, and Kaled’a’in, all at once.”
Starfall gave him a look of mock-horror. “I thought you liked Heralds!”
“I do - that’s why I suggested the languages come in all at once. It won’t take Tyrsell that much longer to give them all to him, and the headache won’t be that much worse, after. Better to get it over with, I say.” Darian mimicked Starfall’s look of horror. “Well? Wouldn’t you rather have it all at once than strung out over several days? I should think that after the first experience, the subsequent dread would make the next sessions worse.”
Starfall nodded, then turned to face the hertasi upon hearing a low hiss.
“We were discussing the celebration,” Ayshen reminded them pointedly, baring his teeth for emphasis. “Now just how, precisely, would you suggest we greet him?”
“Just that,” Darian replied. “Greet him as our guest. Our welcome guest, our equal, who will be joining the leaders already here in their efforts to foster harmony among otherwise different peoples. He’ll already be on best behavior to impress when he rides up, so having a good turn out but little ceremony would make him feel appreciative that he must not endure trial after trial. Getting his disposition in our favor right away would be valuable.”
“And you thought you didn’t have the talent to become a leader!” Starfall exclaimed. “Listen to you!”
“I’m just quoting what my excellent teachers would say in the same circumstances,” Darian retorted. “Weren’t you just agreeing with Lord Breon that we’re to make certain Herald Anda understands he is one among equals here?”
“Huh. The boy finally pays attention,” Ayshen muttered, but when Darian turned to fix him with a sharp glance, he looked as innocent as could be.
“On the whole,” Ayshen continued blandly, “I am relieved. This is going to be much easier to plan and execute than a wedding, for instance. Should I pull some of the ekele-building crew to go to work on the Herald’s permanent quarters, do you think?”
Starfall exchanged a glance with Darian, who shook his head slightly. “Not yet,” Starfall told him. “Although Breon said he’s expecting to stay here - I presume as a kind of envoy - he may decide that he prefers to lodge in the village, in more familiar surroundings. For all we know, he may decide to establish himself outside all of our enclaves. I can let him know at some point that we have the hands, and the rest will contribute materials, when he wants to have a permanent residence built, and that he can have it constructed where he pleases.”
Darian nodded. “Instead, I suggest you pull a couple of builder crews off to add proper accommodations for the Companion; they’ll want to be close to each other, and this will show that we understand that the Companion is as important as the Herald, and that they work together. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to have Companion quarters attached to the guest lodge for future visiting Heralds.”
Ayshen nodded his blunt snout decisively. “Right, then. Won’t be difficult; knock a two-level door into one of the end rooms, add the stabling, bring water in for a fountain - I can have that finished in a few days.” He scratched his nose. “Sawdust floor, I think. Maybe some mats. Outside door with a rope latch, so the Companion can let himself in and out.”
“That sounds perfect to me,” Darian replied, very much impressed with Ayshen’s forethought.
“So . . . just the welcome to plan for now, and the extra building.” Ayshen wrote out a note in silverstick, folded it into a pyramid, and stuck it on the model of the guest lodge as a reminder. “That’s manageable. Well, are you two going to sit there all day, eating everything in the kitchen? Shoo! I have work to do!”
Laughing, Darian and Starfall left the hertasi to his own devices, as he began rummaging about for more paper, muttering about menus.
Keisha stood at the open door of Darian’s vine-covered house, hefting first one wicker pannier basket, then the other, to judge roughly which was heavier. Above her head, the trees met to form a ceiling over the house and path; songbirds and colorful messenger-birds chattered and sang, and hummingbirds chased each other around the branches. She had not gone to the meeting; as the chief Healer to both Vale and village, she spent roughly equal time in each - and that left her feeling a bit odd about representing either. Instead, Nightwind served as the mouthpiece for the Healers unless there was some pressing reason for Keisha herself to be there.
She had to check her packs anyway, for she was about to make another trip back to the village to make sure anyone who needed her services was properly tended to. The baskets were laden with various medications, most of them for animals rather than humans. The villagers were uncommonly healthy this summer, with half the normal number of accidents, even among the children. Perhaps that was due to increasing prosperity; well-fed and well-rested people resisted disease and didn’t have nearly so many mishaps. Ever since the events of recent times, the Crown had sent more funding for rebuilding and renewing the area than it had ever received before in half a decade. Newer tools were invariably more reliable, safer tools out here. Even the old mill had been rebuilt into a safer operation - she had not had to deal with a single injury from it since its reopening.
She wore full Greens now, the forest-hued colors of a full Healer, with a silk scarf serving as a sash around her waist, laid over a matching one of cotton. Healers always had a use for a scarf - to sling an arm, tie off a cut artery, or dry a child’s tears. They were not official parts of Healer’s uniform, but their use was so common they might as well have been. Keisha paused, considering the Healer’s uniform she wore. It had taken her a while to get used to that - and some persuasion as well. It was finally the argument that it would be better for her patients to see her in the colors of a Healer, because they would be under less stress, that tilted the balance. She refused to don anything elaborate, though; the loose trews and long-sleeved tunic were fancy enough for everyday wear - and when she wanted something festive, she opted for something that didn’t display her status for all to see.
The good thing about being in the Vale was that she no longer had to make her own medicines unless she really felt like it; all she had to do was give the hertasi instructions, and they would see to the preparation for her, presenting her with neatly labeled pots and jars of anything she needed or wanted. A great deal of her time in the past had been spent in the actual concoction of medicine, time she now had leisure to spend in other ways.
So now I spend it riding to and from the village, instead! she thought wryly, as she made sure the two pannier baskets that her dyheli would carry were finally balanced as evenly as she could manage without actually weighing them.
She shared Darian’s quarters - and yes, his bed - when she was in the Vale, and since he had never yet accompanied her to Errold’s Grove when she went on her weekly visits, the touchy problem of whether he would share her home had never come up. Her parents, of course, had no idea that they were anything but friends, and everyone else had the sense not to betray their ongoing relationship to the village. It was true that she was old enough to do as she wished; it was also true, as Kerowyn had remarked before she left, that no child is “old enough” in her parents’ eyes. She could own an estate, command a dozen servants, and have gray hair, yet she would not be “old enough.”
She ducked back inside for a moment to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything, then returned to wait in the sunshine for her dyheli to arrive. It’s a given. If Shandi were to come back for more than a fortnight, she’d be treated the same way - as if she was no more than fourteen, and unable to make any decisions for herself. The only reason she doesn’t get treated that way is because before Mother has a chance to get her lectures set fair in her head, Shandi’s gone again.
Besides, Keisha wasn’t entirely sure how long this particular liaison was going to last. Darian was a very handsome lad, and every village female unspoken for (and some who were) had made it very clear that they found him fascinating. There were plenty of girls who would be only too happy to find out what life was like in a Vale. What if he got tired of her?
What if I got tired of him? Well, she couldn’t see that happening, but she had a lot of responsibilities, more than she had ever had before.
And so did he.
That was part of the problem. His responsibilities kept him here, but that was not so with hers. Yes, she was - for now - the chief Healer for k’Valdemar. She was also still the Healer for Errold’s Grove, and she wouldn’t blame him if he got tired of finding her gone half the time. She couldn’t devote herself to him the way her mother had devoted herself to her family. It just wasn’t going to happen that way.
She rubbed her temple with one finger, and stifled a sigh. Sooner or later, the Vale would get a Tayledras Healer as well, and then all her energies would go to the village. She wouldn’t have a reason to stay in k’Valdemar anymore. He certainly wouldn’t move back to Errold’s Grove. Then what? She couldn’t keep going back and forth between here and the village when she didn’t need to be here. People would start to wonder why. Saying she was studying under the Tayledras Healer would hold for a while, but what then?
She bent over to tie her baskets closed, certain now that she had everything she intended to take with her. Her vision was suddenly blocked by a pair of hands in front of her eyes; she seized Darian’s wrists and spun herself around to meet his merry brown eyes and cheerful grin, reflecting dappled sunlight.
There was a crumb of pastry tangled up in a lock of his hair - and he was too fastidious to have left it there for very long. He must have just eaten minutes before. She sniffed, experimentally. “You’ve been eating garlic sausage rolls!” she accused.
“Well, you weren’t going to be here tonight, so the garlic wouldn’t matter, would it?” he retorted, and gave her a redolent kiss. “If you change your mind, there’s still time to help yourself, and we’ll both have garlic breath. Besides, you know how good garlic is for you!”
Not that she minded garlic breath, at least not when they both had it. Her main objection was that he would have been perfectly happy if everything he ate was spiced with garlic, and she didn’t like it that much. . . .
Another thing we don’t share. . . .
“Not a chance; if I don’t make my trip, the Trilvy family will probably come get me. Rana Trilvy is that close - ” she replied, holding her thumb and forefinger an infinitesimal distance apart. “And even though I’ve told her a hundred times that she’s fine, she’s still convinced that if I don’t see her every week, something is bound to go wrong and her baby will be born with nine heads. Never, ever, try to argue with a nervous mother-to-be; you haven’t the chance of a pigeon in a cattery of winning the argument.”
Something about his expression made her wary; he had that devilish look he always got when he was keeping a secret, that made his sharp features look even more fox-like. “What happened at the Council meeting?” she continued, as if she hadn’t noticed.
“Mostly the usual, but Breon had some news.” He was much too casual; something was definitely up. Whatever Lord Breon had brought in the way of news was something he knew she’d want to hear.
She decided that two could play that game of feigned indifference. “Oh? Anything important, or can it wait until I get back?” She fooled with the baskets a bit more, taking care not to look directly at him.
“You’ll probably hear it on the way back anyway, since you’re going with Barda and Harrod. We’re getting resident Heralds.” He watched her closely, and she knew from the way he was acting that although this was momentous news, it wasn’t the biggest part of his secret.
“Really?” she exclaimed anyway. “Heralds? As permanent residents? More than one?”
He nodded. “Two of them; an older, experienced Herald-Mage, believe it or not, and his personally selected trainee. Or maybe I should say, protege, since she’s got her Whites, and this is taking the place of her ‘first circuit.’ “
“A Herald-Mage! That’s certainly something!” It was, too; there still weren’t that many Herald-Mages about, and to have one of them assigned permanently to Errold’s Grove said a great deal for how the status of this area had risen. “They must think we’re high on their list of priorities now!”
“But it’s not the biggest news, not for you, anyway. The other Herald is your sister Shandi.” He grinned as her jaw dropped, and she looked at him in disbelief. “No, really, it is! I suppose they figure that they might as well assign her here, since she’s likely to assign herself here, given half a chance. Even without half a chance, she’s likely to turn up anyway.”
“But - it hasn’t been much more than two years - ” She still couldn’t believe it; Shandi had said nothing of this in her letters! She’d only complained now and again of how busy she was and how much she was expected to absorb.
Is that why she hasn’t spent more than four weeks here in the last two and a half years? Because she’s been rushing - or rushed - through her studies?
“Breon said she hadn’t gotten the record for graduating quickly, but she was close. He was fairly impressed.” Darian grinned at her reaction. “Mind you, he shouldn’t have been surprised. Look at how well you’ve done, and you haven’t had a Collegium full of teachers to help you! When I first met you, you would have barely qualified as a Healer trainee, at least as far as your Gift went. Now even the Sanctuary Healers call you their equal.”
“Pfft.” She dismissed her own prowess with a wave of her hand, not the least because she was not nearly as impressed with her “accomplishments” as he seemed to be. “How soon will they be here?”
“Cut your visit to Errold’s Grove as short as you can; I got the impression it’s just a matter of days before they arrive. For now, they’ll be staying at the Vale. We’re going to put on a celebration for them. Oh, the senior one’s name is Anda; I don’t suppose you recognize it, do you?” He tilted his head to the side, curiously.
She thought for a moment. “It sounds vaguely familiar; Shandi must have mentioned him now and again.” She kissed him quickly, then pushed him gently away, and turned back to her baskets, tying them shut deftly. “The sooner I’m gone, the sooner I’ll be back. Don’t work too hard while I’m off; but do try to see that Ayshen doesn’t try to do everything.”
He sighed melodramatically, then bent to help her with her baskets. “You ought to know by now that keeping Ayshen from overwork is beyond my powers. I suppose it’s of no use to ask if you’d like to stop all this, find a replacement, and settle down permanently here with me, is it?” he asked.
“When someone is getting ready for a journey, it’s the wrong time to ask about settling down, Darian.” She told her stomach to stop bouncing, and put on an air of calm. “The answer still hasn’t changed.”
“I didn’t think it had, but a fellow can ask. It’s just that we’re awfully good together. . . .” To her intense relief, he didn’t pursue the subject. She was saved from having to say anything more by the arrival of her dyheli, a young buck this time.
He didn’t ask the question every time she left, but it was at least once a month. Was it only a sense of duty that kept him asking? He couldn’t possibly understand what it meant to be bound to a calling; being a Healer meant being tied into her avocation even more tightly than being wedded.
Without being asked, Darian saddled the dyheli and fastened the baskets on either side of the arm-thick pad seated just over the stag’s rump. She grabbed hold of the handle that was built in place of a saddle-horn, put her foot in a stirrup, and swung herself up into place. Dyheli had no reins to take up; they would never have permitted so undignified a contraption as a halter on their heads.
:Good day, Healer,; the buck said formally. :I am Talen.:
:Thank you for your help, Talen,: she replied just as formally. :Are Barda and Harrod ready to return yet?:
:They await us at the Vale entrance. Shall we go?: Talen responded, his thoughts glossed with a skimming of impatience. The bucks were almost always a little impatient; it seemed to go with the gender.
“I heard - go and come back soon, Keisha.” That was all Darian said, but beneath the words was a great deal more that Keisha just didn’t want to have to deal with. Talen felt her assent, and leaped away, keeping her from having to do anything more than wave back over her shoulder.
Within the Vale, the dyheli kept to a fast lope, but as soon as he burst through the tenuous curtain of the Veil and caught up with the other two, he stretched out into a full run. Dyheli often seemed as tireless as Companions; he’d have all of them in Errold’s Grove well before suppertime.
Barda and Harrod hung on grimly; they were used to travel by dyheli-back, but not as accustomed to it as Keisha was. Although she could not (as Heralds were rumored to do) have fallen asleep in Talen’s saddle, she moved easily with her mount.
If only she could have been as easy with her own thoughts.
Firesong k’Treva finished the last of his stretches, moving smoothly and slowly, while his partner Silverfox watched, alert for any sign of strain. Such alertness was as natural for him as breathing, after so many decades of body study. They shared this ritual every morning; Silverfox insisted on it, and Firesong had to admit he’d felt more like his younger self since he’d begun.
Being limber does have its advantages.
“Well?” he asked, as he finished the exercise and stood, arms hanging at his sides, completely relaxed, yet energized, tingling with the song of the body rather than of magic, on the uppermost deck of their ekele.
“You’ll do,” Silverfox replied, smiling slightly. “You might even be in better shape than you were before the Storms. I told you this would loosen you up, and you wouldn’t believe me.”
“I didn’t have you to keep me active, before the Storms,” Firesong pointed out, slipping on a robe of scarlet silk, embroidered with white-and-gold firebirds, over his form-fitting sleeveless tunic and trews.
“In other words, you were a lazy sluggard,” the kestra’chern replied, and ducked as Firesong mimed a blow at him. The Healing Adept’s firebird, Aya, who had been watching all of this activity with keen interest, let out a derisive squawk. The bird opened his snowy wings and dropped down onto Firesong’s shoulder, fixing his talons carefully into the padded fabric. The long white tail trailed gracefully down Firesong’s back, curling around the thick, silver braid of Firesong’s hair.
“Whose part are you taking, mine or his?” Firesong asked, looking into his bird’s diamond-dust eyes. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
“And Aya is too smart to answer, anyway,” the kestra’chern laughed. “Not when he knows he can get treats from both of us this way.”
It was Firesong’s turn to make a noise of derision; Aya stretched his head and neck under Firesong’s chin, and the Adept answered the silent request by scratching the firebird’s chin. Aya crooned with pleasure. “Don’t listen to him, little one,” he said into Aya’s ear. “He thinks everyone is as self-centered as he is - or more.”
“Of course I do - since I’m not at all self-centered,” Silverfox replied matter-of-factly. He took Firesong’s elbow, and steered him in the direction of the staircase that curved around the trunk of their tree. “And don’t look now, but your pet is trying to coax me into tickling him, too.”
Aya opened one eye and gave Silverfox a withering look at the word “pet,” but did not pull his head away from Silverfox’s fingers.
Firesong felt a smile stretching the stiff, pitted and scarred skin of his face. Although life was nothing like he’d anticipated when he left his home Vale, it was very good. What’s more, I’m not sure if I’d be willing to do any of it over, since the end result is so - comfortable. It’s amazing now that I can wear so many faces here without any of them being a mask - and wear a mask without hiding my feelings.
Silverfox followed him down past the bedroom to the main public room of the ekele. The tree wasn’t large enough to support an ekele very high off the ground, or for more than one room to be on a single level, but now that the Veil was in place, he’d had the hertasi construct an external stair linking all the rooms, so that the area that had been used for the internal staircase could be converted into usable space. Wide decks circled each level of the ekele, and the staircase threaded its way around and through them. All the windows were open to the balmy air, and flowering vines grown from k’Vala cuttings had been trained around each of the windows to scent the breezes.
There were plenty of masks hanging on the walls, but Firesong didn’t trouble to reach for any of them as he and Silverfox entered the room. Here in his own home, no one would trouble him who had not been invited - and no one who had been invited would be shocked or disturbed by his burn-scarred appearance.
Some of Silverfox’s handiwork hung on the walls as well - gryphon feathers, shed by some of the residents of k’Valdemar when they molted. These were all primaries, secondaries, or tail-feathers, and the smallest was as long as Firesong’s forearm. Silverfox decorated the quills with beadwork, and painted the broad expanses with sinuous designs echoing the colors of the beads. Dyed leather and ribbons of strong textures complemented the interlace and lilt of the line-work. Feather artworks hung between each mask, and Firesong never tired of resting his eyes on them.
He lifted Aya off his shoulder and set the firebird down on a perch mounted in the wall, one indulgently made of silver in the form of a vine-wrapped branch with a hammered brass reflector behind it as tall as a hertasi. Aya roused all his feathers and shook himself vigorously; bits of fluff flew off of him and rode the air currents of the room like wayward insects, and sparks of false fire crackled around him.
“Wasn’t the Joint Council meeting this morning?” he asked Silverfox, as he sank into his favorite chair and reached for a book. Before he could even make up his mind that he wanted something, one of his hertasi appeared at his elbow and left a tall glass of cooled juice on the table where his book had been.
“Yes, and Keisha was going back to Errold’s Grove with the village representatives, so Darian will probably be a little late.” Silverfox sighed, but didn’t say anything more; Firesong assumed that the sigh was for Darian’s situation with the girl. And it was too bad; but it was also Darian’s and Keisha’s choice to keep things hanging this way. Darian didn’t allow it to affect his mage-studies; only if it had, would Firesong have had any right to stick his own nose into the affair.
It was later than Firesong would have expected, though, when Kuari came in to land on the railing of the porch, signaling that Darian could not be far behind. Lunch was long over, and Firesong was well into his book by then; Silverfox had already gone below to his workrooms at the foot of the tree to administer to some of his massage clients.
The Healing-Adept laid his book aside after reading a passage that made him smile, since it echoed his own teaching philosophy so well. Teach what you know, regardless of when you have learned it - teach what you learned yesterday sagely, as if you have known it all your life, and teach what you have known for decades with enthusiasm, as if you learned it only yesterday. He marked that page with a scarlet-jay feather and waited for Darian’s step on the stair, and saw by the young man’s face that there was unexpected news.
“Lord Breon said we’re going to get a permanent, resident Herald,” were the first words out of the young man’s mouth.
“Really?” Firesong was a little surprised at the “we.” “I take it he is expected to reside here? In k’Valdemar?”
Darian picked a seat and settled into it. “So Lord Breon says - unless the Herald decides it would be more politic to actually live outside the Vale. He’s supposed to be a Herald-Mage, too. Keisha’s sister Shandi just got her Whites, and she’s coming too, as his protege. I don’t know if that’s for the long term, but she’ll certainly be here for a year.”
“Hmm. We’re having a welcome, obviously.” Firesong knew there was something more, but Darian would get to it quickly enough; it was his nature not to hold anything back, for good or ill.
“Yes, and I - well, I suppose you could say that I’m going to be the chief entertainment,” Darian replied ruefully, his expression a comical mixture of chagrin, embarrassment, and pride. “Lord Breon got this idea - ”
He related exactly what had happened at the Council Meeting with remarkable facility - but then, the young man hadn’t been out of the circles of power since he was about fourteen or fifteen. Starfall is probably only waiting for him to reach the status of a full Mage before resigning from the Council, having Snowfire take his place, and graduating Darian into Snowfire’s slot.
‘Well, if that was indeed Starfall’s plan, Firesong’s own plans fit right into that. And now was a good time to set those plans in motion.
“Well, in that case,” he said casually, “it is a pleasant enough day. I have had a good breakfast. Before you get too involved in all these other ceremonies, perhaps we’d better put you through your Mastery Trial.”
Darian’s face went completely blank; Firesong had the satisfaction - which was not happening often, these days! - of catching the young man completely by surprise. Firesong may as well have said, “I had a nice nap, so let’s dig up this forest and make a pretty lake, eh?” The look on Darian’s face was delicious.
“So, let’s get that little exercise taken care of, shall we?” he continued, with mischievous casualness, as he got to his feet. “Come along.”
He didn’t stop to see if Darian was following as he headed for the stairs; Darian would follow, because Firesong hadn’t given him any time to actually think about what he was going to do. Darian was ready - but the more time he had to stew about the Trial, the more likely it was that he’d work himself up into a nervous state over it, and risk failure. Firesong had never intended to give him that chance. Too many young mages froze up and couldn’t even remember the simplest of spells when allowed to dwell on the upcoming Trial; it was a mistake some teachers made that would not happen with Darian.
The steps behind him creaked under Darian’s weight, and Firesong smiled to himself. By this evening, the Vale would have yet another piece of news to talk about. Or at least they would, if Firesong had anything to say about it. Firesong usually got his way - although these days, when he didn’t get what he wanted, he just changed his mind until he was happy with what he had.
Darian, however, would do very well in the coming trial, he knew. Firesong could feel intuitively that he would get exactly what he wanted. He had confidence in his pupil, and the Vale would have something more to celebrate by nightfall - the first new Master Mage of a new Vale. His student. Magnificent!

Three

Darian shivered as he followed Firesong down the stairs to the dome complex nestled at the foot of the tree. Most of that structure belonged to Silverfox, but Firesong kept one private room for himself, protected with the tightest permanent shields inside k’Valde-mar. Layer upon layer, unseen buttress against invisible firewall, every sort of stabilized, strengthened magical protection known to the Adept had been firmed up. Over the past years they had been cast and enchanted into virtual patterns of stone, as if mortared by an expert, with the equivalent of pockets and drains for excess power to collect. This was Firesong’s workroom, where he had taught Darian for two years; many of the shields were not meant to keep anything out but rather, to keep Darian’s “mistakes” from escaping.
There hadn’t been a great number of those mistakes - no more than three, all in his first few months with Firesong, and all minor ones - but the existence of those shields allowed him to work without worrying about the consequences of an accident to the rest of the Vale. The first had resulted in no worse than a burned hand and singed eyebrows, the second a splitting headache for both of them, and the third, a scorch mark on the floor surrounded by frost, which resulted in an intensive series of lessons on why resilient shields were more important than rigid ones. Darian had known all along that every lesson would lead up to a Mastery Trial, but he’d assumed he would have time to prepare for it, and undergo days of special readiness rituals.
Why now? Why not give me some time to work up to this? he asked himself, anticipation setting his nerves afire. He had no idea just what was going to be expected of him - 
And it was too late for second thoughts. Firesong had reached the bottom of the staircase, palming something from one of the dozen narrow shelves of ornaments and oddities, and held open the door to the workroom for Darian. His scarred face showing nothing except pleasant anticipation, quite as if this were just another, perfectly ordinary lesson. Darian entered the door into the windowless room, lit from above by a blue-tinted skylight, and Firesong closed the door behind them both. He dropped a latch that all but seamlessly blended into the interlaced trim that ran around the room.
With the closing of the door, the shields sprang up and into place all around them, creating a kind of hum in the back of his head and a tingle along his skin. Firesong leaned casually against the doorframe, folded his arms across his chest, and nodded. “The usual,” was all he said laconically.
So Darian began with “the usual,” the building of his own shields, spreading them outward to encompass the room, then integrating them with Firesong’s shields that were already in place, leaving some layers fragile so they could collapse back in case of a surge. He could have done this much in his sleep; it took scarcely a thought to shape his own energy to his will now. It hadn’t always been that way.
But next came an addition to his shields, a shunt to drain off excessive heat. He had never actually needed this shunt before, but unused mage-energy, if not properly grounded and sent back to its source, or energy that came in to the mage at a rate greater than he could handle, manifested in waste heat. At the level a Journeyman worked, this was a trivial concern; the worst that happened was that the area got a bit too warm for comfort - or the occasional flash, like the earlier accidents. In fact, if working in the dead of winter and there was energy to spare, some Journeymen deliberately eliminated the shunt so as to warm the area they worked in. This ability to deliberately create heat made mages very popular in cold climes and seasons, and some weather-work was based directly on that effect.
But at the level a Master worked, improperly handled energy could be deadly; the shunt was a necessity - as Firesong’s own scars testified. At the end of the Mage Storms, when trying to avert magical catastrophe, Firesong and his allies had done everything right, but the energies they had dealt with had been greater than any mage before or since had ever faced - even Adepts working in concert with Avatars of the Star-Eyed Goddess of the Shin’a’in had not been able to prevent all the damage such an overwhelming force could conjure.
“Now locate all the Heartstones of all the Clans,” his mentor told him. Darian nodded, and unfocused his eyes to better invoke Oversight and see into the plane of mage-energy, searching out each active Stone and tracing the intricate web of ley-lines that surrounded them. First, his own - k’Valdemar was a lesser Stone by any estimation, but it was growing, its power increasing daily. He was rather proud of that, for some of the energies invested in the Stone were of his harvesting. Each bit of power he had added over the past two years had made the Stone stronger and more stable, so that now it was possible to turn this into a real Vale by all Tayledras standards.
Then - the Heartstone under the Palace at Haven. This one was a bit peculiar; very old, very powerful, but quiescent. The shields had held through the last of the mage-storms, making it just about the only magical artifact outside of a Vale that had survived complete and untouched. There wasn’t much pull on it at the moment, for there were not that many Herald-Mages about who could use it. Someday, perhaps, Haven would be the Valdemar version of a Vale - but for now, the Stone slumbered. Like a war horse asleep in its stall, it wouldn’t take much to rouse it to fury, but the proper hands could control it with a mere touch of the reins or a whisper in its ear.
However, his were not those hands; that power was there for the service of the Heralds. It was theirs, and theirs alone. They were sealed to it by their very nature, and by the bonds they had with their Companions. It helped to maintain a different sort of web of power, one that linked all Heralds and Companions together.
Next, k’Vala Vale, the nearest to k’Valdemar. Its Stone was old, too, though not nearly as ancient as the Palace Stone, and unlike that Stone, this one was fully awake and active, with much power flowing out as well as into it. There were plenty of demands on the k’Vala Stone, and it responded to those demands as smoothly as a masterful juggler kept an impossible number of toys in the air. It wasn’t quite alive, not quite sentient, yet there was a quality of “life” and “personality” to it that was the hallmark of every Heartstone. That wasn’t surprising, considering how closely linked to the life of a Vale the Heartstone was.
Darian found and identified all of the stones, holding them all balanced within his mind, shining points of brilliant light in the web of life-energy. Firesong followed his work closely, and nodded when Darian found and touched the last of the lot, and the farthest, the Stone of k’Treva Vale.
“Good.” Firesong seemed satisfied that Darian had done the job with a minimal expenditure of his own energies. As a Journeyman, that was all he could really draw on for sustained and heavy use; the energies he himself produced or stored. He could recharge himself with the little trickles of power produced by all the living things around him, but that was akin to filling a cup with the dew collected on leaves. He could also make use of the tiny rivulets of energy as the living power collected in trickles and flowed toward the ley-lines. But not until he reached Master could he use the lines themselves - or the Heartstone.
Most schools of mage-craft built and maintained pools of power available to their Masters, but none except the Tayledras invested the energies not only of their own members but actually ran ley-lines into their power-pools and terminated them there. That was perhaps because only the Tayledras knew how to construct the Heartstones, to keep energy flowing out so that it never overloaded; of all of those outsiders who had tried, only one had succeeded - and that one was the legendary Herald-Mage Vanyel, Adept, and Tayledras-trained. Hundreds of years ago, Vanyel had invested the energies in the web that linked his Heralds, and a spell that had kept (or, more truthfully, irritated) “foreign” mages out of Valdemar, providing that steady drain; the Vales invested the excess in weather-control, shielding, and luxuries like the hot pools. When anyone else tried, the focus of power quickly destabilized in a manner quite destructive and usually fatal to all concerned.
“Now,” Firesong continued, unperturbed, “without disturbing the ley-lines in any way, link yourself to the ones feeding our Stone.”
He knew how to do that. He’d “watched” Firesong do it a thousand times - he’d practiced everything short of touching the lines themselves - and now was the moment of truth. He would either be able to call this hawk he’d trained back to his gloved fist, or fail - and feel its talons sink into his flesh, or watch it soar away out of reach forever.
He noticed that Firesong had no personal shields up whatsoever in case of failure. Knowing Firesong, that might be just another way to increase Darian’s confidence, but it was a trust that touched him deeply.
Except for a brief stab of something sharp, a mingling of fear and excitement, he didn’t let himself think or feel. He just acted.
He “reached” out, moving surely, but not too quickly. He caught hold of the nearest ley-line, and without permitting himself to hesitate, seized it, opening himself to it.
He knew enough to brace himself for the shock, but it still rocked him; it was like opening up his veins to a flow of white-hot glass! For a fraction of a second, he was immersed, blinded by the fiery incandescence, as pathways within him felt the caress of energies they had never known until this moment. Every breath seemed thicker, and every color more intense. All at once, he was drunk, delirious with power, dizzy with its intoxicating song, and disoriented.
Then everything he’d learned, from Starfall, from Firesong, from the mages of k’Vala Vale, came surging to the fore, and it was he who was in control, not the power.
It was still dizzying, still intoxicating, but the heady draught no longer overwhelmed him. He’d ridden horses in Valdemar, some very spirited and powerful horses. This was very like riding such a horse. He commanded; the power obeyed, but only because he had the skill to command and the strength of will not to succumb to the seductive song and be lost in it.
Darian still remembered that lesson outside k’Vala Vale when he’d nearly gotten lost in the shift and flow of the simple life-powers of everything around him. Having experienced that, he knew would not make that mistake again. He made sure that he was still anchored in himself and let his channels become accustomed to the new sensations. Then, metaphorically, he sat back and allowed himself to experience the moment. The wonder of Tayledras teaching was that it permitted the student to accept those things, to comprehend them, but never to become numbed to them; it was a way of understanding, not just using. Now he understood as a Master would. It would never happen like this again, this first taste of power, this seductive latent drunkenness; Darian wanted to be able to remember it, however dimly.
:A remarkably mature sentiment,: came a dry mental voice, after an interval. :But you, my young student, are a Healing-Mage. So what else do you see, feel, or sense?:
What else? Was there anything else?
But even as he asked himself that, his own Mage-Senses answered him, and he knew that, of course, there was. Within the stream of power that was the ley-line, there were a myriad of little subcurrents, and each of those threads told him of the health of the place it originated from. Eddies and obstructions in the flow as he traced it back out of the Vale showed him where the line itself needed alteration or mending. Two other mages - both Hawkbrothers - had tapped into this particular line; he sensed their presence at the same moment they sensed his. They acknowledged each other briefly, and went on with what they were doing. As did he; his touch moved by instinct and, sure from long practice, he mended the line, smoothing out the eddies, altering the flow until it ran swift and unimpeded.
:Good. So, then, catch!: Just as he completed this work, Firesong flipped something at him. Before it had gone half the distance between them, he lanced out a coruscating line of force and caught it in a gentle net of power, holding it in midair. It was only a river stone, but as he met Firesong’s eyes and saw the approval in them, he was very glad that he had chosen to cradle it, and not blast it aside.
:Well done. Now tap into the Heartstone,: the voice commanded. :You’re keyed to it. Now use it. Without dropping the rock, that is.:
Without releasing his hold on the line or the rock, Darian did exactly as he had been ordered, reaching for the Heartstone, touching it, then melding with its outer edges. He sensed it test him (or was it “taste” him?) and recognize him. That was all there was to it; he joined with the Stone, and all its power was his for the taking.
He’d expected an even wilder rush than the ley-line had fed into him; instead, this was like sinking into a peace-filled globe of light, or a blissfully hot pool of water. There was no sensation of heat, no exquisitely flickering inflow of energy; just the presence of enormous power, and the knowledge that he could do whatever he wanted with it.
This was no spirited horse, obedient to his will, but a kind of partner; a reservoir with a mind of its own, that acknowledged his right to drink of it.
Some mages signaled their achievement of Mastery with the production of “fireworks” that other mages of the same school could see and identify. But the Tayledras considered themselves no more than temporary custodians of their power. The Star-Eyed had granted them the use of that power for the purpose of healing the land after the Mage-Wars, and it wouldn’t even have occurred to them to make such a frivolous use of it as a peacocklike display of achievement with that power.
Theirs was a different tradition; to leave their mark upon the Vale itself, creating some change that would improve the lives of all those dwelling within. And Darian knew just what his mark would be, as the first new Master of a new Vale. He had been thinking about it for some time, ever since he had been told of the tradition, and the last time he’d been in Ayshen’s office, he’d checked the maps and models carefully for a place that would be open and suitable for his gift.
The lake at the far end of k’Valdemar was fed by several springs; he examined each of them in turn, to determine which would be the best candidate for his purpose. When he found one whose source was deeper than any of the others, he persuaded it to change its channel, to sink a little deeper, move nearer to the white-heat at the root of the Heartstone, before bubbling again to the surface.
Now with its waters warmed, it would serve as the water source for the first of the outdoor bathing pools. It wouldn’t take the hertasi long to notice the change, and within days they would cap the new flow and be building great pools to receive the hot waters. By the end of the month, there would be Tayledras soaking in the soothing waters under the stars, and there would be room for anyone who needed a hot soak to come and take one. The current hot pools were all inside one of the first buildings to be constructed here, and there wasn’t enough room to accommodate everyone at the same time.
:A fine choice of gifts to your Vale, Master Dar’ian.:
Firesong’s mind-voice held a smile of approval, and Darian blushed a little.
Just as carefully as he had taken control of Heart-stone and ley-lines, he released them, but not before he replenished the power he had used to create his hot spring. He opened his eyes on Firesong’s little workroom to see his mentor’s eyes full of warmth and congratulations.
Then he took a deep breath, and sat down carefully, right there on the floor, as exhaustion hammered him with a blow that made his legs go weak. He put out his hand and caught the river stone squarely in his right palm, as it dropped.
“Put it all back, did you?” Firesong asked rhetorically. “Well, that’s proper, but you didn’t have to put all the energy back at one time. You could have ‘borrowed’ some of it.”
“I didn’t?” he asked. “But with all the preparations for the celebrations, we’re going to be strengthening the Veil for a few days, and I thought we’d need every bit of energy now.”
“Hmm. A kind thought. Never mind, you’ll recover by this evening,” Firesong interrupted, helping him up and keeping him on his feet with a hand beneath his elbow. He dismissed his shields, and Darian recaptured his own, feeling a little better as he took the power he’d expended on them back into himself again. Firesong didn’t take him far, only past the door and into one of Silverfox’s consultation rooms.
This was a very small room, used only for counseling. It had both a large window and a skylight, but the furniture was minimal. There was a soft, dark-green sling couch there, though, and Darian was very happy to lie down on it, dropping onto the silk-covered, down-stuffed cushions with his head spinning a little.
“Just lie there, and don’t move,” Firesong cautioned. He needn’t have bothered, as Darian had no intention whatsoever of moving. He felt as if he’d run all the way to Errold’s Grove and back.
Maybe a few magical fireworks would have been a better idea, he thought as he closed his eyes.
He woke again, suddenly, sweating, out of a dream that, like the one last night, he could not recall. His heart pounded in alarm, his hands were clenched on the fabric of the couch. An irrational feeling of dread hung over him, and he opened all of his senses in an effort to discover if there was anything wrong in the Vale at all.
But there was nothing. The Vale was as it had been; crafters working at their tasks, hertasi scuttling about, gryphons dozing in the sun. His heart slowed, the sweat dried, and he was too weary to maintain his state of alarm. Gradually he relaxed, and slept again.
The next time he opened them, he was feeling much better, and both the skylight above him and the open window beside him were dark. Someone had come in and covered him with a light blanket, then left a sweetly scented candle burning in a blue glass holder mounted on the wall. He felt better - but he didn’t much feel like moving.
There didn’t seem any real reason to move, either; Firesong knew where he was, and had presumably told anyone else who needed or wanted to know. Silverfox wouldn’t mind him taking over the consultation room. And since Keisha wasn’t going to be home, there was no great urgency to get back to his own ground-bound ekele. He was perfectly content at the moment to lie surrounded by warmth and softness, let his thoughts drift, and listen to the night noises outside.
Keisha’s going to be surprised. Pleasantly, he hoped. This would put him on an equal footing with her, rankwise, though he very much doubted that would change anything in their relationship. She’ll be happy for me, that much I know for sure. All the other honors that had been planned for him were really nothing more than titles to impress other people; reaching the rank of Master meant a real achievement of his own, felt in his heart.
“And how is our new Master Mage doing?” Firesong asked from the doorway, and Darian let out a little yip of startlement.
Firesong chuckled, and moved out of the shadows of the hallway and into the dim light from the candle.
“Serves you right for all the times you’ve sent me out of my skin,” Firesong said. “Especially that time you shaved a year off my life when you managed to sneak up on me in my own ekele. How are you feeling?”
“Tired and hungry,” Darian replied, suddenly feeling that hunger rise up and growl in his gut. “Very hungry, actually.”
“No headache? Nausea? Dizziness?” As Darian shook his head at each question, Firesong smiled in satisfaction. “Good. Then you not only pass, you pass with all honors. And tired is easily fixed - find a ley-line.”
“Now? Without shields?” Darian asked dubiously.
“You’d already integrated your shields into a coherent whole once you became a Journeyman; now you don’t need to protect anyone from your mistakes anymore, because you aren’t going to make any.” Firesong sounded more confident in Darian’s ability than Darian was, and he looked impatient for the first time as Darian wavered. “Look now, do you bother with special shields anymore when you use Oversight? Or gather low-level energy?”
“Well, no . . .” Darian took himself in hand without any further prodding. Firesong was right; by now, everything he’d learned was as familiar to him as the act of speaking or reading. Drawing on that confidence he’d had this afternoon, he closed his eyes, invoked Mage-Sight, and reached for the nearest ley-line, then opened himself. As thirsty earth drank in rain, his power-depleted self soaked in the raw strength of the line, and when he opened his eyes and released it again, he felt as good as he had when he’d awakened this morning.
Firesong gave him a lopsided grin. “Next time, don’t wait to be reminded. I won’t always be around, you know.” He stood up, and Darian finally noticed that he’d changed his clothing from this afternoon. Now he wore blue and green, a loose-sleeved, body-hugging tunic with a high, embroidered collar, and skin-tight trews with matching soft boots. And in one hand he carried one of his many masks, a delicate thing of green scales and wispy blue plumes, that dangled loosely in his long fingers.
“Are you going somewhere?” he asked, for Firesong seldom donned a mask unless he planned to leave the shelter of his ekele. He didn’t wear his masks to spare himself - he did it to spare others the sight of the burn scars that pockmarked his face from scalp to chin, but for a strip across his eyes where his equally burned forearm had saved his vision. But there was also the very real possibility that he had another reason as well; if there was one thing that Firesong loved to cultivate, it was an aura of mystery, and the wearing of his masks was an integral part of that mystery.
“As a matter of fact, I am,” Firesong replied. “I’m taking you to your party.” He grinned again. “You don’t for a moment think we’d pass up such a fine excuse to have at least a little celebration, do you? It wouldn’t be Tayledras!”
Firesong was inordinately proud of his pupil, though he wasn’t about to let Darian know that. At least, he didn’t want Darian to know how proud he was. One of the reasons he’d been contemplating giving up taking on pupils was because the last couple had, for one reason or another, never quite come up to his expectations of them. They were not bad people at all, nor stupid, just . . . less than optimal. Perhaps part of that had been a failure to mesh their personalities, or that some of his pupils had been as interested in him as they had been in learning what he taught. Part of that, of course, might just have been that they were discouraged; it would be a very long time before anyone was able to casually work the kind of large-scale magics that had been possible before the Mage-Storms disrupted everything. His pupils would be very old before they had power available to them to duplicate Firesong’s own feats as a young and headstrong Master. It was likely that it would take another generation before there was the abundant power on hand to duplicate the lesser feats of an Adept. Gating was out of the question for at least a hundred years - safe and reliable Gating, anyway. It was no wonder they saw no reason to acquire proficiency in skills it was unlikely they would ever be able to use.
But Darian had a touch as sure and skilled as a fine craftsman, and he never left loose ends, or a job unfinished. Firesong was not yet certain he would reach Adept status, but as careful a worker as he was, given the current state of things and barring disaster, he would become one of the best mages of this generation. Darian was willing to follow brusque or peremptory instruction without thinking of Firesong as a tyrant; he had confidence that when he had done what he was told, it would be explained to him.
Always provided, of course, that nothing happened that interfered with his continued learning.
So Firesong decided that it was time to do a little delicate prodding. Not meddling - more on the order of information gathering. He never called his meddling by that unflattering name. Unsolicited guidance, discreet help, a “nudge,” but never meddling.
“So, how do you think Keisha will feel about this?” he asked, as he walked beside his protege, past the outer door of Silverfox’s workrooms and out into the cool half-light of the Vale at night. It wasn’t dark beneath the trees; lanterns tended by the hertasi and set along the path at intervals saw to that. They tried to replicate the blue of twilight, just after the sun has set and the sky to the west is luminous with afterglow, and Firesong thought that they succeeded very well.
“She’ll be pretty pleased, I think,” Darian replied. “She’ll probably pretend to be annoyed that I don’t have to wear uniforms, though. She’s still awfully self-conscious about being in Greens.”
“Mmm.” Firesong made a noncommittal sound. “She did make rank before you did, though. There was an imbalance.”
“That’s probably why she’ll be pleased; she’s not very comfortable with being at a higher rank than people around her.” Darian sounded as if he found that difficult to understand, but then, Darian was, beyond any doubt, a natural leader himself. Which means he doesn’t yet really understand Keisha’s motivations. That could be a point of potential conflict, especially if she is put into a position where she has to make a leader’s decisions.
Firesong continued to probe, interspersing his personal questions with those of a much more casual nature, and got the distinct impression that Darian was having some difficulty with the young Healer. It wasn’t enough to break their pairing - yet - but any time that conflict didn’t get resolved in one way or another, there was always the potential for it to happen. An unhappy Master Mage was a potentially reckless or careless one, and there was a long Hawkbrother tradition of taking good care of compatriot mages. More than that was the fact that Firesong genuinely liked young Darian on a friendly basis, and he did not want to see him troubled.
While he continued to exchange banter with his student, half of Firesong’s mind was elsewhere, pondering what, if anything, could be done. Goddess help me, I’ve turned into an inveterate matchmaker, he thought with a mingling of amusement and dismay. If I don’t watch my step, I’m going to have anxious fathers coming to me yet. Well, I have before, actually, but daughters weren’t involved. . . . Nevertheless - 
I’ll ask Silverfox to look into the matter and have a word with one or both of them, he decided at last. Silverfox was infinitely more skilled at such things than he - as well he should be, since it was one of the duties of a kestra’chern, to keep all the interpersonal relationships running smoothly within the group to which he or she belonged, be it city or Vale, army or Clan.
Let Silverfox make what he can of it, he decided. And at that point, it was past time to do any more thinking of his own - he stepped aside at a particular point in the path marked by a lamp-standard shaped like an elongated gryphon, holding the glass globe of the lamp in one extended claw. Darian paused when Fire-song did, looking faintly puzzled, and Firesong drew aside the curtain of flowering vines that had hidden a clearing at the foot of a tree too small as yet to support an ekele. He gave Darian’s shoulder a push, sending him into the center of the clearing, where he was surrounded by friends and well-wishers, all eager to congratulate him on his new status. Hertasi had been waiting for just this moment, and as soon as Darian was escorted to a seat of cushions piled up against the trunk of the tree, they swarmed him with offerings of food and drink.
Firesong stayed for a time, but kept his silence, as those who were mages monopolized the conversation. Those of Master rank and above - Starfall, Snowfire, and others - related their own Mastery Trials, as those who had not yet attained the rank of Master listened eagerly and a little enviously, then pelted the others with questions.
It was altogether too much like a gathering of scouts comparing the latest skills of their bondbirds. Each and every nuance and tactic was described and debated in staggering detail. When anyone asked Firesong a question directly, he answered it, but otherwise kept silent.
Although he hid it well, he was just as tired as Darian, and with as much reason; he had cultivated an appearance of calm, even indifference, but beneath it he had laid careful safety precautions, planning for the very worst. All of those safeguards had been integrated into his shields, of course, ensuring that Darian wouldn’t notice them - it was good for the young man’s confidence. Doing so had cost him a great deal in terms of work. The energy could be replaced, but the physical labor meant he needed his own rest. He’d also had an emotional stake in the trial that had worn him out; he was ready for relaxation, not a seminar.
So he waited until the celebration was well underway, and he knew he would not be missed, before he slipped out.
Once on his own, he took off his mask and used it as a fan - not that he was very hot, but it was pleasant to feel the cool air on his face. He walked slowly back to the ekele he shared with Silverfox, taking note as he walked of all of the improvements that the hertasi had made along the trail. He liked to be able to compliment them on specifics; it made them very happy when their handiwork was noted in detail.
For instance, the lamps had been replaced recently, so that they all matched. Much effort had gone into color matching the opaque, blue glass globes that protected the flames of the lamps from being blown out. All of the oil reservoirs matched, too - now they were made of green porcelain that harmonized with the blue glass. It was a very effective touch.
A Vale to match my outfit. How nice.
The standards themselves remained the same. Along this path they were all in the shapes of living things, inhabitants of the Vale. The gryphon at the entrance to the clearing was just one example; the standard Firesong was just passing was in the shape of an elongated hertasi, and the one just ahead in the form of an attenuated dyheli. Sometimes Firesong wondered if they were portraits of particular individuals, but he had never asked, and since none of the standards were of humans, he couldn’t tell by examining them in passing. Individuals of each species had distinctive markings and proportions, of course. Representations of those weren’t apparent, not in the ones he had seen, at any rate. It certainly didn’t detract from their beauty.
The path he was on crossed with another - the hertasi had not yet gotten around to replacing the lamps here to make them match. The bell-shaped glass covers were also blue, but they were of differing sizes and shapes, and were not all of the same color of glass. The standards, however, were all similar; simple wooden poles with vines trained to climb up them. The effect was more rustic and less baroque, and reminded him of all of the makeshifts that they had used when the Vale was first settled.
Two lamps marked the entrance to Silverfox’s home, a structure very much like Darian’s, a dome made of stone with rounded corners on the added chambers. It was covered with vines, so that it looked from outside as if there was nothing there except a heap of greenery. Somewhat to Firesong’s surprise, Silverfox was waiting for him, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed over his chest.
“Well, stranger, what are you doing out here?” he asked, pausing to admire the view. Silverfox had always been a handsome fellow, but in Firesong’s opinion, he had improved with age. He had lost some of the softness along his jawline that had made him look younger than he actually was, and the silver streak running from his temple all through his waist-length hair had grown wider by no more than a finger’s-width. Somehow he always managed to wear garments that harmonized with Firesong’s - blue and black, for instance, to Firesong’s current blue and green.
“Waiting for you; I knew you wouldn’t be too late at the party,” came the easy reply. “You never did care much for discussions of technique, and that’s all they’re going to get into tonight - hmmm. Well, you won’t be involved in - magical power technique, anyway.” He cast his eyes upward a little, as if he was calculating something. “By now I expect they’ve reached the stage of drawing diagrams on whatever surface is available.”
Firesong laughed. “I expect you’re right,” he replied. “I’d rather keep discussions of technique for lessons; it’s not my notion of conversational material.”
“Come on, then,” Silverfox said, standing up straight and beckoning. “I have refreshments cooling on the top deck, and there’s a good breeze.”
By the time Firesong got to the upper deck of the ekele, his weariness had completely caught up with him, and he was perfectly happy to sink down into a chair next to Silverfox and accept a cool drink. “I’ve got a bit of a favor to ask you, ashke,” he said, as Silverfox took the chair next to him, pulling his hair over his right shoulder to avoid sitting on it. “Would you keep an eye on Keisha and Darian? I’ve got the feeling that all is not comfortable between them, and I think they could use a little advice.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Silverfox replied easily. “I’ll be glad to look into it. You mustn’t be angry at me, though, if the outcome is that they decouple themselves.”
That took Firesong aback. “Why should they?” he asked, a little more sharply than he intended. “Do you already know something I don’t?”
Silverfox shrugged. “No, actually, I don’t. But remember, my job is to get the best possible outcome. I’m not a matchmaker. If our chief Healer and eventual Vale Elder are better off apart than together, that’s what I’ll counsel them. Short-term unhappiness is much better than long-term misery, and very few liaisons are lifebonds.”
Firesong was a touch disappointed in that answer, but he had to admit that Silverfox was right. “Well, if that’s what happens, I can’t promise you that I won’t be upset, but I won’t be angry, and certainly not with you.”
“Very sensible of you - and I’m only reminding you of the worst possible situation.” Silverfox reached over and took his hand, squeezing it reassuringly. “We could have the very opposite here, with both of them wanting a committed relationship, and both holding back because of some idealistic nonsense or other - ”
“Like, for instance?” Firesong put a teasing note into his voice, knowing what Silverfox was likely to say. “Idealism is always nonsense when it isn’t your idealism, eh?”
“Pest. Like, for instance, that they both are under the illusion that all successful relationships have to be lifebonds,” Silverfox replied.
“You mean they don’t?” Firesong asked innocently.
“Oh, no, no, no. Spells aren’t needed to make magic, and lifebonds aren’t needed to make love. Here - ” Silverfox put his drink down, and stood up in a single fluid, gliding motion, to lean over Firesong’s chair. His long hair made a curtain that shut out the rest of the world. “Allow me to demonstrate. . . .”

Four

Darian watched the shadows dance among the lamp-lit leaves overhead, supremely relaxed and content with his lot. The talk had settled to a murmur over to one side, with the rest of the small gathering of friends simply enjoying an all-too-infrequent moment of doing absolutely nothing.
“This isn’t really a proper party,” Wintersky complained, for after the drowsy laziness that inevitably followed a round of excellent food and drink set in, bodies sprawled over cushions as if in the aftermath of a massacre, and no one was inclined to do much more than listen to crickets sing. It had been a massacre, of sorts. The refreshments and supper brought by eager hertasi had been slaughtered down to the last drop and crust. Darian was wondering if he would make it to his bed after all, or just give up and fall asleep where he was, when Wintersky’s complaint broke the silence.
The bodies stirred and sat up, but no one replied to Wintersky, who continued in a firmer tone of voice. “No, it’s just nothing like a real party, and if anyone among us deserves a big celebration, it’s you, Dar’ian,” Wintersky stated authoritatively. “We ought to have one, that’s what we should do!”
“What, on top of everything else we’re planning?” Darian replied, appalled at the very idea. “Aren’t you all going to make me enough of an entertainment as it is? And think of the poor hertasil They’re already working their tails to stubs just to get ready for the Heralds, and now you want to add another party to their burden?”
“He’s right, Wintersky,” Sunleaf responded from the far corner of the clearing. Sunleaf, a contemporary of Snowfire, had been eager and willing to assist Darian in his studies when none of the greater mages were available, and the two had become good friends. “But Dar’ian, Wintersky is right, too,” he continued, nodding his shaggy head. “Keisha isn’t here, for one thing, and it doesn’t seem fair to me that we leave her out. Why don’t we just do this all over again as soon as she gets back? We’ll just call this a practice for the real party - or better yet, just a little gathering of friends. Say we just made a spur-of-the-moment picnic to congratulate you, and it’s not a party at all. Because really, that’s all it was.”
Darian didn’t have to think about it. He knew that Keisha would be hurt if she thought she’d been left out of the celebration. He did not want to hurt her feelings, nor did he want to make her think that he had forgotten all about her in the rush of euphoria after passing the Trial. “I’m glad you thought of that,” he replied gratefully. “So long as we don’t overburden our hertasi friends, that’s what we ought to do.”
Sunleaf laughed. “Oh, trust me, it’s in my own best interest,” he answered, and from across the clearing, Darian saw him wink. “I know what she’d do to me if she found out we had a party without her!”
“Do to you? Have pity, I have to sleep with her - what do you think she’d do to me? I’d be afraid to close my eyes!” Since the attendees at this little celebration were all males, and mostly bachelors, the entire gathering laughed at both of them, and Darian was momentarily ashamed to speak so of Keisha. On the other hand, Snowfire has said the same thing about Nightwind, to her face, and she just pretends to threaten him. “We should keep it very casual, but give Keisha and the other girls a chance to dress up.” There; that should make up for his lapse.
One of the hertasi that had adopted Darian and Keisha - a young striped male called Meeren - was picking up discarded and empty cups. At this sally, he hissed a laugh of his own. “Very well, then, do not worry about the preparations,” the leather-capped hertasi put in. “It is of manageable difficulty. In fact, with this much notice, we can have a few delicacies set aside for you. I will arrange for the official party to take place when Keisha returns.”
Darian relaxed; Meeren was one of Ayshen’s most valued assistants, a specialist in logistics. Whatever Meeren organized was certain to be a success.
Now the young hertasi turned to sweep the clearing with his gaze, his tail counterbalancing his movement as he turned. “And what Dar’ian has said makes me think. Do you young Tayledras think to be inviting some females, so that Keisha will not be the only one of her gender here? It will not only be Keisha who is disappointed to learn that there was a gathering to which no one thought to bring a friend.”
“That’s an even better idea - how did this end up as an all-male party, anyway?” asked Wintersky, looking around himself in astonishment. One of the shaych scouts replied with a laugh, “We were just lucky?”
“Don’t ask me - I was the last one to be invited,” Darian countered, tossing a cushion at the scout. “It wasn’t any idea of mine!”
Keisha was unusually glad to see the entrance of the Vale ahead of her. The twin pillars with the shimmer of the Veil between them beckoned her with all the warmth and welcome of an old friend. She was equally glad to ride through the cool shadows under moss-covered trunks and dismount at her very own door again. She removed the panniers resting across the back of her dyheli, but before she could touch the tack, a hertasi had come and taken it, and the dyheli trotted off to rejoin his herd.
How do they do that? Appear out of nowhere and just take over things? She stared at the retreating hertasi tail. I am never going to get used to it. It’s like they are always around, and always watching, no matter what we do - and then they know what we need next. She picked up the empty panniers, one in each hand, and with her foot nudged open the green-painted door.
It wasn’t that she was tired - that was far from the case; she had enjoyed the ride back enormously. Spring was her favorite season, and this spring was turning out to be particularly lovely. So far it had rained just enough, and only at night, so that blue skies graced the daylight hours. Everything was growing or in bloom. There were already spring vegetables coming in to the market, weeks before the usual time. It hadn’t been too cold or too hot. In fact, if the entire region had been seated beneath a Veil, the weather couldn’t have been more perfect.
No, the problem was not that Keisha was tired - unless it was that she was tired of Errold’s Grove. When she returned to her childhood home, she increasingly felt as if she was trying to squeeze into clothing that she had long since outgrown. Every time she made her weekly visit it was the same thing, whereas the Vale was constantly changing. The only change in the village was the occasional new pile of rocks, a fresh border around a flower bed, or a new shirt worn out-of-season so that everybody noticed. Other than that, it was the same little complaints, the same village gossip - 
The same lectures from Mother about still being single.
She dropped her panniers into their corner, and frowned, feeling a sullen anger well up in her again. Back in Errold’s Grove she had fought it down, but now she allowed herself to admit it. I wanted so badly to tell her exactly what I thought. What was so bad about not being married? It wasn’t as if she was the only one in the family expected to produce grandchildren - there were already two squalling infants bearing the Alder name and features, one each from her two oldest brothers. What on earth could she do as a married woman - besides produce legitimate grandchildren - that she couldn’t do as a single one? Could she be any more valued? Would she have any higher rank?
If she doesn’t stop giving me the “you’ll grow old, lonely, and abandoned” lecture every time I’m ready to leave, I swear, I’m going to stop visiting her, Keisha thought sullenly. What’s more, I’ll let everyone in the village knoiv why I stopped visiting her!
She wouldn’t and she knew it, but the idea was very, very tempting. As she walked into the outer room with its comfortable furnishings of woven branches and overstuffed beige cushions, its walls of soft cream, and tiled floor, she took her first completely free breath since she’d left. This was home, from the mask and decorated gryphon-feather hanging on the wall, gifts from Firesong and Silverfox, to the flowering vines around the skylight of the bathing room.
I’m stale, that’s what it is. All I ever see these days are farm animals, idiot men as dumb as farm animals, women as stubborn as farm animals, pregnant mothers-to-be, cuts and scrapes, and the occasional sniffle. It wasn’t that she wanted Errold’s Grove to suffer a disaster. Nothing of the sort could be farther from her mind! But she didn’t even get to see the interesting diseases the Northern tribes brought down with them anymore. The Sanctuary Healers got all of those. All she was left with were the all-too-ordinary problems.
Havens, people are taking such care these days that I never even see an infected puncture anymore!
She dropped all of her soiled clothing from the trip into the basket-hamper they kept for the purpose just outside the bathing-room door. She stripped off the tunic and trews she wore, and added them to the pile, then entered the bathing room. In the echoing room, tiled floor-to-ceiling, she knelt beside the square tub sunken into the floor and drew herself a bath. They had hot water now, although it came from a tank perched up in a tree, shared by several other ekele and heated by the sun rather than by magic.
Maybe we’ll get that, too, in a few years, though it seems a pity to waste the sun’s heat when it costs us nothing. She was no mage, but she was acutely sensitive to the cost in magical energies of every act of magic. Living here in a new Vale as much as living with Darian had made her very aware of such things. Darian was in superb physical shape, even to a Healer’s eyes, and when she saw the physical exhaustion he bore after some of his lessons, she had no doubts remaining about magic’s costs.
When the tub was full, she added herbs and scented salts, and soothing fragrance rose in the steam that condensed on the leaves of the vines planted in boxes around the skylight above her. She eased into the tub, to just over her breasts, and soaked for a good long time, allowing herself to run through all of the emotions she had repressed. Nightwind had told her that holding them in did no good and much harm, so she let them run their course. Disappointment led to anger, which gave way in turn to a seething despair.
What am I doing with myself? Nothing, that’s what! Is Mother right? Am I going to die a cross old maid, lonely and abandoned? How long is it going to be before this makes me sour, and Darian gets tired of me and starts looking for a prettier girl? It was going to happen; she was just sure of it. Then what?
Then, I suppose, I’ll go back to my little house in the village. Eventually they’ll start to treat me the way they treated Justyn. . . .
A hard lump of self-pity rose in her throat, a sob that she choked down lest one of the hertasi was about. If they caught her in this mood, they’d be upset and concerned, and entirely sure it was their fault that she was unhappy.
The hertasi like me anyway. . . .
She couldn’t get herself out of this mood; it felt as if she had fallen into a pit and was too tired to climb out. She squeezed out a few bitter tears, a distillation of it all, and then, suddenly, felt much better. It was as if those few tears had taken all of her self-pity with them.
Not that crying had changed anything.
But with the tears out, she started to think past them, realizing how silly she would have sounded to anyone else, and in a moment, she laughed weakly at her own absurd thoughts. In the very worst case, it’s not as if I would lose everything! Even if Darian gets tired of me, we’ll still be friends, I’d still be a full Healer, and I’m entitled to ask to be sent wherever I want. And Shandi is coming back, so how bad can things be, really? Darian gave no hint that he had lost interest in her, anyway - so why was she borrowing trouble?
Worry about that when the time comes, if it ever happens at all. And if it does - well, there’s no reason why I can’t exchange positions with one of the Sanctuary Healers, is there? I’ll bet one of them would be willing to take over the village for a few months’ rest! Or even longer - there’s no telling how any of those Trainees are going to turn out, and if any of them turns out like old Gil Jarred, with a weak Gift, then Errold’s Grove is the right place for him and I can take his place in the Sanctuary permanently. That will give me plenty of excitement! The very fact that she had come up with an alternative to moldering in the village cheered her up immensely.
So what if Darian has more and more duties - and Firesong keeps heaping him with more complicated lessons. I might end up being sent off by the Healer’s Circle, too - things happen. Crying about them before they’ve happened isn’t going to stop them.
She stopped herself before she could step off the edge again, and fall into that pit of depression. I think I’d better talk to Nightwind.
She scrubbed off the sweat and dirt of the journey, feeling as if she was scrubbing away all her frustrations as well. She washed her hair, then ran more clean water for a thorough rinse. Sometimes it seemed like water was her best friend of all; it was nearly impossible to feel too badly when in a refreshing soak or a warm rain. When she emerged from the bathing room, cleansed and wrapped in thick towels, she found that one of the hertasi had been in the bedroom before her, and had laid out - a garment she didn’t recognize.
What - Havens, what is this?
She lifted one sleeve of the dress that had been put out for her to don. A springlike leaf green, it was absolutely charming - of light Tayledras-made silk with billowing sleeves caught into long cuffs, and a high collar. Both collar and cuffs were ornamented with silver embroidery, and there was a second, sleeveless gown of a slightly heavier weight in a darker green to wear over it. This sleeveless gown had a beautiful embroidery of silver-thread vines, leaves, and flowers running from the left shoulder to the hem, and all around the bottom.
This was not the simple green tunic-and-trews she had expected. She did not recall that there had been anything special planned for her return.
But next to the dress was a note attached to a new hair ornament - one of Aya’s sparkling white tail-feathers with green crystal beadwork ornamenting the shaft. She picked it up and read it.
You are invited to share a small celebration in honor of Darian Firkin k’Vala k’Valdemar on the occasion of his attaining the rank of Master Mage, follow the firebird feathers. And there was a postscript, in a rougher hand. We decided to postpone this until you came home; it wouldn’t be a proper celebration without you. She didn’t need a signature to recognize Darian’s handwriting on the postscript, and only the elegant Silverfox could have penned the invitation.
She forgot her anger completely. Surprise was followed immediately by such a rush of cheer that she might as well have downed an entire beaker of wine by herself.
She dropped her towels on the floor and hurried into the lovely gown, fastening the hair clasp into her damp hair. The feather trailed down along the side of her face, brushing her cheek in a graceful curve. Although the feather ceased to drip false sparks once it was no longer attached to Aya, it did retain the ability to sparkle as if it had been dusted with minute particles of gemstones.
With her skirts caught up in one hand, she ran out the front door and caught sight of the first of the firebird feathers. This was a smaller, body-feather; it hung from a strand of beads fastened to the lamp-standard marking the beginning of the lefthand path, fluttering and twisting in the light breeze.
The feathers were easy enough to spot - each one was within sight of another - and she soon met someone else following the same trail.
Wintersky’s current partner, a Tayledras scout called Ravenwing, waved to Keisha just as Keisha caught sight of her. She, too, was dressed for a celebration, in tunic of gold deerskin and trews of black silk. The tunic had beading in black and metallic gold across the shoulders and around the collar, with fringes along the sleeves and bottom hem that cascaded past her knees. Her bondbird, a handsome little cooperihawk, perched on a light gauntlet she wore on her left hand.
“Heyla!” Ravenwing called cheerfully. “Have you any idea what’s been planned? I got out of my bath to find an invitation next to my clothing!”
Keisha shook her head, admiring Ravenwing’s new hair patterns. Many of the Tayledras had snow-white hair by their early twenties at least, simply because they lived within a place where extremely powerful mage-energies were a part of everyday life, but the scouts often had their hair dyed in camouflage colors so that they blended in with their surroundings. Ravenwing’s patterns were brand new, the colors and edges crisp and unfaded - and it was obvious to Keisha’s experienced eyes that the reason she’d been in the bath was because she had been washing out the excess dyes.
“I love your new patterns!” she exclaimed - for Ravenwing’s hair had been dyed to resemble the wings of the enormous brown-eye butterflies that thronged the Vale. It was still camouflage, but it was anything but drab.
“You do? Thank you!” Ravenwing looked pleased, and ran her fingers through her loose hair with obvious pleasure. “I just got so tired of looking like I had a nest of old leaves on my head!”
“Once the others see it, they’ll want to copy it,” Keisha assured her. “It looks wonderful!”
Ravenwing caught her up on the news as they followed the trail of beaded feathers at a brisk walk. Keisha learned that she hadn’t missed much, other than Darian attaining Master status. “Everybody’s too caught up in getting ready for the Heralds to arrive,” Ravenwing concluded, and looked curiously at Keisha. “Is it true that one of them is your sister?”
“So they tell me! I’ll be glad to see her. Until she was Chosen, she was my best friend besides being my sister.” Keisha fingered the feather in her hair thoughtfully. “I hope she hasn’t forgotten that.”
“How could she? Don’t be silly.” Ravenwing seemed very sure of that. “She’ll be just as happy to see you as you are to see her. And if she’s anything like you, I can’t wait to meet her. There aren’t enough girls our age around this Vale, not nearly enough to get into the kind of trouble we used to cause back in k’Vala!”
Ravenwing’s eyes sparkled with amusement as she said that, and Keisha had to laugh. The Tayledras girl had been very free with her tales of the scrapes she and her gang of friends had perpetrated, and Keisha had, more than once, wished she had gotten a chance to join in the mischief. “Believe me, Shandi can cause enough trouble for three! If she hasn’t gone all sober on us now that she’s a Herald, we’ll have a fine time - oh, look - ” She interrupted herself. “That must be where the party is!”
Meeren, her own hertasi, stood beside the path, holding aside a curtain of vines for someone who had come from the opposite direction. He saw them, and beckoned them on; they hurried their steps and he grinned, showing all his teeth, as they reached him.
“Ah, the final pair!” Meeren exclaimed. “With you, we are ready to begin the celebration at last!”
Keisha ducked under the slant of vines, and was seized from behind by a pair of strong arms. “Keisha!” Darian crowed, spinning her around and around until she was dizzy. “You found my presents!”
“What? The dress? The feather?” she asked, trying to catch her breath, her head swimming as he finally stopped whirling her around. “Never mind, thank you for both - oh, Darian, congratulations! This is - wonderful!”
She cupped both her hands around his chin and pulled his head down for a long, heartfelt kiss. She heard the others whooping behind her, and for once, was not embarrassed by their rowdy attentions. She was wholeheartedly proud of him, and happy for his achievement, and she wanted him to know it beyond a shadow of a doubt. His arms closed around her as he drew her close, and for a time the cheers and hoots faded into a faint murmur as her ears filled with the pounding of both their hearts.
Then he let her go, and she took a step backward, smiling breathlessly up into his wide grin. She hadn’t even gotten her scattered wits together when he seized her hand and led her ceremoniously to a seat on the far side of a little clearing, where two enormous cushions had been braced against backrests placed on the ground. “My lady,” he said, gesturing broadly as he bowed to her, his grin as wide as ever, “if you will choose your seat, we can begin.”
She took the seat to the right; he dropped onto the cushion at the left, and a steady stream of hertasi moved into the clearing, each carrying a platter. As was usual at these casual celebrations, the hertasi carried each platter around the circle of diners, and they helped themselves. If the platters still had anything left on them, they made the rounds a second time. Hertasi then returned bearing drink, pouring each cup full of a light spiced wine. There was very little alcohol in this wine; Tayledras drank it for the taste, not with the purpose of intoxication. That was one of the things that Keisha liked so much about living among the Tayledras. Celebrations in the village inevitably ended in drunks staggering about and making themselves nuisances, and the morning after inevitably brought a parade of hung-over sufferers to her door. But the rare intoxicated Hawkbrother took himself away to sleep it off as soon as he or his friends realized the extent of his intoxication, and he either found his own hangover remedy or quietly suffered the punishment for his overindulgence.
Every morsel was delicious - even though most of it wasn’t special “feast” food. She quickly gathered that this was not a formal celebration, probably to spare the hertasi from any more extra work. The few special dishes could very well have been culled from the ones already in progress for the Heralds’ welcome. That made her feel easier; like Darian, she knew how hard the hertasi worked, and like him, she had not grown up accustomed to having them around. Putting any extra burden on them made her feel guilty.
As the dinner proceeded, each of Darian’s friends in turn voiced a wish for the new Master, and when it came time for Keisha to give hers, she knew precisely what she wanted to say.
“I salute our own Darian,” she said. “May he always be properly recognized for his accomplishments, and may he never regret a moment spent in achieving them.”
She raised her glass, and the others joined her. Now, if this had been the kind of celebration one would find in Errold’s Grove, now would be the time that Darian made a speech. But the Hawkbrothers didn’t have that particular tradition, and Keisha was just as glad; Darian didn’t much care for making speeches, and he already had plenty he was going to have to produce when the Heralds arrived.
Instead, those of the participants who cared to took turns entertaining the rest. About half of the population of this Vale were amateur musicians, and three of Darian’s guests had brought their chosen instruments with them - Silverfox being one, blindingly quick-fingered with a hand drum. One scout got up to teach a sculptor a step, and in no time at all, impromptu dancing had started. Keisha began to tap her fingers in time to the infectious beat, and Darian’s left foot did the same, until Darian could bear inactivity no longer.
“Come on!” Darian urged her, jumping to his feet and holding out his hand to her. She loved dancing, and did not hesitate a moment in allowing him to help her to her feet, and joining him in the circle.
They danced until the musicians were tired of playing, pausing only for cold drinks and a moment to catch their breath. She had danced with every male at the celebration, including Firesong (in a striking mask made of Aya’s feathers and polished quartz beads), and was just about out of energy. By that time, it was late enough that everyone agreed it was time to bring the party to an end. A final round of iced teas and juices - the ice cut during the winter and stored deep in hertasi-dug caves during the warmer months - allowed the heated dancers to cool down.
Keisha leaned against Darian’s shoulder, tired, permitting herself the luxury of forgetting all about the duties of a Healer, and giving herself up completely to the pleasure of the moment. And the moment was glorious; glimpses of a sky full of stars appeared as the great tree above them moved its branches in a light wind. The air, perfumed faintly with night-blooming flowers, had cooled just a trifle since sundown but was still perfectly comfortable. Now that the musicians were done in, the murmur of conversation and the song of insect and bird provided another sort of melody.
“So, Keisha, how was your visit?” Darian asked, shifting just a little so that she could settle more comfortably against his shoulder, and putting one arm around her to hold her steady.
She groaned. “Mother managed to get me into a corner again. Other than that, it was the usual, nothing of any great urgency. I think they don’t need me so much as the potions I bring with me.”
“We could always send your medicines over with the Council members,” he suggested. “You could cut your visits to every other week or so, instead of going once a week.”
The idea was tempting. “Perhaps after Rana Trilvy’s baby comes. I wouldn’t care to upset a first-time mother.” Darian’s shoulder was warm, and his arm around her comforting. She shoved all of her doubts and misgivings into a corner of her mind and shut a door on them. “This was lovely; thank you for waiting for me.”
His arm tightened slightly around her; she squeezed his hand in reply. “I knew you’d be disappointed if I didn’t. Besides, you don’t get nearly enough of a chance to simply enjoy yourself. When the village has a celebration, you spend most of the time dealing with accidents and drunks, and the next day with hangovers and belly-aches.”
“Well, thanks to you, I’m going to get quite a few chances to do so in the near future,” she said, and laughed when he sighed. “Come on, it won’t be that bad, will it?”
“I’m not so sure. The easiest is likely to be the Ghost Cat ceremony - and for that, all of the men will be stripping down and cramming into the sweat house until we’re equally parboiled. Then I exchange blood with the Shaman - I gather we each cut our palms and clasp hands - he declares that I’m his true son, with his blood in my veins and mine in his.”
“That doesn’t sound too difficult,” Keisha observed. “Other than the parboiling part. By all the men, are you just talking about the Ghost Cat folk?”
She heard the grin in his voice. “Oh, no, this includes Lord Breon and Val - Snowfire and Wintersky have to get in on this too, and maybe Starfall - and certainly Herald Anda. Should be very interesting to see how he reacts.”
She giggled. “It should be very interesting to see how Lord Breon takes it!”
The rest of the guests had started to slip away, by twos and fours, while they talked. She took a quick glance around, and realized that they were completely alone; not even a single hertasi had remained behind.
He was still caught up in thinking about the ordeals he was about to undergo. “Before that, there’s the knighting thing. I’ve got to do a night-long vigil, then Breon gets to put on his show, which is supposed to take the rest of the day. Oathtaking, knighting, ceremony following the knighting, speeches, tournament, feast, more speeches. The Ghost Cat people are probably going to be bored silly - and I know I will be, at least during the speeches.”
“You will not - you’ll be making mental notes like you always do,” she retorted. “You’ll be figuring what people are thinking by what they say and don’t say, and who they look at while they’re talking. You’ll tuck all that away in your mind, and when we most need it and least expect it, you’ll pull something out in a Council session that will solve everything.”
“Oh, come now!” he protested, laughing, “I’m not anywhere near that good!”
“You only think you aren’t. The rest of us know better.” He didn’t say anything, but she could tell he was embarrassed. “You’d better get used to it; people rely on you, Darian, and you’re good enough to be depended upon,” she added. “I know, and Starfall, Firesong, and Snowfire know, that you’ve got the instinct. You read people beautifully.”
“I don’t like to think that I’m manipulating them, though,” he replied, his voice uncertain. “That seems so unethical.”
She chose her words carefully. “It isn’t that you’re manipulating them, it’s that you’re getting them to see things they wouldn’t think of for themselves. Eventually, when the problem is over, they do see, and the next time you won’t have to prompt them or coax them into it. I don’t think that’s manipulation, that’s education. Besides, in a sense, we all manipulate each other; that’s what happens when you are friends, when you trust and love someone. I manipulate people as a Healer, but it’s with skill and good intent. Sometimes I have to trick them in order to make their medicine work.”
“I don’t know. . . .” He still sounded reluctant. “It just seems that I’m getting people to do things they’d rather not do at the time, and I wonder if that’s right.”
“But aren’t they more inclined to do the same thing on their own, later, once you’ve persuaded them into it the first time?” she countered. “Think of Val! If you hadn’t shown him how awful fighting and warfare really is, he’d have been inclined to throw himself into the thick of battle the first chance he had! Now he takes the time to think things through, and see if there isn’t a way to solve a situation without killing anyone. I don’t doubt for a moment that if fighting turns out to be the only answer, he’ll still be right up in the front of it - you didn’t turn him into a coward, because that’s not in his nature. All you did was bring out a part of his nature he hadn’t bothered to develop before you talked to him.”
“But what if he had been fearful, and I had turned him into a coward?” Darian replied.
“What’s better? That he discover that he was really timid about fighting when he was in the middle of a fight, or when he was sitting safe at home?” she said instantly. “Which does the most harm - or the least? It seems to me that if he’d discovered he couldn’t bear the battlefield, he’d have had plenty of opportunity to cultivate courage or find an alternative place to be useful where he didn’t have to actually fight. But you know what kind of havoc a single fighter can wreak just by turning and running.”
Darian sighed. “I guess you’re right.”
She clasped both her hands over his and squeezed them. “You know I am, you mean. You never use your abilities with people to make them do something that’s alien to their nature - you just make them see alternatives and then try those alternatives. Some day it might happen that you run up against someone who doesn’t like the alternative you offer, and goes into it reluctantly, but you don’t nock an arrow to your bow and force him into it. He can always say no.”
“But people don’t want to say no when I ask them to do something,” he protested. “It makes them feel guilty to turn me down, so they go ahead and do what I ask even though they don’t want to - ”
“Then it’s their job to grow a stronger spine.” As far as she was concerned, that was the end of that argument. “And here we are, wasting a perfectly lovely evening by agonizing over things that haven’t ever happened! I can think of much better things to do with our time.”
She hadn’t expected an immediate response, but she was very pleased when she got one. “So can I,” he replied, and turned so that she was no longer resting on his shoulder so that he could kiss her.
Her body began to tingle pleasantly as he prolonged the kiss, nibbling delicately on her lip as she responded. She shifted a little so that she could put both her arms around him, losing herself in sensation. Meeren will see that the “privacy” sign is set up by the time we need it, she thought - and gave herself up to loving.

Five

Darian stepped back from the golden-oak wall panel he’d been holding up, and admired all of the new hertasi-work ornamenting the Companion stables. The structure was finished just in time. Thank goodness for gryphons. If we hadn’t had warning, we could have been caught in mid-addition.
For the past several days, especially swift gryphons had been patrolling the main road to Errold’s Grove, on the watch for the approaching Heralds; even at the speed a Companion moved, a gryphon in the air traveled faster. A rough calculation gave them about a day’s warning before the visitors arrived. Last night the two had finally been spotted just before sunset, and the gryphon in question, a gyrfalcon-type with amazing speed, had come rushing back to the Vale as fast as she could with the news. She was exhausted when she arrived, but two more gryphons had been eager to take the news to Errold’s Grove and Lord Breon’s Keep, giving everyone advance notice that their very special guests were soon to appear.
The basic structure of the attachment to the guest lodge meant to house the Companions had been finished quite quickly, but Ayshen (no mean architect) had planned for the ornamentation and elaboration to be completed in stages. No matter when the new residents arrived, the stables would appear finished. The first change had been to the fountain that supplied fresh running water; the initial installation had been a simple trough with water constantly flowing through it running along the rear of all three stalls. Utilitarian, but not very impressive; certainly not Tayledras. “There is power in style,” was all Ayshen would say concerning the redesign. Now each of the three stalls held a separate handsome terracotta basin, with a constant flow of fresh, clean water bubbling up from the bottom and drained by a pipe just beneath the rim at the rear. Outside, the pipes joined into one, which drained into an ornamental pond. Ayshen figured the fish wouldn’t mind secondhand water.
The second change had been to add separate mangers for different sorts of foodstuffs; a hay rack just for hay, and smaller mangers and basins for oats, sweet-feed, and hot mashes. The hay rack had been fastened at the front of the stable for all three to share, but each stall had its own “special treat” containers; the latter were actually more terracotta basins which fitted into twisted-wire racks. The basins were removable, so that they could be taken away to be cleaned after use. The old wooden mangers that served for all food and were not removable for cleaning had been left in place, but trimmed with braided rope.
Then the dirt floor was replaced with brick, laid over a layer of gravel, over which in turn first sawdust, then clean straw was spread. Since Companions weren’t horses, a “latrine stall” with a slanted brick floor was added, with a sluice to wash the waste away, and a drain to carry the waste to the waste tanks to be purified and turned into fertilizer. The Companions themselves could operate the sluice with a pull-rope, as they would be able to open all doors with a pull-latch and could come and go as they liked.
The last set of improvements was to give the place ornamentation; paneled woodwork, carvings along the beams, shelves and a proper tack room. Whenever Darian found himself with a moment to spare, he’d gone to help the building crew, and he’d been holding a wall panel in place when the news had come that the Heralds were within a few hours of arrival.
I’d be perfectly happy to live here, he thought, looking around at the fine carvings, the solid appointments, the beautifully made door into the guest lodge itself, which was actually a double door. It was a regular door divided in half, so that the upper half could be left open for the Companions to stick their heads into the room.
“You’ve done a terrific job, friends,” he said aloud to the crew of hertasi picking up their tools. “I can’t see anything that could be improved upon.”
One of the nearest looked up at him. “I can,” the hertasi responded. “And if I can, you know that Ayshen will, too.”
“This is better and far more gracious than anything outside of Haven,” he told the hertasi firmly. “I’ll tell Ayshen that myself. Besides, I think any further changes ought to be made after you consult with the Companions themselves, not before.”
The hertasi, who appeared to be the work-crew chief, looked around, and nodded after a moment. “You’re probably right,” it admitted. It (it was usually impossible for humans to tell which hertasi was male and which female) stowed the last of its tools in its toolbox, then bent and picked up the heavy box as easily as if it had weighed no more than a basket of eggs. The other hertasi cleared out as the crew chief took a last look around and nodded again. “It’s solid,” the hertasi said, the ultimate compliment that any hertasi would ever pay to its own work. “Even Ayshen will agree to that.”
It trotted out with a wave of farewell to Darian, who shook his head and had to laugh.
He left through the door into the guest lodge just as more hertasi arrived, bearing bales of hay and bags of grain. More were following, carrying cleaning supplies, although he could not imagine how the place could possibly be any cleaner. But then, he wasn’t a hertasi.
The guest lodge had been cleaned and polished until every surface gleamed; the mattresses taken out and restuffed, new linens made for the beds, new blue gauze curtains hung on the windows. There were flowers in all the rooms, scented candles in holders on every table, with bundles of additional candles tied with a ribbon stocked in an open cabinet in the main room. Last year a bathing room had been added to the guest lodge since not every guest cared to bathe in company; like Darian’s, this bathing room was supplied with sun-heated water from a tank above the roof. He took a quick peek, and saw that everything possible had been supplied here, as well. In two of the rooms, a set of white clothing designed by the hertasi was laid out on the bed. Presumably one set had been made to Shandi’s measurements. As for Herald Anda, perhaps the hertasi had simply guessed at the size for the other set. It was easy enough to tell which room had been designated for each Herald, though. The room that was to be Shandi’s held some of her old possessions brought from Errold’s Grove, and a specially chosen basket of sewing and embroidery supplies.
Obviously there was nothing more he needed to do here. As Darian walked out onto the covered porch that surrounded the Lodge, he nearly ran into another hertasi, an adolescent by its build. “Dar’ian - you are to prepare!” the youngster blurted out before he could apologize for his clumsiness. “The guests are less than two hours distant!”
He glanced up at the sky, trying to tell where the sun was through the trees, and judged that it was early afternoon. The Heralds had made good time, but the Vale was ready for them.
All except me! he reminded himself, and bolted up the trail to his ekele.
It was empty when he arrived; Keisha had probably gotten ready hours ago. He had seen her outfit earlier; the hertasi that had adopted the two of them had outdone themselves in the way of clothing for her. She now had a set of Greens that would be the envy of every Healer who saw them. There would be plenty of Healers to impress, too; every Sanctuary Healer that could get away had been arriving all morning. Even if they hadn’t been anxious to meet the new Heralds, no one wanted to miss a Vale-wide Hawkbrother celebration. K’Valdemar had a far-flung reputation for its hedonistic hospitality on such occasions.
The hertasi hadn’t exactly shirked when it came to Darian’s outfit either, but at the moment he wasn’t concerned with his clothing. After helping with the stables since early morning, what he needed most was a bath.
Once clean, he hurried into the first of his four sets of “welcoming” garb. This first set, the most exotic and ornamental of the lot, was for today, when the Heralds were formally -greeted and welcomed into k’Valdemar Vale. This was to mark his primary allegiance to his Vale and Clan. Tomorrow, he would wear Valdemaran formal military garb, although it would not be in Guard blue, but in brown, with badges of owls rather than the winged horse of Valdemar. This outfit included light ornamental armor and came complete with embroidered surcoat displaying his new arms. But the arms were not in Valdemaran style, but in the mode of the Hawkbrothers - the fluid, sinuous curves and stylization they had developed over the course of centuries. And the device itself was not Valdemaran either, for there was not a single noble family in all of the land that used an owl for their device. It seemed odd to him, but it was so. Lord Breon told him that owls were considered ill-omened in some parts; it was said that if an owl landed on one’s house three nights in a row and called, someone in the house would die. Others swore that owls were the eyes of evil spirits, because they flew so silently and attacked in the darkness when no other creature could see. There were plenty of nocturnal creatures besides owls, including animals no one thought of as evil - but there was no arguing with superstition. The good part was that there was no one to argue with when he planned his device around a stylized portrait of Kuari coming in to land, wings spread wide.
He would spend the night in that outfit, in vigil. The next morning he would change into his third outfit, Valdemaran Court garb, with a more elaborate version of his embroidered surcoat, this one sparkling with gold-and-silver thread and tiny gem-stones. He had no idea how the hertasi had managed to get not one, but two embroidered surcoats done in time, yet they had. There was always the belief that there were more hertasi than anyone ever actually saw, down in their burrows - and since so many looked alike to human eyes, who could count for sure just how many there were to make the goods they brought? That outfit was for the feast celebrating his knighting. Hopefully they’d let him get a nap before he had to endure hours of a formal Valdemaran feast. . . .
But that wasn’t the end. On the fifth day - they were going to allow him a day to rest before he took up the trial again - he would don a set of clothing that was a blend of Ghost Cat and Hawkbrother styles. Crafted mostly of supple leather, it was decorated with Kuari’s feathers, ornaments of carved bone harvested from Kuari’s kills, beadwork with an owl-and-feather theme, and finished with a belt and dagger-sheath carved with a frieze of standing owls. Under it all was a draped loincloth, woven with a decorative pattern of feathers. He would put it all on only to take it off again (except for the loincloth), for this was his costume for his presentation at the Ghost Cat sweathouse.
At least both Heralds would have to keep him company through most of this. They would stand guard to make certain he didn’t fall asleep during the vigil, and Anda would join all the men in the sweat-house ceremony while Shandi waited with the women in the drum-circle outside. The women had their own rituals, which were held secret from the men; all he knew was that they involved drumming for the men in the lodge.
Right now, however, he had best concentrate on today’s ordeal.
This was not the sort of outfit he would have chosen to wear to a celebration, but fortunately, like the clothing that Snowfire and Nightwind wore for their wedding, he was going to be able to abandon part of it once the most formal portions of the evening were over. The base was a comfortable, soft sleeveless tunic of silk the color of red amber, and a pair of dark brown silk trews. Over this went a hip-length vest woven with a pattern of owl feathers, buttoned with amber toggles. Over that went an ankle-length coat, this cut of and lined with silk the color of honey amber, with a high collar, sleeves scalloped to resemble great wings, and so completely embroidered with owl feathers that very little of the original silk showed through. It was belted over the hips with a belt made of plaques of tiger-eye stone carved with more owls, no two of which were alike. The belt clasp was the mask of an owl, made in two halves that met so perfectly that it looked like a solid piece when buckled. The eyes were amber, the beak of creamy shell all the way from Lake Evendim, and the owl mask of carved horn, each feather individually carved and fitted to a metal backing plate. His boots of warm brown leather were inlaid on each calf with a design of an owl feather in four different shades of brown deerskin.
The coat was infernally heavy; not hot, but heavy. The weight of all that beading and embroidery hung on his shoulders like the heaviest pack he’d ever had to hike with.
Once the entire outfit was on, he waited for Meeren to return to inspect him and put the finishing touches on his appearance.
He certainly couldn’t put the finishing touches on himself; he could hardly move without knocking something over with his sleeves.
It wasn’t long until Meeren trotted in the door, clad himself in a coat made of thousands of tiny black octagonal scales of metal, forming a “fabric” as flexible as silk. Meeren examined him closely, looking at him from all angles, before pronouncing his satisfaction. “You’ll do,” the hertasi said. “Now sit, and let me make you presentable.”
Darian sat gingerly on a low stool, and Meeren moved in, brush and comb in hand. Despite his apprehension, Meeren did not pull every hair out of Darian’s head; in fact, he was remarkably gentle. Darian had allowed his hair to grow long, Tayledras-fashion, so that he could braid feathers and beads into it as his Clan-brothers did. It took a defter hand than his to achieve the kind of effects that Firesong or Starfall managed, and that was where Meeren came in.
He sat patiently as Meeren worked, wondering what was going on, but unable to tell anything from the gentle tugs and pulls on his hair. Meeren didn’t take long, not as long as the hertasi must have taken with Keisha, but Darian was very impatient to see his handiwork, and shifted restlessly on his stool.
“All right, all right, I’m finished!” Meeren exclaimed. “Go ahead and look - but don’t admire yourself too long; they’re waiting for you at the Vale entrance.”
He got up carefully, mindful of his costume, and moved into the bedroom to peer into the only mirror in the house.
It was a pleasant surprise, for he had been a little afraid that Meeren would overdo the decorations; Meeren had worked Kuari’s feathers, a few strands of amber beads, and leather thongs finished with tiny silver feathers and figurines into his hair without making him look like a walking display of hair-jewelry. In fact, with his hair pulled back from his face and given a little more discipline, he looked a few years older than he actually was. That was exactly the effect he’d hoped for, but when he turned to thank the hertasi, Meeren was already gone.
It’s time for me to be gone, too. He took a last look at himself, satisfied himself that everything was fastened in firmly and wasn’t going to come apart, then headed for his destination at a trot that would have been a run if not for the weight.
The Veil distorted the view past the entrance, but there was no doubt that everyone who could possibly appear to greet the Heralds had made it his business to come. As he passed the Veil itself, the tingle along his skin and down his spine seemed a bit stronger than usual; that probably meant Starfall and Firesong had gotten the Veil strengthened enough to keep out rain and inclement weather. Of course, now that they’ve got the “umbrella” up, it won’t rain.
When he emerged on the other side and surveyed the crowd beneath trees that were only large by the standards of those who lived outside a Vale, he saw Keisha wave at him, then run to meet him. She looked a great deal more comfortable in her Greens than he was in his costume; her outfit was a butterfly-sleeved, calf-length tunic over long trews, belted with silver. Silver embroidery of leaves and vines on all hems was the extent of ornamentation, for the real emphasis in her costume was the fabric, which somehow managed to ripple through every possible shade of green as she moved. She seized his arm and tugged him to the right, looking relieved. Out in the crowd, there were at least two brightly painted inflated kick balls being tossed about randomly from person to person.
“Are they here yet?” he asked, wondering if he had missed the ceremony somehow.
“No, no, not yet, but Kel has them in sight.” She gestured upward, and he followed her pointing finger to a patch of blue sky in the canopy of leaves. A small black speck rode a thermal in a slow, lazy circle overhead. Kel is obviously planning on making an impressive entrance, he thought with amusement. His favorite hobby, besides being preened.
But Keisha was tugging on his arm again, and he followed her obediently out past the restless mob of his fellow Hawkbrothers. Anticipation hung thickly in the air, and mingling with the Tayledras were members of Ghost Cat, villagers from Errold’s Grove, and Lord Breon’s people. Errold’s Grove would get its own chance to greet the Heralds, but that wouldn’t take place until the sixth day, and Darian intended to avoid that particular festival if he possibly could. He fully expected to be passed out in his bed then by the time all parties involved had gotten done with him.
There was no elevated platform setting the greeting committee apart from the rest, but one wasn’t needed. If nothing else, the costumes marked all of the principal players out; the last time Starfall, Snowfire, and Nightwind had worn their elaborate outfits had been at Snowfire and Nightwind’s wedding. Since then, the heavily embroidered and embellished items had been serving as wall art, as Darian’s own costume eventually would. Firesong had outdone all of them; if sheer magnificence of clothing was the standard of importance, Herald Anda would surely think that he was the leader in this Vale. Silverfox lacked Firesong’s impressive mask, but that was all he lacked; in every other respect, he was Firesong’s reverse-image twin. The two of them were clad in blue and gold; where Firesong had gold in the patterns of beading and embroidery, Silverfox had blue, and vice versa. What first appeared to be subtle streaks of gold or blue in their hair became, on closer inspection, strings of tiny beads, ending in minute feathers. Aya sat on Firesong’s shoulder, and as Darian neared, Kuari hooted a greeting from a branch above Starfall. His parents, Hweel and Huur, sat beside him. Starfall’s falcon was on his gloved fist, and even the glove was beautifully made, with appliqued designs made of layers of dyed deerskin set into the cuff. Birds called, crowed, or screamed to each other, and a yellow kick ball bounced off Kuari’s branch, making him hoot in indignation.
“Sorry!” someone called.
“Well, the boy cleans up rather nicely,” Firesong said to Starfall, with a wink. “Perhaps we won’t have to pretend he’s a servant after all.”
“Hey!” Darian protested, pointing an accusing finger at Firesong. “I’d been working on the stables all morning. What were you doing?”
“Making certain that rain would not interrupt our greetings,” Firesong replied blandly, with a toss of his head that made the beads chime together like tiny bells. “Delicate work, that, requiring the skill of an expert.”
Starfall rolled his eyes and snorted in derision. “Yes it did, which is why you helped,” he corrected. “Or at least, you called it helping.”
Firesong pretended to be greatly offended, and Silverfox just shook his head at both of them. “Indeed! I was there to make certain that instant corrections could be made if you upset something with your blundering. After all, Father, you are getting a bit forgetful lately.”
“Forgetful? My blundering!” Starfall exclaimed. “What about - ”
“Enough, you two,” Nightwind interrupted them, then giggled. “Some of the outsiders might begin to believe that you two hate each other.”
Starfall grinned, and behind the mask, Firesong mock-pouted. “Oh, Mother - ” he began, in imitation of a whining child.
“Don’t!” Nightwind warned, hands on hips. “Just don’t. Act like the baby, and I’ll send you to your room like a baby!”
Firesong chuckled. “She’s getting rather good at that, isn’t she?” he said in an aside to Snowfire. “That whole mother thing, I mean.”
Snowfire nodded ruefully. “It’s a good thing, too, since the baby has me completely under her control. One teary-eyed look, and any resistance I had just evaporates.”
He might have elaborated on that subject, but a shout of “Here they come!” interrupted him. There were several whistles, and the kick balls mysteriously vanished amid the crowd.
The entire group peered up the trail; Firesong and Darian both shaded their eyes with their hands. At first Darian couldn’t see anything, but then a ray of light falling slantwise through the branches glanced off something white, which resolved into two distant riders.
Was it only two years ago that I stood here waiting for my new teacher, only to find out that he was the famous Adept Firesong? So much had happened since then; he had been so busy he hadn’t even had much time to visit the village except for the seasonal Faires. When I’m not off settling minor disputes, arbitrating trades, or helping the Vale understand the village, I’ve been caught up in Firesong’s training. No wonder time has gotten away from me!
He wished for a breeze, feeling the weight of his coat even more; for once, a breeze sprang up in answer to his wish. The riders neared at a steady pace, and he broke off his musing to examine them at his leisure. They both wore the Herald “working garb” of leather trews, a leather jerkin, and a plain white shirt tied loosely at the neck; it was pretty clear that they hadn’t been expecting a formal reception or a major celebration. It had been a year since he’d last seen Shandi, and it seemed to him at least that she had gotten taller. Her face had thinned out a bit, but aside from that, her new status didn’t seem to have put much of an outward stamp on her.
However, her Whites were obviously new, compared to the well-worn costume of the man riding beside her. So was her Companion’s tack, and Darian made a mental note to have one of the hertasi look it over for stiffness and give it a good oiling with the special lanolin they used on hawk-furniture.
Herald Anda had probably not been very young when he demonstrated Mage-Gift and was selected for training by Darkwind and Elspeth. Now he was in late middle age, brown hair generously streaked with gray, and his weathered face as wrinkled as any shepherd’s of the same age. He was in perfect health and excellent condition, however; despite a ride of many days’ duration, he sat his Companion easily with little hint of fatigue.
The crowd behind Darian stilled, with hardly more than a murmur or two from those waiting. The two Heralds rode up in silence, with only the music of the forest behind them and the sound of their Companions’ hoofbeats to punctuate it. They didn’t use their reins, but the Companions came to a graceful halt about two wagon-lengths from Starfall. Herald Anda was in the lead, but by no more than a pace; neither he nor Shandi looked surprised at the size of the crowd waiting for them. While they probably weren’t thinking about a big, formal reception, I suppose they would be expecting a big crowd - this is one of the most important things to happen around here since we established the Vale. Besides, Heralds are rare enough around here that even an “ordinary” Herald draws a crowd.
Karles, Shandi’s Companion, tossed his head and looked around at the huge crowd with deep interest. The Heralds dismounted together, in a movement as perfectly timed as if they had rehearsed it. There were some murmurs of admiration from the crowd; Ayshen was right, there was power in style. But of course, they don’t have to practice moving together - not when they’re Mind-linked to their Companions, and perhaps to each other as well. It certainly gave a good impression, however, making it look as if they had been a team for a very long time.
Again, Shandi remained a pace or two behind Herald Anda, who approached the little group that stepped forward to welcome him. Firesong and Silverfox in their turn lagged a little behind the rest, as Starfall took the lead with Darian beside him.
All right, here I go. Darian felt Anda’s eyes rest on him for a moment, before the Herald turned his attention to Starfall.
“Herald Anda, we bid you and your Companion welcome to k’Valdemar Vale,” Starfall said gravely. “Shandi and Karles, of course, we already know. We are glad to welcome them as well. We hope this new partnership will be a fruitful one for all of us, and we are pleased to be part of this new venture with Valdemar.”
Darian stepped forward with his own well-rehearsed words. “We of k’Valdemar Vale invite you to partake of our hospitality and fellowship for as long as you desire,” he told them. “We hope, in fact, that you find it so welcome that you take up residence permanently within the Vale. Now, if you will permit - I am Darian Firkin k’Vala k’Valdemar.” He gave his full name with permissible pride, and bowed his head in the brief nod of equal to equal. “This is Adept Starfall k’Vala, this is his son Healing-Adept Firesong k’Treva.” Starfall nodded, and Firesong moved forward a little and did the same. They had agreed on the order in which they would be introduced when they decided that Darian would make the introductions. “With Firesong is the kestra’chern Silverfox k’Leshya of the Kaled’a’in. I also introduce to you Mage-Scout Snowfire k’Vala and trondi’irn Nightwind k’Leshya of the Kaled’a’in.”
Anda nodded to each of the people introduced, and if he didn’t know what a kestra’chern or a trondi’irn was, he didn’t show it.
Now the nonhumans came forward; Hashi wearing a collar and breastplate of appliqued leather, Ayshen in a coat of metal-scale like Meeren’s, and Tyrsell sporting jeweled caps to his horns and a jeweled collar. “Here also are Hashi, chief of the kyree, Ayshen, leader of the hertasi, and Tyrsell, King-Stag of the dyheli of k’Valdemar Vale.”
Evidently Anda had been warned, or had seen enough of intelligent nonhumans that he showed no sign whatsoever of surprise. He was, however, about to get a bit of a start.
Because just as Darian had figured, Kel had planned all along to make an impressive entrance. So he did - plunging through the branches of the trees with folded wings, to open them with a sudden snap at the last moment, and thunder in to a perfect landing. He kicked up such a wind that the Heralds both had to protect their eyes with their hands from the flying debris, and the Hawkbrothers, male and female alike, seized their hair to avoid ending up with a tangled mess.
Kel settled back onto his haunches, and regarded the Heralds with a mild gaze. He was in the full panoply of a Silver Gryphon; harness, collar, gems on his ear-tufts, and feathers painted and gilded. “And this is Silver Gryphon Kelvren, chief of the k’Valdemar gryphons,” Darian finished, determined to look as if Kel’s entrance had been planned from the beginning. Kel bowed his head regally - then lost every bit of his dignity at Anda’s reply.
“I am very pleased to meet all of you at last,” the Herald replied. “As is my Companion Eran. I am sure you already know that Shandi and Karles are overjoyed to be here as well. I am personally pleased to meet again with gryphons, since I was taught the use of magic by Treyvan and Hydona; I came to know them well, and consider them to be two of my best friends.”
Kel’s beak opened, and his eyes pinned in surprise. “You were taught by Treyvan and Hydona? You arre frrriends with the great onesss?” he gasped, and could not manage to say more, so overcome he was with the shock. Darian smoothly took up his speech again, covering Kel’s dumbfounded astonishment.
“We comprise the Elders and Council of k’Valdemar,” he told Herald Anda. “And as such, we open the Vale to you.”
That was all that he was supposed to say, and as he stepped back, Starfall took over. “If you will allow us, we will conduct you and your Companions to your temporary home.” He followed his speech with a gesture. “When you are settled and refreshed, we have planned a welcome feast and festival in honor of your arrival. We hope our customs will soon seem comfortable to you.”
“Thank you, for all four of us,” Anda replied, and took his place at Starfall’s right, with his Companion Eran following. They all turned to face the gathering waiting behind Starfall, who had been holding their collective breath the better to hear the speeches.
That was the signal for everyone assembled to greet the new Heralds with a rousing cheer that shook the leaves and probably frightened every bird for furlongs about into silence.
The gathering split in two, making a path for Starfall and Anda. Behind them followed everyone else, with Shandi, Karles, and Keisha bringing up the rear. Shandi had her head together with Keisha, and Darian figured that they wouldn’t miss his presence, so he stayed right behind Starfall. He was easily within hearing distance, and so caught most of the men’s conversation.
“I am quite glad to take up this position, Adept Starfall,” Anda was saying earnestly. “I have had enough traveling for two lifetimes. It will be good to finally settle into one place.”
“I was under the impression that Heralds generally did not settle, is that true?” Starfall asked.
“In the past, yes, that has been true,” Anda admitted. “Our saddles were usually our homes. We certainly spent more time on roads than in bedsteads. However, it occurred to Her Majesty that those with Mage-Gift would be of less use to the Crown in an emergency if it was impossible to lay plans knowing where they were, or if they were too far into the hinterlands to do any good. She decided that, insofar as it was possible, it would be better for Herald-Mages to assume permanent residencies, especially since there are so few of us. She has stationed about half of us as instructors at the Collegium, made Elspeth, Darkwind, and myself ambassadors, and the rest will be taking new stations such as mine, in important places along the Border.”
“So you are intended to become the permanent ambassador here?” Starfall’s satisfaction at that admission was evident in his voice.
“When you have gone to the trouble of creating a perfect place for all of the peoples of this area to come together, we would have been rather foolish to ignore the tacit invitation,” Anda said dryly, and Starfall chuckled. “And to be blunt, in doing so, you saved Haven the trouble of making such a place and even better, saving them, if not a king’s ransom, certainly a duke’s!”
I think he’s going to fit in just fine. He certainly has the right sense of humor, Darian mused.
“Now, did I understand your young spokesperson to say that our quarters are temporary?” Anda continued. Starfall nodded, and gestured to Darian to join them.
“We didn’t want to assume your requirements, so we’re putting you in the guest lodge until you have decided what you want,” Darian said diffidently. “You’ll want to see the Vale, of course, and we took into consideration that there is always the possibility that you might decide you would rather have your permanent headquarters outside it.”
“Possible, but unlikely; why put the embassy in the countryside rather than the diplomatic capital?” Anda smiled slightly. “By the way, I’m given to understand that you have some method of imparting language in a candlemark or so. I would be very grateful if you could arrange for me to undergo the ‘lesson’ as soon as possible.”
Starfall coughed slightly. “It leaves one with a dreadful headache,” he warned.
Herald Anda shrugged. “Extended use of any mind-magic leaves one with a dreadful headache,” he replied, as Darian stifled a grin of triumph. “The cost, however, is well worth the benefit. If you can arrange for this, I should like very much to have all of the languages in use here. I understand that Shandi has already acquired the necessary tongues.”
“I will arrange for it with pleasure,” Starfall told the Herald. “And you will curse me for it afterward. Meanwhile, we do have a great deal scheduled for you over the next few days.”
Darian watched Herald Anda very closely, and thought he detected a faint hint of dismay as Starfall outlined all of the ceremonies ahead. Surely he must have expected something of the kind. Or maybe not. Although Heralds were important people, he hadn’t seen a lot of ceremony involving them or honoring them - maybe because they tended to swoop in, take care of their business, and ride out again.
Poor Anda! He has no idea of what he’s in for now! For the first time since all this had been planned, Darian felt a little better about his role as “entertainment.” If his guess was right, Anda was just as dismayed at the prospect of a week of “performing” as Darian was. There was some small comfort in shared misery after all.

Six

According to Val, those about to be knighted generally spent their vigil in a chapel, on their knees. Darian had no intention of following that particular tradition; if Lord Breon wasn’t satisfied with his way of keeping vigil, the man shouldn’t have offered to knight him.
He wasn’t going to spend the night indoors, and he absolutely wasn’t going to spend it on his knees. The point of the vigil was to contemplate, to meditate on the things that had brought him here and what would follow. The point was definitely not to dislocate kneecaps, and besides that, he did his thinking better outside.
So after the requisite instructions from a Senior Knight (Val, coached by his father), Darian retired to the rear of the Keep and the gardens. He carried Kuari, and was accompanied by Val and Herald Anda. Women about to be knighted, it seemed, were always accompanied by females, and men by males, which let Shandi off easily. Or maybe not; now she would have to endure the feast, as the representative Herald.
Together, they watched the sun set behind the trees and the stars appear in the darkening sky. Darian had picked a spot with a garden bench to sit on, surrounded by bushes; as Val and Anda withdrew a little to hunch over a strategy game, he settled himself for the night. He gingerly helped Kuari down onto the trimmed grass; Kuari looked up at him hopefully.
:Hunt now?: the owl begged. Kuari loved hunting Lord Breon’s lands; there were pastures and grain fields that attracted rabbits, with no cover for them to hide in. Kuari raised his wings a little, looking up into Darian’s face with his enormous golden eyes.
:Of course you can hunt now,: he told the owl affectionately. Kuari didn’t hesitate; with a soft croon, he spread his wings wide and shoved off from the ground with his powerful legs. Darian’s dark-adapted eyes had no trouble following him; for the first several wagon-lengths, Kuari flew at knee height, pumping his wings to gain speed. Then, just at the edge of the garden, he surged upward and flew off into the trees. From there, he would scout for a good place to wait at the edge of the fields.
He would be back as soon as he had made his kills and fed; for now, Darian was content to sit on the stone bench and take in the night alone.
This was the dark of the moon, so nothing was going to obscure the stars. It wasn’t as quiet as he would prefer; Lord Breon had several important guests, nobles from “nearby” holdings, who had come especially for the week-long festivities. The pre-knighting feast was still going on inside, and there was a fair amount of loud conversation coming from the Great Hall. More noise came from the kitchens; the rattling of pots and pans, the clatter of dishes, the shouts of the servants. There was a group of minstrels in there somewhere, trying manfully to produce music for the occasion, but they were losing the battle against the noise.
It was quite a contrast with last night’s celebration at the Vale; it was always possible to talk to someone without raising the voice, for instance. Right now Darian heard a dozen different conversations going on, all shouted - someone was holding forth on sheep, someone else lamented the fact that he had three daughters, all within a year of each other in age and all betrothed, who were determined to have separate weddings rather than the money-saving triple wedding their father wanted. A round of laughter erupted when someone bawdily suggested a connection between the two subjects. Another old grouch bellowed out that things were different when he was knighted, no foreigners in fancy outfits and no disobedient daughters, either - 
Darian stifled a laugh at that last; even in the Vales there were old grouches who growled that way. The same old tune would be sung in the future, and probably back in the time of Urtho there had been someone complaining how things had been different. . . .
At a Vale feast, though, the grouches kept their grumbles at a lower volume, so no one had to listen to them except other grouches who agreed with them. Obvious pockets of malcontent were easily avoided.
There wasn’t anyone like that at k’Valdemar yet; no one moved here who wasn’t prepared, indeed eager, for change. There was a surprising number of truly elderly Tayledras who had indicated that they would like to come, now that there was a Veil in place. He couldn’t blame them for not wanting to share in the relative hardship of the first two years, and he had told the others that he thought encouraging the older folk to try k’Valdemar for size was a good idea. A Vale composed of folks mostly between the ages of sixteen and forty seemed very unbalanced to him; he wanted to see more children, and more people over the age of fifty.
No grouches, though.
He heard Keisha’s sudden laugh ring out above the background noise, and Shandi’s a moment later. He smiled at that; he was glad they were enjoying themselves. Shandi had walked Herald Anda through all the intricacies of last night’s festivities, with Keisha helping. Shandi had looked very handsome in her Vale-made Whites, and so had Anda, though there had been some last-minute adjustments of hems and waistbands, or so Meeren had said. Virtually identical to the celebration of Nightwind and Snowfire’s wedding, with the exceptions being that there were no displays of magic, and that there were a great many folk from outside the Vale taking part, the official celebration took place in and around the Council House. Anda stayed there; Shandi didn’t, once she knew that Anda had things well in hand and was comfortable. She knew very well that the little clearings and the hot pools were the best places for fun, and as soon as she could reasonably assume that Anda would be all right on his own, she and Keisha slipped out. Darian joined them very shortly thereafter, leaving Anda to a discussion of mutual acquaintances with Firesong and Silverfox.
And right now, I expect they wish they could slip out again, he thought. It was much better out here, in the clear, cool air, watching the stars. He had the feeling that even Val felt the same way, although it was too bad that Val would have to keep himself awake, and could not retire to the bed he shared with his pretty young wife.
It certainly wasn’t going to be the first time Darian had stayed awake until dawn. Some of Firesong’s lessons had involved fasts, vigils, enduring extremes of heat and cold, and other discomforts. He’d had to learn how to shut out what he had to, in order to keep his concentration on the task at hand, and how to force himself to the limits of his endurance and even a bit beyond.
Sitting and thinking until dawn is a walk down a Vale path by comparison.
He supposed that most of those who came to their knighthood vigils had plenty to think about. They would ponder the circumstances that had brought them here, and wonder if they could live up to the expectations of those who had chosen to honor them. For Darian, this wasn’t so much an honor as a tool; a tool to help him handle his responsibilities more effectively. Still, there were those oaths - once a knight, courage was not applauded, it was assumed. Honesty was required. All the virtues he displayed would simply be expected of him - the only things that would be noticed would be his lapses.
So that’s probably why most people aren’t knighted until they’ve proved themselves, he reflected. At that point, I suppose that virtue becomes a habit.
The level of noise from the Keep behind him was tapering off as the candlemarks passed. The feast was probably over; the ladies had retired, leaving the men to serious drinking and progressively more incoherent conversation. What a stupid custom! he thought, amused. Then again, there came one of his old, departed Master Justyn’s lessons: “Young Darian, your great speech is always mindless prattle to someone else, just as they are certain their prattle is a great speech.” The old man had been right about so many things that only with experience made sense now.
At around midnight last night, the festivities had also slowed down. That was because most of the outsiders had left the Vale for their camps outside; only a few had been invited to stay within the Veil, and not only the guest lodge, but several ekele were hosting overnight visitors. Lord Breon’s party cut their celebrating short as well, knowing they would have to ride back to the Keep in the morning. They wanted to have clear heads and steady stomachs for the journey. The villagers were still wary of staying too long in the strange Vale, especially after dark, and most of them had cleared out long before midnight. Only Ghost Cat tribesmen had stayed to “help” the Hawkbrothers see in the dawn.
Darian had stayed up past midnight, but not far past. Unlike Lord Breon’s people, he knew he would be able to sleep late; the dyheli that took him to the Keep was much swifter than a horse, and even if he left just before noon, he would catch up with Lord Breon before his group arrived at the Keep. Nevertheless, he was not interested in seeing two dawns in two days, not with so much yet to do.
Herald Anda had retired at midnight; Shandi had not. There was some very interesting interplay going on between Shandi and Steelmind, a Tayledras herb-and plantmaster; what it meant, he didn’t know, but it was certain that Shandi had made a deep impression on the other.
Shandi had a confidence about her that he dearly wished Keisha could acquire. What was it that had made Keisha so uncertain of herself? She was completely self-assured when it came to Healing, so why was she so unsure about everything else, especially her standing with him?
I’ve got to have a word with Silverfox, he decided. If there was such a thing as an expert in emotions, it would be a kestra’chern. Maybe Silverfox could give him the clue he needed to help Keisha.
But that brought something else to mind. I’d better explain what a kestra’chern is to Anda as soon as the opportunity presents itself. Silverfox can do a great deal that Anda wouldn’t even guess on his own. It had taken Darian the better part of a year to really understand just what it was that Silverfox did.
A kestra’chern, a good one like Silverfox, anyway, was the oil that kept friction within a group to a minimum. But the tools he used to deal with incipient trouble were just about unlimited, up to and including taking someone into his bed, if that was what was needed. He was very like a Herald with a limited “community” to serve, but without careful explanation, Darian was afraid that Herald Anda would not necessarily see things that way.
Another difference between a Herald and Silverfox was that a kestra’chern tended to wait until people with problems came to him, rather than reaching out to deal with the problems. There were exceptions, but as Silverfox had once said, succinctly, “I am no one’s nursery maid. Sometimes the children have to fight their quarrels without intervention.” A Herald, of course, would plunge right in, but because Heralds rode a circuit rather than living in a particular community, real problems were usually at the point where they required intervention by the time a Herald got to them.
And the things that people can and should handle by themselves are usually kept quiet when the Herald is around. Reluctance to show the dirty linen in public saves Heralds front having to deal with it.
Darian decided that he’d had enough of sitting thanks to the numbness that usually came from sitting on stone, and got up to take a slow walk around the garden. He looked back at his two watchers, dark shapes against the backdrop of the light stone of the Keep, and the golden gleam of the lighted windows. Anda waved at him to show that he’d seen Darian stand.
In the dark, senses besides sight were heightened, and perceptions shifted in wondrous ways if one made himself open to them. Night birds called, at distances farther than he could have seen through the forests in daylight. Insects and what must have been thousands of tiny peeping frogs filled the air with their songs. It wasn’t too difficult to keep to the garden paths, even in the darkness. The paths were graveled, and the moment he stepped off them, the sound alone told him. It was still a bit early for the garden to be fully in flower, but there were hints of scent as he passed certain beds - the sweetness of honey-climber, the intoxicant edge of the tiny flowers of the lily-bell, the subtle scent of violet. He knew which beds had recently been turned by the tang of fresh earth, and where the lawn had just been clipped by the sharpness of the newly cut grass. The sound behind him was definitely dying, and a quick glance back at the Keep showed more than half the windows had gone dark. Perhaps it was just as well that the guests had all faced that long ride this morning; the wine had gotten to them all the easier. With luck, less than half of them would be nursing hangovers in the morning when he was knighted.
When the dawn first painted the eastern sky with thin, gray light, Darian was still wide awake, but poor Val had fallen asleep where he sat! Darian pretended not to notice, turning his back so mat Herald Anda could wake the young man discreetly. Kuari had returned with a sated appetite after Darian had finished his walk; now he, too, dozed, perched on the bench beside Darian with one foot tucked up. From time to time Darian worked his fingers in through the soft feathers to scratch Kuari’s round head; when he did that, the owl crooned in his sleep and clicked his beak.
Footfalls behind him woke Kuari, who swiveled his head halfway around to glare at the interlopers. Darian stood up and turned to grin at Anda and a sleepy-eyed Val.
“Ready?” Anda asked casually. Darian nodded, then coaxed Kuari up onto his arm.
:Time to go find a tree to sleep in,: he told the owl, who looked a little ruffled at having his nap disturbed. :I have to go inside now, and if you don’t find a secure place, you know that the crows will harass you.:
Kuari sighed, but agreed. Darian gave him a boost, and he labored off to a thick evergreen close to the Keep, where he could find a roost near the trunk, and the songbirds wouldn’t see him. At the moment, the songbirds were too busy heralding the day and warming up their muscles to pay any attention to Kuari.
Darian followed Anda and Val back inside, to the Great Hall, where a group awaited them. Again, knighting was usually done in the chapel, but Darian had voiced a mild objection to that. Breon had readily agreed, since the chapel at the Keep wouldn’t have held the full group that wanted to witness the knighting anyway.
Breon’s Keep was not very old; it dated back no more than a century or so. As a consequence, it didn’t have the same air of gloom that many of the older buildings of Valdemar did. In the Great Hall, the stone walls had been plastered over and whitewashed, then hung with tapestries. Above the tapestries, clerestory windows let in the early-morning daylight. Wooden beams supported the roof, and the battle banners of Breon’s family hung from them. Because of the windows and plastering, although the Hall was cool, there was none of that feeling of dank-ness and damp that made older versions of this room that Darian had seen in Valdemar so uncomfortable.
Breon waited on the stone dais that held the High Table; behind him the table had been set for breakfast, which would follow the ceremony.
That certainly shows where my importance is, Darian thought with great amusement. First, we get the ceremony over with, and then we can eat!
The rest of his witnesses were gathered below Breon. The sturdy Breon was wearing a surcoat that reached down past his knees, embroidered with the arms of his family and his own personal device. This was a relatively new item of his wardrobe, replacing the one he had worn for his investiture as a knight. The hertasi had made it for him as a birthday gift in time for Val’s knighting, and it was just as splendid as the one Darian would wear to tonight’s feast. Anda and Val led the way to the foot of the dais, with Darian following about four paces behind. From here on, the knighting would follow strictly traditional lines.
“Who comes before me in the light of the new sun, and why are you here?” Breon rumbled, in a voice that sounded a little hoarse - no doubt from all the shouted conversation last night. The wording had a weighty air of the ancient about it, a nearly palpable reinforcement that a knighting was anything but a casual lark.
Val answered, as the Senior Knight for this ceremony. “The Knighted Heir of Lord Breon, Sir Valyn, and the Herald-Mage Anda; we present a candidate for the honor of Knighthood, and stand as his sponsors.”
“And has he passed all tests of valor and virtue, of word and deed?” Breon replied, looking sternly down at his son and the Herald.
This time it was Anda who answered. “He has passed all tests and more, by the words of his mouth, and the deeds of his body. It is his actions of virtue and nobility that bring him before you this dawn.”
That last was an acknowledgment that Darian hadn’t been required to undertake any physical trials to prove his fitness for combat. Val had, because he had never actually fought, but Darian had faced - and struck down - the barbarian shaman of the northern Blood Bear tribe that had ravaged Errold’s Grove, and he had done so entirely by himself at the ripe age of fourteen. That alone probably would have qualified him.
Although I’m not sure how noble the weapons of a bucket and a pitchfork are. . . .
“Has he stood his vigil as ordained by tradition?” asked Breon.
The back of Val’s neck flushed with embarrassment at his own lapse, but he answered stoutly, “He has, waking the night through, alone with his thoughts, fasting, and in contemplation of his past and future.”
At that reminder of “fasting,” Darian’s stomach protested his lack of breakfast. At least it didn’t growl.
Breon nodded ponderously. “Therefore present him to me now, that I may see him with my own eyes.”
Val and Anda each stepped to the side, and Darian stepped forward. In his capacity as Herald - in the most ancient sense of the word - Anda presented Darian.
“Here we bring to all eyes and powers Darian Firkin, adopted of k’Vala clan of the Hawkbrothers, founder of k’Valdemar Vale, and worthy candidate for the honor of knighthood.” Anda’s voice rang out with strength, filling the Great Hall without sounding as if he was shouting.
Well, that’s one trick I’d certainly like to learn.
Breon looked down at Darian, and gave him a quick wink. Darian raised his eyebrows slightly in acknowledgment, but otherwise kept his expression properly sober.
“Darian Firkin, adopted of clan k’Vala, founder of k’Valdemar, is it your will that you be presented for the honor and responsibilities of Valdemaran Knighthood?” Breon asked, managing to get through the k’Vala and k’Valdemar without any trouble, though Val said he’d been fumbling the titles in practice. That was one reason why they’d broken up Darian’s name the way they had.
Darian nodded. “It is my will and my wish, Lord Breon,” he said, pitching his voice a little deeper than usual.
“Kneel, then.” Lord Breon held out his hand, and Val put Darian’s sheathed sword hilt-first into his palm. Breon held out the sword hilt-first toward Darian, who knelt and put his right hand on the hilt. “Do you swear, Darian, by this blade which is your honor, that you will use your strength for good and not ill, to aid and not oppress; that you will defend the weak and helpless against those who would oppress them, that you will seek good with all your heart, seek the light with all your soul? That you will serve as an example to those who would follow you, as a rock of fortitude for those who have gone before you; that you will uphold the law when the law is in the right, and oppose the law when it serves oppressors; that you will work for the greatest good, with all you may bring to bear, even in the face of death and fear?”
“I do swear,” Darian replied firmly.
“Do you swear to strive for honor, for courage, for valor, for virtue, all for their own sake and not for the acclaim of the multitude, nor for gain, nor for the power they might bring you?”
“I do swear,” Darian repeated in the same tones of resolve.
“Do you accept the honor of knighthood as a responsibility as well as a title? Will you hold to the standards of all those before who have ever borne the title of Knight?”
“I do so accept it,” Darian said, wondering if Breon knew just how long he had pondered that very question, wondering if he dared take on another responsibility. But he had come to the conclusion that it represented giving his current responsibilities a more recognizable name, and as such, he felt comfortable in accepting it. “And I will hold to those standards, keeping them ever in my heart and mind.”
Breon reversed the sword, unsheathed it, and laid the naked blade once on each shoulder, tilting the sword after each so that the cold steel laid against Darian’s bare neck. “Then accept these blows in token of the ones you shall take that others be spared - and rise, never to kneel to another again, unless you deem that other to be worthy of your profoundest esteem. Kneel only to honor what is holy or in recognition of one whose nobility exceeds the common.”
Darian stood, and Breon sheathed the sword. “Accept from me this blade, Sir Darian, and wield it forever in honor.”
Darian took the sword and belted it on over his surcoat, buckling and latching it securely, then turned to face the group behind him. Once again, Anda raised his voice. “Ladies and Lords, Knights, gentlemen, and guests, I present to you Sir Darian Firkin k’Vala k’Valdemar, Owl Knight of the Tayledras!”
There were enough friends in the crowd - and those who had just recently gained genuine admiration for him, too - that the cheer took on a distinctly enthusiastic note as Darian was escorted by Val and Anda out of the Great Hall, down the special strip of Valdemaran-blue carpet that had been laid for him to walk on.
Once past the doors, Darian sagged a little, and Val slapped him on the back. “To bed with you,” the young man declared. “I’m your champion and representative at the tournament, so you don’t even have to put in a token appearance if you don’t feel up to it.”
“No, I should open it, at least,” Darian responded. “That’s only right.” He grinned and straightened up. “Besides, think of all those young fighters out there who’ve been dying for a look at the weird Tayledras knight - they at least deserve to see that I don’t have two heads. I’ll call Kuari in to land, on my shoulder, you know, give them a show. Then I’ll retire.”
He didn’t have any feelings of guilt over the fact that Val wasn’t going to get a nap, not when he knew from Val’s relative freshness that his friend had probably had a good long doze in the darkness. Anda had big, dark rings under his eyes, but Anda was going to be able to get some sleep as well; he wasn’t needed at the tournament at all.
“In that case, let’s get this tourney open, so the hotbloods can start beating on each other,” Val replied heartily. Anda took his leave of them, and they headed for the front of the Keep, where a well-worn stand and a tourney-field had been set up outside the walls. Tournaments were a good place for fighters to demonstrate their skills to a potential employer, and to have a chance to earn some prize money into the bargain. Since this tournament was sponsored by k’Valdemar, the prizes weren’t money, but were Tayledras-produced items that could readily be converted into money - or into dowries - bolts of silk, glassware, and jewelry. The prizes had been on display at last night’s feast, and Darian didn’t doubt that most examples, if not all of them, already had several potential buyers from among Breon’s guests.
Darian climbed up into the grandstand, and looked down at the sea of helmets below him. With the early-morning sun to his right, he couldn’t see faces inside those helmets, only dark eye-slits. It was a little unnerving, but only a little.
It was a good thing he’d memorized a speech for this, too, since fatigue was starting to catch up with him. He smiled, waved, made his speech, and exhorted the fighters to display not only strength and courage, but honor and brotherhood. In fact, there was an award for the fighter who behaved the best on the field and off it. Despite some mental disgruntlement from his owl, who had been awakened for the flight, Kuari’s appearance and wide-winged, silent landing as Darian declared himself by the title Owl Knight raised a cheer from everyone. Kuari then left Darian in a ground-skimming flight down the length of the tourney grounds past every competitor, and disappeared into the shadows of the forests. Exclamations of amazement and murmurs of approval resounded. It seemed Ayshen was proven right yet again. Darian turned the proceedings over to Val, who took over with relish. As Darian’s Champion, Val was going to get to do some fighting against the few knights among the fighters, and he had his eye on the prize to give to his wife. He could have gotten the same sort of prize by just asking Darian for it, but it wouldn’t have been as satisfying to Val to just ask for it, as it would be fun to win it by pounding everyone else into the ground. Darian happily left him to it.
Darian dismounted the grandstand and managed not to stagger as he made his way to the little room he’d been given. It was deep within the Keep, not even a clothes closet by Tayledras standards, with a bare arrow-slit for a window. It was only large enough for a narrow cot, at the foot of which waited a tray with his breakfast on it - but right now, it suited his purposes perfectly. It had a bed, and nothing at the moment was needed more. Now he had no more duties until this evening, when he would be presented to all the guests, preside over the distribution of the prizes, and take the seat of honor at Breon’s right hand at the High Table.
Darian struggled against a heavy weight on his chest; for some reason, he couldn’t open his eyes or even move - 
Finally he wrenched his head around, and his eyes flew open.
A huge, translucent cat lay laconically on him, covering him from his neck to his toes, hindquarters spilling over the cot and onto the floor. It looked into his eyes and breathed softly on his face; its breath held the same scent as the winter wind just before a storm.
It looked up suddenly, its shimmery golden eyes wary and alert. Darian found his gaze pulled to the tiny slit of a window.
A raven the size of the huge cat - and just as eerily translucent - peered in through the slit, first one eye, then the other, then tried to force its way into the room.
Impossibly, first the beak, then the head, then the body and wings flattened themselves and oozed into the room with him.
Both cat and raven stared at him, as if expecting him to answer a question of life-or-death importance - 
But he had not the faintest notion what the question was.
He fought to cry out, but his throat was frozen - 
And he sat bolt upright on the floor, with a shout.
He was alone. No bird, no cat; the heavy weight on his chest had been the cot; he had overset it on top of himself.
Hot with embarrassment, he was just grateful that no one had come in answer to his shouting, or the ruckus he must have made as he fought with his bedding. Still clumsy with fatigue, he managed to fumble the cot upright again, and lay back down, this time to sleep dreamlessly.
The next day he was safely back in k’Valdemar, and although he’d had some doubts about his performance at the feast, Anda assured him that he had done splendidly. “I caught the sarcasm,” Anda said, when he’d expressed his guilt over some of his remarks to one of Breon’s grouchy guests, “But trust me, Lord Talesar wouldn’t recognize irony if you loaded it into a catapult and flung it at him. You did well; people I talked with said they couldn’t believe how patient you were with the old goat.”
Today was a rest day for him; Anda and Shandi were getting their formal reception at Errold’s Grove. Keisha had gone along as moral support for Shandi, figuring that with both of them there, her mother wouldn’t be able to single either of them out for attention.
The first place he went when he arrived was the hot pools; the one thing he truly needed at this point was a long soak. As always, Meeren knew the moment he’d passed the Veil, and he had no sooner gotten settled into the water than the hertasi appeared with cold drinks and finger food.
“Well?” Meeren asked, perching on the rocks beside Darian. “How did it go?”
Darian gave the hertasi a complete description of the events of the past two days, knowing that Meeren would be providing all the details to the other, insatiably curious hertasi of the Vale, and to the kyree who served as their historian. Meeren sat rock-still, interrupting Darian only for questions about details, and at the end let out an enormous sigh of satisfaction.
“Excellent job,” he said, bestowing the hertasi vote of approval on him. “You gave them a good show, and you’ve made a fine impression on Lord Breon’s neighbors. I anticipate more trade agreements from this, especially now that they’ve seen the quality of our goods. We could use more trades for meat; those gryphons are eating the larder bare, and red meat fills them up better than herd birds.” Meeren rubbed his hands at the prospect; when trade agreements were conducted in the Vale, he usually served as Ayshen’s assistant - of late he had even conducted them himself under Ayshen’s supervision. Darian often wondered when he found the time to take care of the ekele and his other responsibilities.
Then again - if he couldn’t take care of twenty major things at once, Ayshen would never have picked him as an assistant.
“So tomorrow is the Ghost Cat ceremony,” Meeren went on. “I don’t foresee any problems there.”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Darian agreed. “No speeches, for one thing. I’ve been to their sweat-house gatherings before. Anything you say is supposed to be right out of your head, and spontaneous. Nobody minds if you aren’t very articulate.”
Meeren chuckled. “That should certainly suit you,” he teased. “You’re at your best when you’re inarticulate.”
“Oh, thank you,” Darian replied sarcastically. “Have you been taking lessons in sarcasm from Firesong? By the way, you might want to consider adding needlework to your list of potential trade items; most of Breon’s lady-guests were positively drooling over our surcoats.”
“I doubt any of them could afford what we would charge for work like that,” Meeren said dryly. “But I’ll keep it in mind. Who knows? There might be potential in selling small motifs for ladies to add their own work around.”
Having satisfied himself that he had pried everything worth hearing out of Darian for now, Meeren left him to his soak and dinner, pausing only to add, over his shoulder, “Oh, and by the way - good work on the hot spring.”
Once he was ready to come out, the building had started to fill up with folk coming in from hunting and labor. He left the pools to them, and sought his bed, hoping Keisha was having a good time at the village. He was still so tired from the vigil, his nightmare, and the feast that followed that he’d almost fallen asleep on his dyheli’s back, and that was no mean feat.
Breon’s guests, no longer hindered by the need to be alert and fresh the following day now that the tournament was over, had kept him awake far longer than he’d wanted to be. It was just a good thing he’d been able to opt out of the Errold’s Grove welcome; he really pitied poor Anda.
When he got back to his ekele and into the bedroom, he found that Meeren had left a mug of something on the bedside table with a note attached. In the spiky hertasi script, it read, “Drink this, and nothing will wake you up until I do.” He contemplated the mug for a moment. He wanted to be awake when Keisha came back from the village - but he really didn’t want any of those uneasy dreams he’d been having off and on. So I suppose the question is, how much do I want to greet Keisha, versus how much I want to avoid having a nightmare.
He yawned, closed his eyes for a moment, and caught himself starting to drop off. That decided him.
The question isn’t “want” but “need.” I need sleep. They’re going to have the sweat house packed and hot, and I can’t leave it without losing face. If I don’t get enough sleep, I won’t be able to take the heat, and I might even pass out.
There was danger in that possibility as well; if he passed out, it was possible that no one would notice in the darkness until he was in serious trouble.
And wouldn’t that be a bad omen where everyone was concerned! No, Keisha’s Healer enough to expect me to be sleeping, and she’d probably get mad at me if I wasn’t getting the rest I need.
He picked up the mug and drank the contents off as quickly as he could, resolutely ignoring the bitter taste that no amount of honey could conceal.
Before the potion could go to work on him, however, he wrote a note for Keisha on the other side of Meeren’s. The hertasi want me to sleep, so I’m going to be obedient. Otherwise I might wake up to find all my clothing tied in knots. Sorry I couldn’t wait up for you, ashke.
Only after he had propped the note up on the empty mug did he lie down, and it was a good thing he did, because when the potion hit, it hit without warning, and not even an earthquake would have awakened him.

Seven

The Ghost Cat enclave was near enough to k’Valdemar that the inhabitants could send runners to the Vale for protection in case of disaster or attack. In the first few weeks, that had given Darian an odd feeling - that Northerners would be running to the Tayledras, and for protection! By now, though, he was so used to it that it only occurred to him on the occasions when Ghost Cat tribesmen dressed up in their ceremonial regalia, and once again, his sense of difference woke up. What the tribesmen wore for everyday use was similar to Tayledras scout gear but for the looser seams, and grew more so all the time as Ghost Cat adopted Hawkbrother materials and styles. The people he had first thought of as barbarians turned out to be very appreciative people, even going so far as to honor their benefactors by becoming like them whenever they could. When Darian woke up with Meeren shaking him, Keisha was already up and dressed, looking down at him with laughter in her eyes. She, too, had donned a special costume for the occasion, the female version of Shaman Celin’s garb. On her head, because she was a Healer and allied with the Tayledras, she wore a hood made to resemble an enormous hawk head. Darian thought he detected the delicate touch of Firesong in the placing of the feathers, and Ayshen’s talons in the carving of the beak, which had clearly been modeled after Kel’s. The headdress was attached to a feathered cloak, complete with pseudo-wings, and while the feathers of the head had been made from the molted feathers of k’Valdemar raptors, the cloak had been built out of the body-feathers of the gryphons. Keisha’s deerskin dress, fringed and beaded, had the badge of the Healers worked in beadwork on the breast just under her throat. Little bone carvings dangled amid the fringes, but unlike Darian’s, which were of predators and prey, Keisha’s were of flowers and leaves, with the occasional hawk. Her dress ended at the floor, but the deerskin had been slit into fringe from the floor to the knee, giving her great freedom of movement. She wore boots with leaves appliqued along the outer calves and lacings up the inner side. Once again, the hertasi had outdone themselves . . . but then again, Meeren and Loshi found Keisha and Darian very undemanding when it came to clothing.
I don’t think we’ve asked for anything new for . . . more than a year anyway. The outfits that Loshi had designed might well have been in production, or even finished, waiting for a special occasion to finally be presented.
Well, not the two surcoats - but the uniforms, the festival garb, and the Ghost Cat regalia could have been made. There was bound to be something of importance at Ghost Cat eventually.
“You know - ” Darian paused to yawn, and accepted a warm mug of something from Meeren. “You look amazing in that outfit.”
“I think I like it,” Keisha replied, turning to the right and left to look down at herself. “I didn’t think it would be comfortable, but it is.”
Darian downed the drink, which was mouthpuckeringly tart, and handed the mug back to Meeren before he got out of bed; his mind felt very fuzzy, and he hoped whatever it was that Meeren had given him was a dose to help clear the effects of the sleeping potion. “How did the village welcome go?”
“I think I am going to be in Shandi’s debt for at least a year,” Keisha replied, still looking as merry as she had before Darian broached the subject. “She’s gotten Mother to think of something besides me.”
She looked so tickled that Darian could only say, “Dare I ask how?”
“Shandi can answer that for herself, thank you,” Shandi replied, poking her head in at the bedroom door. “Mother made the mistake of asking about - no, actually making prying questions about the overnight arrangements Heralds have, meaning me and Anda of course. So I told her.”
Shandi’s lips twitched as she tried not to laugh. “Oh, but that wasn’t the best part,” Keisha put in. “She turned bright pink, and practically shouted, ‘You mean you sleep with him?’ “
“And I answered, quite matter-of-factly, ‘Why, no, do you think I should?’ It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her speechless.” Shandi couldn’t hold back the laughter any longer, and Keisha and Darian joined her.
Darian wiped his eyes, which were damp with tears of laughter. “Both of you had better go get something to eat before all the good stuff is gone. I’ll catch up with you. It won’t take me long to get dressed.”
Shandi vanished, and Keisha took the hint. Only then did Darian get out of bed. He’d gone to sleep last night not wearing much, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to get out of bed in front of Shandi. She didn’t have Tayledras sensibilities, after all.
Meeren had his entire outfit ready and waiting, and in next to no time he was trotting up the trail toward the building where most people in the Vale ate together; food was always kept ready and waiting there, but at the usual mealtimes hot, fresh dishes were brought from the kitchen in a steady stream. He actually did catch up with Keisha and her sister just before they reached the door; they helped themselves, then took a small table near one of the open windows. Gauzy curtains and vines framed them as they began their meal.
He ate lightly, but drank plenty of water; he hoped someone had warned Anda to do the same. “Where’s your senior?” he asked Shandi, as she did justice to a stack of flat-cakes.
“He’s already over at Ghost Cat,” she replied. “You should have seen his face when I told him what he was going to be doing today!” She rolled her eyes and grinned. “It’s a good thing he has patience and a sense of humor. I pointed out that he wasn’t the only one making this round of ceremonies, and that it’s all in his honor anyway. He just sighed, and said, ‘I wish they were a little less glad to see me, then.’ “
“How long have you known him?” Keisha asked, curiosity writ large all over her expression. “You mentioned him now and again, but I didn’t think he was anything more than one of your teachers.”
“All the way from the time I arrived - what I didn’t know is that there’s a kind of fast way through the Collegium, if you arrive older than about fifteen and are already educated by Collegium standards.” She paused to take a bite or two. “I didn’t have to go through most of the academic courses, because I had the basics already - and imagine my surprise to discover that all of those useless lessons in ‘manners’ we had to go through turned out to be identical to all the courtly protocol Heralds need for dealing with the nobility!”
It was Darian’s turn to drop his jaw. “No! Are you serious?”
“Absolutely.” Shandi nodded and grinned. “Even the book they use is the same one old Widow Clay uses. There were three examinations, which I passed - those old lessons saved me from a year of schooling in ‘Courtly Graces.’ To cut it all short, by doubling up a fair amount and not taking as many holidays as everyone else, I finished in two intensive years instead of four. In order to do that, I had to have a mentor assigned to me to help. It was no accident that I got Anda. As soon as the Queen and her Council realized what you lot were up to, they planned to send an ambassador and picked Anda for the job, and he mentioned that I was from the region. The Queen herself gave the nod about me, can you believe it? And so then I was being tutored by Anda.
He was learning as much from me as he could while I was stuffing my head full of Collegium classes, and he tutored me when I wasn’t quite getting things. He’s a lot like your Starfall, Darian. Very dry sense of humor, but it goes deep. He took to dragging me around with him socially, once he knew I wasn’t going to embarrass him, so I got to know the gryphons and some of the other ambassadors. We got on so well that they waited until I had my Whites and sent us both, so I could coach him on local politics and customs while I learn about how to be a diplomat.”
“Are you going to stay after your field-year?” Keisha asked.
I’ll bet she wants Shandi to stay, Darian thought. I think it would be a good thing if she could.
Shandi shook her head. “I don’t know; it may depend more on what happens here than anything else. If Anda thinks I need more experience elsewhere, then I’ll be sent off. If he decides he needs me to help out here, then I’ll stay. Heralds don’t have much say in where they’re sent; we go where we’re needed.”
“But why send a Herald-Mage and not assign another Herald-Mage as his junior?” Keisha wanted to know.
Good question. Darian was as interested to know the answer to that as Keisha - maybe even more.
Shandi took her time in finishing her breakfast before answering. She pushed the plate away as a sign that she was done with it, and took a long drink of juice while Keisha waited with admirable patience.
“I can only tell you what I think is the reason,” she replied, putting down her glass. “I haven’t asked that question myself, partly because right now I’m supposed to be learning to figure out answers on my own. I think that the reason a Herald-Mage was sent in the first place is twofold. First, the Circle wants to know more about how to use that Heartstone they’ve got simmering under the Palace, and they hope Anda can pick up some answers from you lot. Second, magic comes as naturally to the Hawkbrothers as breathing, and someone who didn’t have Mage-Gift might make some wrong assumptions or give the wrong impression to them.”
“I don’t know if you’re right, but it certainly sounds logical,” Darian agreed. “But why not pick a junior who has the Gift?”
“Two reasons again. One, there aren’t a lot of Heralds with Mage-Gift, and there might not have been anyone to send. It’s entirely possible that I’ll be replaced by someone who has it. Second - our generation is used to magic; we’ve grown up with it. We know what we can reasonably expect a mage to do and how he’ll think. Or - maybe I should say, the Heralds of our generation will; ordinary folk might be just as perceptive or completely oblivious.” She chuckled and winked at Keisha. “The point is, for someone to assist Anda, or even take over the post when he steps down, a Herald of our generation is perceptive enough to handle the job. Plus, they told me that my particular Gifts will be very useful to a diplomat.”
She didn’t elaborate on what her Gifts were, leaving Darian to wonder just what it was she had. He knew about the limited ForeSight - which could presumably keep a diplomat from making a disastrous decision - but what else would apply?
Keisha was staring at her sister with a mingling of surprise and chagrin. “Shandi, you have changed out of all recognition!” she managed. “When you left, you were - well, kind of dreamy and careless. Now - ”
Shandi waved her hand at her sister. “It’s all in having a sense of purpose and a job to do. You were the one who always had that; there didn’t seem to be any place for me that made any sense. I didn’t really see myself as getting married no later than seventeen and raising ten or a dozen littles. The only thing I really liked was sewing, but you can’t make a life around fancy-work. I just drifted, right up until the moment Karles Chose me. Then, for the first time, I had a place that was my own, and an important job no one else could do.” She shrugged. “I haven’t so much changed as woken up, you could say, and as soon as I did, I started making up for lost time.”
“With a vengeance!” Keisha looked at her sister as if seeing Shandi for the very first time. “No wonder you were able to render Mother speechless!”
Now I’m happier than ever that Shandi’s here, Darian thought, surveying the two sisters, who were more alike than they would have guessed two years ago. She’s like fuel for Keisha’s fire.
“Time to go, people,” Darian reminded them. They all shoved away from the table, which was promptly swarmed by hertasi, and by the time they had reached the doorway another group had taken it over.
The sweat house was very dark inside, with only a little light leaking in around the blanket over the door. Sweat literally ran from every pore of Darian’s body as he sat knee-to-knee in the circle around the hot rocks in a pit in the center of the house. Thick with steam, redolent with the scent of cedar, the air was so hot it would have been torture to anyone who hadn’t been in the circle from the time the first rock was brought in.
A hand touched Darian’s right elbow, and he accepted the bucket of water passed to him, taking up the dipper made of gourd floating on the top and drinking eagerly of water that tasted strongly of the bundles of herbs that had been soaking in it. Once in a very great while, and only under extreme conditions, there were herbs in there that were supposed to make “seeing the other side” easier, according to Shaman Celin Broadback Caller. That wasn’t the case today; this ceremony was meant to make Darian one of the tribe, not meant to be a vision-seeking. The herbs in the bucket were those that aided endurance and heat tolerance, nothing more esoteric.
Still, even with that help, the heat in here had climbed considerably past the point that Darian had experienced the last time he was undergoing a ceremony. He was glad that they were on the last round, and from here on, although it wouldn’t get cooler, it wouldn’t get hotter either.
This round was for silence; the rounds alternated, silence and speech. With each round, more hot rocks came in, fresh from the fire. They had been warming in the heart of the fire stack for half the day and hissed as they were brought in, glowing red from every pit and crevice. Poignant to Darian only perhaps was the fact that they were brought in scooped by a pitchfork. The ceremony began with a round of speech, and ended in a round of silence, or rather, listening. Outside the sweat house, the women surrounded the building, drumming. Six of the Eldest sat in a half-circle around a huge drum made from a section of tree trunk; the rest were placed around the sweat house with hand-drums. All of them beat the same, simple rhythm during the silence rounds, the rhythm of a heartbeat. Darian felt as if he were sitting in the middle of the earth’s own heart as the drumbeat throbbed around him, vibrating deep in his chest. It was a magnificent effect, felt deep in the bones and lungs.
He passed the bucket on to Anda, who was on his left, and stared at where the rock pit was, just in front of him, no more than a hand’s length away from his feet. He couldn’t see the rocks glowing anymore, but he certainly felt the steam coming off them when the Shaman tossed another ladle of cedar water on them. The rocks hissed as the water splashed on them, and it rose in clouds of heat that felt like a blow to the skin of his face.
And yet he had to admit that all this felt curiously comforting, if not comfortable. There was no one partaking of this ceremony who did not want Darian to be there, the Shaman and Chief Vordon had seen to that. Unlike the ceremony of knighting, literally everyone here was a friend, and fully pleased to welcome Darian and his friends into their tribal circle. Even Anda must have sensed that, for now there was no hint of the earlier tension that Darian had sensed to his left.
Outside, had the drumbeats quickened a little? It was the women who determined the length of the rounds of silence, signaling an end by increasing the speed of their rhythm until the drum song ended in three decisive beats.
He thought there was tension in the air that had not been there a moment before. Perhaps the drums had sped up, and the women were about to set them all free into the cool air of early evening. He knew every nuance of the symbolism here; he and Shaman Celin had discussed the ritual for many long nights once Ghost Cat had decided to bring him into the tribe. This was in every sense a birth - did Anda know or sense that? He wasn’t sure how much the Shaman had told the Herald before the ceremony began.
Tension increased; the air throbbed around him, pressing in on him. There was the recurring sensation that his skin no longer held him, but rather that his flesh and blood extended out into the sultry air, a vapor. Celin threw another dipperful of water on the stones. A second rhythm joined the first, both sets of drums driving onward, pace increasing slowly, but steadily.
In the general area of the stone pit, a hazy hint of a glow appeared. At first Darian thought that his eyes were playing tricks on him; then he figured that Celin had opened the blanket over the door a trifle, and there was a ray of light reflecting and diffusing into the steam. But when he glanced to the side, the blanket was still firmly down, yet the glow had strengthened.
Is anyone else seeing this?
To his right, there was no sign that Kala saw anything but darkness - but to his left, he felt Anda stir and lean forward, peering at the glow.
Little whispers of sound between the drumbeats told him that there were others who were seeing something, too. The glow brightened, and began to pulse in time to the drums.
Celin hadn’t said anything about this!
Now even phlegmatic Kala tensed; the glow was bright enough at this point to see the faint outlines of rocks piled beneath it.
As the drums sped up, with each beat the glow pulsed and condensed, assuming a definite shape.
A large four-legged shape.
Suddenly, in the rounded area that could have been a head, a pair of fiery eyes appeared, exactly as if the mist-creature had just opened them. And the eyes were fixed on Darian.
Darian caught his breath and sat very still, although his heart outraced the drums outside.
A moment more, and the final pulse of light brought form and detail to the shape - but Darian had known from the moment those eyes focused on him what that shape would be. It was the Ghost Cat, the totemic spirit of Ghost Cat tribe. It was the size of a pony, with blue eyes exactly the color of a blue-white flame. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen it - though there had only been one other moment he had looked into its eyes while wide awake.
The drums outside rose to a crescendo of frenzy.
It paced toward him, putting one enormous, snow-shoe-sized-paw in front of the other, until it literally stood nose-to-nose with him. Then it slowly bent its head - he thought he felt a puff of cold breath on his feet - he couldn’t think through the frantic drumbeats that filled his body - 
Thud! Thud! Thud!
With the last of the three beats signaling the end of the ceremony, the Ghost Cat vanished. From outside, the Eldest of the women flung the blanket up, and light and cool air poured into the sweat house as the steam rushed out. The steam glowed, but with natural, reflected light; swirls of fresh air entered and began to dissipate it.
Those to the left and immediately at the door began crawling out, Shaman Celin first; although Darian was still trying to wrap his mind around what he’d just seen, he managed to respond when Kala nudged him and joined the rest to crawl in single-file out the sweat-house entrance.
The light of the setting sun half-blinded him; as his head emerged, the women set up a mighty chorus of ululation; two of the Elder Women came forward and seized him under each elbow, pulling him to his feet. A third came forward with a bucket of cold water - which, after the heat of the lodge, felt like knives of ice! - and drenched him with it.
He yelped, then performed as expected, gasping and sputtering; the women howled with laughter, then the two Elders wrapped him in a blanket and rubbed him down briskly, as impersonally as if he’d been a horse. They spun him three times around, then thrust him forward, staggering, to where a fourth woman waited to help him on with his clothing. Shandi and Keisha stood by on the sidelines, bent over with laughter, but he didn’t mind. He’d known exactly what was coming, and he was the one who had asked for Ghost Cat to invite both the girls to participate.
The Shaman, clothed and dry, but with damp hair slicked back, came forward as soon as Darian was dressed; he grabbed Darian’s right hand and swiftly slashed a flint blade across his palm, in the fleshy padded part between the base of the thumb and the wrist. He did the same with his own, and before Darian’s cut had even begun to sting, Shaman Celin clasped their two bloody hands together, and raised them to the sky.
“This is our new son, Kurhanna, whose blood is in my veins as mine is in his!” the Shaman shouted. “Welcome him to our circle!”
A great cheer arose, and although the Shaman gave Darian a considering look that portended a long discussion at a later time, he said nothing. Instead, he stepped back and allowed the members of his tribe to carry their newest member off to their version of a formal feast.
It had taken Anda a little time to get used to sitting on the ground and eating meat with only a knife, but now he seemed right at home among the tribesmen. With a leaf-wrapped strip of meat in his left hand and his knife in his right, Anda fed himself just as the tribesmen were doing, setting his teeth into the meat and cutting off a bite-sized portion, the blade coming perilously close to his lips. Despite the fact that he needed translations to understand what the men around him were saying, he managed to carry on tolerable conversations.
In a situation unusual for Ghost Cat, and prompted by the wish to honor both Heralds, women mingled with men around the fire. Normally women had their own meals and fire, but that would have separated Anda from Shandi. The women were enjoying the novel situation, although the oldest of them had formed a little circle of their own off to the side. The unmarried women were taking full advantage of this unique opportunity to flirt, though the Elders among the women tried to quell them with disapproving glances.
Evidently most of the men had gotten over their initial surprise and had simply accepted the appearance of their tribal totem as a unique demonstration of the spirits’ approval. The Clan would not be where it was now - namely alive and safe - if not for visions of the Ghost Cat in the past, the Tayledras agreed. It was not something simply made up or hallucinated; it had been there those times, as it was in the sweat house today. No one had said anything to Darian about it yet.
Anda cast Darian a questioning glance now and again, but he had not pursued the subject of what they had seen any more than the other tribesmen had.
Now it seemed that he had forgotten it entirely - or at least, he intended it to appear that way. Anda, as Darian had observed, was a very deep fellow, and if he didn’t want you to know how he felt about something, he could be as opaque as a sheet of stone.
Darian was quite sure that every single person in that sweat house had seen the Cat, but had what seemed extraordinary behavior to him been something easily accepted by the rest of the men? Only the Shaman seemed to think it needed more examination.
They’re used to seeing the Cat; after all, it led them here. Maybe the Cat always comes to greet new members of the tribe, and they were only startled because they hadn’t expected it to greet an obvious outsider like me.
But that then posed the question, why didn’t Celin simply accept the explanation as well? What did the Shaman know that the rest of his kinsmen didn’t?
Stupid question; a great deal, obviously, or he wouldn’t be the Shaman.
This celebration reminded him of the time he’d spent with the k’Vala delegation that had gone into Valdemar to help clean out the problems created by the mage-storms. When they hadn’t been guested in someone’s keep - which was mostly, especially in good weather - they’d camped like this. The Vale was never completely dark, and it never had the feeling of wilderness that the land outside it possessed. Here, beyond the circle of firelight, was the dark. Within the lighted circle was fellowship - but beyond it, there was no telling what could lie in wait.
But I fly an owl, and the night holds no mystery for me. That’s what my Northern name means, after all - Night-walker.
Night-walker, Owl Knight, Tayledras - he was taking on a great many identities lately.
He absently answered a question from the tribesman to his right, and movement to his left caught his gaze. Shaman Celin watched him closely, the old man’s eyes gleaming with reflected flames, and when he saw that he had gotten Darian’s attention, he gave a nod, then jerked his head toward his own lodge. Darian gave an amusing answer to his friend which sent the fellow into gales of laughter. With that for an ending to his conversation, he got up. As soon as he did so, the Shaman did likewise, and as Darian walked away from the fire, the Shaman joined him.
One benefit of having been formally adopted was that Shaman Celin came right to the point as soon as they were out of easy earshot of the rest. Darian was now a member of the tribe, and no secrets need be kept from him.
“You saw the Cat,” the Shaman said bluntly.
“Everyone saw the Cat, Eldest,” Darian replied, just as brusquely. “Even Anda. I hope you have an explanation for him, because he’s bound to ask me, and I don’t know what to tell him.”
The Shaman grimaced. “I was hoping you would have one for me - why the Cat came to your feet - and why he left this on the ground where you sat.”
The Shaman held something out to Darian, something small and dark, difficult to identify in the flickering firelight. Darian took it from him gingerly.
It was a black feather, roughly as long as his hand, probably from a corvid, like a crow, or perhaps a raven.
Darian shook his head and fingered the feather thoughtfully. “I wish I had an answer for you, Celin,” he said candidly, and rubbed his head. “Perhaps the Cat didn’t leave it. Are you certain the feather wasn’t in there before we started?”
“Yes,” Celin replied. Darian did not doubt him for a moment; Celin was very thorough in his duties; if he said the feather wasn’t in the sweat house before the ceremony began, then it hadn’t been there.
“I suppose one of us could have brought it in accidentally,” he said, but he was hesitant, because he hadn’t seen any corvids hanging about the enclave. And he didn’t see how anyone from k’Valdemar could have brought a feather this far - and tracked it into the sweat house after completely disrobing.
Someone might have brought it in on purpose, but why? And why leave it where Darian had been sitting? Even if one of the men in the ceremony had secretly been resentful, there was no particular “message” that such a feather could have carried. The raven was not a bird of ill omen for the Northerners; in fact, the raven was one of their prominent totems. Yet since the raven was not a Ghost Cat totem, leaving a raven feather would mean exactly nothing, neither approval nor disapproval.
And Celin would have made careful note of everything the Cat did anyway; if he said that the Cat had left this feather, whether or not Darian noticed it at the time, it was a fairly good bet that the Cat had done just that.
“If it had been an owl feather, that would have made some sense. An obvious message of approval,” Celin said, thinking out loud. His eyes crinkled around the edges. “Spirits give clear messages when a clear message will accomplish more . . . they give riddles when the act of solving the riddle accomplishes more. Or, when the riddle itself is part of the answer. Are you certain this means nothing to you?”
A very vague recollection of his uneasy nights prodded at him. I owe it to him to tell him as much as I can remember, even if it isn’t enough to be useful. “I’ve had some - dreams - of late,” he said slowly. “But I don’t remember a great deal. I think I remember the Cat, and maybe a raven, but that’s all. I was exhausted.”
Shaman Celin nodded. “Spirits often wait until we are exhausted. Sometimes it is easier to reach us then. Sometimes it is to make the messages firmer to us.” He hissed out a long sigh. “Dreams are important,” he said somberly. “It was a dream that sent us south, and visions along the way that kept us going. Some were riddles no more obvious than this one. I wish you could remember more.” He shook his head and sighed again. “If it comes again, this dream - ”
“If it comes again, I shall wake myself and write down all I can,” Darian told him. “I can promise you that, even if it doesn’t help us now.”
The weariness of six days of celebration - or “suffering” the celebrations - had taken their toll, and when Darian elected to cut his participation short, Anda and the rest followed his lead with no regrets. As they walked back to the Vale together, beneath a waxing moon, Darian had the feeling that Anda was seething with questions, and was not quite certain how to broach them. Finally, Anda asked the most obvious, and least likely to offend.
“Did I really see a - a ghostly cat in there? One like the name of the Clan?” the Herald asked, as if he was not really certain of his own senses.
In the darkness Anda might not be able to see him nod, but Darian nodded anyway by pure reflex. “You did,” he said shortly. “That was the Ghost Cat totem; the creature itself. They say it led them here.”
“You saw the Ghost Cat again?” Shandi asked excitedly. That certainly got Anda’s attention.
“What do you mean by again?” he asked sharply, turning his head to look back at her.
“Darian, Keisha, and I all saw it - well, actually everyone saw it - when we stopped Ghost Cat and Captain Kero’s force from fighting,” Shandi said, freeing Darian from having to say anything more, for which he was very grateful. Anda turned his attention to the person he knew best in the group, and left him alone for the moment, beckoning Shandi to walk beside him so that he could talk to her.
Shandi gave him all the details of that final moment when she and Karles had brought the child that Keisha had cured back to the tribe - and a Companion and the Ghost Cat spirit had interposed themselves between the two forces, themselves in obvious truce. Anda either had not heard this before, or had not taken much note of the appearance of the spirit, for he questioned Shandi, and then Keisha, very closely.
“It wasn’t an illusion,” he muttered, as if to himself. Darian judged it safe to put in his own word.
“No, Herald, it wasn’t - not when Keisha and I first saw the Cat, leading the boy’s brother to us, and not back there in the sweat house.” Darian put as much firmness into his tone as he could. “By that time I was enough of a mage that I would have been able to sense an illusion - assuming anyone in Ghost Cat was capable of producing such an illusion, which they aren’t. Firesong is very certain that no one in the tribe has Mage-Gift.”
Anda sighed. “I’ve never seen a spirit,” he admitted reluctantly. “And I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve been a bit doubtful that anyone else has, in spite of everything that I’ve heard from folk I trust. Now I’m not sure what to think. I suppose ... I suppose the fact that it appeared and came over to you means that you’ve been accepted without reservation into the tribe, not only by the people, but by the spirits who guide them.”
“It sounds that way to me, Herald Anda,” Shandi put in eagerly. “And that’s good, really. In fact, it’s excellent that you saw the Cat; it means that the Cat approves of you being here. If I were you, I’d let the Shaman know.”
Anda pondered that for a moment. “I would rather that you or Keisha mentioned it, rather than it coming directly from me,” he said, finally. “Say that I saw it, and wondered what it meant.”
Darian admired his restraint - if it had been his experience, he’d probably have gone straight to Celin and demanded to know what had happened. But coming from Shandi or Keisha as an aside, the Shaman would assume that Anda was perfectly used to seeing such portents, and had not been in the least alarmed. The Shaman would also assume, as Shandi had, that if the Cat had permitted Anda to see it, Anda’s presence had been given spiritual approval.
That was all to the good, and would make Anda’s job a great deal easier.
Now if only I could be certain of what it all meant.

Eight

Darian was cleaning and oiling dyheli tack outside the storage building when an adolescent hertasi appeared at his elbow. That was the only way to describe the phenomenon; one moment Darian was alone, sitting on a section of a tree stump outside the shed that held all the Vale’s tack, the next moment there was a short, skinny lizard standing at his elbow. Darian had finally gotten used to the way hertasi just appeared without warning, and no longer jumped in startlement when it happened.
“Dar’ian,” the youngster said diffidently. “You will please go to the meadow? Tyrsell has need of you.”
“On my way,” Darian replied, taking time only to finish cleaning the saddle strap he was working on and put away the cleaned tack. Tyrsell didn’t just arbitrarily send for anyone, but he hadn’t worded the message as if it was an emergency, so Darian didn’t want to leave his mess for someone else to have to clean up.
It did sound urgent enough that Darian broke into a lope when he was on paths broad enough that there was a reasonable chance he wouldn’t accidentally crash into anyone coming the other way. He thought he had an idea why Tyrsell needed him, though. Anda had been distinctly showing impatience at having to rely on Shandi as his translator, and Darian had the feeling he had taken matters into his own hands.
Not the brightest idea, when Tyrsell would assume he’d been told everything about the process of getting languages from the dyheli. As far as I know, he hasn’t talked to anyone in detail about it.
The problem was, since Anda was a Herald, and the Heralds were taught the use of whatever Mind-Gifts they had, Anda might well assume that he knew everything there was to know about mind-to-mind communication. But a dyheli mind was only superficially like a human mind, and the close melding of the human and dyheli required for an instantaneous transfer of language had certain bewilderingly painful side-effects.
When he arrived at the meadow, he discovered that his guess was correct; Anda lay sprawled on his back in the grass, out cold, bleeding from both nostrils. Darian trotted over and knelt beside the unconscious Herald, then looked up at Tyrsell’s long nose. “How long has he been like this?” Darian asked.
:Longer than I anticipated, but I have never given anyone five languages at once before,: Tyrsell replied.
“Five?” Darian raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were only going to give him three - hertasi, Ghost Cat, and Tayledras.”
:He wanted Kaled’a’in and tervardi as well. He also wanted Shin’a’in, but I have no command of that tongue.: A deer-fly chose that moment to buzz around the dyheli’s eyes. Tyrsell shook his head so that his ears flapped, and snapped at the fly in irritation. It took the hint and flew off, and Tyrsell resumed his contemplation of the Herald and Darian.
“He’s a glutton for punishment, isn’t he?” Darian asked rhetorically. “Typical Herald. They think they’re invulnerable.” He checked the prone Herald over with Mage-Senses and with the Healer tricks he’d picked up from Keisha. “Well, his pulse is good, he’s breathing regularly, he didn’t hit his head on a rock when he went down, and he seems all right otherwise. Where’s his Companion? I’m sure Eran can give us some help here.”
Tyrsell flattened his ears in chagrin. :I beg your pardon. I didn’t think to call him. A moment - : He raised his head and looked off in the general direction of the Vale. :He’s coming.:
Eran didn’t look concerned when he trotted into the meadow; his behavior as he bent his head down and stared for a moment at Herald Anda’s face confirmed Darian’s “diagnosis.” A moment later, Eran looked up again, into Tyrsell’s eyes.
:Eran says that there is nothing wrong with Anda other than that he has overstrained his Mind-Gifts,: Tyrsell reported. :He says that he will pull Anda into waking, so that he can begin to recover properly.:
“Did you order the tea for his headache?” Darian asked. Tyrsell nodded.
:The same hertasi I sent for you should be arriving with it in a moment.: Tyrsell and Eran looked into one another’s eyes again, exchanging another set of thoughts, and Tyrsell snorted in dyheli laughter. :Eran thinks we should withhold the tea so that Anda gets a lesson in humility.:
“Eran, that’s not very nice of you!” Darian said in mock surprise. The Companion snickered - that was the only possible description of the sound that came from him. “No, really, I know you’re annoyed with Anda, but his only real mistake was in thinking that his training in Mind-Gifts would prepare him to meld with Tyrsell. And I don’t think he realized that taking in five languages instead of the three we recommended would hit him so hard.”
The young hertasi came out of the trees carefully carrying a stoppered jug. “Nightwind gave specific instructions. She says that if this does not do the trick, you are to hit him in the head with it, for being too stupid to live,” the hertasi told Darian solemnly.
“I heard that,” Anda said from the grass.
:You were meant to,: Tyrsell observed dryly. :Or so I surmise.: He gave Eran a penetrating look, and the Companion tossed his head and snickered again.
Darian took the jug, unstoppered it, and discovered that it was not the tea that was commonly used for the treatment of mental strain, but the stronger and more concentrated decoction. Normally one only took two or three mouthfuls - Nightwind had sent an entire jug! A small jug, no bigger than a closed fist, but a jug nevertheless.
“Hit me in the head with it,” Anda continued with a groan, after briefly opening his eyes and closing them immediately. “I would prefer to die.”
Darian laughed at the Herald’s woebegone expression “What, and prove Eran and Nightwind right?”
“I will not be here to suffer their scorn,” Anda pointed out logically, but squinted his eyes open and made an effort to sit up. When he finally got upright, he propped both elbows on his knees, and dropped his head into his hands with a moan. Two drips of blood from his nose spattered on his uniform.
It was quite clear that Anda had never suffered a reaction like this one to any of his attempts at mind-magic.
“Did Nightwind say how much of this he was to take?” he asked the hertasi, who stared at Anda in fascination.
“All of it,” the adolescent said succinctly. He then looked upon Anda with sudden clear disdain and just muttered, “Blood on white,” then disapprovingly shook his head.
She said he should drink all of it? Darian shook the jug to try to judge how full it was, then gingerly tilted it. It was quite full.
Well, Nightwind knows what she’s doing.
“Here, you heard him,” Darian said, pulling one of Anda’s hands away from his face and pushing the jug into it. “Drink it. All of it.”
“Only if you’ll swear it’s poison.” But Anda clasped his hand around the jug and raised it to his mouth. He was obviously expecting it to taste foul (which, as Darian knew from experience, it did) so although he reacted to the flavor with a hideous expression, he drank it all down, as ordered, before dropping the jug into the grass and gasping, “Blessed godsl What does she make that out of, hoof scrapings? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”
When Nightwind had given Darian this particular potion, she’d followed it with a drink that took the wretched taste out of his mouth. She’d sent no such drink with the hertasi - which meant she really was annoyed with Anda.
But the Herald was a resourceful fellow; he began pulling up pieces of grass and chewing them, then discreetly spitting them out. His attempt at cleansing his mouth evidently worked, as his mouth stopped puckering and his eyes gradually stopped watering.
“All right,” he sighed. “I admit it. I was an idiot. I made assumptions and acted on them without bothering to ask anyone first. Now is this vile medicine really going to work, or was this all a cruel hoax?”
“It works,” Darian promised. “In fact, given how much of it you just drank, we’d better get you back to the guest lodge before it hits you.”
Anda looked up at Eran, who relented, and knelt down beside the Herald. Anda used the Companion’s back and Darian’s arm to steady himself, and staggered to his feet. Eran rose as well, and Anda draped one arm over Eran’s back, resting most of his weight on his Companion. With that support, and Darian on his other side, they walked slowly back to the Lodge. Tyrsell remained in the meadow, having a silent discussion with the young hertasi.
“By the way, had you noticed that you’ve been speaking and understanding Tayledras?” Darian asked casually.
“I have?” Anda replied, his astonishment momentarily superseding his pain. “Great good gods, I have!”
“Not only that, but you really understand the tongue,” Darian pointed out. “You understand it the way you would if you’d grown up speaking it. You aren’t mentally translating it. That’s why you have the headache, because you just got the language dumped into your head whole and entire, the way Tyrsell first got it from a human. That’s the way the dyheli remember things, but not the way a human does. You have to remember that when you do anything that requires closer contact than simple Mindspeech, Anda - dyheli, tervardi, hertasi, and kyree are not human, and if you aren’t careful, you can get into trouble. Well, Havens, check your new memories about dyheli and how the king stag is chosen.”
Darian kept silent and let Anda sort through the memories he’d gotten along with the language, and watched his eyes widen. Darian knew why - the king stag was chosen by having the strongest mind in the herd, which meant that, at any time he cared to, he could literally take over the minds of every dyheli in the herd and make the herd do what he wanted. This was useful in an emergency, when individuals might panic and throw the entire herd into chaos.
And Anda had probably realized that Tyrsell could do the same thing to a sizable number of humans as well, if he chose.
The fact was, no king stag treated that ability trivially, for if he did, he wouldn’t remain the king stag. And that, too, would be in Anda’s new memories.
“You have to get some rest, maybe sleep a little, and let things settle into your head,” Darian continued. “Once you do, you’ll be all right.”
“Which is, I take it, the real purpose of the potion?” Anda replied, with a wry smile. “Not to kill the pain so that I can go back to work, but to make sure that I don’t?”
“Precisely. And may I remind you that you are the one who got yourself into this in the first place? So do not get angry at us for seeing to your health.”
Eran curved his head around, stretching out his long neck to do so, and looked Darian straight in the eye before snorting his agreement.
“At least I’ll never have to repeat this experience,” Anda sighed, as they reached the door of the guest lodge. By that time he wasn’t resting his weight on Eran anymore, and Darian was only walking beside him in case he stumbled.
Darian turned to leave him - but could not resist replying over his shoulder, “Not unless you meet a dyheli who knows Shin’a’in.”
Anda only groaned, and looked pitiable. “You’re a cruel man, Darian. A very cruel man.”
Darian laughed, and left him to return to his chore.
Since all of Keisha’s handiwork was in the ekele that she shared with Darian, it only made sense to take Shandi there to demonstrate some of the needlework and dyes Keisha had been trying since she moved into the Vale. She’d learned some new techniques from the hertasi, who did most of the embroidery and beadwork for the Tayledras; the little lizards had been happy to share their passion with a fellow addict.
Shandi was just as enthusiastic as Keisha had been. They soon had threads, yarns, and strip samplers spread out all over the sofa and chairs, plus a few pieces of Keisha’s finished work were down off the walls or out of the wardrobe. In the middle of an animated discussion of new dye colors, Shandi suddenly looked into nothingness, then laughed out loud. Keisha had learned enough by now, though, not to be alarmed at what might have signaled the onset of insanity in anyone but a Herald.
“What did Karles just tell you?” Keisha demanded.
“That Anda just pulled a typically stubborn and pig-headed male act, and went to Tyrsell to get the languages by himself. Five of them, all at once. And is suffering the consequences, with no pity from anyone.” Shandi laughed again, shaking her head, as Keisha was torn between feeling sorry for Anda and wickedly pleased that he’d mounted his pride and let it carry him straight over the edge. “Nightwind sent a jug of something to him, with instructions to hit him in the head with it if the potion didn’t do any good.”
“Ouch! She’s annoyedl This may be the best way to teach him that he doesn’t know evenIthing, though,” Keisha said.
“Just because he’s a Herald, you mean?” Shandi shrugged, but her eyes twinkled and her mouth twitched into a grin. “That tends to be our major fault, I suppose. It’s difficult to remember that you might be wrong when you’re almost always right.”
Keisha rolled her eyes ceilingward. “Modest, aren’t you?” Keisha replied dryly.
“Of course - that, and every other possible virtue,” Shandi countered with a toss of her head, as she feigned a lofty attitude. “Are you trying to tell me you’ve lived all your life in Valdemar and haven’t learned that yet?”
Keisha made a rude noise by way of an answer, and Shandi laughed heartily, throwing her head back. “Oh, it’s good to be back here with you - I made a lot of friends at the Collegium, but there was never anyone that was a sister.”
Keisha knew exactly what she meant - more so, perhaps, because until she had begun living in the Vale, she hadn’t had anyone she could really think of as a friend except Shandi. Now she could count Nightwind, Ravenwing, several friends among the liertasi, and was cautiously coming to think of Silverfox as a friend, though she was still rather intimidated by him. Firesong - well, she was completely intimidated by Firesong, though she’d never let him know that. But she knew that if she needed help, Firesong was someone she could count on, and wasn’t that part of the definition of a friend? Friends weren’t supposed to be identical in what they did, or what they meant to someone - otherwise, who would want or need more than one?
And then there was Darian. Darian was the best friend she’d ever had, except for her sister, and always would be, no matter what happened between them. Now if only she could figure out exactly where she was going with him.
“So what’s going on with you and Darian?” Shandi asked, as if she had been following Keisha’s thoughts. Keisha looked at her, startled by the question.
“What do you mean by that?” she demanded, with a touch of sharpness.
Shandi leaned back into the cushions of the sofa, and fingered the soft silk of a skein of embroidery thread. “Well, since you asked, I couldn’t help but notice that you seem restless, a little nervous, but he seems perfectly happy. So what’s the matter? I should have thought you’d have been posting the banns by now - and I don’t think it’s his fault that you’re not. I also don’t think that you are looking for someone else, so what’s the problem?”
“I’d . . . rather not talk about it just yet,” Keisha demurred. I’d rather not talk about it at all, actually. Maybe she’ll take the hint and leave me alone.
Shandi shrugged. “All right for now, but you’re not going to avoid talking about this for too long. Maybe the folks here in k’Valdemar are too polite to get you to ‘fess up, but I’m not. You’re my sister, and I’m going to find out what’s bothering you and fix it if I can.”
Keisha eyed her sister cautiously; this was an entirely new side to Shandi that she hadn’t suspected existed. What had brought this out in her? Was it being trained as a Herald, and being used to jumping straight in to solve problems whether the people involved wanted them solved or not? “How do you know what I’m thinking, anyway?” she demanded. “I thought you weren’t supposed to go snooping around in people’s heads.” She couldn’t help feeling resentful, even though this was Shandi who was trying to meddle. Hadn’t she already had enough of her mother’s meddling in her life?
“Not thinking,” Shandi corrected. “Feeling. I know what you’re feeling, which is hardly the same as knowing what you’re thinking, especially when you make it so easy to read. And what do you expect, when my sister is such a strong Healer?”
That was such a complete non sequitur that Keisha could only look stupidly at her. “What?”
“Healer. Empath. Not thinking, feeling. That’s what made them decide back at the Collegium that I’ll be a good diplomat. It turned out when they got everything sorted out and started giving me real testing and training that my strongest Gift is Empathy.” She chuckled. “Which is probably why I could never bear to hurt anyone’s feelings.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Keisha asked.
“You didn’t ask, and it was never relevant.” Shandi was so matter-of-fact about it, that Keisha could hardly believe it. “You didn’t need to know about it when we all handled the Ghost Cat crisis, and it didn’t come up when I was visiting.”
“Well, that’s true enough,” Keisha admitted. “I just thought - well, I suppose I wasn’t thinking, actually.”
Shandi raised an eyebrow at her. “I was trained by Queen’s Own Talia, no less. Then again, Herald Talia is the only Empath currently among the Heralds, so she’d pretty much have to be the one who taught me, wouldn’t she?”
Keisha was utterly speechless at this - and stared at her sister as if she had turned into a stranger. In a sense, she had - here was the girl that Keisha had taken care of and gotten out of scrapes, talking casually about being taught by the Queen’s Own Herald of Valdemar!
“It developed fairly late, which they tell me was just as well,” Shandi continued calmly, ignoring her sister’s dropped jaw and goggled eyes. “But they said with a sister who turned out to have a strong Healing Gift the way you have, and as alike as the two of us are, it’s not too surprising that I’d be an Empath. The only thing likelier would have been that I’d be an Animal Mindspeaker - or another Healer, but then I probably wouldn’t have been Chosen. No Companion will Choose a Healer or a potential Healer, unless the Healing Gift is really, really minor, and some other Gift is a lot stronger.”
“I suppose that Animal Mindspeech would have been useful,” Keisha ventured, slowly gathering her scattered and wandering wits together.
“Not as useful as this.” Interestingly, Shandi didn’t seem particularly proud of her Gift, any more than a carpenter was proud of having an average, serviceable set of tools. “I can tell when people are lying, or trying to lie, without using the Truth Spell. I can tell when they’re being pushed into saying or doing something against their will. All kinds of things that it’s useful for a diplomat to know.”
“Or a spy,” Keisha said without thinking, and looked sharply at her sister.
But Shandi laughed at her. “Or a spy - which is sometimes an impolite name for a diplomat. You see? We even think alike. Now, since you won’t talk about Darian, what was it you were saying about this golden yellow?” She held up the skein she’d been toying with.
Keisha went back to her yarns and dyes, but beneath the discussion, her mind was busy with all that Shandi had revealed in those few words. There were many things, it seemed, that she needed to learn about her sister, especially now that she would be living right under Shandi’s nose.
And even the “old” Shandi had not been inclined to let sleeping problems lie undisturbed if she thought she could do something about them.
After a fruitful afternoon of cleaning and mending every bit of dyheli tack in the shed, Darian was ready to reward himself with a swim. He stowed the last bit of tack awayI then tucked the cleaning supplies in their proper place, and closed the shed up. He was dirty and oily, but he knew the girls were in the ekele and he didn’t want to disturb them. I’ll get clean enough in the lake, he decided. And the hertasi will take care of a change of clothing for me. And as for the tack oil, it was lanolin, and his skin would absorb it.
Cleaning tack was most often a job for the hertasi, but they had enough to do just building, and catching up with the chores and projects that had been put back while the celebration and the preparations for it had been going on. When a job needed doing in the Vales, whoever had the skill took care of it. Except, perhaps, for the cooking chores - so far as the hertasi were concerned, there wasn’t a human anywhere who could match hertasi cookery, and the making of a meal would be the very last job that the hertasi would give over to human hands.
I’ve come along a bit from the fellow who resented having to clean and mend. He chuckled at himself, and shook his head. I guess that’s what growing up is supposed to do to you.
The tack shed, one of a group of storage sheds tucked into an out-of-the-way corner screened with trees and ornamental bushes, was not all that far from the lake, and a direct pathway linked the two. The walk was barely long enough to get his muscles warmed up from sitting all afternoon.
Once the path opened up to the clear, quiet waters, he turned to the right to stroll along the edge of the lake on his way to the swimming beach. He wanted to see how the hertasi were coming with the hot spring he’d created. One of the reasons he had chosen that particular spring was its nearness to the lake; but another was that it emerged about a third of the way up to the top of one of the hills cupping that end of the valley. The water started from a point that was about the height above the lake of a five-year-old tree. That would make it perfect for a series of cascading pools, where the water moved downward from pool to pool, cooling as it went. Soakers could pick their preferred temperature by the height of the pool in the cascade.
The hertasi had already dug the series of soaking pools leading down to the lake, from the smallest (which would be the hottest) at the top, to the largest (big enough to hold thirty or forty soakers, and would be just comfortably warm) at the bottom, just like the ones at k’Vala. The first three pools had been sculpted and finished inside with formed rock; these three were in the process of curing. A crew of hertasi was laying the rock of the fourth pool, and the other pools each had one or two hertasi in them, sculpting the earth into seats, couches, and benches, which would be covered with the formed rock. At the moment, the hot water ran down a temporary channel into the lake, where it mixed directly with the lake waters, creating an area of warmth. Even now, that spot was in use, though it wasn’t as hot as the finished pools would be, nor was the edge anything more than raw lake shore. As soon as the last pool was finished, the hertasi would plant the slope with heat-loving vegetation, and a specialist like Steelmind who worked at inducing plants to grow with amazing speed would soon have the place looking as if it had always been there. When the pools had cured, the hertasi would divert the water and they would begin filling. It would take at least a day for them to fill and come up to proper temperature. Then, no doubt, there would be an impromptu opening party.
Right now, though, Darian wasn’t looking for a place to soak; tack cleaning wasn’t hard work, just tedious work. He didn’t need to soothe sore muscles, he just needed to cool off and get cleaner. He was also hoping Kel would be out here, as this was the time of day that the gyrphon usually took his bath and he hadn’t had a chance to talk to Kel in days. They’d both been so busy with the celebrations that there hadn’t been time for anything else.
He was right on time for the gryphon’s bath. Just as he neared the sloping rock-shelf that stretched for several wagon-lengths just under the surface where the gryphons usually bathed in shallow water heated by the sun, Kel flew in, hovered, and landed in the water. He skimmed in at a shallow angle, sending a huge rooster tail of water to the other side of his body before plunging. Gryphons bathed like birds, and Kel was no exception to that rule, slamming his head and shoulders into the water, then hunkering down and splashing vigorously with his wings. Even the smallest bird kicked up quite a bit of water when bathing; when a gryphon (twice the size of a war-horse, with a wingspread wide enough to shelter a small house) decided to take a bath, it tended to drench anyone within five or six furlongs. Darian knew this, of course, and stood well away as the gryphon ducked and splashed, ducked and splashed, until every feather was soaked so that it looked as if he were covered in quills instead of feathers.
Gryphons, like birds, also tended to be single-minded about their bathing, so Kel didn’t look up and notice Darian until he was done and looking for the best spot to clamber out and sun himself.
“Ha! Darrrrian!” Kel exclaimed. “Have you rrrrec-overrred from all the cccelabrrrationsss?” He looked so ridiculous that Darian had to strangle his laughter, for otherwise he’d hurt Kel’s feelings.
“Barely,” Darian acknowledged. “I’m going for a swim. Mind if I join you afterward?”
“Be my guessst,” Kel responded genially. “I will be verrry happy to ssshare a rrrock with you.” The gryphon waded out, generously not shaking himself until Darian was out of range. And when he did go into a blur of motion, he carefully did so where a plot of flowers looked as if they could use the water, then saw to it they were fertilized, too.
Darian meanwhile stripped and waded in along the shallow rock-shelf. The water here was tepid - fine for bathing gryphons, but not particularly refreshing. He wanted his swim in cooler waters, and as soon as he reached a place where the lake was deep enough, he dove in and struck for the opposite shore.
By the time he’d swum to the shore and back again, he felt relaxed and sufficiently cleansed of the oil and dirt of tack cleaning that he was ready to come out.
The ever-watchful hertasi had spirited his dirty, oil stained clothing away and left towels and one of the loose, enveloping robes where his clothing had been. He dried himself off and pulled the robe on over his head, cinched the various ties, then climbed out onto Kel’s chosen rock to join him in the sun.
There were many flat-topped sheets of rock here, conveniently near the underwater rock-shelf, and Kel wasn’t the only gryphon drying his feathers in the sunlight. All of the gryphons in k’Valdemar were young adults, looking to make reputations for themselves; Kel had the most experience and seniority of the lot. That could have been a cause for problems, because young and ambitious gryphons were like young and ambitious humans - they tended to forget they weren’t immortal and took risks. Kel was not old enough to remain immune if the rest got excited, but they were all in the Silver Gryphons as well, and their senior officer was a Kaled’a’in of about fifty, imbued with plenty of caution and good common sense. Their trondi’irn, who cared for their injuries and ills, was Nightwind - and there wasn’t a being in all of k’Valdemar who cared to annoy Nightwind by getting hurt by doing something stupid. With Nightwind and Redhawk supervising them, the young gryphons of k’Valdemar would probably not do anything intolerably risky.
Darian threw a towel down on the rock and stretched out beside Kel. Damp gryphon had an odd scent, not unpleasant, but different from the spicy-musky odor of dry gryphon. Kel smelled a little like spice, but more like a certain dark brown, salty sauce that Ayshen used for vegetables. Strange, really. He looked almost black, his feathers were still so laden with moisture; when he dried, he would be a beautiful golden-brown, with a sheen of bronze.
“So, have you gotten a chance to ask Herald Anda about studying with Treyvan and Hydona?” he asked lazily.
There was a long, and unexpected pause. “I darrre not,” Kel confessed sheepishly. “Trrreyvan and Hydona! The Great Ones! Why, they arrre legendsss!”
“They’re gryphons, like other gryphons, Kel. They’re bone and blood and gristle. And Herald Anda is as fallible as anyone else; you don’t have to be intimidated by him.” He glanced over at the sunning gryphon, who had his head down on his outstretched forelegs, watching Darian with one golden eye. His ear-tufts were flat, a sign that he really was feeling as sheepish as he sounded.
“That iss not ssso easssy,” Kel sighed. “It isss harrrd to rrregarrrd Herrrald Anda asss orrrdin-arrry.”
“Listen, you may not believe this, but the awesome Herald Anda just did one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard of.” Without sparing Anda, he related the Herald’s blunder of the afternoon, and Nightwind’s response to it. He watched for Kel’s reaction, and saw the gryphon slowly lift his head, his ear-tufts picking up as he recounted the story.
“I sssuppossse - ” he began, “that wasss not the brrrightesst of actionsss.”
“Kel, it just proves that you don’t have to be intimidated by him,” Darian repeated. “You haven’t done anything quite that stupid.”
“It wasss not precisssely ssstupid,” Kel protested, but his eyes sparkled. “Jussst - overrrconfidence.”
“Call it what you will, I don’t think that you need to feel as if he’s some sort of minor god just because he was trained by your idols,” Darian repeated. “Besides, didn’t he say he was looking forward to getting acquainted with all the gryphons? You’re the chief gryphon of this Vale. You’ve got as much rank as I do, Kel - which means you’re Herald Anda’s equal.”
Kel perked up more. “I am, arrren’t I?” His beak gaped in pleasure, and he looked around with contentment. “I believe I will find an imprrresssive enough placsse, and welcome Herrrald Anda on behalf of the otherrrsss - when he wakesss, in a few daysss, that isss.”
Darian laughed. “That’s a good choice, Kel,” he agreed, and turned over onto his back, shading his eyes with a flap of towel. “I doubt very much that he wants to see anyone for quite a while.”
He was half asleep when Kel’s voice woke him. “Darrrian,” the gryphon said. “What arrre you thinking?”
“Nothing, actually,” Darian replied sleepily. “Why?”
“I wasss thinking, You arrre my frrriend, and I am yourrrsss. That we arrre of the sssame family of sssorrrtsss. We arrre wingmatesss and brrrotherrrsss, you and I.” The gryphon paused to scratch an ear slowly, sending a freshly dried tuft of feather-down drifting in the breezes caused by his movement. “I wasss thinking, how prrroud my parrrentsss arrre of what I have done, and how yourrrsss would be the sssame if they knew.”
Kel’s words acted like that bucket of cold water after the sweat-house ceremony; they shocked him awake. “They would,” he said, but his mind was elsewhere, sent careening on a new path - or rather, on an old path that he had not traveled in far too long.
I still don’t know what happened to them. I meant to go out and hunt the old trap-lines to find out - or try-but I never did. How did I forget?
Guilt wracked him for a moment with a physical spasm. How could he have let himself get so involved in the life of the Vale that he forgot his parents?
Get hold of yourself. There’s no reason to feel guilty. You did not forget, you were busy. You have thought of them constantly, you just didn’t go do that one thing. You had too much else to do, including growing up, he told himself, though it was easier to tell himself that than it was to shed the guilt. Two years aren’t going to make any difference in the clues that are left - if there are any. He was woods-wise enough to know that (in the worst possible case) bodies left out in the open were quickly torn apart by scavengers. The parts were carried off, scattered; summer insects found what was left to be irresistible. In a year, not even the major bones were likely to be left. Although it made him sick to even think of applying that to his parents - 
After all this time, two years wouldn’t make any difference, he repeated to himself. Five, even ten wouldn’t make any difference.
Darian rubbed at his face with both hands, coping with the thoughts that Kelvren’s innocent commentary had dredged up. He murmured a thanks to the gryphon, who responded by bumping him affectionately with a wing, then assuming another lounging position. Darian’s thoughts stayed on his parents’ fate. They could not have been lost in the Pelagiris this long - not even for a year. Blind, deaf, dumb and limbless they could find their way back to Errold’s Grove by orienteering. They had been that good.
But if his parents weren’t dead - then there was only one other thing that could have happened to prevent them from returning to him.
They had to have been caught in a Change-Circle.
And if they had survived that experience, there was no telling what might have happened to them. What they might have become.
Or where they were.
His duties to his homeland, his adopted people, his friends and his mentor had been fulfilled, and then some. It was more than time for him to use his own tracking skills and resolve, and find out what he could about the past.

Nine

“I want to visit the Sanctuary,” Anda abruptly declared, just as Keisha set her plate and cup down and joined the little group around the table he shared with Shandi and Darian. Shandi smiled at her sister and shrugged slightly; Darian kept eating. “How do I go about doing that?”
“Catch a disease?” Darian offered.
Anda was looking at Darian, but it was Keisha who answered seriously, ignoring her breakfast for the moment to shoot Darian a look of disdain. The meal was too hot to dig into immediately anyway; she might as well deal with Anda. She wasn’t at all certain that he had learned the lesson of impatience. If he’s going to the Sanctuary, though, I’m going along.
“I suppose I can take you there,” she said. “When do you want to go?” She already knew the answer, of course. Anda had been running at full speed since the moment he arrived, and not even the exhausting welcome-week had kept him from what he saw as his duty to integrate himself into the life of Vale, village, and tribe.
“Today, if possible.” Anda had taken a frugal breakfast of fruit and bread; Keisha wondered how he could accomplish so much on so little food. Her heartiest meal was breakfast. “Are there any new patients there at the moment?”
“There are always new patients there,” Keisha sighed, but with envy rather than weariness. “Except in the dead of winter, the Sanctuary gets a new group roughly every fortnight. If what you want to see is Northerners fresh from the wilds and tired to the bone, that’s exactly what you’re going to get.” She took an experimental bite of her own breakfast of stuffed mushrooms; they were cool enough to eat, and she didn’t want them to grow cold. She gave Darian a glance; he took the hint, and picked up where she left off.
He’s almost done with his breakfast, anyway. If I don’t get something to eat soon, I’m going to start tearing out throats.
“The Ghost Cat people sent up a couple of messengers to the tribes they were related to,” Darian explained, fully aware of how irritable morning hunger made Keisha. His meal was all made up of things that wouldn’t be spoiled by getting cold, and he had no problem talking around bites of food. “Those tribes have been spreading the word that there’s a place of Healing down here, but they are being careful the word doesn’t get to tribes like Blood Bear - those were the barbarians that overran Errold’s Grove. Either we were lucky or very careful. Those tribes seem to have gotten a lot of strange diseases out of the Change-Circles up north.”
“We were careful,” Anda said, after swallowing the last of his own breakfast. “After the scholars at Haven figured out the pattern for where the Circles would pop up, people were told. No one went near them until they’d been checked over. Sometimes they were sterilized by fire, if need be.”
“But things still got away,” Darian pointed out. “Animals, insects, some creatures we never could identify. We know that - and it happened here in Valdemar. My parents hunted all kinds of bizarre things that came out of those Circles. I’d have to say we were lucky, Anda; we could have ended up with the Summer Fever and Wasting Sickness as readily as Ghost Cat did. And - bless poor Justyn, but he would have been the first to admit to this - the Healer we had at the time wouldn’t have had the power to cure it.”
“But he would have the power to call those who did,” Anda said firmly. “Furthermore, those he called would know the right steps to take, not only to cure the disease, but how to keep it from spreading further. Keisha, when can we go to the Sanctuary? Will this be an overnight trip?”
Keisha hastily swallowed the last of her mushrooms. “Overnight, yes, but longer than that, no, and we won’t have to pack anything. But I think we ought to go first to Ghost Cat so they can explain how they deal with the pilgrims. They are the ones who are most involved, after all. You ought to see how this is benefitting all of us, not just the Northerners. If we leave now, we can go there, then to the Sanctuary, then be back by nightfall tomorrow.”
“Then I’m ready.” Anda stood up. “Shandi?”
“Ready enough.” Shandi followed her Senior’s example. “Karles says he and Eran will meet us at the Vale entrance. He’ll have Tyrsell send a dyheli for Keisha.”
Keisha could have allowed the two Heralds to go on their own; there was no reason why she had to come along. One of the dyheli at the Ghost Cat enclave could readily guide them to the Sanctuary without Keisha’s help.
She didn’t want to do that. She didn’t want to take the chance that there was some serious illness, even a plague in the early stages, at the Sanctuary. Anda was perfectly confident in the abilities of the Sanctuary Healers to deal with such a thing, but the Sanctuary Healers would not be paying a great deal of attention to the healthy Heralds. All of their interest was bound up in their current patients, and it might not occur to them that the Heralds were exposing themselves to danger.
She, above all, knew just how focused Healers could be; when dealing with an incipient crisis, they concentrated on the problem in front of them to the exclusion of all else. Whatever ills were being treated at the Sanctuary, Keisha would be there to note the symptoms and the cure - and if Shandi or Anda, or both, showed any signs of illness, she would be able to treat them before either of them sickened too far. She would have the sense to get them isolated and keep them from the rest of the Vale; with the help of the hertasi (who could not catch human illnesses) she could get them through whatever they caught.
Besides, I want to see what’s going on there! For that chance, she was willing to make the trip. She hadn’t been to the Sanctuary in person for well over a year.
When they reached the Vale entrance, both Companions were waiting for them, already saddled with their lightest tack. With them was a single dyheli for Keisha. There was no need to pack anything, as they would be spending the night at the Sanctuary, which was more than prepared to host visitors. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t had healthy people there before.
They’ll probably be glad to see someone who doesn’t need help. And Healers are even more implacable than Heralds. If Anda’s in the way, they won’t hesitate to push him aside.
Shandi and Anda were in the saddle before Keisha had gotten her foot into the dyheli’s stirrup. She was getting used to the way that Heralds and their Companions worked so incredibly smoothly together, but it took the dyheli’s amused comment of :Show-offs: to make her realize that some of that was a deliberate - if somewhat automatic - attempt to impress.
Oh? she thought at her mount, not wanting to elaborate lest the rest of her thought leak over to the others.
The dyheli flicked her ears back delicately. :Yes. They didn’t have to link so tightly just to get into the saddle. And there’s no real reason to try to impress us, is there? They’re doing it to create an image, but is it an image they have to project all of the time?: The irony in her tone colored every nuance.
Keisha always appreciated the dyheli’s dry sense of humor, and never more so than now, but she was inclined to be charitable. Maybe they’re practicing, she suggested. You know, they haven’t been together for all that long, and it’s not easy to get a coordinated link that’s natural and easy.
The doe flicked her ears forward. :Perhaps,:-was all she would say.
The journey to the Ghost Cat village took place without incident, and in a very short period of time. Sentries hailed them from posts among the trees without asking them to stop; the Heralds and their Companions were instantly recognizable, even at a distance. By the time they reached the village, Vordon and Celin were waiting for them. The Shaman was in his ordinary working clothes, not his talis-manbedecked ritual garb, and bits of bark caught in his beard and hair betrayed the fact that he’d been splitting wood when he was apprised of their imminent arrival.
“Hah! Kei-eh-sha!” Vordon hailed Keisha first, which rather pleased her. “And has our new brother recovered from his birthing? What brings you here, on this bright morning?”
“More or less, Chief,” she laughed. “He is certainly up and at all of his duties again, rather than sleeping like a man-shaped pile of rocks. My friends wish to know of the arrangements that Ghost Cat has with the pilgrims.”
“That is correct, Chief,” Anda said immediately, as the Chief and Shaman turned to the Heralds with faces full of lively interest. “If you will be so kind as to explain it to us, and show what you can.”
The Chief, who himself had only dared to learn Tayledras with the help of Tyrsell, nodded to hear Anda salute him in his own tongue. “So you have braved the pain of teaching, eh? Well, this is good. I have begun to think such a thing is equal to the death of a bear in counting toward manhood!”
Anda rubbed his head ruefully. “I could not find it in me to argue with that,” he agreed, and dismounted. “It’s good to know you consider me a man.”
Shandi and Keisha followed his example, but Shandi had to add to her Senior’s statement. “Herald Anda must surely qualify for more than just manhood,” she told Vordon, “for he has taken five tongues of Tyrsell at once.”
“I am not sure if that was bravery or foolishness,” Anda added hastily. It looked to Keisha as if Vordon agreed with that statement.
They chatted about gardens, roots, new babies, and leaf blight as they followed the Chief and the Shaman farther into the village, which had grown - indeed, doubled - in size, in the past year. There had been more additions than simple births or marriages. Some of the pilgrims had petitioned for adoption into Ghost Cat as their own tribes were so severely decimated by war or disease that they were effectively nonexistent, and Ghost Cat usually agreed to take them in. Darian was not the only outsider to have been formally adopted by a Ghost Cat family as an adult. He was just the only one thus far who was not a Northerner.
Many of those in Errold’s Grove and k’Valdemar had been surprised to learn, once the tribesmen began to build, that they were capable of a great deal of sophistication in their dwellings. In fact, their village was as neatly laid out as any Valdemaran village. The Northerners built large, one-room circular houses, with an enormous common room in the center, and small cubicles built against the outer walls for privacy. Each extended family lived in one house - married children moved in with the bride’s parents until the birth of their third child. It usually took that long for a young man to gather the resources to construct his own dwelling. Those who did not wed remained with their families, as additional hands, and suffered no decrease in status for doing so. The Chief had told Keisha that grandparents often bequeathed their homes to a favored young couple, then moved in with the oldest daughter’s family. There was often much competition among married daughters to lure Grandmother and Grandfather to their home; there was an increase in status for those who sheltered such valuable repositories of wisdom as grandparents.
The Northerners used wood to build their homes, but no stone, with wooden roofs supported by four great pillars rather than slate or thatch. The buildings were made of squared-off logs with the chinks closed with moss and mud mixed, and the roof of rough planks laid over a radial pattern of rafters, which were then topped with rough wooden shakes.
The houses were odd to Valdemaran eyes, but it was the art decorating them that was so startling to those who were not out of the North.
The thick plank door of each house was carved and painted with the totem animal of the particular family in a kind of high-relief style. These were not realistic portrayals, but very stylistic and colorful, featuring patterns in red, white, and black. In good weather, beautiful blankets made of pieced fur were hung on the outer walls - both as a precaution, to chase out any vermin and odors, and to display the handiwork of the women of the house. Now that Ghost Cat had access to woolen fabric, they were making similar blankets of wool in bright, primary colors. Each blanket was a representation of the totem of the person it belonged to. There were always two poles outside each house, carved and painted with all of the totems of the family, and topped with the Ghost Cat.
Totem animals played a huge part in the lives of the Northerners; each tribe had a special totem (usually a very powerful predator). Each family also had a totem related to the totem of the tribe. And when each family member reached adulthood, he or she also got a totem - or as they put it, were embraced by one - in a special dream-ceremony presided over by the Shaman. Darian was an exception - Ghost Cat judged he already had his totem, in the form of Kuari.
Rafter ends that protruded beyond the edge of the roof were similarly carved and painted, but this time with the heads of spirits and ancestors. Inside each house the four great roof-pillars were identical to the poles outside the front door. The floor of a house was not exactly of earth, although the central hearth was a pit dug in the ground and lined with stones, with the smoke-hole through the center of the roof above and stones laid to some distance on the floor in case of sparks jumping from the fire. The floor of each of these dwellings was made of grass mats, many layers thick, laid over the pounded earth of the floor and added to on a daily basis. It was the duty of every member of the family old enough to do so to weave one grass mat in the morning and lay it over a place where the mats were looking shabby. As the mats below disintegrated, they were replaced from above; pine needles and herbs layered between the mats drove off insects.
Crude but adequate oil lamps placed on little shelves around the inside wall gave the place a fair amount of light, considering that there were no windows of any sort. But Keisha figured that was only to be expected, since these buildings were intended for much colder climes and a window was just one more place for cold wind to come through.
The little cubicles that family members retreated to for privacy were also used for storage. Basically, partitions were set against the wall with a distance of about six to eight paces between them, extending six to eight paces into the main room. A rope across the front made a place to hang a curtain for privacy; shelves built across the back and sides made a place for storage. People kept their personal possessions in the cubicles during the day; at night, they had the option of sleeping beside the fire, or in their cubicles with blankets over the rope to block out the main room.
Circular shelters, like the family houses but without walls, stood beside each house, providing a solution to the warmer weather that Ghost Cat had encountered in Valdemar. From spring until fall, this was where most of the work and living took place for each family; on the hottest nights, sometimes the entire family even slept in their shelters. Smoke from smoldering herbs in pots around the periphery kept insects somewhat at bay. And even those pots were decorated with painted decorations.
The longer that Ghost Cat remained here, the more of their village was decorated with painted carvings;
Keisha expected that before long even the blank walls of the houses might start to sport their stylized artworks. No one had anticipated that, and a few traders had been eying the carvings and pieced-work with interest, wondering if there was any profit to be made from Northern art.
The houses were arranged in circles around a central building that was not the Chief’s house, but rather was the storehouse for the entire tribe. As such, it was decorated only with Ghost Cat, repeated over and over, in an endless variety of poses. Each family had a cubicle within for the storage of raw materials of their own, and the center was reserved for common storage.
“So-ho, you come in a good time to see how we deal with the pilgrims come for healing, Valdemar-Herald,” Chief Vordon was saying as they neared the central storehouse. “We have just sent on a family that came with riches, so you will see what we have had of them.”
While Keisha had been admiring the newest carvings, the Chief had explained to Anda that Ghost Cat, in return for feeding and sheltering the pilgrims during their initial week of quarantine and continuing to shelter and feed those who were not injured or ill, received a toll of whatever the pilgrims brought with them. Being that some pilgrims came with little but desperation and hope, this was a very flexible toll. From the poorest, Ghost Cat often took nothing but a little labor - mat weaving, wood cutting, help in building, or carving if there were skilled artists among them. But there were plenty of pilgrims who had come laden with goods, and those made up for the ones that arrived with empty hands.
“See here - this was a tribe I do not know, but vouched for by those I do - and they are wealthy in fur and amber.” The Chief gestured to the piles of goods laid out in front of the storehouse, and indeed, there was enough heaped there to make even Anda’s eyes widen. “They have only lately been touched by the Summer Fever and Wasting Sickness, and are eager to pay for a cure that they do not lose any of their children.” The Chief pointed to the piles of glossy furs. “There is bear, there beaver - there fox - that white is snow-fox - the small furs are what we call gosfoon, very soft and good, you have no name for it.”
Indeed, even though Keisha knew the Ghost Cat language and got a mental image of the gosfoon (which was obviously in the weasel family), it was with the disorienting sensation that told her she had never seen one of these creatures with her own eyes.
Imagine what the senior Herald must be feeling! He has a skill I never thought of before - this Herald has the ability to act completely undisturbed by whatever he encounters even though it is so alien to him. He must have thousands of new concepts and images in his mind, from tunnel-spar designs of the hertasi to thirty names for how a leaf tastes from the dyheli to - who knows! And yet he still manages to travel and carry on a conversation without letting it overwhelm him. Incredible.
“And here is amber, both the amber-of-the-sun and the amber-of-scent; these are Seashan tribe - ” (another new word, and this one without any kind of mental picture of the live animal, but only the to-temic rendering; so Ghost Cat knew the name and the carving that represented it) “ - and they live upon the bitter-water where these things are found along the shore.”
The amber-of-the-sun was the yellow, golden-brown, and red rough amber that Keisha knew was used in jewelry; these pieces ranged from the size of the end of the little finger to the size of a fist. But this amber-of-scent was an odd, gray-white substance with a faintly greasy look to it. There wasn’t much of it, but from the way Vordon regarded the stuff, it was even more valuable than “real” amber. He held up a little piece and indicated that they should sniff it; Keisha did so, and was delighted with the fragrance, very sweet, heavy, and musky.
“A bit of this used in perfume, no bigger than a seed, and the scent will last for years,” Vordon said with satisfaction. “Your traders will give us much gold for this, for there are those among the k’Leshya who know the use of it.”
“I can see how you are raising the wealth of your tribe,” Anda said with admiration.
“Not just of Ghost Cat, but of k’Valdemar and the Sanctuary as well. The dyheli of k’Valdemar have a share of this for their part, as does the Sanctuary.” Vordon canted his head over, looking at them shrewdly. “We trade with the village for grain for the dyheli and the goods going to the Sanctuary are taken there with each new lot of pilgrims. It is good trade, all around, and trade is how we of Ghost Cat have always prospered.”
“As opposed to war?” Shandi asked, and Vordon nodded.
“That is why, if we did not wish someone to see us, then like the Cat, we would not be seen.”
He led them away from the piles of furs; Keisha cast a wistful glance back, and decided that she would try to bargain for some of those goshon furs, so glossy and soft, and a wonderful dark brown. They would be a joy against the face, and so warm lining the hood of her winter cloak. . . .
“And here is the camp of the tribe,” Vordon was saying. “We hold them here until the Healers send the holy dyheli with the last group, making room for the new pilgrims. Those who are not ill remain while the rest go to the Sanctuary.”
Here was an encampment very like the one that Ghost Cat had first made when they arrived at this place - the difference being that the people here looked healthy and hopeful, perfectly at their ease. There was a distinct difference in their artwork, which was displayed on their clothing and carved on their wagons. This was, so far as Keisha could tell, some sort of fish, with a large top fin. She wondered what on earth the real creature looked like.
They lived in the tents that Ghost Cat supplied, but unlike Ghost Cat, these folk had no herds. They were hunters, fishers, and gathered what foodstuffs they did not hunt or fish. Keisha wondered what they were making of the strange foods that Ghost Cat had learned to prepare from foodstuffs bartered from Errold’s Grove.
“All of the sick ones that we sent to the Sanctuary were children; their mothers went with them to help tend them.” Vordon finished. “So, now, are you ready to journey onward? There is really nothing more to see here, unless you wish to watch the division of the goods.”
Anda smiled. “Not really; how you share your profits is your business, not mine. I would like to get to the Sanctuary before nightfall, if that is possible.”
It was not only possible, it was easily accomplished; the Shaman called one of the dyheli in the Ghost Cat herd to escort them, and off they went. Keisha had been this way before, but it was new to Shandi, and to Anda.
The dyheli took no one path; in fact, he made several detours through untracked forest from one game trail to another. This was all intended to confuse, and it succeeded admirably.
“I give up,” Anda said to Keisha, after they had been traveling for half the afternoon. “Where are we?”
“Three-fourths of the way there,” Keisha told him, unable to hold back a grin. “This is only one of the ways that pilgrims are brought to the Sanctuary; there must be at least a dozen, maybe more by now.”
“All right,” Anda replied, as Eran looked back over his shoulder at Keisha. “Why?”
It was Shandi who answered. “We want the Northerners to believe that the Sanctuary is a special and holy place, and that only the dyheli know the way there. We hope that will keep any renegades from getting the bright notion to come kidnap a Healer for themselves.”
“I would say it works, since I’ve been trying to keep track of our route, and I’m hopelessly lost,” Anda sighed, looking about at the forest surrounding them. There was no sign of any sort of landmark; no rocks, no particularly large trees, and no trace of a trail. There wasn’t enough light filtering down through the trees to help, either.
“What happens when you climb a tree and look around?” Anda wanted to know.
“Nothing,” Keisha answered with surety, as their mounts continued to follow the dyheli, who moved on his own secret “path.” “All you’ll see is trees. The Sanctuary is in a pocket valley, and they use some clever contrivances to disperse smoke from their fires, so you can’t see that either.”
Indeed, when they came upon the Sanctuary, they did so suddenly; one moment there was nothing but trees and brush, the next, the outer walls of the Sanctuary loomed up in front of them, walls of natural stone topped with slatted wood. They followed the wall around to the entrance; it wound around and through the forest in a most peculiar fashion, but it appeared as if it had been built without disturbing a single tree.
They passed inside the open gates, to find themselves in one of the oddest complexes Anda had ever seen - because, once again, very few trees had been cut to make way for the buildings of the Sanctuary. Keeping the integrity of the forest canopy was important to keeping the Sanctuary secret, so instead of one big building, the Sanctuary was a complex of tiny ones, all of stone, linked by covered, raised wooden walkways, like tiny covered footbridges. All of the buildings were raised above the forest floor as well, in order to keep out vermin and insects; this was a precaution to keep illness from spreading further.
Anda took a wide-eyed look around, and suddenly grinned. “This is marvelous!” he exclaimed. “How ingenious!”
One of the Trainees, in the pale-green of one who was still a student of Healing, came hurrying toward them, his face anxious as he realized that the resident Heralds had arrived all unlooked-for.
“Heralds!” the boy exclaimed, shaking a shaggy brown forelock out of his eyes. “We weren’t expecting you! Please, come this way, I’ll take you to our Senior - ”
Anda smiled down at the boy, then he and Shandi dismounted. Keisha did the same while Anda spoke to the boy in a casual and off-handed manner, conveying the idea that he hadn’t wanted any special fuss or preparations. “It’s quite all right; this is just meant to be a friendly visit, so I didn’t send any notice ahead. Can you take us on a little tour, rather than interrupting your Senior? Let him finish whatever he’s doing and join us at his leisure.”
Keisha already knew her way around the Sanctuary, and let the Trainee lead the other two off while she led her own dyheli and the two Companions to the Sanctuary stabling. Since it was intended for intelligent dyheli, it would serve the Companions equally well. It was essentially nothing more than a large shed, open and airy, with thick straw on the floor and mangers and water buckets for food and drink. It was always left open so that the dyheli could come and go. Like the rest of the buildings, it was made of stone, with a thick roof of thatch.
When she had removed the tack, left it piled neatly in a corner, and given all three a brief brush-down, she headed for the heart of the Sanctuary, the infirmary buildings where new patients were kept.
Each tiny building held no more than four patients. This mimicked the pattern of the usual sort of structure, where the patients were kept in separate rooms.
In this case, the Healers tried to keep as many family members together as possible. It was already traumatic enough, to find themselves depending on total strangers for a cure - to separate sick family members would have put too much stress on them.
Now that the weather was warm, there was no need to heat the buildings, but in the winter charcoal braziers or tiny fireplaces filled that requirement. Although the walkways connecting them were all of wood, the buildings themselves were not; they had been built partly of stone, the better to keep them clean. Their thick walls kept heat in during the winter, and out in the summer; windows covered with netting and flawed silk to prevent insects from entering were closed by glass windows and wooden shutters in the worst weather. At the moment, the windows were propped open and the shutters open wide to let in the fresh air.
Keisha found one of the Healers working in the third building she checked.
It was Kandace, someone Keisha knew quite well, a Healer with a great deal of experience and expertise with children. Her middle-aged, motherly face and figure tended to make children relax and trust her; she looked as if she had at least a dozen of her own - though, in fact, she was single and childless. With brown eyes and hair and a medium complexion, she could have passed as almost anyone’s relative. This made her perfect to deal with frightened, wary Northerners.
Keisha stood just outside and caught Kandace’s eye, then waited outside, rocking on her heels just beside the ladder leading down from the walkway. Kandace must have been nearly finished anyway, as it wasn’t long before she came out, and jumped down to give Keisha a welcome hug. “It’s been too long!” Kandace exclaimed. “I didn’t get nearly as much time to talk to you at the celebration as I would have liked?”
“Neither did I,” Keisha replied warmly. It was impossible not to like the exuberant, outgoing Healer; she treated every child like her own, every adult like a friend. Furthermore, everyone in her family was the same way; Keisha had met them all over the course of a year as they came to visit. All but one of Kandace’s siblings were Healers, as was her father. Her mother and one of her sisters were skilled cabinetmakers. “I came with the new Heralds,” Keisha continued. “They wanted to see the Sanctuary.”
“That Anda wanted to see the Sanctuary, you mean!” Kandace laughed. “I have never seen anyone so determined to find out everything in the shortest possible time!” She shook her head in disbelief. “If he wasn’t so healthy, I’d be worried about him. That sort tends to drive themselves into heart trouble by working too hard.”
She and Keisha shared a conspiratorial look. “I think you can depend on Nightwind to see he doesn’t,” was all Keisha said, but they both knew what she meant. “Since Anda wouldn’t hear of not coming, I thought I’d better go along in case your current crop had anything different this time.”
Kandace brushed her short hair back with one hand. “No, nothing different this time - just the Wasting Sickness that comes with Summer Fever, and thank the gods, the mild form.”
Now they knew that the Wasting Sickness came in two forms - one that sickened and weakened, and sometimes left a victim with paralysis of a limb, and one that killed or left the victim totally paralyzed. With help, the victims of the weak form could recover much of what they had lost - but unless the disease was caught in its early stages, victims of the strong form could not return to their former healthy selves.
Keisha relaxed; Shandi was now immune to the Wasting Sickness, and even if Anda caught it - which was less likely, as it tended to attack children rather than adults - she and Nightwind could cure it in a few days.
“I’ve got one more set of patients to see. Want to help?” Kandace offered, knowing that Keisha would. Without waiting for her answer, Kandace skipped up the stairs and headed along the walkway, looking behind once to see if Keisha was following.
She didn’t see a case of Wasting Sickness at all anymore, and she was right on Kandace’s heels. They walked in single file with their footsteps sounding hollow as they headed toward the next building. Hung as decorations beneath the shelter of the roof were all manner of little talismans; there was no end to the variety of materials they had been made of - wood, bone, fabric, fur, stone - there were even some made of dried grasses or pine needles and twigs.
They all portrayed a single creature, the dyheli, and each one had been made as a thanks-token for a successful recovery. Some, made by the children, were crude indeed, but it was the thought that counted, not the skill. All of the walkways were hung with these tokens, which were never taken down or replaced, though wind and weather had rendered some of them pretty battered. The patients worked on their talismans as they recovered, and hung them themselves from the rafters of the bridges around the building they had stayed in.
“Ready?” Kandace asked, pausing on the threshold, and looking back at Keisha.
“Always!” Keisha said eagerly, as Kandace reached for the door to open it.
Now if only I could be so certain about the rest of my life. . . .

Ten

Darian was agreeably pleased when Keisha and the Heralds decided to head for Ghost Cat and the Sanctuary right after breakfast; he had a plan of his own, and if Wintersky turned out to be free for a day or two, all the better. He finished his own breakfast in a leisurely fashion, knowing that Wintersky was a late riser, and hoping to see his friend come into the eating hall before he left.
His patience was rewarded as he lingered over a mug of cooling tea; Wintersky did appear in the door, looking damp and cheerful from his morning swim. Darian waved at him; Wintersky acknowledged the wave with one of his own, then went over to the tables to fix himself a plate.
Wintersky was only Gifted with a trace of Mage-Talent; no more than half of all Hawkbrothers had enough of the Mage-Gift to perform more than the barest of magical tasks. As a consequence, Wintersky’s black hair had only gone silver in streaks, and his eyes were still the intense blue of a Tayledras who hasn’t meddled much with magic. Lean and wiry, with a generous grin and a long jaw, he was one of Dalian’s oldest friends.
He joined Darian shortly, his plate heaped with hot flatcakes and fruit. “What stirs you this morning, my friend?” Wintersky asked genially, as he set down his mug and plate and took a seat across from Darian.
“Actually, I was waiting for you,” Darian replied, as Wintersky applied himself to his food with a good appetite. “Did you have any plans for the next day or two?”
“Not really.” Wintersky ate a few more bites before continuing. “I take it that you do, and you’d like my company?”
“Your company and your help. You’re an expert at cold-tracking, and this track is ten years cold.” He waited for Wintersky’s reaction, which was just what he’d expected.
Wintersky gave him a long look, ate a bit more, and put down his knife and fork. He steepled his fingers over his plate, his eyes fixed on Darian’s. “You want to see if you can figure out what happened to your parents.”
Wintersky was good at deducing a great deal from a small amount of evidence - that was what made him such a good cold-tracker. “If I can. If there are any traces left at all.” Darian shrugged. “I’m not deluding myself; I don’t expect much, but if there is anything to be found, I’d like to know I looked for it. They wouldn’t let me look while the trail was still hot. Now, though, anything that was left after a few years will still be there.”
“Perhaps. I can understand that reasoning.” Wintersky picked up his fork again and applied himself to his food. “Yes, I can understand that.” He said nothing more as he finished his plate, returned to the tables for a second helping, and finished that as well. Darian didn’t say anything about the subject either; he knew Wintersky, and knew that his friend was thinking the project over, weighing prospects for success against those of wasting his time for two days and finding nothing.
“If there’s anything to be found,” Darian added, “I can use magic to find it. After that, it’ll be up to you to make what you can of it.”
“All right,” he said at last. “I’m your man. Between my tracking and your magic, if there’s anything to be found, we’ll find it in two days and figure out where it leads.”
“And if we don’t find anything, we’ll know there’s nothing to be found.” Darian hated to say that, but he knew that it was only the truth. I want answers, but sometimes there aren’t any. Much as I hate that. . . . The more he had thought about his general feelings of unease, the more he was convinced that they all had something to do with that sense of not knowing. If he just had some notion what had happened, he might feel better.
“Let’s find a couple of restless dyheli and our camping gear and see what’s to be found.” Wintersky pushed away from the table and paused again. “Is Kel likely to be useful on this trip?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at the sudden thought.
Darian shook his head. “Our birds will be good enough scouts to keep an eye out for trouble. Any tracking will be by small signs, on the ground. I doubt that anything will be visible from the air.”
“Right enough. I’ll meet you at the Vale entrance with my gear and food - you get your gear and the dyheli.” When Wintersky made up his mind to do something, he got to it at once, and went at it with all his focus on the task - another thing that made him such an outstanding tracker. He was already out the door by the time Darian got to his feet.
He went first to the dyheli meadow, where he paused and sent out a general thought to the herd, which was divided pretty equally between those who were grazing and those who were taking their ease. Does had young at their heels, sometimes twins; young dyheli had all the wide-eyed innocence of any young thing, but were not much more intelligent at this stage than a human baby. Their bodies were capable of a great deal, but not their minds. When danger threatened, a doe would literally take over the mind and body of her baby to get it out of harm’s way, controlling it so that it ran swiftly and surely at her side. And if the entire herd panicked, the king stag assumed control of all of them.
Darian did not leave the does out of his general message, although he knew that at this time of year, no female would leave the herd, not even a young or old one with no youngster of her own. Females were instinctively attracted to the babies, and willingly served as nannies and surrogate mothers, giving the blood-mothers time to graze in lush pastures on their own. There was no such thing as an orphaned dyheli; a youngster whose mother died was immediately adopted by one or more childless females, and any female with a baby of her own would allow the orphan to nurse. The youngsters stayed with their mothers for up to fifteen years, nursing for the first two, then continuing to learn as they grazed for the next ten to fourteen years.
Darian sent the equivalent of polite throat-clearing to get the herd’s attention, then Mindspoke. :Wintersky and I are going to do some cold-tracking for the next two days. We would like two friends to help us with this; is anyone interested?:
Young adult dyheli were always restless and ready for an adventure, and at least nine heads popped up at that. He waited; there was some silent conferencing among the would-be volunteers and with Tyrsell, who had the last word, and then two young stags separated from the herd and trotted eagerly toward him. Their large eyes were bright with excitement, and they made no pretense of being anything but enthusiastic.
:I am Jonti,: said one. :This is my twin, Larak. We have not been far outside the Vale before, and we hope that will not cause a difficulty.:
“Then you should enjoy this,” Darian said aloud. “We’ll be off in a place where I don’t think any of the herd has been before; you’ll be first to scout it.” The stags switched their stubby tails with excitement, and followed behind Darian as he led them toward his ekele, heads bobbing with every step. On the way, he encountered a hertasi and requested it to bring riding gear for him; it nodded and continued on its way. Darian had long since decided that the hertasi were constantly in mental contact with each other - what other explanation could there be? This hertasi probably would not be the one to bring the tack, but someone would show up with saddles before he’d finished packing.
His camping gear was ready; it was always ready, since Meeren took it away as soon as he returned from a trip, cleaned, repaired, or replaced whatever needed tending to, and repacked it for him. He got the packs out of the storage chest where they stayed until he needed them, then rummaged through his closet for his oldest scouting clothes. He didn’t think he’d need more than one change of clothing, but he packed three - because accidents happened, and wet clothing was an invitation to serious illness.
It didn’t take him long to gather his things, but when he walked out of his front door, there was tack waiting beside the young dyheli, and no sign of the hertasi who had brought it.
Dyheli tack consisted of a saddle with belly, chest, and rump girths, stirrups, and a very thick saddle pad. It didn’t take long to get the two stags harnessed up and his packs fastened to the saddle; he mounted up, and all three of them headed for the Vale entrance.
As promised, Wintersky was waiting, with his own packs and a waterproof pair of saddlebags containing their provisions. In no time at all, he too was ready and in the saddle, and they were on their way.
“So, where are we going?” Wintersky asked curiously.
“North of the village, almost directly north,” Darian replied. “It’s part Pelagiris Forest, part meadowlands, with the river running along one side, a couple of ponds and some streams. That’s where my parents had their traplines. My thought is that we’ll see if we can find anything left of the traps, first. If we can, we’ll know that, whatever happened, nobody worked the lines and collected the traps.”
This time both Wintersky and his dyheli turned their heads to look at him. “You think perhaps someone took them captive, then harvested their traps and everything in them?”
“That’s one among many possibilities,” Darian pointed out. “One of the more remote ones, I’ll admit, but if that was what happened, I think it’s important to know that.”
:Blood Bear might not be the only pack of hunters who know where the village is.: That was Jonti, who sounded curiously unmoved by the observation.
“That’s entirely true,” said Darian, and left it at that.
They rode past the village without going into it. Darian didn’t comment on that openly, but he felt that seeing the village and calling up all of its memories would unfocus his concentration on the task at hand. According to Darian’s best recollection, his parents worked an area that was several days’ distance from Errold’s Grove. But they had traveled on foot, in the winter. He and Wintersky were going by dyheli-back, at a lope, in the spring. They should reach the area where his parents had last been well before nightfall.
They stopped at a stream around noon for a brief rest and lunch, and in late afternoon, when they were close to the area where Darian expected to find things - if there was anything to be found - they stopped to set up for the night. It was time for Darian to try his luck.
Darian got down off Jonti, and stood quietly, closing his eyes, blocking out the world, bit by bit. Wintersky went straight to work, dismounting and taking care of the dyheli stags and setting up camp. It might seem as if he was the one doing all the work, but that was not the case and he knew it very well. Darian’s search would take as much energy as he was using; perhaps more. That is how the Hawkbrothers were; as long as one did equal work, in one’s own way, there were no complaints from others of the clan.
Darian did not open his eyes, since he would be exploring the forest for some distance around - perhaps a distance of a league or two - and the night was still young.
He himself had worked this area as a child; now he had to bring those childhood memories up from the back of his mind, superimpose them onto their current surroundings, and then - then he would invoke Mage-Sight, but he would be looking for two things. First, he would search for objects that did not belong in the forest naturally, such as refined and forged metals. Such things, even in a state of decay, might hold the traces of the humans that had made or owned them. Second, he hoped that his kinship with his parents would draw him to anything that they had once used.
It was not always easy to keep an objective pursuit as the hours of sifting went by. When he dredged through his memories for physical references to the landscape, he would come across one image after another of his mother’s smile - or of his father trimming away a loose branch - or of him bending a trap-wire carefully while explaining to his young son how the spring worked. Darian would get such memories brought back to him, lit with intensely bright sun, in that way that only fond recollections seem to have.
It was fortunate for him, he knew, that the visions of Mage-Sight could not be blurred by tears.
Mage-Sight showed him the world as it was for those who could see the energies of life. On the surface, the living animals and plants were each enveloped in a faint emerald glow, a mist of verdant power, thin but very real. This, rather than the deeper layer where the ley-lines were, was the stratum he wanted to examine.
His emotions were suppressed through practiced discipline just enough to be able to work safely. He existed in a detached and analytical state for this exercise in receptivity to power - at least, that was the ideal intent. The pace of his search was slowed by periodic pauses, while he collected his thoughts from the effects of one family memory or other. In the intervening times of emotional control, he searched for “holes” in the overlying mist, places where the nonliving intruded through the living at certain relative “depths.”
He concentrated on each of those places, usually discovering that the “hole” represented a rock, or a place scorched bare by fire or lightning. Meanwhile, Wintersky worked quietly around him as he painstakingly sifted through each area he thought he remembered. With all of his concentration centered on his task, he was not aware of time passing. He was not aware of anything except the next pattern of radiant energy, from the next hand’s breadth of ground. He felt the “glare” of someone approaching, seeming to his magical vision much like someone was walking closer bearing a torch while his eyes were adjusted to night and starlight.
Wintersky touched his elbow, getting his attention without disturbing his search. Like a sleepwalker, Darian allowed Wintersky to guide him to a place to sit, allotting just enough of his attention to keep from stumbling over his own feet. He continued his search without a moment’s pause.
He sensed - albeit remotely - the sun setting; he felt it as an overwhelming, nurturing presence slowly sinking away.
In addition to searching out gaps in the fabric of life-energy, he used a more subtle “sense” in his examination - the Earth-Sense that made him a Healing-Mage. It was more like a sense than a skill, since it was not always consciously directed. As he examined each bit of ground, he let the earth tell him about itself. Had it been injured, had it been contaminated in the past? Was it under some sort of pressure, other than the normal pressures of life and change? Was there anything different about it? The more he listened to the earth, the farther that sense extended, and the easier it was to read the earth ways.
He expected to find at least one Change-Circle this way. This area had not been checked for mage-storm damage or interference, except in a very cursory fashion, because the Changecreatures that had come out of it had long since been “dealt with,” and whatever had happened here during the Storms had not been grave enough to disrupt the flow of magic to k’Valdemar. Eventually every finger-length of land would be gone over with the same painful care that he was using now, but such a detailed examination would take decades, even centuries. For now, only specific strategically important areas of the land closest to k’Valdemar had undergone such intense scrutiny.
He sensed a fire crackling nearby, sensed the cool of evening on his back and the warmth of the fire on his face and chest. Wintersky made the ideal partner in a situation like this one; quiet and unobtrusive, he kept his presence from impinging upon Darian’s concentration, allowing the mage to do what he needed to do.
It was late, very late, and Darian was just about ready to give up for the night, when a distant hint of “other” distracted him from the area he was in the process of examining. His Earth-Sense, running out ahead of the conscious examination, had found something that didn’t fit. Thirty-some degrees off from his current focus there was another sort of “glare,” more akin to a reversed shadow. And it wasn’t subtle either.
It was not an impulsive decision to abandon his examination and switch his focus; he was tired, yes, but this was something that needed to be looked at. The “nearer” he drew to the place, the more obvious it became that whatever was here, it didn’t belong. There was nothing “wrong” as such - nothing that a Healing-Mage needed to put right - but this thing that had caught his attention was as obvious as a cabbage in a flowerbed. It was out of place - it had neither been born of this soil, nor had it been brought here long enough ago that some of the sense of it permeated the land around it. It was rawly new, stubbornly unintegrated.
He drew near enough to “see” its shape and form, clearly. Ah, now, what is this? It was a Change-Circle, all right, but the kind where territory was transported whole. What made it stand out was its sterility - and it was nothing but bare rock, so bare that not even moss grew on it. It had been planted in a scooped-out area of Pelagiris Forest. Tree roots did not penetrate it, though surface vegetation had spilled over onto it from erosion of the surrounding soil. Its surface was not level. In fact, it tilted slightly as a whole, like the side of a shallow hill scooped out by a massive ladle and dropped. The curvature of the stone carried true into the softer ground it had sunken into, and for the first time Darian had evidence that the Change-Circles were not circles at all, but spheres.
Huh! I wonder what those theory builders back in Haven will make of this?
He was about to leave the search altogether when something else caught his attention, very like the glint of sun on something small, but shiny and glittering amidst dark tangles of ground and greenery - 
Only in this case, it was a faint calling of like-to-like. Or more accurately, of blood-to-blood. His blood, answering the faint call of blood that he shared - weak, old, but unmistakable - so faint that he had to clear his senses again and refocus. He fed it a wisp of power to reenergize it and make it more easily recognizable for what it was.
He had just found a possible first trace - the first sign - of his parents’ fate!
He hardly slept at all that night; only good sense and the need to replenish the energy he’d spent kept him quiet after he’d burst out with his news to his traveling companions.
Knowing he would not sleep, he simply kept quiet and allowed his body to rest, although his mind refused to. He carefully catalogued all the possible things he could find, and made a simple plan for what he would do for each possibility. It was the equivalent of counting sheep - the only equivalent his emotions would tolerate at this point. At least he had the illusion of accomplishing something to comfort him. . . .
He dropped off to sleep from sheer exhaustion at some point, for the next thing he knew, Wintersky was shaking him awake and the stars were fading in the first light of predawn. They packed up the camp together and saddled Jonti and Larak, whose tails were twitching with suppressed energy and excitement. He and Wintersky planned to eat in the saddle, for Wintersky had brought journey-rolls for just that purpose. So they were on their way to the spot he had marked out, riding the dyheli and followed in the trees by their birds before the first hint of sun appeared in the sky.
He rode in a kind of fever, afire to be there, that very moment; wanting to hope, afraid to do anything of the sort. He couldn’t even think, not really; his mind jumped from one thought to another without any real coherence. Kuari picked up his agitation, and flew back and forth, surging ahead of them, then swooping to the rear to check on their backtrail.
If it had been remotely possible to Gate there, Darian would have tried. During the entire interminable journey, his stomach churned, the muscles in his shoulders and neck were in knots, and his mouth was as dry as sand.
Their goal was as clear to outward eyes as it was to his inward senses. It loomed up, enfolded in the white haze of early morning low fog around its base as if it had shrugged off a mantle of clouds. A huge, perfectly spherical piece of gray-white rock, easily the size of his ekele or larger, reared up between the trunks of the trees ahead of them. The moment they spotted it, the dyheli went from their lope into a full-out gallop, leaving Darian and Wintersky to hang onto the handles built into the saddles and stay on as best they could.
The dyheli skidded to a halt as they reached the artifact, hips slewing a little sideways with the momentum of their run as they dug in their hooves, and Darian leaped from the saddle the moment they came to a halt.
The surface of the rock was perfectly smooth. Darian tentatively put out his hand to touch it, and the rock beneath his hand might as well have been perfectly polished by a jeweler.
“It’s amazing. Look at this, Wintersky. Have you ever seen anything like it?”
But he had no thought for how that unusually smooth finish might have happened; what he wanted was on the opposite side of the boulder. He hurried around it to search in the grass at the junction of forest floor and rock. “It’s near here,” Darian murmured. “I felt the sign from near here, on the northwest side of the rock formation. In the soil.”
Wintersky joined him, the two of them kneeling side by side and carefully parting the grass stems, pulling apart the leaf litter and dead vegetation of so many years, sifting through decayed grasses and earth for some tiny artifact - 
Then, Darian’s fingers tingled as he touched something small and hard under the surface.
He stopped dead for a moment - then slowly, carefully, probed at the object, fishing it up out of the moist, crumbling soil. His breath caught.
It was a bone; a tiny bone no larger than a thimble.
Now Wintersky took over, pushing Darian aside gently, and hunting carefully and methodically through the loam. Darian went to the dyheli who had followed them to this side of the rock. He pulled his ground-cloth out of his pack and spread it out beside Wintersky, numbly taking what Wintersky dug up, cleaning it meticulously with spit and a handkerchief, and laying it out on the ground-cloth. Of all the things that he had imagined last night, this was not one of them.
“Lay them out in the order I give them to you,” Wintersky ordered after the third tiny bone emerged from the soil. He excavated the site meticulously, using the tip of his knife as well as his fingers, after cutting a square of turf going back to the rock and pulling it up. Darian obeyed him, and piece by piece, bone by bone, a pattern began to emerge.
Bones flared at each tiny joint, then nestled into the longer ones of the same general shape; bones gone gray-white from weathering, the surface cracked and pitted. Wintersky worked more slowly now, and there was a pattern to his excavation as he worked out the direction that the bones lay.
They were toes.
The heel - the ankle bones - then - 
Right against the rock, flush with it, the joint end of the lower leg bones. But the rest of the bone had been sheared off cleanly, leaving only the rounded ends, with the cuts lying flat against the surface of the rock.
Slowly, Wintersky picked up the two bone fragments, cleaned them off, and handed them to Darian, cut-end first, so that Darian could see for himself that the ends had not been crushed, as they would have been had the boulder landed after a fall, upon the unfortunate owner of the foot.
Another few minutes and the remains of a hard boot heel and sole were excavated from rotted tatters of thick canvas.
 - Father - He knew that must be whose foot they had found; he had somehow known it the moment he touched the first bone. He knew it from the lurch in his heart, the dryness of his mouth, the surge in his blood. His father always wore his boots to sleep in, in case there was trouble in the night. He wore canvas-bodied boots coated in the same neutral wax as his leggings, so he would not leave scent marks to warn the game. The waxing had to be restored every few weeks or it would let the canvas rot. This had to be his father’s - 
 - but the ends of the bone were shiny, polished, as if they had been cut by a fine saw, then polished by a jeweler.
“Check with Mage-Sight. Is there any more sign?” Wintersky asked diffidently, laying the two bones down with the rest when Darian did not take them.
Darian closed his eyes, extended his senses, and - shook his head. “Nothing,” he said hoarsely, surprised at the sound of his own voice.
Together they looked at the bones, at the incontrovertible evidence that lay before them.
There was only one possible interpretation.
“They must have been caught in the Change-Circle,” Darian whispered. He did not for a moment doubt that his mother had been with his father - otherwise she would have made her way back to him. “They were caught in the Circle, and sent - where?”
Wintersky could only shake his head. “I don’t know, Dar’ian,” he replied. “I just - don’t know.”
A few hours later, Darian had cause to bless the caution with which Wintersky had worked, for he had managed to preserve the very few representatives of non-native vegetation that had taken root around the boulder. How they had come there, Darian had no idea, but they were not part of the normal flora of the Pelagiris Forest. Perhaps seeds had drifted in with the air that had come with the rock - perhaps they had been caught in a crack at the top of the boulder, for he had discovered by climbing up on top of it that it wasn’t perfectly sheared off. The top, flattened and cracked, looked like normally aged rock surface.
He carefully and reverently folded away the bones in one of his shirts in the saddlebag. He wasn’t altogether certain how they could be of use - but Firesong would know.
Surely we can use them to tell me whether Father is dead or alive. That would be some sort of closure; he could weep for them, and know they hadn’t come back to him because they couldn’t. It was a disconcerting feeling, to almost hope they were dead just so he would know at last, one way or the other. It was sobering and distressing at the same time, so he pushed it away from his thoughts through force of will, as he had become accustomed to doing by his training.
The dyheli were as excited over their own finds as Darian was; with all four of them equally eager to return to k’Valdemar, the young stags alternated their easy, distance-eating lope with bursts of full-out gallop. Darian had only to hang on; they would get him home faster than any other means except by air - though now he was regretting that he had not brought Kel along. Kel couldn’t have carried him home, but he could have taken those precious bones to Firesong.
He didn’t dare send Kuari ahead with the bones. For one thing, Kuari wasn’t that fast a flyer; for another, they needed his eyes when the sun set. Which was going to be very shortly. . . . The dyheli could see fairly well in the dark, but not at the breakneck pace they were setting now, and Darian was not willing to waste the power it would take to set mage-lights above and ahead of them; he preferred to use it to augment the dyheli’s strength. They needed Kuari’s night-sight, and the owl was happy to oblige.
Darkness gradually crept over the forest, and the dyheli linked their minds to Kuari’s. The owl swooped down from among the branches and flew a little ahead of the racing riders, about an arm’s-length higher than their heads. From this position, he could see anything that would trip the dyheli in any way - and so could they, through his eyes. Wintersky’s bird had already come down and was riding his shoulder, gripping the padding and hunched down with his wings held close to his body.
Darian guessed that it was just about midnight when the first light of k’Valdemar glimmered through the trees in the distance. The weary dyheli found an untapped reservoir of strength, and broke into a last, tired gallop.
They stumbled through the Veil, and into the waiting hands of the hertasi. Wintersky had turned his own attention to notifying the hertasi - and thus the Vale - of what they had discovered as soon as they were within range. With Darian occupied in keeping up the stags’ energy, he had no attention to spare for that particular job.
But thanks to Wintersky, not only were hertasi waiting, but so were Firesong, Silverfox, and Snowfire. The latter took charge of Wintersky, who was just as exhausted as Darian, and ushered him away for congratulations, food, and rest.
Firesong took one look at Darian’s fever-filled eyes, and simply took charge of the bones and his pupil. “You won’t rest until we know something,” Firesong said wisely, and with unusual gentleness. “Come along; I think I can at least tell you whether your father is alive or dead.”
He took Darian by the elbow, and guided him in the direction of his ekele and workroom. Darian didn’t resist; he felt as if he was consumed by the need to know. It was a fire in his blood, a blinding light in his mind.
They went straight to the workroom, where Firesong already had shields cast and the room prepared for what they would do. When all three of them were inside, Firesong motioned for Darian to sit, and closed up the shields, sealing them inside.
He collapsed onto a stool, and stared hungrily at Firesong, who took the bones and carefully unwrapped them. Darian couldn’t look away from the tiny white fragments; they drew his gaze and held it.
Firesong placed them down on the floor and sat cross-legged on a cushion beside them. Then he contemplated them for a moment, while Darian’s heart pounded.
“First thing, I think - ” the Adept broke off what he was saying, and closed his eyes, holding his hands palm down over the bones. “Link with me, Dar’ian,” he ordered, but in a half-absent voice. Darian didn’t question whether he had the strength available; he linked first with a ley-line, and then with his teacher, clutching the stool with both hands.
There was a moment of double-disorientation, as the raw power from the line rushed into him, then as he melded with Firesong. When he got himself straightened out again, Firesong was setting up a complicated relational field enclosing the bones. :This was once part of a greater whole,: the Adept said to him, quite dispassionately - but it was vitally important to be dispassionate when handling magic. :You see what I am setting up here? I’m reestablishing a connection with the rest of the body this once belonged to - the plane of Power doesn’t care about distance in our world, that’s why we can Gate when things there are stable enough. By reconnecting in that plane what used to be connected there and here, I can learn something about the state of the rest of the body.:
Darian watched with fascination that was not quite as dispassionate as Firesong’s. The Adept was literally weaving a web of power between the artifacts here, and - and something somewhere else; a web that was possible only because they had once been connected.
When the last thread was in place, Firesong gathered up a little more power - surprisingly little - and gave it a command, in effect saying to it wordlessly, Show me what you would be like if you were still one object.
The power settled over the bones in a tenuous, visible mist, while all three of them watched with varying degrees of hope and fear. If Darian’s father was dead, there would be no change - or the change would show conditions even less pleasant than a handful of dry bones.
The mist took on a pinkish tinge, swirled a little -
 - then took on the ghostly outlines of a healthy, whole foot.
Darian hadn’t realized that he’d made a sound until he heard it in his own ears - half a strangled sob, half a choked-off gasp. But he certainly felt the tears suddenly fill his eyes and blur the scene in front of him, then pour down his cheeks in an outpouring of the emotions he would not give in to while he was still linked in with the line. Silverfox rested a calming hand on his shoulder, a comfort and warmth that released some of the tension that had been building in him.
“Right; well, that’s the main thing,” Firesong muttered, and played a bit more with the relational field. He got no changes, however, and finally dismissed it with a sigh of frustration. Darian blinked burning eyes and told himself fiercely not to be disappointed; this was more, much, much more, than he had known yesterday at this time.
“I tried to get a sense of direction and distance, but I didn’t get much,” Firesong said, as Darian let go his own hold on the ley-line. This time Darian did not try to replenish anything; he needed the energy himself too much. “All I got was that it is north and to the west, and so far away that I couldn’t get any reading on distance.”
“But he is alive,” Darian said, his own voice sounding forlorn even in his own ears.
“He is alive,” Firesong replied, and smiled, patting Darian’s knee, adding his comfort to his partner’s. “Very much alive, and I think it far more likely than not that your mother is alive and well and with him. If he survived - with the loss of a foot - then she likely did, still intact.”
The sudden outburst of tears surprised him, though it didn’t appear to surprise either Firesong or Silverfox. It was over in just a few moments, but he felt as drained as if he’d just done his entire Mastery Trial all over again.
Silverfox helped him to his feet, as Firesong handed him a square of gauze cloth to wipe his eyes and nose with. “You’ve been through more than enough for one day,” the kestra’chern said. “And since Keisha is off with the Heralds, why don’t you stay with us overnight? I think you need company.”
“I - think I do, too,” Darian confessed, and followed both of them up the staircase to the ekele-above, his legs leaden weights, his head full of confused bits of thought that refused to come together into anything coherent.
They sat him down on a low sling-couch; Silverfox went out briefly and came back with food and something hot to drink. Numbly, Darian ate and drank without tasting anything, and listened while the two of them talked lightly of utter commonplaces. The longer he sat, the heavier his head seemed, until at length it felt as if it was easier to lie down than remain seated upright. Silverfox stepped over to him, uncapped a small brown bottle from a nearby shelf, and gently touched two fingertips to Darian’s forehead just between his eyebrows. Darian focused on the unusual touch, and Silverfox waved the open bottle under Darian’s nose while he was distracted.
Then, in spite of his certainty that he wouldn’t be able to sleep the entire night - he closed his eyes for a moment, and knew nothing more until morning.

Eleven

Sleeping in the tiny, austere isolation hut, with the windows wide open to the night air, was very like sleeping in a hard-sided tent. Keisha enjoyed it as a change from Darian’s ekele. Out here where the weather wasn’t controlled, it still got quite cool at night, and she needed to use the blankets left folded up on her pallet. She woke up once or twice during the night at an unexpected sound, and smiled sleepily, as she listened to the life of the Sanctuary go on around her in the darkness, while she snuggled under the weighty warmth of her blankets. Helping out on the rounds had made her pleasantly tired, and she had gone to bed while Shandi and Anda were still deep in conversation with the Healers.
In the morning, they showed their lack of sleep with yawns and puffy eyes, but neither had lost an iota of enthusiasm. “When we get back to k’Valdemar, you can tell everyone that I’ve got enough to think about for a while,” Anda told Keisha as they mounted into their saddles, with a cheerful wink that told her he knew very well that he had been driving some of the others to distraction with his incessant questions. “I shan’t be pestering anyone for at least a week - and then it will probably be to find out who can help me arrange to build our headquarters.”
“You won’t have to pester anyone, since I can already tell you - it’s the hertasi chief, Ayshen. He schedules all the work in the Vale,” Keisha told him as she polished off the last drops of her tea: “You are building in the Vale, aren’t you? What are you going to call this establishment of yours? An embassy?”
“Yes, we’re building in the Vale, and I think I’ll let this Ayshen fellow pick a good spot,” Anda told her. “As for what we’re calling it - well, it’s not a waystation, and it isn’t exactly an embassy - so I thought I’d just call it k’Valdemar Station.”
“That’ll work,” Keisha acknowledged with hidden amusement. So, Anda didn’t think it was an embassy, did he? Wait until he’s been here a year.
The dyheli got them back to Ghost Cat in good time; Anda wanted to speak further with Chief Vordon and Shaman Celin, so Keisha decided to have a look at those fascinating goods that the Northern tribes had brought in.
Since she had spotted her old friend Hywel in the crowd gathering to greet them - now warrior Hywel, a fact he was burstingly proud of - she waved to him and got his attention as Anda and Shandi walked off with the Chief. He waved back, face full of delight, for the fact that he was great friends with Healer
Keisha and Owl-warrior Darian gave quite a boost to his status.
She walked over to him as he waited for her; no man of the Northern tribes would come to a woman for a casual conversation, not even so high-status a woman as a Healer. It was nonsense, of course, and these attitudes were gradually changing even among the most recalcitrant of tribesmen - for this once, Keisha was willing to bow before custom.
“Greetings to you, Healer Keisha,” Hywel said solemnly. He was trying very, very hard to look mature and warriorlike; he had shot up another hand’s breadth in the last six months and was wearing a new leather shirt made from the skins of his own kills. The impression he was trying to make was utterly spoiled by the obvious youth of the face behind the new beard and mustache. He still looked to her exactly like the boy who’d been frantic to save the life of his brother, and willing to brave anything to do so.
“Greetings to you, Warrior Hywel,” she replied, just as soberly, though it was all she could do to keep from chuckling. “Could you tell me who I would speak to if I were to wish to barter for some of the goods held in trust for Ghost Cat, k’Valdemar, and the Sanctuary?”
“Nothing easier,” he said, brightening at the idea that he would be able to do so high-status an individual a good turn. “My mother, Laine, has the authority to barter for those goods for the tribe. I am sure she will be happy to bargain with you.”
That was not in the least surprising; Laine was known to cut a shrewd bargain herself, quite as well as glass-maker Harrod’s wife. The only reason that she was not in charge of Ghost Cat’s dealings with the village was that she had not dared try the language exchange with a dyheli. In part, that was because she was strongly averse to any “meddling with magic and holy things” for herself, and in part it was because she didn’t want to court the horrid headache that always followed such an. exchange.
Not that Keisha blamed her.
Laine was learning Valdemaran the old-fashioned way, bit by bit, from her sons, who had gotten the tongues the “easy” way. This would not matter to Keisha, who spoke Laine’s tongue with the fluency of her own.
“Come,” Hywel said, gesturing grandly, “I will take you to her.” Keisha repressed another chuckle at that; she didn’t need Hywel to show her to his own house, she knew quite well where it was - but conducting her there raised his status another minute increment. The saying she had heard about the Northerners did seem to be true: “You are known by who you know!”
Not long after that, the two women were going over the goods in the storehouse, with all the pleasure of any two women anywhere in the lustrous furs, the warmth of the amber. His job done, Hywel had gone off to do “man things” - which basically meant sitting about with his young warrior friends, boasting about the animals they would hunt when fall came.
The familial resemblance between Laine and her sons was unmistakable; all three shared a distinctively high brow, deep-set eyes, and short nose. For the rest, they shared brown eyes, black hair, sturdy, muscular build, and heavily tanned skin with the rest of their tribe.
“Ah - these are what I wanted - ” Keisha said, when she finally turned over a protective layer of cloth to reveal the skins she was looking for. “How many do you think it would take to line the hood of a winter cloak?”
“Six,” Laine said instantly, the fringes of her leather dress swaying as she reached for one of the furs. She spread it over her arm, displaying it to Keisha, ruffling up the fur with her breath to show how thick and plush the hair was. “Yes, six. No less. You will not want the fur about the hindquarters, you see, and the belly-fur is thin. And were I you, I should have some wolverine as well, to put about the edge of the hood. The wolverine is so hot-blooded that the virtue goes even into the fur, and your breath will not freeze upon it.”
Keisha very much doubted that “virtue” had anything to do with it, but she did know that the rest was true. She started to agree, when Laine spoke again.
“And here - I think that Clanbrother Darian might well like one of these,” Laine continued, taking a cloth off another pile of what had appeared to be pieced and worked goods. She picked one up and shook it out - it was a vest, made of leather, but not tooled, dyed, or decorated in the usual fashions of the Ghost Cat tribe, but actually embroidered with designs. When Keisha examined it further, taking it from Laine’s hands, she saw that it had been embroidered, not with thread or yarn, but very cleverly with tufts of dyed fur of some kind.
The designs themselves were nothing like those the Northern tribes used, although they seemed faintly familiar. But try as she might, Keisha just couldn’t place them. They were more like some sort of foreign designs that the Northerners had tried to adapt to their own style.
“I think you’re right, Laine,” she said, as she held the vest in her hands, admiring the workmanship. “Darian will like this quite a lot. He’s not the lover of decoration that Firesong is - ”
“Ai, and who is?” Laine interjected, giggling, hiding her mouth behind her blunt-fingered hand as was the custom among Ghost Cat women.
“No one!” Keisha laughed. “But Darian does like to dress handsomely now and again, and this is just his sort of clothing.”
She and Laine bargained spiritedly for some time, and eventually arrived at a price they both liked. Ghost Cat craved Keisha’s dyes and the food-spices she raised - she would never bargain with medicinal herbs, but she had no compunction about using her spices as currency. The tribesmen had learned that spiced food was a fine thing; it was a taste they quickly acquired, for the spices gave their plain meals a savor they had never had before. In the cases of garlic and some peppers, it was quite good for their health, too.
In exchange for spices and dyes to be delivered by dyheli, Keisha carried off enough furs to line her hood and make mittens, and she also bought the handsome vest. She had stowed them away in her saddlebags by the time Shandi and Anda were ready to leave.
Darian is usually the one getting things for me, she reflected, very pleased with herself. It’ll be fun to see his face when I surprise him with a gift, for a change.
It was at that moment that Anda’s Companion picked up his pace, leaving Shandi and Keisha lagging a little behind. Shandi did not trouble to catch up, and the dyheli Keisha rode was in no great hurry either. Anda disappeared around a turn in the road, and only then did Shandi turn to her sister.
Shandi wore a stubborn expression; her golden-brown eyes narrowed as she regarded Keisha. “All right,” the young Herald demanded. “What exactly is going on - or not going on - between you and Darian.”
“Nothing!” Keisha responded before she thought.
“That’s exactly the problem,” Shandi retorted. “And I want to know why. You said you’d talk about it later - well, this is later, and we can’t get any more privacy than we have now.”
Except for two pairs of four-hooved, pointed ears, Keisha thought, looking resentfully at Karles’ head. His ears were pointed back toward both of them, although the dyheli’s weren’t. She didn’t relish the notion of having any witnesses at all to this.
“Come on, Keisha, you know I won’t give up. I know you too well,” Shandi persisted, turning in her saddle to face her fully. “You’ve got a situation here that’s hurting both of you, whether you’ll admit it or not.” She sounded very sure of herself; too sure, Keisha thought.
“I don’t see how you can claim that,” Keisha said sullenly, looking straight ahead and not at her sister. She couldn’t - didn’t want to - meet Shandi’s eyes. “I’m not in the least unhappy. I have a terrific life; it couldn’t possibly be any better.”
“Huh. You might be able to convince anyone else of that, but not your sister, and not an Empath,” Shandi retorted energetically. “What’s the problem? He’s not discontent, and you aren’t interested in anyone else. Are you afraid he’s inevitably going to lose interest in you and go chase some other girl?”
Since that was precisely what had been troubling her, Keisha’s head snapped around and she stared at her sister in shock. “How did - ”
“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” Shandi replied, staring into her startled eyes. “You never believed that anyone would ever think you were pretty enough to bother with when we were at home, and you don’t believe it now. In your heart,” she continued ruthlessly, “you’re sure this is all some kind of accident on Darian’s part, and one of these days he’ll wake up and realize it.” Shandi sounded calm, collected, and utterly unruffled; the very opposite of the way Keisha felt. “In fact, you’re actually planning on it happening.”
Put that way, so baldly and unadorned, it sounded ridiculous, and Keisha felt as if she’d been caught doing something very stupid. Embarrassed, resentful, full of chagrin - but it hadn’t seemed foolish all those times when she’d been feeling alone and so unhappy!
“You haven’t done anything stupid, sib,” Shandi said gently, her eyes softening. “But you almost did. It’s one short step from being sure that something good can’t last to sabotaging it, and making your fears come true. You can’t let things that you know don’t make sense get in the way of a wonderful relationship!”
But Empath or not, Keisha was not about to admit anything to her little sister. Shandi was, after all, her little sister; younger, presumably less experienced. How dared she sit in judgment on her older sister? Besides, Shandi had no idea of the stresses on her. “Look, that’s not all it is, it isn’t even most of it. I have my duties, my responsibilities, and Darian has his - they aren’t the same, and we’re apart more than we’re together. I can’t trail around after him the way a wife is suppo - ”
“Oh, please,” Shandi groaned, interrupting her, while Karles snorted in obvious scorn. “What god came down and told you exactly what a wife is supposed to do? Who set up rules like that?”
Keisha’s temper flared as her resentment mounted. Just because Shandi was a Herald and didn’t have to go along with the kinds of conventions that normal people did, she had no right to make any kind of judgments for her sister! Keisha wasn’t about to flout conventions! “Everyone knows what - ”
“That’s ridiculous,” Shandi interrupted again. “When has Darian ever told you - or even hinted - that he expects you to sit home and bake and spin? You aren’t everybody, you probably have more wits than any two of my old friends put together - and you don’t have to put up with the small-mindedness of village gossips if you don’t want to. They won’t even know what you’re doing if you live here, for one thing! And for another - no one but you should be allowed to make any decisions about how you live and who with.”
Keisha opened her mouth - and closed it again. She had no answer whatsoever for that, because Shandi was right - once again.
“So when did Darian demand or even hint that if you two got married, you had to become a so-called ‘proper’ wife?” Shandi demanded.
“You can’t answer me, because he hasn’t, right?” Shandi shook her head. “Listen to me, and think. What kind of couples has he had for comparison of what a good pairing is like? I’m not talking about the villagers, either, because he doesn’t really think of himself as one of the villagers, he thinks of himself as a Hawkbrother. He had his own parents - who worked together as a team; his mother certainly didn’t sit at home and wash floors. He has the Hawkbrothers - who are very careful about getting into a marriage, or whatever they call it, but who don’t make any demands that one partner be subservient to the other! So why should he suddenly demand that of you?”
Shandi was too logical, and fired off her arguments too quickly for Keisha to respond. She felt a headache coming on, a shaft of pain coming from her temple, even as she felt flushed and very uncomfortable. Why wouldn’t Shandi just drop the whole subject and leave her alone?
Now Shandi changed her tone to one of coaxing; she lowered her voice and cocked her head to one side. “Keisha, just because you get involved with someone, even marry him, that doesn’t mean one of you has to get swallowed up by the other. Darian doesn’t want that - if he did, trust me, you’d know it, and you have a good sense of self-preservation; you’d be running away as fast as a dyheli could carry you!” She laughed.
Shandi certainly did that, when Mother tried to swallow her up. . . .
But Shandi didn’t make that comparison, which was probably just as well. “You say that you and Darian are apart more than together now that you’re both taking on your full responsibilities - well, things change, and you have to change with them, you ought to know that by now! You’ll probably have to work some things out, maybe make some alterations in how you work, but - ”
Me? Why should I be the one to have to change? “I don’t think it’s fair for me to have to make all the compromises!” Keisha said - and cringed when she heard the whining tone in her own voice.
“So don’t! When I said ‘you’ I meant both of you!” Exasperation crept into Shandi’s voice. “Listen to what I’m saying, and don’t keep jumping to the worst possible conclusion! You make some compromises, he’ll make some, you’ll work out what’s acceptable to both of you. But don’t undermine your own happiness because you think you haven’t got anything to offer him, and don’t drive him away just because you’re afraid of a commitment!”
I’m not afraid! Keisha wanted to snap - but she knew, instantly, that it would be a lie. So she didn’t say anything at all.
Fortunately, that seemed to be the end of Shandi’s lecture. Shandi left her alone then; she didn’t ride ahead or lag behind, but she didn’t say anything more. Finally Keisha thought of something to say.
She couldn’t help it; she sounded sarcastic. “How did you become such an expert on - on - ”
“On romance?” Shandi looked over at her, and winked, taking her question at face value and ignoring the sarcasm. “Forced into it. Between all the boys that chased after me in Errold’s Grove, and all the Trainees who came to me with boy- and girl-problems, I got to be an expert fairly quickly.” She sighed heavily. “Everybody goes to an Empath for a shoulder to cry on.”
“Don’t I know it!” Keisha said involuntarily, thinking of the number of times that Shandi’s disappointed suitors had done just that to her - and that broke the uncomfortable stalemate. They both laughed, Shandi heartily, Keisha weakly.
By unspoken consent they did not discuss anything remotely uncomfortable after that. Shandi changed the subject to something completely innocuous. They spent the rest of the ride talking about trivialities, nothing that used up an awful lot of brain power, which was just as well.
Shandi had given her a great deal to occupy her thoughts.
Darian woke in the late morning feeling just as much turmoil and confusion in his mind as he’d had when he went to bed. In fact, he hadn’t really expected to sleep, but his exhausted body had decided otherwise. He turned himself out of the hammock he’d awakened in, in one of Silverfox’s workrooms, and found (as he’d expected) a fresh set of his own clothing waiting for him beside the window. And cleaned boots.
The hertasi were busy this morning.
Getting dressed, he hurried up the staircase to Firesong’s ekele above, certain that he would find his mentor there, probably engrossed in a magical text.
He was not wrong; Firesong looked up as soon as he poked his nose in the door. “Get over here,” Firesong ordered, pointing to a low chair. In a moment, his teacher had Darian sitting down with food in front of him. Firesong turned his apparent attention back to the heavy book from which he was making notes.
“Don’t say anything just yet,” Firesong cautioned, without looking up. “Eat first.” And he sat there with his arms folded across the pages, drawing delicate diagrams, while Darian did just that. Darian obeyed him, even though the food had no more taste than old leaves, and kept catching in his throat.
When he’d finished enough to satisfy the Adept, Firesong allowed him to set the tray aside and get down to a serious discussion.
“I’ve been doing some research, but I haven’t found anything that was of much use. Charting the Change-Circle against our maps put it on a proper arc, in line with others we knew of already, but since no one has yet been able to find a provable correlation between source and destination Circles when they change places, I have no prediction of where what was initially in that Circle went. I also did a little more work this morning, when I was fresher, with Starfall’s help,” Firesong told him. “Unfortunately, we got pretty much the same result. Your father is somewhere north and west of us; how far, and in exactly what direction he is, we simply can’t tell - except that it’s a long way. Farther than a hawk would fly in a week.” He sighed. “There still isn’t enough clean, clear power about for us to be able to point to him with any more accuracy than that. Best scrying we can do at present gives us a general “feel” within a quarter compass, at this distance. It is like target shooting in a dense fog, when you haven’t even seen where the target is placed first. We’d either have to have more power, or be a great deal closer to him to find him.”
“And there’s an awful lot of ‘north and west’ to be searching in,” Darian sighed. “Firesong - ”
“Don’t make any decisions yet,” Firesong cautioned. “We haven’t begun to exhaust all of our resources. There may be someone among the tribesmen coming here for Healing who can give us clues, or even a real direction.”
Darian grimaced. “And this is where you counsel me about patience. My head knows you’re right, but - I don’t want to sit around and wait, I want to be up and doing something!” He unclenched a fist he wasn’t even aware he’d made. “I have been patient. I’ve undergone trials, travels, and ceremonies until my ears could bleed. I’ve been in fights that scared me to death and done responsible things for others enough to be Knighted, and even that was to better do the duties demanded of me.”
Firesong nodded, and a lock of his snowy white hair fell over one eye. He said nothing in agreement, but also said nothing disapproving.
“I’ve given and given to this Vale. And to the village, and to Valdemar, and even the Northerners. I have had some wonderful times and great benefits, and I don’t have too many regrets. I have not done these things so I could stack up favors to call in.” Darian paused for a long deep breath then continued. “It is just that - the things I have done over the past few years have been almost all for others, but this is for me.”
Firesong brushed the stray hair away from his face, still seemingly impassive as he listened, then said levelly, “Go on.”
Darian set his jaw and then concluded. “Firesong, I want this one. I want this one for me and for my family. I’m horribly afraid that if we wait too long, something will happen to them. . . .” His voice faded as he contemplated that terrible notion, that he would learn his parents were alive only to discover they’d perished just days before he could reach them.
Firesong shook his head slightly while he steepled his fingers. “I understand. But Darian, they’ve survived this long, surely they can survive the summer!”
“If I knew where they were, and what the situation was, I’d be more inclined to agree with you. But what if they’re alive now only because they’re being kept as a death-sacrifice by Blood Bear or some other tribe like them?” Darian protested.
“That is as may be, but it could as well have happened two years ago as not, or never,” Firesong replied blithely. “What needs to be done is for you to balance and measure the likelihood of results with the risks to be taken, with what powers can be brought to bear with the time you have.”
Darian looked unhappy with such an objective assessment, but he knew that Firesong was right. What they did know was that his father was in passable, maybe excellent health; the first spell had told him that much, and he had to presume that Starfall and Firesong working together had confirmed that. If a man lacking a foot and marooned in the far north was in any health after all these years, that argued for his continued survival.
But it was hard, so hard, to simply sit there and discuss logistical possibilities with Firesong, when what he wanted to do was to get a score of dyheli volunteers and go north as fast as they could carry him, carrying whatever food and equipment he could gather in a dash through his quarters, trusting that luck and his own magic would give him a direction.
But even at his most optimistic and foolhardy, he knew that such a plan would be ridiculous. Luck only favored those who didn’t need it, an old saying went. . . .
Besides, Keisha deserves to hear about this.
That was another consideration altogether. He couldn’t just go haring off without telling her.
“Of all the things in the world, I think being patient is the hardest,” he moaned, and Firesong nodded.
“I know quite a few people who would agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment,” his teacher replied, with true sympathy. “That includes the man I was for the first half of my life. As the Shin’a’in shaman say, though, ‘Every scar is a lesson remembered.’ “ His face wrinkled in pits and creases as he smiled sideways. “I think that while we plan and prepare for what you will do about your parents, you ought to go find something useful that will occupy your mind.” He closed the book firmly, caressing its spine before looking to Darian.
“I think you’re right,” Darian said after a pause, and got to his feet. “Have you any suggestions?”
But when Firesong also rose, a wicked gleam in his eye, Darian knew he had asked the wrong question.
“Of course, my dear student,” Firesong said in tones of silk. “After all, just because you’ve become a Master, that doesn’t mean you’ve stopped needing to learn, does it?”
The next several hours of magical work left him exhausted in mind and body; Firesong’s idea of something that would “occupy his mind” was a set of exercises that took every iota of his thoughts and left him nothing to devote to his own problems.
He found himself juggling multiple ley-lines, plus Heartstone power, while fending off little stinging “annoyance” attacks from Firesong - and meanwhile he had to accomplish his started task, which was to create a second outlet for his hot spring, since there was more than enough water flowing from it to supply two sets of hot pools. Ayshen had already voiced a wish for a supply of hot water for the kitchens so that they didn’t nave to use the smoke-belching wood-fired boiler that everyone considered a dubious compromise; adding blocks of native hickory sweetened the smell but still was not ideal. So, Darian just had to make a channel for the water from his spring. “Just.” Hah!
What he’d actually had to do was find a series of cracks and weak spots through the bedrock leading to the kitchen, seal them from side pathways, then coax a tendril of the hot spring to take those cracks as he slowly forced open the weak spots, melted and sculpted the stone into a sealed channel, and finally bring the spring out near the boiler itself, so that Ayshen could use the existing boiler as a hot-water storage tank instead.
And meanwhile, hundreds of little wasplike attack “stingers” came at him from every possible direction - any he didn’t deflect gave him a sharp reminder of his inadequacy. Twice Firesong even lobbed physical rocks at him, as he had during his Master Trial. He deflected both away - the second one directly back at his mentor, earning a chuckle from him.
When he was through, Firesong laughed, congratulated him, and sent him back to his own ekele to bathe and change again. For a few hours, at least, he had been far too preoccupied to think of his father, but as soon as he set one foot on the path outside the workroom, it began again.
And Mother - how is she? I don’t know anything about her - but if Father survived having his foot taken off, she had to have been with him. He could easily imagine her standing by and guarding him, hunting for both of them until he recovered, taking care of him. They worked together as seamlessly as a hand inside a glove; they’d both been hunters, but had switched to trapping so that they could include Darian in their treks. Trapping was no less work than hunting, but the danger was a bit less, and it had been something that they could all work at together, even when Darian was an infant. A crying baby wasn’t much use on a stalk, but didn’t make much difference in working a trap-line.
He opted for a quick shower, using a spigot high up on the wall, perforated with many tiny holes. It was his own idea, to have a way to get clean quickly in his own quarters rather than having to head for a hot pool or falls; Keisha liked it for washing her hair. He was just pulling his clean shirt on over his head when he heard hoofbeats coming toward the open front door.
He hurried outside, still barefoot, hoping to be able to catch not only Keisha, but her sister, and possibly Herald Anda as well. He wanted to tell all three of them what he had discovered himself. By now the news had certainly spread all over the Vale, and when any story spread, it tended to get changed, sometimes out of all recognition.
He was in luck; all three of them were together, and he managed to wave Anda and Shandi in before they rode off to the guest lodge. Keisha looked faintly puzzled, but she said nothing.
“Listen, I need to tell all three of you what’s just happened,” he said when the other two had dismounted. Then when the Companions shook their heads and snorted at him, he quickly revised, “I mean, all five of you.”
The Companions looked mollified at his acknowledgment and he quickly outlined his search, the results, and the information that had come out of the magical investigation afterward. “And that’s all I know,” he concluded, looking mostly at Keisha for her reaction. “It’s driving me frantic, because there really isn’t enough to make a search on - ”
“But you have to keep working on it!” Keisha exclaimed passionately, interrupting him. “Of course you have to! How can you come so close and just leave it at that? And when you do find out where they are, you’ve got to go looking for them!”
“I wouldn’t advise undertaking a full-scale search on so little information,” Herald Anda cautioned. This was what Darian had expected out of him, but suddenly Anda dropped his dignity and his caution and burst out with, “But - oh, hang it all! We’ll all help you get a better idea of where to look, and the Tayledras and the Northerners, too, no doubt! Surely as many good minds as we have can come up with something!”
Darian stared for a moment, as Shandi nodded energetically. “I absolutely agree,” Shandi seconded firmly. “No doubt at all; Karles feels the same. We’ll all work on this together. It seems to me that with all the best minds of Valdemar and the Vales working on it, we’ll surely come up with a way to figure out exactly where your parents are, and bring them home again!”
Darian did not know whether to laugh or weep with relief. He’d been sure that Keisha would support him, but he’d been half convinced that the two Heralds would oppose any attempt to find and bring back his parents, since it would mean his absence from Valdemar - and all his duties. “I - all I can say is ‘thank you’ and that hardly seems adequate,” he managed, after two tries to make words come out had failed.
“Thank us when we’ve got some results,” Anda said simply. “Just know we’re not going to oppose you, and we’ll help you any way we can, starting by putting our own minds to work on this. Remember, I was trained in a couple of different ‘schools’ of magic; I might be able to think of something new to you.”
He and his Companion exchanged a glance, then he and Shandi traded looks. “We all need some rest, and a chance to think, so we’ll see you later,” Shandi said by way of farewell, then she and Anda mounted again and rode off toward the guest lodge.
While they had been talking, Keisha had taken a bundle down off her dyheli, who then left them to find a hertasi to rid him of his tack. Keisha had held it clutched tensely to her chest all the time she’d been listening to Darian, and only now did she remember it. “Havens!” she said, looking down at the bundle in her hands in surprise. “I’d forgotten all about the present I got you! It doesn’t seem like much after your news - ”
But Darian was deeply touched. “I beg to differ!” he replied. “Thank you for remembering me - I’m hardly as exciting as the potential to see a brand new disease, after all!”
He saw by the gleam in her eye that she understood he was teasing her. “Oh, is that what you think, then? Well you might be right!” she teased back. “Maybe some day I’ll leave you for a nice, exciting plague!”
He caught her up in his arms, and felt a new relaxation about her that delighted him. Whatever had caused this change, he hoped it would persist; she hadn’t been this easy around him for months. “How about if I give you a fever instead?” he murmured into her ear as he nuzzled her neck.
She turned her head - and bit his ear. Not hard, but it startled him and he let her go. “You’ll have to earn it by catching me first,” she taunted, and ran into the ekele.
He ran after her, and for the next fever-warm candlemark or so, they were too busy with each other to think of anything else.
After a much more pleasant shower-bath, this time shared, and yet another change of clothing, Darian stumbled over Keisha’s bundle in the middle of the floor of the outer room. He picked it up, saw to his relief that it was undamaged, and looked for a place to put it down.
“Oh, good, I was afraid we might have trampled that,” she said, emerging from the bedroom and tying her hair back as she walked. “Here, let me.”
She held out her hands for it, and he obediently handed the bundle to her.
She sat down and began to unwrap it in her lap - first the outer square of cloth, which he realized had been her scarf. A scarf was something no modern Healer was ever without, since a scarf could be put to so many useful purposes. Inside the scarf was a bundle of soft, dark-brown furs. They looked rather like weasel or muskrat, but were much softer and the fur was more plush.
Keisha put the furs aside, and brought out something made of leather and lined with a coarser fur - she shook it out and held it up to him, beaming. “Yes, that fits - have a look, do you like it?”
He took it from her and turned it around - and almost dropped it, stepping back involuntarily.
He stared, struck dumb, as familiar patterns of embroidery branded themselves on his mind.
Keisha’s smile faded and she looked at him with uncertainty. “You - you don’t like it - I’ll - ”
“No, no, no, that’s not it - ” It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be - it was only a superficial resemblance, surely!
But he put the vest down, and went straight to the storage chest where he kept the few precious relics of his childhood that had pleasant memories attached. He opened it, reached in, and brought out a small, cloth-wrapped package of his own. This he took over to Keisha and opened, laying out the embroidered leather vest that lay inside next to the one she had brought him.
Though the colors of the second vest were faded and stained, the leather worn - though the motifs had been embroidered using wool and flax threads rather than tufts of dyed hair - and though the older vest was barely half the size of the new one - there was no doubt.
In all other ways, they were identical.
They stared at the vests, then into each other’s eyes. And finally, Keisha managed to speak.
“Havens!” She exclaimed involuntarily. “They’re the same! But how?”
“I don’t know, Keisha,” Darian breathed. “Where did you get this?”

Twelve

“Wait - ” Keisha said, feeling that she had to slow all this down, at least a little. Things were happening too fast for her. “This could just be a flower, and flowers are a universal embroidery motif - ”
“But it’s not a flower,” Darian interrupted. “It’s a radial repeat of the Trappers’ Guild symbol, see?” He blocked off all but one quarter of the spiky circle, and sure enough, Keisha had no trouble in recognizing the stylized trap. “It’s Mother’s own design, making it repeat like that; I’ve never seen anyone else use it.”
So much for it being an accident or a coincidence, Keisha thought. “Well, I got it from Ghost Cat - they got it in trade-goods from one of the tribes that came here looking for Healing.”
Darian started to move, and she put out her hand and pushed him back down into his chair. “It will keep for half a day,” she told him. “If you wait until tomorrow morning, you’ll be able to actually talk with someone; if you go now, you’ll only have to wait until morning when everyone wakes up.”
“But - ” Darian was looking a bit wild-eyed, and she was in complete sympathy.
“I know, you need to do something, and the smartest thing to do is take these vests to Firesong. Maybe he can make some sense out of them. Then - well, I think we should talk to the Vale Council and see what everyone else says.” She was actually grasping at straws, but he nodded, agreeing with her, and she sighed with relief. The last thing she wanted was for him to go running off into the darkness to find a dyheli and ride off to the Ghost Cat village. Kuari or no Kuari, the mental state he was in was conducive to mistakes. Suddenly, she had a nightmare vision of Darian, his dyheli, or both falling on the night-shrouded trail and breaking a leg. Or both legs. Or worse.
But at least she had managed to come up with an idea that made him feel that he was accomplishing something. She followed him out the door and down the trail as he set off at a lope for Firesong’s ekele, knowing that it was going to be a very long night.
It turned out to be not quite as long for her; she kept dozing off, first while Darian and Firesong worked over the vests, then later, while Darian and most of the Vale Council of Elders discussed possibilities in endless detail. In fact, the last thing she remembered was half-waking as someone picked her up and laid her on a pile of pillows, covering her with a soft lap-rug.
She woke a second time when Darian shook her; when she raised her head, she saw from the thin light outside that it was dawn. Darian looked tired, but by no means discouraged; in fact, he appeared to be ready to set out for the north on a moment’s notice. “Ready to go to Ghost Cat?” he asked, taking it for granted that she would want to be with him.
She caught herself just as she started to feel resentment; there was nothing to feel resentment about! She didn’t have patients, except the ones at Errold’s Grove, and they weren’t due to see her for a few days. And he knew that; he kept as close an eye on her schedule as he did his own.
“As soon as I change,” she agreed, rubbing her eyes and yawning. Then she looked critically at Darian’s clothing. “You ought to also,” she chided gently. “It won’t take more than a moment.”
He looked down at his rumpled, stained clothing, and blushed with embarrassment. He might not be a peacock like Firesong, but at least he isn’t as slovenly as a great many men I’ve known.
“You’re right, and I will. Firesong once said to me, ‘Dress your best. Heroes in paintings always look terrific, and you never know when it might be your turn to become a legend.’ Perfect Tayledras reasoning, isn’t it? Come on, then,” he said, and offered her his hand.
Before the sun actually crested the horizon, they were in the saddle and on their way past the Vale entrance - but Darian looked odd to her when Keisha glanced over at him. He was preoccupied with something, his forehead creased, his eyes narrowed as he concentrated. The tension suddenly around him made her muscles clench.
“What’s the matter?” she asked sharply, wondering what had him so nervey all of a sudden. Both the dyheli flicked their ears back at him; they sensed something strange as well.
“I’m trying to remember something,” he murmured, rubbing his temple. “Something about dreams. ...” His voice had a distracted tone; whatever the “dream” was, his mood was odd - as if the dream had overwhelming significance, and he had to recall it at all costs.
It can’t be that - it’s just that he’s not thinking clearly.
“What, have you been dreaming that the Northern Spirit Cat has been trying to send you messages?” she asked, trying to put a chuckle in her voice. She meant it teasingly, to try and get him out of this mood, but he responded as if he had just sat down on a tack.
Even his dyheli stopped dead, ears flattened, as he jerked around to stare at her, eyes wide, pupils dilated.
What did I say?
“That’s it!” he shouted. “That’s it!”
But without bothering to tell her what “it” was, he bent over the dyheli’s neck. In response to an unvoiced command, the young stag launched into a full gallop, and Keisha’s followed, leaving her no choice but to stifle her curiosity and hang on for dear life.
They reached the Ghost Cat village in half the time it would normally have taken; the dyheli staggered into the village on their last bit of energy, and stopped, sides heaving. Unlike horses, they were in no danger of foundering, or Keisha would have been more worried about them than she was about Darian. Darian jumped down out of the saddle. As he sprinted for the Shaman’s log house, with the bundle containing the new vest clutched in one hand, his dyheli began its own slow, careful cool-down. Keisha took her time dismounting, and followed, noting the curious looks that Darian attracted as he ran, a small part of her hoping that he hadn’t lost his wits, the rest of her full of a faltering anxiety.
The second surprise of the day came. The Shaman must have been expecting Darian, for he flung his door open before Darian even reached it and beckoned him to come inside. And when he looked up and saw Keisha standing beside her dyheli, he waved to her as well.
The two men disappeared inside. She entered the door in time to hear Darian say, “... so is there a Raven clan?”
“I don’t know out of my own knowledge, but the meaning of your dream and mine is now clear,” Shaman Celin said somberly, and looked down at the vest spread out on the bench between them. “This, however - this comes from Snow Fox tribe. There are still folk from Snow Fox among us, cured, but not strong enough yet to travel, for the cure itself exhausted them. Let us speak with them, and perhaps they can give us the last piece of what we need to know.”
Darian was on his feet immediately, so completely focused on the Shaman that Keisha might not even have been there.
And strangely, this didn’t trouble her; she was too relieved to discover that, whatever all this was about, Shaman Celin obviously knew all about it as well.
As she trailed along in Darian’s wake, she felt a real sense of relief and even anticipation, which completely replaced the anxiety she’d felt on the way here. This was real, something she could deal with, and a perfectly reasonable and understandable obsession; if it had been her parents rather than his, she would have been just as focused as he was.
Absolutely. They may drive me crazy, but they’re my parents. I know how he must feel.
There was a log house in the farthest circle that had no tribal totems ornamenting it; instead, the house was decorated in stylized carvings of dyheli. Once again, the “holy dyheli” identified those who had come to seek a cure from Ghost Cat and the Sanctuary.
Here they encountered a slight difficulty, for the Snow Fox tribe spoke a different variant of the northern tongue. It took Darian and the Shaman several tries before the most senior of the men left in charge of the invalids understood what they were asking. Keisha couldn’t follow him at all; he spoke so much faster than the Ghost Cat folk that he almost seemed to be speaking a different language altogether.
He wasn’t all that old either; just out of adolescence, and probably newly come to full Warrior status. He was in charge of a band of young men his own age who had remained behind to guard and protect the three women and gaggle of youngsters who had not been strong enough to travel back to the tribal lands with the rest. The Shaman stood beside Darian as he and the young warrior sat facing each other on a bench just outside the door, with the morning sun full on them.
Keisha stood by and watched, rather than listened, as Darian grew more proficient in the Snow Fox dialect with each passing moment. She suspected from the faint tingling she felt along the surface of her skin that he was using magic to help speed his acquisition of the tongue. The young warrior, biting his lip earnestly, was a bit alarmed.
He must know it’s magic - but it isn’t dyheli magic. And Darian must look completely alien to the young man, with his Tayledras clothing and lighter hair and eyes than the Northerners had.
The Shaman saw this as well, and stopped the conversation to reassure him; after a few words, the youngster became quite charmingly cooperative.
Darian stooped and took a bit of charred stick from the ground to draw a crude map on the bench where they both sat, but the young man shook his head and put his hand over Darian’s. Clearly he didn’t understand maps; or at least, he wasn’t able to translate what he knew to map form.
They do so much by rote - Keisha bit her lip, hoping Darian’s memory was up to this.
Darian listened to him with fierce concentration as he described what must have been the journey here, committing every landmark to memory; frowning so, his eyebrows almost meeting in the center of his forehead, that Keisha knew he’d have a headache before this was over.
At last, Darian sat back, his frown fading and being replaced with a smile. He thanked the youngster - that much, at least, Keisha understood! - made some polite comments, then he and Celin took their leave.
Darian reached out and took her hand as he passed her, giving it a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry if I seemed to be ignoring you, ke’chara,” Darian said apologetically as soon as they were out in the open again. “I - ”
“You were trying to get as much information as you could in the shortest possible time,” Keisha interrupted, and smiled at his relief. “Havens, did you think I couldn’t see that? But you had better give me a full explanation later on, and not leave anything out!” She squeezed his hand back, and his smile turned so warm she almost blushed.
“I will, on the way back, I promise.” Darian turned then to the Shaman, squinting against the sunlight. “Celin, I can’t begin to thank you - ”
“Nay, do not thank me. It is the Ghost Cat’s doing, and nothing of mine. If he wills you to this task, then I do no more than my duty to aid you,” the Shaman said solemnly. “And you will be wanting a guide.”
Darian was now the one looking surprised at Celin’s words.
Celin laughed. “What, did I not tell you this was the Ghost Cat’s will? You shall go northward into the white; this, he has told me. You will need one of us to guide you. I have thought upon it, and I believe your guide should be Hywel. In doing this, you will permit him to discharge his life-debt to you.”
Darian and Keisha both knew better than to argue with the Shaman when he used that phrase. A life-debt was a serious thing among the northerners, and it was not something that any northerner wanted hanging over his head. By Keisha and Darian being instrumental in saving Hywel’s brother, Hywel had incurred a life-debt to them both that would hold him back, socially and personally, in many ways until he repaid it. He could not marry, could not even court a young woman, and could not incur any other major responsibilities until this one was discharged.
Besides, Hywel would have been her first choice as a guide. He might be young, but he was sharp, intelligent, and observant.
“What you have done for us would oblige us even to your whims. This is more than a whim you have conjured as a game. It is a personal imperative. You go now to the Vale, and make your plans,” Celin continued. “I will see to Hywel and Hywel’s mother, making her easy with the journey her son must take with you.”
Darian sighed, and accepted the Shaman’s words without any argument, since it was obvious that Celin had made up his mind about all this. Or the Ghost Cat made it up for him. “We’ll head back, then - we’ve borrowed two more dyheli. I don’t want to impose on the two we rode on before; they practically broke their necks to get us here quickly.” He must have already asked the dyheli, for two volunteers had joined up with the two cooling down, waiting for someone to come take the tack off the first two and put it on them.
“Go, go, go!” the Shaman said, making shooing motions at them. “Send one of the holy ones to come for Hywel when you are ready.”
There didn’t seem to be anything else for them at that point but to take the saddles from the backs of their weary original mounts and transfer them to their new volunteers.
They were out of sight of the Ghost Cat village before Darian took a deep breath, shook himself out of his reverie, and turned to find her staring at him expectantly. “I definitely owe you an explanation,” he began sheepishly.
“Definitely,” she replied, with just a touch of acid - enough to let him know that she was more than tired of waiting. “I have been incredibly patient, understanding, noble, forbearing - ”
“Enough, I get the idea!” he cried, holding up his hands as if to fend her off. “I guess the place to start is - I’ve been having these dreams, except I couldn’t remember them afterward.”
“I know.” When he looked at her oddly, she added, “It was like sleeping with a kicking dyheli fawn. Or rather, trying to sleep.”
He blushed. “Anyway,” he continued valiantly, “When you said something about the ‘Spirit Cat’ talking to me, I remembered suddenly what those dreams were about.” He shook his head ruefully. “I don’t know why I couldn’t remember before.”
“Maybe you were afraid,” she said slowly, remembering the aura of fear that had hung over him during those dreams. It had been the fear, and not the restlessness, that had awakened her.
He looked very thoughtful. “Maybe. Especially since I didn’t have any notion that they were supposed to help me. They were weird through and through.” He shrugged. “The point is, they all involved the Ghost Cat and a different totem, an enormous Raven. Not only that, but the day I was made a Clanbrother, the Ghost Cat appeared at the ceremony and left a raven feather at my place. Nobody seemed to have an explanation, and no one thought it was a bad omen, so I just dismissed it in favor of everything else that had to be done.”
“Until I triggered your memory.” Now she understood why he’d acted as if she had jabbed him.
“I just had this inspiration - no, that’s too mild. I suddenly knew that the Ghost Cat was trying to tell me something - that I needed to find the Raven tribe, so that was why I wanted to see Celin - ”
“Because you wanted to find out if there is a Raven tribe.” She nodded slowly, as all of the pieces began to fit together for her. “And he didn’t know for sure, but the vests came from Snow Fox, so he figured the Snow Fox people would know. I take it that there is?”
“Yes, and here’s the best part. They make the vests as trade goods, usually to order, with someone’s own totems on them. But sometimes they make the ones like I got - and what’s more, they only started making them a few years ago.” He looked at her in triumph, and she felt her eyes widen.
“So we’re going?” she asked, feeling breathless all at once. If he goes, I go. I have to. Is this one of those compromises? Maybe - if so, it’s one I know I have to make.
“We? You want to go?” He looked at her with doubt and hope mingled in his glance. “I thought - ”
“I can turn Errold’s Grove over to the oldest of the Sanctuary Trainees; they’re about to make him a full Healer anyway,” she said resolutely, a thrill of pleasure running through her at his reaction. Yes. This is a compromise I have to make. “You don’t think I’d let you go traipsing off into the howling wilderness on your own, do you? You might get hurt, and then how would we both feel?”
Armed with this new information, Darian asked for an informal meeting of all of those who might be at all concerned with his proposed expedition. Shandi and Anda invited themselves to the meeting; he was pleased, but not surprised, given their earlier positive reactions.
He asked Tyrsell, because he would have to have dyheli if he expected to get from here to who-knew-how-far north in any reasonable length of time. The Elders of the Council were obviously concerned, given that he was supposed to become an Elder himself eventually. Shaman Celin and Hywel both arrived when he sent a polite invitation by dyheli. Hashi came because he wanted to, and Kel came because Kel wanted to know everything that was going on. Ayshen was there because he would have to see that the expedition was properly provisioned. Wintersky because his friend already knew what was planned, and had no intention of being left out.
There was an addition who was entirely unexpected: Steelmind. Why the plant expert would care where he went and what he did, he wasn’t certain, but Steelmind and his buzzard were both in attendance.
He finished his summation of everything he had learned, and looked around the table. “I want to go north to find them,” he said. “I know that’s obvious; it should also be obvious that I can’t do this alone. Shaman Celin and Hywel both think that Hywel should go as my guide, and I agree. Also, Keisha wants to go. I want to leave now; I want to get there and back before winter, and winter probably comes earlier there than here. So - ” He spread his hands. “Are you going to let me go - and have you any ideas of your own?”
Firesong burst into laughter, as Snowfire grinned and Nightwind cast her eyes upward. “Do you really think we could stop you?” Nightwind demanded. “Whether we like it or not, this is something that’s too important to you. You’d claw your way through a mountain if it stood between you and your parents, now that you know at least one may be alive.”
“You might have some really pressing reason why I shouldn’t go, and I am supposed to be the Valdemaran representative here,” Darian pointed out mildly. “I wouldn’t like it - ”
“Be truthful, you’d be miserable and angry,” Nightwind interrupted. “So the best thing we can do is not only agree, but give you everything you need to get you there and back safely. Which is - what?”
“Me,” Kel interjected eagerly. “I am a forrrmidable foe. I am an outssstanding ssscout. You need me. I am fierrrce. I will frrrighten enemiesss jussst by being therrre!”
Kel seemed to take a great delight in being fierce. He was doing his best to look the part, too; head up, eyes bright with a predatory gleam, beak slightly agape, talons slightly flexed.
“Agreed,” Starfall said immediately, to the delight of both Darian and Kel. “Since Keisha is going along, she can serve as Kel’s trondi’irn. Keisha, Nightwind can show you how, enough anyway to handle most problems. You’ll all be immensely safer with Kel along. What next?”
:I believe I should accompany him,: Hashi offered diffidently. :You know that what Kel cannot see or scent on the ground, I can. I can work well with Kuari after dark. I am eager to have this saga at first hand. I am not vital to this Vale; there are others who can serve as the kyree representative as well as I. The fact that I have remained so is mostly habit on our part.:
“Any objections?” Starfall looked around the table, and saw none. “So far we have Darian, Kel, Keisha, Hashi, and Hywel. Tyrsell, I take it that you can supply as many restless young stags as need be?”
:Hah. I would have difficulty holding them back. This will be a high-status expedition for our eager young stags. The young does will be greatly impressed.: Tyrsell’s dry amusement at the expense of his younger counterparts had them all chuckling.
But Tyrsell hasn’t had to exert himself to impress does in a very long time, Darian reminded himself, with rising sympathy for those “eager young stags.” The only way a young stag became a father and potential harem leader was to do something impressive.
“Do you have to ask?” Wintersky said. “I’m going, of course. It’s too dull around here. If I spend another summer shooing those Northern pilgrims onto the right trail, I’ll go mad. I swear I will.”
Starfall laughed at him. “All right, all right. I think you can be spared! That’s Darian, Keisha, Kel, Hashi, Wintersky, and a herd. Who else should we ask to volunteer?”
“No hertasi,” Ayshen said reluctantly. “It is very cold in the north, even in the summer.”
“Not that cold!” the Shaman protested. “You speak as if there is snow upon the ground everywhere at midsummer!”
But Starfall shook his head. “No, I agree. This is not like our foray into Valdemar, where the hertasi were protected and we were in no great hurry to cover ground. This expedition will move too quickly, and have too many risks for any hertasi to go along safely. Ayshen, your people are fine fighters, but only in large numbers, and what’s the point of asking for fifty hertasi to go and be chilled solid up North, when they’re needed more in the warm Vale?”
“No argument here,” Darian agreed, nodding. “Ayshen, I agree with you completely, even if it does mean I have to eat my own cooking.”
That brought a laugh as he had hoped, and the talk turned to provisioning for a little while, until Shandi cleared her throat. That brought silence, and all eyes turned toward her.
She flushed a little but said into the quiet, “Karles and I want to go along. Actually, Karles and I think we need to go along.”
Now that was a surprise! Of all of them, only Steelmind nodded, as if he had guessed as much.
“Anda and I talked this over very seriously before Darian went to the village, and spoke to the Snow Fox people,” she continued. “Anda would like us to see what conditions are like up there. It is not intended as a slight to any of you, of any species, but depending upon what was encountered it could be very advantageous to have an official Valdemaran presence there. No offense meant, Shaman Celin, but we need to know if there are any more - ” She paused to pick out the least offensive words. “Any more aggressive peoples, like the Blood Bear tribe.”
“You need to know? You are not the only ones!” the Shaman replied. “We stand between you and any armies, recollect! And we have pledged to guard this place, have we not?”
“Well, there you have it.” Shandi shrugged. “Karles and I put our necks into this, too, then.”
Anda traded a look with her, then spoke to the rest. “This is something that is very important to us. I would have hesitated to send her and Karles alone, but this is going to be a group that is large enough - not to protect her, but that she can work with.”
This was not the first time that Darian had gotten the feeling there was a great deal going on between the two Heralds that was not spoken aloud. There was an entire conversation taking place - probably in personal Mindspeech - that no one else was privy to.
“My Gift of Empathy can be pretty useful in figuring out if someone is telling the truth without having to use a vrondi-based Truth Spell, you know,” Shandi pointed out. “And I probably know as much about rough camping as any of you. And I can do one thing that none of you can. Through Karles, I can keep in touch with Anda and the Vale.”
Darian raised an eyebrow at that, but said nothing; he could read between the lines easily enough. Valdemar and the Hawkbrothers were friends and allies, but . . . it was always better to have a pair of your own eyes along.
He couldn’t find it in his heart to feel resentful either; he’d have felt the same if the shoe had been on the other foot.
In fact, I don’t think any of us here at the Vale would want a set of Heraldic spies going up there without one of us along. After all, we’re the ones who’d be getting the arrows and spears in our teeth first.
But the greatest surprise of all was that Steelmind then said, “And I would go, too, if you will have me.”
From the startled look that Shandi threw at him, this was a complete surprise to her as well as everybody else - except possibly Silverfox. “Why?” was the question on the tip of everyone’s tongue, Darian suspected, but no one asked it, in part because it was, frankly, no one’s business but Steelmind’s. “We can certainly use you,” Darian said gratefully, and left it at that.
We-ell! There must be a great deal more going on there than I had thought! And Steelmind’s decision to come took Shandi by surprise, too! I wonder why - unless it’s that she’s closing off that Empathy of hers when it comes to Steelmind . . . maybe because she didn’t want to know what he was feeling?
Hywel and Celin had gotten their heads together and now Celin said, “We two believe that it would be well if you went as traders. Traders have some protection among our people, more than any other outsiders; they tend to be left alone by all except wolf-heads and outlaws, for if the traders were molested, who would bring new goods in the coming year, or pretty things for our women?” He chuckled. “I tell you, our women would take our scalps for that, if the traders were frightened off!”
Darian didn’t much like the idea of posing as traders. He didn’t want to end up weighed down by a lot of clattering goods, and he certainly didn’t want to be a target for outlaws because of those same clattering goods!
“Could we trade in dyes?” Keisha asked instantly. “I know your women really like the ones I have.”
Oh, good thought, ke’chara! Dyes are light, and a little goes a long way! We’d have a reason for not carrying much baggage! He had not liked the idea of being loaded down with pure mass to maintain the ruse, or perhaps even being forced to bring a wagon for trade goods.
“Dyes would be good,” the Shaman ruminated. “I tell you what you may ask for. Earth-amber, gold, and carved ivory. Dyes are valuable; we weigh them out, weight for weight, with such treasure. Those things will not weigh you down; you will look like proper traders, but wise ones, who are willing to move quickly and venture much for much gain.”
Darian privately had decided that if anything threatened to weigh them down, he would discard it without a moment of hesitation. This was not a real trading expedition, and he had no intention of looking for a profit.
With that decided, the planning began in earnest.
When they finally returned to the ekele, very late that night, Keisha looked around with a sigh. “If I’d had any idea what this expedition was going to be like - ” she began.
“You’d have volunteered to come along anyway,” Darian replied confidently. He was already selecting clothing for the journey - and curiously, the first thing he picked was his Ghost Cat outfit.
Perhaps I’d better take mine, too.
“I don’t know about that,” Keisha muttered, but mostly to herself. It hadn’t occurred to her that she was going to be camping rough when she volunteered. She’d scarcely been camping at all, and when she did go, it was with full amenities; tents, cook-stoves, plenty of food, and lots of hertasi to help out.
But there weren’t going to be any comforts on this trip; no tents, no cook-stoves, and they’d eat mostly what they killed or found for themselves.
Thank goodness for Steelmind. He’ll be able to tell what’s good and what’s not without our having to experiment with it. An all-meat diet would be very bad - though I doubt Kelvren would agree.
They’d be cooking over the fire, without pots for the most part. They’d be sleeping in hammocks, sometimes strung high in the trees for safety. If it rained, they’d each have a rain cape to drape over themselves and their hammock - or they might put up a lean-to, if they had time.
It could be worse. We could be sleeping on the ground, I suppose.
True, there wasn’t much danger of anyone becoming sick, not with her along, and one thing was certain, she wasn’t going to scrimp on her medicines. Darian could always use magic to keep them warm, if he had to, and maybe even sheltered from the weather. Still “Heyla, you’ll enjoy it,” Darian said, putting his arms around her, as if he had been reading her thoughts. He probably didn’t have to; her thoughts were written clearly enough on her face. “I know it’s not what you’re used to, but camping this way can be a lot of fun. You miss sleeping out under the stars when you’re in a tent, and you miss waking up to the dawn.”
“Insect repellent,” she muttered absently, thinking about the black flies and nocturnal mosquitoes that Hywel had described. “I’d better come up with an insect repellent we can wear. There’s a camphor balm I can mix up.”
“Exactly. It’s not as if we aren’t clever enough to improvise, or as if we haven’t done this before. You’re the only one of us who’s never camped this way.” He turned her around and gave her a winning smile; a little reluctantly, she responded.
“I’ll try not to be a burden on the rest of you,” she told him, looking up into his eyes. “That’s the part I’m really afraid of - that after a week you’l wish I’d never come along, and after two, you’d wish you’d never met me.”
There it was, out in the open. The confession hac slipped out before she could stop herself. She pushec away from him, as he considered her words.
“You might say the same thing about me,” he finally answered. “When it’s cold and raining, and we haven’t had any luck hunting, or when we’re trying to sleep knowing that there’s something prowling around at the foot of our tree,  you might wish me on the other side of the world.”
“I might,” she agreed. She’d meant it to sound teasing; it came out as a bit waspish.
“So we’re even.” He didn’t pay any attention to her sharp tone; he just grinned and shrugged. “We’ll deal with it when it happens. In the meantime, we’ve other things to think about. What is going on with Steelmind?”
That’s certainly changing the subject! “Why are you asking me? I don’t have any more clues than you do,” she replied, making no effort to conceal her own confusion. “I suppose it might have something to do with Shandi, but you know that he’s far too steady to be doing this on a whim, or halfheartedly. Does it matter why he’s coming?”
“Actually - no.” He looked down into her eyes. “As long as I know why you are.”
Once again, words came from her mouth that she hadn’t intended to say. “For you,” she whispered. “Just - for you.”
It seemed to be the right thing to say.

Thirteen

Keisha fingered the talisman at her throat and stared at the mountains before her in disbelief, drawing comfort from the little clay owl figure on her necklace. Since Owl Knight Darian’s induction into the clan, the Elder Women had been making the talismans along with their dyheli figurines. Each of them in the traveling group had one of the clan’s talismans - given to them by Shaman Celin before they left, strung on sliding thongs in the Northern fashion. Hywel’s featured cat claws, understandably enough; both Keisha and Darian had little handmade owl figurines and semiprecious stone beads on theirs. Hers featured the color green in its beads as a reminder of her status as a Healer. Shandi’s had an odd sort of charm - a Tayledras-made chiming ball, enameled with a white horse. Steelmind’s was a silver hawk on a crystal arrowhead shape. Wintersky’s was a pair of hawk talons in stone, with a stone knot between them.
These talisman necklaces were meant to identify them to other northerners as friends to at least one of the tribes. Celin and Vordon had advised them not to wear their Ghost Cat costumes, at least not at first; the relationships among the tribes were complicated, and it was better to be thought of as traders and healers first, and allies of a particular clan second.
They were now altogether out of familiar territory; for the past several days they had been taking a barely discernible track through hills that had been plenty tall enough for Keisha, but today they had come up over a particularly lofty range to see the real mountains.
Keisha could only sit slackly in her saddle and stare. Between the top of the hill where they were and the beginning of the mountain range was a wide river valley, a meandering river running through it that they would have to ford.
“Is there snow on the tops of those?” she asked Hywel incredulously, pointing to the white-dusted peaks looming against the blue sky.
“Probably,” he replied, shrugging his indifference. “It doesn’t matter; we won’t be going up that high.” The young tribesman was in his element now. So far as he was concerned, this trip was the height of pure pleasure. Not that he disliked living on the border of Valdemar, but here he was, ranging and hunting rather than staying in one place and herding, and doing it all by dyheli instead of his own two feet. This was a much superior form of travel, and Hywel very much enjoyed the experience.
Keisha had mixed feelings; she was finding more pleasure in this form of travel than she had expected, but that was leavened by the fact that she seemed so much clumsier at rough-camping than anyone else. Steelmind, Darian, and Wintersky were already part of a functioning “team.” They had worked and traveled together for four years before Keisha had ever met them. That left Keisha, Shandi, and Hywel to fit themselves into the pattern somehow.
Hywel had insinuated himself into the working trio within a day; his role was clear cut, after all. He was the guide. Between everything that he had absorbed from his elders and the Snow Fox folk, and his own memories, he had a fair idea of where he was going. Between Hywel and the sole dyheli doe that had come as Tyrsell’s representative - who served as their scout - they had clear courses marked out for them every day.
Shandi had learned the essentials of camping all through her two years at the Collegium, by going out with Anda on a regular basis with little more than a bow and arrows, a fire-starter, and a few essentials in a saddlebag. Within three days, Shandi also had fit herself into the regular rhythm of things.
It was Keisha who had remained out of step for the longest, much to her chagrin. It took her a couple of days to get the hang of putting up her hammock so that it didn’t fold her in half, nor slip down on one side or the other. She’d never cooked over an open fire before, so she watched, feeling useless, as Shandi and Steelmind made meals. About the only things she could do competently were to fetch wood and water.
At least I’m good at fetching wood and water - and Steelmind can cook.
The others were already starting down into the river valley below; Keisha’s dyheli took it upon himself to follow. She stared at the mountains with the same fascination that she usually reserved for poisonous snakes. Beautiful, yes, but - 
How far are we going to have to climb into those peaks? She’d heard all sorts of horrible stories about mountains - trails that ran out, leaving you on a tiny ledge too small to stand on properly, avalanches that swept down in white roaring walls of death, storms that came up out of nowhere, air too thin to breathe, and the dreaded “mountain sickness.” The latter wasn’t an illness as such; it was caused by the thin air; the symptoms ranged from simple shortness of breath to vomiting and delirium. . . .
And the only way to cure it is to get off the mountain, which could be a bit hard to do if you’re vomiting and delirious.
Nevertheless, that was where they were going, and she had volunteered to go.
The river valley was pleasant enough at least, and they couldn’t get farther than the very foot of the first mountain before nightfall. “Hywel, aren’t there any northern tribes around here?” she called to the front of the group. “This place looks deserted.”
“Oh, yes. This is part of Gray Wolf territory,” he said cheerfully. “They are usually farther upriver this time of year; I do not know if we will see them. They do not herd at all; they hunt and plant some.”
They had encountered two tribes thus far; Black Bear (not to be confused with Blood Bear) and Magpie. The latter, allied with Ghost Cat in the past, had welcomed them with great enthusiasm for the dyes that Keisha had brought with them. The northerners, like the southern Shin’a’in, had apparently never seen a color they didn’t love, and combined colors in ways that made Keisha’s eyes water.
Black Bear, however, had been wary and careful; the travelers saw only their warriors, and never had been invited to the camp. Keisha had asked about their Shaman and Healing Woman, and had been greeted with blank stares and no information. Still, Black Bear had not been actively hostile - or else they hadn’t wanted to take on a formidable enigma like Kel - and had let them pass.
Kel was up above now. Hashi and the dyheli doe Neta were somewhere ahead, acting as advance scouts. Neta was years past the age of breeding, but was just as agile as a doe half her age. More to the point, she was wary, clever, and experienced. The young stags were half afraid of her, since she had acted as a disciplinarian to each of them at some point in his life. Keisha was very glad to have her with them.
As her mount Malcam began picking his way down the hillside, Keisha scanned the valley below. There were no thin streams of smoke from possible campfires, nothing moving through the small clearings among the trees, nor along the banks of the river.
The air was so clear that everything stood out in sharp detail, and the scents were more like those of early spring than of early summer.
“We’ll camp early, on this side of the river,” Hywel called back over his shoulder, then urged his mount on ahead to pick out a good campsite.
Good! Steelmind and I can look for edible plants while a couple of the others hunt. Now that she’d gotten the hang of things, she’d be able to help with setting up camp, too.
In next to no time, they were under the trees again, and the branches cut off all sight of those intimidating mountains looming over them. The dyheli continued to pick their way down the slope in single file, with Steelmind taking rearguard just behind Keisha. There was no discernible track, but the rocky slope didn’t support much underbrush, so the way was clear between the trees.
It was a lot farther to the river than it had looked from the top of the hill; they were still making their way toward the river long past the time Keisha would have figured that they would have already been in camp.
They heard the water long before they saw it; a deep rumble that alarmed Keisha, though she saw no signs of worry in any of the others. When they finally came out into the sunlight, just on the riverbank, she saw why.
To her right, on the downstream side, a smooth and silky expanse of broad water passed into a much narrower and rockier channel. Instead of rolling placidly along, the river leaped over boulders the size of a house and roared along a series of descending cascades.
Yet to her left, there could have been nothing more peaceful. The channel was three times the size of the one to the right; the water was placid and relatively slow-moving. It should be no great problem to ford or even swim it.
Darian and his mount had already turned to the left; Shandi and Karles followed. There was no sign of Hywel, who must have gone ahead to a campsite upriver.
He had, and it took several more furlongs of moving westward before they caught up with him. Hashi, Kel, and Neta were with him, acting as perimeter guards while he made some of the initial preparations for the camp. The rapids were no more than a far-off rumble, not disturbing, but the noise might cloak the sounds of anyone or anything approaching.
Keisha dismounted, pulled off her dyheli’s saddle, and set to work. Her job was to make a fire pit while Darian and Hywel went in one direction to hunt, Kel took to the air to find prey for himself, Steelmind to the woods to find edible plants, and Wintersky took fishing tackle to the river. That left Keisha to take care of fire and water duties, and Shandi to get out all their camping gear and decide how she was going to prepare camp for this night’s terrain.
By the time the hunters, fisher, and gatherer had returned with their bounty (or lack of it), Shandi and Keisha had the camp set up and the fire ready.
By sundown, everyone had been fed except for the dyheli, who would graze on-and-off all night. Tonight they had eaten better than usual, since Wintersky had successfully hooked and netted a nice lot of fish. The ones that hadn’t been eaten yet were smoking over the fire, along with strips of meat from the small rabbitlike animals that Hywel and Darian had killed. That would give them tomorrow’s breakfast and lunch - that, and whatever else Steelmind gathered in the morning.
Tonight, with one side guarded for them by the river, Shandi had strung the hammocks at ground level and downwind of the fire where the smoke would drive away blackflies and other biting insects. Keisha brought in a last armload of wood before darkness closed in completely, and she and Darian set themselves up for the first watch of the night.
Hywel and Wintersky took the second, and Shandi and Steelmind the third. The arrangement suited everyone well except Wintersky’s bird, and that hardly mattered, since the handsome falcon was ideally suited for daylight scouting.
While everyone else went straight to their hammocks, Keisha carefully turned the strips of meat and fish fillets to make sure they cured evenly, and Darian made the first of his many rounds of the periphery with Kuari. When he returned, Keisha made a space for him on the pile of leaves she was sitting on - leaves that would eventually end up on the fire to make more smoke.
“Is there a ford, or are we going to have to swim tomorrow?” she asked, as he put his arm around her and held her close. It might not have been a very romantic question, but he didn’t seem to mind that.
“There’s a ford - Ghost Cat used it coming here,” he told her. “Hywel doesn’t think the water is much higher than it was then. It is bound to be some higher, since they came through in summer, not spring, and there’s still snowmelt coming down off the mountains.”
“I know about the snowmelt,” she replied, with a wry smile. “I gave up on the idea of a bath the moment I dipped out the first bucket of water. It feels cold enough to have been solid ice a candlemark before I dipped it out!”
“That’s why we’re crossing in the morning - it’ll give us the full sun to dry out in once we’re across.” Darian looked toward the water, and Keisha knew he had planned every moment of the crossing and just beyond. “Then we spend a full day hunting and fishing.”
“Oh?” She craned her neck around to look him in the face. “Why?”
“Because when we reach the mountains, there won’t be much worth hunting,” he said. “At least, that’s what Hywel says. There’s supposed to be a big pass going right through the range, but Hywel never went through there; Ghost Cat’s traditional territory is in the mountains, but east of here on the other side of the river. We need to go west, though. Once we get across and into that pass we’ll be following Snow Fox directions.”
“Hmm.” She put her head on his shoulder and tried to listen for noises beyond the distant thunder of water. “Well, we knew that was going to happen at some point.”
He didn’t seem at all tense or worried, so she made up her mind not to worry either. How much farther do we have to go? she wondered. All that she knew for certain was that the Raven tribe was said to be living near or on a large body of water, but also in the mountains. I suppose it could be both, she decided, and got up to put more green wood and leaves on the fire.
They spent the rest of their watch making rounds and tending to the smoked meat, then took to their hammocks when Wintersky and Hywel awoke to take over. And yet, in spite of that (or was it because of that?) she felt more relaxed and at ease with Darian than she ever had before.
Their hammocks were strung within easy touching distance, though not so closely that they would bump into each other, and they twined the fingers of one hand together every night before they dozed off. That little ritual had come about entirely by accident, but they’d fallen asleep that way every night since.
And she fell asleep tonight the same way, taking and giving comfort with that simple, wholly natural connection.
“Well, this is deeper today,” Hywel said dubiously, eying the fording place. “We should have crossed yesterday; something must have happened up in the mountains. A storm, maybe, or massive snowmelt.”
Hywel was right; the water was higher by a significant amount, and faster, too. It licked at the rocks just beneath his feet now; if he stepped down to the point where yesterday’s waterline had been, he’d be knee-deep in the torrent. “Too late now; let’s just swim and have done with it,” Darian replied with a shrug. “It’s not that wide; we’re in good shape. We can get across.”
“No, but the current is swifter than yesterday,” Hywel pointed out. He peered upstream. “Look there. If we’re going to swim anyway, let’s pick where we want to come ashore, then go upstream from there and cross diagonally. That way we won’t have to fight the current as much.”
Darian nodded, and sent Kuari up into the air ahead of them. The owl often got a better vantage from above than they had. Looking through Kuari’s eyes, he examined the riverbank on the other side. Kuari perched in a tree just above the ford, and looked down at the riverbank. Water swirled treacherously among rocks, creating turbulent eddies and vortices.
“I don’t much like the look of the ford,” he said.
“Now that the water’s high, there’s a nasty current right there at the bank, and a lot of rocks for hooves to get caught between. But - ” This time he asked Kuari to land right on the bank, as he spotted a much better candidate for a landing point. “Look where Kuari is - we’ve got a nice, shallow slope going up to the shore and no loose rocks - yesterday that was a stone shelf leading down to the water.”
“There’s quite a drop-off at the end of that shelf, but that won’t matter since we’re swimming anyway.” Hywel considered what he could see of the bank from here. “All right; that’s probably the best we’re going to get. Let’s go upstream and see what we can find for a starting point.”
They checked spot after spot; they had Kuari drop chips of wood into the river at various points to gauge the current. It took the better part of a candlemark to find what they were looking for, which was another shelf to allow them to walk into the river, but by midmorning everyone was ready to make the crossing.
Half the dyheli would carry baggage only. The other half, and Karles, had handhold-straps fastened to either side of their saddles. Like it or not, the larger creatures were better equipped to make the crossing, and the humans would have to take advantage of that.
Those carrying the baggage went over first, and Darian ran downstream as they were carried by the current, anxious to see them safely on the other side. He was just as anxious to see how their initial guesses panned out.
Not well. He knew that as soon the dyheli were halfway across. They fought the current every bit of the way, necks stretched out, eyes fixed on the farther shore, legs pumping, nostrils flaring as they panted - and they were the strongest of the mounts. One by one, they clambered ashore, where they stood with heads hanging and sides heaving. They had barely made it to the assigned landing spot; if any of them had been any weaker, he could have gotten swept along to a point where there were no more places to climb out. And after that came the rapids, which were certainly much worse by now.
Darian came back to the group on the shore, and looked from Steelmind to Hywel and back. “What do you think?” he asked them; Shandi had already disavowed any experience in these matters, as had Wintersky.
“We can’t rely on the dyheli to help us; they’re going to have enough to do to get themselves across.” Steelmind spoke first, and Hywel nodded.
“I think we can get across all right anyway. We’re all strong swimmers.” Hywel didn’t sound as certain as Darian would have liked, though.
:I can help.:
It was a mind-voice, but it wasn’t any of the dyheli, nor was it Hashi.
As one, they all turned incredulously toward Karles, who bowed his head and pawed the ground. :I can stay downstream; if anyone begins losing ground to the river, I can come to help him.:
Darian and Keisha, alone of all of them, knew how astonishing it was that Karles should begin talking to everyone. Darian decided not to make an issue of it; if Karles continued to speak to the rest of the group, all well and good. Maybe he had decided to take his cue from Neta and Hashi.
“I can tow frrrom the airrr,” Kel pointed out. “I can have a rrrope rrready to drrrop to anyone who needsss help.”
But that gave Darian an idea. “We can put up a catch-rope across the river at the crossing point; if the water carries any of us off, we can save ourselves with that. Karles and Kel can stand by in case that’s not enough. That’s three kinds of rescue, and that ought to be safeguards enough.”
It would have to be enough; there was no one to help them here except the members of their own party. Three tries or a freezing, sure death in fast water that would batter them against the rocks, and still they were willing to see Darian through on his quest.
That seemed the best plan; with Kel’s help, they strung a rope across the river from bank to bank. The unladen dyheli went over first, with Hashi paddling madly beside them. Then Karles, who had no difficulty getting across, unlike the dyheli. It occurred to Darian at that point that the Companion’s strength must be enormous; he already knew that Karles’ stamina was incredible, but his strength must have been incredibly greater than a horse for him to get across with such ease. Then, one by one, the humans crossed.
Steelmind - oldest, tallest, and strongest - went first, and instead of using the rock shelf, he dove directly into the water a little farther upstream beyond the shelf. If he had trouble, they were going to have to rethink their plan.
Like the dyheli, Steelmind labored every bit of the way, but did make landfall at the proper place. Without a pause, once he waved from the bank, Wintersky followed him from the same point that he had used. Meanwhile Steelmind gathered tinder, partly for a quick warming-fire on the other side, and partly so the activity would generate more body heat.
The two girls went next, one at a time; Keisha, who had been swimming every day in the Vale lake, just barely made the landing spot. Shandi overshot and had to catch herself on the rope lest she go farther downstream. Steelmind and Karles both waded in to help her over the last bit.
Hywel and Darian went in together; Hywel was not the swimmer that Darian was, and Darian wanted to pace him, just in case. Due to the life-debt, or perhaps friendship alone, Hywel did not want to be away from Darian.
The river was unbelievably cold.
Darian gasped as he hit the water, shocked by the temperature. He rose spluttering to the surface, and struck out for the shore, but the shock had driven most of the air from his lungs, and he had to fight to get another full breath. Darian realized that it was the life-sapping cold that they had not figured into their calculations. In no time he was numb and shivering uncontrollably; it was hard to get air as the muscles of his chest clenched from the cold.
He was too busy watching out for Hywel, swimming and fighting for air to think; the swim was a nightmarish experience that required every fragment of his attention. His focus was split between Hywel thrashing along beside him and his own next breath, the next stroke of his arms, and kick of his legs.
Then he was on the other side; Steelmind and Keisha hauled him out onto the sloping shelf of stone. Beside him, Shandi and Wintersky pulled out Hywel. They both staggered to the land, and dropped to the ground, shivering and coughing.
But as soon as Darian could manage to think, despite gasping like a stunned fish, he seized the nearest ley-line and used the magic - unshielded - to create heat. Without the shielding, the spell created more heat. The dyheli crowded close, steam rising from their coats, and the humans relaxed and stopped shivering. Hashi moved out of the way and shook himself vigorously, then trotted back into the zone of warmth. The heat made an enormous difference; as it soaked into them, and they stopped shivering, it was easier to catch their breaths, easier to regain lost strength. Steelmind returned with an armful of driftwood and twigs, quirked a smile as he realized what they were doing, then dropped the bundle in place to join the group.
It was while they were still drying off that Kuari hooted a warning from somewhere out of sight. Darian’s head snapped up, and the dyheli snorted in alarm.
:Men coming!: he told Darian. :With bows!:
They all scrambled to their feet; Darian dismissed the spell and readied a trip-up, a variation on the first bit of magic he’d ever used in combat, to make people’s feet stick to the ground just long enough to trip them. With their backs to the river, they waited for the strangers to approach - weapons to hand, but not at the ready. Would they approach, or would they slip up to the newcomers to their land? And if they did, would it be with intent to examine, or to ambush?
The warriors must have realized immediately that the strangers had been alerted to their presence, for they did not even try to approach unnoticed. They came openly, but very, very silently - by Northern standards.
Not by Tayledras standards. Darian, Steelmind, and Wintersky heard them long before they appeared among the trees; the crinkle of dead leaves, and the sharp snap of a twig betrayed them. The dyheli snapped their ears forward at each sound until the Northerners emerged from the forest, then they parted to show Kelvren lying at his ease in their midst.
The Northerners froze in mid-step, one by one, as soon as they saw the gryphon. They were clearly taken aback to see what to them must seem a monster lying like a pet dog beside the strangers.
Before anyone could move or speak, Hywel suddenly brightened and stepped forward. “Hiyo! Warriors of Gray Wolf, I greet you!” he said cheerfully. “I am Hywel, a warrior of Ghost Cat, and these are my friends, come to trade!”
That made all the difference. Some of the tension ebbed out of the group, and one of the warriors stepped forward.
“What, then, is - that?” asked the warrior, who boasted a headpiece made of a wolf’s mask, with the rest of the fur serving as a cloak. He pointed to Kel, who stood up - slowly.
“I am Kelvrrren, a warrriorrr of the tribe of Sssil-verrr Grrryphon; we arrre allied with Ghost Cat,” Kel said genially, and cupped his wings. The warrior of Gray Wolf looked dubious, but wasn’t inclined to dispute the word of anything as large and dangerous-looking as the gryphon.
Finally, though, the Gray Wolf fighters came forward. Although the Gray Wolf tribesmen still walked carefully around Kel, giving him wary glances, it appeared that they were ready to give conditional welcome to everyone.
“What have you to trade?” asked one, looking at their saddlebags curiously.
“Dye,” said Hywel, and grinned. “Your women will bedeck you in colors of scarlet and blue, if you have amber or gold to trade for it.”
That got their interest; Northern men were even more color-mad than the women, if that was possible. Hywel extracted samples of thread dyed with Keisha’s colors and passed them around, causing the stalwart warriors to croon like happy girls over the brilliant shades. That loosened the mood considerably, and when Hywel remarked casually that they were trying to find the Great Pass to get to the north and Raven tribe, one of them commented that it would be no great matter to show them the way. In fact, once roughly a candlemark had passed, they were ready to do what no other tribe thus far had been willing to do - they offered to guide the group to their own encampment.
“From thence, we will take you through the mountains to the Great Pass,” one of them said to Hywel. “If that will serve.”
“Good; Snow Fox told us that the Great Pass will lead us to Raven,” Hywel replied, as the others gathered up their baggage and the saddles that had been removed for drying and began tacking up the dyheli and Karles. Darian was very pleased with the way that Hywel was handling the contact, and had decided to leave him nominally “in charge” at least for now.
If Hywel hadn’t been there, he might have hesitated in accepting the offer of Gray Wolf hospitality, but Hywel was perfectly confident with these folk. He even asked about specific individuals, and got answers - something that increased Darian’s comfort level.
“And Shaman Rogare? Wisewoman Awhani?” Hywel continued with his interrogation as they took to their saddles and the whole cavalcade started out. “Have you had more trouble with the Summer Fever and Wasting Sickness, and have they learned of a cure?”
That certainly captured the Gray Wolf folks’ attention; the fellow who appeared to be the leader (with a headdress made of an entire wolf-head, skull and all, and a cloak of several wolf-skins), and who hitherto had held himself somewhat aloof, suddenly addressed Hywel directly.
“Is it true, then, that Ghost Cat has found the cure for the Wasting Sickness?” he asked sharply - and anxiously.
Hywel started to answer, thought better of it, and looked to Darian. Darian motioned to Keisha to come up to the front of the group, and replaced Hywel himself.
“Warrior of Gray Wolf, I am Dar’ian k’Valdemar adopted of Ghost Cat, and it is among my people that Ghost Cat found their answer to the Wasting Sickness,” he said. “What is it that you would know?”
The eyes of the Northerners widened to hear him claim kinship with Ghost Cat, and to see Hywel nod to confirm his claim.
“You have a cure?” the warrior asked sharply, showing no sign of surprise that Darian knew his tongue.
Darian nodded to Keisha, who answered the warrior with no sign of fear.
Star-Eyed, I’m proud of her! She acts as if she did this all the time!
“We have a cure only for the early stage of the sickness,” she said gravely. “Once the fever has fled the body, little more can be done - but we have the means of that cure with us, and will share it gladly.”
The warrior sighed; a mixture of relief and disappointment. “And are you, then, a Wisewoman?” he asked Keisha, with the aloof interest most Northerners gave to the female Healers - it was beneath their dignity to give females any notice outside of the home, but at the same time, the status of Wisewoman was nearly equivalent to that of Shaman.
“I am,” she acknowledged. “And the holy dyheli have decreed that I am to impart what cures we have to your Shaman and Wisewoman, if they are able to master those cures.”
The warrior nodded, then turned back to Darian, relieved that he no longer had to pay direct attention to Keisha. “I am Chulka, the chief hunter of Gray Wolf,” he told Darian. “You will be very welcome among our people, with such gifts to impart.”
The rest of the journey was made in silence, as the warriors of Gray Wolf spread out into the forest around them, leaving only one walking beside Hywel as his guide. The two young men - for the one that had been left was, if not Hywel’s age, certainly very near to it - spoke with animation to each other. Darian didn’t bother to try and listen, since it seemed to be mostly a mixture of boasts and hunting stories.
Darian knew that they were near the Gray Wolf camp when the warriors began appearing again, most carrying game, to close in around the strangers as a precaution against overreaction by their own folk. By the time they reached the encampment, there were curious children running alongside them, and women peering at them from the shelter of their bark-covered houses.
This was a temporary camp, not the kind of permanent village that Ghost Cat had established in Valdemar. Gray Wolf did very little in the way of husbandry, and as a consequence moved as they depleted the resources around their camp. In winter, they moved to a place where there were many caves that they used for storage and for living space during the cold months.
What they had here were movable shelters, made of flexible willow branches and covered with slabs of bark and pine boughs, intended to keep out rain, give a certain amount of privacy, and not much more than that. There were cook fires in front of each of these homes, with pots half-buried in the ashes, much like at Ghost Cat. The one striking difference between Gray Wolf and Ghost Cat was the presence of enormous dogs everywhere - huge, easy-tempered dogs who paid no attention whatsoever to the newcomers, even Hashi, who was about their size. Darian made a mental note to ask about the dogs later.
As was the case at Ghost Cat, the homes of the most important people in the encampment were nearest the center, so the Chief, the Shaman, and the Wisewoman had plenty of time to assemble to greet the visitors.
Their guide stepped back so that the chief hunter could make his introduction; Hywel introduced everyone, including the dyheli and kyree.
And Kel, of course.
Kel came to the fore of the group and bowed to the three leaders of the tribe. “Have no fearrr of me,” he said, with a serious and sober inflection in his voice. “And do not fearrr forrr the game herrre-aboutsss. I ssshall hunt upon the oppossssite sssside of the rrrriverrrr.”
“That is good to hear,” the Chief replied, just as seriously. “But it is best of all to hear that our allies of Ghost Cat have prospered in their new home. So, friends of our friends, before there is any talk of trade - will you share salt with us?”
A bowl of salt was duly brought forward, and everyone tasted it ceremoniously, even Hashi and the dyheli. That ceremony was all it took to break down the last barriers; the Wisewoman and the Shaman immediately took Keisha aside to interrogate her; Shandi went with them, and Darian, Hywel, Steelmind, and Wintersky found themselves seated at the Men’s Fire, taking turns describing the journey they had taken and the condition of the land they had traveled through.
“Truly - the rumors we have heard are not rumors at all, then, but truth,” the Chief said with unvarnished satisfaction. “Blood Bear is no more - having brought the Wasting Sickness upon us, they have finally sickened of it themselves. Had there been even a single war party, you would not have traveled past Magpie unmolested.”
The warrior with the wolf-mask headpiece spat. “All the better, say I,” he growled.
The others nodded.
“What rumors did you hear?” Darian asked, grimly curious to hear the details of the downfall of his oldest enemies, the people who had nearly destroyed Errold’s Grove and who had succeeded in killing his first teacher.
“After their war band failed to return, they set to breeding sons on the orders of their new Shaman,” said the Chief, his expression grim. “Girl-babies they exposed, that their women waste no time upon them. They sent out parties to capture more women to breed more sons. Then the Wasting Sickness at last struck them, and their new Shaman had not the cure for it.”
“I heard that at the last, they had taken to sacrificing any who were stricken,” offered the chief hunter. “The warriors took to eating the flesh of those warriors who had fallen, to take on their extra strength after their death. And that the women began to run back to their own people.”
“And so - they are no more.” There was no doubt as to the satisfaction in the Chief’s voice, a satisfaction that Darian shared completely.
But he did not permit himself to indulge in it; an old Shin’a’in saying was that it was one thing to take pleasure in the defeat of an enemy, but gloating over it for very long made you no better than he.
“So,” he said, allowing himself a single smile. “Let us talk of more pleasant things. Permit me, Chief, to show you the colors that we have brought. . . .”
And let me never have to think of Blood Bear again.

Fourteen

“Make slow, deep breaths,” Keisha told her sister, who was struggling to get enough air. She wasn’t feeling all that well herself, but it was Shandi and Wintersky who had been hit the worst by what their guide assured them was not a sickness, but due to “only the height of the mountain.” This was mountain sickness, the illness of which Keisha had heard such unsettling tales. Safe to say, no one was making light of it.
Shandi leaned on Karles’ shoulder, visibly taking calm from her Companion’s presence. She was dizzy, felt as if she were choking, and nauseated; all symptoms, so their guide said blithely, of what he called “mountain fever.” He insisted that coming down off the mountain would cure them, and since Keisha had not been able to find any signs of disease using her Healing Gifts, she was forced to take his word and the word of all the tales that she had heard for it.
Of all of them, Keisha seemed to have suffered the least. Steelmind, Hywel, and Darian were very short of breath and had killing headaches; Wintersky had both problems and was looking a bit green. Shandi had all of these and shook with cold; they’d bundled her up, but she still shivered, besides being sick and half blind with headache. The nonhumans all showed discomfort in some way, to a varying degree, except for Kelvren, who seemed invulnerable to it all.
Keisha only suffered from the headache, which was bad enough. I suppose I should be happy with that, she thought, and tried to will more air into her lungs.
“We must get over the pass,” their guide insisted. “It will only get worse if we stay here.”
“Worse?” Shandi moaned. “This can get worse? I can’t see how - ”
“It will,” the Gray Wolf warrior said firmly. “Fever-dreams, or unconsciousness. We must get over. It will be better then.”
“All right,” Shandi managed to gasp, and climbed into her saddle. “Let’s go, while I can still ride.”
With her head feeling exactly like someone had tied a wire around it and was tightening it more with every passing breath, Keisha got into her dyheli’s saddle and waited for the rest to mount. How was the guide managing to be so healthy?
I suppose he must be used to being this high, she decided. It hardly seems fair, though. They had been traveling through these mountains for three days now, but it was only today that they had started to feel so sick.
It was a pity they were all so miserable, because the scenery was spectacular; this last of the passes was actually above the clouds, though still below the snow line. It was about as cold in the shade as a late fall day in Errold’s Grove, the full sun was intense and quite hot, and the little white puffs of cloud floating just below them looked like heaps of newly shorn fleeces.
Below and behind them lay one of many valleys, green and tree-filled; farther back, more mountains, growing blue with distance. Ahead of them lay the notch between two mountains marking the pass; mountains that in turn towered so far above the pass that it made Keisha dizzy to think about it.
This, so the guide assured them, was the final obstacle they needed to cross. Below this lay what the guide called “the Great Pass.”
I can’t imagine how Snow Fox got this far, laden with sick people! she thought. They must have been truly desperate to undertake the journey.
But then she remembered the children of Ghost Cat, so ill with Wasting Sickness they could hardly even feed themselves, and she knew that no parent could see that and not try everything to make it better. With the exception of the now-extinct Blood Bear, these people cherished their children no less than the parents of Valdemar.
She held on to the saddle-grip, enduring the jarring of her head with each step her dyheli took. She knew it was worse for everyone else - most of all for Shandi, who was as white as Karles’ coat. Karles himself looked positively pale, even for a white “horse.”
The trail they followed was a slender track threading its way between enormous rocks tumbled from the higher slopes and clumps of brush. At this height, colors had been leached from everything by the intense light of the sun; the bushes and grasses were gray-green, the trunks of the tiny trees gray-brown, the rocks around them pale gray. Here and there were spring flowers - pale blue, pale pink, and white. Only the sky held an intense color, a blue so deep and pure that Keisha longed to be able to dip fabric in it and capture it forever. The only other place she had ever seen a blue that beautiful was when she had looked into Karles’ eyes, just before he had Chosen Shandi.
They plodded upward, and the top never seemed to get any nearer - then suddenly they were there, at the top of the pass, looking down . . .
. . . and down . . . and down ....
Hywel whistled his astonishment; Darian shook his head in disbelief, and Keisha gasped. Even Shandi forgot her misery for a moment and stared.
Havens - it must be a league or more to the bottom! And it goes on forever!
“The Great Pass,” their guide said simply. “And here I must leave you. The track down is plain, see? You no longer need my help.”
He pointed to a much clearer track than the one they had used to climb up here, one that zigzagged down the steep slope (more of a cliff than a slope) from where they now stood.
The Great Pass; that was far from being any kind of a descriptive name for it. Keisha had pictured a mountain pass like any other - perhaps deeper, certainly longer, since it was supposed to go straight through all the way to Raven territory.
What she saw, however, beggared imagination.
It was as if someone had taken a giant knife and carved through the mountains to form a passage. The bottom was as level and flat as a good paved road, and it disappeared in either direction into the mists of distance. Right now the sun was high above them, so the bottom was in full light; she caught a glint of water down there, shining between the branches of trees made so small by distance that she could scarcely make them out.
“Gods of my fathers,” Darian murmured. “Who could possibly have possessed the kind of magic needed to make such a thing?”
Only then did Keisha realize that it was magic, and not nature, that had created this place.
“Huh,” Shandi said, rousing herself out of her misery. “I guess you don’t know your history very well. The northern mage that Herald Vanyel fought, that’s who - and I guess Vanyel must have had even more than he did, since Vanyel stopped him.” She peered off into the south and east, following the gash with her eyes. “It’ll come out just north of the Forest of Sorrows - or it would, if Vanyel hadn’t blocked it. I had no notion this thing still existed.”
Nor had anyone else, except the northern tribes, who clearly knew very well it existed, and provided easy access to the south. Only luck and Vanyel’s Curse had kept them from taking it all the way into Valdemar in the past - and now, save for that final blockage, the north stood open to invasion.
Now it was more imperative than ever to find out what sort of state the rest of the northern tribes were in. They had joined together once to invade Valdemar, and only Vanyel had stopped them. What if they should band together again? They wouldn’t need a great mage this time, only a strong leader and a good strategist - all the work of creating an easy path to the south had been done for them.
She was the first to break out of the trance of fascination that the Great Pass exerted on them, and ask her dyheli to start down the trail before them. Darian quickly shook off his own bemusement and followed her. One by one, the others did the same, as their guide remained on the top of the pass behind them, watching them solemnly as they began their journey downward.
It took them all day to make their way to the bottom, and once there, the great age of the place was self-evident. Far from being the barren cut it must have been for years after it had been made, a hundred thousand different plants and animals had taken advantage of the shelter it provided to move in and flourish. A stream ran right down the middle, fed by the runoff of the mountains above it, and where there is water, there will always be life. Leafed trees and evergreen trees had taken root here, and a variety of plants flourished along the banks of the stream. There was game in plenty, too, which was just as well, since the mountains cut off the sunlight and night would come very quickly here. There wasn’t a lot of time left to set themselves up for the night.
So they didn’t hesitate when they reached the bottom; they made camp immediately. They still had some provisions in the form of dried meat pounded together with dried berries, provided by their hosts of Gray Wolf. That would do for now; in the morning they could hunt.
“How are your heads, all of you?” Keisha asked the others as they quickly gathered deadfall for a fire.
She got variations on “Fine, now,” from all of them, and Shandi in particular looked much more like her old self. Evidently their guide had been right; there was something about going up very high that made people sick - 
Unless they’re used to it? That must be it; Keisha didn’t want to contemplate what it would be like to try and become accustomed to the heights. How long would the sickness last?
How long would I be willing to bear it before I gave up? That’s the real question.
Perhaps it would be possible to become accustomed gradually, without the symptoms.
But I don’t care to be the one to find out, she decided, and went back to gathering very dry twigs to serve as kindling.
Steelmind found a real windfall, in that he found a tangle of wood piled up against a rock, dry and ready to burn. But that very find raised the possibility of another danger. Flash floods were always a possibility in the mountains, and they were in a particularly hazardous and vulnerable place. A cloudburst could cause a flood leagues away - a flood that would sweep everything before it all the way down the Pass, and they would have no warning.
“Weather-Watching,” Darian said to Steelmind, as they all came to that realization after a short discussion. “Have you ever done it?”
“Not often, but I can do it,” the older man replied, unsheathing a hand ax, adjusting its weighting slide, then stooping to chop up the battered brush and limbs. Hywel and Wintersky helped him, as Keisha, Shandi, and Darian gathered up the armfuls of wood. Darian limbered up and hacked skillfully at some branches with his heavy brush-knife, while Kelvren helped in his own way by standing on long branches or small trees and snapping through them with his beak, even if they were as thick as a man’s upper arm. It was getting dark fast, and even though the tops of the mountains above them still gleamed golden with sunlight, it was twilight on the floor of the Pass.
“Wintersky and I can watch, too,” Darian said with satisfaction. “Good; there won’t be a night watch when we won’t have a Weather-Watcher too; during the day we can take turns. Kel will know more than any of us during the day; he’ll be up in the weather we’re watching.”
:It is likely that we and Hashi will also be able to hear a flood before it reaches us - well in time for us all to climb to escape,: Neta said diffidently. :So we will have twin defenses.:
But Keisha wondered how well she was going to be able to sleep with the specter of a flood sweeping down out of nowhere hanging over her head every night. “Maybe we’d be better off trying to find caves above the waterline each night?” she suggested, dropping her armload of wood beside the fire and going back for another.
“We would - if we can find any,” Darian replied. He didn’t have to add anything; she’d seen the condition of the walls on the way down herself. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of caves. “If I have to, I can use magic to enlarge a cave or fissure that is already there, depending upon the conditions at the time. I could maybe make us a shelter, before there were any rains, but that would put out an easily readable magical signature. It’s best if we just make a camp as usual, though, because I’d rather not advertise to whatever may be out there.”
They could camp on the trail itself, but that carried its own risks, and how many more trails would they find as they made their way up the Pass?
She resolved not to think any more about it. They would be vigilant, and improvise. There had been too many surprises on this journey already to try to anticipate all the possibilities and plan for them. Meanwhile, she could gather wood and water, and do what she could to make certain that none of them would suffer any long-term effects from their mountain sickness.
Steady marching brought them to the end of the Pass in three days, and they had pressed themselves to do so in that short a time. The terrain, at least, provided nothing to impede them; it must have been an easy trip for that long-ago army that Vanyel defeated.
The tall mountains around them never grew lower, but the valleys between grew broader - and wetter. More of their time was spent crossing valley floors, some of them thickly greened valleys that were filled with plants that were entirely new to Steelmind. Here they did find furtive signs of people, but never saw any. Kuari reported that the tribes he saw were all small, no more than twenty or thirty people altogether, and they kept away from the travelers and their strange beasts and stranger allies.
More streams joined with theirs, and they started to see fish more abundantly. With that, Wintersky began throwing his line in every time they camped, and they enjoyed the results of his labor.
The end of the third day brought them to the end of the Pass; it opened out into one of those broad valleys, heavily forested, green, and wreathed with mist. All that day Keisha had noticed the clouds becoming thicker overhead, and the air growing more humid, although there was no sign that it was about to rain.
“Hurrrr,” Kel said, as he landed beside them. “Thisss isss like the Haighlei Forrressstssss, except that it isss not ssso hot.” He looked about with interest. “The trrreessss arrre asss big, and it isss damp therrre, like thisss.”
Moss and lichen grew thickly underfoot and on the trunks of the trees; and moss hung from the boughs high overhead. All of the trees were varieties of conifer or evergreen, and some were awe inspiring in their size, even to someone who was used to a Vale and the huge trees that grew there. These giants towered above their heads, so high that their tops were lost to sight among the branches of lesser trees.
Those trunks were like great, smooth columns, without any branches for such distances that Keisha couldn’t see how they could possibly be climbed. This was how they differed from the Vale trees, which branched out no more than two or three stories above the ground; these trees went on forever without branching out. It was unlikely that anyone would be using these trees to house an ekele any time soon, unless they built from the ground up!
But the raptors and Kel all loved the new surroundings, and cheerfully went out on scouting forays while the rest moved away from the mouth of the Pass and found a secure site to set up camp.
They all returned at sunset, Kuari last of all, and as they ate fish caught by Wintersky and grilled over the fire, each Hawkbrother related what his bird was telling him.
And in the end, even Kel looked troubled by what they had not seen.
“Wherrre arrre the people?” Kel said finally. “We have flown herrre and therrre - and therrre isss no sssign of people.”
“No sign that anyone has traveled the Pass recently either,” Darian pointed out, frowning. “There were tiny tribes in the other valleys - shouldn’t there be some sign of people here? Could another sickness have come through here and wiped everyone out?”
“If it had - why wouldn’t Snow Fox have brought it with them?” Keisha asked. “They only had Wasting Sickness and a few other things we already knew how to clear up.”
Hywel poked at the fire with a stick. “People do things differently, up here,” he said at last. “It could be that they are off fishing.”
“Fishing?” Wintersky said incredulously. “Fishing? What is that supposed to mean?”
Hywel looked uncomfortable. “I have heard - heard - that on the other side of that mountain there is a great expanse of water so far that you cannot see the other side, and it tastes of salt. This is where the peoples round about here get salt with which to trade. And I have heard that in the spring, there are torrents of fish coming up the streams. People gather at the rivers and catch these fish for as long as they come, and it is said that the fish are so thick in the rivers that one can walk from bank to bank upon their backs and keep dry feet. It is said that they can thus dry and smoke enough of these fish to serve them the rest of the year.”
“That sounds like some sort of fable to me,” Wintersky said skeptically.
Hywel shrugged. “It is only what I have heard. Also, I have tasted of this fish. Traders brought some back with them as provisions. It is good, very rich, and the meat of it is red, not white.”
“Huh.” Wintersky still looked skeptical.
“White Grrryphon liesss bessside sssuch a sssalty waterrr,” Kel observed, tilting his head to the side. “We call it an ‘ocean’ or ‘sssea.’ Could thisss be the sssame sssea?”
“I don’t know why not,” Steelmind replied. “There is no reason why the coastline here could not be much farther to the east than it is where the Haighlei lands lie. It could be a larger lake than we can even imagine. But that doesn’t address the question of where the people are.”
“No, it doesn’t, but we’ve only looked close to the mouth of the Pass,” Darian said. “Now, if I were living up here, and I knew that this place existed and might be used by war parties or even armies, I certainly wouldn’t want to live near it.”
Nods all around the campfire showed that Darian had come up with a reasonable explanation - for now.
But Keisha had the shivery feeling that this was not the real explanation.
After half-a-day’s travel, they had finally come upon signs of people - but the signs weren’t good.
“I don’t like this,” Darian said, staring at the remains of the village. This place had been more like the permanent village that Ghost Cat had built in Valdemar, before it had been deserted.
Deserted? Maybe. Maybe not. However the village had become untenanted, it had been too long ago to tell if the people had left, died, or been taken away. All that was left were the moss-covered remains of the log houses, the carved poles, the other artifacts of life. The roofs had fallen in - but that could have happened in a single season; Darian had seen how the kind of roof the Ghost Cat folks built needed constant attention. As wet as it was here, moss would have started to grow inside immediately. Grass was knee-tall, but there were no possessions, nor the remains of any.
“Hywel?” Darian said, turning to their only expert. Hywel looked just as troubled, and just as puzzled. “I do not know,” he said, looking around at the rumbled houses, the fallen poles. “There are no bodies, and no belongings. Perhaps they - ”
Then he shook his head. “No, I do not think they walked away, and it would be foolish to say so. I do not know what happened here.”
Darian scratched his head. “Do you see any signs of attack?” he asked reluctantly. “What would we be looking for?”
“There would be no signs,” Hywel told him. “If the tribe was under attack, the men would go out to meet the enemy, and the women and children would remain here. And if the men did not come back - ” He paused. “Well, until Blood Bear began taking other tribes’ women, the women and children of the defeated would have been left in peace to rebuild their tribe as best they could.”
“But now - we don’t know.” He considered for a moment. “If they were attacked by Blood Bear, wouldn’t the victors come here and carry everything off? They certainly tried to do that at Errold’s Grove.”
“What if illness killed most of the people here?” Keisha asked. “Would the survivors just pack up and walk away?”
“They might.” Hywel brightened a bit at that. “It is tradition that girls go to other tribes to wed, and warriors take wives from other tribes, so there are alliances created all the time. It could happen that they would pack what they had and go, if there were too few hunters to feed the people, or too few people to make a tribe.”
But this settlement had been huge, larger than the Ghost Cat village was now. Could sickness have wiped out that many people?
The ruins held no answers for them now, it had been too long since - whatever it was - had happened.
“We move on,” he decided. “We’re nearly to Snow Fox territory anyway. We know that they’re all right. Maybe they can tell us what happened here.”
He didn’t have to add that they would have to be wary. They already knew what to do. With Neta taking point, the birds spread out to either side, and Kel watched their backtrail. Hashi ranged out in a fan shape in front, filling in wherever another scout wasn’t. The one advantage they had was the forest itself; it was damp enough that scent lingered, giving Hashi plenty of information. The scant undergrowth and lack of low branches kept a relatively clear line-of-sight for them down on the ground, and a clear flight path for the birds.
But the forest was not continuous; there were huge meadows to cross, with acres and acres of waist-high grasses. They were beautiful, but dangerous; crossing them meant coming out of cover.
They had another one of those meadows ahead of them. This time, though, Darian was fairly certain that they would be safe, for a herd of deer grazed there, and Neta’s probe of their minds showed that they felt perfectly comfortable here, which meant they hadn’t been hunted recently. Darian was tempted to ask Kel to take one down for them, but decided against the idea. It was too early in the day to stop, and they would have to stop in order to take care of that much meat.
So they were the ones who spooked the herd into flight when they came out from under the shadows of the trees.
As the deer disappeared, the party moved warily out into the sunshine. Only now could they see the mountains towering on all sides of them; mountains with snow capping their peaks, rising through the thin clouds. It was Darian’s turn on Weather-Watch, and he sensed that there were storms moving in from the west. There would be rain tonight. Again.
He didn’t know what the natives called this land, but he had a few choice selections. When they’d packed for this trip, he hadn’t counted on facing rain practically every night. They’d been improvising with limited success; rain shelters made from boughs and rain sheets didn’t keep the precipitation out all night long, and by dawn everyone was damp.
He used magic to dry them out, driving the water from clothing and hair. He had no choice, even though this simple act might signal their presence to an enemy; they could not afford to get sick, or pick up something that would rot feet or infect skin. Keisha had to preserve her own strength for things that could not be prevented.
Carefully, with all the birds in the air, they crossed the meadow. Steelmind gathered plants as they walked, stooping over now and again to snatch something that his peculiar Gift told him was useful. Already he had a dozen different herbs that he wanted to try cultivating - someday. For now, he was content to add flavor and variety to their meals.
This time he walked practically bent over, pulling up bulbs that looked exactly like wild onions, brushing them off, and stashing them in the bag at his waist.
Darian knew that Hakan, Steelmind’s buzzard, was keeping a sharp eye out for trouble; Hakan circled highest above the clearing and had the widest view. Hakan’s type was not the same as the scavenger vultures; it was closer by far to the hawk families. Buzzards had fully feathered heads, mild tempers, and sleepy dispositions. They never exerted themselves if they didn’t have to - but that mild and sleepy outward demeanor concealed a determined nature. Hakan would fly through fire to protect Steelmind.
Wintersky’s little sharpshin hawk Kreeak by contrast was a bundle of nerves. Never able to stay still unless he was asleep, Kreeak was making a circuit of the meadow, while Kuari stayed in the trees at the point where they would reenter the forest. Kel was above with Hakan, in position to attack if he was needed.
Neta and Hashi kept their noses in the wind, staying beside the humans. The rest of the dyheli spread out all around them, for they were on foot, deciding that it would be better for the humans to present less of themselves above the grass as targets.
It was Kuari who sounded the warning, before they were a quarter of the way across the vast meadow - but through Kuari’s eyes, Darian saw that the hunting party drawing cautiously towards the meadow wore the emblem of the Snow Fox.
“It’s Snow Fox!” he shouted, and got into the saddle of the nearest dyheli, the rest no more than a fraction of a moment behind him.
Hywel, on Neta, took the lead; although he was riding on an unfamiliar animal, he wore the familiar clothing of another Northerner, and more, he carried with him a token from the Snow Fox women and children and the young warriors still with Ghost Cat. Darian let him race ahead of them; when he came close enough, he dismounted and finished his approach on foot. At that distance, he and the others were no more than dots against the shadow of the trees, but through Kuari’s eyes Darian saw that the meeting was going very well indeed. With that as encouragement, he led the rest on at a brisk lope.
By the time they reached Hywel and the hunting party, Hywel and the strangers were acting like old acquaintances. This was a party of young men his own age, which certainly helped, and the faces that they turned to the approaching riders were friendly and smiling.
But they soon sobered after the introductions were made and the initial excitement of the meeting died down. “We must make a kill and return quickly,” the leader of the hunting party said, with a nervous glance to the east. “We are too near to Wolverine territory. . . .”
They didn’t elaborate, and Darian figured that questions could wait until later. “We will help,” he offered. “We should not come to your home empty handed, after all.”
The Snow Fox hunters were too young to hide their skepticism well, but politely said nothing. But of course the moment that Darian had offered his help, he, Wintersky, and Steelmind had sent off their birds to scout for those deer that they had frightened off earlier.
:Kel!: he called upward. :These are Snow Fox hunters; they need to make some kills and get out of here. When the birds find those deer, can you help out?:
:Hah! Easily!: cane the cheerful reply. :I will dive at them so that they run toward you - it will be your task to see that at least one or two do not get by you!:
Kreeak located the deer at just that moment, and Kel gave them time enough to get back across the meadow and in place before he began his flush. Darian felt his blood begin to heat and his heart speed up as they approached their ambush point.
“I beg your indulgence,” he said carefully. “But there will be a herd of deer running here in a moment - will you make ready?”
Now the hunters exchanged thinly veiled looks of amusement. Of course they were amused. This was their land, and they knew the habits and movements of the animals here; how could strangers presume to predict that a herd of deer would come through a particular place?
Nevertheless, they were polite young men, and they did indulge this ridiculous foreigner. So when, after a short period of waiting, the herd of deer did come charging through the trees as if a terrible enemy was on their heels, they were understandably startled. Only two or three of them actually got shots off, and of those, only one hit.
Darian and the rest, of course, knew exactly when Kel spooked the deer - and knew that Kel had managed another of his infamous double-kills as well. Small wonder that the deer fled!
Darian and Wintersky targeted the same deer that the Snow Fox hunter had hit, and the three of them brought it down. Shandi held her fire, as did Steelmind; Hywel brought down a fourth deer by himself. That was more than enough to make them welcome at the Snow Fox village.
One for Kel, three for us; that’s generous enough. Darian signaled to Wintersky and Steelmind to come with him; they found Kel with his two prizes, terribly proud of himself.
“Hah! Did I not tell you!” he shouted happily, holding his head high, his eyes shining. “I am asss good asss my worrrd!”
“Indeed you are,” Darian laughed. “Would you like us to wrap it up, or will you eat yours here?”
“Sssome of both,” Kel replied. “You will clean and drresss them herrre, yesss? Why wassste good food? I want sssome marrow, too.”
So as Darian and the others gutted and dressed the deer, bundling the meat into the hides, Kel gobbled up the entrails and other parts they would normally have left behind. The dyhelis flared their nostrils in distaste at the scent of blood, but permitted their riders to load the bundles up behind their saddles. Their attitude toward deer hunting was remarkably pragmatic considering that they looked so much like dyheli. They didn’t like it, but they didn’t actually object to it. The general attitude seemed to be, “better them than us.”
While they proceeded with the messy business of butchering, Darian Mindspoke to Neta, the dyheli doe. :Neta, could you ask Hywel to carefully explain Kel to the Snow Fox hunters for me?: he asked, once he had established contact with her.
:Hmm, yes, I think he had better,: was the thoughtful reply. :I shall try to help him.:
When Darian and the others rejoined the rest, Kel came along with them, walking sedately on the ground rather than making one of his spectacular flying entrances. Darian hoped that Hywel and Neta had managed to “explain” Kel adequately.
Then again, knowing the dyheli doe, she would have no compunction whatsoever about invading their hosts’ minds and making certain that they wouldn’t panic when they first sighted the gryphon.
He had some qualms about that. More than a few.
Should I have forbidden her to do any such thing? He could have done that, but that didn’t mean she’d obey him. Dyheli had their own code of behavior, one that set the good of the herd above that of any individual, and that meant she would do whatever she thought was in the interest of her “herd,” in this case, the entire group she was with. She would dispassionately disobey orders, and lie to him about it. Of all the known creatures with Mindspeech, only the dyheli could lie successfully when using it.
There was no way to compromise with his conscience. He could only accept what happened and try to make up for it afterward.
Whether Neta had a hand in it or not, when they came out of the forest and into the sunlight, although the Snow Fox hunters looked a bit nervous to see Kel, they didn’t seem frightened. “This is our friend Kelvren,” Darian said carefully. “He has made two kills of his own, and wishes to present one of them to Snow Fox as thanks for your hospitality.”
Kel glanced longingly at the piles of offal laid to the side, but immediately turned his attention back to the hunters. “I am honorrrred to make thiss gift,” he said, with a graceful bow, and a broad gesture of his taloned forefoot.
“It is we who are honored by your generosity,” the chief hunter said bravely. “And - ah - are your tastes similar to those of the hunting birds? If so, would you care to take your choice of the - remains - before we leave this place?”
Darian was extremely pleased and a bit surprised by this display of tact and thoughtfulness. And it argued powerfully for the notion that Neta had only helped to explain Kel’s appearance, and had not taken charge of the hunters’ minds.
“Yesss!” Kel exclaimed. “And I thank you!”
The hunters tactfully looked the other way as Kel pounced upon the pile of discards with relish; watching a gryphon eat was something that took getting used to. It was all too easy to imagine what else that cruel beak and talons could do.
He made very short work of the meal - which was indeed a full meal even by a gryphon’s standards - and they were shortly on their way.
With the meat that would ordinarily have burdened them loaded on the backs of dyheli, the hunters set off at a lope that made conversation impossible.
Very clearly they wanted to be gone from this place, and quickly, too. Darian longed to ask them why, but knew that he would have to wait.
Whatever the answer was, though, he was fairly sure that it had to do with the Wolverine tribe - and that it would not be good news for them.

Fifteen

Keisha wasn’t the only one who felt the relief in the hunters as they crossed some invisible line into “safe” territory. They slowed their pace to a trot from what had very nearly been a run; they began to talk among themselves and even make occasional comments to their guests. And at last they finally looked back at the laden dyheli with the satisfaction and anticipation such a fine take of venison warranted.
She decided to talk to one of the young men herself, and asked her mount to take her up to the front of the group. She “picked” the first one that looked over at her and smiled, thinking it would be easier to approach someone who showed some friendliness from the beginning rather than trying to coax a reaction out of someone determined to keep a stony visage.
“How much farther do we go to reach your home?” she asked him, thinking that would be an easy way to begin a conversation, and grateful that they had all learned the Snow Fox dialect via dyheli before they left k’Valdemar.
“Not far,” the young man told her; he couldn’t be much older than Hywel, and was possibly younger. “We are within the range of our sentries now,” he added. And that was a curious addition, or so it seemed to Keisha. Why should that matter to her?
Unless he is reassuring me that no one can move upon his village without warning, she thought soberly. Like a war party from this Wolverine tribe, perhaps?
Their journey had brought them right up to the foot of the mountains, and soon it was evident that they were about to enter a kind of side valley, a cleft with steep cliffs on either side and a small, clear stream meandering along the base of the cliff on the left. If the village had not originally been situated with defense in mind, the setting certainly provided as much shelter as if protection had been a major consideration from the beginning.
Defensive cliffs, a water supply - the only thing they would lack if they came under siege would be food, and if they’ve stored enough, they might be all right.
“This is our valley,” the young hunter said proudly. “It has been the home of our tribe from the time of my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather. The Snow Fox himself led us here, as the Snow Fox told our Shaman to send our sick to Ghost Cat, and then led our sick ones on the journey.”
Ah? They didn’t say anything about that back at the Sanctuary. But then again - they might assume we already knew something of the sort must have happened in order for them to find us at all. It seemed that the tribal spirits of these northerners took a very paternal (or was it maternal?) interest in their titular tribes.
:And the other deities of you humans do not?: came the impudent query from her dyheli.
:Other deities have a great many more people to Oversee, and rarely go so far as to personally lead their followers to help or safety,: she pointed out wryly. :Perhaps it is easier when your worshipers number less than a hundred to intervene directly in their lives.:
“I am called Bendan,” the hunter continued diffidently, looking up at her, but not meeting her eyes directly. “May I know your name, Wisewoman?”
Hywel had found a way to get the tribesmen to grant both Keisha and Shandi better status than “merely female.” Keisha was always introduced as the Wisewoman, and Shandi as something that translated as “woman whose soul is a man.” Apparently there were a few female warriors in the history of the tribes, and they’d had to come up with a category to fit them into. “Man-souled women” who passed the boys’ initiation trials could become hunters and warriors, but they sacrificed the traditional role of “wife and mother” in order to attain that status. They were considered neither male nor female - rather like the Shin’a’in Sword-Sworn, in a way.
At any rate, that was Shandi’s role, and she went along with it, since taking on that persona at least allowed her to sit at the Men’s Fire with the rest of the party, and not suffer a lonely exile to the company of the clan’s women.
It said something for the status of Wisewoman that Bendan gave Keisha his name. A “mere woman” would have had to learn it obliquely, by overhearing it or learning it from one of her friends, for he would never have addressed her directly if she had not had that rank.
“I am called Keisha,” she said. “Has Snow Fox a Wisewoman of their own, or does the Shaman conduct all healing?”
“We have only the Shaman, and he has no healing magic - that is why the Snow Fox sent to us to take our sick into the south,” Bendan said eagerly. “Have you been sent by the Fox to teach our Shaman in the ways of southern healing?”
:Boy’s a quick one, isn’t he?: chuckled the dyheli.
“I have; your people reached us safely, as you know, and I came in answer to your need,” she replied solemnly, taking the question as the gift it was. “That we bear trade goods is as a protection, so that others will not interfere with our passage.”
“It is wise - though I do not think it would avail you with Wolverine,” he replied, then shrugged and changed the subject, trotting along at her stirrup with no sign of effort. “We have some sick still with us; too ill to travel. I hope you will be able to help them.”
“I hope so, too,” she said sincerely.
When they reached the village, it was apparent that this was a permanent enclave, unlike some of the other hunting camps they had visited. Here were the familiar log houses, decorated and carved, roofed with slabs of bark; the characteristic poles stood prominently before each house with totemic animals and spirit representations carved into them. Even more than at Ghost Cat, there were piecework blankets on display, made of felted and dyed fur, and the costumes of the inhabitants were covered with embroideries made with tufts of dyed fur.
It was clear that this was a prosperous tribe; it was also clear that the invisible sentries had already alerted the Chief and Shaman that visitors were being escorted in. Women and children clustered at the entrances to the log houses - craning their necks and straining their eyes for a good look at the strangers, but also ready to bolt inside at a hint that there was something amiss. The Chief and Shaman marched forward to meet them, surrounded by armed warriors older and more experienced than the young hunters.
Hywel bounded from his saddle, and together with Bendan, came forward to speak with the leaders of Snow Fox. He displayed the token that the Snow Fox folk back in Valdemar had given them, and soon the faces of those around him were relaxed, even smiling. The warriors lowered their weapons, and with that sign that all was well, the women and children began to ease closer.
The Shaman headed straight for Keisha once the formalities were over; she dismounted rather than tower over him as he approached. Gray-haired and bearded, he was a handsome old fellow by anyone’s standards, with strong features and lively eyes. Knot-work was layered down the front edges of his mantle, with points of antler serving as closures alternating from side to side. The colors picked for the tufting between the antler tips exactly matched his eyes.
“Wisewoman Keisha, I am Shaman Henkeir Told-True. I am warmed to see your presence. May your spirits bless you for coming to us!” he exclaimed, seizing her hand. “The Chief’s woman and children are ill, as are several more, too ill to send to Ghost Cat with the others, and I have had no success with them. The Snow Fox told me I must wait for a healer out of the south - ”
“Bendan told me,” she replied, clasping the old man’s hand. “Is it the Wasting Sickness? Summer Fever?” Those were both names for the same illness, the disease that struck the channels that carried the commands of the mind to the body, causing weakness and paralysis.
“Nay, it is something else, another new sickness out of the times of evil magic and heartsick skies; something that chokes the breath but does not weaken the muscles. So short of breath are they that we dared not send them over-mountain, for the mountain sickness would have killed them. When they move with any forcefulness at all, they become unable to breathe, but they cannot stay completely still,” he told her, and she felt a little thrill of excitement, though she immediately was ashamed of being excited at someone else’s misfortune. Still - the prospect of seeing something new - 
“Let us go to them, and I will see what may be done,” she said instantly. “All else can wait.”
The old man’s eyes lit up. “Hah! You are a true Wisewoman!” he exclaimed, leading her to think that perhaps he had encountered those who had not been as dedicated to their duty. “Come, and I will show you.”
The sick folk had been isolated from the others in a separate log house. Although there were no windows, the roof had actually been propped up here and there to provide fresh air and ventilation. But the patients were bundled up near the fire, all of them weak, feverish, and thin. An effort had been made, using thick slabs of bark set upright in an overlapping-edged ring, to make sure that the smoke from the central fire was at a minimum; nevertheless, there was constant deep coughing coming from nearly everyone around the fire.
The Shaman told the stricken ones who this strange woman was, and in response there were murmurs of relief between rasps and coughing fits. Keisha examined the child nearest to her at the Shaman’s urging, opening her shields and sinking her awareness deep into the body before her.
It didn’t take her long to identify what was wrong - and it was a disease new to her, something that lived in the lungs, scarring them and turning them from a healthy honeycomb to a useless solid mass. But for all its toughness, for all that it was, if unchecked, absolutely deadly, it was no match for the forces she could wake in the body of its host with her power. It thrived because it walled itself off from those forces with scar tissue; she could break that wall down.
She gave the child a good first treatment before she emerged from her Healing trance, to see the Shaman staring at her with intense interest. “Have you the mastery of this magic?” she asked him. “The way of seeing inside the body, and going to war with sickness?”
“Nay, but my student has,” he said instantly. “I could not teach him, and he has been doing the best that he could without any learning, trusting to instinct. I shall go to fetch him, if you would deign to teach him.”
That’s a relief! “Please! That is why I am here. And if you would call upon the spirits as well, while we help the sick ones, it would be well,” she told him.
“It is not good to treat only the body and leave the spirit untouched.”
He grinned broadly and got to his feet, leaving the log house only to return in a few moments with a very young man - perhaps fourteen or fifteen - and a bundle, which proved to be a set of drums, wrapped in a charm-bedecked cape. The boy bobbed his head awkwardly at her, and she smiled in a way she hoped would encourage him.
She could tell already that he had used his Healing powers in much the same way that she had at that age - crudely, because he never had a real teacher. The Shaman at least recognized his power, but he was unable to teach him. Instinct and necessity had given him some direction, but to go any further, he needed proper instruction.
“You’ve done well by yourself,” she told him, as the Shaman donned his cape, and cast cedar on the fire. “You are like a carver who has been making good images with only an ax - I will give you fine knives as well, with which to do your work.”
He brightened at the praise, and nodded enthusiastically at her explanation. “Yes!” the boy all but shouted. “That is exactly how I have been feeling! I know that there is a way to do things, but I cannot make them happen! Oh, Wisewoman, but show me the way, and I will speak your name to the spirits forever!”
“Exactly.” She patted his hand, and placed it on top of hers, for the physical contact would help her make mind-to-mind contact. “Now, prepare yourself, and let me show you what I know. . . .”
Keisha worked with the young student until they were both exhausted; by that time, all of the people suffering from the illness that the Shaman had termed “Hammer Lung” had been given their first treatment. The disease was treacherous and tenacious, and would need many more treatments to be eradicated. The young student had gotten his bearings, and Keisha was certain he would make a fine Healer, in time.
Tomorrow I’ll ask Shandi to give me a hand; maybe Darian, too. We’ll get these people over the worst of their illness before we leave. Something in the back of her mind teased at her. There had to be a way to give this young man more of her own knowledge, but she couldn’t make the thought come clear. Finally she let it go; if she didn’t work so hard at it, it would probably surface by itself. That was how things seemed to work for her. When there was a problem that could be solved with quick thought, it would be at the forefront of her awareness, but if it would take a long time to solve a problem, then it would be mulled over behind her consciousness until finally popping up as a clear solution.
The patients were already feeling and looking better. She’d been able to advise some other things that let them breathe more easily, things that the Shaman could do in addition to his spiritual ministrations.
Although I have to wonder . . . I’ve never been able to work alone for quite so long before. Time seemed to move slowly for me, but it never dragged on. I am tired but not as completely exhausted as I would normally be. Maybe those spirits of his were helping out.
The student stumbled off to his bed, glowing with the satisfaction that only comes with accomplishment. The Shaman packed up his gear and offered to conduct her to the Men’s Fire.
“Please,” she said gratefully. It was very dark outside the log house, and she really wasn’t up to stumbling around looking for the men. “I would appreciate that.”
Henkeir beamed his pleasure, his beard practically bristling with cheer. This had been a good day for him, statuswise; the foreign Wisewoman sent by the tribal totem had deferred to him, requested that he specifically tend to the souls and spiritual needs of the sick ones, and now had asked him to escort her to the Men’s Fire. If he had feared the possibility of losing status because of her appearance, those fears had been totally put to rest. Completely aside from her personality, for those reasons alone he would have liked her.
He led her out of the log house, as the patients settled into what must have been their first restful sleep for many weeks. Soft calls of thanks and well-wishes faded away behind as the pair walked. Even though there hadn’t been a lot of light inside the house, thanks in part to the smoke shielding around the fire pit, it was incredibly dark outside it. The cliffs on either side cut off most of the sky, and the moon was not yet up. Mist wreathed among the trees; the smoky air, cedar-scented and damp, penetrated Keisha’s clothing and made her shiver. She was quite glad that she had accepted his guidance before they had gone more than a few paces, for the Men’s Fire, as was the custom at Ghost Cat, had been sequestered in a remote pocket from the rest of the village. By contrast, the Women’s Fire, which they passed as they walked between two more log houses, was right in the center of the village, with the women and young children clustered about it, laughing, talking, and eating. There was a wonderful smell of roast meat and some sort of bread, of wild herbs and onions. Her stomach growled.
The fire they sought was in a little pocket carved into the cliff when an enormous boulder came crashing down from above some time in the far past. The boulder itself, the size of one of the log houses, shielded the sight of the entrance to the pocket from the rest of the village, and even hid the reflected firelight.
The pocket canyon was as welcoming as a conventional hearth in a Valdemaran home. Firelight warmed the air and the stone walls, and if there was no roof, tonight at least there was no need of one either. The men “welcomed” her to the circle simply by making space for her beside Darian and passing a wooden platter loaded with roasted tubers, onions, and venison to her. She was famished, and with a nod and a word of thanks, set to her meal.
She ate as they did, with her fingers and a small, stubby eating-knife, keeping her head over her platter so that the juices from the meat dripped back down onto her food. The Shaman immediately took command of the conversation, telling the Chief the good news - both that his wife and children were on the way to being cured, and that the Shaman’s young student would soon have the special healing magics of the southerners himself.
The Chief would not rush to thank Keisha here, in front of the rest of the men, but the look of gratitude he threw at her told her he would definitely be approaching her in private. She sensed that before their arrival, the conversation had taken a dark and foreboding tone, and that the Chief had welcomed the change their good news brought.
Meanwhile, the food warmed and filled her - and tasted wonderful, especially after the somewhat meager meals of the past few days. As her hunger eased, she started feeling how tired she really was; tired, not sleepy. She was content to sit beside the fire and listen to the men - and Shandi - talking. She had closed her shields in tight around her, knowing that she would be oversensitive after all her work, and as a consequence felt as if she were wrapped in a cocoon that kept the rest of the world at a comfortable distance. She had her footwear off, and her soles baked deliriously from their proximity to the slow fire, as she lay back and closed her eyes for a while.
The earnest conversation that her entrance had interrupted resumed after the Shaman described with great pride the work of his apprentice. He’s right to be proud; the boy outdid himself, and he’s a fast learner. He’s one I certainly won’t forget.
But already the conversation had gone back to bleaker subjects. “There is no doubt that Wolverine has taken up what Blood Bear left off,” the Chief said, with a glance over his shoulder into the darkness, as if he feared that a spy from Wolverine tribe might be lurking there. “The difference, though, is that they raid, not destroy. Their raiding parties come farther south every moon; they take everything of value, male children less than five, widows and unmated females of breeding age. If a tribe dares to resist, they cripple the warriors after they have won.”
“Ah, but first they come all smiles, and offer alliance - or rather, encourage their servitude to Wolverine - ” the Shaman interjected. “It is only if the tribe fights that they raid.”
Keisha was too tired to feel anything for herself, and too protected behind her walls to feel what the others felt, but the tension and concern beat against her protections and would flood her if she let it.
“Oh, but alliance means to surrender half of the provisions and goods, and all of the unmated females, and all boys down to the toddlers!” the Chief scoffed. “I do not call that generous!”
“They have not found us yet,” the Shaman confided to Keisha. “That is why we are unmolested. Our valley hides us well.”
She nodded; she had not seen the mouth of the valley until they were practically inside it.
“Your sentries are to be given credit, too, I would think,” Wintersky observed. Steelmind nodded, even as he frowned, and Shandi spoke up.
“It isn’t just your location or your sentries, is it?” she asked, and looked directly at the Shaman. “You are - concealing. Yow are hiding the tribe, Honored One, using your powers. Aren’t you?”
“Not I - the Snow Fox hides us, as he himself hides in winter,” the Shaman protested, but he looked pleased. Darian raised his eyebrow at Shandi and smiled at the Shaman in a conspiratorial fashion. The Shaman gave Darian the same smile - Mage to Mage, exchanging the compliment of recognizing each other’s handiwork.
“I do what little I can,” the Shaman said modestly. “But too much done to hide our people would reveal, rather than conceal them. Wolverine has a Shaman, too, whose power is of the Eclipse, and he will see the use of power should I overstep myself.”
“That’s why the hunting parties are on their own.” Darian made it a statement. He sighed. “I can’t think of any way of concealing them that wouldn’t betray them just as readily; you are perfectly right to be cautious.”
“Our skill will conceal us,” the chief hunter spoke up, with all the arrogant certainty of someone who has never met with failure - yet. “We can outwit any Wolverine scout.”
This time it was the Chief who exchanged a raised eyebrow with Darian. For all Darian’s apparent relative youth, it was clear that the Chief of Snow Fox realized he had a great deal of experience, and Keisha hid her own smile of pride.
“Why is it that you have no Wisewoman of your own?” Shandi asked, knowing now, after seeing so many other tribes, that when the Shaman was not a healer, his work was generally supplemented by a Wisewoman.
“She went to the ancestors before she could find a successor,” the Shaman told her, sighing heavily. “That was many years ago. My pupil has the healing touch, and there is another boy who I will train in my own work when he comes to his manhood trial, but it is not fit that I seek out a girl-child to become a Wisewoman. In other times, the Wisewoman of one of our allies would have found and trained such a girl, but we have had little contact with our friends since Wolverine began raiding. We have not had the great Midsummer Gathering for two years.”
Even as tired as she was, Keisha knew that was a very bad sign; even at the height of the mage-storms, the Midsummer Gatherings had taken place. They were the only time that all the tribes came together under a truce banner; a time for trading, finding mates in other tribes, exchanging information, making alliances. If they had not been held for two years, none of these things were happening, and the peaceful tribes were becoming more and more isolated from each other.
He looked hopefully at Keisha, who grimaced. “We have another task,” she said reluctantly. “It has been put upon us by both the Ghost Cat and the Raven spirits that we seek the Raven tribe.” She did not say why, but no one would ask if she did not volunteer the information. It would be assumed that it was private business between her people and the spirits.
The Shaman’s face fell; he had probably been hoping that she had been sent for the benefit of Snow Fox alone, and would remain until both his apprentice and a new Wisewoman had been chosen and trained. Keisha felt badly for him, and added, “I will do all I can to leave you with all that Snow Fox needs.”
Not that I have any idea how to do that, she added to herself. Healing isn’t like a language that can be dumped entire into someone’s head by a dyheli - 
Or - was it? Could Neta extract everything that Keisha knew about Healing and deposit it in the minds of the young apprentice and anyone else who needed to have it? And if she could - would it be more dangerous to do that than leave them on their own? Having so much information dumped into his mind at once might drive the poor apprentice mad . . . unless there was a way to keep it out of his conscious mind until he needed it. I don’t know. There has to be some terrible price hidden in it somewhere. Inventive or not, it seems too easy somehow. In this world, we sometimes get lucky, but we never get things easy.
The best creature to ask would be Neta herself - arid that would have to wait for morning. Now she was sleepy, and a warm fire and full stomach were contributing to that; for the moment, it didn’t matter how much anxiety the rest of them felt, it couldn’t penetrate to keep her awake. She wasn’t the only one - there were plenty of hunters and warriors blinking their heavy eyes trying to stay awake. It wasn’t long before the Shaman excused himself, and the Chief offered to send his guests to his own log house for rest. Darian accepted for all of them, and Keisha was glad; beyond the fire the mist was getting heavy, and there would probably be rain before morning. At least tonight they’d sleep dry. And she was too sleepy now to care about anything else.
Morning brought the unfamiliar sounds of children chattering like a tree full of birds near at hand, and Keisha woke all at once, with no intermediate drowsing between dream and wakefulness. She remembered at once where she was, partly because of the rush of unfamiliar smells, and stretched happily beneath her bright (and borrowed) blankets. There was rain pounding on the roof above her head, and from the sound of it, the storm was good for the rest of the day. If they’d been outside, they’d have started the day soaked again.
Would rain keep raiding parties stuck in one place? Now that she wasn’t so tired, she remembered the conversation last night, and it wasn’t just the chill and damp draft sneaking under her chin that made her shiver suddenly. Wolverine tribe - they sounded too much like the tribe that had almost destroyed Errold’s Grove.
Not good news. And we’ll have to get past them to get to Raven. That was worse news; would they have to skulk across the countryside from bit of cover to bit of cover? These raiding parties - how many were there?
I wonder if Dorian wants to use magic to hide us? The existence of another enemy mage made that potentially as dangerous as going unhidden. How did these people rank mages, anyway - and how strong was he, how skilled? Journeyman? Master? Worst of all - Adept? Would they be unfortunate enough to encounter some sort of mage they had never even thought of, whose powers would be a total surprise? She felt anxiety starting to get hold of her, and fought it off. There was no point in getting worried about something that was in the future - something she couldn’t affect, for that matter. It was not that she disliked planning or even speculating, but there was such a thing as pointless worry in a case like this. This wasn’t her problem - or at least, it wasn’t her problem unless and until Darian asked her opinion. For now, her problem was to work with the Shaman - and she really ought to find out what his name was! No, wait. Hank. Henk. Henkeir. Henkeir Told-
True.
That prompted the recollection of her thoughts the night before, about enlisting the help of the dyheli in transferring Healing knowledge directly to the young apprentice, and possibly, (if she could find one) a potential Wisewoman.
Language was at least as complicated as Healing; the problem with transferring it all at once was that Healing involved the use of power, a power very like mage-energy - and it involved using techniques that could leave the Healer’s mind perilously open.
But what else did I think of last night - ah, I remember now. Would it be possible to transfer the knowledge in such a way that it only becomes available when the person needs it - 
But no, that wouldn’t work, because they might need it before they were ready to handle it.
Perhaps - it becomes available when the person masters something - keyed to that - 
No one had ever tried anything like this before, not that she knew of. But just because no one has ever done it before, that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. . . .
Once again, though, she knew only that she didn’t know enough. She would have to ask the dyheli Neta as she had thought last night, at the very least. Perhaps the Shaman might know something out of his own traditions that would help.
It would be so nice just to go back to sleep and forget this for a little longer, she thought wistfully. It had been so long since she’d had the luxury of sleeping until she felt completely rested - 
But now that she was awake, her restless mind wouldn’t let her go back to sleep again. Too much to do. She shoved the thought of drowsing away resolutely, and pushed the blankets aside. Like the log-houses of Ghost Cat, the loghouse of the Chief of Snow Fox had little cubicles around the walls used for storage and sleeping in a modicum of privacy. Presumably because Snow Fox was a very prosperous tribe, the barrier between the cubicle and the rest of the house was not a simple curtain, but was one of the beautiful piecework felt blankets.
It cut off the light from the central hearth fire much better than a cloth curtain would have; it was as dark as a cave in their cozy nest.
She sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the platform bed she shared with Darian, and he stirred. “Getting up?” he asked; he didn’t sound sleepy, and she wondered if he had been awake and thinking as long as she had.
“I’ve got so much I need to do - ” she began “Anything I can help with?” He sat up, too. “I knew you were really concentrating on something, and I wondered what about. You seemed tense.”
“I don’t - ” she began, then stopped as a thought interrupted her. Hadn’t she been thinking that the power she used in Healing was like magic? And hadn’t he added his power to hers in the past? Maybe he had an answer, or part of the answer she was looking for. Quickly, she explained what she had been thinking of doing. “Do you know of a way to keep that knowledge locked up until the person is ready for it?” she asked.
He pondered her question, giving it full attention; she couldn’t see his face clearly, but she sensed he was concentrating, trying to remember something. “I think it can be done,” he said finally. “You’d have to be awfully good, though. I - don’t think I could do something like that. Maybe an Adept could.”
She grimaced; disappointed, but not surprised. “I’ll see if their Shaman knows of something that would work. You never know.”
“I might as well get up, too,” he said, levering himself up out of bed beside her, his long hair strung across his face in tangles. “There’s a lot to get done. I think that we’d better stay here until the sick are healed, so we can have Snow Fox’s full support when it’s time to move on. It can only help.” He sounded as wistful as she was, though. “Sometimes I wonder if the only time we’ll ever get to be lazy is if we get sick ourselves.”
“Don’t even think that,” she chided, and reached for her clothing, handing him his. “We can’t afford to be sick.”
They both got dressed and Keisha pushed aside the partition blanket, stepping out into the central room. The Shaman’s wife hurried to greet them, handing them bowls of porridge made with crushed nuts and sweetened with honey. It was very good, and a nice change from the breakfasts of cold meat they’d been having.
They were the first ones awake from their group, although some stirring and muttering indicated that the rest weren’t too far behind them in getting up. Keisha finished her breakfast quickly and got her rain cloak, heading out to find the Shaman and begin the morning’s treatments.
The Shaman was waiting for her at the house holding all the sick, and before she and his apprentice began work, he made a point of offering her a second breakfast, this time of a kind of bread or cake made of the same crushed nut mixture. She was not at all averse to having more to eat, knowing that she would need all the energy she could get.
As they ate, the Shaman introduced his apprentice as Lother. Henkeir’s wife made all the meals for the sick isolated here in this house, and had sent extra for Keisha, her husband, and his pupil.
“Your wife is extremely accommodating,” Keisha said dryly, thinking how much work a woman of the tribes did just to keep her own family fed, clothed, and cared for - never mind adding on the care of a dozen sick people.
“My wife tells me just how accommodating she is on a regular basis,” he replied, just as dryly. “But I agree with her, even when she is not nearby to hear it.”
Keisha covered her mouth with one hand, stifling her giggles; young Lother laughed outrignt, and Henkeir grinned behind his beard.
“I think that this may be the case with all worthy spouses,” Henkeir told them. “Perhaps they fear that if they are too silent, we will come to take them for granted.” He put aside his cup of hot herb drink and stood up. “Are you ready for the morning’s work?”
“More than ready,” she told him, and the three of them approached the first patient of the day together.
After rest - and a noon meal that she ate so fast she didn’t even taste it - Keisha went out in search of the dyheli. She was altogether gratified to learn from the Shaman that the dyheli and Karles had been housed in the communal storage house, rather than forced to spend the rainy night and day  out in the weather.
The children, who shed the water like so many ducklings and evidently considered this to be balmy weather, were making a great game of going out and tearing up armloads of grass to feed to the four-legged guests. She spotted a group of them running into the storage house, shrieking with laughter, so laden with long, wet bundles of grass that they looked like so many little walking haystacks. She followed them, and soon discovered why the sport of feeding the dyheli was so popular.
The dyheli were earning their dinner by taking turns telling stories.
Of course, when a dyheli “told” a story, it appeared in the “listener’s” head, complete with pictures, sounds, and smells. The children were absolutely enraptured. This was better entertainment than anything they’d ever encountered before.
It was not yet Neta’s turn to tell a story, so Keisha was able to take her aside and quiz her on the possibility of transferring knowledge rather than language.
Neta considered the question, then diffidently asked Keisha for free access to her mind. Keisha sat down on a pile of furs and obliged - sitting, in case this turned out to cause the kind of reaction that a language transfer did, and she passed out cold.
She didn’t drop over, although Neta’s explorations left her with the oddest feeling, as if her mind was a box whose contents were being meticulously turned over and examined, one bit at a time. It felt strangely like the mountain sickness, crossed with being intoxicated on very bad wine, and then being flattened thoroughly with a rolling pin but not minding it at .all.
:I think the transfer can be done,: Neta finally said, when she’d withdrawn her mind from Keisha’s. :The problem would be that Healing involves development and exercise of mental powers - rather like training muscles for strength. If a young one tried to use the knowledge before he had the strength, it could harm him. Worse than another Healer could fix.:
Keisha ground her teeth in frustration. Not that she hadn’t already been afraid that would be the case, but it was disappointing in the extreme.
:Let me think of this, and consult with Karles,: Neta added, responding to her frustration with a sympathy that surprised her. :There may be something that we can do.: The dyheli doe looked across the room at the Companion, who responded by joining them immediately.
Karles regarded Keisha with an unreadable deep-blue gaze, then turned his attention toward Neta. While the children in the corner giggled and exclaimed over the story one of the young bucks was “telling” them, Keisha watched the silent colloquy going on between the Companion and the doe, and wondered what they were talking about. Finally Neta turned back toward Keisha. :If we think of knowledge as something to be held, then what you need is a container from which a little can be taken at a time, yes?:
“More like a smart container that knows how much to dole out, but yes, something like that,” she replied, intrigued by the analogy.
:Karles suggests that we ask the Snow Fox to be that container.:
Shaman Henkeir was at first surprised speechless, then briefly appalled - then intrigued by Keisha and Neta’s suggestion. “It has . . . merit,” he said cautiously. “If this could be done, it would mean that we need never fear the loss of a Wisewoman, for the Snow Fox would always hold this wisdom in its keeping. The old stories hold that the People give knowledge to the gods. That is why we do not become like stagnant water, for we can create and give that knowledge to benefit the totem. The Snow Fox might be pleased by this, yes.”
Keisha did not ask why the Snow Fox didn’t already have that knowledge to dispense. The tribal totems didn’t seem to be so much “gods” as benevolent overseers and benefactors. They certainly weren’t all-seeing and all-knowing, or they would have been able to protect their own tribes from the depredations of others. It was said, even in Valdemar, that gods received power and support from their followers, and they in turn helped those followers prosper. She wondered if there was a kind of spiritual warfare going on among the totemic “animals,” with the stronger paving the way for the conquest of the weaker as the totemic spirits defeated each other.
It was actually a rather frightening thought.
If that were the case, it was no wonder that the tribes spent so much time in strengthening their totems with prayer and worship!
“How would we find out if the Snow Fox was willing to be the vessel for this knowledge?” she asked aloud, and the Shaman’s eyes widened as he looked over her shoulder.
She felt a cool breath on the back of her neck, and turned to find herself staring into a pair of amused, milky-blue catlike eyes. She flinched backward, which elicited a look of frank amusement from the manifestation.
The eyes were set in a head with a sharply pointed muzzle and a pair of blunt, pointed ears. The head was attached to a body the size of a small pony, but it was a resemblance in scale only. The furred body was a misty white, and translucent - just as the shadowy spirit of the Ghost Cat had been. Tiny sparkles of white light, like twinkling stars, fell away from the apparition in all directions, as slow as falling dust motes in sunlight.
Time seemed to slow for Keisha, and there was only one thing that she could think. I - guess we have our answer!

Sixteen

Another day, another deity.
On the whole, even after hearing from Keisha about the bizarre manifestation of the Snow Fox itself and its subsequent absorption of her Healing knowledge, Darian regretted leaving this latest tribe - but there was no choice. Something strong and true and part of him drove him on; if he gave up now, how could he remain himself?
They left Snow Fox better provisioned than they had arrived. Dried meat, nut-meal, and dried berries made their saddlebags bulge, and in the packs of trade goods, gold nuggets replaced packets of dye. Keisha now wore two token necklaces instead of one; in addition to the owl, she wore a string of tiny carved foxes of mother-of-pearl. The Snow Fox Shaman had given her that just before they left. Keisha tried to think little of what she had done, but inside, Darian figured Keisha knew she had just given an entire tribe of people an edge against the cruelties of the wild world. The customs of the tribes made effusive thanks from a male to a female unlikely; given everything she’d done to heal their sick, he figured she more than deserved that necklace, and it was one of the few ways that the Shaman could show his gratitude. In fact, by rights she should have been bedecked by a dozen such necklaces by now, one for every tribe she’d helped, and for every Wisewoman and Shaman she’d tutored in the Valdemaran use of the Healing Gift.
I think that Keisha is blissfully unaware of what a huge impact she is having upon an entire culture, by what she gives so selflessly. The tribes may worship or thank the holy dyheli now, but it is Keisha and the others in green they talk about plenty among each other, I’ll wager.
They had good instructions on how to reach Raven tribe - and the origin of the vests had been confirmed. One more stretch of mountains lay between them and their goal - one more stretch, that just happened to be claimed by Wolverine.
Every time he thought about Wolverine, an odd chill touched him for just a moment.
“This is as far as I can take you,” their guide said at about noon on the second day after they had left Snow Fox. He looked out over the valley that stretched out before them with some regret. “You wish to aim for that pass, between those two peaks,” he said, pointing. “On the other side is the Bitter Water, and the Raven tribe.”
And between us and them is trouble. He didn’t give any sign that he was worried, though; he just thanked the hunter with as much sincerity as he could show, and watched as the man trotted off into the shelter of the forest that Snow Fox called its territory, melting into the undergrowth almost like a Tayledras might.
He looked back over his own group; Keisha was worried, but he could hardly blame her for that. Hywel was as confident as any young and untried warrior. He happily bore the arrogance of ignorance. Steelmind was as calm as one of the mountain peaks, Wintersky impatient to be gone, and Shandi unreadable. The nonhumans displayed a similar mix of emotional stances.
“It’s probably going to take us twice as long to cross this stretch as it’s taken before,” he said, mostly to Keisha and Shandi. “If you thought we were being careful before, you were wrong. We’re truly going into enemy territory now, and we’ll be moving accordingly.”
Shandi nodded alertly. “Kel overhead, the birds out in front, the dyheli, Karles, and Hashi behind them, then us, following on foot. Right?”
“Absolutely right.” He felt rather gratified that she had caught on so quickly, but then, she was a Herald, and Heralds got some military training. The only difference between this group and a group of the Guard or local militia was that their scouts had wings, paws, and hooves. He dismounted, and the rest did the same, taking time to tighten every baggage-strap and harness-fastener so that the hooved ones wouldn’t be hindered by loose baggage. Then every stirrup was tied up, so that they didn’t dangle free either. If they had to run for it, having the stirrups out of the way would make mounting and riding harder, but not impossible, especially not since their mounts were dyheli and a Companion.
He gave the mental signal to Kuari that the owl had been waiting for, then called Kel.
:All right, Silver Gryphon - we’re moving out! Take high point.:
:I am ready,: came the reply from somewhere aloft. :The way is clear to the next stretch of trees. Dodge to your left to make use of the runoff ravine and follow it to the light-gray stack of boulders.:
The dyheli and Karles spread out, trotting down through the waist-high meadow grass, heading for the trees. Hashi was with them, but invisible in the grass. He could have left a “wake” in the grass, but he didn’t - and wouldn’t. The kyree were masters of moving invisibly.
Now it was the humans’ turn, and despite having been given the word that there were no enemies in the immediate vicinity, they moved cautiously across the open stretch, hunched down near the tops of the grasses. Those who had bows had arrows loosely nocked to the strings. Wintersky and Darian, as the two most experienced in this sort of movement, took point; Hywel took right flank, Shandi the left, and Steelmind the rear, putting Keisha in the relatively protected middle. Darian wondered briefly if that rankled with her, then centered all of his attention on scanning the territory ahead.
It was hard to remain on the alert when from all the signs there was no need to be. Tiny birds flitted through the stalks of the grass, or skimmed ahead of them, chasing the insects they scared up. Occasionally they kicked up a rabbit. Other than that, the meadow drowsed in the warm late-spring sun, with some puffy clouds around to the west beginning to develop darker bottoms that might promise (more) rain.
Darian figured that as long as he remained in a posture of readiness, the others would take their cue from him - especially Hywel, who might well need “reminding.”
The greatest danger was that because the meadow was at least a league wide, enemies might appear before they had crossed it. The dyheli, and kyree, Kel and Karles ought to be able to spot them in time to take cover in the grass, but that would leave them horribly vulnerable.
But they made it into the shelter of the forest again without mishap, and Darian relaxed a little. But only a little. There was one advantage here; the giant trees were interspersed with “normal” trees, and that gave them an escape route and a hiding place - into the boughs of those trees.
They had gone about another league into that forest, relying on Kel and the birds to guide them towards the mountain pass that was their goal, when Hashi sounded a warning of his own.
:I scent a party of humans - many smelling of fear, the rest of fighting.They come from the northeast and are coming straight for you!:
Darian had been planning escape routes all along as they moved through the forest. “Steelmind - you and Shandi up that tree!” he shouted, pointing to a cedar. He turned and pointed to another. “Wintersky and Hywel, up there!”
He grabbed Keisha’s hand and ran for a third tree, a black pine. All three had the advantage of very thick foliage as well as branches near enough to the ground to be hooked by the climbing stick, a hooked half-weapon and half-tool device, that all three Tayledras carried.
He pulled his own climbing stick from the sheath on his back as he ran, slung his bow over his shoulder and shoved the arrow he’d had ready back into the quiver. In a practiced move, he aimed the hook of his climbing stick at an overhead branch as he ran, and used his momentum to carry him up the trunk. He went hand-over-hand up the stick as he scrambled over the bark of the trunk, and once lodged securely on the branch he had hooked, pulled the climbing stick loose, and extended it to Keisha. She grabbed it, and he pulled her up beside him, then repeated the process with the next branch. Once they were high enough that the branches were closer together, Keisha could climb up by herself without his aid; at that point, he stowed his climbing stick and worked his way up the trunk until they were both well-hidden from below. :Kuari, I need you,: he called.
:I come!: the owl replied immediately. As he waited for Kuari, he made contact with each of the outliers, making sure that the dyheli stayed well out of the way, the kyree hid himself, and Kel stayed high overhead.
Kuari came in to land just as he heard the most distant sounds of forest disturbance, the scolding of corvids. :Go perch where you can see the enemy,: Darian told the owl. :Then let me use your eyes.:
Kuari hooted softly, and ghosted down out of the tree, choosing a branch a little lower with nothing else between it and the ground. He perched there and set his feet well onto the branch, then relaxed - and Darian saw what he was seeing.
No doubt Wintersky and Steelmind were doing the same with their birds.
A bit higher on the trunk than he was, Keisha tied herself into place as a precaution against becoming unbalanced. Darian was so comfortable in trees now that he didn’t need such helps; he could fall asleep in the fork of a tree without losing his balance - and had, in the past. He still preferred to live in an ekele firmly planted on the ground, but that was just a preference.
The scolding of crows came nearer, and through the owl’s eyes, Darian got his first sight of the warriors of Wolverine.
There were more than twenty, perhaps as many as thirty of them; they were more heavily armed and armored than any Northerners that Darian had seen since his last encounter with the fighters of Blood Bear. Most had breastplates of boiled leather, and arm-guards and greaves of hammered bronze. All had bronze helmets and iron swords; they also carried javelins or short spears with iron points, and long daggers. A few were also armed with bows.
But they were not alone.
They had taken prisoners: many prisoners. The captives had been divided into three groups - young women, young boys, and girls. The prisoners within each group were strung out in single-file, and the women and girls (though not the boys) were tied together at the waist by a rope that led from one to the next. In addition, the older women were also tied at the wrists. The boys, all under the age of five, were allowed freedom of movement.
There must have been a hundred prisoners, and by the decorations on their costumes, they were of some fox tribe. Were they allied with Snow Fox - or even related to them?
Their captors were, without a doubt, of Wolverine. They bore the insignia of their tribe on everything - but they also bore the sign of the eclipse. The sight of that symbol, even though it was through Kuari’s eyes, made his blood run cold, and a sour taste came up the back of his throat. The last time he had seen that symbol, it had been terrifyingly close, on a pendant around the neck of the Blood Bear Shaman - 
But this time there was no sign of the weird half-human creatures that Blood Bear had counted among its warriors. These were “no more than” humans.
Very well-armed, very large and muscular humans, who seriously outnumbered Darian’s group. And much as he longed to drop down out of the tree, slashing at them with his climbing stick, he knew better. He wouldn’t stand a chance, and from the cowed and beaten look of the women, they wouldn’t even be able to muster the spirit to use his attack as a distraction to make a break for freedom. But it was hard to hide in safety and do nothing, when he watched one of the warriors trip one of the women with his spear butt and laugh to see her stumble - then when he saw the fear in the eyes of girl-captives barely into puberty. They knew what their fate would be as soon as they arrived at the Wolverine village.
Darian had to repeat to himself that there was nothing he or his friends could do, but his hands clenched so tightly on the tree trunk that the bark bit into his palm and his fingernails were white. He felt another’s anger as well, and realized that Kel, circling high above, was also looking through Kuari’s eyes, and was just as enraged as he was. Gryphons had always had an inherent hatred for slavery as a matter of principle, and this was making the gryphon’s hackles rise, and quickly.
:Kel!: he called immediately. -Don’t attack! This is an order, Silver Gryphon! Stay aloft!:
He felt Kel’s wordless protest, and from the way that Keisha turned pale and clutched the trunk, so did she. It was the anger-surge of a great predator, immensely larger and more powerful than Kuari, a predator that needed to kill. Kel clamped it down after that first surge, but it left both Darian and Keisha shaking with reaction in the aftermath of the experience.
Poor Keisha; she’s never “seen” him this way. I have; I know him for what he is. He is a killer with civilization. Kel was the sweetest and most genial creature alive, until his killing instincts were aroused. At that point, there was no creature Darian knew of that was more murderous and less stoppable.
They clung to the tree, silent, each alone with his thoughts, as Wolverine paraded their captives past them and on to their own village. Darian tried to concentrate on memorizing everything he could about the warriors - and that was when he noticed something odd. The Wolverine raiders were treating the women and girls with casual brutality, but the little boys, who were allowed to run free, were being indulged - even petted and spoiled. Any time that a boy made any kind of overture toward a Wolverine fighter, it was immediately reciprocated with a smile, a pat, a treat. And already a few of the boys were trotting at the heels of some of the men, looking up at them fearlessly.
Of course - they took these boys to make them into future Wolverine fighters. And the campaign to win their loyalty began the moment they left their own village.
Brutal they may be, but they are not stupid. Those boys would respond to the petting and spoiling just like any child of that age. In six months, they would be strutting around and imitating the warriors’ contempt for the women, even their own mothers. In a year, they would belong to Wolverine.
He wondered what the others were thinking, if they had seen what he had, and knew what it meant. This was a harvest - of breeders and future warriors. The women were no more nor less than walking wombs, valued only for what they could produce.
Whether the Wolverine fighters treated the women of their own tribe any better remained to be seen, but Darian had an idea that they might. Putting their own women higher in the social scheme “gave them an extra set of guardians for their captives. Making the captive women the slaves to their own women virtually ensured that every Wolverine woman would regard the slaves as property, rather than as a fellow.
The only reason we defeated Blood Bear was that they underestimated us. The only reason that Blood Bear is no more is that they made stupid mistakes.
All the evidence pointed to one thing - Wolverine was of the same ilk as Blood Bear had been, but they had paid attention to all the things that Blood Bear had done wrong.
And that made them all the more dangerous.
Kel was doing everything but frothing at the mouth with rage. He paced, he snapped his beak, he mantled his wings, he bristled his crest. “Jussst one!” he hissed, tearing up the sod with his fore-talons. “Let me have jussst one, Darrrrian!”
Kel had been like this since he landed. He wanted to launch an attack on the raiding party, right now - no planning, no waiting, no thinking about it. He could not bear what he had seen, and wanted to fix it. After all, he was Kelvren, the brave, fierce Silver Gryphon - he should be able to fix all of these things, by shredding those responsible for them!
Keisha had all of her shields up, and still felt the heat of his anger blazing against them. She just hoped that time and Darian’s soothing would calm him down. Right now no one was arguing with him; they were just letting him vent his emotions, agreeing, when confronted, that it was a horrible situation and should not be allowed to continue.
Hywel was as angry as Kel, but was handling it better; he was white around the eyes and mouth, but hadn’t said or done much. “Why aren’t you frothing at the mouth?” Keisha asked him quietly.
“Because it would not do good,” he replied, with a maturity she had not expected. She might have forgotten that he was a native of these parts, but he hadn’t, and he was well aware of the harsh reality of life here in the north. “Darian is right; we are too few to do anything. But - ”
He didn’t complete the thought; he looked back along the trampled underbrush where the party of captives had passed, and anger flitted over his face. Perhaps he was well aware of the harsh realities of life up here, but that didn’t mean he was inured to them. Or this is beyond what even he is used to.
Shandi had one hand on Karles’ shoulder, and Keisha guessed that she was sharing her thoughts with her Companion. Wintersky and Steelmind were impassive, and Keisha could not guess what was going on behind their masks. These aren’t our people, she reminded herself. I am sure that they care, but we can’t help the captives.
But she had an idea, and it might take Kel’s mind off his anger - or at least give him an acceptable outlet for it. “Shouldn’t we - ” she began.
Kel stopped tearing the helpless grass, and all eyes turned toward her. She swallowed, looking up into Kel’s golden glare.
“Shouldn’t we go back that way?” She pointed in the direction from which Wolverine had come. After all, the trail was clear enough. “There may be people where they came from that need help. There may be survivors,”
They stared at her in silence for a moment. Then Kel leaped into the air without another word, powering purposefully upward but remaining below the canopy of the mammoth trees so that he could follow the trail.
There seemed nothing else more appropriate to do, so without further discussion, the rest of the party mounted up and followed in his wake.
Keisha heaved a sigh of relief, which no one but her dyheli noticed. :A bit difficult for you, are they, Healer?: he asked dryly. :Not the easiest lot to deal with.:
She snorted; he knew as well as she the kinds of strain all those angry people were putting on her shields. Not that she wasn’t angry, but perhaps because she was a Healer, she’d learned to be pragmatic. You couldn’t save every patient - although you tried; you couldn’t solve every problem - though you did your best. She knew from the moment that she saw all the armed fighters that there was nothing they could do for the prisoners, much as she and everyone else would like to.
Turning their attention to something they could do something about had been the one thing she could do about the situation. She was just glad that her attempt at redirection had worked for Kel; he needed an outlet, a constructive outlet, before he flew off and did something foolish.
Now she steeled herself for what they would find at the end of the trail of trampled vegetation. Whatever it was, she knew that it would surely put a different set of stresses on them all.
It was dusk when they reached the village that they would later learn belonged to the Red Fox tribe, a group that long ago had split from Snow Fox. Kel had gotten there long before, had given them a grim summary of what they would find when they got there, then flew off on a mission of his own - and an important one, second only to the Healing Keisha would be doing when she arrived.
Kel went hunting, for there was nothing left to eat in the village, and at the moment, no one capable of hunting or gathering. Absolutely nothing edible of any kind had been left - the village had been scoured right down to the spices. Even leather, curing hides and scraped skins had been taken.
They did not need to follow the trail to find the village; the wailing of women led them there. But there was no heavy scent of smoke, for the raiders had not troubled themselves with burning any of the log houses. It was not their intention to leave the survivors without shelter, because it was not their intention that all of the survivors should die.
It had been candlemarks since the raiders hit this place; long enough for the women to gather their dead and lay them out for mourning on a single rough pyre, long enough for the wounded to receive the rough tending that was all a tribe without a Shaman could give them. The Shaman - much younger than the Shaman of Snow Fox - had been laid out with the rest of the dead by his wives, who were the source of the wailing. The rest of the women were too numb for anything but silent mourning - and at a single glance, Keisha knew they had their own internalized wounds to deal with. No one had touched the Shaman’s three wives, possibly for fear of a curse, but by the condition of the other women, clothing torn, faces bruised, and the vacant look of someone who has endured too much, they had not shared this protection.
Forewarned by Kel, Keisha was armored against their pain, emotional and physical, as the group rode into the village. Hywel preceded them afoot, calling to the survivors that help was coming; by the time the rest rode in, it was too dark for the northerners to see what they were riding, which probably spared them the fear that would have come when they saw the unfamiliar mounts. They had already endured too much, and even a little more fear might well push them over the edge of sanity.
Keisha left the organization of the survivors to the others, and went straight to work on the most seriously wounded, concentrating only on pure Healing with her Gift. Shandi and Karles supported her, lending her new strength and energy when hers faltered - then, when they were exhausted, Darian took their place. It was very, very late when she finished with the last woman; the moon was high overhead, though obscured by thick clouds, and all she wanted to do was eat and sleep - not necessarily in that order. She blessed the darkness that hid the ravaged village; with no fires outside tonight, and all of the inhabitants drugged into a semblance of sleep in their own homes, there was finally a measure of peace in this shattered place.
Darian led her into a log house, which by the trappings had belonged to the Shaman. When they entered, and all three of the Shaman’s wives descended on them, pressing food rations, venison and a hot herbal drink on her, she was too tired to be surprised, but she was very grateful.
The women left them at the hearth fire where the others had gathered - including the dyheli, Karles, and Kel, which did surprise Keisha, Kel most of all. “What are you doing here?” she asked, staring at him stupidly.
“The folk of Rrrred Fox arrre not inclined to trrreat a gift brrringerrr as an enemy,” he replied simply, and left it at that.
Judging by the fact that all of the party were eating chunks of well-roasted venison, Kel’s gifts had been generous indeed. “What can you tell me?” she asked, knowing by Darian’s rigid expression that he had learned far more than he really wanted to know.
Darian’s voice was tight with suppressed rage as he answered. “This wasn’t just a raid,” he said. “They hit this place at dawn. They took out all the sentries just before they were going to be replaced by the dawn crew, then hit the village itself. When they had taken the village, they started harvesting.”
She was startled alert by the odd word. “Harvesting?” she asked, incredulously.
He nodded, his lips white with anger, a vein in his temple throbbing. “The warriors that survived they crippled - or didn’t you notice all the missing index fingers on their bow-hands? They did the same to the older boys, so they couldn’t possibly grow up to be warriors. Without an index finger, they can’t pull a bow or use a sword.”
“But - harvesting?” she repeated.
“You were Healing them - you know the secret wounds they had in common. The invaders did their best to make certain that every woman here would be left pregnant, regardless of her age. The ones that still had husbands were left behind, the ones that had infants were left behind with their babies, and girls too young to breed. The rest were taken, along with the older girls and younger boys, as you saw. They took every scrap of food, and anything that was valuable - but they left the bare essentials, and they left the houses intact.” She actually heard his teeth gritting as he snarled silently. “They intend to come back, Keisha. They intend to come back as soon as these people have started to recover. They’ll take girls old enough to breed, and young boys, and strip the place again. And they’ll keep coming back, as long as there is anything left of Red Fox.”
“These are not our people, Darian,” Steelmind said, in that slow, deliberate way of his. “We have already done more than they would expect from an ally.”
She reached for his hand and clasped it, as he controlled his temper. Kel hung his head wearily; the gryphon was just as angry, but they all knew that Steelmind was only telling the truth.
“We’ve done more than our share,” Shandi added, her voice flat. “Remember why we’re here. It’s not to fight a war with people who don’t even know we exist. It’s to look for danger to Valdemar, and find your parents, Darian. If we take the time to get involved in this, we may never do those things.”
He didn’t answer; he didn’t have to; Keisha felt his upset even though her shields were up and tight, as a sick feeling in her stomach and a dry lump in her throat.
No one else said anything; there didn’t seem to be much that anyone could say. Eventually they all went to their sleeping rolls in silence - but Darian held her very tight for a long, long time, and she cradled him, projecting peace, until he relaxed and finally slept.
But the only reason she slept was because she was too tired not to.
She was the first to wake the next day, and after a sketchy meal that she ate only because she needed the energy, went straight to her patients. They were doing better than she had any reason to expect; the women had mustered the tattered remains of their courage and were tending to the wounded men. Each man had his own wife taking care of him, and usually at least one other woman as well. It occurred to Keisha that this might be in self-defense. Wolverine had not taken the wives of any man who lived through the raid, so obviously the best way to keep from getting taken was to become someone’s second or third wife.
But whatever their motives, they were working as hard as the “real” wives, which was giving the wounded men some excellent care.
The Shaman’s widows had fired the funeral pyre and were chanting and drumming the farewell to the dead - they might not be Wisewomen themselves, but they knew the ceremonies, and no one was going to dispute their right to see that the dead were properly taken care of. All three of them sat on the upwind side, two playing a large drum, the third playing a counterpoint on a smaller drum. Whatever they had built the pyre out of, it had gone up like an oil-soaked torch, and was burning hotly with very little smoke.
Keisha was very glad that the village was upwind of the pyre; as it was, the unmistakable too-sweet scent of burning flesh made her stomach lurch, and she had to fight her breakfast back down.
Slowly the tribe of Red Fox was reclaiming its village and its life. A few children had recovered enough spirit to play a counting game quietly together, and the prepubescent girls were restoring order to the open spaces between the log houses by the simple expedient of throwing anything that was of no use into a rubbish pile and dividing the rest among themselves.
There wasn’t a great deal to divide. Although the raiders hadn’t taken common clothing and domestic utensils, that was about all that they had left. Finished furs and trade goods in the storehouses were gone, as were “show” blankets, weapons, and every bit of dried meat and fish. The women had been too traumatized to go out gathering, and the stocks of perishable foods hidden away was low. Unless the remaining men could recover enough to hunt soon, they would be starving in a matter of weeks.
As Keisha made her rounds, she noticed Shandi and Karles watching the villagers thoughtfully, as if they were making some kind of assessment. Shandi glanced over at her once, but said nothing, so Keisha left her to her thoughts and continued taking care of the wounded.
She finished around noon, and returned to the Shaman’s house. The pyre was nothing but embers now, for which she was very grateful, and the widows had thrown great heaps of green cedar, wiiite sage, and juniper on the coals. The scented smoke had overcome the stench of the pyre.
A line of gutted deer carcasses hung upside down by their rear hooves in the trees just outside the Shaman’s house; Kel and some of the others must have been very busy this morning. Ordinarily it wasn’t like Kel or the Tayledras to take out an entire herd of deer, but under the circumstances, it was the right thing to do.
Maybe Red Fox won’t starve, she thought with a little more hope. This looks like enough to keep them going for a while.
Shandi met her at the door as she approached, stopping her with a look. “How long do you think that will last?” she asked, nodding toward the line of carcasses.
Keisha counted the deer, made a quick mental estimate of the number of people left and how much they would need to eat, added a bit more for generosity, and said, “About a fortnight.”
Shandi nodded, and sucked on her lower lip for a moment. “That was what I figured. How long before most of the injured can hunt for themselves? About a fortnight?”
“Pretty much,” she said truthfully, wondering what Shandi was thinking. “I’ve got them about half Healed; if we left now, it would be about a fortnight before they could do anything strenuous.” There was something going on in her sister’s mind - but what?
Darian pushed the blanket over the door aside and joined them, looking sharply at Shandi. “What’s on your mind?” he asked abruptly, the same question Keisha had.
“These people used to be in Snow Fox,” Shandi told him. “They split off about three generations ago, but they’re still a Snow Fox sept. Neta can put the directions to Snow Fox right into the heads of as many people as we need to. We can leave them with enough food to get them healed up, and they can make it to safety before anyone from Wolverine comes checking on them. There’s your solution.”
Keisha heaved a sigh of relief as the tension eased out of Darian. “There’s our solution,” he agreed, nodding, the worry lines in his forehead smoothing out. “They won’t burden themselves down with possessions, because they don’t have any to speak of. Snow Fox has to take them in; they’re related. There’s nothing keeping them here, so I doubt they’ll make any objections, but let me check and see what Hywel thinks.”
Keisha went back into the log house while Shandi, Karles, and Darian went over to the butchering area where Hywel was working to turn the deer into strips of jerked meat.
She ate without tasting what she was eating, stayed a moment to rest, then went back to her patients. Now she had helpers - helpers who were dealing with their own pain by giving themselves something to think about besides their own ordeals, and they were very good at obeying her directions. She gave the same instructions so many times she could recite them without thinking about it: “Wash your hands in water that’s been boiled and cooled. Pull the dressing off carefully; don’t touch the wound with your hands. Sprinkle the mold-powder on the wound, check for the signs of infection. Take a new dressing that’s been washed and boiled, rebandage the wound.” One man had the start of an infection; she used the occasion to call all the women together to give them a lesson in what infection looked like and how to deal with it. If they aren’t Wisewomen, they’ll certainly have half the training by the time this is over. . . .
By nightfall she was as exhausted as she had been the previous night, but when she returned to the group around the fire in the log house, the mood there was so much more cheerful that she nearly wept with gratitude. She didn’t, but she quietly basked in the positive feelings while she ate, listening to the discussions of what to do to prepare Red Fox for the journey. The Shaman’s widows joined in the discussion - not with animation, but with a determination that surprised and pleased her. They were ready to leave now, and anything they could do to hasten the date of departure would be dealt with.
“Neta already gave Gwynver, Rinan, and Dedren the directions to Snow Fox,” Darian told her in an aside during a pause in the discussion. “They’re going to tell the rest of the tribe tomorrow that their husband and the Red Fox spirit came to them in a dream tonight - the Red Fox turned white, and their husband showed them the way to their allies.”
“Nobody will argue with that,” Hywel agreed, looking more like his old self. “And who knows? Tonight it might well happen that way. If I were the Red Fox, I would certainly choose to do that for my people.”
“Young man!” called one of the three women - who was certainly no older than Hywel - in an imperious tone. “Tell me again where in the stream to place the fish trap!”
Hywel rolled his eyes, but turned back to her with all the deference due that rare woman who ranked higher than a young warrior, and the conversation resumed. Keisha leaned against Darian and closed her eyes. There was no more tension in the air; even Kel was satisfied with the solution. No longer having to keep her shields reinforced, she relaxed further - then she heard the word sleep in a dyheli mind-voice and the next thing she knew, Darian was putting her into her sleeping roll.
She murmured her thanks, and unable to even get her eyes open, gave up and fell back into dreamless slumber.

Seventeen

If the people of Red Fox themselves had not been so determined to take Shandi’s solution and follow through on it, Darian would have had a harder time with his conscience. As it was, it was difficult, very difficult, to persuade himself that the tribe would do as well without his help as with it.
But the survivors greeted the morning’s “revelation” by the three co-conspirators with unquestioning belief and even enthusiasm. It didn’t hurt that the eldest of the three widows confided to Darian with a look of wonder that she really had dreamed of the Red Fox spirit. Furthermore, she wonderingly said that in her dream the spirit had bestowed its approval of all that they had said and planned, and it had told her to tell the rest of the people to do as these special foreigners - the “Trusted Not-of-the-Tribe” - directed. Whether her own mind manufactured the dream, or it was a true vision didn’t really matter at the moment; what did make a difference was the reverence. She almost palpably projected a glow when she told the rest of her tribe of the manufactured vision. Because the spirits had approved of it, it became true for her and for her two co-widows. Their belief was contagious; it didn’t even require the mental nudging of the dyheli, which had been his private, emergency plan.
When one of the younger widows lamented her husband’s loss again, the older woman gained a sudden look of extreme serenity and replied, “The Fox says, ‘Do not let yesterday use up too much of today,’ child.” Two heartbeats of utter stillness followed, and then the older woman bent to pick up some of her belongings to prepare for the journey. Whether that had been clever acting or an actual contact with the Fox Spirit he did not know, but the effect was startling. One by one, the rest followed suit.
Kel, Hywel, and Wintersky went hunting that day as well, making certain that the village would have meat enough to carry it through not only the next fortnight, but the necessarily slow journey to Snow Fox. Steelmind, Shandi, Karles, and the dyheli “hunted” growing edibles and collected firewood.
Perhaps “collecting” was an understatement. They hitched the dyheli and Karles to downed trees, which were then dragged to the village; before long there was an enormous line of them in the clearing, waiting to be chopped up. It was an exquisite irony that so many of Darian’s youthful indiscretions had revolved around collecting firewood, and now here he was, in charge of firewood yet again.
Darian remained behind to help the survivors plan their journey, help Keisha, and chop the wood - with the help of the strongest of the girls, women, and any of the men fit to swing an ax or a mallet. Many of them were impressed by the high quality of the Tayledras axes, and marveled at Wintersky’s folding ax. And from the fierce and controlled anger with which the women dealt with their woody “adversaries,” Darian figured they were getting more than just stockpiled wood out of the exercise.
For him, the day passed quickly. He took a great deal of his own anger out on the wood; it felt good to imagine the faces of the Wolverine raiders and strike with his full strength behind the blows.
Everyone was so exhausted by the end of that day that they all went straight to bed relatively early. But there was none of the depression and gloom hanging over them that there had been; having a place to go and things to do to get ready for the migration had altered the entire mood of the tribe.
He had no illusions about the damaged psyches of the women, however. What they had endured would have to be dealt with eventually - but he trusted, having met and worked with him, that the Shaman of Snow Fox would be able to give them help.
Or if he can’t, their own tribal spirits certainly will.
So he went to sleep feeling, if not cheered, certainly with his conscience doing little more than an occasional mutter.
They left only when they all felt that they had done as much for the tribe as was needed; there was firewood piled high, racks and racks of meat drying, all manner of stores to tide these people through the difficult weeks ahead. Keisha had done as much as she could, given the brief amount of time she’d had to work; time and their own bodies would do the rest. The women had a purpose again, the men a reason to heal and get on their feet. The despair was gone, and there was even a glimpse of hope, now and again. These people were ready to stand on their own feet. If they weren’t to become dependent on their benefactors, it was time for Darian’s group to leave.
So they rode out on the morning of their fifth day with Red Fox, though not precisely as they had ridden in. If there were no cheers sending them off, there were grateful farewells, hands pressed silently but fervently, eyes with life in them again. If Darian did not feel good about leaving them to carry on without any more help, he didn’t feel bad about it either. As they took their bearings and departed from that path of browned and dying underbrush, heading once again for the pass between two mountains to the west and north, Darian felt the weight of another responsibility descend on him. Now they knew that Wolverine was out there, raiding, looting, and killing. They would have to be twice as vigilant as before.
He also held a secret from Keisha and Shandi, which made him feel a bit guilty. It wasn’t a major secret - but he wasn’t sure how they’d react if they knew it.
Kel hadn’t won the hearts of Red Fox with his gifts; the dyheli had insinuated the concept of friendly, helpful, protective gryphons into the minds of the tribesmen long before the group ever reached the village itself.
Now that was meddling, by any standard. The dyheli didn’t think of it that way; they considered it as being helpful, easing the way, making certain that the humans of Red Fox got no more traumatic experiences. However, they had planted a concept in the minds of the unsuspecting without consent or permission.
Quite frankly, at this point, Darian was in accord with the dyheli. Things had been difficult enough without having to calm hysterics and panic. They needed Kel’s help, and needed to be able to have him come and go openly.
According to Kel, their detour might have been a good thing in a tactical sense. There were no wide meadows between here and the pass, nothing but thick forest. At least the group on the ground would have cover the entire way.
Yes, but so will any Wolverine raiding parties.
Hardly a comforting thought.
:Excuse me,: Neta said politely into Darian’s mind, :but there is something rather badly wrong in these woods. I don’t know what, precisely, but it’s too quiet.:
:I agree,: Hashi spoke up. :There doesn’t seem to be anything around here bigger than a tree-hare, and even the tree-hares are staying high up. I haven’t scented anything of a decent size since we crossed that last big stream.:
Darian didn’t like the way the forest felt either. The trees were a little farther apart here, letting plenty of sunlight through, and it should have been correspondingly more cheerful. But it wasn’t; the forest felt empty, hollow, like that deserted village they had encountered.
Could Wolverine have hunted this place out? he wondered. That might be the explanation, and yet it didn’t feel right. For one thing, there wasn’t any sign of humans hunting - the broken undergrowth, trail marker ties, remains of camps, that sort of thing. For another, he didn’t think that even a tribe like Wolverine would hunt an area bare.
They had been climbing steadily all day; they had managed to journey over all the territory between Red Fox and this final pass without crossing paths with any more raiding parties. There shouldn’t be any reason why they wouldn’t be on the other side of the mountains by tonight. Then, provided the information they had was correct, they would be within touching distance of Raven. And my parents?
The shadow of the mountain fell across their path; it wasn’t just cool here, it was cold. Darian shivered, and out of the corner of his eye saw Shandi pulling her cloak closer. I’ll be glad when we get across, into the sunlight. Who would have thought it could be this cold at the beginning of summer? Small wonder that the Ghost Cat villagers had not been prepared for the summer heat in Valdemar. He was just glad that for once it wasn’t raining. In this cold, rain would feel like drops of ice.
There was another small clearing coming up ahead of them, one with a brush-filled ravine running along the left side. As they cautiously entered the clearing, Hashi and Neta were running flank guard, Kelvren was high above, Kuari was running tail guard, and the other two birds were in front. It was better to have the birds in front and behind; they could cover more ground than Neta and Hashi. It’s too bad they don’t have a way to pick up scent, but - 
There was a flash of motion. Out of nowhere, something huge and white reared up from the ravine, stretching up and up, and Darian froze. He couldn’t move; all he could do was stare upward, at the strange eyes that whirled and pulsed in the snakelike head two stories above the ground. . . .
. . . . how . . . incredible. . . .
Was there someone calling him? Well, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but those eyes. He forgot everything, even his name; all he wanted to do was to stare into those eyes forever. They were beautiful. He’d have thought his Clan, his Knighthood, and his quest were all useless if he’d even been able to think of them. The eyes were all that mattered. All else narrowed to them, or rather - yes, the eyes engulfed him. There was nothing above or below or around him that was of consequence, or was even noticed as missing, for that matter. There was only those eyes.
Just as abruptly as the drake’s appearance, his mount went from immobile to active in a heartbeat. The dyheli spun in place, wrenching his attention from those hypnotic eyes, lurched into a run, and fled back down the way they had come. Greenery and stone flashed past at incredible speed, making even the view through Kuari’s eyes when they were linked seem plodding by comparison. Holding on for dear life, Darian’s dyheli caromed off the side of another one laden with supplies, which went down into the underbrush. Darian’s knee and shin hurt immediately from the crushing blow against the dyheli’s ribs, but the fallen dyheli was nowhere to be seen now. He looked around desperately. The noise of cracking branches and clattering gear mixed with a climbing whine behind him - a shrill one he had never heard before, much like the death cry of a rabbit, but forced from larger lungs. The dyheli he had crunched against struggled to get back up and then vanished into a pillar of white - the cold-drake’s open jaws crushed down upon the flailing dyheli and there were three swift thrashing bites. The dyheli was dead, somewhere back there, but the scenery blurred past and the line of sight was gone. He wasn’t alone; all of the dyhelis were stampeding back down the path, with Karles and Shandi in the lead. He shook off his pain and hung on like a leech as his mount lurched down the slope just a breath away from a disastrous stumble.
That was a cold-drake. Oh, gods, that was a cold-drake! Now that he wasn’t under the creature’s spell, he knew the danger of what it was, and could put a name on it. He knew what must have saved them, too - Neta, out there free and not under the cold-drake’s mesmerizing gaze. She had exercised her own Gift and had taken over the minds of every other dyheli and probably Karles, too. Then she had made them all stampede away from the danger zone; the cold-drake wasn’t swift enough to keep up with them.
The dyheli traveled across the forest floor in huge bounds, snapping Darian’s head back and forth until he got into the same rhythm as his mount. The dyheli didn’t usually break into this “stampede gait” when mounted, and he could only thank his luck that there was a saddle between him and that knobby dyheli backbone. As it was, his neck muscles hurt, and so did his head.
As abruptly as they began their run, they ended it, bouncing in three or four steps to a halt a safe distance down the pass. The others came to a stop beside him, with the dyhelis shaking their heads so hard their ears flapped as Neta let their minds loose. Last to stop was Karles, and it seemed to Darian that as the Companion walked toward them, his expression was decidedly sheepish.
Now it hit him - how close they had all been to a distinctly unpleasant death - and he began to shake with reaction, the sour taste of fear in his mouth. One more heartbeat, and we’d all have been dinner. Oh, gods.
Keisha looked puzzled; Shandi still confused. “We lost - we lost Gacher. What happened?” Keisha blurted. “What was that? Why did the dyheli all run?”
:Gacher has died. The herd ran because I made them,: came Neta’s mind-voice. :As for what that was, I do not know; only that it was dangerous. It had you all spell-trapped with its eyes and mind.:
“It’s a cold-drake,” Steelmind said flatly. “Thank you, Neta; that was precisely the right thing to have done. You saved us all - except for poor Gacher. I hope his death was a swift one.”
:It was,: Neta confirmed.
“I don’t understand. I’ve studied all the weirdlings we were likely to find up here. Cold-drakes are normally dormant in the summer,” Steelmind continued as he wiped his hair back from his face. “I wonder what woke this one up?”
“What’s a cold-drake?” Keisha wanted to know.
Kel interrupted the conversation, coming in beside them for a noisy landing, his beak agape with agitation. He swung his head around, counting them silently, and heaved an enormous sigh of relief to see the humans all present. “I sssaw the drrrake!” he said, “But you all rrrran beforrre I completed a ssstoop.”
“It’s just as well that you didn’t connect with it, Kel,” Darian told him, dismounting and clasping Kel’s neck - even though his own legs were still shaky. “One gryphon is no match for a cold-drake.”
“Will someone please tell me, what’s a cold-drake?” Keisha repeated insistently. “And why couldn’t I move or think?”
Darian and Steelmind exchanged a look, and Darian answered. “A cold-drake is a magical construct, like a gryphon; they were created during the Mage-Wars as offensive weapons, but the problem was that they couldn’t be controlled, and turned on their own side as often as not. They’re eating machines.”
“But they use mind-magic,” Steelmind continued. “They freeze their prey in place, then move in and strike, or dine at their leisure depending upon their mood. That thing caught all of us, every one that could see its eyes. If Neta hadn’t done what she did, we’d be sliding down its throat right now.”
Karles hung his head, as if he was ashamed that he had not somehow resisted the cold-drake’s gaze. Steelmind noticed, and turned toward the Companion. “No one is immune from a cold-drake,” he said, for Karles’ benefit. “I don’t care who or what you are. When you’re in front of a cold-drake, you belong to the cold-drake.”
Shandi patted Karles’ neck sympathetically. The Companion didn’t say anything that Darian could hear, but he understood the Companion’s chagrin; he shared it.
You’d think I would be able to shake that damned thing off. . . . How had he managed to get so completely under the monster’s power in so short a time?
I didn’t even get a good look at it before it had me!
It took one look at Hywel to realize that he did not have the worst of it. Darian was, by comparison, a war-hardened general compared to the young Ghost Cat warrior. In his past he’d been routed, ambushed, beaten up, surprised, attacked, and scared out of his wits before. It was Hywel’s first time for being totally, utterly helpless, face-to-face with death when there was nothing he could do about it. Hywel looked just as white as the Ghost Cat itself.
“How are we going to get past that thing?” Hywel stammered, aghast. “Does it ever sleep?”
“Yes, but they’re like spiders; they sense the vibrations of the ground if anything bigger than a mouse walks on it, and wake up immediately,” Steelmind told him. “I don’t think we could drive it off or lure it away either - they are very, very territorial. If we want to get through that pass, we’re going to have to kill it.”
“Oh, great,” Darian muttered, as Hywel’s eyes went round. Being magical constructs, cold-drakes were, to some extent, designed to be immune to the effects of magic. “What I don’t understand is why it isn’t dormant - it’s summer.”
“It’s also cold.” Steelmind looked over his shoulder at the mountain behind him. “With this shadow falling over the pass for most of the day, and being so high up, it doesn’t ever really get warm. That’s probably why there aren’t any animals here - the drake has hunted the place bare, and the animals don’t get a chance to recover their numbers in the summer.”
“It could be awake because it didn’t get enough to eat to support dormancy,” Wintersky said thoughtfully. “Unless it moves to a new territory, it’s going to starve to death.”
“Well, we can’t stand around and wait for that to happen,” Darian replied with irritation. “And it just got fed.”
Kelvren dipped his head toward Neta and intoned solemnly, “I am sssorrry forrr yourrr losss.”
Neta returned the gesture, and her gaze went from buck to buck. :It is a risk Gacher knew he was taking by volunteering for this journey. He knew before coming that such things could happen to him. It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.:
Darian could only nod, even though he knew Neta was speaking to the bucks and not to him. As much as he had questioned the human morality of Neta’s powers, those same powers had just unquestionably saved their lives.
Darian’s mind was soon preoccupied, thinking on the ways to get around the drake. Wintersky went from one dyheli to another, checking them for injuries and making a mental inventory of what gear was lost when they fled. We’re so close - 
“We could go back,” Shandi pointed out. Dead silence dropped over them all; Darian looked at each of his party in turn. Shandi wouldn’t look him in the eyes. Hywel looked solemn and frightened; Wintersky thoughtful. Steelmind just shrugged. Only Keisha met his eyes completely, and looked just as determined as he was to continue.
“We can’t stop now,” Keisha said firmly, and cast a withering glance at her sister. “That would be giving up.”
Shandi shrugged off the criticism. “It’s no shame to give up under the right circumstances.”
Keisha didn’t even dignify the comment with an answer; instead, she turned to Steelmind. “Do you have any idea what we can use against this creature?”
“Not at the moment,” the Tayledras replied, with a look of admonition at Shandi. “But we’d better think of something other than bows and arrows.”
“Heat,” Darian muttered, after half a candlemark of debate. “That’s the key, I think. They thrive in cold, and even magically generate it. It might not be directly vulnerable to magic, but if we can weaken and confuse it with heat, we can kill it.”
“You think,” Shandi put in.
Darian was getting more than a little irritated with Keisha’s sister. Every time someone suggested something, she had a quelling remark. “Look,” he said finally. “You wanted to come along on this journey. I didn’t ask you for your help, but you, and Anda, and your Companions decided you needed to be with us, so you came. We’ve established a safe route back through the tribes, so why don’t you just go home? You’ve been helpful, but you aren’t doing anything that we can’t afford to lose.”
Shandi sat straight up, offended; Keisha, on the other hand, moved slightly closer to Darian. Steelmind raised an eyebrow, and licked his lips. “Is there a problem, Shandi?” he asked carefully. “Why are you trying to discourage us from going on?”
“I - ” She looked around uneasily. “We already have so much information about the Northerners - and we know that Wolverine poses a danger to us back home if they continue to expand. Don’t you think we have a duty to get back with that information?”
“Don’t you think we have a duty to help our friend find his parents?” Steelmind countered. “That was why we came here.”
“Yes, but - ” Shandi looked confused.
“You could go back by yourself, if you want to,” Steelmind continued. “But it seems to me that you would be going back on the agreement you made with Darian if you did that, and I suspect that you feel the same way. Is that why you’re being so negative, trying to get us all into agreement to give up and go home so that you won’t have conflicting duties?”
Shandi flushed, and had a hard time meeting his eyes. She couldn’t meet Darian’s either. Something in what Steelmind had said had hit home.
“All right, then; you’ve tried and failed, so give it a rest,” Steelmind said decisively. “Either be helpful toward our objective, or be silent.”
Shandi flushed again and bit her lip; she obviously wanted to make a retort, and didn’t want to do so in front of the others. Darian exchanged a knowing glance with Keisha, feeling conspiratorial. The first lovers’ quarrel? Could be. And I think he’s going to hear about it from her when there isn’t an audience. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to give up at this point - but he and Steelmind had faced other monsters in the past, and he wasn’t going to let a mere monster stand between him and finding his family. They’d encountered spirit manifestations before, but this cold-drake was, for all of its fearsome power, still flesh and bone.
“What else can we do?” he asked. “Can Kel and the birds confuse and distract him without getting into range of his eyes or teeth?”
“We could drrrop thingsss on him,” Kel said meditatively. ‘Sssimple but effective grrryphon tactic. Rocksss. Trrreesss. Perhapsss, if my luck isss good, I could drrrop sssomething over hisss head?”
“Just before we’re ready to go for the final kill - even if you don’t get the thing over its head, you’ll distract it. A shot at the eyes themselves is not likely except from directly in front of it, and we all know what the danger is there.” Steelmind fingered the hilt of one of his watersteel knives, thinking. “The main thing is to keep it from freezing any of us again.”
“Could we just sneak by it?” Keisha asked diffidently. “Wouldn’t that be better? If you use any magic at all, Darian, you’ll show the Wolverine Shaman where you are. He can’t ignore the presence of a Master mage so near to them.”
Darian grimaced. “I know - but we can’t do this without magic, and no, I don’t think we can just sneak by it. You heard what Steelmind said about how it’s sensitive to footsteps.” He stood up. “If we’re going to get over the pass before nightfall, we have to do this now. It isn’t going to get any easier as the air gets colder, and if we camp, it may come after us.”
They took out bows and arrows from their baggage, even Shandi. Kel and the birds took to the air. In this instance, being mounted would not be any advantage, so the dyheli and Karles were to stay out of the creature’s range, and only come in to rescue them if they fell under its spell again.
Darian alone was unarmed, as he would need to keep all of his attention on his magic. Carefully, watching the ravine with every step they took, they approached the clearing. Darian’s heart was in his mouth with every step; his breath sounded very loud, and he had to control a start at every unexpected noise. When they were at the periphery, the birds went into action.
Diving and shrieking, they showed where the monster was hiding and teased it up into the open. Their talons could not harm the creature, but they annoyed it, and it lunged upward the full length of its neck as it snapped at them in irritation.
Oh, gods . . . it’s huge. How are we ever going to defeat this thing?
Now Kel joined them, sweeping in from the west, dropping clawfuls of stones and branches on the cold-drake. He was aiming for the head, but the drake was too agile for any of the weapons to hit the skull; most of them fell short, or bounced off the armored hide of the shoulders without touching anything. What Kel did accomplish, was to distract it from Darian down below, who tapped into the nearest ley-line and began the simplest of all magics - creating heat. His heart pounded in his ears, but he couldn’t allow himself to be distracted. With energy from the ley-line, he could pour heat into the ravine, warming the very stone around the drake. He concentrated on raising the temperature of the area surrounding the drake, though there was no perceptible effect for some time. They didn’t have arrows to waste; the only time that any shots were taken were when they were sure ones - clear shots at the creature’s eyes or nostrils, the only two vulnerable places on it.
None of those shots hit the mark; the cold-drake evaded the arrows even as it evaded the missiles dropped on its head - but it was angry, and getting angrier by the moment. If Darian had allowed himself to feel it, he knew he would have been terrified. The drake towered over them, its bone-white plates glinting with the sheen of ice. Its head was the size of a dyheli, the fanged mouth looked large enough to take in any of them whole, but they all fought against instinct to keep from looking it in the eyes. It hissed and snarled, snapping at the birds, threatening the humans around it with upraised talons. They had to keep it irritated and off-balance, but not get it angry enough to charge.
Darian shut his ears to the screams of the birds and of Kel, and to the battle sounds of the drake, which sounded like the tearing of canvas. Heat. That was all he dared think of.
The others came forward for a cautious shot or two, hoping for that lucky moment - being able to hit the eye and strike the brain. Kel must have given up on his idea of blinding the thing with a dropped tent-cloth, because he hadn’t come back for one. The drake particularly wanted a piece of Kel; every time he came by, the creature clawed the sky in his direction and gave one of those harsh battle cries. Kelvren pressed that advantage, at great cost to his endurance, engaging the cold-drake in a duel of feint-and-trick while staying airborne. A dive from the left would turn into a slip to the right in an instant, drawing the cold-drake up onto his hindquarters. That would be followed in an eyeblink by a blinding twist in midair, and the attack would be mirrored as the drake dropped back down to all fours again. Showers of ice crystals sprayed from the beast’s shoulders when Kel did get a solid contact in, but not even gryphon talons got a single blood mark on the drake. A well-aimed wounding strike was out of the question - Kelvren was using all of his skill just to stay alive and engaged.
Meanwhile, Darian kept concentrating, raising the temperature around the drake bit by bit. He could feel the difference in the air now, and by its behavior, so could the drake.
It was uncomfortable; it tried to move farther back in the ravine where the rock hadn’t been heated, but Kel wouldn’t let it, dropping quickly retrieved branches on it, stooping at it, hovering in the air just out of reach and screaming at it. For one fleeting moment, Darian wondered if he ought to call Kel off and let it retreat - but it was too late to change their plans now.
Darian kept pouring heat into the small space containing the cold-drake, and the beast began to react to the heat as a human would react to the cold; the swipes of its talons became less sure, it snapped its jaws on empty air, and its eyes took on an odd glaze. It was fighting off torpor, and they all moved nearer. Then Steelmind let fly a shot that hit the mark - one in the nostril. The cold-drake screamed, but in a far different way than the battle snarls and cries from the combat with Kelvren.
The sound went right through Darian’s head like a white-hot lance. He dropped to his knees, involuntarily clapping his hands to his ears.
Then Darian lost control of his magic; the birds shot away up into the sky, and Kel floundered out of harm’s way, landing heavily onto his side, behind their lines. The dyheli fled, though Karles stood his ground; all the humans cupped their hands over their ears; the scream went on and on, a sound that ripped through the head and stabbed into the brain.
We hadn’t - counted on - this! Darian thought with difficulty, his eyes watering with pain. The cold-drake clawed desperately at its nose, and finally dislodged the arrow; the screaming stopped, replaced by a whimper, as the monster dropped its head down on the ground and rubbed its wounded nostril against the earth. Steam curled up around the drake, and its body plates dripped with melted ice.
“That’s enough!” Keisha shouted in anguish. She stood up and staggered, unsure of each step, but seemed to have a purpose. She half-screamed again, “That is enough!” and marched toward the drake, her hands curled into fists. Darian stumbled to his feet and ran after her, but she paid no attention to him. She concentrated on the cold-drake, and the cold-drake was so preoccupied with its wounded nose that it ignored this small and insignificant morsel of prey marching toward it. But suddenly its head jerked up, and it stared at Keisha with eyes blank and widened. Bright red blood smeared down its snout, and ran freely from the wound in the nostril. The drake raised one claw, then curled it under its chest, staring at Keisha, yet somehow unable to focus upon her.
Darian felt a growing illness in his belly, adding queasiness to fatigue and the pounding headache. Ahead of him, Keisha was within easy striking distance of the cold-drake, and from his point of view, her small body was entirely framed by the red-spattered white mass of the cold-drake. Her feet were ankle-deep in the water runoff, both from the drake’s newly lost ice layer and the nearby landscape. Darian’s limbs seemed to move far too slowly, as he tried to gain on her, and the terror rose up inside him - was he about to see his Keisha die? But Keisha wasn’t affected by the eyes the way they all had been the last time. Could it be that Keisha was doing something to the drake?
“Yes!” Shandi shouted from behind him, and ran to join her sister, shoving Darian aside. The two women came to within striking range of the drake and stood there, staring at it. They were too close for Darian to dare shooting at the thing - especially with its ... head down?
Then it not only blankly stared at the duo, it raised its head to the fullest extent, and its eyes were widened and completely dilated. If Darian had not seen the cold-drake’s next move with his own eyes, he would never have believed it. It reared up and back - but not as if to strike. It bobbed its head and seemed to be cowering away from them, as if they were the most dangerous and threatening things it had ever seen. Its whimpers changed to a whine, and it slowly backed away from them, scrabbling backward across the rocks, claws slipping on the smooth, slick surface, without ever taking its eyes off them, moving up and out of the ravine and then down past the openly stunned Steelmind, and more rapidly down to the edge of the clearing.
It reached the edge of the forest, still walking awkwardly backwards, its tail actually between its legs at one point. Its own bulk made the progress painfully slow. Then, just as a large branch it had pushed aside snapped back into place, obscuring for a moment its sight of the two young women, it turned and ran - ran off into the forest, crashing through brush and briar and making an incredible amount of noise.
What did they - !
“Now! Let’s get past!” Shandi shouted, as Karles raced up beside her. She mounted; the dyheli each sought out a rider - no matter which one, they’d sort out the baggage later.
They raced up the pass at breakneck speed, following Shandi, who was in the lead. Kel kept watch behind, the birds in front. There was no one watching the flanks, but at the speed they were traveling now, they’d be past anyone on their flanks in short order.
Darian wouldn’t have thought the dyheli could maintain this pace uphill, but evidently fear was spurring them on; as he leaned down over the outstretched neck of his mount, there was no slackening of their speed as they reentered the forest, charged headlong through it, and exited again, higher up the slope. Now there was nothing between them and the pass - 
Then they were up to the pass itself, and over it, and if anything, their pace increased as they charged downhill again. They were out in the sunlight at last; the air was considerably warmer, and the hordes of birds and small creatures that startled and fled before their headlong rush testified that the cold-drake didn’t hunt on this side of the mountain.
Darian got a brief glimpse of something shining off to the west - it might have been water, but he didn’t get a good enough look to tell for certain. Then they plunged into the forest shadows again.
The dyheli kept running for a good candlemark, and only when their flanks were soaked with sweat and their sides heaving did they finally slow and stop beside a trickle of a stream.
Darian was off his mount in a heartbeat, as were the rest. Snatching up handfuls of coarse grass, they began wiping their mounts down. They pulled off the tack and did what they could, then the dyheli themselves walked off to cool down and take occasional sips of water.
Only then did Darian turn to Keisha. “You got into its mind? What was it that you two used? Fear?” he asked.
She nodded. “Fear. But I guarantee you, it is not in a way you would have expected.”
Steelmind commented, somewhat amusedly, “These two’ve certainly scared me before, so I can understand that. I thought it had to be something more. I didn’t think my arrow was that effective.”
Keisha grinned. “Effective enough. When you hurt it, that was the first time anything had ever touched it since it had left its mother and been on its own in the wilds. Literally it had never felt pain since the last time its mother disciplined it. And do you know how drakes discipline their babies?”
Darian shook his head dumbly.
“They bite the baby’s nose!” She laughed breathlessly.
Steelmind knit his brow, and shook his head slightly. “I still do not understand. You two are just humans, not the cold-drake’s mother.”
Shandi stepped over, her sweat-scraper and curry-brush still in hand, after tending briefly to Karles. “I’ll try to explain. The warmth Darian summoned was making it delirious and disoriented. It became more and more unfocused mentally, it felt more vulnerable as its armor’s ice layer melted, and its eyesight clouded, too, much like a developing infant’s. It thought about the last time it felt that way - when it was just a pup. So instinctively, even though we were just snacks for it, when that nose wound hurt so sharply, the drake felt as if we were bigger and more powerful than it for just a moment.”
Keisha picked up the explanation from there. “It’s like with a pony, if you pick it up off the ground as a foal, even when it’s full grown, it will think you can still do that. Lessons learned early in life stay just as big in any creature’s mind, and when someone is in pain they tend to act more childlike - that’s something we Healers know and use. That wound-scream jarred me out of my own fear and my Healing knowledge sort of welled up, and I remembered where I’d sensed that sort of reaction - from other wounded animals, and some badly injured people. The cold-drake didn’t know what was happening to it, and its instincts made it think of dear old mama. We just pushed more fear at it, using what we sensed its own memories of an angry mother were. I don’t know if I could have driven it off by myself, but when Shandi and I joined, there was enough to push it over the edge.”
Steelmind shook his head. “Empaths,” was all he said, but it was in a mix of bemusement and admiration.
“Well, how many more doses of that scream could you take?” Shandi retorted, glancing around for Kel. “I thought blood was going to pour out of my ears in a moment. I was in such pain from the scream I was damned well going to do something about it!”
“I have no arguments with what you did!” Darian assured them, waving his hands in the air for emphasis. “It worked, and that’s all I care about!”
Kelvren limped up, his left side somewhat scraped up but only slightly bloodied. “It isss good rrreass-soning,” he added, sounding complimentary. “It isss the mind that trrruly winsss orrr losssesss each battle. Talonsss would not accomplish in ten daysss what one well-placsssed bad memorrry of Motherrr did.”
Keisha frowned at the gryphon, and gestured with one finger pointing downward at her feet, then snapped her fingers. “Come here, hero. Let me look at that.” Kelvren gave her a withering look, but approached obediently and gently mocked, “Jussst do not thrrreaten me with yourrr Fearrrsssome Pow-errrsss, and I shall obey,” as he lay down to be tended to.
Shandi’s face abruptly clouded, and she looked back up the pass, anxiously. “Getting back, though - ” she started.
“We’ll worry about getting back when we have to.” That was Wintersky, who had been dragging their belongings into a rough circle. “I’ve been checking what we have left. Anybody object to staying here for the night?”
Darian shook his head. “I feel like it was me carrying the dyheli, not the other way around.”
:I am no frisking filly - my old bones ache after a gallop like that one,: Neta said ruefully. :With any luck the ladies have affrighted that cold-drake into a new hunting ground - it will eat its fill and retire into torpor as it properly should, and we will not need to concern ourselves with it on the return journey.:
Neta looked terrible - all the dyheli looked terrible, and Karles didn’t look much better. Their coats were drenched and streaked with sweat and dust; they hung their heads, and their legs trembled with fatigue.
“You lot, go lie down as soon as you think you can without cramping up,” he said in a quick decision. “We’ll mount guard tonight without you.”
:Thank you,: Neta replied simply for them all. One by one the dyheli folded their legs underneath them and dropped to the moss and grass; following Darian’s example, each of the humans pulled a blanket out of their bedrolls and draped it over the prone bodies so that the wet dyhelis didn’t take a chill.
Darian squatted down in front of Neta. “About the . . . loss of Gacher. I’m sorry. Is there any ceremony for his death that we should do?”
:It has already been done,: Neta mindspoke. :What you all choose to do regarding Gacher’s death is yours to determine.:
They made camp, although it was still light; the early stop gave them time to hunt and cook food for a change. Kel settled in beside Darian and Keisha after his own hunt; the gryphon still looked somewhat shaken, and settled down on his bandages as an easy way of keeping pressure on them.
“I did not know the thing would ssscrrream like that,” Kel said finally.
“None of us did,” Darian replied. “I don’t know that anyone has ever gotten close enough to a cold-drake to find out.”
“The only time I’ve ever heard of anyone killing a drake, it’s been three or four Adepts at a distance,” came Steelmind’s dry comment. “No one has even been stupid enough to try to take on one on foot that I know of, and survive.”
Darian smiled a bit. “We certainly qualify as stupid enough.”
“Maybe, but according to Kerowyn, the Shin’a’in say that if it is stupid but works, it isn’t stupid,” Shandi added. It looked to Darian as if she’d forgotten whatever grievance she had with Steelmind.
Then again, she’s probably storing it up to use some other time. When he least expects it.
“I can only say that I hope never to meet with such a thing again in my lifetime,” Hywel told them all solemnly. “Killing such would make the Manhood trial for a legendary hero, and I am no such hero.”
At that, Steelmind smiled slightly, got stiffly to his feet, walked over to the young tribesman, and dropped slowly to one knee. While Hywel watched, Steelmind handed the young warrior one of his own valuable watersteel fighting knives.
Hywel took it gingerly, appearing startled. “What is this?” he asked, perplexed.
“I have no place in my life for anyone who is sure he can do everything. You just realized - and admitted - that you’re not invulnerable, or unbeatable, or perfect,” Steelmind said solemnly. “By my reckoning, that makes you a real man. Now I completely trust you, and I’ll have you at my back any time.”
Hywel admired the knife - and what it symbolized - for a long moment, before Kelvren broke the silence with his own comment.
“If you want rrreal perrrfection, you mussst find a grrryphon.”

Eighteen

Fog surrounded the campsite; there had been no rain last night, but it was a damp, cool morning. Kel had gone out to scout out the way as soon as there was any light in the sky at all. Darian looked up at the sound of large wings, his breakfast uneaten in his hands. He couldn’t see anything in the mist, but a moment later, Kel’s wings blew the fog away enough for him to land beside the morning fire. Darian put down the broiled fish, uneaten. He’d been too keyed up for hunger anyway.
“If you rrride harrrd all day, you will rrreach a village at the edge of the waterrr, and it isss definitely Rrraven,” Kel said, breathing heavily. “I sssaw the totemsss forrr myssself.”
Darian started to breathe a little heavily himself. Don’t get too excited, he reminded himself. Raven is only the tribe that creates the vests. Mother and Father might not be there.
Oh, he could tell himself that, but it was impossible not to hope, impossible not to feel his heartbeat quicken, his nerves tingle. “Then let’s get going - ” he began, starting to rise, when a hand on his belt jerked him back down again.
“First, eat,” Keisha ordered, frowning. He knew that look. He ate, though the fish was cold and tasted like wheat paste. He crammed it down as fast as he could, washing it down with water.
He wished he could use magic to seek out the village and know if his parents were there, but he didn’t dare. Last night he’d felt the sweep of a search over them, someone looking for the scent of magic and mages, and had been very glad that he had not used any magic at all in guarding the camp. A mage, and a powerful one, had picked up the magic he’d used against the cold-drake, and was hunting for the one who had used it. He was under no illusion that the one hunting for them was friendly; there was only one powerful mage hereabouts, and that was the Wolverine Shaman. An Eclipse Shaman. There is no way that he can be a friend to us.
He’d hoped that the creation of heat was a minor enough usage of magic that it would have gone unnoticed, but in his heart he had known all along it was a vain hope. Maybe if the seeker found nothing, he’d assume the drake had eaten the mage that had tried to kill it. He would certainly find the drake alive and well - wherever it had gone to.
With the drake standing guard over the pass, it was no wonder that Wolverine hadn’t gotten this far - nor that Raven was so isolated from the other tribes. Surely the pass could only be traveled during the hottest days of summer, and only then at midday, when the sun reached every part of the pass and even a hungry cold-drake would seek a cool cave to sleep.
Darian was in the saddle before the rest of the group had finished loading their belongings in their saddle panniers. He curbed his own impatience at them; he reminded himself yet again that at this point they only knew that Raven produced vests with motifs that looked like those his mother had used in her embroidery, and that was all they knew.
But the moment everyone else was ready to go, he was off at a lope, trusting to Kel and the birds for guidance through the mist, and to the abilities of the others to keep up. The way led literally downhill, down the slopes of the mountain to the water; that made it easy for his dyheli. Everything conspired to help him except the mist; there were clear game trails to follow, the trails themselves were easy and not strewn with rocks, even the mossy turf was springy and dulled the sound of the dyheli’s hooves. His mount Jakir positively frisked his way through the trees, enjoying the run. He couldn’t see much through the fog, though - the nearest tree trunks, the lowest branches. He could just as readily have been running over the same piece of ground, except that the paths always led downward.
The others caught up with him, but he kept the lead; they broke unexpectedly into a meadow just as the sun began to burn off some of the fog and startled a herd of deer into flight ahead of them. As the fog thinned, they saw more and more of their surroundings, and they were nothing short of amazing; as lovely as a Tayledras Vale in a very different and far wilder fashion. There was water everywhere; in tiny rivulets that trickled down the mountainside and made miniature waterfalls, in larger streams they crossed in a single bound, and crystal-clear brooks that laughed through stone-strewn beds, in still pools full of fish, in the cool but humid air itself. Moss covered everything; rocks, tree trunks, branches; it hung in pendulous beards from the branches overhead, and cushioned every step the dyheli took. And everywhere was green, a thousand shades of green, from the black-green of water weeds in the pools through the blue-green and emerald of the underbrush, to the bright green of leaves overhead with sunlight shining through them. Even the light was green; Darian glanced back at Keisha, and saw she was looking about her with enchantment in her eyes in spite of the hard pace they were setting. The cool, damp air was full of wonderful scents; green growing things, the sharp scent of crushed pine needles, the ghosts of flowers, the promise of rain. Unfamiliar birds called in bell-like tones that echoed down through the branches, and from all around came every sort of song that water could possibly make, from the musical laughter of the tiny waterfalls and the gurgle of the brooks, to the steady, soporific dripping of water on leaves. But rather than lulling, the surroundings conspired to make him exhilarated, ready to do anything and everything.
They were getting dripped on themselves, of course, but today in Darian’s excitement it seemed more refreshing than annoying.
They stopped long enough for the dyheli and Karles to snatch a few mouthfuls and get a drink; the others dismounted to stretch stiff legs, but Darian begrudged even the time it took for that. He tried not to show his impatience too blatantly, closing his eyes to check with Kel and Kuari.
:You’re not far now,: Kel replied, :You’re making better time than I’d thought you could,:
:It’s all downhill,: he replied, greatly cheered by this. :How soon do we reach them at this pace?:
:Huh - maybe a couple of candlemarks, no more. But do slow down before you get too close - you’ll raise an alarm, galloping in this way, and I’d hate to see you shot full of arrows.:
Darian grimaced, but Kel had a point. Normal traders would not come riding in as if a cold-drake were on their heels. :Give me an idea where to slow down, and I will:
:Darian, I have to say that I have seen no sign of your people. All the folk here look like Northerners.: Kel parted with that information reluctantly. :Of course,: he added, brightening, :l know I haven’t seen all, or even most of them. There are surely some out hunting, and women in the log houses.:
Once again, Darian clamped down on both hope and disappointment, reminding himself that he was looking only for a direction, not for his mother and father in person. :Stay alert for trouble.: he warned Kel. :I caught the edge of a magic-search last night.:
He caught Kel’s assent, and turned his attention to Kuari, who flew along just behind them, with Win-tersky and Steelmind’s birds, who were much swifter, taking lead. :Anything to our rear, old friend?:
:Was tree-hare. Very tasty. No tree-hare, anymore.: Ku-ari’s mind-voice, overlaid with great satisfaction at an easy kill and the pause to eat it, made him chuckle in spite of his anxiety.
He heard the others mounting up, and opened his eyes again. “Kel says we’ve made better time than he’d thought we would, and we’re nearly there,” he told them encouragingly. Shandi made a movement that caught his attention, and he looked over at her directly.
“I want to borrow you and Keisha when we get there, to give Karles a boost for his mind-voice,” she said, in a tone that made it more of a demand than a request. Karles bobbed his head and stamped a hoof to emphasize the “request.” “The information about Wolverine is too important; I have to get it back home, so that it gets there regardless of whether or not we make it back.”
“That’ll take magic,” he said, with some reluctance, as his mount shifted restlessly under him. “I’m not sure that’s wise, given that - ”
Shandi eyed him with disfavor, and Karles snorted, giving him a similar look. “You picked up a magic-sweep last night, didn’t you? And you didn’t tell us.”
“So did I, and I didn’t tell you either,” Steelmind put in, mildly. “It doesn’t matter; nobody was using magic, so whoever it was - ”
“ - the Wolverine Shaman - ” she interjected with annoyance.
“ - won’t have found us. He probably thinks the magic we used was a futile effort against the cold-drake, and it ate us.” Darian finished the sentence for Steelmind. “But using magic again might tell him it didn’t.”
Shandi looked him square in the eyes, and Karles moved a pace closer. “This is my duty. I’m helping you with yours, it’s only fair that you help me with mine.”
Great good gods, they’re getting more alike with every day. Are all Heralds and Companions like this, I wonder? Her logic was inescapable, however, and he knew that she was right, even though it seemed to him that she didn’t have to be so forceful about it. He wasn’t all that hard to convince. He shrugged. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t help, I was only advising you that we’ll be putting up a big, thick smoke signal for anyone with the right kind of eyes to see it. If you believe it’s worth that risk, then we’ll do it, and try to do what we can to prevent anyone from noticing.” Shandi seemed completely satisfied with that; Karles tossed his head and gave a nod of agreement. “All right, then,” she replied, and swung up into her own saddle, the last to do so. “Let’s get moving.”
Once again, Darian’s heart was in his mouth, and his blood singing in his ears; the emotion filling him was a very close relative to the fear he’d felt against the cold-drake. As they walked their mounts toward the distant village, situated above an expanse of water so large he couldn’t see an opposite shore, he tried, and failed, to keep from hoping to see a familiar face among the people coming slowly to meet him.
And as they neared, and he could make out the features of the wary men approaching, he tried, and failed, to keep his heart from sinking with disappointment.
These were tribesmen just like any others; brown, lean, dressed in the felt and tanned deerskin garments of others they had met with. He saw vests on some, but they were all decorated with tribal totemic animals, chiefest among them being the beaky head of Raven. He stifled his own feelings, put on a smile, and walked forward with Hywel to introduce his group.
Of all the folk they had met so far, these were the friendliest, and the least suspicious - but that might have been because they wore tokens from Red Fox, Snow Fox, and Ghost Cat; tokens that were not given out lightly, from three relatively peaceful tribes. Learning they were ostensibly traders brought looser grips on weapons, and a few faint smiles.
“And what have you brought to trade?” the Chief of Raven asked, tilting his head to one side inquisitively. “I see no pack-animals. . . .”
“Dyes, oh, Chief,” Darian replied, slipping into his role of trader as easily as slipping on a well-worn slipper. “Colors such as you have not seen the like of. We bring another thing, also, and that is the learning of our Wisewoman - ” He gestured, and Keisha came forward, “ - who has the means to defeat the Summer Fever and the Hammer Lung, if you should be cursed with either, and will teach these things to you, in gratitude to the spirits who permit us to bring these trade goods to you.”
“Indeed!” The Chief looked impressed. “We have neither sickness among us, but we know of them. Can she teach such to our Wisewoman even if there are none so touched?”
Keisha bowed her head slightly. “I can, Chief, and gladly will. But since you have no sick in urgent need, would you look to our dyes?”
“We will; come, be welcome in the house of the Raven.” He waved them on, but Darian raised his hand. “We have representatives of our totems, Chief, and an ally you might find monstrous. We wish you to see them before you welcome us, for you must welcome all of us or none at all.”
The Chief nodded; as one, Darian, Steelmind, and Wintersky raised their arms, and their birds came in to the glove. Gasps of surprise, followed by admiration followed the appearance of the hawk and buzzard, but when Kuari came in, everyone stepped back a pace. Kuari looked about - as fast as his head could turn, for he knew how funny humans found the way he could swivel his head in nearly a full circle - and chuckles followed.
Then came Kel.
He did not drop in suddenly, he approached gradually, so that the tribesmen could see him approaching in the distance, with huge, graceful wingbeats, and become accustomed to him. It was still a dramatic entrance, though, and Kel was still an imposing figure that took even the Chief aback.
Kel folded his wings with immense dignity. “I grrrreet the Chief of Rrrraven from the Chief of Ssssilverrr Grrryphon,” he said, enunciating slowly and clearly. The Chief gathered his wits and his courage to approach.
“You are called a gryphon, then?” the Chief asked, looking up at Kel’s golden eyes and immense beak.
“I am; my name issss Kelvrrren,” Kel replied. “And in rrreturrrn forrr yourrr hossspitality, I beg you to accept my aid in hunting deerrrr and otherrr larrrge crrreaturesss while we arrre herrre.”
“Gladly!” the Northerner said with alacrity; it didn’t take a genius to figure out that so large a predator as Kel could be an enormous asset in hunting. “I thank you, and bid you welcome as well.”
They followed him into the circle of log houses, escorted by the warriors, who were relaxing more by the moment. Darian saw at once that there were scores of drying racks covered with a red-fleshed filleted fish, with smoldering fires beneath them. That made sense - in this damp, fish would cure better smoked than simply dried. But the sheer quantity made him pause and wonder if those stories about fish being so thick in the river that you could walk dry-shod on their backs might have a solid kernel of truth to them.
Keisha and Shandi spread out the contents of the trade-pack, together with the samples of dyed wool - drawn by the colors and encouraged by the actions of the Raven Chief, the women of Raven gathered closer to look. In moments they were passing around the bits of wool, exclaiming over the colors, asking if they could be painted on leather or used to dye quills or fur, while the men feigned indifference, coming up cautiously to Kel to discuss a future hunt.
As they clustered around Keisha and Kel, Darian looked in vain for one of the special vests, or any other sign of Valdemaran handiwork. He ached with impatience, he longed to take someone aside and ask about the vests, but he knew that now wasn’t the time. They had to establish a relationship with these people before he could go about asking questions of them.
Keisha got free for a moment, turning the questions over to Shandi and Hywel, since Hywel’s heart was truly into getting the best possible bargains he could, and Shandi loved bargaining. “Any sign of your family?” she asked Darian in Valdemaran, all the while smiling pleasantly, as if she was simply commenting on how eager these people were for their dye.
He kept his facade up as well. “No,” he replied, a bit louder, so that the tribesmen wouldn’t think they were making some sort of secret comments. “No, I haven’t seen anything, not a vest, not even a bit of embroidery that looks familiar.”
But just as he said that, something odd happened. A young girl at the edge of the gaggle of chattering women jerked her head up as if it was on a string and stared at him.
Then she was off like a shot arrow speeding to a target - the target being one of the log houses.
“What was that all about?” Keisha asked, having noticed it too. “That girl acted as if something frightened her.”
“I have no idea,” he replied, his attention more on his own concerns than those of a strange Raven girl. “Maybe she was just shy of being around strange strangers. Kel probably made her really nervous, then it scared her over the edge to hear a different tongue. It doesn’t seem to have bothered anyone else.”
Almost before he finished his sentence, the girl reappeared, pulling a seemingly reluctant woman along by one hand. The woman was protesting, and it was clear why. In her other hand she held a headless, gutted fish, and she had obviously been interrupted in the middle of preparing a meal. She was looking down at her daughter - for surely that was who the girl was - and laughing along with her protests. Then she looked up.
Darian felt his head start to spin. His jaw dropped; he grabbed Keisha’s arm, and stared. Older - yes - gray in the brown hair, a face weathered and lined with the cares of ten years, but - 
“Mother!” he shouted, and ran toward her. As if the world had slowed, he watched her reactions. She stared, first without any recognition in her eyes, then with puzzlement, then the look he longed for dawned, and grew, and burst forth like the sun coming from behind a cloud.
“Darian!” she shrieked - the fish went one way, the little girl the other, and she ran for him with outstretched arms.
He caught her up in his embrace, a tiny part of him bewildered by how small she’d become, and held her as he’d hoped to for too many lonely years. She hugged him, laughing and crying at the same time; she put both her hands about his face, looked into his eyes, kissed him, looked again, kissed him again. His throat swelled, and tears of his own streamed from his eyes, though his mouth was stretched in a smile so large the corners of his mouth ached; the smell of fish suddenly became the most wonderful perfume in the whole world.
By this time, of course, they had gathered a substantial audience, and not only the little girl was dancing around them, but a second, slightly younger one, and a littler boy, all chanting his name and tugging on their mother’s deerskin shirt.
As for Darian - he didn’t care. His mother was in his arms, babbling endearments - he held her tightly, babbling nonsense of his own. No matter what happened in the next moment, or day, or week - he savored where he was, right now, and no one could ever take it from him.
Darian looked dazed as well as blissfully happy, and Keisha held one of his hands as he and his mother slowly caught up on the last ten years. They all sat on benches or flat grass-stuffed leather cushions on the ground in front of the log house. She had insisted that he go first, plying him with honey-sweetened berry juice whenever his voice grew hoarse.
“So strange,” she marveled at last, shaking her head as a cool breeze toyed with strands of her hair that had escaped from her single braid. “Of all the things I had imagined you would become, a mage was not one. And a Hawkbrother! Your father will be speechless.”
“Where is Father?” Darian asked eagerly.
His mother laughed. “Where would you think? Out on the river, trapping fish this time, rather than four-leggers. You wouldn’t expect the loss of a mere foot to slow him down, now would you? Kelsie’s twin Kavin is with him.” She ruffled the hair of the oldest girl, who watched her brother Darian with undisguised adoration. The younger two, solemn six-year-old Ranie, and two-year-old Tel, snuggled against their mother’s legs. “I suspect that these littles came as a great surprise to you - ”
“I’d be lying if I said they didn’t, but they’re a wonderful surprise,” he replied, smiling down at the little girl Kelsie, then at her sister and brother. “I never thought of myself as a big brother before. But tell me what happened, from the beginning.”
Darian’s mother - Daralie Firkin, Keisha reminded herself, Her name is Daralie, Dar for short - sighed, caressed the hair of the smaller girl, and began. “We had just finished setting up camp, when - something happened. I don’t remember what being caught in the magic felt like, and I suspect that’s just as well. The next thing I knew, we were halfway up that mountain there - ” she nodded at the mountain to the north of the village. Even at this distance, there was a spot of terrain that was visibly different - no doubt the sphere of Valdemaran land that had switched places with the piece of terrain originally there. “Kullen was screaming, and no wonder, since his foot had been cut off clean. The fire had come with us, and - I don’t know where he got the presence of mind to do this - and he shoved the stump into the coals. That seared the severed veins off; if he hadn’t, I think he would have bled to death.”
Keisha didn’t need to be an Empath to know that those simple words concealed fear and horror that Dar still felt, even now. Keisha could not imagine being in her shoes at that moment - utterly alone, thrown onto the side of an unknown mountain by an unknown power, her husband wounded, perhaps mortally - 
She shuddered, then smiled wanly, and shook off the emotions her recollection called up.
“Thanks be to the gods, all our camping gear came with us as well - well, except for the corner of the tent that had gone along with his foot; I bound up the stump and dosed him with poppy. We had food enough for a while, so I nursed him while I studied where we were.” Daralie smiled thinly. “The most I could say was that I didn’t know. I put out trap-lines for small animals, and caught things that are like short-eared rabbits that live among the rocks, and built up our campsite into a small stone hut walled over with snow blocks - I had no idea how long we would be there, and I wanted to be ready for the worst blizzards. As it happens, we weren’t there for very long, and the blizzards aren’t bad as far down on the mountain as we were.” More of that years-old fear drained from her, and she smiled. “You might not believe it, but down here in the valleys the winter isn’t harsh at all; it seldom snows. And when snow does come, it doesn’t linger.”
“I have trouble believing that, indeed, given how chilly it is at the moment,” Darian replied, “But if you say it is so, I will try to believe anything you tell me.”
That brought a smile to his mother’s face, and she continued. “I don’t know what we would have done if we had been left on our own, but some of the hunters from Raven found us. They brought us here, and although we didn’t know it, we were intended to become someone’s slaves - but one of the Changed creatures attacked the camp first. By then, thanks to the Wisewoman, Kullen was up and about, and when the hunters couldn’t get near enough to the creature to kill it, we showed them how to build a pit-trap to take it. Would you believe it? They didn’t know anything but the simplest of snares!” She shook her head at the idea. “Well, that ended any talk of making us slaves, or so I’m told. We helped them trap any number of wretched Change-Creatures, clearing out the valley, and they adopted us into the tribe and made us their Chief Hunters. There isn’t much more to tell,” she concluded. “We taught them how to trap, and they taught us their ways. When we realized that we were right off the map, we gave up the notion of getting home. I knew that the people of Errold’s Grove would see you were taken care of.”
Keisha was glad that Darian had not mentioned the way he’d been treated by the Errold’s Grove villagers now, and she suspected he felt the same. Why cause Daralie any more distress? What was in the past could not be changed, and if things had not happened the way they had, he might not be talking to her now.
“I never gave up hoping that one day we’d get some word back to you, though,” she finished, looking up into his face with eyes that were the aged mirror-image of his. “That was why I kept sending the vests out. There was always that possibility that one day, someone in Valdemar would see one, would recognize the pattern, and ask about where it came from.”
“And that was brilliant, Mother,” he replied, kissing the hand that he held. “Of all the things in the world that are likely to travel, it is trade goods that travel the farthest.”
She blushed with pleasure at his praise, and spread her hands wide. “Well, we learned to live here, we came to love it, we prospered, the children came along - that is the sum of it. Here we do not count the passing of time by the day, but by the season, for the days are very like one another.”
Darian was saved from having to reply to that by the appearance of a fast-moving party of happily shouting tribesmen, with a limping man - Kullen, no doubt - and a boy in the middle. Darian shot to his feet, shouting “Father!” and reprised the running greeting he had given his mother, while Keisha stayed prudently behind.
Rather than joining her sons and husband, Daralie cast a speculative glance at Keisha. “Keisha Alder - your people are the Alders that lived south and east of the village?” she asked. “The ones with all the boys?”
Keisha nodded, and Daralie looked her over carefully. “A Healer and a Herald out of the same family - your mother must be very pleased and proud.”
“My mother is appalled and shocked,” Keisha retorted wryly. “Having her precious girl-babies turn out to be independent women with minds and vocations of their own was not what she had in mind. Husbands, spotless cottages, and grandbabies would have been more to her liking.”
To her pleasure, Daralie laughed out loud. “Good for you, Keisha Alder!” she applauded warmly. “Be sure you keep that mind of your own! Any man worth spending time with will value intelligence over a spotless cottage and a milk-meek maiden, however pretty she is.”
By the warm glance she aimed at her own husband, there was no doubt in Keisha’s mind what Kullen’s preferences were. Daralie was by no means a milk-meek maiden.
This is the woman that raised Darian - came an unbidden voice in the back of her mind. So, what was all that nonsense you were worrying about? Something about Darian really wanting a honey-sweet maiden in his heart of hearts, and not being satisfied with you?
But now the man and boy were approaching, with Darian between them, an arm around each shoulder. When Keisha got a good look at the boy, she was struck by how very like Darian he was.
Daralie followed her look, and smiled fondly. “He could be Darian at the same age,” she said softly.
“Kavin could not be more like his brother if they were twins separated in time.”
But this little boy will never have his mother and father wrenched away from him, if fortune smiles, Keisha thought, watching how the child looked up at his father with undisguised adoration that spoke well for the man’s parental skills.
Kullen Firkin limped heavily, and Keisha’s eyes went to the place at the end of his leg where a wooden form poked out of the bottom of his trews where his foot should have been. It wasn’t foot-shaped, but it wasn’t the peg she’d expected; it seemed to be the narrow end of a fat cone, which was interesting. I should try that shape with a patient some time. . . .
Where Daralie Firkin was small and slim (despite bearing five children), with soft, dark eyes and dark hair going to silver, Kullen Firkin was fair going to gray, with hazel eyes and a tough, wiry frame. The children, except for Darian, took after their mother rather than their father - but neither parent looked at all like the Errold’s Grove “norm,” which was to be brown-eyed, brown-haired, and stocky - muscular in the males, plump in the females. Small wonder that Darian had stuck out as the odd one.
Kullen was in tears, making no effort to hide them, and Darian’s eyes were wet again. Keisha almost decided to absent herself from the reunion, but the glance that Darian cast at her said so clearly, “please stay,” that she changed her mind.
The entire family, including Keisha, retired to the log house, where Darian again told an edited version of his experiences of the past years. During the recitation, several women brought in all of the components of a good dinner - fish baked in clay, roasted onions and cattail roots, a piece of honeycomb and some of the flatbread they’d sampled at Snow Fox.
Daralie thanked them sincerely. “We saw your dinner go flying - and one of the dogs got it,” said the oldest of the women with a wide grin. “It was no great matter to add food to our fire. You certainly have done it often enough for the rest of us!”
The fish was a new dish to Keisha, but it was something she thought she could get used to pretty easily. It had been rubbed with herbs inside and out, stuffed with onions, then folded into an envelope of wet clay, the whole buried in coals and ashes. Keisha had never tasted anything like it.
She felt very much the interloper in this family circle, but there was one thing that she could not help but notice. Daralie was no stay-at-home wife, no matter what she had been doing today when they arrived. It was clear from the conversation that Daralie and Kelsie would be minding the same fish traps tomorrow that Kullen and Kavin had tended today.
It was also evident that this was the ordinary state of things for them - and Kelsie and Kavin were given equal chores and responsibilities based on strength, size, and ability, not on sex. Tomorrow, in fact, Kavin would be helping his father cook, as well as doing some repairs to the log house.
During a break in the family conversation, when Kullen asked Darian some detailed questions about the fighting with Blood Bear, Keisha decided to be bold and ask Daralie a few questions of her own.
“How did the Raven people come to accept you?” she asked. “You aren’t a Man-souled woman, you’ve got a husband and a family, but you act like one.”
Daralie laughed softly. “Well, they didn’t have a choice at first,” she pointed out. “Kullen was in no shape to help them; I was the one with the trapping knowledge and the two strong legs to take me out into the wilderness. They had to accept me, but I can tell you they didn’t like it! It was a bit of a struggle; they did what I told them, but I got no respect in the village. And when Kullen was able to walk about again, they stopped listening to me at all!”
“So what happened?” Keisha asked.
“I don’t know.” Daralie shrugged. “The men had one of their ceremonies, and something happened there that changed them entirely in their attitude toward me. But they won’t tell the women what it was - and I don’t care, so long as they don’t treat me like a nonentity anymore.”
I wonder if the Raven intervened? That was the only thing Keisha could think of, and by the shrewd glance Daralie threw at her, she figured the older woman had come to the same conclusion. But of course, she didn’t know Keisha, she didn’t know how much exposure Keisha had to the totemic spirits and the beliefs of the Northerners. The average Valdemaran would not expect to find spirits intervening so directly in the lives of mortals, and might even greet such a revelation with thinly disguised disbelief.
“So - I take it that you and my son are - partners, after the Hawkbrother fashion?” Daralie then said, her glance sharpening. And before Keisha could answer, she added, “Do you intend to wed?”
Keisha felt the blood rush into her face, and she averted her eyes. “We had discussed it - but we didn’t make any plans. And then, well, looking for you was more important.”
“You would probably do all right living here with Raven,” Daralie replied, nodding knowledgeably. “You are a Wisewoman after all. You won’t have to fight for respect. They’ll give it to you without asking, and they won’t expect you to act like their own women; they already have a category you fit into.” That confused Keisha. “Why would I want to live here?” she asked, her brows knitting. “I’m a Valdemaran Healer - ”
“Because Darian will be here, of course.” Daralie looked over at her son with undisguised satisfaction. “Now that he’s found his family again, he’ll want to stay - and besides, Raven needs him. He’s exactly what we need.”
“What - what you need?” Keisha repeated, feeling uncommonly dense. “What do you mean by that?” The glance Daralie gave her made her think that Darian’s mother must feel the same. “We need his talents and training,” she said, with a touch of impatience. “He’s a mage. We need a mage. The Raven Shaman has only Healing magic, and our warriors are no match for Wolverine. Now that Darian is here with us, you can all help us destroy Wolverine for good.”
Keisha had a queasy feeling, and her food had nothing to do with it. Here with us? Our warriors? Help us? I don’t know how Darian is going to take this, but - like it or not, his parents are Ravens now!

Nineteen

The others had gotten wind of Daralie’s assumptions long before dinner was over, and it wasn’t long after Dar and Kullen excused themselves to put the children to bed that the entire group descended on Darian and Keisha and pulled them off to “discuss things.” They had their own campfire, far enough away from the Men’s or Women’s Fires that they were well out of earshot. They settled down around it, and Keisha knew what Shandi would say long before she said it. One look at her face while Darian put Raven’s case forward with all of his persuasive power told Keisha that he would never be persuasive enough.
“No,” Shandi said flatly, the moment he finished speaking. “Absolutely no. We are not going to get involved here. These are not our people, this is not our problem, and your parents can claim protection as citizens of Valdemar all they want - my answer to that is that they can pack up and come back with us.”
Shandi’s eyes told the story; nothing was going to change her mind. The girl who had seemed so sweet and gentle was gone, and in her place stood a young woman who was gentle only when she felt she could afford to be. She must feel this occasion called for her to be hard and strong. Shandi was not going to budge; she wasn’t even going to compromise.
But Darian wasn’t going to give up either. Not yet, anyway. “Shandi, they may not be our people, but this is our problem, or rather, it will be. How long do you think it will be before Wolverine eats up every little tribe north of the border and starts to contemplate taking us? I wouldn’t give it five years - and maybe less. They’ve already taken everything Blood Bear had and more, and it’s only because they’ve been going slowly and consolidating their conquests that they haven’t come after us.”
“So now you’re ForeSighted as well as a mage?” Shandi retorted, with no hint that she meant it humorously. “It seems to me that Wolverine is far more likely to stay up here in the north when they’ve taken in all the tribes. Why should they come south, when every conquering army that’s gone to Valdemar has come back in pieces, if at all?”
“Because in the south are riches,” Hywel put in solemnly. “In the south are herds of cattle and sheep, horses, grain and fruit for the taking. There are women with golden hair and red, with skin like snow and slim bodies, to become slaves. There are spineless dirt-digging men to be made into slaves to grow crops so that the warriors need never soil their honor with the cultivation of plants. There is gold, silver, gemstones. There is woven cloth, such as the traders bring, for slaves to make into brilliant tunics, warmer and softer than leather. And there are Healers who can cure all ills. That is why they will come.”
“They can trade all that for fur and amber, and not have to fight,” Shandi retorted. “They know what will happen if they bring an army into Valdemar. If Blood Bear was thwarted by a single village, what chance would they have against the army of Valdemar? We need only fortify the border; we do not have to stop them ourselves.”
Darian’s whole body telegraphed his distress to Keisha, but she was torn herself. Shandi was right; now was not the time or place to confront Wolverine, regardless of what would happen to Raven if they didn’t. After all, Raven could conceivably leave as a whole, and seek sanctuary with Ghost Cat if they didn’t want to fight or ally with Wolverine. They could join with Snow Fox and Red Fox; the three tribes united might well have enough force to hold Wolverine off. Confrontation was not their only option.
But part of her agreed with Darian; wouldn’t it be better to take care of the problem now, before Wolverine became an unstoppable force? Valdemar had faced a Northern tribes enemy before - wasn’t that why the Forest of Sorrows had been called a “defensive border?”
So she stayed silent, dropping her eyes when both Shandi and Darian looked at her for support. I can’t support either of them, she thought helplessly. They’re both right, and I don’t know which of them is more right.
From under her lashes she watched as Darian looked beseechingly at Wintersky and Kel instead, when he could not get backing from her.
Kel, at least, had no hesitation. “Darrrian isss rrright!” he hissed, his eyes narrowed as he glanced at Shandi. “You sssaw what they did to Rrred Fox!” His hackles came up and he snapped his beak for emphasis. “You sssaw with yourrrr own eyesss! How can you sssit therrre and sssay that we ssshould do nothing?”
“I think that what happened to Red Fox was a tragedy, but it’s not our tragedy,” Shandi insisted. “There are likely things like that happening in the Eastern Empire - or what’s left of it - at this very moment, and it’s very sad, but we can’t do anything about it. Life isn’t fair, Kel, and it’s not our job to make it so.”
“Sssketi!” Kel spat, clearly disgusted with Shandi and Karles together, since it was obvious from the way that they had drawn together that Shandi spoke for both of them. “You call yourrrssself a Herald, and sssay that? That isss cowarrrd’sss talk! If no one trrriesss to make the worrrld fairrr, then it neverrrr will be, will it? Ssso you will alwaysss have that to fall back upon! I do not think that the firrrssst Herr-raldsss in Valdemarrr made sssuch excusssesss!”
Keisha noticed that Shandi flinched a little at that, but she did not back down. Now she looked at Wintersky and Steelmind, seeking supporters of her own. Steelmind licked his lips and sighed. “I can see both sides,” he said reluctantly. “I can’t see that one outweighs the other.”
Relieved that he had put into words what she felt, Keisha looked up and nodded eagerly. “Exactly,” she said. “Both of you are right.”
“That’s my feeling,” Wintersky told them. “You know, none of us have ForeSight, so how can we know for sure what’s likely to happen? And - Darian, just what are we supposed to do; there’s only the nine of us - sixteen, if you count the dyheli. How big a difference can nine creatures make?”
“That’s a mage, a gryphon, a Companion, a Herald, three Tayledras and a seasoned Ghost Cat warrior,” Darian retorted. “It’s not as if we were nine plowboys!”
“It’s not as if we were an army either,” Shandi countered, glaring at him. “And what about our duty to get back home and warn Valdemar about all this? Karles and I can only send so much - Anda needs more than we can tell him - ”
By the sudden light in Darian’s eyes, Keisha knew that Shandi had given him an opening, and he saw a way to get her to compromise.
“All right. Then let’s at least get him some real information!” he insisted. “We can do what no one in Raven can. We can get in close to Wolverine and see what their numbers are, and what their equipment is! Why, I’ll bet we could even get in close enough to find out some of their plans, just by listening to the warriors’ boasting!”
Which would make us close enough to work a little sabotage, no doubt? Keisha thought. She knew how Darian thought; once they had worked themselves in that close, there would be opportunities to disrupt the enemy tribe, and no matter what Steelmind and Wintersky thought now, they would not be able to resist taking advantage of those opportunities.
Shandi frowned fiercely, and Keisha had a good idea what was in her sister’s mind as well. Shandi wanted, very badly, to object, but there was nothing she could really object to. She and Karles exchanged a long, wordless look, neither of them happy about the position they’d been placed in.
“I think that’s an . . . acceptable compromise,” Keisha said tentatively, and earned herself a frown from Shandi.
Of course, I’m not one of the ones who’ll be going on these scouting forays - 
“I think that’s the best answer, personally.” Wintersky sounded a lot more decisive than Keisha, but that was to be expected.
Kel, however, was clearly not enamored with halfhearted measures. “I ssstilll sssay we ssshould do morrre than that!” he began, but a look from Darian silenced him, and Keisha sensed another mind-to-mind exchange like the one that Shandi had exchanged with Karles. Kel’s beak snapped shut, and he looked a little happier; that was when Keisha knew that she had guessed right about Darian’s intention of adding sabotage to the scouting forays.
Steelmind looked from Shandi to Darian, and held out his hands, palms up. “I think that will work,” was all he said, with no elaboration on what he considered “that” to be. So he knew, or guessed, too.
Shandi gritted her teeth and glared, but it was obvious that she was outvoted. She gave in, but not with good grace.
Keisha, however, had extended a careful tendril of Empathy toward her sister, and there was more going on beneath that hard surface than Shandi was allowing to show. I wonder - will she go off by herself - To Keisha’s satisfaction, that was just what Shandi did; she exchanged another look with Karles, and got up and left the fire. The men interpreted it as going off in a sulk; Wintersky raised his eyebrows at Darian who shrugged, and Hywel snorted derisively. Steelmind looked defensive, but said nothing.
Keisha waited a few moments, then when the men began to discuss possible “scouting forays,” she excused herself and left. It was not at all difficult to tell where Shandi was; at least, not for her. Shandi might think she was away from all eyes, hidden in the shadows on the outskirts of the village, but Keisha followed a surer summons than vision.
Her senses led her correctly. Keisha approached her slowly; Karles was a white shape in the darkness and Shandi a dark, upright slash against him. “Shandi?” she said quietly. “Why didn’t you just tell the truth?”
The dark slash practically vibrated with tension; upon closer approach, Keisha could see that Shandi was trembling, handling an arrow wrapped in red ribbon. “What truth?” Shandi asked, in a tone very like anger - except that it wasn’t.
But Keisha knew what the emotion gripping her sister really was. “Why didn’t you tell them that you’re afraid?”
“Me? Afraid? What are you talking about?” That was bluster, and Keisha only needed to hear how Shandi’s voice shook to know it.
“I’m an Empath, too, Shandi,” Keisha said. The reaction to that could only have been predicted by someone who knew Shandi as well as her older sister did. Instead of blustering further when her bluff was called, Shandi dropped the arrow, and flung herself away from Karles and into her sister’s arms. Keisha held her as she had when she’d been much smaller, and had suffered an emotional, childish tragedy. Only now, she was a young woman, and this crisis was anything but childish.
Shandi shook in every limb, and sobbed wordlessly into Keisha’s shoulder; there was no point in trying to coax her to talk until she was over the first bout of tears. As Karles stirred restlessly, Keisha led her sister to a fallen log and got her to sit down on it. It took a long time before Shandi cried herself out enough to speak, but Keisha was perfectly willing to wait as long as it took. Poor Shandi! They taught her haw to handle other people’s emotions, but not her own.
“A chick can’t go back in the shell, and a young hawk can’t unfledge. I’m your sister, Shandi. We’ve grown up together, but we aren’t the same as we were when we were little. We’ve always trusted each other, so trust me now. You have to remember that when you wall things out, you can wall them in with you, too,” Keisha said into Shandi’s hair as she held Shandi’s head against her shoulder. Her own eyes stung a bit as she held back tears of sympathy. “Shields can work both ways - bottle up fear and it will eat you alive, sweetling.”
“But I’m a Herald - ” Shandi wept. “I’m supposed to be strong and dependable - ”
“Since when does that mean never showing fear?” Keisha countered. “You saw how we all acted, when the cold-drake caught us. Hawkbrothers, dyheli, and even a gryphon - we were all terrified and showed it. And since when is fear a bad thing? Fear keeps us from doing a lot of really stupid things. Hey, fear kept me from becoming a good little miller’s wife, right?” She smiled, trying to cheer Shandi, and pulled her a little closer, feeling very much the Big Sister once again. “It’s perfectly all right to be afraid about this. I know I am, and you can tell, right? I’m afraid - as far as that goes, really very afraid.”
“How can you possibly understand?” Shandi retorted. “You’ve faced all kinds of terrible things without being afraid! I can hardly stand the sight of blood! How can you know how I feel - ”
“How? I’ve lived with you, sweetling, or have you forgotten?” Keisha almost laughed. “I don’t even need to be an Empath to know, sister! You spent most of your life being a good maidenly daughter, then became the belle of the village - everything in your life was sweet, perfect, and predictable. Then suddenly you got Chosen - which is every child’s secret daydream, but there aren’t too many who would know what to do if it happened - whisked out into another world, with no family around, and put through strange schooling so fast it made your head spin. And as if that wasn’t enough on your plate, no sooner did you get someplace where you thought you might be able to catch your breath than you were thrown onto a dangerous mission that goes right off the map without anyone who taught you to help or advise you! You’ve seen some horrible things that you’d never imagined in your worst nightmares. And now this idiot mage wants you to help him fight an army? You’d have to be crazy not to be in a panic, and I know you aren’t crazy!”
Shandi had been silent through all of this - and now her body began to shake again as she clung to her sister. “How could you know - how did you guess - ” she sobbed weakly.
“Because I’m your sister and your best friend, and I love you,” was the simplest answer she could give - and must have been the best. Shandi completely dissolved in tears - and now, so did Keisha, tears that flowed down her cheeks silently, without the kind of painful knot she got in her throat when she was fighting to hold them back. But Keisha’s were tears of happiness mixed with relief, for now, at last, she knew that Shandi was never going to wall her out again.
It was well past midnight when Shandi had talked herself out; by then, Keisha was cold and stiff, but she wouldn’t have moved to save her soul.
“ - and the worst was when Kel said that the first Heralds wouldn’t have been so cowardly,” Shandi said, in a voice made hoarse with talking and crying. “He was right, I knew he was right - I wanted to sink into the ground, but I knew if I showed anything, they’d all think that the only reason I was against Darian was because I was afraid! And it’s not, it’s not, I swear it!”
“If you hadn’t spoken up, I’m not sure any of the rest of us would have said anything,” Keisha told her truthfully. “I mean, after all, we may each have our own private agendas, but at the heart of it, this is Darian’s personal quest we’re helping with. With his parents asking for help - how could his best friends let him down?”
Only now did Karles take the few steps needed to move to Shandi’s side and gently rub his warm, soft nose against her shoulder - and Keisha’s hands. Shandi reached up and patted his neck. “Karles - tried to help me, but - ”
:I am not an Empath,: Karles said simply, surprising Keisha once again by speaking to her as well as to Shandi. :I cannot shield her from her own fear, when I am just as afraid - I cannot even shield her from mine! This is not Valdemar, and I am ... out of my element.:
“We all are, to some degree or other,” Keisha told both of them. “Never doubt it.”
:But Valdemar is home, and I have never been away from it!: The plaintive note in Karles’ mind-voice came as a second shock; all her life she had been raised to think that Companions were near-invulnerable and infallible - 
:We are different, with a few powers, yes, and more experience, but hardly infallible.: Karles sighed heavily, and nuzzled Shandi once more. :Shandi and I are two halves of a whole; we complement and complete one another. That is the way of Herald and Companion. We are still as prone to weakness and mistakes as any other soul. If being Companion and Chosen made us infallible, think how many disasters in Valdemar’s history could have been avoided!:
“Good point,” Keisha replied, but kept her thought of and how nice of you to have finally admitted that! carefully under shields. “Shandi, do take it from an older and more experienced Empath - and not just your big sister - that you are doing yourself no good by keeping those walls up, inside and out. You need to do a certain amount of shielding, but not to the point that you feel nothing from us, and let nothing of your own emotion show! We need to know how you feel about things as much as you need to know how we feel, otherwise we cannot work with each other. Out here in the wild unknown, that could cost a life, maybe even mine.” Keisha smiled again and kissed her sister’s forehead gently. “Neither of us would want that, yes? Now let’s get some sleep, and see what matters look like in the morning.”
Is Darian thinking clearly? Is he so caught up in trying to impress his parents, to give them anything they need, that he’s not able to be objective? No doubt, Shandi was already thinking those things, without Keisha’s experience with Darian to bolster her faith in him.
And Steelmind needs to know more of how you feel than all the rest of us put together, she thought, but also under shield, as Shandi got stiffly to her feet and gave her sister a hand up. It wasn’t her place to give Shandi any advice about romance, and she wasn’t sure that Shandi would take it, even if it was her place. Maybe Shandi and Karles hadn’t seen it as clearly as Keisha had, as a result of how much they had tried to wall themselves off from their own emotions and others’, but day by day there was much more in Steelmind’s attitudes toward Shandi than a passing interest in a fellow traveler.
I’ve been lucky enough to find Darian. Maybe the best gift I can give to my sister is getting her to open up enough to see that Steelmind is right next to her. And, just maybe, when he sees she will open up to him now, Steelmind will open his arms to her. We are farther away from home than any of us ever imagined we’d be, and all we have is each other.
Darian woke up all at once, with the disorienting impression that Kuari was trying to dance a jig on the roof of the log house. Then what Kuari was trying to tell him penetrated his muddled mind, and a moment later he leaped from bed and was pulling on his clothes in grim haste, as Keisha stirred grog-gily beside him.
“What?” she managed, raising a face half-covered with sleep-tousled hair.
“We’ve got to alert the village,” he told her, for there was no time to tell this gently. “Kuari’s seen something. I think there’s something bad - a tribal army coming straight for us.”
:Kel!: he blasted into the gryphon’s dreaming mind. :Kel, wake up1.:
:?: The reply was foggy and inarticulate. :Food sleep preen mate fight what?:
:Up! Alarm! Enemies!: He kept his reply simple; it took a moment for Kel’s mind to get working. A moment later, Kel’s war cry ripped through the village, shocking everyone within hearing distance awake.
In another moment, Hashi’s howl started all the dogs in the village up, which ensured that no one slept. Darian left Keisha struggling to organize herself while he headed for the door to get the village mobilized. He was already outside before his parents, reacting to the unholy cacophony, pushed their way out of their sleeping cubicle. Keisha could explain to them; he had to get the rest of the village alert so defenses were in place before the enemy arrived.
Steelmind and Shandi burst out of the door of the log house they were guesting in shortly after he stumbled into the ghostly mist that swirled around the log houses, a mist that clung damply to him in the half-light of predawn. Steelmind whistled shrilly for his bird, and Karles pounded through the mist to Shandi’s side. She seized her saddle from the bench beside the door and swung it up onto his back as he skidded to a halt beside her. Hywel and Wintersky were next out the door, and the dyheli were all close on the heels of Karles, snorting and stamping with agitation.
Then the northerners began piling out of their houses, all sleepy, all confused, all babbling. Darian tried shouting his warnings, but his voice was lost in the general confusion and he despaired of making himself heard.
Then Kel put a stop to the noise by diving down out of the trees and braking with huge sweeps of his wings to land beside Darian, just as Hashi broke off his howl of alert and the dogs followed his lead. The wind of Kel’s wings cleared the mist; his sudden appearance silenced everyone, with shock and alarm, for no one here was used to a gryphon’s dramatic entrances. Darian took full advantage of the sudden silence.
“Our birds just alerted us, Wolverine is on the way, in force,” he called out. “Whatever defensive plan you’ve got, you’d better put it in motion now. We’ve got until dawn before they get here, and dawn’s not far off.”
There was no more confusion; the men quickly sorted themselves into defensive groups and headed for the stored weapons; boys and some of the women went for hunting bows and arrows, while the rest began dragging tied bundles of thorny brush into a defensive barricade around the perimeter of the village.
Shandi pulled herself into the saddle and trotted Karles over to Darian. “What do you want us to do?” she asked; her voice trembled a little, and she was dead-white, but she seemed steady enough. In fact, Darian was just as glad to see her finally showing a little fear; it made him less worried that she would try to do something comprised of equal parts of bravery and foolishness.
“Stand by,” he told her. “You’re the only cavalry we’ve got; I just hope Wolverine doesn’t have any riders. One person can do a lot if she’s the only one on horseback.”
Karles stamped a hoof loudly.
“Or on whatever,” Darian added.
Hywel had grabbed a boar-spear and picked out a group of Raven warriors to stand with on his own; that was perfect. He knew how to fight alongside these people, in their style; Darian dismissed him from his mind. Steelmind and Winter sky retrieved their bows and every arrow they owned, then sent their birds out after Kuari. Kel lumbered back up into the air to perch on the rooftree of one of the log houses.
How long do we have? he wondered, and joined his mind to Kuari’s. Through Kuari’s eyes he looked down on the approaching throngs of warriors and recognized one of the slopes they had passed yesterday.
His stomach lurched. Not long enough.
Wolverine’s fighters would be within hearing distance in a few moments; he didn’t bother warning the rest, since they’d be catching the sounds of jingling harness and men trampling through brush in a moment. Wolverine was no longer making even a token attempt at slipping up unnoticed.
And just how did they know they don’t have surprise on us?
The answer to that was clear enough as the second rank came into Kuari’s view.
Striding alongside a guard of muscular fighters dressed identically in leather tunics ornamented with an eclipsed sun instead of a tribal or personal totem was an all-too-familiar-looking figure. Darian’s nightmares were sometimes haunted by a similar, dark figure out of his past.
The Shaman of the Eclipse. Mage and Shaman in one, this fellow was in his late twenties or early thirties, bearded, shaggy-haired, and fully as muscle-bound as his personal guards. Unlike the guards, he had only token armor; a helmet, shoulder plates, arm braces. He also wore robes of cloth, not a leather tunic; black cloth, with the corona of the eclipse painted in scarlet on the breast. He wore the same style medallion that the last such Shaman had worn - the Shaman who had led Blood Bear to attack and conquer Errold’s Grove.
A Shaman you killed yourself, with a lot fewer weapons and no training, he reminded himself, as the sight of the man sent atavistic chills down his back. He tried not to think about how huge a part luck had played on that long-ago night.
“Their mage is with them,” he told the others - which now included Keisha and his parents, who had joined Wintersky, Steelmind, and Shandi. “He must have followed my trail from the pass.” Too late now to chastise himself for using magic at all; he’d done what seemed right at the time.
“They’re coming!” someone shouted from the barricade, and as the first scarlet hint of the sun silhouetted the mountains to the east, an unexpected breeze blew off the mist. The clearing in front of the village sprang up as if conjured from the fog - and there they were.
Darian swallowed, his mouth gone dry. Even if every man, woman, and child of Raven took up a weapon, they would still be outnumbered two-to-one. The only slim advantage they had was that they were the defenders. Their opponents, though not as well-armed as Blood Bear had been when they descended upon Errold’s Grove, were still formidable; all of them were fit, tough, and looked to be seasoned warriors, armed with swords, knives, and throwing-spears, armored with hammered-metal helmets, shoulder- and breast-plates, with vambraces and greaves over their leather tunics and trews. Cold-eyed and wary, they didn’t seem impressed with the defenders.
His heart went cold and sank into the bottom of his stomach. His chest went tight as the warriors of Wolverine lined themselves up before the defenses of Raven, making a loose formation of two ranks. The ones in the second rank had bows instead of javelins.
Oh, gods. It’s not all Wolverine either. . . .
He should have expected this, but somehow it had never occurred to him that there would be fighters sporting the totem of Blood Bear allied with those of Wolverine. There they were - not the half-human, half-bestial things that their Shaman had created, but more than nasty-looking enough. And by the wicked snarls on their faces, they recognized the three Hawkbrothers, too - recognized them as coming from the same folk as the instrument of their defeat in the south, at any rate.
I’ve got a very bad feeling about this.
Shandi eased Karles over to Darian’s side, and nodded at the Blood Bear contingent, who made up nearly half of the left flank. “Is that who I think it is?” she asked, in a voice that cracked a little.
“It is.” He didn’t take his eyes off the Shaman. If there was a single person commanding this force, it was this Shaman, and his control was absolute. After the fighters arrayed themselves in two ranks, they remained in place, and when one or two stirred restlessly, the Shaman quelled them with a single spearing glance.
Only when all of his troops had settled into immobility did the Shaman send his gaze questing over the Raven defenders. When his eyes locked with Darian’s, it was clear enough who he had been looking for.
Darian returned his gaze somberly, determined not to show a hint of weakness or fear. You want to start a staring contest? Be my guest. I’d rather we tried to stare each other down than started flinging arrows at each other. He tried to judge the level of the mage’s power without actually probing him, for a probe could be turned against him; the other man was probably doing the same.
The flows of power around the Shaman told Darian quite a bit - more bad news, since the Shaman had accessed a ley-line four furlongs behind, which crossed the trail the army must have taken. It wasn’t the strongest line Darian had ever seen, nor the strongest in the area, but the fact that the mage was accessing it at all meant he was at least Darian’s equal. Higher than Apprentice and Journeyman. Master, at least. How experienced a Master? There was no telling, but Darian felt altogether too new and raw in his ranking at the moment. I am not ready for a contest of mage-against-mage - he thought, as he accessed another power line.
But evidently the other was.
With a brusque motion to his guard to stand their ground, the Shaman stepped forward from the rest.
His voice, deep and mocking, with an underlying rasp, rang out across the clear ground between them. “Ho! Chief of Raven!”
With a tightening of his jaw muscles, the Raven Chief answered, though he did not step forward in turn. “I see you, Shaman of Wolverine,” he called, raising his chin in a gesture of defiance. “What brings you to Raven at the season of fishing?”
“A friendly visit.” the Shaman grinned, his teeth glinting whitely in the darkness of his beard. “You give us cold greeting.”
Darian felt his skin crawling at the sight of that smile. The Shaman was very sure of himself.
“Do friends come as armies, visiting with weapons in hand?” Raven Chief countered bravely. The Chief held his head high, his voice clear and steady. If he was worried, it wasn’t apparent.
The Shaman did not reply directly to that; instead, he allowed his gaze to drift back to Darian, then return to the Chief. “You have strange visitors,” he said instead, with a heavy frown. “Visitors who bear a strange resemblance to folk who caused friends and allies of ours much grief, some few years ago.”
“Ah?” The Chief tilted his head to one side. “That is odd; I had heard a different tale.” He scratched his head and feigned thinking hard. “There was something about an attempt to conquer the southlands that was thwarted by the inhabitants there. Something about Blood Bear being routed by a few birds and a handful of dirt-diggers and children - ”
There was a roar of anger from the left, and the Shaman had to divert his attention to regaining command of his own forces, while the fighters of Raven roared with laughter. Somewhat forced laughter, perhaps, but it served its purpose, which was to make the Blood Bear fighters angry and difficult to control.
Darian silently cheered for the Raven Chief; he was doing exactly the right thing, putting as much strain on the Shaman’s control of the troops as possible.
When the Shaman had regained the upper hand and returned to his negotiations, he had not lost a bit of his outwardly pleasant and half-amused demeanor. “That was ill-said, Chief of Raven,” he chided gently. “You have made our allies unhappy. I cannot answer for what they may do if you anger them a second time.”
The Chief shrugged, as if it was a matter of complete indifference to him. “Whether you can keep any grip on your own warriors’ collars is not my problem, Shaman.”
Darian hoped he could keep talking for the rest of the day - while they were exchanging barbed witticisms (or at least what passed for witticisms among the Northerners) there wasn’t any fighting going on. “Your allies are no friends to Raven,” he pointed out. “Why not send them on their way? Then, perhaps, we will consider offering you a warmer welcome.”
“Oh, Chief, I do not believe I can do that,” the Shaman said silkily, shaking his head with mock-sadness. “Much as I would like to oblige you. I believe they have some business with these visitors of yours.”
“I believe they do not. These visitors are related to Elders of my tribe and are traders; Blood Bear has no relatives here, and has never been interested in gaining goods by trade.” The Chief’s tone implied that the reason Blood Bear wasn’t interested in trade was because they preferred to steal.
Raven-spirit, this Chief of yours is as clever as any of the feathered tribe, Darian thought. Darian saw what he was up to - he was trying to divide the forces. For some reason, the Shaman of Wolverine wasn’t ready to attack yet, and might not support Blood Bear if they did. It would be much easier to handle the enemy if they came at the defenses a piece at a time.
“Really?” The Shaman’s arch tone betokened mock-astonishment. “You have some strange blood in Raven, then.”
“No stranger than a tribe whose warriors once looked as much beast as man,” the Chief countered, grounding the butt of his spear for emphasis. He looked down his nose at the left flank, and the Blood Bear fighters stirred uncomfortably. “The blood in Raven is different, perhaps, but strong. The Raven is lord of the skies. Even the Eagle does not interfere with him.”
“So you say; the Raven’s calls sound like empty croaking to me.” That was an open challenge, but the Chief wasn’t lured into taking it. He knew as well as Darian that their advantage lay in keeping the enemy talking as long as possible.
“For those who have not the learning or the wisdom, all good advice sounds like empty croaking.” There was the challenge turned back without having to answer it.
But the Shaman was losing patience. “You have one among your so-called visitors with dangerous learning,” he warned, pointing directly at Darian, who responded by standing straighter and staring back stonily into the Shaman’s gaze. “Or has he not told you? Chief of Raven, this man would make you think he is but a harmless thing, but he is a poison serpent among you. He has magic powers that he had not disclosed to you, that do not come from the spirits - ”
“But he has,” the Chief laughed. “He has told us all, and much more than you know. And we know him. You say he is a poison serpent disguised, but I say he is the guardian serpent across our threshold - ”
The Shaman smiled, and both Darian and the Chief - and everyone else knew that the Chief had finally said the wrong thing, and given the Shaman the opening he’d been looking for. “In that case,” the Shaman said quickly and gleefully, “Send forth your guardian, for a Shaman is a serpent-slayer, and let him contend with me. If you wish us to depart in peace, that is the least that we will accept. Send your guardian forth so that we will face each other, and see who has the greater strength; he whose power comes from the Spirits, or he whose power comes from nothing we recognize.” His tone turned silky and coaxing. “You have nothing to lose by this, Chief of Raven; only send him out. If he wins, we will depart.”
Keisha stifled a gasp of dismay, and Darian bit back a gasp of his own as his heart sank right down into his boots. Of all things, the very last that he wanted was a head-to-head mage-duel with someone whose power and abilities were a complete unknown to him.
And the Shaman had maneuvered them all into a position where that was precisely what he would have to do.

Twenty

Keisha stopped herself from grabbing Darian’s sleeve to hold him back. Her lover closed his eyes a few moments, took a deep breath, and stepped forward. To her left, Daralie made a little whimper, but no other sound of protest, though she caught Kullen’s hand in hers and Keisha felt fear coming from both of them in waves.
I’ll bet they never foresaw Darian confronting this mage face-to-face. They thought he’d just wave his hands at a safe distance and the Eclipse Shaman would fall into dust. Her throat was so tight it hurt to swallow. Too bad magic doesn’t work that way. ...
Darian looked cool and untroubled as he stepped up to the barricade of brush and waited for the warriors of Raven to use fishing hook-poles to pull the thorns aside, so he could pass; only Keisha and Shandi could really know how apprehensive he was.
The Shaman of Wolverine waved off his guard and stepped forward to meet Darian halfway between the two lines.
Keisha held her breath, as the two mages stared into each others’ eyes while they established the stance they wished to begin with. There was some distance, to prevent the bystanders from being injured - maybe. Of all the clothing Darian could have grabbed in his haste to dress, Keisha thought it was interesting that he had grabbed the leather tunic and trews that he’d worn for his ceremony with Ghost Cat. In the war of minds that was almost as important as the war of magic, Darian had gotten a boost with that outfit - he was supposed to be an outland southerner, but he was wearing the clothing of the tribes. Some of the Shaman’s power came from the belief his followers had in him - and Keisha sensed a stirring of unease among them.
Darian made a cool and calm backhanded insult to the mage he was facing, by turning his back to him for a moment - a wordless way of showing the mage was of so little concern he didn’t even have to keep an eye on him. Darian spread his arms, with his open hands at waist height, and two horse-lengths away from each hand, a wall of force grew up from the ground. As he drew his hands together, the ground churned up as if being plowed and the wall rose, looking like flattened bolts of lightning along its leading edge. When Darian’s palms met, there was a shimmering wall several times his height in a semicircle between himself and Raven, cupping him toward the Shaman’s side. Raising one eyebrow slightly, Darian turned to face the Shaman.
The Shaman grunted, and reluctantly mirrored Darian’s action - the intent being to keep the opponent’s attacks from harming the mage’s own forces. The churning earth sputtered up in large uneven chunks, less plowed-looking and more like they were hammered upward from below. There was a resounding thud when the force-wall kicked up a log. The semicircles were barely visible to those who could not see the energies and powers that lay beneath the skin of the world. They shimmered a little in the early-morning sunlight, as if each mage had a structure of the thinnest, most delicate glass built around them as they faced each other.
The two semicircles joined edge to edge with a visible flash, and Darian’s began to glow a very pale silver, while the Shaman’s restlessly flickered yellow. The effect faintly obscured the two mages inside, who backed away to get as much distance as possible between each other. No one would enter or leave now.
The Shaman struck first, abruptly; he leaped into action, arms flailing as if he threw a handful of stones, pelting Darian with what looked like white-hot shooting stars, so bright they hurt the eyes. Keisha moaned and flinched away, her heart racing.
Darian didn’t do anything outwardly, but the shooting stars bent their paths to either side, and bounced off something just in front of him, two of them slowing in midair before accelerating straight back at the Shaman.
The Shaman reached out, caught them, and with a sly smile, drew his arms up in a slow arc. He displayed the catch to his men, and crushed the sputtering fireballs in his raised fists in a pyrotechnic show of dominance.
Darian shrugged, as if the tactic hadn’t impressed him, and the Shaman’s smile turned to a frown. Is Darian going to attack next? Keisha wondered, her hands balled into fists at her side as she watched. The Shaman was obviously expecting him to do something equally showy in response, and his frown deepened.
Darian didn’t even shift his weight; he waited patiently, with no sign of agitation or anger. Why? she wondered. Steelmind had come up to her other side unnoticed; he put a comforting hand on her shoulder and she jumped.
“Darian is playing a waiting game,” he murmured in her ear. “When two Masters contend, there is no question of one running out of magic energy, for they use the ley-lines. Instead, usually the one who loses is the one who becomes physically fatigued soonest. Darian is rightly letting the Shaman expend his own strength first; he loses nothing by this, but if the Shaman were to play the same game, he would lose face with his warriors, who expect him to be aggressive.”
The Shaman tried another few volleys of those shooting stars, but however thick and fast they came, Darian deflected them without turning a hair. They looked impressive - as most of his magics likely were - but the blazing attacks were treated with such apparent indifference by his opponent, the Shaman must have realized this bit of flashiness was working against him.
The Blood Bear warriors, already keyed up and spoiling for a fight, had no patience with this onesided battle. They had been moving restlessly and muttering among themselves since the Shaman stepped forward. Just as Keisha glanced over at them, alarmed at a sudden rise in their anger, they charged the Raven defenses.
Their screams of battle drowned out her own scream of fear, and she stumbled backwards and would have fallen if she hadn’t caught herself. Steelmind had an arrow on his bowstring and another in the air before the enemy had gone more than a dozen steps.
With her mouth dry and her heart racing, Keisha backed up further, and set herself behind the shelter of a carved pole just as the first set of enemy arrows rained down on their lines. The war cries of the fighters and the screams of the wounded drowned everything else, and her stomach turned over with nausea as the metallic scent of blood reached her.
But something else pulled her out of her shelter; the need of those injured. She darted from cover, grabbed the nearest wounded man, and dragged him back to relative safety by his shirt. Then she went to work, blotting everything else out. Every man, woman, or child she could get back on his or her feet with a bow in their hands might give them a better chance. She couldn’t help Darian, she couldn’t wield a sword, but she could do this much.
And she would.
Darian watched the Eclipse Shaman through narrowed eyes, sensing the ebb and flow of power in the ley-line that the Shaman had linked to. He didn’t think it had occurred to the Shaman to do the same, and that gave him an edge in knowing when an attack would come, if not how. Then again, Darian had the advantage of Tayledras training, and not merely the standard training, but also Firesong’s version of that training. The Hawkbrothers were steeped in the precise and most efficient use of magic, passed on for many generations, and by comparison this Shaman was likely self-trained or tutored in rough skills at best.
The Shaman began to prowl his half of the circle, pacing back and forth, eying Darian with barely suppressed fury. Outside the circle, there was a battle going on; someone had broken the promise the Shaman had made. But neither Darian nor his opponent dared pay any heed to anything outside their wall of power; any distraction would give the other a chance to strike the fatal blow.
Darian began to move warily himself, watching the Shaman and nothing else, keeping the same distance between them at all times. Then the Shaman darted toward him, pushing his hands forward, palms out.
A massive wall of force hit Darian and knocked him backward; he’d have fallen if he hadn’t been moving himself; as it was, he had to dance sideways and fend off a second invisible blow, turning the force aside and into the wall of the sphere. That put him almost within physical reach of the Shaman, who made a grab for him.
He dropped and rolled out of the way, jumping to his feet and putting the fullest possible distance between himself and the Shaman again.
Again he watched the line even as he watched the Shaman, and again, an ebb in the power-level warned him before the Shaman attacked.
Hands blazing with power, the Shaman lunged for him; there was no time to move out of the way, so Darian used the oldest of all of his defenses.
The Shaman’s right foot caught on the earth for a critical moment; he stumbled and fell, catching himself with his outstretched hands. The power he had meant to use to blast Darian discharged into the ground, creating nothing worse than a blackened spot and the smell of scorched dirt.
As he fell, Darian ran out of the way again; the Shaman picked himself up with red rage burning in his eyes. Darian reacted to the immediate drop in power just in time by strengthening his shields; this time the weapon he used was anything but subtle. He lashed at Darian with levin-bolts, whips of power that looked and hit like lightning.
The levin-bolts arced into his shields with a crack that hurt his ears and an eye-burning light that made his eyes water. He held his shields against the bolts as the Shaman poured power into them and the air around him tasted of a thunderstorm at its peak.
Abruptly, the Shaman released the bolts; Darian could barely see. Blinking tears out of his eyes, he used Mage-Sight to watch the Shaman instead, seeing him as a form laced with little threads of red and yellow.
Those threads blazed up as the ley-line ebbed, but this time Darian reacted before the Shaman could; he made the Shaman’s foot stick again as the man moved sideways before his attack. The Shaman hadn’t expected an offensive move after so much defense; this time he fell hard, and while he was down, Darian lashed him with eye-burning levin-bolts.
He held the bolts on his still-prone enemy until his own eyes had time to recover, then leaped sideways just as he released them, and just in time, for the moment he did so, the Shaman hit him with the conjured weapon he’d been planning to use.
A massive sphere of energy rolled toward him, looking like fire with teeth, threatening to engulf him. He made a quick guess and assumed that the Shaman would expect him to run; he stood his ground instead, and held his shields. The sphere rolled right over him; it was dangerous in itself, for it immediately began to suck power from his shields, but it wasn’t as dangerous as the jagged spikes of energy that blasted out a pit right where Darian would have been if he’d run.
That made another obstacle to avoid. He solved the problem of the sphere by puncturing its outer wall; it deflated like a punctured bladder, and vanished as if it were a flame out of fuel.
The Shaman was furious. He was about to have his temper cooled. Darian detachedly reasoned out his primary advantage against this Shaman. The Shaman’s use of power was formidable, and his endurance considerable, but it was all oriented toward obvious, surface-visible effects - which was only logical considering he was a Shaman who also sought power among his people - when you want to discourage challenges and impress your followers, why not use the most awe- and fear-inspiring magics?
Darian, however, was able to work beneath the surface. There were springs everywhere underground here; they accounted for part of the verdancy, part of the humidity, and were doubtless under pressure thanks to the large body of water nearby. Darian found the nearest underground reservoir, and with a few deft hand motions to help in the mental process of sculpting the channel underneath, brought it powerfully to the surface, right beneath the Shaman.
Water blasted upward in a cold geyser, knocking the other to the ground, and soaking him in moments.
Two can play at making holes in the earth.
And while he was at it - in the next breath, he aerated the ground around the Shaman, creating an ear-numbing protracted thunderclap, then super-saturated the ground beneath the Shaman with water from that same geyser, turning it into a sinkhole. The Shaman predictably began to struggle, miring himself up to the waist - at which time Darian cut off the geyser’s feeding-channel, leaving the pressure to build below the surface. Another twist of the magic and Darian chased all the water out of the mud pit, leaving the Shaman embedded in rock-hard ground.
Raven kept the Blood Bear warriors at the barricade; none got past the hedge of thorns backed by heavier pieces of tree trunk. Keisha pulled ten or twelve of Raven’s wounded to safety, mostly struck by arrows. After the first three, she got into a rhythm; wait for a lull, dash out, seize the victim by the shirt, haul him to protection. Then break off the arrowhead, pull the shaft out, stop the bleeding. Once that was done, most of her patients went grimly right back into the fray without pausing for more than a drink of water. She could hardly believe it - they must have been in terrible pain! But they didn’t seem to feel anything; as soon as she had them reasonably patched up with rough bandages and supportive bindings they grabbed another weapon and went for the barricade.
The noise and stench were awful; metal clanging against metal, arrows piercing leather and skin, men and women screaming and shouting, punctuated with Kel’s war shrieks and the cries of the raptors - old and new sweat, blood, rancid grease, churned mud. It all overwhelmed the senses, impossible to block out. She couldn’t ignore the chaos, so she endured it, and after the tenth (or twelfth) man ran back to the lines as she finished tying off the bandages on his upper arm, she looked around for another patient and discovered to her surprise that there weren’t any.
There were no more arrows flying into their lines; the fighting on this side of the barricade was all hand-to-hand, but now the advantage was with the defenders. They could continue to rain arrows down on the back rank of the enemy without even taking combatants from the line - the women and young boys stood off at a distance, lobbing their arrows in a high arc over the Raven lines and into the back ranks of Blood Bear. Blood Bear hadn’t managed to breach the barricade, as the thorns still held them at bay, and as bundles of thorns were broken and trampled by the sheer press of bodies, grimly determined children came dragging new ones to be shoved into place with boar-spears.
Boar-spears - strangely enough, those were proving to give Raven a real edge. They were long enough to reach over the barricade and stab at the enemy without exposing their wielder to the thorns. The blade, long and sharp to piece a boar’s tough hide, was about the same size as the short-swords all of the fighters were using, and the iron cross-bar designed to keep the boar from coming up the shaft at the hunter made effective quillons. Anyone could use it to stab; really good fighters could use it to slash as well. Although the only fatal wounds to Blood Bear so far had been caused by arrows the spearmen were holding the line.
But where was Wolverine?
Keisha stood on her toes behind the shelter of her carved pole, and craned her neck to look over the embattled defenders.
Wolverine had not moved a single pace forward. In fact, some of them looked embarrassed!
They broke the Shaman’s promise, that’s why, she thought, astonished. Blood Bear has broken the promise the Shaman made not to attack while he and Darian were fighting. This wasn’t a case of Northerner against out-land Southerner, where anything was fair and promises didn’t matter - this was tribe against tribe, where strict rules held.
And Blood Bear had broken the rules. No matter who survived this fight, Blood Bear had blackened the name of their tribe. Even their own totemic spirit might choose to desert them, and no tribe or individual would ever trust the word of a member of Blood Bear again. That meant no alliances, no intermarriages, no trade agreements, no intercourse of any kind. Essentially, it meant the death of the tribe. The only way a member of Blood Bear could survive the shunning would be if he somehow convinced the Chief of another tribe that he had not participated in the oathbreaking; then he could be adopted into a new tribe.
Which means no adult warriors of Blood Bear, period. Only the women and children. Wolverine will throw them out as soon as the fighting’s over. Skies above - I’m actually witnessing the final death of the entire clan that attacked Errold’s Grove.
Wolverine wouldn’t raise a finger to help Raven, though. Their code of conduct didn’t extend that far.
Another man fell, and Keisha dashed out to drag him into safety. This time her treatment took even less time; a simple slash wound, shallow, with no arrow to extract. In a few moments he was back in his place, boar-spear in both hands, punishing the man who’d managed to reach him with savage thrusts of the spear.
One of the fighters in the rear of the Blood Bear mob pulled himself back and out of the fight; it was this movement against the flow of battle that caught her attention.
The fighter, who by his elaborately decorated, heavy armor, was someone of high rank, whirled to face the combat between Darian and the Shaman. He grabbed a discarded bow from the ground, took an arrow from the quiver still attached to his belt, and took aim at Darian’s back.
Keisha screamed, but her cry was lost in the general outcry. Her heart convulsed painfully, as she cried out a warning no one would ever hear - 
But someone did.
A huge, white shape streaked from the far right of the lines, launched into the air, and sailed over the barricade with the grace of a swan in flight. It was Karles, and Shandi clung to his back, her mouth set in a taut line, her never-used sword in hand.
Just as the warrior loosed his arrow, Karles reached him; Shandi’s sword licked out and, impossibly, deflected the arrow from its deadly flight.
Their momentum carried them on past; the warrior put a second arrow to his bow, cursing loudly in his own tongue. But now, Shandi was not the only one who knew what he was trying to do.
An ear-piercing shriek from above startled everyone into looking up. Kel had been voicing his war cries before this, but never anything like the one he produced when he realized who the bowman’s target was.
Kel dove down out of the sky with terrifying speed, shallowing his arc the faster he went and the quicker he approached the ground, fore-talons outstretched. The fighter had only time enough to cringe down, trying (in utter futility) to hide. Kel hit him with more force than a levin-bolt, doubtlessly breaking the warrior’s back in an instant, and pushed him level to the lay of the earth for over five horse-lengths.
Then Kelvren rose again into the sky, wings laboring, talons set firmly into the fighter’s shoulder and torso. The man screamed shrilly, writhing in what must have been incredible pain, for Kel’s talons had wrapped right around the protective shoulder plates and penetrated the joints between them and the rest of the armor, and the thumb-talon of the other foreclaw was surely right through the stomach. Blood oozed from the wounds, streamed down the armor, and splattered down on the heads of his fellows as Kel lumbered higher and higher into the sky.
Then he let go.
Still screaming, the man plummeted toward the ground, hitting it with a crunch that made even Keisha wince. The screaming stopped instantly and there was a moment of terrible silence.
Kel had dropped the man practically on top of the Wolverine lines. The Wolverine warriors drew back from the mangled body - then, incredibly, turned their backs on it. No one bothered to see if the fighter still breathed, or render him aid in any way.
The shunning had already begun.
None of this seemed to give the Blood Bear fighters pause for more than a few moments. A heartbeat after their fellow hit the ground, they were back at the barricade again. If anything, their fury had redoubled.
But now they had another target besides the Raven fighters behind the barricades.
A handful of them turned on Shandi and Karles; the Companion reared on his hindquarters, lashing out with fore-hooves, then dropped back to the ground to kick those trying to take him from behind. Shandi laid about her with her sword; together they accounted for three of their assailants, but more turned on them.
Shandi was screaming, but it was not in fear or pain. She was screaming, “For Valdemar’s honor! For Valdemar’s honor!” again and again, with each slash of the blade.
Steelmind vaulted the barricade, racing to Shandi’s defense. Hashi and Neta joined him, helping him fight his way through the packed fighters to Shandi’s side. Steelmind wasn’t trying to use any weapons; he seized fighters before they were aware that he wasn’t one of them and physically flung them out of the way, while Neta used her horns and hooves to good effect in clearing the path, and Hashi attacked any pair of legs that wasn’t protected.
Steelmind got to Shandi with only a minor gash on his head; once there, he pulled his climbing staff from the sheath on his back and began to use it with lethal efficiency. Neta and Hashi made a stand on her opposite side. Together, the three guarded Karles’ rear flanks, allowing Shandi and Karles to keep their attention on the enemy in front of them.
Steelmind’s staff - a deadly device with a spike on one end and a sharply-pointed hook on the other, with several grab knobs at regular intervals - seemed as light as a straw in the Hawkbrother’s hands. His buzzard, no longer slow or sleepy, joined the battle with a series of heavy stoops, knocking helmets forward to obscure vision, knocking helmets off completely, then returning to lacerate the unprotected heads with his raking talons.
Kel remained above, kiting on the strong wind, keeping watch over Darian. Meanwhile Shandi, Karles, Hashi, Steelmind, and Neta began working their way back toward their own lines. Kelvren then folded wings in for a moment and dropped to attack again, someone unseen, identified only by a short scream an instant later and the gryphon taking off again with a human arm in his beak.
With a dry mouth and a pounding heart, Keisha watched the horrifying battle her friends were engaged in, oblivious to the fighting going on immediately around her, her hands clasped tightly under her chin. She was afraid to pray, for who should she pray for? Her sister, or her beloved? Her friends, or her family?
Please, please, she whispered silently. Keep them all safe. . . .
Darian wasn’t aware he’d been in danger from outside until an arrow arced high over his head, piercing both walls of the magic circle. The Shaman’s smile warned him that he’d become a target, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off his opponent.
It hadn’t taken the Shaman long to blast himself free of his earthy prison - but it had taken time and physical energy, and the Shaman’s legs were badly bruised and lacerated from the effort. Darian had those few moments of rest, which the Shaman had spent in labor.
Now they circled warily; the Shaman staggered, somewhat the worse for wear, and Darian tried to split his attention, using peripheral vision, trying to spot the archer who’d taken that shot at him while keeping the Shaman under his eye as well.
Suddenly a shrill scream rent the air and stunned everyone on the field into momentary silence. Riding the scream down out of the sky came a bolt of golden-brown power, which hit someone in the melee and rose again, a shrieking bit of man-flesh dangling from his talons. It was Kel - and Darian hadn’t known the gryphon could lift and carry a man off before this. He wanted to gape in astonishment, but didn’t dare. He wouldn’t underestimate this opponent for a moment; the Shaman still had plenty of raw power, and the will to use it.
But he had weaknesses. He didn’t look for attacks that weren’t purely magical power. He only used visible magic manifestations. And - 
And he’s focusing every attack just on what I do.
The Shaman’s attention flickered away, as Kel dropped his screaming burden. The man hit the ground with a curiously wet crunch, and the screaming stopped. The Shaman turned his attention back to Darian, his mud-streaked face set in a snarl.
But not before Darian had managed to snatch up and conceal a rock in the palm of his hand.
They began to circle again, and Darian sensed the Shaman draining power for another strike. Now I have to put you right where I want you - 
He circled, feinted back, moved forward again. The Shaman followed his maneuvers with narrowed eyes, suspecting something. Then he glanced to the side, saw the shallow crater where he had blasted himself free, and graced Darian with a grimace of contempt. With exaggerated care, he stepped past it, then Darian felt the quick drop in ley-line power that warned he was about to strike.
That was when Darian threw the rock at him.
Startled, expecting it to be a magical attack, the Shaman redirected his power and shattered the poor rock to powder with a single blast. In doing so, he faltered back into the crater he had so contemptuously avoided.
But Darian’s meddling with the groundwater wasn’t over. As the Shaman stumbled into the crater, he sucked the spring’s water out of the area again; between his efforts and the Shaman’s, that particular piece of ground was on the verge of becoming a sinkhole big enough to swallow a house, and when Darian removed the groundwater, the surface layer of sandstone gave way.
Instead of swallowing a house, it swallowed the Shaman, who disappeared into the earth with a hoarse cry. Darian fused the stone, using the same technique he had used to create the water channels for the bathing spring at the Vale, and the startled Shaman was buried up to his knees in sifting, crumbling earth while his ankles and feet smoldered.
Then Darian brought back all the water, and more, dancing back to avoid getting dropped into the sinkhole himself as the earth crumbled around the rapidly growing - and filling - crater.
Ten heartbeats later, the Shaman’s half of the wall winked out of existence.
Darian took down his own half, and stood staring into what was now a roughly circular pond of very muddy water, but the only thing that arose from the depths was a few bubbles - then nothing at all.
He looked up, slowly, to face the Wolverine lines.
For a long moment, he stared defiantly at the warriors, who stared back at him wearing expressions of incomprehension and dismay. No one moved. He clasped his hands before him in the same gesture he had used at the beginning of the duel, and waited.
Then one of the men at the far right broke, babbling, and ran, stumbling away as fast as his legs could carry him. That was all that was needed; a heartbeat later, the retreat had become a rout, the brave fighters of Wolverine taking to their heels as fast as they could, even casting off armor and shedding weapons so that they could run faster.
In a sudden reversal of tactics, the Blood Bear fighters turned from the barricade and flung themselves at the easier target within their midst. Steelmind’s staff moved in a lethal blur, but there were too many around him, fighting to take him down; he went down under a pile of bodies. Shandi wrenched Karles’ head around and forced her Companion back, coming to his rescue; the Companion bit, lashed, and kicked like a demon-horse as Keisha watched in agony, certain she was going to see all three of them die before her eyes.
Then, just as suddenly, the warriors of Blood Bear broke and ran.
Keisha didn’t bother to wonder why; as the Raven fighters pushed aside the barricade and poured after them, she followed, heading straight for the place where she had seen Steelmind go down.
She found him - and Shandi and Karles with him. Shandi was on her knees, clutching the front of his tunic and weeping over him. Keisha shoved her aside without a word, sending her tumbling, and took her place.
Oh, gods. This is bad, very bad. There were many, many internal injuries; someone had landed a terrible blow to his back, and another to his stomach. He’s bleeding in there and I - She knew with dismay that neither she, nor she and Shandi together had enough power to save him.
But someone else did.
She looked up; grabbed Karles’ dangling reins, and pulled his head down to the same level as hers. She looked defiantly into his eyes, and let him know without any words at all that she wasn’t asking for his help - she was ordering him to give it.
He stared at her blankly for just a moment, then the power came flooding into her in a blue-white torrent.
If water were to be compared to power and energy, being caught in the midst of Karles’ strength was akin to swimming that flooded river so many weeks ago. But she had swum that river, and she would direct this power now!
Fiercely, she flung herself into the battle to save Steelmind’s life, just as fiercely as any Raven warrior had fought at the barricade. She transmuted the blue-white beam into the gentler green energies of Healing and the golden ones of strength, and poured both into the shattered shell that was the Hawkbrother. She pieced together bone, mended torn and bleeding veins and arteries, soothed bruised tissues, and reinforced Steelmind’s own faltering strength. She did things she hadn’t even known she could do, galvanized by the unending flow of energy. This was something like the time she had Healed Hywel’s brother - except that this rime she was in no danger of losing herself.
The moment that everything she needed to do was done, and there was nothing more to do except that which only time could accomplish - the power was gone.
She dropped abruptly out of her Healing trance with a mental thud, and opened her eyes to see Shandi bent over Steelmind, both of them taking turns babbling about how much they loved each other.
Karles looked at her, then at Shandi, and snorted. Keisha got slowly to her feet, wobbling a little, feeling more than a bit light-headed. Karles hadn’t given her a single iota of power more than he’d had to, but somehow she didn’t resent that.
After all, Companions are supposed to help us with problems, not solve them for us. Karles looked up again just as she thought that - and nodded his gore-spattered, beautiful head, winking.
Darian walked slowly toward what was left of the barricades, which were now being pulled apart by industrious women. The Raven warriors were on the heels of Wolverine and Blood Bear, making certain that they took themselves over the pass, the news of their defeat with them. More women, boys, and a few old men followed their own fighters, each carrying leather bags or small fishing nets - harvesting the discarded arms and armor. They were no fools; they could alter the style and fit of what was once Wolverine’s, and make it Raven’s.
He saw Karles first - then Shandi, Keisha, and Steelmind. For one horrible moment, he feared the worst.
Then Shandi helped Steelmind to his feet; she draped one of his arms over Karles’ back, and the other over her own shoulder, then began walking him back toward the village. Darian heaved a sigh of relief.
Keisha looked up as a shadow went across them, to see Kelvren wing heavily overhead, returning from overseeing the Wolverine warriors’ retreat. His landing was imperfect and he nearly buckled; it was not too hard to see why as his left side became visible. There was a deep gash from the top of his beak, through the cere, and a nick in his eyelid, clearly from the same blow. His nares freely bled distinctively dark red blood which flowed to mix with the lighter sticky red of his foes’, most of which had dried with loose feathers, dirt, twigs and other debris glued into it. The broken ends of two arrows showed from the blood-matted feathers in the leading edge of his left wing, and in his left thigh. As he landed, clearly in terrible pain, he raised his head high and bellowed, “Arrre therrre any morrre left? Brrring them on!”
Keisha and Darian cried out, in unison, “Kelvren!” and quick-walked - since they had little energy left for running - to the wounded gryphon.
“Arrre therrre any morrre left to fight?” Kelvren demanded, eyes pinning, his gaze darting right and left. Darian grimaced, seeing what had happened to his good friend. “No more left, Kel. We won. They’re all gone now.”
Kelvren gazed off in the direction Wolverine had fled and then slumped down onto his hindquarters, leaning right, and finally collapsing onto his side without even folding his wings. “Hurrrrhhh - then I will rrressst. Darrrian, Ssshin’a’in arrre might - being conssspicuousss attrractsss arrrowsss.”
Swaying a little, Keisha turned to Darian, with both hands outstretched. They fell into each other’s embrace, and that was all he needed or thought about for a brief, but blissful moment, broken only by Keisha murmuring in his ear.
His heart lofted skyward with joy, and his heartbeat in his ears sounded like wingbeats.
They had made it through every ordeal, despite fatigue, pain, and fear. Together.
Keisha was in an awkward position, in quite a few ways. Physically, she had one foot under Kelvren’s head, and her other leg across his neck, snugged around the nape and all but unseen underneath the mass of feathers. Kelvren himself was flat on his belly, with Darian straddling his back, keeping his wings safely folded by sitting on them. The gryphon had his beak clamped around a bedroll, and flinched every time she pierced his cere with the needle.
Kuari, feeling drowsy, was perched atop a chair back nearby.
“I know you don’t like this, Kel, but I have to get this gash stitched up,” Keisha softly said, and she hoped she actually sounded as reassuring as she was trying to. “The powder is dulling the pain as much as it will, the rest you just have to cope with. Bite down on the bedroll instead of me, and we’ll be through with this in just a little while, all right?”
It wasn’t just her physical position that made her feel awkward and strained right now, though. They were also in the middle of a discussion with Darian’s parents, who hovered off to the side and projected nervous tension like a thunderstorm sent out lightning.
“Father, you know that I love you, but I am a Knight of Valdemar now and an Elder of my Vale. I do like it here, I truly do - but I cannot stay here and be a part of Raven. There are things happening back home that I have to tend to.”
Daralie nodded slowly, her expression very neutral. “And that does say it all, doesn’t it - back home. There, in Valdemar, and at your Vale. We always taught you from an early age that home is a place in your heart, Darian. Sometimes the place in your heart can also be represented by a place in the world. If it is where you have to be, then you have to be there.”
Kullen nodded, agreeing with his wife’s words, though his expression was much more grave. “Darian, we are so proud of you that there are just no words in any language to tell you how much. When we lost you, we carried around a hole in our hearts for years. Even with what we were going through up here, we thought of you, or rather – we thought of you as we last knew you. When we were separated, our only influence on you was what we’d taught you already, and we hoped that you remembered. We wish we could have been with you, all that time you were under Justyn’s care, but fate did not have it so. We loved you then, and as for who you have become - we do not love you any less.”
Kelvren rumbled deep in his throat, not quite a growl, but close. He was reacting to the stitching, not what was being said, but it made a strange counterpoint to the discussion. At least the most delicate part - the eyelid cut - had been completed first. Wintersky limped by, conversing with Raven’s Chief, and glanced in at the tableau briefly. They both seemed to surmise in the same instant what was going on between Darian and his parents, and drifted off discreetly after no more than a short wave.
Kullen shifted his weight off of his crippled leg. “Son - who and what you have become, we could not have given you. You are a wonder to us, and to all of Raven, too. You’ll be spoken of here for a long time - Darian, the Hunters’ Son, the Owl Knight, the Shaman of the Earth-mother who can call up fountains and crack stone with a thought, to defend the people - and more stories yet to come.”
Darian looked from his mother to his father, and even though he tried to soften the blow of his words, he couldn’t. They still carried a hint of bitterness. “I didn’t come this far to become a tribal hero. I came here for you.”
“We know, son, we know,” Daralie spoke, and then she paused when Kelvren flinched strongly, biting hard enough into his gag they could all hear the bedroll’s stitches popping. She resumed a few seconds later, filling the uncomfortable silence of the moment. “All of you will be welcome back here, I hope you know that. But - before we even came here to talk to you, we knew what the outcome would be. We haven’t survived this long without knowing how to listen to our hearts, and - we can’t go back to Valdemar with you. We also know that you can’t stay here with us.”
Darian’s jaw set and his muscles were visibly tense, but that was nothing compared to what Keisha sensed from him. He was angry, disappointed, frustrated - upset at a very deep level over this news, yet - there was an undercurrent of relief, as well. Keisha sensed that inside, this was one of the end results that her lover secretly wanted. She sensed an undercurrent of - 
Relief? Happiness at - freedom?
Kelvren growled, jarring her attention back to the task of stitching the wound. Darian straightened his shirt, and replied.
“Mother. Father. When you were gone, I had only feelings of fear and abandonment. I also had myself, and one more thing. I had my memories of you.”
Darian’s eyes clouded in introspection. “In a way, this entire journey was not coming back to you, it was a way of confirming that my memories were real - that even though I remembered that you loved me, I wanted to be sure of it. When you go from childhood to manhood, everything changes, until you’re not even sure that the very things that made you were real. Now that we’re reunited, we have found that it was real. Then. But then is not now. Now, we are new people, and we love each other all over again, in a new way.”
Darian is good at this. Maybe he learned it from Firesong, or maybe Silverfox - how to pick the right thing to say, to soothe and support the listener so the meaning of what is said doesn’t crush them. He has the heart of a Healer, that is for sure. That may be why I love him so much.
Kullen nodded, his arms crossed loosely, listening to Darian intently. Daralie rested against her husband’s shoulder, squeezing his nearest hand slightly - something very natural between them, Keisha could tell, and long-practiced.
I wonder if, when we are that age - may we live so long - we will be that easy with each other, that comfortable. Kullen just lists to the side, already knowing that Daralie will be there. They do not have “powers” like Empathy and Healing, these Gifts, but just look at them. Being in love is enough.
“You have a new home now, and so do I. Mine is far away from here, but your hearts will always be my home. My heart will always be your home. I have to return to my work in Valdemar and the Vales, with the woman that I love.”
Darian looked at Keisha with an expression that showed no doubt in that statement at all.
Another moment, and Darian looked back to his parents. “I love you both, so much.”
“We love you, too, Darian,” Daralie half-whispered. “We are so proud of you. And what you have done for this tribe is - ”
Darian smiled a little and shook his head, holding up one hand. “ - is done lovingly, for no charge, price or demand. It was done for the principle, for the honor, and for you.”
Kullen grunted, and nodded once, in acknowledgmerit. Kuari hooted softly, as if answering, then twisted his head to receive a slow scratching from Darian while his bondmate collected his thoughts.
Darian took a deep breath. “Personally, though I need you to do something for me.”
Darian clasped his hands in front of him, and despite his own bandages he stood perfectly straight up and strong. “You have children now, my brothers and sisters who I’d never met before and, honestly - who I just don’t know. I may never know them. We are siblings by blood, but not by culture, except for one vital link.”
“The link is you, and your knowledge . . . the things that you can teach them. Teach them that their oldest brother is a Knight of Valdemar, and that he is a Hawkbrother, and teach them what those things mean. Teach them that his friends of many tribes, cultures and species came here to defend Raven, and them. Teach them that they can live, and love, and actually fulfill the kinds of duties and risks and grand adventures that you used to tell me about in hero stories when I was just your little boy, Mother. Teach them that it isn’t beyond their reach, that they can be brave, and travel, and learn amazing tilings, and do what is compassionate at whatever cost, Father. Teach them for me, because I cannot be here to do it myself.”
Daralie wept, and Kullen’s eyes looked near to crying as well. Keisha held her breath, and as she knotted the last stitch of Kelvren’s wound, a teardrop from her own eyes fell on the blotting pad.

Epilogue

“Ho,” Keisha said adamantly, and Ayshen’s face fell. “No flower arches, no procession from the village, and especially no ceremonial dance. I hate those rigid dances - too much structure. I feel like I’m spellcasting, not celebrating, when I’m stuck in one of those things.”
Ayshen looked to Darian for support, and Darian shook his head. “We’re all agreed on this, old friend,” he said with sympathy. “You got your chance to drag me through all the ceremonies you wanted last spring. We want a small and private ceremony, a modest celebration, and that’s that.”
“No fireworks,” Steelmind put in. “No invitations to every Vale within flying distance. No canopies carried by hovering gryphons.”
“You can invite the tervardi to come sing, though,” Darian added thoughtfully, and Ayshen’s snout lifted a little.
“Couldn’t we manage to combine it with the Harvest Faire?” he asked hopefully. “Think what a fabulous celebration that would make! And with all of the symbology of the coming fertility, and new births the next spring!”
Keisha and Darian exchanged a glance. “I don’t suppose the Tayledras are familiar with the concept of elopement, are they?” she whispered, as Ayshen launched into another set of grandiose plans.
He laughed and held her closer, and she snuggled into his embrace without a shadow of doubt coming between them. “Maybe we ought to consider introducing it to them,” he whispered back, and she stifled a laugh against his shoulder.
Ayshen glared at them. “This is your future I am planning! Aren’t you paying attention?” he asked irritably.
All four of them exchanged a look, and burst out in helpless laughter.
“Ayshen, my friend,” Steelmind chuckled, “Gods and spirits laugh their loudest when a mortal makes plans, and doubly so when they make plans for another.”
Reluctantly, Ayshen backed down, sitting back on his tail. “It is true that weddings are not so much for the ones being wed, as for their loved ones. I suppose that after all that has happened, you just want peace.”
Darian hugged Keisha’s shoulder, and confided, “Just about now, some time alone together sounds very, very appealing.”