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

 “Iwant 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.