If the people of Red Fox themselves had not been so determined to take Shandi’s solution and follow through on it, Darian would have had a harder time with his conscience. As it was, it was difficult, very difficult, to persuade himself that the tribe would do as well without his help as with it.
But the survivors greeted the morning’s “revelation” by the three co-conspirators with unquestioning belief and even enthusiasm. It didn’t hurt that the eldest of the three widows confided to Darian with a look of wonder that she really had dreamed of the Red Fox spirit. Furthermore, she wonderingly said that in her dream the spirit had bestowed its approval of all that they had said and planned, and it had told her to tell the rest of the people to do as these special foreigners - the “Trusted Not-of-the-Tribe” - directed. Whether her own mind manufactured the dream, or it was a true vision didn’t really matter at the moment; what did make a difference was the reverence. She almost palpably projected a glow when she told the rest of her tribe of the manufactured vision. Because the spirits had approved of it, it became true for her and for her two co-widows. Their belief was contagious; it didn’t even require the mental nudging of the dyheli, which had been his private, emergency plan.
When one of the younger widows lamented her husband’s loss again, the older woman gained a sudden look of extreme serenity and replied, “The Fox says, ‘Do not let yesterday use up too much of today,’ child.” Two heartbeats of utter stillness followed, and then the older woman bent to pick up some of her belongings to prepare for the journey. Whether that had been clever acting or an actual contact with the Fox Spirit he did not know, but the effect was startling. One by one, the rest followed suit.
Kel, Hywel, and Wintersky went hunting that day as well, making certain that the village would have meat enough to carry it through not only the next fortnight, but the necessarily slow journey to Snow Fox. Steelmind, Shandi, Karles, and the dyheli “hunted” growing edibles and collected firewood.
Perhaps “collecting” was an understatement. They hitched the dyheli and Karles to downed trees, which were then dragged to the village; before long there was an enormous line of them in the clearing, waiting to be chopped up. It was an exquisite irony that so many of Darian’s youthful indiscretions had revolved around collecting firewood, and now here he was, in charge of firewood yet again.
Darian remained behind to help the survivors plan their journey, help Keisha, and chop the wood - with the help of the strongest of the girls, women, and any of the men fit to swing an ax or a mallet. Many of them were impressed by the high quality of the Tayledras axes, and marveled at Wintersky’s folding ax. And from the fierce and controlled anger with which the women dealt with their woody “adversaries,” Darian figured they were getting more than just stockpiled wood out of the exercise.
For him, the day passed quickly. He took a great deal of his own anger out on the wood; it felt good to imagine the faces of the Wolverine raiders and strike with his full strength behind the blows.
Everyone was so exhausted by the end of that day that they all went straight to bed relatively early. But there was none of the depression and gloom hanging over them that there had been; having a place to go and things to do to get ready for the migration had altered the entire mood of the tribe.
He had no illusions about the damaged psyches of the women, however. What they had endured would have to be dealt with eventually - but he trusted, having met and worked with him, that the Shaman of Snow Fox would be able to give them help.
Or if he can’t, their own tribal spirits certainly will.
So he went to sleep feeling, if not cheered, certainly with his conscience doing little more than an occasional mutter.
They left only when they all felt that they had done as much for the tribe as was needed; there was firewood piled high, racks and racks of meat drying, all manner of stores to tide these people through the difficult weeks ahead. Keisha had done as much as she could, given the brief amount of time she’d had to work; time and their own bodies would do the rest. The women had a purpose again, the men a reason to heal and get on their feet. The despair was gone, and there was even a glimpse of hope, now and again. These people were ready to stand on their own feet. If they weren’t to become dependent on their benefactors, it was time for Darian’s group to leave.
So they rode out on the morning of their fifth day with Red Fox, though not precisely as they had ridden in. If there were no cheers sending them off, there were grateful farewells, hands pressed silently but fervently, eyes with life in them again. If Darian did not feel good about leaving them to carry on without any more help, he didn’t feel bad about it either. As they took their bearings and departed from that path of browned and dying underbrush, heading once again for the pass between two mountains to the west and north, Darian felt the weight of another responsibility descend on him. Now they knew that Wolverine was out there, raiding, looting, and killing. They would have to be twice as vigilant as before.
He also held a secret from Keisha and Shandi, which made him feel a bit guilty. It wasn’t a major secret - but he wasn’t sure how they’d react if they knew it.
Kel hadn’t won the hearts of Red Fox with his gifts; the dyheli had insinuated the concept of friendly, helpful, protective gryphons into the minds of the tribesmen long before the group ever reached the village itself.
Now that was meddling, by any standard. The dyheli didn’t think of it that way; they considered it as being helpful, easing the way, making certain that the humans of Red Fox got no more traumatic experiences. However, they had planted a concept in the minds of the unsuspecting without consent or permission.
Quite frankly, at this point, Darian was in accord with the dyheli. Things had been difficult enough without having to calm hysterics and panic. They needed Kel’s help, and needed to be able to have him come and go openly.
According to Kel, their detour might have been a good thing in a tactical sense. There were no wide meadows between here and the pass, nothing but thick forest. At least the group on the ground would have cover the entire way.
Yes, but so will any Wolverine raiding parties.
Hardly a comforting thought.
:Excuse me,: Neta said politely into Darian’s mind, :but there is something rather badly wrong in these woods. I don’t know what, precisely, but it’s too quiet.:
:I agree,: Hashi spoke up. :There doesn’t seem to be anything around here bigger than a tree-hare, and even the tree-hares are staying high up. I haven’t scented anything of a decent size since we crossed that last big stream.:
Darian didn’t like the way the forest felt either. The trees were a little farther apart here, letting plenty of sunlight through, and it should have been correspondingly more cheerful. But it wasn’t; the forest felt empty, hollow, like that deserted village they had encountered.
Could Wolverine have hunted this place out? he wondered. That might be the explanation, and yet it didn’t feel right. For one thing, there wasn’t any sign of humans hunting - the broken undergrowth, trail marker ties, remains of camps, that sort of thing. For another, he didn’t think that even a tribe like Wolverine would hunt an area bare.
They had been climbing steadily all day; they had managed to journey over all the territory between Red Fox and this final pass without crossing paths with any more raiding parties. There shouldn’t be any reason why they wouldn’t be on the other side of the mountains by tonight. Then, provided the information they had was correct, they would be within touching distance of Raven. And my parents?
The shadow of the mountain fell across their path; it wasn’t just cool here, it was cold. Darian shivered, and out of the corner of his eye saw Shandi pulling her cloak closer. I’ll be glad when we get across, into the sunlight. Who would have thought it could be this cold at the beginning of summer? Small wonder that the Ghost Cat villagers had not been prepared for the summer heat in Valdemar. He was just glad that for once it wasn’t raining. In this cold, rain would feel like drops of ice.
There was another small clearing coming up ahead of them, one with a brush-filled ravine running along the left side. As they cautiously entered the clearing, Hashi and Neta were running flank guard, Kelvren was high above, Kuari was running tail guard, and the other two birds were in front. It was better to have the birds in front and behind; they could cover more ground than Neta and Hashi. It’s too bad they don’t have a way to pick up scent, but -
There was a flash of motion. Out of nowhere, something huge and white reared up from the ravine, stretching up and up, and Darian froze. He couldn’t move; all he could do was stare upward, at the strange eyes that whirled and pulsed in the snakelike head two stories above the ground. . . .
. . . . how . . . incredible. . . .
Was there someone calling him? Well, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but those eyes. He forgot everything, even his name; all he wanted to do was to stare into those eyes forever. They were beautiful. He’d have thought his Clan, his Knighthood, and his quest were all useless if he’d even been able to think of them. The eyes were all that mattered. All else narrowed to them, or rather - yes, the eyes engulfed him. There was nothing above or below or around him that was of consequence, or was even noticed as missing, for that matter. There was only those eyes.
Just as abruptly as the drake’s appearance, his mount went from immobile to active in a heartbeat. The dyheli spun in place, wrenching his attention from those hypnotic eyes, lurched into a run, and fled back down the way they had come. Greenery and stone flashed past at incredible speed, making even the view through Kuari’s eyes when they were linked seem plodding by comparison. Holding on for dear life, Darian’s dyheli caromed off the side of another one laden with supplies, which went down into the underbrush. Darian’s knee and shin hurt immediately from the crushing blow against the dyheli’s ribs, but the fallen dyheli was nowhere to be seen now. He looked around desperately. The noise of cracking branches and clattering gear mixed with a climbing whine behind him - a shrill one he had never heard before, much like the death cry of a rabbit, but forced from larger lungs. The dyheli he had crunched against struggled to get back up and then vanished into a pillar of white - the cold-drake’s open jaws crushed down upon the flailing dyheli and there were three swift thrashing bites. The dyheli was dead, somewhere back there, but the scenery blurred past and the line of sight was gone. He wasn’t alone; all of the dyhelis were stampeding back down the path, with Karles and Shandi in the lead. He shook off his pain and hung on like a leech as his mount lurched down the slope just a breath away from a disastrous stumble.
That was a cold-drake. Oh, gods, that was a cold-drake! Now that he wasn’t under the creature’s spell, he knew the danger of what it was, and could put a name on it. He knew what must have saved them, too - Neta, out there free and not under the cold-drake’s mesmerizing gaze. She had exercised her own Gift and had taken over the minds of every other dyheli and probably Karles, too. Then she had made them all stampede away from the danger zone; the cold-drake wasn’t swift enough to keep up with them.
The dyheli traveled across the forest floor in huge bounds, snapping Darian’s head back and forth until he got into the same rhythm as his mount. The dyheli didn’t usually break into this “stampede gait” when mounted, and he could only thank his luck that there was a saddle between him and that knobby dyheli backbone. As it was, his neck muscles hurt, and so did his head.
As abruptly as they began their run, they ended it, bouncing in three or four steps to a halt a safe distance down the pass. The others came to a stop beside him, with the dyhelis shaking their heads so hard their ears flapped as Neta let their minds loose. Last to stop was Karles, and it seemed to Darian that as the Companion walked toward them, his expression was decidedly sheepish.
Now it hit him - how close they had all been to a distinctly unpleasant death - and he began to shake with reaction, the sour taste of fear in his mouth. One more heartbeat, and we’d all have been dinner. Oh, gods.
Keisha looked puzzled; Shandi still confused. “We lost - we lost Gacher. What happened?” Keisha blurted. “What was that? Why did the dyheli all run?”
:Gacher has died. The herd ran because I made them,: came Neta’s mind-voice. :As for what that was, I do not know; only that it was dangerous. It had you all spell-trapped with its eyes and mind.:
“It’s a cold-drake,” Steelmind said flatly. “Thank you, Neta; that was precisely the right thing to have done. You saved us all - except for poor Gacher. I hope his death was a swift one.”
:It was,: Neta confirmed.
“I don’t understand. I’ve studied all the weirdlings we were likely to find up here. Cold-drakes are normally dormant in the summer,” Steelmind continued as he wiped his hair back from his face. “I wonder what woke this one up?”
“What’s a cold-drake?” Keisha wanted to know.
Kel interrupted the conversation, coming in beside them for a noisy landing, his beak agape with agitation. He swung his head around, counting them silently, and heaved an enormous sigh of relief to see the humans all present. “I sssaw the drrrake!” he said, “But you all rrrran beforrre I completed a ssstoop.”
“It’s just as well that you didn’t connect with it, Kel,” Darian told him, dismounting and clasping Kel’s neck - even though his own legs were still shaky. “One gryphon is no match for a cold-drake.”
“Will someone please tell me, what’s a cold-drake?” Keisha repeated insistently. “And why couldn’t I move or think?”
Darian and Steelmind exchanged a look, and Darian answered. “A cold-drake is a magical construct, like a gryphon; they were created during the Mage-Wars as offensive weapons, but the problem was that they couldn’t be controlled, and turned on their own side as often as not. They’re eating machines.”
“But they use mind-magic,” Steelmind continued. “They freeze their prey in place, then move in and strike, or dine at their leisure depending upon their mood. That thing caught all of us, every one that could see its eyes. If Neta hadn’t done what she did, we’d be sliding down its throat right now.”
Karles hung his head, as if he was ashamed that he had not somehow resisted the cold-drake’s gaze. Steelmind noticed, and turned toward the Companion. “No one is immune from a cold-drake,” he said, for Karles’ benefit. “I don’t care who or what you are. When you’re in front of a cold-drake, you belong to the cold-drake.”
Shandi patted Karles’ neck sympathetically. The Companion didn’t say anything that Darian could hear, but he understood the Companion’s chagrin; he shared it.
You’d think I would be able to shake that damned thing off. . . . How had he managed to get so completely under the monster’s power in so short a time?
I didn’t even get a good look at it before it had me!
It took one look at Hywel to realize that he did not have the worst of it. Darian was, by comparison, a war-hardened general compared to the young Ghost Cat warrior. In his past he’d been routed, ambushed, beaten up, surprised, attacked, and scared out of his wits before. It was Hywel’s first time for being totally, utterly helpless, face-to-face with death when there was nothing he could do about it. Hywel looked just as white as the Ghost Cat itself.
“How are we going to get past that thing?” Hywel stammered, aghast. “Does it ever sleep?”
“Yes, but they’re like spiders; they sense the vibrations of the ground if anything bigger than a mouse walks on it, and wake up immediately,” Steelmind told him. “I don’t think we could drive it off or lure it away either - they are very, very territorial. If we want to get through that pass, we’re going to have to kill it.”
“Oh, great,” Darian muttered, as Hywel’s eyes went round. Being magical constructs, cold-drakes were, to some extent, designed to be immune to the effects of magic. “What I don’t understand is why it isn’t dormant - it’s summer.”
“It’s also cold.” Steelmind looked over his shoulder at the mountain behind him. “With this shadow falling over the pass for most of the day, and being so high up, it doesn’t ever really get warm. That’s probably why there aren’t any animals here - the drake has hunted the place bare, and the animals don’t get a chance to recover their numbers in the summer.”
“It could be awake because it didn’t get enough to eat to support dormancy,” Wintersky said thoughtfully. “Unless it moves to a new territory, it’s going to starve to death.”
“Well, we can’t stand around and wait for that to happen,” Darian replied with irritation. “And it just got fed.”
Kelvren dipped his head toward Neta and intoned solemnly, “I am sssorrry forrr yourrr losss.”
Neta returned the gesture, and her gaze went from buck to buck. :It is a risk Gacher knew he was taking by volunteering for this journey. He knew before coming that such things could happen to him. It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.:
Darian could only nod, even though he knew Neta was speaking to the bucks and not to him. As much as he had questioned the human morality of Neta’s powers, those same powers had just unquestionably saved their lives.
Darian’s mind was soon preoccupied, thinking on the ways to get around the drake. Wintersky went from one dyheli to another, checking them for injuries and making a mental inventory of what gear was lost when they fled. We’re so close -
“We could go back,” Shandi pointed out. Dead silence dropped over them all; Darian looked at each of his party in turn. Shandi wouldn’t look him in the eyes. Hywel looked solemn and frightened; Wintersky thoughtful. Steelmind just shrugged. Only Keisha met his eyes completely, and looked just as determined as he was to continue.
“We can’t stop now,” Keisha said firmly, and cast a withering glance at her sister. “That would be giving up.”
Shandi shrugged off the criticism. “It’s no shame to give up under the right circumstances.”
Keisha didn’t even dignify the comment with an answer; instead, she turned to Steelmind. “Do you have any idea what we can use against this creature?”
“Not at the moment,” the Tayledras replied, with a look of admonition at Shandi. “But we’d better think of something other than bows and arrows.”
“Heat,” Darian muttered, after half a candlemark of debate. “That’s the key, I think. They thrive in cold, and even magically generate it. It might not be directly vulnerable to magic, but if we can weaken and confuse it with heat, we can kill it.”
“You think,” Shandi put in.
Darian was getting more than a little irritated with Keisha’s sister. Every time someone suggested something, she had a quelling remark. “Look,” he said finally. “You wanted to come along on this journey. I didn’t ask you for your help, but you, and Anda, and your Companions decided you needed to be with us, so you came. We’ve established a safe route back through the tribes, so why don’t you just go home? You’ve been helpful, but you aren’t doing anything that we can’t afford to lose.”
Shandi sat straight up, offended; Keisha, on the other hand, moved slightly closer to Darian. Steelmind raised an eyebrow, and licked his lips. “Is there a problem, Shandi?” he asked carefully. “Why are you trying to discourage us from going on?”
“I - ” She looked around uneasily. “We already have so much information about the Northerners - and we know that Wolverine poses a danger to us back home if they continue to expand. Don’t you think we have a duty to get back with that information?”
“Don’t you think we have a duty to help our friend find his parents?” Steelmind countered. “That was why we came here.”
“Yes, but - ” Shandi looked confused.
“You could go back by yourself, if you want to,” Steelmind continued. “But it seems to me that you would be going back on the agreement you made with Darian if you did that, and I suspect that you feel the same way. Is that why you’re being so negative, trying to get us all into agreement to give up and go home so that you won’t have conflicting duties?”
Shandi flushed, and had a hard time meeting his eyes. She couldn’t meet Darian’s either. Something in what Steelmind had said had hit home.
“All right, then; you’ve tried and failed, so give it a rest,” Steelmind said decisively. “Either be helpful toward our objective, or be silent.”
Shandi flushed again and bit her lip; she obviously wanted to make a retort, and didn’t want to do so in front of the others. Darian exchanged a knowing glance with Keisha, feeling conspiratorial. The first lovers’ quarrel? Could be. And I think he’s going to hear about it from her when there isn’t an audience. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to give up at this point - but he and Steelmind had faced other monsters in the past, and he wasn’t going to let a mere monster stand between him and finding his family. They’d encountered spirit manifestations before, but this cold-drake was, for all of its fearsome power, still flesh and bone.
“What else can we do?” he asked. “Can Kel and the birds confuse and distract him without getting into range of his eyes or teeth?”
“We could drrrop thingsss on him,” Kel said meditatively. ‘Sssimple but effective grrryphon tactic. Rocksss. Trrreesss. Perhapsss, if my luck isss good, I could drrrop sssomething over hisss head?”
“Just before we’re ready to go for the final kill - even if you don’t get the thing over its head, you’ll distract it. A shot at the eyes themselves is not likely except from directly in front of it, and we all know what the danger is there.” Steelmind fingered the hilt of one of his watersteel knives, thinking. “The main thing is to keep it from freezing any of us again.”
“Could we just sneak by it?” Keisha asked diffidently. “Wouldn’t that be better? If you use any magic at all, Darian, you’ll show the Wolverine Shaman where you are. He can’t ignore the presence of a Master mage so near to them.”
Darian grimaced. “I know - but we can’t do this without magic, and no, I don’t think we can just sneak by it. You heard what Steelmind said about how it’s sensitive to footsteps.” He stood up. “If we’re going to get over the pass before nightfall, we have to do this now. It isn’t going to get any easier as the air gets colder, and if we camp, it may come after us.”
They took out bows and arrows from their baggage, even Shandi. Kel and the birds took to the air. In this instance, being mounted would not be any advantage, so the dyheli and Karles were to stay out of the creature’s range, and only come in to rescue them if they fell under its spell again.
Darian alone was unarmed, as he would need to keep all of his attention on his magic. Carefully, watching the ravine with every step they took, they approached the clearing. Darian’s heart was in his mouth with every step; his breath sounded very loud, and he had to control a start at every unexpected noise. When they were at the periphery, the birds went into action.
Diving and shrieking, they showed where the monster was hiding and teased it up into the open. Their talons could not harm the creature, but they annoyed it, and it lunged upward the full length of its neck as it snapped at them in irritation.
Oh, gods . . . it’s huge. How are we ever going to defeat this thing?
Now Kel joined them, sweeping in from the west, dropping clawfuls of stones and branches on the cold-drake. He was aiming for the head, but the drake was too agile for any of the weapons to hit the skull; most of them fell short, or bounced off the armored hide of the shoulders without touching anything. What Kel did accomplish, was to distract it from Darian down below, who tapped into the nearest ley-line and began the simplest of all magics - creating heat. His heart pounded in his ears, but he couldn’t allow himself to be distracted. With energy from the ley-line, he could pour heat into the ravine, warming the very stone around the drake. He concentrated on raising the temperature of the area surrounding the drake, though there was no perceptible effect for some time. They didn’t have arrows to waste; the only time that any shots were taken were when they were sure ones - clear shots at the creature’s eyes or nostrils, the only two vulnerable places on it.
None of those shots hit the mark; the cold-drake evaded the arrows even as it evaded the missiles dropped on its head - but it was angry, and getting angrier by the moment. If Darian had allowed himself to feel it, he knew he would have been terrified. The drake towered over them, its bone-white plates glinting with the sheen of ice. Its head was the size of a dyheli, the fanged mouth looked large enough to take in any of them whole, but they all fought against instinct to keep from looking it in the eyes. It hissed and snarled, snapping at the birds, threatening the humans around it with upraised talons. They had to keep it irritated and off-balance, but not get it angry enough to charge.
Darian shut his ears to the screams of the birds and of Kel, and to the battle sounds of the drake, which sounded like the tearing of canvas. Heat. That was all he dared think of.
The others came forward for a cautious shot or two, hoping for that lucky moment - being able to hit the eye and strike the brain. Kel must have given up on his idea of blinding the thing with a dropped tent-cloth, because he hadn’t come back for one. The drake particularly wanted a piece of Kel; every time he came by, the creature clawed the sky in his direction and gave one of those harsh battle cries. Kelvren pressed that advantage, at great cost to his endurance, engaging the cold-drake in a duel of feint-and-trick while staying airborne. A dive from the left would turn into a slip to the right in an instant, drawing the cold-drake up onto his hindquarters. That would be followed in an eyeblink by a blinding twist in midair, and the attack would be mirrored as the drake dropped back down to all fours again. Showers of ice crystals sprayed from the beast’s shoulders when Kel did get a solid contact in, but not even gryphon talons got a single blood mark on the drake. A well-aimed wounding strike was out of the question - Kelvren was using all of his skill just to stay alive and engaged.
Meanwhile, Darian kept concentrating, raising the temperature around the drake bit by bit. He could feel the difference in the air now, and by its behavior, so could the drake.
It was uncomfortable; it tried to move farther back in the ravine where the rock hadn’t been heated, but Kel wouldn’t let it, dropping quickly retrieved branches on it, stooping at it, hovering in the air just out of reach and screaming at it. For one fleeting moment, Darian wondered if he ought to call Kel off and let it retreat - but it was too late to change their plans now.
Darian kept pouring heat into the small space containing the cold-drake, and the beast began to react to the heat as a human would react to the cold; the swipes of its talons became less sure, it snapped its jaws on empty air, and its eyes took on an odd glaze. It was fighting off torpor, and they all moved nearer. Then Steelmind let fly a shot that hit the mark - one in the nostril. The cold-drake screamed, but in a far different way than the battle snarls and cries from the combat with Kelvren.
The sound went right through Darian’s head like a white-hot lance. He dropped to his knees, involuntarily clapping his hands to his ears.
Then Darian lost control of his magic; the birds shot away up into the sky, and Kel floundered out of harm’s way, landing heavily onto his side, behind their lines. The dyheli fled, though Karles stood his ground; all the humans cupped their hands over their ears; the scream went on and on, a sound that ripped through the head and stabbed into the brain.
We hadn’t - counted on - this! Darian thought with difficulty, his eyes watering with pain. The cold-drake clawed desperately at its nose, and finally dislodged the arrow; the screaming stopped, replaced by a whimper, as the monster dropped its head down on the ground and rubbed its wounded nostril against the earth. Steam curled up around the drake, and its body plates dripped with melted ice.
“That’s enough!” Keisha shouted in anguish. She stood up and staggered, unsure of each step, but seemed to have a purpose. She half-screamed again, “That is enough!” and marched toward the drake, her hands curled into fists. Darian stumbled to his feet and ran after her, but she paid no attention to him. She concentrated on the cold-drake, and the cold-drake was so preoccupied with its wounded nose that it ignored this small and insignificant morsel of prey marching toward it. But suddenly its head jerked up, and it stared at Keisha with eyes blank and widened. Bright red blood smeared down its snout, and ran freely from the wound in the nostril. The drake raised one claw, then curled it under its chest, staring at Keisha, yet somehow unable to focus upon her.
Darian felt a growing illness in his belly, adding queasiness to fatigue and the pounding headache. Ahead of him, Keisha was within easy striking distance of the cold-drake, and from his point of view, her small body was entirely framed by the red-spattered white mass of the cold-drake. Her feet were ankle-deep in the water runoff, both from the drake’s newly lost ice layer and the nearby landscape. Darian’s limbs seemed to move far too slowly, as he tried to gain on her, and the terror rose up inside him - was he about to see his Keisha die? But Keisha wasn’t affected by the eyes the way they all had been the last time. Could it be that Keisha was doing something to the drake?
“Yes!” Shandi shouted from behind him, and ran to join her sister, shoving Darian aside. The two women came to within striking range of the drake and stood there, staring at it. They were too close for Darian to dare shooting at the thing - especially with its ... head down?
Then it not only blankly stared at the duo, it raised its head to the fullest extent, and its eyes were widened and completely dilated. If Darian had not seen the cold-drake’s next move with his own eyes, he would never have believed it. It reared up and back - but not as if to strike. It bobbed its head and seemed to be cowering away from them, as if they were the most dangerous and threatening things it had ever seen. Its whimpers changed to a whine, and it slowly backed away from them, scrabbling backward across the rocks, claws slipping on the smooth, slick surface, without ever taking its eyes off them, moving up and out of the ravine and then down past the openly stunned Steelmind, and more rapidly down to the edge of the clearing.
It reached the edge of the forest, still walking awkwardly backwards, its tail actually between its legs at one point. Its own bulk made the progress painfully slow. Then, just as a large branch it had pushed aside snapped back into place, obscuring for a moment its sight of the two young women, it turned and ran - ran off into the forest, crashing through brush and briar and making an incredible amount of noise.
What did they - !
“Now! Let’s get past!” Shandi shouted, as Karles raced up beside her. She mounted; the dyheli each sought out a rider - no matter which one, they’d sort out the baggage later.
They raced up the pass at breakneck speed, following Shandi, who was in the lead. Kel kept watch behind, the birds in front. There was no one watching the flanks, but at the speed they were traveling now, they’d be past anyone on their flanks in short order.
Darian wouldn’t have thought the dyheli could maintain this pace uphill, but evidently fear was spurring them on; as he leaned down over the outstretched neck of his mount, there was no slackening of their speed as they reentered the forest, charged headlong through it, and exited again, higher up the slope. Now there was nothing between them and the pass -
Then they were up to the pass itself, and over it, and if anything, their pace increased as they charged downhill again. They were out in the sunlight at last; the air was considerably warmer, and the hordes of birds and small creatures that startled and fled before their headlong rush testified that the cold-drake didn’t hunt on this side of the mountain.
Darian got a brief glimpse of something shining off to the west - it might have been water, but he didn’t get a good enough look to tell for certain. Then they plunged into the forest shadows again.
The dyheli kept running for a good candlemark, and only when their flanks were soaked with sweat and their sides heaving did they finally slow and stop beside a trickle of a stream.
Darian was off his mount in a heartbeat, as were the rest. Snatching up handfuls of coarse grass, they began wiping their mounts down. They pulled off the tack and did what they could, then the dyheli themselves walked off to cool down and take occasional sips of water.
Only then did Darian turn to Keisha. “You got into its mind? What was it that you two used? Fear?” he asked.
She nodded. “Fear. But I guarantee you, it is not in a way you would have expected.”
Steelmind commented, somewhat amusedly, “These two’ve certainly scared me before, so I can understand that. I thought it had to be something more. I didn’t think my arrow was that effective.”
Keisha grinned. “Effective enough. When you hurt it, that was the first time anything had ever touched it since it had left its mother and been on its own in the wilds. Literally it had never felt pain since the last time its mother disciplined it. And do you know how drakes discipline their babies?”
Darian shook his head dumbly.
“They bite the baby’s nose!” She laughed breathlessly.
Steelmind knit his brow, and shook his head slightly. “I still do not understand. You two are just humans, not the cold-drake’s mother.”
Shandi stepped over, her sweat-scraper and curry-brush still in hand, after tending briefly to Karles. “I’ll try to explain. The warmth Darian summoned was making it delirious and disoriented. It became more and more unfocused mentally, it felt more vulnerable as its armor’s ice layer melted, and its eyesight clouded, too, much like a developing infant’s. It thought about the last time it felt that way - when it was just a pup. So instinctively, even though we were just snacks for it, when that nose wound hurt so sharply, the drake felt as if we were bigger and more powerful than it for just a moment.”
Keisha picked up the explanation from there. “It’s like with a pony, if you pick it up off the ground as a foal, even when it’s full grown, it will think you can still do that. Lessons learned early in life stay just as big in any creature’s mind, and when someone is in pain they tend to act more childlike - that’s something we Healers know and use. That wound-scream jarred me out of my own fear and my Healing knowledge sort of welled up, and I remembered where I’d sensed that sort of reaction - from other wounded animals, and some badly injured people. The cold-drake didn’t know what was happening to it, and its instincts made it think of dear old mama. We just pushed more fear at it, using what we sensed its own memories of an angry mother were. I don’t know if I could have driven it off by myself, but when Shandi and I joined, there was enough to push it over the edge.”
Steelmind shook his head. “Empaths,” was all he said, but it was in a mix of bemusement and admiration.
“Well, how many more doses of that scream could you take?” Shandi retorted, glancing around for Kel. “I thought blood was going to pour out of my ears in a moment. I was in such pain from the scream I was damned well going to do something about it!”
“I have no arguments with what you did!” Darian assured them, waving his hands in the air for emphasis. “It worked, and that’s all I care about!”
Kelvren limped up, his left side somewhat scraped up but only slightly bloodied. “It isss good rrreass-soning,” he added, sounding complimentary. “It isss the mind that trrruly winsss orrr losssesss each battle. Talonsss would not accomplish in ten daysss what one well-placsssed bad memorrry of Motherrr did.”
Keisha frowned at the gryphon, and gestured with one finger pointing downward at her feet, then snapped her fingers. “Come here, hero. Let me look at that.” Kelvren gave her a withering look, but approached obediently and gently mocked, “Jussst do not thrrreaten me with yourrr Fearrrsssome Pow-errrsss, and I shall obey,” as he lay down to be tended to.
Shandi’s face abruptly clouded, and she looked back up the pass, anxiously. “Getting back, though - ” she started.
“We’ll worry about getting back when we have to.” That was Wintersky, who had been dragging their belongings into a rough circle. “I’ve been checking what we have left. Anybody object to staying here for the night?”
Darian shook his head. “I feel like it was me carrying the dyheli, not the other way around.”
:I am no frisking filly - my old bones ache after a gallop like that one,: Neta said ruefully. :With any luck the ladies have affrighted that cold-drake into a new hunting ground - it will eat its fill and retire into torpor as it properly should, and we will not need to concern ourselves with it on the return journey.:
Neta looked terrible - all the dyheli looked terrible, and Karles didn’t look much better. Their coats were drenched and streaked with sweat and dust; they hung their heads, and their legs trembled with fatigue.
“You lot, go lie down as soon as you think you can without cramping up,” he said in a quick decision. “We’ll mount guard tonight without you.”
:Thank you,: Neta replied simply for them all. One by one the dyheli folded their legs underneath them and dropped to the moss and grass; following Darian’s example, each of the humans pulled a blanket out of their bedrolls and draped it over the prone bodies so that the wet dyhelis didn’t take a chill.
Darian squatted down in front of Neta. “About the . . . loss of Gacher. I’m sorry. Is there any ceremony for his death that we should do?”
:It has already been done,: Neta mindspoke. :What you all choose to do regarding Gacher’s death is yours to determine.:
They made camp, although it was still light; the early stop gave them time to hunt and cook food for a change. Kel settled in beside Darian and Keisha after his own hunt; the gryphon still looked somewhat shaken, and settled down on his bandages as an easy way of keeping pressure on them.
“I did not know the thing would ssscrrream like that,” Kel said finally.
“None of us did,” Darian replied. “I don’t know that anyone has ever gotten close enough to a cold-drake to find out.”
“The only time I’ve ever heard of anyone killing a drake, it’s been three or four Adepts at a distance,” came Steelmind’s dry comment. “No one has even been stupid enough to try to take on one on foot that I know of, and survive.”
Darian smiled a bit. “We certainly qualify as stupid enough.”
“Maybe, but according to Kerowyn, the Shin’a’in say that if it is stupid but works, it isn’t stupid,” Shandi added. It looked to Darian as if she’d forgotten whatever grievance she had with Steelmind.
Then again, she’s probably storing it up to use some other time. When he least expects it.
“I can only say that I hope never to meet with such a thing again in my lifetime,” Hywel told them all solemnly. “Killing such would make the Manhood trial for a legendary hero, and I am no such hero.”
At that, Steelmind smiled slightly, got stiffly to his feet, walked over to the young tribesman, and dropped slowly to one knee. While Hywel watched, Steelmind handed the young warrior one of his own valuable watersteel fighting knives.
Hywel took it gingerly, appearing startled. “What is this?” he asked, perplexed.
“I have no place in my life for anyone who is sure he can do everything. You just realized - and admitted - that you’re not invulnerable, or unbeatable, or perfect,” Steelmind said solemnly. “By my reckoning, that makes you a real man. Now I completely trust you, and I’ll have you at my back any time.”
Hywel admired the knife - and what it symbolized - for a long moment, before Kelvren broke the silence with his own comment.
“If you want rrreal perrrfection, you mussst find a grrryphon.”
Fog surrounded the campsite; there had been no rain last night, but it was a damp, cool morning. Kel had gone out to scout out the way as soon as there was any light in the sky at all. Darian looked up at the sound of large wings, his breakfast uneaten in his hands. He couldn’t see anything in the mist, but a moment later, Kel’s wings blew the fog away enough for him to land beside the morning fire. Darian put down the broiled fish, uneaten. He’d been too keyed up for hunger anyway.
“If you rrride harrrd all day, you will rrreach a village at the edge of the waterrr, and it isss definitely Rrraven,” Kel said, breathing heavily. “I sssaw the totemsss forrr myssself.”
Darian started to breathe a little heavily himself. Don’t get too excited, he reminded himself. Raven is only the tribe that creates the vests. Mother and Father might not be there.
Oh, he could tell himself that, but it was impossible not to hope, impossible not to feel his heartbeat quicken, his nerves tingle. “Then let’s get going - ” he began, starting to rise, when a hand on his belt jerked him back down again.
“First, eat,” Keisha ordered, frowning. He knew that look. He ate, though the fish was cold and tasted like wheat paste. He crammed it down as fast as he could, washing it down with water.
He wished he could use magic to seek out the village and know if his parents were there, but he didn’t dare. Last night he’d felt the sweep of a search over them, someone looking for the scent of magic and mages, and had been very glad that he had not used any magic at all in guarding the camp. A mage, and a powerful one, had picked up the magic he’d used against the cold-drake, and was hunting for the one who had used it. He was under no illusion that the one hunting for them was friendly; there was only one powerful mage hereabouts, and that was the Wolverine Shaman. An Eclipse Shaman. There is no way that he can be a friend to us.
He’d hoped that the creation of heat was a minor enough usage of magic that it would have gone unnoticed, but in his heart he had known all along it was a vain hope. Maybe if the seeker found nothing, he’d assume the drake had eaten the mage that had tried to kill it. He would certainly find the drake alive and well - wherever it had gone to.
With the drake standing guard over the pass, it was no wonder that Wolverine hadn’t gotten this far - nor that Raven was so isolated from the other tribes. Surely the pass could only be traveled during the hottest days of summer, and only then at midday, when the sun reached every part of the pass and even a hungry cold-drake would seek a cool cave to sleep.
Darian was in the saddle before the rest of the group had finished loading their belongings in their saddle panniers. He curbed his own impatience at them; he reminded himself yet again that at this point they only knew that Raven produced vests with motifs that looked like those his mother had used in her embroidery, and that was all they knew.
But the moment everyone else was ready to go, he was off at a lope, trusting to Kel and the birds for guidance through the mist, and to the abilities of the others to keep up. The way led literally downhill, down the slopes of the mountain to the water; that made it easy for his dyheli. Everything conspired to help him except the mist; there were clear game trails to follow, the trails themselves were easy and not strewn with rocks, even the mossy turf was springy and dulled the sound of the dyheli’s hooves. His mount Jakir positively frisked his way through the trees, enjoying the run. He couldn’t see much through the fog, though - the nearest tree trunks, the lowest branches. He could just as readily have been running over the same piece of ground, except that the paths always led downward.
The others caught up with him, but he kept the lead; they broke unexpectedly into a meadow just as the sun began to burn off some of the fog and startled a herd of deer into flight ahead of them. As the fog thinned, they saw more and more of their surroundings, and they were nothing short of amazing; as lovely as a Tayledras Vale in a very different and far wilder fashion. There was water everywhere; in tiny rivulets that trickled down the mountainside and made miniature waterfalls, in larger streams they crossed in a single bound, and crystal-clear brooks that laughed through stone-strewn beds, in still pools full of fish, in the cool but humid air itself. Moss covered everything; rocks, tree trunks, branches; it hung in pendulous beards from the branches overhead, and cushioned every step the dyheli took. And everywhere was green, a thousand shades of green, from the black-green of water weeds in the pools through the blue-green and emerald of the underbrush, to the bright green of leaves overhead with sunlight shining through them. Even the light was green; Darian glanced back at Keisha, and saw she was looking about her with enchantment in her eyes in spite of the hard pace they were setting. The cool, damp air was full of wonderful scents; green growing things, the sharp scent of crushed pine needles, the ghosts of flowers, the promise of rain. Unfamiliar birds called in bell-like tones that echoed down through the branches, and from all around came every sort of song that water could possibly make, from the musical laughter of the tiny waterfalls and the gurgle of the brooks, to the steady, soporific dripping of water on leaves. But rather than lulling, the surroundings conspired to make him exhilarated, ready to do anything and everything.
They were getting dripped on themselves, of course, but today in Darian’s excitement it seemed more refreshing than annoying.
They stopped long enough for the dyheli and Karles to snatch a few mouthfuls and get a drink; the others dismounted to stretch stiff legs, but Darian begrudged even the time it took for that. He tried not to show his impatience too blatantly, closing his eyes to check with Kel and Kuari.
:You’re not far now,: Kel replied, :You’re making better time than I’d thought you could,:
:It’s all downhill,: he replied, greatly cheered by this. :How soon do we reach them at this pace?:
:Huh - maybe a couple of candlemarks, no more. But do slow down before you get too close - you’ll raise an alarm, galloping in this way, and I’d hate to see you shot full of arrows.:
Darian grimaced, but Kel had a point. Normal traders would not come riding in as if a cold-drake were on their heels. :Give me an idea where to slow down, and I will:
:Darian, I have to say that I have seen no sign of your people. All the folk here look like Northerners.: Kel parted with that information reluctantly. :Of course,: he added, brightening, :l know I haven’t seen all, or even most of them. There are surely some out hunting, and women in the log houses.:
Once again, Darian clamped down on both hope and disappointment, reminding himself that he was looking only for a direction, not for his mother and father in person. :Stay alert for trouble.: he warned Kel. :I caught the edge of a magic-search last night.:
He caught Kel’s assent, and turned his attention to Kuari, who flew along just behind them, with Win-tersky and Steelmind’s birds, who were much swifter, taking lead. :Anything to our rear, old friend?:
:Was tree-hare. Very tasty. No tree-hare, anymore.: Ku-ari’s mind-voice, overlaid with great satisfaction at an easy kill and the pause to eat it, made him chuckle in spite of his anxiety.
He heard the others mounting up, and opened his eyes again. “Kel says we’ve made better time than he’d thought we would, and we’re nearly there,” he told them encouragingly. Shandi made a movement that caught his attention, and he looked over at her directly.
“I want to borrow you and Keisha when we get there, to give Karles a boost for his mind-voice,” she said, in a tone that made it more of a demand than a request. Karles bobbed his head and stamped a hoof to emphasize the “request.” “The information about Wolverine is too important; I have to get it back home, so that it gets there regardless of whether or not we make it back.”
“That’ll take magic,” he said, with some reluctance, as his mount shifted restlessly under him. “I’m not sure that’s wise, given that - ”
Shandi eyed him with disfavor, and Karles snorted, giving him a similar look. “You picked up a magic-sweep last night, didn’t you? And you didn’t tell us.”
“So did I, and I didn’t tell you either,” Steelmind put in, mildly. “It doesn’t matter; nobody was using magic, so whoever it was - ”
“ - the Wolverine Shaman - ” she interjected with annoyance.
“ - won’t have found us. He probably thinks the magic we used was a futile effort against the cold-drake, and it ate us.” Darian finished the sentence for Steelmind. “But using magic again might tell him it didn’t.”
Shandi looked him square in the eyes, and Karles moved a pace closer. “This is my duty. I’m helping you with yours, it’s only fair that you help me with mine.”
Great good gods, they’re getting more alike with every day. Are all Heralds and Companions like this, I wonder? Her logic was inescapable, however, and he knew that she was right, even though it seemed to him that she didn’t have to be so forceful about it. He wasn’t all that hard to convince. He shrugged. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t help, I was only advising you that we’ll be putting up a big, thick smoke signal for anyone with the right kind of eyes to see it. If you believe it’s worth that risk, then we’ll do it, and try to do what we can to prevent anyone from noticing.” Shandi seemed completely satisfied with that; Karles tossed his head and gave a nod of agreement. “All right, then,” she replied, and swung up into her own saddle, the last to do so. “Let’s get moving.”
Once again, Darian’s heart was in his mouth, and his blood singing in his ears; the emotion filling him was a very close relative to the fear he’d felt against the cold-drake. As they walked their mounts toward the distant village, situated above an expanse of water so large he couldn’t see an opposite shore, he tried, and failed, to keep from hoping to see a familiar face among the people coming slowly to meet him.
And as they neared, and he could make out the features of the wary men approaching, he tried, and failed, to keep his heart from sinking with disappointment.
These were tribesmen just like any others; brown, lean, dressed in the felt and tanned deerskin garments of others they had met with. He saw vests on some, but they were all decorated with tribal totemic animals, chiefest among them being the beaky head of Raven. He stifled his own feelings, put on a smile, and walked forward with Hywel to introduce his group.
Of all the folk they had met so far, these were the friendliest, and the least suspicious - but that might have been because they wore tokens from Red Fox, Snow Fox, and Ghost Cat; tokens that were not given out lightly, from three relatively peaceful tribes. Learning they were ostensibly traders brought looser grips on weapons, and a few faint smiles.
“And what have you brought to trade?” the Chief of Raven asked, tilting his head to one side inquisitively. “I see no pack-animals. . . .”
“Dyes, oh, Chief,” Darian replied, slipping into his role of trader as easily as slipping on a well-worn slipper. “Colors such as you have not seen the like of. We bring another thing, also, and that is the learning of our Wisewoman - ” He gestured, and Keisha came forward, “ - who has the means to defeat the Summer Fever and the Hammer Lung, if you should be cursed with either, and will teach these things to you, in gratitude to the spirits who permit us to bring these trade goods to you.”
“Indeed!” The Chief looked impressed. “We have neither sickness among us, but we know of them. Can she teach such to our Wisewoman even if there are none so touched?”
Keisha bowed her head slightly. “I can, Chief, and gladly will. But since you have no sick in urgent need, would you look to our dyes?”
“We will; come, be welcome in the house of the Raven.” He waved them on, but Darian raised his hand. “We have representatives of our totems, Chief, and an ally you might find monstrous. We wish you to see them before you welcome us, for you must welcome all of us or none at all.”
The Chief nodded; as one, Darian, Steelmind, and Wintersky raised their arms, and their birds came in to the glove. Gasps of surprise, followed by admiration followed the appearance of the hawk and buzzard, but when Kuari came in, everyone stepped back a pace. Kuari looked about - as fast as his head could turn, for he knew how funny humans found the way he could swivel his head in nearly a full circle - and chuckles followed.
Then came Kel.
He did not drop in suddenly, he approached gradually, so that the tribesmen could see him approaching in the distance, with huge, graceful wingbeats, and become accustomed to him. It was still a dramatic entrance, though, and Kel was still an imposing figure that took even the Chief aback.
Kel folded his wings with immense dignity. “I grrrreet the Chief of Rrrraven from the Chief of Ssssilverrr Grrryphon,” he said, enunciating slowly and clearly. The Chief gathered his wits and his courage to approach.
“You are called a gryphon, then?” the Chief asked, looking up at Kel’s golden eyes and immense beak.
“I am; my name issss Kelvrrren,” Kel replied. “And in rrreturrrn forrr yourrr hossspitality, I beg you to accept my aid in hunting deerrrr and otherrr larrrge crrreaturesss while we arrre herrre.”
“Gladly!” the Northerner said with alacrity; it didn’t take a genius to figure out that so large a predator as Kel could be an enormous asset in hunting. “I thank you, and bid you welcome as well.”
They followed him into the circle of log houses, escorted by the warriors, who were relaxing more by the moment. Darian saw at once that there were scores of drying racks covered with a red-fleshed filleted fish, with smoldering fires beneath them. That made sense - in this damp, fish would cure better smoked than simply dried. But the sheer quantity made him pause and wonder if those stories about fish being so thick in the river that you could walk dry-shod on their backs might have a solid kernel of truth to them.
Keisha and Shandi spread out the contents of the trade-pack, together with the samples of dyed wool - drawn by the colors and encouraged by the actions of the Raven Chief, the women of Raven gathered closer to look. In moments they were passing around the bits of wool, exclaiming over the colors, asking if they could be painted on leather or used to dye quills or fur, while the men feigned indifference, coming up cautiously to Kel to discuss a future hunt.
As they clustered around Keisha and Kel, Darian looked in vain for one of the special vests, or any other sign of Valdemaran handiwork. He ached with impatience, he longed to take someone aside and ask about the vests, but he knew that now wasn’t the time. They had to establish a relationship with these people before he could go about asking questions of them.
Keisha got free for a moment, turning the questions over to Shandi and Hywel, since Hywel’s heart was truly into getting the best possible bargains he could, and Shandi loved bargaining. “Any sign of your family?” she asked Darian in Valdemaran, all the while smiling pleasantly, as if she was simply commenting on how eager these people were for their dye.
He kept his facade up as well. “No,” he replied, a bit louder, so that the tribesmen wouldn’t think they were making some sort of secret comments. “No, I haven’t seen anything, not a vest, not even a bit of embroidery that looks familiar.”
But just as he said that, something odd happened. A young girl at the edge of the gaggle of chattering women jerked her head up as if it was on a string and stared at him.
Then she was off like a shot arrow speeding to a target - the target being one of the log houses.
“What was that all about?” Keisha asked, having noticed it too. “That girl acted as if something frightened her.”
“I have no idea,” he replied, his attention more on his own concerns than those of a strange Raven girl. “Maybe she was just shy of being around strange strangers. Kel probably made her really nervous, then it scared her over the edge to hear a different tongue. It doesn’t seem to have bothered anyone else.”
Almost before he finished his sentence, the girl reappeared, pulling a seemingly reluctant woman along by one hand. The woman was protesting, and it was clear why. In her other hand she held a headless, gutted fish, and she had obviously been interrupted in the middle of preparing a meal. She was looking down at her daughter - for surely that was who the girl was - and laughing along with her protests. Then she looked up.
Darian felt his head start to spin. His jaw dropped; he grabbed Keisha’s arm, and stared. Older - yes - gray in the brown hair, a face weathered and lined with the cares of ten years, but -
“Mother!” he shouted, and ran toward her. As if the world had slowed, he watched her reactions. She stared, first without any recognition in her eyes, then with puzzlement, then the look he longed for dawned, and grew, and burst forth like the sun coming from behind a cloud.
“Darian!” she shrieked - the fish went one way, the little girl the other, and she ran for him with outstretched arms.
He caught her up in his embrace, a tiny part of him bewildered by how small she’d become, and held her as he’d hoped to for too many lonely years. She hugged him, laughing and crying at the same time; she put both her hands about his face, looked into his eyes, kissed him, looked again, kissed him again. His throat swelled, and tears of his own streamed from his eyes, though his mouth was stretched in a smile so large the corners of his mouth ached; the smell of fish suddenly became the most wonderful perfume in the whole world.
By this time, of course, they had gathered a substantial audience, and not only the little girl was dancing around them, but a second, slightly younger one, and a littler boy, all chanting his name and tugging on their mother’s deerskin shirt.
As for Darian - he didn’t care. His mother was in his arms, babbling endearments - he held her tightly, babbling nonsense of his own. No matter what happened in the next moment, or day, or week - he savored where he was, right now, and no one could ever take it from him.
Darian looked dazed as well as blissfully happy, and Keisha held one of his hands as he and his mother slowly caught up on the last ten years. They all sat on benches or flat grass-stuffed leather cushions on the ground in front of the log house. She had insisted that he go first, plying him with honey-sweetened berry juice whenever his voice grew hoarse.
“So strange,” she marveled at last, shaking her head as a cool breeze toyed with strands of her hair that had escaped from her single braid. “Of all the things I had imagined you would become, a mage was not one. And a Hawkbrother! Your father will be speechless.”
“Where is Father?” Darian asked eagerly.
His mother laughed. “Where would you think? Out on the river, trapping fish this time, rather than four-leggers. You wouldn’t expect the loss of a mere foot to slow him down, now would you? Kelsie’s twin Kavin is with him.” She ruffled the hair of the oldest girl, who watched her brother Darian with undisguised adoration. The younger two, solemn six-year-old Ranie, and two-year-old Tel, snuggled against their mother’s legs. “I suspect that these littles came as a great surprise to you - ”
“I’d be lying if I said they didn’t, but they’re a wonderful surprise,” he replied, smiling down at the little girl Kelsie, then at her sister and brother. “I never thought of myself as a big brother before. But tell me what happened, from the beginning.”
Darian’s mother - Daralie Firkin, Keisha reminded herself, Her name is Daralie, Dar for short - sighed, caressed the hair of the smaller girl, and began. “We had just finished setting up camp, when - something happened. I don’t remember what being caught in the magic felt like, and I suspect that’s just as well. The next thing I knew, we were halfway up that mountain there - ” she nodded at the mountain to the north of the village. Even at this distance, there was a spot of terrain that was visibly different - no doubt the sphere of Valdemaran land that had switched places with the piece of terrain originally there. “Kullen was screaming, and no wonder, since his foot had been cut off clean. The fire had come with us, and - I don’t know where he got the presence of mind to do this - and he shoved the stump into the coals. That seared the severed veins off; if he hadn’t, I think he would have bled to death.”
Keisha didn’t need to be an Empath to know that those simple words concealed fear and horror that Dar still felt, even now. Keisha could not imagine being in her shoes at that moment - utterly alone, thrown onto the side of an unknown mountain by an unknown power, her husband wounded, perhaps mortally -
She shuddered, then smiled wanly, and shook off the emotions her recollection called up.
“Thanks be to the gods, all our camping gear came with us as well - well, except for the corner of the tent that had gone along with his foot; I bound up the stump and dosed him with poppy. We had food enough for a while, so I nursed him while I studied where we were.” Daralie smiled thinly. “The most I could say was that I didn’t know. I put out trap-lines for small animals, and caught things that are like short-eared rabbits that live among the rocks, and built up our campsite into a small stone hut walled over with snow blocks - I had no idea how long we would be there, and I wanted to be ready for the worst blizzards. As it happens, we weren’t there for very long, and the blizzards aren’t bad as far down on the mountain as we were.” More of that years-old fear drained from her, and she smiled. “You might not believe it, but down here in the valleys the winter isn’t harsh at all; it seldom snows. And when snow does come, it doesn’t linger.”
“I have trouble believing that, indeed, given how chilly it is at the moment,” Darian replied, “But if you say it is so, I will try to believe anything you tell me.”
That brought a smile to his mother’s face, and she continued. “I don’t know what we would have done if we had been left on our own, but some of the hunters from Raven found us. They brought us here, and although we didn’t know it, we were intended to become someone’s slaves - but one of the Changed creatures attacked the camp first. By then, thanks to the Wisewoman, Kullen was up and about, and when the hunters couldn’t get near enough to the creature to kill it, we showed them how to build a pit-trap to take it. Would you believe it? They didn’t know anything but the simplest of snares!” She shook her head at the idea. “Well, that ended any talk of making us slaves, or so I’m told. We helped them trap any number of wretched Change-Creatures, clearing out the valley, and they adopted us into the tribe and made us their Chief Hunters. There isn’t much more to tell,” she concluded. “We taught them how to trap, and they taught us their ways. When we realized that we were right off the map, we gave up the notion of getting home. I knew that the people of Errold’s Grove would see you were taken care of.”
Keisha was glad that Darian had not mentioned the way he’d been treated by the Errold’s Grove villagers now, and she suspected he felt the same. Why cause Daralie any more distress? What was in the past could not be changed, and if things had not happened the way they had, he might not be talking to her now.
“I never gave up hoping that one day we’d get some word back to you, though,” she finished, looking up into his face with eyes that were the aged mirror-image of his. “That was why I kept sending the vests out. There was always that possibility that one day, someone in Valdemar would see one, would recognize the pattern, and ask about where it came from.”
“And that was brilliant, Mother,” he replied, kissing the hand that he held. “Of all the things in the world that are likely to travel, it is trade goods that travel the farthest.”
She blushed with pleasure at his praise, and spread her hands wide. “Well, we learned to live here, we came to love it, we prospered, the children came along - that is the sum of it. Here we do not count the passing of time by the day, but by the season, for the days are very like one another.”
Darian was saved from having to reply to that by the appearance of a fast-moving party of happily shouting tribesmen, with a limping man - Kullen, no doubt - and a boy in the middle. Darian shot to his feet, shouting “Father!” and reprised the running greeting he had given his mother, while Keisha stayed prudently behind.
Rather than joining her sons and husband, Daralie cast a speculative glance at Keisha. “Keisha Alder - your people are the Alders that lived south and east of the village?” she asked. “The ones with all the boys?”
Keisha nodded, and Daralie looked her over carefully. “A Healer and a Herald out of the same family - your mother must be very pleased and proud.”
“My mother is appalled and shocked,” Keisha retorted wryly. “Having her precious girl-babies turn out to be independent women with minds and vocations of their own was not what she had in mind. Husbands, spotless cottages, and grandbabies would have been more to her liking.”
To her pleasure, Daralie laughed out loud. “Good for you, Keisha Alder!” she applauded warmly. “Be sure you keep that mind of your own! Any man worth spending time with will value intelligence over a spotless cottage and a milk-meek maiden, however pretty she is.”
By the warm glance she aimed at her own husband, there was no doubt in Keisha’s mind what Kullen’s preferences were. Daralie was by no means a milk-meek maiden.
This is the woman that raised Darian - came an unbidden voice in the back of her mind. So, what was all that nonsense you were worrying about? Something about Darian really wanting a honey-sweet maiden in his heart of hearts, and not being satisfied with you?
But now the man and boy were approaching, with Darian between them, an arm around each shoulder. When Keisha got a good look at the boy, she was struck by how very like Darian he was.
Daralie followed her look, and smiled fondly. “He could be Darian at the same age,” she said softly.
“Kavin could not be more like his brother if they were twins separated in time.”
But this little boy will never have his mother and father wrenched away from him, if fortune smiles, Keisha thought, watching how the child looked up at his father with undisguised adoration that spoke well for the man’s parental skills.
Kullen Firkin limped heavily, and Keisha’s eyes went to the place at the end of his leg where a wooden form poked out of the bottom of his trews where his foot should have been. It wasn’t foot-shaped, but it wasn’t the peg she’d expected; it seemed to be the narrow end of a fat cone, which was interesting. I should try that shape with a patient some time. . . .
Where Daralie Firkin was small and slim (despite bearing five children), with soft, dark eyes and dark hair going to silver, Kullen Firkin was fair going to gray, with hazel eyes and a tough, wiry frame. The children, except for Darian, took after their mother rather than their father - but neither parent looked at all like the Errold’s Grove “norm,” which was to be brown-eyed, brown-haired, and stocky - muscular in the males, plump in the females. Small wonder that Darian had stuck out as the odd one.
Kullen was in tears, making no effort to hide them, and Darian’s eyes were wet again. Keisha almost decided to absent herself from the reunion, but the glance that Darian cast at her said so clearly, “please stay,” that she changed her mind.
The entire family, including Keisha, retired to the log house, where Darian again told an edited version of his experiences of the past years. During the recitation, several women brought in all of the components of a good dinner - fish baked in clay, roasted onions and cattail roots, a piece of honeycomb and some of the flatbread they’d sampled at Snow Fox.
Daralie thanked them sincerely. “We saw your dinner go flying - and one of the dogs got it,” said the oldest of the women with a wide grin. “It was no great matter to add food to our fire. You certainly have done it often enough for the rest of us!”
The fish was a new dish to Keisha, but it was something she thought she could get used to pretty easily. It had been rubbed with herbs inside and out, stuffed with onions, then folded into an envelope of wet clay, the whole buried in coals and ashes. Keisha had never tasted anything like it.
She felt very much the interloper in this family circle, but there was one thing that she could not help but notice. Daralie was no stay-at-home wife, no matter what she had been doing today when they arrived. It was clear from the conversation that Daralie and Kelsie would be minding the same fish traps tomorrow that Kullen and Kavin had tended today.
It was also evident that this was the ordinary state of things for them - and Kelsie and Kavin were given equal chores and responsibilities based on strength, size, and ability, not on sex. Tomorrow, in fact, Kavin would be helping his father cook, as well as doing some repairs to the log house.
During a break in the family conversation, when Kullen asked Darian some detailed questions about the fighting with Blood Bear, Keisha decided to be bold and ask Daralie a few questions of her own.
“How did the Raven people come to accept you?” she asked. “You aren’t a Man-souled woman, you’ve got a husband and a family, but you act like one.”
Daralie laughed softly. “Well, they didn’t have a choice at first,” she pointed out. “Kullen was in no shape to help them; I was the one with the trapping knowledge and the two strong legs to take me out into the wilderness. They had to accept me, but I can tell you they didn’t like it! It was a bit of a struggle; they did what I told them, but I got no respect in the village. And when Kullen was able to walk about again, they stopped listening to me at all!”
“So what happened?” Keisha asked.
“I don’t know.” Daralie shrugged. “The men had one of their ceremonies, and something happened there that changed them entirely in their attitude toward me. But they won’t tell the women what it was - and I don’t care, so long as they don’t treat me like a nonentity anymore.”
I wonder if the Raven intervened? That was the only thing Keisha could think of, and by the shrewd glance Daralie threw at her, she figured the older woman had come to the same conclusion. But of course, she didn’t know Keisha, she didn’t know how much exposure Keisha had to the totemic spirits and the beliefs of the Northerners. The average Valdemaran would not expect to find spirits intervening so directly in the lives of mortals, and might even greet such a revelation with thinly disguised disbelief.
“So - I take it that you and my son are - partners, after the Hawkbrother fashion?” Daralie then said, her glance sharpening. And before Keisha could answer, she added, “Do you intend to wed?”
Keisha felt the blood rush into her face, and she averted her eyes. “We had discussed it - but we didn’t make any plans. And then, well, looking for you was more important.”
“You would probably do all right living here with Raven,” Daralie replied, nodding knowledgeably. “You are a Wisewoman after all. You won’t have to fight for respect. They’ll give it to you without asking, and they won’t expect you to act like their own women; they already have a category you fit into.” That confused Keisha. “Why would I want to live here?” she asked, her brows knitting. “I’m a Valdemaran Healer - ”
“Because Darian will be here, of course.” Daralie looked over at her son with undisguised satisfaction. “Now that he’s found his family again, he’ll want to stay - and besides, Raven needs him. He’s exactly what we need.”
“What - what you need?” Keisha repeated, feeling uncommonly dense. “What do you mean by that?” The glance Daralie gave her made her think that Darian’s mother must feel the same. “We need his talents and training,” she said, with a touch of impatience. “He’s a mage. We need a mage. The Raven Shaman has only Healing magic, and our warriors are no match for Wolverine. Now that Darian is here with us, you can all help us destroy Wolverine for good.”
Keisha had a queasy feeling, and her food had nothing to do with it. Here with us? Our warriors? Help us? I don’t know how Darian is going to take this, but - like it or not, his parents are Ravens now!
The others had gotten wind of Daralie’s assumptions long before dinner was over, and it wasn’t long after Dar and Kullen excused themselves to put the children to bed that the entire group descended on Darian and Keisha and pulled them off to “discuss things.” They had their own campfire, far enough away from the Men’s or Women’s Fires that they were well out of earshot. They settled down around it, and Keisha knew what Shandi would say long before she said it. One look at her face while Darian put Raven’s case forward with all of his persuasive power told Keisha that he would never be persuasive enough.
“No,” Shandi said flatly, the moment he finished speaking. “Absolutely no. We are not going to get involved here. These are not our people, this is not our problem, and your parents can claim protection as citizens of Valdemar all they want - my answer to that is that they can pack up and come back with us.”
Shandi’s eyes told the story; nothing was going to change her mind. The girl who had seemed so sweet and gentle was gone, and in her place stood a young woman who was gentle only when she felt she could afford to be. She must feel this occasion called for her to be hard and strong. Shandi was not going to budge; she wasn’t even going to compromise.
But Darian wasn’t going to give up either. Not yet, anyway. “Shandi, they may not be our people, but this is our problem, or rather, it will be. How long do you think it will be before Wolverine eats up every little tribe north of the border and starts to contemplate taking us? I wouldn’t give it five years - and maybe less. They’ve already taken everything Blood Bear had and more, and it’s only because they’ve been going slowly and consolidating their conquests that they haven’t come after us.”
“So now you’re ForeSighted as well as a mage?” Shandi retorted, with no hint that she meant it humorously. “It seems to me that Wolverine is far more likely to stay up here in the north when they’ve taken in all the tribes. Why should they come south, when every conquering army that’s gone to Valdemar has come back in pieces, if at all?”
“Because in the south are riches,” Hywel put in solemnly. “In the south are herds of cattle and sheep, horses, grain and fruit for the taking. There are women with golden hair and red, with skin like snow and slim bodies, to become slaves. There are spineless dirt-digging men to be made into slaves to grow crops so that the warriors need never soil their honor with the cultivation of plants. There is gold, silver, gemstones. There is woven cloth, such as the traders bring, for slaves to make into brilliant tunics, warmer and softer than leather. And there are Healers who can cure all ills. That is why they will come.”
“They can trade all that for fur and amber, and not have to fight,” Shandi retorted. “They know what will happen if they bring an army into Valdemar. If Blood Bear was thwarted by a single village, what chance would they have against the army of Valdemar? We need only fortify the border; we do not have to stop them ourselves.”
Darian’s whole body telegraphed his distress to Keisha, but she was torn herself. Shandi was right; now was not the time or place to confront Wolverine, regardless of what would happen to Raven if they didn’t. After all, Raven could conceivably leave as a whole, and seek sanctuary with Ghost Cat if they didn’t want to fight or ally with Wolverine. They could join with Snow Fox and Red Fox; the three tribes united might well have enough force to hold Wolverine off. Confrontation was not their only option.
But part of her agreed with Darian; wouldn’t it be better to take care of the problem now, before Wolverine became an unstoppable force? Valdemar had faced a Northern tribes enemy before - wasn’t that why the Forest of Sorrows had been called a “defensive border?”
So she stayed silent, dropping her eyes when both Shandi and Darian looked at her for support. I can’t support either of them, she thought helplessly. They’re both right, and I don’t know which of them is more right.
From under her lashes she watched as Darian looked beseechingly at Wintersky and Kel instead, when he could not get backing from her.
Kel, at least, had no hesitation. “Darrrian isss rrright!” he hissed, his eyes narrowed as he glanced at Shandi. “You sssaw what they did to Rrred Fox!” His hackles came up and he snapped his beak for emphasis. “You sssaw with yourrrr own eyesss! How can you sssit therrre and sssay that we ssshould do nothing?”
“I think that what happened to Red Fox was a tragedy, but it’s not our tragedy,” Shandi insisted. “There are likely things like that happening in the Eastern Empire - or what’s left of it - at this very moment, and it’s very sad, but we can’t do anything about it. Life isn’t fair, Kel, and it’s not our job to make it so.”
“Sssketi!” Kel spat, clearly disgusted with Shandi and Karles together, since it was obvious from the way that they had drawn together that Shandi spoke for both of them. “You call yourrrssself a Herald, and sssay that? That isss cowarrrd’sss talk! If no one trrriesss to make the worrrld fairrr, then it neverrrr will be, will it? Ssso you will alwaysss have that to fall back upon! I do not think that the firrrssst Herr-raldsss in Valdemarrr made sssuch excusssesss!”
Keisha noticed that Shandi flinched a little at that, but she did not back down. Now she looked at Wintersky and Steelmind, seeking supporters of her own. Steelmind licked his lips and sighed. “I can see both sides,” he said reluctantly. “I can’t see that one outweighs the other.”
Relieved that he had put into words what she felt, Keisha looked up and nodded eagerly. “Exactly,” she said. “Both of you are right.”
“That’s my feeling,” Wintersky told them. “You know, none of us have ForeSight, so how can we know for sure what’s likely to happen? And - Darian, just what are we supposed to do; there’s only the nine of us - sixteen, if you count the dyheli. How big a difference can nine creatures make?”
“That’s a mage, a gryphon, a Companion, a Herald, three Tayledras and a seasoned Ghost Cat warrior,” Darian retorted. “It’s not as if we were nine plowboys!”
“It’s not as if we were an army either,” Shandi countered, glaring at him. “And what about our duty to get back home and warn Valdemar about all this? Karles and I can only send so much - Anda needs more than we can tell him - ”
By the sudden light in Darian’s eyes, Keisha knew that Shandi had given him an opening, and he saw a way to get her to compromise.
“All right. Then let’s at least get him some real information!” he insisted. “We can do what no one in Raven can. We can get in close to Wolverine and see what their numbers are, and what their equipment is! Why, I’ll bet we could even get in close enough to find out some of their plans, just by listening to the warriors’ boasting!”
Which would make us close enough to work a little sabotage, no doubt? Keisha thought. She knew how Darian thought; once they had worked themselves in that close, there would be opportunities to disrupt the enemy tribe, and no matter what Steelmind and Wintersky thought now, they would not be able to resist taking advantage of those opportunities.
Shandi frowned fiercely, and Keisha had a good idea what was in her sister’s mind as well. Shandi wanted, very badly, to object, but there was nothing she could really object to. She and Karles exchanged a long, wordless look, neither of them happy about the position they’d been placed in.
“I think that’s an . . . acceptable compromise,” Keisha said tentatively, and earned herself a frown from Shandi.
Of course, I’m not one of the ones who’ll be going on these scouting forays -
“I think that’s the best answer, personally.” Wintersky sounded a lot more decisive than Keisha, but that was to be expected.
Kel, however, was clearly not enamored with halfhearted measures. “I ssstilll sssay we ssshould do morrre than that!” he began, but a look from Darian silenced him, and Keisha sensed another mind-to-mind exchange like the one that Shandi had exchanged with Karles. Kel’s beak snapped shut, and he looked a little happier; that was when Keisha knew that she had guessed right about Darian’s intention of adding sabotage to the scouting forays.
Steelmind looked from Shandi to Darian, and held out his hands, palms up. “I think that will work,” was all he said, with no elaboration on what he considered “that” to be. So he knew, or guessed, too.
Shandi gritted her teeth and glared, but it was obvious that she was outvoted. She gave in, but not with good grace.
Keisha, however, had extended a careful tendril of Empathy toward her sister, and there was more going on beneath that hard surface than Shandi was allowing to show. I wonder - will she go off by herself - To Keisha’s satisfaction, that was just what Shandi did; she exchanged another look with Karles, and got up and left the fire. The men interpreted it as going off in a sulk; Wintersky raised his eyebrows at Darian who shrugged, and Hywel snorted derisively. Steelmind looked defensive, but said nothing.
Keisha waited a few moments, then when the men began to discuss possible “scouting forays,” she excused herself and left. It was not at all difficult to tell where Shandi was; at least, not for her. Shandi might think she was away from all eyes, hidden in the shadows on the outskirts of the village, but Keisha followed a surer summons than vision.
Her senses led her correctly. Keisha approached her slowly; Karles was a white shape in the darkness and Shandi a dark, upright slash against him. “Shandi?” she said quietly. “Why didn’t you just tell the truth?”
The dark slash practically vibrated with tension; upon closer approach, Keisha could see that Shandi was trembling, handling an arrow wrapped in red ribbon. “What truth?” Shandi asked, in a tone very like anger - except that it wasn’t.
But Keisha knew what the emotion gripping her sister really was. “Why didn’t you tell them that you’re afraid?”
“Me? Afraid? What are you talking about?” That was bluster, and Keisha only needed to hear how Shandi’s voice shook to know it.
“I’m an Empath, too, Shandi,” Keisha said. The reaction to that could only have been predicted by someone who knew Shandi as well as her older sister did. Instead of blustering further when her bluff was called, Shandi dropped the arrow, and flung herself away from Karles and into her sister’s arms. Keisha held her as she had when she’d been much smaller, and had suffered an emotional, childish tragedy. Only now, she was a young woman, and this crisis was anything but childish.
Shandi shook in every limb, and sobbed wordlessly into Keisha’s shoulder; there was no point in trying to coax her to talk until she was over the first bout of tears. As Karles stirred restlessly, Keisha led her sister to a fallen log and got her to sit down on it. It took a long time before Shandi cried herself out enough to speak, but Keisha was perfectly willing to wait as long as it took. Poor Shandi! They taught her haw to handle other people’s emotions, but not her own.
“A chick can’t go back in the shell, and a young hawk can’t unfledge. I’m your sister, Shandi. We’ve grown up together, but we aren’t the same as we were when we were little. We’ve always trusted each other, so trust me now. You have to remember that when you wall things out, you can wall them in with you, too,” Keisha said into Shandi’s hair as she held Shandi’s head against her shoulder. Her own eyes stung a bit as she held back tears of sympathy. “Shields can work both ways - bottle up fear and it will eat you alive, sweetling.”
“But I’m a Herald - ” Shandi wept. “I’m supposed to be strong and dependable - ”
“Since when does that mean never showing fear?” Keisha countered. “You saw how we all acted, when the cold-drake caught us. Hawkbrothers, dyheli, and even a gryphon - we were all terrified and showed it. And since when is fear a bad thing? Fear keeps us from doing a lot of really stupid things. Hey, fear kept me from becoming a good little miller’s wife, right?” She smiled, trying to cheer Shandi, and pulled her a little closer, feeling very much the Big Sister once again. “It’s perfectly all right to be afraid about this. I know I am, and you can tell, right? I’m afraid - as far as that goes, really very afraid.”
“How can you possibly understand?” Shandi retorted. “You’ve faced all kinds of terrible things without being afraid! I can hardly stand the sight of blood! How can you know how I feel - ”
“How? I’ve lived with you, sweetling, or have you forgotten?” Keisha almost laughed. “I don’t even need to be an Empath to know, sister! You spent most of your life being a good maidenly daughter, then became the belle of the village - everything in your life was sweet, perfect, and predictable. Then suddenly you got Chosen - which is every child’s secret daydream, but there aren’t too many who would know what to do if it happened - whisked out into another world, with no family around, and put through strange schooling so fast it made your head spin. And as if that wasn’t enough on your plate, no sooner did you get someplace where you thought you might be able to catch your breath than you were thrown onto a dangerous mission that goes right off the map without anyone who taught you to help or advise you! You’ve seen some horrible things that you’d never imagined in your worst nightmares. And now this idiot mage wants you to help him fight an army? You’d have to be crazy not to be in a panic, and I know you aren’t crazy!”
Shandi had been silent through all of this - and now her body began to shake again as she clung to her sister. “How could you know - how did you guess - ” she sobbed weakly.
“Because I’m your sister and your best friend, and I love you,” was the simplest answer she could give - and must have been the best. Shandi completely dissolved in tears - and now, so did Keisha, tears that flowed down her cheeks silently, without the kind of painful knot she got in her throat when she was fighting to hold them back. But Keisha’s were tears of happiness mixed with relief, for now, at last, she knew that Shandi was never going to wall her out again.
It was well past midnight when Shandi had talked herself out; by then, Keisha was cold and stiff, but she wouldn’t have moved to save her soul.
“ - and the worst was when Kel said that the first Heralds wouldn’t have been so cowardly,” Shandi said, in a voice made hoarse with talking and crying. “He was right, I knew he was right - I wanted to sink into the ground, but I knew if I showed anything, they’d all think that the only reason I was against Darian was because I was afraid! And it’s not, it’s not, I swear it!”
“If you hadn’t spoken up, I’m not sure any of the rest of us would have said anything,” Keisha told her truthfully. “I mean, after all, we may each have our own private agendas, but at the heart of it, this is Darian’s personal quest we’re helping with. With his parents asking for help - how could his best friends let him down?”
Only now did Karles take the few steps needed to move to Shandi’s side and gently rub his warm, soft nose against her shoulder - and Keisha’s hands. Shandi reached up and patted his neck. “Karles - tried to help me, but - ”
:I am not an Empath,: Karles said simply, surprising Keisha once again by speaking to her as well as to Shandi. :I cannot shield her from her own fear, when I am just as afraid - I cannot even shield her from mine! This is not Valdemar, and I am ... out of my element.:
“We all are, to some degree or other,” Keisha told both of them. “Never doubt it.”
:But Valdemar is home, and I have never been away from it!: The plaintive note in Karles’ mind-voice came as a second shock; all her life she had been raised to think that Companions were near-invulnerable and infallible -
:We are different, with a few powers, yes, and more experience, but hardly infallible.: Karles sighed heavily, and nuzzled Shandi once more. :Shandi and I are two halves of a whole; we complement and complete one another. That is the way of Herald and Companion. We are still as prone to weakness and mistakes as any other soul. If being Companion and Chosen made us infallible, think how many disasters in Valdemar’s history could have been avoided!:
“Good point,” Keisha replied, but kept her thought of and how nice of you to have finally admitted that! carefully under shields. “Shandi, do take it from an older and more experienced Empath - and not just your big sister - that you are doing yourself no good by keeping those walls up, inside and out. You need to do a certain amount of shielding, but not to the point that you feel nothing from us, and let nothing of your own emotion show! We need to know how you feel about things as much as you need to know how we feel, otherwise we cannot work with each other. Out here in the wild unknown, that could cost a life, maybe even mine.” Keisha smiled again and kissed her sister’s forehead gently. “Neither of us would want that, yes? Now let’s get some sleep, and see what matters look like in the morning.”
Is Darian thinking clearly? Is he so caught up in trying to impress his parents, to give them anything they need, that he’s not able to be objective? No doubt, Shandi was already thinking those things, without Keisha’s experience with Darian to bolster her faith in him.
And Steelmind needs to know more of how you feel than all the rest of us put together, she thought, but also under shield, as Shandi got stiffly to her feet and gave her sister a hand up. It wasn’t her place to give Shandi any advice about romance, and she wasn’t sure that Shandi would take it, even if it was her place. Maybe Shandi and Karles hadn’t seen it as clearly as Keisha had, as a result of how much they had tried to wall themselves off from their own emotions and others’, but day by day there was much more in Steelmind’s attitudes toward Shandi than a passing interest in a fellow traveler.
I’ve been lucky enough to find Darian. Maybe the best gift I can give to my sister is getting her to open up enough to see that Steelmind is right next to her. And, just maybe, when he sees she will open up to him now, Steelmind will open his arms to her. We are farther away from home than any of us ever imagined we’d be, and all we have is each other.
Darian woke up all at once, with the disorienting impression that Kuari was trying to dance a jig on the roof of the log house. Then what Kuari was trying to tell him penetrated his muddled mind, and a moment later he leaped from bed and was pulling on his clothes in grim haste, as Keisha stirred grog-gily beside him.
“What?” she managed, raising a face half-covered with sleep-tousled hair.
“We’ve got to alert the village,” he told her, for there was no time to tell this gently. “Kuari’s seen something. I think there’s something bad - a tribal army coming straight for us.”
:Kel!: he blasted into the gryphon’s dreaming mind. :Kel, wake up1.:
:?: The reply was foggy and inarticulate. :Food sleep preen mate fight what?:
:Up! Alarm! Enemies!: He kept his reply simple; it took a moment for Kel’s mind to get working. A moment later, Kel’s war cry ripped through the village, shocking everyone within hearing distance awake.
In another moment, Hashi’s howl started all the dogs in the village up, which ensured that no one slept. Darian left Keisha struggling to organize herself while he headed for the door to get the village mobilized. He was already outside before his parents, reacting to the unholy cacophony, pushed their way out of their sleeping cubicle. Keisha could explain to them; he had to get the rest of the village alert so defenses were in place before the enemy arrived.
Steelmind and Shandi burst out of the door of the log house they were guesting in shortly after he stumbled into the ghostly mist that swirled around the log houses, a mist that clung damply to him in the half-light of predawn. Steelmind whistled shrilly for his bird, and Karles pounded through the mist to Shandi’s side. She seized her saddle from the bench beside the door and swung it up onto his back as he skidded to a halt beside her. Hywel and Wintersky were next out the door, and the dyheli were all close on the heels of Karles, snorting and stamping with agitation.
Then the northerners began piling out of their houses, all sleepy, all confused, all babbling. Darian tried shouting his warnings, but his voice was lost in the general confusion and he despaired of making himself heard.
Then Kel put a stop to the noise by diving down out of the trees and braking with huge sweeps of his wings to land beside Darian, just as Hashi broke off his howl of alert and the dogs followed his lead. The wind of Kel’s wings cleared the mist; his sudden appearance silenced everyone, with shock and alarm, for no one here was used to a gryphon’s dramatic entrances. Darian took full advantage of the sudden silence.
“Our birds just alerted us, Wolverine is on the way, in force,” he called out. “Whatever defensive plan you’ve got, you’d better put it in motion now. We’ve got until dawn before they get here, and dawn’s not far off.”
There was no more confusion; the men quickly sorted themselves into defensive groups and headed for the stored weapons; boys and some of the women went for hunting bows and arrows, while the rest began dragging tied bundles of thorny brush into a defensive barricade around the perimeter of the village.
Shandi pulled herself into the saddle and trotted Karles over to Darian. “What do you want us to do?” she asked; her voice trembled a little, and she was dead-white, but she seemed steady enough. In fact, Darian was just as glad to see her finally showing a little fear; it made him less worried that she would try to do something comprised of equal parts of bravery and foolishness.
“Stand by,” he told her. “You’re the only cavalry we’ve got; I just hope Wolverine doesn’t have any riders. One person can do a lot if she’s the only one on horseback.”
Karles stamped a hoof loudly.
“Or on whatever,” Darian added.
Hywel had grabbed a boar-spear and picked out a group of Raven warriors to stand with on his own; that was perfect. He knew how to fight alongside these people, in their style; Darian dismissed him from his mind. Steelmind and Winter sky retrieved their bows and every arrow they owned, then sent their birds out after Kuari. Kel lumbered back up into the air to perch on the rooftree of one of the log houses.
How long do we have? he wondered, and joined his mind to Kuari’s. Through Kuari’s eyes he looked down on the approaching throngs of warriors and recognized one of the slopes they had passed yesterday.
His stomach lurched. Not long enough.
Wolverine’s fighters would be within hearing distance in a few moments; he didn’t bother warning the rest, since they’d be catching the sounds of jingling harness and men trampling through brush in a moment. Wolverine was no longer making even a token attempt at slipping up unnoticed.
And just how did they know they don’t have surprise on us?
The answer to that was clear enough as the second rank came into Kuari’s view.
Striding alongside a guard of muscular fighters dressed identically in leather tunics ornamented with an eclipsed sun instead of a tribal or personal totem was an all-too-familiar-looking figure. Darian’s nightmares were sometimes haunted by a similar, dark figure out of his past.
The Shaman of the Eclipse. Mage and Shaman in one, this fellow was in his late twenties or early thirties, bearded, shaggy-haired, and fully as muscle-bound as his personal guards. Unlike the guards, he had only token armor; a helmet, shoulder plates, arm braces. He also wore robes of cloth, not a leather tunic; black cloth, with the corona of the eclipse painted in scarlet on the breast. He wore the same style medallion that the last such Shaman had worn - the Shaman who had led Blood Bear to attack and conquer Errold’s Grove.
A Shaman you killed yourself, with a lot fewer weapons and no training, he reminded himself, as the sight of the man sent atavistic chills down his back. He tried not to think about how huge a part luck had played on that long-ago night.
“Their mage is with them,” he told the others - which now included Keisha and his parents, who had joined Wintersky, Steelmind, and Shandi. “He must have followed my trail from the pass.” Too late now to chastise himself for using magic at all; he’d done what seemed right at the time.
“They’re coming!” someone shouted from the barricade, and as the first scarlet hint of the sun silhouetted the mountains to the east, an unexpected breeze blew off the mist. The clearing in front of the village sprang up as if conjured from the fog - and there they were.
Darian swallowed, his mouth gone dry. Even if every man, woman, and child of Raven took up a weapon, they would still be outnumbered two-to-one. The only slim advantage they had was that they were the defenders. Their opponents, though not as well-armed as Blood Bear had been when they descended upon Errold’s Grove, were still formidable; all of them were fit, tough, and looked to be seasoned warriors, armed with swords, knives, and throwing-spears, armored with hammered-metal helmets, shoulder- and breast-plates, with vambraces and greaves over their leather tunics and trews. Cold-eyed and wary, they didn’t seem impressed with the defenders.
His heart went cold and sank into the bottom of his stomach. His chest went tight as the warriors of Wolverine lined themselves up before the defenses of Raven, making a loose formation of two ranks. The ones in the second rank had bows instead of javelins.
Oh, gods. It’s not all Wolverine either. . . .
He should have expected this, but somehow it had never occurred to him that there would be fighters sporting the totem of Blood Bear allied with those of Wolverine. There they were - not the half-human, half-bestial things that their Shaman had created, but more than nasty-looking enough. And by the wicked snarls on their faces, they recognized the three Hawkbrothers, too - recognized them as coming from the same folk as the instrument of their defeat in the south, at any rate.
I’ve got a very bad feeling about this.
Shandi eased Karles over to Darian’s side, and nodded at the Blood Bear contingent, who made up nearly half of the left flank. “Is that who I think it is?” she asked, in a voice that cracked a little.
“It is.” He didn’t take his eyes off the Shaman. If there was a single person commanding this force, it was this Shaman, and his control was absolute. After the fighters arrayed themselves in two ranks, they remained in place, and when one or two stirred restlessly, the Shaman quelled them with a single spearing glance.
Only when all of his troops had settled into immobility did the Shaman send his gaze questing over the Raven defenders. When his eyes locked with Darian’s, it was clear enough who he had been looking for.
Darian returned his gaze somberly, determined not to show a hint of weakness or fear. You want to start a staring contest? Be my guest. I’d rather we tried to stare each other down than started flinging arrows at each other. He tried to judge the level of the mage’s power without actually probing him, for a probe could be turned against him; the other man was probably doing the same.
The flows of power around the Shaman told Darian quite a bit - more bad news, since the Shaman had accessed a ley-line four furlongs behind, which crossed the trail the army must have taken. It wasn’t the strongest line Darian had ever seen, nor the strongest in the area, but the fact that the mage was accessing it at all meant he was at least Darian’s equal. Higher than Apprentice and Journeyman. Master, at least. How experienced a Master? There was no telling, but Darian felt altogether too new and raw in his ranking at the moment. I am not ready for a contest of mage-against-mage - he thought, as he accessed another power line.
But evidently the other was.
With a brusque motion to his guard to stand their ground, the Shaman stepped forward from the rest.
His voice, deep and mocking, with an underlying rasp, rang out across the clear ground between them. “Ho! Chief of Raven!”
With a tightening of his jaw muscles, the Raven Chief answered, though he did not step forward in turn. “I see you, Shaman of Wolverine,” he called, raising his chin in a gesture of defiance. “What brings you to Raven at the season of fishing?”
“A friendly visit.” the Shaman grinned, his teeth glinting whitely in the darkness of his beard. “You give us cold greeting.”
Darian felt his skin crawling at the sight of that smile. The Shaman was very sure of himself.
“Do friends come as armies, visiting with weapons in hand?” Raven Chief countered bravely. The Chief held his head high, his voice clear and steady. If he was worried, it wasn’t apparent.
The Shaman did not reply directly to that; instead, he allowed his gaze to drift back to Darian, then return to the Chief. “You have strange visitors,” he said instead, with a heavy frown. “Visitors who bear a strange resemblance to folk who caused friends and allies of ours much grief, some few years ago.”
“Ah?” The Chief tilted his head to one side. “That is odd; I had heard a different tale.” He scratched his head and feigned thinking hard. “There was something about an attempt to conquer the southlands that was thwarted by the inhabitants there. Something about Blood Bear being routed by a few birds and a handful of dirt-diggers and children - ”
There was a roar of anger from the left, and the Shaman had to divert his attention to regaining command of his own forces, while the fighters of Raven roared with laughter. Somewhat forced laughter, perhaps, but it served its purpose, which was to make the Blood Bear fighters angry and difficult to control.
Darian silently cheered for the Raven Chief; he was doing exactly the right thing, putting as much strain on the Shaman’s control of the troops as possible.
When the Shaman had regained the upper hand and returned to his negotiations, he had not lost a bit of his outwardly pleasant and half-amused demeanor. “That was ill-said, Chief of Raven,” he chided gently. “You have made our allies unhappy. I cannot answer for what they may do if you anger them a second time.”
The Chief shrugged, as if it was a matter of complete indifference to him. “Whether you can keep any grip on your own warriors’ collars is not my problem, Shaman.”
Darian hoped he could keep talking for the rest of the day - while they were exchanging barbed witticisms (or at least what passed for witticisms among the Northerners) there wasn’t any fighting going on. “Your allies are no friends to Raven,” he pointed out. “Why not send them on their way? Then, perhaps, we will consider offering you a warmer welcome.”
“Oh, Chief, I do not believe I can do that,” the Shaman said silkily, shaking his head with mock-sadness. “Much as I would like to oblige you. I believe they have some business with these visitors of yours.”
“I believe they do not. These visitors are related to Elders of my tribe and are traders; Blood Bear has no relatives here, and has never been interested in gaining goods by trade.” The Chief’s tone implied that the reason Blood Bear wasn’t interested in trade was because they preferred to steal.
Raven-spirit, this Chief of yours is as clever as any of the feathered tribe, Darian thought. Darian saw what he was up to - he was trying to divide the forces. For some reason, the Shaman of Wolverine wasn’t ready to attack yet, and might not support Blood Bear if they did. It would be much easier to handle the enemy if they came at the defenses a piece at a time.
“Really?” The Shaman’s arch tone betokened mock-astonishment. “You have some strange blood in Raven, then.”
“No stranger than a tribe whose warriors once looked as much beast as man,” the Chief countered, grounding the butt of his spear for emphasis. He looked down his nose at the left flank, and the Blood Bear fighters stirred uncomfortably. “The blood in Raven is different, perhaps, but strong. The Raven is lord of the skies. Even the Eagle does not interfere with him.”
“So you say; the Raven’s calls sound like empty croaking to me.” That was an open challenge, but the Chief wasn’t lured into taking it. He knew as well as Darian that their advantage lay in keeping the enemy talking as long as possible.
“For those who have not the learning or the wisdom, all good advice sounds like empty croaking.” There was the challenge turned back without having to answer it.
But the Shaman was losing patience. “You have one among your so-called visitors with dangerous learning,” he warned, pointing directly at Darian, who responded by standing straighter and staring back stonily into the Shaman’s gaze. “Or has he not told you? Chief of Raven, this man would make you think he is but a harmless thing, but he is a poison serpent among you. He has magic powers that he had not disclosed to you, that do not come from the spirits - ”
“But he has,” the Chief laughed. “He has told us all, and much more than you know. And we know him. You say he is a poison serpent disguised, but I say he is the guardian serpent across our threshold - ”
The Shaman smiled, and both Darian and the Chief - and everyone else knew that the Chief had finally said the wrong thing, and given the Shaman the opening he’d been looking for. “In that case,” the Shaman said quickly and gleefully, “Send forth your guardian, for a Shaman is a serpent-slayer, and let him contend with me. If you wish us to depart in peace, that is the least that we will accept. Send your guardian forth so that we will face each other, and see who has the greater strength; he whose power comes from the Spirits, or he whose power comes from nothing we recognize.” His tone turned silky and coaxing. “You have nothing to lose by this, Chief of Raven; only send him out. If he wins, we will depart.”
Keisha stifled a gasp of dismay, and Darian bit back a gasp of his own as his heart sank right down into his boots. Of all things, the very last that he wanted was a head-to-head mage-duel with someone whose power and abilities were a complete unknown to him.
And the Shaman had maneuvered them all into a position where that was precisely what he would have to do.
Keisha stopped herself from grabbing Darian’s sleeve to hold him back. Her lover closed his eyes a few moments, took a deep breath, and stepped forward. To her left, Daralie made a little whimper, but no other sound of protest, though she caught Kullen’s hand in hers and Keisha felt fear coming from both of them in waves.
I’ll bet they never foresaw Darian confronting this mage face-to-face. They thought he’d just wave his hands at a safe distance and the Eclipse Shaman would fall into dust. Her throat was so tight it hurt to swallow. Too bad magic doesn’t work that way. ...
Darian looked cool and untroubled as he stepped up to the barricade of brush and waited for the warriors of Raven to use fishing hook-poles to pull the thorns aside, so he could pass; only Keisha and Shandi could really know how apprehensive he was.
The Shaman of Wolverine waved off his guard and stepped forward to meet Darian halfway between the two lines.
Keisha held her breath, as the two mages stared into each others’ eyes while they established the stance they wished to begin with. There was some distance, to prevent the bystanders from being injured - maybe. Of all the clothing Darian could have grabbed in his haste to dress, Keisha thought it was interesting that he had grabbed the leather tunic and trews that he’d worn for his ceremony with Ghost Cat. In the war of minds that was almost as important as the war of magic, Darian had gotten a boost with that outfit - he was supposed to be an outland southerner, but he was wearing the clothing of the tribes. Some of the Shaman’s power came from the belief his followers had in him - and Keisha sensed a stirring of unease among them.
Darian made a cool and calm backhanded insult to the mage he was facing, by turning his back to him for a moment - a wordless way of showing the mage was of so little concern he didn’t even have to keep an eye on him. Darian spread his arms, with his open hands at waist height, and two horse-lengths away from each hand, a wall of force grew up from the ground. As he drew his hands together, the ground churned up as if being plowed and the wall rose, looking like flattened bolts of lightning along its leading edge. When Darian’s palms met, there was a shimmering wall several times his height in a semicircle between himself and Raven, cupping him toward the Shaman’s side. Raising one eyebrow slightly, Darian turned to face the Shaman.
The Shaman grunted, and reluctantly mirrored Darian’s action - the intent being to keep the opponent’s attacks from harming the mage’s own forces. The churning earth sputtered up in large uneven chunks, less plowed-looking and more like they were hammered upward from below. There was a resounding thud when the force-wall kicked up a log. The semicircles were barely visible to those who could not see the energies and powers that lay beneath the skin of the world. They shimmered a little in the early-morning sunlight, as if each mage had a structure of the thinnest, most delicate glass built around them as they faced each other.
The two semicircles joined edge to edge with a visible flash, and Darian’s began to glow a very pale silver, while the Shaman’s restlessly flickered yellow. The effect faintly obscured the two mages inside, who backed away to get as much distance as possible between each other. No one would enter or leave now.
The Shaman struck first, abruptly; he leaped into action, arms flailing as if he threw a handful of stones, pelting Darian with what looked like white-hot shooting stars, so bright they hurt the eyes. Keisha moaned and flinched away, her heart racing.
Darian didn’t do anything outwardly, but the shooting stars bent their paths to either side, and bounced off something just in front of him, two of them slowing in midair before accelerating straight back at the Shaman.
The Shaman reached out, caught them, and with a sly smile, drew his arms up in a slow arc. He displayed the catch to his men, and crushed the sputtering fireballs in his raised fists in a pyrotechnic show of dominance.
Darian shrugged, as if the tactic hadn’t impressed him, and the Shaman’s smile turned to a frown. Is Darian going to attack next? Keisha wondered, her hands balled into fists at her side as she watched. The Shaman was obviously expecting him to do something equally showy in response, and his frown deepened.
Darian didn’t even shift his weight; he waited patiently, with no sign of agitation or anger. Why? she wondered. Steelmind had come up to her other side unnoticed; he put a comforting hand on her shoulder and she jumped.
“Darian is playing a waiting game,” he murmured in her ear. “When two Masters contend, there is no question of one running out of magic energy, for they use the ley-lines. Instead, usually the one who loses is the one who becomes physically fatigued soonest. Darian is rightly letting the Shaman expend his own strength first; he loses nothing by this, but if the Shaman were to play the same game, he would lose face with his warriors, who expect him to be aggressive.”
The Shaman tried another few volleys of those shooting stars, but however thick and fast they came, Darian deflected them without turning a hair. They looked impressive - as most of his magics likely were - but the blazing attacks were treated with such apparent indifference by his opponent, the Shaman must have realized this bit of flashiness was working against him.
The Blood Bear warriors, already keyed up and spoiling for a fight, had no patience with this onesided battle. They had been moving restlessly and muttering among themselves since the Shaman stepped forward. Just as Keisha glanced over at them, alarmed at a sudden rise in their anger, they charged the Raven defenses.
Their screams of battle drowned out her own scream of fear, and she stumbled backwards and would have fallen if she hadn’t caught herself. Steelmind had an arrow on his bowstring and another in the air before the enemy had gone more than a dozen steps.
With her mouth dry and her heart racing, Keisha backed up further, and set herself behind the shelter of a carved pole just as the first set of enemy arrows rained down on their lines. The war cries of the fighters and the screams of the wounded drowned everything else, and her stomach turned over with nausea as the metallic scent of blood reached her.
But something else pulled her out of her shelter; the need of those injured. She darted from cover, grabbed the nearest wounded man, and dragged him back to relative safety by his shirt. Then she went to work, blotting everything else out. Every man, woman, or child she could get back on his or her feet with a bow in their hands might give them a better chance. She couldn’t help Darian, she couldn’t wield a sword, but she could do this much.
And she would.
Darian watched the Eclipse Shaman through narrowed eyes, sensing the ebb and flow of power in the ley-line that the Shaman had linked to. He didn’t think it had occurred to the Shaman to do the same, and that gave him an edge in knowing when an attack would come, if not how. Then again, Darian had the advantage of Tayledras training, and not merely the standard training, but also Firesong’s version of that training. The Hawkbrothers were steeped in the precise and most efficient use of magic, passed on for many generations, and by comparison this Shaman was likely self-trained or tutored in rough skills at best.
The Shaman began to prowl his half of the circle, pacing back and forth, eying Darian with barely suppressed fury. Outside the circle, there was a battle going on; someone had broken the promise the Shaman had made. But neither Darian nor his opponent dared pay any heed to anything outside their wall of power; any distraction would give the other a chance to strike the fatal blow.
Darian began to move warily himself, watching the Shaman and nothing else, keeping the same distance between them at all times. Then the Shaman darted toward him, pushing his hands forward, palms out.
A massive wall of force hit Darian and knocked him backward; he’d have fallen if he hadn’t been moving himself; as it was, he had to dance sideways and fend off a second invisible blow, turning the force aside and into the wall of the sphere. That put him almost within physical reach of the Shaman, who made a grab for him.
He dropped and rolled out of the way, jumping to his feet and putting the fullest possible distance between himself and the Shaman again.
Again he watched the line even as he watched the Shaman, and again, an ebb in the power-level warned him before the Shaman attacked.
Hands blazing with power, the Shaman lunged for him; there was no time to move out of the way, so Darian used the oldest of all of his defenses.
The Shaman’s right foot caught on the earth for a critical moment; he stumbled and fell, catching himself with his outstretched hands. The power he had meant to use to blast Darian discharged into the ground, creating nothing worse than a blackened spot and the smell of scorched dirt.
As he fell, Darian ran out of the way again; the Shaman picked himself up with red rage burning in his eyes. Darian reacted to the immediate drop in power just in time by strengthening his shields; this time the weapon he used was anything but subtle. He lashed at Darian with levin-bolts, whips of power that looked and hit like lightning.
The levin-bolts arced into his shields with a crack that hurt his ears and an eye-burning light that made his eyes water. He held his shields against the bolts as the Shaman poured power into them and the air around him tasted of a thunderstorm at its peak.
Abruptly, the Shaman released the bolts; Darian could barely see. Blinking tears out of his eyes, he used Mage-Sight to watch the Shaman instead, seeing him as a form laced with little threads of red and yellow.
Those threads blazed up as the ley-line ebbed, but this time Darian reacted before the Shaman could; he made the Shaman’s foot stick again as the man moved sideways before his attack. The Shaman hadn’t expected an offensive move after so much defense; this time he fell hard, and while he was down, Darian lashed him with eye-burning levin-bolts.
He held the bolts on his still-prone enemy until his own eyes had time to recover, then leaped sideways just as he released them, and just in time, for the moment he did so, the Shaman hit him with the conjured weapon he’d been planning to use.
A massive sphere of energy rolled toward him, looking like fire with teeth, threatening to engulf him. He made a quick guess and assumed that the Shaman would expect him to run; he stood his ground instead, and held his shields. The sphere rolled right over him; it was dangerous in itself, for it immediately began to suck power from his shields, but it wasn’t as dangerous as the jagged spikes of energy that blasted out a pit right where Darian would have been if he’d run.
That made another obstacle to avoid. He solved the problem of the sphere by puncturing its outer wall; it deflated like a punctured bladder, and vanished as if it were a flame out of fuel.
The Shaman was furious. He was about to have his temper cooled. Darian detachedly reasoned out his primary advantage against this Shaman. The Shaman’s use of power was formidable, and his endurance considerable, but it was all oriented toward obvious, surface-visible effects - which was only logical considering he was a Shaman who also sought power among his people - when you want to discourage challenges and impress your followers, why not use the most awe- and fear-inspiring magics?
Darian, however, was able to work beneath the surface. There were springs everywhere underground here; they accounted for part of the verdancy, part of the humidity, and were doubtless under pressure thanks to the large body of water nearby. Darian found the nearest underground reservoir, and with a few deft hand motions to help in the mental process of sculpting the channel underneath, brought it powerfully to the surface, right beneath the Shaman.
Water blasted upward in a cold geyser, knocking the other to the ground, and soaking him in moments.
Two can play at making holes in the earth.
And while he was at it - in the next breath, he aerated the ground around the Shaman, creating an ear-numbing protracted thunderclap, then super-saturated the ground beneath the Shaman with water from that same geyser, turning it into a sinkhole. The Shaman predictably began to struggle, miring himself up to the waist - at which time Darian cut off the geyser’s feeding-channel, leaving the pressure to build below the surface. Another twist of the magic and Darian chased all the water out of the mud pit, leaving the Shaman embedded in rock-hard ground.
Raven kept the Blood Bear warriors at the barricade; none got past the hedge of thorns backed by heavier pieces of tree trunk. Keisha pulled ten or twelve of Raven’s wounded to safety, mostly struck by arrows. After the first three, she got into a rhythm; wait for a lull, dash out, seize the victim by the shirt, haul him to protection. Then break off the arrowhead, pull the shaft out, stop the bleeding. Once that was done, most of her patients went grimly right back into the fray without pausing for more than a drink of water. She could hardly believe it - they must have been in terrible pain! But they didn’t seem to feel anything; as soon as she had them reasonably patched up with rough bandages and supportive bindings they grabbed another weapon and went for the barricade.
The noise and stench were awful; metal clanging against metal, arrows piercing leather and skin, men and women screaming and shouting, punctuated with Kel’s war shrieks and the cries of the raptors - old and new sweat, blood, rancid grease, churned mud. It all overwhelmed the senses, impossible to block out. She couldn’t ignore the chaos, so she endured it, and after the tenth (or twelfth) man ran back to the lines as she finished tying off the bandages on his upper arm, she looked around for another patient and discovered to her surprise that there weren’t any.
There were no more arrows flying into their lines; the fighting on this side of the barricade was all hand-to-hand, but now the advantage was with the defenders. They could continue to rain arrows down on the back rank of the enemy without even taking combatants from the line - the women and young boys stood off at a distance, lobbing their arrows in a high arc over the Raven lines and into the back ranks of Blood Bear. Blood Bear hadn’t managed to breach the barricade, as the thorns still held them at bay, and as bundles of thorns were broken and trampled by the sheer press of bodies, grimly determined children came dragging new ones to be shoved into place with boar-spears.
Boar-spears - strangely enough, those were proving to give Raven a real edge. They were long enough to reach over the barricade and stab at the enemy without exposing their wielder to the thorns. The blade, long and sharp to piece a boar’s tough hide, was about the same size as the short-swords all of the fighters were using, and the iron cross-bar designed to keep the boar from coming up the shaft at the hunter made effective quillons. Anyone could use it to stab; really good fighters could use it to slash as well. Although the only fatal wounds to Blood Bear so far had been caused by arrows the spearmen were holding the line.
But where was Wolverine?
Keisha stood on her toes behind the shelter of her carved pole, and craned her neck to look over the embattled defenders.
Wolverine had not moved a single pace forward. In fact, some of them looked embarrassed!
They broke the Shaman’s promise, that’s why, she thought, astonished. Blood Bear has broken the promise the Shaman made not to attack while he and Darian were fighting. This wasn’t a case of Northerner against out-land Southerner, where anything was fair and promises didn’t matter - this was tribe against tribe, where strict rules held.
And Blood Bear had broken the rules. No matter who survived this fight, Blood Bear had blackened the name of their tribe. Even their own totemic spirit might choose to desert them, and no tribe or individual would ever trust the word of a member of Blood Bear again. That meant no alliances, no intermarriages, no trade agreements, no intercourse of any kind. Essentially, it meant the death of the tribe. The only way a member of Blood Bear could survive the shunning would be if he somehow convinced the Chief of another tribe that he had not participated in the oathbreaking; then he could be adopted into a new tribe.
Which means no adult warriors of Blood Bear, period. Only the women and children. Wolverine will throw them out as soon as the fighting’s over. Skies above - I’m actually witnessing the final death of the entire clan that attacked Errold’s Grove.
Wolverine wouldn’t raise a finger to help Raven, though. Their code of conduct didn’t extend that far.
Another man fell, and Keisha dashed out to drag him into safety. This time her treatment took even less time; a simple slash wound, shallow, with no arrow to extract. In a few moments he was back in his place, boar-spear in both hands, punishing the man who’d managed to reach him with savage thrusts of the spear.
One of the fighters in the rear of the Blood Bear mob pulled himself back and out of the fight; it was this movement against the flow of battle that caught her attention.
The fighter, who by his elaborately decorated, heavy armor, was someone of high rank, whirled to face the combat between Darian and the Shaman. He grabbed a discarded bow from the ground, took an arrow from the quiver still attached to his belt, and took aim at Darian’s back.
Keisha screamed, but her cry was lost in the general outcry. Her heart convulsed painfully, as she cried out a warning no one would ever hear -
But someone did.
A huge, white shape streaked from the far right of the lines, launched into the air, and sailed over the barricade with the grace of a swan in flight. It was Karles, and Shandi clung to his back, her mouth set in a taut line, her never-used sword in hand.
Just as the warrior loosed his arrow, Karles reached him; Shandi’s sword licked out and, impossibly, deflected the arrow from its deadly flight.
Their momentum carried them on past; the warrior put a second arrow to his bow, cursing loudly in his own tongue. But now, Shandi was not the only one who knew what he was trying to do.
An ear-piercing shriek from above startled everyone into looking up. Kel had been voicing his war cries before this, but never anything like the one he produced when he realized who the bowman’s target was.
Kel dove down out of the sky with terrifying speed, shallowing his arc the faster he went and the quicker he approached the ground, fore-talons outstretched. The fighter had only time enough to cringe down, trying (in utter futility) to hide. Kel hit him with more force than a levin-bolt, doubtlessly breaking the warrior’s back in an instant, and pushed him level to the lay of the earth for over five horse-lengths.
Then Kelvren rose again into the sky, wings laboring, talons set firmly into the fighter’s shoulder and torso. The man screamed shrilly, writhing in what must have been incredible pain, for Kel’s talons had wrapped right around the protective shoulder plates and penetrated the joints between them and the rest of the armor, and the thumb-talon of the other foreclaw was surely right through the stomach. Blood oozed from the wounds, streamed down the armor, and splattered down on the heads of his fellows as Kel lumbered higher and higher into the sky.
Then he let go.
Still screaming, the man plummeted toward the ground, hitting it with a crunch that made even Keisha wince. The screaming stopped instantly and there was a moment of terrible silence.
Kel had dropped the man practically on top of the Wolverine lines. The Wolverine warriors drew back from the mangled body - then, incredibly, turned their backs on it. No one bothered to see if the fighter still breathed, or render him aid in any way.
The shunning had already begun.
None of this seemed to give the Blood Bear fighters pause for more than a few moments. A heartbeat after their fellow hit the ground, they were back at the barricade again. If anything, their fury had redoubled.
But now they had another target besides the Raven fighters behind the barricades.
A handful of them turned on Shandi and Karles; the Companion reared on his hindquarters, lashing out with fore-hooves, then dropped back to the ground to kick those trying to take him from behind. Shandi laid about her with her sword; together they accounted for three of their assailants, but more turned on them.
Shandi was screaming, but it was not in fear or pain. She was screaming, “For Valdemar’s honor! For Valdemar’s honor!” again and again, with each slash of the blade.
Steelmind vaulted the barricade, racing to Shandi’s defense. Hashi and Neta joined him, helping him fight his way through the packed fighters to Shandi’s side. Steelmind wasn’t trying to use any weapons; he seized fighters before they were aware that he wasn’t one of them and physically flung them out of the way, while Neta used her horns and hooves to good effect in clearing the path, and Hashi attacked any pair of legs that wasn’t protected.
Steelmind got to Shandi with only a minor gash on his head; once there, he pulled his climbing staff from the sheath on his back and began to use it with lethal efficiency. Neta and Hashi made a stand on her opposite side. Together, the three guarded Karles’ rear flanks, allowing Shandi and Karles to keep their attention on the enemy in front of them.
Steelmind’s staff - a deadly device with a spike on one end and a sharply-pointed hook on the other, with several grab knobs at regular intervals - seemed as light as a straw in the Hawkbrother’s hands. His buzzard, no longer slow or sleepy, joined the battle with a series of heavy stoops, knocking helmets forward to obscure vision, knocking helmets off completely, then returning to lacerate the unprotected heads with his raking talons.
Kel remained above, kiting on the strong wind, keeping watch over Darian. Meanwhile Shandi, Karles, Hashi, Steelmind, and Neta began working their way back toward their own lines. Kelvren then folded wings in for a moment and dropped to attack again, someone unseen, identified only by a short scream an instant later and the gryphon taking off again with a human arm in his beak.
With a dry mouth and a pounding heart, Keisha watched the horrifying battle her friends were engaged in, oblivious to the fighting going on immediately around her, her hands clasped tightly under her chin. She was afraid to pray, for who should she pray for? Her sister, or her beloved? Her friends, or her family?
Please, please, she whispered silently. Keep them all safe. . . .
Darian wasn’t aware he’d been in danger from outside until an arrow arced high over his head, piercing both walls of the magic circle. The Shaman’s smile warned him that he’d become a target, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off his opponent.
It hadn’t taken the Shaman long to blast himself free of his earthy prison - but it had taken time and physical energy, and the Shaman’s legs were badly bruised and lacerated from the effort. Darian had those few moments of rest, which the Shaman had spent in labor.
Now they circled warily; the Shaman staggered, somewhat the worse for wear, and Darian tried to split his attention, using peripheral vision, trying to spot the archer who’d taken that shot at him while keeping the Shaman under his eye as well.
Suddenly a shrill scream rent the air and stunned everyone on the field into momentary silence. Riding the scream down out of the sky came a bolt of golden-brown power, which hit someone in the melee and rose again, a shrieking bit of man-flesh dangling from his talons. It was Kel - and Darian hadn’t known the gryphon could lift and carry a man off before this. He wanted to gape in astonishment, but didn’t dare. He wouldn’t underestimate this opponent for a moment; the Shaman still had plenty of raw power, and the will to use it.
But he had weaknesses. He didn’t look for attacks that weren’t purely magical power. He only used visible magic manifestations. And -
And he’s focusing every attack just on what I do.
The Shaman’s attention flickered away, as Kel dropped his screaming burden. The man hit the ground with a curiously wet crunch, and the screaming stopped. The Shaman turned his attention back to Darian, his mud-streaked face set in a snarl.
But not before Darian had managed to snatch up and conceal a rock in the palm of his hand.
They began to circle again, and Darian sensed the Shaman draining power for another strike. Now I have to put you right where I want you -
He circled, feinted back, moved forward again. The Shaman followed his maneuvers with narrowed eyes, suspecting something. Then he glanced to the side, saw the shallow crater where he had blasted himself free, and graced Darian with a grimace of contempt. With exaggerated care, he stepped past it, then Darian felt the quick drop in ley-line power that warned he was about to strike.
That was when Darian threw the rock at him.
Startled, expecting it to be a magical attack, the Shaman redirected his power and shattered the poor rock to powder with a single blast. In doing so, he faltered back into the crater he had so contemptuously avoided.
But Darian’s meddling with the groundwater wasn’t over. As the Shaman stumbled into the crater, he sucked the spring’s water out of the area again; between his efforts and the Shaman’s, that particular piece of ground was on the verge of becoming a sinkhole big enough to swallow a house, and when Darian removed the groundwater, the surface layer of sandstone gave way.
Instead of swallowing a house, it swallowed the Shaman, who disappeared into the earth with a hoarse cry. Darian fused the stone, using the same technique he had used to create the water channels for the bathing spring at the Vale, and the startled Shaman was buried up to his knees in sifting, crumbling earth while his ankles and feet smoldered.
Then Darian brought back all the water, and more, dancing back to avoid getting dropped into the sinkhole himself as the earth crumbled around the rapidly growing - and filling - crater.
Ten heartbeats later, the Shaman’s half of the wall winked out of existence.
Darian took down his own half, and stood staring into what was now a roughly circular pond of very muddy water, but the only thing that arose from the depths was a few bubbles - then nothing at all.
He looked up, slowly, to face the Wolverine lines.
For a long moment, he stared defiantly at the warriors, who stared back at him wearing expressions of incomprehension and dismay. No one moved. He clasped his hands before him in the same gesture he had used at the beginning of the duel, and waited.
Then one of the men at the far right broke, babbling, and ran, stumbling away as fast as his legs could carry him. That was all that was needed; a heartbeat later, the retreat had become a rout, the brave fighters of Wolverine taking to their heels as fast as they could, even casting off armor and shedding weapons so that they could run faster.
In a sudden reversal of tactics, the Blood Bear fighters turned from the barricade and flung themselves at the easier target within their midst. Steelmind’s staff moved in a lethal blur, but there were too many around him, fighting to take him down; he went down under a pile of bodies. Shandi wrenched Karles’ head around and forced her Companion back, coming to his rescue; the Companion bit, lashed, and kicked like a demon-horse as Keisha watched in agony, certain she was going to see all three of them die before her eyes.
Then, just as suddenly, the warriors of Blood Bear broke and ran.
Keisha didn’t bother to wonder why; as the Raven fighters pushed aside the barricade and poured after them, she followed, heading straight for the place where she had seen Steelmind go down.
She found him - and Shandi and Karles with him. Shandi was on her knees, clutching the front of his tunic and weeping over him. Keisha shoved her aside without a word, sending her tumbling, and took her place.
Oh, gods. This is bad, very bad. There were many, many internal injuries; someone had landed a terrible blow to his back, and another to his stomach. He’s bleeding in there and I - She knew with dismay that neither she, nor she and Shandi together had enough power to save him.
But someone else did.
She looked up; grabbed Karles’ dangling reins, and pulled his head down to the same level as hers. She looked defiantly into his eyes, and let him know without any words at all that she wasn’t asking for his help - she was ordering him to give it.
He stared at her blankly for just a moment, then the power came flooding into her in a blue-white torrent.
If water were to be compared to power and energy, being caught in the midst of Karles’ strength was akin to swimming that flooded river so many weeks ago. But she had swum that river, and she would direct this power now!
Fiercely, she flung herself into the battle to save Steelmind’s life, just as fiercely as any Raven warrior had fought at the barricade. She transmuted the blue-white beam into the gentler green energies of Healing and the golden ones of strength, and poured both into the shattered shell that was the Hawkbrother. She pieced together bone, mended torn and bleeding veins and arteries, soothed bruised tissues, and reinforced Steelmind’s own faltering strength. She did things she hadn’t even known she could do, galvanized by the unending flow of energy. This was something like the time she had Healed Hywel’s brother - except that this rime she was in no danger of losing herself.
The moment that everything she needed to do was done, and there was nothing more to do except that which only time could accomplish - the power was gone.
She dropped abruptly out of her Healing trance with a mental thud, and opened her eyes to see Shandi bent over Steelmind, both of them taking turns babbling about how much they loved each other.
Karles looked at her, then at Shandi, and snorted. Keisha got slowly to her feet, wobbling a little, feeling more than a bit light-headed. Karles hadn’t given her a single iota of power more than he’d had to, but somehow she didn’t resent that.
After all, Companions are supposed to help us with problems, not solve them for us. Karles looked up again just as she thought that - and nodded his gore-spattered, beautiful head, winking.
Darian walked slowly toward what was left of the barricades, which were now being pulled apart by industrious women. The Raven warriors were on the heels of Wolverine and Blood Bear, making certain that they took themselves over the pass, the news of their defeat with them. More women, boys, and a few old men followed their own fighters, each carrying leather bags or small fishing nets - harvesting the discarded arms and armor. They were no fools; they could alter the style and fit of what was once Wolverine’s, and make it Raven’s.
He saw Karles first - then Shandi, Keisha, and Steelmind. For one horrible moment, he feared the worst.
Then Shandi helped Steelmind to his feet; she draped one of his arms over Karles’ back, and the other over her own shoulder, then began walking him back toward the village. Darian heaved a sigh of relief.
Keisha looked up as a shadow went across them, to see Kelvren wing heavily overhead, returning from overseeing the Wolverine warriors’ retreat. His landing was imperfect and he nearly buckled; it was not too hard to see why as his left side became visible. There was a deep gash from the top of his beak, through the cere, and a nick in his eyelid, clearly from the same blow. His nares freely bled distinctively dark red blood which flowed to mix with the lighter sticky red of his foes’, most of which had dried with loose feathers, dirt, twigs and other debris glued into it. The broken ends of two arrows showed from the blood-matted feathers in the leading edge of his left wing, and in his left thigh. As he landed, clearly in terrible pain, he raised his head high and bellowed, “Arrre therrre any morrre left? Brrring them on!”
Keisha and Darian cried out, in unison, “Kelvren!” and quick-walked - since they had little energy left for running - to the wounded gryphon.
“Arrre therrre any morrre left to fight?” Kelvren demanded, eyes pinning, his gaze darting right and left. Darian grimaced, seeing what had happened to his good friend. “No more left, Kel. We won. They’re all gone now.”
Kelvren gazed off in the direction Wolverine had fled and then slumped down onto his hindquarters, leaning right, and finally collapsing onto his side without even folding his wings. “Hurrrrhhh - then I will rrressst. Darrrian, Ssshin’a’in arrre might - being conssspicuousss attrractsss arrrowsss.”
Swaying a little, Keisha turned to Darian, with both hands outstretched. They fell into each other’s embrace, and that was all he needed or thought about for a brief, but blissful moment, broken only by Keisha murmuring in his ear.
His heart lofted skyward with joy, and his heartbeat in his ears sounded like wingbeats.
They had made it through every ordeal, despite fatigue, pain, and fear. Together.
Keisha was in an awkward position, in quite a few ways. Physically, she had one foot under Kelvren’s head, and her other leg across his neck, snugged around the nape and all but unseen underneath the mass of feathers. Kelvren himself was flat on his belly, with Darian straddling his back, keeping his wings safely folded by sitting on them. The gryphon had his beak clamped around a bedroll, and flinched every time she pierced his cere with the needle.
Kuari, feeling drowsy, was perched atop a chair back nearby.
“I know you don’t like this, Kel, but I have to get this gash stitched up,” Keisha softly said, and she hoped she actually sounded as reassuring as she was trying to. “The powder is dulling the pain as much as it will, the rest you just have to cope with. Bite down on the bedroll instead of me, and we’ll be through with this in just a little while, all right?”
It wasn’t just her physical position that made her feel awkward and strained right now, though. They were also in the middle of a discussion with Darian’s parents, who hovered off to the side and projected nervous tension like a thunderstorm sent out lightning.
“Father, you know that I love you, but I am a Knight of Valdemar now and an Elder of my Vale. I do like it here, I truly do - but I cannot stay here and be a part of Raven. There are things happening back home that I have to tend to.”
Daralie nodded slowly, her expression very neutral. “And that does say it all, doesn’t it - back home. There, in Valdemar, and at your Vale. We always taught you from an early age that home is a place in your heart, Darian. Sometimes the place in your heart can also be represented by a place in the world. If it is where you have to be, then you have to be there.”
Kullen nodded, agreeing with his wife’s words, though his expression was much more grave. “Darian, we are so proud of you that there are just no words in any language to tell you how much. When we lost you, we carried around a hole in our hearts for years. Even with what we were going through up here, we thought of you, or rather – we thought of you as we last knew you. When we were separated, our only influence on you was what we’d taught you already, and we hoped that you remembered. We wish we could have been with you, all that time you were under Justyn’s care, but fate did not have it so. We loved you then, and as for who you have become - we do not love you any less.”
Kelvren rumbled deep in his throat, not quite a growl, but close. He was reacting to the stitching, not what was being said, but it made a strange counterpoint to the discussion. At least the most delicate part - the eyelid cut - had been completed first. Wintersky limped by, conversing with Raven’s Chief, and glanced in at the tableau briefly. They both seemed to surmise in the same instant what was going on between Darian and his parents, and drifted off discreetly after no more than a short wave.
Kullen shifted his weight off of his crippled leg. “Son - who and what you have become, we could not have given you. You are a wonder to us, and to all of Raven, too. You’ll be spoken of here for a long time - Darian, the Hunters’ Son, the Owl Knight, the Shaman of the Earth-mother who can call up fountains and crack stone with a thought, to defend the people - and more stories yet to come.”
Darian looked from his mother to his father, and even though he tried to soften the blow of his words, he couldn’t. They still carried a hint of bitterness. “I didn’t come this far to become a tribal hero. I came here for you.”
“We know, son, we know,” Daralie spoke, and then she paused when Kelvren flinched strongly, biting hard enough into his gag they could all hear the bedroll’s stitches popping. She resumed a few seconds later, filling the uncomfortable silence of the moment. “All of you will be welcome back here, I hope you know that. But - before we even came here to talk to you, we knew what the outcome would be. We haven’t survived this long without knowing how to listen to our hearts, and - we can’t go back to Valdemar with you. We also know that you can’t stay here with us.”
Darian’s jaw set and his muscles were visibly tense, but that was nothing compared to what Keisha sensed from him. He was angry, disappointed, frustrated - upset at a very deep level over this news, yet - there was an undercurrent of relief, as well. Keisha sensed that inside, this was one of the end results that her lover secretly wanted. She sensed an undercurrent of -
Relief? Happiness at - freedom?
Kelvren growled, jarring her attention back to the task of stitching the wound. Darian straightened his shirt, and replied.
“Mother. Father. When you were gone, I had only feelings of fear and abandonment. I also had myself, and one more thing. I had my memories of you.”
Darian’s eyes clouded in introspection. “In a way, this entire journey was not coming back to you, it was a way of confirming that my memories were real - that even though I remembered that you loved me, I wanted to be sure of it. When you go from childhood to manhood, everything changes, until you’re not even sure that the very things that made you were real. Now that we’re reunited, we have found that it was real. Then. But then is not now. Now, we are new people, and we love each other all over again, in a new way.”
Darian is good at this. Maybe he learned it from Firesong, or maybe Silverfox - how to pick the right thing to say, to soothe and support the listener so the meaning of what is said doesn’t crush them. He has the heart of a Healer, that is for sure. That may be why I love him so much.
Kullen nodded, his arms crossed loosely, listening to Darian intently. Daralie rested against her husband’s shoulder, squeezing his nearest hand slightly - something very natural between them, Keisha could tell, and long-practiced.
I wonder if, when we are that age - may we live so long - we will be that easy with each other, that comfortable. Kullen just lists to the side, already knowing that Daralie will be there. They do not have “powers” like Empathy and Healing, these Gifts, but just look at them. Being in love is enough.
“You have a new home now, and so do I. Mine is far away from here, but your hearts will always be my home. My heart will always be your home. I have to return to my work in Valdemar and the Vales, with the woman that I love.”
Darian looked at Keisha with an expression that showed no doubt in that statement at all.
Another moment, and Darian looked back to his parents. “I love you both, so much.”
“We love you, too, Darian,” Daralie half-whispered. “We are so proud of you. And what you have done for this tribe is - ”
Darian smiled a little and shook his head, holding up one hand. “ - is done lovingly, for no charge, price or demand. It was done for the principle, for the honor, and for you.”
Kullen grunted, and nodded once, in acknowledgmerit. Kuari hooted softly, as if answering, then twisted his head to receive a slow scratching from Darian while his bondmate collected his thoughts.
Darian took a deep breath. “Personally, though I need you to do something for me.”
Darian clasped his hands in front of him, and despite his own bandages he stood perfectly straight up and strong. “You have children now, my brothers and sisters who I’d never met before and, honestly - who I just don’t know. I may never know them. We are siblings by blood, but not by culture, except for one vital link.”
“The link is you, and your knowledge . . . the things that you can teach them. Teach them that their oldest brother is a Knight of Valdemar, and that he is a Hawkbrother, and teach them what those things mean. Teach them that his friends of many tribes, cultures and species came here to defend Raven, and them. Teach them that they can live, and love, and actually fulfill the kinds of duties and risks and grand adventures that you used to tell me about in hero stories when I was just your little boy, Mother. Teach them that it isn’t beyond their reach, that they can be brave, and travel, and learn amazing tilings, and do what is compassionate at whatever cost, Father. Teach them for me, because I cannot be here to do it myself.”
Daralie wept, and Kullen’s eyes looked near to crying as well. Keisha held her breath, and as she knotted the last stitch of Kelvren’s wound, a teardrop from her own eyes fell on the blotting pad.
“Ho,” Keisha said adamantly, and Ayshen’s face fell. “No flower arches, no procession from the village, and especially no ceremonial dance. I hate those rigid dances - too much structure. I feel like I’m spellcasting, not celebrating, when I’m stuck in one of those things.”
Ayshen looked to Darian for support, and Darian shook his head. “We’re all agreed on this, old friend,” he said with sympathy. “You got your chance to drag me through all the ceremonies you wanted last spring. We want a small and private ceremony, a modest celebration, and that’s that.”
“No fireworks,” Steelmind put in. “No invitations to every Vale within flying distance. No canopies carried by hovering gryphons.”
“You can invite the tervardi to come sing, though,” Darian added thoughtfully, and Ayshen’s snout lifted a little.
“Couldn’t we manage to combine it with the Harvest Faire?” he asked hopefully. “Think what a fabulous celebration that would make! And with all of the symbology of the coming fertility, and new births the next spring!”
Keisha and Darian exchanged a glance. “I don’t suppose the Tayledras are familiar with the concept of elopement, are they?” she whispered, as Ayshen launched into another set of grandiose plans.
He laughed and held her closer, and she snuggled into his embrace without a shadow of doubt coming between them. “Maybe we ought to consider introducing it to them,” he whispered back, and she stifled a laugh against his shoulder.
Ayshen glared at them. “This is your future I am planning! Aren’t you paying attention?” he asked irritably.
All four of them exchanged a look, and burst out in helpless laughter.
“Ayshen, my friend,” Steelmind chuckled, “Gods and spirits laugh their loudest when a mortal makes plans, and doubly so when they make plans for another.”
Reluctantly, Ayshen backed down, sitting back on his tail. “It is true that weddings are not so much for the ones being wed, as for their loved ones. I suppose that after all that has happened, you just want peace.”
Darian hugged Keisha’s shoulder, and confided, “Just about now, some time alone together sounds very, very appealing.”