The Mage Wars

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Oh,” she replied weakly. “I’d thought perhaps that I had cracked a vertebra…”

  “Oh, nothing nearly so exciting,” the voice replied. “But this could have been worse. It is good that Urtho sent you to me when he did. Do you feel any tension here…?”

  Winterhart felt a spot of cold amid the sea of warmth in her back. This man was amazing—the Healers she knew could activate the nerves in a specific point of the body, but never a specific sensation. By the time her training had been terminated, she could not activate a circle of nerves smaller than her thumb’s width without causing the patient to feel heat, cold, pressure, and pain there all at once. And here this—this kestra’chern—was pinpointing the nerves in a tenth of that area, and making her feel only a chill. Not pain!

  She could only grunt an affirmative, and let her defenses slip a little more. He knew what he was doing, and he felt so competent, so good…

  * * *

  Amberdrake let the fluids around the damage balance slower than absolutely necessary, partly out of caution but mostly to buy some more time.

  This was not going to be as easy as he had thought.

  Winterhart was like an onion; you peeled away one layer, thinking you had found the core, only to find just another layer. She had so many defenses that he was forced to wonder just what it was she thought she was defending herself against.

  “How did you manage to do this?” he asked quietly, letting the soothing qualities he put into his voice lull her a little more. “This kind of injury doesn’t usually happen all at once; didn’t you notice anything wrong earlier?”

  “Well, my back had been bothering me for a while,” she replied with obvious reluctance, “but I never really thought about it. My fami—I’ve always had a little problem with my back, you know how it is, tensions always strike at your weakest point, right?”

  “True,” he replied, wondering why she had changed “my family” to “I.” How would revealing a family history of back trouble reveal anything about her? “And your back is your weakest point, I take it?” He thought carefully before asking his next question; he didn’t want to put her more on the defensive than she already was. “I suppose you must have seen how busy all the Healers were, and you decided just to ignore the pain. Not necessarily wise, but certainly considerate of you.”

  She grunted, and the skin on the back of her neck reddened a little. “I don’t like to whine about things,” she said. “Especially not things I can’t change. So I kept my mouth shut and drank a lot of willow. Anyway, after the defensive at Polda, one of the Sixth Wing gryphons was brought in with some extensive lacerations to its underbelly, delirious, and when you tried to restrain it, it nearly went berserk.”

  Interesting. Resentment there. As if she somehow thought that the gryphon in question had been acting unreasonably.

  “Who was it?” Amberdrake asked.

  “What are you talking about?” she replied suspiciously.

  “Who was the gryphon?” Amberdrake repeated mildly. “I knew about Aubri’s burns, but I didn’t know anything about a Sixth Wing gryphon with lacerations. I was wondering if it was Sheran; if it was, I’m not surprised she reacted badly to being restrained. She was one of the gryphons that Third Wing rescued just before Stelvi Pass. Ma’ar had them all in chains and was going to pinion them. We don’t know what else he did to them, but we do know they had been tortured in some fairly sophisticated and sadistic ways.”

  There. Make her think of the gryphon in question as a personality, and not an “it.” See what that unlocks.

  “It could have been,” Winterhart said, slowly, as if the notion startled her. “There was a lot of scar tissue I couldn’t account for, and it was a female…”

  Amberdrake probed the injury again, before he spoke. “Ma’ar saves some of his worst tortures for the gryphons. Urtho thinks it’s because Ma’ar knows he thinks of them as his children, not as simply his ‘creations’.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Silence for a while, as the flames of the lanterns overhead burned with faint hissing and crackling sounds. “I like animals; I was always good with horses and dogs. That was why I became a Trondi’irn.”

  “Gryphons—” He started to say, “Gryphons aren’t animals,” then stopped himself just in time.

  “I thought gryphons were just animals, like the Kaled’a’in warhorses. I thought they only spoke like the messenger-birds… just mimicking without really understanding more than simple orders.” She sighed; the muscles of her back heaved, and trembled a little beneath his hands, and he exerted his powers to keep them from going into a full and painful spasm. “I kept telling myself that, but it isn’t true, they aren’t just animals. But I hate to see anything in pain, and it’s worse to see something that can think in a state like that gryphon was.”

  “Well,” Amberdrake replied, choosing his words with care, “I’ve always thought it was worse to see an animal in pain than a creature like the hertasi, the gryphons, the kyree, or the tervardi injured. You can’t explain to an animal that you are going to hurt it a little more now to make it feel better later. You can explain those things to a thinking creature, and chances are it will believe you and cooperate. And it has always been worse, for me, to see an animal die—especially one that is attached to you. They’ve come to think of you as a kind of god, and expect you to make everything better—and when you can’t, it’s shattering to have to betray that trust, even though you can’t avoid it.”

  “You sound as if you’ve thought this sort of thing over quite a bit,” she said, her voice sounding rather odd; very, very controlled. Over-controlled, in fact.

  “It is my job,” he reminded her with irony. “You would be amazed at the number of people who come to me after a dreadful battle with nightmares of seeing their favorite puppy dying on the battlefield. Part of what I do is to explain to them why they see the puppy, and not the friends they just lost. Only I don’t explain it quite that clinically.”

  There wasn’t much she could say to that, so after a few breaths, she returned to the safer topic. “Anyway, I was trying to treat the gryphon, and I’d gotten bent over in quite an odd position to stitch her up without tying her down, when she lashed out at me with both hindlegs. She sent me flying, and I landed badly. I got up, felt a little more pain but not much, and thought I was all right.

  Good. The gryphon has gone from “it” to “she.” That’s progress anyway.

  “But the pain kept getting worse instead of better, right?” he probed. “That’s the sign you’ve done something to one of those spinal pads.”

  “I think that’s one lesson I’m not likely to forget very soon,” she countered, with irony as heavy as his had been. “But as you said, the Healers were all busy with injuries worse than mine, and I don’t believe in whining about things as trivial as a backache.”

  “I would never call telling of extreme pain whining,” was all he said.

  She relaxed a little more; minutely, but visible to him.

  “This is going to need more than one treatment,” he continued. “If you can bring yourself to resort to a mere kestra’chern, that is.”

  The skin of her neck flushed again. “I—you are a better Healer than I am,” she replied, with painful humility. She hadn’t liked admitting that. “If you would be so kind—I know what your fees are for other things—but if you can spare the time…”

  “To make certain that the Healer of my friends is in the best of health, I would forgo the fee a king would offer for my services,” Amberdrake replied with dignity. “When you are in pain, you can’t do your best work; you know that as well as I do. Skan is not the only gryphon friend I have, and I want my friends to have nothing less than the finest and most competent of care.”

  “Ah,” she said weakly. “Ah, thank you.”

  He examined the injury again. “I’ve done all I can about this spinal pad right now,” he told her truthfully. “I need to finish that massage, and then you can go. I think yo
u’ll feel some difference.”

  “I already do,” she admitted.

  He rubbed some fresh scented oil into the palms of his hands to warm it, and started soothing the muscles of her back he had not reached earlier. They had gone into spasms so often they had become as tense and tight as harp-wires, and as knotted as a child’s first spun thread.

  She gasped as the first of them released; quivered all over, in fact. Amberdrake was quite familiar with that reaction, but evidently she wasn’t.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, and tensed again. “I—”

  “It’s quite all right, don’t move,” he ordered. “It’s the natural reaction to releasing tensed muscles. Ignore it if you can, and try to enjoy it if you can’t ignore it.”

  She didn’t reply to that; interesting. The last commoner he’d made that particular remark to had said, with dangerous irony, “What, like rape?” It was a natural thought for the ordinary soldier, who all too often found him or herself in the position of victim.

  But there was no tightening of Winterhart’s neck-muscles, no tensing at all to indicate that thought had occurred to her.

  Interesting. Very interesting. So whatever she is afraid of it isn’t that. And she is not the “ordinary soul” she says that she is.

  “If I hurt you, tell me,” he said. “A good massage should not hurt—and in your case, if I start to hurt you, you’ll tense up again, and undo everything I’ve done so far other than the real Healing.”

  “I will,” she promised. “But it doesn’t hurt. It just feels very odd. My m—the massages I’ve had in the past were never for injuries.”

  What other kinds of massages are there? She can’t mean sexual. So for beauty treatments?

  That would account for the superb state of her body. There were no blemishes, no signs of scarring anywhere. When the posturing and stiffness were gone from Winterhart’s body, she was a magnificent sculpture of human beauty. She cared for her skin and hair scrupulously, filed her toenails, and had no calluses anywhere that he had seen, not even the calluses associated with riding or fighting.

  Unusual, and definitely the marks of someone high-born, and he thought he knew all the humans of noble lineage who had ever lived near Urtho’s Tower.

  Perhaps she was from before I came here? But that would date back to the very beginning of the war.

  “Do you get along with your commanders?” he asked, adding, “I need to know because if you don’t, it is going to affect how your muscles will react—and I may need to ask you to resort to herbal muscle relaxants when you are around them.”

  She was silent for a very long time. “They think I am the proper subordinate. I suppose I used to be; that may be why my back went badly wrong all at once. I don’t ever contradict them, even now. I suppose you’ll think I’m a coward, but even though I don’t agree with the way they treat the gryphons, I don’t want to be stripped of my rank and sent away.”

  “You wouldn’t be, if you took your case to Urtho,” he pointed out. “As Trondi’irn, it is your job to countermand even the generals if you believe your charges are being mistreated.”

  “I can’t do that.” Her skin was cold; she was afraid. Of what? Of confrontation? Of going directly to Urtho?

  “Besides,” she continued hurriedly. “My l-lover is one of Shaiknam’s mages; his name is Conn Levas. If I went to Urtho, I’d still be reassigned, and I don’t want to be reassigned to some other wing than his.”

  Untrue! Her muscles proclaimed it, and Amberdrake’s intuition agreed. The way she had stumbled over the word “lover,” not as if she was ashamed to say it, but because she could hardly bear to give the man that title. Amberdrake remembered Conn Levas, the mage who had come to him in order to shame his lover. That lover was Winterhart. She and the mage might trade animal passions, but there was no love in that relationship. She didn’t care that she might be reassigned someplace where he wasn’t, precisely.

  There is something deeper going on here. In some way, the man protects her. He must not know he is doing so, because if he did, he’d use it against her.

  This was getting more and more complicated all the time.

  “Well, I would say you aren’t going to have to worry about that much longer,” he said without thinking.

  “What do you mean?” Her alarm was real, and very deep; she actually started.

  He put a hand in the middle of her back and soothed the jerking muscles. “Only that thanks to Zhaneel, Urtho is already aware of the situation in Sixth Wing. You won’t have to confront anyone now. I suspect he’ll take care of things. He always does.”

  “Oh.” She relaxed again.

  Now what on earth set her off like that? It has to be something to do with whatever it is that she is afraid of.

  What that could be, he had no clue. Perhaps he ought to try probing further back in her past—so far back that it would not seem like a threat.

  “I learned all of my skills at Healing when I was a child,” he said casually. “My parents sent me to a very odd school, one that did not admit the existence of a Healing Gift, nor of Empathy. I did learn quite a bit about Healing without the use of either—everything from massage to anatomy to herbal and mineral medicines. But I was also more or less trapped among very sick people with Empathy too strong to shut them out. I was miserable, and my parents didn’t understand why when I wrote them letters begging to come home. They thought they were doing their best for me, and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t grateful.”

  “My parents were like that,” she said, sounding sleepy. “They knew their children were exceptional, and they wouldn’t accept anything less than perfection. They never understood why I wasn’t fawningly grateful for all the opportunities they gave me.”

  I thought as much! Well, this is something I can start on, right this moment.

  “Like my parents, yours surely thought they had your best interests at heart,” he replied quickly. “Perhaps they were too young for children. Perhaps they simply didn’t understand that a child is not a small copy of one’s own self. Many people think that. They feel the child must have the same needs and interests they do, simply because it sprang from them. They have no notion that a child can be drastically different from its parents.”

  “So?” she replied, probably more harshly than she intended. “Does that excuse them?”

  He let her think about that for a long time before he answered. “There are no excuses,” he said at last, “but there are reasons. Reasons why we are what we are. Reasons why we do not have to stay that way. Even Ma’ar has reasons for what he does.”

  That turned the discussion into one of philosophy, and by the time he sent her away, he had come, grudgingly, not only to feel sorry for her, but even to like her a little.

  But she was going to have to change, and she would have a hard time doing so all alone. He was going to have to help her. As she was, she was a danger, not only to herself, but possibly to everyone she came in contact with. No matter how she tried to hide it, she was unbalanced and afraid.

  And fear was Ma’ar’s best weapon.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Skandranon cautiously pushed his way into Tamsin’s work-tent with a careful talon, and the tail of a playful breeze followed him inside, teasing his crest feathers. As he had expected, Tamsin and Cinnabar mumbled to each other over their notes, oblivious to anything else going on. They made quite a pretty picture, with their heads so close they just touched, lamplight shining down on them, the table, and the precious stack of paper. Dark hair and bright shone beneath the lantern. They were a vision of peace. But pretty pictures were not precisely what he was after at the moment, and all peace was illusory as long as Ma’ar kept moving. And he knew that, despite his motivations, stealing this secret was a dangerous game to play.

  But this secret would at least ensure the survival of his people, no matter what befell Urtho.

  “Took you long enough to get here,” Tamsin said without looking up, though Cinnabar gave him
a wink and a wry grin. He wrote another word or two, then set aside the paper he had been scrawling on and raised his eyes to meet Skan’s. “What did you do, stop to seduce a half-dozen gryphons on the way here?”

  Skan’s nares flushed, but he managed to keep his voice from betraying him. Half-a-dozen gryphons? Well—one female, and there certainly wasn’t a seduction involved. And until he had a chance to think out a plan, he’d rather not discuss Kechara with anyone. “Not at all; I just stopped to look at something very interesting in the Tower. So, what have you discovered?”

  By the gleam in Tamsin’s eyes, it was good news, very good news. “That your so-called ‘spell’ isn’t precisely that,” Tamsin replied. “Enabling fertility in male and female gryphons takes a combination of things, and all of them are the sort of preparation that any gryphon could do without magical help, though a little magic makes it easier. Urtho just shrouds the whole procedure in mysticism, so that you think it’s something powerfully magical. His notes detail what to do to make the most impressive effects for the least expenditure of energy. He’s been bluffing you all, Skan.”

  Skan’s head jerked up so quickly that he hit the top of the doorframe with it and blinked. He’d hoped for simple spells; he had not expected anything like this. “What?” he exclaimed.

  Tamsin chuckled, and leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head. “When he designed you, he wanted to have some automatic controls on your fertility, so he borrowed some things from a number of different beasties. Take the Great White Owl—the females don’t lay fertile eggs unless their mate has stuffed them first with tundra-mice. The sudden increase in meat triggers their bodies to permit fertilization of the eggs; and the more meat, the more eggs they lay. Well, Urtho borrowed that for your females. The ‘ritual’ for the female gryphon is to fast for two days, then gorge on fresh meat just before the mating-flight. That gorging tells her instincts that there’s food enough to support a family, just like with the tundra owls, and she becomes fertile.”