Amberdrake nodded, as if he had expected as much. Which, if he really is behind all this, shouldn’t surprise me.
“In private, I take it?” the kestra’chern asked. As if he didn’t know.
“Very private,” Skan confirmed, and flattened his ear-tufts to his skull in real misery. “Drake, it’s Zhaneel. She’s the one—the one. And I’m nothing more to her than one of her students.”
“And just how do you figure that?” Amberdrake asked casually.
“Because she—I just don’t impress her, no matter what I do!” Skan exclaimed in desperation. “It’s driving me insane! I don’t know what to do!”
“Let me see if I understand what you’re saying correctly,” Amberdrake replied, leaning back on one elbow. “You have decided that Zhaneel is your ideal mate, and you are upset because she isn’t following you and draping herself all over you like every other gryphon you’ve wanted. Then, when you strut and puff and act in general like a peacock, she still isn’t impressed. Is that it?”
Skan felt his nares flushing hotly. “I wouldn’t put it that way!” he protested.
“I would,” Gesten said, from behind him. The hertasi pushed his way in through the curtains past Skan. “Feh,” he added, “you look like a used mop. If I were a female, I wouldn’t have you either.”
“Drake!” Skan cried.
“Gesten, that’s enough,” Amberdrake admonished. “Skan, has it ever once occurred to you to go and talk with the lady? Just talk? Not to try to impress her, but to find out what she’s like, what she thinks is important, what kind of a person she is? Find out about her instead of talking about yourself?”
“Ah—” the gryphon stammered.
“Try it sometime,” Amberdrake said, leaning back into his pillows. “You might be surprised at the results. Gesten, this used mop would like to know if you’re willing to help him look more like a gryphon. I can go get a bath in the shower-tent for once; I look worse than I feel.”
“If you want,” Gesten said, dubiously. “I think you sprained something.”
“Then I can get Cinnabar to unsprain it for me,” Amberdrake said to the roof of the tent. “Go on, Skan needs your help more than I do at the moment, and we are supposed to be sharing your very excellent services.”
“All right,” the hertasi said with resignation. “Come on, Black Boy. But you’ll have to put up with my massaging; Drake is no way going to be up to it.”
Skan climbed to his feet with more groans. “Right now, I’d accept a massage from a makaar,” he replied. “And I’d court the damned thing, if it would get the muck off me.”
Gesten looked back over his shoulder and batted his eyes at Skan in a clever imitation of a flirtatious human. “Why Skan, I never guessed! Harboring an unfulfilled passion for little me?”
Skan only snorted, and followed the hertasi into the sunlight behind the tent. Gesten opened a box built into the side of the wagon that carried Amberdrake and all his gear when the entire army was on the move, and got out the brushes and special combs needed for grooming gryphons. “You really ought to go find a vacant tub and have a bath,” the hertasi said, looking him over. “You’re mage enough to heat the water so your muscles don’t stiffen up in the cold.”
“Once you brush me out, please,” Skan pleaded. “If I go in like this, it’ll be a mud bath.”
“You have a point.” The hertasi picked up one of the brushes and set to work with a will. Bits of dried, caked mud flew everywhere with the force of Gesten’s vigorous strokes. “So besides you being infatuated with Zhaneel, and her having the good sense to see through you, what else is new out there?”
Skan ignored the first part of the question to answer the second. “What’s new is that we may have the Pass, but Ma’ar isn’t budging another toe-length.” He shook his head, and leaned into Gesten’s brush. “I don’t know, Gesten. I can’t tell if things look good for us, or bad.”
“Neither can anyone else.” Gesten put the brush down and picked up one with finer bristles. “Urtho don’t know what to do, I hear. Ma’ar won’t leave us be, and Urtho won’t spend troops like Ma’ar does to get rid of him. That’s the problem with an ethical commander; the guy who doesn’t care how many of his men he kills has an edge.”
Skan shook his head. “Too much for me, at least right now.”
The hertasi snickered. “Yah. I know what’s on your mind—what there is of it. Don’t know how Drake thinks you’re going to impress Zhaneel with it, since I haven’t seen much evidence of a mind in you since I met you.”
Skan did not rise to his teasing this time. “Gesten—” he said hesitantly, “do you really think she’d ever pay any attention to me if I did what Drake said? Nothing I’ve done has worked.”
“So try it. Who knows?” Gesten slapped him on the shoulder, raising a cloud of dust. The man’s job is the heart, you know. I figure he probably knows what he’s talking about.”
Skan considered that. Gesten was right. And besides, I have to tell her what she is, what I learned in the Tower. Might as well kill two birds with the same stone, as they say.
“But first, Skan,” Gesten cautioned, “there’s something that’s really important you need to do.”
Skan craned his neck around to look at him, the hertasi sounded so serious. “What is it?” he asked anxiously.
Gesten fixed him with a sobering gaze for a long moment, then said, with deadpan seriousness, “Skan—get a bath.”
The hertasi made it all the way to the tent-flap before the flung brush caught up with him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Zhaneel preened a talon thoughtfully, then looked down at her hand. Hand, and not a misshapen collection of foreclaws. She was not some kind of an accident. As Amberdrake had surmised, she was the living result of something that had been planned.
“So.” She looked from the talon to Skandranon, and even though she managed to keep her expression calm and serene, her heart raced to have him here beside her, on her favorite rock overlooking the obstacle-course. “I am the first of a breed, you say? And you saw evidence of that in Urtho’s Tower?”
Skan nodded; his great golden eyes fixed upon her as steadily as if he were the needle of a compass, and she were the Northern Cross. The sun shone down on his black feathers, bringing up the patterns in them that were normally concealed by the dye he used. “There seem to be about fifty different types altogether. Mostly broadwings, eagle-types. You are based on the only kind that looks really falcon-based. I don’t know what Urtho had in mind to call your type, but I’d call you a gryfalcon.”
“Gryfalcon.” She rolled the word around on her tongue. It sounded even better when Skan had said it than when Amberdrake had come up with it. “And none of this—” she spread her foreclaws wide “—is accidental. I am simply the only one of my kind.”
“Not that I saw. But Zhaneel…” He hesitated a long moment, and she looked at him curiously. From the tension in his body, he was trying to make up his mind about saying something more. “Zhaneel, you aren’t precisely the only one of your type. Only the first successful gryfalcon.” He ground his beak for a moment, then clearly made up his mind to continue. “There’s—well, what we’d call a real misborn in the Tower, too. It looks as if she started out to be a gryfalcon, but something went wrong. She’s distorted, like a child in her head, I think she’s a neuter, and there are probably other things wrong with her as well.”
Zhaneel’s tiny ear-tufts rose. “In the Tower? But why—why would Urtho keep her there? I—” But then all of the slights and insults, the teasing and the bullying of her own childhood returned to her, and she knew why. “No. I see.” Gryphons did not cry, but sadness made their throats tighten and triggered a need to utter a keening sound. She bowed her head, and stifled the urge to keen. The poor, poor thing. Perhaps it is as well that it is like a child, for it cannot understand how cruel the world can be, and it will not mourn what it has never seen. “Does it have a name, this poor little one?”
Skan nodded. “Urtho calls it ‘Kechara’, and it says that he visits and plays with it often. I don’t think it is in any kind of pain or want.”
“Kechara—beloved…” She took a deep breath, and her throat opened again. “Yes, that would be like Urtho, to care for the poor thing that was not quite what he wanted, to make it as happy as he could.” She had come to understand their leader very well during the past several weeks. She wondered if Skandranon knew how often Urtho had taken the time to talk to her; Amberdrake knew, and several times things that Amberdrake had told her made her think that Urtho had been talking with him about her. “But what does this mean for us? I think that if we can, we should find a way to free Kechara. With two of us to protect her, she will not suffer taunts as I did, do you not think? With two of us, acting as her family…? We should not have younglings just yet, I think, but Kechara will serve as practise of a kind. Now that you have made it possible for us to do so, whether or not Urtho approves.”
She cocked her head to one side, shyly. Skan gaped at her, looking extremely silly, as the sense of what she had just suggested penetrated to him.
He looked even sillier a moment later, but it was because he was giddy with elation. But then, so was she.
She above all knew how exhausted he must be after the workout of this afternoon, yet from somewhere he found the strength to follow as she leapt into the air, giving him a playful, come-hither look over her shoulder. And as the moon rose, she led him on a true courtship chase, a chase that ended when they caught each other, landing in the warm grass of a hillside far above Urtho’s Tower.
As was the only way to end a courtship chase, after all.
* * *
This was the face of defeat. Chaos on the landing-field; shouting, and the screaming of gryphons hurt too badly to keep still. Healers and Trondi’irn from the Hill and every wing swarmed the site, somehow never getting in each other’s way. Winterhart ignored it all as she held the bleeding gryphon in life by the barest of margins, holding the mangled body together with Gift and hands both, until a more Gifted Healer could reach her. She swore at and coaxed the poor creature by turns, stopping only to breathe and to scrub tears from her eyes by rubbing her cheek against her blood-stained shoulder.
“Don’t you die on me, Feliss!” she scolded. “Not after all the work Zhaneel’s put in on you! If you die, I swear, I’m going to have Urtho catch your spirit and put it in the body of a celibate Priestess of Kylan the Chaste! That’d teach you!”
Tears rose up again to blind and choke her; she wiped them away again, and ignored the way her own energy was running out of her the way Feliss’ blood ran between her fingers. Gods, gods, it had been easier a few short weeks ago—before she had been forced to see these gryphons the way Amberdrake saw them. Before she had found herself caring for them, and about what happened to them. Before she learned to think of them as something more than a simple responsibility…
Before Amberdrake made her like them, and Zhaneel made her respect them.
Tears rose again, but there was no time now to wipe them away; she held on, grief-blinded, unable to see—
Until a Gift so much greater than hers that it dazzled her touched her, and used her as the conduit to bring the Healing to Feliss that she had not been able to give. Emerald-green Healing energy poured through her, and beneath her hands the gaping wounds closed, the flesh knit up, the bleeding stopped.
Winterhart closed her eyes, and concentrated only on being that conduit, on keeping Feliss’ heartbeat strong, until the energy faded, blood no longer flowed through her fingers, and the heartbeat strengthened of itself. Only then did she open her eyes again.
Lady Cinnabar removed her long, aristocratic hands from where they rested atop Winterhart’s, and looked deeply into the Trondi’irn’s eyes. Winterhart was paralyzed, frozen in place like a terrified rabbit. She had been trying for weeks to avoid the Lady’s presence, ever since the moment she’d thought she’d seen a flicker of recognition in Cinnabar’s face.
Who would ever have thought that a song would give me away? She’d been humming, on her way back from a session with Amberdrake; her back felt normal for the first time in ages, Conn was still in the field and not in her bed, and she’d actually been cheerful enough to hum under her breath.
But she hadn’t thought about what she was humming, until she passed Lady Cinnabar (hurriedly, and with her face a little averted), and the Lady turned to give her a penetrating stare.
Only then did she realize that she had been humming a song that had been all the rage at High King Leodhan’s court—for the single week just before Ma’ar had challenged the King to defend his land. Like the nobles who had fled the challenge in terror, or simply melted away in abject fear, the song had vanished into obscurity. Only someone like Lady Cinnabar, who had been at the High King’s Court at that time, would recognize it.
Only someone else who had been part of the Court for that brief period of time would have known it well enough to hum it.
Winterhart had seen Cinnabar’s eyes narrow in speculation, just before she hurried away, hoping against hope that Cinnabar would decide that she was mistaken in what she thought she had heard.
But the Lady was more persistent than that, and Winterhart caught Cinnabar studying her at a distance, more than once. And she knew, because this was the one thing she had dreaded, that Cinnabar was the kind of person who knew enough about the woman she had once been, that the Lady would uncover her secret simply by catching her in habitual things no amount of control could change or eliminate.
And now—here the Lady was, staring into Winterhart’s eyes, with the look on her face of one who has finally solved a perplexing little puzzle.
“You are a good channel, and you worked today to better effect than I have ever seen you work before,” Cinnabar said mildly. “And your ability and encouragement kept this feathered one clinging to life. You are a better Trondi’im and Healer than you were a few weeks ago.”
“Thank you,” Winterhart said faintly, trying to look away from Cinnabar’s strange, reddish-brown eyes, and failing.
“Altogether you are much improved; get rid of that Conn Levas creature, and stand upon your own worth, and you will be outstanding.” Cinnabar’s crisp words came to Winterhart as from a great distance. “He is not worthy of you, and you do not need him, Reanna.”
And with that, she turned and moved on to the next patient, leaving Winterhart standing there, stunned.
Not just by the blunt advice, but by Cinnabar’s last word.
Reanna.
Winterhart went on to her next patient in a daze; fortunately her hands knew what to do without needing any direction from her mind. Her mind ran in circles, like a mouse in a barrel.
Lady Cinnabar knew. Winterhart had been unmasked.
How long before the Lady told her kinsman Urtho that Reanna Laury—missing and presumed fled—was working in the ranks as a simple Trondi’irn? How long before everyone knew? How long before her shame was revealed to the entire army?
But before Winterhart could free herself from her paralysis, Cinnabar was back. “You and the rest can handle everything else from here on,” the Healer said quietly. “I’m needed back up on the Hill. The gryphons are not the only injured. And Reanna—”
Winterhart started at the sound of her old name.
Cinnabar laid one cool hand on Winterhart’s arm. “No one will know what I have just spoken, that you do not tell,” the Healer said quietly. “If you choose to be only Winterhart, then Winterhart is all anyone will know. But I believe you should tell Amberdrake. He has some information that you should hear.”
The Lady smiled her famous, dazzling smile.
“Sometimes being in the middle of a situation gives one a very skewed notion of what is actually going on. If I was a minnow in the middle of a school, I would not know why the school moved this way and that. I would only see that the rest of the school was in flight, and not what they fled. I would neve
r know when they ran from a pike, or a shadow.”
And with that rather obscure bit of observation, the Lady turned, and was gone.
* * *
Winterhart sat in her own, austere tent, and braided and rebraided a bit of leather; her nerves had completely eroded. In another few moments, she was scheduled for a treatment for her back—treatments she had come to look forward to. The kestra’chern Amberdrake was the easiest person to talk to that she had ever known—although the changes he had caused in her were not so easy to deal with.
But now—Cinnabar knew. And although she had said that she would not reveal Winterhart’s secret, she had also said something else.
“I believe you should tell Amberdrake.” Cinnabar’s words haunted her. Who and what was this man, that she should tell him what she had not told anyone, the secret of her past that she would rather remained buried?
Why would Cinnabar say anything so outrageous?
And most of all—why did she want to follow the Lady’s advice?
Oh gods—what am I going to do? What am I going to say?
She could say nothing, of course, but Amberdrake was skilled at reading all the nuances of the body, and he would know she was upset about something. He had a way of getting whatever he wanted to know out of a person, as easily as she could extract a thorn from the claw of her charges.
I could stop going to him. I could find someone else to handle the rest of the treatments.
But she was not just seeing him for her back, and she knew it. Not anymore. Amberdrake was the closest thing she had to a real friend in this place, and what was more, he was the only person she would ever consider telling all her secrets to.
So why not do it?
Because she didn’t want to lose that friendship. If he heard what she was, how could he ever have any respect for her, ever again?
Then there was the rest of what Lady Cinnabar had said. “Get rid of that Conn Levas creature and stand on your own.” Oh, Cinnabar was right about that; she and Conn were no more suited for each other than a bird and a fish. And dealing with Conn took more out of her than anyone ever guessed.
The Mage Wars Page 27