Hadanelith glared at Amberdrake all the time he was being bound, and continued to glare at him all the time he was being hauled out of the room, as if he held Amberdrake personally responsible for what was happening to him. That just added another level of unease to all of the rest.
If they had found Hadanelith alone, Amberdrake might have turned and bolted at that moment—but they hadn’t, and through all of this, the young woman had not moved so much as an eyelash. Amberdrake’s personal unease gave way to a flood of nausea as he knelt down beside her.
He eased down his own shields, just a trifle, and touched her arm with a feather-brush of a finger to assess the situation.
He slammed his shields back up in the next instant, and knew he had gone as white as Skan’s feathers by the chill of his skin.
He looked up at Judeth, who hovered uncertainly beside him.
“It’s not good, Judeth, but I can take it from here.” He took a deep, steadying breath and reminded himself that this was no worse than many, many of the traumas he had helped to heal in his career as the Chief Kestra’chern of Urtho’s armies. He looked up again and manufactured a smile for her. “You go on along. I can manage. She’ll have to go to Lady Cinnabar, of course, but I can snap her out of this enough to get her there.”
One of Judeth’s chief virtues was that she never questioned a person’s own assessment of his competence; if Amberdrake said he could do something, she took it for granted that he could.
“Right,” she replied. “In that case—I’ll go along with the others. I want to make personally sure that chunk of sketi gets past the border markers by sundown.”
She turned on her heel and stalked out the door, leaving Amberdrake alone with the girl, a young woman whose name he didn’t even know.
And that’s the next thing; go through Hadanelith’s records and find his client list. Where there is one like this, there will be more.
You knew it could be this bad, Drake. Just think how much worse it would be for her if you weren’t here.
* * *
Hadanelith would not run, no matter how grim and threatening his captors looked. He walked away from them at a leisurely pace, as if he was out for an afternoon stroll, keeping his posture jaunty and his muscles relaxed.
It wasn’t easy. The back of his neck crawled, and despite that officious bitch Judeth’s assertions that they were not going to physically harm him—themselves—he half expected an arrow in the back at any moment.
But no arrows came, and he completed his stroll down the furrow of planted ground without incident, carefully stepping on each tiny seedling before him as he walked, and grinding it into powder beneath his feet. A petty bit of revenge, but it was all that he was likely to get for some time.
At the end of the furrow was the land that had not been claimed from the forest—forest that held so many dangers that sending him out here might just as well have been a death sentence. Even the field workers came out under guards of beaters to drive the beasts away, and Kaled’a’in whose specialty was in handling the minds of wild beasts in case the beaters couldn’t frighten predators off.
And archers in case both fail. Thank you so much for your compassion, you hypocrites.
He did not pause as he reached the trees and the tangle of growth beneath them. He pushed right on in and continued to shove his way grimly through the bushes and entwined vines, ignoring scratches and biting insects until he finally struck a game path.
Then he stopped, a little out of breath, to take inventory of his hurts. He wanted to know every scratch, every bruise, for he would eventually extract payment for all of them.
There was the kick to his jaw, the other to his hand; the one had practically broken the jawbone, the other had left his hand numb. His guards hadn’t been any too gentle on the trip up here, either; they’d just about dislocated his arms, wrenching him around, and they’d gotten in a few surreptitious kicks and punches that left more bruises and aching spots under his clothing.
Nevertheless, Hadanelith smiled. They’d been so smug, so certain of themselves—they’d said he was to be sent into this exile as he was, and then were bound by that word from searching him!
Fools. They assumed that a kestra’chern at work would be completely unarmed—but Hadanelith was not exactly a kestra’chern.
And Hadanelith was never unarmed.
He began to divest himself of all his hidden secrets, starting with the stiletto blades in the seams of his boots.
Shortly, he would resume his journey to the boundary markers, and he would be very careful to remain outside them for the few days it took to convince these idiots that some beast or other had disposed of him.
Then he would return.
And then the repayments would begin.
CHAPTER TWO
Skan cupped his wings and settled onto the ledge of the lair he and Zhaneel had chosen when White Gryphon was first laid out, this time only stubbing two talons upon landing. That wasn’t unusual; he was often less careful when he thought no one was watching him, and the pain was negligible. This was his home. He could blunt his talons on the stone if he felt like it.
Together with a small army of hertasi, they had carved it from the rock of the cliff, used the resulting loose stone for mortared walls and furniture, then filled it with such gryphonic luxuries as they had brought with them. It had a glorious view of the surf on the rocks below, but was sheltered from even the worst winter storms by an outcropping of hard, black stone covered with moss and tiny ferns. It was easily the best lair in the city; mage-fires kept it cozy in the winter, breezes off the sea kept it cool in the summer, and there were plenty of soft cushions and carved benches to recline upon. Occasionally rank did have its privileges.
One of those privileges was absenting himself from the likely unpleasant confrontation with this Hadanelith character. He felt rather sorry for poor Amberdrake but, on the whole, rather relieved for himself. Perhaps he could soothe his guilt later by visiting Amberdrake with a special snack or treat.
At least that Hadanelith mess was one decision I didn’t have to make. All I had to do was agree with Drake. What’s happened to me, when not deciding someone else’s fate is an event.
His wing muscles still ached, distantly, from his landing, and he felt a lot more tired than he should have been after two relatively short flights. I’m going to have to increase the time I spend sky dancing, he decided. No matter how I have to juggle my schedule. I shouldn’t be tiring this quickly. After ten years you’d think I’d get most of my endurance back!
He folded his wings, and glanced back down at the surf before pushing open the door to the lair. Cinnabar kept warning him, even after all these years, that the time he spent between Gates followed too quickly by the perils of their cross-country trek had burned away every bit of his reserves. He was stripped to the bone by the strain, so many years ago—but he should have gotten all of it back by now! Amberdrake, Gesten, and Lady Cinnabar had done their best for him, too. This is all the fault of a sedentary life! I spend more time strolling around the streets than I do in exercises, and no one says anything because I’m Skandranon—but if I were any other gryphon, there’d be jokes about my sagging belly!
He closed the door neatly behind him and stepped over the wall across the entrance—a necessary precaution to keep unfledged, crawling, leaping gryphlets from becoming hurtling projectiles off the balcony. The gryphons had never had to face that particular problem when their lairs had been on the ground, but a small inconvenience seemed a trivial price for the added safety of their youngsters.
Small mage-lights illuminated the interior of the lair—unusual in the city at the moment, as were the mage-fires that heated the lair by winter. Mage-lights and mage-fires were far down on the list of things the mages needed to create during the brief times that magic worked properly. Skan had made most of these, and Vikteren had done the rest.
There we are again. Another reason why I am such a feathered lump. Lying in p
lace for days on end to make mage-lights. Staring at a stone to enchant it to glow like a lovesick firefly while hertasi and humans bring me enough food to sink a horse. What would Urtho think of me now!
The humans and hertasi had to make do with candles and lanterns; while mage-lights and mage-fires were in limited supply, they went first to the Healers, then the gryphons and tervardi, then the kyree. Only after all the nonhumans had sufficient lights and heating sources would humans receive them for their homes. This had been a decision on Skan’s part that although it seemed slightly selfish, had a sound reason behind it. The Healers obviously needed mage-lights and heat sources more than anyone else—and as for the gryphons, tervardi, and kyree, well, the former had feathers, which were dangerous around open flames, and the wolflike latter didn’t have hands to light flames with.
Freshly crisped gryphon and roasted tervardi, mm-mm! Served fresh in their own homes, in front of their children—Ma’ar’s secret recipe! That was the very phrase he’d used to persuade the rest of the Council to agree to the edict, and as he’d figured, the invocation of Ma’ar’s name did the trick, more than logic had.
He hadn’t enjoyed manipulating them, though. Tricks like that left a rather bad taste in his mouth. He really didn’t like manipulating anyone, if it came right down to it. Neither had Urtho.
There were many things Urtho didn’t like, gods bless his memory. I always secretly pitied him for the position he was put in by others’ need for him. He never liked being the leader of all those who craved freedom from Ma’ar, but it was something he had to do. I remember him looking at me once, with a look of quiet desperation, when I asked him why he did it.
Skandranon paused, eyes unfocused, as his memory brought the moment back in sharp detail. He said, simply, “If not me, then who!”
Now I know how he felt then. It wears a soul down, even though the sense of fulfilling a duty is supposed to make a soul enriched. A noble heart, the stories say, is supposed to live and find joy in the responsibility. But I am satisfied less and less, doing a great deal I don’t like—including getting fat!
“Zhaneel?” he called softly, when a glance around the “public” room showed no signs of life, not even a gryphon dozing in the pile of pillows in the corner. “I’m—”
He’d called softly, hoping that if the little ones were sleeping, he wouldn’t wake them. Stupid gryphon. Vain hope.
A pair of high-pitched squeals from the nursery chamber greeted the first sound of his voice, and a moment later twin balls of feathers and energy came hurtling out of the chamber door. They each targeted a foreleg; Tadrith the right and Keenath the left.
They weren’t big enough to even shake him as they hit and clung, but they made it very difficult to move then they locked on and gnawed. And Amberdrake and Winterhart thought they had problems with their two-legged toddler! Young gryphons went straight from the crawling stage into the full-tilt running stage, much like kittens, and like kittens they had three modes of operation—“play,” “starving,” and “sleep.” They moved from one mode to another without warning, and devoted every bit of concentration to the mode they were in at the time. No point in trying to get them interested in a nap if they were in “play” mode—and no point in trying to distract them with a toy if they were squalling for food.
Zhaneel followed her two offspring at a more sedate pace. She was more beautiful than ever, more falconlike. Her dark malar-markings were more prominent; now that she wasn’t trying to look like the gryphons whose bodies were based on hawks, and now that she had learned to be self-confident, she carried herself like the gryfalcon queen she was. “Don’t worry, I wasn’t trying to settle them for a nap,” she said calmly over their wordless squeals of glee, as Skan tried vainly to detach them. “We were just playing chase-mama’s-tail.”
“And now we’re playing burr-on-papa’s-leg, I see,” he replied. Zhaneel took one bemused look at what her children were doing and began chortling. At the moment, still in their juvenile plumage, the gryphlets looked like nothing but balls of puffy, tan-and-brown feathers, particularly absurd when attached to Skan’s legs. “The Council session broke up early,”
Skandranon continued, “and I decided that I’d had enough and escaped before anyone could find some other idiot’s crisis for me to solve.”
It came out a lot more acidic than he’d intended, and Zhaneel cocked her head to one side. “Headache?” she inquired delicately.
He succeeded in removing Tadrith from his right leg, but Keenath, being the older of the two tiercels, was more stubborn. “No,” he replied, again with more weariness than he had intended. “I am just very, very tired today of being the Great White Gryphon, the Wise Old Gryphon of the Hills, the Solver of Problems, and Soother of Quarrels. No one remembers when I was the Avenger in the Skies or Despoiler of Virgins or Hobby Of Healers. Now they want someone to do the work for them, and I am the fool that fell into it. I am tired of being responsible.”
He slowly peeled Keenath from his foreleg, as the young gryphlet cackled with high-pitched glee and his brother pounced on Skan’s twitching tail.
“You want to be irresponsible?” Zhaneel asked, with a half-smile he didn’t understand, and a rouse of her feathers.
“Well,” he replied, after a moment of thought, “Yes! The more people pile responsibilities on me, the less time I have for anything else! All of my time is taken up with solving other peoples’ problems, until I don’t have any time for my own! And look at me!” He shook himself indignantly. “I’m fat, Zhaneel! I’m overweight and out of condition! I can’t think of the last time I sat around chatting with Amberdrake and Gesten just because I enjoy their company, when I spirited you off for a wild storm ride, or just flew off somewhere to lie senseless in the sun for a while! Or for that matter, to lie on you a while. And the longer this goes on, it seems, the less time I get to even think!”
Zhaneel reached out a foreclaw and corralled her younger son before he reattached himself to his father’s leg, nodding thoughtfully. “But the city is almost finished, except for the things that people must do for their own homes, which you cannot be responsible for,” she pointed out. “So—surely they must not need you as much?”
He sighed and shook his head. “Except that the more things get done, the more they find for me to do. As the months go by, the things are always less vital, but they’re frozen without my word of approval or decree. It’s as if they’ve all decided that I am the only creature capable of making decisions—never mind that I’m only one member of a five-person Council!”
As she fixed her eyes on his, he struggled to articulate feelings that were not at all well defined. “I don’t know if this is some twisted joke that fate has played on me, Zhaneel, but I’m beginning to feel as if I’m not me anymore. It’s as if the old Skandranon is being squeezed out and this—this faded, stodgy, dull old White Gryphon is taking his place! And it is happening in my body, and I can only watch it happen.”
As Tadrith raced around to attack Skan’s other side, Zhaneel cornered him as well, tumbling both gryphlets together into a heap of cushions, where they attacked each other with exuberant energy, their father utterly forgotten. She sat down beside him and nibbled his ear-tuft, with an affectionate caress along his milky-white cheek. “The wars are over, my love,” she pointed out with inarguable logic. “There are no more secret missions to fly, no more need to dye your feathers black so that you do not show against the night sky—no more real need for the Black Gryphon. We all have changed, not just you.”
“I know that,” he sighed and leaned into her caress. “But—that was more than a part of me, it was who I was and I miss it. Sometimes I feel as if the Black Gryphon died—with—with Urtho—and now all I have left is a shell. I don’t know who or what I am anymore. I only know that I don’t like what’s happened to me.”
Zhaneel clicked her beak in irritation. “Perhaps you do not care for what you are, but there are many of us who were very pleased to see a Skandra
non who had learned a bit of responsibility!” she said crisply. “And we would be very annoyed to see that particular lesson forgotten!”
She glared at him just as she would have glared at a foolish young brancher for acting like one of the fledglings.
He shook his head, trying to bite back a hasty retort and instead make her see what he was talking about. “No, it isn’t that,” he replied, groping for words. “I—it’s just that it seems as if I’ve gone to the opposite extreme, as if there just isn’t any time for me to be myself anymore. I’m tired all the time, I never have a moment to think. I feel—I don’t know—thinned out, as if I’ve stretched myself to cover so much that now I have no substance. My duty has consumed me!”
The slightly frantic tone of his voice was enough to make both the youngsters look up in alarm, and Zhaneel patted his shoulder hastily. “You’ll be all right,” she told him, clearly trying to placate him. “Don’t worry so much. You gave a lot of yourself in the journey here. You lost almost all of your strength when you were trapped in the Gates. You just need more rest.”
That’s always the answer, any time I complain that I don’t feel like myself.
“And that’s just what I’m not getting,” he grumbled but gave up trying to explain himself to her. She didn’t understand; how could he expect her to, when he didn’t really understand what was wrong himself?
The gryphlets came galloping over to him again, and he settled down on the floor and let them climb all over him. What was wrong with him, anyway? He had everything he had ever wanted—a lovely mate, a secure home, peace—and he was the leader he had always dreamed of being. Shouldn’t he be content, happy?
Well—except that he wasn’t the leader he had dreamed of being, back when he fought against the sky, makaar, and all the death-bolts an army could hurl at him. The stories he was raised on, of heroes and hopes, said nothing about the consumption of the leader by his duties. He had dreamed of dramatically-lit skies against which his glorious form would glide across the land he protected, and below him the people would cheer to behold him and flock to his presence.
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