"Amberdrake?" It was a thin whisper behind him, female, and it was followed by what sounded like a strangled sob.
He dropped the last blanket and turned quickly, wondering if his mind was playing tricks on him. But—no, he had not imagined it; Winterhart stood in the doorway, tent flap drawn aside in one hand, clearly in tears.
He quickly reached out, grasped her hand in both of his, and drew her inside. The tent flap fell from her nerveless fingers and he took a moment to tie it shut, ensuring their privacy. "What happened?" he asked, as she took a few stumbling steps, then crumpled onto the couch, clutching a pillow to her chest with fresh tears pouring down her face. "What's the matter? Don't worry about being interrupted, my last client just left, and I have all night for you if you need it."
"I may," she said, rubbing the back of her hand fiercely across her eyes. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to fall apart on you like this—it's just—I saw you standing there and you looked so confident, so strong—and I feel so—so—horrible."
He sat down beside her, and took her into his arms, handing her a clean towel to dry her tears and blow her nose with. It might not be a handkerchief, but it was at hand.
"Tell me from the beginning," he said, as she took several deep breaths, each of which ended in a strangled sob. "What happened?"
"It—it's Conn," she said, muffled in the towel. "You knew we haven't been—for a couple of weeks now. Mostly it was because I was exhausted, but sometimes—Amberdrake, I just didn't want to. There's nothing there for him anymore, even if there ever was. I just wished he'd go away. So tonight, when his group came back in and he started on me—well, that's when I told him that I wanted him to leave—and not just for right then, but permanently."
"And?" Amberdrake prompted gently.
"He said—" she burst into tears again. "He started yelling at me, telling me how worthless I am. He said I was a cold, heartless bitch, that I didn't have the capacity to love anyone but myself. He said I was selfish and spoiled, and all I cared about was myself. He said I was the worst lover he'd ever had, that it was like making love to a board, and that I'd never find another man as tolerant as he was. He said I was probably a Trondi'irn because no human would have me as a Healer, and if it weren't for the fact that there's no one checking on the Trondi'irn's competence, I wouldn't even have that job. He said I was clumsy, incompetent, and if there weren't a war on, I'd be a total failure—" She was weeping uncontrollably now, and if Amberdrake hadn't been listening carefully, he wouldn't have been able to understand more than half of what she said.
"And you're afraid that it's all true, right?" he said gently, as soon as she gave him the chance.
She nodded, quite unable to speak, her eyes swollen and bloodshot, her nose a brilliant pink. She looked horrible. He wanted to hold her in his arms and protect her from the rest of the world.
And then he wanted to take the nearest crossbow and go hunting for Conn Levas.
And I told Gesten I couldn't be angry with anyone anymore....
But none of that would solve anything. She did not need to be coddled or protected; she needed to regain confidence in herself, so that she could stand on her own feet without having to hide behind anyone else.
"You think that what he said is true, only because you are very self-critical, and there is just enough truth in what he said to make you believe all of it," he said firmly. "We both know what kind of a manipulator he is. He plays people the way a musician plays his instruments—and he can do that because he simply doesn't care what happens to them so long as he gets the tune he wants." He pulled away a little, and looked her straight in the eyes. "Think about him for a moment. Right now, the one thing he is afraid of is that someone will think you left him because he isn't 'man enough to keep you.' He said what he did to make you feel too afraid to leave him. Let's take the things he said one at a time. What is the first thing that you can think of?"
"Th-that I'm a c-cold bitch?" she said, in a small voice.
"By which he means that you are both uncaring and an unsatisfactory lover?" he replied. "Well, so far as he is concerned, that's correct. You told me yourself that you didn't care in the least for him, emotionally, when you made your arrangement with him. You used him to protect your real identity. Reanna would never have had anything to do with someone like him, which made him perfect as part of your disguise. Right?"
"Reanna would never have taken any lover, much less a lowborn one," she replied, her cheeks flaming. "I—I—"
He shook his head gently. "You made an unemotional bargain, and you expected it to remain that way. It didn't. In part, because he was good enough at winkling out your real feelings and using them against you. Which by definition means that you are not without emotion. Yes?"
She nodded, still blushing, her eyes averted.
"He also claimed that you are incompetent and clumsy, and you are professional enough to fear that he is correct in that assessment as well." He thought for a moment. "The worst that I ever heard about you—and trust me, kechara, a kestra'chern hears a great deal—was that you parroted rotten orders without questioning them, and treated your charges as if they were so many animals. No one ever questioned your competence, only your—ah—manner. And now that you treat your gryphons as the people they are, you have the highest marks from everyone. Cinnabar included."
"I do?" She looked at him again, shocked.
"I don't know Conn Levas very well on a personal level, nor do I wish to," Amberdrake continued. "I had him as a client once, and I managed to avoid a second session; I have seen far too many people with his attitudes, and I don't feel I need to see any more. Furthermore, every other kestra'chern that he has gone to feels the same about him as I do. The center of Conn's world is Conn; he is interested only in someone else insofar as they can do something for him. In his world, there are users and the used; once you took yourself out of the ranks of the latter, you must have become one of the former, and thus, you went from being his possession to his rival. So that is why he flung the other insults at you, about being selfish and spoiled. To his eyes, the universe is a mirror—he sees himself reflected everywhere, both his good and bad traits. People who are good to him must be like him—and people who are bad to him must also be like him." She nodded, and rubbed her eyes with the corner of the towel.
"As for the rest of his accusations..." he paused a moment, and assessed his own feelings. Should I? What happens if I do? And what would happen if I don't? "...would you care to have a professional assessment?"
She pulled away, eyes wide with surprise. But not with fear or revulsion, the two things he had been worried that he would see in her expression.
"You can't—I mean, do you mean—" she stammered.
He smiled, and nodded. "The assessment would be professional," he told her, very quietly. "But the motives are purely selfish. I find you exceedingly attractive, Winterhart. I do not want to complicate our friendship, nor do I want to jeopardize it, but I wish that we were more than just friends."
She blinked for several moments, as her cheeks flushed and paled and flushed again. For a moment, he thought that she was going to refuse, and he wished that he had never said a word. Then, to his own delight and surprise, she suddenly flung herself at him. But not like a drowning woman grasping after safety, but like an eagle coming home to her aerie after a long and weary flight, and there was no doubt left at all, of her feelings—or of his.
The afternoon respite was rare enough for Skan—and that Amberdrake had time to spare was a gift from the hand of the gods. Time for the two of them to sit in the warm sun together—and as an excuse to keep others away, Amberdrake tasked himself with repairing feathers Skan had broken in the last engagement with the enemy.
"The word on the lines is—stalemate," said Skan, as Amberdrake imped in one of his old feathers on the shaft of a broken primary. "Again. Not a quiet stalemate though, at least not for us."
The warm sun felt so good on his back and neck... he stretched h
is head out and half-closed his eyes, flattening his ear-tufts and crest-feathers with pleasure.
"That seems to be the case up and down the lines," Amberdrake replied, his brows furrowed with concentration, as he carefully inserted the pin that would hold the new shaft to the old.
Skan turned his head a little, and watched him with interest, and not a little envy. He would have loved to have the hands to do things like this for himself. Even Zhaneel couldn't imp in her own feathers, for all that she had those wonderful, clever "hands." She could do plenty of other things he relied on a human for, though.
She no longer had the disadvantage of shortened foreclaws that had handicapped her in aerial combat. A human in the Sixth who had once been a trainer of fighting cocks had made her a set of removable, razor-sharp fighting "claws," that fit over the backs of her hands. She could still manipulate objects while wearing them, for they worked best when she held her own foreclaws fisted. Now she was as formidable as the strongest of the broad-wings and wouldn't need to rely on her shears to take down makaar! These new claws were made of steel, sharp as file and stone could make them, and much longer than natural claws.
She had been so effective in claw-to-claw combat with the makaar while wearing these contraptions that the man had been pulled out of the ranks and set to making modified "claws" and "spurs" that other gryphons could wear. The makaar dropped with gratifying frequency, and gryphons wearing the new contraptions found themselves able to take out two and even three makaar more per sortie.
The trouble was, of course, that as soon as someone in the enemy ranks figured out what the gryphons' new advantage was, it would be copied for the makaar. It was only a matter of time.
As long as every makaar that gets close enough to see the new claws winds up dead, we can keep our secret weapon secret a little longer, Skan told himself. And every makaar dead is one more that won't rise to fight us and will have to be replaced.
"I understand that the word in the camp is much more interesting than that," Skan continued casually, looking back at his friend through slitted eyes.
Amberdrake fitted the trimmed feather onto the spike of the pin, and slowly eased it into place. Skan had expected him to hem and haw, but the kestra'chern surprised him by glancing up and smiling. "If you mean what's going on between Winterhart and me, you're right," he said, with a nod. "The situation between us is not a stalemate anymore." He looked back down and finished the work of gluing the feather to the steel pin and the place where both shafts met. "Hold still. Don't move. If you can sit there patiently until this sets, it's going to be perfect."
"Not a stalemate?" Skan asked, suppressing the urge to flip his wings, which would ruin Amberdrake's careful work. "Is that all you can say?"
Amberdrake peeled the last of the glue from his fingers, and tossed aside the rag he had used to clean up before he answered. "What else do you want me to say?" he asked. "She's the Sixth Wing East Trondi'irn, I'm theoretically the chief kestra'chern. She can't and won't abandon her duties, and neither will I. Mine take up a great deal of the evening and night, and hers take up a great deal of the daytime. Aside from that—we are managing. Conn Levas is back out in the field. He has made no moves to cause her trouble other than gossip and backbiting which we can both ignore. He chooses to believe that she is proving what a fool she truly is by taking up with a manipulating kestra'chern, and if that makes him happy and causes him to leave her alone, then he can spread all the gossip he wants so far as we are concerned. We have an ear among the mages in the person of Vikteren, so we know everything he says."
"Huh." Skan cast Amberdrake a look of dissatisfaction, but the kestra'chern ignored it. "Tamsin and Cinnabar had a lot more to say about it than that."
"Tamsin is a romantic, and Cinnabar was raised on ballads," Amberdrake retorted, his neck and ears flushing a little. "Winterhart and I are satisfied with the arrangement we have. We are fulfilling our duties exactly as we did before. That is all anyone needs to know."
Skan raised his head carefully and flattened his ear-tufts. "Heyla, excuse me!" he said in surprise at Amberdrake's controlled vehemence. "Didn't mean to pry. When you're in love, you know, you like to hear that the whole world's in love, too!"
Amberdrake finally looked into his eyes, and patted his shoulder. "Sorry, old bird," he said apologetically. "There've been too many people who want to make up some kind of romantic nonsense about the two of us being lifebonded, and just as many who want to turn me into the evil perchi who seduced the virtuous Winterhart away from the equally virtuous Conn Levas. I'm a little tired of both stories."
Skan nodded, but for all of Amberdrake's denials, there was very little doubt in his mind that Amberdrake and Winterhart were a lifebonded pair. Tamsin and Cinnabar said so, and they also said that those who were lifebonded tended to be able to recognize the state in others.
"It won't be easy for either of them," Tamsin had added pensively. "Lifebonding is hardly as romantic as the ballads make it out to be. Both of you have got to be strong in order to keep one from devouring the other alive. And you'd better hope that both of you are ready for the kind of closeness that lifebonding brings, especially between two people who are Empaths. You can't fight or argue—you feel your partner's pain as much as your own. You become, not two people precisely, but a kind of two-headed, two-personalitied entity, Tamsin-and-Cinnabar, and you'd better hope that one of you doesn't suddenly come to like something that the other detests because you wind up sharing just about everything!"
"But when it finally works," Cinnabar had added, with an affectionate caress for Tamsin, "it is a good thing, a partnership where strengths are shared and weaknesses minimized. I think that the good points all outweigh the bad, but I have reason to."
Neither of them had bothered to point out the obvious—that Tamsin was as low-born as Cinnabar was high, and if there had not been a war on, there would have been considerable opposition to their pairing even from Cinnabar's conspicuously liberal and broad-minded family. In fact, there had been terrible tragedies over such pairings in the past, which was why there were as many tragic ballads about lifebondings as there were romantic ones. Even Skan knew that much.
Well, if Amberdrake chose not to admit to such a tie with Winterhart, that was his business and not Skan's. And if he preferred to make the relationship seem as casual as possible, well, that was only good sense.
"Can't help what people say, and you know that Conn is the origin of most of the spiteful talk," Skan observed. "And as for the people who are spreading it, well, you know who they are, too. If it wasn't Winterhart, they'd make something up about you, and that's a fact. I just want to know one thing. Are you happy! Both of you?"
Amberdrake nodded, soberly. "I think that we are as happy as any two people can be, in this whole situation. We aren't unhappy, if that makes any difference." He sighed and smoothed down the vanes of the feather, blending the old one into the new. "This is a war; she deals with the physical hurts, I try to deal with the emotional ones. Every day brings more grief; I help her through hers, and she helps me through mine. Maybe—"
He didn't finish the sentence, but Skan knew the rest of it. It was the litany of everyone in Urtho's forces, from the lowest to the highest. "Maybe someday, when the war is over—"
The war had gone on so long that there was an entire generation of gryphons now fighting who had never known anything but the war. That probably went for humans, too. The war had turned the society that older folks sometimes talked about completely upside down, and even Skan could not remember most of what his elders talked about with such longing. The repercussions of that were still going on.
"Is it set?" Skan asked finally, when the silence between them had lingered for some time. Amberdrake seemed to jar himself awake from some pensive dream, and checked the joint with a careful finger.
"I think so," he replied. "Give yourself a good shake. If it holds through that, it's set."
Skan did so, gratefully. There was nothing lik
e being told to hold still that made a gryphon wild for a good shake! Amberdrake laughed and backed out of the way as the gryphon roused all of his feathers and then shook himself so vigorously that bits of down and dust went everywhere.
The newly-imped feather held, feeling and acting entirely as strong as any of the undamaged ones. He grinned in satisfaction and saluted Amberdrake with a jaunty wave.
"Excellent as always, my friend," he said cheerfully. "You should give up your wicked ways and become a full-time feather-artist."
"Very few gryphons are as enthusiastic in the performance of their duties as you are," Amberdrake countered. "I don't think I've had to imp in more than a dozen feathers in the last two years, and most of those were yours. I'd starve for lack of work."
"You could always tend hawks as well as gryphons," Skan suggested.
"You could always pull a travel-wagon," Amberdrake replied. "Thank you, no. I enjoy my duties. I would not enjoy tending psychotic goshawks, neurotic peregrines, murderous hawkeagles, and demented gyrfalcons. Have you ever heard the story about how you tell what a falconer flies?"
"No," Skan replied, with ear-tufts up. Hawks and falcons fascinated him, because they were so outwardly like and inwardly unlike a gryphon. "How do you?"
"The man who flies a falcon has puncture wounds all over his fist from nervous talons. The man who flies a goshawk has an arm that is white to the elbow, because he never dares go without his gauntlet. And the man who flies a hawkeagle is the one with the eye patch." Amberdrake's mouth quirked slightly, and Skan chuckled.
"I presume that must be a very old Kaled'a'in proverb," Skan told him, with the sigh that was supposed to tell Amberdrake he had quoted far too many Kaled'a'in proverbs. "But—nervous talons? What does that mean?"
"Tense birds have tense toes, and peregrines are notoriously nervous," Amberdrake said, his mouth quirking a little more, this time with a distinctly wicked glint in his eye. "Remember that the next time your little gryfalcon is startled when she's got some portion of you in her 'hands.'"
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