“A native like Ikala?” Tad replied shrewdly, and chuckled when she blushed involuntarily. “Well, I wish he was with us.”
“I do, too—” she began, intending to change the subject, quickly.
“And probably for more reasons than one!” he teased, not giving her a chance to change the subject, and sounding more like his old self than he had in days. “I can’t blame you; he’s a handsome fellow, and he certainly accounted well for himself in training. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to get to know him better.”
“I suppose,” she said, suddenly wary. There was nothing that Tad liked better than to meddle in other peoples’ love lives. “If we’d had a chance to ask him more about forests like these, we might be faring better now.”
He saw what she was trying to do. “Oh, come on, Blade!” he coaxed. “Stop being coy with me! Am I your partner, or not? Shouldn’t your partner know who you’re attracted to?” He gave her a sly, sideways look. “I know he’s attracted to you. It’s obvious, if you’re watching.”
“And you were watching, I suppose,” she grumbled, giving up on her attempt to distract him to something more serious. He laughed.
“I’m supposed to watch out for you, aren’t I? You’d be happier with a male friend to share some— hmm—pleasant moments with, and I know it would be easier dealing with you if you were happier.” He tilted his head comically to the side.
“Oh, thank you,” she said sarcastically. “Now you sound like both my parents. They can’t wait to get me—attached.”
Into bed with someone, you mean, she thought sourly. And Tad knows it. He should know better than to echo them! He knows how I feel about that!
‘They’re obsessed with it, and have built much of their lives around pleasures of flesh. They think of it as a means to all happiness, even if it is by a strange, obscure path! Seeing you bedded with someone is not my goal. I simply want to see you content in all areas of your life,” Tad said persuasively. “He’s certainly a fine prospect. Good-looking, intelligent, and open-minded enough that you wouldn’t get all tangled up in Haighlei custom with him. Good sense of humor, too, and that’s important. And being trained as a prince, he knows that you have to be able to concentrate on your duty, you can’t just devote yourself slavishly to a man. Hmm?”
Blade fixed her partner with a stern and fierce gaze, neither agreeing nor denying any of it. “You’re matchmaking,” she accused. “Don’t try to deny it; I’ve seen you matchmake before, you’re as bad as an old woman about it! You want to see everyone paired off and living—well, if not happily ever after, at least having a good time while the affair lasts!”
“Of course!” Tad replied smugly. “And why not?”
She growled at him. “Because—because it’s invasive, that’s why not! I repeat—I get enough of that kind of nonsense from my parents! Why should I put up with it from you?”
He only snorted. “I’m your partner, I have to know these things, and I have to try to help you get what you want and need, whether or not you know what it is! I’d tell you, and I’d expect you to help me. We both have to know if there’s something that is going to have us emotionally off-balance, because that’s going to affect how we do our job. Right? Admit it!”
She growled again, but nodded with extreme reluctance. He was right, of course. A Silver’s partnership was as close as many marriages, and partners were supposed to confide in each other, cooperate with each other, in and out of the duty times.
And for some reason, what seemed so invasive from her parents didn’t seem so bad, coming from Tad. Perhaps it was because Tad was a gryphon, and not human. Despite the gryphons’ abilities to see things like a human did, Tad would always be one step removed from complete empathy with Blade, and that gave her a barrier of safety.
“So tell your partner how you feel about it.” He settled his head down on his foreclaws. “What do you think of Ikala, then?”
Rain drummed down outside their shelter and pattered through the branches they had piled on the roof. Lightning made patterns of the branches screening the front of the shelter, reflecting whitely off Tad’s eyes and the silver gryphon-badge on her tunic. As usual, rain and thunder were the only sounds that could be heard outside.
Inside—the smoke had finally cleared away and the fire burned brightly. She was dry, full, and warm. Her shoulder didn’t hurt too much, and she was in a well-camouflaged shelter with two very solid walls on either side of her and a cushioning of springy boughs between her and the cold, damp ground. In short, there was nothing to distract her from her thoughts, which were confused to say the least.
“I suppose I don’t really know,” she said slowly, as Tad’s dark eyes watched her with that intensity that only a raptor could display. “He is very handsome, he’s very charming, he’s quite intelligent . . . but I just don’t know. Part of the time I think I like him for himself, part of the time I think I’m attracted to him just because he’s so exotic, and part of the time I think it’s because he’s the only person in White Gryphon that my father doesn’t know everything about!”
Tad chuckled heartlessly. “There is that. I’ve noticed that Ikala has never once had the occasion to patronize a kestra ‘chern. Amberdrake should find him more of an enigma than you do.”
“That would certainly be an improvement,” she said acidly. “It would be very nice for once to have a conversation with someone without the person wondering if Father was going to tell me all the things he’d really rather I didn’t know.”
“And it would be very nice for you,” Tad commented, “to talk to your father without wondering if he was going to tell you things you’d rather not know.” Blade nodded, and Tad shrewdly added, “I don’t go to kestra’chern, so you are doubly safe talking to me about how you feel; word will not reach your father. May I give up all my hedonism if I lie.”
Blade smiled despite herself. Depend upon a gryphon male to count that as the ultimate oath.
“He’s under control,” she added. “He’s a very controlled person. I like that.”
I like it a great deal more than unbridled passion, truth to tell
Tad coughed. “Still,” he prompted helpfully. “Some might say that argues for a certain coldness of spirit?”
She snorted. “You know better than that, you’ve worked with him. He loses his temper about as often as anyone else, he just doesn’t let it get away from him. And—so far as not visiting a kestra‘chern—”
“And?” Tad’s eyes sparkled with humor.
She blushed again. “And he hasn’t exactly been— well—chaste. He’s had female friends while he’s been here. They just weren’t kestra’chern. Even if they were casual. Recreational.”
And I could almost envy Karelee. I wish she hadn‘t been so enthusiastic about his bed abilities.
“Oh?” Tad said archly. “He hasn’t been chaste? I suppose you were interested enough to find out about this.”
She coughed and tried to adopt a casual tone.
“Well, one does, you know. People talk. I didn’t have to be interested, people gossip about that sort of thing all the time. I only had to be nearby and listen.” She favored him with a raised eyebrow, grateful to feel her hot face cooling. “Winds know that you do enough talking, so you ought to know!”
“Me? Gossip?” His beak parted in silent laughter and he squinted his eyes. “I prefer to call it the ‘gathering of interpersonal information,’ for ‘management of sources and receivers of pleasure.’ “
“Well, I call it gossip, and you’re as bad as any old woman,” she retorted. “You are just as bad when it comes to matchmaking. And as for Ikala—he is attractive, and I don’t deny it, but I think you’re getting way ahead of yourself to tie the two of us together in any way. I don’t even know how I feel, so how could I even speculate about how he feels? And anyway, you and I have our missions to run, and when we get out of here, we have a long tour of duty at a remote outpost to take care of. If we don’t die of embarrassment at
having to be rescued.”
If we are rescued, if we do get out of here. . . . The unspoken thought put a chill in the air of the tent that the fire could not drive away. All frivolous thoughts faded; this was the change in subject she had tried to make, but not the new subject she would have preferred. Reflexively she glanced out through the screening branches. It was getting darker out there, and it looked as if—once again—the rain was going to continue past nightfall.
That might not be so bad, if it keeps our unseen “friends“ away.
“Well,” she said, as lightly as possible, which was not very, “now you’ve got my brain going, and I’m never going to be able to get to sleep. I’ll just lie awake thinking.”
He yawned hugely. “And I am warm and sleepy. I always get worn out listening to people’s reasons why they won’t be happy. Shall we switch watches?”
He didn’t wait for her to answer, settling his head back down on his foreclaws. She shrugged. “We might as well,” she replied, and edged over until she was in a position where she could see through a gap between two of the branches hiding the front of their shelter. She memorized the positions of everything in sight while the light was still good enough to identify what was visible through the curtain of rain. The flashes of lightning helped; if she concentrated on a single spot, she could wait until the next lightning bolt hit to give her a quick, brightly-lit glimpse of what was there, and study the afterimage burned into her eyes.
Tad hadn’t been lying about his fatigue; within a few moments, she heard his breathing deepen and slow, and when she turned to look behind her, she saw that his eyes were closed. She turned back to her vigil, trying to mentally review what she had done when she constructed the shelter.
She had tried not to take too many branches away from any one place. She had tried to pile the ones she brought to the shelter in such a way that they looked as if they were all from a single smaller tree brought down by the larger. With all this rain, every trace of our being here should have been washed away. No scent, no debris. . . .
Smoke, though—the smoke Tad had used to drive out insects had been very dense and odoriferous, and she wondered if the rain had washed all of it out of the air. If not—how common would smoke be in a forest that experienced thunderstorms every day? Common enough, she would think. Surely lightning started small fires all the time, and surely they burned long enough to put a fair amount of smoke into the air before the rain extinguished them.
Well, there wasn’t anything she could do about the smoke—or the shelter itself—now. If there was anything looking for them, she could only hope that she had done everything she needed to in order to cover their presence. Last night it would have been difficult for their possible followers to find them; she hoped tonight it would be impossible.
The rain turned from a torrent to a shower, and slowed from a shower to a mere patter. Then it wasn’t rain at all, but simply the melodic drip of water from the canopy above, and the sounds of the night resumed.
She breathed a sigh of relief, and checked the fire. No point in letting it burn too high now; the inside of the shelter was at a good temperature, and with two walls being the trunks of trees, it should sustain that level without too much work. She rebuilt the fire, listening to the hoots and calls from above, tenting the flames with sticks of green fuel and banking the coals to help conceal the glow. This should let the fire burn through the night without needing too much more fuel or tending. It would burn slowly now, producing a bed of deep red, smokeless coals instead of flame. That was precisely the way she wanted it.
With the level of light in the shelter down to the point where Tad was nothing more than a large, dark shape, she turned her attention back to the outside.
Nothing had changed; the creatures of the canopy continued to go about their business with the accompanying noise, and now the luminescent insects she had noted before began to flit about the foliage. She allowed herself to relax a little further. It just might be that whatever had been following them had decided to leave them alone.
But don’t count on it, she cautioned herself. Assume the worst. Assume that they’re still—
Something moved out in the darkness.
Just a shape, a shifting of shadow, but she knew that there should not have been a shadow in that place, much less a moving one. Instantly she was on the alert.
Whatever it was, it was big. Bigger than the tame lion she’d seen in Shalaman’s menagerie. She knew to within a thumb’s breadth just how wide a distance lay between each bush, how tall a young tree was. The head of the shadow would rise a little above hers, she thought, though she had the impression of a very long, slender neck; the chest briefly obscured one bush while its hindquarters still lay behind another. Altogether, that would make it about the size of a horse, perhaps a little smaller. She couldn’t quite tell how bulky it was, but the fluid way in which it moved and the fact that it melted in with the other shadows so well suggested that it had a slender build.
Her view was a narrow one, limited to the wedge of forest between the two long walls of log—yet in a moment, as she concentrated further, she knew that there was more than one of those creatures out there. One shadow flitted as another froze; further flickering in the distance suggested that either they were incredibly fast, or there might be a third.
Two, at least, for certain. But they don’t seem to know we‘re here.
The first of the shadows darted suddenly out of sight; a heartbeat later, and a bloodcurdling scream rang out into the night.
Blade’s heart leaped into her throat, and she felt as if she had been plunged into ice water. Tad only wheezed in his sleep. It took all of her control to remain frozen in place. She had an impression that those shadows possessed extremely sharp senses, and that if she moved, even obscured by branches as she was, they might spot the movement, or hear it.
Silence descended, as Blade tried to get her heartbeat started again. It was a good thing that she had heard the death scream of a rabbit before, or she would have thought that one of those somethings had just killed a child.
Now, as if the canopy dwellers had only just noticed the shadows’ presence, the silence extended up into the tree-tops. Only the insects and frogs remained unaffected, chirping and trilling as calmly as they had a moment before.
She blinked—and in the time it took her to do so, the shadows vanished, at least from her view.
She did not breathe easier, however. From the silence, she knew that they were still out there, and she had no intention of letting them know her location.
I can only hope that they haven’t had the bright idea to come take a walk on top of the sheltering logs.
The very idea made her want to shiver. The back of her neck crawled as she imagined one of those creatures sniffing around the brush piled above her head. There was nothing between her and these hunters stronger than a layer of canvas and a pile of flimsy branches and leaves. Surely if one of the hunters got close, no amount of brush and herb juice would obscure their scent. Surely the scent of the fire alone would tell the creature that they were here—
But I’m assuming that the thing is intelligent, that it would associate a fire with us. I’m assuming that it’s hunting us—it could simply be here, we could have wandered into its territory. We haven’t seen any large predators nor any sign of them; this could simply be the local equivalent of a lion.
And yet. . . something about the way it had moved had suggested intelligence and purpose. That could be her imagination, but it might be the truth. It was wary; it moved carefully, but when it did move, it was quick and certain. That was an indication of something that either had incredible reflexes, or something that decided very precisely what it was going to do before it acted.
In any case, there was no reason to take any chances, and every reason to be painfully cautious. No matter what else, these creatures were hunters, predators. The behavior of the canopy dwellers showed that, and demonstrated that the animals that lived in th
e treetops recognized these beasts and feared them.
Even if those things are just the local equivalent of a lion, they’re still big, they’re still carnivorous, and they’re hunting. There’s no reason to put myself on their menu.
A new thought occurred to her; what if they were not dealing with one enemy, but two? One that had brought them down, and a second that was hunting them? In that case, there were two possibilities; the shadows were either wild hunters that had nothing to do with what brought them down—or they were allied with it. In the second case, the shadow shapes out there could be the equivalent of a pack of hunting hounds, trailing them for some unknown master.
It was not something that was unheard of; that was the problem. Urtho wasn’t the only mage that created living things. Ma‘ar did, and so did others who never participated in the wars. The ability to create a new species was a mark of prestige or a symbol of ability above and beyond the status of being an Adept. Among the higher mages there were a handful that had created new creatures for centuries before the war with Ma‘ar.
That gave her yet another possible scenario; a mage who hunted other intelligent creatures, and had chosen them for his next prey. Their chasers were his dog pack—
Ma’ar had been one such, and she’d heard tales of others, both from her own people and from the Haighlei. That, in fact, was one of the reasons why the Haighlei restricted magic use to the priests; they had a tale of a sadistic, powerful mage who captured men and brought them to his estate to hunt them like beasts. A brave young priest had suspected what was happening and allowed himself to be taken, thus giving his fellows an agent within the spell-protected walls through which they could channel their own power to destroy the mage.
That was how the story went anyway.
She grew cold all over again, and restrained herself from running her hand through her hair nervously. Her imagination went wild again, taking off all on its own. She had never had any difficulty coming up with scenarios for trouble. So—suppose that one of the neutral mages came down here to hide before the Cataclysm. Even if he wasn’t Urtho’s equal, he could have guard-beasts and birds to warn him when anything was in the area. The Haighlei never travel through the wilderness in groups of less than ten, and that includes a priest, but all he‘d have to do would be to stay quiet while they passed by. Unless they actually stumbled over him, they wouldn ‘t find him. Then he could hunt individuals at his leisure.
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