Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  No, somehow I don't think that attracting Luck is on the list of active spells....

  Chapter Fifteen

  DARKWIND

  Treyvan roused his feathers, fluffing his crest and shaking his head, his claws digging long furrows into the thick weedy turf. He held his head high, his muscles stiff with impatience. Darkwind glanced sideways at him and smiled a little.

  A shadow passed over the scout, and he looked up automatically, but it was only a cloud passing across the sun. Vree was waiting for him back in the forest, away from the temptation of Treyvan's crest feathers. "How long have you and Hydona been mated?" he asked, with pretended innocence.

  "Twelve yearsss," the gryphon replied, rousing his feathers again, and casting his own glance upward. "What'sss that got to do with anything?"

  "And you've made quite a few mating nights, haven't you?" the scout continued, his smile broadening. Treyvan was so preoccupied he didn't even realize that Darkwind was teasing him.

  "Well," Treyvan said, with a sidelong glance at Hydona. Hydona only roused her own feathers, watching him coyly. "Yesss."

  "If you've got so much experience at it," he laughed, reaching up to scratch behind Treyvan's ear-tufts, "don't you think you ought to be able to take your time about this one?"

  Treyvan closed his eyes, wearing an expression of long-suffering patience. "You, a human, alwayss in ssseason, with matesss ambusshing you even when you are bathing—you tell me that? You crrreaturess neverrr ssstop."

  Hydona made a choking sound; her mate pointedly looked away from her. Darkwind knew that faint gargling from past exchanges with the pair; she was trying not to chuckle. He raised his eyebrows at her, then gave her a broad wink. She hid her head by turning it to the side, but her shaking shoulders told him she was stifling outright laughter.

  "Anyway," Treyvan continued, in an aggrieved tone, "you know very well that I casst the initial ssspell thiss morrrning. And you know verrry well that until we complete it with the sssecond ssspell, it'sss going to make me itchierrr than a plague of sssand-fleasss. I explained it to you often enough." He shook his head and made a grinding sound with his beak. "I feel asss if my ssskin isss too tight," he complained.

  Darkwind bit his tongue to keep from making a retort to that particular complaint. "In that case," he said, soothingly, "I had probably better leave you two alone."

  "Oh, he'll live," Hydona countered, controlling herself and her humor admirably. "Trrruly he will. You're rrready for what we'll do thisss time, I hope? Not like the lassst time?"

  He flushed at the memory of the "last time," when he had been much younger. He had been close enough to them, and unshielded, so that he had gotten caught up in the extremely potent magic of their mating spell. The first spell that Treyvan had mentioned was what actually made the mating fertile; otherwise their sexual activity was purely for enjoyment. The second would ensure conception. And despite Treyvan's acerbic comment about "humans always being in season," the fact was that the gryphons were at least as active in that area as any humans Darkwind knew.

  "I'll be fine," he told her. "I'm not fourteen anymore."

  Hydona laughed. "I'd notisssed," she teased. "Essspecially around Dawnfirrre. When will you be picking a mate?"

  "Uh—" the question took him by surprise, so he settled for a gallant answer. "When I find a mate as magical as you are."

  "Flattererrr," she replied, dryly. "Well, when you do, perhapsss we'll all be rrready to ssssettle a new place together, ssso that we can keep eyesss on each other'sss sssmall onesss." She looked over his head a moment, off into the distance. "That isss the ultimate goal of ourrr being herrre, you know," she said thoughtfully. "We'rrre pioneersss, of a sssort. Our kind came from sssomewhere about herrre, you know, very, very long ago, and Trrreyvan and I are here now to sssee if it isss the time to rrreturn."

  "So you told me," he said, "A long time ago."

  She nodded as Treyvan sighed and lay down in the long grass with a long-suffering look.

  "Oh, yesss," she said, ignoring her mate, with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes. "We arrre herrre to sssee if we can raissse little ones, brrring them into the magic of the land, and prosssper. If we do well, more will come. You know, ourrr people and yoursss arrre ancient parrrtnersss, from the daysss of the Kaled'a'in. The hertasi, too, and othersss you may not have everrr ssseen beforrre. It would be good if we could be partnersss again."

  Another surprise; this time, a much greater surprise. He'd been astonished to learn that the gryphons were fluent in the ancient tongue of Kaled'a'in, a language so old that very few of either the Tayledras or the Shin'a'in could be considered "fluent," despite the fact that both their current languages were derived from that parent. But this revelation was a total surprise, for there was nothing in the Tayledras histories to indicate that the two species had been so close.

  While he pondered the implications of that, Hydona reached over and gently bit Treyvan's neck. The male gryphon's eyes glazed and closed, and the cere above his beak flushed a brilliant orange-gold. Obviously, her mind was no longer on the far past, but on the immediate future. And from the look on Treyvan's face, his mind had been there for some time.

  Darkwind coughed. "Uh—Hydona?"

  "Hmm?" the gryphon replied dreamily, her own eyes bright, but unfocused, her thoughts obviously joined to Treyvan's.

  "Who's watching the little ones?" he asked. "I can't; I've got to be out on patrol. I don't trust this quiet."

  "They'll be fine," Hydona replied, releasing her mate long enough to reply. "They've been told not to leave the nessst, and if they called, nothing could get to them beforrre we'd be on top of it."

  "Are you sure?" he persisted, but Hydona was nuzzling Treyvan's neck again and he knew there was no way he was going to get any sense out of her at the moment.

  "They'll be fine," she mumbled, all her attention centered once more on her mate.

  Despite being under shielding, the sexual euphoria began penetrating even his careful defenses. This was obviously the time to leave.

  As he picked his way through the ruins, a feeling of light-headedness overcame him for a moment. He looked back over his shoulder to see the two of them surging up into the cloudy sky, Hydona a little ahead of Treyvan. Even as he watched, they began an elaborate aerial display, tumbling and spiraling around each other, in a dance that was half-planned and half-improvisation. This "dance" itself was part of the spell; the rest—Treyvan's extravagant maneuvers—were designed to inflame himself and his mate.

  And judging by the faint excitement he was feeling, even through his shields, it was having the desired effect.

  As he turned his eyes back toward the ground, another moving speck caught his eye. Though it was very high, long experience enabled him to identify it as a red-shouldered hawk, one of the many breeds often used as bondbirds by the Tayledras.

  That made him think reflexively of Dawnfire, whose bird was a red-shouldered. And that—given all that he'd been exposed to in the past few moments—made his thoughts turn in an entirely different direction than they had been tending.

  Dawnfire rode the thoughts of her bondbird with the same ease that the bird commanded the currents of the sky. Theirs was a long partnership, of seven years' standing, for she had bonded to Kyrr at the tender age of ten. Darkwind's Vree had been with him only four or five years; the bird he had bonded to before that had been a shorter-lived shriek-owl, gift of his older brother.

  A shriek-owl was not a practical bird for a scout, but the tiny creatures were perfect for a mage, which was what Darkwind had been in that long-ago, peaceful time. Shriek-owls in the wild seldom lived beyond three years—the bondbird breed in general tripled that lifespan. That was nothing near like the expected lifespan of the scouts' birds—twenty-five to fifty years for the falcons, larger owls, and hawks, and up to seventy-five years for the rarer eagles. And shriek-owls were tiny; scarcely bigger than a clenched fist. They ate mostly insects, flew slowly, and generally flitted from
tree to tree inside a very small territory. They could hardly be counted on to be an effective aid either on a scouting foray or to aid in an attack. But the owls were charming little birds, by nature friendly and social—in the wild they nested several to a tree—and the perfect bird for a mage who only needed a bird to be occasional eyes and ears and to pass messages. A mage did not necessarily need to bond to his bird with the kind of emotional closeness that a scout did, nor did he need a bird with that kind of long expected lifespan. All of the mages that Dawnfire knew that she liked, personally, did bond closely with intelligent birds, but it was not as necessary for them as it was for scouts.

  Scouts had to develop a good working, partner-like relationship with their birds, and that required something with a long anticipated lifespan. Scouts spent as much as a year simply training their birds, then it took as much as four or five more years to get the partnership to a smooth working relationship. Like the scouts, the lives of the bondbirds were fraught with danger. There had already been casualties among the birds, and Darkwind had warned his corps to expect more. Their enemies knew the importance of the birds, as well as the impact a bird's violent death had on his bondmate, and often made the birds their primary targets. Dawnfire tried not to think about losing Kyrr, but the fact was that it could happen.

  Darkwind's father Starblade had lost his bird in circumstances so traumatic that the mage had returned to the Vale in a state of shock, and actually could not recall what had occurred. Since he had been investigating a forest fire ignited by firebirds, and since the birds themselves seldom reacted so violently that they set their homes aflame, the other Tayledras assumed that whatever had frightened the firebirds had probably caught and killed Starblade's perlin falcon. That had been a set of very strange circumstances, actually; Dawnfire remembered it quite vividly because her mother had been one of the scouts who had found the mage and had talked it over one long night with friends in her daughter's presence.

  There had been a sortie that had drawn most of the fighters off when word of the fire had reached the Vale. Starblade had gone out to take care of it.

  He had then vanished for many days. He was found wandering, dazed, within the burned area, near nightfall on the third day. His bondbird was gone, and he himself could not remember anything after leaving the Vale. Injured, burned, dehydrated, no one was surprised at that—but when days and weeks went by and he still could not remember, and when he chose to bond again with a crow, from a nest outside of the Vale—some people, like Dawnfire's mother, wondered....

  Darkwind had once said something after another of his angry confrontations with his father—something about his feeling that Starblade had changed, and was no longer the father he had known. He blamed the change on the disaster, Dawnfire wasn't so sure.

  Starblade had not been that close, emotionally, to Darkwind's mother, though Darkwind had never accepted that. Dawnfire was not at all certain that Starblade would have been so badly affected by her death that his personality had changed. She blamed the change on the death of Starblade's bird. It seemed to her and her own mother that Starblade had become silent and very odd afterward. And that crow he'd bonded to was just as odd....

  She pulled her thoughts away from the past and returned them to the present. She was off-duty today and had decided to indulge her curiosity in something.

  Darkwind's gryphons.

  She had been terribly curious about them for a very long time, and had even gone to visit them a time or two. But the gryphons, while still being cordial and polite, had made one thing very clear to her: the only visitor they truly welcomed was Darkwind.

  That—had hurt. It had hurt a very great deal, and not even Darkwind knew how much it hurt. She brooded on that, as Kyrr neared the ruins, coming in high over the forest.

  I've never had anyone rebuff me like that, she thought resentfully. Every other nonhuman I've ever met seems to think I'm a good person to deal with and to have as a friend. Tervardi, kyree, dyheli, hertasi—even firebirds, teyll-deer, wolves, the nonsentients.... Why don't the gryphons want me around?

  She'd asked that question any number of times. Darkwind wouldn't tell her a great deal, citing the gryphons' desire for privacy. That had only inflamed her curiosity—at the same time, she felt she had to respect that need. But why wouldn't they be willing to meet with her, once in a while, away from their nest? Why was it that only Darkwind was worthy of their attention?

  Over the months and years, the unfulfilled questions ate at her, and she had slipped over to the ruins more than once to watch the gryphons and their offspring from a distance. Darkwind had never forbid her that; in fact, he said once that she had eased one of his worries, helping to keep an eye on the young ones while the adults were off hunting.

  They had to spend a great deal of time in hunting; they were very large, flighted carnivores, like the birds-of-prey they resembled, and they needed a lot of meat. They ranged very far in order to keep from overhunting any area, and they often spent an entire morning or afternoon away from the nest. Dawnfire had taken this tacit approval as permission to watch them whenever she wasn't otherwise occupied, so long as she did it from afar, feeling that she might be able to earn the acceptance of the adults with her unofficial guardianship of their offspring.

  But then, a week or so ago, Darkwind had specifically forbidden her to go anywhere near the ruins today, without giving any explanation. And that had driven her curious nature wild, as well as rousing resentment in her that he had simply ordered her as if it was his right.

  He probably shouldn't have told me, she admitted to herself, as her bird soared just at the border of the gryphons' territory. If he hadn't told me, I probably wouldn't be doing this—

  But then anger at him and his authoritative attitude burned away that thought—an anger nearly a week old, born of resentment, and nurtured on his continued silence. How dare he forbid her to go where she wanted to go on her own time? He had no authority over her, over her freedom! He hadn't asked her, simply and politely, he'd demanded that she promise, then and there, refusing to answer any questions, either before she reluctantly promised, or after. He refused to explain himself, or even talk about it. Her anger smoldered, hot, and grew hotter with every day that passed.

  Following anger had come suspicion, slowly growing over the course of several days; a feeling that he was hiding something, and nothing had alleviated it since.

  Her suspicions centered around the Changechild. He was always with the gryphons—he was with them, and with that Changechild. He wouldn't talk about either. It was not unreasonable to suppose that the two were connected—and that there was something about the Change-child that Darkwind didn't want her to know.

  He'd never hidden anything from her before. There was no reason why he should want to start now.

  Or so she had thought. Until this morning, when an overheard comment told her something very important that Darkwind had somehow left out of his few stories about the Changechild.

  "Has Darkwind said anything more about the Changechild?" Ice-shadow asked someone. "Is she ready to leave, yet?"

  She? This Changechild, neuter in her mind, suddenly took on a different face. "It" was a she.

  Suddenly the senseless questions had sensible answers. And there were plenty of reasons why Darkwind would want her kept in the dark about this female. Especially if she was attractive.

  And Dawnfire's imagination painted her as very attractive. Most Changechildren were. And there were the attractions of the exotic, of course....

  Not that I care if he's enamored with the girl, she told herself, as Kyrr soared a little closer to the gryphons' nest. It's not as if we're lifebonded or something. We haven't even traded bondbird primary feathers. I would if he offered, but we haven't, just coverts. I don't exactly have a hold on him....

  Excuses, excuses, and none of them meant anything, not really.

  Damn him, anyway.

  She had given a promise, and she never broke one—no matter
what.

  Even if the person she had given the promise to turned out to be a worthless sneak.

  So she had spent most of the morning trying to think of a way around that promise, so that she could see what Darkwind was really up to when he slipped off to his gryphon friends. She wasn't entirely certain why she was tormenting herself, it was as if she kept biting at a sore tooth. It hurt, but she just couldn't seem to stop doing it.

  Then the answer to her dilemma had occurred to her; she had promised that she wouldn't go near the gryphons, but she hadn't promised that Kyrr would stay away. And what Kyrr saw, she could see. Kyrr could be her way to see just what Darkwind was really up to.

  The only problem was that to do that, she would have to hole up in her ekele and go into a full trance. That was something she was secretly ashamed of; that she could not make full contact with Kyrr's mind unless she performed a full bonding. She didn't know why; scouts generally had no trouble using their bird's senses. There were one or two others who had the same trouble, but no more than that. Darkwind had speculated that she found the experience of having her consciousness split to be too traumatic to deal with unless she was in a full trance-since in a full trance, her consciousness wasn't really split.

  Normally this wasn't a handicap; her communication with Kyrr was otherwise excellent. The big hawk was one of the most intelligent of all the scouts' bondbirds, and had no trouble with simply telling her what she needed to know. Kyrr could "speak" in full sentences, she had a sense of humor, and had no trouble in cooperating with her bondmate. There had never been any rebellion or any real disagreements with Kyrr.

  But Kyrr could not read facial expressions; she could not pick up the nuances of behavior that Dawnfire needed to know. She wanted to know how he really felt about this Changechild. Kyrr only understood things as they related to raptor feelings and instincts. And she didn't want Kyrr to misinterpret things that she saw in light of those instincts. After all, it was entirely possible that Darkwind had other reasons for keeping her away, legitimate reasons.