Lackey,Mercedes - Darian's Tale02 - Owlsight.doc

by Owlsight [lit]

  The dining hall turned out to be one of the few wooden buildings in the Vale, a long, low structure that was nothing like Keisha imagined it would be inside. One single room, with the ceiling supported by slender pillars; there was no real sign of what the room’s function should be, it could have been used for any purpose required. Instead of rows of tables and benches, there were a few tables with stools, a great many cushions, some couches, and some individual chairs. Part of one corner had been built up with three raised tiers, also covered with cushions. At the far end, food had been laid out for people to help themselves, which they did, then taking their choices to sit however they chose to eat.

  “There is almost always food here, even between meals, but hot food is only served at mealtime,” Nightwind told her, as she directed Keisha in getting a wooden platter and helping herself. “Things tend to happen in a Vale that upset schedules, so there are plenty of folk missing the regular meals who need feeding at any given time.”

  They found seats - Keisha felt much more comfortable eating at a table - and Nightwind began asking her questions about herself. Keisha discovered that she and the trondi’irn had more in common than she would have guessed. Both of them had a swarm of male relatives to put up with - in Nightwind’s case, it was a horde of cousins, rather than brothers - and both had younger sisters that they liked and missed enormously. “Though Nightbird may come here anyway - but not until her training is finished.”

  Both of them seemed to have the same slightly cynical outlook on life as well. Nightwind had a better sense of the absurd, though, and Keisha wished she had Nightwind’s ability to see humor in things. It looked to her as if Nightwind got more enjoyment from things by not taking them too seriously.

  “I have to get back to work,” Nightwind told her, when they’d finished eating and put their platters in the bin for dirty dishes. “Keep following this gray path, and you’ll eventually come to the guest lodge.” She frowned slightly. “At some point in the next couple of days, I’ll have to get Tyrsell to give you our language; the hertasi for the most part don’t understand Valdemaran. If you see Dar’ian and your headache is gone, tell him I said that.”

  “I will,” she promised, though she couldn’t imagine how she was to learn a language on top of everything else. She wandered the gray path, enjoying the sights, and eventually did come to the guest lodge. With a sigh, she went inside and obediently got out her texts.

  To her delight, a large part of the things she had not understood did come clear, although the texts often used slightly different terms for things than Nightwind did. Oversight, for instance, was called Mage-Sight or Healing-Sight. Now that she knew some of the basics, though, she was amazed at how much the texts actually told her, occasionally explaining things better than Nightwind had.

  She became so absorbed in her studies that she barely noted the passage of time until she found she was straining to read, looked up, and realized that it was growing dark. More than that, her foot was asleep, and she was starving. She put the book down, and decided to get some dinner on her own.

  She walked to the dining hall through a dusk lit softly by lanterns and scented with the perfumes of night-blooming flowers. A different sort of fragrance coming from the dining hall made her move a bit faster, though, and she shyly took her place amid a tangle of strange Hawkbrothers to get her platter and fill it. With a little searching, she found a quiet corner out of everyone’s way, and sat there, watching and listening to the strange music of their unfamiliar tongue.

  She was just about to leave when she (almost literally) ran into Darian. He caught her by the elbow as she passed him, with a contagious grin for her when she realized who it was. “Working hard?” he asked, with a wink.

  She made a face. “Hard enough to get a headache,” she replied, sighing. “I wish I’d known this was going to be so difficult.”

  “Well, that’s good, it means you’re stretching new talents,” he told her, without a hint of pity. “Almost everything worth doing is hard, at least at first. Do you still want to meet Kuari?”

  “Absolutely!” She remembered then what her teacher had told her. “Oh, and Nightwind said to let you know if I saw you that she wanted - someone - to give me the Hawkbrother tongue.”

  “That would be Tyrsell,” Darian identified, nodding, so that a wisp of hair dropped into his eyes and he brushed it back with an absentminded wave of his hand. “Tyrsell is the king-stag of the dyheli herd; he’s the one I was riding yesterday.”

  A dyheli teaching her a language? “That doesn’t seem right. They don’t talk, I mean, not aloud,” she responded, with a frown. “How can he do that?”

  “Oh, you’ll understand soon enough - still have the headache?” he asked, and she shook her head. “Good; let me bolt something down, and I’ll take you to the dyheli meadow. The sooner you have Tayledras, the better. The hertasi mostly don’t understand Valdemaran.”

  “That’s what Nightwind said.” She followed him as he got bread rounds that looked very like her breakfast this morning, and waited while he inhaled his dinner.

  “Sorry about my manners,” he said between bites. “I got used to eating quickly, because things are always happening quickly around a Vale.” He grinned again. “Maybe that’s why we take our leisure so seriously, because most of the time we’re madly scrambling to get things done. You’ve got to keep a balance in life, so that you can enjoy your pleasures completely, and then go and enjoy your work completely. Heyla, when you rest well, you work better, right?” She nodded.

  He led her down another series of twisting paths, coming out into a moon-gilded meadow full of the horned dyheli. One was patiently waiting for them where the path met the meadow. He wasn’t all that much bigger than the rest, but there was a sense of power about him that Meree hadn’t had.

  :Darian has told me that Nightwind wishes you to have Tayledras-tongue,: rang a solemn voice in her mind.: Will you lower your shield for me?:

  She’d been diligent in remembering to check that she had it up, and lowering it was a little like relaxing her grip on something. She sighed as it came down, feeling something inside her head relaxing as well. Will I ever really do this without thinking about it?

  Tyrsell stood over her, a silver statue in the moonlight. :Now sit, please. This will not take long.:

  Obediently she sat down on the grass. A moment later, she found herself looking up at Darian from a prone position, with her head aching all over again and no notion how she’d wound up lying down when she’d been sitting just the heartbeat before.

  “Sorry about that,” Darian said apologetically. “If I’d warned you what was going to happen, you’d have tensed up, then it would have been harder on both you and Tyrsell. I know exactly how you feel right now - this is how they gave me the language years ago.”

  It took her a moment to realize that he was speaking in the Hawkbrother language - and she understood it.

  “How does he do that?” she asked, sitting up, and rubbing her head. “How can he shove a language into my head when he doesn’t actually speak it?”

  Darian shrugged. “I don’t know exactly how; being able to take over someone’s mind like that is a special dyheli Gift. The king-stags use it to control the herd if they panic.”

  “It feels like he ran the whole herd through my head!” she complained; Darian chuckled, and she got the sense that Tyrsell was amused as well.

  “I know; I remember all too clearly how I felt after my turn, and it took me months to get comfortable with all the new concepts that showed up in my head along with the words. Come on, I’ll show you back to the guest lodge and get a hertasi to bring you a headache-potion.” He helped her to her feet; she had the presence of mind to turn to the dyheli before they left.

  “I hope I didn’t seem ungrateful. Thank you very much, Tyrsell,” she said carefully. “This is going to make things endlessly easier for all of us.”

  :You are welcome, and thank you for your courtesy; it will ser
ve you well with my people,: the stag said. Then he turned and walked calmly off into the moonlit meadow, just as if he hadn’t just worked something very like a miracle.

  “How are you coming with your studies?” Darian asked her as they turned back onto the path.

  “The good news is that I haven’t got anything to unlearn,” she replied, one hand to her aching temple. “The bad news is that I have a lot to learn in a short time. From what the books say, I think it was a good thing Nightwind made her offer. I would never have worked this out on my own.”

  “You might have,” he offered, surprising her. “After all, somebody did. There had to be a first Healer.”

  “I suppose so.” The books had also told her just how close she had come to losing control of her Gift, and what that would have meant. No wonder she had thought longingly of becoming a hermit! She had very nearly been forced to do just that, in order to stay sane!

  “Nightwind is awfully kind, and a lot more encouraging than I thought she’d be,” Keisha continued. “And the best thing is that Nightwind says that I was right all along to say I couldn’t go to the Collegium. She says that even untrained, I was doing things that Gil can’t, and that my primary duty was to the people I take care of.”

  “I can see that.” The lights of the guest lodge appeared ahead of them, and just as Keisha noticed them, a hertasi also approached them on the path. “Do you want to make the request?” Darian continued, “Or shall I?”

  “I’d like to,” she decided. When the hertasi neared, it seemed to sense that she was going to say something, and stopped, waiting attentively. “If you would be so kind, I have just been given this tongue by Tyrsell the king-stag, and my head hurts dreadfully,” she told it. It hissed with sympathy.

  “I know just the thing, Keisha-Guest,” it replied. “Shall I bring it to the lodging?”

  “Please,” she replied with gratitude, and it whisked away so fast it almost seemed to vanish.

  “Very good!” Darian applauded. “You’re going to make a Hawkbrother yet!”

  She thought about that, after Darian left her and the hertasi had come and gone with her headache medicine. She hadn’t really considered “becoming” a Hawkbrother, but Darian had, so obviously outsiders could. Could she come to serve both the Vale and the village as a Healer, in time?

  It was at least as intriguing as becoming a Herald, like her sister.

  Eleven

  Kuari roused all his feathers with a full body shake, then tucked up a foot and closed his eyes. He knew Darian wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while.

  “Well, what do you think of our little Healer?” Nightwind asked Darian as they gathered to meet with Lord Breon and Val. The Valdemarans had taken to coming over with the wagons full of trade goods rather than asking the Tayledras to come to Kelmskeep. Darian had a notion that this was as much because both Lord Breon and his son were fascinated with the new Vale as it was to save the Tayledras the inconvenience of making the trip.

  “I think she isn’t ‘little’ at all,” Darian responded, deciding that Nightwind was fishing, and he wasn’t going to take the bait. “She’s the same age as me.”

  Nightwind laughed. “Point taken. I think she’s going to be quite competent, she’s easy to get along with, and I wish I could persuade her to live here instead of Errold’s Grove. We could certainly use her.”

  “I don’t think there’s any way you could get her to forsake the village,” Darian replied thoughtfully, pulling his hair behind his ears. “She takes her responsibilities awfully seriously.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean she should give up tending the villagers,” Nightwind corrected, shaking her head. “I just don’t think they need to have her there to handle every hangnail and black eye. She could get there from here within a candlemark by gryphon-carrier, and for anything less than serious she could visit once or twice a week, easily enough.”

  He had to laugh at that; Nightwind sounded as if she’d already decided for Keisha, and if he understood Keisha at all, he doubted she cared for anyone making up her mind for her. “I don’t know; you’d have to persuade her first. At least they’re taking her more seriously than they did Justyn, and they’re treating her quite well.”

  “Having to do without can make people astonishingly appreciative,” Nightwind said dryly. The conversation might have continued in the same interesting vein, but at that point, the voices of several people in discussion drew nearer, and in a moment he and Nightwind were joined by the rest. Bondbirds flew in to roost ahead of their bondmates; Hweel and Huur took perches near Kuari and began preening each other, while Aya joined Starfall’s bird, who had been there all along. As Aya settled himself, the rest of the group entered the garden.

  They met in Starfall’s garden beneath his ekele, a miniature version of the various garden spots within k’Vala Vale except that all of the plants here were cold-hardy, either evergreens, or plants that would have a leafless, dormant period during the winter. Right now, of course, they were flourishing mightily, coaxed into accelerated growth and quick maturity by Steelmind and some of his apprentices. Tough vines had been woven and trained to form the frames for comfortable seats, holding cushions stuffed with dried grasses and fragrant herbs. Canopies of more vines shaded the occupants, while tall shrubs, climbing plants, and young trees gave the place privacy. A tiny waterfall plunging into a pool filled with young fish sent cooling spray into the air and lent the soothing music of falling water to the setting - though thanks to some of the bondbirds, the pool had to be restocked regularly. Yet, with that art that was the hallmark of the Tayledras, all of this carefully contrived work of man seemed to have been magically wrought by nature.

  By common consent, most meetings with Lord Breon were held here. The hertasi provided anything in the way of refreshment that might be needed, shade and water cooled the air, and no one really wanted to be inside on days of good weather. Meetings weren’t held in bad weather, because a delay in the arrival of the Valdemaran trade supplies meant nothing, and if the weather was going to be bad, why risk the chance of accident or spoilage? With so many mages here in k’Valdemar, it was a simple matter to read the weather, then make certain that Lord Breon got warning of any storm that could not be delayed or hurried on.

  It was a pity that the discussions here in this oasis of tranquillity had little to do with peace and growth.

  “I have word back from the capital,” Lord Breon said, when they were all seated. Besides Nightwind and Darian, the usual participants from k’Valdemar were all in attendance; Ayshen, Kel, Starfall, Snowfire, Hashi, and Firesong. “They are sending us the small force we asked for, under the direction of a Herald with experience in diplomacy.”

  Two hertasi made the rounds, offering cool drinks, and vanished when everyone had been served. Starfall nodded, and his face betrayed the relief he felt. “I am glad to hear that, the more so because of what Kelvren saw on his patrol this morning. Kel?”

  “Yesss.” The gryphon took up the thread, sitting up very straight, intense and serious. “I have ssseen the barrrbarrriansss. They arrre at the farrrrthessst point in my patrrrolsss. They continue in theirrrr patterrrn.”

  This was no news to Darian or Nightwind, who’d heard it directly from Kel before the meeting. Ayshen had no expression, Snowfire looked resigned, and behind his mask, there was no telling what Firesong thought.

  Lord Breon nodded; after all, he had probably been expecting to hear this for some time. “That would be, making a fortified camp, remaining until the hunting and grazing are down, then moving on?”

  “Exactly ssso,” Kel agreed, bowing his head in Lord Breon’s direction. “And asss rrreporrrted, they do have childrrren, women, old people. Even babesss in arrrmsss, and prrregnant women. Not what I would call an arrrmy.”

  Lord Breon frowned as if this wasn’t altogether good news. “But it is an invading and occupying force, especially if they are sending out scouts ahead of the main group, and intend to keep the noncombatants in
a protected camp while the fighters deal with any resistance.”

  He does have to think of these things, Darian reminded himself, and took note for the future. Some day, presumably, so would he.

  “It’s also the pattern of nomadic herders, like the Shin’a’in,” Snowfire pointed out, to cover all possibilities. “They may not even know there is a settlement anywhere near. It simply could be that they’ve depleted their old grazing grounds too much to recover in a single season - or that all the magical weather disruption of the past decade has caused a drought in the north.”

  Lord Breon nodded. “Also true - but really, we can’t have them coming into Valdemar or the Pelagirs and establishing new grazing grounds without asking permission first. It is our land, after all. The Crown says that in accordance with our long-established tradition, if they are peaceful and agree to settle, we are to welcome them, but they will have to follow the law!”

  “True enough,” Snowfire agreed. “If we ignore them and let them proceed as they wish, we simply send a message that whoever else wants to flood down here will meet no resistance and no law! If we choose to let them remain here, it must be by treaty, with agreed-upon limits, and on our terms.”

  “I think we ought to fight them!” Val burst out. “Why should we let them just wander in and take over? Why should we even tolerate them near our border? They’re barbarians! Why should we want them here at all?”

  “We don’t intend to let them wander in and take over; haven’t you been listening?” Darian suppressed impatience with an effort. “Look, I have the most reason of any of us to want to fight these people. Remember what they did the last time they came here! They hurt and killed people that I knew, people I cared about! If it were up to my feelings, I’d lure them all under a cliff and drop it on them, pregnant women, grandmothers, babies and all. But those feelings should have nothing to do with this - and there are women and children at least in that group that had nothing to do with what happened the last time and certainly don’t deserve to be judged by me. For all we know, this isn’t even the same tribe. They may know nothing about what happened years ago. They could be peaceful. They could be running away from the same lot that overran us!”