Owlknight v(dt-3

by Mercedes Lackey

  He was half asleep when Kel’s voice woke him. “Darrrian,” the gryphon said. “What arrre you thinking?”

  “Nothing, actually,” Darian replied sleepily. “Why?”

  “I wasss thinking, You arrre my frrriend, and I am yourrrsss. That we arrre of the sssame family of sssorrrtsss. We arrre wingmatesss and brrrotherrrsss, you and I.” The gryphon paused to scratch an ear slowly, sending a freshly dried tuft of feather-down drifting in the breezes caused by his movement. “I wasss thinking, how prrroud my parrrentsss arrre of what I have done, and how yourrrsss would be the sssame if they knew.”

  Kel’s words acted like that bucket of cold water after the sweat-house ceremony; they shocked him awake. “They would,” he said, but his mind was elsewhere, sent careening on a new path - or rather, on an old path that he had not traveled in far too long.

  I still don’t know what happened to them. I meant to go out and hunt the old trap-lines to find out - or try-but I never did. How did I forget?

  Guilt wracked him for a moment with a physical spasm. How could he have let himself get so involved in the life of the Vale that he forgot his parents?

  Get hold of yourself. There’s no reason to feel guilty. You did not forget, you were busy. You have thought of them constantly, you just didn’t go do that one thing. You had too much else to do, including growing up, he told himself, though it was easier to tell himself that than it was to shed the guilt. Two years aren’t going to make any difference in the clues that are left - if there are any. He was woods-wise enough to know that (in the worst possible case) bodies left out in the open were quickly torn apart by scavengers. The parts were carried off, scattered; summer insects found what was left to be irresistible. In a year, not even the major bones were likely to be left. Although it made him sick to even think of applying that to his parents -

  After all this time, two years wouldn’t make any difference, he repeated to himself. Five, even ten wouldn’t make any difference.

  Darian rubbed at his face with both hands, coping with the thoughts that Kelvren’s innocent commentary had dredged up. He murmured a thanks to the gryphon, who responded by bumping him affectionately with a wing, then assuming another lounging position. Darian’s thoughts stayed on his parents’ fate. They could not have been lost in the Pelagiris this long - not even for a year. Blind, deaf, dumb and limbless they could find their way back to Errold’s Grove by orienteering. They had been that good.

  But if his parents weren’t dead - then there was only one other thing that could have happened to prevent them from returning to him.

  They had to have been caught in a Change-Circle.

  And if they had survived that experience, there was no telling what might have happened to them. What they might have become.

  Or where they were.

  His duties to his homeland, his adopted people, his friends and his mentor had been fulfilled, and then some. It was more than time for him to use his own tracking skills and resolve, and find out what he could about the past.

  Nine

  “Iwant to visit the Sanctuary,” Anda abruptly declared, just as Keisha set her plate and cup down and joined the little group around the table he shared with Shandi and Darian. Shandi smiled at her sister and shrugged slightly; Darian kept eating. “How do I go about doing that?”

  “Catch a disease?” Darian offered.

  Anda was looking at Darian, but it was Keisha who answered seriously, ignoring her breakfast for the moment to shoot Darian a look of disdain. The meal was too hot to dig into immediately anyway; she might as well deal with Anda. She wasn’t at all certain that he had learned the lesson of impatience. If he’s going to the Sanctuary, though, I’m going along.

  “I suppose I can take you there,” she said. “When do you want to go?” She already knew the answer, of course. Anda had been running at full speed since the moment he arrived, and not even the exhausting welcome-week had kept him from what he saw as his duty to integrate himself into the life of Vale, village, and tribe.

  “Today, if possible.” Anda had taken a frugal breakfast of fruit and bread; Keisha wondered how he could accomplish so much on so little food. Her heartiest meal was breakfast. “Are there any new patients there at the moment?”

  “There are always new patients there,” Keisha sighed, but with envy rather than weariness. “Except in the dead of winter, the Sanctuary gets a new group roughly every fortnight. If what you want to see is Northerners fresh from the wilds and tired to the bone, that’s exactly what you’re going to get.” She took an experimental bite of her own breakfast of stuffed mushrooms; they were cool enough to eat, and she didn’t want them to grow cold. She gave Darian a glance; he took the hint, and picked up where she left off.

  He’s almost done with his breakfast, anyway. If I don’t get something to eat soon, I’m going to start tearing out throats.

  “The Ghost Cat people sent up a couple of messengers to the tribes they were related to,” Darian explained, fully aware of how irritable morning hunger made Keisha. His meal was all made up of things that wouldn’t be spoiled by getting cold, and he had no problem talking around bites of food. “Those tribes have been spreading the word that there’s a place of Healing down here, but they are being careful the word doesn’t get to tribes like Blood Bear - those were the barbarians that overran Errold’s Grove. Either we were lucky or very careful. Those tribes seem to have gotten a lot of strange diseases out of the Change-Circles up north.”

  “We were careful,” Anda said, after swallowing the last of his own breakfast. “After the scholars at Haven figured out the pattern for where the Circles would pop up, people were told. No one went near them until they’d been checked over. Sometimes they were sterilized by fire, if need be.”

  “But things still got away,” Darian pointed out. “Animals, insects, some creatures we never could identify. We know that - and it happened here in Valdemar. My parents hunted all kinds of bizarre things that came out of those Circles. I’d have to say we were lucky, Anda; we could have ended up with the Summer Fever and Wasting Sickness as readily as Ghost Cat did. And - bless poor Justyn, but he would have been the first to admit to this - the Healer we had at the time wouldn’t have had the power to cure it.”

  “But he would have the power to call those who did,” Anda said firmly. “Furthermore, those he called would know the right steps to take, not only to cure the disease, but how to keep it from spreading further. Keisha, when can we go to the Sanctuary? Will this be an overnight trip?”

  Keisha hastily swallowed the last of her mushrooms. “Overnight, yes, but longer than that, no, and we won’t have to pack anything. But I think we ought to go first to Ghost Cat so they can explain how they deal with the pilgrims. They are the ones who are most involved, after all. You ought to see how this is benefitting all of us, not just the Northerners. If we leave now, we can go there, then to the Sanctuary, then be back by nightfall tomorrow.”

  “Then I’m ready.” Anda stood up. “Shandi?”

  “Ready enough.” Shandi followed her Senior’s example. “Karles says he and Eran will meet us at the Vale entrance. He’ll have Tyrsell send a dyheli for Keisha.”

  Keisha could have allowed the two Heralds to go on their own; there was no reason why she had to come along. One of the dyheli at the Ghost Cat enclave could readily guide them to the Sanctuary without Keisha’s help.

  She didn’t want to do that. She didn’t want to take the chance that there was some serious illness, even a plague in the early stages, at the Sanctuary. Anda was perfectly confident in the abilities of the Sanctuary Healers to deal with such a thing, but the Sanctuary Healers would not be paying a great deal of attention to the healthy Heralds. All of their interest was bound up in their current patients, and it might not occur to them that the Heralds were exposing themselves to danger.

  She, above all, knew just how focused Healers could be; when dealing with an incipient crisis, they concentrated on the problem in front o
f them to the exclusion of all else. Whatever ills were being treated at the Sanctuary, Keisha would be there to note the symptoms and the cure - and if Shandi or Anda, or both, showed any signs of illness, she would be able to treat them before either of them sickened too far. She would have the sense to get them isolated and keep them from the rest of the Vale; with the help of the hertasi (who could not catch human illnesses) she could get them through whatever they caught.

  Besides, I want to see what’s going on there! For that chance, she was willing to make the trip. She hadn’t been to the Sanctuary in person for well over a year.

  When they reached the Vale entrance, both Companions were waiting for them, already saddled with their lightest tack. With them was a single dyheli for Keisha. There was no need to pack anything, as they would be spending the night at the Sanctuary, which was more than prepared to host visitors. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t had healthy people there before.

  They’ll probably be glad to see someone who doesn’t need help. And Healers are even more implacable than Heralds. If Anda’s in the way, they won’t hesitate to push him aside.

  Shandi and Anda were in the saddle before Keisha had gotten her foot into the dyheli’s stirrup. She was getting used to the way that Heralds and their Companions worked so incredibly smoothly together, but it took the dyheli’s amused comment of :Show-offs: to make her realize that some of that was a deliberate - if somewhat automatic - attempt to impress.

  Oh? she thought at her mount, not wanting to elaborate lest the rest of her thought leak over to the others.

  The dyheli flicked her ears back delicately. :Yes. They didn’t have to link so tightly just to get into the saddle. And there’s no real reason to try to impress us, is there? They’re doing it to create an image, but is it an image they have to project all of the time?: The irony in her tone colored every nuance.

  Keisha always appreciated the dyheli’s dry sense of humor, and never more so than now, but she was inclined to be charitable. Maybe they’re practicing, she suggested. You know, they haven’t been together for all that long, and it’s not easy to get a coordinated link that’s natural and easy.

  The doe flicked her ears forward. :Perhaps,:-was all she would say.

  The journey to the Ghost Cat village took place without incident, and in a very short period of time. Sentries hailed them from posts among the trees without asking them to stop; the Heralds and their Companions were instantly recognizable, even at a distance. By the time they reached the village, Vordon and Celin were waiting for them. The Shaman was in his ordinary working clothes, not his talis-manbedecked ritual garb, and bits of bark caught in his beard and hair betrayed the fact that he’d been splitting wood when he was apprised of their imminent arrival.

  “Hah! Kei-eh-sha!” Vordon hailed Keisha first, which rather pleased her. “And has our new brother recovered from his birthing? What brings you here, on this bright morning?”

  “More or less, Chief,” she laughed. “He is certainly up and at all of his duties again, rather than sleeping like a man-shaped pile of rocks. My friends wish to know of the arrangements that Ghost Cat has with the pilgrims.”

  “That is correct, Chief,” Anda said immediately, as the Chief and Shaman turned to the Heralds with faces full of lively interest. “If you will be so kind as to explain it to us, and show what you can.”

  The Chief, who himself had only dared to learn Tayledras with the help of Tyrsell, nodded to hear Anda salute him in his own tongue. “So you have braved the pain of teaching, eh? Well, this is good. I have begun to think such a thing is equal to the death of a bear in counting toward manhood!”

  Anda rubbed his head ruefully. “I could not find it in me to argue with that,” he agreed, and dismounted. “It’s good to know you consider me a man.”

  Shandi and Keisha followed his example, but Shandi had to add to her Senior’s statement. “Herald Anda must surely qualify for more than just manhood,” she told Vordon, “for he has taken five tongues of Tyrsell at once.”

  “I am not sure if that was bravery or foolishness,” Anda added hastily. It looked to Keisha as if Vordon agreed with that statement.

  They chatted about gardens, roots, new babies, and leaf blight as they followed the Chief and the Shaman farther into the village, which had grown - indeed, doubled - in size, in the past year. There had been more additions than simple births or marriages. Some of the pilgrims had petitioned for adoption into Ghost Cat as their own tribes were so severely decimated by war or disease that they were effectively nonexistent, and Ghost Cat usually agreed to take them in. Darian was not the only outsider to have been formally adopted by a Ghost Cat family as an adult. He was just the only one thus far who was not a Northerner.

  Many of those in Errold’s Grove and k’Valdemar had been surprised to learn, once the tribesmen began to build, that they were capable of a great deal of sophistication in their dwellings. In fact, their village was as neatly laid out as any Valdemaran village. The Northerners built large, one-room circular houses, with an enormous common room in the center, and small cubicles built against the outer walls for privacy. Each extended family lived in one house - married children moved in with the bride’s parents until the birth of their third child. It usually took that long for a young man to gather the resources to construct his own dwelling. Those who did not wed remained with their families, as additional hands, and suffered no decrease in status for doing so. The Chief had told Keisha that grandparents often bequeathed their homes to a favored young couple, then moved in with the oldest daughter’s family. There was often much competition among married daughters to lure Grandmother and Grandfather to their home; there was an increase in status for those who sheltered such valuable repositories of wisdom as grandparents.

  The Northerners used wood to build their homes, but no stone, with wooden roofs supported by four great pillars rather than slate or thatch. The buildings were made of squared-off logs with the chinks closed with moss and mud mixed, and the roof of rough planks laid over a radial pattern of rafters, which were then topped with rough wooden shakes.

  The houses were odd to Valdemaran eyes, but it was the art decorating them that was so startling to those who were not out of the North.

  The thick plank door of each house was carved and painted with the totem animal of the particular family in a kind of high-relief style. These were not realistic portrayals, but very stylistic and colorful, featuring patterns in red, white, and black. In good weather, beautiful blankets made of pieced fur were hung on the outer walls - both as a precaution, to chase out any vermin and odors, and to display the handiwork of the women of the house. Now that Ghost Cat had access to woolen fabric, they were making similar blankets of wool in bright, primary colors. Each blanket was a representation of the totem of the person it belonged to. There were always two poles outside each house, carved and painted with all of the totems of the family, and topped with the Ghost Cat.

  Totem animals played a huge part in the lives of the Northerners; each tribe had a special totem (usually a very powerful predator). Each family also had a totem related to the totem of the tribe. And when each family member reached adulthood, he or she also got a totem - or as they put it, were embraced by one - in a special dream-ceremony presided over by the Shaman. Darian was an exception - Ghost Cat judged he already had his totem, in the form of Kuari.

  Rafter ends that protruded beyond the edge of the roof were similarly carved and painted, but this time with the heads of spirits and ancestors. Inside each house the four great roof-pillars were identical to the poles outside the front door. The floor of a house was not exactly of earth, although the central hearth was a pit dug in the ground and lined with stones, with the smoke-hole through the center of the roof above and stones laid to some distance on the floor in case of sparks jumping from the fire. The floor of each of these dwellings was made of grass mats, many layers thick, laid over the pounded earth of the floor and added to on a daily basis. It was the duty
of every member of the family old enough to do so to weave one grass mat in the morning and lay it over a place where the mats were looking shabby. As the mats below disintegrated, they were replaced from above; pine needles and herbs layered between the mats drove off insects.

  Crude but adequate oil lamps placed on little shelves around the inside wall gave the place a fair amount of light, considering that there were no windows of any sort. But Keisha figured that was only to be expected, since these buildings were intended for much colder climes and a window was just one more place for cold wind to come through.

  The little cubicles that family members retreated to for privacy were also used for storage. Basically, partitions were set against the wall with a distance of about six to eight paces between them, extending six to eight paces into the main room. A rope across the front made a place to hang a curtain for privacy; shelves built across the back and sides made a place for storage. People kept their personal possessions in the cubicles during the day; at night, they had the option of sleeping beside the fire, or in their cubicles with blankets over the rope to block out the main room.