Owlflight

by Mercedes Lackey

  “And you eluded them?” came the question.

  “Well,” he admitted, “there weren’t many of them. And I—ran away.” Admitting that to all of those people was one of the most difficult things he’d ever had to do, and he felt tension build up suddenly inside him. “I had to!” he cried out, the words forced out by the tension, “I had to! I couldn’t help Justyn. I didn’t know what else to do!”

  And then, unexpectedly, he lost control of himself and burst into tears again, and felt another overwhelming wave of shame for losing control of himself, which ironically only made him cry harder.

  Starfall patted his shoulder sympathetically, but evidently was not prepared to leave him alone. “I am sorry that we must ask these questions, Dar’ian, but we need the answers. Now, do you remember how many men you saw on your side of the river, and if they were entirely human? An accurate number?”

  The questioning went on despite his distress, becoming more and more detailed. Several times he lost control again and began to cry; each time the Hawkbrothers waited politely for him to regain control of himself, then continued from where they had left off.

  Finally, though, they had exhausted everything he could tell them about the enemy army—for such, they were all agreed, it was. The questioning turned to another subject, one even more trying for him to face, because the subject was himself. Some of the scouts had gone off, leaving only Starfall, Snowfire, Wintersky, and two others, but the five of them were inexorable in their questions. If all the villagers were afraid to go into the Forest, why was he out there? Why was he not afraid of the Forest? What had happened to his parents? Why had he been signed over to Justyn’s care by the rest of the villagers? Why did the villagers have any say in what was to happen to Darian? Why didn’t Darian want to be a mage? Did he think there was something wrong with being a mage? Did he often run off? What did Justyn do when he disobeyed? Was he thinking of running away at the time of the attack? How did he feel about what Justyn did on the bridge?

  It was the last question that undid him. It was bad enough having to admit how often he had gotten into trouble, and worse admitting that the reason he’d been sent out of the village was as a punishment for running away from a duty, but to be asked how he felt about seeing Justyn sacrifice himself—

  Again, he started to cry, but this time he couldn’t get control of himself once he started. Snowfire even tried to soothe him, saying that he wasn’t at fault—but he knew that he was, and he was certain that, in some strange way, he should have been able to do something. But all he had done was to run away, like the coward he was.

  “You weren’t there, you don’t know, you didn’t see what I did!” he wailed, his voice breaking with hysteria. “You don’t understand! I’m a coward, I’m a rotten, lying coward, and it’s all my fault!”

  And with that, he ran, stumbling and half blinded with tears, out of the clearing, in the direction he’d been led from.

  He couldn’t think of what to do, but when he found himself back in front of Snowfire’s hut, the darkness inside seemed a good place to hide himself in, and he blundered in. The owl was gone, it was very quiet, and he crumpled into a miserable heap on the sleeping pallet, crying so hard that he thought he would never be able to stop.

  “Now I feel guilty,” Starfall murmured to Snowfire, as the child stumbled out of the gathering space, choking on his sobs.

  Snowfire sighed. Nightwind had warned him last night that scenes like this would occur, and probably several times. “Nightwind thinks there are emotional hurts that he has not dealt with, except by avoiding them,” he told the Adept. “She said last night that he was suffering from other troubles, things that perhaps occurred some time ago. She was quite sure he would not even mention them unless he was prodded into it.”

  “Well, it seems that one of those hurts was the loss of his parents,” Starfall said, and ran his hand through his silver hair. “Poor child. I would feel terrible if something happened to mine—he must feel dreadful.”

  “It seems obvious to me that he has not been allowed to properly mourn for them,” Snowfire pointed out. “These people who took him in seemed to want to make him ashamed of them. Children may be resilient, but—”

  “But not that resilient,” Starfall interrupted, his mouth set grimly. “And although these Valdemarans may have meant well, it is said by our cousins that ‘The road to disaster is ordered by the righteous, planned by the well-meaning, and paved with their good intentions.’ I think that, although Dar’ian has many faults, as do most younglings, they were viewed in an exaggerated manner. On the whole, they were in a fair way to ruining a fundamentally good child.”

  Snowfire could only nod, for he was in perfect agreement. How can good people manage to so mishandle a boy? he wondered. Was it only that they refused to see he did not fit in their constrained lives? Or were they only trying to be “cruel to be kind,” never realizing they were only being cruel, and their kindness missed the mark altogether? “I will see if Nightwind thinks she should come help with this latest outbreak,” he sighed. “I hate to press the boy, but even if we are going to do nothing more than avoid any contact with these barbarians, we still need his knowledge of the area, and we need to know everything he has seen.”

  Starfall frowned at that; Snowfire reflected that in many ways, he was made of sterner stuff than the Adept. Well, Starfall might be the heart of the expedition, but Snowfire was its hands—and it was his job to keep the heart safe. Finally Starfall could contain himself no more.

  “I don’t want to destroy the child just to extract information!” Starfall protested, then colored. “He—I apologize; I know you would never countenance any such thing. It is just that I am not used to having children flee my presence in tears.”

  Snowfire smiled wanly. “Dar’ian’s fragility has an unnerving effect on all of us, and that effect is redoubled by the burden of what he has told us. Two days ago, we were engaged in simple duty; something routine, not unmixed with pleasure, I think, and a duty we were completely prepared to handle. Now, suddenly we have a mysterious enemy of unknown ability appearing to threaten us, without prior warning of any sort. It is quite enough to make anyone feel tempted to indulge in a fit of strong hysterics. I know I am tempted.”

  Starfall stood up, shook out his robes, and tossed back his hair. “I hope you will not think badly of me if I leave the boy in the hands of you and Nightwind—” he ventured. “I feel as if I am playing the coward myself by doing so, but—”

  “But you have other things to do that involve the welfare of more than one boy,” Snowfire reminded him. “And you may think me ruthless in some ways, but if it meant preventing the rise of another Ma’ar, or even another Falcons-bane, I would not hesitate to sacrifice myself, the boy, and anyone else I could get to volunteer.”

  “I think you would have a surprising number of volunteers,” Starfall replied. “And you are right; I do have a task to complete that cannot wait, regardless of my personal feelings. I am going to leave things in your hands, as usual. Now, more than ever, I need to get those matrices established.”

  “You might consider locking the power to yourself,” Snowfire suggested, and as Starfall looked surprised, even shocked, he added, “There are no other Alliance mages living here to require access to it, you can key the rest of us into it if you really think it is necessary. This may prevent trouble. What can be locked securely can always be unlocked—but it cannot be stolen. That is one way to make sure this new mage cannot get at it, and one way to make sure that, if worst comes to worst, he must keep you alive. That would give time for help to come, should disaster befall and you come into captivity.”

  “You have a point,” Starfall acknowledged, looking troubled and just a little queasy. Starfall had never had to face a situation like this before, and Snowfire felt very sorry for him. For all that Tayledras were sturdy folk, not all had grown up prepared to face an enemy in life-or-death struggle, and Adepts especially tended to stay toward
the power management side of magic. “I’ll consider it. I would not have thought it possible for a mage to work Changes on humans under our current conditions; if he can do that, he may be able to do other unpleasant and unexpected things. That being so—he may be able to bypass anything but a true personal lock.”

  As Starfall walked off in the direction of his “workplace,” Snowfire was left to contemplate the smaller problem of Darian.

  He’s going to have to cry himself out again, and he hasn’t yet gotten to the point where he’s going to consider my failure to appear at his side as an act of desertion. In fact, he may just be grateful to be left alone. Better to consult with Nightwind first—and possibly with Kelvren. The gryphon had managed to get himself wrought up to a high pitch of excitement at the notion that he might be the one to confront a second Ma’ar—as unlikely as that was—and it might do Kel some good to have something else to think about. Something like one small boy, parentless and friendless, with an apparent affinity for winged things.

  So, the next obvious place to go was the rock at the rear of the valley where the gryphon liked to sun himself between scouting forays. And since he’d already been out once this morning, making certain that the barbarians had not gotten too close to the Tayledras’ perimeter, he would definitely be there.

  The spring that watered this valley had been made to serve many creative purposes; its water had been divided into several channels that gave everyone access to a thread of stream at the very least. Tayledras liked the sound of running or falling water, and preferred to live in the midst of it. Lacking the lovely, secluded spaces of a Vale, everyone in the team had made up for—or hertasi had made up for—that lack by creating a scrap of water garden for him- or herself. Some had constructed tiny pools with a single water lily or a stand of reeds and a tiny singing-frog, some preferred miniature waterfalls and gurgling brooks filled with stones, and Nightwind had made a clever little aqueduct and water wheel that powered an ever-changing series of frivolous and colorful whirligigs. But the greater part of the water could be diverted to fill two pools, one to be used only for washing, the other for swimming. The former was emptied when the water was dirty into a sand-filter so that the water that sank into the earth was cleansed. Since there was no natural hot spring here, the Tayledras were making do with a steambath. Kelvren, being a fastidious gryphon, made use of the swimming or washing pool on a daily basis, but could not be persuaded into the steam-hut.

  Kelvren’s daily bath was an occasion of much splashing and generally emptied the pool. When every feather on his body was soaked, he would shake himself out, thus ensuring that anyone and anything near by that was not already drenched would receive a fair share of the spray. Then he would flap laboriously to a smooth rock high above the pool, one of the few places in the valley that received sun for most of the day. There he would sit and preen until he considered every feather to be perfectly groomed, at least in a serviceable manner; after that his trondi’irn could do decorative and restorative tendings in the evening.

  By checking the angle of the sun, Snowfire reckoned that Kelvren would be about halfway through the grooming process and damp, but not wet. Gryphons, being more complicated and imperfect creatures than the bondbirds, occasionally suffered some deficiencies, and one of the more common was a tail gland that produced an insufficient quantity of oil to keep the feathers healthy and weatherproof. That was Kelvren’s problem, and it was one of Nightwind’s duties as his trondi’irn to make up for that lack. So she would be with him, adding touches of very light, fragrant oil to the shafts of his larger feathers with a small artist’s paintbrush. After that, it was his job to preen it into the barbs. An odd task, but then, caring for gryphons evidently involved a great many odd tasks.

  Snowfire walked down the winding paths that threaded the encampment with a lengthened stride that allowed him to move quickly without appearing to hurry. He soon reached the end of the valley and as he came around the last vine curtain and out into the full sunlight beyond the trees, he saw Nightwind sitting beside Kelvren on the gryphon’s favored perch. She was the only person in the entire group who had the same raven-wing-black hair as their Shin’a’in cousins, along with the golden complexion and intense blue eyes. She was not tall, but she held herself so well that she gave the impression of being taller than she was. Her finely-sculptured face reminded him a little of a vixen. She did indeed have a tiny paintbrush in one hand, and a pot in the other, all her attention concentrated on the primaries and secondaries of the wings he had stretched out over her lap like a great, feathered blanket. It looked for all the world as if she were gilding or painting the great bird.

  In fact, she could have been painting him; for special occasions, besides wearing body- and leg-jewelry, the gryphons often had their feathers bleached, then dyed or painted, and sometimes strings of beads or bells were attached to the base of the tail-covert feathers or along the shafts of the crest-feathers or primaries. She had told Snowfire that this, too, was one of her skills—an uncommon one among trondi’irn. Kelvren was excessively proud of the fact that his attendant was so skillful a feather-painter. Snowfire himself had never seen a gryphon so decorated, and frankly, could not imagine it. The whole idea seemed very bizarre to him, as if Hweel should suddenly express a desire to be transformed with colors, like a firebird or a scarlet jay. But gryphons, being highly intelligent, had an appreciation for artistry and a particular eye for ornament. Since they were in a very real sense living sculptures by a long-lost master artist, Urtho, they felt rightly that they were canvasses for beauty to be worked upon. Snowfire wondered wryly if Urtho had bred them for vanity, or if this trait had been an “accidental” feature of these created creatures.

  He hailed them both; Nightwind responded with a wave of her brush, and Kel with fanning the opposite wing from the one being tended to. He rounded the pool—as he had expected, Kel had pretty much emptied it, and it was now refilling from the spring—and climbed up the path to their rock.

  “I take it from your expression that the situation is not exactly a good one?” Nightwind asked, as he sat down beside her with his back to the sun.

  “In a word, correct,” he said, as Kel cocked an ear-tuft at him. He quickly summed up the most salient points of the questioning, and Kel snapped his beak and flattened his head-feathers.

  “Not good,” the gryphon surmised. “It appearrsss that this trrruly isss an arrrmy, and not jussst a child’sss exagerrration. An arrrmy of rrreasssonable quality, asss well. Well arrrmed, well trrrained.”

  “And there is a high probability of a mage among them or leading them,” he reminded the gryphon. “My guess would be that he is leading them. And to be honest, we don’t have the strength to risk a direct or even indirect confrontation.”

  Kelvren growled, but nodded reluctantly. “I do not like it, but you arrre, unforrrtunately, corrrect. But I sssshould like to venturrre a sorrrtie orrr two, ssstrrrictly ssspy misssssionsss. At night, perrrrhapsss? With Hweel to guide, I am a good night-flyerrr.”

  Snowfire gazed at the gryphon with surprise and admiration. “Now that is one of the better ideas I have heard today,” he replied, very pleased with the idea. “Hweel needs a certain amount of mental guidance, and you should have a backup, so that could be my role. I think I could manage that without needing to use a weapon.”

  “That’s good, because until that wound is healed, you won’t be doing anything like shooting a bow,” Nightwind said, rather pointedly.

  “I think,” Snowfire replied, with a bit of impatience, “that I am perfectly capable of figuring that out for myself.”

  “And what about the time you went climbing right after a concussion, last year?” she asked.

  He ignored her, which appeared to cause her a great deal of amusement. “Hweel and I could go in together as far as that clearing where I rescued the boy,” he said to Kelvren. “Then you and Hweel could go on alone. We can get some idea from the boy how near the trees grow to the village, but
my impression was that you could easily use them as cover quite close in.”

  Kel nodded, clearly satisfied by having something constructive to do.

  “Now that you mention the boy,” Nightwind put in, “how badly did he take to being questioned?”

  Snowfire winced. “Well, he left the meeting in tears, if that tells you anything.”

  “No more than I expected,” she replied with a shrug. “Did he happen to let anything out that would give you a hint to those other emotional burdens he’s carrying?”

  “Some of his background. His parents were trappers, and apparently disappeared a year or so ago. The people of his village were afraid of the Forest and have been since the mage-storms brewed up some nasty creatures out there. Evidently the encounters they had with the monsters gave them some severe shocks. So the villagers disapproved of anyone who would go into the Forest on a regular basis, claiming that the Storm-Changed monsters would track such people back to the village to attack them.”

  “So what happened when the parents didn’t come back?” Nightwind asked. “What made the villagers take him in?”

  “Guilt, maybe,” Snowfire hazarded. “He was apprenticed to the village mage, who evidently was not very good, and didn’t get much respect. Dar’ian did not really want to be a mage himself. And the villagers did their best to persuade him that his parents brought their fate on themselves.” He assumed that Nightwind could make her own assessment from those rather bald facts, probably much more accurately than he could.

  “Oh, no—” she said, looking at him with all traces of amusement gone. “No wonder he’s a tangle of unhappiness inside! I hardly dare think of what he must be going through.”