Owlflight

by Mercedes Lackey

  “I do need your insight,” he reminded her. “You are the only Empath among us, you know.”

  “I’m not trained in sorting out human emotions,” she protested, then made a face. “I know, I’m making excuses. Emotions are emotions.”

  “But among my peoplesss, ourrr emotional sssolutionsss arrre much morrre dirrrect,” Kel pointed out with a chuckle.

  “And your emotions were modeled on your maker’s, which were quite human. Point taken. Now, let me think a moment.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “I’m going to assume that he had a strong and positive bond with his parents, so we have the obvious trauma of losing them, and the not-so-obvious trauma of not knowing what really happened to them. He could even be coping with the loss by inventing reasons why they might still be alive, which is only delaying the mourning period.”

  “That sounds reasonable,” he agreed. “The people of his village strongly disapproved of his parents themselves as well as their profession. I don’t imagine too many days went by without Dar’ian hearing how reckless and dangerous his parents were.”

  “Which made it imperative to him to defend them, except that defending them would be disrespectful of the adults in the village, who would in turn punish him in some way, never thinking that this was telling him that he either had to disassociate himself from his parents—”

  “Not likely. Hrrrr,” Kel rumbled.

  “Or take on the same disapproval. It also told him that it was inappropriate to mourn them, since presumably he was now in the care of much ‘worthier’ people.” She shook her head fretfully. “I wish people would think before they do things like this to children! All right, so before he has lived a single day with these people, he has been given the message that they disapprove of him, it is wrong to care deeply about the parents he loved because they didn’t deserve it, and he is to be grateful to people whose ways are utterly at odds with his. That’s a fine way to begin a new life, isn’t it?”

  Snowfire coughed, and scratched his head. “There isn’t a great deal I can add to that statement,” he said awkwardly. “Nightwind, pardon me for saying this, but you seem very—direct—for an Empath. The k’Vala Empath was more—how should I put this?—diplomatic.”

  “The k’Vala Empath is one of your Elders,” she chuckled. “Besides, you aren’t the one whose emotional turmoil is under discussion. I might be more diplomatic with you.”

  “Get back to the sssubject,” Kel grumbled, “orrr the two of you will begin courrrting behaviorrr again, and I will have to sssprrread thisss oil myssself while you arrre posssturrring.”

  “Oh, excuse me,” she mocked him, dabbing a bit of oil on the tip of his beak in a lightning-quick stroke of her brush. “Since you insist—now, you say he has Mage-Gift and was apprenticed to a rather ineffective village mage, but did not actually want to be a mage?” At his nod, she pursed her lips. “Again, I am going to assume that he liked his Master. So, his Master is of low status and meager ability. He has been bound to this man, regardless of his own preferences. And he has, no doubt, been told how grateful he should be for having been so bound. So—the message he has been given is that he is so worthless he is now forcibly associated with a low-status individual. Because they believe he obviously is incapable of making a logical decision, his own preferences are of no bearing on the situation. Because they tell him he is too ignorant to make his own choices, his future has been determined for him whether or not he likes it, and because he cannot understand why he should be pleased and gratified with the situation, he is obviously morally and mentally deficient.”

  “Starfall quoted the Shin’a’in about the road to disaster,” he observed.

  She massaged her temples with her fingers, looking pained. “I know that one. You know, it is a very good thing that there are none of them available for me to strangle, for I would be very tempted to do so. I am also very tempted to suggest that what happened to that village seems very like a proper retribution for what they loaded upon this poor child! But, of course, that would be making a moral judgment based on limited information, about another culture.”

  “And that would be wrrrrong,” Kel said, with an ironic tilt to his head. “Ssso of courrrsse you could not possssibly do that, unlesss it werrre sufficiently enterrrtaining.” The gryphon half-rumbled, half-burbled a laugh, and received a poke in the side in return.

  “Well, now I have some clearer idea of what I will probably be walking into when I go root him out of my ekele,” Snowfire sighed. “Mind you, I have no doubt that the boy is as full of mischief as a gryphlet, is quite convinced that he knows better than any adult born, and is stubborn, willful, and rebellious. Just exactly as any other boy his age would be. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if these folk intended to create a situation designed to bring out the worst in him, they could not have been more effective.”

  “That would be my conclusion, Snowfire,” Nightwind agreed, and dropped a thistledown-soft kiss on his forehead. “Now, go and see what you can do to turn the child around. You have a knack for that which astonishes me. For someone who claims to have no ability as an Empath, you certainly handle young creatures well.”

  “Let’s hope it is a knack, and not just a streak of good luck,” he replied, and stood up. “And as for you, old bird,” he continued, looking to the gryphon, “I should think a distraction would do him some good, and you are the most distracting creature I can think of. Would you care to help me out with him?”

  “Why not?” the gryphon agreed genially. “But—not immediately. I think he isss likely to indulge in morrre weeping, and I have only now gotten my featherrrsss drry.”

  “Vain bird,” Snowfire told him with mock severity, and took himself back down the path to his ekele, leaving Nightwind and Kel together on the sunning rock.

  He had no doubt that Kel was waiting to get Nightwind’s advice about how the gryphon should handle the boy, and not for any specious reason about drying feathers. That was fine; they should, ideally, have different approaches. After all, they couldn’t both play “elder brother.” Let me see; Starfall obviously is better suited to the role of “respected elder”—and when Dar’ian sees that a mage is the highest statused person in our group, that might make him change his mind about magic. Nightwind may be waiting to see if he accepts her as “mother surrogate”—it would be better if he made that choice. I think he is a little too clever to accept her if she puts herself forward in that role, and I know she knows it could be trouble if she tried to force it on him. The gryphon being the gryphon, he will no doubt take the role of “mysterious wonder” or “entrancing enigma” and play his appearance for all he can, to work in advice we could not give.

  As he continued to plan out several possible approaches to take, he reached the door of his hut and carefully parted the curtain of vines. The boy was huddled up on his pallet with his face to the wall—and somewhat to Snowfire’s surprise, the owl, who was normally rather aloof, had come down off his perch and was on the ground beside the boy with one wing stretched over him as if Hweel were sheltering a nestling.

  The owl turned his head and fastened his great golden eyes on Snowfire as the Tayledras entered. Instead of words, Hweel Sent emotion, a complicated flavor of distress and protectiveness.

  :Boy hurts. Inside, loss. Shelter lost, caring lost. Pain, but no blood.: Hweel finally articulated.

  :I know,: Snowfire replied simply. :I’ll do the best I can for him.:

  Hweel relaxed immediately, as if certain, now that Snowfire understood and had promised to help, that Snowfire could solve all of the boy’s complicated problems. Sometimes Hweel’s absolute trust in his bondmate’s ability to solve any problem was as irritating as it was touching, but Snowfire took great care never to convey that irritation.

  Hweel relinquished his place on the boy’s pallet, waddling over to be lifted up to his perch, and once the owl was back where he belonged, Snowfire took up the place Hweel had vacated. He touched Darian’s shoulder carefully
.

  “Dar’ian,” he said, quite calmly. “I came to see if you were feeling any better.”

  His immediate answer was a sniff, but Darian at least sat up. “N—no,” the boy replied, his voice hoarse.

  Snowfire suppressed a chuckle, which would have been taken amiss. At least the lad is honest! “I’m sorry to hear that; no one wanted to upset you, least of all Starfall. He is quite personally distressed that you were made so unhappy by our questions; his last words to me were that he is not accustomed to having children run from him in tears.”

  Darian rubbed his reddened eyes and sniffed again, but looked up at Snowfire with mingled surprise and disbelief. “Why should he care? It doesn’t matter how I feel—”

  “But it does,” Snowfire interrupted. “It matters a great deal. Adept Starfall is a great favorite among the children of our Vale; he is accustomed to being liked for his kindness as well as respected for his wisdom, and it makes him feel badly if someone is hurt by his actions or words.”

  “I’m not worth worrying about,” Darian mumbled, looking down at the ground. “There’s no reason why he should think about me. There’s no reason why any of you should think about me, you’re all important people. You’re all these amazing warriors and mages, you can do things that nobody back in Errold’s Grove would believe, and I’m—I’m just the worthless troublemaker nobody else wants.”

  Snowfire nodded to himself mentally as the boy’s words echoed what Nightwind had already surmised.

  “I’m sorry to hear you say that, since I don’t in the least agree with you. I truly hate to spoil a friendship by beginning it with a quarrel,” he replied lightly, and was rewarded once again with Darian’s glance of dumbfounded astonishment.

  “How can you say that?” the boy asked, incredulously. “There isn’t anybody in Errold’s Grove who’d believe their ears if they heard you say that!”

  “Why, what would they say?” Snowfire asked, ingenuously.

  “That—that I’m ungrateful, disrespectful, and I don’t know my place,” Darian said, in what was very nearly a growl, turning his gaze away from Snowfire’s face and back down to the ground.

  Snowfire made a noncommittal sound. “And why would they say that you’re ungrateful?”

  “Because after all the effort they’ve gone to in order to make sure I had someone to take care of me, and have food and shelter, and the trouble they’ve gone to in order to see that I was going to learn a useful trade, I’m not grateful, and I don’t know my place,” Darian muttered, his voice full of resentment.

  Snowfire shifted his weight, and took a more comfortable pose, giving himself time to think out his answer. “It seems to me,” he said carefully, “that you already had the grounding in a very good trade, that being the one that your parents followed. It seems to me that—provided you liked that trade, of course—you could, with a little effort, have found someone else in that trade to take you as half-trained apprentice, and thus you would have supplied your own food, shelter, and Master. So I fail to see why they should think you should consider yourself beholden to them for what they did. After all, the choice of caretaker, lodging, and trade was theirs, not yours, and you had never asked them to undertake it on your behalf. If someone cooks food I do not care for and offers it to me when they know I am not hungry, should I be grateful to them?”

  “Some people would think so,” Darian replied, but his spirits seemed a little higher.

  He shrugged. “Then some people are foolish, and that is their problem, not mine, nor should it be yours. However, there is this to consider; would any of their children, at your age, have been able to do as you would have done had they waited to let you try?”

  “No,” he admitted. “They’d have been pretty helpless. They’d have had to get a relative to take care of ‘em and sort things out for them.”

  “Then wouldn’t it be reasonable to say that they were taking care of things for you as their own children would have needed care?” Snowfire waited for Darian to make the next leap of logic.

  “I guess so.” Darian didn’t say anything else, but Snowfire could tell he was thinking about something. I hope it’s that he can see why they would expect him to be grateful, even though he wasn’t obliged to feel gratitude. Poor lad. He was a tervardi being brought up by hertasi, who didn’t understand why he wanted to live at the tops of trees instead of a nice, safe burrow deep in the ground. And he didn’t understand why he should be grateful that they kept giving him the room farthest from the exit!

  “Well,” Snowfire said at last. “Why would they say you were disrespectful?”

  “Because I pretty much told them what you just did,” Darian said with some wonderment, so surprised to hear his own thoughts echoing from Snowfire’s mouth that he was hard put to keep his eyes down on the ground.

  “Well, if you told them in approximately the same words that I used, I can understand being called disrespectful,” Snowfire chuckled. “You might consider cultivating a more diplomatic approach to avoid conflict in the future. But what is this about ‘knowing your place’?”

  Darian looked up at him from beneath a pair of fiercely knitted eyebrows. “I guess I wasn’t humble enough,” he replied. “Old Justyn, he just let everybody treat him like the whole village’s servant, and I guess I was supposed to act the same.”

  “Really?” Snowfire did not let his expression of friendly interest slip. “Perhaps, though, it wasn’t that they treated Justyn as if he were a servant, but as if they had become so accustomed to his services that they took him for granted?”

  “Maybe.” Darian’s fierce expression eased a little. “I suppose that was it. I guess when you do things for people and they get used to you being there, it’s natural to kind of get taken for granted.”

  “Exactly true.” Snowfire nodded calmly. “That is why, from time to time, our Vale Healer goes out into the deep Forest to meditate and refresh his spirit. When we have to do without him for a while, we notice again how much he does. Of course, if any of us were to have a genuine emergency, he would return, but that rarely happens. When he comes back, he is invigorated by his rest, and we are properly appreciative of all he does. Now, that your Master did not do this is as much his own fault as the villagers’. Our Shin’a’in cousins have a saying, ‘To treat a person like a carpet, it is necessary that one do the walking, and one allow himself to be walked on.’”

  Darian actually smiled a little, and rubbed his reddened nose with the back of his hand. “That’s a funny saying. But I guess I see the point.”

  “It seems to me,” Snowfire continued, with perfect calm, “that the people of your village could have used a deal more exposure to the wider world, and were stubborn and loud in their refusal to change their ways.”

  Now Darian laughed out loud. “That’s a funny thing for a Hawkbrother to say!” he replied. “Hellfires, you people never even came out of the Forest till just a little bit ago! Most people thought you had feathers instead of hair!”

  “That would be the tervardi, not the Tayledras,” Snowfire chuckled. “And again, the cousins say, ‘It takes a mule to repeat a mule’s bray,’ which is to say, the one most likely to recognize a fault is the one who suffers from the same fault. Hmm?”

  “I guess so.” Darian grew quiet and thoughtful, and Snowfire wondered if he had caught the second lesson—that a great deal of the trouble between himself and his guardians lay in the fact that neither of them cared to compromise the vision they had for Darian’s future. A clue that he just might have came a moment later, when he asked plaintively, “Do I have to be a mage?”

  “That is a good question, Dar’ian. Well, you have the Gift, and it seems reasonable to train it, so that it is at least under your control,” Snowfire replied judiciously. “Having a Gift is a bit like having a very large and active dog. Think about the large dogs you have been around in your life, from pups to adults. If you do not train a dog to obey you—what happens?”

  “He jumps al
l over people, steals what he wants, maybe bites someone.” Darian nodded, as if the analogy made sense to him.

  “But if he is trained, even if you do not go to the extent of training him for—say—pulling a cart, or searching for lost children, he will stay out of trouble. That is why you should at least train your Gift. Otherwise, like the dog, it is likely to break loose and do something unanticipated, usually at a bad moment.”

  Darian sighed and propped his chin on his hand. “It’s just that, before you did that stuff with the bandage, I couldn’t see much you could do with magic that you couldn’t do with a pair of hands.”

  Snowfire stretched and thought quickly. He needed to find something that would convince Darian to undertake real training, which would mean a great deal of hard work. “Well, in the long run, you are correct. If I wish to know something happening at a distance, I could work the magic to find it out, or I could go there and find it out for myself. If I needed to hide myself, I could work the magic to do so, or I could wear the correct clothing and learn to move without making a sound. Now—I could not call lightning by myself, for instance, but the Artificers of Valdemar have a powder that will certainly leave a large hole and make one think that lightning was called. So you are in the right of it. But—the black powder does not work in the rain, sometimes the right clothing still would not conceal a watcher, and it is not always convenient to go off on a journey to learn what is going on somewhere.” He spread his hands wide. “You see? It is good to know how to do things without magic, but it is good to know how to do them with magic as well. It gives you more options than just one or the other.”

  “Justyn couldn’t do much,” Darian said meditatively. “Magic, I mean. Something was wrong with his head, he said, and he couldn’t do magic like he used to. I don’t know.”

  “That may have been as much the result of the mage-storms as anything else,” Snowfire replied. “With the way that magic was scattered, he may not have had the power to do the things he used to—and that may be why he lost some of the respect that he had in the past. And also—we do not know why, but a small number of mages were affected by the Storms. Some lost ability, some gained it. He may have been one of those who lost it, and that is hardly his fault. Do you fault a man for no longer chopping wood when he has lost a hand?”