Then, leaping grandly into the air with a thrust of his wings that was vastly more powerful than his trial, the gryphon took off, creating a veritable whirlwind within the confines of the clearing, and sending dust and stray leaves surging into the sky in his wake.
Darian stared after him with his mouth dropping open in amazement. Wings pumping rhythmically, the gryphon surged up above the treetops, then vanished above the foliage.
Snowfire laughed, then patted him on the shoulder. “He did that for your benefit, you know,” the Hawkbrother said with amusement. “He could very easily have gone to the mouth of the valley and taken off from there. In fact, it would have taken him a lot less effort—but gryphons seem to love to impress an audience, and you are the only one of us who isn’t used to seeing him take off and land. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he tries to find out where you are before he comes in for a landing, and arranges to make a dramatic entrance in front of you.”
“Are all gryphons like that?” Darian asked, still dazzled.
“Most of them; endlessly cheerful, considerably vain, but able to make fun of themselves. Oh, and beautiful, of course, but we try not to say that too often in front of them; they’re conceited enough as it is,” Snowfire chuckled, his shoulders shaking a little.
Darian’s eyes began to water from staring so long into the bright blue of the sky, and his head throbbed in protest. He moved quickly back into the shadows, and Snowfire must have noticed the grimace of pain he couldn’t repress, for the Hawkbrother gestured him to take a particular path leading out of the clearing and set off down it himself. Darian followed him willingly now, recalling that Snowfire had said something about Nightwind having some way of getting rid of that pounding ache.
The way that the paths here twisted and turned around little groves and vine-covered huts and tiny water gardens made him very confused, and made this place seem much larger than it probably actually was. It was very bewildering, and Darian had quite lost his way when they came out into sunlight again, at the side of the smaller of two pools of water. This was clearly the end of the valley; a short, cliff cut out of the rocks of the hills rose before them, with steep, tree-covered slopes on either side. A spring emerged from the rock at the base of the cliff, feeding the two pools and a stream which led from them into the tangle of the Tayledras encampment. One of the pools was considerably smaller than the other, being just large enough for—say—a gryphon to bathe in.
“This is where you will bathe,” Snowfire said, pointing to the smaller pool. “You see the sluice there? Lift the lever when you are done, and the dirty water will drain away—then drop it, and lift that lever, and new water will flow into the pool from that larger one. Don’t worry about trying to find bathing things. Just come here and start to undress; a hertasi will see you and there will be soap and towels beside you before you are finished disrobing. Your clothing will disappear as if by magic, and clean clothes will be waiting for you when you are done bathing.” Snowfire smiled at his expression of surprise. “Now you see why we hate to travel without our hertasi friends.”
“I dunno,” Darian said dubiously, looking down at the pool and then out at the spring that fed it. “It looks awfully cold.” Of all the things he hated most, he hated cold baths—which was mostly all he got, since everybody else in the village had precedence over him at the bathhouse.
“Ah, I forget you cannot heat your water with magic—or can you?” Snowfire looked at him quizzically.
He shook his head, and regretted doing so almost at once, as his head protested. “Not that Justyn ever taught me,” he replied.
“Well, can you call fire?” the Hawkbrother persisted. At Darian’s cautious nod, he looked satisfied. “It is the same, only spread out over the water and not concentrated on the kindling. I would ask you to try it, but I think you had better wait until I find where Nightwind has gone.”
He peered around the clearing, and then left Darian to nurse his head beside the pool while he went off to investigate some of the places at this end of the valley that were not immediately visible. Darian stared at the surface of the pool and wondered why on earth Justyn had never taught him how to heat water. It would have made a great many winter baths more bearable.
But maybe he didn’t know how, Darian told himself, trying to be fair. I mean, it could be that only the Hawkbrothers know about this sort of thing. It isn’t all that logical to think you can use the same magic that calls fire to heat up water—fire and water are opposites, right? So maybe it wasn’t his fault he didn’t know.
Just then, Snowfire appeared, parting the trailing branches of a huge willow, and holding them aside to let Nightwind pass through them. Of all of the Hawkbrothers that Darian had seen thus far, she was the only one who didn’t have snow-white hair, or hair dyed in patterns of pale cream and various shades of brown. Her hair was as black as a raven’s feather, and she wore it in a heavy knot at the nape of her neck, with little wisps escaping from it. Her eyes, set under a pair of brows as curved as a falcon’s wings, were a darker blue than the others, and her skin was just a few shades duskier. Her clothing was a bit different, too; nothing he could put a finger on, since he hardly cared what he wore from one day to the next, but something he definitely noticed—and on the breast of her tunic was a peculiar silver badge, rather like the wings and head of a bird of prey. He thought perhaps he had seen it before, and then he realized that he had—in the center of the chest-piece of Kelvren’s harness. Perhaps it signified that they weren’t actually Hawkbrothers, but were—his new memories supplied the word—Kaled’a’in.
She had a basket over one arm, and a friendly smile on her lips, and held out one hand to him which he took in reflex. “I don’t know if you recall me from last night,” she said, her speech betraying a faint accent, as opposed to the way his new memories told him that Tayledras should sound. “I’m Nightwind, in case you’ve forgotten or this ruffian forgot to mention my name, and I understand you have one demon-rending headache.”
“Well,” he said, feeling suddenly shy. “It does hurt.”
“I can certainly understand that,” she replied, and put her basket down to take his face in both hands, turning his eyes into the light and examining them. “Yes, indeed, I can certainly understand that. However, I think I have a remedy for you; it’ll taste vile, but it will work.”
She let go of him to rummage in her basket, as he had to laugh a little at her honest directness. “I like your claim better than Justyn’s; he always said that his potions wouldn’t taste that bad, and the more he said that, the worse they’d taste.”
“You can do that to younglings a few times before they stop believing you, and then you’ll never get them to take their medicine,” she replied, holding up a stoppered clay bottle with a little frown. “I always say things will taste worse than they do, and then they’re always surprised; follow that up with a honey-candy or a bit of other sweet, and they take their doses without much of a fuss.” She paused to uncork the bottle and sniff. “This is what I want.” She looked at him and smiled. “Are you going to need a sweet after your dose?”
“Not unless that stuff is going to linger in my mouth all day,” he replied, as manfully as he could.
“Not after a good drink of cold water.” She handed him the bottle. “Take a good stout mouthful and swallow it fast.”
He held his breath, braced himself, and did as he was told. The stuff wasn’t as bad as some of Justyn’s potions, many of which seemed to contain mycofoetida, but it was very strong-tasting, more sour than bitter, with an astringent bite. He swallowed it before he had a chance to gag, and found she was holding out a cup full of water, ready to exchange it for her bottle. He drained it, and passed it back to her; she tucked it and her bottle back into her basket.
“Well?” she asked. “How bad was it?”
“Not as bad as I thought, but—gleah! Nothing I’d drink for pleasure.” He shuddered. “How did you make that stuff, anyway? Justyn always
brewed teas and tisanes.”
“This is tea—concentrated, so one swig is as good as a cupful,” she told him. “These concentrated versions have to be pretty fresh, but things like the headache potion are needed often enough that they’re used up before they go weak. I also make some preparations—distillations as well as decoctions—with spirits of wine as the carrier, but those tend to be very powerful.”
“And,” Snowfire added helpfully, “they taste so much worse that none of us ever want to drink them unless we absolutely have to.”
“I—I think I’d like to learn how you make them,” Darian said, a little surprised at himself, and feeling his ears heat up as they reddened with embarrassment. “Maybe I can help.”
“Then I’d be happy to show you,” Nightwind promised, looking a bit surprised at him herself. “I always like to have extra medicine on hand, and I never have enough time to make all that I want. Now, I want you to sit down for a moment until that medicine takes effect. I don’t think you’ll have an unusual reaction, but it’s better to wait a moment and see.”
Darian obeyed, although he didn’t expect to feel anything more than he did with Justyn’s medicines. He just hoped this potion would make some of the pain go away quickly, without slowing him down too much. Justyn’s potions generally didn’t do too much unless he drank so much he went from “sick” to “asleep” without much warning. At the moment, it felt as if someone inside his skull was trying to pound his way out.
“Look—” Snowfire said, pointing up at the sky. “There’s a gyre; it must be one of ours, it’s too big to be one of the wild ones around here.”
Darian followed his pointing finger, squinting, until he made out the gray-and-white bird against the gray-and-white clouds, a dot moving so fast that Darian wondered how Snowfire could tell it was a forestgyre, much less that it was bigger than the wild ones. “Are the wild ones around your Vale as big as the bondbirds?” he asked with surprise.
“Most of them are bondbirds—or of bondbird stock, anyway,” Snowfire replied, still watching the bird, shading his eyes with his hand. “There are usually far more birds around the Vales than there are people to bond with, because we need a large breeding pool of each species to keep the stock healthy. The adult birds are polite to us, though rather standoffish, unless as adults they decide that they want to bond rather than continuing to be wild. Sometimes that happens, especially in the larger species, like eagle-owls and hawk-eagles—” He winced. “And, Goddess help us, bondbird eagles themselves. We have two species of eagles that are bondbirds, the Black and the Golden, and a color-morph of the Golden that looks red—they almost never bleach out white, since I’ve never known an Adept-class mage to fly one. Not too many people of any sort fly eagles for that matter; not too many can carry one. They aren’t as greatly oversized, proportionately, as the smaller species—bondbird merlins are about the size of wild tiercel peregrines, just as an example—but they are very, very big and heavy. There is one, and I mean one k’Vala Tayledras who flies a Black eagle, and he’s the blacksmith. That should tell you something.”
Darian thought about the shoulders on the smith at Errold’s Grove, and how much he could carry and lift, and nodded solemnly. He tried to picture carrying a bird bigger than Hweel, and couldn’t. It must be like carrying a barrel of flour on your shoulder, he thought. “How does someone get a bondbird, then?” he asked curiously. Not that he thought he’d ever get one, but it was more likely than being Chosen by a Companion.
“Either an adult picks you out, or, more often, the adult parents pick you as the bondmate for one of their offspring. If the adults are bonded to someone, they let that person know who the eyas is going to, and if that person has experience with downy baby birds, very often they co-parent with the eyas’s new bondmate. If not, they wait until the little one is fledged, and lead him to you.” Snowfire turned his attention from the sky to smile at Darian. “That’s how I got Hweel; he blundered down out of a tree behind his parents, landed tail over head, fluffed all his feathers, and told me with the solemnity of a Kal’enedral that he was ready for me.”
“Does anybody have more than one bondbird?” Darian asked, wishing he could have seen that moment.
“Sometimes. One of us has an owl and a merlin for day and night scouting, I know of someone with a whole flock of ravens, and there are others. And sometimes your bondbird’s mate may decide she wants to bond with you, too.” Snowfire raised an eyebrow. “Hweel says his mate is considering it, bonding with me, that is.”
“Hweel has a mate?” Darian replied, feeling oddly excited at the idea, though he didn’t know why. “Where is she?”
“Back at the Vale, teaching the youngster to hunt. I wouldn’t have left if there were still young in the nest, but by the time we were ready to go, the young one was fledged. Eagle-owls lay their eggs in deep winter; they’re hatched and fledged by the time most birds are going to nest, and once they’re no longer in the nest, they don’t need their father unless there’s more than one to teach to hunt.” Snowfire crossed his arms over his chest, and gave Darian a measuring look. “Now, you’ve spent plenty of time in the forest, can you guess why they’d do things that way?”
“Uh—” Darian thought hard. “They build up for egg-laying in fall, when there’s a lot of dumb young animals on their own for the first time. Then they sit the eggs in winter, when there isn’t quite as much to eat but they also aren’t going to have to eat as much, then they have babies to feed in deep winter when there starts to be winter-kills and cold-kills lying around?”
“Good!” Snowfire applauded. “Then, obviously, it’s a good time to teach the youngsters to hunt when there are litters of very young and extremely stupid young rats, rabbits and squirrels about—not to mention the odd snake or duckling.”
“Do you have a bondbird?” Darian asked Nightwind, curiously.
She broke into peals of laughter. “Mercy, no!” she managed after a moment. “Trust me, the gryphons are more than enough for any poor trondi’irn to keep up with! Besides, with my temperament, I’d likely end up with something like a raven or a crow, and a bird with that much mischief in him would never be able to resist snatching at gryphon ear-tufts and jewelry, and there would never be any peace! How is your head?”
“It’s—fine!” he said in surprise, realizing that his headache had vanished without his noticing.
“That’s good, because you promised to help Ayshen with washing-up, and he’ll be expecting you about now,” Snowfire reminded him. “Now you’ll be able to talk to him—you might just go up and remind him of your promise and surprise him. There isn’t anything about the Tayledras that Ayshen doesn’t know—”
“—and there isn’t anything that he isn’t dying to gossip about—” Nightwind interjected wryly, with a tilt of her head.
“—so if there is anything you want to know, and you feel awkward about asking one of us, go ahead and ask him,” Snowfire concluded, with a wink.
Darian gave a sigh of relief at that; there were things he wanted to know, but he’d felt uncomfortable about talking to Snowfire about them. It wasn’t that Snowfire wasn’t kind, and it wasn’t as if the things he wanted to know were at all personal, it was just—well—they felt like stupid questions, and he was embarrassed to ask them of Snowfire. I look bad enough, with him having to rescue me and all, he thought. I don’t want him thinking I’m so dumb that I’m going to be nothing but a bother to him.
“If you want to get back to Ayshen right now, just follow the path and only take right-hand turns,” Nightwind added helpfully. “When you’re done, well—by then, the rest of the scouts will have thought over what you’ve already told them, and I suspect someone will come fetch you for another round of questions. And this time, you won’t feel as if they’re talking over your head!”
Darian beamed at her. “Thank you!” he told her, both for the directions to Ayshen’s kitchen, and for understanding how horrid it had been to hear all those people chatteri
ng away, being certain they were talking about him, and not being able to understand a word of it. Suddenly eager to find the gossip-hungry hertasi and barrage him with a deluge of questions, he shyly took his leave of both the adults. Feeling as if he had been freed from a leash, he sped off down the path, always taking the right-hand turns, until he found himself at his goal, only a little winded. The hertasi, who was mixing something in a large bowl, looked up at him in some surprise—probably because very few people ever ran anywhere in this tranquil-seeming place.
“Hello, Ayshen!” he said cheerfully, taking great pleasure in the way the hertasi’s eyes widened with surprise at his perfect Tayledras. “Here I am, just like I promised!”
“You and Tyrsell are in a conspiracy over the boy, I know it. The two of you agreed to do something with him,” Snowfire said—trying not to sound too accusing—as soon as the boy had run off. “Just what have you two done to him? And don’t try to play the innocent with me; no child who’s just had his teacher go up in flames before his eyes and his entire village overrun by bloodthirsty barbarians can go running happily off to wash dishes!”
Darian had become cheerful—too cheerful—right after Tyrsell laid in the Tayledras language on his memory. Tyrsell was quite good enough to have meddled further with the boy’s memory without Snowfire noticing. Snowfire had seen the change in the boy’s behavior at once; he lost the haunted look that was in his eyes and started acting like a child on an adventure.
“Tyrsell has put a little ‘forgetfulness loop’ in his mind at my suggestion,” Nightwind told him with her usual forthrightness. “Whenever he starts to get frightened, anxious or stressed, he will forget what he was getting upset about. He’ll know that his mentor is dead, objectively, but when the memory of that fact starts to make him upset, he’ll get distracted and then temporarily forget the fact. It’s strictly a palliative, and it will go away in a few days, but we can’t have a hysterical boy upsetting Starfall, you, and other key people while you’re deciding what to do about this situation. Furthermore, as an Empath and the only Healer you have, I can’t devote all my time to him.” She looked him straight in the eye, as challenging as the dyheli had been. “I went to Tyrsell this morning before you saw him and suggested it. That was why he was so eager to volunteer his services.”
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