Owlflight

by Mercedes Lackey

  “I would like to stay, very much, Elder,” he said at last, with a little bow to Starfall. “I am honored that you ask me, and I certainly accept! I promise that I will do all that I can to help everyone here, and I will try to be more patient in learning magic.”

  Starfall smiled, and motioned him closer. Taking his hand, the Adept placed a pendant into it. It was a hawk-talon, mounted in silver; the mounting was decorated with a blue moonstone and strung on a beaded chain. “Welcome to k’Vala, then, little brother,” he said warmly, as he closed Darian’s hand around the talon. “You must wear this as a token of your acceptance into the Clan, as Nightwind does. You both bear the talons of my father’s great suntail hawk-eagle, Skyr, who shared my father’s labors as a Healing Adept and went to white at the age of only four. I know that you will be worthy of the token, even as Nightwind is.”

  Snowfire took the talon from Darian’s nerveless fingers and put it around his neck. Darian looked up at him, trying to find the right words to thank him, and failing completely—but Snowfire acted as if he had already said them.

  “You have labored long and hard already, and I am not minded to begin your lessons with one today, little brother,” the younger Hawkbrother said as he clasped and released Darian’s shoulders. “Why not go out into the forest for a time? It will cool your mind and help you think.”

  If there was one thing that Darian agreed with, it was that he needed some time to think this over. He nodded. “But— do I need to have someone with me?” he asked, hoping that the answer would be “no.”

  Snowfire shook his head. “That horse that we stole is in need of exercise,” he suggested. “Go take it about for a while. You will be safe enough, riding, and you won’t have to worry about dyheli chatter in your mind.” The corner of his mouth twitched a little, suggesting to Darian that although the remark was intended as amusement, Snowfire had suffered “dyheli chatter” in the past.

  As he hesitated a moment, Starfall nodded at the entrance to his little sanctuary. “Off with you, young one. I am the one most needful of your elder brother’s skills at the moment. We have some tricky work ahead of us before we can rest this day.”

  Perhaps yesterday such a dismissal would have made Darian sullen and resentful, suspecting that they were getting rid of him so that they could discuss him. But now—now he had no such feelings. If Starfall said they had work, then they had work, and he would only get in the way. He stammered his thanks to both of them, and turned and ran, his heart hammering with so many mixed feelings that he couldn’t sort them out properly.

  He already knew where the horse was; in the pasture, being guarded by the dyheli herd and kept from straying. He guessed that the tack would be in a hut he knew was used for storing things with no immediate use, and sure enough, it was. He hadn’t saddled many horses in his life, but with the help of two amused dyheli who kept the nag from running off half-equipped, he managed to get all the gear on in the proper manner. It wasn’t that the horse was at all ill-tempered, it was more as if it expected bad treatment; it didn’t fight him, but if it could get away without being saddled and bridled, it would be very happy to do so.

  The horse sighed with resignation as he clambered into the saddle, his stomach aching reflexively as he recalled the last time he’d ridden the beast. But it seemed tractable enough, and it moved out of the entrance to the valley at a calm walk.

  Darian was used to finding his way in the Forest, and had no fear that he was going to get lost. He set a general course southward, but otherwise let the horse have its head, and it ambled on beneath the trees while he let his own thoughts wander. They tended to stray into mere contemplation of his surroundings; it was so easy to let his mind go blank as he admired a golden shaft of sunlight piercing the green gloom, then saw with surprised delight a single flower basking in its warmth like a precious jewel displayed for his admiration. It was more comfortable to contemplate the majesty of the enormous tree trunks rising in a never-ending vista of columns all around him than to contemplate his own future. And the liquid notes of birdsong dropping tranquilly down through the boughs were infinitely preferable to the discords of his past.

  Everywhere he looked, he saw things that his parents would have drawn his attention to, if they had been there. Summer was not a time to trap for furs, so his summers in the past had been spent in exploration. Here in the hills, wonderful and magical spots seemed hidden in every valley. Sometimes it was a sparkling stream burbling over a stone-filled bed. Sometimes the stream poured down the side of the hill in a series of exuberant waterfalls. He caught sight of a pair of does with their fawns, grazing in a tiny pocket of meadow, surrounded by moss-covered boulders. Once they passed a fallen tree that supported an entire community of plants and ferns on its decaying, moss-covered side.

  All was well for some time; the horse, given no commands, chose to eat as much as he walked. He meandered from one sparse bit of grass to the next. The grass beneath the tree canopy was thin and tended to grow in widely-spaced, wispy clumps; thick growths of fern and moss were more common here than grasses, and the horse disdained both. Darian let the reins hang loose on the horse’s neck, engrossed in his own increasingly troubled thoughts.

  Those thoughts weren’t really coherent; too much had happened to him for coherency. He had the vague feeling that perhaps this was the root of what bothered him—events had taken him so completely by surprise that he wasn’t acting anymore, he was reacting.

  At least before, when anything happened to me, it was generally because I’d already done something to make those things happen, he thought. And it was usually something that I knew would make trouble. It was true he hadn’t had a lot of control over his own life, but at least he’d had some, and he’d had choices, even if it was only the choice to resist what other people had in mind for him.

  But now—fate or chance was hitting him with one hammer blow after another, not even giving him the time to reel back from one blow before slamming him with the next. Being invited to join the Hawkbrothers was the first thing that had happened in days that involved any choice for him.

  And now that he’d accepted, he felt strange. There was a creeping sense that he had betrayed the people of Errold’s Grove in some way, and yet at the same time he resented the fact that he felt that way. What right had they to claim his loyalty? Why should he chain his fate to theirs?

  There was guilt, too, a great deal of it, and he wasn’t at all sure what to do about it. What had happened to the folk of the village? He hadn’t made any real effort to find out. Surely he ought to at least do that. And no matter what Snowfire said, how could anyone be sure there was nothing that he could have done that would have saved Justyn? Maybe if he’d been beside his master on that bridge, the way any good apprentice would have been, the outcome would have been different. All right, so he didn’t have any real magic yet, but he’d learned a lot at the side of his parents, and maybe he would have been able to do something that would have saved them both. I could have jumped off the bridge when he set it afire, and dragged him along with me. I can swim, even if he couldn’t. Or—His mind buzzed with a hundred absurd things he might have done, or could have done, or thought he could have done, and all of them just made him feel guiltier.

  He became so engrossed in his thoughts that he didn’t realize that the horse had stopped eating and was sneaking through the forest at a fast, if furtive, walk, until he saw a landmark he recognized with a start. He knew then that they were getting far too close to Errold’s Grove for comfort and made a grab for the reins.

  But the horse was an older hand at this game than he was; with a flip of its head, it tossed the reins out of reach, and increased its pace. Darian didn’t have to be able to read its thoughts to know what they were—the beast had scented its herdmates, and it was going to get back to them by whatever means it took. The blacksmith had explained once why all the horses in the village were kept in a single herd; horses weren’t happy alone, and even though the E
rrold’s Grove “herd” wasn’t a breeding herd, the lack of a stallion was no impediment to the horses’ comfort in each other.

  This horse probably felt the same about the rest of the horses he was used to being with, and no dim memory of mistreatment was going to overwhelm the urgent need on his part to get back to the safety of the herd. Darian considered trying to throw himself out of the saddle, but the horse was going faster now, and suddenly the ground seemed very far away to a boy who’d never done more than steal rides on the innkeeper’s old pony. With the horse moving, he didn’t know how to get himself out of the saddle and onto the ground without breaking something. So he just held grimly to the saddle, gritted his teeth against the jolting, and prayed that they wouldn’t run into any enemy sentries.

  The trees cleared away up ahead, and Darian felt his heart stop with terror as he thought they were almost at the village. But the horse hesitated as the tree cover thinned, and Darian managed to seize the reins before the recalcitrant beast managed to bolt into the middle of town.

  But then, Darian realized that the daylight ahead of them was not the daylight of the cleared fields. Somehow the horse had managed to come out of the forest at the top of the only bluff that overlooked the village. How it had managed that, Darian had no clue, but once he dismounted and led the horse cautiously to the edge of the bluff, he had as good a view of the village as if he’d been sitting in one of the trees.

  But what he saw made his skin crawl, and filled him with the desperate feeling he had to do something, along with the knowledge that there was nothing he could do.

  In the distant fields were people, people he recognized, toiling like beasts in the heat of midday. Hitched to plows like oxen were the biggest men of the village, sweating beneath the blows of a whip held in the hands of a stranger. Behind them, guiding the plows through the fields meant to be sown with late-ripening crops, were the women, who were also chained in their places. Others worked, chained at the waist in pairs, beneath the watchful eyes of more strangers. These men weren’t wearing the armor that Darian remembered, but he knew they must be the same men who had invaded the village.

  As to why men were being used to pull the plows instead of oxen, well, the smell of roasting beef coming up the bluff certainly provided a reasonable explanation. There were no oxen now, and the horses had probably been confiscated to serve the army.

  How many of the villagers had been recaptured? Enough, evidently, to provide field-slaves for their conquerors.

  Darian found his hands clenched on his bow without any memory of reaching for it. He could sneak in closer, get a position up in one of the trees, and start picking off guards. They weren’t wearing armor; they’d be easy shots—

  I could kill all the guards I see and they could escape, I could lead them to the Hawkbrothers—

  Right. He could kill all the guards that he could see. How many more men were there that he couldn’t see? If they’d gotten to the point this quickly of killing and eating the oxen—tough meat at best—

  Anger flooded him next, anger at the Hawkbrothers. Why hadn’t they told him the truth?

  It faded as quickly as it came. They hadn’t told him, perhaps, because they didn’t know themselves. It was entirely possible that this was the first day the villagers had been put to work in the fields. Why should the enemy have put them out? It would have been more logical for them to take their captives away; sell them, perhaps, or put them to work in their own fields back in the northern mountains.

  Unless, of course, they had decided to stay.

  He couldn’t do anything here, and this was information that the Hawkbrothers didn’t have. He had to get back, as quickly as he could.

  It’s not cowardice to go. I can’t do anything by myself, and Starfall and the rest need to know what’s happened here.

  Carefully, he backed the horse into the heavier cover before he mounted. He considered his next move carefully. He hadn’t really been paying attention when the horse took off on its own. Somehow, if there were sentries (and there probably were) the horse had managed to thread its way past them without being spotted. So if he could retrace the horse’s path, he could do the same.

  Finally, finally something he could do right! He felt a grin stretch his mouth, an expression that had not been on his lips since his parents died. If? Say rather, how quickly. The day he could not track a shod horse in the soft earth of the forest floor would be a day when he renounced his heritage and asked to be apprenticed to a clerk!

  He had to cast around a bit before he found the clear trail; it had gotten a little muddled when he finally got control of the reins back from the stubborn beast. But once he found the trail, the rest was easy.

  He soon saw how the horse had gotten up onto the bluff without his realizing it; the beast had wound a zigzag course up the slope, taking the ascent so gradually that he hadn’t known they were climbing. He was tempted to cut straight down, but reminded himself that the horse had managed to avoid the sentries this way; it wouldn’t be a good idea to take what appeared to be a shorter path only to run into one of the enemy.

  The horse didn’t want to be ridden away from its mates, and fought him for a good long time, which didn’t make finding the path more difficult, but did take up more valuable time. It was sunset by the time that Darian got to a point where he was fairly certain that there were no enemies to watch out for. By then, the horse was tired enough to stop fighting, which was just as well, because Darian’s temper was frayed to a thin strand, and he was in no mood for further nonsense.

  With a clear path ahead of them, Darian finally got some revenge; he smacked the horse’s rump with his unstrung bow, startling it into a tired gallop, and headed for the Hawkbrother encampment as fast as the miserable beast would go.

  Weary and aching, Darian found himself the center of another Council, but now he understood what was being said, which was certainly an improvement over the last time.

  Hweel had met him outside the valley, and Snowfire at the entrance; Darian had feared anger or reproach for being gone so long, but to his surprise, Snowfire had been perfectly calm right up until the moment he had gotten within speaking distance and blurted, “I’ve been to Errold’s Grove! They’re all slaves!”

  Snowfire’s expression had changed completely in that moment, and Darian found himself swept off the horse and into the middle of a Council that was assembled so hastily that people actually came running to the clearing while pulling on tunics or holding half-braided hair in one hand. Hertasi simply appeared with boots, shirts, food, hair-thongs, or anything else that had been forgotten, and vanished again. One of them left a bowl of stew, bread, and tea at Darian’s hand without him ever actually seeing the food left there, just the flash of a departing tailtip.

  As firelight flickered on the concerned faces of his Hawkbrother hosts, he alternated bites of stew and gulps of tea with words of explanation.

  The only person missing from this council session was Starfall, but although no one said anything, Darian guessed from what wasn’t said that Starfall had more than enough problems of his own.

  Finally the others stopped firing questions at him and began a worried discussion among themselves. Darian turned his own attention to the remains of his meal, too tired and hungry to really think of anything else. As he wiped the bowl with his bread, Wintersky came and sat on a rock beside him.

  “I hope you don’t think we deceived you, Dar’ian,” the young man said, leaning forward earnestly. “After the way that Kel and Hweel were caught by those magic-sniffing creatures, we didn’t want to risk anything or anyone that might set off more such guardians, and someone kept us from being able to use scrying to set a watch on the place magically. And it didn’t seem advisable to risk being seen ourselves—the enemy doesn’t know we’re here, and if he did, he might decide to attack. We were certain that all the barbarians had were houses, some stock, but never people. If we’d had any idea that those barbarians had your people, we’d have ris
ked more to find out for certain, then to do something for them—”

  “I know!” Darian interrupted, just as earnestly. He scratched his head, and gave Wintersky an anxious smile. “I was mad at first, but, well, I had a lot of time to think on the ride back. I trust your word; I know that—if you say you would have done something, if you’d known what was going on, then you would have.”

  “We should have made sure.”

  Darian looked up, and saw Snowfire standing over him, his eyes expressionless and flat, shadows flitting over his face as the light from the fire shifted and changed. “We should have made sure,” the Hawkbrother repeated harshly. “That was a mistake on our part. I’m sorry, Dar’ian.”

  Darian shrugged awkwardly. “Wintersky was explaining—and I’d kind of figured some of it out myself. You thought everything was all right. And you and Starfall were busy,” he reminded his mentor shyly. “You told me yourself, you have to fix the magic so no one else can get at it—” Suddenly, the thought he’d set aside last night came back to him. “Snowfire, how are you doing that? Are you making just—uhm—what’s the word—nodes the way they used to be?”

  Snowfire’s expression changed, and he looked down at Darian with speculation. “Not exactly. Why?”

  Darian licked his lips, and wondered just how stupid he was going to sound. After all, compared to what the Hawkbrothers knew, he didn’t know much of anything about magic, really. But still—

  “There’s definitely a mage with the enemy, right?” Darian asked. “I mean with them, at Errold’s Grove, not just working with them or behind the attack.”

  Snowfire nodded. “I cannot imagine how they could be blocking our scrying if there wasn’t.”

  “And the mage is going to want that power—he’d have to want to grab for it.” He bit his lip, hoping that he wasn’t going to make a total fool of himself. “And I guess if there was a big source of power, he’d try to get to it, right?” Before Snowfire could answer that, he asked another question. “And there are way too many of those enemy soldiers for us to fight, right?”