Owlflight

by Mercedes Lackey

  He couldn’t move, couldn’t see anything.

  Am I blind? With a convulsive shudder, he managed to move, to get to his knees, but he still couldn’t see anything. Everything was dark.

  Then, with a creak, one of the stable doors swung open, and vague and flickering red light outside proved that he wasn’t blind after all. It was the mage-light that was gone.

  But the mage was still moving. In a moment, he might get up again. He was hurt, but by no means dead yet.

  Darian’s right hand was wet, as was his sleeve, and as he moved it, his fingers touched his abandoned bucket. He grabbed it and lurched to his feet, staggering over to the mage who stared up at him in the changing light, spittle at the corner of his mouth.

  He gave the man no chance to act; he brought the bucket down on his head as hard as he could. If the man wouldn’t die, at least he wasn’t going to stay awake for long!

  He hit the mage a couple more times for good measure, then left the bucket upturned over his face and staggered, exhausted, out into the open. He didn’t care who or what saw him at this point. He stood in the middle of the dirt path, swaying on his feet, wondering where he should go next. The shouting had decreased; who was winning?

  Then he sensed something gathering at his back; something oddly familiar. Magic—but—where and when had he sensed something like this before?

  Magic—like— For some reason the sensation called up a memory of Justyn, but Justyn had never had enough magic for him to sense like this—

  Except the day he destroyed the bridge!

  Fear gave him energy he thought he didn’t have; he sprinted for shelter, any shelter, heading for the nearest building as fast as his feet would carry him. He reached it just as the stable behind him exploded into flame, the shock of the blast knocking him into the side of the cottage. He saw fireworks behind his eyes for a moment, and had all the wind knocked out of him. He struggled to breathe, lying on his side, trying to make his lungs work again.

  He didn’t stay that way for long; when his eyes cleared and he got a few good breaths, he picked himself gingerly out of the remains of a flower garden. He looked around, and things were pretty much the same as they had been. With a single exception, that is. What was left of the stable blazed fiercely, as if it had been soaked in oil.

  Darian went looking for Snowfire and the others, but didn’t have to go far to find them. No sooner did he round the corner of the house than he saw the entire cavalcade approaching—the Hawkbrothers, battered and injured, but all still alive, followed by the villagers.

  The villagers of Errold’s Grove were a far different group of people than they had been a half moon ago. They had clearly been kept on short rations by their captors, and just as clearly had been worked to exhaustion. They were filthy, unkempt—precisely the kind of folk that they themselves would have turned away from the village as vagabonds. Clothing, dirty, torn and tattered in the course of hard labor, had not been changed, cleaned or mended in all the time they’d been captives. Some of the men showed signs of beatings; all looked as wary and spooked as the horses running freely among the houses.

  But Darian had no eyes for them; with a joyful shout, he ran to Snowfire and the others, who answered his shout and surrounded him, babbling questions, while the villagers stared at him with wide eyes. The villagers recognized him, yes, but this was not the same Darian that they had scorned and disregarded before.

  “One at a time!” Snowfire ordered, and some of the babble subsided. “Dar’ian, we were surprised by a group coming to claim some of your people. We were attacked. We took shelter in the barn, and were promptly put under siege. What saved us was that the elite fighters that were left here had been drinking, and simply didn’t fight together at all well. We were holding our own, until we were attacked by a—a bear-creature. It must have been summoned and controlled by their mage. It broke through our defenses and killed three of your people and injured several of us. We are sorry—there was just nothing we could have done to save them, though we tried. Then, the creature suddenly went berserk, as if it was no longer under control, and turned on the barbarians! They had to fight us and it at the same time; they killed it, but seemed to lose heart and retreated—then there was a tremendous roar and flames shot into the sky, and their retreat turned into a rout! What happened here?”

  “It was the mage,” Darian said, too tired to feel even a flicker of pride in his deed. “I saw him making magic and I knew I had to do something. I think he’s dead; I think he did what Justyn did at the bridge.”

  He told the tale as quickly as he could, in as few words as possible. He was a little afraid that Snowfire and the rest might not believe him. After all, who was he to claim to have destroyed a powerful mage?—but they accepted his tale at face value. And the results were there for all to see, so perhaps it was not as difficult to believe as he had feared.

  “You were one thing he would not have been concerned about,” Snowfire said thoughtfully. “He would never have believed that a single young boy could be a threat to him, not even when he had the evidence of that threat slashed into his own body. He should have known better. We all know that the smallest creature can become dangerous when driven to desperation.”

  “I couldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for Huur,” Darian said hastily. “She is all right, isn’t she?”

  “One broken feather, and a ruffled temper, which she has flown off to cool,” Snowfire assured him, and looked around at the wide-eyed group of villagers surrounding them. He switched to stilted Valdemaran.

  “I believe we hold Errold’s Grove, and need not fear the return of the barbarians tonight,” he said, raising his voice. “I believe it is safe enough to stay and sleep, and in the morning, begin to rebuild. If you will go to your houses, we allies of Valdemar will secure the place against intruders.”

  Still shocked and bewildered, ready to listen to anyone who offered a voice of authority, they trailed back to their houses by twos and threes. Snowfire divided the Hawkbrothers into three groups of five, leaving out the two worst wounded, to take night-watches. “Is there anyplace you can go to rest?” he asked Darian, with a hand resting lightly on his shoulder. “Would anyone give you bed space? You have done more than enough for one night!”

  Darian felt each and every separate bruise aching, thought longingly of Justyn’s little cottage, once despised, and nodded.

  “Go then,” Snowfire said, giving him a gentle shove. “I will see that you are awakened in the morning.”

  Already those not on the first watch were putting out the fire in the blazing stable; soon concealing darkness hid the signs of battle, leaving only the acrid scent of smoke in the air. Darian trudged toward Justyn’s cottage, wondering what he would find there.

  What he found in the light of a single lantern was signs of recent occupation; the furniture was gone, probably broken up for firewood. The contents of the shelves lay piled in a corner, discarded as worthless, including all the bad paintings of famous mages, and there were bedrolls spread across every available bit of floor. He wrinkled his nose at the smell of sweat, burned food, and unwashed bedding; he took the time to throw all the bedrolls out the door and open the windows. The fireplace hadn’t been swept in ages, and it seemed that when the barbarians finished eating, they tended to pitch what was left into the fire, for it was littered with bones and burned crusts—hence the odor of burned food. Darian climbed the ladder to his loft bed, and discovered it was the one corner of the house that hadn’t been touched, probably because his little bed was too short for any of the barbarians.

  With a weary sigh, he tumbled into bed, leaving the lantern to burn itself out.

  It was the sound of horses and men’s voices that woke him in the gray light of dawn, and before he was even properly awake, he tumbled down out of the loft and emerged from the cottage with a poker in one hand, ready to do battle all over again.

  But it wasn’t the barbarians who had returned; the noise was the arri
val of a rescue expedition. Men on horses milled around the square, all of them wearing Lord Breon’s colors and badge; more men afoot were rounding up loose livestock and confining it in hastily-built corrals. Darian put down his poker and scratched his head, watching all the activity with a sense of bleary bemusement.

  After another moment, he quietly got himself a bucket of water and used it to clean himself up, wincing as he scrubbed a body that was black and blue from neck to knee. Once clean and marginally presentable, he went back out and joined the milling people, picking up what had happened this morning by listening to fragments of conversation.

  Lord Breon had gotten Starfall’s message and had gathered his men to respond to it—but on the way, he had encountered the thoroughly demoralized barbarian foot soldiers, and had fought an unequal battle with them. Then, having defeated the barbarians, he had been stopped by the rockfall, and had been forced to find a place to ford the river to get to the road on the other side. By this time, of course, they were certain that they would find Errold’s Grove occupied by a hostile force, and had only hoped to catch the remaining barbarians by surprise. Ready for battle, they had clattered over the bridge a little before dawn only to encounter the sentries; after learning that the town was in friendly hands, they had made enough noise to wake up most of those who were sleeping.

  When Darian wandered in, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand, Lord Breon himself was in earnest consultation with Snowfire, with townsfolk standing awkwardly about, still looking dazed and bewildered, though most of them had cleaned themselves up and found more presentable clothing. They formed a sad contrast with their once-respectable selves, however, and looked rather as if they had grabbed whatever would fit with little regard for the sex or size their garments were originally intended for.

  Snowfire spotted him and hailed him with relief. “Here! Little brother! Your command of the tongue is better than mine, come and help me with this!”

  Not at all reluctant, Darian ignored his bruises and aching bones, and trotted to Snowfire’s side, feeling flushed with pride. When Snowfire was at a loss for words, he translated. Lord Breon, a neat and handsome gentleman of middling age and height, clothed in a businesslike suit of riveted armor, brown of hair and eyes and beard, took the Hawkbrothers completely in stride. But Darian’s fellow villagers started every time any one of them moved suddenly, and kept circling warily around the birds. To Darian’s relief, he caught sight of Huur, Hweel, and an awkward-looking youngster dozing on the rooftree nearest Snowfire, where they had evidently been most of the night, with Daystorm’s bondbird corbies keeping the natives at a respectful distance.

  “My Lord Snowfire,” Lord Breon said when they were finished, a look of profound respect in his eyes, “you have certainly kept things well in hand here. I am sure that the Queen herself will want to thank you eventually.”

  Snowfire shrugged. “We are allies, are we not?” he pointed out. “And if you had not intercepted the foot troops before they returned, we should probably have been forced to defend ourselves from them as we marched these folk toward your holding and safety. Now they need no longer seek shelter among your people.”

  “Beggin’ your pardon!” Lutter spoke up, interrupting him. “But we need to know what we’re to do now.”

  The man was a far cry from his former, prosperous self. He had changed his clothing, but it hung on him loosely, and his middle-aged face bore signs of both fresh and not-so-recent bruises in purple, black, green, and yellow.

  “What are you to do?” Lord Breon looked at him askance. “Why, pick up your lives, man, what else?”

  “Pick up our lives?” he replied, aghast. “What are you talking about? How can we pick up our lives? There’s nothing left here! The barbarians took it all—what they didn’t eat, they destroyed! We’ve no crops, no food, no herds or flocks, how are we to get through the winter?”

  Darian snorted with contempt, and all eyes turned toward him. Snowfire looked at him curiously, Lord Breon with surprise, and Lutter with astonishment turning to anger at having been interrupted by the village scapegrace.

  “I’ll tell you what you’ve got!” Darian said hotly, amazed at their stupidity. “You’ve got your homes back, you’ve got a pile of weapons and armor that ought to be worth something. You’ve got a dozen or more real warhorses that are each worth the price of a good house, and you’ve got a whole lot more regular horses, too! You’ve got mules and two wagons, whatever was in those wagons, and you’ve got the whole Peligiris Forest to hunt dye-fungus in. You can buy food again, you don’t have to grow it! What are you complaining about?”

  “And you’ve got this.” Lilly, the barmaid, came up dragging someone’s once-fine coverlet, made into a crude bag, across the ground. She let the corners fall, revealing a mixed pile of coins and jewelry. “I couldn’t tell whose was whose,” she continued. “So I just piled them all together, but I know that most of this didn’t come from Errold’s Grove.”

  It certainly couldn’t have, since a great deal of the jewelry was of gold. No wonder the bundle had been too heavy to carry!

  “Shkar had all this in his room,” she continued. “And I thought that when you get done picking out the bits that belong to you, Lord Breon could arrange to sell the rest and buy new stock for everybody who lost beasts and fowl.”

  “What about the stuff you’re wearing?” asked a woman, shrilly, and only then did Darian look up to see that Lilly was bedecked with several heavy gold bracelets, chains, and odd-looking pendants.

  Lilly flushed, but looked angry. “This is mine,” she replied fiercely. “I earned every bit of it!”

  “Oh, earned it, did you?” the woman snarled. “At your ease, in comfort, while the rest of us sweated out in the fields? Earned it, did you?”

  For once, Lilly stood up for herself, pulling herself up tall and staring the woman down. “Yes, earned it! Earned it by waiting on Shkar day and night, doing things I don’t even like to think about, keeping him and his bullies looking at me and thinking about me instead of you, making sure that every time their eyes started wandering toward your pretty little daughter, Stella Harthon, that they got pulled back toward me. How did you think it happened? By magic? I fought for all our sakes with the only weapon that I knew would work against them! And now I’m keeping what I earned from them, I’m taking it, and I’m going to go and buy a real inn someplace else where nobody is going to look down her long petty nose at me again!”

  Darian flushed with anger as he saw sour and angry faces among the women still, in spite of the fact that the pile of loot in the coverlet was vastly more valuable than what Lilly wore. How greedy can they be? he wondered.

  But Lutter coughed, and said to Lilly, red-faced, “You’re right, girl. You’ve earned it. And you’ve earned the right to take it and yourself someplace else if you want to. But if we’re going to get the dye-trade going again, we’re going to need a real inn—”

  Lilly interrupted him, shaking her head, though her demeanor softened. “No. If I go elsewhere, I’ll be Lilly, the respectable innkeeper. I can never be that if I stay here. I’m leaving. Besides,” she chuckled weakly, “when I leave, it’ll give your wives a bad example to show their girl-children.”

  “I would like to ask you some questions about your time among those men,” Lord Breon said with delicate tact. “You knew the name of one of the leaders, for instance.”

  “Shkar,” she said, and shrugged. “I didn’t learn much of their tongue. They didn’t need me for language lessons, and what they wanted they could get by pointing.”

  “Nevertheless, you may know more than you think you do,” Lord Breon persisted. “If you’d care to come back with me, after I’ve learned what I can from you, I’ll gladly provide an escort to wherever you choose.”

  “That suits me.” She turned abruptly and went to stand among Lord Breon’s men, who, after a stern look from Lord Breon, did not leer or make suggestive comments but simply made a place for her.

>   “In the meantime, the woman is right,” the Lord continued, surveying the pile. “Between the loot there, and the horses, you will have more than enough to rebuild what was lost. I’ll trade ten cattle or twenty adult hogs for each warhorse this minute, sight unseen, for instance. Or you can take them to the horsemarket and try your luck there.” He raked his eyes over the crowd. “You’ll have to agree on equal shares, as you all suffered equally, so far as I can see. It will take a great deal of work, but in the end, Errold’s Grove will be as prosperous as it was before.”

  There was some muttering, especially among those who had been the most well-off before the invasion, but finally everyone agreed.

  “Now, as for Darian,” Lord Breon began.

  Snowfire interrupted him this time. “With all respect, we have already taken him into our clan,” the Tayledras said, and Darian’s heart leaped. “We do not consider him a burden.”

  But evidently some word of what Darian had done had gotten to the villagers, for there was an immediate protest. “But he’s our mage! We are going to need a mage!” exclaimed Lutter in dismay. “What if someone like these barbarians comes back?”

  “You need a trained mage, which Dar’ian is not,” Snowfire replied sternly. “He must be trained, and you have no adequate teachers. Nor are you likely to get any, considering how long it took to get you the first one.”

  “But he can heal—”

  “As I believe some of you once pointed out, any of your young people could learn to do, apprenticing for six months with a Healer.” Snowfire’s mouth twitched at the dismay on certain faces; Darian had to hide his face lest his own expression give him away. “I suggest you do that. Perhaps, if at some time, a generous offer is made, you may tempt another mage to come and take residence here. Until that time, I fear you shall have to learn to watch your own borders and defend yourselves.”

  But Darian felt a twinge of guilt as he looked at the real fear in the eyes of some of them. Terrible things had happened here, things that people would never speak of, but which would shadow their dreams for the rest of their lives. They would never feel truly secure again.