Owlknight

by Mercedes Lackey

  Well, Nightwind knows what she’s doing.

  “Here, you heard him,” Darian said, pulling one of Anda’s hands away from his face and pushing the jug into it. “Drink it. All of it.”

  “Only if you’ll swear it’s poison.” But Anda clasped his hand around the jug and raised it to his mouth. He was obviously expecting it to taste foul (which, as Darian knew from experience, it did) so although he reacted to the flavor with a hideous expression, he drank it all down, as ordered, before dropping the jug into the grass and gasping, “Blessed godsl What does she make that out of, hoof scrapings? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”

  When Nightwind had given Darian this particular potion, she’d followed it with a drink that took the wretched taste out of his mouth. She’d sent no such drink with the hertasi - which meant she really was annoyed with Anda.

  But the Herald was a resourceful fellow; he began pulling up pieces of grass and chewing them, then discreetly spitting them out. His attempt at cleansing his mouth evidently worked, as his mouth stopped puckering and his eyes gradually stopped watering.

  “All right,” he sighed. “I admit it. I was an idiot. I made assumptions and acted on them without bothering to ask anyone first. Now is this vile medicine really going to work, or was this all a cruel hoax?”

  “It works,” Darian promised. “In fact, given how much of it you just drank, we’d better get you back to the guest lodge before it hits you.”

  Anda looked up at Eran, who relented, and knelt down beside the Herald. Anda used the Companion’s back and Darian’s arm to steady himself, and staggered to his feet. Eran rose as well, and Anda draped one arm over Eran’s back, resting most of his weight on his Companion. With that support, and Darian on his other side, they walked slowly back to the Lodge. Tyrsell remained in the meadow, having a silent discussion with the young hertasi.

  “By the way, had you noticed that you’ve been speaking and understanding Tayledras?” Darian asked casually.

  “I have?” Anda replied, his astonishment momentarily superseding his pain. “Great good gods, I have!”

  “Not only that, but you really understand the tongue,” Darian pointed out. “You understand it the way you would if you’d grown up speaking it. You aren’t mentally translating it. That’s why you have the headache, because you just got the language dumped into your head whole and entire, the way Tyrsell first got it from a human. That’s the way the dyheli remember things, but not the way a human does. You have to remember that when you do anything that requires closer contact than simple Mindspeech, Anda - dyheli, tervardi, hertasi, and kyree are not human, and if you aren’t careful, you can get into trouble. Well, Havens, check your new memories about dyheli and how the king stag is chosen.”

  Darian kept silent and let Anda sort through the memories he’d gotten along with the language, and watched his eyes widen. Darian knew why - the king stag was chosen by having the strongest mind in the herd, which meant that, at any time he cared to, he could literally take over the minds of every dyheli in the herd and make the herd do what he wanted. This was useful in an emergency, when individuals might panic and throw the entire herd into chaos.

  And Anda had probably realized that Tyrsell could do the same thing to a sizable number of humans as well, if he chose.

  The fact was, no king stag treated that ability trivially, for if he did, he wouldn’t remain the king stag. And that, too, would be in Anda’s new memories.

  “You have to get some rest, maybe sleep a little, and let things settle into your head,” Darian continued. “Once you do, you’ll be all right.”

  “Which is, I take it, the real purpose of the potion?” Anda replied, with a wry smile. “Not to kill the pain so that I can go back to work, but to make sure that I don’t?”

  “Precisely. And may I remind you that you are the one who got yourself into this in the first place? So do not get angry at us for seeing to your health.”

  Eran curved his head around, stretching out his long neck to do so, and looked Darian straight in the eye before snorting his agreement.

  “At least I’ll never have to repeat this experience,” Anda sighed, as they reached the door of the guest lodge. By that time he wasn’t resting his weight on Eran anymore, and Darian was only walking beside him in case he stumbled.

  Darian turned to leave him - but could not resist replying over his shoulder, “Not unless you meet a dyheli who knows Shin’a’in.”

  Anda only groaned, and looked pitiable. “You’re a cruel man, Darian. A very cruel man.”

  Darian laughed, and left him to return to his chore.

  Since all of Keisha’s handiwork was in the ekele that she shared with Darian, it only made sense to take Shandi there to demonstrate some of the needlework and dyes Keisha had been trying since she moved into the Vale. She’d learned some new techniques from the hertasi, who did most of the embroidery and beadwork for the Tayledras; the little lizards had been happy to share their passion with a fellow addict.

  Shandi was just as enthusiastic as Keisha had been. They soon had threads, yarns, and strip samplers spread out all over the sofa and chairs, plus a few pieces of Keisha’s finished work were down off the walls or out of the wardrobe. In the middle of an animated discussion of new dye colors, Shandi suddenly looked into nothingness, then laughed out loud. Keisha had learned enough by now, though, not to be alarmed at what might have signaled the onset of insanity in anyone but a Herald.

  “What did Karles just tell you?” Keisha demanded.

  “That Anda just pulled a typically stubborn and pig-headed male act, and went to Tyrsell to get the languages by himself. Five of them, all at once. And is suffering the consequences, with no pity from anyone.” Shandi laughed again, shaking her head, as Keisha was torn between feeling sorry for Anda and wickedly pleased that he’d mounted his pride and let it carry him straight over the edge. “Nightwind sent a jug of something to him, with instructions to hit him in the head with it if the potion didn’t do any good.”

  “Ouch! She’s annoyedl This may be the best way to teach him that he doesn’t know evenIthing, though,” Keisha said.

  “Just because he’s a Herald, you mean?” Shandi shrugged, but her eyes twinkled and her mouth twitched into a grin. “That tends to be our major fault, I suppose. It’s difficult to remember that you might be wrong when you’re almost always right.”

  Keisha rolled her eyes ceilingward. “Modest, aren’t you?” Keisha replied dryly.

  “Of course - that, and every other possible virtue,” Shandi countered with a toss of her head, as she feigned a lofty attitude. “Are you trying to tell me you’ve lived all your life in Valdemar and haven’t learned that yet?”

  Keisha made a rude noise by way of an answer, and Shandi laughed heartily, throwing her head back. “Oh, it’s good to be back here with you - I made a lot of friends at the Collegium, but there was never anyone that was a sister.”

  Keisha knew exactly what she meant - more so, perhaps, because until she had begun living in the Vale, she hadn’t had anyone she could really think of as a friend except Shandi. Now she could count Nightwind, Ravenwing, several friends among the liertasi, and was cautiously coming to think of Silverfox as a friend, though she was still rather intimidated by him. Firesong - well, she was completely intimidated by Firesong, though she’d never let him know that. But she knew that if she needed help, Firesong was someone she could count on, and wasn’t that part of the definition of a friend? Friends weren’t supposed to be identical in what they did, or what they meant to someone - otherwise, who would want or need more than one?

  And then there was Darian. Darian was the best friend she’d ever had, except for her sister, and always would be, no matter what happened between them. Now if only she could figure out exactly where she was going with him.

  “So what’s going on with you and Darian?” Shandi asked, as if she had been following Keisha’s thoughts. Keisha looked at her, startled by the question
.

  “What do you mean by that?” she demanded, with a touch of sharpness.

  Shandi leaned back into the cushions of the sofa, and fingered the soft silk of a skein of embroidery thread. “Well, since you asked, I couldn’t help but notice that you seem restless, a little nervous, but he seems perfectly happy. So what’s the matter? I should have thought you’d have been posting the banns by now - and I don’t think it’s his fault that you’re not. I also don’t think that you are looking for someone else, so what’s the problem?”

  “I’d . . . rather not talk about it just yet,” Keisha demurred. I’d rather not talk about it at all, actually. Maybe she’ll take the hint and leave me alone.

  Shandi shrugged. “All right for now, but you’re not going to avoid talking about this for too long. Maybe the folks here in k’Valdemar are too polite to get you to ‘fess up, but I’m not. You’re my sister, and I’m going to find out what’s bothering you and fix it if I can.”

  Keisha eyed her sister cautiously; this was an entirely new side to Shandi that she hadn’t suspected existed. What had brought this out in her? Was it being trained as a Herald, and being used to jumping straight in to solve problems whether the people involved wanted them solved or not? “How do you know what I’m thinking, anyway?” she demanded. “I thought you weren’t supposed to go snooping around in people’s heads.” She couldn’t help feeling resentful, even though this was Shandi who was trying to meddle. Hadn’t she already had enough of her mother’s meddling in her life?

  “Not thinking,” Shandi corrected. “Feeling. I know what you’re feeling, which is hardly the same as knowing what you’re thinking, especially when you make it so easy to read. And what do you expect, when my sister is such a strong Healer?”

  That was such a complete non sequitur that Keisha could only look stupidly at her. “What?”

  “Healer. Empath. Not thinking, feeling. That’s what made them decide back at the Collegium that I’ll be a good diplomat. It turned out when they got everything sorted out and started giving me real testing and training that my strongest Gift is Empathy.” She chuckled. “Which is probably why I could never bear to hurt anyone’s feelings.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Keisha asked.

  “You didn’t ask, and it was never relevant.” Shandi was so matter-of-fact about it, that Keisha could hardly believe it. “You didn’t need to know about it when we all handled the Ghost Cat crisis, and it didn’t come up when I was visiting.”

  “Well, that’s true enough,” Keisha admitted. “I just thought - well, I suppose I wasn’t thinking, actually.”

  Shandi raised an eyebrow at her. “I was trained by Queen’s Own Talia, no less. Then again, Herald Talia is the only Empath currently among the Heralds, so she’d pretty much have to be the one who taught me, wouldn’t she?”

  Keisha was utterly speechless at this - and stared at her sister as if she had turned into a stranger. In a sense, she had - here was the girl that Keisha had taken care of and gotten out of scrapes, talking casually about being taught by the Queen’s Own Herald of Valdemar!

  “It developed fairly late, which they tell me was just as well,” Shandi continued calmly, ignoring her sister’s dropped jaw and goggled eyes. “But they said with a sister who turned out to have a strong Healing Gift the way you have, and as alike as the two of us are, it’s not too surprising that I’d be an Empath. The only thing likelier would have been that I’d be an Animal Mindspeaker - or another Healer, but then I probably wouldn’t have been Chosen. No Companion will Choose a Healer or a potential Healer, unless the Healing Gift is really, really minor, and some other Gift is a lot stronger.”

  “I suppose that Animal Mindspeech would have been useful,” Keisha ventured, slowly gathering her scattered and wandering wits together.

  “Not as useful as this.” Interestingly, Shandi didn’t seem particularly proud of her Gift, any more than a carpenter was proud of having an average, serviceable set of tools. “I can tell when people are lying, or trying to lie, without using the Truth Spell. I can tell when they’re being pushed into saying or doing something against their will. All kinds of things that it’s useful for a diplomat to know.”

  “Or a spy,” Keisha said without thinking, and looked sharply at her sister.

  But Shandi laughed at her. “Or a spy - which is sometimes an impolite name for a diplomat. You see? We even think alike. Now, since you won’t talk about Darian, what was it you were saying about this golden yellow?” She held up the skein she’d been toying with.

  Keisha went back to her yarns and dyes, but beneath the discussion, her mind was busy with all that Shandi had revealed in those few words. There were many things, it seemed, that she needed to learn about her sister, especially now that she would be living right under Shandi’s nose.

  And even the “old” Shandi had not been inclined to let sleeping problems lie undisturbed if she thought she could do something about them.

  After a fruitful afternoon of cleaning and mending every bit of dyheli tack in the shed, Darian was ready to reward himself with a swim. He stowed the last bit of tack awayI then tucked the cleaning supplies in their proper place, and closed the shed up. He was dirty and oily, but he knew the girls were in the ekele and he didn’t want to disturb them. I’ll get clean enough in the lake, he decided. And the hertasi will take care of a change of clothing for me. And as for the tack oil, it was lanolin, and his skin would absorb it.

  Cleaning tack was most often a job for the hertasi, but they had enough to do just building, and catching up with the chores and projects that had been put back while the celebration and the preparations for it had been going on. When a job needed doing in the Vales, whoever had the skill took care of it. Except, perhaps, for the cooking chores - so far as the hertasi were concerned, there wasn’t a human anywhere who could match hertasi cookery, and the making of a meal would be the very last job that the hertasi would give over to human hands.

  I’ve come along a bit from the fellow who resented having to clean and mend. He chuckled at himself, and shook his head. I guess that’s what growing up is supposed to do to you.

  The tack shed, one of a group of storage sheds tucked into an out-of-the-way corner screened with trees and ornamental bushes, was not all that far from the lake, and a direct pathway linked the two. The walk was barely long enough to get his muscles warmed up from sitting all afternoon.

  Once the path opened up to the clear, quiet waters, he turned to the right to stroll along the edge of the lake on his way to the swimming beach. He wanted to see how the hertasi were coming with the hot spring he’d created. One of the reasons he had chosen that particular spring was its nearness to the lake; but another was that it emerged about a third of the way up to the top of one of the hills cupping that end of the valley. The water started from a point that was about the height above the lake of a five-year-old tree. That would make it perfect for a series of cascading pools, where the water moved downward from pool to pool, cooling as it went. Soakers could pick their preferred temperature by the height of the pool in the cascade.

  The hertasi had already dug the series of soaking pools leading down to the lake, from the smallest (which would be the hottest) at the top, to the largest (big enough to hold thirty or forty soakers, and would be just comfortably warm) at the bottom, just like the ones at k’Vala. The first three pools had been sculpted and finished inside with formed rock; these three were in the process of curing. A crew of hertasi was laying the rock of the fourth pool, and the other pools each had one or two hertasi in them, sculpting the earth into seats, couches, and benches, which would be covered with the formed rock. At the moment, the hot water ran down a temporary channel into the lake, where it mixed directly with the lake waters, creating an area of warmth. Even now, that spot was in use, though it wasn’t as hot as the finished pools would be, nor was the edge anything more than raw lake shore. As soon as the last pool was finished, the hertasi would plant th
e slope with heat-loving vegetation, and a specialist like Steelmind who worked at inducing plants to grow with amazing speed would soon have the place looking as if it had always been there. When the pools had cured, the hertasi would divert the water and they would begin filling. It would take at least a day for them to fill and come up to proper temperature. Then, no doubt, there would be an impromptu opening party.

  Right now, though, Darian wasn’t looking for a place to soak; tack cleaning wasn’t hard work, just tedious work. He didn’t need to soothe sore muscles, he just needed to cool off and get cleaner. He was also hoping Kel would be out here, as this was the time of day that the gyrphon usually took his bath and he hadn’t had a chance to talk to Kel in days. They’d both been so busy with the celebrations that there hadn’t been time for anything else.

  He was right on time for the gryphon’s bath. Just as he neared the sloping rock-shelf that stretched for several wagon-lengths just under the surface where the gryphons usually bathed in shallow water heated by the sun, Kel flew in, hovered, and landed in the water. He skimmed in at a shallow angle, sending a huge rooster tail of water to the other side of his body before plunging. Gryphons bathed like birds, and Kel was no exception to that rule, slamming his head and shoulders into the water, then hunkering down and splashing vigorously with his wings. Even the smallest bird kicked up quite a bit of water when bathing; when a gryphon (twice the size of a war-horse, with a wingspread wide enough to shelter a small house) decided to take a bath, it tended to drench anyone within five or six furlongs. Darian knew this, of course, and stood well away as the gryphon ducked and splashed, ducked and splashed, until every feather was soaked so that it looked as if he were covered in quills instead of feathers.

  Gryphons, like birds, also tended to be single-minded about their bathing, so Kel didn’t look up and notice Darian until he was done and looking for the best spot to clamber out and sun himself.