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 bond-bird’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 va
nished 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 chattering 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 forth-rightness. “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.”
“I’d wondered,” Snowfire growled, not at all happy with the way his opinions had been subverted.
“I didn’t see a choice,” she told him flatly, with what Wintersky called her “take no prisoners” expression. “My only other course of action was to keep him sedated, and that would be very bad for him. This way, he has a chance to absorb the situation without thinking about it for a few days, then try and come to terms with it - gradually, instead of all at once. And by then, you all should know more about what’s going on; you’ll be able to tell him where his people are and what Valdemar is going to do about the attack. He’ll be able to make some choices for himself with a reasonable amount of information, and we’ll see how he’s fitting in and what we’re going to do with him.”
Snowfire knew he was going to have to accept whatever she told him she’d done - not only because it was already an accomplished fact, but because he was not a Healer and an Empath, and his opinions really didn’t matter. However, having Nightwind make the decision was a bit more palatable than Tyrsell; Nightwind might primarily treat non-humans, but she herself was human, and her reasoning came out of her human experience.
“All right,” he said with resignation. “I can see why you decided the way you did, and this is better than keeping him drugged. And I know why you didn’t ask me first, because I would have argued with you.”
“And last night, I was in no mood to argue with you; my intentions were in the other direction entirely.” She grinned at him and fluttered her eyelashes coyly in a way that drew an unwilling laugh out of him. “As for the headache potion, that was all it was. Now, if you need to question him more about the attack - “
Snowfire interrupted her with a shake of his head. “I don’t think so. What we’ll need are descriptions of the village, where things are, at least for now. Kel and Hweel and I are going to do a little scouting there tonight, just to see who and what’s still there.”
She nodded. “Then there should be no problem; his memories of the village before the attack are going to be perfectly clear, just don’t be surprised if he blanks out in describing the things he thinks are damaged. He’ll probably completely forget the fact that the bridge was burned, for instance.” She licked her lips and twisted a strand of hair around her index finger as she paused for a thought. “In fact, he’s very likely to act and talk as if the whole town is still intact, so don’t correct him.”
“I won’t. You say in his deeper thoughts he’s still going to be aware of what happened, though?” At her nod, he sighed, and gazed out over the pool for a moment, collecting his thoughts. If he’s got it in his deeper memories, those are what usually come out in dreams. “Well, we could be looking at some interrupted nights, if he starts having nightmares.”
“If he does, we’ll move him into the Bower, and I’ll deal with it. He’ll very likely have them, and in some ways that would be good; if he does, they will mean he’s absorbing and coming to terms with the experience on the deeper level.” She didn’t seem at all adverse to having the boy in the “Bower,” the half-cave in the rocky cliff where she had built isolated facilities for those who were sick or injured. Well, if she didn’t mind having her sleep disturbed, Snowfire was not going to try to argue her out of it.
So he shrugged. “Once again - you are the expert; I am not. And much as I enjoy your company, I have a scout’s meeting to gather - “
“So go gather it.” She paused, resting a hand against the side of his face and making him look deeply into her eyes so he could not miss her sincerity and her regret. “Kechara, if I didn’t have to balance a potentially dangerous, even explosive situation against this boy’s needs, I wouldn’t have made the decisions I have. But if I didn’t also have his welfare in mind, I would have told you to pack him up and send him off with Wintersky and a couple of dyheli to the nearest large settlement. I think that for now at least, he will be better treated among us. Now, I must be off, too, so go find your scouts.”
They parted, with Snowfire feeling a little better about Darian’s welfare t
han he had been. When it came right down to it, the boy could not be in better hands.
It’s been a long day, Snowfire thought, as he laced up his climbing boots by the light of the fire. And it’s going to be a long night.
Darian was safely asleep, and so, most probably, were the current inhabitants of Errold’s Grove. It was time for that little scouting run.
Little? Not so little. I’ve never run a sortie against an army before. But it’s not as if I don’t have the experience to carry it off. Snowfire had been an active scout since he was a mere fourteen winters old, although he hadn’t been permitted in the field against human intruders for the first four years. So how much different can they be, I wonder, than a large bandit gang?
Across the fire from him, Nightwind was getting Kelvren ready. Kelvren’s eyes pinned with excitement, the pupils contracting to a mere nothing, then widening until there was nothing showing but pupil, then contracting again. In the firelight, the effect was particularly striking; his eyes looked as if they were flashing with a gilded light as his golden irises appeared and disappeared. Nightwind calmly tightened his harness at all points, checking his gear, making certain that the amplifying metal lacework-headband of the teleson set was properly in place under the feathers on his head, and that it wasn’t going to distract him in any way. Kelvren’s Mindspeech wasn’t particularly strong, and this little bit of metal filigree that looked so much like one of his favorite ornaments would help him reach Snowfire without effort.
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