6

Nyara slicked back her sweat-soaked hair, hardly feeling the cold as the chill breeze dried her scalp. She licked salt from her lips and crouched in the shelter of the bushes for a moment, surveying the open expanse of cracked and crazed pavement that kept the forest from encroaching on the foot of her tower. Though the stones were fragmented, even melted in places, they must have been incredibly thick, for nothing but grass grew in the cracks. It looked similar in construction to the ruins around the gryphons’ home, though the tower’s age and makers were unknown to her.

There was no sign of anything waiting for her, but she had learned to leave subtle telltales, things easily disturbed by interlopers. The “random” lines of gravel, for instance; not so random, and placed so that one or more of them would be scuffed by anyone crossing the paving. The faint threads of shields that would vanish if breached—or, just as importantly, if even touched by a mage’s probing. With her feeble command of magic, she could scarcely hope to build a shield that would hide her presence from a greater mage, so she didn’t even try. Instead, she concentrated on things that would let her know if she had been discovered, so that she had the time to run and hide somewhere else.

But once again, her refuge seemed secure; the threads were still in place, the pavement clear. Nevertheless, she stayed in the shelter of the evergreen bushes, and sent a careful probe up into the heart of her shelter.

:Well?: That was all she Mindsent. Anything more could reveal her location to lurkers. There were creatures—some of them her father’s—that were nothing more than compasses for the thoughts of those who could Mindspeak. Normally only the one Spoken to could Hear, but these creatures could Hear everything, and could follow the thoughts of a Mindspeaker from leagues away.

:All’s clear,: came the gravelly reply. :Come on up, kitten. I trust you had good hunting.:

Now she relaxed; nothing got past her teacher. :Quite good,: she replied shortly. :No visitors?:

:None,: came the answer. :Unless you count our daily cleanup committee.:

She would have worried if they hadn’t shown up. Anything bad enough to frighten off a vulture was a serious threat indeed. :I’m coming up,: she Sent, and only then arose from her shelter, pushing through the bushes and trotting out into the open—as always, with a thrill of fear at leaving her back exposed to the forest, where someone else could be lurking.

She padded quickly across the paving, taking care to avoid her own traps. The less she had to redo in the morning, the sooner she would be able to get out to hunt. The sooner she got out to hunt, the more practice she would have. She was under no illusions about her hunting successes; the colder the weather grew, the scarcer the game would become, and the harder it would be for her to catch it. She had never truly hunted for her meals before this, and was no expert. She was lucky; lucky that game was so abundant here, and lucky that she was getting practice now, while it was abundant, and a miss was not nearly so serious as it would be later in the winter.

The wall of her tower loomed up before her, the mellowed gray of weathered granite. The tower had that look about it of something intended to defend against all comers. She took the neck of the pheasant she had caught in her teeth, and set her finger-and toe-claws into the stone, and began climbing. The scent of the fresh-killed bird just under her nose made her mouth water. Just as well there had been no blood, or she would have been in a frenzy of hunger.

As she climbed, it occurred to her that it was not going to be pleasant, if indeed possible, to make the climb in winter. Ice, snow, or sleet would make the rock slippery; cold would numb her hands and feet. The prospect daunted her.

Well, no point in worrying about it now; truly dismal weather was still a few weeks off, and anyway, there was nothing she could do about it at the moment. Not while she was clinging to sheer stone, three stories above the pavement, with another to go.

Perhaps a ladder, like the Tayledras outside the Vale use for their treehouses. True, she did not have a bird to let the ladder down for her, or to hide the line that pulled it up, but she had magic. Not much, but she was learning to use every bit of what she had, and use it cleverly. A bit of magic could take the end of such a ladder up, and drop it down again when she returned.

So many trips up and down that stone had taught her where all the holds were, and now she didn’t even need to think about where she was putting her hands and feet. This was the most vulnerable moment in her day—this, and the opposite trip in the morning. There was a staircase up the inside of the tower, but although it looked sound, appearance was very deceptive. It was, in fact, one more of her traps and defenses, and anyone chancing it would find himself taking a two- or three-story drop to the ground, depending on how far he got before the weakened stone gave way beneath him.

But then, she privately thought that anyone trusting his weight to an unproven stair—in a ruined tower, no less—probably deserved what he found.

Her mind wandered off on its own, planning lightweight ladders and imagining what she might use to make them, discarding idea after idea. She came to the conclusion that she might be trying to make things a little too elaborate; after all, by virtue of her breeding she was a much better climber than the best of the Tayledras. A simple, knotted rope might serve her better.

At that point, her hand encountered the open space of her window, and she grasped the sill with both hands, and hauled herself up and over the stone slab. She swung her legs inside and dropped down to the floor, crouching there for a moment. She took the pheasant out of her mouth and grinned, as her teacher and weapon growled in her mind :I hate it when you do that. You look like a cat that’s just caught someone’s pet bird.:

“But it is not a pet bird, Need,” she replied pertly. “It is my dinner.”

:So is the pet bird for the cat,: the sword said, :But nobody ever asks the bird how it feels about the situation.:

She sat down cross-legged on the bare stone of the floor, and began industriously plucking her catch. “If it gets caught, it deserves to get eaten,” she told the sword.

:You stole that from the Hawkbrothers.: Need accused.

She shrugged. “So? That does not make it less true. And like all Hawkbrother sayings, it is double-edged. If it gets caught, it deserves to be eaten—to be appreciated, used entirely and with respect, and not robbed of something stupid, like a tail-feather, and discarded as useless. I honor my kill, and I am grateful that I caught it. If it has a soul, I hope that soul finds a welcome reward.”

Need had nothing to say in reply to that. Nyara smiled, knowing that “no comment” was usually a compliment of sorts.

She put the best of the feathers aside; the large, well-formed ones she would use to fletch arrows, the rest would go to stuff her carefully-tanned rabbit hides. Need had been teaching her a great deal; she had come to this tower with nothing but a knife she had filched from Skif and the sword. Now she had clothing made from the hides of animals she had caught; a bed of furs from the same source, with pillows of fur stuffed with feathers on a thick pallet of cured grasses. And that was not all; over in the corner were the bow and arrows Need had taught her to make and was teaching her to use. Need had already taught her the skills of the sling she had used to take this pheasant.

The sword had also unbent enough to conjure—or steal by magic—a few other things for her, things she couldn’t make herself. Not many, but they were important possessions; a firestarter, four pots, three waterskins and a bucket, one spoon, a second knife, and a coil of rope. The latter was precious and irreplaceable; she had used it only to haul heavy game and her water up the side of her tower.

:Are you going to eat that raw?: Need demanded. She licked her lips thoughtfully; she was very hungry and had been considering doing just that. But the way the question had been phrased—and the fact that her teacher had asked the question at all—made her pause.

“Why?” she asked. “Is there something wrong with that?”

If the sword could have moved, it would have shrugged. :Not intrinsically,: Need replied. :But it gives the impression that you are more beast than human. That is not the impression we are trying to give.:

Nyara did not trouble to ask just who would be there to observe her. True, there was no one except herself and her mentor at the moment, but she sensed that Need did not intend either of them to be hidden away in the wilderness forever.

She doesn’t want me to seem more beast than human. Need had been trying to reverse the physical changes Nyara’s father had made to her; now she had an inkling of why. Need wanted to make her look…

Less like an animal. Perhaps she should have been offended when that thought occurred to her, and she was, in a way, but rather than making her angry with Need, it made her angry at her father. He was the one who had made so many changes to her body and mind that Need had been incoherent with rage for days upon discovering them. He was the “father” that had made her into a warped slave, completely in thrall to him, often unable even to act in her own defense.

Need had done her best to reverse those changes; some she had, but they were all internal. There was no mistaking her origin; the slitted eyes alone shouted “Changechild.”

If the world saw a beast—the world would kill the beast. It was not fair, but very little in Nyara’s life had ever been fair. At least this was understandable. Predictable.

Mornelithe Falconsbane had never been that, ever.

No one was here to see her now except Need, but when she finished plucking the pheasant, instead of tearing off a limb and devouring it raw as her stomach demanded, she gutted and cleaned it as neatly as any Tayledras hunter or hertasi cook, and set it aside.

She tried not to think about how loud her stomach was complaining as she uncovered the coals in her firepit and fed them twigs until she had a real flame. Once she had a fire, she spitted her catch, and made a token effort to sear it.

Once the outer skin had been crisped, she lost all patience; she seized the spit and the bird, and began gnawing.

Need made an odd little mental sound, and Nyara had the impression that she had winced, but the sword said nothing, and Nyara ignored her in favor of satisfying her hunger.

But when she had finished, sucking each bone clean and neatly licking her fingers dry, the blade sighed. :Tell me how the hunt went,: she said. :And show me.:

“I saw the cock-pheasant break cover beside the stream,” she said, picturing it clearly, as she had been taught. “I knew that the flock would be somewhere behind him…”

The stalk had taken some time, but the end of the hunt came as swiftly as even Need could have wanted. She had lost only one of her carefully rounded shot, which splintered on a rock, and took one of the juvenile males with the second. She felt rather proud of herself, actually, for Need was no longer guiding her movements in hunting, or even offering advice. Although the blade could still follow her mentally if she chose, it was no longer necessary for her to be in physical contact with her bearer to remain in mental contact.

When Nyara had fled from the Tayledras as well as her father, she had no clear notion of where she was going or what she would do. She had only known that too many things were happening at once, and too many people wanted her. Their reasons ran from well-intentioned to darkly sinister, and she had no real way of telling which from which. So she ran, and only after she had slipped out of Darkwind’s ken had she discovered herself in possession of Elspeth’s sword. She honestly had no memory of taking it; the blade later confessed to having influenced her to bear it off, making her forget she had done so.

At first she had been angry and afraid, expecting pursuit; the blade was valuable enough that her father had wanted it very badly. But pursuit never came, and she realized that Elspeth was actually going to relinquish the blade to her. Such unexpected generosity left her puzzled. It would not be the last time that she was to be confused over matters in which Need was involved.

Nyara had found the tower after a great deal of searching for a defensible lair. Need had rebuilt the upper story with her magic, strengthening it and making it habitable. It still looked deserted, and both of them had been very careful to leave no signs of occupancy. Any refuse was taken up to the flat roof and left there; vultures carried off bones and anything else edible, and the rest was bleached by the sun and weathered by wind and rain. Eventually the wind would carry it away, and it would be scattered below with the dead leaves.

:You’re doing well,: the sword said, finally. :Even if you do eat like a barbarian. I don’t suppose table deportment is going to matter anytime soon, though.:

Nyara was silent for a moment; now that her stomach was full and the little chamber warmed by the fire, she had leisure to consider the blade’s remarks, and feel a bit of resentment. Nyara appreciated all that Need had done for her, attempting to counter the effects of twenty years of twisting and abuse, teaching her what she needed to survive. Still, sometimes the sword’s thoughtless comments hurt.

“I’m not a barbarian,” she said aloud, a little resentfully. “I’ve seen Darkwind bolt his meals just like I did.”

:Darkwind is fully human. You are not. You are clever, intelligent, resourceful, but you are not human. Therefore you must appear to be better than humans.:

Once again, Nyara was struck by the injustice of the situation, but this time she voiced her protest. “That’s not fair,” she complained. “There’s no reason why I should have to act like some kind of—of trained beast to prove that I’m just as human as anyone else!”

:You were a trained animal, Nyara,: Need replied evenly. :You aren’t any longer. And we both know why.:

Nyara shuddered, but did not reply. Instead, she cleaned up the remains of her meal, saving a few scraps to use as fishing bait on the morrow, and took everything up to the roof. As Need had mentioned, the vultures had been there already; there was little sign of yesterday’s meal.

Although the wind was cold, Nyara lingered to watch the sunset, huddled inside her crude fur tunic with her feet tucked under her. Need was right. She had been little more than a trained animal. Her father had controlled her completely, by such clever use of mingled mind-magic, pain and pleasure that a hint of punishment would throw her into uncontrollable, mindless lust, a state in which she was incapable of thinking.

Need had freed her from that; Need had worked on her for hours, days, spending her magic recklessly in that single area, to heal her and release her from that pain-pleasure bondage. Need had watched the nomad Healer working on the Tayledras Starblade from afar, studying all that the woman did and applying the knowledge to Nyara.

In this much, she was free; she would no longer be subject to animal rut. Although Need had not been able to “cure” her tufted ears, pointed canines, or slit-pupiled eyes, the blade had put her in control of her emotional and physical responses.

Must I really be more than they are to be accepted as an equal? Nothing less would do, according to Need, and as she watched the stars emerge, she came to the reluctant conclusion that the blade was right. She had to be accepted as at least an equal to claim alliance with the Hawkbrothers. She needed them, and knew it, although they did not yet know how much they needed her. She had information that would be very useful to them, even if some of it was information they might have to get at using Need’s mind-probing tactics. She would gladly submit to that, to have their protection.

But to earn that, did she have to give up what she was, to take on some kind of mask of what they considered civilized? That simply wasn’t fair, not after everything she had already been through! What Falconsbane had done—she didn’t want to think about. And under Need’s tutelage, she had not only undergone the pain that preceded Healing, but nightly—and sometimes daily—vision-quests. She had to admit there was one positive result of that; her real dreams were no longer haunted, and her nightmares had vanished completely. The sword was as hard a teacher as she could have imagined, driving her without allowance for weakness. Not only did she take Nyara through trials in her dreams, and teach her the skills that helped her survive on her own, but she launched Nyara like an arrow against whatever target she deemed suitable, giving her lessons in real combat as well as practice. Nyara had already defeated a wandering bandit and a half-mad hedge-wizard. Both had been left for the vultures when they had seen only a female alone, and attempted to take her. In both cases, Need had ultimately taken command of her body, as soon as she reckoned that Nyara had gone to the very edge of her abilities, and moved her with a skill she did not, herself, possess. There would, doubtless, be more such in the future. So why must she prove that she was something other than she was to be accepted?

No, she decided as she watched the moon rise above the horizon. It was not fair. Need wanted too much of her.

She descended to her tower-top chamber only to find the fire burning down to coals and the sword silent. She watched it for a moment, then shrugged philosophically and heated just enough water for a sketchy sort of bath. One advantage of her breeding, besides her owl-keen nightsight, was that the pelt of very short, very fine fur that covered her body made bathing less of a chore than it was for full humans. And one had to be very, very close to her to learn that it was fur, and not just smooth skin. She wasn’t entirely certain that either Skif or Darkwind had figured it out. Well—perhaps Skif had. He hadn’t seemed to mind.

Morning would arrive far too early. Although she intended to fish and not hunt, it would still be better to do so in the early morning when the fish were hungry. So as soon as she had cleaned herself, she banked the fire, and crawled into her bed of furs.

Only then did Need speak, just as she was falling asleep.

:Let’s explore that business of “fair,”: the sword said, with deceptive mildness. :Shall we?:

* * *

Nyara was no longer Nyara; no longer a Changechild. In fact, she was no longer in the world or the body she knew.

Except that she was Nyara; she was herself and someone else, too. She relaxed; this was something she had experienced in Need’s dream-quests many times, although this was someone she’d never been before. Then she realized that this was different; strange, in a way she could not quite describe. This life—was ancient, heavy with years, and faded. She felt the experience as if through a series of muffling veils, each of which was a century.

Her name was Vena; she was once a novice of the Sisterhood of Spell and Sword. Now she was alone, except for the sword that had once been her teacher, the Mage-Smith Sister Lashan—and ahead of her was an impossible task.

A mage that Lashan identified as Wizard Heshain had come to the enclave of the Sisterhood with an army of men and lesser mages, capturing the Sisterhood’s mage-novices and slaughtering everyone else. Vena had escaped mostly by luck, and by hiding in the forest surrounding the enclave until they all left. She had thought she was completely alone until Sister Lashan had come riding up, returning from her yearly trip to the trade-markets where she sold her bespelled blades to weapons’ brokers to profit the Sisterhood.

When she saw her teacher, she’d had no thought but to escape with her to somewhere safe. But Lashan had other ideas.

She had questioned Vena very carefully, probing past the girl’s hysteria to extract every possible detail from her. Then she had sat in silence for a long, long time.

Her decision had not been the one that Vena had expected; to make their way to some other temple of the Twins, and seek shelter there, since it was plainly impossible for anyone to rescue the captured novices from such a powerful mage-lord. Sister Lashan had told her stunned apprentice that they—the two of them—were going to rescue their captive Sisters. She admitted that she did not know what he planned to do with the novices exactly—mostly because there were so many things he could do with a collection of variously mage-talented, untrained, mostly virginal young women. But all of the fates she outlined to her apprentice were horrible. Eventually, even Vena had to agree. They could not leave their Sisters in Heshain’s hands.

Rescue was possible. Especially if rescue could come before the caravan reached Heshain’s stronghold. But there was no time to gather another small army to rescue them, assuming that anyone could be found willing to commit themselves and their troops against a mage like Heshain.

That had left only Vena and Sister Lashan, who had decided, unbeknownst to her bewildered apprentice, that her old, worn-out human body was just not going to be up to the task. So instead, she had chosen a new one; a body of tempered steel. A sword, to be precise; a bespelled blade, the kind she had been teaching Vena to make.

Vena was still not certain how Sister Lashan, who had ordered her to forget that name and call her “Need” now, had ensorceled herself into the blade. She wasn’t certain that she wanted to know. It had certainly involved the death of the mage herself, for she had found the Sister spitted on her own sword. She had thought that despair had overcome her mentor, and had been overwhelmed with grief—when the sword spoke into her mind.

Now she was on the trail of Heshain and his minions, armed with a blade she scarcely knew how to use, ill-provisioned, and without the faintest idea of what she was doing. And winter was coming on. In fact, since the trail led northward, she would be walking straight into the very teeth of winter.

But if she did not try to do something, no one would. She had no choice.

No choice at all.

All this, she knew in an instant, as if she had always known it. And then, she was no longer aware of Nyara—only of Vena. Only of a moment that was dim and distant, and yet, now.

* * *

Vena crouched above the road, belly-down in the snow, and tried to think of nothing. There was no sign that Heshain had any Thought-seekers among his men—but no sign that he didn’t, either. Despite her wool and fur-lined clothing, she was aching with cold. It had been a very long time since she’d last dared to light a fire, and she couldn’t remember when she’d last been warm.

She was hungry, too. The handful of nuts and dried berries she’d eaten had only sharpened her appetite. And down below her was everything she craved. Shelter, a roaring fire, hot food—

Trouble was, it was all in the hands of the enemy.

And the enemy wasn’t likely to share.

She Felt Sister Lashan—or rather, Need—studying the situation through her eyes. She wasn’t certain how Need felt about it, but it looked pretty hopeless from here. The group that had captured the novices seemed to have divided up. This was the hindmost bunch, and the girls they guarded seemed to be the ones in the worst shape. Most were in deep shock; some were comatose, and carried on wagons. The rest hardly seemed aware of their surroundings. None of them were going to be of any help at all—at least, not until Vena could physically get Need into their hands, for contact-Healing was one of Need’s abilities. But that could only happen after they were rescued, and not before.

So just how was one half-trained Mage-Smith apprentice going to successfully take on twenty or more well-trained fighters?

:Cleverly, of course,: Need’s voice grated in her mind.

:There are twenty or more tired, bored, careless males down there. What do you think would distract them the most?:

“Women?” she whispered tentatively, thinking of conjuring an illusion of scantily clad girls, and getting into the camp under the cover of the excitement. But then what? The illusion wouldn’t hold past the first attempt to touch one of the girls, unless Need could somehow make it more than mere illusion—

Her teacher made a mental sound of contempt. :And a troupe of dancing girls rides up out of nowhere. I don’t think so, dear. These are also seasoned fighters; they’re suspicious of anything and everything. Try to think like one of them. Look at their camp; what are they doing?:

As if she hadn’t been doing just that, ever since they cleared a space for the first tent, and freezing her rear off too. “They’re eating,” she offered tentatively.

:Closer. What are they eating?:

Vena’s mouth watered as she stared down at the fire. “Looks like winter-rations. Beans and bread, I think.” Oh, she would gladly have killed for some of those hot spiced beans and a piece of bread.…“I don’t see—”

:Meat, Vena. They don’t have any. They’re on winter-rations, and they haven’t been allowed time to hunt, so they don’t have any meat. And these are fighters; they’re used to having it. They don’t seem to have any wine, either, but I can’t think of a way to get that to them without making them suspicious of their good fortune. Back down the ridge, slowly. I’m going to try calling in an elk. I used to be good at this.:

* * *

In the end, it was a deer Need managed to attract, and not an elk, but in all other ways it was precisely what she wanted. Old, with broken antlers, already looking thin this early in the winter, the aged animal would not have outlasted the snows. Vena followed her directions carefully, as they poisoned the poor beast by means of counter-Healing, hamstrung one leg, as if it had just escaped from a wolf, and drove it over the ridge and down into the enemy camp.

The men there fell on the weakened beast, seeing only their good luck, and never thinking that there might be something wrong with it other than exhaustion and injury. The toxin Need had infused into the deer’s blood and flesh was only slightly weakened by cooking. A clever poison, there was little or no warning to the victims of their fate; most ate, fell asleep, and never woke. By daybreak, all twenty men were dead or dying—and Vena came down into the camp to dispatch the dying, and found herself in charge of eleven of her fellow novices.

Not one of whom could be trusted even to look after the others, much less find her own way back to safety.

Confidently, she turned to Need for advice.

:Damned if I know what to do with them,: the blade replied. :I can Heal their injuries, but the rest is up to you. Demonsbane, girl, I only made blades before I made myself into one! You’re the one with the hands and feet, and they know you, they probably never even met me! I’m fresh out of clever ideas. Time for you to come up with one or two.:

So it was up to Vena to deal with the girls; to try to rouse some of them from their apathy, and to figure out what to do with the rest. And to drag the bodies of the poisoned fighters out of the camp, to get her eleven charges fed and sheltered, to make sure the horses were tended to.

It was nothing less than hard labor, although she gave herself a selfish moment to build the fire back up, and warm herself by that fire until her bones no longer ached. Then she took a little more time to stuff herself on the bread and oat porridge (not beans, after all) that was cooking over the fire—avoiding the charred venison and the pot of venison stew.

She freed the novices from their cages in the four prison wagons, but most of them didn’t recognize her, and the ones that did reacted to her as if they’d seen a ghost—terrified and huddling speechless in the corners. She tried not to look too closely at them after the first encounter; the girl wasn’t one she had known, but her eyes were so wild, and yet so terrified, that she hardly seemed human anymore.

She led the girl, coaxingly, away from there, across the snow, and into the only wagon without bars and chains; the one that held the provisions. When she offered the girl a blanket, taken as an afterthought from one of the bedrolls beside the fire, the poor child snatched it from her, and went to hide in the darkest corner of the wagon.

She repeated the process until she got them all herded into the wagon, where they huddled together like terrified rabbits, their eyes glinting round and panic-stricken from the darkness of the back.

During the long process of getting her former fellow students into the provision wagon, she’d tossed out everything else that had been in there. Now, in the last of the daylight, she sat on a sack of beans and went through everything she had thrown on the ground, and all the personal belongings that were still in the camp. She felt very strange, rifling through other peoples’ possessions, at least at first. But soon sheer exhaustion caught up with her and she no longer saw them as anything other than objects to be kept or discarded in the snow. Blankets went straight into the wagon behind her; hopefully, the girls still had enough wit left to take them. The best blankets she kept for herself, as well as enough food for the girls for a few days more, and in a separate pack, provisions for herself.

Finally, the unpleasant job she had been avoiding could be put off no longer. She tethered all the horses next to the wagon, then harnessed up one, the gentlest, the one she had marked for her own. Trying not to look at the bodies of her former enemies, she threw a hitch of rope around their stiffening feet, and towed them one by one to a point far beyond the camp, leaving them scattered around a tiny cup of a valley like dolls left by a careless child.

Then she returned to the shelter of the wagon, and the non-company of her charges. All of that work had taken another precious day. She got the girls fed and bundled up in blankets as best she could, spending a sleepless night listening to the screams of scavengers when they found the bodies, and making sure none of the eleven wandered off somewhere on her own. It was, possibly, worse even than the nights she had spent waiting for the raiders to return.

In the end, it was the horses that gave her the idea of how to move them, and what to do afterward. Vena was a country girl; where she came from, a horse was a decent dowry for any girl. A pair of horses apiece ought to be enough to pay for their care until someone could come get them, later.

She roused six of the girls to enough self-awareness and energy that they could cling to the saddle-bow of a horse—even if half the time they stared in apathy, and the other half, wept without ceasing. The other five she put in one wagon, with the rest of the horses following behind, tethered in a long string. Then she coaxed Need into using her magic to find the nearest farm. It proved to be a sheep-farmer’s holding rather than a true farm; hidden away in a tiny pocket-valley, she would never have found it if not for Need.

To the landowner she told the truth—but cautioned him to tell any other inquirers a tale she and Need concocted, about a plague that caused death and feeble-mindedness, killing all the men of a village where she had relatives, and leaving only the healthiest of the girls alive. She offered him the entire herd of horses (save only the one she had chosen for herself) to tend to the novices. Her only other condition was that as soon as possible he was to send a message to the nearest temple of the Twins, telling what had happened and asking for their aid for the girls.

As she had expected, the offer was more than he could possibly refuse, and when Need read his thoughts to be certain he would keep the bargain, she found no dishonesty. Winter was an idle time for farmers and herders; he had a houseful of daughters and servants to help tend the girls. And sons to find wives for… it would be no bad thing to have a mage-talented girl for a bride for one of his boys. Such things tended to breed true even if shock made the girl lose her own talent, and a man could do much worse than have a wife who could work bits of magic to help protect herself and her home, and to enrich the family, if she was able to keep practicing. Hedge-wizardry and kitchen-witchery was easy to learn; it was having the power to make it work that was granted to only a few.

She agreed on their behalf that if any of them chose to stay with him and his boys, there would be no demands for reparations from the Sisterhood. Then she saddled and mounted her horse, and turned back to the hunt.

They were now weeks, not days, behind the enemy, but he was burdened with wagons and hysterical girls, and Vena was alone, and now a-horse. As she turned her mare’s head back along the trail, Need finally spoke.

:Demonsbane, girl! Why didn’t you put that fatuous sheep-brain in his place? Brides for his sons—what did he think you were, some kind of marriage-broker? And where did he ever get the idea any of them would want to live out their lives making hero-charms and tending brats and lambs?: The sword grumbled on, for a while, and Vena let her. The novice had plenty of other things to think about; most notably, finding the now-cold trail of the rest of the captives. It wasn’t easy, not with two weeks’ worth of wind and weather eating at the signs.

But she had the right gear for the job, at last. Sheepskin boots and coat, woolen leggings, sweater and cotton undertunic. And all the provisions and equipment she needed.

Or at least, all that she needed until the next encounter.

But she told herself she wasn’t going to think about that until it happened.

Finally she found the track, half-melted prints of hooves and wagon-wheels in the snow, and Need finally finished venting her spleen.

Vena waited for a moment, both to be sure she had the trail and to be certain Need was talked out. “Look,” she pointed out, “after everything those girls have been through, one or more of them are bound to change their minds about a life dedicated to High Magery and the Sisterhood. That farmer was trustworthy and kindhearted; not a bad thing in a father-in-law. And the boys were a little rough around the edges, but no worse than the lads in my home village. You and I can never give back what those girls—our Sisters—have lost, but we can at least give them options.”

Need stayed silent for a moment. :You could be right,: she finally said, grudgingly. :I don’t like it, but you could be right.:

Vena decided not to tell her that she was having second thoughts, herself… she doubted she’d survive long enough to consider being a farmer’s wife. Right now, despite this early success, she wasn’t going to give herself odds on that.

* * *

Nyara woke with the sun in her eyes, and for a moment, her arms and legs still ached with that long-ago cold; her hands expected to encounter those heavy blankets instead of furs, and she was exhausted with a phantom weariness that vanished as soon as she realized who she was, and where.

Phantom weariness was replaced by real weariness. She lay where she was for a moment, despite her resolution of the night before to get up early to fish. Dream-quests did not, as a rule, leave her tired. Nor did they leave her feeling a weight of years…

:That’s because I never took you back so far before,: Need said, and it seemed as if the sword was just as tired as her student. :I’ve granted you what I seldom grant my bearers; now you know the name I had forgotten, my name as a human.:

But that wasn’t what mattered to Nyara; suddenly she sat bolt upright and stared at the sword leaning against the wall with a feeling of anger and betrayal. “You didn’t help her!” she accused. “You didn’t help her at all!”

:I did what I could,: the blade replied, calmly. :I was new to my form and my limitations. I had as much to learn as she did, but I didn’t dare let her know that, or her confidence would have been badly undermined. I’ve had a long, long time to learn more of magic, Nyara. I didn’t know a fraction then of what I know now.:

Nyara stared at the sword propped in the corner, aghast. “You mean—you did not know what you were doing?”

:Oh, I knew what I was doing. I was herding us both into trouble. But what else was I going to do? There were all those youngsters in danger, and if Vena and I didn’t do something about it, nobody would.:

Nyara blinked, and started to say, “But that’s not f—”

:Fair? No, it wasn’t. Not to Vena, not to me, and certainly not to the novices.: The blade’s matter-of-fact attitude took Nyara aback.

She climbed out of her bed of furs as her thoughts circled around something she could not yet grasp. Need was not cruel—not on purpose, at any rate. She was driven by expediency, and by a dedication to the longer view. But she wasn’t cruel…

So what was she trying to say?

She had sacrificed herself for the bare chance of saving the novices through Vena. The girl herself had done the same. And it was all so unf—

It was unfair. But so was what Father did to me, what he did to the Hawkbrothers, what happened to the gryphons…

Life was unfair. She knew that, and so did Need. But she’d been complaining about that unfairness a great deal lately.

:Very good, kitten,: Need said in her mind. :You’ve figured that part out. I find it a wonder that you can even grasp “unfairness,” knowing so little else in your life besides it. I am still working on that; it seems inconsistent with what your thrice-damned father taught you. Know this, though: oftentimes the concept of fairness can be a wall to accomplishing what must be done. Worrying over fairness can sometimes impede justice, and that in itself is not fair.:

Nyara nodded, as more awareness of Need’s teaching came to her.

:Now let me show you what real unfairness is…:

* * *

Vena clung with her fingers and toes to the side of the cliff, and prayed that Heshain’s Thought-seekers would not find her…

7

Darkwind had been struggling for several days now to maintain his dignity, his composure, and above all, the signature Tayledras detachment, and failing dismally. The cause, ever and always, was Elspeth. He wondered if all teachers felt like this, or if he was particularly blessed—or cursed—with a student so intelligent and quick that she threatened to run right over her hapless instructor.

“I can’t keep ahead of her, and sometimes it’s all I can do to fly apace with her,” he confessed to Treyvan, as he helped the gryphon affix a set of shelves onto a wall of an interior room, a bit of work that only small, nimble, human hands could manage. Treyvan and his mate had expanded the original lair quite a bit since things calmed down, reconstructing the original walls of the building that had stood here, then creating several rooms where there had once been only two. Why the gryphon would want shelves, he had no idea—but then, there were a great many things he still didn’t know about the gryphons. For all he knew, they collected hertasi carvings and wanted to display them.

Darkwind hammered on a stake and tied support cords from it. Finished flat boards such as the gryphons had discovered were hard to come by, and he wasn’t going to waste them on wall mounts; he was using a variation on the Tayledras’ ekele construction, that of anchored, co-supporting lines.

“Ssso what iss the trouble?” the gryphon asked genially. “You have had much more tutelage than she, and access to more knowledge.” He lounged in the corner and watched Darkwind with half-lidded golden eyes, not out of laziness, but because he had just eaten, and the gryphons, like the raptors Darkwind knew so well, rested after filling their crops.

“I can’t do everything,” Darkwind admitted, with a touch of annoyance. He shook his hair out of his way, and aligned the support he was working on with the others. “I haven’t actively worked magic in years, and my memory of what to do is a little foggy. My magical skills are—well—as stiff as muscles get if not exercised regularly. And, the Mage-Gift fades if not used.”

“Asss any other attribute,” the gryphon agreed. “Asss in hunting, sswordsskill, or musssic.”

“Well, mine’s creaky with disuse,” Darkwind sighed, “And I can’t re-learn everything I’d forgotten and teach Elspeth, too. It was all right when she didn’t know anything about mage-craft, because I could set her to work on something basic, while I practiced something else. But now—that won’t work anymore.”

The gryphon stopped in the middle of a lazy stretch, and blinked at him, claws still extended, back arched. “Ssshe isss that quick?”

“She’s that quick,” Darkwind told him, setting the last support firmly into the wall. “The problem is that her people have made quite a science of mind-magic, and she’s very good at it. Although she says she isn’t particularly outstanding.” He snorted. “Either it’s the one and only time I’ve caught her being modest, or her people are frightening mind-mages. Good enough to stand equal with an Adept.”

“And in mind-magic there isss enough sssameness to give her a basssisss in true magic,” Treyvan supplied. “Isss there alsso enough sssameness to causse her trouble?”

Darkwind wedged the heavy shelf into the support loops and eyed it critically, ignoring the question for the moment. “How level do these have to be?” he asked. “What are they for?”

“Booksss,” Treyvan replied, completing his stretch. “Jussst booksss, many of them. Ssso long asss they do not fall, it iss level enough.”

Books? Where is he getting books? He sighted along the shelf again. It slanted just a bit, but not enough for most people to notice. Or it just might be the uneven stone floor that gave the illusion that it slanted; it was hard to tell. It would certainly do for books—wherever the gryphons had gotten them. And whatever they planned to do with them. He couldn’t imagine them reading, either—

“Yes,” he admitted, finally. “There is just enough that mind-magic has in common with true magic to make her ask me some really difficult questions and to occasionally get her in trouble. And that’s the problem—if she’s asking me questions, I’m distracted from polishing my own skills. And when she gets into trouble, it’s sometimes difficult to get her out again, because I am, well, rusty. I’ve forgotten most of the specifics. It’s more annoying than anything else at the moment, but it’s going to be dangerous when facing an enemy.”

And how would I explain that to her countrymen? “I’m sorry, but I seem to have let your princess get killed. I hope you have a spare?”

“Can you not asssk anotherrr Adept to train herrr?” the gryphon asked, his crest-feathers erect with interest.

He sighed, put his back to the wall, and slid down it to sit braced against the cool stone. “That’s just the difficulty, you see. I sponsored her as Wingsib; unless I really get into trouble, she’s my problem and my responsibility. We don’t have that many Adepts in the first place, and, frankly, none to spare to teach Elspeth.”

Besides, I can just imagine what would happen if she were to pull one of her impertinent little questions on, say, Iceshadow. And how would I explain that? “I’m sorry, but your princess seems to have gotten a bit singed. Don’t worry, truly, I’m sure everything will grow back as good as new.”

Treyvan scratched meditatively for a moment, then said, “Well, what of me?”

Darkwind frowned, not understanding the gryphon’s question. “What about you?” he asked.

The gryphon coughed, and cocked his head to one side. “It ssseemsss to me that I could train herrr. I am Masssterrr, and my ssskillssss, while not Adept-classs, arrre quite finely honed and in usssse. I am sssurely good enough to ansswer herrr quessstionsss, get her out of tanglesss, and drill you both. Anything I cannot deal with, you can sssurely anssswer, sso long as the child isss not breathing firrre down yourr neck.” His beak gaped in that familiar gryphon grin. “Besssidess, I doubt ssshe will give me asss much backtalk asss sssshe givess you!”

This was the answer to all his problems. He’d known the gryphon was some kind of mage. He’d seen it proven, and levels were largely a matter of power rather than skill, once one reached anywhere near to Master.

“Would you?” he said eagerly. “Would you really do that?”

The gryphon made a chirring sound, something between a snort and a chuckle. “I ssssaid that I would, did I not? Of courssse I will. It will be amusssing to teach a human again.” He eyed Darkwind speculatively. “What isss more, featherrrless sson, I sshall drrrill you asss well. I sshall assk Hydona to help me.”

Darkwind suddenly had the feeling a sparrow must have when caught out in a storm. He could bluff Elspeth when he didn’t know an answer or concoct a spur-of-the-moment fake that would hold until he recalled the real answer. He wouldn’t be able to do that with Treyvan.

And what was more, by the glint in Treyvan’s eye, the gryphon knew he’d been doing exactly that.

On the other hand, he needed the drill badly, and Treyvan was the only one likely to offer. He didn’t like to go to the other mages and beg for their help; many of them were working themselves into the ground, first shielding, then trying to Heal the Heartstone. The rest, now that the rift between mages and non-mages had been dealt with, were often working the borders with the scouts. Thanks to them there were proper patrols and reasonable work shifts, and the scouts were no longer spread so thin that if one of them were ill or injured, it meant a gaping hole in their border coverage. Those holes were how Falconsbane had gotten in and out of their territory at his leisure.

But that meant there was no one Darkwind really wanted to ask to help him re-train. Except Starblade—but there were too many things between Starblade and he that had yet to be resolved. Besides, Starblade had task enough in simply being healed.

“There isss ssomething more about Elssspeth, iss there not?” Treyvan asked. The gryphons’ perceptiveness was a constant source of annoyance for Darkwind. It was impossible to be self-indulgent around them. “You have feelingsss beyond the ssstrictly necesssarrry. Sssomething—hmm—perrsssonal?”

He flushed. “Not really,” he replied, more stiffly than he would have liked. “I’m attracted to her, of course. But that would happen with any beautiful young woman that became my pupil. It’s a natural occurrence in the student-teacher relationship, when both student and teacher are young, and their ages are close.” He winced at saying that; he’d sounded pompous, and he’d come perilously close to babbling. But better that than have Treyvan think there was more between them.

“Of coursse,” Treyvan said blandly. Too blandly. He could hardly take exception to that. He could suspect that Treyvan was teasing him, but he could prove nothing—which was, of course, exactly what Treyvan wanted. So long as Darkwind couldn’t prove a real insult, the gryphon could tease all he wanted.

Crazy gryphon. Treyvan and his sense of humor, he thought sourly. He’d laugh at his own funeral.

“Anyway,” he continued, as if Treyvan had said nothing at all, “with you drilling her, that won’t come up. I will be too busy with my learning, as will she, and I sincerely doubt she will have any interest in you as a… uhm… I wouldn’t worry about it, if I were you.”

“Oh,” Treyvan replied, a definite twinkle in his eyes, “I won’t.”

Darkwind gritted his teeth; Treyvan was trying to annoy him, and there was no point in letting the gryphon know he was succeeding. That would only encourage him.

And after all, Treyvan had put up with plenty of harassment from Darkwind’s bondbird, Vree. The forestgyre had a fascination for Treyvan’s crest-feathers, and attempted to snatch them any time he had the chance, no matter how often or forcefully Darkwind warned him off. Sometimes, much to Treyvan’s discomfort, he succeeded in getting a claw on them, too. Once when Treyvan was in molt, he’d even managed to steal one.

I suppose I can put up with a little teasing. Unlike Vree, Treyvan is at least not snatching at body parts in his joking.

But he would rather that Treyvan had chosen another subject for the teasing besides his feelings toward Elspeth…

* * *

Hydona hissed and clacked her beak to get Elspeth’s attention; Darkwind ignored her, for he had learned that Treyvan would use any moment of distraction to send lances of carefully tempered power at the Hawkbrother’s shields. And Treyvan was watching him very carefully without seeming to; the advantage of the placement of the eyes on gryphon heads. They had excellent peripheral vision; a full three-quarters of a circle, and sharper than Darkwind could believe.

Despite Treyvan’s comment about asking his mate, Darkwind had not expected that both gryphons would show up to tutor them. But when he and Elspeth traveled across the pass-through to the Practice Ground, four wings, not two, lifted to greet them.

“Hydona hass more patience than I,” Treyvan had said jovially. “And ssshe hasss taught morrre than I. Ssshe thought ssshe might be a better teacherr for Elssspeth.” His eyes glinted. “That leavesss me morre time to tutorr you.”

Hydona trilled. “Tutorr orr torturrre?”

“What about the young ones?” Darkwind had asked, worriedly, trying to ignore Hydona’s remark. “The Heartstone still isn’t safe for little ones to be near, even with all the shielding we’ve put on it.”

“They are at the lair,” Treyvan had replied. “The evening of the celebrrration had an unexpected outcome. The kyree, Torrl, hasss decided to ssstay with usss to aid yourr folk in ssscouting, and hisss young cousin, Rris, arrrrived yesssterday to join him. Rris watches the younglingsss. He ssays he isss glad to do ssso.” Treyvan grinned hugely. “It ssseemss that we are sssuch thingss of legend that it isss worrth it to him to be the brrrunt of the younglingsss’ gamesss to be nearrr usss.”

Darkwind could only shake his head. The kyree were large, yes, but by no means the size of a half-grown gryphlet. Lytha and Jerven could bowl him over without even thinking about it; they would certainly give that poor kyree plenty of reasons to regret his offer.

I can just imagine the games they’ll get up to. Pounce and Chase, Scream and Leap, Who-Can-Send-Rris-Rump-Over-Tail…

Unless, of course, Rris was very agile—or very clever. If the former, he could probably dodge the worst of their rough-and-tumble games, and if the latter, he could think of ways to keep them out of mischief without getting flattened.

“I hope this Rris has a great deal of patience, my friend,” was all he had said. “Your offspring are likely to think he’s some kind of living tumble-toy.” Treyvan had only laughed. “Think on Torrl,” he had replied. “Young Rrisss isss asss clever asss hisss cousin, and verrry good, I am told, with younglingsss. All will be well.”

Then Darkwind had no more time to worry about the well-being of the brave young kyree who had taken on the task of tending Jerven and Lytha, for their father launched him straight into a course of practice aimed at bringing him up to full and functional Adept status in the shortest possible period of time. It was aggressive, and Treyvan proved to be a merciless teacher.

Interestingly enough, he proceeded very differently from the way that Darkwind had initially been taught. In his years of learning before, he had mastered the basics of manipulating energies and shielding, then learned the offensive magics, then the defensive. But the first thing that Treyvan drilled him in were the Master-level defensive skills.

As now; he was constructing a structure of shields, onionlike in their layering, while Treyvan watched for any sign of weakness in them and attacked at that point. The object was to produce as many different kinds of shields as possible, so that an enemy who might not know every kind of shield a Tayledras could produce would be defeated by one, perhaps the third, fourth, or fifth.

The outermost was not so much shield as misdirection; it bent the mental eye away from the wearer and refracted the distinct magical image of the mage into resembling his surroundings, as if there was no one there. Beneath that was a shield that deflected energy, and beneath that, one that countered it. Yet deeper was one that absorbed energy and transmuted it, passing it to the shield beneath it, which simply resisted, like a wall of stone, and reflected the incoming energy back out through the previous layer. It was the transmutational shield that was giving Darkwind trouble. It would absorb Treyvan’s attacks, right enough, but it wasn’t transmuting the energy-lances into anything he could use.

“Hold,” Treyvan said, finally, as Hydona lectured Elspeth on the need to establish a shield and a grounding point first, before reaching for node-energy. He had been trying to get that through her head for the past two days; finally, with someone else telling her exactly the same thing, it looked as if she was going to believe that he was right.

No, she’s going to believe the information was right, he chided himself. That’s what’s important, not the source of the information. If hearing it from Hydona is what it takes, then fine, so long as she learns it now and not the hard way—

No one in k’Sheyna had ever learned that lesson “the hard way,” not within living memory, but there were tales of a mage of k’Vala who had seized a node without first establishing a grounding point, and discovered that the node was rogue. Nodes could go feral, flaring and dying unpredictably, without the stabilizing focus of a Heartstone. The node he seized had done just that; it flared, and with no ground point to hold him and shunt the excess away and no shield to shelter him, he had burned up on the spot, becoming a human torch that burned for days—or so the tales said.

In fact, it had probably happened so fast that the mage had no notion of what had gone wrong. But whether the tales were true or not, it was still a horrible way to die.

Maybe all she needed was for it to be a female that taught her, he thought, watching as her grave eyes darkened and lightened according to her mood. Her weapons teacher, the Tale’sedrin-kin that she worships so, is a female; and so is her oldest friend. And her Companion is female. Maybe she just responds better to female teachers.

A reasonable thought—

Thwap!

A mental slap across the side of his head woke him to the fact that he was supposed to be working, not woolgathering. Once again, Treyvan had taken advantage of the fact that his attention had wandered to deliver a stinging reminder of what he was supposed to be doing.

Damn you, gryphon. That hurt.

With his “ears” still ringing, he turned his attention back to his teacher, whose twitching tail betrayed his impatience.

“If you do not pay heed, I ssshall do more than ssswat you, Darrrkwind,” Treyvan warned him. “That isss the third time today your thoughtsss have gone drrrifting.”

He grunted an assent, without mentioning that each time Elspeth had been the cause of his wit-wandering. He needn’t have bothered. Treyvan brought it up on his own.

“Can you not worrrk about a young female without having yourrr mind drrift?” he asked acidly. “Humanss! Alwaysss in sseasson!”

Darkwind felt his neck and ears heat up as he flushed. “That’s not it,” he protested. Treyvan cut his protests short.

“It mattersss not,” the gryphon growled. “Now watch thiss time. Thisss is how the transsssmutation ssshould look to you. Crreate the texturrre sso, pussh it frrrom you asss if rrreleasssing a brreath. Halt it herrre frrom yourr body.”

Darkwind blotted everything out of his mind except the sense of the power-flows, and the magic that the gryphon manipulated. As Treyvan built the proper shield, step by slow, tiny step, Darkwind finally saw what he had forgotten.

Treyvan had woven a complex texture into the shield, in one area directing power only in, and in another place filtering it out, giving him two power flows—one from himself, the other ready to take in energy directed at him by an enemy, and transmute it. That was the problem; he’d only allowed for the single power-flow from himself. The energy coming in from outside took over the field that was supposed to channel power from himself into the first shield. Back-pressure, as in a wellspring, with only the inevitable leaks to relieve that pressure. Once there, since it wasn’t shield-energy, it eddied or stood idle—or worse, waited to react with another “color” of magic—in all cases, more than frustrating. Potentially deadly, in fact. It never reached the transmutational part of the working, so it never channeled to the last shield.

Mentally cursing himself, he rebuilt his shields; this time the transmutational shield worked correctly, giving him two shields for the personal-energy cost of one. At least for as long as the enemy chose to sling spellweapons at him.

“Now, you know how thisss ssshield can be countered, yess?” Treyvan asked, when the shields had been tested and met with his approval.

“Two ways—well, three, if you count just blasting away with more energy than the shunt can handle,” Darkwind replied. “The first is to find the shunt—where he’s grounded—and use it to drain energy out of the shield—hooking into it yourself, and taking the energy back. If that happens, the shield starts draining the mage that’s holding it. If you do that fast enough, all his shields will collapse before he can react.”

Treyvan’s crest-feathers rose with approval. “And?”

“Attack where the mage isn’t expecting it,” he said. “That can be one of two things—attacking through the shunt, which is structurally the weakest part of the shield, or attacking with something else entirely.” He thought for a moment. “At this point, if I were the attacker, I’d go for something completely unexpected. Like… a physical attack. Send Vree in to harass him. Toss an illusion at him. Demonsbane—throw a rock at him to make him lose his concentration!”

Treyvan laughed. “Good. Now—could you have done what the sssword Need did? Could you now transssmute the energy of an attack and sssplit it?”

He thought about that for a moment; thought about exactly what the sword had done. “Yes,” he said finally. “But only by doing what she did—holding no shields at all between the attack and the transmutation-layer. That might work for a thing made of metal and magic, but it would be pretty foolhardy for a flesh-and-blood creature.”

Treyvan nodded. “Neverrrthelesss,” he said, pointing a talon at Darkwind, “it did worrk. And ssso long asss Falconsssbane kept launching magical attackss against herr, it continued to worrrk. Only if he had ssseen what ssshe wass doing and launched a physical attack, or ssome otherr type of magic, would he have failed. He ssufferrred frrrom sshort sssight.”

Darkwind countered that statement with one of his own. “We were lucky,” he said flatly. “Falconsbane was overconfident, and we were damned lucky. I have the feeling that if he’d had the time to plan and come in force, he could have taken us, all the Shin’a’in, and maybe even their Goddess on, and won.”

Treyvan hissed softly. “Your thoughtsss marrch with mine, featherlesss ssson,” he said, after a pause. “And it isss in my mind that we ssshall not alwayss be ssso lucky.”

“In mine, too.” Darkwind nodded toward Elspeth, and tried to lighten the mood. “For one thing, that woman seems to attract trouble.” The gryphon’s beak snapped shut, and he nodded. “Yesss, sshe doess. Sshe hass attracted you, forr one. Ssso, let usss sssee if you can conssstruct thossse ssshields corrrectly a ssecond time—and thisss time, hold them againssst me.”

* * *

Elspeth paid careful attention to every hissed word Hydona spoke, finding it unexpectedly easy to ignore the fact that her teacher was a creature larger than the biggest horse she had ever seen, with a beak powerful enough to snap her arm off at a single bite. Even with a motivation to pay attention such as that, the gryphon already made more sense than Darkwind did. Neither she nor the gryphons were native speakers of the Tayledras tongue; Hydona was being very careful about phrasing things in unambiguous terms that Darkwind likely thought were intuitively obvious.

Another case for being careful about what you assume in translation. Interesting. That is a consideration I would expect of a Court-trained person, not a creature like Hydona.

Hydona related everything she taught Elspeth to the mind-magic Elspeth already knew. That made a lot more sense than Darkwind’s convoluted explanations of power-flows and energy-fluxes. They seemed clear to him, apparently, and seemed to make sense, except when he tried to fake; she had seen bluffs in enough Court functions to recognize the signs.

Hydona clearly detailed making an anchor point and shielding, for instance; that was a lot like grounding and centering, and was done for many of the same reasons. When put that way, Elspeth stopped subconsciously resisting the idea of having to effectively double-shield, once against mental intrusions and once against magical attacks. The other thing that made sense was that Hydona had pointed out the sword Need had done all that for her; the sword was in itself a permanent anchor point, radiating a seemingly ungraspable power into the earth, forever acting as a ground for the bearer it was bonded to. Need had shields on it that Hydona doubted were under conscious control anymore—if they ever had been. She seemed to think that they hadn’t been; that they were some part of the sword itself, before the spirit came to reside in it.

So that was how Elspeth had managed to work magic without all the preparations the Hawkbrothers and their large friends deemed necessary. The precautions had been taken, they simply hadn’t been taken by her.

And now that Need was no longer in Elspeth’s possession, Elspeth was going to have to learn how to do everything Need had done so that she could manage for herself. With an ironic smile, she thought how easily Need could have become less a sword and more a crutch.

Oh, Need would have forced her to learn it all anyway. The only reason Need had aided her for as long as she had was because they had been in something of an emergency situation. In all probability, Need would have insisted on her learning to fend for herself as soon as there had been some breathing room.

Obediently, she “watched” as Hydona led her through the steps of anchoring and shielding, then practiced until they came easily. First, feeling the stable point in the power-flows about her and setting mental “hooks” into it, then erecting a shield against mage-energies that was remarkably similar to mental shields. Hydona drilled her over and over, and after a while the exercises stopped being something foreign and started feeling like second-nature. Best of all, they took about the same effort it took to stay on a galloping horse. She was a little surprised by how quickly it all came to her, but Hydona said nothing of it. She seemed to think it was only natural.

“Now,” the gryphon said, after she’d repeated the patterns until she was weary of them, and thought she could do them in her sleep. “Here isss when you rrreach for powerrr; when you arrre ssafe in yourrr protectionsss, and anchored against fluxesss. Now, there isss a ley-line to the eassst of you; a young one, eassily tamed—but you do not know that. Ssso. Assssume you know nothing. Searrch for it. When you find it, rrreach forr it, asss Need ssshowed you, and ssample it. Sssee if you can usse it, orrr if it isss too ssstrong forr you.”

She closed her eyes, found the line Hydona spoke of, and reached for it, dipping the fingers of an invisible hand into it, as if it were a kind of stream, and she wanted to drink of it.

She “tasted” it; tested the textures, the strength of the flow and the complexity. It was very tame, and bland. Not terribly strong. Kind of boring, in fact, compared with the rush of power she had gotten when she’d tapped into the node under the gryphons’ ruins for the first time.

I can’t do much with this, she thought, and began to trace it out to whatever node it was linked into, without thinking twice about doing so.

She felt her skull resound with a hard mental thwap! Her eyes snapped open, and she rocked back on her heels for a moment, staring at the female gryphon, aghast.

“What did you do that for?” she cried, angrily, “I was just—”

“You were jussst about to find yourrr way to the Hearrtssstone,” Hydona interrupted. “And that, little child, would have eaten you whole, and ssspit out the piecessss. A trrrained and warry Adept can stand againssst it, but not you.”

She licked her lips and blinked. “I thought the Heartstone was shielded. I thought nobody but Adepts could reach it now. Isn’t that what all the mages have been working on since we got rid of Falconsbane?”

“And ssso it isss,” Hydona nodded, “But you arrre within the prrotectionsss of the Practice Ground. The ssshieldsss do not extend herrre, so that those who arrre trrrying to Heal the Ssstone can rrreach it without dissrrupting thossse sssame ssshieldsss.”

“So the Adepts healing the Stone come here to work?” she asked. Hydona nodded. Her voice rose with alarm; if the shields didn’t extend here—“Isn’t it dangerous for us to be here, then? I mean, what if we interfere with what’s going on?”

“Therrre isss no one herrre at the moment,” Hydona said calmly. “Arrre you afrrraid?”

Reluctantly, she nodded. After all she’d heard about the Heartstone and how dangerous it was in its current, shattered state, she wasn’t very happy being somewhere that had no protections against it. The idea made her skin crawl a little with uneasiness.

“Good,” Hydona said, with satisfaction. “You ssshould be afrrraid. Verrry afrrraid. It isss nothing to disssregarrd, thisss Ssstone. It isss lightning harrnesssed, but barrrely, in itsss perfect sstate.” She refolded her wings, and settled her tail about her forelegs. “Now, why werrre you wanderrring off like that?”

She shuffled her feet, uncomfortable beneath the gryphon’s dark, penetrating gaze. “I—there wasn’t much power there,” she stammered. “I wanted more than that. I mean, there was hardly enough there to do anything with.”

“Morrre than you think,” Hydona scolded gently. “Tcha. You are a child who hasss alwaysss had a forrtune at herrr beck, and hasss never learrrned how to make do with less.” The gryphon shook her massive head, and the scent of cinnamon and musk wafted over Elspeth. “You musst learrrn to budget yourrrssself.” She cocked her head sideways and watched Elspeth with a knowing eye. “The mossst effective mage I know neverr rossse above Journeyman-classss. He wasss effective becaussse he knew exactly what hisss limitsss werrre, and he did everrrything possible inssside thossse limitssss. He neverrr perrrmitted lack of powerrr to thwart him; he sssimply found waysss for lesss powerrr to accomplisssh the tasssk.”

That was the harshest speech she’d ever gotten from Hydona, the closest the gryphon had ever come to giving her a scolding.

Although the thwap a few moments ago was a great deal like one of Kero’s “love-taps.”

She rubbed her temple, and considered the similarities between the two teachers. “Delivered for your own good,” Kero used to say. Well, this is another kind of weaponswork I suppose. And what was it Kero always says? “On the practice ground, the weaponsmaster is the one true God.” And this is the same as the practice ground, I guess. She nodded meekly, and Hydona seemed satisfied, at least for the moment.

“Ssso, do asss I told you in the firrssst place. Find the line, tesst it, and link with it.” Hydona sat back on her haunches and gave her a steady, narrowed-eyed look that Elspeth interpreted as meaning she would not permit the slightest deviation from her orders.

So, with a purely mental sigh, she found the tame, boring line of power again, and tapped into it. The amount of energy possible to get from a source so slight was hardly more than a trickle, compared to the sunlike fury that was the Heartstone. This time, she made the connection without even closing her eyes. The relationship between the inner world of power, unseen by physical eyes, and the outer world no longer confused her. Part of that was simply all the work she’d done with FarSight over the years; another instance of how working with mind-magic made work with real magic much easier.

Ah, but as Hydona pointed out, less power does not mean less effective power. Mind-magic is still strong. If there are more Heralds with the MageGift, after this I should be able to teach them in a reasonable length of time—not in the six or eight years it takes Quenten’s students to become Journeymen. I could just work from their own mind-magic Gifts outward.

When she finished her assigned task, sealing the connections with a bit of a flourish, Hydona nodded with satisfaction. “Good. Now, channel the powerrr to me.” Her beak opened in a hint of amusement at Elspeth’s dropped jaw. “What, you did not know sssuch a thing wasss posssible? Becaussse it isss not posssible in mind-magic? Ah, but it isss possible in Healing, isss it not? Asss there are ssssimilaritiesss, there are differencesss asss well, and those differencesss might kill you. Trrrussst yourrr intuition, but neverrr asssume any thing.”

What Hydona did not say—because she didn’t need to—was that Elspeth needn’t think she knew everything just because she was well-versed in the magic of her own people.

All right, so I’m a bonehead. She reached a tentative “hand” to Hydona, and was relieved to find the gryphon’s shields down, and Hydona waiting for her “touch.” She had no idea how to proceed with someone who was uncooperative, or worse, unable to cooperate. It took several false starts before she was able to create a channel to Hydona without losing the first one to the ley-line, but once she had it set up, she was able to redirect the power without too much difficulty.

She was tempted to set up a channel from Hydona to the line, directly, but she had a notion that Hydona would be able to tell the difference, and that the gryphon would not be amused.

Hydona broke the contact, and Elspeth maintained the channel without drawing any more energy from it while she waited for the gryphon’s next instructions.

“Ssso, you can ssseek, sssample, channel, and sssend. Now we sssshall practice all of thossse,” Hydona said genially. “We sssshall prrractice, and prractice, until you can ssseek, sssample, channel and sssend underrr any circumssstancesss.”

Elspeth smothered a groan, and broke her contact with the ley-line neatly, letting its newly freed power wisp away harmlessly. This was starting to get frustrating. Hydona sounded more and more like Kero with every passing moment. If she starts being any more like Kero, the next thing she’s going to do is quote a Shin’a’in proverb at me.

“It isss sssaid that ‘Whatever isss prreparred forr neverrr occurrrssss,’” Hydona quoted. “That isss an ancient Kaled’a’in sssaying. Ssso, let usss prrepare you for finding yourrrssself alone, sssick, wounded, exhaussted, ssssurrounded by enemiessss and needing powerrr, and it will neverrr occurrr. Yesss?” Elspeth could only sigh.

* * *

Later, after the gryphons were gone, Darkwind rubbed eyes that ached and burned with the strain of DoubleSight, and was mildly surprised to find Elspeth still there. She sat quietly on a stone bench, leaning against the curved marble wall of their corner of the Practice Ground with her eyes closed. He wondered if she was waiting for him to show her the way out—or just waiting for him.

He walked up to her, and she stared up at him with eyes as tired as his own. “We should leave, Elspeth,” he said carefully, uncertain of her temper, as weary as she looked. “The others will be here soon to work on the Heartstone, and we shall be in the way.”

“We’ll be more than in the way, if what Hydona said is any indication,” she replied, getting slowly to her feet. “We’d be in danger—and a danger to them. Well, I would be, anyway. Like having a toddling baby underfoot on a tourney field. Nobody would ever hit it on purpose, but… well.”

He nodded, relieved. “There you have it, truly. Would you care to come with me, to find something to eat?”

She hesitated a moment, then shrugged. “I’m not hungry, though.”

“All the more reason that you should eat,” he told her warningly. “Until you are used to it, the manipulating of mage-energies dulls the appetite. You must take care that you do not starve yourself.”

She looked at him in surprise, and must have seen by his expression that he wasn’t joking. “Well, that’s not such a bad thing if you’re on the plump side, but—”

“Hmm. There are no fat mages,” he pointed out as he walked, “except those who habitually and grossly overindulge themselves; those for whom overeating is either a self-indulged vice or a disease. Manipulating mage-energies also costs one in terms of one’s own energies, which means that you have just done work, Wingsib. Very hard, physical work, that deceives your own body.”

He led her to the peculiar Gatelike construction called a “pass-through” that led to the Practice Ground. It was yet another way to ensure that the unwary and unready did not intrude on students at practice, or the Adepts at their work.

Because of the wall about it, the grounds could not be seen from outside, nor the Vale from within. They were a place and a time unto themselves. And in fact, he sometimes wondered if time moved a bit differently there.

She shook her head as she recovered from the jolt of disorientation that accompanied the transition across the pass-through. “How do you ever get used to that?” she asked. “That kind of dizzy feeling, I mean.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “We never do,” he said simply. “There is a great deal that we never get used to. We simply cease to show our discomfort.”

She said nothing, but he caught her giving him a speculative look out of the corner of his eye. For his part, he was more concerned with finding one of the hertasi-run “kitchens” before his temper deteriorated. Hunger did that to him, and he couldn’t always predict what would set him off when his temper wore thin.

He didn’t want to alienate her; the opposite was more like it, but he often felt as if he was dancing on eggs around her. He wondered if she felt the same around him. There was no cultural ground that they could both meet on, and yet they had a great deal in common.

The “kitchen” was not a kitchen as such; just a common area, a room in one of the few ground-level structures, that the hertasi kept stocked with fresh fruits, bread, smoked meat, and other things that did not spoil readily. Those Hawkbrothers who either did not have the skill or the inclination to prepare their own meals came here to put together what they pleased. The fare was not terribly varied, but it was good. And at the moment, Darkwind had no inclination to make the trek to his own ekele for food. Not while his stomach was throttling his backbone and complaining bitterly.

He indicated to Elspeth that she should help herself, and chose some fruit and bread, a bit of smoked meat, and a handful of dosent roots that had a cheesy taste and texture when raw. They found a comfortable spot to sit, in an out-of-the-way clearing, and fell to without exchanging much more than nods.

“So, what was it that Hydona tutored you in?” he asked, when the edge was off his hunger.

“Baby-steps.” She made a face. “This is childish of me, I know, but she had me tapping into a very low-power ley-line, over and over, until she was certain that I could handle it in my sleep. But I was working the node under the lair with Need, and she knows that!”

“So you wonder why is she insisting that you work with minimal energy?” he replied, trying very hard to see things through her eyes.

Elspeth nodded, and nibbled a chasern fruit tentatively.

He licked the juice of another chasern from his fingers, and tried to answer as he thought Hydona would. “Firstly, there are some sources of power that are much too dangerous even for a single Adept to handle. Yes, even here, in our own territory. I mean besides the Heartstone.” He nodded at her look of surprise. “There are pools of tainted magic, like thin-roofed caves, left by the Mage Wars. Difficult to see from the surface, and deadly to fall into. That is what a Healing Adept must deal with, and at the moment, we have none. There are even perfectly natural sources too strong for one Adept to handle by himself—any node with more than seven ley-lines leading into it, for instance, or rogue lines, which fluctuate in power levels unpredictably. Add in the tendency of lines to move, and you find the only way to use these sources is with a group of Adepts, each one supporting the others, each doing a relatively small amount of work so they have a reserve to deal with emergencies.”

“I can see why she doesn’t want me to just tap into whatever powerful source I See,” Elspeth replied impatiently, “but why is she insisting that I only work with a bare trickle of power when energy is everywhere?”

“Ah, but it isn’t,” he replied, happy to at last discover the misconception that was the source of her impatience. “There is a limit on all Gifts, no matter how powerful. There is a limit on how far you, personally, can FarSee, yes?”

She nodded, slowly, and focused on him intently, paying very close attention to his words.

“And when you Mindspeak, you can only do so within a given distance, true?” he continued. “Well, power is not everywhere—or rather, great power is not everywhere. There are places where there are not even weak ley-lines for a day’s ride in any direction. There are places where even the nodes are weaker than the line you worked with today. We are Tayledras, Elspeth, and we are enjoined by the Goddess to cleanse these lands of magic. To that end, we concentrate it here. The energy level is unnaturally high in and around a Vale, even one as damaged as this one, and unnaturally high in and about the lands you call the Pelagir Hills, which we call the Uncleansed Lands.”

She swallowed the bite she had begun with a bit of difficulty. “So you’re saying that when I get home, I might find that there’s no magic energy to work with?” She looked horrified, and he hastened to assure her.

“No. I am saying that when you return, you may find you have lower levels of energy available than you have here. Or the power may be there, but buried deeply.” He ate the last of his fruit. “That is why there are schools of mages, who build up reservoirs of power that are available to the Masters and Adepts of those schools. And that is why blood-mages build power for themselves by exploiting the pain and death of others. So, you must know how to work subtly. You must learn that raining down blows with pure power is not always the correct response. It was not with some of Falconsbane’s creatures; that you witnessed.”

She shook her head; whether stubbornly or for some other reason, he couldn’t tell. “Listen,” he said, “Hydona believes you are doing well. Once you have mastered the fainter sources of power, and in using the energy you yourself have stored within you, she and Treyvan wish us all to take our places on the border.”

She perked up at that, and he smiled to see her interest. “Really?” she exclaimed. “I’ve felt so useless. I know you have to learn theory before you practice anything, but—”

“But you came here to become a weapon against the enemy of your land, I know,” he replied. “Now please—I know that you are impatient, but believe me. It is better to use little power rather than too much. Using a poleaxe to kill small game destroys the game thoroughly, rendering it useless. So it is with magic. Too much can attract things you do not wish to have to deal with, as a dead creature can attract things more dangerous than it was to scavenge upon it. Master the subtlety Hydona tries to teach you. There will be time and more than time for the greater magics.”

He watched her face; she seemed thoughtful, and he hoped she believed him, because whether she knew it or not, her life depended on believing him—and sooner than she might think.

For Hydona had not meant that suggestion in jest, that both of them take up a scout’s position on the border of k’Sheyna. When they did that, there were no longer any shields, any protections, or any rules. It would be only themselves and the gryphons, and it might well be that there were things out there that were more powerful and deadly than Mornelithe Falconsbane.

8

So now I’m a scout on the border of the Tayledras territories. In the Pelagirs. Me, who never even rode circuit. Mother would have a cat. Elspeth’s heart raced every time a bird called an alarm or a stray twig broke, even though she knew very well that potential danger was likely to be upon them long before there were any such warnings. Gwena was jumpy too, and that didn’t help her nerves any. She had all her shields down toward Gwena, and whatever her Companion felt, she felt, and vice versa.

Or was it that Gwena was jumpy after all? The Companion was ill at ease, but it didn’t quite have the feeling of nerves.

:All right,: she said, suddenly suspicious. :What are you hiding this time?:

:I wasn’t hiding it—at least, not from you,: the Companion temporized. :I’ve been keeping something from the others. Well, maybe I have and maybe I haven’t—I mean, I don’t know how much they’ve guessed about Cymry and me. So I wasn’t really hiding it from you, but—:

Elspeth choked and coughed to cover it. :Gwena, dear, you can stop babbling, all right? I’d say the Tayledras know plenty about you two, from the way Darkwind dances around you, and they aren’t telling me about what they know, either. So you might as well let this great secret out, whatever it is, because even if I don’t know about it, they probably do.:

She couldn’t hide her resentment at that, and didn’t try. It was obvious—would have been plain even to a child—that the Hawkbrothers considered the Companions something quite special, according them more reverence than they even got at home in Valdemar. But the Tayledras wouldn’t discuss the Companions at all without one of them being present, as if they were determined not to offend the Companions or reveal something they shouldn’t.

And even if there was nothing to this dancing about the bushes, it drove Elspeth to distraction.

:Well,: Gwena said slowly, :I would have to tell you soon, anyway. It’s not really all that complicated. Now that you know how to channel mage-energies, and you know how to feed someone else and be fed in turn—well—I can feed you.:

Elspeth was past being surprised. She simply nodded. :And of course it would have been no use telling me this before I had the skill, I know.: She closed her eyes and counted to ten, very, very carefully. :You aren’t keeping anything else back, are you?:

:No,: Gwena replied in a subdued voice. :No, not really. I can feed you if you need it, but I’m subject to the same limitations you are. Except—:

Elspeth counted to ten a second time. :Except?:

Gwena waited a long time, and Elspeth sensed that she was choosing her words very carefully. :Except that you and I are a special pairing; so special that distance doesn’t matter between us. That’s all. I’m—different that way. It’s like a lifebonded pair working together. Ask Darkwind about that some time, if you like; there are things a pair can do that even two Adepts working together can’t do.:

A vague memory fluttered at the back of her mind; something about a dark, windy night, the night when Gwena had Chosen her.

But the memory escaped before she could grasp it and she gave up trying to get it back after a fruitless moment of concentrating. :I won’t say I’m unhappy to hear that,: she told Gwena sincerely. :If things ever go badly for us, you and I might need that edge. I—don’t suppose this means you’re a mage, too—does it?:

:Oh, no!: Gwena replied, her mind-voice bright with relief. :No, not at all! I can just tap into nodes, energy-lines, and fields. All Companions can, just most of them can’t use it for more than—oh, the usual. Healing themselves quickly, extended endurance, and running faster than a horse can. And they certainly can’t feed their Chosen. That’s why we’re white, you know—ask Darkwind about node-energy and bleaching.:

She sat up straighter, and looked up in the tree above her at Darkwind, who was “taking the tree-road.” Except that right now he was just sitting, letting Vree do his scouting for him before they all moved on to another spot on their patrol. “Darkwind?” she whispered.

He looked down at her, but did not give her the hand signal that indicated she should be quiet.

“Gwena says I should ask you about node-energy and bleaching. She says that’s why Companions are so white, because they use node-power to increase speed and endurance.” She shook her head, still trying to figure it out.

But Darkwind seemed to get the point immediately; his eyes lit up, and he grabbed the branch beneath him. He swung down off his branch perch like a rope dancer, to land lightly beside her. “So! That is the piece of the puzzle that I have missed!” he said cheerfully. “I think you need not fear lack of nodes and power in your land, if all your Companions are able to tap them to enhance their physical abilities. That must mean that there is no scarcity of mage-energy.”

Well, that was a great weight off her mind. “About bleaching?” she prompted.

He tugged at his own hair, and she noticed that white roots were starting to show and that the color had faded to a dull tan. “Use of node-energy gradually bleaches a mage; the color-making dyes in skin, hair, and eyes, and the color that is already there is leeched away. I do not lie when I say that magery changes a person. So—your Companions use node-energy, and thus are blue-eyed, silver-coated, gray-hooved.”

:Silver-hooved,: Gwena said with dignity. He chuckled softly, and tapped her nose.

“If you insist, my lady.” He turned back to Elspeth. “My hair is not white, because as a scout I dye it. Tayledras all live with node-energy, whether we are mages or no, so nonmages bleach as well. Mages are silver-haired usually in their fifth year of practice; any other member of the Clan will have made the change at, oh, thirty summers, or thereabouts. Even with dye, I must renew the color every few days now that I am a mage again.”

Elspeth could only cast her eyes upward. “It’s like continuous sun on them, then? No wonder dye won’t take on them,” she said. “The gods know we’ve tried often enough—you know, it’s damned hard to disguise a big white horse!”

:Sorry,: Gwena put in. :Can’t help it.:

“In a trade-off between endurance and the rest of it, and being unable to disguise them, I think I’ll take the endurance,” Elspeth said, as much for Gwena’s ears as Darkwind’s. And for Gwena’s ears only, :I’ll take you just the way you are, oh great sneak,: and felt Gwena’s rush of pleasure, much like a pleasantly embarrassed flush.

He shrugged. “It is the choice I would make. Besides, now that you are a mage, you may make her seem any color you choose, by illusion.”

Before she could answer that, he was back up in the tree again, swarming up the trunk like a squirrel, and hooking the branches above him with the peculiar weapon-tool he kept in a sheath on his back. She still didn’t see how he could possibly climb that quickly, even with the spike-palmed climbing gloves he wore; humans shouldn’t be able to climb like that.

She was about to ask him what was going on, when he gave her the hand signal indicating that she should remain quiet. She and Gwena froze, statue still, trusting to the bushes they sheltered in to keep them from sight.

She didn’t dare let down her shields to probe about her. Darkwind had warned her of the danger of that, and after hearing more about Mornelithe Falconsbane and the creatures he had commanded, she was inclined to listen to him and believe. But she was free enough to use every other sense, and she did. At first she couldn’t tell that there was anything at all out of the ordinary, but then she realized that the forest was a little too quiet. No birdcalls, no wind stirring the branches, nothing but the little ticks the red and golden leaves made as they fell.

:Elspeth?: came the tentative mental touch, as soft as the caress of a feather. :Vree has found someone. I sense only a void, which means that there is someone inside a shield where Vree sees a two-legged creature.:

Darkwind had told her that he would use Mindspeech only if he had determined that an enemy could not hear it, and had explained that he would test with a quick mental probe of his own, too swift to fix on. She had wanted to object, but it was his land and he was used to scouting it; she had to assume he knew what he was doing. And evidently he did…

:We’re going to have to work out what I should do if someone ever does catch a probe and lock horns with you,: she interjected, sending a mental picture of stags in full battle.

A rush of chagrin accompanied his reply. :You are right. But—not now.:

:No,: she agreed. :Not now. What do you want me to do? Should I try a probe? Are the gryphons going to get in on this?:

:Not unless there is no other choice,: he replied firmly. :We need to keep their existence as quiet as possible; there are surely others besides Falconsbane who might covet them or the small ones. And you may try a mind-magic probe, but I think you will encounter the same shields as I have. No, you and I will confront and warn him. If he does not heed the warning, we will deal with him—:

He broke off his link with her so suddenly that she was afraid that something had locked him in mental battle after all. But then, a heartbeat later, his mind-voice returned. :There is an additional complication,: he said dryly; she looked up to find him looking down at her with a face full of irony. :It seems our intruder is a Changechild.:

* * *

Her first thought had been: it must be Nyara. Her second thought had been that it couldn’t be Nyara, but that it must be another of her father’s creatures, running wild with Falconsbane gone. She tried a mental probe and discovered that just as Darkwind had said, the creature had very strong shields, well beyond her ability to counter. So the only way to learn anything about it was to confront it.

As she and Darkwind watched the intruder from their respective hiding places, she knew all of her guesses about it had been wrong.

She didn’t know whether to be relieved that this interloper was not their Nyara, or not. If it had been Falconsbane’s daughter, the situation between herself and Darkwind would have been complicated enormously. Her own instincts warred with her on the subject; she trusted Nyara to a limited extent, and she certainly felt that the Changechild had been greatly wronged and abused, but—

But Nyara was incredibly, potently, sexually attractive. She couldn’t help herself. Elspeth would have to have been blind not to see that Darkwind had wanted her as much as Skif had and that if anything had kept them from becoming intimate, it wasn’t lack of attraction. She suspected that his own innate suspicion, lack of opportunity, and perhaps something on Nyara’s part had kept him from playing the role of lover. As it was, that night before Dawnfire had returned to them, trapped in the body of her bondbird, it had been Skif, not Darkwind, who had taken that role. And, perhaps, guilt had kept Darkwind at arm’s length. Guilt, that kept him from taking a new lover when his former love was a captive, confined to a bird’s body by the temptress’ father.

But Falconsbane was dead, or the next thing to it, and Dawnfire was out of reach of any of them. That left him free. And if he encountered Nyara before Skif did, would he be able to stand against temptation a second time? Especially if Nyara were to make overtures?

Knowing men, she didn’t think so.

But at the same time, discovering that this stranger was not Nyara was a disappointment. However brief their acquaintance had been, Elspeth liked Nyara, and felt a great deal of sympathy for her. And she sometimes spared a moment to worry about her, put there in the wild lands that k’Sheyna no longer held, with a mage-sword who might not even like her. She had few or no provisions, no shelter against the coming winter unless she had somehow found or made one…

Well, this wasn’t the time to worry about their errant Changechild. Not with another standing on k’Sheyna lands, within k’Sheyna borders—and by the blood on its hands and the circle about its feet, one who was up to no good.

Elspeth had done enough hunting in her time not to be sickened by the blood of a butchered deer. What made her ill were the fact that it was a dyheli that had been slain, and the signs that the butchery had taken place before it was dead, not after.

Blood-magic. Wasn’t that what Darkwind and Quenten both mentioned, but wouldn’t talk about?

Well, here it was—a “blood-mage”—and now that she knew what to Look for, she Sensed the power that the mage had drawn into himself as a result of his work. It wasn’t power she could have used under any circumstances; in fact, it made her a little nauseous to brush against it just long enough to figure out what it was. But it was power, and she had a notion that the death of a thinking, reasoning creature like a dyheli would have given this mage four times the strength that a deer would have. Perhaps more, depending on how long it had suffered.

Easy power, easily obtained, from a source you can find anywhere. And if you’re sadistic by nature, a source that gives pleasure when exploited. No wonder Ancar is attracted to it.

If Nyara was feline in nature, this creature was serpentine. As he moved about, disposing of his victim, he glided rather than walked, and many of his motions had a bonelessness to them that made her shiver in an atavistic reaction to the evocation of “snake.”

Odd. The hertasi don’t do that to me, and they aren’t half as human. I wonder why this thing does?

What exposed skin she saw—mostly hands and a glimpse of cheek—gleamed in the late afternoon light, with a kind of matte reflectivity that hinted at hard, shiny scales.

He dressed for deep cold, rather than the autumnal chill of the season; heavy leather boots, thick hose, a fur-lined tunic and cloak, and a heavy velvet shirt beneath the tunic. The colors were curious; a strange, dappled golden brown shading into deep orange—colors that blended surprisingly well into the foliage. Whatever else he was, this Changechild was canny. If he lay unmoving in the heart of a thicket, no one would ever see him.

The Changechild looked up at the first rustle of leaves, and froze in a combat-ready crouch. Darkwind dropped out of the branches like a great hawk coming to land, his knees flexed, and his hands in front of him, wary and ready to launch into an attack or defense as the need arose. The creature faced her fully now, and she saw that beneath the hood of his cloak, his face was curiously flat, with a thin, lipless mouth, and unblinking eyes as round as marbles. He straightened, but did not relax his wary pose.

Neither did Darkwind.

“You trespass,” the Hawkbrother said clearly and slowly, in the most common of the trade-tongues used hereabouts. “You trespass upon the lands of the Tayledras k’Sheyna, and you pollute those lands with blood needlessly spilled.”

That thin mouth stretched in what might have passed for a smile in any other creature. He straightened with arrogant self-assurance. “Not needlessly,” he said, “and who or what are you to tell me what I may or may not do?”

“Tayledras k’Sheyna,” Darkwind replied flatly. “These are our lands. We do not permit this. You will depart, taking your filth with you.”

The mouth stretched a little more, and the creature’s hands flexed a little. “What? Run from a single foe? I think not.”

He made no gesture, but the circle he had drawn about his feet in blood flamed with sullen power—

—and, horribly, the disemboweled dyheli on the ground beside him heaved itself to its feet. It stood swaying a little, a gaping hole where its belly should have been, its eyes red with that same sullen power, and a dull glow about its hooves and horns.

“You are only one,” the Changechild said softly. “One single Hawkbrother is hardly a threat. This weak creature was not enough. I think you will do to serve me.”

Elspeth did not need Darkwind’s signal to step from concealment, with Gwena at her side. She took up her position near enough to the Hawkbrother that they could not easily be separated, but distant enough that they would not interfere with each other.

“We are Tayledras k’Sheyna,” Darkwind said, firmly, but with no hint of anger. “And you will leave now.”

This time Hydona was not around to keep her from using the strongest source of power she could Sense, and there was a three-line node not more than a furlong from where they stood. She tapped into it, quickly; to her Othersight it glowed with healthy green fire, and touching it was a pleasant jolt, as if she took a deep draught of cold spring water on a hot day. She established her link and channeled power to herself and her shields before the stranger had a chance to respond to Darkwind’s challenge. She kept the level of her outermost shield the same so as not to warn him; at minimal strength, the kind of mage-shield a beginner would build. But, like a paper screen hiding a stone barrier, beneath the disguising energies of the first shield was a second, and it was linked to the node-power.

It was just as well that she did, because the Changechild’s reply was to attack.

He was no Falconsbane, but he was no Apprentice, either. He chose his target cleverly, launching his initial onslaught against Elspeth rather than Darkwind. Perhaps he was deceived by the rudimentary outer shield, or perhaps he was under the impression that a female would be less prepared and less aggressive than a male.

If that was the case, he judged wrongly.

She Saw his attack as he launched it; a flight of white-hot energy-daggers that he flung at her with both hands. She anticipated the direction of his attack by his eyes—and was ready in time to reflect them straight back at him, holding up mirror-shielded hands that doubled the flame-bright weapons back on themselves and sent them back on their original path. That must have been something of a shock to him, for he did not even deflect them properly, much less reabsorb them. They impacted on his shields, splintering silently into a thousand shard-sparks, and he flinched away.

Before he had a chance to recover from that shock, Darkwind had launched an attack of his own, but not one he likely would have expected. He attacked the mage’s shields with a needle-lance of force, not the mage himself, boring through the protections at their weakest point, where some of the energy daggers had impacted. The blue-white lance split the air between them, and Darkwind held it straight on target, despite the Changechild’s best efforts to shake it off. Elspeth readied a second attack, arrows of lightning, but did not launch it, holding it in reserve.

The Changechild sent his unliving creature to attack them; the shambling, bloody thing charged with a speed quite out of keeping with the condition it was in. It was halfway to them before Elspeth realized that it was an attack, but Gwena intercepted it, like a trained war-horse, as if she had dealt with such things all her life. She sidestepped the wicked horns neatly, and twisted sideways to launch a cruel double-hooved kick with her hind legs as the thing passed, that sundered its hips with a meaty thunk and a wet crack.

The dead thing staggered and went down again, and tried to heave itself erect. But it could not struggle upright again, for its hip and one of its hind legs were broken and would no longer bear its weight.

At that same instant, Darkwind penetrated the Changechild’s shields, and Elspeth launched the lightning-arrows she had been readying, targeting them at the hole Darkwind had bored and was even now spreading open. The first one missed slightly, impacting just to one side of the hole, splintering as had the mage’s own energy-daggers.

The second did not miss, nor did Darkwind’s fireball that followed in the arrow’s wake.

Within the enemy’s shields and contained by them, a storm of utterly silent fireworks erupted. The Changechild stood frozen for a moment, a dark silhouette against a background of coruscating energies—

Then he collapsed to the ground as his shields collapsed around him, and, like the dyheli that had been his victim, did not move again.

* * *

They patrolled the border until nightfall and the arrival of Summersky, the scout that was to relieve them, but there wasn’t so much as a leaf out of place. As they headed homeward toward the Vale, Elspeth found herself very glad that she was riding. Although Hydona had warned her that a mage-duel would take far more out of her than she would ever believe, she hadn’t really understood what the gryphon meant. Now though—now she knew Hydona was not only right, she had understated the case. Mostly all that she wanted right now was a soak in one of the hot springs, a meal, and her bed.

But besides being weary, she was very confused; a poor combination, all things considered. She was dissatisfied with her first foray on k’Sheyna’s border. Certainly there were questions that had not been answered adequately.

And as she followed in Darkwind’s wake, watching him stride tirelessly along with one hand on Treyvan’s shoulder and folded wing, and Vree perched on a padded perch on his shoulder, she tried to reconcile her mixed emotions. It didn’t help matters any that from this angle she had such a good view of his tight, muscular…

Hydona trilled to herself, apparently amused by a private joke. The female gryphon walked beside her as her mate strode beside Darkwind, all of them following a dry stream bed back to the Vale. Hydona’s head was easily level with Elspeth’s, which was a little unsettling, since it underscored how very large the gryphon was. It was easy to forget that, when one often saw them lounging about like overgrown house cats.

“And what arrre you thinking?” Hydona asked, as if she were following Elspeth’s thoughts.

“I’m not sure,” she said, frowning, trying to put her emotional reactions into words. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been in combat—it isn’t even the first time I’ve been in magical combat. I think we did all right—”

“You did,” Hydona confirmed. “Verrry well, essspecially forr a beginnerrr. But asss you pointed out, you have had combat experrrience, and I expected nothing lesss than competence.” She cocked her head at Elspeth. “How do you feel you will manage againssst that enemy of yourrrsss?”

She thought for a moment, weighing what she could do now with what she knew Ancar could produce. “Well, providing Ancar hasn’t acquired an army of mages, I should be able to do something about him, if I can keep progressing at this rate. I mean, it isn’t easy, but so far I haven’t lost any body parts. Provided I don’t reach an upper limit to my powers in the near future, and Ancar hasn’t learned to tap nodes. I know he should be a Master-class mage by now at the very least.”

“One should neverrr trrusst an enemy to be placssid. What about yourrr perrrforrrmance?” Hydona asked shrewdly. “How would you rrrate yourssself ?”

“Darkwind and I worked together as a team quite well, I think. At least we did once he got around to doing something.” There it was; that was what she had been trying to pinpoint as the root of her discontent. “But that was the problem; he gave that damned thing a warning even after we knew it had worked blood-magic!”

She couldn’t keep indignation from creeping into her voice, and didn’t try. Kero would have cut the interloper down where he stood; filled him full of so many arrows that he would have looked like a hedgehog.

“The oddssss werrre two to one,” Hydona responded. “Thrree to one, if we count Gwena. Don’t you think that the crrreaturrre dessserrved a fairr warrrning with oddsss like that?”

Elspeth shook her head, stubbornly. “No,” she said flatly, and her voice shook a little with intensity. “I don’t. We knew he was a blood-mage; there’s no point in giving something like that a chance to get away or hurt you. I sure as Havens don’t intend to give Ancar a shred of warning. In fact, if I get the chance, I’ll ambush him!”

As always, the mere thought of Ancar and what he had done made her blood boil. The tortures he had inflicted on Talia—the rape of his own country—the hundreds, thousands of lives he had thrown away—but most of all, the careless glee he had taken in it all—

No, when she thought of Ancar, all she could think of was the chance of getting him in her power and shredding him. She hated him, she hated everything he’d ever done, and she wanted him dead, safely dead, so that he couldn’t hurt anyone any more.

Ever.

In fact, if there was a way to destroy his very soul, she’d do it, so that there wouldn’t even be a chance he’d be reborn and start over again, as some mages could.

“You arrre angrrry,” Hydona observed. “This enemy of yourrrsss angersss you.”

“I’m always angry when I think about Ancar,” she replied fiercely. “I can’t help it; the man’s another Falconsbane, just as evil and as corrupt, and I want him dead as much as any Tayledras could ever have wanted Falconsbane dead.” She raised her chin defiantly. “More than that, I want Ancar’s liver on a plate, so I can feed it to something vile. I not only want to kill him, I want to hurt him so that he knows some of what his victims felt. I hate him, I’m afraid of him, and if there were any way to put him through what he has put others through, I’d take it.”

Hydona shook her head with open admonition. “You arrre too angrrry,” she said. “It isss not underrr contrrol, thisss angerrr. Hate will not serrve you herrrre. And ssssuch hate, sssuch angerrr will weaken you. You musst learrrn to contrrrol them, orr they will contrrol you. Thisss I know.”

Elspeth grimaced, but kept her lips clamped tight on what she wanted to say. This wasn’t the first time she’d heard this particular lecture; the first time, it had come from Darkwind. And it just made her angrier.

How could she not hate the bastard, after everything he’d done to her friends and her land? How could she not hate him after seeing what he had done to his own people? How could she not feel enraged at everything he had done?

And how in Havens could an emotion that strong possibly be a weakness? It was a contradiction in terms.

But there was absolutely no point in getting into an argument over it, so she elected to keep her thoughts to herself, and her tongue on a very short leash, until they reached the sanctuary of the Vale.

Hydona said nothing more.

* * *

The gryphons left them once they were well within the “safe” area that was kept under close watch by the mages, and full of alarms that would be tripped by strangers. By the time they arrived at the shielded entrance to the Vale it was already dark, and her temper had cooled considerably. Not that she had changed her mind about anything she’d said, but she wasn’t quite so ready to bite off someone’s head over it.

One thing had calmed her down a bit; she discovered that Gwena felt the same as she did—at least about Ancar. The Companion was of two minds about Darkwind warning the Changechild, admitting that there were good reasons for either decision, whether to warn or not—but on the subject of Ancar of Hardorn, Gwena was in full accord with her Chosen.

:The man is a mad dog,: she told Elspeth flatly. :You don’t give a mad dog a chance to bite you, and you don’t try and cure it. You get rid of it, before it destroys something you love.:

That backing of her own thoughts on the matter made her feel a bit more secure about her own judgment, and that Gwena shared her anger eased her own somewhat. That helped her temper to cool a lot faster.

She was quite ready to see the Vale long before they actually reached it. She discovered, somewhat to her surprise, that it was no real effort to keep her Mage-Sight invoked—and since Mage-Sight gave her an enhanced, owl-like view of her surroundings, she left it in force. It occurred to her, as she noted how every living creature and some things that were not alive each bore a faint outline of energy, that this must be what Companions used for night-sight. After all, in order to tap into and manipulate mage-power, you had to be able to See it, and since this kind of Sight worked equally well by day or night, why not use it to give you a nighttime advantage? Yet another Companion power she could explain away, which gave her a perverse feeling of satisfaction.

Once they approached the shields surrounding the Vale, she had to drop the Sight; the energies there were so powerful they threatened to “blind” her.

Well, that’s one reason not to count on it for night-sight. And if powerful energies can “blind” you—well, that’s something to be wary of. Hmm. And something to keep in mind as a weapon.

The faint tingle of her skin as they passed the entrance to the Vale, as if lightning were about to strike her, told her that they had crossed the shields and protections standing patient guard over the only way in and out. But even if she had not felt that little tingle, she would have known they were inside k’Sheyna Vale, for in the space of half a heartbeat they went from deep autumn to high summer. Suddenly her clothing was much too warm.

Gwena stopped as Darkwind went on ahead, pushing through the foliage draped over the path and vanishing into the shadowy gloom. Elspeth dismounted, unfastened her cloak, and draped it over the saddle. Even then she was a little too warm; she rolled up the sleeves of her shirt and opened the collar to the balmy night air, heavy with the scent of night-blooming flowers she could not even put a name to.

This place was the closest thing on earth that she had ever seen to the Havens of scripture and sermon. Too bad I can’t bring a little bit of this back with me, she thought wistfully. Fresh fruit and flowers in the dead of winter, hot springs and cool pools to bathe in—trysting nooks, and I can think of plenty of people who’d enjoy those! Near-invisible servants. Balmy breezes. No wonder Vanyel visited k’Treva whenever he was exhausted.

Darkwind had said more than once that this Vale wasn’t even a real showplace of what the Hawkbrothers could do. K’Sheyna, he’d wistfully related, was the smallest of the Clans even when they were at full strength, and the Vale was neglected and run down. Half tended at the very best, with no water-sculptures, no wind-harps—more than half the ekeles untenanted and falling to ruins—no one making vine-tapestries or flower-falls. No concerts except on the rarest of occasions, no artists except Ravenwing and the hertasi. Still, Elspeth found it beautiful beyond her wildest dreams.

She could only wonder what the rest of the Vales must be like. And—could the Heralds create something like this, if only in miniature?

But—should they?

She brushed aside a rainbow-threaded dangling vine and wondered about that.

This Vale was a very seductive, hedonistic place, and many people already thought that the Heralds were a bit too randy as it was. It was also a place that could encourage sloth; she found it very easy to justify sleeping a little later, lingering in the hot spring, or sitting and watching a waterfall and thinking about nothing at all.

Her footsteps made no sound on the soft sand of the pathway, sand that cradled her feet luxuriously. Everything about this Vale hinted at luxury—a luxury that few outside the Vales enjoyed. In fact, not even the Tayledras “cousins,” the Shin’a’in, got to enjoy this sort of life. For that matter, could the Heralds really justify making themselves a private paradise when there were so many other things that needed doing?

A pair of long-tailed birds sang sweetly nearby, scarcely an arm’s length from Gwena, reminding her by their presence that outside the Vale the songbirds had long since gone south. Even if Heralds could justify building a place like this, there was no way that they could justify lounging about in it the way the Tayledras did. Frolicking in flower-bedecked bowers and lounging in hot pools didn’t get circuits ridden. Too much living like this, and she’d find herself wasting time designing feather-masks and festival-garb instead of getting her work done.

A feeling of moral superiority crept into her thoughts, and she let it. She led Gwena up the path to her loaned ekele and the tiny, sculpted hot pool beneath it, and felt a bit smug.

The stone path wound across another just ahead of her, and the murmur of voices to her right warned her that several folk were going to cross ahead of her. She paused—

And her sense of moral superiority vanished as soon as the Hawkbrothers came in view.

“Elspeth,” called the first of the group as he caught sight of her, “We should like the use of your pool. The hertasi are cleaning several of the others, and yours is the nearest that is prepared. May we?”

The mage-light that danced over his head revealed the little group of five pitilessly. The one in the lead, a mage named Autumnwing, was the best off, physically—and he was worn right down to the bone. Overextended, to say the least; his eyes were sunken, his skin pale, and he trembled with weariness. Behind him were two of Darkwind’s scouts, both bruised and bloody, and supporting them were two more mages who looked in no better shape than Autumnwing. Even as she watched, one was redressing a wound that gleamed dark and wet, while her partner held the arm steady.

“What in Havens happened to you?” she exclaimed, before she could stop herself.

Autumnwing shrugged. “I have been with the rest on the Heartstone; it fluxed again today. Be glad you were not within the Vale, or we would have conscripted you with or without training. But I am not so bad—these four met with a pack of Changewolves that had cornered one of k’Sheyna’s dyheli herds, and if it had not been for them, there might have been a score of Changewolves hounding the Vale itself tonight.” As Elspeth’s eyes widened, he added, “They are very valiant. Had I been in their place, I fear I would have fled.”

The arm-wounded woman grunted and said, “Forty-arrow fight.” Then she shrugged.

“P—please,” Elspeth stammered, “feel free to use the spring. I was going to find some food; shall I bring you back some, or send a hertasi with it?”

“Either,” replied one of the scouts wearily. “I could happily eat one of our fallen enemies at this moment, raw, and without salt.”

:I’ll take care of it, if you’ll pull off the tack,: Gwena told her. :I can probably find a hertasi before you can.:

In answer, Elspeth bent to loose the saddle-girth, and saddle and blanket slid to the ground as she unbuckled the hackamore and hauled it over Gwena’s ears. The Companion vanished into the undergrowth.

“She’s gone to recruit you some food,” Elspeth told the others, as she bent to retrieve the fallen saddle.

“Our thanks,” Autumnwing told her gravely; she waited for them to make their way past her, then gave them a head start, before following in their wake.

Hot pools and life in an eternal summer don’t compensate for that, she thought, balancing the saddle on her shoulder. And given the Goddess’ edicts, I suppose that even in Vales where the Heartstone is whole the mages aren’t sitting around discussing water-sculpture.

So much for moral superiority.

The Vales must seem like paradise itself when they’re out in the Pelagir wilds—but one that wouldn’t be there to return to if they weren’t out in those wilds to defend it. Is Valdemar any different to a Herald?

Willfully faulty memory caught up with reality. This wasn’t the first time she’d seen Hawkbrothers in such poor condition. The mages, half-Healed Starblade among them, worked themselves to a thread every day, shielding the Vale from attack, and trying to do something about their Heartstone. She had her own experience today to show her the hazards of being a scout on the bonier of the k’Sheyna territory, where every league held new and deadly honors.

For that matter, she’d been an inadvertent witness to the worst—save only death—that could befall a Hawkbrother. She’d seen what had happened to Dawnfire, and she’d been asked to feed power to Kethra one day, when the mage that usually augmented the Healer-shaman was too exhausted to continue. Kethra put Starblade through purest agony that day, explaining only that this was a necessary part of Healing what had been done to him. Elspeth still felt uncomfortable with the memory. Although she repeated to herself again and again that it was for the better, she still felt like a torturer’s apprentice for it.

We’re pampered, we Heralds, she realized, stopping long enough to shift the weight of the saddle to her other shoulder, and shake some of the aches out of the arm that had balanced it. We have everything we need taken care of for us. We live in prepared quarters, we have servants picking up after us. The Hawkbrothers have Vales; we have our rooms at the Collegium. They have hertasi, we have human servants. They have their food and clothing made for them; so do we. Neither of us have physical pleasures that are adequate compensation for what we do.

She reached the foot of the tree that held her ekele; muted voices and faint splashing told her that the pool was occupied. She hung her saddle and hackamore over the railing at the bottom of the stair, and took herself up the staircase.

Darkwind had pointed out something about the Vales; that anyone with sufficient magic power could create one. They were really just very large hothouses, with a mage-barrier serving in place of glass. Nothing terribly exotic about a hothouse. She pulled aside the door to her ekele, and looked down over the edge of the staircase for a moment. Kerowyn’s grueling lessons in strategy and tactics caused her to realize something else as well.

The ekeles were not simply exotic love nests. They were based directly on the quite defensible treetop homes of the tervardi. How defensible they were could be demonstrated by the ekeles built outside the Vale; once the ladder to the ground had been pulled up, there was virtually no way to reach them. They were warded against fire, even, by set-spells and a transparent resin painted around the tree trunks well past two man-heights.

Even the ekele here could be made quite defensible simply by destroying the rope-and-truss suspended staircases, making them an excellent place to retreat if the Vale defenses were ever breached.

Gwena must have found her hertasi right away, for there was a tray of food waiting for her, and the herb tea in the pot was still hot and steeping. She helped herself to bread and meat, and collapsed onto her pillow-strewn pallet.

My people build walls. The Tayledras put themselves up in the trees. Differences in philosophy, really. More like the Heralds than like the ordinary folk of Valdemar. They think in terms of evasion, the way we do, rather than the stand-and-fight of the Guard.

She finished as much of her meal as she wanted at the moment, and stripped off her filthy, blood-speckled clothing. Dyheli blood, of course, and not of herself or Darkwind, but it was still going to be a major task to get it out. She could bleach it with magic of course, and she probably would, but that was a waste of mage-power.

Maybe she’d just shift over to scout clothing. It was more practical for all this woods-running, anyway.

She wrapped a huge towel around herself and descended the staircase, heading for the spring. Occupied or no, she was going to use it. After all, she deserved a good soak as much as her visitors did; she’d just spent her day doing the same things they had done. She had earned a little luxury.

They all had.

9

Vree stayed calm on Darkwind’s shoulder after they passed the protections at the entrance to the Vale, even though until recently the bondbird had not wanted to enter the Vale itself. The rogue energies of the Heartstone had disturbed Vree badly, and the bondbirds of every other scout as well, but the additional shielding on the Stone seemed to be having some beneficial effect.

:Are you all right?: he asked Vree, just to be sure. :We can turn around and leave if you want; I can hold the scouts’ meeting at the ekele just as well as here. The mages will just have to climb a rope ladder instead of a staircase, and they’ll all have to squeeze into my rooms. I think it would bear their weight.:

Vree ducked his head a little, and yawned. :Fine. Happy,: he replied sleepily. Then, anxiously, :Food soon?:

:Soon,: he assured the bird. :Quite soon. As soon as we get to the meeting.: The other scouts would have hungry birds as well; the hertasi would have provided a selection of whole game birds and small mammals for the raptors, along with some kind of meal for the birds’ bondmates.

For the first time in a very long time, this would be a meeting of day-watch scouts and scout-mages. Stormcloud would hold a similar meeting for those on night-watch. Yesterday Darkwind had asked them to gather because there was something important to be addressed. He hadn’t specified what that was.

He had been the scouts’ representative to the k’Sheyna Council during the most divisive period in their history—the period when Starblade, as directed by Mornelithe Falconsbane, was creating rifts between mages and nonmages, to weaken the Clan and make it easier for Falconsbane to destroy them. Darkwind had been willing to serve then, knowing that no one else had the edge he did, having his own father as chief of the Council. It was a bitter truth that his advantage then was not in currying favor, but knowing the other’s weaknesses. He had sometimes been able to manipulate his father. Equally painful to recall was the fact that Starblade had done the same to him.

But now that he was devoting more time to mage-craft, he had less time to spend elsewhere. The scouts were his friends and charges, and with his attentions divided so, they could conceivably suffer for it.

It was time for a change. Now the question was whether or not he could get the others to agree with him. In general the kind of person who became a successful scout was not the kind who enjoyed being in a position of authority, or who relished dealing with those who were.

The best place for the gathering was the central clearing that had been used for the celebration, but that was closer to the Heartstone than Darkwind liked, shielding or no shielding. So he had asked them all to gather in the smaller clearing beneath the tallest tree in the Vale; the one that the scouts had used for dancing.

When he arrived, he found a near replication of the celebration, except that there was no music or dancing, the clothing was more subdued, and the conversation level was considerably quieter. Birds stood on portable perches, the exposed roots of trees, or in the branches, most of them with talons firmly in their dinner, the rest eyeing the mound of fur and feathers with a view to selecting something choice. Brighter mage-lights than those conjured for the celebration hung up in the branches, illuminating everything below with a clear yellow light, sunlike but for its intensity. Tayledras sprawled all over the clearing, eating, talking, or both. Darkwind did a quick mental tally and came up a few names short, as Vree yearned toward the heap of “dinner,” making little plaintive chirping noises in the back of his throat.

:Hungry!: he urged his bondmate, as Darkwind tried not to laugh at the ridiculous sounds he made. The uninitiated were often very surprised at the calls of raptorial birds; most of them, other than the defiant screams of battle and challenge, were very unimpressive chirps, clucks, and squeals. One species, the Harshawk, even croaked, sounding very like a duck with a throat condition. And owls hissed; not the kinds of things one expected to hear from the fierce hunters of the sky.

But silly sounds notwithstanding, Vree’s hunger was very real and quite intense, and the bondbird had more than earned his dinner. Darkwind took him on the gauntlet and tossed him into the air, to give him a little height. Vree gave two great beats of his wings, reaching the lowest of the branches, then dove straight down at the pile, shouldering aside lesser and less-famished birds to get at a fat, choice duck. One of the Harshawks quacked indignantly as the tasty morsel was snatched right from under his talons, and two of the owls hissed angrily at being shouldered aside, but Vree ignored them all. The gyre heaved himself and his prize up into the air, and lumbered off to a nearby branch, where he mantled both wings over it and tore into it with his sharp, fiercely hooked beak.

“Here—” Shadowstar shoved sliced meat and bread at Darkwind, and snatched back her fingers, laughing, when he grabbed for it as if he were a hungry forestgyre himself. “Heyla! Sharp-set, are we? In yarak?”

“Something like,” he admitted. “It’s been a long day, with a mage-duel at the end of it.” He took a healthy bite of the food, and bolted it, suddenly realizing just how hungry he was. “Where are Summerstar and Lightwing? And—ah—” it took him a moment to remember the names of the mages that had been assigned to help the two scouts.

Shadowstar beat him to it. “Songlight and Winddance. Gone to get injuries tended again; they ran into Changewolves. Nothing serious.”

A tentative Mindtouch from an unfamiliar source reassured him. :Songlight here. We are mostly soaking bruises, Darkwind. I will stay in Mindtouch and relay to the others, if you like.:

:Please,: he replied, taking a seat where he could see the others. :This shouldn’t take long.:

He took out his dagger and rapped the hilt of it on the side of the tree; it rang hollowly, and got him instant attention and instant silence.

“I hope that most of you have guessed why I asked for these meetings—” he began.

Shadowstar stood up, interrupting him. “We pretty much figured it out,” she said dryly, as the others nodded. “We were talking it all over before you got here. And we’re all agreed that while we don’t want to lose you as our leader, you deserve a rest, and you aren’t going to get one at the rate you’re going.”

Nods all around confirmed her words, and Darkwind felt an irrational surge of relief—both that the scouts still wanted him as leader, and that they were willing to let him go.

“Have any of you got a candidate in mind?” he asked. Surprisingly, it was one of the mages who answered him.

“Winterlight,” the young man said promptly. “He did it before you had the position, and now that we aren’t at each others’ throats, he says he would be willing to take it again.”

Darkwind turned to his old friend, one of the oldest scouts in the Clan, raising an eyebrow inquisitively. Winterlight coughed and half-smiled. “I know the job,” he answered, confirming the mage’s words. “And since it’s no longer the trial that it was—”

Darkwind grinned openly. “Then as far as I am concerned, the position is yours, my friend—if the rest agree, that is.”

He was going to open the meeting up to discussions, but the others forestalled him with their unanimous assent. Even the bondbirds seemed pleased with the choice. It was a good one; although he was not a mage, Winterlight seldom dyed his hair, and wore it long, as a mage did. So he looked like a mage, and he was a contemporary of Starblade and Iceshadow, which made him doubly acceptable to the Elders of the Council.

“As long as the night-watch agrees, then, it’s yours,” he told Winterlight happily. “And if they come up with a different candidate, you’ll have to deal with that yourself.”

“If they come up with a different candidate, we’ll split the duties,” Winterlight replied immediately. “I’ve had my fill of dissension.”

Darkwind shrugged. “That’s fine with me,” he responded.

Winterlight smiled. “It wasn’t just a rest that the youngsters decided you need,” he said, in a confidential whisper. “I overheard one of them saying that you’ve been living like a sworn celibate and you needed to take that pretty Outlander off to a bower and—”

The rest of Winterlight’s whispered suggestion made Darkwind flush so hard he was afraid he was glowing.

The rest of the scouts howled with laughter.

Winterlight just smiled enigmatically and asked if Darkwind needed to borrow any feathers. Darkwind deliberately turned his attention first to Vree to make sure the gyre was all right, then to his food, both to cover his confusion. When he looked beside him again, Winterlight was gone—

—but the Shin’a’in shaman Kethra had taken his place.

Oh, my. I wonder what I owe this pleasure to.

He brushed invisible crumbs from his tunic, self-consciously. Kethra was another source of confusion entirely for him, and not just because she was his father’s lover.

Although that was a part of it—

“Is Father well?” he asked her, quickly.

She nodded, her bright green eyes as cool and unreadable as a falcon’s, and smoothed her long black hair behind her ears. She wore a birdfetish necklace that sparkled in the magelight, and a braided length of cord adorned with feathers hung from her left temple.

“He is relatively well,” she told him, as the assembled scouts collected their birds as if at an unspoken signal, and drifted not-too-casually off, back to their respective ekeles. There wasn’t any people-food left, and the few carcasses that remained were taken by those who lived outside the Vale.

Kethra, however, was not leaving. “There are some things I need to discuss with you before I proceed to the next steps with him. They concern you, and your relationship to him.”

“What about it?” he asked, more brusquely than he intended. Suddenly it seemed as if everyone in k’Sheyna was interested in his private life! Am I to be allowed no thoughts to myself ? He glanced around the clearing, hoping for a distraction, but all of the scouts who had thronged the area had evaporated like snow in the summer sun, as if there was some kind of conspiracy between them and the Shin’a’in. She only pursed her lips and shook her head at him, allowing him no evasions.

“I need to know what you think of him now—and what you think of me.” She fixed him with an unflinching gaze. “You know I am Starblade’s lover.”

He flushed, painfully embarrassed. “Yes,” he said shortly. “And Iceshadow told me why—why it was necessary.”

“What did he tell you?” she asked. “Humor me.”

He averted his eyes for a moment, but she recaptured them. “Because so many of the things that were done to Father, and the magics that were cast to control him, were linked with sex, it has required sexually oriented Healing to undo them. That meant Father’s Healer should be a lover as well.”

Kethra nodded, and leaned back, her slender hands clasped around one knee. “That is quite true,” she said quietly, “And in case you had wondered, I knew that was the case when I came here at Kra’heera’s request. But had you also deciphered that I am your father’s love as well as his lover, and he has become mine as well?”

Darkwind tried to look away in confusion, and found that he could not. “I—it had occurred to me,” he admitted. “I am not blind, and your attitude toward one another shows.”

She set her jaw with the perpetual half-smile that shamans always seemed to have. “And what do you think of that?” she asked bluntly, a question he had not expected. “What do you think of me, when you picture me in that role?”

Gods of my fathers. She would ask that. “I am confused,” he said, as honestly as he could. “I do not know what to think. I admire you for yourself, shaman. You are a very strong, talented, and clever woman. You force my father to be strong again, as well. I think that he must need this, or you would not do it. I see you encourage him to go to his limits; you permit him to do for himself what he can. Yet you do not let him fall when you can steady him, and you match your talents with his when he cannot do something alone.”

“You are describing a partner,” Kethra said calmly. “An equal. Someone who is likely to go on being one for the foreseeable future.”

He nodded, reluctantly, aware that his uneasiness was making him sweat.

“And this makes you ill at ease.” She stated it as an observation rather than a question. “Uncomfortable in my presence whether or not I am with your father.”

He sighed. “Yes, lady. It is not just because you are a shaman, though there is something to that.”

Kethra chuckled. “Shamans make you nervous?”

Darkwind took a deep breath and chose his words carefully. “Shamans as a rule can make one uncomfortable by seeing more than one would like. That is not the whole of it, though. I do not know what to say to you, or how to treat you. You are the first of my father’s lovers who has been a full partner since my mother’s death. And when I am looking objectively at my memories, it seems to me that you have more patience and compassion than my mother had. And yet—”

“And yet, what of your loyalty to your true mother, now that I have come to replace her? Surely I seem an interloper. I suffer by comparison with your memory of her.”

“It is easy to regard someone who is dead as without peer,” he told her candidly. “I have lost enough friends and loved ones to be aware of that.” He cocked his head to one side, and nibbled his lower lip. This was, possibly, one of the oddest conversations he had ever taken part in. “Say this. I know that I can call you friend. I think if you will give me time, I can even come to call you more than that. Will this serve?”

Her smile widened, and she reached out a hand to clasp his, warmly. “It will serve,” she told him. “Friend alone would have served; I am pleased you think of me that well. I was not sure, Darkwind. You are adept at hiding your true feelings—you have had need to, I know. That is not unique to Tayledras, Shin’a’in, or any other people. Trust me, we shamans need to hide our feelings ourselves sometimes, to struggle through pain.”

He shrugged. “We all have needed to hide true feelings here, to one extent or another. Events have made it necessary.”

She nodded. “Well, at least you and I have looked beneath the masks, and not run from what we have found.”

He smiled, impressed by her steadfast sense of humor. “Now the unpleasant news. Your father is still far from recovered. It will not take weeks or even months to cure him; it will be a matter of years.”

He took a deep breath and ran his hand through his hair. He felt his shoulders slumping, and remembered that it made a poor impression of strength, but he knew Kethra would see through any attempts to hide his emotions, either by words or body language. He closed his eyes. “I had thought so, but I had not liked to believe it. Father has always been so—strong. He has always recovered quickly from things. Are you quite certain of this?”

A deep, somewhat strained male voice spoke from behind them.

“You must believe it, my son,” said Starblade. Darkwind jerked his head up and turned to face him. Starblade wore a thin, loose-cut resting-gown that Songwind… Darkwind had designed for him a decade ago. The Adept walked slowly into the clearing, and now that he knew the truth, Darkwind saw the traces of severe damage done to him, physically as well as mentally.

Starblade found a space beside Kethra and joined her. “You must. I am but a shadow of what I was. In fact,” he chuckled as if he found the idea humorous, “I have considered changing my use-name to Starshadow. Except that we already have a Shadowstar, and that would be confusing for everyone.”

Darkwind clenched his hands. It wasn’t easy hearing Starblade confess to weakness; it was harder hearing him admit to such profound weakness that he’d thought of altering his use-name. That implied a lasting condition, as when Songwind had become Darkwind, and sometimes an irreparable condition.

Starblade sat carefully down beside the shaman, and took her hand in his. His left hand—the one that Darkwind had pierced with his dagger as part of his father’s freeing from Mornelithe Falconsbane. It showed a glossy, whitened scar a half-thumblength long now that the bandages had been removed. “I hope that you and I have reconciled our differences, my son,” he said, as Darkwind tried not to squirm, “because I must tell you that I do not trust my decision-making ability any more than I can rely on my faded powers.”

Darkwind started to blurt out a protest; his father stopped him. “Oh, not for the small decisions, the everyday matters. But for the decisions that affect us all deeply—and the ones I made in the past—I do not feel that I can continue without another view to temper mine. In our Healings, I see my actions laid on bare earth, without order. As I am rebuilt, Kethra helps me to understand the motivations behind those actions, and reject those that Falconsbane engineered. It is a slow process, Darkwind. I do not know which of the decisions I have made were done out of pride, out of good judgment, or out of the direction of our enemies. I need you, my son; I need your vision, and I need your newly regained powers. More so: k’Sheyna needs them.”

Now Darkwind was numb. At the moment, all he could do was to nod. But this—this was frightening, inconceivable. Even at his worst, when Starblade had been trying to thwart him at every turn, he had been in control, he had been powerful. He had been someone who at least could be relied upon to know what he was doing, a bastion of strength. Full of certainty.

This was like hearing that the rock beneath the Vale was sand, and that the next storm could wash it away.

Kethra and Starblade both were waiting for some kind of response, so he got himself under some semblance of control, and gave them one. “What is it you want me to do?” he asked.

“I want your opinions, your thoughts,” Starblade told him, his lined and weary face showing every day of his age. “I need them. The most pressing concern is the Heartstone; what do you think we should do about it? You know enough to make some educated guesses about it. We cannot stabilize it, not without help. I do not think that we can drain it, either. When we try, it fluxes unpredictably. And after you have given me your opinion, I want your help in doing whatever it is that we must to end this trouble—I want you to take my place as the key of the Adepts’ circle.”

He shook his head at that, violently. “Father, I can’t. I haven’t even begun to relearn all I’ve forgotten and—”

“The strength of your will and youth will counter that lack of practice,” Kethra said, interrupting him. “The key need not be the most experienced Adept, but he must be the strongest, and you are that.”

Starblade coughed, then settled himself, fixing Darkwind with a sincere look. “I will explain it to you in this light, then. Your mother and I raised you to be a strong and responsible person, Scout or Mage. Now, the strength that I taught you has been taken from me. You are at least in part the vessel of my old personality. I would appreciate relearning what I was from you, and learning your strength.”

Given a choice, he would have told them it was impossible; turned and fled from the Vale, back to his ekele. But he had no choice, and all three of them knew that. He bowed to their will. “If that is truly what you want,” he said unhappily. “If it is, then I shall.”

“Thank you,” Starblade said, simply. As Kethra stood up, he rose to his feet to place one hand on his son’s shoulder. “This—confession has cost me a great deal, but I think it has gained me more. I have given over wanting you to be a copy of me, and I wish that Wintermoon and I had not drifted so far apart that I cannot say those same words to him and be believed. Perhaps in time, he will not be lost to me. I do not wish you to be anything but yourself, Darkwind. Whatever comes of this, it will have happened because you went to the limit of your abilities, and not the sum of my expectations. In all that happens, I shall try to be your friend as well as your father.”

With those words, which surprised him more than anything else that had happened tonight, Starblade turned and walked slowly back into the shadows, with Kethra at his side.

Vree swooped down off his perch, and backwinged to a new one beside his bondmate. He swiveled his head, turning it upside down to stare at Darkwind from a new angle, as only a raptor would do. Hard to manage, with his crop bulging as if the bird had swallowed a child’s ball. And possibly the silliest pose any bird could take.

:Sleepy,: he announced. :Sleep now?:

Darkwind held out his gauntlet automatically, and Vree swiveled his head back and hopped onto his bondmate’s wrist. :I think so,: he replied, absently, all the while wondering if, after all this, he still could get to sleep.

* * *

He flailed up out of slumber, arms windmilling wildly, with sparkling afterimages of confused dream-scenes still in his mind and the impression of someone shaking him.

Someone was shaking him. “What?” he gasped. “Who?” The hammock-bed beneath him felt strange, the proportions of the room all wrong.

Light flared, and he blinked, dazzled; the shaker was Sathen, the hertasi who usually tended Starblade’s ekele for him. The little lizard was holding a lit lantern in one claw, with the other on Darkwind’s shoulder. And the proportions of the room were wrong because he was not in his own ekele, he was in Starblade’s, in the guest quarters. Vree dozed on, oblivious, on a block-perch set into the wall, one foot pulled up under his breast-feathers and his head hunched down so far there was nothing visible in the soft puff of white and off-white but a bit of beak.

I need to find Father a new bondbird, came the inconsequential thought, as Sathen waited patiently for him to gather his wits and say something sensible.

“What?” he obliged, finally. “What’s wrong?”

“Trouble,” the little hertasi whispered. “Trouble-call it is, from Snowstar. Needing mage. Needing mages,” he corrected. “More than one.”

Marvelous. Well, I’m probably the least weary. “What for?” he asked. It couldn’t be for combat; by the time he reached Snowstar’s patrol area, any combat would have been long since resolved. He reached for his clothing and pulled on his breeches.Well, at least this means that someone else will have to take our patrol in the morning. And I don’t have to be the one to decide who it is.

“Basilisk,” Sathen said, his nostrils closing to slits as he said it. The lizard-folk did not like basilisks—not that anyone did, but basilisks seemed to prefer hertasi territories over any others.

Darkwind groaned, and pulled his tunic over his head, thinking as quickly as his sleep-fogged mind would permit. “Go leave a message for Winterlight that—ah—Wingsister Elspeth and I went out to deal with the basilisk, and he’ll have to get someone else on day-watch to cover for us. Then go wake up the Outlander and tell her I’ll be coming for her in a moment.”

Fortunately Elspeth’s ekele was not that far from Starblade’s. She wasn’t going to like being awakened out of a sound sleep—but then, who did? She took the oath, he told himself a little smugly as he pulled on his boots. He splashed water from the basin Sathen had left onto his face to wake himself up. She might as well find out what it means.

Besides, being shaken awake in the middle of the night might also shake up that attitude problem of hers. And once she saw a basilisk for herself, he had a shrewd notion that she might start paying better attention to him when he told her something. Particularly about the dangers that lurked out in the Uncleansed Lands, and how you couldn’t always deal with them combatively.

This would be a good exercise in patience for her, as well; now that he thought about it, he realized he couldn’t have planned this encounter more effectively.

Other than staging it by daylight instead of darkness.

For a basilisk could not be moved by magic power—it grounded attacks out on itself, sent the power out into the earth, and ignored the attackers. And it could not be moved by force.

It could only be dealt with by persuasion. And a great deal of patience, as Elspeth would likely discover the hard way.

He took the gracefully curved stairs down to the ground, jumping them two at a time, suppressing the urge to whistle.

This promised to be very, very entertaining.

* * *

It was not just any basilisk. It was a basilisk with a belly full of eggs.

Snowstar held his torch steady, no doubt trusting in the cold to keep the creature torpid. It blinked at them from the hollow it had carved for itself in the rocky bank of the stream, but remained where it was. Torchlight flickering over the thing’s head and parts of its body did nothing to conceal how hideous the poor creature was.

“Havens, that thing is ugly,” Elspeth said in a fascinated whisper. Basilisks came in many colors—all the colors of mud, from the dull red-brown of Plains-mud, to the dull brown-black of forest-loam mud, and every muddy variation in between. This one was the muddy gray-green of clay. With the face of a toad, no neck to speak of, the body of an enormous lizard, a dull ash-gray frill running down the head and the length of the spine and tail, a mouth full of poisonous half-rotted teeth, and a slack jaw that continuously leaked greenish drool, it was definitely not going to appeal to anything outside of its own kind. And when you added to that the sanitary habits of a maggot, and breath that would make an enraged bull keel over a hundred paces away, you did not have anything that could be considered a good neighbor.

And that was when it was torpid. As soon as the sun arose, and warmed the thing’s sluggish blood, it would go looking for food. It wasn’t fussy. Anything would do, living or dead, so long as it was meat.

But as soon as the blood warmed up, the brain would warm up, too—and when that happened, nothing nearby would be safe. Not that the basilisk was clever; it wasn’t—it wasn’t fast either, or a crafty hunter. It didn’t have to be. It simply had to feel hunger and look around for food, and everything within line-of-sight would freeze, held in place by the peculiar mental compulsion it emitted.

Then it could simply stroll up to its chosen dinner, and eat it.

As Snowstar explained this to Elspeth, Darkwind created a heatless mage-light and sent it into the basilisk’s shelter, so he could get a better idea of how big it was. Elspeth shuddered in revulsion as the light revealed just how phenomenally hideous the creature was.

“Are we going to kill it now?” she asked; Darkwind had the feeling that she wanted to get this over with quickly. Well, he didn’t blame her. Being downwind of a basilisk was a lot like being downwind of a charnel pit.

Snowstar answered for him. “Gods of our fathers, no!” he exclaimed. “If you think it stinks now, you don’t want to be within two days’ ride of a dead one! That’s assuming we could kill it. It has three hearts, that warty skin is tougher than twenty layers of boiled hide, and it can live for a long time with what we’d consider a fatal wound. It can live without two legs, both eyes, and half its face. Altogether. Assuming you could get near enough to it to take out an eye. Personally, I’d rather not try.”

Elspeth shook her head, not in disbelief, but in amazement. “What about magic?”

“Magic doesn’t work on them,” Darkwind told her, as he reckoned up the length of the beast and judged it to be about the size of three horses, not counting the tail. “It just passes around them and goes straight into the ground. We should have shields like that! An amazing animal.”

“You sound like you admire it,” Elspeth replied in surprise.

He shrugged, and walked around a little, to see if the basilisk noticed him, or if it had gone completely torpid. “In a way I do,” he said, noting with satisfaction that the creature’s eyes tracked on him. “It is said that they were created by one of the Great Mages, not as a weapon, but as a way of disposing of the carcasses of those creatures that were weapons, that even dead were too dangerous to touch and too deadly to leave about. Nothing else will eat a dead cold-drake, for instance.” His brief survey complete, he returned to Elspeth’s side. “They weren’t supposed to be able to breed, but neither were a lot of other creatures. Most of their eggs are infertile, but there are one or two that are viable now and again.”

He turned to Snowstar. The scout wiped the back of his hand across his watering eyes, and stood a little straighter. Snowstar was one of the youngest of the scouts; Darkwind was grateful that he had known enough to send for help and not attempted to move the basilisk himself. It could be done without magic, but the odds of success, especially in the uncertain weather of fall or spring, were not good. “Have you found any place for us to put her?” he asked.

“Yes, but it’s not as secure as I’d like,” the scout replied, wiping his eyes again. The wind had turned, and the fumes were—potent. Darkwind’s eyes had started to burn a few moments ago, and Snowstar had been here for some time. Small wonder he had watering eyes. “I’ve got a rock-bottomed gully along this stream; the sides are too steep to climb and there’s always lots of things falling into it to die. The only problem is that the mouth of the valley is open to the stream, and I couldn’t see a way to close it off.”

“Isn’t there a swamp somewhere off that way?” Darkwind asked, waving vaguely in the direction where he thought he sensed water.

“Can you get the thing that far?” Snowstar asked, incredulously. “If you can, that would be perfect. There’s plenty for it to eat, no hertasi like it because it’s full of sulfur springs, and the sulfur’s enough to make sure any eggs it lays won’t hatch.”

“If we can get it moving, we can get it that far,” Darkwind told him. “The problem is going to be getting it moving without getting it worked up enough to think about being angry or frightened. If it’s either, it’ll start trying to fascinate everything within line of sight.”

“Right.” Snowstar spread his hands. “I’ll leave that up to you. Get it moving and I’ll guide you to the nearest finger of the swamp and make sure nothing interferes with you on the way.”

“That will do.” Darkwind studied the hideous beast, trying to determine whether it was better to lure it out of its rudimentary den, or force it out.

Force it out, he decided at last. He didn’t think that the beast was going to take any kind of bait at the moment.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said, turning to Elspeth, who still watched the basilisk with a kind of repulsed fascination. “It’s comfortable and it feels secure in that den. You and I are going to have to make it feel uncomfortable and insecure, and make it come out. Once it’s out, it will try to go back in again; we’ll have to prevent that. Then we’ll have to herd it in the direction we want it to go.”

Elspeth licked her lips and nodded, slowly. “We use magic, I presume?”

“That, or mind-magic, or a combination of the two,” he told her. He yawned as he finished the sentence, and hoped he wasn’t going to be too fuddled from lack of sleep to carry this off. Elspeth looked as if she felt about the same. “Got any ideas about what might drive it out?”

She leaned back against a tree trunk and frowned at the beast. “Well, what would drive you or me out of bed? Noise?”

Interesting idea. “That’s one nobody I know of has tried.” He thought for a moment. “If it were warmer, we could lure her out with an illusion of food, but she isn’t hungry in the semi-hibernation she’s in right now. Heat and cold in her cave—no, too hot and she’ll just wake up more, and we don’t want that. Too cold and she’ll go torpid.”

“How about rocks in her bed?” Elspeth hazarded. “Sharp, pointy ones. Maybe combine it with noise.”

“Good. Good, I like that plan. It should irritate her without making her angry, and if we make her uncomfortable she won’t want to go back in there.” He scratched his head. “Now, which do you want? Rocks or noise?”

“Rocks,” she said, surprising him. “I’ve got an idea.”

Since he already had a notion about the noises that might irritate the basilisk, that suited him very well. He had been afraid that Elspeth wouldn’t think herself capable of manifesting good-sized stones, but evidently she already had a solution in mind.

“Do it, then,” he said, shortly, and concentrated all his attention on a point just behind the basilisk’s body. The one thing he didn’t want to do was frighten her—just make her leave her lair. If he frightened her, she might be aroused enough to set all her abilities working, and that would do them no good at all.

Fine thing if I met my end as a late-night snack for a foul-breathed, incredibly stupid monster.

He already knew how some pure, high-pitched sounds irritated wolves and birds; he reasoned the same might well be true of this beast. It just had to be loud enough and annoying enough.

Dissonance, he thought suddenly. That might work even better; two pure tones out of tune with each other.

He’d done this before as a kind of game, when he was just learning very fine control. He’d gotten good enough that he had been able to produce recognizable voices out of the air. Producing pure tones wasn’t all that hard, it just took a lot of energy.

He started near the top of the human-audible scale, figuring to go up if he had to. It took him a moment to recall the trick of it, but when he got it, Snowstar jumped as a nerve-shattering squeal rang out from the basilisk’s lair. The young scout clapped both hands over his ears, his expression pained. Darkwind wished he had that luxury. He had to listen to his creation in order to control it.

When he glanced out of the corner of his eye at Elspeth, he saw she had blocked both her ears with her fingers, and her brow was creased with concentration.

His sounds didn’t seem to be having any effect, although already he noticed the basilisk shifting her weight, as if she found her position uncomfortable. He raised the notes another half step and waited to see the effect.

Another increment followed that, until he had gone up a full octave, and still he was not getting the reaction he wanted, although the monster turned occasionally to snap at the empty air, as if trying to rid her lair of its noisy visitor.

Finally, he took the sounds up past the range where even he could hear it, and he had one of the longest ranges in the Clan. Elspeth had taken her fingers out of her ears two steps earlier, and Snowstar had taken his hands down before that, with an expression of deep gratitude. This was the range that animals other than man could hear; he wasn’t about to give up this plan until he’d passed the sounds that bats used. And from the look on Elspeth’s face, she wasn’t going to give in until she had produced rocks the size of small ponies.

Neither of them had to go that far, although whether it was Darkwind’s dissonant howls or Elspeth’s stones that finally tipped the balance, he couldn’t tell. The basilisk had been snapping and shifting uncomfortably for some time when he changed the tone again, and the basilisk came pouring out of her lair, burbling with anger and frustration.

She stood there for a moment, wavering between the discomfort of the lair, and the exposure of the outdoors. If she dove back in again, they might never get her out.

Before Darkwind could say anything, Elspeth solved the problem for him. He sensed her grabbing the underlying web of earth-energies at the mouth of the half-dug lair and yanking.

The lair collapsed in on itself, leaving the basilisk nowhere to go.

The monster rumbled deep in her chest, and turned, heading downstream and away from them, into the darkness. “That will do for a few furlongs, but then we’re going to have to turn her out of this stream when it forks,” Snowstar said, as the basilisk plodded out of the range of his torch and Darkwind’s mage-light.

“Don’t worry, I think we can deal with it,” he said, breaking into a trot along the graveled streamside, sending his mage-light winging on ahead until it illuminated the unlovely rump of the basilisk. She was moving at a pretty fair pace; he’d had no idea they could move that fast. In fact—was he going to be able to keep up with her?

Elspeth supplied his answer, as she and the Companion trotted up alongside and she offered him a hand up. “Gwena can carry two for a while,” she said. He took her at her word and got himself up behind her. “Are you going to use that sound of yours to drive that thing?” she asked once he was settled and Gwena was bounding after the tail of the monster.

“Yes,” he said—shortly, as it was difficult to speak when bouncing along on the rump of a trotting mount. “That—was—the—idea—”

:I have another idea,: Elspeth said by Mindspeech. :It’s a reptile, which means it can probably sense heat very well. Let’s create a ball of warmth about her size, and lure her along with it. Keep it a couple of lengths ahead of her until she’s where we want her, then dissipate it. What do you think?:

He switched to Mindspeech as well. :That is an excellent idea. This is going to be great news when we get back to the Vale,: he told her, and smiled at the glow of well-earned self-congratulation that met his words. :You’ve helped uncover something entirely new, and very useful to us. The other forms of driving these monsters have all been much riskier. You are going to make your Clansibs quite happy with this news.:

For that matter, she was making him quite happy. The basilisk responded to guidance by noise and the heat lure beautifully. They were going to be returning to the Vale much sooner than he had thought.

Much sooner, and flushed with success. Not a bad combination.

Not a bad combination at all.

* * *

Everyone wanted to hear about the basilisk drive. This was the first time that a basilisk had been moved with fewer than a dozen people and with no injuries. Small wonder that the Vale had been astir when they returned, and that the mages had all wanted to hear the story in detail. It seemed that if he and Elspeth hadn’t used unorthodox tactics because there had only been two of them, they would never have budged the thing. And if Snowstar hadn’t been so inexperienced in the ways of basilisks, he’d never have called for just a pair of mages.

“You weren’t lucky,” Iceshadow finally said. “Snowstar was relatively lucky because he got you. But you two—you were quite clever. Or am I being overly optimistic?”

Darkwind laughed tiredly, and drank another full beaker of cold water—the aftereffect of all that basilisk stench was incredible dehydration. He and Elspeth together had drained a small lake, it seemed, and they were still thirsty.

“No, we were bright enough that if we hadn’t been able to budge the old girl with methods that wouldn’t enrage her, we would have called for help,” he assured the Adept. “I pledge you that. I don’t trust anything that can entrance you to the point that you let yourself be swallowed whole.”

When the others finally left them in peace, Darkwind realized that he was much too keyed up to sleep, at least not without a long soak in hot water to relax him.

He stood up abruptly, catching Elspeth by surprise; she jumped when he moved and looked up at him with round eyes.

“I need a bath and a soak,” he said, “and the pool under your ekele is the nearest two-layered one I know of. Would it disturb you if I used it?”

“Would it disturb you if I joined you?” she asked.

At first, he thought she was making some kind of an overture, but a moment of reflection told him that she couldn’t possibly be doing anything of the sort. She was just as tired as he was—even if she wasn’t bruised from riding for furlongs on the sharp and protruding hipbones of her Companion. Even if the two of them had been ready to tear one another’s clothes off in a fit of unbridled lust, neither of them would have had the energy to do so. No, she was just being polite.

But at least she wasn’t as shy as she had been. And she was still an attractive woman. There might be some hope after all.

“It surely won’t disturb me,” he told her, and offered her a polite hand to help her rise. “In fact, I doubt very much if it would disturb me to share a pool with—”

He stopped himself before he said “with that basilisk;” realizing at the last moment that the comment could be construed as saying that he did not find her attractive. Which was not the case, at all.

“—half the Clan,” he concluded. “All I want is to get this stink off and soak my muscles until I can sleep.”

“Good plan,” she said, and smiled. “I’ll make you a bargain. If you find some of that fruit drink, I’ll get soap, robes and towels from my treehouse.”

“I’ll take that,” he said instantly. Elspeth disappeared into the greenery while he sought one of the storage areas, and dug out a tiny keg of a peculiar, mineral-rich drink Elspeth had gotten very fond of. Normally he didn’t care much for the stuff, but when he was as parched and exhausted as he was now, he downed it with the same enthusiasm as she did.

Keg under one arm and a pair of turned wooden mugs in the other hand, he retraced his path and followed in Elspeth’s wake. When he arrived at the pool, he found that she had been as good at keeping her word as he. There was strongly herb-scented soap beside the lower of the two heated pools, and towels and robes hanging nearby on a couple of branches, with one small mage-light over each pool providing just enough light to see by.

Elspeth was already in the upper soaking pool. He left the keg and mugs beside it as she waved at him indolently from the steam, then he stripped and plunged straight into the lower pool.

It took three full soapings before the last of the stench was gone and he felt clean again. By then he was more than ready for a mug and a long, soothing soak.

“I think I took all my skin off,” Elspeth complained languidly from her end of the pool as he slipped across the barrier between the pools and into the hotter water of the second. “I scrubbed and scrubbed—every time I thought I was clean, I could still smell that thing.”

“Worse than skunk or polecat,” he agreed. She seemed very relaxed for the first time since he had met her. “Did you see how much Iceshadow liked that idea of yours, moving the basilisk with noise?”

“But it was your idea to use pure-tones in dissonance,” she said immediately. “I had just thought of using volume, or maybe make it sound like the cave was falling in.”

He allowed himself to feel pleased about that part of it. “Well, I guess that I’m going to have to admit that you are right about trying new things even in magic. Just because they aren’t the way we’ve always done something, that doesn’t mean new ideas aren’t going to work. Change comes to the Vales; quite a concept.”

She laughed heartily. “I thought I’d never hear you say that! But I have to make a confession to you, though. I have been pushing you, just because you were being such a—mud-turtle about things. Not wanting to try anything new. But—well, now I know that there’s good reasons why some things aren’t done in the Vales and in this one in particular. Hydona’s been explaining things to me…”

Her voice trailed off, and he thought she was finished, until she spoke up again. “You know, Hydona reminds me a great deal of Talia.”

That old friend of hers. The one that’s some kind of aide to her mother, and not the one that’s the weapons teacher.

“In what way?” he asked.

She waved steam away from her face. “She made me give her a promise back when I was a child—that I would never simply dismiss anything she told me just because I didn’t want to hear it, or that I was angry at her or anything else. That I would always go away and think about it for a day. Then if I couldn’t agree with any of it, I had the right to be angry, but if I could see that she was right in at least some of what she’d said, I would have to come back to her and we’d talk about it as calmly as we could.”

Well, if that isn’t an opening chance to talk about her attitude—

“I know we don’t know one another as well as you and Talia do,” he said tentatively, “but could you grant me that same promise as a Wingsib?”

“Oh, dear,” she said, her voice full of ironic chagrin. “Been a bitch, have I?”

He wanted to laugh, and decided against it. Still, he smiled. “Not exactly a bitch. But your attitude hasn’t been helping me teach you. That was one reason why, when the gryphons volunteered to help, I agreed.”

“Attitude?” she asked; her voice was carefully controlled to the point of being expressionless. Not a good sign.

“Attitude,” he repeated, getting ready for an outburst. “You’re very self-important, Elspeth. Very aware of your own importance, and making sure everyone else is aware of it, too. Take what you just said, about being a bitch. You laughed about it; deep down, you thought it was funny. You think you are so important it doesn’t matter if you’re offending those around you. You just make some perfunctory apology, smile and laugh, and that’s that. But nothing has really changed.”

She was quite silent over there in the steam, but he wondered if he’d just felt the temperature of the water rise by a bit. That silence was not a good sign, either.

“The truth is, Elspeth, right now you’re an enormously talented liability.” She wasn’t going to like that, one bit. “I never heard of your land, outside of something vague from the old histories. You could be a bondslave from Valdemar, and we would be treating you the same as we are now. Your title doesn’t matter, your country doesn’t matter, and your people don’t matter. Not to us.”

Little waves lapped against him as she shifted, but she remained silent.

“What does matter is that you did help us; for that, we made you a Wingsib. Because we made you a Wingsister, you became entitled to training. Not because of a crown, and not because of a title. Not even because you asked us. Because you are part of the Clan. And what’s more, the only ones willing to train you were myself and the gryphons. Everyone else has more important matters to attend to.”

That wasn’t precisely the truth, but it was close enough that it might shake her up a bit.

“So.” No doubt about it, she was angry. “I don’t matter, is that it?”

“No, that’s not it. You matter; your title doesn’t.” He hoped she could see the difference. “So you might as well stop walking around as if there was a crown on your head. Kings don’t mean much, out here. Anyone can call himself a king. Having the power to enforce authority—that’s something else again. Until you have that, you’d best pay a little closer attention to the way you treat those around you because we are not impressed.”

“Oh, really?” He sensed an angry retort building.

But then, she said nothing. Nothing at all. He tensed, waiting for an outburst that never came. He wondered what she was thinking.

Finally she yawned and stretched, water dribbling from her arms.

“I’m tired,” she said, yawning again. “Too tired to think or react sensibly. I’ll sleep on what you just said.”

“Please do, and carefully, Elspeth. More could depend on it than amiable learning conditions.” He looked down and sighed. “I do like you, and would prefer not to spend my time with you deciphering what you really mean under the royal posturing.”

She rose, surprising him, and hoisted herself out of the pool, wrapping a towel around her wet hair, then bundling one of the thick, heavy robes around herself. She turned and looked down at him.

“You’ve said quite a bit,” she told him quietly. “And I’m not sure what to think. Except that I’m certain you weren’t being malicious. So—good night, Darkwind. If there’s anything to say, I’ll say it tomorrow.”

She gathered her dignity about her like the robe, and walked off into the darkness, leaving him alone.