Owlflight v(dt-1 Read online

  At worst, they must think he was good for nothing except to get them into more trouble. His heart sank, and he began to feel utterly worthless. What good was he? What good had he ever been? Surely these people could only wish him gone out of their lives.

  He began to be a little bit afraid of them, too. Oh, Snow-fire seemed approachable and normal enough, but the rest of these folk - well, they were the mysterious and dangerous guardians of the Forest. Who knew what strange customs they had? What if they decided to make him disappear? After all, if he disappeared, there would be less trouble all the way around.

  Snowfire and the Adept finished their conversation and came over to Darian, and took seats beside him with him placed between the two of them. That took him aback; he’d expected to be sitting alone, surrounded by strangers, all of them interrogating him. But it seemed as if Starfall and Snowfire had made themselves his advocates, of a sort.

  “We’d like to begin now, if you are ready?” Snowfire said, phrasing the words as a question.

  “I guess I am,” Darian replied, a bit shaken.

  “Some of our scouts do not know your tongue at all, and most do not know it as well as I do,” Snowfire told him, by way of explanation. “So. They will ask the question, and I will act as translator - or I will clarify what they are asking. I would like you to think back to just before you saw the signs of the attack. Had you seen or heard anything in the past few weeks to make you think that there might be such an attack?”

  Darian shook his head. “No,” he said truthfully, then added, “but the people don’t go out of the village much, and especially not into the Forest. So they might not see anything. Justyn - “ his voice quavered, “ - Justyn wasn’t much good at ForeSight. He could see the weather all right, but never anything on the ground. That was how we got caught by a flood last fall - the rain that caused it was way up north, he didn’t ForeSee it, and of course he didn’t ForeSee the way it would make the river rise.” He shook his head. “Everybody was so afraid of the Forest that they wouldn’t stir past the fields if they could help it, and nobody was due to go over to one of the other towns for trading for a while.”

  Snowfire translated, and some of the scouts discussed what he had said among themselves. “Are towns there, to your north?” called out one.

  Darian had to think hard about that one - Justyn had been making him memorize maps, but he had a poor head for it. He had much better luck in remembering things by means of landmarks than by arbitrary marks on a piece of paper. “I don’t think so,” he said, trying to be honest. “That is, I think that the ones north of us are all a lot farther east as well. I think - “ He closed his eyes, and tried to visualize the map he’d been studying. “I think that the border here kind of sticks out in a bump pointing west, and we’re at the tip of the bump.”

  There was more discussion, and some sketching in the sand. “Let us go forward then, to the time of the attack,” Starfall said carefully. “When did you first know that there was something wrong?”

  “I was up in a tree, looking for mycofoetida fungus,” he replied. “I was pretty high, because we’d kind of harvested everything that was near the ground and near the town. So the first thing I saw was that there were big fires in town.”

  One of the Hawkbrothers with a forestgyre said something to Snowfire, who relayed the question. “So the attack had already begun?”

  Darian shook his head. “No - no, not yet. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew something had to be wrong, so I left the basket and ran back to town, and what was burning, mostly, was haystacks and sheds, and just a few of them. And I saw Vere - that was one of the farmers – setting a fire himself. I guess they were burning things to keep the bad people from getting them.”

  Now discussion among the scouts lasted for some time, before another called out a question that Snowfire translated. “What did the army look like? Exactly? Can you remember any numbers?”

  He shuddered at that one, but he had expected that it would be coming, and he closed his eyes and tried to picture the scene at the bridge. “There was Justyn on the bridge,” he said slowly. “Then there was the big monster with the little monster riding on it. Then there were some of the bear-men - they were five across the road, and I think four lines of five - then behind them was a bunch of human people with tall spears - “ He tried so hard to visualize the scene that he began to get a headache. “I couldn’t see behind them very far, but there were a lot of them. They were lined up on the road five across, and - I remember so many spears sticking up in the air that it looked like a burned forest was on the road, for as far back as I could see.”

  He opened his eyes at the murmur of surprise, but now attention was completely off him for the moment, as the Hawkbrothers discussed possible numbers represented by what he remembered. From their worried faces, he gathered that the implications weren’t good.

  “Were all the bear-men on the bridge?” Starfall asked him quietly.

  “I think so,” he said, just as quietly. “But I don’t know for sure, because I ran. Some of them might have jumped into the river, and some of them might have gotten out of the way.”

  “And some might have been farther back in the ranks,” Snowfire pointed out.

  Starfall sighed and nodded agreement. “Did you see anyone that - “ He groped for words for a moment, then said something incomprehensible to Snowfire.

  “Did you see anyone who looked like a mage?” Snowfire asked, then raised one eyebrow as if aware of the useless-ness of such a question.

  “I didn’t see anyone wearing fancy robes, or who looked like he was doing any magic,” Darian replied, trying to be as exact as possible. “The thing on the lizard acted more like - like - somebody who was in charge of things, but not really in charge of everything, if you get my meaning. He acted like somebody who had to answer to somebody else. And when he got caught in the fire, the rest of ‘em acted like it was no great thing that he wasn’t there. Like maybe they were getting orders from somebody behind them.”

  Darian was doing his best to answer the questions to the fullest, but the more he had to think about Justyn, to see the scene in his mind, the worse he felt. He was doing his best to hold back tears, but it wasn’t easy.

  And it didn’t get any easier. “Where were the rest of your people at the time the bridge was destroyed?” Starfall asked.

  “Gone,” Darian told him glumly. “They were all running away from the village when I was running toward it.”

  “And you turned to run when the bridge was destroyed?” That was one of the scouts, a very young man whose face Darian remembered from last night.

  He hung his head, not liking to think what they must believe of him for running. “Yes,” he admitted, flushing hotly, from the top of his head on down.

  “And where were the enemy then?” the young man persisted. “Still on the other side of the river?”

  Darian looked up, surprised to see that there was no open scorn in their faces. “No - “ he told them. “No, some of them were on the other side when I got out to the fields. I guess they must have forded the river, or something, but they were working their way through the fields, I guess to keep people from escaping.”

  “And you eluded them?” came the question.

  “Well,” he admitted, “there weren’t many of them. And I - ran away.” Admitting that to all of those people was one of the most difficult things he’d ever had to do, and he felt tension build up suddenly inside him. “I had to!” he cried out, the words forced out by the tension, “I had to! I couldn’t help Justyn. I didn’t know what else to do!”

  And then, unexpectedly, he lost control of himself and burst into tears again, and felt another overwhelming wave of shame for losing control of himself, which ironically only made him cry harder.

  Starfall patted his shoulder sympathetically, but evidently was not prepared to leave him alone. “I am sorry that we must ask these questions, Darian, but we need the answers. Now, do you reme
mber how many men you saw on your side of the river, and if they were entirely human? An accurate number?”

  The questioning went on despite his distress, becoming more and more detailed. Several times he lost control again and began to cry; each time the Hawkbrothers waited politely for him to regain control of himself, then continued from where they had left off.

  Finally, though, they had exhausted everything he could tell them about the enemy army - for such, they were all agreed, it was. The questioning turned to another subject, one even more trying for him to face, because the subject was himself. Some of the scouts had gone off, leaving only Starfall, Snowfire, Wintersky, and two others, but the five of them were inexorable in their questions. If all the villagers were afraid to go into the Forest, why was he out there? Why was he not afraid of the Forest? What had happened to his parents? Why had he been signed over to Justyn’s care by the rest of the villagers? Why did the villagers have any say in what was to happen to Darian? Why didn’t Darian want to be a mage? Did he think there was something wrong with being a mage? Did he often run off? What did Justyn do when he disobeyed? Was he thinking of running away at the time of the attack? How did he feel about what Justyn did on the bridge?

  It was the last question that undid him. It was bad enough having to admit how often he had gotten into trouble, and worse admitting that the reason he’d been sent out of the village was as a punishment for running away from a duty, but to be asked how he felt about seeing Justyn sacrifice himself -

  Again, he started to cry, but this time he couldn’t get control of himself once he started. Snowfire even tried to soothe him, saying that he wasn’t at fault - but he knew that he was, and he was certain that, in some strange way, he should have been able to do something. But all he had done was to run away, like the coward he was.

  “You weren’t there, you don’t know, you didn’t see what I did!” he wailed, his voice breaking with hysteria. “You don’t understand! I’m a coward, I’m a rotten, lying coward, and it’s all my fault!”

  And with that, he ran, stumbling and half blinded with tears, out of the clearing, in the direction he’d been led from.

  He couldn’t think of what to do, but when he found himself back in front of Snowfire’s hut, the darkness inside seemed a good place to hide himself in, and he blundered in. The owl was gone, it was very quiet, and he crumpled into a miserable heap on the sleeping pallet, crying so hard that he thought he would never be able to stop.

  “Now I feel guilty,” Starfall murmured to Snowfire, as the child stumbled out of the gathering space, choking on his sobs.

  Snowfire sighed. Nightwind had warned him last night that scenes like this would occur, and probably several times. “Nightwind thinks there are emotional hurts that he has not dealt with, except by avoiding them,” he told the Adept. “She said last night that he was suffering from other troubles, things that perhaps occurred some time ago. She was quite sure he would not even mention them unless he was prodded into it.”

  “Well, it seems that one of those hurts was the loss of his parents,” Starfall said, and ran his hand through his silver hair. “Poor child. I would feel terrible if something happened to mine - he must feel dreadful.”

  “It seems obvious to me that he has not been allowed to properly mourn for them,” Snowfire pointed out. “These people who took him in seemed to want to make him ashamed of them. Children may be resilient, but - “

  “But not that resilient,” Starfall interrupted, his mouth set grimly. “And although these Valdemarans may have meant well, it is said by our cousins that ‘The road to disaster is ordered by the righteous, planned by the well-meaning, and paved with their good intentions.’ I think that, although Dar’ian has many faults, as do most younglings, they were viewed in an exaggerated manner. On the whole, they were in a fair way to ruining a fundamentally good child.”

  Snowfire could only nod, for he was in perfect agreement. How can good people manage to so mishandle a boy? he wondered. Was it only that they refused to see he did not fit in their constrained lives? Or were they only trying to be “cruel to be kind,” never realizing they were only being cruel, and their kindness missed the mark altogether? “I will see if Nightwind thinks she should come help with this latest outbreak,” he sighed. “I hate to press the boy, but even if we are going to do nothing more than avoid any contact with these barbarians, we still need his knowledge of the area, and we need to know everything he has seen.”

  Starfall frowned at that; Snowfire reflected that in many ways, he was made of sterner stuff than the Adept. Well, Starfall might be the heart of the expedition, but Snowfire was its hands - and it was his job to keep the heart safe. Finally Starfall could contain himself no more.

  “I don’t want to destroy the child just to extract information!” Starfall protested, then colored. “He - I apologize; I know you would never countenance any such thing. It is just that I am not used to having children flee my presence in tears.”

  Snowfire smiled wanly. “Darian’s fragility has an unnerving effect on all of us, and that effect is redoubled by the burden of what he has told us. Two days ago, we were engaged in simple duty; something routine, not unmixed with pleasure, I think, and a duty we were completely prepared to handle. Now, suddenly we have a mysterious enemy of unknown ability appearing to threaten us, without prior warning of any sort. It is quite enough to make anyone feel tempted to indulge in a fit of strong hysterics. I know I am tempted.”

  Starfall stood up, shook out his robes, and tossed back his hair. “I hope you will not think badly of me if I leave the boy in the hands of you and Nightwind - “ he ventured. “I feel as if I am playing the coward myself by doing so, but - “

  “But you have other things to do that involve the welfare of more than one boy,” Snowfire reminded him. “And you may think me ruthless in some ways, but if it meant preventing the rise of another Ma’ar, or even another Falconsbane, I would not hesitate to sacrifice myself, the boy, and anyone else I could get to volunteer.”

  “I think you would have a surprising number of volunteers,” Starfall replied. “And you are right; I do have a task to complete that cannot wait, regardless of my personal feelings. I am going to leave things in your hands, as usual. Now, more than ever, I need to get those matrices established.”

  “You might consider locking the power to yourself,” Snowfire suggested, and as Starfall looked surprised, even shocked, he added, “There are no other Alliance mages living here to require access to it, you can key the rest of us into it if you really think it is necessary. This may prevent trouble. What can be locked securely can always be unlocked - but it cannot be stolen. That is one way to make sure this new mage cannot get at it, and one way to make sure that, if worst comes to worst, he must keep you alive. That would give time for help to come, should disaster befall and you come into captivity.”

  “You have a point,” Starfall acknowledged, looking troubled and just a little queasy. Starfall had never had to face a situation like this before, and Snowfire felt very sorry for him. For all that Tayledras were sturdy folk, not all had grown up prepared to face an enemy in life-or-death struggle, and Adepts especially tended to stay toward the power management side of magic. “I’ll consider it. I would not have thought it possible for a mage to work Changes on humans under our current conditions; if he can do that, he may be able to do other unpleasant and unexpected things. That being so - he may be able to bypass anything but a true personal lock.”

  As Starfall walked off in the direction of his “workplace,” Snowfire was left to contemplate the smaller problem of Darian.

  He’s going to have to cry himself out again, and he hasn’t yet gotten to the point where he’s going to consider my failure to appear at his side as an act of desertion. In fact, he may just be grateful to be left alone. Better to consult with Nightwind first - and possibly with Kelvren. The gryphon had managed to get himself wrought up to a high pitch of excitement at the notion that he might b
e the one to confront a second Ma’ar - as unlikely as that was - and it might do Kel some good to have something else to think about. Something like one small boy, parentless and friendless, with an apparent affinity for winged things.

  So, the next obvious place to go was the rock at the rear of the valley where the gryphon liked to sun himself between scouting forays. And since he’d already been out once this morning, making certain that the barbarians had not gotten too close to the Tayledras’ perimeter, he would definitely be there.

  The spring that watered this valley had been made to serve many creative purposes; its water had been divided into several channels that gave everyone access to a thread of stream at the very least. Tayledras liked the sound of running or falling water, and preferred to live in the midst of it. Lacking the lovely, secluded spaces of a Vale, everyone in the team had made up for - or hertasi had made up for - that lack by creating a scrap of water garden for him- or herself. Some had constructed tiny pools with a single water lily or a stand of reeds and a tiny singing-frog, some preferred miniature waterfalls and gurgling brooks filled with stones, and Nightwind had made a clever little aqueduct and water wheel that powered an ever-changing series of frivolous and colorful whirligigs. But the greater part of the water could be diverted to fill two pools, one to be used only for washing, the other for swimming. The former was emptied when the water was dirty into a sand-filter so that the water that sank into the earth was cleansed. Since there was no natural hot spring here, the Tayledras were making do with a steambath. Kelvren, being a fastidious, gryphon, made use of the swimming or washing pool on a daily basis, but could not be persuaded into the steam-hut.