Valdemar 11 - [Owl Mage 02] - Owlsight Read online

  Keisha nodded, but couldn’t think of a response. Nightwind patted the rock beside her, inviting Keisha to join her. Keisha climbed up and sat down, with the gryphon within touching distance of both of them. There were long, stiff feathers, much like guard hairs, around the nostrils and eyes. The great beak was polished or waxed, gleaming in the sun. Like a raptor, he had double eyelids, the inner one probably to protect his eyes during a fight or a kill. He had a spicy-sweet scent to him, a hint of ginger and cinnamon, which rather surprised her. He wore jeweled ear studs in each ear, and the shafts of each crest-feather had been decorated in jewel tones and gold leaf to match the ear studs.

  “You aren’t maintaining your shield,” Nightwind observed. “You are going to have to get into that habit; any time you think about it, make sure it’s there! If you’re checking it a hundred times each day, that’s not too many. Use a mnemonic if you have to; associate the checking with something you see a lot of—fallen leaves, stones in the path.”

  Already feeling guilty, Keisha put her shield up, and Nightwind nodded.

  “That’s better. Now, I’m going to ask you some questions, because I suspect that you have already done some things with your Gift that you aren’t really aware of doing, and I want to find out what they are.” She began to question Keisha closely, asking her all sorts of odd things. Had she ever known what was wrong with a human or animal by just looking? Had she ever found herself knowing that she had given a human or animal enough medicine without measuring? Had she ever felt drained and tired after helping someone, even though she hadn’t done a great deal of physical labor?

  The list of questions went on and on, some seemed quite senseless, but others were surprising, because Keisha had felt, or done, those things and hadn’t known how or why.

  Finally, Nightwind was through, and she looked down at the notes she had taken with a waxboard and stylus. “You’re using your Gift with animals, rarely with children, never with adults,” she said. “You’re using it mostly to determine what exactly is wrong with them, and what dosages of medicines are sufficient. You are not using your Gift to Heal without medicine. That’s about normal, for someone who’s untrained, but who is developing a powerful Healing Gift.”

  She seemed to be waiting for a response. “It’s nice to know that I’m normal in something, at least,” Keisha replied dryly, and Nightwind laughed.

  “I’ve asked Kel to help me this morning, in part because I’m intimately familiar with him, and in part because the way he’s put together is going to give you some surprises.” She raised a brow, and Kel chuckled. “Remember how I touched your mind, and you saw through my eyes yesterday? Lower your shield, and we’ll do that again, but this time we’ll be looking at Kel using Healing OverSight.”

  So began the most intense morning that Keisha had ever spent in her life. She learned that there were many kinds of OverSight, many ways of using it, and how to use all the kinds that she had. Specifically, she began to learn how to use it to discover what was wrong with someone, whether it was injury or illness.

  “But I’m mostly treating either familiar animal diseases, or humans who can tell me what’s wrong,” she protested.

  Nightwind raised that eyebrow again. “Oh, indeed? What about someone who is unconscious? Someone with multiple injuries who isn’t aware of all of them? A child too young to talk? Do you always treat just the obvious symptoms without looking for anything further?”

  She dropped her eyes and had to admit that this was exactly what she had been doing.

  “That’s acceptable for a beginner, for a Trainee, but you can’t stay a beginner forever,” Nightwind said, softening her rebuke. “At some point you’re going to have to function as a full Healer, and the sooner that can happen, the better.”

  By the end of the morning, Keisha had a dull headache unlike anything she had ever experienced before, and Nightwind called a halt to the lessons. “For this afternoon, I think you should go through your texts and see if now you understand some of what confused you before,” her teacher told her. “The headache you have now is due to using that part of your mind and Gift that you haven’t exercised before—rather like riding muscles!” Keisha giggled a little at that, and Nightwind smiled. “So this afternoon should be devoted to your books, and when your headache eases, I’d like you to start examining people and creatures around you in this new way. Stop when it starts to hurt again, but the more exercise you give this talent, the stronger it will become, and the easier to use. And remember to keep your shield up otherwise!”

  Keisha felt dizzy with all the orders, but nodded anyway.

  “Now we’ll go get something to eat; I’ll show you the common dining hall.” Nightwind slid off the rock; Keisha followed her. “Kel, thank you, we’re done with you. Go fly your patrols.”

  “Happy to be of ssserrrvicsse,” the gryphon said genially, then took straight off from the rock in a thunder of wings that sent dirt and bits of debris flying in all directions.

  Nightwind also gave her the clue to following the paths—which turned out to be absurdly simple, once you knew it. Paths leading to the entrance had reddish markers which were often colored stones beside the path, paths leading to private residences had black markers, paths leading to the water had greenish ones, paths leading to the buildings housing the common areas—dining hall, kitchens, laundry, baths, and soaking pools—had gray markers. The paths themselves were made up of substances reflecting their “key” colors—bark, pebbles, sand, and so forth. “Just follow all the gray paths, and eventually you’ll come to what you’re looking for,” Nightwind told her. “The guest lodge is on a gray path, too.” Where paths met, there were marker stones in the appropriate colors, so sooner or later, no matter how lost she got, she’d eventually be able to straighten herself out.

  The dining hall turned out to be one of the few wooden buildings in the Vale, a long, low structure that was nothing like Keisha imagined it would be inside. One single room, with the ceiling supported by slender pillars; there was no real sign of what the room’s function should be, it could have been used for any purpose required. Instead of rows of tables and benches, there were a few tables with stools, a great many cushions, some couches, and some individual chairs. Part of one corner had been built up with three raised tiers, also covered with cushions. At the far end, food had been laid out for people to help themselves, which they did, then taking their choices to sit however they chose to eat.

  “There is almost always food here, even between meals, but hot food is only served at mealtime,” Nightwind told her, as she directed Keisha in getting a wooden platter and helping herself. “Things tend to happen in a Vale that upset schedules, so there are plenty of folk missing the regular meals who need feeding at any given time.”

  They found seats—Keisha felt much more comfortable eating at a table—and Nightwind began asking her questions about herself. Keisha discovered that she and the trondi’irn had more in common than she would have guessed. Both of them had a swarm of male relatives to put up with—in Nightwind’s case, it was a horde of cousins, rather than brothers—and both had younger sisters that they liked and missed enormously. “Though Nightbird may come here anyway—but not until her training is finished.”

  Both of them seemed to have the same slightly cynical outlook on life as well. Nightwind had a better sense of the absurd, though, and Keisha wished she had Nightwind’s ability to see humor in things. It looked to her as if Nightwind got more enjoyment from things by not taking them too seriously.

  “I have to get back to work,” Nightwind told her, when they’d finished eating and put their platters in the bin for dirty dishes. “Keep following this gray path, and you’ll eventually come to the guest lodge.” She frowned slightly. “At some point in the next couple of days, I’ll have to get Tyrsell to give you our language; the hertasi for the most part don’t understand Valdemaran. If you see Dar’ian and your headache is gone, tell him I said that.”

  “I wi
ll,” she promised, though she couldn’t imagine how she was to learn a language on top of everything else. She wandered the gray path, enjoying the sights, and eventually did come to the guest lodge. With a sigh, she went inside and obediently got out her texts.

  To her delight, a large part of the things she had not understood did come clear, although the texts often used slightly different terms for things than Nightwind did. OverSight, for instance, was called Mage-Sight or Healing-Sight. Now that she knew some of the basics, though, she was amazed at how much the texts actually told her, occasionally explaining things better than Nightwind had.

  She became so absorbed in her studies that she barely noted the passage of time until she found she was straining to read, looked up, and realized that it was growing dark. More than that, her foot was asleep, and she was starving. She put the book down, and decided to get some dinner on her own.

  She walked to the dining hall through a dusk lit softly by lanterns and scented with the perfumes of night-blooming flowers. A different sort of fragrance coming from the dining hall made her move a bit faster, though, and she shyly took her place amid a tangle of strange Hawkbrothers to get her platter and fill it. With a little searching, she found a quiet corner out of everyone’s way, and sat there, watching and listening to the strange music of their unfamiliar tongue.

  She was just about to leave when she (almost literally) ran into Darian. He caught her by the elbow as she passed him, with a contagious grin for her when she realized who it was. “Working hard?” he asked, with a wink.

  She made a face. “Hard enough to get a headache,” she replied, sighing. “I wish I’d known this was going to be so difficult.”

  “Well, that’s good, it means you’re stretching new talents,” he told her, without a hint of pity. “Almost everything worth doing is hard, at least at first. Do you still want to meet Kuari?”

  “Absolutely!” She remembered then what her teacher had told her. “Oh, and Nightwind said to let you know if I saw you that she wanted—someone—to give me the Hawkbrother tongue.”

  “That would be Tyrsell,” Darian identified, nodding, so that a wisp of hair dropped into his eyes and he brushed it back with an absentminded wave of his hand. “Tyrsell is the king-stag of the dyheli herd; he’s the one I was riding yesterday.”

  A dyheli teaching her a language? “That doesn’t seem right. They don’t talk, I mean, not aloud,” she responded, with a frown. “How can he do that?”

  “Oh, you’ll understand soon enough—still have the headache?” he asked, and she shook her head. “Good; let me bolt something down, and I’ll take you to the dyheli meadow. The sooner you have Tayledras, the better. The hertasi mostly don’t understand Valdemaran.”

  “That’s what Nightwind said.” She followed him as he got bread rounds that looked very like her breakfast this morning, and waited while he inhaled his dinner.

  “Sorry about my manners,” he said between bites. “I got used to eating quickly, because things are always happening quickly around a Vale.” He grinned again. “Maybe that’s why we take our leisure so seriously, because most of the time we’re madly scrambling to get things done. You’ve got to keep a balance in life, so that you can enjoy your pleasures completely, and then go and enjoy your work completely. Heyla, when you rest well, you work better, right?”

  She nodded.

  He led her down another series of twisting paths, coming out into a moon-gilded meadow full of the horned dyheli. One was patiently waiting for them where the path met the meadow. He wasn’t all that much bigger than the rest, but there was a sense of power about him that Meree hadn’t had.

  :Darian has told me that Nightwind wishes you to have Tayledras-tongue,: rang a solemn voice in her mind. : Will you lower your shield for me?:

  She’d been diligent in remembering to check that she had it up, and lowering it was a little like relaxing her grip on something. She sighed as it came down, feeling something inside her head relaxing as well. Will I ever really do this without thinking about it?

  Tyrsell stood over her, a silver statue in the moonlight. :Now sit, please. This will not take long.:

  Obediently she sat down on the grass. A moment later, she found herself looking up at Darian from a prone position, with her head aching all over again and no notion how she’d wound up lying down when she’d been sitting just the heartbeat before.

  “Sorry about that,” Darian said apologetically. “If I’d warned you what was going to happen, you’d have tensed up, then it would have been harder on both you and Tyrsell. I know exactly how you feel right now—this is how they gave me the language years ago.”

  It took her a moment to realize that he was speaking in the Hawkbrother language—and she understood it.

  “How does he do that?” she asked, sitting up, and rubbing her head. “How can he shove a language into my head when he doesn’t actually speak it?”

  Darian shrugged. “I don’t know exactly how; being able to take over someone’s mind like that is a special dyheli Gift. The king-stags use it to control the herd if they panic.”

  “It feels like he ran the whole herd through my head!” she complained; Darian chuckled, and she got the sense that Tyrsell was amused as well.

  “I know; I remember all too clearly how I felt after my turn, and it took me months to get comfortable with all the new concepts that showed up in my head along with the words. Come on, I’ll show you back to the guest lodge and get a hertasi to bring you a headache-potion.” He helped her to her feet; she had the presence of mind to turn to the dyheli before they left.

  “I hope I didn’t seem ungrateful. Thank you very much, Tyrsell,” she said carefully. “This is going to make things endlessly easier for all of us.”

  : You are welcome, and thank you for your courtesy; it will serve you well with my people,: the stag said. Then he turned and walked calmly off into the moonlit meadow, just as if he hadn’t just worked something very like a miracle.

  “How are you coming with your studies?” Darian asked her as they turned back onto the path.

  “The good news is that I haven’t got anything to unlearn,” she replied, one hand to her aching temple. “The bad news is that I have a lot to learn in a short time. From what the books say, I think it was a good thing Nightwind made her offer. I would never have worked this out on my own.”

  “You might have,” he offered, surprising her. “After all, somebody did. There had to be a first Healer.”

  “I suppose so.” The books had also told her just how close she had come to losing control of her Gift, and what that would have meant. No wonder she had thought longingly of becoming a hermit! She had very nearly been forced to do just that, in order to stay sane!

  “Nightwind is awfully kind, and a lot more encouraging than I thought she’d be,” Keisha continued. “And the best thing is that Nightwind says that I was right all along to say I couldn’t go to the Collegium. She says that even untrained, I was doing things that Gil can’t, and that my primary duty was to the people I take care of.”

  “I can see that.” The lights of the guest lodge appeared ahead of them, and just as Keisha noticed them, a hertasi also approached them on the path. “Do you want to make the request?” Darian continued, “Or shall I?”

  “I’d like to,” she decided. When the hertasi neared, it seemed to sense that she was going to say something, and stopped, waiting attentively. “If you would be so kind, I have just been given this tongue by Tyrsell the king-stag, and my head hurts dreadfully,” she told it. It hissed with sympathy.

  “I know just the thing, Keisha-Guest,” it replied. “Shall I bring it to the lodging?”

  “Please,” she replied with gratitude, and it whisked away so fast it almost seemed to vanish.

  “Very good!” Darian applauded. “You’re going to make a Hawkbrother yet!”

  She thought about that, after Darian left her and the hertasi had come and gone with her headache medicine. She hadn’t really
considered “becoming” a Hawkbrother, but Darian had, so obviously outsiders could. Could she come to serve both the Vale and the village as a Healer, in time?

  It was at least as intriguing as becoming a Herald, like her sister.

  Eldan and Kerowyn

  Eleven

  Kuari roused all his feathers with a full body shake, then tucked up a foot and closed his eyes. He knew Darian wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while.

  “Well, what do you think of our little Healer?” Nightwind asked Darian as they gathered to meet with Lord Breon and Val. The Valdemarans had taken to coming over with the wagons full of trade goods rather than asking the Tayledras to come to Kelmskeep. Darian had a notion that this was as much because both Lord Breon and his son were fascinated with the new Vale as it was to save the Tayledras the inconvenience of making the trip.

  “I think she isn’t ’little’ at all,” Darian responded, deciding that Nightwind was fishing, and he wasn’t going to take the bait. “She’s the same age as me.”

  Nightwind laughed. “Point taken. I think she’s going to be quite competent, she’s easy to get along with, and I wish I could persuade her to live here instead of Errold’s Grove. We could certainly use her.”

  “I don’t think there’s any way you could get her to forsake the village,” Darian replied thoughtfully, pulling his hair behind his ears. “She takes her responsibilities awfully seriously.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean she should give up tending the villagers,” Nightwind corrected, shaking her head. “I just don’t think they need to have her there to handle every hangnail and black eye. She could get there from here within a candlemark by gryphon-carrier, and for anything less than serious she could visit once or twice a week, easily enough.”