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  “Pfft.” She dismissed her own prowess with a wave of her hand, not the least because she was not nearly as impressed with her “accomplishments” as he seemed to be. “How soon will they be here?”

  “Cut your visit to Errold’s Grove as short as you can; I got the impression it’s just a matter of days before they arrive. For now, they’ll be staying at the Vale. We’re going to put on a celebration for them. Oh, the senior one’s name is Anda; I don’t suppose you recognize it, do you?” He tilted his head to the side, curiously.

  She thought for a moment. “It sounds vaguely familiar; Shandi must have mentioned him now and again.” She kissed him quickly, then pushed him gently away, and turned back to her baskets, tying them shut deftly. “The sooner I’m gone, the sooner I’ll be back. Don’t work too hard while I’m off; but do try to see that Ayshen doesn’t try to do everything.”

  He sighed melodramatically, then bent to help her with her baskets. “You ought to know by now that keeping Ayshen from overwork is beyond my powers. I suppose it’s of no use to ask if you’d like to stop all this, find a replacement, and settle down permanently here with me, is it?” he asked.

  “When someone is getting ready for a journey, it’s the wrong time to ask about settling down, Darian.” She told her stomach to stop bouncing, and put on an air of calm. “The answer still hasn’t changed.”

  “I didn’t think it had, but a fellow can ask. It’s just that we’re awfully good together. . . .” To her intense relief, he didn’t pursue the subject. She was saved from having to say anything more by the arrival of her dyheli, a young buck this time.

  He didn’t ask the question every time she left, but it was at least once a month. Was it only a sense of duty that kept him asking? He couldn’t possibly understand what it meant to be bound to a calling; being a Healer meant being tied into her avocation even more tightly than being wedded.

  Without being asked, Darian saddled the dyheli and fastened the baskets on either side of the arm-thick pad seated just over the stag’s rump. She grabbed hold of the handle that was built in place of a saddle-horn, put her foot in a stirrup, and swung herself up into place. Dyheli had no reins to take up; they would never have permitted so undignified a contraption as a halter on their heads.

  :Good day, Healer,; the buck said formally. :I am Talen.:

  :Thank you for your help, Talen,: she replied just as formally. :Are Barda and Harrod ready to return yet?:

  :They await us at the Vale entrance. Shall we go?: Talen responded, his thoughts glossed with a skimming of impatience. The bucks were almost always a little impatient; it seemed to go with the gender.

  “I heard - go and come back soon, Keisha.” That was all Darian said, but beneath the words was a great deal more that Keisha just didn’t want to have to deal with. Talen felt her assent, and leaped away, keeping her from having to do anything more than wave back over her shoulder.

  Within the Vale, the dyheli kept to a fast lope, but as soon as he burst through the tenuous curtain of the Veil and caught up with the other two, he stretched out into a full run. Dyheli often seemed as tireless as Companions; he’d have all of them in Errold’s Grove well before suppertime.

  Barda and Harrod hung on grimly; they were used to travel by dyheli-back, but not as accustomed to it as Keisha was. Although she could not (as Heralds were rumored to do) have fallen asleep in Talen’s saddle, she moved easily with her mount.

  If only she could have been as easy with her own thoughts.

  Firesong k’Treva finished the last of his stretches, moving smoothly and slowly, while his partner Silverfox watched, alert for any sign of strain. Such alertness was as natural for him as breathing, after so many decades of body study. They shared this ritual every morning; Silverfox insisted on it, and Firesong had to admit he’d felt more like his younger self since he’d begun.

  Being limber does have its advantages.

  “Well?” he asked, as he finished the exercise and stood, arms hanging at his sides, completely relaxed, yet energized, tingling with the song of the body rather than of magic, on the uppermost deck of their ekele.

  “You’ll do,” Silverfox replied, smiling slightly. “You might even be in better shape than you were before the Storms. I told you this would loosen you up, and you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “I didn’t have you to keep me active, before the Storms,” Firesong pointed out, slipping on a robe of scarlet silk, embroidered with white-and-gold firebirds, over his form-fitting sleeveless tunic and trews.

  “In other words, you were a lazy sluggard,” the kestra’chern replied, and ducked as Firesong mimed a blow at him. The Healing Adept’s firebird, Aya, who had been watching all of this activity with keen interest, let out a derisive squawk. The bird opened his snowy wings and dropped down onto Firesong’s shoulder, fixing his talons carefully into the padded fabric. The long white tail trailed gracefully down Firesong’s back, curling around the thick, silver braid of Firesong’s hair.

  “Whose part are you taking, mine or his?” Firesong asked, looking into his bird’s diamond-dust eyes. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

  “And Aya is too smart to answer, anyway,” the kestra’chern laughed. “Not when he knows he can get treats from both of us this way.”

  It was Firesong’s turn to make a noise of derision; Aya stretched his head and neck under Firesong’s chin, and the Adept answered the silent request by scratching the firebird’s chin. Aya crooned with pleasure. “Don’t listen to him, little one,” he said into Aya’s ear. “He thinks everyone is as self-centered as he is - or more.”

  “Of course I do - since I’m not at all self-centered,” Silverfox replied matter-of-factly. He took Firesong’s elbow, and steered him in the direction of the staircase that curved around the trunk of their tree. “And don’t look now, but your pet is trying to coax me into tickling him, too.”

  Aya opened one eye and gave Silverfox a withering look at the word “pet,” but did not pull his head away from Silverfox’s fingers.

  Firesong felt a smile stretching the stiff, pitted and scarred skin of his face. Although life was nothing like he’d anticipated when he left his home Vale, it was very good. What’s more, I’m not sure if I’d be willing to do any of it over, since the end result is so - comfortable. It’s amazing now that I can wear so many faces here without any of them being a mask - and wear a mask without hiding my feelings.

  Silverfox followed him down past the bedroom to the main public room of the ekele. The tree wasn’t large enough to support an ekele very high off the ground, or for more than one room to be on a single level, but now that the Veil was in place, he’d had the hertasi construct an external stair linking all the rooms, so that the area that had been used for the internal staircase could be converted into usable space. Wide decks circled each level of the ekele, and the staircase threaded its way around and through them. All the windows were open to the balmy air, and flowering vines grown from k’Vala cuttings had been trained around each of the windows to scent the breezes.

  There were plenty of masks hanging on the walls, but Firesong didn’t trouble to reach for any of them as he and Silverfox entered the room. Here in his own home, no one would trouble him who had not been invited - and no one who had been invited would be shocked or disturbed by his burn-scarred appearance.

  Some of Silverfox’s handiwork hung on the walls as well - gryphon feathers, shed by some of the residents of k’Valdemar when they molted. These were all primaries, secondaries, or tail-feathers, and the smallest was as long as Firesong’s forearm. Silverfox decorated the quills with beadwork, and painted the broad expanses with sinuous designs echoing the colors of the beads. Dyed leather and ribbons of strong textures complemented the interlace and lilt of the line-work. Feather artworks hung between each mask, and Firesong never tired of resting his eyes on them.

  He lifted Aya off his shoulder and set the firebird down on a perch mounted in the wall, one indulgently made of silver
in the form of a vine-wrapped branch with a hammered brass reflector behind it as tall as a hertasi. Aya roused all his feathers and shook himself vigorously; bits of fluff flew off of him and rode the air currents of the room like wayward insects, and sparks of false fire crackled around him.

  “Wasn’t the Joint Council meeting this morning?” he asked Silverfox, as he sank into his favorite chair and reached for a book. Before he could even make up his mind that he wanted something, one of his hertasi appeared at his elbow and left a tall glass of cooled juice on the table where his book had been.

  “Yes, and Keisha was going back to Errold’s Grove with the village representatives, so Darian will probably be a little late.” Silverfox sighed, but didn’t say anything more; Firesong assumed that the sigh was for Darian’s situation with the girl. And it was too bad; but it was also Darian’s and Keisha’s choice to keep things hanging this way. Darian didn’t allow it to affect his mage-studies; only if it had, would Firesong have had any right to stick his own nose into the affair.

  It was later than Firesong would have expected, though, when Kuari came in to land on the railing of the porch, signaling that Darian could not be far behind. Lunch was long over, and Firesong was well into his book by then; Silverfox had already gone below to his workrooms at the foot of the tree to administer to some of his massage clients.

  The Healing-Adept laid his book aside after reading a passage that made him smile, since it echoed his own teaching philosophy so well. Teach what you know, regardless of when you have learned it - teach what you learned yesterday sagely, as if you have known it all your life, and teach what you have known for decades with enthusiasm, as if you learned it only yesterday. He marked that page with a scarlet-jay feather and waited for Darian’s step on the stair, and saw by the young man’s face that there was unexpected news.

  “Lord Breon said we’re going to get a permanent, resident Herald,” were the first words out of the young man’s mouth.

  “Really?” Firesong was a little surprised at the “we.” “I take it he is expected to reside here? In k’Valdemar?”

  Darian picked a seat and settled into it. “So Lord Breon says - unless the Herald decides it would be more politic to actually live outside the Vale. He’s supposed to be a Herald-Mage, too. Keisha’s sister Shandi just got her Whites, and she’s coming too, as his protege. I don’t know if that’s for the long term, but she’ll certainly be here for a year.”

  “Hmm. We’re having a welcome, obviously.” Firesong knew there was something more, but Darian would get to it quickly enough; it was his nature not to hold anything back, for good or ill.

  “Yes, and I - well, I suppose you could say that I’m going to be the chief entertainment,” Darian replied ruefully, his expression a comical mixture of chagrin, embarrassment, and pride. “Lord Breon got this idea - ”

  He related exactly what had happened at the Council Meeting with remarkable facility - but then, the young man hadn’t been out of the circles of power since he was about fourteen or fifteen. Starfall is probably only waiting for him to reach the status of a full Mage before resigning from the Council, having Snowfire take his place, and graduating Darian into Snowfire’s slot.

  ‘Well, if that was indeed Starfall’s plan, Firesong’s own plans fit right into that. And now was a good time to set those plans in motion.

  “Well, in that case,” he said casually, “it is a pleasant enough day. I have had a good breakfast. Before you get too involved in all these other ceremonies, perhaps we’d better put you through your Mastery Trial.”

  Darian’s face went completely blank; Firesong had the satisfaction - which was not happening often, these days! - of catching the young man completely by surprise. Firesong may as well have said, “I had a nice nap, so let’s dig up this forest and make a pretty lake, eh?” The look on Darian’s face was delicious.

  “So, let’s get that little exercise taken care of, shall we?” he continued, with mischievous casualness, as he got to his feet. “Come along.”

  He didn’t stop to see if Darian was following as he headed for the stairs; Darian would follow, because Firesong hadn’t given him any time to actually think about what he was going to do. Darian was ready - but the more time he had to stew about the Trial, the more likely it was that he’d work himself up into a nervous state over it, and risk failure. Firesong had never intended to give him that chance. Too many young mages froze up and couldn’t even remember the simplest of spells when allowed to dwell on the upcoming Trial; it was a mistake some teachers made that would not happen with Darian.

  The steps behind him creaked under Darian’s weight, and Firesong smiled to himself. By this evening, the Vale would have yet another piece of news to talk about. Or at least they would, if Firesong had anything to say about it. Firesong usually got his way - although these days, when he didn’t get what he wanted, he just changed his mind until he was happy with what he had.

  Darian, however, would do very well in the coming trial, he knew. Firesong could feel intuitively that he would get exactly what he wanted. He had confidence in his pupil, and the Vale would have something more to celebrate by nightfall - the first new Master Mage of a new Vale. His student. Magnificent!

  Three

  Darian shivered as he followed Firesong down the stairs to the dome complex nestled at the foot of the tree. Most of that structure belonged to Silverfox, but Firesong kept one private room for himself, protected with the tightest permanent shields inside k’Valde-mar. Layer upon layer, unseen buttress against invisible firewall, every sort of stabilized, strengthened magical protection known to the Adept had been firmed up. Over the past years they had been cast and enchanted into virtual patterns of stone, as if mortared by an expert, with the equivalent of pockets and drains for excess power to collect. This was Firesong’s workroom, where he had taught Darian for two years; many of the shields were not meant to keep anything out but rather, to keep Darian’s “mistakes” from escaping.

  There hadn’t been a great number of those mistakes - no more than three, all in his first few months with Firesong, and all minor ones - but the existence of those shields allowed him to work without worrying about the consequences of an accident to the rest of the Vale. The first had resulted in no worse than a burned hand and singed eyebrows, the second a splitting headache for both of them, and the third, a scorch mark on the floor surrounded by frost, which resulted in an intensive series of lessons on why resilient shields were more important than rigid ones. Darian had known all along that every lesson would lead up to a Mastery Trial, but he’d assumed he would have time to prepare for it, and undergo days of special readiness rituals.

  Why now? Why not give me some time to work up to this? he asked himself, anticipation setting his nerves afire. He had no idea just what was going to be expected of him -

  And it was too late for second thoughts. Firesong had reached the bottom of the staircase, palming something from one of the dozen narrow shelves of ornaments and oddities, and held open the door to the workroom for Darian. His scarred face showing nothing except pleasant anticipation, quite as if this were just another, perfectly ordinary lesson. Darian entered the door into the windowless room, lit from above by a blue-tinted skylight, and Firesong closed the door behind them both. He dropped a latch that all but seamlessly blended into the interlaced trim that ran around the room.

  With the closing of the door, the shields sprang up and into place all around them, creating a kind of hum in the back of his head and a tingle along his skin. Firesong leaned casually against the doorframe, folded his arms across his chest, and nodded. “The usual,” was all he said laconically.

  So Darian began with “the usual,” the building of his own shields, spreading them outward to encompass the room, then integrating them with Firesong’s shields that were already in place, leaving some layers fragile so they could collapse back in case of a surge. He could have done this much in his sleep; it took scarcely a thought to shape his o
wn energy to his will now. It hadn’t always been that way.

  But next came an addition to his shields, a shunt to drain off excessive heat. He had never actually needed this shunt before, but unused mage-energy, if not properly grounded and sent back to its source, or energy that came in to the mage at a rate greater than he could handle, manifested in waste heat. At the level a Journeyman worked, this was a trivial concern; the worst that happened was that the area got a bit too warm for comfort - or the occasional flash, like the earlier accidents. In fact, if working in the dead of winter and there was energy to spare, some Journeymen deliberately eliminated the shunt so as to warm the area they worked in. This ability to deliberately create heat made mages very popular in cold climes and seasons, and some weather-work was based directly on that effect.

  But at the level a Master worked, improperly handled energy could be deadly; the shunt was a necessity - as Firesong’s own scars testified. At the end of the Mage Storms, when trying to avert magical catastrophe, Firesong and his allies had done everything right, but the energies they had dealt with had been greater than any mage before or since had ever faced - even Adepts working in concert with Avatars of the Star-Eyed Goddess of the Shin’a’in had not been able to prevent all the damage such an overwhelming force could conjure.

  “Now locate all the Heartstones of all the Clans,” his mentor told him. Darian nodded, and unfocused his eyes to better invoke Oversight and see into the plane of mage-energy, searching out each active Stone and tracing the intricate web of ley-lines that surrounded them. First, his own - k’Valdemar was a lesser Stone by any estimation, but it was growing, its power increasing daily. He was rather proud of that, for some of the energies invested in the Stone were of his harvesting. Each bit of power he had added over the past two years had made the Stone stronger and more stable, so that now it was possible to turn this into a real Vale by all Tayledras standards.