Tempest

by Mercedes Lackey

  He threw a side glance from a tear-pooling eye at Tyrsell, the kingstag of the dyheli, and Kel understood the paralysis at least. No creature yet known could resist his body- and mind-control. Tyrsell’s control over Kelvren was so complete that the kingstag utilized the gryphon’s internal lift to support him in a pose suited to a statue, without even tipping sideways. He felt his wings being spread fully, only they weren’t being yanked at; his wings “wanted” to be wide open. Little wonder that when Tyrsell was not around, the Tayledras said he was probably the most powerful being alive. Sure, he could be attacked with a spell, but what good was that when Tyrsell could just make the Mage’s body impale itself on his horns while he kept calmly eating leaves?

  Millions of motes of entoptic light swirled and pulsed with Kelvren’s speeding heartbeat, obscuring his vision further. His head pounded and his hearing was disrupted, but he could hear voices, some in his mind.

  :He thinks he is Kelvren.:

  “Whoever he is, he’s a mess inside. His pain’s blocked almost completely. I mean, wide open, it’s amazing he can even breathe the way he’s pumped up. His intake’s like nothing I’ve ever heard of.”

  :How did his bones not splinter with that kind of swelling?:

  :They have, in three places I’ve found so far, and who knows how many fractures besides. This is too dangerous.:

  “I can’t recommend him staying in the Vale. In fact, I put forth that we exile him immediately, for everyone’s safety. We can chain him someplace neutral and keep the rest of us out of danger from him.”

  “Are you just stupid? This is Kelvren, we owe him.”

  :Are we agreed it’s Kelvren, now? Not some other monster?:

  :Watch it.:

  :You know what I mean.:

  “This is Kelvren’s home, regardless of what he did and what happened to him. It is also the most stable and guarded place we could put him.”

  “So you want him to go unstable here in the center of our home, where things are the most controlled? Won’t that, logically, do the most possible damage to everything?”

  “We can shield him and stabilize him, and the best healing Mages are here. We can watch the Veil to see his effects on it, like during that flyover.”

  :Again, are we all in agreement now that it really is Kelvren?:

  :If it isn’t, it’s the most convincing copy ever made. I’ll say yes.:

  “Yes.”

  :Yes, I agree.:

  “I can’t win the argument that he be kept far away from your parlor, apparently. So, he’ll roast the lot of you. Fine. I still want him under constant monitoring, and I mean by Mages and more. And he still has to answer for what happened at Deedun.”

  “The Shin’a’in proverb states, “The hero who will kill you should be admired from a safe distance.” Just because we love him doesn’t mean he can’t unintentionally destroy us.”

  “I’ll take care of that as best I can. Just make him better.”

  :This is Kelvren and he is a friend to the herd. Kelvren is to have the best treatment from all of you or I will be displeased.: Oh, that was surely Tyrsell.

  “Agreed that this is genuinely Kelvren. Tyrsell, let him down, with limited movement, would you? That’s safer for everyone.”

  Kelvren’s dizziness ebbed, and he found himself able to move, albeit as if weighted down and navigating a mud bog. His vision cleared somewhat, and he tested his jaw movement before shrieking, “What is wrong with you all?”

  Just two body lengths away, his dearest friend, Darian k’Valdemar, stood with his hands folded in front of him, brightly lit both by Kelvren and by the seething field of his magical shields, normally invisible but now lit in thousands of short silvery tendrils pointed at the glowing gryphon. His hair was cut back more harshly than usual for a Vale resident, and he wore a lightweight pair of silver symbolic pauldrons. “I know this is a shock, Kel. The reports we got, and what we could learn as you came home, and now—how you look—it’s surprised us.”

  “You feel surprised? Guess how I feel! I thought I’d return to a hero’s welcome. Instead I was brought in by my replacement and ground-bound, by my friends!” Kelvren growled, well past a reasonable tone.

  “We are your friends,” Darian offered. “That’s why we’re gathered. We wouldn’t allow anyone to hurt you, and as your friends, we need you to calm down, so we can work on your internal injuries.”

  I’m convinced this is the real k’Valdemar, whatever is going on. I don’t have the imagination to hallucinate in this kind of detail. If I was hallucinating, I’d have hallucinated twenty weeks of feasts, adoration, and exhausting sex, not this kick under the tail.

  Nightwind, Kelvren’s longtime friend and his trondi’irn, stepped up beside Darian. Her heavy gloves were folded through her smock’s belt, her sleeves were rolled up, and she was sweating profusely. Her husband, Snowfire, in light scout leathers, stayed within a few arm lengths of her, and her sister, Nightbird, stood in a wing position to them both. Nightbird wore a silver-piped shield-styled woven breastplate with her Silver Gryphon badge in the center. Nightbird’s badge was the same size as her sister’s but was in a more prominent position; Nightwind considered herself more caregiver than enforcer and just kept her badge pinned out of the way on her sleeve.

  Nightwind wiped her brow, and confirmed what Darian said. “My first look inside you tells me that you can’t feel pain right now, and that means you will injure yourself worse without knowing it, and starve yourself, too.” She opened her arms and slowly, deliberately closed them until she held the gryphon’s head in her palms, causing Kelvren’s vision to constantly adjust to her. “We have to work deep on you, Kel, and so I’m ordering you to surrender,” she spoke clearly. “Keep your eyes on me, Kel, and let your defenses down. Concentrate on me, believe in me, surrender to me, and we will save you.”

  Kelvren let the throng on the council circle fade far away in his perception and drop out of focus, until the kind, concerned face of his trondi’irn thumb-brushing his cheek-feathers was the last thing he was aware of.

  • • •

  Kelvren lost awareness of time, of place, and of his body. There were periods of unknown duration when he perceived a bewildering separation of his consciousness from his body, as if they’d been very precisely cut away from each other and set aside in the sun to bake. He honestly did not know that k’Valdemar had gathered so many trondi’irn until he’d undergone the most invasive examinations of his life. Tyrsell was present for many of the procedures and tests that Kelvren underwent, occasionally walking past Kel’s field of view before shutting off his consciousness as easily as flicking away a fly. Firesong was there a few times, in his Adept finery and mask one moment, and an eye blink later it would be night, and Firesong would just be standing up in a basic, single-layer garment while hertasi washed his hands for him and helped him back into his robes.

  Each time, Kelvren awoke without any grogginess. He wasn’t ever really drugged, he was simply being shut off and on. Sometimes he’d notice he felt well fed, another time he felt upside-down, and another time he was aware of standing fully on his hind legs. On occasion he would see piles of bloodied bandages and instruments, obviously from trondi’irn work, but he felt no pain. He couldn’t remember speaking to anyone, nor anyone talking to him.

  This time when he awoke, he spotted Tyrsell, Nightwind, the rump of another dyheli, two hertasi with a stack of scrolls with his name on them, a few unknown Hawkbrothers, and a kyree. They and a few trondi’irn he knew were tidying up the glade they were in now, and as they left, he saw that two humans under a vine-wrapped awning were Nightwind and Darian. It was late afternoon, but of what day, he couldn’t tell.

  Nightwind, her eyes as gray as stormclouds and her knee-length hair dyed as black as a new moon night, shrugged on a fresh set of trondi’irn working clothes: belt, scarf, and apron. Wearily, she approached w
here Kelvren lay perfectly symmetrically on a grassy spot among clover. The dyheli kingstag, Tyrsell, simply turned and walked away out of sight, sending :Good fortune to you, friend of the herd, gentle slopes and tasty feeding.: accompanied by faint mental images of exactly that, but they were full-sensory ones. It was a strange feeling indeed to have the subtleties of berries, grasses, and leaves on your tongue, and register the tastes, when you weren’t even the same species as the one who had put them there. Tyrsell was accompanied by another dyheli Kelvren had known since youth, Snowfire’s usual mount, Sifyra, and they walked through a curtain of vines under a stone arch, where a coiled pair of plump, brightly colored snakes dozed.

  Kelvren flexed each pair of appendages in turn. Everything felt better than it had in months, and his full-body glow had lessened significantly. He asked the obligatory first question, the one that everybody asked when they regained awareness, regardless of their era, situation, or species.

  “How long was I out?”

  “Six days, and maybe ten candlemarks,” Nightwind answered. “I know you’ve been hurt before, Kel, but this time, you were in a bad way like nothing we’d seen before. We learned a lot from you. A lot about you. You’ve had almost a hundred people looking you over or consulted by teleson, and there’s nothing quite like this in any records. Kyree historians all the way back to White Gryphon were asked about it, and trondi’irn from two Vales were brought in. Everyone from Adept to handwaver in the Vale’s been talking about you. We think this is unprecedented.”

  “I drew a crowd, at least,” Kelvren commented, immediately sorting out the part that was important to a gryphon, while standing up and fanning his wings. They tingled when he did, and the tingle flowed into his chest and spine heartbeats later. “I remember arriving, being insulted, being assaulted, then surrendering to you. Some sketi-sack even said I should be exiled!”

  “We aren’t proud of that,” Darian conceded. “They only saw the surface problems. You know as well as any of us how tricky magical biology can be.”

  Kelvren returned to his self-absorption. “It was Treyvan that did this to me, did you know that? Treyvan himself! Whatever it was, he made it work, and he did it for me. This was done by the best.”

  “We know; we investigated you very deeply. We went into memories past what you think you know. Firesong said it was a brilliant solution, ‘for a generalist like Treyvan.’ What Treyvan did was very risky. He turned a known ruin into a new kind of ruin.” Nightwind sighed and shook her head.

  Darian took up the thread of conversation, “You survived long enough to make it here, but you’re not just in trouble, you are trouble. In a few more ways than usual. We think you will live, but it may not be long, and it won’t be the life you had before all of this.”

  Kelvren huffed at Nightwind and Darian, and walked in a wide circle around them. “Hurrh! I thought I taught you, Dar’ian, none of us live long, and every new moment means the life we had is gone. So give me the details, what is such a ruin now? I feel good. Hungry, but good.” He said the last part loudly enough that any hertasi nearby would get the hint.

  Nightwind took up the answer, “Without getting too technical, we rebroke your bones, set them, accelerated their healing, and repaired a significant amount of internal damage. Your virtusgan—the larger-bone linings—normally draw in magic energy at a steady rate and refuse the rest, but yours were dying off when Treyvan got to you. That meant your virtutem organ was essentially going dry, and your spleen tried to compensate. Your indusvenarum system had nothing to distribute, so it was shutting down. When Treyvan’s gamble actually worked, the virtusgan feasted. In fact, it gorged and didn’t self-limit. It became dangerously swollen, the virtutem had too much to handle, and you had virtusgan ruptures all through your body. You were so overwhelmed that what should have been agony from it was just washed away. You didn’t have a clue how hurt you were. Just the opposite, in fact. You were euphoric.”

  “Of course I felt euphoric! Look what I had done!” Kelvren proclaimed. “I rallied a Valdemaran army! I lit their path to victory!”

  “You—did do some impressive things,” Darian said, tactfully.

  Nightwind said, “And you came back. Your feathers were as dry as any I’ve ever seen. Without trondi’irn care, you went unoiled too long. You could have gone up like breezecotton if a campfire had popped a spark near you.”

  Kelvren turned his head to look himself over. “I think I knew that somehow. When I felt that new energy surge up into me, I was scared. I thought I’d turn to ash. But then I thought, to dump away the heat from too much magic power, use it for something. The fastest, simplest thing I knew was Lightcasting. You should have seen it!”

  “During your interrogations, I didn’t just see it, I felt it,” Nightwind replied. She was, after all, an accomplished Empath, which was a significant part of why she was a successful trondi’irn. Even when she did not know a creature’s anatomy intimately, she could at least understand what they felt, and that informed her healing abilities. “Tyrsell and the stronger Mindspeakers linked us all. Believe me, now they know far more about gryphons and their needs than they likely ever wanted to.”

  Darian joked, “I think Greywinter wants a gryphon costume now. Much of what you like appeals to his tastes. He is newly, ah, invigorated.”

  Nightwind chuckled, but she returned to solemnity soon enough and rubbed one of the gryphon’s ears. “You went through so much, Kel. I have lost gryphons before. You were close to being my third. I have never worked on anyone like you. I am so sorry, you were pushed too far when you were interrogated—”

  “When I was what? Who was responsible for that?”

  “We all were,” she lied. Kelvren could usually tell when a human was lying, and he had known Nightwind so long it was very obvious she was covering something up. “We needed to know what you knew, so the search went deep into your mind. Too deep. Too far back into you, and it made you—well, it hurt you. In your mind. There were some arguments about what to do, and what was done made your breathing and your heart stop, and—the important thing is, we brought you back.”

  It’s not difficult to imagine whose horns that “mistake” lay upon. Tyrsell was never spoken of as being gentle, and the kingstag had all the subtlety of a horizon-wide thunderstorm over a wildfire. It also explains the mental tone of that farewell. It was solemn and apologetic. What she’s trying so hard to hide is probably that Tyrsell found me to be too much of a threat to the Vale and killed me, and the others beat away at reviving me.

  “Firesong and I fixed the trouble,” Nightwind continued. “Together, and with help from k’Vala, we put things into a . . . kind of working order. It took a while.”

  “It is a wonder you are making any noise at all, since you’re putting so much work into not saying anything,” Kel grumbled.

  Darian spread his hands. “It is just that we don’t know what memory of the past few days you actually have, Kel. We’re afraid that if we say the wrong thing, you might get angry.”

  Kelvren’s building displeasure peaked. His eyes flashed then pinned at them both before he abruptly stood up and stalked out toward his home. “Angrier.”

  They deserve better than that from me, but right now, I just don’t want to be near them, he thought. I hate the idea of that damned dyheli laying every secret I’ve ever had out bare as a book page. We keep secrets for good reasons, but dyheli don’t. They only know indifference, neutrality, invasiveness, and more invasiveness as their degrees of “secrecy.” Now they all know who and what I actually am, not what I want them to know. It is infuriating!

  Crows and ravens chased two falcons through the distant branches, disturbing a roosting vulture who loped through the air for someplace more peaceful. Kelvren shouldered through the arch’s thick wall of trimmed vines to find the hertasi Ayshen and his mate Drusi, the dyheli stag Sifyra, and the human kestra’chern Silverfox there.
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br />   Oh, here’s a coincidence, the same dyheli stag Tyrsell was with. I’ll lay odds he’s Tyrsell’s prize pupil. Probably here to paralyze me if he feels like it, or share my deepest thoughts if he feels bored. “Bring me a bowl of berries and I’ll tell you Kelvren’s deepest fears!” Won’t that be fun? Just hilarious, you hoof-holes.

  Sifyra twitched both ears forward and stared at Kelvren.

  Silverfox did not exactly show age ungracefully, but although his hair matched Nightwind’s in length, by now a full third of it was streaked in stripes of light gray. The two hertasi wore long, customized tool-vests and tailcuffs with long fringe to match the vests and each other. They stood in a semicircle on the far side of the pathway junction, and Ayshen was showing Silverfox some decorative chains when Kel stepped right into the middle of them. The four of them weren’t blocking Kelvren’s way, but it was clear they’d been waiting there to be an escort.

  :Greetings, Sky Warrior,: Sifyra Mindspoke to the group. :We are here to assist.:

  “Assist who, exactly? Me, or those who near-killed me after I was treated as an invader, and my mind was cut up like a feast of ribs?” Kelvren snapped.

  Ayshen and Drusi both just went a bit wide-eyed. Ayshen dropped his chains, then swiftly picked them up and pocketed them.

  Silverfox rocked back a little, then commented, “Ho. Ah. That punches the air out of our happy welcome-back.” He raised his arms from his sides. “I think I understand why you’re upset. Don’t rage at us, Kel, we’re your friends. You’re no enemy of ours.” He spread his hands wide and palms up, in a k’Leshyan display that translated to “I have no weapons, I bare no claws toward you.” Silverfox then gestured down the path toward Kelvren’s cliffside home, and the ekeles near there, far from the Heartstone. “We’re here to walk with you. Firesong wants to see you.”

  Ayshen chimed in, “And that’s where your meal awaits, with sweetbread and the honeywater mix you like.” Drusi added, “Baked just for you. We have missed you so much. You’re the talk of the halls.”