Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  Lights in the central tent, and shadows moving inside it, told him that someone, at least, was there. He pushed aside the flap and moved quietly inside, and found Tamsin and Cinnabar bandaging a middle-aged land-scout, surrounded by tables bearing the debris of a thorough patching job. A mercenary; Amberdrake caught sight of the badge on his shoulder and recognized the wolf-head of Pedron's Wolves. Urtho was very careful about the mercenaries he hired, and the Wolves had a particularly good reputation. Even the gryphons spoke well of them.

  Even Skan had spoken well of—

  Sketi, Drake, you're fixated. It's a downward spiral, and it's got to be broken—before you are.

  He sagged against a tent brace and hid his face in the shadows as he lost control over his expression. He wanted to be within sensing distance, but he also didn't want to be obtrusive. He shielded as much of his grief as he could, but these were fellow Healers, Empaths—and the closest friends he had.

  Next to Gesten and Skan....

  Tamsin didn't look his way, but Amberdrake sensed his attention, and in the next moment he said to the mercenary, "You'll do well enough, fire-eater. What you need now is some rest. Limit your activity to complaining for a few days. Here's your green chit for days off." He signed the wooden square with a silver-rod and handed it off. "Three days, and six more at light duty."

  Now Tamsin looked up, as if noticing Amberdrake for the first time, and added quietly, "I think I have a friend in need of a little help himself at the moment."

  The merc looked up, caught sight of Amberdrake standing in the shadows, and grunted. "Thankee, Master Tamsin. I 'spect you'll send me the charge, eh?"

  Tamsin laughed at the tired old joke, and the mercenary shuffled off, passing Amberdrake with a nod, and pushed through the tent flap into the warm dark beyond. Amberdrake laid himself down on the cot the scout had just vacated, disregarding the binding of the silk caftan against his body as he rolled over. He threw his arms over his eyes, hand bunched into a fist. A fist was a sign superstitiously avoided among Healers as being bad luck, but his mind was not on wards and omens. He heard the sounds of hands being washed and toweled dry, and instruments being laid back in trays. Minutes passed without a word, and the after-Healing cleanup was concluded. He heard a curtain being drawn around them for privacy.

  "The rumors about Stelvi are true—the truth's probably worse than you've heard," he said to the waiting silence. "And Skandranon didn't make it back."

  He felt one hand lightly touch his cheek; felt someone else take his hand. Both touches released the flood of grief he had pent up within him and, lost in the dark waters of mourning, he couldn't tell which of the two was touching him. Focus wavered in his mind. It didn't matter which of the two touched him where; what mattered was that they did. He welcomed them both.

  Tears threaded their way down his face, soaking the hair at his temples. The knot in his throat choked further speech.

  "Don't mourn for one who might still be alive," Tamsin chided gently. "Wait until you know—"

  But they both knew that if Skandranon were able, he'd have made it back by now or somehow have sent a message. Tamsin made a swallowing sound, as if he had stopped himself before he said anything stupid.

  "I think it's the fact that we don't know," Lady Cinnabar said as Amberdrake fought for control. "Drake, we love him too, you know—but we've seen too many times when people we've given up as lost made it back. Skandranon—"

  "Has never failed a mission in his life," Amberdrake cried, half in anger, half in grief. "If he didn't—if he couldn't—"

  The rest was lost in tears, as he finally stopped trying to control himself and simply let himself weep. The cot creaked as two weights settled beside him; one of them kissed his forehead, the other embraced him, and he buried his face in the proffered shoulder as a wave of compassion and reassurance spread from both of them.

  "This is too much!" he sobbed bitterly, as whoever was holding him rocked him a little, like a child. "Waiting here, waiting to see who comes back in pieces—who doesn't come back at all. Not being there when they're hurt and dying."

  "We know," Tamsin murmured, a world of sorrow in his own voice. "We know."

  "But you don't know the rest of it—rewarding the ones who survive, when inside I cry for the ones who didn't."

  There was nothing they could say to that.

  "I'm sick of detaching myself!" he burst out, in another flood of tears. "They come to me to forget their pain, but when am I allowed to mourn?"

  There was no spoken answer for that, since they were the answer. They simply held him while he wept, held him and tried to give him the little comfort they had. Finally, after he had cried himself out in their arms, he was able to talk a little more calmly.

  "Drake, you've heard it all before," Cinnabar said as Tamsin got up to retrieve a damp cloth for Amberdrake. "But I'll tell you again; we are here to help you, just as you help others. You've been bearing up through all this better than anyone else. No one has ever seen you lose control, but you don't have to be superhuman."

  "I know that," he said, exhausted by his bout of emotion. "Gods, that's exactly what I just got through saying to someone else tonight. But I've never felt like this before. It's Skandranon this time—he was my constant. I always knew he'd be all right, that it was safe to love him because I never thought I'd lose him. He never comes back with anything worse than a lost tailfeather."

  Cinnabar smoothed Amberdrake's damp hair back from his forehead with the cool cloth, cool as winter skies, as the ache in his heart struck him once again. "Now—just losing him—I can't bear it. It hurts too much!"

  Early morning sounds, muffled by the cloth and canvas of the tent, punctuated the talk. Wasn't it too early, yet, for all of that? Maybe time had simply gotten away from them. Maybe that was the next lesson in all of this—that no matter how Amberdrake felt, all would still go on without him. Still....

  Tamsin settled on the other side of him as Cinnabar captured his hands in hers.

  "There's nothing I can say that you don't already know," Tamsin said quietly. "You have a harder task than we—a double burden. We have flesh to make whole again; you have hearts and minds to heal as well. The only comfort I can offer is to say you aren't alone. We hurt, too. Skan is our friend, and he—"

  The noise outside didn't settle to the dull murmurs of daybreak. Instead, it kept rising.

  It sounded, in fact, as if a small riot was approaching the surgery tent. A pang of what have I done now! struck Amberdrake in his self-pitying state, but left when reason returned a heartbeat later.

  Amberdrake pushed the cloth away from his eyes and sat up—just as a pain-filled shriek ripped through the pre-dawn air, shattering his eardrums, and ensuring that all three Healers had their full attention taken by the noise outside.

  "What in—" Tamsin leapt to his feet, Cinnabar beside him, just as the tent flap flew open and the mob shoved its way inside.

  In the center of the mob was an unholy mating of gryphon and brush pile, all liberally mired in mud. Amberdrake would not have recognized it as Skandranon, except for the black feathers and the incredible vocabulary of half-delirious curse words.

  He rolled off the cot and to his feet, as Gesten directed the litter team—for there was a litter under all that mess—to get what was left of the gryphon up onto one of the surgery tables. The hertasi looked around for a Healer; spotted Tamsin and Cinnabar, and Amberdrake behind them.

  "You'll do. Here!" Gesten snapped.

  Gods, if he ran the army....

  But the three Healers had begun their work before he spoke; Tamsin getting the clattering trays of surgical instruments, Cinnabar calling for their assistants, and Amberdrake pushing aside the litter bearers to get at the injured gryphon, heedless of anything else.

  Amberdrake touched the Black Gryphon and felt Skandranon's pain as if it screamed through his own nerves, striking him like a hammer blow to the forehead. This was the drawback of working on so close a frien
d. He shielded somewhat, automatically, but that pain also told him what was wrong, so he dared not block it all out.

  As Cinnabar's assistants scraped and washed the mud from the tangled flesh and cut branches away from broken limbs, Amberdrake took Skandranon's pain deeper into himself, warning the others when they were going to cause more damage by moving something. He could feel his mouth agape as he sucked in halting breaths; felt his eyes widen in double-Sight, his mind split between seeing the physical and Seeing inside. It seemed an eternity before they got Skandranon's body free of the remains of the tree he'd crashed into, another eternity before they got him washed down so that they could see the external injuries clearly.

  Wordlessly, the other two left the wings to Amberdrake and concentrated on Skan's legs and body. Amberdrake was one of the few in camp who knew the gryphons' anatomy well enough to Heal wings to be flightworthy again. Muscle, tendon, bone, vein, all were dependent on each other in living bodies—yet in an avian's body this seemed doubly true. Alter this and balance and weight distribution and control surface and a hundred other things would change.

  The right wing had a crossbow wound, still bleeding sluggishly. The left was broken in several places. Amberdrake directed Gesten to put pressure on the bleeding bolt wound. Gryphon wing-bones tended to knit almost as soon as they broke, like a bird's, and the sooner he got to the breaks, the less likely that he would have to rebreak anything to set it properly.

  Skandranon whimpered a little and coughed, until a fourth Healer, still sleepy-eyed and robed from bed, came to stand at his head, and with one hand on either side of the huge beak, willed the gryphon into slumber. Skandranon's throat gurgled as his beak parted.

  The wing muscles relaxed, and Amberdrake went to work.

  He eased the shattered fragments of each broken bone together, then held them in place with his bare hands while his mind forced the bits and pieces into the right order and prodded them into the process of knitting, all the while drawing away the fluids that built up around the damage. When the bone started healing, he called for splints and bandages, wrapped the section of wing tightly, and went on to the next, pausing only to wipe the drying blood from his hands before it caked so thickly it interfered.

  "Drake?" Gesten said, barely making a stir in his concentration.

  "What?" he asked shortly, all of his attention focused on getting the final bone to draw together.

  "I think you'd better hurry." That was all the hertasi said, but it was enough. He left the splinting of the final bone and the binding of the wing as a whole to one of the assistants, and came around to Gesten's side of the table.

  He knew with a glance why Gesten had called him; the sheer dead weight of the injured wing was so great that the bolt wound was tearing open, and the great wing vein was perilously close to the site of the wound. A fracture under that pressure could simply break wide open and sever the vein as it went.

  Quickly, he directed Gesten under the gryphon's wing, to take some of the strain off, and reached out to hold the wound closed, being careful not to pinch. He closed his eyes and concentrated, Seeing the injury, examining it with his inner sight, bringing together the torn muscle fibers, rejoining bleeding veins, goading it all into the process of Healing at a rate a thousand times faster than it would naturally, and providing the energy the body required to do so from within himself. Infection threatened; he burned it away ruthlessly. He strengthened the rest of the muscles, taking some of the strain off the injured ones. When they threatened to cramp, a finger's touch soothed them. He found smaller broken bones, wounds and cuts he had not noticed in Healing the larger ones. He dealt with them all, searching out dangerous blood clots and filtering them from the bloodstream, until the wings had been wrapped in a binding of energies that would, in time, allow Skandranon to fly again.

  Skandranon moaned and coughed weakly, as if something were caught in his throat. His breathing steadied as the fourth Healer pushed him back into slumber, but he was taken by a fit of coughing again that caused everyone near to hold onto him tightly. Amberdrake was peripherally aware of Tamsin putting his arm down Skandranon's gullet while an assistant held the beak open with a metal bar, and then the badly wounded gryphon wheezed, shook, and fell into deep sleep again.

  The assistants administered fortifying herbal and mineral infusions of all kinds into the gryphon while Amberdrake set Skandranon's fractured forearms and splinted his foreclaws.

  Finally, it was over, and he swayed away from the table, letting the assistants do their mechanical labor of bandaging and bracing. He saw then that Tamsin and Cinnabar had already finished; Cinnabar was telling the litter bearers where to take Skan, and Tamsin had disappeared. The early morning sun shone brightly through the walls of the tent, making them glow with a warm amber light.

  The tables and floors were a disaster. Blood—how could a flyer hold so much blood? he thought—and cut-away feathers pasted bits of bark and leaves to the floor. On the table, a length of a crossbow bolt lay amid the other debris, next to something that was relatively clean—a leather-wrapped handle of some kind, perhaps a broken sword. That must have been what was blocking his throat, Amberdrake thought numbly. How would it get there...?

  Amberdrake blinked once and staggered back.

  "No, you don't!" Gesten left Skandranon's side to go to Amberdrake's, getting under the kestra'chern's arm and bracing him upright. "It's bed for you, Drake. Skan's going to be fine—but you'd better lie down before you pass out!"

  "I think you're right," Amberdrake murmured, actually finding a chuckle somewhere. Skan's going to be all right. He made it back. That was all that really mattered, after all. The cold place inside him had warmed; the emptiness erased. Skan made it back.

  With Gesten's help, he tottered off down the slight slope to the kestra'chern's portion of the camp, just beyond the Healers'. He was so tired, he hardly noticed when he was guided into his own tent, except that the bright light of the morning sun dimmed, and the cool, fresh air took on a tinge of incense and body-scent. That was when he pulled away from Gesten, staggered to his bed, and collapsed across it. He managed to position himself the right way, but after that, he knew nothing more.

  Amberdrake felt Skandranon's pain and frustration as he awoke. Even after—how many?—hours of needed oblivion, there was a dull ache in Amberdrake's body in all the places he'd helped Heal in Skandranon's body the night before. In all the places that Amberdrake didn't have a direct analog to—the wings and tail, especially the wings—there was an ache. It was an aftershock effect that Healers knew well and had to live with; in the case of the wing pain, it bunched in Amberdrake's shoulder blades and upper arms, like a bruised muscle cramping to the bone.

  Amberdrake had awakened feeling as if he had run for days carrying a full pack; as if he had worked for two days without a rest—

  —in short, as if he had served his full roster of clients, then Healed a gravely injured gryphon.

  Gesten—loyal, competent Gesten—had drawn the sleeping-curtains to block as much light as possible from reaching the exhausted kestra'chern and was, no doubt, away from the tent clearing Amberdrake's schedule of responsibilities.

  Amberdrake pulled the blankets from himself and stood up, steadying himself on a ring set into the oversized bed frame. He washed quickly and gulped down a meal of meat strips and flatbread, then pulled on the caftan and belt Gesten had laid out for him. By his clothes was a roster-sheet of appointments for the day; all but one had been crossed out, and that one was not due for another two hours.

  Amberdrake stepped out from the spell-quieted canvas of his multiroomed tent into the afternoon daylight of the camp. Messenger-birds shot past, brightly colored, calling their descending chittering cry, while smoke from cook-fires scented the air they flew through. Three laughing children ran by, wearing the green and yellow ribbons of their parents' cadre, chased by a playful kyree with a bright red ball in its mouth. This was the way life should be. Amberdrake stretched, then ran
a hand across his chin and cheeks as he squinted in the light; time to shave again before serving that client. A thorough general grooming was in order after he insured that Skandranon was healing properly. Being immaculately groomed always made him feel better.

  He threaded his way through the shacks, forges, and service huts to the great tent where he'd left the Black Gryphon languishing that morning. In the daytime, the camp was far more inviting, despite the tension that was apparent everywhere you looked.

  Assistant Healers and surgery aides surged past Amberdrake as he stepped inside, all intent on taking care of small administrative tasks and stocking supply shelves while the luxury of time was theirs. Casualties could course in like an overwhelming wave at any moment, so any spare minutes had to be spent in preparation. The war hadn't left the Healers much time to rest; they (and the grave diggers, body burners, and clergy) had few hours of leisure time. That was the nature of a war, after all. It ate spirits and bodies. It fed like any other creature.

  War forced individuals and species together in ways no peacetime situation would duplicate, and some of the oddest friendships—even loves—came out of that. Amberdrake's affection for Gesten was natural, given the long association that hertasi had with the Kaled'a'in. Only the war and the needs of the fighters for support personnel had prevented Amberdrake from acquiring an entire troop of the little lizard-folk. As it was, he had to share Gesten's services with Skandranon.

  But the bond between himself and the Black Gryphon—that was something that would never have occurred in peaceful times. The gryphons were literally unnatural—creations of Urtho, the Mage of Silence—and they would never have been found near the rolling plains that the nomadic Kaled'a'in called home. At least, not in Amberdrake's lifetime. He had heard Urtho mention some kind of vague plans he'd had, of planting them in little aeries in some of the wilder parts of the mountains, creating yet another population of nonhuman intelligences, as Urtho's predecessors had done with the hertasi and kyree. But that plan, of course, had come to nothing with the onset of war among the Great Mages.