He learned more about birds of prey in that morning than he had ever learned in his life, and when he and the little lizard were done, every bit of equipment that could be mended, had been.
Then it was time for lunch, and time to help clean pots for a bit.
It occurred to him after lunch, as he stood beside a-half barrel with his arms up to the elbow in warm, slippery, soapy water, that he had seldom worked this hard with poor Justyn. But this didn’t bother him at all, and that was the odd thing.
Maybe it’s just - it’s just that no one shouts at me, or tells me what a terrible, ungrateful child I am, he concluded. It’s not so bad to work when no one is scolding you.
Of course, he’d never had such interesting work before, which might have been the reason. Ayshen always had funny or fascinating things to tell him while he scrubbed pots, and mending the hawk furniture had been something entirely different from anything he’d ever done before. It wasn’t hard to get through a chore when someone was chatting to you and making jokes, and when the chore required concentration and delicacy, time just flew by.
And as for helping to tend Kelvren, well, he had felt positively honored. It had been an amazing thing, to touch the gryphon’s huge feathers, and make sure the killing talons were pinprick sharp and immaculately clean.
Odd, he thought, as Ayshen left him alone for a moment, to tend to the bake ovens, I thought Kelvren was so old, older than Snowfire, but it was almost as if he was my age. I wonder how old he really is? There was no way of telling with a bird, of course. They didn’t exactly show their age in any way that he could recognize.
I like it here, he thought, with yearning, as he watched Ayshen’s back. I wish I could stay.
If only there was some way that he could! When things got back to normal, would anyone at Errold’s Grove ever want him back? Was there the faintest chance that the Hawkbrothers would want him with them?
And what if things never got back to normal? What if no one wanted to go back to the village? Would the Hawkbrothers be willing to give him a home?
Last night Snowfire kept calling me “little brother.” Is that just something he calls every boy, or -
“Dar’ian!” Wintersky popped up behind his back, and he yelped in startlement, dropping the bowl he’d been scrubbing back into the water. Wintersky jumped with amazing agility right out of the way, and didn’t even get a single drop of water on himself. He laughed, and clapped Darian on the back. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to creep up on you like that, it’s just habit. Snowfire wants you for a moment, if Ayshen doesn’t mind.”
“Not at all,” the hertasi said without turning. “He’s done twice the work of any of you clumsy-handed louts. He can consider his work done for the day.”
“Why, Ayshen, I am crushed!” Wintersky mocked, and threw Darian a towel to wipe himself down with. “Come on, this won’t take long.”
Wondering what Snowfire could want, Darian followed the younger Tayledras with increasing curiosity. He became even more puzzled, and a little uneasy, when Wintersky brought him down a very narrow path into a part of the encampment where he had never been before. It was heavily overgrown, cool, dim, and so quiet he could hear himself breathing. The path ended in a place completely overshadowed by the branches of the oldest and largest willow Darian had ever seen, with the usual log hut built right up against the trunk of the tree, which was easily as big around as the hut itself. No grass could possibly grow here, but that lack was more than made up for by the thick moss carpeting the area. Sitting on a bow perch beside the door was a handsome cooperi hawk, watching everything with alert, reddish-yellow eyes.
Waiting for Darian were Snowfire and Starfall. The Adept looked very tired, as if he had been working all night, and Darian wondered if he had gotten any rest at all. They must be taking me seriously enough that Starfall is working himself as hard as he can to keep those people from getting at the magic. That was oddly reassuring.
“Dar’ian, I understand you have been a great deal of help to us,” Starfall said, by way of a greeting.
Caught off guard, Darian shrugged. “I guess so. Have to earn my keep, don’t I?” He winched a little, inwardly, for his words didn’t sound very polite, but Starfall didn’t seem offended.
“We do expect all of those in our own group to do their share if they are not disabled,” the older man said gravely. “We are not so well-equipped that we cannot use another pair of hands. In fact - “ he cast a glance at Snowfire,” - we could use that pair of hands on a more permanent basis, if that would suit you.”
Darian stared at him, quite certain that his new-won ability to understand Tayledras must be faulty.
Starfall persisted, grave but earnest. “Our impression is that you do not feel any truly strong ties to those of your people that remain. Is that impression true?”
He shook his head a little, hardly able to believe what he was hearing. Was Starfall making the offer that he thought? Starfall was clearly waiting for an answer, and Darian was startled enough to give him stark, unvarnished truth. “Uh, I’d say they’d probably be happy to see the last of me right now,” he admitted, shamefaced. “With no Master, I go back on the village to care for, and I don’t think any of them would care to apprentice me now.”
Bet they could find all kinds of excuses not to, in fact, he thought with sudden bleakness, for how could Starfall take that as any kind of a recommendation?
“Then, would you care to remain with us?” Starfall asked, watching his face intently. “Snowfire has offered to take you as his younger sibling, and that is all that I need as Elder.”
“But there is a condition,” Snowfire said warningly, before Darian could burst out with an astonished and immediate acceptance. “You must agree to - to ‘apprentice’ to me, in the matter of magic, at least for as long as I have the ability to teach you. You may outstrip me; I do not yet know how strong your Gifts may be, and if that happens, you must go to a real teacher, Starfall, by preference.”
“And we shall be gone from our home Vale for some time, several years, perhaps, working to establish the ley-lines and nodes all through the northern part of Valdemar,” Starfall added, watching him closely. “So you will not actually see our Vale until our work is done. If you were hoping for exotic surroundings, well, our surroundings will be less and less exotic all the time that we are out. That is another reason for us to want you with us. It would be good to have someone who has a native’s command of this tongue at our disposal.”
Darian stood rock-still, thinking furiously. So, that was to be the price of being given a place here - that he must continue the tedious study of magic. Of all the things he wanted to learn, surely that was the last on the list!
But perhaps he was doing Snowfire an injustice. Justyn was hardly the best teacher in the world, and as a practitioner, he was even worse. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if he was studying with someone who actually knew something.
And even if it was just as tedious and boring as it had been with Justyn, well, wasn’t that a small price to pay to be where he was actually wanted?
And Snowfire says he wants me for a brother? Me? They want me to be a real Hawkbrother?
He made a real effort to contain his excitement, but it surely showed. He stifled his urge to shout, and somehow managed to turn a grave face toward the Adept.
“I would like to stay, very much, Elder,” he said at last, with a little bow to Starfall. “I am honored that you ask me, and I certainly accept! I promise that I will do all that I can to help everyone here, and I will try to be more patient in learning magic.”
Starfall smiled, and motioned him closer. Taking his hand, the Adept placed a pendant into it. It was a hawk-talon, mounted in silver; the mounting was decorated with a blue moonstone and strung on a beaded chain. “Welcome to k’Vala, then, little brother,” he said warmly, as he closed Darian’s hand around the talon. “You must wear this as a token of your acceptance into the Clan, as Nightwind does. You both bear the tal
ons of my father’s great suntail hawk-eagle, Skyr, who shared my father’s labors as a Healing Adept and went to white at the age of only four. I know that you will be worthy of the token, even as Nightwind is.”
Snowfire took the talon from Darian’s nerveless fingers and put it around his neck. Darian looked up at him, trying to find the right words to thank him, and failing completely - but Snowfire acted as if he had already said them.
“You have labored long and hard already, and I am not minded to begin your lessons with one today, little brother,” the younger Hawkbrother said as he clasped and released Darian’s shoulders. “Why not go out into the forest for a time? It will cool your mind and help you think.”
If there was one thing that Darian agreed with, it was that he needed some time to think this over. He nodded. “But - do I need to have someone with me?” he asked, hoping that the answer would be “no.”
Snowfire shook his head. “That horse that we stole is in need of exercise,” he suggested. “Go take it about for a while. You will be safe enough, riding, and you won’t have to worry about dyheli chatter in your mind.” The corner of his mouth twitched a little, suggesting to Darian that although the remark was intended as amusement, Snowfire had suffered “dyheli chatter” in the past.
As he hesitated a moment, Starfall nodded at the entrance to his little sanctuary. “Off with you, young one. I am the one most needful of your elder brother’s skills at the moment. We have some tricky work ahead of us before we can rest this day.”
Perhaps yesterday such a dismissal would have made Darian sullen and resentful, suspecting that they were getting rid of him so that they could discuss him. But now - now he had no such feelings. If Starfall said they had work, then they had work, and he would only get in the way. He stammered his thanks to both of them, and turned and ran, his heart hammering with so many mixed feelings that he couldn’t sort them out properly.
He already knew where the horse was; in the pasture, being guarded by the dyheli herd and kept from straying. He guessed that the tack would be in a hut he knew was used for storing things with no immediate use, and sure enough, it was. He hadn’t saddled many horses in his life, but with the help of two amused dyheli who kept the nag from running off half-equipped, he managed to get all the gear on in the proper manner. It wasn’t that the horse was at all ill-tempered, it was more as if it expected bad treatment; it didn’t fight him, but if it could get away without being saddled and bridled, it would be very happy to do so.
The horse sighed with resignation as he clambered into the saddle, his stomach aching reflexively as he recalled the last time he’d ridden the beast. But it seemed tractable enough, and it moved out of the entrance to the valley at a calm walk.
Darian was used to finding his way in the Forest, and had no fear that he was going to get lost. He set a general course southward, but otherwise let the horse have its head, and it ambled on beneath the trees while he let his own thoughts wander. They tended to stray into mere contemplation of his surroundings; it was so easy to let his mind go blank as he admired a golden shaft of sunlight piercing the green gloom, then saw with surprised delight a single flower basking in its warmth like a precious jewel displayed for his admiration. It was more comfortable to contemplate the majesty of the enormous tree trunks rising in a never-ending vista of columns all around him than to contemplate his own future. And the liquid notes of birdsong dropping tranquilly down through the boughs were infinitely preferable to the discords of his past.
Everywhere he looked, he saw things that his parents would have drawn his attention to, if they had been there. Summer was not a time to trap for furs, so his summers in the past had been spent in exploration. Here in the hills, wonderful and magical spots seemed hidden in every valley. Sometimes it was a sparkling stream burbling over a stone-filled bed. Sometimes the stream poured down the side of the hill in a series of exuberant waterfalls. He caught sight of a pair of does with their fawns, grazing in a tiny pocket of meadow, surrounded by moss-covered boulders. Once they passed a fallen tree that supported an entire community of plants and ferns on its decaying, moss-covered side.
All was well for some time; the horse, given no commands, chose to eat as much as he walked. He meandered from one sparse bit of grass to the next. The grass beneath the tree canopy was thin and tended to grow in widely-spaced, wispy clumps; thick growths of fern and moss were more common here than grasses, and the horse disdained both. Darian let the reins hang loose on the horse’s neck, engrossed in his own increasingly troubled thoughts.
Those thoughts weren’t really coherent; too much had happened to him for coherency. He had the vague feeling that perhaps this was the root of what bothered him - events had taken him so completely by surprise that he wasn’t acting anymore, he was reacting.
At least before, when anything happened to me, it was generally because I’d already done something to make those things happen, he thought. And it was usually something that I knew would make trouble. It was true he hadn’t had a lot of control over his own life, but at least he’d had some, and he’d had choices, even if it was only the choice to resist what other people had in mind for him.
But now - fate or chance was hitting him with one hammer blow after another, not even giving him the time to reel back from one blow before slamming him with the next. Being invited to join the Hawkbrothers was the first thing that had happened in days that involved any choice for him.
And now that he’d accepted, he felt strange. There was a creeping sense that he had betrayed the people of Errold’s Grove in some way, and yet at the same time he resented the fact that he felt that way. What right had they to claim his loyalty? Why should he chain his fate to theirs?
There was guilt, too, a great deal of it, and he wasn’t at all sure what to do about it. What had happened to the folk of the village? He hadn’t made any real effort to find out. Surely he ought to at least do that. And no matter what Snowfire said, how could anyone be sure there was nothing that he could have done that would have saved Justyn? Maybe if he’d been beside his master on that bridge, the way any good apprentice would have been, the outcome would have been different. All right, so he didn’t have any real magic yet, but he’d learned a lot at the side of his parents, and maybe he would have been able to do something that would have saved them both. I could have jumped off the bridge when he set it afire, and dragged him along with me. I can swim, even if he couldn‘t. Or - His mind buzzed with a hundred absurd things he might have done, or could have done, or thought he could have done, and all of them just made him feel guiltier.
He became so engrossed in his thoughts that he didn’t realize that the horse had stopped eating and was sneaking through the forest at a fast, if furtive, walk, until he saw a landmark he recognized with a start. He knew then that they were getting far. too close to Errold’s Grove for comfort and made a grab for the reins.
But the horse was an older hand at this game than he was; with a flip of its head, it tossed the reins out of reach, and increased its pace. Darian didn’t have to be able to read its thoughts to know what they were - the beast had scented its herdmates, and it was going to get back to them by whatever means it took. The blacksmith had explained once why all the horses in the village were kept in a single herd; horses weren’t happy alone, and even though the Errold’s Grove “herd” wasn’t a breeding herd, the lack of a stallion was no impediment to the horses’ comfort in each other.
This horse probably felt the same about the rest of the horses he was used to being with, and no dim memory of mistreatment was going to overwhelm the urgent need on his part to get back to the safety of the herd. Darian considered trying to throw himself out of the saddle, but the horse was going faster now, and suddenly the ground seemed very far away to a boy who’d never done more than steal rides on the innkeeper’s old pony. With the horse moving, he didn’t know how to get himself out of the saddle and onto the ground without breaking something. So he just held grimly to t
he saddle, gritted his teeth against the jolting, and prayed that they wouldn’t run into any enemy sentries.
The trees cleared away up ahead, and Darian felt his heart stop with terror as he thought they were almost at the village. But the horse hesitated as the tree cover thinned, and Darian managed to seize the reins before the recalcitrant beast managed to bolt into the middle of town.
But then, Darian realized that the daylight ahead of them was not the daylight of the cleared fields. Somehow the horse had managed to come out of the forest at the top of the only bluff that overlooked the village. How it had managed that, Darian had no clue, but once he dismounted and led the horse cautiously to the edge of the bluff, he had as good a view of the village as if he’d been sitting in one of the trees.
But what he saw made his skin crawl, and filled him with the desperate feeling he had to do something, along with the knowledge that there was nothing he could do.
In the distant fields were people, people he recognized, toiling like beasts in the heat of midday. Hitched to plows like oxen were the biggest men of the village, sweating beneath the blows of a whip held in the hands of a stranger. Behind them, guiding the plows through the fields meant to be sown with late-ripening crops, were the women, who were also chained in their places. Others worked, chained at the waist in pairs, beneath the watchful eyes of more strangers. These men weren’t wearing the armor that Darian remembered, but he knew they must be the same men who had invaded the village.
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