Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  Kel could catch a deer in a tail-chase, it just wasn’t his favorite form of pursuit - though the injuries that often resulted from tail-chases gave him plenty of extra attention. He’d much rather make a clean kill, and a quick one; chases were a waste of energy.

  Faintly, from behind him, came the noise of something large crashing through the branches, and Kuari’s excited hoots. Kuari loved watching Kel hunt; all bondbirds were far more social than their raptor ancestors, and took pleasure in each others’ company and successes. Breeding that trait into them had been imperative, since without it, Kuari would have happily made a meal off of any of the other birds in the company. Kuari’s talons could easily pierce a cow’s skull; he’d make short work of another bird.

  :Two! Two!: Kuari projected excitedly into Darian’s mind. :He got two!:

  :Two?: Tyrsell chimed in, impressed. :By the horns of the Moon-Doe, that’s amazing!:

  If Kelvren had managed to kill two deer at once, there was no point in letting them go to waste. “Snowfire!” he called ahead. “I sent Kel on the backtrail after a deer, and it seems he’s gotten two instead of one.”

  Snowfire turned, stared at him to see if he was serious, then broke into astonished laughter. “I had no idea he was that hungry!” He called ahead to the rest of the team. “Wintersky! Raindance! Peel off and go back until you find Kel, he’s made a kill too big for him to carry.”

  A short time later, two of the team rode past Darian with a wave, their mounts at a brisk trot, two riderless does from the herd trotting beside them. While Kelvren stood guard, and their own birds circled above as extra protection, they’d field-dress the two deer, strap each to a rough travois, then rejoin the rest. To make it easier for them to catch up, Snowfire slowed the team to an amble. This wasn’t the first time that Kel had made kills too large to eat at once or carry, but it was the first time he’d made a double-kill.

  Nightwind is going to be very proud of him, Darian thought warmly. He’s going to be just as proud of himself! Gryphons, after all, were praise-driven, and what they didn’t receive from others they often enough filled in for themselves.

  Roughly a candlemark later Raindance and Wintersky came trotting back, the riderless dyheli now each dragging a travois with the somewhat-mangled carcass of a fine young buck strapped on it. That would slow them all down, of course, but it wasn’t that long until they were going to make camp, so the prospect of fresh meat would more than make up for it. Kel would dine tonight on one deer, the team would have part of the other, then Kel would get the remains for his breakfast. It took a lot of meat to feed a gryphon, though fortunately he usually managed to supply it himself. In lean times, breads were used to supplement the meat, mostly to provide mass, and luckily for everyone who would have had to hear his complaining, Kelvren had acquired a taste for bread anyway. Hungry gryphons were grouchy gryphons.

  There were no more breaks in the routine of travel until the light beneath the trees had begun to redden and grow dimmer, a sure sign that the sun was about to set. By then, the advance scouts had found a suitable camping spot and those with lighter burdens and the unburdened dyheli had gone on ahead to prepare the camp, leaving the rest to come in at their own pace.

  That, or so Darian thought, was one of the advantages of being the rearguard. By the time he reached camp, it was a camp; the tents were all set up, a latrine pit had been dug, water fetched, and Ayshen, the chief hertasi, had everything ready to make dinner for the entire team. Since the job of rearguard was to make a circuit of the camp before coming in himself, the rearguard never had to do any of the camp chores.

  Some nights, in the winter, for instance, when he was frozen from his nose to his toes, or in the pouring rain, that was a hardship. Being the one who had to make certain that all the territory within their perimeter was clear under those circumstances, with dinner scents on the breeze, was assuredly a hardship. Not tonight, though.

  He dismounted and let Tyrsell go on into camp, to put himself into the capable hands of the hertasi to have his minimal tack removed. No dyheli would ever subject himself to the indignity of a bit and bridle; however, they did allow a modified hackamore, similar to that worn by Companions, and a saddle-pad to cover their protruding backbones. As Darian knew from painful personal experience, riding a dyheli without that saddle-pad was much like sliding naked down a cliff, but not nearly as comfortable.

  He and Kuari made the circuit of the camp without incident, marking good places for sentries with something unobtrusive, natural, but unmistakable to any of the Tayledras - feathers, usually wedged into the bark of a tree.

  When he got back into camp, the first set of sentries had eaten a light snack and were ready to go out. They’d get a second meal when they came back in, but, no Tayledras would stand sentry with a full stomach; it was too easy to doze off.

  Ayshen had his dinner ready and waiting for him: a savory butterflied venison steak and journey-bread, with some mixed, unidentified shoots and greens. Ayshen and the other hertasi knew the forest and what it could provide as well as they knew the patterns of their own scales; they foraged as the team traveled every day, and Darian never knew what they would come up with. They always had something green and growing in addition to meat and bread, even in the dead of winter, for Ayshen took great care with the diet and health of his “charges.”

  Darian knew better than to leave so much as a scrap of that green stuff on his plate, too. Ayshen would show no mercy to anyone who didn’t eat what was given him.

  Darian sat down to eat in the blue dusk beneath the trees; he polished off the last scrap in full dark. He was the last to eat, and brought Ayshen his empty plate just as the hertasi cleaned the last of the pans.

  “We are not far from the Vale now,” Ayshen told him with a toothy grin. “One day, two at the most. Then you will see! Nothing we passed through in Valdemar compares!”

  “Nothing we passed through in Valdemar was bigger than two or three villages put together,” Darian reminded him. “We were not exactly traversing through the height of Valdemaran civilization, you know.”

  “Oh, indeed.” Ayshen chuckled. “You will see.”

  Darian laughed, and slapped the little lizard-creature on the back. “I’m certain that I will,” he agreed. “But for tonight, all I want to see is my bed.”

  He wouldn’t have thought, back when he was Justyn’s apprentice, that simply riding all day long would be tiring. After all, it was your mount that did most of the work, right?

  Well, that turned out to be only partially true; riding was more work than Darian would have imagined four years ago. Riding literally from dawn until dusk was enough to tire anyone out - riding as tail-guard was exhausting mentally as well as physically.

  So he wasn’t joking when he told Ayshen that all he wanted to see was his bed. He continued to share a tent with young Wintersky; it was a tent made for three, but only the two of them used it now. Snowfire had long since made his union with Nightwind a formal one, which just gave Wintersky and Darian more room.

  Wintersky sat beside a small campfire in front of their tent, contentedly toasting a stick. Darian sat down beside his friend and took another dry twig, breaking it into tiny bits and casting each bit into the heart of the fire. “Ayshen says we’ll be at the Vale in the next day or two,” he said, and Wintersky nodded.

  “Probably late tomorrow,” he replied. “Everybody’s pretty anxious to get home. My guess is that they’ll roust us out before dawn and tell us to eat in the saddle.”

  “Which is why you’re roasting a stick to calm down so you can get to sleep quickly,” Darian finished for him, and yawned. “Believe me, I don’t need that to get me to sleep.” Then he snickered. “Poor Snowfire - he and Nightwind won’t get much chance to cuddle tonight!”

  Wintersky snorted and elbowed him; Darian elbowed right back, and both made moon-calf faces at each other so that they both broke into peals of laughter.

  As the two youngest members of the team, t
hey spent a great deal of time together, got into a certain amount of mischief together, and despite coming from such different cultures, had far more in common than Darian had found with the boys his age in Errold’s Grove. Darian really felt by now that he was part of a family, with Wintersky the brother he had always wanted.

  They chortled themselves breathless, paying no attention to the quizzical looks of some of the other Hawkbrothers; Wintersky tossed his stick into the fire, Darian followed it with the remains of his, and they both went straight to bed. Wintersky’s bird was already asleep on his perch inside the tent, Kuari dozed in the branches of the tree above them. Although most owls were nocturnal, the eagle-owls were comfortable in darkness or daylight; their size gave them a hunting advantage in the daytime, and their night-sight and silent flight the advantage after dark. Kuari could adapt his sleep schedule to suit his bondmate.

  As Wintersky had predicted, hertasi rousted them out while it was still as dark as the inside of a cold-drake’s belly in an ice cave. They weren’t given a lot of time to ready themselves, either. Hertasi were efficient under any conditions, but Darian had never seen them work quite so quickly before. The camp was down and packed up by the time he had Tyrsell saddled, and Ayshen must have known last night that this was going to happen, because one of his helpers came by with pastry-wrapped venison that Ayshen must have put to baking in the embers of the cook fire the night before. Darian actually got to eat his without being in the saddle; no one had told him he had a new assignment, so he, was tail-guard again this morning. Tail-guard’s morning duty was to make sure the camp was clear, that all the fires were out, that nothing had been left behind. So he ate his meat-roll and drank his bittersweet, hot kava while everyone else bustled about, getting their riding order straight, then started the day’s trek - still in the dark. Darian was entirely unsurprised to see that Snowfire had lead-duty; with not one, but two owls as bondbirds, he was the only logical choice for a ride in total darkness.

  As soon as the last dyheli cleared the camp, Darian summoned up a mage-light and made a thorough inspection of the site. This time he uncovered evidence of the hasty departure in the form of a couple of misplaced small articles of clothing and adornment, a bit of trash that needed burial, and one fire that had not been thoroughly extinguished and still smoked. These small tasks attended to, he mounted Tyrsell, and with Kuari following in the trees, he caught up with the rest.

  He banished the light as soon as he drew up with the rearmost rider - Sunleaf, whose forestgyre dozed on a perch incorporated into the saddle-bow in front of him. Riding in the darkness like this, the team now depended on the eyes and ears of only three birds and Kelvren to protect them. Even Daystorm’s flock of crows rode - two on the saddle-bow perch, two on the horns of her dyheli Pyreen, and the rest on the horns of any other dyheli that would let them.

  With nothing to look at but the vaguest of shadows, Darian was acutely aware of every calling insect, every time a bird chirped or squawked its sleepy protest at being disturbed, every crackle of dead leaf or rustle of undergrowth. None of this made him at all wary or nervous; he’d grown up in forest like this, and these were all normal night sounds. He’d be alerted only if they stopped, or if a sudden burst of noise betrayed that something had disturbed the sylvan sleepers.

  Kuari was perfectly composed - and perfectly full; he’d eaten well last night, and would not need to eat again until tonight. He wasn’t tempted to hunt, not even by the flocks of drowsy birds he passed beneath. What Kuari saw danced like a ghost-image in front of Darian’s eyes, a double-vision that did not disconcert him in the least now, though it had taken him months to get used to it.

  The air was very still, not a breath of breeze; it was cold, and smelled of damp, old leaves, and fog. It felt heavy, somehow; morning before dawn almost always felt like that, as if it was just possible that the sun might not rise, after all.

  It was difficult to judge the passing of time; Kuari would rise above the treetops once in a while, to take the measure of the dawn, and for what seemed to be the longest time he saw nothing but darkness and stars.

  Finally, though, the strange sense of heaviness lifted, ever so slightly. Kuari lofted through the leaves to catch the first brightening in the east, and the first tentative notes of the birds’ dawn chorus drifted down to the travelers below.

  Sunleaf’s forestgyre roused all his feathers with a quick shake - still more heard than seen - as those first notes brought him out of his doze. Gradually, faint light filtered down through the trees; at first the light was so very faint that everything seemed painted in shades of black and gray, but as the sun rose, the light brightened to a thin, dusty rose, and color came back into the world.

  Up and down the line of riders, birds were shaking out their feathers, stretching their wings, preening and yawning. Then, one by one, they hopped onto their bondmates’ gauntleted arms to be tossed into the air.

  The crows were the first, and taunted the others as lazy loafers with their derisive claws as they rowed up into the canopy. Stung by the good-natured insult, the younger birds followed immediately. The older birds were too seasoned to be tempted into flight by a pack of delinquents before they’d warmed up their muscles; there was plenty of stretching and flapping before the rest took to the air.

  Two enormous shapes lofted silently toward the line beneath the lowest branches, one from ahead and to the right, one from the left. These were Hweel and Huur, Snowfire’s bondbirds; that meant that Snowfire had dropped back and someone else with a fresher bird had taken over the forward position. There were three dyheli in the herd with peculiar saddles - more of a perch, than a saddle - and no reins. These were for Hweel and Huur, and sometimes Kuari, who were all far too large to sit a perch in front of anyone. It was all Darian could do to carry Kuari on his shoulder or give him a short and temporary ride on his gauntleted arm; the eagle-owls were big, and awfully heavy. On Snowfire’s advice, Darian had built up his arms and shoulders with a great deal of lifting and carrying and wood-chopping in order to be able to support the weight of his friend.

  It’s just a good thing that nobody with us has real eagles as a bondbird, Darian thought, as he watched the eagle-owls disappear somewhere up ahead, presumably making a landing on their mounts. Snowfire had once told him that the only person in k’Vala to have a true eagle and not a hawk-eagle as a bondbird was the black-smith! All bondbirds were easily twice, even three times, the mass of their wild counterparts. Darian could hardly imagine how large a true bondbird eagle must be. . . .

  The morning passed uneventfully, and so did the afternoon, except that the break for lunch was hardly more than a pause while more pastry-rolls were passed out to the riders and nosebags of grain to the dyheli. They all ate on the move, something that until now had been done only during wretchedly cold weather, to enable the team to get to shelter faster.

  It was late in the afternoon that the biggest bird Darian had ever seen in his life swooped down out of the trees and screamed a greeting as it passed over the heads of everyone in the team. The wingspan alone was so wide not even Huur could match it; more than the height of a mounted man, easily.

  All the bondbirds set up a deafening chorus of replies, converging on the riders from every direction, and taking to their perches to go into full, wing-spread display. The huge raptor that had triggered the cacophony made another pass over the heads of the team, this time flying from the rear to the frontmost rider, then disappearing into the branches again.

  :Darian, you can stand down.: The mind-voice was Snowfire’s; no point in trying to shout, he wouldn’t be heard. :Remember the eagle I told you about, that’s bonded to a blacksmith? That’s her; we’re under k’Vala guard now. You can relax.:

  Darian took a deep breath and let it out in a low whistle; the birds were finally quieting down and settling. So that’s a bondbird eagle? If I were dyheli, I think I’d make her walk!:

  As dusk fell, there was a distant glow through the trees ahead of th
em, and just as the last light of day faded from beneath the trees, the next lot of escorts met them.

  This was a veritable stampede of dyheli, first an avalanche of young stags and does, then followed by the older does and their fawns, with five king-stags bringing up the rear. They poured around the line of riders, the youngsters frolicking, the older dyheli trotting up to rub noses with friends, and the king-stags making straight for Tyrsell. Judging by all the vigorous head-nodding going on, the king-stags went into an immediate six-way conference, one which would probably last for several days. After all, Tyrsell was an ajnbassasor to Valdemar in his own right, one looking for riew grazing lands for dyheli, and he had negotiated his own set of treaties with various Valdemaran populations through the medium of different Heralds.

  Unburdened dyheli separated from the group and joined the massed herds, who all cleared off, heading back to the Vale. That left room for the next lot of greeters, a flood of hertasi. They seemed to appear out of nowhere - as hertasi were wont to do. There were probably a few hundred of them, but it seemed as if there were a couple of thousand at the least. When they had finished swarming the team and disappeared back into the darkness, there was not a single scrap of baggage left anywhere in the line, for they had stripped it from every burdened dyheli, leaving them free to run ahead as well.

  Then came the first of the wonders that would leave Darian breathless for most of the evening.

  Lights approached the line of riders, lights bounding along just below the level of the first branches. As the manycolored lights neared, Darian identified them as mage-lights, but they were carried - or rather, pulled along - by bondbirds. Mage-lights weighed nothing, of course, but how wonderful to see the bondbirds, each trailing a different colored sphere in its wake!