The Eagle And The Nightingales bv-3

by Mercedes Lackey

  That was enough to give T'fyrr the opening he needed. He dashed into the gap left when the first horse ran off and launched himself into the air, wings beating powerfully, further panicking the horses.

  The street was full of neighing, dancing horses, or so it seemed. Their riders had their hands full for the moment.

  She didn't wait to see what would happen next; if anyone down there suspected that they had been attacked from one of the balconies and happened to look up, she could be in serious trouble. She ducked inside the nearest window exit, getting into hiding quickly, before any of T'fyrr's assailants had a chance to calm his beast, look up, and spot her.

  Then she ran for the inside stairs, heading for the roof. That, surely, would be where he would go. Freehold meant the nearest point of safety, and the roof was the best place for him to land.

  He'll be in a panic, and once he gets out of the streetlights, his eyes won't have time to adjust and he'll be flying half-blind. He may land hard_

  She burst out onto the roof at the same time he landed as hard and clumsily as she had expected, and as he heard her footfall behind him, he whirled to face her, hands fanned, talons extended in an attack stance. His eyes were wild, black pupils fully dilated. His beak parted, and his tongue extended as he hissed at her.

  "T'fyrr!" she cried, "It's me! It's all right, Joyee is getting the Freehold peace-keepers at the door_no one is going to get past them_"

  She expected him to relax then, but he didn't so much relax as collapse, going to his knees, his wings drooping around him. One moment, he was ready to slash her to ribbons; the next, he was falling to pieces himself.

  Dear Lady! She ran to him in alarm; he moved to reach for her feebly, and when she touched his arm, his emotional turmoil boiled up to engulf her, making her own breath come short and her throat fill with bile.

  Quickly she shunted it away; helped him to his feet, and led him as quickly as she could to the staircase. My room. I have to get him somewhere quiet. If he panics more_

  She didn't want to speculate. He was armed with five long talons on each hand, and four longer talons on each foot, not to mention that cruel beak. This collapse might only be momentary. If he thought he was in danger again, and lost control of himself_

  Well, she had seen hawks in a panic; they could and did put talons right through a man's hand. T'fyrr was at least ten times the size of a hawk.

  Somehow she got him into her room and shut the door; she lowered the bed and put him down on it, dimming the lights. He seemed to be in a state of shock now; he shook, every feather trembling, and he didn't seem to know she was there.

  All right. I can work with that. I don't need him to notice me.

  Of course not. All she needed was to touch him_and open up every shield she had on herself. But there was no choice, and no hesitation. She sat down beside him, laid one hand on his arm, and released her shielding walls.

  It was worse, much worse, than she had ever dreamed.

  After a time, she realized that he was speaking, brokenly. Some of it was in her tongue, some in his own, but she finally pieced together what he was saying, aided by the flood of emotions that racked him. He could not weep, of course; it seemed horribly cruel to her that he did not have that release. If ever anyone needed to be able to weep, it was T'fyrr.

  He had gone to Gradford, on behalf of Harperus, and he had been captured and held as a demon by agents of the Church. They had bound him, imprisoned him in a cage so small he could not even spread his wings, which had driven him half mad.

  She tried to imagine it, and failed. Take all the worst nightmares, the most terrible of fears, then make them all come true. The Haspur needed space, freedom, needed these things the way a human needed air and light. Take those away_and then take away air, and light as well_

  How did he endure it? Only by descent into madness....

  But that had not been enough for them. Then they had starved him_which had sent him past madness altogether, turned him from a thinking being into a being ruled only by fear, pain and instinct.

  As familiar as she was with hawks, she knew only too well what they were like when they hungered. Their entire being centered on finding prey and eating it_and woe betide anything that got in the way. But T'fyrr had never been so overwhelmed by his own instincts before; he had not known such a thing could happen. He retained just enough of his reasoning ability to take advantage of an opportunity to escape provided by the Free Bards.

  He did not have enough left to do more than react instinctively when one of the Church Guards tried to stop him.

  He did not realize what he had done until after_after he had killed and eaten a sheep on the mountainside, and remembered, with a Haspur's extraordinary memory, what had happened as he escaped. He could not even soften the blow to himself by forgetting....

  He killed. He had never killed before, other than the animals that were his food Certainly he had never even hurt another thinking being before. For all their fearsome appearance, the Haspur were surprisingly gentle, and they had not engaged in any kind of conflict for centuries. It was inconceivable for the average Haspur to take a sentient life with his own talons. Oh, there were Haspur who retained some of the savage nature of their ancestors, enough that they served as guards to warn off would-be invaders, or destroy them if they must. But the average Haspur looked on the guards the same way the average farmer looked on the professional mercenary captain; with a touch of awe, a touch of queasiness, and the surety that he could not do such a thing.

  To discover that he could had undone T'fyrr.

  To learn, twice now, that his battle-madness had been no momentary aberration was just as devastating.

  Gradually, he allowed her to hold him, as he shook and rocked back and forth, his spirit in agony. He had come close, so close, to killing again tonight, that the experience had reopened all his soul-wounds. The man who had been nearest him had been reaching for a hand-crossbow at his belt_and that was how he had been captured the first time, with a drugged dart shot by a man who caught him on the ground. The horror of that experience was such that he would rather die_

  _or kill again_

  _than endure it a second time.

  And with her spirit open to his, she endured all the horror of it with him, and the horror of knowing that he could and would kill as well.

  His throat ached and clenched; his breath came in hard-won gasps, harsh and unmusical, and every muscle in his body was as tight as it could be. If he had been a human, he would have been sobbing uncontrollably.

  He could not_so she wept for him.

  She understood, with every fiber of her spirit, just how his heart cried out with revulsion at the simple fact that he had taken a life, that if forced to he would do so again. There was no room in his vision of the world for self-defense, only for those who killed and those who did not. She knew, deep inside her bones, why he hated himself for it.

  He had not stopped; had not tried to subdue rather than kill. Never mind that he was mad with fear, pain, hunger. Never mind that the man who had tried to stop his escape would probably have killed him to prevent it. The man himself was not his enemy; the man was only doing the job he'd been set. T'fyrr had not even paused for a heartbeat to consider what he was doing. He had struck to kill and fled with the man's heart-blood on his talons.

  And she told him so, over and over, between her sobs of grief for him, just how and why she understood. She would have felt the same, precisely the same, even though there were plenty of people she considered her friends and Clansfolk who would never agree with her. Her personal rule_which she did not impose on anyone else_forbade killing. She knew that she might find herself in the position one day of having to kill or die herself. She did not know how she would meet that. She tried to make certain to avoid situations where that was the only way out.

  Which was why, of course, she avoided cities. Death was cheap in cities; the more people, the cheaper it was. At least out in the countryside, life wa
s held at a dearer cost than here, where there were people living just around the corner who would probably strangle their own children for a few coins.

  All of that flitted through her thoughts as a background to T'fyrr's terrible pain, and to the tears that scalded her own cheeks. But there was a further cost to this ahead for her. She had thought that she had opened herself to him completely before; but now, as she held him and sensed that this would bring him little or no ease, she realized that she had still held something of herself in reserve. Nothing less than all of herself would do at this moment_because of what he was.

  The Haspur had an odd, sometimes symbiotic relationship with the humans who shared their aeries and villages. Most of the time, it never went any deeper than simple friendship, the kind she herself shared with the Elves who had gifted her with her bracelets.

  But sometimes, it went deeper, much deeper, than that.

  She had always known, intellectually, that she was not the only human to have her peculiar gift_or curse_of feeling the needs and the emotions of others. She had never met anyone else with the gift to the extent that she had it, though. She had never encountered another human who found him- or herself pulled into another's soul by his pain or his joy; never found one who was in danger of losing himself when bombarded by the emotions of others.

  But it seemed that there were many more of the humans who lived among the Haspur with that curse_or gift. Their gifts were_at least from what she gleaned from T'fyrr_as formidable as her own. And for those who bore that burden, a relationship with a Haspur could never be "simple" anything.

  They felt, and felt deeply, but had no outlet for their extreme emotions. At the ragged edge of pain, or sorrow, or that dreadful agony of the soul, the Haspur could only try to endure, dumbly, as their emotions tore them up from within, a raging beast that could not break free from the cage of their spirits.

  But humans did have that outlet_at least, the humans he called "Spirit-Brothers" could provide it, by becoming unhesitatingly one, without reservations, with their friends, and sharing the pain.

  Becoming one, without reservations. Giving all, and taking all, halving the pain by enduring it themselves.

  She had one lover in all her life_one real lover, as opposed to friends who shared their bodies with her. She had not known; she was so young, she had not known that when she gave all of herself, the one she gave to might not be able to give in return_that he might not even realize what she had done. She had not thought she was the only one with this curse_or gift_and had supposed that her lover would surely feel all that she felt.

  He didn't, of course. He hadn't a clue; he'd thought she was the same as all the other ladies he'd dallied with, and she lacked the words, the skill, the heart to tell him.

  When Raven had left her the first time, it had felt as if something that was a part of her had been ripped away from her soul. She smiled and bled, and he smiled and sauntered off with a song on his lips.

  And he had never understood. He still didn't; not to this day.

  She had learned to accept that, and had forgiven him for not knowing and herself for her own ignorance. But she had vowed it would not happen again and had never opened herself to another creature that deeply, never under any other circumstances, until this moment. But nothing less would do now, but to give everything of herself, for nothing less would begin the healing T'fyrr needed so desperately.

  She did not know, could not know, what would come of this. Perhaps an ending like the end of her love affair with Raven, and pain that would live in her forever, a place inside her spirit wounded and scarred and never the same again.

  But she could bear the pain, and she could heal herself again, over time. She had done it once, and she could again. T'fyrr could not, not without her help, for he did not truly understand the emotions festering inside his soul.

  Great power demands that the user consider the repercussions of actions. She had the power; she had long ago accepted the responsibility, or so she had thought.

  I was fooling myself. I should have known that the Lady would put this on me.

  But this was no time to have second thoughts; really, she had made all her choices long before she met T'fyrr, and this was only the ultimate test of those choices. What was it that Peregrine had said to her a few months ago? She had known at the time that he was trying to warn her of an ordeal to come_

  You cannot speak truly of the path without walking it.

  And she could not. Not without repudiating everything that she said, that she thought, that she was.

  So she opened the last of her heart to him, opened her souls arms to him and gathered him up inside the place where her own deepest secrets and darkest fears lay_she brought him inside, and she gave him all that she was, and all the comfort that she had.

  T'fyrr did not know how he had gotten to Nightingale's room; he did not even realize that he was talking to her until he heard his own voice, hoarse and cracking, telling her things he had never intended to share with anyone.

  Especially not with her.

  She was too fragile, too gentle_how could she hear these horrible things and not hate him? He knew she was one of the kind who felt things; he had sensed that the first time he met her.

  The same as the Spirit-Brothers, perhaps.

  But not the same, not with the training or the knowledge, surely. The idea of murder_it would surely send her fleeing him in utter revulsion.

  Only Harperus knew he had killed. Harperus had told him that it was an accident, something he could not have helped.

  Harperus had not even begun to understand.

  The Spirit-Brothers of the Haspur would have been able to help him bear the guilt, although it would have meant that he and the Brother who chose to help him would have been in debt to one another for all their lives, bonded in soul and perhaps in body as well. The latter happened, sometimes, though not often. But the Spirit-Brothers, male and female, were far away and out of reach, and he had no hope of reaching them for years, even decades....

  At some point in his babbling, it began to dawn on him that Nightingale not only understood, she felt as he felt. She wept for him as a Spirit-Brother would have wept, gave him her tears in an outpouring of release for both of them.

  Something in him turned to her as a flower turns toward the sun, as a drowning creature seizes upon a floating branch. Something in her answered that need, granted him light, kept him afloat. He was beyond thinking at that point, or he would never have let her do what she did. It wasn't fair, it wasn't right, not for her! She was a Gypsy, a Free Bard, who should be as free as the bird that was her namesake, and not bound as a Spirit-Brother!

  But it was already done, before thoughts even began to form in the back of his terror-clouded mind.

  She stayed awake with him until his internal sense told him that the sun was rising, comforting and holding him, and even preening his feathers as another Haspur would_

  _a Haspur, or a Spirit-Brother.

  He did not understand how she knew to do this; he did not understand why he accepted it. He was beyond understanding now, beyond anything except feeling. It was feeling that held him here, weak as a newborn eyas, simply accepting the comfort and the understanding as an unthinking eyas would accept them.

  Finally, he slept, exhausted.

  When he woke again, she was there beside him, stroking his wings with a hand so gentle it had not even disturbed his sleep, although he had felt it and it had soothed him out of the nightmares he had suffered for so long. He blinked up at her, astonished that she was still there.

  Silence stretched between them; he felt as if he must be the one to break it. Finally, he said the only thing that was in his mind.

  "You should hate me_" And he waited to see that hate and contempt in her eyes for what he had done.

  Her expression did not change, not by the slightest bit.

  "How could I hate you?" she asked, softly. "You hate yourself more than enough for both of us. I want t
o help you, T'fyrr. I hope you will let me."

  He blinked at her again, and slowly sat up. She shook her hair back out of her face, and rubbed her eyes with her hand as she sat up too.

  "I think that there is something that you believe you need to do, to make up for what you did," she said then. "I will help you, if that is what you want. I will come with you to the King, and stand beside you in your task. I will give you my music, and I will give you my magic; you can have one or both, they are freely given."

  "And when the King sees again the things that he does not want to see?" T'fyrr asked, very slowly. "Will that_"