Probably because she had a tendency to take everything and everyone at
face value, and every time Aubri went into his “senile old featherhead” act,
she fell for it.
Well, she can’t help it. This was her big weakness, and Tad had a good
idea why she wasn’t likely to cure it any time soon. Part of the problem was
that she just didn’t want to look past the surface masks that everyone wore,
no matter how honest and genuine they were. Tad’s partner just didn’t want to
know what surprises might lie beneath those polite masks; that Empathy thing
of hers bothered her, and if she could have had it surgically removed, Tad had
it figured that she would have done so no matter what the risk. And there were
reasons behind that as well; she had realized a long time ago that she would
never, ever be as good as her father at delving into people’s hearts and souls.
She was the kind of person who, if she couldn’t excel at something, didn’t
want to try.
Silly. Not every mage can be a Snowstar, but the hedge-wizards can do
plenty of things he hasn’t got the time for, or even do subtle things he can’t do
at all. Well, it’d be flogging pointlessly to take that up with her, at least now.
Maybe after we’ve been out there a while, and we ‘ve had a lot of peace and
privacy. That particular twitch of hers bothered him, though, and he wanted to
have it straightened out before too very long. Any amount of mind-magic was
useful, the more so in someone who might well be supposed to boast nothing
of the sort. Father always says that if you’ve got an ability, it’s stupid not to
train and use it, even if it isn‘t something that you‘d use very often.
Blade compared the two lists, and added several items to theirs before she
handed the one Aubri had given her back to him. Tad was pleased to note
that she had not needed to copy the whole thing down. So they hadn’t done
so badly on their own.
I wonder if there was a bone setting kit on Aubri’s list, though. It certainly
fits his criteria of “nonmagical” and “spoiled by damp.“ But, oh, the weight! If
only someone could come up with better splints and casting material! It seems
so stupid to be hauling wood and powdered rock!
Aubri crossed his forelegs in front of him, and regarded both of them with a
benign, almost paternal expression on his face. “Well. Two more of my
fledges go out to prove their wings. I think you’ll like the post; neither of you
are the kind to pine after a city when you can thrash around in the forest and
see things no one else ever has before.” He sighed. “Adventures are for the
young, who haven’t got bone aches. Now me—I’m happy to be here in White
Gryphon where I can sunbathe every day. But there should be enough new
discoveries there to make even two youngsters like you happy.”
He did not mention that he knew their personal prime reason for being so
happy with this assignment; getting away from their beloved families. He had
never acted as if he recognized them as Skandranon’s and Amberdrake’s
offspring—
Well, he wouldn’t; not while we were in training. But he’s never even
mentioned our parents casually. Maybe he is a little absentminded in that
direction; maybe he doesn’t recognize us now that we’re grown.
“We’re looking forward to it, sir,” he said honestly. “And it’ll be nice to be
away from home for the first time.”
Aubri nodded, then grinned. “Oh, you aren’t the only ones who’ve been
interested in long assignments outside the city, believe it or not. I told Judeth
that she should never assign anyone to Five who didn’t have a good reason
for being there as well as a good reason for getting away from home. I’ve
never seen anyone who fit those qualifications better than you two. And to tell
you the truth, I had a third reason to want you out there—you’re a two-and-
four team. That’s a good combination for an outpost.”
That was a gryphon paired with a human. That particular team was not all
that usual among the Silvers; people tended to team up with members of their
own species. Usually the two-and-fours were default teams, made up of those
who couldn’t find a compatible partner among their own kind. Quite often they
broke up after training, when a senior Silver could take a junior out of training
as a partner. Those who were in default two-and-fours generally did just that.
“I like a two-and-four for these remote postings,” Aubri continued, then got
that twinkle back in his eye. “The teams are more flexible, more versatile.
Even if some people think there’s something wrong with a gryphon who
doesn’t team up with one of his own.”
Tad stared back at his superior with his head held high and challenge in his
gaze. He’d heard that one before, and it didn’t ruffle his feathers. “Oh? Does
that include you, too, sir?”
Aubri laughed. “Of course it does! Everyone knows I’m a twisted
personality! All of us war veterans are warped, it comes with combat! What’s
your excuse?”
Tad grinned back as the perfect answer came to him. “Family tradition, sir,”
he responded immediately, prompting Aubri into another bray of laughter.
“Well said! And I can’t wait to tell the Black Boy what you just told me; if
that doesn’t make his nares redden, nothing will.” He shook his head, and the
feathers rustled. “Now, you two run along. Give that list to the supply officer;
he’ll see to getting your basket packed up. All you need to worry about is your
own kit.”
They both stood and snapped to attention. Aubri chuckled, and rose slowly
to his feet to let them out—old, maybe, but not dead yet.
As Tad had expected, his father already knew about the posting, and was
outwardly (and loudly) enthusiastic. If he had beaten every contender and
been appointed as Judeth’s sub-Commander, Skandranon could not have
been more thrilled. It was positively embarrassing. As they gathered for the
evening meal in the main room of the family aerie, with the sky a dark velvet
studded with jewellike stars beyond the window, Tad wondered if he shouldn’t
have opted for a quiet bite alone—or perhaps have gone hungry.
“Outpost duty! And you fresh out of training!” he kept saying, all through
dinner. “I can’t ever remember any Silver as young as you are being put on
remote duty!”
His tone was forced, though, and he hadn’t eaten more than half his meal.
At the least, this sudden change in his son’s status had put him off his feed.
Was he worried?
Why should he be worried? What’s there to be worried about?
Zhaneel, Skandranon’s mate, cuffed him lightly. “Let the boys eat,” she
admonished him. “You won’t be doing Tadrith any favor by giving him no time
to have a proper meal.”
But her look of rebuke followed by a glance at Keeth made Skandranon’s
nares flush red with embarrassment. He had been neglecting Keeth the whole
time, although Keeth didn’t seem too terribly unhappy about that. “I hear fine
reports about you from Winterhart,” he said hastily to his other son. “You’r
e
training in things your mother and I dreamed of doing, but were never able to
achieve.”
Tad winced. Now, if that didn’t sound forced, he’d eat grass instead of good
meat!
“Well, if there hadn’t been that annoying war, Father, you two would
probably have invented the gryphon trondi’irn, the gryphon kestra’chern, and
the gryphon secretary,” Keeth said, with a sly grin at his brother. “And
probably the gryphon seamstress, mason, and carpenter as well!”
Trust Keeth to know how to turn it into a joke, bless him.
Skandranon laughed, and this time it sounded genuine and a bit more
relaxed. “And maybe we would have!” he replied, rousing his feathers. “Too
bad that war interfered with our budding genius, heh?”
Tad kept silent and tore neat bites from his dinner, the leg of a huge
flightless bird the size of a cow and with the brains of a mud-turtle. One of
these creatures fed the whole family; the Haighlei raised them for their
feathers, herding them on land that cattle or sheep would damage with
overgrazing. The gryphons found these creatures a tasty alternative to beef
and venison.
Tad was perfectly pleased to let clever Keeth banter with their father. He
couldn’t think of anything to say, not when beneath the Black Gryphon’s pride
lurked a tangle of emotions that he couldn’t even begin to unravel. But he was
more and more certain that one of them was a fear that Skandranon would
never admit to.
Of course not. He doesn’t want to cripple me with indecision or even fear of
my own before I go out there with Blade. He knows that if he shows he’s
unhappy with this, I might be tempted to back out of it. And he knows that
there’s nothing to worry about; we ‘re hardly the first team to ever take this
outpost. We ‘re just the first team that included one of his sons, and he’s been
thinking about all the accidents that could happen to us ever since he heard of
the posting.
He was worrying too much; Tad knew that, and he knew that his father
knew it as well. This was not wartime, and they were not going to encounter
hostile troops.
But this is the first time I’m “leaving the nest.” I suppose it’s perfectly normal
for parents to worry. I worry, too, but I know that it can be done. I wonder why
parents can say they trust their young so much, yet still fear for them? He
supposed that a parent’s imagination could conjure up a myriad of other
dangers, from illness to accident, and play them out in the space of a
heartbeat. Parents had to be that way; they had to anticipate all the trouble
youngsters could get into and be prepared to pluck them out of danger before
they got too deeply into it.
But I’m an adult, and I can take care of myself! Isn’t he ever going to figure
that out? He has been an adult for ages longer than I have, and he has had to
be rescued before—so why is it that adults regard trouble as the sole territory
of the young? Do we remind them of their vulnerability that much?
Between bites, he cast a glance at his mother, surprising her in an openly
concerned and maternal gaze at him. She started to look away, then evidently
thought better of it, and nodded slightly.
Mother’s worried, but she admits it. Father won’t, which will make it worse
on him. And there’s no reason for either of them to worry at all! Maybe the
more intelligent a parent is, the more they worry, because then they are able
to see more of what could go wrong. The Kaled’a’in Quarters know that they
could concentrate just as much on what could go right, but when it comes to
children—or young adults—it could be smartest to have only grudging
optimism. Still. . . .
He spared a thought for Blade, who was probably undergoing the same
scrutiny at the hands of her parents, and sighed. He didn’t know how
Amberdrake and Winterhart would be reacting to this, but Blade had
threatened to spend the night with friends rather than go home to face them.
Tad had managed to persuade her to change her mind.
It could be much worse, he told himself. They could be so overprotective
that they refuse to let me take the post. Or, worse than that, they could be
indifferent.
A couple of his classmates had parents like that; Tad had heard mages
speculating that the raptor instinct ran so strongly in them that it eclipsed what
Urtho had intended. Those parents were loving enough as long as their young
were “in the nest.” They began to lose interest in them when they fledged, just
exactly as raptor parents did. Eventually, when the young gryphons reached
late adolescence and independence, their parents did their best to drive them
away, if they had not already left. Such pairs were more prolific than those
who were more nurturing, raising as many as six or eight young in a
reproductive lifetime.
But those offspring were, as Aubri would say, “glorified gamehawks;” they
lived mostly for the hunt and, while extremely athletic, were not very long in
the intelligence department. Most of the gryphonic fatalities at White Gryphon
had occurred among this group, which for the most part were assigned to
hunting to supplement the meat supply of the city. They were very much like
goshawks in focus and temper; they would fly into the ground or a cliff during
a chase and break their foolish necks, or go out in wretched weather and
become a victim of exposure. Some simply vanished without anyone ever
knowing what happened to them.
Aubri had said once in Tad’s hearing that a majority of the fatalities in
gryphon-troops of the war—other than those attributable to human
commanders who saw all nonhumans as expendable and deployed them that
way—were also among this type of gryphon. Needless to say, the type had
been in the minority among those that had reached safe haven here, and
were not likely to persist into a third generation. Not at the rate that they were
eliminating themselves, at least!
When they weren’t hunting, they could usually be found lounging about on
the sunning platform with others of their kind, either attempting to impress
like-minded females or comparing wing-muscles. Granted, there was always a
bit of that going on among young gryphons, but this lot acted like that all the
time!
Very attractive, to look at perhaps. But as trysting mates or play-fighters, I
don’t think I could stand them.
So while Skandranon was probably thinking over how many young
gryphons of Tadrith’s generation had been lost, it was not occurring to him
what those unfortunate fatalities had in common.
Say—an absolute dearth of brains. A squandering of what they had. And
most importantly, a lack of decent parenting. Keeping a young one’s body
alive was one thing, but it only created more breeders to do the same with the
next generation they bred. Even a charming young idiot can succeed with
good parenting. I’m proof of that, aren’t I?
His father had lost some of his self-consciousness and was now speaking
normally to Keeth and Zhaneel about some modification Winterha
rt had made
to the standard obstacle course in order to train trondi’irn. Tad took full
advantage of their absorption to get some more of his meal down in peace.
Skandranon was an odd sight just now; halfway into a molt, he was piebald
black and white. The white feathers were his natural color—now—and the
black were dyed. He dyed himself whenever he was due to visit Khimbata in
his capacity as special representative of White Gryphon. Ever since the
Eclipse Ceremony, when he had come diving dramatically down out of the
vanishing sun to strike down an assassin who would have murdered Emperor
Shalaman, Winterhart, and probably several more people as well, he’d been
virtually forced to wear his Black Gryphon “guise” whenever he visited. He
had rescued Shalaman, the Black King, as the Black Gryphon—and in a
culture that set a high value on things that never changed, he was mentally
set in that persona whenever he returned to the site of his triumph.
The Gryphon King, beloved where e’er he goes. That was what Aubri had
said to his face, mockingly.
But the real irony of the statement was that it was true. He never left
Khimbata without being loaded down with gifts of all sorts. His jewelry
collection was astonishing; if he and Zhaneel wore all of it at one time, they’d
never get off the ground.
Between us, if we’re lucky, Keeth and I might manage to be a quarter as
famous as he is—and then most of it will be due to the fact that we‘re his
sons.
That could have been a depressing thought, if Tad had any real ambition.
But to be frank, he didn’t.
He’d seen the negative effects of all that adulation— how it was always
necessary for Skandranon to be charming, witty, and unfailingly polite no
matter what he personally felt like. How when the family visited Khimbata,
Skandranon had barely a moment to himself and none to spare for them. And
how even at home, there was always someone who wanted something from
him. He was always getting gifts, and a great many of those gifts came with
requests attached. Even when they didn’t, there was always the chance that a
demand, phrased as a request, would come later, perhaps when he wasn’t
expecting it and was off his guard.
There was no way for Skandranon to know whether someone wanted his
friendship because of what he was or because of who he was—and the
Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon - Mage Wars 03 - The Silver Gryphon.txt Page 6
