Owlflight

hands. In a moment, he had wrung it as dry as possible and seized his arm.

“Please to hold still, good sir,” the boy said, carefully forming the Valdemaran words as he looked directly into Snowfire’s eyes, as if he thought he could give the sense of what he said if he simply spoke slowly and clearly, and locked gazes with his rescuer. Then again, if he had a touch of mind-magic, that might work; Snowfire had not lowered his own shields, so he couldn’t have told whether the boy possessed such a thing.

“Yes. Surely - “ Snowfire said, too much taken aback to argue. Was the boy in training to be a Healer? It certainly seemed as if he might be. But if that were the case, why was he not in the pale green of a Healer- student?

Using some clean, dry moss picked from a rock beside the stream as a pad, the boy rewrapped the bandage with the deft hands of an expert, putting exactly the right kind of pressure at the proper angles on the wound to hold it closed again. When he came to the end of the bandage and looked at it for a moment in puzzlement, Snowfire took over, and sealed the end of the bandage down again with magic.

And to his surprise, he felt the boy following what he had done with his own mind.

“Oh!” the lad said, sounding surprised. The next words were blurted, as if he spoke before he thought. “So magic is good for something - “

Then he clapped his hand over his mouth, his face, a comic mask of dismay.

“The littlest magics are usually the most practical,” Snowfire said mildly, in accented Valdemaran. He cleared his throat carefully. “I am Snowfire k’Vala, Scout of the Tayledras - or as you say, Hawkbrothers. I return now to my own people, in a place we have made for ourselves.”

The boy ducked his head awkwardly, but his eyes were alive with mingled curiosity and apprehension. “My name is Darian,” he said simply. “Darian Firkin. And - ah - thank you. I thought they were going to - kill me.”

“I do not think that what they had in mind for you would have been pleasant,” Snowfire said carefully, unsure of how much or little to tell the lad. He might well be much older than he looked; he had very old eyes for such a young face, and the face itself was a mask of politeness behind which something else was hidden. “Have you any place you need to go, or a place of safety that I may take you to? Or would you care to come with me to a safe haven?”

The boy held his breath, and slowly the polite mask shattered and fell. He crumpled, sobbing, apparently completely overcome by sudden, overwhelming grief.

Snowfire did not need to be an Empath to read that there was something dreadfully wrong, something triggered by mention of safety, or a safe place to go. He decided on his own that the best place for both of them was back with his little band. Whatever had gone wrong had evidently been horrible, terrifying; it likely had a great deal to do with those barbarians, and was probably something that he and his people urgently needed to know about.

But there was a more immediate need: to soothe the child enough so that he could ride without falling apart. The sooner he got back to camp, the better.

Snowfire had never had a little brother, but he had played the role of confidante and helper a time or two in the past, to warriors, mages, and younger scouts. “Hush, now,” he soothed, putting his good, though leather layered, arm about the boy’s shoulder - close enough to give emotional support, not so close as to be intrusive. He knew before the boy did, by the imperceptible tensing of the lad’s muscles, when he was coming too close, and backed off a bit. “Here, you may come with me, and we will go to my people. I promise, you will be quite safe enough with us. Eh? Then, when you are rested, you will talk to us, tell us what happened. Perhaps we can help. Even if we cannot, we will see to it that you are safe. Warm and safe and well-fed.”

The boy only nodded, and Snowfire mounted, lending the boy a hand so that he could swing up to sit behind the saddle instead of being carried like so much baggage. The boy must have ridden this way before; he put his foot carefully on top of Snowfire’s, trusted his weight to Snowfire’s arm, and got himself up behind the Tayledras with a minimum of awkwardness. And there he sat, his arms around Snowfire’s waist to hold him in place. His sobs had ended, but as he held tightly to Snowfire’s waist, the Tayledras felt him shivering, and not with cold, but with suppressed emotion and shock. He was very near a breaking point, and Snowfire wanted him to be safely in the hands of someone who could deal with his trauma before he came to that breaking point.

Nightwind was an Empath as well as a trondi’irn, and she would be the best person for the child at this moment.

Snowfire clucked to the horse, which lengthened its stride readily into a slow canter. Evidently it already preferred Snowfire over its previous masters.

It seemed as if this was something more serious than a single boy and a few sadistic barbarians. Perhaps this situation was more than his little group could deal with; after all, they already had quite a bit on their plate.

After the danger from the mage-storms had ended, magic had been shattered like a broken crystal; the matrixed pattern of ley-lines and nodes was gone as if it had never been, and the energies that had once flowed in them were spread evenly across the face of the land. This had left the more powerful mages at something of a loss, but the Tayledras already had a plan in place to deal with such a contingency. They were a long-sighted and patient people when it came to making and fulfilling plans. They would move with urgency when speed was called for, or could wait for generations to lay something in place.