Owlflight

Darian rubbed some of his scratches with a bit of self-conscious embarrassment, even though some of them were deep and he had many braises as well.

“And this is Wintersky - “ He looked askance at the younger man, who grinned at Darian and finished the sentence.

“Wintersky, who will share his quarters with you and Snowfire, unless you prefer to camp alone in a tent, or have us make some other arrangements.” The young man winked. “I pledge you I do not snore. My Valdemaran is the best of all of us save the mighty hunter Snowfire, so I thought I’d volunteer our ekele. It’s always better to have people about who know your tongue fairly well. Snowfire does snore, though.”

Darian was clearly getting overwhelmed; his eyes looked a trifle glazed, his face was pale, and his expression bewildered. “I don’t mind, I mean, that would be good - whatever you like - “

“Whatever it is that I like is that you are to come and be tended, and be eating and drinking, and be then sleeping,” Nightwind said firmly, taking the boy in charge with maternal authority. The boy yielded to her with relief and gratitude, and she ushered him off.

“I’ll report in brief, and then I need to be tended, eating, drinking, and then sleeping after you’ve gotten the full report,” Snowfire told the Adept, as Wintersky took the horse and led it away to be watched by the dyheli herd. “Hweel saw the boy being chased by northern barbarians. Bearclan would be my guess, but they were all wearing identical armor, and I don’t much care for what that implies.”

“Neither do I,” Starfall said, his brows furrowing.

“Their tattoos would have told me more, but things were rather impolite at the time, and I didn’t stay around to request a viewing from those remaining.” Snowfire noted Starfall’s lips twitch as he tried not to smile at the understated and offhand manner Snowfire was taking with the tale.

“How impolite?” Starfall asked.

“Only two casualties. Not even a minor quarrel by Bearclan standards. Hardly more than an ordinary drunken brawl-though I did make sure to substitute the boy’s arrows for mine; I didn’t want to alert them to our presence. Still - one of them had caught the boy by the time I got there, and he and his colleagues were exchanging pleasantries that implied they had been . . . improving some Valdemaran settlements.” He dropped his tone of levity. “I think that the boy belonged to the latest one, though I have not yet questioned him at all. I wished an Empath to be present when I did.”

Starfall lost all trace of humor at that. “So, you have barbarians in identical armor, what amounts to something more serious than a little banditry, and all this a good bit farther south than we should expect to see mountain tribes. I shall check my maps, but. . . .” Starfall shook his head. “I do not like this, Snowfire.”

“Neither do I, since the barbarians don’t move in groups larger than a dozen without having a shaman-mage along with them.” Snowfire had been letting what he knew about the northern tribes dig itself out of his memories during the last part of the journey; he was better at recollection when he allowed the memories to surface on their own. “And they don’t use horses as a rule, yet all of the barbarians I saw were mounted.”

“This isn’t sounding very promising.” Starfall bit his lip for a moment. “Well, the best thing that I can do is to move the progress I was making on ahead. It won’t take more than a day or so, and I’ll have the matrices set up and completely in my control; I’d like to see the mage that can get it out of my hands then.”

“I wouldn’t,” Snowfire replied. “But if there was someone able to do that, he’d have challenged you already, so the worst we’ll have to deal with is someone your equal. I think we can do that.”

“And I think you’d better have someone look at that arm while you get some hot food inside you,” Starfall pointed out. “Your stoicism is respected, but not required. Go, you can make a more detailed report after you’ve rested and gotten properly patched up - and by then, the boy will be rested, too, and we can find out why barbarians on horses were chasing him.”

Now that his initial report had been made, he had the relief of the discharge of duty, and a great weariness descended on him. He decided that the best place for him was in his shared ekele. Fortunately, it was one of the nearer structures; he rounded two vine screens, and there it was, looking like nothing so much as a leafy hummock. He parted the vines with his good hand, and found that Nightwind had already preceded him there.

He had taken weather-felled limbs and constructed a fine log home, octagonal in shape, with a roof of sod held up by logs and willow withes woven into fine mats. The snug dwelling would probably serve as well in winter as in summer, except that he would have to fill in the bottom rank with sod; he had left off the bottom rank of logs on four of the eight sides so as to allow the movement of air through the place. A cool breeze came in at the level of the floor and went out at the smoke hole in the middle. It had been a great deal of extra work to make this ekele, but he reckoned it had been worth the work. A lantern with a mage-light in it hung from one of the ceiling logs. His sleeping place and Hweel’s perch were on the far right as one came in the door, and Wintersky’s sleeping pad and Tiec’s perch were on the left. That left a cooking place in the middle, and any gear they shared near the door. Now there was a third sleeping place at the rear, with the boy sitting sleepily on it and Nightwind beside him.

Snowfire saw at once that someone had left a young rabbit on Hweel’s perch, which meant Hweel would not