The notion of seeing Kel sick with poison - of Wintersky with some terrible wound, bleeding into the dirt - it was horrible. Not that he hadn’t seen nasty injuries, because obviously he had, but to think of such things being inflicted by other people on his friends, and on purpose, to hurt or kill them - well, it was just entirely different from seeing the results of an accident, and it was hard to wrap his mind around the idea. Not just hard - ugly. It made him feel horrible inside to realize that people could actually want to hurt other people. Oh, there were plenty of times when he’d wanted something nasty to happen to other people, but the wish was always vague and ill-defined, and what he’d wanted was for something to happen to them, not that he wanted to inflict a hurt.
But - I think I could have hurt those men who were chasing me. He considered it a little more. I know I could have hurt them. I was ready to shoot them. He recalled quite clearly how he had felt at the time - coldly calculating an eye-shot, as if the men were nothing more than tree-hares he was hunting for the pot.
But they were going to kill me and Snowfire. And they attacked the village. And for no reason! Or, not for no reason, but not for any good reason.
When he finished with Kel - who had really enjoyed being able to tell someone about his fight - Wintersky caught him before anyone else did.
“We need to get the hawk furniture in order,” Wintersky told him, “and you’re the only one free,” without any explanations of what “hawk furniture” was, or how to get it in order. Instead, the youngest of the Hawkbrothers left him in the charge of a painfully shy hertasi in someone else’s hut, the entire left side of which was full of - hawk furniture.
Which was not little chairs and tables for birds of prey, as his imagination had devised, but the bits and pieces of hawk equipment needed for the bondbirds.
For all their intelligence, bondbirds were still hawks, and a hood slipped over their heads would let them sleep in a noisy and brightly-lit room. “Darkness - makes them sleep,” the little hertasi whispered, cupping her hands over her eyes by way of illustration. “If the bondmate needs to be awake, the bird must still sleep - to feel well, they must sleep from dawn to dusk.”
She showed him how to clean the hoods, made of hard, but extremely thin leather, odd bulges over the areas of the eyes to keep from touching the lids. Then, when he had cleaned them, she showed him how to repair those that were damaged. Most often, it was the braces, the leather thongs that held the hoods shut at the back, that were damaged, broken, or worn out. That was easy to fix, once he saw the odd way in which they were laced, so that a Hawkbrother could tighten or loosen the hood with one hand and his teeth. But sometimes what was damaged was the welt of leather protecting the raw edge of the bottom of the hood, or the ornamental knot on top, which was supposed to be used to take the hood off and put it on. The hertasi let him repair the simplest of these, but for the really complicated repairs, such as restitching the eye-covers, she insisted on doing the work while he watched. It was fascinating, for he would not have thought that such stubby little fingers could take such delicate stitches.
Most of the bondbirds didn’t need restraints, such as jesses, but all of them wore the bracelets on their ankles that the jesses fitted through. The bracelets were good for other things, for tying a light string onto, for instance, that a bird could carry up and over a high branch, so that a rope could be pulled up afterward. So the hertasi taught him how to cut and oil such bracelets - then how to make leather- or rope-wrapped and padded perches as well. Hawks took wall- or floor-perches of tree limbs wrapped in leather, while falcons, it seemed, required perches made of upthrust sections of stump, like upthrusting rocks, but padded so that the talons of a sleeping bird had something to grip. Care of the feet, it seemed, was all-important, and sharp talons were hard on wrapped perches. Perches had to be made to withstand hard use, but not made of things that would bruise or abrade the feet; bruised or cut feet could infect, leading to a state called “bumblefoot,” which in turn could cripple a bird if not adequately treated.
He learned more about birds of prey in that morning than he had ever learned in his life, and when he and the little lizard were done, every bit of equipment that could be mended, had been.
Then it was time for lunch, and time to help clean pots for a bit.
It occurred to him after lunch, as he stood beside a-half barrel with his arms up to the elbow in warm, slippery, soapy water, that he had seldom worked this hard with poor Justyn. But this didn’t bother him at all, and that was the odd thing.
Maybe it’s just - it’s just that no one shouts at me, or tells me what a terrible, ungrateful child I am, he concluded. It’s not so bad to work when no one is scolding you.
Of course, he’d never had such interesting work before, which might have been the reason. Ayshen always had funny or fascinating things to tell him while he scrubbed pots, and mending the hawk furniture had been something entirely different from anything he’d ever done before. It wasn’t hard to get through a chore when someone was chatting to you and making jokes, and when the chore required concentration and delicacy, time just flew by.
And as for helping to tend Kelvren, well, he had felt positively honored. It had been an amazing thing, to touch the gryphon’s huge feathers, and make sure the killing talons were pinprick sharp and immaculately clean.
Odd, he thought, as Ayshen left him alone for a moment, to tend to the bake ovens, I thought Kelvren was so old, older than Snowfire, but it was almost as if he was my age. I wonder how old he really is? There was no way of telling with a bird, of course. They didn’t exactly show their age in any way that he could recognize.
