Owlflight

“I know!” Darian interrupted, just as earnestly. He scratched his head, and gave Wintersky an anxious smile. “I was mad at first, but, well, I had a lot of time to think on the ride back. I trust your word; I know that - if you say you would have done something, if you’d known what was going on, then you would have.”

“We should have made sure.”

Darian looked up, and saw Snowfire standing over him, his eyes expressionless and flat, shadows flitting over his face as the light from the fire shifted and changed. “We should have made sure,” the Hawkbrother repeated harshly. “That was a mistake on our part. I’m sorry, Dar’ian.”

Darian shrugged awkwardly. “Wintersky was explaining - and I’d kind of figured some of it out myself. You thought everything was all right. And you and Starfall were busy,” he reminded his mentor shyly. “You told me yourself, you have to fix the magic so no one else can get at it - “ Suddenly, the thought he’d set aside last night came back to him. “Snowfire, how are you doing that? Are you making just - uhm - what’s the word - nodes the way they used to be?”

Snowfire’s expression changed, and he looked down at Darian with speculation. “Not exactly. Why?”

Darian licked his lips, and wondered just how stupid he was going to sound. After all, compared to what the Hawkbrothers knew, he didn’t know much of anything about magic, really. But still. . . .

“There’s definitely a mage with the enemy, right?” Darian asked. “I mean with them, at Errold’s Grove, not just working with them or behind the attack.”

Snowfire nodded. “I cannot imagine how they could be blocking our scrying if there wasn’t.”

“And the mage is going to want that power - he’d have to want to grab for it.” He bit his lip, hoping that he wasn’t going to make a total fool of himself. “And I guess if there was a big source of power, he’d try to get to it, right?” Before Snowfire could answer that, he asked another question. “And there are way too many of those enemy soldiers for us to fight, right?”

Snowfire looked both guilty and relieved. “Far too many for us to take in direct confrontation,” he acknowledged. “Yet - I do not know how we are to free your people, otherwise.”

“But what - what if you baited a big trap for them?” Darian asked. “What if you made a big source of magic, made it show up all of a sudden? Wouldn’t the mage send out men, maybe a lot of them, to try and take it over?”

“Or loot it,” Wintersky suggested, his sleepy eyes brightening. “If you moved it around a little, he might get the idea it’s portable and send his fighters to loot it for him. He might think it was an artifact someone had found.”

“And I know traps, lots of traps,” Darian offered in eager triumph, holding out one hand as if he was offering his knowledge as a gift. “My parents and I, that’s what we did. A lot of the animals we trapped were as big as humans, or bigger. We could take a lot of the enemy out with traps, without ever needing to send anybody closer than bowshot. You set a trap that blocks them from going back the way they came, then you make sure that they can’t get back without having to go through all your other traps. That’s called a channeling trap. Maybe we could even fix things up so that the enemy has to divide up into small groups. Why, if we did that, we could just have one bowman up in a tree near each trap, and what the trap didn’t take care of, he could!”

Snowfire looked at him, and beamed with the most wonderful expression Darian had ever seen.

Respect.

And what was more, others among the Hawkbrothers, who had overheard the conversation, were looking at him in the same way - and those who had been too engrossed in their own conversation to hear were whispering questions to those who had. In another few moments, they were all looking at him that way, and silence replaced the murmur of voices in the clearing.

“Just how many traps do you mean, when you say lots of traps, Dar’ian?” asked Rainwind, a scout only a little older than most of the rest. He stood up and joined Snowfire, a man who was a little more weathered, a little shorter, and a little stockier than Darian’s mentor. “We know some, obviously, but trapping is not the way we usually deal with things. We are more direct and, to be honest, more accustomed to having a superior force. What traps we do use are for snaring game, not stopping soldiers - “ He shrugged.

Darian blinked, and made a quick mental survey of the traps he and his parents had used for large, dangerous, clever animals. “I know by heart maybe six or eight major different kinds that would work against a man - or several men at a time,” he said finally. “Maybe more; we might be able to adapt others I know by disguising them, or we could combine some. I grew up making traps in this part of the Pelagiris. Some of what we caught were probably smarter than these barbarians.”

Someone whistled through his teeth with admiration.

“So you’d already know how to adapt the designs to use the local cover!” Snowfire exclaimed, his whole body taking on a new animation.

Darian nodded. “Entirely using found materials, too,” he said earnestly. “We only carried basic tools with us