Owlflight

:lt was clever of you to have his mate come with yours; the fledges will have protection by day and night on the journey.:

Hweel huured, a contented little sound of pleasure from which his mate got her name. He liked being praised, and he had greatly missed his mate, so knowing that Snowfire would welcome her arrival made him doubly happy.

It would be no bad thing to have a couple of unbonded birds along with the expedition either. They would make excellent camp guards, and if the unthinkable happened and someone lost a bird, there would be possible replacements at hand.

Enough; concentrate on the immediate problem, he reminded himself. He needed to collect Darian and some paper and a charcoal stick; it was time to make a detailed plan of how to get into and out of the village.

He’d left Darian about to take his turn in the bathing pool; by now the boy should be clean and ready for something to eat. Snowfire was terribly proud of him, for Darian had worked as hard as any of them, and had mastered his frustration admirably when someone didn’t quite understand what it was he wanted for a trap. The boy had matured a great deal in the last week, though it was clear every so often that he was still a boy.

When this is over - he needs some time to play and be young, Snowfire concluded to himself. But right now, well, none of them could afford to be anything other than mature and responsible.

He collected more meat and bread from the stores; the berries were gone, but when Ayshen heard who this next meal was going to, he pulled Snowfire aside and passed him a honeycake surreptitiously. “The hatchling didn’t get enough the last time I made them,” Ayshen said, as if daring him to challenge the statement. Since Snowfire had seen Darian stuffing himself with the coveted sweets, and knew Ayshen knew he had, it was clear that the hertasi had taken very strongly to the boy.

“I’ll make sure he knows who sent it,” Snowfire replied, and carried the treasure off. He’d seen Ayshen watching the boy out of the corner of his long eye; evidently this was the hertasi’s way of rewarding hard work.

He met Darian on the path, hair damp, dressed in fresh clothing. “Here, I brought you something to eat,” Snowfire said, holding the napkin out to him. “There’s a honeycake in there from Ayshen.”

“There is?” Darian looked as pleased as if it had been a lump of amber. “I love Ayshen’s honeycakes! Where can we go so I can eat, and help you with those maps of the village you wanted at the same time?”

“Let’s try the council clearing,” Snowfire suggested. “There’s a game place there that no one is going to be using tonight. We’ll have a drawing surface there.”

Darian nodded, his mouth already full of bread and meat. He followed Snowfire to the clearing and at the far side Snowfire took over the game place, a flat sheet of rock balanced on a stump that served as a table, and two more stumps, one on either side of it. He took the taller of the two, and Darian took the shorter, as he spread out the first sheet of paper and took out a scribing rod. “All right,” he said, making a diagonal line for the bank of the river. “Here is the riverbank. Let’s start there.”

“Put one edge of the forest here, and one here,” Darian suggested, pointing with a sticky finger. “And the bridge would be here.” He devoured the last crumb of his cake and licked his fingers clean while Snowfire sketched. “Right, now put the back edge of the forest there. The road goes from the bridge to the center of town, and stops there. Here’s the mill, with the waterwheel there. There’s the forge.”

Snowfire was agreeably surprised at the lad’s clear and precise ability to remember and place everything in the village, but there just weren’t enough adequate areas of cover to sneak a number of people in without getting caught.

“. . . and here’s where the aqueduct starts,” Darian was saying, and the words brought him out of his thoughts with a jolt.

“Aqueduct?” he said, suddenly interested. “What aqueduct?”

“We use it to bring river water to the fields in summer,” Darian explained. “See, it goes around through the middle of the planted fields, then to the cistern house and the watering trough in the center of town.”

“And where does it stop?” Snowfire demanded. “What’s it made of?”

“It stops at the river, I guess,” Darian said, confused by the sudden barrage of urgent questions. “There’s a water-lifting wheel beside the mill that brings water up to the aqueduct and that brings the water out of the river down to the fields because it’s always sloping down from where it starts. As for what it’s made of - hollow tree trunk, mostly. It’s covered to keep trash out of it.”

“Is it big enough for a man to crawl in?” Snowfire persisted.

“Oh, certainly - and I see what you want to do!” Suddenly Darian was all smiles. “It’s absolutely big enough for a man to crawl inside. What’s more, even though we use it all summer, I doubt that anyone’s tending to it now. I can’t imagine a bunch of barbarians thinking to irrigate the fields, and I doubt that anyone in the village is inclined