Owlflight

to help them by telling them that the fields need water.”

“So it starts at the river?” Snowfire asked. “Where, precisely?”

Now Darian’s face fell. “I don’t exactly know,” he confessed. “It’s all overgrown there; I know it’s somewhere near the mill, but not exactly. At least, I don’t know what the place looks like at night. It’s real tall, though, because otherwise it wouldn’t be able to slope down to the fields.”

“But if we can find it, we can get right into the heart of the village undetected.” This was exactly the sort of thing Snowfire was looking for. “Dar’ian, your memory is so good, surely you can remember where the aqueduct starts!”

But Darian shook his head unhappily. “I know what it looks like, but I can’t tell you where to find it,” he confessed. “I only remember that it’s near the mill, not in it.” He looked up at Snowfire hopefully. “I could guide you, though.”

Snowfire frowned. “I don’t want you anywhere near possible fighting,” he objected.

“But if you won’t let me guide you, how do you expect to convince people you aren’t a different kind of enemy?” Darian asked shrewdly. “None of them have ever seen a Hawkbrother, and they’ll probably be frightened of you!”

That was something else Snowfire hadn’t thought of, and he hated to admit it, but the boy was probably right. Still, it went against the grain to permit someone as young as Darian anywhere near combat.

He argued with the boy for some time, and in the end Darian had more good, sound reasons why he should go than Snowfire had counters for them.

“All right,” Snowfire sighed. “You can guide us. But just to a place of safety, mind! You aren’t to rush in and try to help if there’s fighting. You’ll only get in the way, and you might make someone lose his concentration and his life.

“I promise!” Darian agreed, his eyes shining.

Snowfire only hoped that both of them - and ultimately, the village and the Hawkbrothers - would not regret this decision.

Seven

Now, in some ways, came the worst part. All of the traps were constructed and set, and now came the waiting. Daystorm had her birds over the village, while Starfall created his “bait,” and the nagging question was, would their foe take it?

If he closed his own eyes, Snowfire could picture the scene as clearly as if he himself were there. A flock of five crows perched in a tree above the rooftops of Errold’s Grove, an unusually silent gathering, but no one in the village seemed to notice either their presence or their silence. Through their eyes, Daystorm watched the activity in the village below. Two of the crows were bonded to her, the rest were the offspring of her original pair, but all were willing to lend her their eyes and wings, especially when the activity at hand promised to be entertaining. Snowfire occasionally envied the Tayledras who bonded to crows and ravens; the birds had tremendous senses of humor, and as a matter of course, when the original bird took a mate, the mate also became his or her bondbird. Sometimes Hweel’s sober dignity was a little wearing, and he would have welcomed the raucous hooliganism of a band of crows; he would also have welcomed having both halves of a pair as his bondbirds. He sometimes worried that having an unbonded mate gave Hweel divided loyalties.

Last night the dyheli doe Pyreen had taken her place upriver, carrying the double burden of an illusion of a heavily guarded caravan and the newly-strengthened power-point. She had remained stationary until daybreak, then moved slowly southward, mimicking the plodding pace of heavily-laden mules. By then Daystorm’s birds had already been in place to see if the mage somewhere below would take the bait. Tentative experiments had proven that either the mage could not sense anything different about the bondbirds, or that there was enough magical energy in the form of his own Changed fighters to mask the magic of the birds and their links to their bondmates. To Snowfire’s mind, that only confirmed his impression that it had been Kelvren that the “watchdogs” had reacted to, and not Hweel.

Daystorm was simply sitting quietly with her back braced against a tree at the side of the Council circle, with an eager audience waiting around her. She took it all in stride, including the audience; there was very little that rattled this experienced scout. She sat so quietly that she could have been a painted statue, for her chest rose and fell so slowly that it would be very difficult to tell that she was breathing. Her hair, shorn short on the sides, cut into a stiff crest on the top, and braided in a long tail down her back, never moved in the fitful breeze that came with sunrise, contributing to the statuelike illusion.

Finally she broke the silence. “There’s some activity around the Lutters’ house,” Daystorm announced. “Someone just dashed out. Now - he’s going around to all the houses of the village at a run. He’s pounding on the doors and shouting something at each house. Now there are men coming out of the houses, one out of each, walking fast toward the Lutter house.”