In moments he was up in the branches. The game-trail along the edge of the territory lay below him. When two-legged intruders penetrated k'sheyna, most of the time they sought trails like this one.
When scouts patrolled, it was often up here, where the trails could be seen, but where the scouts themselves were invisible.
He shaded his eyes and chose a route through the next three forest giants by means of intersecting limbs, stowing his climbing-spikes and removing his double-ended climbing tool from the sheath on his back.
Then he picked his way through the foliage, walking as surefootedly on the broad, swaying branch as if he were on the ground, pulling another branch closer with the hook end of his tool and hopping from his goldenoak to the limb of a massive candle-pine just as the branch began to bow beneath his weight. He followed the new branch in to the trunk, then back out again to another conifer, this time stowing the tool long enough to leap for the branch above him and swing himself up onto it.
As he chose his next route, his thoughts turned back to that wild magic, as they always did. 'what it has done to the land, to us, is unforgivable.
What it could do is worse.
Never mind that the Tayledras tamed that magic, cleansed the places it had turned awry, made them safe for people and animals alike to live there. Not that there weren't both there now-but they often found their offspring changed into something they did not recognize.
But that isn't our real task. Our real task is more dangerous. And my father has forgotten it ever existed, in his obsessions with power and Power.
Darkwind looked back at the treeless sky where the Plains began. The Shin'a'in had no such problems. But then, the Shin'a'in had little to do restricted parts of the Palace dressed in Grays-and I'm a bit too young kujwith magic. Odd to think we were one, once.
Very odd, for all that there was no mistaking the fact that Tayledras features and Shin'a'in were mirrors of each other. The Kaled'ain' they had been the most trusted allies of a mage whose name had been lost over the ages. The Tayledras remembered him only as
'The Mage of Silence,' and if the Shin'a'in had recorded his true name in their knotted tapestries, they had never bothered to tell anyone in the Tayledras Clans.
Fatherforgets that the real duty of the Hawkbrothers is to heal the land of the scars caused by that war of magics, even as the Goddess has healed the Plains.
He often felt more kinship with his Shin'a'in 'cousins' these days than he did with his real kin. The Lady gave them the more dangerous task, truth to tell, he admitted grudgingly. He looked back again, but this time he shuddered. The Hawkbrothers cleansed-but the Shin'a'in guarded.
And what they guardedsomewhere out there, buried beneath grass and soil, are the weapons that caused all this. And not all of them require an Adept to use them.
Only the Shin'a'in stood guardian between those hidden weapons and the rest of the world.
I don't envy them that duty.
'Men,' Vree sounded the alert, and followed it with a vocal alarm-call.
Darkwind froze against the tree trunk for a moment, and touched Vree's mind long enough to see through the bondbird's eyes.
He clutched the trunk, fingernails digging into the bark. Direct contact with the forestgyre's mind was always disorienting. His perspective was skewed-first at seeing the strangers from above, as they peered up through the branches in automatic response to Vree's scream, the faces curiously flat and alien. Then came the dizzying spiral of Vree's flight that made the faces below seem to spin. As always, the strangeness was what kept him aware that it was the forestgyre's eyes he was using and not his own-the heightened sharpness of everything red, and the colors Vree saw that human eyes could not.
He was a passive traveler in Vree's mind, not an active controller. It was a measure of the bond and Vree's trust that the forestgyre would let him take control on occasion, but Darkwind took care never to abuse that trust. In general it was better just to observe-as he found yet again.
Vree spotted one of the strangers raising what was probably a weapon. and kited up into the thick branches before Darkwind had registered more than the bare movement of an arm.
Darkwind released his link with Vree, and his hold on the trunk at the same time, running along the flat branch and using his tool as a balance-aid, and leaping to the next tree limb a heartbeat later. In his first days with Vree it had taken him a long time to recover from a linkand some never did, especially the first time. Caught up in the intoxication of the flight and the kill, they never detached themselves. And unless someone else discovered them, they could be lost forever that way-their bodies lying in a kind of coma, while their minds slowly merged with that of the bird, diminishing as they merged, until there was nothing left of what they were.
