stand by for trouble, I will recruit whatever dyheli I can find to stand guard, and I have no doubt there will be plenty of volunteers, since she helped save one of their herds-I will ask Dawnfire to look for help among the tervardi, and I will see if the gryphons are willing to work some of their protective magics.' He managed not to grin at Starblade's expression. For once, he'd managed to outmaneuver his father.
But there was no feeling of triumph as he left the meeting; the fight had been too hard for that. Instead, he was weary and emotionally bruised.
Like someone's been beating me with wild plum branches.
He climbed down out of the ekele before anyone else. It would have been a courtesy to wait for the eldest to descend first, but he wasn't feeling particularly courteous right now-and he really didn't want to chance his father ambushing him for a little more emotional abuse. It was dark enough around here that he should be able to escape, provided he did the unexpected. And he was getting rather good at doing that... So he hurried off into the cover of the thick undergrowth, taking exactly the wrong path-one leading to the waterfall at the head of the Vale, instead of the exit. It passed the Heartstone, though not near enough to see the damaged pillar of stone, its cracked and crazed exterior only hinting at the damage echoed across the five planes, and visible to anyone with even a hint of Mage-Sight.
He felt it, though, as he passed; an ache like a bruised bone, a sense of impending illness, a disharmony. If he'd had any doubts about it Healing itself earlier, they were dispelled now. It hadn't Healed itself, it had only gotten worse. Now it left a kind of bitter, lingering aftertaste in the back of his mind; if it had been a berry he'd tasted, he would have labeled it 'poisonous' without hesitation.
So he did something he had never thought he would do in his lifetime.
He shielded himself against it.
The air immediately seemed cleaner, and the sour sense of sickness left him. There was only the hint of incense-like smoke from the memorial brazier at its foot, the flame that commemorated the lives lost when the Heartstone fractured. Now all he had to contend with was the bad taste the meeting had left in his mouth.
He started to look for a way to double back to the path he wanted to take, when he remembered that there was another hot spring at the foot of the waterfall. It wasn't a big waterfall, but it was a very aumtive one; it had been sculpted by Iceshadow himself, back when the Vale had first been constructed, and the cool water of a tiny stream fell into a series of shallow rock basins to end in the hot pool of the spring below. Each of the basins had been tuned, although Darkwind had no idea how something like that was done.
The music of the falls was incredibly soothing just what I need right now.
That decided him; instead of retracing his steps, he took the path all the way to the end. And as if to confirm that he had made the right decision, as he entered the clearing containing the pool, the moon rose above the tree level, touching the waterfall, and turning it into a shower of flowing silver and diamond droplets. If you didn't know better, you'd swear there was nothing wrong here in the Vale, it's that peaceful.
And no one, absolutely no one, was there.
Of course, that might have been because this particular pool had once been a popular trysting spot, and there was not a great deal of romance going on in the Vale anymore. Most of the young Tayledras were scouts, and they seldom came this far in now. As for the rest-Darkwind suspected the mages were suffering, perhaps without realizing it, from the same, sickened feeling the Heartstone induced in him. That was not the sort of sensation likely to make anyone think of love-making...He wondered how many of them had thought to cut themselves off from the Stone. Not many, he decided, shedding his clothes and leaving them in a heap beside the pool. It's their power, their lifeblood. They'd rather feel ill than lose their connection to it. They wouldn't be able to draw on it if they shielded themselves against it.
Idiots.
Then he left all thought of them behind, as he plunged in a long, flat dive into the hot water of the pool.
He came to the surface, and floated on his back, letting it soothe the aches in his muscles as it forced him into a state of relaxation. Only then did he realize how tightly he had been holding himself, and how many of those aches were due to tension.
He drifted for a while, losing himself deliberately in the sound of the falling water, the changing patterns of the sparkling droplets, the silence.
'Turning merman?' said a shadow at the entrance.
He swam lazily to the edge, rested his arms on the sculpted rim, and looked up into Dawnfire's amused eyes. She looked down on him, a faint smile playing on her lips, her hair loose, her boots in her hand.
'Not that I'm aware of,' he said lightly. 'Unless you saw something I didn't know about.'
'Probably not.' She knelt down beside him, put her boots down beside her, then unexpectedly seized his head in both her hands, leaned down to water-level, and presented him with the most enthusiastic-and expert-kiss he'd ever had from her. His mouth opened under her questing tongue, and he clutched the rim with both hands, convulsively.
