Owlsight

“I wondered why Father, and you - ” Val shook his head and looked mortified. “I came very close to making a serious mistake. I have to apologize to you.”

“Thought I was a coward?” To Val’s obvious surprise, Darian grinned. “I’m not offended! I used to think the same things that you did about fighting. Honor, glory, adventure, fame, all that stuff. Probably everybody does, until he does it himself. Maybe a mercenary’s children know better, and probably anyone who’s had a fight go over his land does, but unless you’ve seen it for yourself, how can you know?” His grin turned cynical. “Well, think about it, how could they get us bone-headed youngsters go out to get bits hacked off if they didn’t make it sound glorious?”

Val managed a sickly sort of smile himself. “You’ve got a point.” He blinked, as if something had just occurred to him. “Now that I think about it, battles almost never happen in empty land, do they?”

“Not unless somebody manages to force it that way, no,” Darian replied. The fellow was thinking, all right! “Obviously, we’re going to try to choose the ground ourselves, but we may not get to make that choice.”

“So Father isn’t going to want something like that rampaging through the village, or over the crops, ruining them - ”

Darian decided on a final ghoulish touch. “Imagine trying to eat crops that came up the next year in a field where people died! Crops fed on blood!”

Val shuddered. “I’d - rather not.”

“So we bluff them, or negotiate with them, or - well, Firesong, Snowfire, and your father have a lot of ideas, I expect. They’ve all fought before, and they’ve got all the reasons in the world to make peace first, if it can be done without making a bad bargain.” It was Darian’s turn to look pensively out over the lake. “Believe me, if it were up to me - These people, or ones like them, killed Justyn right in front of me. They hurt a lot of people I knew, and killed a couple. They tried to kill me, twice, and they nearly managed it. I’m the last person to want them to get off easy, but - ” He shook his head and looked back at Val. “If we force them to fight, things will almost certainly be bad, and more people I know will be dead or hurt. I don’t want revenge half badly enough for that.”

You know, I think Justyn would be very happy to hear me say that.

Val nodded, very slowly, and Darian decided to change the subject so that they could part on a good note. “So, tell me about this girl you’re marrying! When does she get here? What is she like? How did you meet her?”

Since Belinda was obviously a subject Val could wax eloquent on for hours, this was the best thing he could have done. Until Lord Breon came to fetch his son for the trip home, Darian heard so much about Belinda that he suspected he could write a book - or at least several pages - about her many virtues. Val was completely smitten.

When Breon did come to get Val, though, the handclasp Darian got from the younger man, coupled with the thoughtful look and the nod they shared, let him know that Val had not forgotten the earlier subject. As Breon and his son rode off on the trail back to Kelmskeep, Darian felt quite proud of himself.

Firesong came up beside him at that point. “You look like a cat that’s gotten into the cream,” he said. “What have you been up to?”

“Convincing Val that fighting in battle isn’t the way the Bards sing about it.” He glanced sideways at Firesong to see how the mage would react.

Firesong laughed aloud, crossing his arms over his chest. “Good for you! I knew you had more sense than he did about that particular subject, but I didn’t know you’d take it on yourself to talk to him.”

“Somebody had to. I’d as soon not see his bride become a widow, you know?” He turned to Firesong, and grinned. “I’d have felt responsible.”

“Good,” Firesong nodded. “You are responsible. It’s when we stop feeling responsible for each other, for the people we know we can affect, that we become the barbarians.”

Firesong waited, and Darian sensed that there was another Talk with his Teacher in the offing. On the whole, he didn’t mind those, except when Firesong seemed to expect an unreasonable level of magical expertise from him, given how short a time he’d been studying with good teachers. One of those had been just yesterday, in fact. Firesong had shouted impatiently at him, and he had left the lesson abruptly rather than lose his temper.

Firesong cleared his throat, and Darian put on an attentive look. If there was any chance his teacher would actually apologize, he wanted to encourage it.

“Silverfox gave me a bit of a lecture this morning, before the meeting,” Firesong finally said, actually sounding sheepish. “When you do something that is exceptionally mature, like taking on young Val and disabusing him of the notion that battle equals painless glory, I start thinking of you, not as a student, but as a potential peer. I get both of us in trouble when I do that, because then I expect a similar level of skill in mage-craft. I expect that’s what happened last night.”