myself, I never could; when someone is hurt or sick, I have to help them no matter what. She had the feeling that he would have understood her, though, or else why would he have stayed and stayed during all the years when he was disregarded?
He had that feeling, too, he must have. Oh, how I wish he were here now, to teach me all the things I don’t know!
Three
Hooves made very little sound on leaf-littered forest floor, which was a welcome change to everyone from the steady clicking of dyheli hooves on roads packed rock-hard from generations of use. And after four years of so-called “normal” forests and entirely domesticated Valdemaran fields, Darian Firkin was glad to see a forest that looked normal to him.
It’s so good to be on home territory again! Trees so tall you can’t see the tops from the ground, with trunks so big it takes three men to circle them. This is more like it! He didn’t crane his neck and gawk upward the way a “foreigner” would, but all the same he was very aware of how high the trees above him reached, simply by virtue of the fact that he had to look up before he saw any branches springing from the huge trunks standing all around him. Darian had grown up on the edge of the Pelagirs, and what the Valdemarans seemed to think of as proper-sized trees looked like saplings to him. Most of his life had been spent in the forests with his trapper parents, rather than in his home village of Errold’s Grove, and he felt as comfortable among trees as did his adopted Hawkbrother-kin.
Oh, it’s very, very good to be home. Now I don‘t feel as if the sky is going to swallow me up. Despite the pleasure he took in his surroundings, he remained alert. The rest of the team rode ahead of Darian; he usually rode tail-guard, and took his responsibility seriously.
They were all on their way home now - not to Errold’s Grove, at least not immediately, but to k’Vala Vale. This little group of Tayledras - one of many, be it added - had taken on the task of spending four years away from their Vale for the purpose of cleansing some of the northernmost Valdemaran territories of pockets of “trouble” left over from the mage-storms that had swept the entire world a few years ago. Darian had personal experience of the Storms and of their results, most of which were anything but beneficial, and he could see why the Valdemarans needed help with it. “Trouble” could take many forms: bizarre creatures warped and twisted from ordinary animals; dangerous animals “imported” from some other far lands within the area of Change-Circles; even pools of magical energy with the potential to affect anything that fell into it. And while they were at it, they were establishing new ley-lines and nodes, or reestablishing old ones, so that magical energies, just like rainwater, could again flow into and through convenient channels.
He smiled to himself, shrugging the quiver on his back into a more comfortable position; it tended to ride down a little. Not that they wouldn‘t establish their own, eventually, but I rather fear my adoptive kin have a passion for neatness in magic. It was no accident that the ley-lines and nodes established in or near Tayledras territory all fed into Tayledras Heartstones, for instance, instead of messily running this way and that without any consideration for the convenience of the would-be users.
For, as all mages knew to their sorrow, the mage-storms had disrupted everything, spreading magic, much like a fall of freezing rain, evenly across the face of the world. For the most part, magic collected in nodes or stored in objects had been dispersed as effectively as all the rest - some few reservoirs had been shielded and saved (most notably, the Heartstones of the Tayledras Vales), but when the Storms were over, those reservoirs no longer had sources to replenish them. By reestablishing the ley-lines, mages of the level of Master and above would eventually have reliable and powerful sources of energy to tap into.
“Eventually” though - that was the key. It would take time for enough magical energy to trickle into those channels and collect again. For now, as Darian’s very first teacher had told him, the powerful magics that Adepts and even Masters had been able to perform were things of the past - there just wasn’t enough readily available, amassed energy available to perform them. He had heard it spoken of as “fog” by Starfall - sure, there might be enough water in a barn-sized mass of fog, but it did you no good if you wanted a drink of water.
Well - that’s almost true. If three or four mages got together and pooled their personal power, you could do one fairly impressive piece of work. But you couldn‘t hold it for long, and the mages would be useless for a week after. Or worse, they‘d be dead, which is certainly a scandalously wasteful use of mages and one which the mages would probably object to. The faint sound of a twig snapping behind them made him swivel to peer back along their trail, only to see a deer in the far distance stare back at him, then bound away out of sight.
By Adept Starfall’s way of thinking, even leaving mages exhausted and drained was just a little too expensive a price for a temporary achievement. Darian tended to agree, at least in principle, though he could think of a few occasions when it might be worth it. On the whole, he preferred Starfall’s precept that it was better and more effective to use small magics cleverly than big ones clumsily.
:Kuari?: he Mindcalled to his bondbird :Anything back there but deer?:
:Fox. Tree-hare. Was squirrel. Tasty, too.: Kuari’s mind-voice was overlaid with sated pleasure, but it wasn’t as intense as it would have been if he’d stuffed himself.
:Do me a favor and circle a bit, then come back to the line.: Something had caused that deer to come out of cover - it might have been the animal’s own curiosity, but if it wasn’t, Darian wanted to know the cause.
Kuari gave willing assent, and Darian’s thoughts returned to their original track.
