Owlsight

“The hertasi of k’Valdemar Vale welcome you to your new home, friends and brothers,” he said ceremoniously. “May there always be as much pleasure here as you bring with you.”

Starfall smiled, and bowed in return. “Your welcome doubles our pleasure, my brother,” he replied. “It is good to be home.”

Starfall dismounted, which seemed to be the signal for everyone else to do the same. “Allow me to guide you to your new ekele,” Ayshen said, and without waiting for a reply, led the way up the path that looked increasingly familiar with every step. It wasn’t one of the paths in k’Vala - but it also wasn’t the path that Darian remembered.

Someone had been hard at work on the plantings, someone like Steelmind, who could coax plants into amazing growth spurts in a very short period of time. Although by no means as lush as k’Vala, there were the vine screens, plantings of exotics, and tree sculptures that Darian had come to think of as “proper.” The path twisted and turned, crossing over the little stream he remembered, with rustic bridges and artistically placed stepping stones providing dry-footed crossings. From time to time, Ayshen stopped, and pointed out a dwelling of one sort or another - most of them proper tree-built ekele, though the trees never supported more than one, and access was by means of a rope ladder more often than a staircase. When he stopped, those who found the place attractive would pause long enough for a discussion of who was the most taken with the situation. The discussions never lasted too long; one person (or two, if it was a couple) would remain, the dyheli with the appropriate baggage would remain, and everyone else would go on. Starfall quickly took possession of an ekele built in the tree where his old camping place had been, and no one disputed him. Then Ayshen stopped in front of what appeared to be a vine-covered mound.

“This was your original camping place, Snowfire,” he said. “And I wondered if either you and Nightwind or Darian would have a preference for it.”

“Have you made an ekele in the cliff where Nightwind and Kel originally camped?” Snowfire asked.

Ayshen nodded. “Actually,” he said with evident pride, “I designed that one, and it’s built both on the cliff and in the cliff - rather like an ekele without a tree, with a balcony outside. But I thought I’d offer you this first.”

Snowfire laughed. “You needn’t have bothered; it sounds like a White Gryphon home, and I already know what Nightwind will want. How about you, Darian? Do you want this site?”

Although he wondered a little just what was underneath that mound of leaves - which certainly seemed bigger than the primitive hut that he remembered - Darian knew one thing for certain. This place was on the ground, and there were going to be storms in this Vale for some years yet. It would take a long time to power up the new Heartstone to the equivalent of the k’Vala Stone. And until k’Valdemar - whose idea had that name been? - was sealed against the weather and the seasons, he did not want to live in a tree that would sway in a storm!

“I’ll take this,” he said instantly. “If no one else likes it better than I do.”

Snowfire laughed again, as did several others. “Little brother, I doubt that anyone here but a kyree or a hertasi would care for a dwelling on the ground the way you do,” Ayshen said genially. The dyheli carrying Darian’s baggage separated from the rest, and the group went on, leaving Darian in solitary possession of his new home.

The first thing he did was to take the baggage off the patient dyheli so that they could go off to graze or rest. As they paced off with the click of carefully-placed hooves, he turned his attention to the ekele.

It took him a moment to find the door, and it was a door, now, a good, solid, wooden door with a handle, not a mere screen of vines. When he opened it, he stared in open-mouthed disbelief at what lay behind it.

This place could not be more unlike the hut that had once stood here. Beneath the vines were solid walls, as thick as his forearm was long, at least. Outside, they were the same color as the vines; inside they had been whitewashed. The floor had been covered in flat paving stones, cunningly fitted together so that a sheet of paper could not fit between them, and sealed with grout. There was a stone fireplace in one wall, real windows with glass in them in the others. The windows were fairly well covered by the leaves and didn’t let in much light, but there were skylights in the remarkably thick roof that took care of that deficiency. Like most Tayledras dwellings, there wasn’t a straight line to be seen, for all the walls and even the doors and window frames curved. Instead of furniture, there were window seats, low tables, thick rugs of fur and fleece, and cushions everywhere.

A door in the same wall that held the fireplace led to a second room, but Darian waited to bring his baggage inside before he explored further. When he did, he discovered that the fireplace was shared with this room, which was a sleeping chamber, quite windowless and without a skylight, with a bed built into the wall and chests woven of willow branches for clothing. There was yet another door leading out of this room, and his curiosity took him onward.

Much to his delight, it was a bathing chamber, as he had found in the guest houses in k’Vala, with a pipe leading into a spacious tub, another into a washbasin, and a water-flushing “necessary” that would be far more comfortable to use than a privy! One of the first things he had learned from Snowfire was how to use magic to heat his bath water, so even the cold water coming from the stream in midwinter would be no problem. Light came from another skylight, and someone in a fit of whimsy had built containers to hold plants all around the edge of the skylight and planted flowering vines in them. Now as long as he could remember to water them, he’d have a touch of k’Vala here all year long!