The only black left to him was a series of back markings among the white feathers, exactly like the black bars sometimes seen on the gyrfalcons of the north.
The White Gryphon regarded the city named for him with decidedly mixed feelings. Skandranon was still more than a little embarrassed about it. After all those years of playing at being the hero, it was somewhat disconcerting to have everyone, from child to ancient, revere him as one! And it was even more disconcerting to find himself the tacit leader of all of the nonhumans of the Kaled’a’in, and deferred to by many of the humans as well!
I thought I wanted to be a leader. Silly me.
Truth to be told, what he’d wanted to be was not a peacetime leader; he’d wanted to be the kind of leader who made split-second decisions and clever, daring plans, not the kind of leader who oversaw disputes between hertasi and kyree, or who approved the placement of the purifying tanks for the city sewage system. . . .
Council meetings bored him to yawning, and why anyone would think that heroism conferred instant expertise in everything baffled him.
He wasn’t very good at administration, but no one seemed to have figured that out yet.
Fortunately, I have good advisors who permit me to pirate their words and advice shamelessly. And I know when to keep my beak shut and look wise.
Somehow both the refugees and the city a-building had survived his leadership and his decisions. Most people had real homes now, homes built from the limestone that partly accounted for the city’s pale gleam under the full light of the sun. All of the terraces were cut and walled in with more of that limestone, and all of the streets paved with crushed oyster shells, which further caught and reflected the light. There was room for expansion for the next five or six generations—
And by the time there is no more space left on the terraces, it will be someone else’s problem, anyway.
Sculpting the terraces and putting in water and other services had been the work of a single six-month period during which magic did work the way it was supposed to. It had been just as easy at that point to cut all of the terraces that the cliff could hold, and to build the water and sewage system to allow for that maximum population. Water came from a spring in the cliff, and streams that had once cascaded into the sea in silver-ribbon waterfalls, carried down through holes cut into the living rock to emerge in several places in the city. It would not be impossible to cut off the water supply—Skan was not willing to say that anything was impossible anymore, given what he himself had survived—but it would be very, very difficult and would require reliably-working magic. It would also not be impossible to invade the city—but every path, either leading down from the verdant lands above, or up from the bay, had been edged, walled, or built so that a single creature with a bow could hold off an army. The lessons learned from Ma’ar’s conquests might have been bitter, but they were valuable now.
Skan raised his head and tested the air coming up from below. Saltwater, kelp, and fish. New fish, not old fish. The fleet must be coming in. It had taken him time to learn to recognize those scents; time for his senses to get accustomed to the ever-present tang of saltwater in the air. No gryphon had ever seen the Western Sea before; his scouts hadn’t even known what it was when they first encountered it.
Huh. “My” scouts. He shook his head. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for—but I should have seen it coming. Amberdrake certainly tried to warn me, and so did Gesten and Winterhart. But did I listen? Oh, no. And now, here I am, with a city named after me and a thousand stupid little decisions to make, all my time eaten up by “solving” problems I don’t care about for people who could certainly solve those problems themselves if they tried. Now he knew what Amberdrake meant, when the kestra’chern said that “my time is not my own.”
And I don’t like it, damn it all. I should be practicing flying, or practicing making more gryphlets with Zhaneel. . . .
Instead, he was going to have to return for another blasted Council session. They could do this without me. They don’t need me. There is nothing I can contribute except my presence.
But his presence seemed to make everyone else feel better. Was that all that being a leader was about?
:Papa Skan,: said a sweet, childlike voice in his head, right on cue. :Mama says it is time for the meeting, and will you please come?: Even without a mage-made teleson set to amplify her thoughts, Kechara’s mind-voice was as clear as if she had spoken the words to him directly. It was another of the endless ironies of the current situation that the little “misborn” gryfalcon had become one of the most valuable members of the White Gryphon community. With magic—and thus, magical devices—gone unreliable, Kechara could and did communicate over huge distances with all the clarity and strength of teleson-enhanced Mindspeech. She was the communication coordinator for all of the leaders—and, more importantly, for all the Silver Gryphons. The Silvers were a resourceful policing organization formed of the remnants of the lighters and soldiers who had made it through the two Kaled’a’in Gates, rather than through the Gates they’d been assigned.
Kechara’s ability, combined with her eternal child-mind, would have caused her nothing but trouble in the old days, which was why Urtho had hidden her away in his Tower. But now—now she was the answer to a profound need. No one ever questioned the care lavished on her, or the way her special needs were always answered, no matter what else had to be sacrificed. She, in turn, had blossomed under the affection; her sweet temper never broke, and if she didn’t understand more than a tenth of what she was asked to relay, it never seemed to bother
