Elivan,' she replied, shortly.
Elivan? Who-Then the dyheli that Wintermoon was riding turned its head on its long, graceful neck and gave him a look and a nod.
The dyheli? She was Mindspeaking the dyheli? Frustrated, he tried to make sense out of the far-off murmuring, unable to make out a single 'word.' Even more frustrating, he caught Wintermoon in a kind of 'listening' attitude, and heard a third 'voice' join the other two in what sounded like a brief remark.
Whatever they were saying, Wintermoon seemed vastly amused; Skif got a look at his expression as he ducked to avoid a low-hanging vine, and he looked like someone who has just been let in on a private joke.
Skif felt a surge of resentment at being left out. Just how much mindmagic did the Hawkbrother have? Why couldn't he hear the dyheli, if Wintermoon and Cymry could? And was it only Wintermoon who had that particular Gift, or did all the Tayledras share it?
They'd been free enough with information about real magic; why keep this a secret?
Except that they weren't exactly keeping it a secret-not from Skif, anyway.
Unless they couldn't block what they were doing. But in that case, why did Cymry tell him matter-of-factly that she was talking to the stag?
The murmur of far-off voices stopped; finally Wintermoon signaled a halt at the edge of a tiny, crystalline stream. The Tayledras dismounted, and the two dyheli moved up side-by-side to dip their slender muzzles into the water. Another sign of the stags' intelligence-the pack-laden stag was not being led, and Wintermoon made no move to limit their drinking.
'I could use a drink too, dear,' Cymry prompted him. Skif slid out of his saddle to let Cymry join them. Wintermoon strolled over, stretching to relieve the inevitable stiffness of riding any distance at all.
'We are at the edge of the territory k'sheyna still patrols,' he said.
'After this point, the hazards begin. It may be dangerous to break silence; if I note anything, I shall warn your lady mind-to-mind.'
'Why not warn me?' Skif asked, doing his best not to sound sullen, but afraid that some of his resentment showed through anyway.
Wintermoon only looked mildly surprised. 'Because I cannot,' he replied. 'The mind-to-mind speech of the scouts is only between scouts and those who are not human.' His brow furrowed as he thought for a moment. 'Perhaps you caught the edge of my conversation with Elivan.
I apologize if this seemed rude to you, but your Cymry told me that you did not share the Gift of Mindspeech with one other than her-or perhaps another Herald. I thought, then, that you did not hear us.' He shrugged, apologetically. 'I am sorry if you thought we had left you out a-purpose. Many Tayledras have this Gift, but I am one of the strongest speakers, as was Dawnfire. Sometimes it only extends to bondbirds. I am fortunate that I share my brother's ability to speak with other creatures as well, although I do not share his gift of speaking with other humans.' Skif flushed. That was one possibility that simply hadn't occurred to him-that Wintermoon might not know that he was aware of the conversation without knowing what was being said. Well, now I feel like a real idiot...'Is that what makes the nonmages scouts, and not something else?' he asked, trying to cover his misstep.
Wintermoon shook his head, and smiled. 'All Tayledras have mindtomind speech, usually only with their bondbirds,' he replied. 'It is a part of us; one of the many things that the Goddess granted to us to help us survive here. but although those who can speak with other creatures make the best scouts, if they are also mage-born, then mage-craft is oft the course of their life.' Skif looked beyond him for a moment, across the stream. It didn't seem any wilder or more threatening there than it did on this side. Frost had laced the trees on both sides of the stream, perhaps because they were more sensitive to it; the leaves were a yellow-brown, and some had already fallen, carpeting the ground and occasionally drifting off on the current of the brook. jays called somewhere out there-or at least, something with the same raucous scream as a scarlet jay. A hint of movement on the other side of the water caught his eye, and he turned his head slightly just in time to catch the tail of a squirrel whisking over to the opposite side of the trunk-presumably, with a squirrel attached to it, although if what he'd been told was true, that didn't necessarily follow.
'Just what's so bad out there?' he asked, curiosity overcoming pride. 'It doesn't look any different to me, but I wouldn't know what to look for.'
'There-not much,' Wintermoon replied, scanning the trees and the ground beneath them with eyes that missed nothing. 'Farther out-I've heard there are wyrsa, though at this season they do not run in packs.
Bears, of course, and Changebears. Treelions and Changelions, wild boars and Changeboars. Perhaps bukto, and-'
'Wait a moment,' Skif interrupted. Those names-that was something he'd been wanting to ask about, and hadn't had an opening.
'Changebears, Changelions, Changeboars-what are you talking about?
Darkwind called Nyara a'Changechild,' does this have anything to do with her?'
'Yes and no,' Wintermoon replied maddeningly. Skif stifled his impatience as Wintermoon paused, as if searching for the proper words.
'Do you not recall what you were shown by Iceshadow? How magic, uncontrolled and twisted, warped all that it touched here?'
' Yes, but wasn't that a long time ago?' he said, thinking back to those images, strange and only half understood. The part where that bright light had appeared to the Hawkbrothers-he'd understood what the Goddess had asked of them, but he hadn't seen more than that light.
Elspeth and the Shin'a'in had plainly experienced more than that.
'Not long enough,' the scout replied, looking soberly out at the innocent-looking land beyond the stream. 'There was a time when magic in all its 'colors' and 'sounds' worked together. The time we call the Mage Wars shattered that order. The structure of magic-and its energieswere stressed to their limits. In the great disaster that ended the Final War, those bonds were broken. Their crystalline patterns, like branches of light to a mage, became as distorted as pine needles dropped to the ground. And every place they touched, on a scale vaster than we can see, they made the land dangerous, and caused creatures that should never have lived to appear.' Skif shook his
