' Oh,' Treyvan replied, a definite twinkle in his eyes, 'I won't.' Darkwind gritted his teeth; Treyvan was trying to annoy him, and there was no point in letting the gryphon know he was succeeding. That would only encourage him.
And after all, Treyvan had put up with plenty of harassment from Darkwind's bondbird, Vree. The forestgyre had a fascination for Treyvan's crest-feathers, and attempted to snatch them any time he had the chance, no matter how often or forcefully Darkwind warned him off.
Sometimes, much to Treyvan's discomfort, he succeeded in getting a claw on them, too. Once when Treyvan was in molt, he'd even managed to steal one.
I suppose I can put up with a little teasing. Unlike Vree, Treyvan is at least not snatching at body parts in his joking.
But he would rather that Treyvan had chosen another subject for the teasing besides his feelings toward Elspeth...Hydona hissed and clacked her beak to get Elspeth's attention; Darkwind ignored her, for he had learned that Treyvan would use any moment of distraction to send lances of carefully tempered power at the Hawkbrother's shields. And Treyvan was watching him very carefully without seeming to; the advantage of the placement of the eyes on gryphon heads. They had excellent peripheral vision; a full three-quarters of a circle, and sharper than Darkwind could believe.
Despite Treyvan's comment about asking his mate, Darkwind had not expected that both gryphons would show up to tutor them. But when he and Elspeth traveled across the pass-through to the Practice Ground, four wings, not two, lifted to greet them.
'Hydona hass more patience than I,' Treyvan had said jovially. 'And ssshe hasss taught morrre than I. Ssshe thought ssshe might be a better teacherr for Elssspeth.' His eyes glinted. 'That leavesss me morre time to tutorr you.' Hydona trilled. 'Tutorr orr torturrre?'
'What about the young ones?' Darkwind had asked, worriedly, trying to ignore Hydona's remark. 'The Heartstone still isn't safe for little ones to be near, even with all the shielding we've put on it.'
'They are at the lair,' Treyvan had replied. 'The evening of the celebrrration had an unexpected outcome. The kyree, Torrl, hasss decided to ssstay with usss to aid yourr folk in ssscouting, and hisss young cousin, Rris, arrrrived yesssterday to join him. Rris watches the younglingsss.
He ssays he isss glad to do ssso.' Treyvan grinned hugely. 'It ssseemss that we are sssuch thingss of legend that it isss worrth it to him to be the brrrunt of the younglingsss' gamesss to be nearrr usss.' Darkwind could only shake his head. The kyree were large, yes, but by no means the size of a half-grown gryphlet. Lytha and Jerven could bowl him over without even thinking about it; they would certainly give that poor kyree plenty of reasons to regret his offer.
I can just imagine the games they'll get up to. Pounce and Chase, Scream and Leap, no-Can-Send-Rris- Rump-Over- Tail...Unless, of course, Rris was very agile-or very clever. If the former, he could probably dodge the worst of their rough-and-tumble games, and if the latter, he could think of ways to keep them out of mischief without getting flattened.
'I hope this Rris has a great deal of patience, my friend,' was all he had said. 'Your offspring are likely to think he's some kind of living tumble-toy.' Treyvan had only laughed. 'Think on Torrl,' he had replied. 'Young Rrisss isss asss clever asss hisss cousin, and verrry good, I am told, with younglingsss. All will be well.' Then Darkwind had no more time to worry about the well-being of the brave young kyree who had taken on the task of tending jerven and Lytha, for their father launched him straight into a course of practice aimed at bringing him up to full and functional Adept status in the shortest possible period of time. It was aggressive, and Treyvan proved to be a merciless teacher.
Interestingly enough, he proceeded very differently from the way that Darkwind had initially been taught. In his years of learning before, he had mastered the basics of manipulating energies and shielding, then learned the offensive magics, then the defensive. But the first thing that Treyvan drilled him in were the Master-level defensive skills.
As now; he was constructing a structure of shields, onionlike in their layering, while Treyvan watched for any sign of weakness in them and attacked at that point. The object was to produce as many different kinds of shields as possible, so that an enemy who might not know every kind of shield a Tayledras could produce would be defeated by one, perhaps the third, fourth, or fifth.
The outermost was not so much shield as misdirection; it bent the mental eye away from the wearer and refracted the distinct magical image of the mage into resembling his surroundings, as if there was no one there. Beneath that was a shield that deflected energy, and beneath that, one that countered it. Yet deeper was one that absorbed energy and transmuted it, passing it to the shield beneath it, which simply resisted, like a wall of stone, and reflected the incoming energy back out through the previous layer. It was the transmutational shield that was giving Darkwind trouble. It would absorb Treyvan's attacks, right enough, but it wasn't transmuting the energy- lances into anything he could use.
'Hold,' Treyvan said, finally, as Hydona lectured Elspeth on the need to establish a shield and a grounding point first, before reaching for node-energy. He had been trying to get that through her head for the past two days; finally, with someone else telling her exactly the same thing, it looked as if she was going to believe that he was right.
No, she's going to believe the information was right, he chided himself. that's what's important, not the source of the information. If hearing it from Hydona is what it takes, then fine, so long as she learns it now and not the hard wayno one in k'sheyna had ever learned that lesson 'the hard way,' not within living memory, but there were tales of a mage of k'vala who had seized a node without first establishing a grounding point, and discovered that the node was rogue. Nodes could go feral, flaring and dying unpredictably, without the stabilizing focus of a Heartstone. The node he seized had done just that; it flared, and with no ground point to hold him and shunt the excess away and no shield to shelter him, he had burned up on the spot, becoming a human torch that burned for days-or so the tales said.
In fact, it had probably happened so fast that the mage had no notion of what had gone wrong. But whether the tales were true or not, it was still a horrible way to die.
Maybe all she needed was for it to be a female that taught her, he thought, watching as her grave eyes darkened and lightened according to her mood. Her weapons' teacher, the Tale'sedrin-kin that she worships so, is a female; and so is her oldest friend. And her Companion is female. Maybe she just responds better to female teachers.
A reasonable thought-thwap!
A mental 'slap across the side of his head' woke him to the fact that he was supposed to be working, not woolgathering. Once again, Treyvan had taken advantage of the fact that his attention had wandered to deliver a
