Shadowstar beat him to it. 'Songlight and Winddance. Gone to get injuries tended again; they ran into Changewolves. Nothing serious.' A tentative Mindtouch from an unfamiliar source reassured him.
'Songlight here. We are mostly soaking bruises, Darkwind. I will stay in Mindtouch and relay to the others, if you like.'
'Please,' he replied, taking a seat where he could see the others. 'this shouldn't take long.' He took out his dagger and rapped the hilt of it on the side of the tree; it rang hollowly, and got him instant attention and instant silence.
'I hope that most of you have guessed why I asked for these meetings-' he began.
Shadowstar stood up, interrupting him. 'We pretty much figured it out,' she said dryly, as the others nodded. 'We were talking it all over before you got here. And we're all agreed that while we don't want to lose you as our leader, you deserve a rest, and you aren't going to get one at the rate you're going.' Nods all around confirmed her words, and Darkwind felt an irrational surge of relief-both that the scouts still wanted him as leader, and that they were willing to let him go.
'Have any of you got a candidate in mind?' he asked. Surprisingly, it was one of the mages who answered him.
'Winterlight,' the young man said promptly. 'He did it before you had the position, and now that we aren't at each others' throats, he says he would be willing to take it again.' Darkwind turned to his old friend, one of the oldest scouts in the Clan, raising an eyebrow inquisitively. Winterlight coughed and halfsmiled.' I know the job,' he answered, confirming the mage's words.
'And since it's no longer the trial that it was-' Darkwind grinned openly. 'Then as far as I am concerned, the position is yours, my friend-if the rest agree, that is.' He was going to open the meeting up to discussions, but the others forestalled him with their unanimous assent. Even the bondbirds seemed pleased with the choice. It was a good one; although he was not a mage, Winterlight seldom dyed his hair, and wore it long, as a mage did. So he looked like a mage, and he was a contemporary of Starblade and Iceshadow, which made him doubly acceptable to the Elders of the Council.
'As long as the night-watch agrees, then, it's yours,' he told Winterlight happily. 'And if they come up with a different candidate, you'll have to deal with that yourself.'
'If they come up with a different candidate, we'll split the duties,' Winterlight replied immediately. 'I've had my fill of dissension.' Darkwind shrugged. 'That's fine with me,' he responded.
Winterlight smiled. 'It wasn't just a rest that the youngsters decided you need,' he said, in a confidential whisper. 'I overheard one of them saying that you've been living like a sworn celibate and you needed to take that pretty Outlander off to a bower and-' The rest of Winterlight's whispered suggestion made Darkwind flush so hard he was afraid he was glowing.
The rest of the scouts howled with laughter.
Winterlight just smiled enigmatically and asked if Darkwind needed to borrow any feathers. Darkwind deliberately turned his attention first to Vree to make sure the gyre was all right, then to his food, both to cover his confusion. When he looked beside him again, Winterlight was gonebut the Shin'a'in shaman Kethra had taken his place.
Oh, my. I wonder what I owe this pleasure to.
He brushed invisible crumbs from his tunic, self-consciously. Kethra was another source of confusion entirely for him, and not just because she was his father's lover.
Although that was a part of it' Is Father well?' he asked her, quickly.
She nodded, her bright green eyes as cool and unreadable as a falcon's, and smoothed her long black hair in back of her ears. She wore a bird-fetish necklace that sparkled in the magelight, and a braided length of cord adorned with feathers hung from her left temple.
' He is relatively well,' she told him, as the assembled scouts collected their birds as if at an unspoken signal, and drifted not-too-casually off, back to their respective ekeles. There wasn't any people-food left, and the few carcasses that remained were taken by those who lived outside the Vale.
Kethra, however, was not leaving. 'There are some things I need to discuss with you before I proceed to the next steps with him. They concern you, and your relationship to him.'
'What about it?' he asked, more brusquely than he intended. Suddenly it seemed as if everyone in k'sheyna was interested in his private life! Am I to be allowed no thoughts to myself? He glanced around the clearing, hoping for a distraction, but all of the scouts who had thronged the area had evaporated like snow in the summer sun, as if there was some kind of conspiracy between them and the Shin'a'in. She only pursed her lips and shook her head at him, allowing him no evasions.
'I need to know what you think of him now-and what you think of me.' She fixed him with an unflinching gaze. 'You know I am Starblade's lover.' He flushed, painfully embarrassed. 'Yes,' he said shortly. 'And Iceshadow told me why-why it was necessary.'
'What did he tell you?' she asked. 'Humor me.' He averted his eyes for a moment, but she recaptured them. 'Because so many of the things that were done to Father, and the magics that were cast to control him, were linked with sex, it has required sexually oriented Healing to undo them. That meant Father's Healer should be a lover as well.' Kethra nodded, and leaned back, her slender hands clasped around one knee. 'That is quite true,' she said quietly, 'And in case you had wondered, I knew that was the case when I came here at Kra'heera's request. But had you also deciphered that I am your father's love as well as his lover, and he has become mine as well?' Darkwind tried to look away in confusion, and found that he could not. 'I-it had occurred to me,' he admitted. 'I am not blind, and your attitude toward one another shows.' She set her jaw with the perpetual half-smile that shaman always seemed to have. 'And what do you think of that?' she asked bluntly, a question he had not expected. 'What do you think of me, when you picture me in that role?' Gods of my fathers. She would ask that. 'I am confused,' he said, as honestly as he could. 'I do not know what to think. I admire you for yourself, shaman. You are a very strong, talented, and clever woman.
You force my father to be strong again, as well. I think that he must need this, or you would not do it. I see you encourage him to go to his limits; you permit him to do for himself what he can. Yet you do not let him fall when you can steady him, and you match your talents with his when he cannot do something alone.'
'You are describing a partner,' Kethra said calmly. 'An equal.
Someone who is likely to go on being one for the foreseeable future.' He nodded, reluctantly, aware that his
