'Until tomorrow, then,' he said, smoothing Vree's feathers with one hand. 'Sleep well, and pass my affections on to Lytha and jerven.'
'Mine, too,' Elspeth piped up, to Darkwind's surprise.
'Tomorrrrow,' Treyvan agreed. The two gryphons moved off down a side path that would take them to the entrance of the Vale; they couldn't possibly take off from within it, for the interlacing branches of the great trees would make it too difficult for them to fly without damage to themselves or the trees.
Elspeth looked after them for a moment, then made a little shrug and turned back to Darkwind. From her expression, there was a lot going on behind her eyes.
'Is there something bothering you?' he asked, thinking she might have questions about the lesson just past.
But her observations had nothing to do with magic. 'They are certainly very good at avoiding questions they don't care to answer,' she pointed out dryly. 'This isn't the first time I've tried to pin them down about where they come from and what they are, and their answers have always been pretty evasive.'
'You can trust them,' he felt moved to protest.
'oh, I have no doubt of that; after all, Need trusted them, and she's about the most suspicious thing in the universe. But they seem to have as many secrets as a Companion!' This, with a glance at Gwena, who shook her head and mane and snorted. 'I had the feeling that they hadn't told the Tayledras much more than they've told me.' He nodded slowly. She was absolutely right about that, anyway. He hadn't quite realized how little he knew about them, really. The fact that they had been his friends for so long had obscured the fact that what he knew about them was only what they had chosen to reveal.
There had been any number of surprises from them, lately. The fact that they were fluent in the ancient Kaled'a'in tongue, for instance, and just how much of a mage Treyvan really was. That they spoke of Urtho as if they knew the lost history of the Mage Wars in much greater detail than any Tayledras did.
As if that history hadn't been lost to their people, whoever and wherever those people were.
Interesting. Very interesting. But it was so frustrating! They didn't even work at being mysterious, the way Elspeth's friend Skif did. They just were.
It gave him enough food for thought that he remained silent all the way back to Elspeth's ekele, and from the expression on her face, she found plenty of room for speculation there herself.
*Chapter Eleven
Skif packed the new supplies he had gotten from the hertasi carefully; Cymry needed to be able to move with the same agility she had without packs once they got back on the trail. Lumpy and unbalanced packs would not make either of them very happy.
'You look like a Hawkbrother,' Elspeth observed from the rock beside him; like everything in the Vale, it had been made to look natural, while being placed in the perfect position to be used as a seat, and had been carefully sculpted to serve that very purpose. She sat cross-legged with a patch of sun just touching her hair. There were already a few white threads in it; he wondered how long it would be before she was completely silver. Wintermoon had confided that Elspeth was handling more of the powerful energies of node-magic in her first few months than most Tayledras Adepts touched in a year or more. And she spent a great deal of time in the unshielded presence of the Heartstone. While Wintermoon was quite certain that none of this would harm her, he did warn Skif that her training and the discipline needed to handle such Powers might cause some changes in his friend, and not just physical Ones.
Indeed, there were some changes since he had left the Vale. Elspeth seemed a little calmer, and considerably more in control of her temper.
She no longer reminded him of Kero, or her mother... she was only~ purely, Elspeth. His very dear friend-but no more. He could not imagine anyone having a romantic attachment to this cool, contemplative person; it would be like having a fixation on a statue.
He glanced up at her and smiled. 'So do you,' he said. 'It suits you.
She really did look like a Hawkbrother; she was growing her hair longer, and although it wasn't yet the stark white of a mage, or the mottled camouflage colors of a scout, she had somehow learned the Tayledras tricks of braiding it so that it stayed out of the way without looking severe. And the tunic and trews she wore-flowing silk in deep burgundy, cut so that the tunic fastened up the side with little antler-tips-well, it suited her much better than anything she'd ever worn at home.
'What happened to your Whites?' he asked.
She laughed. 'They disappeared, and I have the feeling I won't see them again until we're ready to leave. I have the feeling that the hertasi disapprove of uniforms on principle. Whenever I ask about them, the hertasi give me this look, and say 'they're being cleaned.' It's been weeks now, and they're still being cleaned.'
'Mine are probably with yours,' Skif said. 'Wintermoon wouldn't let me bring them; he said they weren't even suited to winter work. He made me get scouts' gear.' She chuckled a little. 'I'm beginning to agree with Kerowyn about Whites,' she told him. 'At least, about the way they're made. You get tired of them. They can't have changed in hundreds of years-you know, we really could stand to have a style choice, at least.' He shrugged. 'Probably nobody ever thought much about it.' He lifted the pack experimentally. It was about as heavy as he wanted Cymry to carry, and after all, it wasn't as if they were cut off from k'sheyna and more provisions. 'That's going to do it, I think.' Elspeth measured the pack with her eyes. 'What's that-two weeks rations at the most?'
'About. We'll be back in by then.' He fastened both packs to Cymry's saddle, and turned back to Elspeth. 'I'm sorry I didn't have any news for you.' She shrugged. 'I'll tell you the truth, big brother-I really don't think it's all that important for me to get Need back, even assuming she'd be willing to return to me, which I doubt. I think it is important for you to find Nyara, for both your sakes.' He flushed but didn't reply to that directly. Another change; she was either much improved at reading body language or she had picked up an uncanny ability to intuit things. 'I don't know how much you're aware of the weather in here, but we're just about on to winter out there,' he said. 'We won't be able to cover as much ground once it starts snowing.' She didn't seem concerned. 'Take as much time as you need. Our orders haven't changed; no one needs us back home, and I need training as complete as I can get. Gwena says that things haven't deteriorated with Ancar and Hardorn any more than they had the last time we got word. It might simply be the weather. They're already into winter up there.'
'And no one, sane or insane, attacks in winter.' He nodded. 'With luck, you'll be ready by spring.' He had
