Owlknight
Darian’s Tale
Mercedes R. Lackey and Larry Dixon.
We’ve got soul.
We’ve got each other.
We’ve got the whole world to embrace.
This one’s for you.
A shrill whistle caught Darian’s attention, and he looked up and over the lake of k’Valdemar Vale, shading his eyes with his hand. As he expected, he saw Snowfire waving at him from his “balcony,” three-quarters of the way up the side of the cliff that edged the far side of the lake.
Actually, it would have been more accurate to say that he saw a tiny figure with white hair waving from the balcony - at this distance he couldn’t have said for certain that it was Snowfire. It wasn’t Nightwind, though; her hair was still raven-wing black.
The sky above the cliff shimmered with a light, pearly opalescence, although it was perfectly possible to see the clouds and blue sky beyond the new Veil, a magic shield that protected k’Valdemar.
He whistled back at Snowfire, and waved his arm in the direction of the Council House, the newly built structure that housed all Joint Council sessions. It wasn’t much of a structure; now that the Vale had protection, it didn’t need to be much of a structure. It had “walls” of wicker work covered in vines, a roof that was half skylight and half slate, a floor of natural turf which flourished in the light. For furniture, in deference to the Valdemar contingent of the Joint Council, there were chairs and a table, but the chairs were of woven grapevine and wicker with soft cushions, and the table was a compass-rose shape of tree-trunk sections, topped with three rising layers of polished wood with one section for each member of the Council. The Tayledras of k’Valdemar, of course, felt no need for formal furniture, and neither did the tribesmen of the Ghost Cat clan.
Up on the cliff, Snowfire waved both arms back, signifying that he understood the Council was gathering. He disappeared into the dark opening in the cliff face behind him, presumably to fetch his mate, Nightwind. His errand of notifying Snowfire and Nightwind completed, Darian Firkin k’Vala k’Valdemar turned back and entered the shaded and secluded pathways of his Vale, heading for the Council House himself.
An odd and sometimes seemingly contradictory combination of qualities was Darian. A Journeyman-level Mage, from a land which did not have such things until very recently - a citizen of the country of Valdemar, yet also a Hawkbrother of the once-secretive Tayledras, adopted into the clan of k’Vala - even his clothing reflected those contradictions.
He wore soft fabrics of Hawkbrother manufacture; the loose trousers, gathered at the ankle, that both sexes wore, and the wide-sleeved, open-collared shirt that was also a staple among the Tayledras. Good, strong dyes were readily available in the Vale, so the rich gold of his shirt and brown of his trousers were commonplace
But the embroidered, fitted vest he wore, though not of Valdemaran manufacture, was definitely of the local
So there it was, contradictions implied in his very dress, contradictions that sometimes confused others, but never confused him. For all the contradictions, Darian was comfortable in his dual citizenship, and sometimes took an impish delight in how uncomfort-able it made others.
He looked up at the sound of a crow’s catcall just above his head, laughing when he saw a falcon playing “tag” with a crow, flying in and out of the branches. In open air, the falcon would have had the advantage, but not in among the trees. The streamer trailing from the falcon’s bracelets was less than half its original length, but the crow still had most of his streamer, and mocked the falcon enthusiastically. Both were bondbirds, of course, the specially bred, highly intelligent companions of the Hawkbrothers, and the falcon seemed to be taking his imminent defeat in good humor. Crows took just about everything in good humor; of all the birds bred by the Hawkbrothers as
