Owlknight

“That’s it!” he shouted. “That’s it!”

But without bothering to tell her what “it” was, he bent over the dyheli’s neck. In response to an unvoiced command, the young stag launched into a full gallop, and Keisha’s followed, leaving her no choice but to stifle her curiosity and hang on for dear life.

They reached the Ghost Cat village in half the time it would normally have taken; the dyheli staggered into the village on their last bit of energy, and stopped, sides heaving. Unlike horses, they were in no danger of foundering, or Keisha would have been more worried about them than she was about Darian. Darian jumped down out of the saddle. As he sprinted for the Shaman’s log house, with the bundle containing the new vest clutched in one hand, his dyheli began its own slow, careful cool-down. Keisha took her time dismounting, and followed, noting the curious looks that Darian attracted as he ran, a small part of her hoping that he hadn’t lost his wits, the rest of her full of a faltering anxiety.

The second surprise of the day came. The Shaman must have been expecting Darian, for he flung his door open before Darian even reached it and beckoned him to come inside. And when he looked up and saw Keisha standing beside her dyheli, he waved to her as well.

The two men disappeared inside. She entered the door in time to hear Darian say, “... so is there a Raven clan?”

“I don’t know out of my own knowledge, but the meaning of your dream and mine is now clear,” Shaman Celin said somberly, and looked down at the vest spread out on the bench between them. “This, however - this comes from Snow Fox tribe. There are still folk from Snow Fox among us, cured, but not strong enough yet to travel, for the cure itself exhausted them. Let us speak with them, and perhaps they can give us the last piece of what we need to know.”

Darian was on his feet immediately, so completely focused on the Shaman that Keisha might not even have been there.

And strangely, this didn’t trouble her; she was too relieved to discover that, whatever all this was about, Shaman Celin obviously knew all about it as well.

As she trailed along in Darian’s wake, she felt a real sense of relief and even anticipation, which completely replaced the anxiety she’d felt on the way here. This was real, something she could deal with, and a perfectly reasonable and understandable obsession; if it had been her parents rather than his, she would have been just as focused as he was.

Absolutely. They may drive me crazy, but they’re my parents. I know how he must feel.

There was a log house in the farthest circle that had no tribal totems ornamenting it; instead, the house was decorated in stylized carvings of dyheli. Once again, the “holy dyheli” identified those who had come to seek a cure from Ghost Cat and the Sanctuary.

Here they encountered a slight difficulty, for the Snow Fox tribe spoke a different variant of the northern tongue. It took Darian and the Shaman several tries before the most senior of the men left in charge of the invalids understood what they were asking. Keisha couldn’t follow him at all; he spoke so much faster than the Ghost Cat folk that he almost seemed to be speaking a different language altogether.

He wasn’t all that old either; just out of adolescence, and probably newly come to full Warrior status. He was in charge of a band of young men his own age who had remained behind to guard and protect the three women and gaggle of youngsters who had not been strong enough to travel back to the tribal lands with the rest. The Shaman stood beside Darian as he and the young warrior sat facing each other on a bench just outside the door, with the morning sun full on them.

Keisha stood by and watched, rather than listened, as Darian grew more proficient in the Snow Fox dialect with each passing moment. She suspected from the faint tingling she felt along the surface of her skin that he was using magic to help speed his acquisition of the tongue. The young warrior, biting his lip earnestly, was a bit alarmed.

He must know it’s magic - but it isn’t dyheli magic. And Darian must look completely alien to the young man, with his Tayledras clothing and lighter hair and eyes than the Northerners had.

The Shaman saw this as well, and stopped the conversation to reassure him; after a few words, the youngster became quite charmingly cooperative.

Darian stooped and took a bit of charred stick from the ground to draw a crude map on the bench where they both sat, but the young man shook his head and put his hand over Darian’s. Clearly he didn’t understand maps; or at least, he wasn’t able to translate what he knew to map form.

They do so much by rote - Keisha bit her lip, hoping Darian’s memory was up to this.

Darian listened to him with fierce concentration as he described what must have been the journey here, committing every landmark to memory; frowning so, his eyebrows almost meeting in the center of his forehead, that Keisha knew he’d have a headache before this was over.