The Eagle And The Nightingales

But she could bear the pain, and she could heal herself again, over time. She had done it once, and she could again. T'fyrr could not, not without her help, for he did not truly understand the emotions festering inside his soul.

Great power demands that the user consider the repercussions of actions. She had the power; she had long ago accepted the responsibility, or so she had thought.

I was fooling myself. I should have known that the Lady would put this on me.

But this was no time to have second thoughts; really, she had made all her choices long before she met T'fyrr, and this was only the ultimate test of those choices. What was it that Peregrine had said to her a few months ago? She had known at the time that he was trying to warn her of an ordeal to come_

You cannot speak truly of the path without walking it.

And she could not. Not without repudiating everything that she said, that she thought, that she was.

So she opened the last of her heart to him, opened her souls arms to him and gathered him up inside the place where her own deepest secrets and darkest fears lay_she brought him inside, and she gave him all that she was, and all the comfort that she had.

T'fyrr did not know how he had gotten to Nightingale's room; he did not even realize that he was talking to her until he heard his own voice, hoarse and cracking, telling her things he had never intended to share with anyone.

Especially not with her.

She was too fragile, too gentle_how could she hear these horrible things and not hate him? He knew she was one of the kind who felt things; he had sensed that the first time he met her.

The same as the Spirit-Brothers, perhaps.

But not the same, not with the training or the knowledge, surely. The idea of murder_it would surely send her fleeing him in utter revulsion.

Only Harperus knew he had killed. Harperus had told him that it was an accident, something he could not have helped.

Harperus had not even begun to understand.

The Spirit-Brothers of the Haspur would have been able to help him bear the guilt, although it would have meant that he and the Brother who chose to help him would have been in debt to one another for all their lives, bonded in soul and perhaps in body as well. The latter happened, sometimes, though not often. But the Spirit- Brothers, male and female, were far away and out of reach, and he had no hope of reaching them for years, even decades....

At some point in his babbling, it began to dawn on him that Nightingale not only understood, she felt as he felt. She wept for him as a Spirit-Brother would have wept, gave him her tears in an outpouring of release for both of them.

Something in him turned to her as a flower turns toward the sun, as a drowning creature seizes upon a floating branch. Something in her answered that need, granted him light, kept him afloat. He was beyond thinking at that point, or he would never have let her do what she did. It wasn't fair, it wasn't right, not for her! She was a Gypsy, a Free Bard, who should be as free as the bird that was her namesake, and not bound as a Spirit-Brother!

But it was already done, before thoughts even began to form in the back of his terror-clouded mind.

She stayed awake with him until his internal sense told him that the sun was rising, comforting and holding him, and even preening his feathers as another Haspur would_

_a Haspur, or a Spirit-Brother.

He did not understand how she knew to do this; he did not understand why he accepted it. He was beyond understanding now, beyond anything except feeling. It was feeling that held him here, weak as a newborn eyas, simply accepting the comfort and the understanding as an unthinking eyas would accept them.

Finally, he slept, exhausted.