The Silver Gryphon

dangers, from illness to accident, and play them out in the space of a heartbeat. Parents had to be that way; they had to anticipate all the trouble youngsters could get into and be prepared to pluck them out of danger before they got too deeply into it.

But I’m an adult, and I can take care of myself! Isn’t he ever going to figure that out? He has been an adult for ages longer than I have, and he has had to be rescued before—so why is it that adults regard trouble as the sole territory of the young? Do we remind them of their vulnerability that much?

Between bites, he cast a glance at his mother, surprising her in an openly concerned and maternal gaze at him. She started to look away, then evidently thought better of it, and nodded slightly.

Mother’s worried, but she admits it. Father won’t, which will make it worse on him. And there’s no reason for either of them to worry at all! Maybe the more intelligent a parent is, the more they worry, because then they are able to see more of what could go wrong. The Kaled’a’in Quarters know that they could concentrate just as much on what could go right, but when it comes to children—or young adults—it could be smartest to have only grudging optimism. Still. . . .

He spared a thought for Blade, who was probably undergoing the same scrutiny at the hands of her parents, and sighed. He didn’t know how Amberdrake and Winterhart would be reacting to this, but Blade had threatened to spend the night with friends rather than go home to face them. Tad had managed to persuade her to change her mind.

It could be much worse, he told himself. They could be so overprotective that they refuse to let me take the post. Or, worse than that, they could be indifferent.

A couple of his classmates had parents like that; Tad had heard mages speculating that the raptor instinct ran so strongly in them that it eclipsed what Urtho had intended. Those parents were loving enough as long as their young were “in the nest.” They began to lose interest in them when they fledged, just exactly as raptor parents did. Eventually, when the young gryphons reached late adolescence and independence, their parents did their best to drive them away, if they had not already left. Such pairs were more prolific than those who were more nurturing, raising as many as six or eight young in a reproductive lifetime.

But those offspring were, as Aubri would say, “glorified gamehawks;” they lived mostly for the hunt and, while extremely athletic, were not very long in the intelligence department. Most of the gryphonic fatalities at White Gryphon had occurred among this group, which for the most part were assigned to hunting to supplement the meat supply of the city. They were very much like goshawks in focus and temper; they would fly into the ground or a cliff during a chase and break their foolish necks, or go out in wretched weather and become a victim of exposure. Some simply vanished without anyone ever knowing what happened to them.

Aubri had said once in Tad’s hearing that a majority of the fatalities in gryphon-troops of the war—other than those attributable to human commanders who saw all nonhumans as expendable and deployed them that way— were also among this type of gryphon. Needless to say, the type had been in the minority among those that had reached safe haven here, and were not likely to persist into a third generation. Not at the rate that they were eliminating themselves, at least!

When they weren’t hunting, they could usually be found lounging about on the sunning platform with others of their kind, either attempting to impress like-minded females or comparing wing-muscles. Granted, there was always a bit of that going on among young gryphons, but this lot acted like that all the time!

Very attractive, to look at perhaps. But as trysting mates or play-fighters, I don’t think I could stand them.

So while Skandranon was probably thinking over how many young gryphons of Tadrith’s generation had been lost, it was not occurring to him what those unfortunate fatalities had in common.

Say—an absolute dearth of brains. A squandering of what they had. And most importantly, a lack of decent parenting. Keeping a young one’s body alive was one thing, but it only created more breeders to do the same with the next generation they bred. Even a charming young idiot can succeed with good parenting. I’m proof of that, aren’t I?

His father had lost some of his self-consciousness and was now speaking normally to Keeth and Zhaneel about some modification Winterhart had made to the standard obstacle course in order to train trondi’irn. Tad took full advantage of their absorption to get some more of his meal down in peace.

Skandranon was an odd sight just now; halfway into a molt, he was piebald black and white. The white feathers were his natural color—now—and the black were dyed. He dyed himself whenever he was due to visit Khimbata in his capacity as special representative of White Gryphon. Ever since the Eclipse Ceremony, when he had come diving dramatically down out of the vanishing sun to strike down an assassin who would have murdered Emperor Shalaman, Winterhart, and probably several more people as well, he’d been virtually forced to wear his Black Gryphon “guise” whenever he visited. He had rescued Shalaman, the Black King, as the Black Gryphon—and in a culture that set a high value on things that never changed, he was mentally set in that persona whenever he returned to the site of his triumph.

The Gryphon King, beloved where e’er he goes. That was what Aubri had said to his face, mockingly.

But the real irony of the statement was that it was true. He never left Khimbata without being loaded down with gifts of all sorts. His jewelry collection was astonishing; if he and Zhaneel wore all of it at one time, they’d never get off the ground.