The Silver Gryphon

Finally, she stepped back. “It’ll do,” she said, in her hissing hertasi voice. “Try to bring the rig back in one piece.”

Blade suppressed a laugh, for the remark was so like Gesten that it could have been he who was standing there. Like her father, Ghana would never admit to concern for the trainees she served, only to concern that the equipment return intact. But of course, it went without saying that if the equipment came back to the warehouse in pristine condition, the trainee would certainly have arrived at the landing platform in like shape.

Tad waved her over, as Ghana began hooking up his harness to the basket itself. “We’re waiting for the parents, I presume?” he said casually.

She sighed. “Much as I would like to simply slip away, if we leave without allowing them their fanfare, they may not let us come back.”

“Or we may not want to,” he groaned, and flexed his claws restlessly. “Because when we did, they’d make our lives sheer misery with guilt.”

She laughed, and patted him on the shoulder. “Parents always know how to pull your strings,” she advised him. “After all, they attached those strings in the first place.”

“Do I hear someone borrowing my words?” The newcomer to the conversation was as elegant as Amberdrake in dress and demeanor, though far less flamboyant. Blade knew him too well to blush.

“Of course, Uncle Snowstar,” she retorted. “You weren’t using them, so why shouldn’t I?”

He chuckled at her impertinence; next to Skandranon, she was the only person likely to take that tone with him. It was not wise to risk the anger of an Adept-level mage as powerful as Snowstar, as others, even his own underlings, had found out to their sorrow.

“I don’t think you’ll have any trouble with the basket-spells, Tadrith,” he said, turning to the young gryphon. “They are as tight as any I’ve ever set.”

Blade had assumed her “adoptive uncle” had come to see them off, along with her parents; she was astonished to hear him say that he himself had placed the magics on their carry-basket that would make it possible to fly with it. “You set them, uncle?” she said, making no secret of her surprise. “Isn’t that—well—?”

“Rather beneath me?” He laughed. “First of all, it is always a good idea for a mage to keep in practice on anything he might be asked to do, and secondly, if something were to fail, magically, on your basket—” He shrugged suggestively. “Suffice it to say, it was easier and safer to do the work myself, than have to explain to your parents why I let some ‘inferior mage’ do it.”

Blade nodded ruefully. “Only too true,” she told him. She would have said more, but at that moment she caught the sound of familiar voices from below the edge of the cliff.

At nearly the same moment, Tad pointed warningly with his beak at a trio of rapidly approaching gryphons, who could only be his parents and sibling.

“All we need now are Judeth and Aubri to make this show complete,” Blade groaned, resigning herself to a long and complicated farewell that would shave precious time off the amount of daylight they could have used for traveling.

“Is that a complaint or a request?”

Commander Judeth stalked out of the door to the Silvers’ clifftop headquarters, but she was smiling rather than frowning. She was not Kaled’a’in; her hair, before it turned to snowy white, had been a dark blonde, and her eyes a clear gray-green. Nevertheless she had been one of Urtho’s generals who understood the value of her nonhuman troops and deployed them with care and consideration, and no one had been unhappy to find her among the k’Leshya when the last Gate came down. She had proved her worth over and over, both during their retreat from lands racked by mage-storms and at White Gryphon. With her partner Aubri, she had organized the first beginnings of the Silvers, and the Silvers in their turn bore the stamp of her personality. She alone of all of them wore anything like a uniform; a black tunic and trews modeled from the tattered originals of her old dress uniforms. The gryphon-badge stood out proudly against such an elegant background.

She stopped just short of the platform and looked sardonically from Tad to Blade and back again. “Can I take it from that remark that you think I might be a hindrance to a timely departure?” she continued.

Blade flushed, and the old woman allowed a hint of a smile to steal across her lips.

“I assure you, Aubri and I came here solely to make certain that your loving relatives did not do any such thing,” she said crisply, and cleared her throat.

“All right, troops!” she called out in a voice that had once commanded thousands, just as Amberdrake and Winterhart appeared at the end of the trail. “Let’s get up here and get your good-byes said and over with! This isn’t a holiday trip, this is a military departure! Move your rumps!”