hide his own embarrassment. “Let them know that more explanations will follow with us — but that they must heed our warning concerning the water in the northern wells!”
“Well said,” Caliphestros judges. Casting his eyes about the increasing darkness, and seeing a nearby hillock that is crowned with thick, obscuring undergrowth, he gives Ashkatar a nod. “Now, Yantek, I shall withdraw and attend to the needs of an old man’s body, and rejoin you in but a few minutes.”
“Very good, Lord Caliphestros — I shall have our escort ready to march by the time you return!” Moving back into his much more comfortable role of admonishing and administering commander, Ashkatar begins to sound out more orders, to both the units that will remain behind on guard and patrol, and to those who will go ahead to Okot. Caliphestros, meanwhile, urges Stasi toward the hillock—
At which Keera notices something odd: the old man has his eyes fixed, not on his destination, nor on the objects he carries, nor even on the powerful companion beneath him. He hurries Stasi along: a natural enough thing, if his old man’s need to relieve himself is as strong as he has suggested. Yet, Keera decides, there remains something not quite correct about his behavior …
Thus, with darkness now falling in its characteristically rapid fashion, in the springtime hours between bright day and Moonrise within Davon Wood, and with Ashkatar’s troops assembling their torches south of the hole at which the foragers, Caliphestros, and the Bane yantek have only just been standing — and most of all, knowing full well that her small scheme may lead to a moment of profound embarrassment between herself and the aging scholar she has come to so admire and trust — Keera puts caution aside and, backing slowly away from the others as they ready themselves for the last stage of the journey south, quickly and silently slips up the trunk and into the branches of one especially thick elm tree. The higher reaches of this gnarled giant offer connections to still other thickly leaved forest sentinels — maples, oaks, and firs — all of which ultimately lead up and over the hillock behind which Caliphestros quickly disappears.
3:{ii:}
One secret unraveled, another made more complex …
It may seem implausible or indeed impossible, that a man or woman, however skilled, should be able to move through treetops every bit as stealthfully as those animals practiced in that form of undetected movement: birds, squirrels, and tree kittens.† And yet, with the wind on Keera’s side — blowing, as it so often does, in from the west and pushing both her limited scent and any excessive sounds of movement back toward Ashkatar’s noisy group of warriors — she is indeed able to achieve this feat, despite the added danger of Caliphestros’s continuing to search the branches above him, evidently looking for something or someone with whom he intends to meet.
The discovery of just who that someone is, when it comes, nearly destroys all Keera’s clever, silent tracking in the treetops. She hears the quiet chatter and quickly beating wings of a starling flying at night, and, correctly guessing who is on the way, turns about and smiles at the same speckled, rainbow-tinted bird that the three foragers encountered what seems a long time ago, when they first followed Stasi and Caliphestros back to the pair’s cave. The bird flits about the spot Keera currently occupies, in the middle of an oak limb, then alights on the limb next to her, staring intently upon the tracker’s human features. Keera is delighted to once again hear the starling’s approximation of Caliphestros’s name, which the bird chatters to her proudly; however, she is also deeply nervous that Caliphestros himself will spot the bird and thereafter lock eyes on her, and so Keera urges it along:
“Quietly, now!” she whispers, as softly as she can. Cupping her hands, she tries to urge the starling down the limb, but, as if in a moment of indignation, the feathered fellow simply flaps noisily into the air a few feet, and then lands directly atop Keera’s head. Now utterly at a loss as to what to do — for the bird is no longer making any sound, but rather settling in, as if he means to stay for a bit — she sits as still as her unnerved condition will allow: for Caliphestros has by now heard the starling, and is more quickly turning from one direction to another, imitating the sounds of the bird in an effort to persuade him to come down. When the speckled messenger finally does stir, however, neither of the humans present causes his action; rather, it is the sudden, utterly silent, yet swift and somewhat threatening passing, above, of an enormous pair of dark, gliding wings, which come close enough to the starling to make it shriek once in alarm and then flutter down to Caliphestros in a nervous dart, alighting upon his shoulder.
“Ah!” the old man says, turning to face the starling’s wide eyes. “What was all that business? And where is your associate, if I may ask?”
But the starling’s “associate” is otherwise engaged, for the moment, having swept down to take up the smaller bird’s position on Keera’s tree limb; the difference being that this creature — the same great eagle owl that has been only very occasionally and briefly visible, from time to time, in Caliphestros’s wake, as well as visiting with Visimar — stands every bit as tall as Keera, when she sits upon the limb they share. The tufts of feathers† that appear at once to be her ears as well as her stern eyebrows, and which ordinarily sit in a lower and more critical position than do those of the smaller males of the species, rise high above her enormous and severe golden eyes, for the moment, in the presence of this strange human who has ventured into the bird’s realm.
Upon hearing Caliphestros chatting with the starling below, however, the owl evidently feels that she has made whatever point she intended to impress upon Keera, and suddenly half-opens her wings, falling and then gliding in wide circles, with startling simplicity and silence, down toward the section of an ancient log upon which the great master of Nature and Science lectures his frenetic young student of language and diplomacy.
Only when the owl has left Keera’s tree limb does the tracker see that the great horned ruler of the air clutches tightly within one talon the same group of plants and flowers that Keera herself discussed with Caliphestros upon their return from his cave: again, not so long ago as events make it feel.
As if in answer to this inward question, Keera hears Caliphestros begin to talk to both of the birds — whose arrival, she suddenly notices, has not raised the least reaction from Stasi.
“… and so,” Caliphestros says to the pair of birds, who are now perched upon two half-limbs that point skyward from a fallen maple trunk which lies close in front of their master’s seat. “It will be for you two to find them—” His expressions become much simpler and more deliberate: “Soldiers — with horses,” he says, repeating the phrase a few times more, until the starling suddenly cries:
If the two birds were children, it would be a clear baiting of the larger but less intellectually skilled sibling by the smaller and quicker of the two; and the starling darts from Caliphestros’s shoulder to the top of his skullcap, and back again, seeming almost to laugh. The owl’s glare, meanwhile, becomes the more severe, as if to warn,
And in the tree above, however, Keera’s face has gone puzzled: for the name Visimar is as well known in Okot as it is in the kingdom of Broken. Is the mysterious scholar’s acolyte, then, a part of his plan that he has not yet chosen to share with his Bane allies? And if so, why has he chosen to keep it a secret? For some sinister reason?
“Remember, now,” Caliphestros resumes, below: “It is required that you work together, you two, and so this bickering must stop! Visimar knows of the fever in the countryside and in the city, but he must now know of it in the Wood, so that he can tell Sentek Arnem.” All this elaborate talk again proving largely useless, Caliphestros stares at
