She was just about to leave when she (almost literally) ran into Darian. He caught her by the elbow as she passed him, with a contagious grin for her when she realized who it was. “Working hard?” he asked, with a wink.
She made a face. “Hard enough to get a headache,” she replied, sighing. “I wish I’d known this was going to be so difficult.”
“Well, that’s good, it means you’re stretching new talents,” he told her, without a hint of pity. “Almost everything worth doing is hard, at least at first. Do you still want to meet Kuari?”
“Absolutely!” She remembered then what her teacher had told her. “Oh, and Nightwind said to let you know if I saw you that she wanted - someone - to give me the Hawkbrother tongue.”
“That would be Tyrsell,” Darian identified, nodding, so that a wisp of hair dropped into his eyes and he brushed it back with an absentminded wave of his hand. “Tyrsell is the king-stag of the dyheli herd; he’s the one I was riding yesterday.”
A dyheli teaching her a language? “That doesn’t seem right. They don’t talk, I mean, not aloud,” she responded, with a frown. “How can he do that?”
“Oh, you’ll understand soon enough - still have the headache?” he asked, and she shook her head. “Good; let me bolt something down, and I’ll take you to the dyheli meadow. The sooner you have Tayledras, the better. The hertasi mostly don’t understand Valdemaran.”
“That’s what Nightwind said.” She followed him as he got bread rounds that looked very like her breakfast this morning, and waited while he inhaled his dinner.
“Sorry about my manners,” he said between bites. “I got used to eating quickly, because things are always happening quickly around a Vale.” He grinned again. “Maybe that’s why we take our leisure so seriously, because most of the time we’re madly scrambling to get things done. You’ve got to keep a balance in life, so that you can enjoy your pleasures completely, and then go and enjoy your work completely. Heyla, when you rest well, you work better, right?” She nodded.
He led her down another series of twisting paths, coming out into a moon-gilded meadow full of the horned dyheli. One was patiently waiting for them where the path met the meadow. He wasn’t all that much bigger than the rest, but there was a sense of power about him that Meree hadn’t had.
:Darian has told me that Nightwind wishes you to have Tayledras-tongue,: rang a solemn voice in her mind.: Will you lower your shield for me?:
She’d been diligent in remembering to check that she had it up, and lowering it was a little like relaxing her grip on something. She sighed as it came down, feeling something inside her head relaxing as well. Will I ever really do this without thinking about it?
Tyrsell stood over her, a silver statue in the moonlight. :Now sit, please. This will not take long.:
Obediently she sat down on the grass. A moment later, she found herself looking up at Darian from a prone position, with her head aching all over again and no notion how she’d wound up lying down when she’d been sitting just the heartbeat before.
“Sorry about that,” Darian said apologetically. “If I’d warned you what was going to happen, you’d have tensed up, then it would have been harder on both you and Tyrsell. I know exactly how you feel right now - this is how they gave me the language years ago.”
It took her a moment to realize that he was speaking in the Hawkbrother language - and she understood it.
“How does he do that?” she asked, sitting up, and rubbing her head. “How can he shove a language into my head when he doesn’t actually speak it?”
Darian shrugged. “I don’t know exactly how; being able to take over someone’s mind like that is a special dyheli Gift. The king-stags use it to control the herd if they panic.”
“It feels like he ran the whole herd through my head!” she complained; Darian chuckled, and she got the sense that Tyrsell was amused as well.
“I know; I remember all too clearly how I felt after my turn, and it took me months to get comfortable with all the new concepts that showed up in my head along with the words. Come on, I’ll show you back to the guest lodge and get a hertasi to bring you a headache-potion.” He helped her to her feet; she had the presence of mind to turn to the dyheli before they left.
“I hope I didn’t seem ungrateful. Thank you very much, Tyrsell,” she said carefully. “This is going to make things endlessly easier for all of us.”
:You are welcome, and thank you for your courtesy; it will serve you well with my people,: the stag said. Then he turned and walked calmly off into the moonlit meadow, just as if he hadn’t just worked something very like a miracle.
“How are you coming with your studies?” Darian asked her as they turned back onto the path.
“The good news is that I haven’t got anything to unlearn,” she replied, one hand to her aching temple. “The bad news is that I have a lot to learn in a short time. From what the books say, I think it was a good thing Nightwind made her offer. I would never have worked this out on my own.”
“You might have,” he offered, surprising her. “After all, somebody did. There had to be a first Healer.”
“I suppose so.” The books had also told her just how close she had come to losing control of her Gift, and what that would have meant. No wonder she had thought longingly of becoming a hermit! She had very nearly been forced to do just that, in order to stay sane!
“Nightwind is awfully kind, and a lot more encouraging than I thought she’d be,” Keisha continued. “And the best thing is that Nightwind says that I was right all along to say I couldn’t go to the Collegium. She says that even untrained, I was doing things that Gil can’t, and that my primary duty was to the people I take care of.”
“I can see that.” The lights of the guest lodge appeared ahead of them, and just as Keisha noticed them, a hertasi also approached them on the path. “Do you want to make the request?” Darian continued, “Or shall I?”
“I’d like to,” she decided. When the hertasi neared, it seemed to sense that she was going to say something, and stopped, waiting attentively. “If you would be so kind, I have just been given this tongue by Tyrsell the king-stag, and my head hurts dreadfully,” she told it. It hissed with sympathy.
“I know just the thing, Keisha-Guest,” it replied. “Shall I bring it to the lodging?”
“Please,” she replied with gratitude, and it whisked away so fast it almost seemed to vanish.
“Very good!” Darian applauded. “You’re going to make a Hawkbrother yet!”
She thought about that, after Darian left her and the hertasi had come and gone with her headache medicine. She hadn’t really considered “becoming” a Hawkbrother, but Darian had, so obviously outsiders could. Could she come to serve both the Vale and the village as a Healer, in time?
It was at least as intriguing as becoming a Herald, like her sister.
Eleven