She must be on station by now and looking for him, and he wouldn’t be where he was supposed to be. You’ve lasted this long, sky dancer, but will you survive what she’ll do to you after the worry you’ll cause her?
Before he could formulate a rebuttal to his own question, the air around him shook from a massive displacement—and a makaar wing entered his vision only a handsbreadth from his face!
Kili’s wing!
Skan desperately twisted sideways to bring his claws to bear on the enemy that was only a heartbeat away from disemboweling him. He lashed out with both foreclaws to latch onto the wing, intent upon taking the monster down with him—
—and found Zhaneel screaming past him in triumph, her shears clutched tightly in her hands. She was followed a second later by a mist of dark, cold blood, another wing, and the dying body of the now-wingless makaar flight leader. Zhaneel arced back up to come beside Skandranon and laugh along with him as he dropped the lifeless makaar wing and resumed controlled flight.
Oh, gods above, I am in love.
The other three makaar, still bedazzled by Skandranon’s spell, scattered and took their remaining brethren along with them. No more makaar harried the retreat, and Ma’ar’s troops had already halted to assess their own losses.
Safe again, and there she was, flying beside him, every bit as confident and beautiful as Skandra-non’s wildest dreams.
Yes, Zhaneel, I am definitely in love. You are worth living for, no matter what comes. You are worth anything. . . .
Peace, at last.
Amberdrake dropped the tent flap behind his last client for the evening; he turned with a whisper of silk to look back into the brightly-lit public chamber, and sighed with relief. Gesten raised his blunt snout from the towel chest, where he had been working, and looked straight at him and then away, as if the hertasi were going to say something, then thought better of it.
Not a comment or a complaint, or he wouldn’t have hesitated, so it must be a request.
“Spit it out, Gesten,” Amberdrake said patiently. “You want something. Whatever it is, you’ve more than earned it a dozen times over. What is it?”
“I’m tired, and I’d like to quit early and get some sleep,” Gesten admitted, “but I don’t want to leave you with all this mess to take care of alone, if you’re tired, too. I thought you felt pretty good until I heard you sigh just now.”
Amberdrake shook his head, and pulled his hair back behind his neck. “That sigh was because it is damned nice to be doing the job I’m trained for, and not playing second-rate Healer,” he told the hertasi. “It was a sigh of contentment.”
Amberdrake turned aside and went over to the portable folding table beside the couch, a table that currently held a selection of lotions and unguents, scented and not. He picked up the first, a half-empty bottle of camil-lotion, and put them in their proper order. He made very sure that the lid of each was properly tightened down before he put it away. Right now, there was no way of telling when he’d ever find replacements, and each drop was too precious to waste in evaporation or spillage. Cosmetics and lotions no longer appeared on the list of any herbalist’s priorities. He knew how to make his own, of course, but when would he ever have the time or the materials?
Of course he might not ever need to find replacements. Ma’ar might very well make the question of where or how he would find them moot at any point.
Better not to think of that. Better just to enjoy the respite and try not to think of how brief it might be.
“No, Gesten, I’m not tired. Oddly enough, I think that exhausting myself on a regular basis up on the Hill only made me learn how to make better use of my resources,” he continued. “Either that, or I’m fitter now than I was before. It’s just such a pleasure to get back to being nothing more than a simple kestra’chern. . . .” A pregnant silence alerted him, and he turned to see that Gesten was grinning a toothy hertasi grin. He made a face. “And you can wipe that smug smile off your snout, my little friend. No puns, and no clever sallies. Just go get some rest. I had to clean up after myself long before you came along, and I think I can remember how.”
If anything, Gesten’s smile widened a bit more, but there was no doubt that the hertasi was as tired as he claimed. Probably more so; the past few days had not been easy ones for him, either. If anything, he had gotten less rest than Amberdrake. His scales had dulled, and he carried his tail as if the weight of it was a burden to him. That didn’t stop him from exercising his tongue, however.
He bowed, spreading his foreclaws wide. “Yes, O greatest of the kestra’chern, O master of massage, O summit of the sensuous, O acme of the erogenous, O prelate of—”
“That’ll do,” Amberdrake interrupted. “One of these days, Gesten, you’re going to get me annoyed.”
“And when that happens, the moon will turn purple and there’ll be fish flying and birds under the sea,” Gesten jeered. “You almost never get angry, Drake, not even with people who deserve it. Demonsblood! The last time I saw you get angry was with that uppity Healer, the one that came all the way down from the Hill to tell you off, and then you cooled off by the time you got back to the tent! You ought to get angry a lot more often; you’re too polite. You’ve got too much control for your own good. Dams break, you know.”
But Amberdrake shook his head, and continued to put the jars and bottles back into their special places, each one in order. The sendel-wood lined case had cushioned slots for each, so that no matter how roughly the case was handled, the contents would never break or spill. And, after all the times of trouble in the recent past, doing a simple task was relaxing. So was simply talking to his dear hertasi rather than trading snap opinions of how to deflect this emergency or that crisis. “It’s not that I’m polite, it’s that I know too much about human nature—and I know how it can be twisted and deformed until people turn into monsters. That makes it difficult to stay angry with anyone for very long, since I generally know what their feelings and motivations are. Now that I’ve talked with Urtho about our enemy, I even know why Ma’ar is the way he is. I can manage to stay angry with Ma’ar; I just wish that knowing the reasons for his behavior would make some difference in stopping him.”
“But you never stay angry with anyone else,” Gesten argued. “And people think you’re weak because of that. They think that they can walk all over you. And they think that because you don’t fight back, you must really think that they are in the right.”
He had to raise a surprised eyebrow at that. “Do they really?” he replied. “Interesting. Well, Gesten, that’s all to the good, don’t you think? If they believe that I’m a weakling, they’ll underestimate me. If they think I’m harboring some kind of secret guilt or shame, they’ll believe that I’m handicapped in dealing with them. I’ll be able to defeat their purposes or get around them with a minimum of effort, and they’ll have spent their strategy-time gloating that they’ve already won.”
Gesten snorted scornfully. “Maybe you think so—but what about all the folk like that damned Healer? The ones who look down their noses at you, think they’re better’n you, and say rotten things behind your back? How’re you going to stop a whispering campaign against you? How’re you going to deal with people who slander you?”