Urtho nodded, pleased with his choice. “Excellent. And she has had no real gryphon wings assigned to her forces until now, only those on loan from the Sixth or the Fourth. Consider it done.” Urtho regarded Skan measuringly. “Still, the gryphons should have their own collective voice, even as the mages do. There are things that you know about yourselves that no human could. There should be one gryphon assigned to speak for all gryphons, so that things will not come to the pass they have with Shaiknam before I come to hear about it.” He stabbed out a finger. “You. You, Skan. I hereby assign you to be the overall commander of all the gryphon wings and to speak for them directly to me.”
Skan’s surprise turned to stupefaction. His head came up as if someone had poked him in the rear. “Me?” he squeaked—yes, squeaked, he sounded like a mouse. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Me? Why me? I am honored, Urtho, but—”
Urtho waved his objections aside. “You’ve obviously thought about becoming the leader of the gryphons, or why else would you have read all my history books about the great leaders of the past? The others clearly think that you should have that position, or why else would they have sent you here to confront me over Shaiknam?”
Is it unusually warm in here? Skan felt his nares flushing, and he hung his head. “They didn’t exactly pick me,” he admitted. “They couldn’t seem to do much besides panic and complain, so I . . . I took over. Nobody seemed to mind.”
“All the more reason to place you in charge, if you were the only one to take charge,” Urtho said implacably. “How do you think I wound up in charge of this so-called army?”
Skan ducked his head between his shoulder blades, his nares positively burning. “I’m not sure that’s a fit comparison—”
“Now, I have a few things to tell you,” Urtho continued. “I don’t know if you’ve been aware of it, but I’ve been sending groups of families and noncombatants into the west ever since we first thought we’d have to abandon the Tower.” He turned back to the map and stood over it, brooding. “I didn’t like having such a great concentration of folk here in the first place, and when I realized what chaos an evacuation would be, I liked it even less.”
Skan nodded with admiration. He hadn’t realized that Urtho was moving people out in a systematic way. That in itself spoke for how cleverly the mage had arranged it all.
“I’ve been posting the groups at the farthest edges of the territory we still hold, near enough to the permanent Gates there that they can still keep in touch with everyone here as if nothing had changed, but far enough so that if anything happens—” Urtho did not complete the sentence.
“If anything happens, we have advance groups already in place,” Skan said quickly. “An evacuation will be much easier that way. Faster, too. And if the fighters know their families are already safe, their minds will be on defense and retreat, rather than on worrying.”
“I don’t want another Laisfaar,” Urtho said, his head bent over the table, so that his face was hidden. “I don’t want another Stelvi Pass.”
Skan had his own reasons to second that. The lost gryphons there sometimes visited him in dreams, haunting him. . . .
. . . fly again, as Urtho wills. . . .
“Who will you pick for your second, Skan?” Urtho asked after a long silence, briskly changing the subject. “I assume it’s going to be one of the experienced fighters. And—” he cast a quick glance out of the corner of his eye at Skan, who caught a sly twinkle there. “—I count Zhaneel as an experienced fighter.”
Skan coughed. “Well, it will be Zhaneel, of course, but because she has the respect of the others. Even gryphons who haven’t trained on her course know how hard it is, and they admire her for all she’s accomplished. But there’s something else I’d like to ask you for as well.”
Urtho turned away from the table. “Oh?” he said, imbuing the single syllable with a multitude of flavorings.
Once again, Skan’s stomach and crop churned with anxiety, and his nares flushed. “I—ah—did a little exploring on that level of your Tower.”
“And?” Urtho’s face and voice were carefully neutral.
“I found the—the models.”
“How did you—” Urtho exclaimed, flushing for a moment with anger, but he quickly calmed. “Never mind. What—”
Skan interrupted. “I met Kechara.”
Urtho stared at him blankly for a moment, then grew just a little pale. “I believe,” he said carefully, “that I had better sit down. You must hate me.”
Skan shook his head as Urtho lowered himself into a chair, and if he was any judge of human reactions, the Mage had been profoundly shaken. “How could I hate you? The more time I spent with her, the more I realized that you had done the best you could for her. And once I had a few days to think about it, I believe I managed to puzzle out why you had her up there, instead of down with the rest of the gryphons. It wasn’t just to protect her from being teased and getting her feelings hurt.” He took a deep breath, and ventured everything on his guess. “It was because she’s a very powerful Mindspeaker. Probably the most powerful you’ve ever seen.”
Urtho’s eyes widened, and he caught his breath. “Did she Mindspeak at you?” he asked.
Skan nodded, pleased that he had been clever enough to figure out the puzzle. “I realized that I had been getting a great deal more information from her than she had the words to tell me. That was when I remembered that she had hit me with a mind-blast just before she attacked me, and I figured out that she wasn’t just telling me things with her voice, but with her mind as well.”
He told Urtho the tale from beginning to end, saving only that he had gotten into the chamber in the first place with Vikteren’s mage-keys. “That’s why she’s in the Tower, in a room with such heavy shields, and why she creates the presence of a dozen gryphons when there’s only her. And that’s why Zhaneel and I would like to have her. We’ll protect her from teasing and ridicule, and she can act as—oh—a kind of relay for groups of gryphons that may need to speak with each other. We have Mind-speakers, of course, but none as powerful as she is.”
“I see that you put a great deal of thought into this.” Urtho mopped his forehead with a sleeve, as small beads of perspiration sprang up. “I must confess—that use for her had occurred to me. I was too softhearted to . . . well . . . misborn usually die young anyway, and I assumed that her nature would take care of the problems she represented for me. When she didn’t die, though, I had to do something about her. She’s as old as you are, Skan. She only seems younger because she’s so childlike, and because her memory for things longer ago than a year is very poor. I knew that if anyone ever discovered her and her power, she’d be a target for our enemies. In the wrong hands, she could be a terrible weapon. I was afraid that I would have to go to war just to protect her, and I couldn’t reconcile the safety and freedom of one misborn with compromising the safety of all those who depend on me. You see? That was why I hid her in the Tower and kept her existence secret. I simply could not protect her otherwise, and I would not risk a war over her.”
“Urtho, I hate to point this out, but we are in a war, and it isn’t over Kechara,” Skan retorted, with a little more sarcasm than he intended. “No one is going to get into this camp to steal her, and there isn’t much point in keeping her mewed up anymore.”