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 hornèd 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. Wild mountain hops, meadow bells, and woad, Keera considers silently; and, although I cannot now see, I would guess that these, too, were harvested by a sharp blade — does the fever then spread inside the frontiers of Broken?
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:
“Sol-jers! Hors-es!” And then the little creature turns to the owl to add, “Ner-tus!”
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, Do not gloat, little man, about your chatter, or I shall swallow you up! Caliphestros, sensing all this, inserts himself in the middle of it, placing a gentle hand around the starling, holding him before his face, and saying, “That is enough of that, Little Mischief”—for such, apparently, is his affectionate name for the starling—“and I have told you as much before. Taunting will get you eaten, and then where should Visimar and I be, eh?”
“Viz-ee-mah!” Little Mischief just manages to squeak out in defiance of Caliphestros’s grip, and the old man cannot help but laugh at his diminutive persistence.
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 Little Mischief and says, firmly, “Fever—Wood.”
“Fee-vah Wood! Wood fee-vah!” the starling replies, now struggling to get a wing free of his human companion, who is finally satisfied that he will speak the correct words at the correct time, and releases Little Mischief to sit upon a nearby branch.
“Which leaves but one thing more,” Caliphestros says, reaching into his bag—
And from it he withdraws another golden arrow, indistinguishable from that which he and Keera took from the dead member of Lord Baster-kin’s Guard. The enormous owl immediately flies toward Caliphestros’s shoulder, shocking the human with her speed, then hovers a few inches above him in order to allow those talons that do not carry the flowers — and which are fully as large as human fingers — to snatch the arrow away from him: once again, no instructions would seem needed, but Caliphestros looks to the starling again, if only to be certain.
“The arrow, Little Mischief,” he says. “Also to Visimar.”
“Viz-ee-mah! Awhoh!” the starling repeats, again comically enough to cause Caliphestros to cradle his head in his hands and try to stifle a bout of chuckling, lest the birds think him anything but resolved and serious in his instructions to them.
As both Keera and Caliphestros will shortly be missed by the rest of their traveling party, she is happy to see Caliphestros wave his arms and send the birds off. They circle the little clearing behind the hillock where they have received their latest instructions, and then finally straighten their path of flight so that they head in the direction of the Fallen Bridge over Hafften Falls and, beyond it, the most likely place for the forces of Broken to make camp before any sort of engagement with Ashkatar’s army. Caliphestros then shifts his robe in order to relieve himself (his nominal purpose for coming to this removèd place) without shifting from the log, and finally urges Stasi to stand close by and lower her neck, so that he can slide from the log onto her shoulders easily. Keera takes the first indication of the old man’s personal actions as her signal to move back along the treetops that she traveled to reach her perch. In a matter of only a few seconds more, she hears her brother and Heldo-Bah calling her name, a distinct sense of worry in Veloc’s voice.
Even for the famous Keera, the marvelous manner in which she manages to move back through the treetops is a wonder; and it is not long before she is once again among the men and women who have collected for the last leg of their march, and coolly lying to her brother and Heldo-Bah by saying that, as Caliphestros had taken the opportunity to see to his private business, she thought that she would, as well.
“You might have told someone, Keera,” Veloc chides.
“Great Moon, Veloc,” Heldo-Bah bellows, “you would be a thousand times more likely to be taken off by some forest beast than Keera ever would — I really don’t know why you persist in playing this idiotic game of being the responsible brother. It’s almost as feebleminded as your insistence on your being an expert historian.”
“Do not go so far as considering a return to that subject, you two,” comes a new voice; and the three foragers all turn to see Caliphestros and Stasi appearing from the darkness. “The time for idiotic blather has passed,” he continues; but his orders cannot stop Veloc from trembling just a bit as he notes to himself what a truly ghostly apparition the white panther is, in this sort of rapidly fading light.
“Great Moon,” Veloc whispers to Heldo-Bah, “it’s truly no wonder the Tall fear her as they do — the animal appears as out of the night air!”
“Ah, ficksel,” Heldo-Bah answers calmly. “And you dare call me the superstitious one?”
At which point Yantek Ashkatar steps forward and declares, “All right, then — to those of you continuing on: I intend to be within the Den of Stone in two hours — and Heldo-Bah, if we fail to make it in that time, I shall know whose back my whip will cut, in return!”