Well, that was a great weight off her mind. "About bleaching?" she prompted.
He tugged at his own hair, and she noticed that white roots were starting to show and that the color had faded to a dull tan. "Use of node-energy gradually bleaches a mage; the color-making dies in skin, hair, and eyes, and the color that is already there is leeched away. I do not lie when I say that magery changes a person. So-your Companions use node-energy, and thus are blue-eyed, silver-coated, gray-hooved."
"Silver-hooved," Gwena said with dignity. He chuckled softly, and tapped her nose.
"If you insist, my lady." He turned back to Elspeth. "My hair is not white, because as a scout I dye it. Tayledras all live with node-energy, whether we are mages or no, so nonmages bleach as well. Mages are silver-haired usually in their fifth year of practice; any other member of the Clan will have made the change at, oh, thirty summers, or thereabouts.
Even with dye, I must renew the color every few days now that I am a mage again." Elspeth could only cast her eyes upward. "It's like continuous sun on them, then? No wonder dye won't take on them," she said. "The gods know we've tried often enough-you know, it's damned hard to disguise a big white horse!"
"Sorry," Gwena put in. "Can't help it."
"In a trade-off between endurance and the rest of it, and being unable to disguise them, I think I'll take the endurance," Elspeth said, as much for Gwena's ears as Darkwind's. And for Gwena's ears only, "I'll take you just the way you are, oh great sneak," and felt Gwena's rush of pleasure, much like a pleasantly embarrassed flush.
He shrugged. "It is the choice I would make. Besides, now that you are a mage, you may make her seem any color you choose, by illusion." Before she could answer that, he was back up in the tree again, swarming up the trunk like a squirrel, and hooking the branches above him with the peculiar weapon-tool he kept in a sheath on his back. She still didn't see how he could possibly climb that quickly, even with the spikepalmed climbing gloves he wore; humans shouldn't be able to climb like that.
She was about to ask him what was going on, when he gave her the hand signal indicating that she should remain quiet. She and Gwena froze, statue still, trusting to the bushes they sheltered in to keep them from sight.
She didn't dare let down her shields to probe about her. Darkwind had warned her of the danger of that, and after hearing more about Mornelithe Falconsbane and the creatures he had commanded, she was inclined to listen to him and believe. But she was free enough to use every other sense, and she did. At first she couldn't tell that there was anything at all out of the ordinary, but then she realized that the forest was a little too quiet. No birdcalls, no wind stirring the branches, nothing but the little ticks the red and golden leaves made as they fell.
"Els-peth?" came the tentative mental touch, as soft as the caress of a feather. "Vree has found someone. I sense only a void, which means that there is someone inside a shield where Vree sees a two-legged creature." Darkwind had told her that he would use Mindspeech only if he had determined that an enemy could not hear it, and had explained that he would test with a quick mental probe of his own, too swift to fix on. She had wanted to object, but it was his land and he was used to scouting it; she had to assume he knew what he was doing. And evidently he did..."We're going to have to work out what I should do if someone ever does catch a probe and lock horns with you," she interjected, Sending a mental picture of stags in full battle.
A rush of chagrin accompanied his reply "You are right. But-not now."
"No," she agreed. "Not now."
"What do you want me to do? Should I try a probe? Are the gryphons going to get in on this?"
"Not unless there is no other choice," he replied firmly. "We need to keep their existence as quiet as possible; there are surely others besides Falconsbane who might covet them or the small ones. And you may try a mind-magic probe, but I think you will encounter the same shields as I have. No, you and I will confront and warn him. If he does not heed the warning, we will deal with him-: He broke off his link with her so suddenly that she was afraid that something had locked him in mental battle after all. But then, a heartbeat later, his mind-voice returned. "there is an additional complication," he said dryly; she looked up to find him looking down at her with a face full of irony. "It seems our intruder is a Changechild."
Her first thought had been: it must be Nyara. Her second thought had been that it couldn't be Nyara, but that it must be another of her father's creatures, running wild with Falconsbane gone. She tried a mental probe and discovered that just as Darkwind had said, the creature had very strong shields, well beyond her ability to counter. So the only way to learn anything about it was to confront it.
As she and Darkwind watched the intruder from their respective hiding-places, she knew all of her guesses about it had been wrong.
She didn't know whether to be relieved that this interloper was not their Nyara, or not. If it had been Falconsbane's daughter, the situation between herself and Darkwind would have been complicated enormously.
Her own instincts warred with her on the subject; she trusted Nyara to a limited extent, and she certainly felt that the Changechild had been greatly wronged and abused, but-But Nyara was incredibly, potently, sexually attractive. She couldn't help herself. Elspeth would have to have been blind not to see that Darkwind had wanted her as much as Skif had and that if anything had kept them from becoming intimate, it wasn't lack of attraction. She suspected that his own innate suspicion, lack of opportunity, and Perhaps something on Nyara's part had kept him from playing the role Of lover. As it was, that night before Dawnfire had returned to them, trapped in the body of her bondbird, it had been Skif, not Darkwind, who had taken that role. And, perhaps, guilt had kept Darkwind at arm's length. Guilt, that kept him from taking a new lover when his former love was a captive, confined to a bird's body by the temptress' father.
But Falconsbane was dead, or the next thing to it, and Dawnfire was out of reach of any of them. That left him free. And if he encountered Nyara before Skif did, would he be able to stand against temptation a second time? Especially if Nyara were to make overtures?
Knowing men, she didn't think so.
But at the same time, discovering that this stranger was not Nyara was a disappointment. However brief their acquaintance had been, Elspeth liked Nyara, and felt a great deal of sympathy for her. And she sometimes spared a moment to worry about her, out there in the wild lands that k'sheyna no longer held, with a mage-sword who might not even like her. She had few or no provisions, no shelter against the coming winter unless she had somehow found or made one...Well, this wasn't the time to worry about their errant Changechild.
Not with another standing on k'sheyna lands, within k'sheyna bordersand by the blood on its hands and the circle about its feet, one who was up to no good.
Elspeth had done enough hunting in her time not to be sickened by the blood of a butchered deer. What made her ill were the fact that it was a dyheli that had been slain, and the signs that the butchery had taken place before it was dead, not after.
Blood-magic. Wasn't that what Darkwind and Quenten both mentioned, but wouldn't talk about?