While he pondered the implications of that, Hydona reached over and gently bit Treyvan's neck. The male gryphon's eyes glazed and closed, and the cere above his beak flushed a brilliant orange-gold. Obviously, her mind was no longer on the far past, but on the immediate future.
And from the look on Treyvan's face, his mind had been there for some time.
Darkwind coughed. "Uh-Hydona?
"Hmm?" the gryphon replied dreamily, her own eyes bright, but unfocused, her thoughts obviously joined to Treyvan's.
"Who's watching the little ones?" he asked. "I can't; I've got to be out on patrol. I don't trust this quiet."
"They'll be fine," Hydona replied, releasing her mate long enough to reply. "They've been told not to leave the nessst, and if they called, nothing could get to them beforrre we'd be on top of it."
"Are you sure?" he persisted, but Hydona was nuzzling Treyvan's neck again and he knew there was no way he was going to get any sense out of her at the moment.
"They'll be fine," she mumbled, all her attention centered once more on her mate.
Despite being under shielding, the sexual euphoria began penetrating even his careful defenses. This was obviously the time to leave.
As he picked his way through the ruins, a feeling of light-headedness overcame him for a moment. He looked back over his shoulder to see the two of them surging up into the cloudy sky, Hydona a little ahead of Treyvan. Even as he watched, they began an elaborate aerial display, tumbling and spiraling around each other, in a dance that was halfplanned and half-improvisation. This "dance" itself was part of the spell; the rest-Treyvan's extravagant maneuvers-were designed to inflame himself and his mate.
And judging by the faint excitement he was feeling, even through his shields, it was having the desired effect.
As he turned his eyes back toward the ground, another moving speck caught his eye. Though it was very high, long experience enabled him to identify it as a red-shouldered hawk, one of the many breeds often used as bondbirds by the Tayledras.
That made him think reflexively of Dawnfire, whose bird was a redshouldered.
And that-given all that he'd been exposed to in the past few moments-made his thoughts turn in an entirely different direction than they had been tending.
Dawnfire rode the thoughts of her bondbird with the same ease that the bird commanded the currents of the sky. Theirs was a long partnership, of seven years' standing, for she had bonded to Kyrr at the tender age of ten. Darkwind's Vree had been with him only four or five years; the bird he had bonded to before that had been a shorter-lived shriekowl, gift of his older brother.
A shriek-owl was not a practical bird for a scout, but the tiny creatures were perfect for a mage, which was what Darkwind had been in that long-ago, peaceful time. Shriek-owls in the wild seldom lived beyond three years-the bondbird breed in general tripled that lifespan. That was nothing near like the expected lifespan of the scouts' birds-twenty-five to fifty years for the falcons, larger owls, and hawks, and up to seventy-five years for the rarer eagles. And shriek-owls were tiny; scarcely bigger than a clenched fist. They ate mostly insects, flew slowly, and generally flitted from tree to tree inside a very small territory. They could hardly be counted on to be an effective aid either on a scouting foray or to aid in an attack. But the owls were charming little birds, by nature friendly and social-in the wild they nested several to a tree-and the perfect bird for a mage who only needed a bird to be occasional eyes and ears and to pass messages. A mage did not necessarily need to bond to his bird with the kind of emotional closeness that a scout did, nor did he need a bird with that kind of long expected lifespan. All of the mages that Dawnfire knew that she aed, personally, did bond closely with intelligent birds, but it was not as necessary for them as it was for scouts.
Scouts had to develop a good working, partner-like relationship with their birds, and that required something with a long anticipated lifespan.
Scouts spent as much as a year simply training their birds, then it took as much as four or five more years to get the partnership to a smooth working relationship. Like the scouts, the lives of the bondbirds were fraught with danger. There had already been casualties among the birds, and Darkwind had warned his corps to expect more. Their enemies knew the importance of the birds, as well as the impact a bird's violent death had on his bondmate, and often made the birds their primary targets.
Dawnfire tried not to think about losing Kyrr, but the fact was that it could happen.
Darkwind's father Starblade had lost his bird in circumstances so traumatic that the mage had returned to the Vale in a state of shock, and actually could not recall what had occurred. Since he had been investigating a forest fire ignited by firebirds, and since the birds themselves seldom reacted so violently that they set their homes aflame, the other Tayledras assumed that whatever had frightened the firebirds had probably caught and killed Starblade's perlin falcon. That had been a set of very strange circumstances, actually; Dawnfire remembered it quite vividly because her mother had been one of the scouts who had found the mage and had talked it over one long night with friends in her daughter's presence.
There had been a sortie that had drawn most of the fighters off when word of the fire had reached the Vale. Starblade had gone out to take care of it.
He had then vanished for many days. He was found wandering, dazed, within the burned area, near nightfall on the third day. His bondbird was gone, and he himself could not remember anything after leaving the Vale. Injured, burned, dehydrated, no one was surprised at that-but when days and weeks went by and he still could not remember, and when he chose to bond again with a crow, from a nest outside of the Vale-some people, like Dawnfire's mother, wondered...Darkwind had once said something after another of his angry confrontations with his father-something about his feeling that Starblade had changed, and was no longer the father he had known. He blamed the change on the disaster, Dawnfire wasn't so sure.
Starblade had not been that close, emotionally, to Darkwind's mother, though Darkwind had never accepted that. Dawnfire was not at all certain that Starblade would have been so badly affected by her death that his personality had changed. She blamed the change on the death of Starblade's bird. It seemed to her and her own mother that Starblade had become silent and very odd afterward. And that crow he'd bonded to was just as odd...She pulled her thoughts away from the past and returned them to the present. She was off-duty today and had decided to indulge her curiosity in something.
Darkwind's gryphons.
She had been terribly curious about them for a very long time, and had even gone to visit them a time or two. But the gryphons, while still being cordial and polite, had made one thing very clear to her: the only visitor they truly welcomed was Darkwind.
That-had hurt. It had hurt a very great deal, and not even Darkwind knew how much it hurt. She brooded on that, as Kyrr neared the the ruins, coming in high over the forest.