"Sick," complained Vree. Darkwind agreed with him. Magic contaminated those lands, a place Outlanders called the "Pelagir Hills" with no notion of just how much territory fell under that description. Magic flowed wild and twisted through the earth, a magic that warped and shaped everything that grew there-sometimes for the better, but more often for the worse.
Darkwind took Vree onto his wrist, the finger-long talons biting into the leather of his gauntlet as Vree steadied himself, and launched him into the trees to scout ahead. The forestgyre took to the air gladly; unlike his bondmate, Vree enjoyed the scouting forays. Hunting was no challenge to a bondbird, and there was only so much for Vree to do within the confines of k'sheyna Vale's safe territory. Scouting and guarding were what Vree had been bred for, and he was never happier than when flying ahead of Darkwind on patrol.
Darkwind didn't mind the scouting so much, even if the k'sheyna scouts were spread frighteningly thin-after all, he was a vayshe'druvon.
Guard, scout, protector, he was all of those.
It's the magic, he told himself-not for the first time. If it wasn't for the magic-Every time he encountered some threat to k'sheyna that used magic or was born of it, and had to find some way other than magic to counter that threat, it scorched him to the soul. And worse was his father's attitude when he returned-scorn for the mage who would abandon his power, and a stubborn refusal to understand why Darkwind had done so ...If I could go back in time and kill those fools that set this loose in the world, I would do so, and murder them all with my bare hands, he thought savagely. His anger at those long-dead ancestors remained, as he chose a tree to climb, looking for one he had not used before.
A massive goldenoak was his choice this time; he slipped hand-spikes out of his belt without conscious thought, and pulled the fingerless, backless leather gloves on over his palms. The tiny spikes set into the leather wouldn't penetrate the bark of the tree enough to leave places for fungus or insects to lodge, but it would give him a little more traction on the trunk. As would the shakras-hide soles of his thin leather boots.
In moments he was up in the branches. The game-trail along the edge of the territory lay below him. When two-legged intruders penetrated k'sheyna, most of the time they sought trails like this one.
When scouts patrolled, it was often up here, where the trails could be seen, but where the scouts themselves were invisible.
He shaded his eyes and chose a route through the next three forest giants by means of intersecting limbs, stowing his climbing-spikes and removing his double-ended climbing tool from the sheath on his back.
Then he picked his way through the foliage, walking as surefootedly on the broad, swaying branch as if he were on the ground, pulling another branch closer with the hook end of his tool and hopping from his goldenoak to the limb of a massive candle-pine just as the branch began to bow beneath his weight. He followed the new branch in to the trunk, then back out again to another conifer, this time stowing the tool long enough to leap for the branch above him and swing himself up onto it.
As he chose his next route, his thoughts turned back to that wild magic, as they always did. "what it has done to the land, to us, is unforgivable.
What it could do is worse.
Never mind that the Tayledras tamed that magic, cleansed the places it had turned awry, made them safe for people and animals alike to live there. Not that there weren't both there now-but they often found their offspring changed into something they did not recognize.
But that isn't our real task. Our real task is more dangerous. And my father has forgotten it ever existed, in his obsessions with power and Power.
Darkwind looked back at the treeless sky where the Plains began. The Shin'a'in had no such problems. But then, the Shin'a'in had little to do restricted parts of the Palace dressed in Grays-and I'm a bit too young kujwith magic. Odd to think we were one, once.
Very odd, for all that there was no mistaking the fact that Tayledras features and Shin'a'in were mirrors of each other. The Kaled'ain' they had been the most trusted allies of a mage whose name had been lost over the ages. The Tayledras remembered him only as
"The Mage of Silence," and if the Shin'a'in had recorded his true name in their knotted tapestries, they had never bothered to tell anyone in the Tayledras Clans.
Fatherforgets that the real duty of the Hawkbrothers is to heal the land of the scars caused by that war of magics, even as the Goddess has healed the Plains.
He often felt more kinship with his Shin'a'in "cousins" these days than he did with his real kin. The Lady gave them the more dangerous task, truth to tell, he admitted grudgingly. He looked back again, but this time he shuddered. The Hawkbrothers cleansed-but the Shin'a'in guarded.
And what they guardedsomewhere out there, buried beneath grass and soil, are the weapons that caused all this. And not all of them require an Adept to use them.
Only the Shin'a'in stood guardian between those hidden weapons and the rest of the world.
I don't envy them that duty.
"Men," Vree sounded the alert, and followed it with a vocal alarm-call.
Darkwind froze against the tree trunk for a moment, and touched Vree's mind long enough to see through the bondbird's eyes.
He clutched the trunk, fingernails digging into the bark. Direct contact with the forestgyre's mind was always disorienting. His perspective was skewed-first at seeing the strangers from above, as they peered up through the branches in automatic response to Vree's scream, the faces curiously flat and alien. Then came the dizzying spiral of Vree's flight that made the faces below seem to spin. As always, the strangeness was what kept him aware that it was the forestgyre's eyes he was using and not his own-the heightened sharpness of everything red, and the colors Vree saw that human eyes could not.
He was a passive traveler in Vree's mind, not an active controller. It was a measure of the bond and Vree's trust that the forestgyre would let him take control on occasion, but Darkwind took care never to abuse that trust. In general it was better just to observe-as he found yet again.
Vree spotted one of the strangers raising what was probably a weapon. and kited up into the thick branches before Darkwind had registered more than the bare movement of an arm.
Darkwind released his link with Vree, and his hold on the trunk at the same time, running along the flat branch and using his tool as a balance-aid, and leaping to the next tree limb a heartbeat later. In his first days with Vree it had taken him a long time to recover from a linkand some never did, especially the first time. Caught up in the intoxication of the flight and the kill, they never detached themselves. And unless someone else discovered them, they could be lost forever that way-their bodies lying in a kind of coma, while their minds slowly merged with that of the bird, diminishing as they merged, until there was nothing left of what they were.
That had never happened in Darkwind's lifetime by accident, although there had been one scout, when he was a child, who had a lightning-struck tree crush him beneath its trunk. He had been far from a Healer, and had deliberately merged himself with his bird, never to return to the crippled and dying wreck of his body. He remained with k'sheyna within his bird's mind, slowly fading, until at last the bird vanished one day, never to return.