Page 20 of Gryphon in Light

Nightwind, her eyes as gray as stormclouds and her knee-length hair dyed as black as a new moon night, shrugged on a fresh set of her trondi’irn working clothes, belt, scarf, and apron. Wearily, she approached where Kelvren lay perfectly symmetrically on a grassy spot amongst clover. The dyheli king stag Tyrsell simply turned and walked away out of sight, sending, :Good fortune to you, friend of the herd, gentle slopes and tasty feeding,: accompanied by faint mental images of just that, but they were full-sensory ones. It was a strange feeling indeed to have the subtleties of berries, grasses, and leaves on your tongue, and register the tastes, when you weren’t even the same species as who put them there. Tyrsell was accompanied by another dyheli Kelvren had known since youth, Snowfire’s usual mount Sifyra, and they walked through a curtain of vines under a stone arch where a coiled pair of brightly colored plump snakes dozed.

Kelvren flexed each pair of appendages in turn. Everything felt better than it had in months, and his full-body glow had lessened significantly. He asked the obligatory first question, the one that everybody asked when they regained awareness, regardless of their era, situation, or species.

“How long was I out?”

“Six days, and maybe ten candlemarks,” Nightwind answered. “I know you’ve been hurt before, Kel, but this time, you were in a bad way like nothing we’d seen before. We learned a lot from you. A lot about you. You’ve had almost a hundred people looking you over or consulted by teleson, and there’s nothing quite like this in any records. Kyree historians all the way back to White Gryphon were asked about it, and trondi’irn from two Vales were brought in. Everyone from Adept to handwaver in the Vale’s been talking about you. We think this is unprecedented.”

“I drew a crowd, at least,” Kelvren commented, immediately sorting out the part that was important to a gryphon, while standing up and fanning his wings. They tingled when he did, and the tingle flowed into his chest and spine heartbeats later. “I remember arriving, being insulted, being assaulted, then surrendering to you. Some sketi-sack said I should be exiled!”

“We aren’t proud of that,” Darian conceded. “They only saw the surface problems. You know as well as any of us how tricky magical biology can be.”

Kelvren returned to his self-absorption. “It was Treyvan that did this to me, did you know that? Treyvan himself! Whatever it was, he made it work, and he did it for me. This was done by the best.”

“We know—we investigated you very deeply. We went into memories past what you think you know. Firesong said it was a brilliant solution, ‘for a generalist like Treyvan.’ What Treyvan did was very risky. He turned a known ruin into a new kind of ruin.” Nightwind sighed and shook her head.

Darian took up the thread of conversation. “You survived long enough to make it here, but you’re not just in trouble, you are trouble. In a few ways more than usual. We think you will live, but it may not be long, and it won’t be the life you had.”

Kelvren huffed at Nightwind and Darian, and walked in a wide circle around them. “Hurrh! I thought I taught you, Dar’ian, none of us live long and every new moment means the life we had is gone. So give me the details, what is such a ruin now? I feel good. Hungry but good.” He said the last part loudly enough that any hertasi nearby would get the hint.

Nightwind took the answer up. “Without getting too technical, we rebroke your bones, set them, accelerated their healing, and repaired a significant amount of internal damage. Your virtusgan—the larger-bone linings—normally draw in magic energy at a steady rate and refuse the rest, but yours were dying off when Treyvan got to you. That meant your virtutem organ was essentially going dry, and your spleen tried to compensate. Your indusvenarum system had nothing to distribute, so it was shutting down. When Treyvan’s gamble actually worked, the virtusgan feasted. In fact, it gorged and didn’t self-limit. It became dangerously swollen, the virtutem had too much to handle, and you had virtusgan ruptures all through your body. You were so overwhelmed that what should have been agony from it was just washed away. You didn’t have a clue how hurt you were. Just the opposite, in fact. You were euphoric.”

“Of course I felt euphoric! Look what I had done!” Kelvren proclaimed. “I rallied a Valdemaran army! I lit their path to victory!”

“You—did do some impressive things,” Darian said, tactfully.

Nightwind said, “And you came back. Your feathers were as dry as any I’ve ever seen. Without trondi’irn care you went un-oiled too long. You could have gone up like breezecotton if a campfire popped a spark near you.”

Kelvren turned his head to look himself over. “I think I knew that somehow. When I felt that new energy surge up into me, I was scared. I thought I’d turn to ash. But then I thought, to dump away the heat from too much magic power, use it for something. The fastest, simplest thing I knew was Lightcasting. You should have seen it!”

“During your interrogations, I didn’t just see it, I felt it,” Nightwind replied. She was, after all, an accomplished Empath, which was a significant part of why she was a successful trondi’irn. Even when she did not know a creature’s anatomy intimately, she could at least understand what they felt, and that informed her healing abilities. “Tyrsell and the stronger Mindspeakers linked us all. Believe me, now they know far more about gryphons and their needs than they likely ever wanted to.”

Darian joked, “I think Greywinter wants a gryphon costume now. Much of what you like appeals to his tastes. He is newly, ah, invigorated.”

Nightwind chuckled briefly, but returned to solemnity soon enough and rubbed at one of the gryphon’s ears. “You went through so much, Kel. I have lost gryphons before. You were close to being my third. I have never worked on anyone like you. I am so sorry, you were pushed too far when you were interrogated—”

“I was what? Who was responsible for that?”

“We all were,” she lied. Kelvren could usually tell when a human was lying, and he had known Nightwind so long it was very obvious she was covering something up. “We needed to know what you knew, so the search went deep into your mind. Too deep. Too far back into you, and it made you—well, it hurt you. In your mind. There were some arguments about what to do, and what was done made your breathing and your heart stop, and—the important thing is, we brought you back.”

It’s not difficult to imagine whose horns that “mistake” lay upon. Tyrsell was never spoken of as being gentle, and the king stag had all the subtlety of a horizon-wide thunderstorm over a wildfire. It also explains the mental tone of that farewell. It was solemn and apologetic. What she’s trying so hard to hide is probably that Tyrsell found me to be too much of a threat to the Vale and killed me, and the others beat away at reviving me.

“Firesong and I fixed the trouble,” Nightwind continued. “Together, and with help from k’Vala, we put things into a . . . kind of working order. It took a while.”

“It is a wonder that you are making any noise at all, since you’re putting so much work into not saying anything,” Kel grumbled.

Darian spread his hands and pleaded, “It is just that we don’t know what memory of the past few days you actually have, Kel. We’re afraid that if we say the wrong thing, you might get angry.”

Kelvren’s building displeasure peaked. His eyes flashed, then pinned at them both, before he abruptly stood up and stalked out toward his home. “Angrier.”

They deserve better than that from me, but right now, I just don’t want to be near them, and I hate the idea of that damned dyheli laying every secret I’ve ever had out bare as a book page. We keep secrets for good reasons, but dyheli don’t. They only know indifference, neutrality, invasiveness, and more invasiveness as their degrees of “secrecy.” Now they all know who and what I actually am, not what I want them to know. It is infuriating!

Crows and ravens chased two falcons through the distant branches, disturbing a roosting vulture who loped through the air for someplace more peaceful. Kelvren shouldered through the arch’s thick wall of trimmed vines to find the hertasi Ayshen and his mate Drusi, the dyheli stag Sifyra, and the human kestra’chern Silverfox.

Oh, here’s a coincidence, the same dyheli stag Tyrsell was with. I’ll lay odds he’s Tyrsell’s prize pupil. Probably here to paralyze me if he feels like it, or share my deepest thoughts if he feels bored. “Bring me a bowl of berries and I’ll tell you Kelvren’s deepest fears!” Won’t that be fun? Just hilarious, you hoof-holes.

Sifyra twitched both ears forward and stared at Kelvren.

Silverfox did not exactly show age ungracefully, but although his hair matched Nightwind’s in length, by now a full third of it was streaked in stripes of light gray. The two hertasi wore long, customized tool vests and tail cuffs with long fringe to match the vests, and each other. They were in a semicircle on the far side of the pathway junction, and Ayshen was showing Silverfox some decorative chains when Kel stepped right into the middle of them. The four of them were not blocking Kelvren’s way, but it was clear that they’d been waiting there to be an escort.