Page 37 of Gryphon in Light

Now, this was more like it! He bent his head modestly, but her open admiration did a bit to soothe the emotional wounds of his reception back at k’Valdemar.

“Is there anything more I can do for you, sir?” Jylan continued.

Now he was in a quandary. If he said “no,” would she be disappointed? But he didn’t want to say “no,” because he wanted more of this kind of company. Well, why not say as much? “I would appreciate your company,” he said, after another bite. “As long as you do not have other duties . . .”

“Oh! No, sir!” she exclaimed, hands clasped in front of her. “Ayshen said I was to make sure you have everything you need!”

Well, what I need is more of those “sirs” and admiring looks, he admitted to himself. “Then please, make yourself comfortable and stay for a bit.”

Taking him at his word, Jylan sat down on the floor with her tail curled around her, and gazed at him while he ate. Her mere presence was like soothing unguent on his raw nerves. “Are you Ayshen’s apprentice?” he asked, after the need to stuff himself became a little less urgent.

“Yes, sir!” she said. “He accepted me just two months ago!”

Hertasi usually apprentice in their early teens. Well! I’m glad the younglings think well of me! “Ayshen calls me Kel,” he told her. “You should, too.”

“Yes, s—I mean, yes, Kel.” She was so excited she practically vibrated. “Oh, si—I mean, Kel! Is it true that—” and she was off, asking so many questions that he was hard-put to get in bites between answers.

All in all, he couldn’t remember having had a better meal.

When he finished it, and she loaded up her handcart with the dishes and remains, he almost asked her to come back when she had delivered the detritus of the breakfast.

He didn’t, but not just because he didn’t want to keep her from whatever other duties Ayshen would assign to her today, but because it occurred to him that he should probably ration her admiration, since Firesong would, without a doubt, succeed in wounding his ego at least once before the day was over. And it would be nice to pull that bell rope and have little Jylan come around to pour out that balm again.

So instead, he stretched, and stretched, and then went for a pace around his tent, ending back where he started, and wondering when Firesong was going to show up. That was when he decided to take a closer look around the single room of the structure.

There’s more here than I thought there was, he realized. Not that the furnishings weren’t sparse, and mostly limited to rugs and cushions, because they were. But behind the cushions piled against the wall were other things. A couple of storage chests, some rolled-up blankets, extra firewood, and possibly other things, but he stopped when he came to four of the oversized, tough books that could hold up to gryphon talons. He pulled one out, tucked it under his right foreleg, and three-legged it to the center of the tent where the cushions were piled and the light was good. He propped it on a fat pillow slightly larger than the book was when open, and turned back the cover.

Somewhat to his surprise, it was a book by a trondi’irn about the magic-empowering system within gryphons. Someone must have brought this from White Gryphon. The Tayledras would have had no need for such a book and had no trondi’irn. The text was rather dry, but he had many, many compelling reasons to struggle his way through it right now.

But it did occur to him to wonder why it was sized and constructed for a gryphon to use, rather than a human.

He managed to get through about the first four pages before his head began to hurt. Not because he didn’t understand what he was reading—he did—but because thinking about his insides, rather than simply going with what felt right, was a lot harder than he had expected.

He closed the book and looked up, blinking his eyes to refocus them. Oh, that’s part of the headache. His eyes didn’t like focusing on something that close for too long. They were made for distance viewing, like the raptors that the gryphons were based on. Urtho probably never thought any of us would have time to read more than a single page of a message, he reasoned.

Some of the headache ebbed, and he decided to spend some of the time waiting for Firesong to appear in trying to apply what he had just read about to himself. But it was hard to concentrate properly, when sunlight poured through the open flaps of the tent, and birdsong drifted in that sounded strange to his ears—because this was the sound of the birds native to here, unadulterated by the foreign twitters and chirps of the Tayledras messenger birds.

It begged for a nap. And even though part of him chafed at the notion that he should be napping in the middle of the day, another part of him cautioned that he was still recovering from not only grievous injuries, but still more injuries done to him in the name of fixing him.

Partly fixing me.

He yawned halfway through the thought.

That patch of sun is going to be in the doorway until sunset. He paced over to that very inviting slice of gold on the wooden floor, then dragged a nice rug and a cushion over to it. With a sigh, he dropped down on the floor and made himself comfortable. I’ll just put my head down and close my eyes, he thought. No harm in that, and a little tiny rest won’t . . .

“Still life with gryphon,” Firesong’s amused voice broke into what was not quite a dream.

“Sketi!” Kel yelped, jumping to his feet, and managed to damp down what was very nearly a flare of power into “just” a flare of light. Nevertheless, he flared so brightly that for a moment even he was blinded, and he blinked watering eyes until his vision came clear again, and he saw Firesong, dressed quite plainly for once, in leaf-patterned trews of dark green and a tunic of lighter green, with a mask to match the tunic. Firesong was nodding with satisfaction, much to his shock.

“Don’t do that!” he snapped. “Don’t ever startle me like that! I could have killed you!”

“I was shielded,” Firesong retorted, “and you didn’t. You got control: crude control, I grant you, but you got your reaction and your powers under control and you didn’t harm anything. Not even the plants,” he added, pointing to the plants on either side of the short path to the tent steps. “How do you feel—inside?”

The change in subject caught Kel off-guard, and he answered without thinking. “Like I just wrenched something, pulling a blow,” he growled. “It’s fading, though.”

“That means you’re on the right track.” Firesong moved up the path and onto the steps, more or less forcing Kel to back up out of his warm patch of sun. Which was all right, at the moment; thanks to that pulled burst of power, Kel felt more than a little overheated. “And how are you liking that book?” Firesong waved at the abandoned book on the floor.

“Dry as bones a year old,” Kel sighed, and went over to the cushions that someone—probably Jylan—had arranged into a pile while he dozed. He kicked a few over to Firesong, who accepted them and made himself a seat out of them, then piled up a few for himself.