Page 42 of Gryphon in Light

Silverfox could very easily define what he needed from those he selected. The ability to encounter an adversarial situation, and instead of denying it, confronting it, or blowing up at it, saying, “Well, what can we do, what is different, and how can that fix things?”

And I am quite good at finding out if they have that characteristic, thank you.

The only set of creatures he had not bothered to run through his interview was the bachelor pack of kyree. There was no point; they were already a pack. Five of them, to be precise, though one of them, the pack leader, was a kyree neuter with a taste for adventure rather than staying with the home pack and pursuing a less hazardous life.

The dyheli, on the other hand . . .

To say that Tyrsell had been displeased when Silverfox had insisted on interviewing—and rejecting some!—of the dyheli that the king stag had proposed was an understatement. He’d been furious. And he had assaulted Silverfox with a mental tirade that had only ceased when it became apparent to even Tyrsell that the kestra’chern was impervious to it. Then, for a moment, there had been blessed mental silence.

“You,” Silverfox had said, with all the stern demeanor of a teacher who has waited out a toddler’s tantrum, “have not heard the word no nearly enough.”

Tyrsell had pulled back in indignation at that. But as he gathered himself to resume his tirade, he stopped, turned his head to the side so he could get a better look at the kestra’chern, and took in Silverfox’s posture. Back erect, arms crossed over his chest, toe tapping with impatience.

“You are certainly the most formidable wielder of Mind-magic that I know,” Silverfox had said into the sudden silence. “But that doesn’t mean that you know anything about group synergy.”

:I!: began Tyrsell.

“You don’t know anything about it, because of your powers,” Silverfox interrupted him—something that simply didn’t happen to the dyheli, and so it knocked him off balance mentally. As Silverfox had intended. Tyrsell might be the mental master of all he surveyed, but a kestra’chern was generally Adept-level at verbal martial arts.

“When you need the herd to do something, you compel them,” Silverfox continued. “You don’t ask, you just do it. And it’s the understood agreement among all dyheli that this is the right of the king stag. Humans don’t work that way, nor do tervardi or hertasi or kyree. Attempts to try will result in resentment at best, rebellion at worst, and rejection the moment you turn your subjects loose. Well, look at how Kel feels about what you did to him!”

:I did what was best.:

“But was it what was right?” Silverfox had countered. “Was there a better way, a way that wouldn’t have resulted in anger and resentment on Kel’s part?”

He did not add, Because now Kel is never going to trust you again, because Tyrsell simply wouldn’t understand that. Trust was not a thing dyheli thought about most of the time. So he put it in terms of Kel’s emotional response, and the question of right or wrong.

:He will adapt. He is respectable.:

Silverfox knew that Tyrsell would never admit that he had been in the wrong in the way he had treated Kelvren, so he just moved on to the matter of the dyheli who would be going along. “We need twelve dyheli who are not going to object to being in harness,” he continued. “Four for each of the three barges.”

Tyrsell had snorted. :Just take the whole bachelor herd, then,: he’d replied, in tones that suggested he’d probably welcome the young bucks’ absence. :We can make more. It’s not as if you are going to have to worry about entertaining them.:

Just to be sure, Silverfox had interviewed the entire herd, and it was immediately obvious that the bachelor herd, like the kyree pack, was exactly what they would need for the known terrain. The young stags were all quite independent-minded, but in the dyheli way—once a direction was chosen, all of them pulled together. Literally so—youthful dyheli loved tests of strength. If Silverfox was any judge of these things, the young stags were all very likely to have their own herds one day, rather than being satisfied to follow Tyrsell and take the one or two mates that he would allow them.

Best of all, they were, one and all, great admirers of Kel, and quietly indignant about the way the gryphon had been treated. Kel could do with a good dose of that admiration right now, Silverfox had judged, and so the herd of sixteen joined the expedition.

But strangest of all were the pair of tervardi.

When Urtho created tervardi, he had probably begun with birds, but they had come farther from that ancestry than the hertasi had come from lizards. Flightless, but covered with feathers no bigger than a baby’s fingernail, they tended to wear loose clothing that would not pull those feathers with movement. They had abbreviated crests and curious mouths with horny lips, something like a cross between a mouth and a beak. Fortunately, they did not need lips to be able to speak perfectly well.

K’Valdemar Vale played host to several of the secretive creatures, but all Silverfox really knew about them was that their singing was exquisite, and that, like gryphons, tervardi were created by Urtho. Unlike gryphons, Ma’ar had not made any counterpart to tervardi.

Perhaps he wasn’t a music lover, was all Silverfox had thought at the time.

But then the pair of tervardi had turned up at the ekele after Firesong had gone out for his lessons with Kel. Silverfox knew immediately that they were a bonded pair by their body language; they mirrored each other constantly, adjusting their poses so that, if you ignored the male’s brighter feathers, they looked like identical bookends, or a single tervardi and its reflection.

“We wish to accompany the Bright Gryphon and your questors, that we may witness and assist the challenges you face,” said the male, when they had perched themselves on the stools in his office, feet on the seat cushions. That speaking voice was rich and resonant, with flanging builds and falls that added yet another layer of emotive subtlety behind the cadence of the words themselves, as if they were accompanied by a melody.

That took him completely by surprise. The tervardi had always seemed shy, fragile, and historically disinclined to stray out of the Vale and its safety. “Why?” he asked bluntly.

“The flock has deemed it needful,” the female trilled. “For many reasons, the chiefest being that although this is not the primary reason for your journey, you are certain to find a place for a new Vale, and we wish to see if that place may be suitable for a new flock, split from the one here. But there is another reason, which is that the unknown may answer to us,” she half-explained. It seemed to be a tervardi trait that to answer a question more fully, they made it more encompassing than direct, to add artistry to the simplest of exchanges. And vagary.

“You have my interest,” he said, sitting back in his chair and folding his hands.

“Our senses are of a broad scope, and we can warm chilled souls with touch and song, somewhat like you may give your graces,” the male replied. “Despite our vulnerabilities, or in a few cases because of them, we do not wish to merely relay the songs and stories of others.”

The female chimed in, head beside the male’s, “We do not wait upon death as spectators of life. And we are not entirely without abilities to thwart hostilities.” The male bobbed his head encouragingly, then nuzzled into the female’s neck-feathers as she continued. “What we give of ourselves in concert, we can give to the open air of the wild,” which certainly qualified as continuing the I-swear-I’m-not-vague quirk of theirs. “We know tones of healing and calm, and for focus over distance. Little-known, as is wisest, we are our own defenders. Perhaps one in ten or twenty of us . . . can kill with song at a distance.” The male snapped his “lips” together with an audible click and waited for Silverfox’s response, staring at him.