Page 64 of Valdemar

“I concede that many stones’ weight of annoyed divine horses will make an effective barrier against snoops and gossips,” Silvermoon laughed. His cousin finally cracked a smile. He whistled sharply and made a circling motion above his head, then pointed at the pasture. Two very large raptors left the roof of the Palace and flew in that direction. “And forgive me for calling you ‘horses.’ No offense meant.”

:None taken. Kordas, Restil wants to know if you will permit him and Darshay to join us.:

“Tell him yes,” Kordas replied.

Silvermoon smiled. “Useful,” was all he said, but Kordas took his meaning. Having a pocket Mindspeaker with every Herald was, indeed, exceedingly useful. And if that had been all that the Companions could do, it would have been enough. But the fact that they could do so much more made them invaluable.

“Very,” he said, dryly.

Just as they reached the Grove, Restil trotted up, riding bareback on Darshay. He slid down easily when he was near enough, looking as if he had never bothered with a saddle in his life.

“It’s good to see you, Silvermoon,” he said, with a little bow and a glance at Starbird.

“It is just as good to see you, young friend,” the Hawkbrother replied. “This is my cousin, Starbird.”

“And this is Darshay,” Restil replied, gesturing toward his Companion. He tilted his head to the side. “Cousin-cousin, or cousin by blood? If you don’t mind my asking.”

Finally Starbird spoke. She had a very nice contralto voice. “Cousin by blood,” she told him, and smiled a little. “It must sometimes be confusing when we refer to all elders as aunt and uncle or grandmother and grandfather, and everyone else as cousins. At least, when they aren’t a brother or sister, mother or father. Our relationships between cousins are—not as scandalous as you might assume.”

Oh, she’s testing Restil. As subtle as a slap, but that’s the play. Crafty.

“Well, I suppose it does make a Vale feel like an enormous family,” Restil replied diplomatically. “I did enjoy that aspect.”

And he replies, “I am not new to this.”

“And here we are,” said Kordas, pausing at the entrance to the Grove. “Shall we?”

He led the way without waiting for them to respond, and as soon as he entered the clearing, he got a surprise. Where grass had been, there was now a square section of pavement with a raised edge around it, in the creamy “stone” he recognized as the work of the Mother.

“It looks as if the Mother approves,” Silvermoon observed. “I assume you had a notion of putting a building here?”

“A universal temple was the thought,” Kordas replied.

“And it is a good thought. This will make an excellent foundation for such a thing. And that edge will serve very well as a bench for now.” Silvermoon passed through the break in the raised edge, where, presumably, a door would be, and sat down. He placed one hand on the stone beside him, and indicated to Starbird that she should come in and take a seat herself.

She sat, and got a thoughtful look. “The Mother is finished here,” she observed. “The rest of the building will be up to you. She must have intuited from one of you that you had plans for the sort of building you wanted.”

“Very likely,” Kordas agreed. “But that’s not key right now. I put up the banner because we have a situation a-building. It’s not a current threat, but it will become one eventually, and it is quite possible that trouble will rear its head in late fall.”

He explained what his spies had learned: that the leader of the city to which his defectors had gone was an Adept, that she was cultivating an Imperial style “army”—although by Imperial standards it was going to be hardly more than a battalion—and what the Valdemarans were doing to counter her.

Silvermoon frowned deeply the moment that Kordas mentioned that their foe was female and an Adept, but he waited until Kordas was finished, and took a deep breath.

“Well,” he said, with what sounded like resignation. “So that’s what she has been up to.”

Kordas stared at him. “You mean—you know about this Adept?”

“Adepts are rare. I find it vanishingly unlikely that k’Vesla would lose one, and that a different one would turn up in the direction we lost her. So. We can assume they are one and the same. Technically, she is one of us.” Silvermoon paused, and Starbird fidgeted uncomfortably with the edge of her right sleeve. “Was one of us. Have you ever known any Adepts?”

“The strongest mage I know of is Jonaton, and he’s not an Adept,” Kordas admitted. “The history of the Empire says that the first Emperor was an Adept . . .” He bit his lip, as he thought. The trees of the Grove muffled sound to an uncanny degree, and there was nothing in here but the sounds that they themselves were making. The birds had all gone silent, probably because of the presence of the bondbirds. “Succeeding Emperors collected every mage they could get their hands on. Father and Grandfather always suspected that the Emperors killed any Adepts they found, or at least used them in ways in which it was not obvious that they had control over an Adept, which is why they never appear again in Imperial history. I don’t even know how a mage becomes an Adept.”

“They don’t,” Silvermoon told him. “In most cases, Adepts are born, not made. They have to learn magic wielding, just as every other mage does, but they are born with an incredible capacity to manipulate power from literally any source, including ley-lines that you and I would not dare touch, or we’d be sizzling little bits of charred meat on the ground.”

“And you think this one is from k’Vesla?” Kordas ventured.

“Yes. And she disappeared early—very early—in her training. She was barely into her teens. We knew that she left the Vale under her own power. . . . We didn’t know why, and we tried to track her, but from being a very beginning apprentice, she seemed to have acquired all the skills of a mature, full Adept overnight, and so far as we were concerned, she vanished without a trace.” Silvermoon looked more somber than Kordas had ever seen him before. Probably with good cause. Bad enough that there was an Adept with plans of conquest in this area, but that she was a Hawkbrother? It didn’t reflect well on k’Vesla, and Silvermoon took these matters personally. “She was—” Silvermoon paused a moment. “—favored by me, and well liked by many.”

“That . . . is alarming,” Kordas said slowly, the hair on the back of his neck going up.