Page 30 of Gryphon in Light

Suddenly, he realized which path they were on. “This goes outside the Vale!” he said, stopping short.

“It does.” Firesong stopped, turned, and folded his hands inside his sleeves, watching Kel carefully.

Kel took several long, deep breaths. “Why are we going outside the Vale?” he asked carefully.

“Because you were entirely correct when you were talking this morning. Yes, my hosting room in my ekele is very, very heavily shielded. But accidents happen, and you really should not be that near to the Heartstone. Plus, being forced to stay in one room for however long it takes us to prepare the expedition is going to make you restless and aggrieved.”

“It will drive me insane,” Kel admitted, though he grumbled it. He started walking again, and Firesong resumed his own leisurely pace.

“So, given the need to get you away from the k’Valdemar Heartstone and the need for you to be able to move about somewhat more freely, we thought it better to create a place for you to stay outside of the Vale and the Veil that protects it.”

Kel flattened his ear-tufts. “Oh,” he said, unable to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “How nice. You’re putting me in a tent. I don’t have very good memories of being in tents.”

To his surprise, Firesong actually laughed. “Oh, come now,” he chided, looking back over his shoulder at Kel as they approached the edge of the Veil. “Ayshen took charge of this project. You should know better.”

“But you haven’t even had a day!” Kel objected, as Firesong made a sweeping motion with his arms and “made a hole” in the Veil large enough for both of them to pass through. Under other circumstances he wouldn’t have needed to do that, but . . . Kel couldn’t in the least object to him keeping the Veil and himself as far apart as feasible.

He shivered as they emerged into the damp spring air. After luxuriating in the warmth of the Vale, the unaltered world outside of it seemed very cold indeed. And it took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

But the path was broad and marked by stakes impregnated with something that made them glow in the dark. It wasn’t bright enough to illuminate the path, but it was certainly bright enough to keep him from blundering into the bushes. And there is no danger of these wooden stakes suddenly exploding. What was more, Kel himself was providing enough illumination to see the path itself. I could brighten more, I think, but I don’t know what that would do. I’ve just managed to achieve a stable state; I’d better not risk that.

But his ear-tufts perked back up again when warm light showed through the tree trunks up ahead. And as they drew nearer, he raised his head with interest. Because this was no mere “tent” that had been hastily pitched out in the woods.

I should have trusted Ayshen.

“What is this thing?” he asked, as they neared the round dwelling with its conical roof. Some light made the thing glow from within, but it wasn’t a lot of light, and in fact, it was only just enough to make the structure a slightly brighter patch against the dark woods. Two bright lanterns marked the three wooden steps that led up to the entrance flaps.

“It’s a variation on the tents our cousins of the Plains use,” Firesong explained, holding aside one of the flaps so he could duck under and go inside. “It’s quilted felt for the walls with a waxed canvas cover. The roof is made of the same stuff with an additional rain cover, and it’s all over a latticed wooden frame.”

And it was not on the cold hard ground. As Kel saw when he went up the three stairs, it had been built on a substantial wooden platform. He had to pause just inside to let his eyes adjust, as Firesong edged along his flank.

“What do you think?” Ayshen asked with pride. “Think this will suit you?”

Inside, the tent was furnished quite simply; the walls had been covered with cloth painted in soothing swirls of pale blue, yellow, and green. More oil lamps hanging from the wooden rafters supplied light, and there was a fine fireplace and chimney covered in green and blue tiles, sitting on a blue-tiled hearth square, making the place pleasantly warm. There were rugs on the oiled wooden floor, and short tables, and cushions of every size and shape, all different, all in the same color scheme as the walls. This tent was to the wretched slab of canvas he’d been left under in Deedun as a fine hunting lodge was to a hastily thrown-up shanty.

“How—did you do this in less than a day?” he asked. “It’s amazing!” He tried to emphasize his admiration, because it occurred to him, now that he was trying to be slow and deliberate about things, that the hertasi had been working his talons to the bone for him since he’d landed. “Thank you!” he added, with emphasis. “This is perfect!”

Ayshen swished his tail on the floor with pleasure. “I had help,” he pointed out. “And we’d been planning on building these things for visitors who were uneasy about living in the Vale for some time. The Shin’a’in call them ker’ts and they swear that they’ll hold against the worst winter weather the Plains can dump on you.” He looked around critically. “I wouldn’t go that far; the walls are still fabric, after all. But you should be comfortable here until we leave.”

“I was out here while you were asleep, putting up the same kinds of shields that are on my gathering room in my ekele,” Firesong told him while selecting one pillow here, another there, to put himself a kind of throne together. “And I had help with that as well. There is plenty of room for us to work here in bad weather. In good weather, we can work out in the fresh air for a change if we don’t need the heavy shielding.” He folded himself down into his nest, as Kel snagged cushions with his talons and made a nest of his own.

Kel paid careful attention to the Healing Adept and how he moved as he made himself comfortable. Firesong moved with a deliberation that suggested he was moving carefully. More evidence that he was not nearly as robust in health as he liked people to believe.

But he wasn’t going to ask Firesong about it while Ayshen was here.

Instead, he lay down, and sighed with the pleasure that came from not hurting. Although . . . now that Firesong had drawn his attention to the true state of his own health, he could tell that the sensation of being pain-free was at least partly false. There was pain somewhere under there, but he remembered what Firesong had said about how he now absorbed spell energy before the spell could do its work—so there was no point in trying to heal himself with a spell.

Or was there . . . ?

“Did you actually imply that I can learn to heal myself with a spell again?” he asked Firesong. “Or did I hallucinate that?”

Firesong took off his mask and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger again. “You’re getting a bit ahead of yourself,” he pointed out. “First, you have to learn how to control this new appetite for magic you’ve developed. Once you can control that, you can regulate how and when and how much magical energy you absorb, and then you can work Healing spells on yourself. Speaking of which—you haven’t flown in days, and you’re away from the Vale. How are you feeling? Drained? Draining? Weaker?”

The Kelvren-that-was would have immediately said that he felt absolutely fine. But after all of Firesong’s lectures and those potent demonstrations of how hazardous he could be, Kel put his head down on the cushion between his forelegs, closed his eyes, and went back to some of his earliest lessons in magic: how to look inside one’s self.

I haven’t had to use this for years. I’ve always just done what gryphons always did: trusted my instincts. But now my instincts can’t be trusted, and I really, really need to be able to analyze myself this way so it becomes as natural as breathing.

It was a struggle. Things kept going out of focus, and his focus shifted unpredictably. This was as hard as catching a fish in chin-deep water. Finally, he remembered his earliest lifting lesson and narrowed his concentration to just his left hind foot.