:Watch and guard,: he told the bondbird, keeping things simple. People had been known to have odd reactions to drugs, and children in particular were prone to sleepwalking after a severe trauma. Snowfire was not in the least deceived by the boy’s apparent calm; Nightwind said that there was great emotion ready to burst out at any moment, and he believed her. :Find me if something happens.:
Hweel roused his feathers and huured his agreement. Now that he was full of rabbit, he was quite content to stay in one place with a foot tucked up beneath his breast-feathers.
Snowfire joined the rest of the group around the small fire that Nightwind kept feeding with herbs to keep the insects away. He accepted a mug of cool water from the spring from Wintersky with a nod of thanks, and took his place in the council session that had formed.
“I’ve told the others what the boy told us,” Starfall explained, as firelight flickered and cast odd shadows on his face. “And the very first question I can think of is whether we should involve ourselves at all.”
“I don’t think we can, to tell you the truth,” replied Wintersky regretfully. “I mean, this sounds like an army! And we have how many? Not quite twenty humans, twice that in the dyheli herd, a couple of hertasi and a gryphon. We aren’t exactly equipped to be fighting battles either.”
The fire popped and hissed, blending with the sound of movement of something large, like the sussuration of canvas across canvas.
“I would sssay that one grrryphon isss worrrth an arrrmy, but I rrreluctantly concurrr,” a deep voice rumbled from the shadows behind Nightwind. “It only takesss a sssingle arrrow.”
“It isn’t just an army of men, but of Changechildren as well, and that means a mage is deep in it somewhere,” Starfall put in. “Unless what the boy saw were just costumes or disguises, and I can’t imagine why barbarians would bother wearing disguises.”
“It sounds to me as if someone managed to reconcile a great many Bearclan septs,” Snowfire mused. “Maybe - well, this is a wild surmise, but from what I know about the northern tribes, they attach heavy religious and emotional significance to their totems, and a lot of emphasis is put on taking on the attributes of those totems. Now, what would happen if a mage came along, perhaps in the guise of a shaman, who could give them physical attributes of their totems?”
“He’d own the clan to the point of being able to reconcile all the feuds between the septs,” Starfall said flatly. “And there was someone who managed that, once.”
“Yesssss.” The shadow behind Nightwind rose, and loomed up over her head. “Yessss, therrre wassss. And we all know hisss currrsssed name.” The shadow resolved itself into a shape, and the shape into a creature, a creature with the mantling wings and head of a raptor, but a raptor of enormous size, and with four limbs instead of two. “He wasss called Ma’arrrrr.”
“I don’t think we’re in any danger of seeing another Ma’ar, Kelvren,” Nightwind soothed. “It’s all right.”
But Starfall frowned. “Perhaps. And perhaps not. I can’t help but think that this is a rather nasty coincidence, these barbarians, presumably led or backed by a mage, suddenly moving into territory where no one has yet established a matrix for magic. The difference between a Ma’ar and a petty tyrant is largely a matter of power.”
“All the more reason for you to form and hold the matrix,” Snowfire replied firmly. “That will have to be our first priority, it seems to me. If the boy is correct, most - if not all - of his people escaped. Surely one will reach Lord Breon, and he can take care of the military problem from there.”
“That would be best,” Starfall replied, but with a little reluctance. “We are hardly the group best suited to taking on an army.”
“But think of what it would have meant if sssomeone had ssstopped Ma’arrr when he wasss gatherrring the trrribesss,” Kelvren urged, his eyes glinting in the firelight. “Would it not have been worrrth everrry sssacrrrificssse to do sssso?”
“We can stop any mage just as easily by holding the magic energy of this area away from him,” Snowfire replied. “I think we should concentrate on getting that done first. By then, we should know if the Valdemarans have taken care of the military situation themselves.”
“And if they have not?” Kelvren persisted.
“We’ll deal with that when we come to it,” Starfall said firmly, ending the debate.
The gryphon folded his wings, feathers making a cloth-on-cloth sound as they slid across each other intq precise order. “Verrry well. I will be - rrready. And if they do rrre-memberrr Ma’arrr and hisss waysss - “ Kelvren reached for a log of firewood and purposefully splintered it into several pieces merely by squeezing it. “ - then I will ensurrre that they rrrememberrr grrryphonsss asss well.”
Four
Darian woke in the morning feeling as if his head weren’t working quite right. It was difficult to put his thoughts together; he seemed to be taking a very long time to get even a single thought to form. He stared for a long time at the wall that was a hand’s breadth or two past his nose, and wondered why the rough texture didn’t look the way it should. Why did each rough-sawn plank look rounded? And why wasn’t the wall itself slanting toward him as it formed the peak of the roof? His mind moved slowly and his thoughts felt fuzzy around the edges. And what was wrong with the light? It was greenish, and it was much darker in the loft than it should have been.
It couldn’t be just turning dawn, because he never woke up that early. Maybe it’s going to rain? Justyn hadn’t Fore-Seen any rains, though, and that was one thing that he could do right; his weather-watching was always accurate.
He’d had the strangest dream, too - that the village had been attacked by a whole army. There was fire, a lot of fire in the dream, the whole town had been on fire. It had been more of a nightmare. Darian shivered and tried to remember more. There was a lot of him running, and monsters chasing him, then more running through the forest, then horrible men on horseback chasing him - getting rescued by a Hawkbrother and an owl, a huge owl -
A pretty strange dream, too. When would I ever see a Hawkbrother? Never in a thousand years. And who would ever bother to attack Errold’s Grove with an army? What could they possibly want? Beans and turnips? Or maybe chickens - He had to shake his head at the way he was trying to make sense of a dream. Anything can happen in a dream, of course - one of Widow Clay’s chickens must have started laying silver eggs with golden yolks. Or maybe Justyn ‘s spells finally worked and everyone was suddenly rich, and that was why an army came.
Then he rolled over, and saw that he wasn’t in the loft, but in a strange, octagonal hut made of rough logs - windowless, and with vines over the door. There was a huge owl, the same one he thought he’d only “dreamed” about, blinking sleepily on a perch to one side. At that moment, he realized with a plummeting heart that it hadn’t been a dream at all. It had all been real, horribly real. Errold’s Grove was gone - or if not gone, it was in the hands of an army of violent strangers, and everyone he knew had fled in fear of losing their lives.