Quickly she shunted it away; helped him to his feet, and led him as quickly as she could to the staircase. My room. I have to get him somewhere quiet. If he panics more_
She didn't want to speculate. He was armed with five long talons on each hand, and four longer talons on each foot, not to mention that cruel beak. This collapse might only be momentary. If he thought he was in danger again, and lost control of himself_
Well, she had seen hawks in a panic; they could and did put talons right through a man's hand. T'fyrr was at least ten times the size of a hawk.
Somehow she got him into her room and shut the door; she lowered the bed and put him down on it, dimming the lights. He seemed to be in a state of shock now; he shook, every feather trembling, and he didn't seem to know she was there.
All right. I can work with that. I don't need him to notice me.
Of course not. All she needed was to touch him_and open up every shield she had on herself. But there was no choice, and no hesitation. She sat down beside him, laid one hand on his arm, and released her shielding walls.
It was worse, much worse, than she had ever dreamed.
After a time, she realized that he was speaking, brokenly. Some of it was in her tongue, some in his own, but she finally pieced together what he was saying, aided by the flood of emotions that racked him. He could not weep, of course; it seemed horribly cruel to her that he did not have that release. If ever anyone needed to be able to weep, it was T'fyrr.
He had gone to Gradford, on behalf of Harperus, and he had been captured and held as a demon by agents of the Church. They had bound him, imprisoned him in a cage so small he could not even spread his wings, which had driven him half mad.
She tried to imagine it, and failed. Take all the worst nightmares, the most terrible of fears, then make them all come true. The Haspur needed space, freedom, needed these things the way a human needed air and light. Take those away_and then take away air, and light as well_
How did he endure it? Only by descent into madness....
But that had not been enough for them. Then they had starved him_which had sent him past madness altogether, turned him from a thinking being into a being ruled only by fear, pain and instinct.
As familiar as she was with hawks, she knew only too well what they were like when they hungered. Their entire being centered on finding prey and eating it_and woe betide anything that got in the way. But T'fyrr had never been so overwhelmed by his own instincts before; he had not known such a thing could happen. He retained just enough of his reasoning ability to take advantage of an opportunity to escape provided by the Free Bards.
He did not have enough left to do more than react instinctively when one of the Church Guards tried to stop him.
He did not realize what he had done until after_after he had killed and eaten a sheep on the mountainside, and remembered, with a Haspur's extraordinary memory, what had happened as he escaped. He could not even soften the blow to himself by forgetting....
He killed. He had never killed before, other than the animals that were his food Certainly he had never even hurt another thinking being before. For all their fearsome appearance, the Haspur were surprisingly gentle, and they had not engaged in any kind of conflict for centuries. It was inconceivable for the average Haspur to take a sentient life with his own talons. Oh, there were Haspur who retained some of the savage nature of their ancestors, enough that they served as guards to warn off would-be invaders, or destroy them if they must. But the average Haspur looked on the guards the same way the average farmer looked on the professional mercenary captain; with a touch of awe, a touch of queasiness, and the surety that he could not do such a thing.
To discover that he could had undone T'fyrr.
To learn, twice now, that his battle-madness had been no momentary aberration was just as devastating.
Gradually, he allowed her to hold him, as he shook and rocked back and forth, his spirit in agony. He had come close, so close, to killing again tonight, that the experience had reopened all his soul-wounds. The man who had been nearest him had been reaching for a hand-crossbow at his belt_and that was how he had been captured the first time, with a drugged dart shot by a man who caught him on the ground. The horror of that experience was such that he would rather die_
_or kill again_
_than endure it a second time.
And with her spirit open to his, she endured all the horror of it with him, and the horror of knowing that he could and would kill as well.
His throat ached and clenched; his breath came in hard-won gasps, harsh and unmusical, and every muscle in his body was as tight as it could be. If he had been a human, he would have been sobbing uncontrollably.
He could not_so she wept for him.
She understood, with every fiber of her spirit, just how his heart cried out with revulsion at the simple fact that he had taken a life, that if forced to he would do so again. There was no room in his vision of the world for self-defense, only for those who killed and those who did not. She knew, deep inside her bones, why he hated himself for it.
He had not stopped; had not tried to subdue rather than kill. Never mind that he was mad with fear, pain, hunger. Never mind that the man who had tried to stop his escape would probably have killed him to prevent it. The man himself was not his enemy; the man was only doing the job he'd been set. T'fyrr had not even paused for a heartbeat to consider what he was doing. He had struck to kill and fled with the man's heart-blood on his talons.
And she told him so, over and over, between her sobs of grief for him, just how and why she understood. She would have felt the same, precisely the same, even though there were plenty of people she considered her friends and Clansfolk who would never agree with her. Her personal rule_which she did not impose on anyone else_forbade killing. She knew that she might find herself in the position one day of having to kill or die herself. She did not know how she would meet that. She tried to make certain to avoid situations where that was the only way out.
Which was why, of course, she avoided cities. Death was cheap in cities; the more people, the cheaper it was. At least out in the countryside, life was held at a dearer cost than here, where there were people living just around the corner who would probably strangle their own children for a few coins.
All of that flitted through her thoughts as a background to T'fyrr's terrible pain, and to the tears that scalded her own cheeks. But there was a further cost to this ahead for her. She had thought that she had opened herself to him completely before; but now, as she held him and sensed that this would bring him little or no ease, she realized that she had still held something of herself in reserve. Nothing less than all of herself would do at this moment_because of what he was.
The Haspur had an odd, sometimes symbiotic relationship with the humans who shared their aeries and villages. Most of the time, it never went any deeper than simple friendship, the kind she herself shared with the Elves who had gifted her with her bracelets.