Amberdrake flushed faintly and pulled his hand back. “Sorry. I forgot that you didn’t inherit my impervious stomach.”
“No, she inherited my questionable one. Stop badgering the child, dear.” Winterhart emerged at last from the rear of the dwelling, putting the last touches on her hair. Blade admired the way she moved with a twinge of envy. Winterhart managed to combine a subtle sensuality with absolute confidence and a no-nonsense competence that Blade despaired of emulating.
Now if I looked like that. . . . Ah, well. Too bad I inherited Mother’s interior instead of her exterior!
Unlike her mate, Winterhart had not dressed for a special occasion, which much relieved Blade. Her costume of a long linen split skirt, tunic, and knee-length, many-pocketed vest, was similar to anything she would wear on any other day. The only concession she had made to Amberdrake’s sartorial splendor was to harmonize with his browns and ambers with her own browns and creams.
“I hope we won’t be unwelcome, but we would like to see you and Tadrith leaving, Blade,” Winterhart said, quite casually, as if they were only leaving for a few days, not six months. “We do know how to stay out from underfoot, after all. Yours is not the first expedition we’ve seen on its way.”
Now it was her turn to flush. “Well, of course I want you there to see us off! Of course you won’t be in the way!” she replied, acutely embarrassed. “I would never think that!”
The only trouble was, deep down inside, she had been thinking precisely that.
She gulped down her cooling tea to cover her embarrassment and guilty conscience, as Amberdrake toyed with a piece of bread, reducing it to a pile of crumbs.
He’s trying to pretend that he isn’t worried; trying to put on a brave face when I know he’s feeling anything but brave. Why? Why is he so worried? If he’s transparent enough for me to see through, he must be all of a knot inside.
Finally Amberdrake looked up at her, slowly chewing on his lower lip. “I know I probably seem as if I am overreacting to this situation, ke’chara,” he said quietly. “I shouldn’t be so worked up over the simple fact that you and your partner are going off on a normal, peaceful assignment. I realize that I am being quite foolish about this, and I can’t even pretend that I have some mysterious presentiment of doom. It’s all due to old—well, I suppose you’d have to call them habits, habits of feeling, perhaps.”
Winterhart stood behind him and put her hands on his shoulders, gently massaging muscles that must have been terribly tense. Outside, seabirds cried, greeting the dawn and the winds that would carry them out to their fishing grounds.
Amberdrake reached up and covered one of his mate’s hands with his own. “I have two problems with this assignment, really, and neither of them is rational. The first is that it is you, my daughter, who is going off for six months to a place that is unsettlingly far away. And you’ll be all alone there, except for a single gryphon. If it were someone else, I would see him or her off with a cheerful heart, and go about my business.”
“But it isn’t,” she stated.
“No.” He sighed, and patted Winterhart’s hand. “Your mother is handling this better than I.”
“I have perfect confidence in Aubri and Judeth,” Winterhart said serenely. “They wouldn’t send anyone that far away who wasn’t prepared for any contingency.” Her tone turned just a little sharp as she looked down at him. “If you won’t trust Blade, dearheart, at least trust them.”
“Intellectually, I do” Amberdrake protested. “It’s just—it’s just that it’s hard to convince the emotions.”
He turned back to Blade, who was even more embarrassed at her parent’s decision to bare his soul to her. She struggled not to show it. And underneath the embarrassment was exasperation.
Can’t he learn that I am grown now, and don’t need him to come haul me out of difficulties? Can’t he just let me go ?
“The other problem I have is very old, older than you, by far,” he told her earnestly. “And it has absolutely nothing to do with your abilities; it’s something I would still feel even if you were a warrior out of legend with magical weapons at your side. It doesn’t matter to my heart that this is peace time, that you are simply going off to man a wilderness outpost. The point to my reaction is that you are going out. When—” momentary pain ghosted over his expressive features. “—when people used to go out, back in the days of the wars, they didn’t always come back.” She opened her mouth to protest; he forestalled her.
“I know this is peacetime, I know you are not going forth to combat an enemy, I know that there is no enemy but storms and accident. But I still have the emotional reaction to seeing people going out on a quasi-military mission, and that fact that it is my daughter that is doing so only makes the reaction worse.” He smiled thinly. “You cannot reason with an old emotional problem, I am afraid.”
She looked down at the polished wood of the tabletop, and made little patterns with her forefinger, tracing the grain of the wood. What on earth did he expect her to say? What could she say? That was years and years ago, before I was even born. Can’t he have gotten over it by now? He’s supposed to be the great magician of the emotions, so why can’t he keep his own trained to heel? What could possibly go wrong with this assignment? We’ll have a teleson with us, we ‘II be reporting in, and if there is a life-threatening emergency and they can’t get help to us quickly, they ‘II take the risk and Gate us back!
But that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, and it wouldn’t help anything to say it. “I can understand. At least, I think I can. I’ll try,” she finished lamely.
True, it is nothing but wilderness between here and there—but when we get “there,” we’ll be in a fortified outpost built to withstand storm, siege, or earthquake. And, granted, no one has even tried to explore all the rainforest in between, but we’ll be flying, not walking! What could possibly knock us out of the sky that our people or the Haighlei wouldn‘t have encountered a long, long time ago ?
It was—barely—possible that some mage-made creatures of Ma’ar’s survived from the Cataclysm. It was less likely that any of them could have made it this far south. And even if they did, there had never been that many of them that could threaten a gryphon. The last makaar died ages ago, and there never was anything else that could take a flying gryphon down. We’ll be flying too high for any projectile to hurt us, and even if we weren‘t, there‘II be the mass of the carry-basket and all our supplies between us and a marksman.
“Father, I promise you, we’ll be fine,” she only said, choking down a last dry mouthful of bread. “Makaar are extinct, and nothing less could even ruffle Tadrith’s feathers. You’ve seen him; he’s one of the biggest, strongest gryphons in the Silvers!”
But Amberdrake shook his head. “Blade, it’s not that I don’t trust or believe in you, but there is far more in this world than you or Tadrith have ever seen. There were more mages involved in the Mage Wars than just Urtho and Ma’ar; plenty of them created some very dangerous creatures, too, and not all of them were as short-lived as makaar. I will admit that we are a long distance from the war zones, but we got this far, so who’s to say that other things couldn’t?”