Winterhart shook her head. “You have me at a loss. I honestly don’t know. And I’ll probably wake up with nightmares every few days for the next six months. I suppose we should concentrate on our mates’ worries instead?”
“That will certainly give us something to do, and give them the job of dealing with how we comfort them.”
Zhaneel nodded, then turned, and reached out to touch Winterhart’s shoulder with a gentle talon. She smiled, and her eyes grew softer as she met Winterhart’s gaze. “And perhaps we can give each other the comfort of a sympathetic ear, now and again, sister-in-spirit.”
One small problem with finally being on duty. Rising at unholy hours. Tadrith sighed, but in-audibly; his partner sometimes seemed to have ears as sharp as a gryphon’s. As usual on this journey, Blade was up at the first hint of light. Tad heard her stirring around outside the tent they shared; building up the fire, puttering with breakfast, fetching water. She was delightfully fastidious about her person, bathing at night before she went to bed, and washing again in the morning. It would have been distinctly unpleasant to share a tent with anyone whose hygiene was faulty, especially now that they were away from the coast and into the wet forest. It was very humid here, and occasionally oppressively hot. Blade was not just being carried like living baggage; the basket shifted in every change of wind, and she had to shift her weight with it to keep it from throwing him off. This was work, hard work, and she was usually damp with sweat; by the time he landed for a rest, she was usually ready for one, too.
He, of course, was not burdened by the need to wash in order to get clean, and most humans expressed pleasure in a gryphon’s naturally spicy musky scent. He couldn’t fly with wet wings, and there usually wasn’t time to bathe before night fell when they stopped. He had decided to forgo anything but dust-baths until they arrived at their outpost. So he felt perfectly justified in lying in warm and sheltered comfort while she went through her bathing ritual and tended to the camp chores.
There wasn’t anything he could do to help her anyway. He couldn’t fetch water; raptoral beaks were not well suited to carrying bucket handles. He shouldn’t have anything to do with the campfire; gryphons were feathered and feathers were flammable.
He had done the larger share of work last night, when it came to chores. He had brought up enough wood to feed the fire until this morning, and provided part of his kill to feed them both at breakfast. He would take the tent down, just as he had put it up; the fast way of erecting it required magic, and although he was no match for his father in that area, he was a minor mage in simple object-moving spells. So he had done his share of the camp chores; this was not lazing about, it was the just reward of hard work.
He closed his eyes, and listened to water splashing and Blade swearing at how cold it was, and smiled. All was well.
Because they were already working so hard, he was bending a personal rule and using magic to hunt with. He used it to find a suitable animal, and to hold that animal in place once he found it. They couldn’t afford energy wasted in prolonged hunting, not now; he had to have the tent up, the wood in camp, and his kill made before dark. Back at White Gryphon, he could afford to be a “sportsman”; there were plenty of herd beasts and fish to feed the gryphons, and wild game was rightfully considered a delicacy. Once he arrived at Outpost Five, there would be time enough on each scouting patrol to hunt “properly.” But he would consume more food than they could carry on this trip, and that meant hunting with absolute efficiency, using every trick at his disposal.
Finally, the sounds of fat sizzling into the fire made him open his eyes and bestir himself again. That was breakfast, and although he personally preferred his meat raw, there were other things to eat besides meat. Though primarily carnivores, gryphons did enjoy other delicacies, and Blade had found some marvelous shelf-fungi last night when he had been bringing in wood. A quick test had proven them to be nonpoisonous, and a quick taste showed that they were delicious. They had saved half for breakfast, still attached to its log just in case detaching it might make it decay.
Fresh venison and fresh mushrooms. A good night’s sleep and a fine day of flying ahead of us. Life is good.
“If you don’t come out of there, sluggard,” Blade’s voice warned from beyond the canvas, “I’m going to have all of this for myself.”
“I was simply granting you privacy for your bath,” he replied with dignity, standing up and poking his beak out of the tent flap. “Unlike some other people I could mention, I am a gentleman, and a gentleman always allows a lady her privacy.”
Perhaps it was technically morning, but out there under the trees it was gloomy as deepest twilight. Blade was slicing bits of fungus into a pan greased with fat; he saw that she had already set aside half of the remainder for him. It sat on top of his deer-quarter, from which she had sliced her breakfast steak.
She had dressed for the heat and humidity, in a sleeveless tunic and trews of Haighlei weave— though not of Haighlei colors. The Haighlei were quick to exploit the new market that White Gryphon provided, weaving their cool, absorbent fabrics in beiges, grays, and lighter colors, as well as black and white. The people of k’Leshya could then ornament these fabrics to suit their own cultural preferences. The results varied as much as the root-culture of the wearer. Those of Kaled’a’in descent embroidered, belled, and beaded their garments in a riot of shades; those who had been adopted into the clan, those outsiders who had ended up with k’Leshya and the gryphons, were usually more restrained in their garments. Blade, consciously or unconsciously, had chosen garments cut in the style of the Kaled’a’in, but in the colors of her mother’s people. In this case, she wore a subdued beige, with woven borders in cream and pale brown. As always, even though there was no one to see it, the Silver Gryphon badge glinted on her tunic.
Around them, but mostly above them, the birds and animals of this forest foraged for their own breakfasts. After three days of travel, they were finally into the territory that the Haighlei called a “rain forest,” and it was vastly different from any place he had ever visited before. The trees were huge, incredibly tall, rising like the bare columns of a sylvan temple for what seemed like hundreds of lengths until they finally spread their branches out to compete with each other for sun. And compete they did; the foliage was so thick and dense that the forest floor was perpetually shrouded in mysterious shadow. When they plunged down out of the sunlight and into the cover of the trees, it took some time for their eyes to adjust.
Despite that lack of direct sunlight, the undergrowth was surprisingly thick. As was to be expected, all kinds of fungi thrived, but there were bushes and even smaller plants growing in the thick leaf litter, and ropelike vines that wreathed the trees and climbed up into the light. Anywhere that a tree had fallen or the course of a stream cut a path through the trees, the undergrowth ran riot, with competition for the light so fierce that Blade swore she could actually see the plants growing larger as she watched them.
She was the team “expert” on plants, and half of the ones she had examined at their campsites were new to her. And they hadn’t even done any exploring; the only plants she saw were the ones she found in the course of setting up camp! Tad couldn’t even begin to imagine what she’d find when she began looking in earnest—and he began taking her up into the canopy.