I hope. But I'm not going to count on anything like sense out of them.
He took the shortest possible route to the pass out of the Vale, cutting down long-neglected paths until he reached the boundary and the shieldwall.
As he burst through a stand of wildly overgrown, flowering bushes, he saw Vree waiting for him in a tree growing just outside the mage-barrier.
The gyre preferred not to enter the Vale itself if he could help it; many of the other bondbirds demonstrated Vree's distaste for the Vale proper, and tried to stay outside of the shield. Darkwind wasn't sure if it was because they shared their bondmates' dislike of magic, or sensed the problems with the Heartstone. One thing was certain, he knew that aversion dated back to the disaster, and not before.
He just wished he could avoid the Vale as well.
The place made him uneasy, for all its luxury. Here, near the edge, it wasn't so bad. The flora were tropical and wildly luxuriant, but it was nothing that couldn't be found in a glassed-over hothouse. But the closer he came to the damaged Heartstone, the stranger the plants became-and the odder he felt; slightly disoriented, off-balance, lethargic. As if something was sapping his energy, clouding his thoughts.
And it's not my imagination, either, he thought stubbornly. If Vree and the other birds don't like the Vale, that should tell us all something. No matter what Father claims. What would he know, anyway? His bondbird is that damned crow-hardly bred out of the wild line, and it might as well be a metal simulacrum for all the intelligence it shows. It does what he tells it to, it doesn't talk to the other birds at all, and most of the time it sits on its perch in the corner of the ekele, like some kind of art object.
He passed through the barrier-a brief tingling on the surface of his skin-and emerged into the real world again. Already he felt lighter, freer, and it seemed to him as he walked out on the path taking deep breaths of the pine-scented air, that even his footfalls were more confident.
No cloying flower-scents, no heavy humidity-just an honest summer breeze. No one to answer to, out here. No one questioning his judgment unless it really needed to be called into question.
"Vree!" He Mindcalled the gyre, suddenly anxious to feel the bird's familiar weight on his shoulder. Vree obliged him by sweeping down out of the top of the nearest pine, landing on his leather-covered wrist with a thunder of pinions, and stepping happily from there to his favorite perch, on the padded shoulder of Darkwind's jacket.
"Don't like Vale," the falcon complained. "Too hot, too empty, feels bad.
Don't like crow, stupid crow. Don't go back." He Sent agreement tinged with regret. "I have to, featherhead. But you don't have to go in if you don't want to. And I don't have to go back for a While." The bird crooned a little, and preened a beakful of Darkwind's hair, as the scout laughed softly. Feeling considerably more cheerful now that he was outside the Vale and wouldn't have to face another Council meeting for days, Darkwind returned the bird's affectionate caress, scratching the breast and working his fingers up to the head-feathers. Vree made a happy chuckling sound, and bent to have his head scratched a little more.
"Sybarite," Darkwind said, laughing.
"Feels good," the bird agreed. "Scratch"
"Report, featherhead," he told the gyre, "Or no more scratches." Vree actually heaved a sigh, and reluctantly complied. The bondbirds had some limited abilities at relaying and reporting messages; while Darkwind was in the Vale, he depended on Vree to keep in contact with the rest of the scouts under his command. Vree had messages from most of the scouts; all those who had not reported in person before Darkwind went to the Council meeting this afternoon.
Most of the messages were simple enough, even by Vree's standards"
"Nothing to report,"
"All quiet,"
"All is well." A normal enough day; he'd been half expecting that something disastrous would happen while he was out of touch, but it seemed that all the scouts had things well in hand.
All except for the handful of scouts who shared the southern boundary with him.
Those sent back messages that there were problems. Three of them said that they had turned their watch over to the night-scouts and would meet him at his ekele, to make their reports in person. Vree could not imitate the emotional overtones of those Mind-sent messages, relayed through their birds to Vree, but the terse quality did not auger well.
He swore silently to himself; the last time he'd had to take reports in person, he and the rest of the scouts had faced a week-long incursion of magically-twisted creatures that ultimately cost them two scouts and the only mage who had deigned to work with them.
That had been shortly after he'd joined the scouts, and before they made him their spokesperson. He could only hope that if this was the situation they faced again, they were sufficiently aware of the problems now to deal with it without more losses.
"Home?" Vree asked hopefully when he'd finished listening to the last of those messages.
Yes," he confirmed, to the bird's delight. "Meet me there." He let Vree hop back down to his wrist and tossed the heavy gyre into the air; Vree pushed off and flapped upward, driving himself up through the branches with thunderous wing-claps. Darkwind waited until he had disappeared, then started off through the forest at a trot-not on one of the usual paths, but on a game-trail-heading for his ekele.
He never took the same route twice; he never approached his ekele the same way. While he ran, as silently as only a Tayledras scout could, he kept his mind as well as his other senses open, constantly on the alert for traces of thought that were out of the ordinary, for the scent of something odd, for a color or texture where it didn't belong, or movement, or the sound of a footfall in the forest beyond him.
Other scouts had not been that cautious. Rainwind hadn't; he'd been ambushed halfway between the Vale and his ekele after a long soak in one of the springs. He'd been lucky; his bondbird had spotted one of the ambushers first, so he had only had to deal with one enemy. The creatures had not sported the kind of poisoned fangs and claws so many others had and he'd escaped with only a permanent limp from a lacerated thigh.
Others had not been so fortunate; they had been just as careless, and had paid for it with limbs or lives.
That was the cost of living outside the Vale. No single Tayledras could hope to shield more than his ekele, even if he were an Adept-class mage.
Since most of the scouts weren't, they paid the price of freedom in personal safety.
But anyone who lived out here felt it was worth that cost.
There were too many other things that were bad about living in the Vale these days; it was good to have a little distance from the Heartstone, and space between themselves and the mages.