Mercedes Lackey - Owlsight

“There is almost always food here, even between meals, but hot food is only served at mealtime,” Nightwind told her, as she directed Keisha in getting a wooden platter and helping herself. “Things tend to happen in a Vale that upset schedules, so there are plenty of folk missing the regular meals who need feeding at any given time.”

They found seats - Keisha felt much more comfortable eating at a table - and Nightwind began asking her questions about herself. Keisha discovered that she and the trondi’irn had more in common than she would have guessed. Both of them had a swarm of male relatives to put up with - in Nightwind’s case, it was a horde of cousins, rather than brothers - and both had younger sisters that they liked and missed enormously. “Though Nightbird may come here anyway - but not until her training is finished.”

Both of them seemed to have the same slightly cynical outlook on life as well. Nightwind had a better sense of the absurd, though, and Keisha wished she had Nightwind’s ability to see humor in things. It looked to her as if Nightwind got more enjoyment from things by not taking them too seriously.

“I have to get back to work,” Nightwind told her, when they’d finished eating and put their platters in the bin for dirty dishes. “Keep following this gray path, and you’ll eventually come to the guest lodge.” She frowned slightly. “At some point in the next couple of days, I’ll have to get Tyrsell to give you our language; the hertasi for the most part don’t understand Valdemaran. If you see Dar’ian and your headache is gone, tell him I said that.”

“I will,” she promised, though she couldn’t imagine how she was to learn a language on top of everything else. She wandered the gray path, enjoying the sights, and eventually did come to the guest lodge. With a sigh, she went inside and obediently got out her texts.

To her delight, a large part of the things she had not understood did come clear, although the texts often used slightly different terms for things than Nightwind did. Oversight, for instance, was called Mage-Sight or Healing-Sight. Now that she knew some of the basics, though, she was amazed at how much the texts actually told her, occasionally explaining things better than Nightwind had.

She became so absorbed in her studies that she barely noted the passage of time until she found she was straining to read, looked up, and realized that it was growing dark. More than that, her foot was asleep, and she was starving. She put the book down, and decided to get some dinner on her own.

She walked to the dining hall through a dusk lit softly by lanterns and scented with the perfumes of night-blooming flowers. A different sort of fragrance coming from the dining hall made her move a bit faster, though, and she shyly took her place amid a tangle of strange Hawkbrothers to get her platter and fill it. With a little searching, she found a quiet corner out of everyone’s way, and sat there, watching and listening to the strange music of their unfamiliar tongue.

She was just about to leave when she (almost literally) ran into Darian. He caught her by the elbow as she passed him, with a contagious grin for her when she realized who it was. “Working hard?” he asked, with a wink.

She made a face. “Hard enough to get a headache,” she replied, sighing. “I wish I’d known this was going to be so difficult.”

“Well, that’s good, it means you’re stretching new talents,” he told her, without a hint of pity. “Almost everything worth doing is hard, at least at first. Do you still want to meet Kuari?”

“Absolutely!” She remembered then what her teacher had told her. “Oh, and Nightwind said to let you know if I saw you that she wanted - someone - to give me the Hawkbrother tongue.”

“That would be Tyrsell,” Darian identified, nodding, so that a wisp of hair dropped into his eyes and he brushed it back with an absentminded wave of his hand. “Tyrsell is the king-stag of the dyheli herd; he’s the one I was riding yesterday.”

A dyheli teaching her a language? “That doesn’t seem right. They don’t talk, I mean, not aloud,” she responded, with a frown. “How can he do that?”

“Oh, you’ll understand soon enough - still have the headache?” he asked, and she shook her head. “Good; let me bolt something down, and I’ll take you to the dyheli meadow. The sooner you have Tayledras, the better. The hertasi mostly don’t understand Valdemaran.”

“That’s what Nightwind said.” She followed him as he got bread rounds that looked very like her breakfast this morning, and waited while he inhaled his dinner.

“Sorry about my manners,” he said between bites. “I got used to eating quickly, because things are always happening quickly around a Vale.” He grinned again. “Maybe that’s why we take our leisure so seriously, because most of the time we’re madly scrambling to get things done. You’ve got to keep a balance in life, so that you can enjoy your pleasures completely, and then go and enjoy your work completely. Heyla, when you rest well, you work better, right?” She nodded.

He led her down another series of twisting paths, coming out into a moon-gilded meadow full of the horned dyheli. One was patiently waiting for them where the path met the meadow. He wasn’t all that much bigger than the rest, but there was a sense of power about him that Meree hadn’t had.

:Darian has told me that Nightwind wishes you to have Tayledras-tongue,: rang a solemn voice in her mind. : Will you lower your shield for me?:

She’d been diligent in remembering to check that she had it up, and lowering it was a little like relaxing her grip on something. She sighed as it came down, feeling something inside her head relaxing as well. Will I ever really do this without thinking about it?

Tyrsell stood over her, a silver statue in the moonlight. :Now sit, please. This will not take long.:

Obediently she sat down on the grass. A moment later, she found herself looking up at Darian from a prone position, with her head aching all over again and no notion how she’d wound up lying down when she’d been sitting just the heartbeat before.

“Sorry about that,” Darian said apologetically. “If I’d warned you what was going to happen, you’d have tensed up, then it would have been harder on both you and Tyrsell. I know exactly how you feel right now - this is how they gave me the language years ago.”

It took her a moment to realize that he was speaking in the Hawkbrother language - and she understood it.

“How does he do that?” she asked, sitting up, and rubbing her head. “How can he shove a language into my head when he doesn’t actually speak it?”

Darian shrugged. “I don’t know exactly how; being able to take over someone’s mind like that is a special dyheli Gift. The king-stags use it to control the herd if they panic.”

“It feels like he ran the whole herd through my head!” she complained; Darian chuckled, and she got the sense that Tyrsell was amused as well.

“I know; I remember all too clearly how I felt after my turn, and it took me months to get comfortable with all the new concepts that showed up in my head along with the words. Come on, I’ll show you back to the guest lodge and get a hertasi to bring you a headache-potion.” He helped her to her feet; she had the presence of mind to turn to the dyheli before they left.

“I hope I didn’t seem ungrateful. Thank you very much, Tyrsell,” she said carefully. “This is going to make things endlessly easier for all of us.”

:You are welcome, and thank you for your courtesy; it will serve you well with my people,: the stag said. Then he turned and walked calmly off into the moonlit meadow, just as if he hadn’t just worked something very like a miracle.