Mercedes Lackey - The Black Gryphon

He threaded his way through the shacks, forges, and service huts to the great tent where he’d left the Black Gryphon languishing that morning. In the daytime, the camp was far more inviting, despite the tension that was apparent everywhere you looked.

Assistant Healers and surgery aides surged past Amberdrake as he stepped inside, all intent on taking care of small administrative tasks and stocking supply shelves while the luxury of time was theirs. Casualties could course in like an overwhelming wave at any moment, so any spare minutes had to be spent in preparation. The war hadn’t left the Healers much time to rest; they (and the grave diggers, body burners, and clergy) had few hours of leisure time. That was the nature of a war, after all. It ate spirits and bodies. It fed like any other creature.

War forced individuals and species together in ways no peacetime situation would duplicate, and some of the oddest friendships—even loves—came out of that. Amberdrake’s affection for Gesten was natural, given the long association that hertasi had with the Kaled’a’in. Only the war and the needs of the fighters for support personnel had prevented Amberdrake from acquiring an entire troop of the little lizard-folk. As it was, he had to share Gesten’s services with Skandranon.

But the bond between himself and the Black Gryphon—that was something that would never have occurred in peaceful times. The gryphons were literally unnatural—creations of Urtho, the Mage of Silence—and they would never have been found near the rolling plains that the nomadic Kaled’a’in called home. At least, not in Amberdrake’s lifetime. He had heard Urtho mention some kind of vague plans he’d had, of planting them in little aeries in some of the wilder parts of the mountains, creating yet another population of nonhuman intelligences, as Urtho’s predecessors had done with the hertasi and kyree. But that plan, of course, had come to nothing with the onset of war among the Great Mages.

Urtho had tried to stay out of the conflict, with the result that the conflict had come to him. Amberdrake wondered if he sometimes berated himself for waiting. There had probably been a point early in Ma’ar’s career when Urtho could have defeated him easily, had he not stayed his hand. But who could have known that war would have come to roost in Ma’ar’s willful head? Urtho couldn’t be blamed for not bottling up the Kiyamvir long ago.

There were little joys amid all the pain, and some of those joys could come from the bindings of affection that just sprang up, like wildflowers in a battlefield.

Amberdrake sighed a little. He loved Skan as much as if he and the gryphon had been raised in the same nest, in the same home, but he wondered now if Skan felt anything more than simple friendship. It was hard to read the gryphon; the raptorial features reflected emotion in far more subtle ways than, say, a kyree’s mobile face. And Skan was—well, Skan. He often kept his deepest feelings to himself, covering them with jokes and pranks—or complaints and feigned irritation. If he felt affection for someone, he was just as likely to mock him as praise him.

Caring for the gryphon certainly had its drawbacks.

Amberdrake made his way quietly and unobtrusively through the rows of smaller tents housing the recovering wounded. There was a special section for gryphons; an array of tents with reinforced frames, built to be used for traction, to keep any of the gryphons’ four limbs or two wings immobile.

He spotted Gesten leaving one of the tents just as the hertasi saw him. Gesten looked uncommonly cheerful, all things considered; his eyes twinkled with good humor and he carried his tail high.

“His Royal Highness has one demon of a headache, and he says he’s too nauseous to eat,” Gesten reported. “Cinnabar says that’s because he’s got a concussion, and His Highness irritated his throat with the thingummy he stuffed into his crop, and since I couldn’t get him to eat anything, she wants you to try.”

Amberdrake nodded. “What was that thing he tried to swallow?” he asked. “It kept intruding on my dreams last night.”

Gesten ducked his head in a shrug. “Some magical weapon Urtho sent him after,” the hertasi said indifferently. “There was a big fuss over it after I got you to bed—half the mages in the Tower came looking for it when Himself found out Skan had been carried in. One of ‘em woke Tamsin and tried to dress him down for not reporting it right away.”

Amberdrake noticed the careful use of the word “tried.” “I take it that Tamsin gave him an earful?”

Gesten chuckled happily and bobbed his head. “It was a pleasure and a privilege to hear,” he said with satisfaction. “It was almost as good as you do when someone gets to you.”

“Hmm.” Amberdrake shook his head. “So, it was some kind of mage-weapon. Well, I suppose we’ll never know the whole truth of the matter.” It occurred to him that this “weapon,” whatever it was, may have been the reason that Laisfaar had been taken. Or it might have been the single factor that made its loss possible, which made it imperative for Skan to have found one and gotten it back so that Urtho’s mages could create a counteragent.

If Skan knew that, he wouldn’t reveal it. The less anyone knew, the better, really. It was terribly easy for a spy to move through Urtho’s camp—precisely because Urtho’s people as a whole were far less ruthless than their counterparts on Ma’ar’s side of the conflict. And camp gossip, as he had seen last night, spread as quickly as flame in oil-soaked tinder.

Amberdrake had long since resigned himself to the fact that he was going to overhear and accidentally see a million tantalizing details that would never make sense. That, too, was in the nature of his profession.

“Anyway, if you can get His Grumpiness—”

“I heard that,” came a low growl from the patient behind the tent flap.

“—His Contrariness to eat something, I can get the place ready for your next client,” Gesten concluded smoothly.

Amberdrake chuckled. “I think I can manage. For one thing, now that I know his throat is irritated, I can do something about that.”

“Don’t strain yourself,” Gesten warned, as he pulled back the tent flap to go inside. “He isn’t your only charge. And he isn’t even paying.’”

That last had to have been added for Skandranon’s benefit. The gryphon only raised his chin off his bandaged forearms a moment, and said with immense dignity and a touch of ill temper, “I ssshould think thisss sssort of thing came underrr the heading of ‘jussst rewarrrd for a missssion sssatisssfactorilly completed.’ “

“I would agree with you,” Amberdrake said absently, noting that Skandranon was pointedly rolling his sibilants for “emphasssisss.” Skandranon’s diction was as crisp as any human’s, when he wanted it to be. Amberdrake extended his finely-honed senses and found nothing more amiss than healing bones, healing wounds, and—yes, a healing concussion.

“How’s the head?” he asked conversationally, letting his awareness sink into the area of Skan’s throat and crop, soothing the irritation caused by the foreign object Skan had (inadvertently?) swallowed. It was something of a truism that a gryphon could not store anything in the crop that was bigger than he could successfully swallow, but that did not mean that the object in question would be a comfortable thing to store. Particularly if it was angular and unyielding as Amberdrake thought he remembered.

“The head isss missserable, thank you,” the gryphon replied with irritation. “I ssshould think you could do ssssomething about it.”

“Sorry, Skan,” Amberdrake replied apologetically. “I wish I could—but I’m not a specialist in that kind of injury. I could do more harm than good by messing about with your head.”