Page 48 of Gryphon in Light

Jefti was faster than his mother was, looked in the middle room, and exclaimed in shock, “Wait! I gots a room all to meself?”

“Is that a problem?” Silverfox said immediately.

“No, I jest—I ain’t never had a room all for me afore . . .” The lad looked a little dazed. “I like it,” he blurted, then blushed.

Completely oblivious to the fact that for a tiny moment, his mother looked—pained. Hallock had seen that sort of look before, in the faces of the mothers of new recruits, who had only just realized that their baby wasn’t their baby anymore, quite the way they had been minutes before.

“All right, you can unpack later,” Firesong pronounced. “You aren’t needed anywhere urgently, and you’ll be tended to. I need you all to sit down on something, and I’m going to use magic to fill your heads with two new languages. Tayledras, and Kaled’a’in, which is what the gryphons speak. I need you sitting down, because having one language dumped into your head like vegetables into a stew-pot is quite disorientating enough. Having two is going to make you all sleep until sundown, and you’ll want to.”

Hallock was going to take his word for it. He joined Genni, perched on the side of the bed nearest the window. Firesong began muttering under his breath, and his hands started to glow. Then his right hand moved toward Hallock’s forehead—

And the next thing Hallock knew, he was awakening from a set of very confused dreams in which people seemed to be reciting at him. He opened his eyes to see that someone had lit a mage-light beside the gauze-screened window; his mouth was dry, and he was hungry enough to have eaten even the miserable rations they’d first gotten when they came to Deedun.

Gingerly, he sat up. Genni sighed.

“I was waiting for you to wake up,” she said. “My head feels stuffed, and I had the strangest dreams!”

Now that she’d said that, he noticed that his head felt just a little too small and a little too heavy. “It’s probably just us thinking our heads should feel full, so they do,” he reasoned out loud. “It’s like having a cold made of lead.” He took stock of his surroundings.

The bed had been supremely comfortable, so much so that if he hadn’t been suffering from hunger and thirst, he would have lain right back down on it. Someone had covered him and Genni with a light blanket, but they really hadn’t needed it. Balmy air scented with green growing things wafted in through the window, and there were distant murmurs of voices and other sounds coming in on that breeze.

“Be you awake?” came the not-quite whisper from Jefti’s room.

“We are now,” Genni laughed. “I think we should go back down to the ground floor and find out if—”

“Good evening, guests!” said a bright voice from the area of the staircase. “I heard your voices! Please, come, come! I will take you where you can wash your hands and faces, and then there will be dinner!”

Hallock was the first to stand up and venture out into the stair, which was brightly lit, in contrast to their room. The owner of the voice was, as he had expected at this point, a hertasi. This one was dressed in what looked like leather: leather kilt, some straps wrapped around his torso and arms. He—well, that’s an assumption. Might be she, or something between.

“I’m Deban,” the hertasi said, which told Hallock that the hertasi was, in fact, a male, because the hertasi took gendered na—

How the hell do I know that?

Evidently it wasn’t just a language that Firesong had shoved into his skull, it was all the nuances and cultural implications!

All right. This’s more impressive than trees or Gates!

And that was when he realized he and Deban had been speaking Tayledras all this time.

“Hurry up, Ma, I’m starving!” Jefti said, in Valdemaran, as he burst out of his room. He stopped short at the sight of the hertasi. “Heyla, friend,” he said, the “heyla” in Valdemaran but the “friend” in Tayledras. “Thank you for caring for us!”

The hertasi opened his mouth in a broad smile that showed an awful lot of teeth. “My pleasure, young Jefti! Please, come. Your likely hunger shall be appeased!”

That was when Ammari emerged from her room, nervously smoothing down her skirts. But before she could say anything or take a single step, Deban was scrambling down the stairs.

“Come on, Ma,” Jefti urged and took her elbow. She had no choice but to take to the stairs, with Hallock and Genni following.

Hallock tried to figure just what sort of lights these were, for they seemed to be encased in frosted glass lanterns and did not waver. Finally, as he and Genni emerged into that large room they had passed through this morning, they found Jefti and Ammari at the “back” of the trunk, washing up at a pair of basins. While they dried themselves, Genni and Hallock did the same, then returned to that large room.

Firesong and his firebird—Aya. How do I know that?—were sharing a plate of fruit. The tables had been pulled away from the walls and cushions piled next to them, and one long table held covered dishes, from which delicious aromas arose.

“Chow line!” crowed Jefti and headed straight for the pile of empty plates.

His mother turned to Firesong, blushing. “I swear, he has better manners than this,” she said apologetically. “Truly he does.”

But Firesong just laughed. “He is a boy, with a boy’s appetite. At his age, I did the same. Still do, sometimes.”

“Your new language should inform you what these foods are, and your own memories of what pleases you will tell you whether or not you will like them.” That was Silverfox, accepting a berry from Deban and feeding it to the firebird. For some time, at least on the part of the Valdemarans, there was nothing but the sound of knives and forks and chewing, with murmurs of approval. Firesong turned and discreetly swapped the lower half of his mask for a beaded veil, to allow dining and drink. He seemed to be enjoying the same tea (amusingly, the Tayledras term for tea was “weed-water”) that Hallock had chosen over wine. Hallock wasn’t sure his head was up to wine after everything that had been stuffed into it, and there was no telling how potent Tayledras wine could be. Silverfox was attentive, doting on Firesong, but eventually seemed satisfied that his partner was all right. Finally, Hallock pushed his plate away, settled his knife and fork atop it, and looked straight at the two of them.