"You comforted her," said Seraph. "You reminded her that she wasn't alone."
The Guardian looked at her and between one breath and the next became Jes again. "Oh, Mother," he whispered, "we are so sad." He dropped bonelessly to the floor in front of her and began sobbing softly with overwhelming grief.
Seraph started to put a hand on his shoulder, but caught herself. As overwrought as Jes was, he wasn't going to be able to stand her touch at all.
Instead, she got to her feet and opened the front door. "Gura," she said. "In."
The big dog gave her an astonished look - though during the day he sometimes came inside, at night he guarded the farm.
"In," she said again.
Gura padded past her to the fire. As soon as he saw Jes, he flopped out beside him with a sigh. Jes, unable to bear the distraction of human touch, wrapped his arms around the dog and pressed his face against him.
When Seraph sat back down beside Lehr he said, "Why doesn't he like to be touched - when..." he hesitated. "This is really confusing. Why didn't it bother him to be touched when he was being Guardian?"
"Jes is sensitive to the touch of others. Many of the Eagles have the gift of empathy. Because he must always keep the Guardian contained, a third person's feelings are just too much."
"You make it sound like he's two people."
Seraph nodded. "From what my oldest brother who was also a Guardian told me, it's very much like that. I don't know why the Eagle is so different from other Orders, why it is so much more difficult to bear. My teacher believed that the old wizards were trying to make something quite different - a superior warrior perhaps - and they made some mistakes: mistakes that Jes and those like him have to pay for all of their lives." She paused and glanced at Jes. He wasn't paying any attention to them, but she lowered her voice before continuing. "Most Eagles die before they reach Jes's age, so my people are very protective of them; we keep them away from strangers when we can, and don't speak of them outside of the clan. The Guardian is both the most dangerous and most vulnerable of all the Orders."
Seraph crossed her arms over her chest, realizing that his survival was up to her alone now. Lehr put an arm around her shoulder and drew her up next to him. "It will be all right, Mother," he said.
They stayed there until Jes's tears grew silent and Gura fell into a doze, snoring softly. Seraph wanted to do something, anything - but there was nothing more she could do to help Tier, nothing more she could do to help Jes, Lehr, or Rinnie. Her gaze fell upon the scraps of Tier's bridle.
She picked it up and left the bench for the better light in front of the fire.
"What are you doing, Mother?" asked Lehr.
"I'm going to see what this bridle has to tell me," said Seraph, sounding much more confident than she felt. She had failed her Order so badly that it seemed wrong that it hadn't failed her. "I told you that within each Order, there is still some variation in abilities. One of the things I could do that my teacher could not was read an object's past."
"You're going to see what happened to Papa?"
"I'm going to try," she said.
She took a deep breath and braced herself, because reading objects closely associated with death was painful. Tentatively she rested her fingers on the browband. Delicacy was more important than power in this kind of magic. She let threads of magic drift through her fingers and touch the leather.
Nothing.
Thinking she'd misjudged the necessary power, she opened herself until the ends of her fingers tingled - still nothing. She pulled her fingers away as if they had been burned.
"Lehr, could you find something..." Seraph's gaze scanned the room and brushed the corner where Tier's sword hung under Lehr's bow. The sword certainly had enough history for her to read. "The sword. Get the sword for me, please."
"What's wrong?" asked Lehr as he took the sword down and brought it to her.
Seraph shook her head and took the sword and unsheathed it. "I don't know." She set the bridle aside and lay the sword on the floor. She had to push Gura to get him out of the way, disturbing Jes, who sat up.