Dragonspell - Donita K. Paul [119]
She stood and walked around in a daze. She picked up Fenworth’s pointed wizard hat and bunched it into a wad, much the way the wizard did when he was thinking. She walked aimlessly around the destroyed campsite. Metta and Gymn followed, making sad chirruping noises to each other.
Kale stooped to pick up Dar’s flute. A dent in the side showed rough treatment by the vicious bisonbecks.
“Dar will want this,” she said to the dragons. “Maybe he can fix it.” She wiped it off with the wizard’s hat and stuck it into one of the hollows of her cape. She picked up Dar’s smashed harmonica and several other small musical instruments, all variously damaged, and quickly stowed them away.
The tumanhofer’s stack of books had been kicked over and thrown in all directions. Kale gathered them, dusted off the sooty grime, and fitted them into a hollow. Picking up a pair of Librettowit’s reading spectacles, she noted a cracked lens and put it with the other things she had collected.
Collapsing on a boulder, gray with Crim Copper’s smudge, Kale dropped her head into her hands, fighting the urge to cry.
With a shudder, she sat up. “It’s no use pretending things aren’t bad.” The dragons flew to her shoulders. “We’ve got to consider what’s best to do and then do it.”
She stared at the debris around her, absent-mindedly putting Fenworth’s hat on her head. She shook herself as if trying to wake up.
“Keeping broken things won’t help.”
She pulled out the spectacles and intended to throw them as far as she could. Gymn hopped on her shoulder and trilled. The high-pitched warble pierced the silent room.
“What?” Kale lifted a hand to rub against her ear. Gymn’s excited squeal had been all too close to her eardrum. At his urging, she looked at the broken lens. “It’s fixed!”
Kale jumped to her feet. The dragons lost their balance, fluttered beside her for a moment, and then landed on the rocks. Kale pulled out the books and found the pages unwrinkled, untorn, the book covers pristine clean. The flute was dentless. She lifted the harmonica to her mouth and blew. A reedy chord resounded merrily in the forlorn cavern. She marveled at the undamaged instruments as she laid them in a row on the ground.
“You’d think somebody would have told me.”
She repacked the items in her cape and continued to rummage through the mess left by the bisonbecks. She picked up items belonging to each of her comrades except the kimens. Again she puzzled over the fact that she had rarely seen them carry anything.
“Do you suppose they have hollows in their light clothes?”
The dragons didn’t offer an opinion.
Kale picked up Leetu’s bow, broken into two pieces. She looked from the pieces in her hands to the dragons watching her with expectant faces. Kale could feel them urging her to try it.
She fitted the two ends of the bow together. The shaft stretched taller than she did. Kale slipped it into the hollow opening. The bow slid in easily, moving down and down until the whole bow disappeared. Kale held her breath and pulled it back out. The jagged edges where she’d put the two pieces together had mended; no sign of breakage existed, not even a seam.
“Look at that! Wait till I show Leetu.”
The emerlindian’s words echoed in her memory. “Follow orders, Kale. And don’t play with your talents. Treat them with respect, or more disaster will fall upon your head.”
Kale looked quickly at the dragons. Both had turned their heads aside and refused to look her in the eye.
“This isn’t my talent. It’s something the cape does.”
The dragons made grunty noises in their throats.
Kale growled back. “All right. Guilty,” she said, and her shoulders slumped. “When will I ever learn?”
She shoved the bow back into the hollow and gathered Leetu’s arrows into the leather quiver. When she finished, she gazed around The Cavern of Rainbows and sighed over its dulled appearance. Her eyes rested on one of the many tunnels leading out.
“Well, Gymn, Metta, we have things to do.”
Kale marched across the disheveled room exiting the cavern by the same tunnel the bisonbeck warriors had used earlier.