"Mercedes Lackey & Larry Dixon - Mage Wars 03 - The Silver Gryphon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

Mother's worried, but she admits it. Father won't, which will make it worse on him. And
there's no reason for either of them to worry at all! Maybe the more intelligent a parent is, the
more they worry, because then they are able to see more of what could go wrong. The Kaled'a'in
Quarters know that they could concentrate just as much on what could go right, but when it
comes to childrenтАФor young adultsтАФit could be smartest to have only grudging optimism. Still....
He spared a thought for Blade, who was probably undergoing the same scrutiny at the hands of her
parents, and sighed. He didn't know how Amberdrake and Winterhart would be reacting to this, but
Blade had threatened to spend the night with friends rather than go home to face them. Tad had managed
to persuade her to change her mind.
It could be much worse, he told himself. They could be so overprotective that they refuse to let
me take the post. Or, worse than that, they could be indifferent.
A couple of his classmates had parents like that; Tad had heard mages speculating that the raptor
instinct ran so strongly in them that it eclipsed what Urtho had intended. Those parents were loving
enough as long as their young were "in the nest." They began to lose interest in them when they fledged,
just exactly as raptor parents did. Eventually, when the young gryphons reached late adolescence and
independence, their parents did their best to drive them away, if they had not already left. Such pairs
were more prolific than those who were more nurturing, raising as many as six or eight young in a
reproductive lifetime.
But those offspring were, as Aubri would say, "glorified gamehawks;" they lived mostly for the hunt
and, while extremely athletic, were not very long in the intelligence department. Most of the gryphonic
fatalities at White Gryphon had occurred among this group, which for the most part were assigned to
hunting to supplement the meat supply of the city. They were very much like goshawks in focus and
temper; they would fly into the ground or a cliff during a chase and break their foolish necks, or go out in
wretched weather and become a victim of exposure. Some simply vanished without anyone ever
knowing what happened to them.
Aubri had said once in Tad's hearing that a majority of the fatalities in gryphon-troops of the
warтАФother than those attributable to human commanders who saw all nonhumans as expendable and
deployed them that wayтАФwere also among this type of gryphon. Needless to say, the type had been in
the minority among those that had reached safe haven here, and were not likely to persist into a third
generation. Not at the rate that they were eliminating themselves, at least!
When they weren't hunting, they could usually be found lounging about on the sunning platform with
others of their kind, either attempting to impress like-minded females or comparing wing-muscles.
Granted, there was always a bit of that going on among young gryphons, but this lot acted like that all
the time!
Very attractive, to look at perhaps. But as trysting mates or play-fighters, I don't think I could
stand them.
So while Skandranon was probably thinking over how many young gryphons of Tadrith's generation
had been lost, it was not occurring to him what those unfortunate fatalities had in common.
SayтАФan absolute dearth of brains. A squandering of what they had. And most importantly, a
lack of decent parenting. Keeping a young one's body alive was one thing, but it only created
more breeders to do the same with the next generation they bred. Even a charming young idiot
can succeed with good parenting. I'm proof of that, aren't I?
His father had lost some of his self-consciousness and was now speaking normally to Keeth and
Zhaneel about some modification Winterhart had made to the standard obstacle course in order to train
trondi'irn. Tad took full advantage of their absorption to get some more of his meal down in peace.
Skandranon was an odd sight just now; halfway into a molt, he was piebald black and white. The
white feathers were his natural colorтАФnowтАФand the black were dyed. He dyed himself whenever he
was due to visit Khimbata in his capacity as special representative of White Gryphon. Ever since the
Eclipse Ceremony, when he had come diving dramatically down out of the vanishing sun to strike down
an assassin who would have murdered Emperor Shalaman, Winterhart, and probably several more