Law of the Broken Earth (17 page)

“My cousin—” Mienthe began, but stopped. “I don’t know… Do you know things?”

And how was a man to answer a question like that? Tan said, “Of course you shouldn’t discuss with me anything your cousin told you in confidence,” because it was important to establish a good, honest character if you wanted anyone to tell you their secrets, far less other people’s secrets.

Mienthe nodded, but distractedly, as though she’d barely heard him. She declared, “You
expect
people to have lived their own lives before you ever met them!” Rising to her feet, she paced rapidly to one side of the little chamber and then back again.

“But sometimes it’s a shock, to find out about those past lives,” Tan suggested. He couldn’t imagine what had
happened. Something to do with her? With him? With someone else?

“Yes, exactly! I knew perfectly well my cousin did
something
to stop us fighting the griffins. And then something else when he was in Casmantium. But I don’t know”—she flung her hands sharply upward for emphasis—“anything! Do
you
know about that? Especially about the Wall? The Wall in Casmantium, I mean, the one between the griffins and… and everybody else?”

“We had reports, of course.” Tan watched her carefully, trying to think what might have prompted these questions. “Those events six years ago were the subject of some speculation in the Fox’s court, I believe. I wasn’t… I’d barely arrived in Teramondian that year. My attention was all for trying to win a place at court. I’d have assumed the people of the Delta would follow their own lord’s actions a great deal more closely than even the most interested of the old Fox’s advisers.”

“I was only twelve,” Mienthe said, not really to him.

“What happened?” Tan asked patiently

“Oh… this griffin came to see my cousin. Did anybody tell you that?”

Tan was rendered, for once, utterly speechless. Whatever he’d expected the young woman to say,
that
hadn’t been it. He cleared his throat, but then only waved weakly for her to go on.

“No one did? Well, you were sleeping all day, you said, and then I suppose everyone thought you shouldn’t be troubled.” She gave him an anxious look.

“Don’t stop there!” Tan said, and laughed. “
That
would trouble me!”

“Oh… yes, I suppose.” Mienthe smiled, too. “Anyway,
yes. A griffin. A mage. A griffin mage, I mean. He wore the shape of a man, but… I didn’t know griffins could do that. Not even their mages. Not that you’d have ever mistaken him for an ordinary man. Anasa—I don’t remember his whole name. Something Kairaithin.”

“A griffin mage.” Only long practice allowed Tan to keep the disbelief out of his tone.

“Yes. Oh, yes. He was very—he was—you could tell. He helped my cousin six years ago, and he helped build the Casmantian Wall. I think,” she added, somewhat more doubtfully, “I think he
is
my cousin’s friend, but…”

“But he didn’t just slip down from the griffins’ desert to wish your cousin a pleasant evening,” Tan prompted her when it became clear that the pause might lengthen.

“Well, I think he came to warn Bertaud that the Wall is going to break,” Mienthe said, simply, as though she were in the habit of constantly providing amazing information in the most casual way.

“Ah.” Tan hadn’t seen
that
coming at all. He tried to think of everything he’d ever heard concerning the great Casmantian Wall. He knew that some Casmantian makers and mages had gotten together and built it in a day and a night and another day, or so the wonder of the making had been reported. He knew it was supposed to forever divide the country of fire from the country of earth… He gathered that “forever” had been a slight overestimation.

“He said the… the balance had been disturbed. Between earth and fire, he said. He said the Wall is—is cracked through. At both ends, I think he meant. When it breaks, something terrible will happen, and he said it will shatter in a few days or a few weeks—” Mienthe’s voice was rising.

“But not tonight, I hope,” Tan said, deliberately wry to offset any incipient hysteria. “So what did your lord cousin do about this?”

“Oh, he and the king went north, to look at the Wall, above Tihannad, you know…”

“Of course.”
That
explained why her cousin had not stopped Mienthe from joining that little raid into Linularinum, which Tan supposed made the griffin’s warning a good thing for him, if for no one else. He asked cautiously, “What disturbed the balance, did this griffin explain that? What terrible thing will happen if the Wall breaks?”

Mienthe shook her head, meaning she had no idea. “Only, I think, the griffins are very angry, and I think that if the Wall breaks, there will be a war…”

“Well, how many griffins can there be?” Tan asked reasonably. “It’s hard to imagine there could be more than a very small war, after all.”

Mienthe shook her head again. “I don’t know… That wasn’t what I thought he meant.”

Had
her cousin’s visitor actually been a griffin? In human shape, Mienthe had said. But you would never mistake him for a man, she’d said. Why not? How could one tell? Especially if one had never encountered a griffin before at all, either in his true shape or disguised?

On the other hand, her cousin truly had, by all reports, been closely involved with the problems Feierabiand had had with griffins six years ago. He would certainly know a griffin when he saw one. And if anyone might find a griffin mage on his doorstep, it was likely Bertaud.

And if that much was true… He said at last, “Well, esteemed Mienthe, you’ve certainly given me a good deal to think over,” which was true.

“But you don’t know anything.”

“Very little,” Tan admitted. “Or very little about griffins. It’s amazing how seldom the subject comes up in Linularinum—except as a consideration for determining what the King of Casmantium might do.”

Mienthe drooped slightly with discouragement.

“Please don’t rush out, however,” Tan said quickly, afraid she might. “Perhaps you might try telling me everything
you
know about griffins. Lord Bertaud is your cousin. Perhaps you’ve learned a bit more than you think you have—”

“No, I don’t think so. He never speaks of those things.” Mienthe hesitated, and then added slowly, “He never has. Never. I think…” But she stopped, feeling perhaps that she had come too close to private things. She opened her hands in a shrug, then gazed down into her palms as though she might find the answer there.

Then she glanced up. “But… I’m so sorry. Here I am telling you all about the griffins and the Wall when there’s nothing either of us can do about the trouble there. How are
you
? Do you do well enough?”

“Well,” Tan said, trying not to laugh, “I’m here and not chained in some dismal barn on the other side of the river, so not only am I very well, I must also suppose no one’s been able to get past your care of me. For all of which I am, I assure you, very grateful indeed. I shall hope we are not so distracted by this other problem that Istierinan is permitted a second opening.”

“Oh, I’m sure Linularinum won’t—”

Tan dismissed this assurance with a wave of his hand. “It obviously took a mage to get me out of this house. I am not confident what this mage might do next, if
Istierinan insists. Istierinan Hamoddian can be uncommonly single-minded.”

Mienthe looked at him expectantly. “So why
did
your Istierinan kidnap you at all, if you’d already finished writing everything out for Bertaud? Or did he not know you’d already finished?”

“After three days in the great house? He can’t have not known.” Tan paused. He rather thought Mienthe was clever, and he knew she had found him by some sort of odd magecraft. And he owed her a debt. And, besides that, he could think of absolutely no reason to keep this particular secret. So he said slowly, “Istierinan wasn’t after vengeance—or not
only
after vengeance. He asked me where ‘it’ was. Whether I still held ‘it’ myself or had given ‘it’ away. Not to the Lord of the Delta, he said. He said maybe I’d been able to give ‘it’ to one of Bertaud’s people.”

“
Able
to give it,” Mienthe repeated blankly.

“That’s what he said. Very odd, yes. He wanted me to return what I had taken. I never could get him to tell me what I was supposed to have stolen. Nor did I have enough time to guess its shape from the pattern of his questions. Fortunately, to be sure.”

“But you must know what it might have been?” Mienthe asked, leaning forward in intense curiosity.

Tan flung up his hands. “Nothing but information! Nothing I could return, even if I wanted to return it—no more than I could return spoken words to the past that existed before they were spoken.”

“Well,” Mienthe said reasonably, “Istierinan thinks you stole something else, doesn’t he?”

Tan opened his hands in a gesture of bafflement.
“Nothing occurs to me. Except that someone else took advantage of my, ah, of the confusion I caused, to steal something else. Something more tangible. And Istierinan thinks I stole it.” Some lying dog-livered bastard was using Tan to conceal his own crime. Tan was offended, and then amused, since he hardly had any right to protest another man’s dishonesty.

“Well, that’s not good, if Istierinan is going to keep coming after you to try to get it back. And not good for anyone else, if he’s willing to cross into the Delta and invade even our great house to get it,” Mienthe observed, with some justice. “And with the king himself in residence! Or the queen, at least—I suppose Iaor was actually gone before they came after you. I suppose that might be why they thought they had a chance, right then; everything
was
confused, with everybody coming and going.”

Tan thought about that, and about the scene in the barn, and about the agonizing but surprisingly uneventful flight back through the marshes and across the river. He said slowly, “Do you know, I wonder whether Istierinan is operating on his own in this. Mariddeier Kohorrian is a clever, ruthless man and a good king, and I don’t think he would send agents to strike openly across the river into the Delta.”

Mienthe made an interested sound.

Her eyes were quite pretty when she was so intent, Tan noticed—she was rather a pretty girl overall, but she didn’t show herself off—indeed, she was so little given to flamboyance a man could simply look right past her.

She said, “Maybe he’s the only one who knows something got stolen, and he’s trying to keep it that way.”

And, yes, she
was
clever. Tan cleared his throat. “Yes,”
he said. “That seems very possible.” He began to smile. “And he thinks I have whatever was stolen, and so he let the real thief get away. Poor Istierinan! Going after the wrong man is no way to win back the regard of the old Fox!”

“It won’t seem nearly so amusing if he keeps coming after you,” Mienthe observed tartly.

“No, I imagine not.” Tan tilted his head, letting his smile broaden. “One might as well enjoy these little moments of irony, esteemed Mienthe. Appreciating the humor life presents to us is what keeps us young. What a lot it is presenting us with at the moment, to be sure. Griffins and mages, legists and spymasters—”

The door opened.

Mienthe rose with a slightly guilty air, though by the time she turned she had done a creditable job of putting on an air of innocent inquiry.

Tan made himself smile as well as he waited for the door to swing back far enough to show him their visitor. Probably it was not Istierinan or his pet mage—ah. Almost as frightening: Their visitor was Iriene herself.

The healer was frowning. That much did not surprise Tan at all.

“You,” Iriene said severely, with only the briefest nod for Mienthe, “should be lying flat. I left strict instructions. In fact, as I recall, I gave
you
strict instructions. And here you are sitting up.”

Tan rapidly considered and discarded half a dozen possible replies, from the flippant to the meek, and replied with almost no hesitation, “Truly, esteemed Iriene, I’d rather try standing and walking. One never knows what necessity might arise. Sitting upright seemed
a reasonable compromise, besides being more respectful to Lady Mienthe.”

Iriene gave him a hard stare and a short nod, acknowledging both the impudence and the possibility of sudden necessity. “Just so you understand that if you undo all my fine work through impatience, I won’t bother finding the time to do it over again. It’s not easy doing work that detailed, you know, even when I’m at my best. Which I’m not, lately, so don’t push your limits or you might find them before you want to, you hear me?”

“Yes, esteemed Iriene,” Tan agreed meekly.

“Esteemed Iriene—” Mienthe said hesitantly.

The healer-mage turned her hard look on Mienthe. “And don’t you be fussing my patient,” she warned.

“No, I won’t—I haven’t,” Mienthe said, just as meekly as Tan had. “I don’t think I have. But, Iriene, I wondered… that is, people think… people say… I must have found Tan by magecraft. But I don’t think I have any mage power. I don’t feel as though I do.”

Iriene’s gaze became inquisitive. She looked Mienthe up and down. Then she shrugged. “You don’t have the look of it to me,” she said. “But I’m not the best one to ask, Lady Mienthe. I’m barely a mage myself—I heal. That’s what I do. That’s all I do.” She paused, glanced at Tan, and shrugged again. “Him now. Events want to slip around
him
. Even I can see that.”