Law of the Broken Earth (28 page)

There were plenty of hoof marks and the tracks of wagons and carts in the packed earth of the road, and Mienthe practiced in her mind the sorts of things she might say to startled folk she might pass, to explain her
solitude and muddy, bedraggled appearance:
I barely got out of Tiefenauer in front of Linularinan soldiers… I had to cross through the marshes.
Perfectly true. Yet she did not feel she had any ability to explain what had really happened, what still might be happening. She could visualize merchants or farmers rolling their eyes:
Chased out of Tiefenauer by Linularinan mages, were you?
Mienthe knew she simply did not have the ability to make anybody believe anything of the sort. Especially not while her horse and skirts and boots were caked with mud, and her hair straggling down her back—she could not look less like a granddaughter of old Berdoen and a cousin of the Lord of the Delta.

But there were few other travelers, and although they gave Mienthe curious, sidelong glances, none of them stopped to speak to her. She passed the occasional farm-track, and from time to time pasture fences ran along the road for some way. Sometimes big, flat-faced white cattle gazed at her incuriously from behind those fences. Tall shaggy farm dogs watched suspiciously as she passed, in case she should be a swamp cat or a cattle thief, but they did not come out to the road.

This branch of the Sierhanan, like the northern branch, was cleaner and wider and better for traffic than any of the smaller Delta rivers. Boats ran along with the current—flatboats, mostly, heading downstream; now and again a keelboat being heaved back upstream by a team of oxen. But the keel road was on the other side of the river and the drovers much too far away to call to or see clearly.

For the first time, it occurred to Mienthe that even when she found her father’s house, the staff there might not know her. Certainly they would not be able to see in
her the nine-year-old child she had been… Would any of them even have known her when she
was
nine? A sudden, vivid memory of Tef, in the cutting garden gathering flowers for the house, came into her mind. She could almost make herself believe he would be at her father’s house, living still. Tears prickled behind her eyes.

She would have felt so much more that she was riding to her proper home if she had really expected to find Tef there waiting for her. She couldn’t think of her father’s house as her home at all. It occurred to Mienthe that she did not even know exactly where her father’s house actually
was
. Well, she knew that it was set on the river a little north of Kames proper, so she must go right past it if she kept on south on this road, but would she recognize its drive when she came to it? She experienced a sudden conviction that this was impossible, that she would not, that she would have to ride all the way into Kames and ask there for directions, like a beggar hoping for generosity from some relative who had a place at the house as a maid or stablemaster… She flushed and checked her horse, looking indecisively left toward the river, and then right, up the low wooded hill that ran up away from the river… and there were the gates.

She somehow knew the carved wooden posts at once, and the wrought-iron bands that spiraled around them; she knew the graveled track that led between avenues of great oaks and how it would curve through neatly kept woodlands to the wide gardens surrounding the big house. Though she would have said she had no clear memory of any of this from her childhood, she knew it all. She checked her horse and sat for a long moment simply staring at the gates and the graveled drive. She did
not feel excited or happy to have come back to this house; was she simply too tired? But she did not even feel very relieved to have arrived. She must be much more weary than she had thought.

Or more frightened of the reception she might meet.

As soon as she thought of this, Mienthe knew it was true. She knew the people in that house would not recognize her. She wondered if they would even admit her. They might think she was an impostor who was trying to mock them and steal things to which she had no claim. Or they might think she was a madwoman who claimed to be Berdoen’s granddaughter and Beraod’s daughter and Bertaud’s cousin because… because… Mienthe could not quite imagine why anybody would claim to be Beraod’s daughter. Probably that was because her memories of her father were a little too vivid…

But Tan would be there, and
he
could tell them who she was. Mienthe found she had no doubt that he was there. That was a heartening thought. She lifted the reins, clucked to the horse, and rode up the curving drive, between the oaks and through the woodlands, and out into the gardens in the last light of the day.

The gardens were not as well-kept as she remembered them, and the house was smaller, and down the hill the river blazed through the trees as though the slanting evening light had set the water afire. Someone called, and someone else answered, and there was a sudden confusion of movement and voices and faces. Suddenly nothing was familiar, and Mienthe tried to speak to an older man who had come out to hold her reins but could not think of anything to say. She wanted to dismount but was afraid to, although she did not know why she should
be afraid—she told herself she should not be—she knew she was being foolish—

And then a familiar voice said, “Mienthe!” and Tan was beside her horse, offering her a hand to dismount. His was the only familiar face she saw. She took his hand gratefully and slid down from her horse with a sense that she had, after all, come at last to a place of safety, a place she knew.

T
he griffins’ fire mages came again to test their strength against the Wall early in the afternoon on the second day following the arrival of the King of Feierabiand and his people.

King Iaor Safiad was not there to see them. After that first icy, brilliant night, the king had taken nearly all his people and gone away again, down the difficult mountain path. He would rouse his people and make them ready—his men, of course, but most especially his mages: the earth mages of Tihannad and all those in high Tiearanan. And he would set all the smiths of both cities to make arrowheads and spearheads infused with the most solid earthbound magecraft possible. So he had said, after looking down upon the cracked Wall and consulting the young earth mage he had brought, and Lord Bertaud, and Anasakuse Sipiike Kairaithin. He had not asked Jos for his opinion, but Jos had not disagreed.

“It might hold a hundred years like that, I suppose,”
the king had said, not with any great conviction. “But it might break tomorrow, and then where will we be?” Then he had added, a touch more hopefully, to Kairaithin, “You are certain your people intend to come down upon Feierabiand if they can break that Wall?
We
have never offended them—or I had thought not. I had thought we had become something like allies…”

Had you thought so?
Kairaithin had asked him.
Well, something like, perhaps, for that brief moment caught out of time. But fire cannot truly ally with earth, king of men. That wall will not shatter along all its length; it will break here, at this end, where its balance has been disturbed and where it comes hard against the mountains. If the People of Fire and Air will come past its barrier, they will do so here, in this wild country, and thus they must strike into Feierabiand and not against Casmantium.

“But—” the king had protested.

“Tastairiane Apailika makes no distinction among the countries of men,” Lord Bertaud had put in, in a low voice. “He never has. And he likes killing and blood.”

Tastairiane Apailika means eventually to burn all the country of earth
, Kairaithin had said.
He is determined to leave nothing but fire in all the world, with the brilliant sky above and the world empty of everything but fierce wind singing past red stone.

“We won’t permit that,” Lord Bertaud had said. His voice had still been low, but Jos had heard odd notes of grief and anger and warning mingled in it. He had understood the anger and he’d thought he understood the grief, but he did not understand the warning at all. King Iaor had given him a sidelong glance, and Jos had wondered what the king might have heard in his voice. Kairaithin
had not looked at him at all. Jos thought the griffin probably did not know how to hear all the undertones of a human voice.

“Indeed, we will not,” King Iaor had agreed, and at dawn the next day he had taken his very silent and subdued earth mage—struck dumb by the near edge of the desert or by the Great Wall or by the enormous, contained threat of Kairaithin himself, for Jos had not heard the young man utter a single word that day or all that night—the king had taken his earth mage and the rest of his retinue and gone down again from the mountain pass to Tihannad, to make what preparations seemed possible and practical.

Lord Bertaud alone had stayed to watch the Wall. He, with his mule and another, and Jos, and the goat, and the frightened chickens, rather crowded the cottage. The rear part of the building, built out in a simple lean-to, had provided ample room for one goat but was hard put to accommodate two mules as well. Their ears brushed the rough stones when they lifted their heads and they seemed rather inclined to eat the thatch. Fortunately, the goat and the mules were willing to be amicable even in their crowded quarters. Perhaps the memory of the griffin lingered even once Kairaithin had gone, so that the presence of any other creature seemed more welcome to all three animals.

In the griffin’s absence, the white cock and all but one of the hens had crept back at last to their roost, attached as it was to the cottage and providing the only reliable warmth in all the mountains. Jos was sorry about his missing hen, though. She had not been one of the most reliable layers of the flock, but he did not like to think of
her lost in the cold. He gave the remaining birds an extra handful of grain to help them forget their fright, watching carefully to make certain the larger hens did not keep the smaller from the grain. Such small concerns occupied him when he did not want to go back into the main part of the cottage.

Once the king and his people had gone and the immediate subject of the Wall and its possible shattering had been exhausted, Jos did not know what to say to Lord Bertaud. Once, Jos had had the gift of speaking easily, of drawing out anyone to whom he spoke, of putting anyone he met at ease. Somewhere during the past six years, he had lost all those skills. Now he did not know how to speak to anyone but the echoing mountains and one griffin mage exiled from his own people.

Nor did the Feierabianden lord seem to know how to speak to Jos. He had too much natural tact, it appeared, to ask anything like,
So, how have you lived? How has it been for you here in these mountains, belonging neither to fire nor to earth?
Far less would he ask any such question as,
How long was it before Kes forsook your company for that of Tastairiane?
And if Lord Bertaud—thankfully—possessed too much delicacy to ask any of those questions, Jos certainly did not intend to volunteer answers.

Or it might have been that Lord Bertaud simply despised Jos too much to speak to him, aside from the commonplaces necessary in such close accommodations. Though Jos would have liked to ask about the world below the mountains, he did not care to invite any rebuff by asking questions. He did not speak. Nor did Lord Bertaud. So it was a silent day that stretched out after King Iaor had departed. There was only the clucking of
the hens to break the quiet, and the song of a hardy finch or two that had come bravely up from the lower meadows, and the muted hum of the bees, and the ceaseless winds above that always sang with more or less violence through the heights.

And after the long day, it was a silent evening, and later still a deathly quiet night. The dawn that followed was cold, of course, as every dawn was cold in these mountains. But the stream did not freeze. It seldom froze even in the depths of the most savage winter; its own inherent wild magic kept it running freely across the clean stone when any sensible water would have turned to shimmering ice and frozen mist.

Jos filled his single pot and made tea from his small store. He was glad to see Lord Bertaud’s saddlebags still held some good bread and hard cheese, and some dried beef, and a handful of last fall’s wrinkled apples. As it happened, Jos did have two mugs, for occasionally Kairaithin took the form of a man to visit him and then the griffin mage liked tea—or perhaps was simply amused to go through the motions of human hospitality; Jos was never confident he understood the griffin’s motivations in even so simple a matter. But there were two mugs. He added sugar and a pat of goat’s-milk butter to the tea in each mug and handed one, steaming, to his… guest, he supposed. For a sufficiently flexible understanding of the word.