Law of the Broken Earth (45 page)

She did not speak, as Jos might have expected, with joyful delight. Instead her voice held an odd kind of wistfulness. She tilted her head to look at him, a quick, almost birdlike motion. She said, “I might take you away. Not into the pass. Somewhere the People of Fire and Air will not come…”

“They will come everywhere, eventually. Or they would. Kes—” Jos wanted to touch her face, run his thumb along the angle of her jaw. He did not let himself reach out, but said urgently, “Kes, I’m so glad you came. You don’t know what will happen. A day of fire and blood, you say, but it’s a day that will quench all fire. Bertaud—Lord Bertaud, whom you know—do you not realize he holds an affinity for griffins?”

For a long moment, Kes did not seem to understand what he had said. Then she did not believe him. “A creature of earth?” she cried. “An affinity for the
People of Fire and Air
? You speak fables and sunbeams, your words are as the ash that crumbles when the wind touches it! That cannot be true. It is not true. How could it be true?” She took a step back from him. Another. Cried even more sharply, her tone more plainly human than he had heard it for years, “How can you tell such lies?”

“You woke the gift in him yourself, when you used fire to heal him,” Jos told her urgently. “No one knows but Sipiike Kairaithin. Think of Kairaithin and tell me it’s
all sunlight and ash! Think of what Kairaithin has done over these past years and what he has refused to do and tell me it’s a lie!”

The fire within Kes brightened, and brightened again, so fiercely that Jos had to take a step away himself. But Kes did not disappear into the wind. She had become a burning figure of white gold and porcelain, but she did not go.

“Kes!” he said, and made himself step forward again. “If the griffins come riding their wind of fire out of that pass tomorrow, they will
all
find out. Do you understand? Do you understand what that will do to them?”

“Yes,” said Kes.

“You must stop them. It’s Tastairiane Apailika driving this wind, isn’t it? You can go to him tonight—tell him—”

“I can’t
tell
him!” cried Kes.

“—tell him you’ve changed your mind, you won’t support this attack against Feierabiand; you can tell him something—tell him you remember your sister.
Do
you remember your sister, Kes? I’m sure she hasn’t forgotten you. It’s just the same this time as six years ago! All the power is in
your
hands. Tell Tastairiane you won’t support him and that we’re prepared, that if griffins come through that pass tomorrow, they’ll face ten thousand arrows and a thousand spears, and you won’t be there to make his griffins whole when they’re struck down—”

Kes shook her head. “He will never stop now. Not now that the Wall is broken. He will never stop, and even if I tell him, he won’t believe it can be true, he’ll think you lied to me. Or if he believes it, he’ll be so angry—it’s Bertaud, you say? Lord Bertaud son of Boudan who has this affinity to fire?”

“Yes—” Jos said, and realized as he spoke—too late!—that he should never have given her Bertaud’s name. She shredded into a blazing white wind, and Jos stared, appalled, for far too long a moment before he flung himself for the stairs.

Bertaud was still in the map room when Jos hurled himself through the door, and still alive, which Jos had not expected; it must have taken Kes a moment to find him—well, she did not know the Feierabianden lord well and
he
had not been fool enough to call her name out across the winds.

But she was there before Jos, even so. She was walking forward when Jos slammed open the door and ran in, panting in great heaving breaths. She had her hand out in almost a friendly manner, and Bertaud was not alarmed—or not alarmed enough. He was just standing there, not even backing away, far less running for the door—not that running would help; the air prickled with living fire. In a moment the house itself would blaze up, the maps and furnishings and the underlying structure itself, and Lord Bertaud would burn like a tallow candle at the center of that conflagration.

Jos could not get enough breath to shout a warning, but Bertaud took in his precipitous arrival and then seemed to see for the first time the white fire prickling across Kes’s outstretched hand. He caught the edge of the map table and flung it over to block her way; worse than useless, for the papers caught fire as they spilled across the floor. Kes put her foot on the fallen table and stepped across it, so lightly it did not even wobble, but flames licked out across the wood—white flames, pale gold at the edges, burning with an intense heat that seemed likely to set the
air itself on fire. Bertaud tried to shout, but the burning air drove him back, choking, his arms across his face.

Here at the edge of the room where Jos stood it was not so unendurably hot, and so Jos took a quick hard breath and shouted, “Kairaithin! Anasakuse Sipiike Kairaithin!” His voice, rough and half-strangled with heat and terror, fell flat and dead against the brilliant air. He lunged forward over the burning table and caught Kes’s uplifted hand in his, dragging her back and swinging her around. He looked into her face, and he could not recognize anything he saw in those golden eyes. The fire that filled her burned his hand and arm, but to his astonishment she caught her fire back away from him after that first instant, containing it, so he did not instantly die for his temerity.

Then Kairaithin came. The eastern wall went up in a fierce blaze, and Kairaithin strode out of that sheeting flame as though he were coming through a door and took in all that was happening in one swift, summing look.

For one horrifying instant, Jos thought the griffin mage might simply lend Kes his own terrible power and rip fire out of the air through the whole house. Then his furious black gaze locked on Bertaud’s, and although the man was coughing and could not speak, all the flames flattened sharply toward the floor, flickering madly, and went out, exactly like candle flames blown out from above.

“Kairaithin—” said Kes. Her tone was urgent, remonstrating. She stretched her free hand out toward her old teacher.

“Kairaithin!” Bertaud said in a much different tone, though just as urgently, and tried to catch his breath through the coughing.

“No!” cried Jos. He knew the Feierabianden lord
meant to command the griffin mage to kill Kes—he knew he should even agree, he knew very well he should agree, but he couldn’t, not even now. He had not let go of Kes, not even yet, and now he jerked her back to put himself between her and Kairaithin. He shouted furiously to the griffin mage, “Get her
out
of here, get her as far away as you can, and
keep
her away! Don’t you see, that will do, that will be enough, if she isn’t there even that bastard Tastairiane won’t press through the pass without her—” He ran out of breath, coughing helplessly; his chest burned and agony radiated from his hand all the way to his shoulders and he knew, he
knew
he hadn’t said enough, hadn’t said it
right
, he’d never been a man with a gift for words—

Then Kairaithin, with no expression Jos could read, called up a hard-driving wind right through the walls of the house, a wind shot through with wild darkness and rushing sand and flames, and that wind whirled all around them and swept them up, and the world tilted out from underneath them, and Lord Bertaud was left behind in the map room and the king’s house as the griffin flung himself and Kes and Jos away into the wind.

M
ienthe came back to Tiefenauer only weeks after she had left it. It seemed like years. It had been raining from the moment they had entered the Delta, but the rain ceased at last as they pressed through the last of the countryside toward the town. Mienthe put back her hood and straightened her back, looking up as the first sunlight of the day struggled through the heavy overcast.

They were coming into Tiefenauer not from the east, but more from the south. The Arobern had taken them around that way so they could come up the coast road. “We turn only a little out of our way, and this road is better for marching, especially in the rain,” he had said, with no explanation of how he came to know the quality of the roads in Feierabiand and the Delta. “And we do not wish to come without warning upon the Linularinan troops in the town.”

Mienthe had been surprised.

“We do not wish to astonish and overwhelm them,” the
Arobern had explained. “We wish them to see us coming so that they may back out of our way. If they do not back away,
then
we will overwhelm them.”

But he had seemed to expect the Linularinan forces to retreat. Mienthe was surprised by this, too. After all, Linularinum had shown itself amazingly determined. The Arobern certainly could not look for any additional support from Casmantium, whereas the Linularinan forces on this side of the river must have everything they needed.

“That is all true,” agreed the Arobern. “And Gereint Enseichen thinks as you do, that we may find Linularinum reluctant to give way. But, militarily, they must. This is all hostile country for them. Half the men all through this country are militia, or have been. We will have the favor of the countryside and the Linularinan forces only sullenness and flung stones.”

It was true that the Casmantian king had asked Mienthe to go ahead and speak to militia officers at Kames, so they had acquired three good-sized militia companies. The militia rode under the command of the Arobern’s professional military officers. Their combined force now flew not only the spear-and-falcon banner of Casmantium, but also the oak banner of the Delta and the golden barley and blue river of Feierabiand. Until the Arobern explained, Mienthe had not realized that he had purposefully set all those banners up where they could be seen.

And at first he seemed to be right: They met no stiff resistance, only from time to time they glimpsed Linularinan scouts or agents, and then as they pressed forward they would often find obvious signs of a larger force that
had been encamped and had now withdrawn. A formal alliance approaching and a thoroughly hostile Delta population to press them: The Linularinan officers did not want to face that. They withdrew, and withdrew again. So there had been no fighting.

“It may be different when we come to Tiefenauer,” the Arobern warned Mienthe.

“It will be, if they haven’t found that book of theirs,” agreed Gereint Enseichen. He gave Mienthe a nod, but really he was speaking to the Arobern. “They might not wish to fight, but I think they will, rather than give up the town where they know it hides.”

“They won’t have found it,” Mienthe had answered with confidence, but the Casmantian mage only shrugged, and as they at last approached Tiefenauer, she gradually became much less certain. She brushed damp strands of hair out of her face, peering ahead for the first glimpse of the city. The sun fought its way through towering clouds, and the woods along the road looked heavy, thick with green shadows. The shadows were ornamented by flashes of yellow and crimson where a flowering vine tumbled down a great oak or a bird darted past. Mosquitoes whined in the heavy shade, and sapphire-winged flycatchers dipped and wheeled in the complicated sky overhead. The horses’ hooves thudded dully on the packed wet earth of the road, and everywhere there was the sound of rushing water—it ran down the ditches on either side of the road and against the banks where the road had been built up through a slough; it dripped from leaves overhead and trickled through the wet leaves that carpeted the ground under the trees. The reins were stiff and cold in Mienthe’s fingers.

“It always seems to be raining when I come back to Tiefenauer after any time away,” Mienthe said aloud.

“If it were in the mountains, it would be snow,” Tan answered with the ghost of a smile. He was riding at Mienthe’s shoulder, his customary place through all these long wet days. He seldom spoke now. His attention seemed to be directed inward. But he had perhaps seen Mienthe’s anxiety and so spoke lightly, to take her mind from her mood.

Mienthe was not willing to be cheered. “At least that would be pretty,” she said. It seldom snowed in the Delta; usually there was only a cold gray drizzle for days on end. Mienthe liked snow. She thought wistfully of pretty, wintertime Tihannad. Up in the shadow of the mountains, there might even be snow this late in the spring. Bertaud was there now. As soon as she thought of him, she found she missed him terribly. Had he met his griffin friend again; had they discovered why the Casmantian Wall was breaking and how to stop it breaking right through? He must have heard now about the trouble in the Delta…

It occurred to Mienthe, for the first time, that her cousin might possibly be riding for the Delta right now; that he might have come before them, he might even be there at this moment. She had assumed that he would stay close by the king, and that Iaor Safiad would avoid the Sierhanan road, and that they would meet Lord Beguchren at Minas Ford and Beguchren would stop them, exactly as the Arobern had planned. But what if—? And then what would he do, when he saw what Mienthe had brought home with her? If he had even made it to Tiefenauer on that dangerous road… if Linularinan soldiers hadn’t stopped him, hadn’t…