Law of the Broken Earth (49 page)

Tan began to stride forward, out of the center of the spiral, toward Istierinan.

“No!” said Kairaithin urgently. “No, man!”

“Yes, come to me!” called Istierinan grimly.

Tan stopped, looking helplessly from the griffin mage to the Linularinan legist, and Istierinan stood up and ran
the white feather of his quill through his fingers. The fire that had caught in its feather went out, and he laughed.

Kairaithin, with no expression at all, took one step forward and exploded violently into fiery wind and driving red sand. The power of that wind slashed across the double spiral with incredible precision, slicing past Mienthe and Kes, scouring away the bloody ink and whipping up the white fire, hardly disturbing Tan’s hair as it whipped past him but driving against Istierinan with terrible force, tearing at his face and eyes, flinging him to his knees, ripping the white quill from his hands. But, though the quill blazed up once more, it did not crumble to ash but flew across the spiral like a burning arrow. It fell point-down at Tan’s feet, its tip deep in the wood of the floor, its feather burning on and on with white fire, like a slim taper that would not gutter out.

The power in that same great wind, unleashed, allowed Kes, even as she screamed in grief, to raise her fragile white hands and send her spiral racing infinitely wide and high, until it cracked the edges of the world and broke against the dome of the sky. Mienthe cried out, and her spiral leaped forward in equal measure as though dragged along by the fiery spiral, only hers broke open the day and the dark and twisted in and down until it shattered the center of the earth.

“Write down the law!” Mienthe cried.

As in a dream, Tan opened the book. He bent and took up the burning white quill.

“Write down fire and joy!” said Kes. She seemed to have forgotten grief. She lifted hands filled with blazing light and shook fire out of her hair, laughing.

“Write down earth
and
fire,” said Jos, leaning against
a wall that was, amazingly, still standing. “Write down sorrow as well as joy.”

“You must subordinate fire to earth!” croaked Istierinan through burned lips and broken teeth, trying blindly to get to his feet.

Mienthe only watched Tan, her expression grave and trusting.

There was no ink left in the quill, so Tan tore its sharp point across his own wrist. He wrote in his own blood, across a page that would take no other ink, a single word. The word he wrote was

AMITY

He wrote it plainly, with neither flourish nor ornament. The word sank into the page and all through the book. From the center of the earth to the dome of the sky, from one edge of the world to the other, the writing remade the law of the world.

I
t was nothing a mage would have thought of. Everyone agreed about that one thing, later. Everyone, at least, who was a mage, or had ever been a mage. Certainly Beguchren Teshrichten said so, so Mienthe was sure it was true.

“It required someone with a remarkable, anomalous gift,” he said wryly to Mienthe. “Casmantium for making, Feierabiand for calling, and Linularinum for law, but I’ve never heard of anyone waking into a gift such as yours.”

“Istierinan Hamoddian was anomalous, too,” Mienthe pointed out.

“But not at all in the same way. Have some of these berries. What a splendid climate you have here in the Delta, to be sure. Fresh berries so early! No, we quite well understand Istierinan, anomalous as he undeniably was. One doesn’t think of a mage being able to sustain any natural gift; indeed, we are taught that bringing out
the mage power smothers the inborn gift. Yet clearly there are and have been exceptions.” Beguchren tilted his head consideringly. “Perhaps the legist gift is more amenable to magework than making or calling. One does rather hope that such persons are rare, generally not quite so powerful, and now inclined toward a certain humility.”

They might very well be so inclined, Mienthe thought, considering what had happened to Istierinan. She had thought they ought to leave him for King Iaor to judge, or even send him back to his own king, but Kes had not been patient or forgiving with the man who was, or so she had seemed to feel, in some part responsible for her old teacher’s death. When she had destroyed him, she had not left even ash. Nor, when it came to the moment, had Mienthe tried very hard to stop her. She had not confessed to anyone her deep relief at the death of Tan’s enemy. But she was relieved. All she said aloud was, “I hope they are
very
rare.”

They were in the Arobern’s camp, set neatly to the east of Tiefenauer, separate and self-contained. The Arobern had thought it politic to keep all his people outside the town, lest anyone should have any impression he’d ever meant to conquer or hold it himself. Iaor Safiad himself had firmly and pointedly occupied the great house as soon as he’d arrived, two days after Tan had written his new law to govern fire and earth. Bertaud had not yet returned. Mienthe was almost certain her cousin was well—the king assured Mienthe he was well—but she longed to see him and be certain of it herself.

Iaor Safiad had not yet granted the Arobern an audience. He had sent only curt word refusing the Casmantian king leave to withdraw east toward the pass. He
had, however, sent almost every available Feierabianden healer to the Casmantian camp, thus demonstrating that while he might be furious with the Casmantian king, he was at least willing to admit that the Casmantian soldiers had suffered on Feierabiand’s behalf. Everyone assumed that Iaor was much angrier with the King of Linularinum than with the Arobern—everyone assumed he would, in due course, forgive the Arobern’s presumption. The Casmantian soldiers, nodding wisely, muttered about royal pride; three or four young men had already wistfully asked Mienthe about the Safiad’s temper. She had not known how to answer their questions.

Beguchren Teshrichten had not asked Mienthe about either king. He said instead, “One does wonder whether your gift would ever have stirred if Tan hadn’t happened to break the law Linularinan legists long ago imposed on the world.” Then he paused and asked, very gently, “How does Tan do, today? May I hope that there has been some improvement?”

Mienthe began to answer, but tears suddenly closed her throat and she found she could not speak. Blinking hard, she opened her hands in a gesture of wretched uncertainty.

“I believe he will come to himself in good time, child. Recovery from such events does take time. He overused his gift, I suspect.” The mage paused and then said plainly but not unkindly, “He might have lost it. Used it up. Such things can happen, in great extremity.”

As Lord Beguchren knew better than anyone. Mienthe nodded. She swallowed, rubbed her hand across her mouth, and managed to ask, “Is there anything you might suggest?”

Beguchren lifted his shoulders in a minimal shrug. “I’m certain you are already doing everything I might suggest. Warmth, rest… the company of a friend…”

“King Iaor made me leave.” Mienthe blushed slightly, remembering the king’s blunt impatience.
You’re too thin, Mienthe. How will it help him if you wear yourself to bone and nerve? Go for a walk, go for a ride, see the sky, have something to eat, have a nap, don’t come back here until dusk. Trust Iriene to watch over him. That’s an actual royal command, Mie. Now go away.
Though she suspected that Iaor had not actually meant for her to ride down to the Casmantian camp and visit Lord Beguchren.

“Undoubtedly wise. It serves nothing for you to fall ill yourself. Once you are both entirely recovered, I wonder whether you might care to visit Casmantium.” Beguchren picked up another cluster of berries between his finger and thumb and gazed at it. “How very like a string of garnets! You might like to wait until your berrying season is past, perhaps. But I would be pleased if you—and Tan, of course—would visit me in Breidechboden. I would like very much to investigate the precise nature of your gift. I believe it is certainly a gift rather than any form of magecraft. But certainly an exceedingly odd gift. I wonder what other odd gifts we may find emerging now that the world is no longer subject to the constraints placed on natural law by Linularinan mages.”

Mienthe thought she would be perfectly ecstatic if her gift, whatever it encompassed, never woke again. Drawing that last double spiral had left her with a persistent and not altogether comfortable sense of increased depth in the world. Well, that was an odd and entirely inaccurate
way to describe it. It was more as though everything in the world was now attended by a faint reverberating echo—well, not precisely an
echo
. Mienthe frowned and ate a berry. The sharp sweet-tart taste seemed just a little bolder or darker or more distinct than it should have. She put the berries down and sighed.

Beguchren said gently, “Is it so very unpleasant?”

“Oh… it’s not
unpleasant
, exactly.” In fact, Beguchren’s curiosity almost made her curious herself. “What other anomalous gifts?” she asked. “You really think other people might—might—” She waved a vague hand.

“Have gifts similar to yours? Or perhaps unique to themselves? Certainly. Why not? You demonstrate the possibility, and I do not believe the new law will constrain such gifts.” Beguchren regarded her with a calm, detached interest that, oddly, made Mienthe feel more comfortable with her strange gift rather than less. He murmured, “I would like to see what you might do in the high mountains. I suspect your gift may be as closely related to wild magic as to the ordinary magic of the earth—an odd notion, and yet I do suspect so. I am curious to see what you might do with the winds. And perhaps with the sea. One might well understand both the winds and the sea to contain”—he made a circular motion in the air—“circles and spirals. Yet we have ordinarily envisioned the sea as allied to earth and the winds as allied to fire.”

“Have we?” Mienthe, distracted by an odd thought, had barely heard him. She said instead, “I wonder whether, if a mage’s power smothers the inborn gift and if you’re no longer a mage—” She stopped. Looked up, with some trepidation. She had not meant to wake old sorrows.

But Beguchren was smiling slightly. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “But, yes. I wonder that as well.”

“If you—” Mienthe began hesitantly.

A Casmantian soldier, ducking his head in apology as well as to clear the low tent roof, came in, and she broke off, trying to decide whether she was glad or sorry for the interruption.

“Lady,” the young man said to Mienthe, and to Beguchren, “my lord, the Arobern asks you to attend him. Immediately, he says, if you will forgive me.”

Mienthe jumped to her feet. “I should go—”

“Not at all,” murmured Beguchren, rising more slowly. “We may well value your advice, Lady Mienthe. Please accompany me.”

“The Safiad has sent for me,” the Arobern told them both. He paced nervously from one end of his much larger tent to the other, then spun to glare at Mienthe. “What will he say? What will he do? I am certain Erich is safe—”
Nearly
certain, suggested the stiffness of the Casmantian king’s shoulders. “But what will he demand? An apology? An indemnity?” His deep voice dropped further, into a rumbling growl. “A longer term for my son to be held as a hostage at his court?”

Mienthe had to confess that she could not guess. “He
ought
to thank you,” she added, but cautiously, because no one but she seemed to think this at all likely.

The Arobern grunted, jerked his head
No
. “I offended his pride. Twice. No. Three times. Once in coming through the pass without leave—twice in leaving Beguchren to delay him on his road—a third time, worst of all, because he knows he must be
grateful
to me.” The
Casmantian king jerked his head again. “No. He will be
furious
.” He prevented Mienthe from exclaiming how unfair this was by adding, in a low growl, “I would be.”

“He will be more furious still if you do not come as he bids you,” murmured Beguchren. The elegant Casmantian lord looked faintly amused, so far as Mienthe could read his expression at all.

“Yes. True.” The Arobern ran a big hand through his short-cropped hair, looking harassed. “Come,” he said to Mienthe abruptly. “
You
, come. An apology is well enough, if that will satisfy the Safiad’s temper, but if your king demands a second term for my son in his court,
you
tell him he should be grateful to me!”

Mienthe could hardly refuse.

Iaor Safiad was in the solar, in a big, heavy chair with ornate carving on its legs and back. Normally that chair occupied Bertaud’s personal apartment, but Mienthe was not surprised to see that the king had claimed it, for it
was
very like a throne. Especially the way Iaor sat in it: not stiff, but upright, with his hands resting on the polished brass finials that finished its arms. There were other chairs near his, but none were much like a throne, and no one was sitting in any of them. There were guardsmen at the door, but they only stared straight ahead, with the most formally rigid posture possible, and did not even seem to notice the Arobern. Or Mienthe, standing nervously in his shadow. She did not know why
she
should be nervous, except that the Arobern’s nervousness had communicated itself to her during the ride up to the great house.