Lord of the Changing Winds (20 page)

“Will you think well of us, man?” asked the griffin. His tone, astonishingly, might almost have been wistful.

Bertaud stared at him, taken utterly aback. “How can I?”

“Try,” Kairaithin advised. He turned his head toward the west, looked into the last light of the sun, and was gone.

T
he young lord stepped freely forward into Kairaithin’s grip, going to carry word of the griffins to his king. Kes admired him: He was, she thought, not really
so
many years older than she was. But
he
was brave. She knew he was afraid of Kairaithin and she thought that, in his place, she would not have been able to come forward with such courage.

Though she understood that, she did not understand
him
.

He would go to his king… her king, too, Kes supposed, but this was so strange an idea that she dismissed it almost at once. He would take to the king his memory of Tastairiane Apailika as well as Kairaithin, and the great Lord of Fire and Air… of her, even. And what image of her would he carry to his king? She wondered about that distant king—what was he like? Was he proud? Violent? Did he fear battle, or long for it? Was he clever, or wise? Or neither?

What would this king say to the lord who came to him from this airy hall? Would the king even listen to a man whom he had sent here, who had lost all his companions and returned alone?

And if he did listen, what would the lord tell him?

If she had gone there, what would she have told the king? Kes sighed. If she had known what to say, perhaps she would have found the courage to go. If Kairaithin had permitted her to go. Kes stared out into the desert night. The wind smelled of hot stone and silence.

Opailikiita’s voice slid into her awareness, oddly tentative.
Are you well?

“Yes,” said Kes, quite automatically. Then she asked herself the same question and did not know the answer. She sighed again and stroked the slim griffin’s neck, ruffling the feathers gently against the grain so that she could feel them settle back. In the darkness, Opailikiita was perceptible mainly as a stirring of heat, a puff of breath. “Would you take me home?” Kes asked her.

Kairaithin has forbidden it.

Kes hesitated. Yet, somehow… she did not feel that this statement, plain as it was, carried quite the force it might have. “Yes,” she said. “But would you do it anyway?”

Opailikiita curled her neck around and touched Kes lightly on the cheek with the tip of her deadly beak; it was a caress, and Kes smiled and moved to lean against the griffin’s shoulder.

Kairaithin is my
siipikaile, said the griffin.
But you are my sister, and I would not hold you here if you did not want to stay. But is the desert not your home? And is Kairaithin not your
siipikaile
as well?

Kes shook her head, but not exactly in denial. Perhaps griffin mages never asked whether you were interested in becoming an apprentice, whether you wanted to learn how to make the fire and the rising wind part of your soul, whether you wanted to belong to the desert. Perhaps a griffin only saw that you could hold the power he needed even when you did not know it yourself, and made sure you would learn to use it according to his needs.

Are you angry?
Opailikiita sounded curious, but not disturbed by the prospect.

Kes wasn’t angry. But longing rose in her, for the simple human house she had shared with Tesme, for the whicker of mares in the low pasture and the homey smells of cut hay and new bread instead of hot stone and dust. She shut her eyes against the heavy darkness and whispered, “I want to go home.”

Then I will take you
, said Opailikiita.
As far as it is possible to go.

Riding the griffin was not like sitting on a horse. There was no saddle, no stirrups, but the difference was more than that. The feathers under Kes’s knees were soft and fragile. Kes found herself afraid to hold the feathers of the griffin’s neck too tightly, lest she harm her.

You may grip tightly
, Opailikiita said, and leaped from the rock with a great leonine bound, sudden enough that Kes bit her tongue.

It was not like riding a horse at
all
. The jarring lurch when the griffin opened her wings to the wind nearly threw Kes off. She swallowed a gasp and held tightly with hands and legs.

The high pasture above the house had become desert. The trees that had been there were gone—not dead, but gone, as though they had never grown there. The grass had withered and blown away; even in the lower part of the hill pastures the grass had become sparse and thin. But on the other side of the creek that ran through the midlands pasture, the grass grew thick and green, as abrupt a change in the landscape as though the little creek separated countries that lay a thousand miles apart.

Opailikiita did not cross the creek into that cooler country, but came down to the ground on its desert side. Kes swung her leg across the griffin’s neck and slid off her back onto legs that seemed inclined not to hold her; she put an arm over Opailikiita’s neck for balance and support.

Can you cross into the country of earth?
asked the griffin.

Kes looked at her without comprehension. She straightened gingerly away from Opailikiita’s support and walked carefully, then more quickly, to the creek; before she quite came to it, it occurred to her that Opailikiita was not with her, and she turned her head to look inquiringly over her shoulder.

That was perhaps why, when she struck the barrier of cold air at the edge of the creek, it was so unexpected that it knocked her entirely off her feet. She sat, dazed, on parched ground at the edge of the desert and stared, mute with bewilderment, at the water lying inches from her feet.

Kairaithin has put a binding on you, that you shall not leave the desert
, said Opailikiita. She did not sound precisely sympathetic. Her tone held something more akin to the satisfaction of someone who has had a shrewd guess confirmed.
You will be angry now. Do not fight him. You do not have the strength.

Kes was not angry. But she wanted to weep in frustration and disappointment. Looking down the hill, she could see the lights in the windows of the house, small at this distance. She should have been able to walk to it in minutes. It was utterly out of reach. Kes stood up and put out a hand toward the creek. She found that she could not even reach out over the water. The barrier she could not see prevented her.

I will take you to the heights
, said Opailikiita.
I will bear you so high you feel the starlight on your shoulders, so high the air shatters and fire comes down to scatter through your feathers. It is very beautiful.

Kes barely heard her. She looked at her own hand, stretched out toward the creek, unable to reach further. She was aware, faintly, that she was shaking.

Sister
, said Opailikiita.

“
You
aren’t my sister.” Kes turned her back to the griffin and walked away from her, away from loss and confusion, into the stillness of the desert night. When she felt Opailikiita move to come after her, she began to run. She found she
was
angry—angry with Opailikiita, with Kairaithin, with all the griffins, with herself; she hardly knew. Rage, bright and unfamiliar, ran through her in a quick hot wave, like a fire cracking through the dark. The strength of it frightened her. She did not want Opailikiita’s company, but it was terror of her own anger that made Kes find a way to shift herself through the world, far from the banks of the creek, into the endless desert silence.

Kes had not known she could do this until she did it, but after it was done it felt as inevitable as taking a step. It was only a matter of understanding the movement of fire. The shifting endless movement of flame through air. That knowledge, which should have been foreign to her, felt as familiar as her own breath. And she found a sure knowledge of what she wanted, which was solitude and quiet.

Solitude Kes found at once. Quiet was longer in coming. The desert itself was quiet; it was within herself that Kes carried a clamor of rage, bewilderment, longing, and terror. She could step from one edge of the griffins’ desert to the other; she could step away from the element of earth into the element of fire; but she could not find her way from this emotional storm into calm.

Thoughts of Tesme, of Minas Ford, of the creek she could not cross all beat painfully at her attention. Kes tucked herself down against the base of a great twisted spire of rock and pressed her face against her knees. Her eyes felt hot; she wanted to weep. But tears would not come. Perhaps she was too angry to weep. She wanted Tesme to hold her, to rock her in her arms like a little child. But Tesme was not here. Tesme was at home. Where Kes should be.

Except that, surrounded now by the silence of the desert, Kes felt the storm of anger and longing slowly subside. She thought that all trouble, all emotion, might fade at last into that great silence; that the desert stillness might encompass all things. Kes found in herself a great longing for that silence, and welcomed it as it closed around her. The silence of the desert muted memory and unhappiness. She thought,
The desert is a garden that blooms with time and silence
, but then could not remember where she might once have heard that line, or whether it was from a history or a work of poetry or a story that Tesme, perhaps, had told her long ago. Except it did not sound like it could have belonged to the kind of stories Tesme told.

Time and silence. Time and silence grew through the dark and flowered with a bodiless beauty that seemed almost to have physical presence. Kes stared into the stark desert night and waited to see what would blossom out of it.

That was where the cold mages of Casmantium found her, in the soft pre-dawn grayness that preceded the powerful sun.

The first Kes knew of the Casmantian mages was a darkening of the desert, a shadow that stretched suddenly across the sand, a colder and stranger darkness than the night itself had brought. Then, startled, she saw frost run across the sand at her feet and spangle the stone by her hand.

She scrambled to her feet. Space seemed to close in around her, as though the infinite reaches of the desert had suddenly become bounded. She shuddered and groped at her back for the steadiness of rock, but flinched from the chill of the stone she found under her hand.

A voice out of the dimness spoke words Kes could not understand. Kes could not see the speaker, but turned her head blindly toward him. It was not, to her ear, a pleasant voice. It seemed to her to contain ice and ill will.

Another voice, deeper and harsher and yet not so unpleasant, answered the first. Men loomed suddenly out of the grayed light, closer than Kes had expected. Frightened, it occurred, at last, to Kes to move herself through the world; yet when she reached for that way of movement, for the heat and stillness that balanced motion, she could find nothing. A coldness lay between her and that way of movement. She tried to call out in the manner of a griffin, silently, for Opailikiita or for Kairaithin, but her call echoed back into her own mind unanswered.

The first voice spoke again and laughed. The sound made Kes shiver. She understood suddenly that the cold voice belonged to a mage, and understood as well that she was terrified of him. He was nothing like Kairaithin; though he was a man and her kind, she thought the man infinitely more frightening than the griffin.

The harsh voice answered, and a man, his dark form bulking large against the sky, came forward and laid a hand on her arm. Kes flinched, terrified, from that touch, and at this the grip eased; the harsh voice spoke again, but this time there was reassurance in its tone. Kes could not stop shivering, but her fear also eased and she stopped trying to pull away. When the man put his hand under her chin and tipped her head up, though she shut her eyes, she did not resist. The man spoke, curtly, not to her; then again to Kes. His was the harsh voice, and yet he seemed to be trying to speak gently. He shook her a little, not hard, and repeated himself. She realized, slowly, that the sounds of the language he spoke were not entirely strange, and understood at last that the language the man spoke was the harsh, choppy Prechen of Casmantium, and that he was Casmantian. That all these men were Casmantian.

Other men, farther back in the dimness, spoke—to the man who held her, or to one another, she did not know. The cold one said something, and Kes flinched again and quickly opened her eyes, afraid that she would find the cold man close by her in the dark. But, though dimly visible, he was not too near.