Lord of the Changing Winds (23 page)

But what had happened to Bertaud in the desert, Meriemne did not recognize.

“Not a deliberate attack,” she said thoughtfully. Her fingers, cool and dry, moved across his face and drew away as she straightened in her chair. “Or I think not. It seems more an intrinsic response in you to the fire of the griffin. As the antipathy poor Diene experienced was intrinsic in her, and a mercy it is that only mages suffer such an aversion.”

“I saw no sign that the griffin mage returned Diene’s aversion,” Bertaud said, suddenly realizing that this was true. “Or is it only earth mages who suffer it, and not mages of fire?”

“Oh, no, young man—the antipathy is a knife with two edges.” Meriemne paused. “Hmm. This was an experienced mage, then, to rule his own reaction so well you did not even perceive it. Well, you say he took on human form. I wonder whether he is very experienced indeed with moving through the country of earth? Perhaps he has learned to recognize and compensate for the aversion? I would almost,” she said thoughtfully, “wish to meet this creature. Though, on further consideration, perhaps not… You yourself did not suffer from the classic mage’s aversion? No, indeed, what you describe is entirely distinct. Tell me, esteemed Bertaud, are you gifted at all? Have you an affinity for an animal? Or are you a maker? A legist?”

“No, esteemed Meriemne. Those of my family are rarely gifted.” Though his father had held an affinity to hawks and falcons, and had been furiously angry when Bertaud showed not the slightest trace of any affinity of his own. Bertaud, wincing from the memory, did not mention that.

“Hmm.” Turning her head, the mage stared into his shadow with her blind eyes. What she saw in it, if anything, she did not say.

“But the dreams?” Bertaud pressed her.

“Certainly the dreams you describe are unusual,” the mage conceded. “I shall search in my books for such reactions.”

With no guarantee she would find anything this year or next. And in the meantime—“What shall I tell Iaor?” Bertaud asked her.

“Hmm. Well, child… do you love the king better than you love the desert?”

“Of course!” he snapped, and then wondered at the instant offense he’d felt. Was it too sudden? Too sharp? A defense, perhaps, against his own heart? He dismissed the doubt at once, yet it returned, slipping uncomfortably around the edges of his thoughts.

“Then trust yourself,” Meriemne advised serenely, either missing or ignoring this uncertainty, and he could not bring himself to give it voice and ask her advice. A baseless concern, anyway. An impossible doubt. Surely.

And so Bertaud went through the next days, and attended his king, and tried not to find the fixed stolidity of stone walls disturbing.

Three days after Bertaud’s return from the disastrous field of battle, Iaor Safiad declared himself satisfied with the preparations for the second attempt to clear the desert from Feierabiand. But on that third day, Bertaud found, to his astonishment, that the griffins had not waited for soldiers to come to their desert. Kairaithin came to Tihannad.

Kairaithin came, unannounced, into the large conference chamber where Iaor and his advisors and General Adries and Meriemne and one of the younger mages in Tihannad were all gathered, discussing last-minute details of the impending military exercise.

It was dusk. The desert wind, Bertaud thought, had no doubt died… From the heart of that stillness, Kairaithin stepped into human time. His black eyes, pitiless as fire, swept across all of them, checked for the space of a breath on Bertaud’s face, and settled on the king.

“Iaor Daveien Behanad Safiad,” he said, and took a short step farther into the chamber. He bowed his head infinitesimally. “May I speak?”

The king was startled, but not, Bertaud saw, afraid or angry. He said, “You should have given your name to my steward. Did no one stop you as you looked for me? This is a private meeting. You should have been told the proper day and manner in which to seek an audience.”

At first bewildered, Bertaud finally understood that the king did not understand that the man who had come so precipitously into this conference was not a man. He could not see, or had not yet seen, the fire in those inhuman eyes; he had not yet noticed that the shadow the lanterns cast back from his visitor was made of fire… He was blind.

It slowly occurred to Bertaud that all the men in this room were similarly blind; even the mages were blind. The younger was looking with growing dislike at the stranger who had come into their presence, but Bertaud saw no sign in his face that he understood what he saw or felt. Only Meriemne, for all she was truly sightless, turned her head toward the griffin with a slow awareness in her old face.
She
looked, as yet, less hostile than simply distressed.

Rising so sharply his chair fell backward onto the stone floor, Bertaud found himself standing between his king and the griffin mage with no clear memory of having moved and no notion at all what he would do if Kairaithin intended harm to Iaor, or to any of them.

“Son of Boudan,” Kairaithin said to him, pitiless amusement moving in his unhuman eyes. “So you have regained your place.”

“Anasakuse Sipiike Kairaithin,” Bertaud answered, and was surprised to find his own voice steady. “Why are you here out of yours?”

“Peace, man,” the griffin mage said, turning empty hands forward. “I followed the path you made for me to speak to your king, if he will hear me.”

Iaor had not risen, but his whole body had tightened. General Adries was on his feet, as were several of his officers. They were armed, and Bertaud could only hope they did not draw their swords and, with that, Kairaithin’s enmity.

“The path I…” Bertaud cut that startled question off short, and said instead, “Iaor, this is the greatest of the griffin mages come to speak to you. I would suggest—”

The young mage, his face twisted in an expression of fear and aversion, rose suddenly and flung a binding of stone and earth at Kairaithin.

Kairaithin, not even blinking, sent the binding awry in a shower of sparks. He said patiently to the king, ignoring the mage, “King of Feierabiand, I have come to this place to speak to you on a matter of importance to us both. If you are wise, you will hear me.”

Iaor gripped the arms of his chair hard. He was meeting Kairaithin’s eyes, and even if he did not see the griffin behind the man, he would have had to be dead not to feel the power rolling through the air around him. He drew breath to speak.

Before he could frame a word, Meriemne shut her sightless eyes and turned her frail hands palm up on the table. The full gathered weight of the earth fell down upon Kairaithin as irresistibly as a landslide.

The griffin, evidently taken by surprise, had only a fraction of a second to react, and it was not enough. Then the stolid power of the earth rolled over him and crushed him to the floor. Even his fiery shadow was pressed out; it went out like a snuffed candle. Helpless, bound by the power of stone and earth, his restless shadow quenched and his black eyes closed, Kairaithin had never looked more human.

“Meriemne?” the king inquired.

“That,” said the oldest mage, “is an unbearably dangerous creature, Iaor. Even from the esteemed Bertaud’s descriptions, I had no idea… Do you not perceive it?” Her voice was the husk of a voice, barely audible. She had turned her face toward Kairaithin as though she could see him.

“He only wished to speak to you!” Bertaud exclaimed.

Meriemne turned her blind gaze toward him. A line appeared between her brows; she tilted her head intently to one side. She whispered, “I would not wish to… Iaor, I might bind this creature. Then you might speak to him safely…” her voice trailed thinly off as though she had simply lost the strength to speak.

Iaor looked from the mage to him. “He may speak to me,” he answered at last. “Once he is bound. Bertaud—would you expect me to leave this powerful creature unbound in my presence? In this company? In this house? Will you say Meriemne was unwise to do as she did?”

“Not unwise,” whispered Bertaud, and added more strongly, almost despite himself, “but wrong.”

The king hesitated. “Do you trust your own judgment in this? Shall I trust it?”

Bertaud could not prevent a slight flinch that said as clearly as a shout that he did not know.

The king shifted his attention to Meriemne. “Will you release this creature from your hold without binding him? What is your advice?”

The mage opened a frail hand. “This creature is opposed to earth, Iaor. It cannot help but be opposed. I am afraid it would pull every stone of this hall down on every other stone, and burn your hall to ash. The stones want to fall just for its presence here. The very air wants to ignite. Can you not feel this?”

Her fragile voice held conviction. Bertaud shook his head. “That’s the aversion speaking—she can’t help but feel that way, Iaor—”

“Do you advise me from uncontrollable antagonism?” the king asked Meriemne. “Is your advice sound?”

The mage hesitated. “I think it is sound,” she whispered at last. “I think so, Iaor. I know this creature is horribly powerful—and unalterably opposed to earth. I
know
that.”

Bertaud stood wordless and helpless when his king looked deliberately back at him. What could he say? That the oldest and wisest mage in Feierabiand was wrong even in her certainty? What possible reason could he give Iaor to think so? He tried, nevertheless, to find words that might persuade him, persuade them all. None came to him.

The king looked back at Meriemne. “You can bind him?”

“Oh, yes,” the mage whispered. “I will make you a chain with the power of earth and of made things in it; it will not be broken by anything that is not of earth. It will bind fire and air and the changing wind. With that chain, you may hold this creature safely in your hand.”

The king nodded. “Make your chain.”

She made it. She shaped the chain link by link out of a sword one of the guardsmen gave her, and out of the stone table itself. She made a link out of a delicate porcelain cup and another from a copper bangle one of the soldiers gave her, and another from a string of polished wooden beads. Into each link she put a power of solidity, of holding, of weight.

The younger mage took the chain reverently from Meriemne’s hands when she was finished making it. It looked like an ordinary chain, but from the manner in which the young man lifted it, it contained the weight of the world. He fastened it around Kairaithin’s wrists and stood back.

With a tiny gesture of her hand, Meriemne released the griffin mage from her hold. Then she leaned back in her chair and tucked her hands in her lap, trembling in exhaustion or in the sudden chill that seemed to invade the room.

Kairaithin lifted his head and got his hands underneath his body, drawing himself slowly to his knees. He looked at the chain that bound his wrists without expression, almost as though he could not actually see it. But when he got to his feet, he moved as though he felt its weight dragging at him. His shadow was… gone. Though the lanterns threw light across the room, and all the rest of them cast shadows… Kairaithin’s shadow was not among the rest. Bertaud could not have said why he found this so deeply disturbing.

Kairaithin did not look at Bertaud. Nor did he look, even for an instant, at Meriemne. He turned his head slowly and looked straight at Iaor.

“If you have something to say to me,” said the king, “say it.”

Kairaithin’s mouth crooked in an expression that might have been humor. “Now? Now I have nothing to say.”

The king stared at him. “Griffin. Fire mage. Kairaithin—is that your name? What greeting was it you looked for from me?”

His answer was a slight lift of austere brows, and a dry, “You have there a man who has seen the heart of fire. You should listen to him.”

“Bertaud?”

Bertaud gave his king a helpless shrug, unable to find words to express his belief that his king had made a terrible mistake in his—surely perfectly reasonable—defense of his own person and his people. He could ask only, “Let me take the chain off, Iaor.”

He knew this was out of the question when he asked it, and was unsurprised by the judicious tilt of the king’s head, No. It might even have meant,
I’m sorry, but no.
But it did not offer any yielding.

Bertaud turned to Kairaithin instead. “If you came here to speak to the king, then speak! Is your pride worth sacrificing the chance?”

Kairaithin returned him only a blank, incredulous stare.

“Take him,” the king said to General Adries, “to the tower room; hold him there.” And to the griffin mage, he said, “When you would speak to me, I will hear you.”

Kairaithin stopped the general in his first step with merely his fierce stare. He said to the king, “Very soon you will have no choice but to hear me. But, I warn you, by then it will do you no good to listen.”

Iaor’s mouth tightened, and he waved sharply to Adries.

“Didn’t you
hear
him?” Bertaud cried in frustration and inexplicable terror.

“Yes,” the king said. “Tell me clearly what I should do to make him speak. Or do you truly believe I should release this dangerous creature in my hall? Everything he has said to me so far has had the tone of a threat.”

I don’t know!
Bertaud wanted to shout.

He did not shout. He merely plucked the nearest soldier’s sword from the man’s hands, stepped forward, and brought the blade slashing down between Kairaithin’s wrists, where it cut the mage-wrought chain that bound him as though the links had been made of grass stems. They spilled away in all directions, shattering into bits of metal and stone and porcelain.