Lord of the Changing Winds (26 page)

Kes, shocked, leaped to her feet.

Errich, his eyes wide with horror and amazement, made it to his knees before the other soldier thrust him back and down. He could not cry out; with his throat cut, he could not even whisper. The blood ran down his chest. He made an awful choking sound as the life went out of his eyes.

The soldier bent down and closed the young man’s open eyes, speaking again, a low phrase in Prechen. At that moment, the Casmantian language did not sound coarse or harsh at all. It sounded like a language meant for grieving, for sorrow. For loss.

Kes had not made a sound. She stood with her hands clenched in front of her mouth, her eyes wide, staring.

The soldier who had killed Errich straightened and turned toward her. She thought he would kill her next and knew she should run away, except he would catch her, and besides she couldn’t move. Then their eyes met. For a long moment she did not know him, even then. But then she did. The big soldier—wearing the clothing of a Casmantian soldier as though perfectly familiar with it, with a sword at his side like it belonged there and a shirt of metal chain under the one of brown cloth—was Jos.

He said, “There is a horse,” and nodded back the way he had come.

For another long moment, Kes was completely incapable of movement. Or speech.

He said impatiently, almost harshly, “We must be quick.”

She shaped his name, without sound. But then she took the hand he held out to her and went the way he indicated.

There was indeed a horse, a very good one, black with three white feet and a narrow white blaze. It waited, ground-tethered, around the curve of the mountain, not forty feet from where Kes had sat with Errich to look at the desert. Jos gathered up its reins and mounted, and held down a hand to help Kes up in front of him. He was clearly tense, but also clearly far from panic. He had a plan. He meant to fold her up into it and… what? Take her back to Minas Ford and Tesme? She should want that.

Kes glanced over her shoulder at the camp, which was stirring briskly. No one, as far as she could tell, had yet noticed… anything amiss. She said, barely above a whisper, but clearly, “The desert. The desert is close, Jos.”

Jos put the horse into a brisk trot north and west, angling down and across the slope, not quite parallel to the distant edge of the desert, but nearly. “We’ll cut around above Minas Spring, avoid the desert—they’ll be sure you went straight down into it. They won’t think so quickly to search this way.”

Kes rested her hands on the neck of the horse; its muscles moved smoothly under her palms. She had a strange feeling it should be feathers under her hands. “They will… will they not see us?”

“Men see what they expect to see,” Jos said, his tone grim. “I have given them a thing they think they understand, and so they do not see anything else.”

Kes didn’t understand, but she nodded. She thought of Beguchren, waiting with his imperturbable smile and ice-pale eyes to take the fire out of her heart, and whispered, “I want to go to the desert.”

“You don’t,” Jos answered flatly. His arms around her were tense. She felt him move to look back over his shoulder, then shift to face forward again. “You must not go back into the desert; I know it looks like the quickest way, but the
malacteir
will only find you again if you go there. They’ll take you back into their power. You need to get home. You and Tesme—you can take horses, ride west. All the way to Sihannas, if necessary. You’ll be safe there.”

Safe,
thought Kes.
Sihannas?
It took a moment for her to understand what Jos had said, as though he had expressed an idea so strange she could not wrap her mind around it. She opened her eyes at last, turned her head warily. The camp was still there, on their right, stretching on—a little farther away, but only a little. There were men moving briskly about, and yet no one had challenged them. She did not understand how they could slip so invisibly by the camp. She looked at Jos’s mailed wrist, at his Casmantian uniform shirt. But if he looked like he belonged to this camp, surely she did not? But she did not ask. She only reached out to take the reins in her own hands and turned the horse firmly south, straight toward the desert.

Jos started to speak, a muffled exclamation.

“The desert,” Kes said tensely. “The desert. Beguchren—Beguchren put a cold binding on me. The sentries don’t matter—the men don’t matter. Only Beguchren. Only the desert. Please. I have to go into the desert. The griffins—they will not harm me. You—you don’t have to come. But I have to go.”

He started to shake his head, a movement she sensed rather than saw.

“Jos,” she said.

He stilled, his hands quiet on the reins, not fighting her. Then he shifted in the saddle. “What are you to the
malacteir
, Kes? You were a prisoner there! Were you not? Shall I not take you home?”

Kes started to say that she had not been a prisoner of the griffins. But she could not say that. It was not true. And yet it
felt
true. She knew perfectly well that she felt this way only because of what Kairaithin had done to her, teaching her to use fire, making her into a fire mage. But even though she
knew
this, she still felt, all through her bones, that fire was a natural and normal element for her, and that Beguchren’s cold magecraft would destroy her. And besides—

She whispered, “They need me. They need me so much. And besides—” she touched her chest—“The cold.
Whatever
else is true or might be true, I can’t bear it, Jos. I need Kairaithin to break the cold binding. Or Beguchren will find me. He’ll know as soon as he begins to look for me where I am—” She shuddered helplessly. “I couldn’t stand that. I couldn’t. Please.
Please
, Jos.”

Jos muttered a curse under his breath, turned to look carefully behind them, and nudged the horse into a slightly faster gait. Down the mountain this time, along a rough path that led almost straight for the desert. Kes shuddered again, in an agony of anxiety lest someone should shout behind them. No one did.

They came around a turn in the rugged path they were following and a man—two men—rose to stand in their way. One of the men had a bow, with an arrow already nocked, though not pointed at them. Kes uttered a small scream, but Jos seemed perfectly unmoved. He drew the horse up and spoke briefly to the men in Prechen, his tone matter-of-fact.

The men looked at Kes with covert interest, but their answers seemed respectful and somehow perfunctory. The one with the bow slipped his arrow from the string. Jos said something else, and the men laughed. Then, nudging the horse, Jos sent it on past them.

“Why—why don’t they stop us?” Kes asked him, when she thought she might be able to speak without her voice shaking.

It took Jos long enough to answer that she thought he was not going to. But he said at last, “This is Lord Anweiechen’s horse. Men know this horse. And I am wearing his badge. So they think I am his man, on his errand, and that is what they see.”

Anweiechen’s horse. The lord who had come into the desert with Beguchren to capture her. Hadn’t that been Lord Anweiechen? Kes said doubtfully, “You stole Lord Anweiechen’s horse?” After a moment, she added, her tone rising incredulously, “You knew his horse, to steal it? You knew his badge, to wear it? You have a Casmantian uniform. And you speak—you speak Prechen. I don’t—I think I don’t understand anything.”

There was a silence, long enough for the desert to grow measurably nearer. But finally Jos said, harshly, “I am Casmantian.”

“Yes,” said Kes. That much was obvious, though inexplicable. “But…”

The horse tossed its head as Jos’s grip on the reins tightened. Jos muttered a word under his breath, but he eased his hands and the horse pricked its ears forward again and quickened its pace. Jos said, in a tone flat and hard as the gray mountain stone, “I am—I was a Casmantian spy.”

This didn’t make sense. Kes blinked. She turned her head, trying to look at his face. She didn’t understand what she saw: The glimpse she got of his expression was… different. It didn’t even look like him, but like some bleak stranger. She said tentatively, “But… you worked for us. For Tesme. For years.”

“Minas Ford,” Jos said, in that precise hard voice that seemed so little like his, “boasts one of the finest inns between Terabiand and Tihannad. A small inn, but still. Men stop there. Merchants, petty lords, everyone. And they talk. To one another, to Jerreid. Jerreid can draw out anyone. He doesn’t really listen to their private business when travelers confide in him. But I do. Did. Minas Ford is a good place for a spy.”

Kes, unable to think of anything to say, said nothing.

“I knew when the Arobern brought his army across from Casmantium. I encouraged that young lord from Tihannad to do battle with the griffins; I watched the battle and saw that little army destroyed, exactly as the Arobern wished. I meant to bring the news of that battle to Anweiechen, who is master of the Arobern’s spies. I did bring that news. But once I came here, I also heard of you.”

And had freed her. Killing a man to do it. A countryman, impossible though that seemed. Kes shook her head slightly, incredulous.

“I—” said Jos, and stopped.

Kes could not imagine what he might say. Apparently, neither could he, because he did not finish his thought, but only pressed the horse to greater speed. When Kes looked cautiously back, she found that the Casmantian camp was no longer visible; it had been lost behind them among the gray stones and snow. She relaxed a little. For a few moments, there was nothing but the sound of hooves on stone and rough ground, the feel of the horse between her thighs, the solidity of the man behind her. Whom she had thought she’d known.

Jos had never pressed Kes to speak; silences between them had always been easy. Companionable. But this time, his discomfort seemed to radiate outward from his body like heat. He fidgeted in the saddle, turning his head to look behind them—there was still no sign of pursuit—then turning again a moment later. His hands shifted on the reins, then shifted again, until the horse tossed its head uncomfortably.

“You came for me,” Kes said, not turning. And he was taking her toward the desert, even though he didn’t want to go there or take her there, even though he couldn’t understand why she insisted that she must go there. She had never understood gratitude, she thought, until this moment. She said again, “When I was a prisoner, and alone, you found me and freed me, when I thought no one would.”

The quality of the silence behind her eased.

Before them, the red desert grew closer, until she thought she could feel its presence like a hot wind against her face, though the air was still.

B
ertaud did, despite all, rest a little. There was no place to sit or lie down other than the open cliff. He sat on the stone, leaned against more stone, and shut his eyes.

He did not dream of Iaor, which was a mercy and yet dismayed him even as he welcomed the fierce griffin dreams that came to him. He dreamed of rivers of burning liquid rock that ran across a jagged iron-dark land and cast droplets of fire into the air where it broke against stone. The air smelled of hot brass and burning stone. Soaring across a last ridge of broken black rock, he found before him a lake of molten fire; a violent joy consumed him, although he did not know why. Sweeping back his wings, he plunged into a steep, fierce dive straight for the heart of the fiery lake, knowing that when he entered it… when he entered it…

Bertaud woke, heart pounding, with red light in his eyes. He moved, startled, murmuring, and a hand closed on his shoulder. It took him a moment to understand that the hand belonged to Kairaithin, and that the griffin mage had stopped him from moving too near the edge of the cliff where he had slept. The red light was the dawn, the sun burning down across the slopes where the red desert rose to the heights.

He was, Bertaud realized as he pulled himself slowly out of his dreams, stiff and hungry and desperately thirsty.

Kairaithin did not look like
he
was stiff or hungry. He stood on the edge of the cliff, his face toward the rising sun, light and heat seeming to pour out of him as much as out of the sun. His shadow, the shadow of a griffin, molten and hot, shifted like a live thing across the stone, and fixed Bertaud with fiery black eyes.

Kairaithin turned, and his eyes were the same as his shadow’s; he gazed at Bertaud with an air of surprise, as though taken aback to find a human man here beside him on this red desert cliff.