Lord of the Changing Winds (31 page)

Iaor was silent, thinking. Of many things, probably: deserts and fire, Casmantium and cold…

“I think… that Kairaithin sincerely does not want battle with you. With us. And that if he is not with his people, his opinion is not likely to carry the moment. I think that without strong leadership, the griffins will take all courses of action instead of just one, and become very dangerous. Kairaithin told me… that he came to Tihannad to warn you of Casmantium.”

“But he changed his mind.”

Bertaud spread his hands. He was baffled by the griffin mage’s behavior himself, and had no idea how to explain it to Iaor. He said tentatively, “You hurt his pride, I think. I don’t know! I don’t know. He seemed… I believe he was honestly distressed to leave you uninformed. For his own purposes, if not for your sake… I think he meant to use Feierabiand to try to get his little fire mage back from the Arobern.”

Iaor put his cup down again, still untasted. He shook his head, incredulous perhaps at the shape of the world, so different than it had seemed so few days earlier.

Bertaud found himself tapping his fingers nervously on the arm of his chair and folded his hands firmly in his lap. He glanced at the king, and away. And, reluctantly, back, gathering his courage. “Iaor?”

The king glanced up.

Bertaud met his eyes, with an effort. “Iaor… I’m sorry.”

“I am not certain you have reason to be. The news you have brought me has great value.”

Bertaud shook his head. “All else aside… I asked protection from another lord, against you. That was… I don’t know what I was thinking. At the time, I don’t suppose I
was
thinking; not clearly. I… well. I am sorry, Iaor. My king. I most earnestly beg your pardon.”

Iaor was still for a moment. Then he nodded. He said nothing, but… Bertaud thought some of the edge had gone from the king’s manner. The king said, “I was also at fault. Another time I will listen more closely to what you try to tell me. As I have tried to listen tonight. I ask for your advice. If I go south, can I depend on your Kairaithin to hold back his people? It should be Casmantium against which the griffins rage, not Feierabiand. What say you? Is there a way to speak to the griffins, to win their quiescence, if not their aid? Or if they should aid us, they may have their desert, and welcome. Would they be amenable to this suggestion? Can I find this Kes, could she perhaps make my desire clear to them?”

“Kes would be the one who might well go between you and the desert,” Bertaud agreed slowly. “I have told her so, and told her to seek you out, though… I don’t know that she would have the nerve. She is a timid creature, and herself half fire, now. Or, failing the girl, you might try to speak to Kairaithin yourself. If he will speak to you. I do not know what to advise you, my king. Except, do not send a mage to speak to the griffins. I don’t think earth mages understand how strong the antipathy will be until they experience it. I am the last person who should speak, I know, but… I truly, truly do not think you should trust the opinions of a mage when it comes to dealing with griffins.”

“I might send you,” Iaor suggested. “If you thought you might trust yourself.”

That question, not quite asked, was hard to face. Bertaud thought of Kairaithin saying,
I could send you as
my
agent
… He had instantly rejected that idea. But neither was he confident that he could act as Iaor’s agent against the griffins.

“Shall I trust you?” Iaor asked him. He asked as a friend. And as a king. “You chose the griffin over me in Tihannad. If it came to that a second time, whom would you choose? If your Kairaithin bids you against me… are you certain what choice you would make? Can I be certain?”

Bertaud knew, to his dismay, that he could not answer this question.

It was Iaor, his friend, who looked at him with sympathy. But it was the Safiad, King of Feierabiand, who said, “I will consult with Meriemne. I will take counsel of my generals and my advisors. But, my friend, I think we will be riding south tomorrow, and I think that you will stay here, under guard. I beg you will not think less of me.”

“No,” Bertaud whispered.

The top floor of the inn held five rooms. The best of these was actually a suite, containing a sitting room and servants’ quarters as well as a bed chamber. Soft rugs covered the wooden floors, chairs with scrolled arms stood by small decorative tables, and a rather good painting of the town hung opposite the curtained bed. The walls were white, the wood bleached pale, the rugs and curtains the color of pale ivory; the effect was one of spacious light, though none of the rooms was large.

Wide windows, shutters thrown open, offered an impressive view over Riamne’s low walls to the river. The afternoon sun struck the water to gold, as though it were molten fire that flowed there. Bertaud shifted uneasily and tried to see the river as simply water. On the road that ran alongside that river, a long column of two thousand men was slowly passing away to the south.

The king, with his banners and his retinue, was already out of sight. It would take an hour, probably, for the tail end of the column to pass out of view. Bertaud, his hands resting on the broad sill, watched their slow movement. For a very little, he would have gone out the window, found a horse, and followed them.

He knew what he wanted: to ride after the king, ask for a different decision, for leave to ride with the army. He understood there was no point. He had not remonstrated with the king’s decision. He had not allowed a whisper of resentment, of bitterness, to inform his manner or his leave-taking with his king. If that leave-taking had been strained… that was nothing for which Iaor could be faulted. He believed that.

And now there was this window, with guards below—Bertaud did not have to look for them to know they were there—and the slow procession, of which he was not part. He paced unhappily from the window to the door and back to the window: Both would be guarded. By men who kept him here by order of the king they all served, whom he did not wish to defy.

He paced again, from window to door, from sitting room to bed chamber, back to the window. The column of soldiers was still in sight, and still moving so slowly a brisk stride might well carry a man to its head before the last of its baggage tail was well in motion.

Which, of course, he could not prove himself. In disgust, Bertaud flung himself into one of the fine chairs and stared sightlessly at the wall, refusing to look again out the window.

The quality of the light flooding the room changed slowly, so that the plaster of the walls turned from white to cream to the palest gold and then to a more luminescent gold, tinged with the red of the lowering sun. Shadows crept slowly into the room, dimming its light, and the breeze that wandered through the window became uncomfortably cool… time passing, carrying them all forward with it, he feared: The king riding endlessly through this suspended moment into the south and the new desert; and the Arobern, hidden with his army in the stillness of the mountains above that desert; and the griffins contained within it, building it out of themselves. All, all of them, separated by distance, but all contained in the identical moment. Until the moment should break, and they all crash together into disaster… He could all but see it, a fast-approaching moment toward which the inexorable wind of time carried them all…

A hand was set firmly on his shoulder, so that Bertaud jerked upright and spun sharply. Yet he was somehow not surprised to find it was Kairaithin who stood over him, in the form of a man, with his shadow the shadow of a griffin. “Earth and iron,” he breathed, and dropped back into the chair.

“You called me,” Kairaithin said, rather harshly. His face was not clearly visible in the dim light, but his eyes blazed with fire that made their blackness somehow only the more absolute.

“I?” Bertaud said blankly.

“You.” Kairaithin gave him a long stare. “Well? Will you tell me you had no intention to call?”

Ignoring this baffling question, Bertaud instead leaned forward and said urgently, “Kairaithin, when Feierabiand comes into your desert, you must pretend to do battle.
Tell
Iaor what you will do. Go to him—or take me to him and I will speak for you. We can arrange it all. Then you and he can
both
turn against the Arobern when he comes down out of the mountains, and all will be well!” And the disaster toward which the wind carried them all would fail, and Feierabiand remain as it should be: Peaceful and green and in no way broken by griffin fire or Casmantian ambition.

The griffin mage turned his fierce, proud face toward the window and the sky beyond.

“Well?” Bertaud asked him urgently. “Well?”

“Tastairiane Apailika has persuaded Eskainiane Escaile Sehaikiu of the efficacy of a different course,” Kairaithin said. His black eyes shifted from the window to Bertaud’s face. “And Escaile Sehaikiu has persuaded the Lord of Fire and Air. We shall draw both Feierabiand and Casmantium into our desert, Feierabiand by pretended aggression and Casmantium by the hope of easy victory; yet both shall be illusion. Thus, once the Casmantian force has destroyed the soldiers of Feierabiand, we shall come down upon it in its turn, and Casmantium will not be able to stand before us. Thus the men of Casmantium will follow those of Feierabiand into the red silence, and my people shall be secure.”

Bertaud stared at him, appalled. He got to his feet, took a single step forward. “Is this what you want?” he whispered.

The fierce eyes held his, without a shadow of apology or regret. “I argued for the calling up of a different wind. But no one has more influence with Kiibaile Esterire Airaikeliu than Escaile Sehaikiu; they are
iskarianere
, closer than brothers. The argument did not go my way. And, in truth, man, this plan will do well enough.”

“Not for Feierabiand,” Bertaud said sharply. “Not for Iaor.”

“No,” agreed the griffin, but not with sympathy. Only with frightening indifference.

Bertaud moved to the window and looked sightlessly out into the dusk for a moment. Then he turned back toward Kairaithin. “Casmantium beat you before, drove you from your own desert, destroyed all your mages but one. Why should you believe you can face the Arobern now? Even wearied by battle against Feierabiand?”

“I have no power for healing,” stated the griffin. “But Kes does.”

The implication stood starkly in the silence between them. Bertaud said at last, “Then you should not need to blunt the Casmantian spear against a Feierabiand shield.”

Kairaithin tilted his head to the side, a slight gesture somehow more like the movement of an eagle than of a man. Fire seemed to burn just out of sight beneath his skin; his black eyes were filled with pitiless fire. He said, “While Casmantium battles Feierabiand, I shall hunt the cold mages. They will discover that the roused desert is more powerful than they had imagined. Thus when the battle of men is over, my little
kereskiita
will be neither wearied nor opposed. Thus she may do her work well during the battle between Casmantium and my people. Thus will the Arobern learn that the People of Fire and Air are not to be lightly offended.”

“No,” Bertaud whispered, without strength.

Kairaithin’s stare held… regret, possibly. But still no hint of apology, or yielding. He said, “You will not need to call me again.” The world shifted, tilted…

“No!” Bertaud shouted, not disbelief this time, but out of desperate need and horror. And found, to his astonishment, that that strange shift of space and time did not continue, that the world and the room steadied, that the griffin had stayed after all.

Kairaithin seemed exasperated, but he remained. “Cease,” he said sharply.

Bertaud stared at him. The fire shone just below the surface of the griffin; for a moment, he saw neither the man-shape Kairaithin wore, nor the true griffin beneath that shape, but only fire—contained and channeled and ruled by will, but fundamentally wild.

He seemed to hear it, roaring high in its burning; he felt its searing heat against his face. It was fierce and merciless, wild and beautiful, passionate and joyous. It spoke, and its voice was the voice of the griffin. It spoke of the hot wind, of the desert storm, of stone that melted and flowed like water.

He was not, Bertaud knew distantly, dreaming. Though his eyes, it occurred to him, were closed. He opened them.

Kairaithin was standing very still in the center of the room, watching him. His proud, austere face showed very little. And yet Bertaud knew that the griffin was afraid. And he knew why. Impossible though it had seemed. Impossible though it seemed still.

He said, “You came when I called you. Can you go, though I refuse you leave?”

“You would not be wise to challenge me,” Kairaithin said. He did not move, did not even blink, but a hot wind sang tensely through the confines of the room; sand hissed across the plaster walls and drifted on the rugs.

“Stop,” Bertaud commanded him.

The wind died.

“Man,” said Kairaithin, “I warn you plainly. You do not know what you are doing. Cease this foolishness. I
will
go. Be wise, and do not challenge me.” The room shifted, tilting underfoot.

“Stop it!” snapped Bertaud, catching his balance on a windowsill that seemed, under his hand, to want to become twisted red stone.

And the room stilled, with both of them still within it.

“I do know what I am doing.” Bertaud tried to steady his voice, which kept wanting to rise into a shout of incredulity. He tried to steady his hands, which were trembling. “Though I… did not know it was possible for a man to hold the affinity to griffins.”