Lord of the Changing Winds (32 page)

“It is not possible.”
Kairaithin blazed into griffin form and then into fire, a savage red fire that cast its own shadow, which was golden and shaped like a griffin. The fire roared up, red and gold, flames running along wooden tables and thick rugs, across the wooden floor and up the plaster walls. Somewhere, distantly, there were shouts.

“No,”
said Bertaud, and fought the fire. It only roared the more passionately until he stopped fighting it and let himself love it: its passion, its fierceness. “No,” he whispered, and quieted it.

His eyes were shut again. He drew a breath of air that tasted of fire, and opened them.

Kairaithin stood in the center of the charred room, in the form of a man. His eyes, filled with fire and rage and a bleak awareness of his own helplessness, were fixed on Bertaud. It hurt to see that bleakness where there should be exultant power. It took a wrenching effort of the heart not to cry
Go, then!
and free the griffin of all constraint. Even knowing that, freed, Kairaithin’s first act would certainly be to strike down the man who had constrained him. That knowledge alone would not have been enough to hold Bertaud back. But his own safety was far from the most important consideration, now.

“I offer you a new plan,” Bertaud said.

“You do not command me.”

Bertaud paused. He took a breath, made his heart iron, and said, carefully and ruthlessly, “Kneel to me.”

The griffin’s human face tightened. He fought the command. Bertaud simply waited; there was no effort in the compulsion he imposed on Kairaithin. It was not like a mage using the power of the earth to overcome the power of fire; it might have been something more akin to the compulsion of the Casmantian
geas
. Bertaud had always found the idea of the
geas
repellent. But the reality of this affinity was worse. The compulsion it let him impose did not require a battle of skill or strength. For Bertaud, though it twisted his heart, it was not a battle at all.

Kairaithin, with a low sound of effort, went to his knees on the charred floor. His quick breaths hissed like blowing sand.

“I do command you. You do not have the power to resist me. So you will do as I choose and not as you would choose.”

Kairaithin brought his gaze up to meet Bertaud’s. He said in a harsh, level tone, “I acknowledge your power, man. I acknowledge your strength. You are wrong to use it.”

Bertaud agreed completely. It felt normal and right to understand the fierce mind and heart and will of the griffin. It felt horribly, devastatingly wrong to coerce that fierceness. He truly understood for the first time in his life why a man who could command the deer would not call them to the huntsman; why a man who could compel wolves to leave a village’s flocks alone would slaughter his own sheep for them in a hard winter. He hated what he did. And yet… he lifted his hands, palms up. “Is not my need too great to allow me to choose what is right? I must choose what I must have. You
will
yield to me.”

There was a pounding, sudden and loud, on the smoke-stained door. Both of them, startled, flinched. Kairaithin also used the moment of startlement to try to break Bertaud’s hold, to fray into wind and fire and try to fly back to the desert.

Bertaud, after the first instant of surprise, stopped him. It did not even take a word. Only a thought. Only a thought to force the griffin back into human shape, to pin him to the charred boards, to force that proud face to the floor. As a man with the gift to speak to cattle might bring an enraged bull to instant docility, so he forced compliance from a creature not meant to yield to any compulsion.

Kairaithin fought him. To no effect.

“Yield to me,” Bertaud insisted, furious and frightened and sickened all at once. And, as the pounding at the door suddenly took on a threatening force, “Keep them out!”

On that, they were in perfect accord. A blazing sheet of fire sprang up all around them. Without the room, there were sudden cries and then silence. The fire died. Kairaithin, as though obedience to the one command carried a yielding to both, slowly and deliberately relaxed the muscles in his back, in his neck, in his arms. He said, muffled against the floor, “I acknowledge that you are stronger than I. I could not possibly mistake it.”

Bertaud eased the compulsion. He was shaking. Kairaithin, gathering himself slowly to his knees and then to his feet, was not. He was angry, with an anger deep and unrelenting as molten stone. Shamed and frightened and angry. Bertaud knew everything the other felt, recognized the shame and fear and anger, understood the source of those emotions and their power.

Kairaithin bowed his head, brought one long hand up, touched his own human face, his own eyelids. He looked, with that gesture, very human. Seeing past all outward appearances into his heart, Bertaud saw the griffin behind the human form and the fire behind the griffin.

Looking up, Kairaithin met Bertaud’s eyes. “You are wrong to do to me what you have done.”

“I know,” Bertaud whispered. And then, more strongly, “I could not possibly mistake it. Were you right to cast Kes into the fire and make her your tool? Is my necessity less dire than yours?”

Kairaithin did not look away, but neither did he answer.

“Tonight,” Bertaud said, “or tomorrow, Iaor will lead his two thousand into your desert. And… everything will go as it will go, from there. You have told me what your king expects. Here is the new plan: Your people will pretend to engage mine in battle, but both sides will understand this is pretense. Iaor will affect to be hard-pressed and ignorant; he will set his men with their backs to the Arobern. When the Casmantian army is lured down from the mountains, both your people and mine will fall upon them and destroy them.”

Kairaithin heard this without expression. Inwardly, he was raging still, and afraid, and in neither his rage nor his fear was he human. He was something other, that should have been incomprehensible. And yet Bertaud looked past his form and understood his heart.

The face the griffin showed outwardly was calm. “This is not the intention of the Lord of Fire and Air.”

“
Make
it his intention!” Bertaud said, his voice rising with anger and self-loathing. He caught himself, and continued more quietly. “You say you did not favor the current plan, that’s all very well, but did you care enough to fight against it with all your strength? Now you must. Remind your king that it is Casmantium that is his enemy, that Feierabiand and your people have a common enemy in this. Suggest to him that if the Arobern’s ambition is not curtailed now, Casmantium will only become more aggressive and more dangerous. Is that what your lord would desire? Is there not natural reason for alliance between your people and mine? Can there not be lasting advantage in an understanding between Feierabiand and the desert?”

Kairaithin did not answer. But at least he did not instantly decry these suggestions.

Bertaud warned him, “Or we shall see whether I am strong enough to force all your people at once to my will. I have never heard that there is a limit to how many animals a man can rule, who has the affinity for that animal.”

“The People of Fire and Air are not to be called to heel like dogs.”

Bertaud stared into the griffin’s fiery eyes. “To me, you are.”

Kairaithin closed his eyes against a visible leap of fury, clenched his teeth against the first violent words that came to his tongue. A moment passed. Another. Mastering his own rage, the griffin said, forcing his tone to a temperance and restraint with an effort Bertaud felt wrench his own heart, “You must not do that, man. Lord. You must not reveal to any other of my people even the merest shadow of the power you have shown to me.” His black eyes met Bertaud’s with a caution foreign to his nature, a trepidation that hurt them both. He said, harshly, “Do you not know what you would do to them? I will beg, if you demand it. I will kneel willingly.”

Bertaud was so horrified by this suggestion he actually recoiled backward. “I have no desire whatsoever to, to… command
any
of your people. I promise you.
You
must see to it that my necessity does not encompass any such act. I want only what I have said.”

Another pause. Kairaithin bowed his head, again with that clear effort. “And if I am not able to persuade him? Lord, you must not set such a penalty on my failure—”

“You will persuade him. You
must
.”

Another moment. “Let me go, then,” the griffin said harshly. “And I will see to it that all occurs as you require.”

Bertaud nodded. “I will follow you in my own time, and expect to see that you have. You won’t fail. I have,” he said quite sincerely, “great faith in your strength and cleverness, once you put everything you have of each into this effort.”

Bitterness shifted through Kairaithin’s heart, hidden behind the mask of his face, but clear to Bertaud. Turning toward the window, the griffin let go of his human seeming and reached after the desert wind. It came to meet him, the world tilting as it came, and Kairaithin touched the boundaries of the desert. He made as he did so one last effort to reach also for freedom.

He did not succeed. Bertaud contained the griffin’s shifting form, his tilting location, his fast flight into the dark and his fierce, sudden lunge against the binding that held him. It did not break. Distance thinned it to a thread. But if he called Kairaithin again, Bertaud knew, the griffin would have no choice but to come. And he knew Kairaithin knew it, too.

This awareness was both reassuring and deeply disturbing.

Bertaud stood for a long moment, his mind following Kairaithin south. Then he collapsed in the fire-damaged chair and put his face in his hands, struggling against overwhelming reaction: He wanted both to laugh hysterically and sob like a child; he wanted to spread great wings with feathers made of fire, to turn his body into fire and blaze like a torch through the sky. All those dreams, explained. And the explanation was nothing he had ever imagined or desired. An affinity for griffins! He felt as though the affinity, woken at last—undoubtedly by Kes, when she used fire to heal him—well, however it had happened, the affinity completed something in his heart that he had never even recognized was missing. A new depth informed the whole world. It felt wonderful. It was horrifying. If Kairaithin was again before him, he knew he would constrain the griffin exactly as he had done before; yet he could hardly believe even now that he had ever twisted the affinity to such a use.

He found that he understood far better than he ever had just how divided Iaor was between his two roles, both man and king. Of course, Bertaud had always understood this. But he understood it much better now. He understood it
intimately
. He had known that power requires to be used; that the world compels the exercise of power if one possesses it. And that necessity constrains what one may do with power.

The last shreds of resentment he had harbored against Iaor shredded in the face of this understanding;
of course
the king had left him in Riamne. What else could the king have done? This, too, though Bertaud had already understood, he understood much better now.

Even so, Bertaud knew that he could not possibly stay in Riamne now. He got to his feet… stiffly. He felt stiff all over, as though he’d pressed his body to its limits, rather than his heart. But stiff or not, he made his way across the fire-scarred floor to the door. How long would it take to get a horse and start after Iaor? Longer, he supposed, if men felt required to try to prevent him… He laid his hand on the door, took a breath, and shoved it open upon charred boards and the smells of smoke and burning.

K
es watched the King of Feierabiand approach the desert from a high perch on an outcropping of red stone. She had one arm thrown lightly over Opailikiita’s neck. Jos sat uneasily some distance away on her other side. It was not the height that made him uneasy, Kes knew. It was Opailikiita. Or perhaps it was Kes herself. She would not have blamed him.

At the edge of sight, where the northwestern border of the griffin’s desert met the gentle country of river and field, lay the road that ran past Riamne, which Kes had never seen, all the way north to Tihannad, where she had never even imagined going. The King of Feierabiand was on that road. The dust of his army made a haze in that direction. So she knew he was there, approaching the country the griffins had made theirs.