Lord of the Changing Winds (6 page)

“You may attend to the injured. The places of men remain untouched by the desert,” Kairaithin said, watching her face. His black eyes held nothing she could recognize as sympathy, but neither did they hold deceit.

Kes took a shaky breath of hot desert air and turned back to the wounded griffin.

This griffin had dreadful injuries across his face and throat and chest; his blood had scattered garnets and carnelians generously through the dead grasses. Kes was surprised he was still alive. But she was confident, this time, that she could make him whole. She called light into her eyes and her blood; she poured light through her hands into the griffin and felt it shape itself into sinew and bone, into bronze feather and tawny pelt. His name ran through her mind, and an understanding of his fierce, quick temperament. She made him whole, unsurprised by the ferocious blaze of temper that accompanied his return to health.

There were many injured griffins. The mage brought her to one and then another, and another. He gave her their names, and she made them whole. The names of the griffins melted across her tongue, tasting of ash and copper, and settled uneasily to the back of her mind. She thought she would be able to recognize every griffin she had healed for the rest of her life, to recall each one’s name like a line of poetry. Dazed with sun and the powerful names of griffins, she was startled to find at last that there were no others awaiting her touch and the healing light. She stood in the shadow of a red rock where Kairaithin had brought her and looked at him in mute bewilderment. The only griffin there was Opailikiita Sehanaka Kiistaike, and Kes knew the small brown griffin did not need further healing.

“Rest,
kereskiita
,” Kairaithin suggested. Not gently, nor kindly. With something else in his tone. Not exactly sympathy, but perhaps… a strange kind of heedfulness.

It seemed, at the moment, enough like kindness. Opailikiita shifted, half-opening a wing in a gesture that looked like welcome, or something similar.
Come
, she said, a smooth touch against the borders of Kes’s mind. The tone of her voice, too, suggested welcome.

Kes had not known how desperately weary she had grown until the opportunity to rest was offered. She did not answer the slim brown griffin. She did not think she was capable of putting words together with any lucidity. But she went forward and sank down in the shade where the heat was marginally less oppressive, leaned her head against Opailikiita’s feathered foreleg when the griffin turned to offer her that pillow, and was instantly lost in fire-ridden darkness.

O
n one particularly fine morning in late spring, Bertaud son of Boudan, Lord of the Delta, found himself standing in the courtyard of the king’s winter house in Tihannad, watching the king of Feierabiand tease apart the delicate roots of young lilies so that they might be most aesthetically arranged in their waiting box. The morning was very fair, and Bertaud would rather, perhaps, have been hunting or hawking or even shooting at targets in the courtyard with the queen and her ladies to look on and applaud. But Iaor Safiad, in perhaps an excess of affection for his young wife, wished instead to wander through the gardens of his winter house, bury his hands in warm dark earth, and play with flowers. Bertaud shifted his weight, trying not to sigh.

The king finished with the lilies and washed his hands in a basin. Ignoring the towel Bertaud proffered, he shook his hands dry in the air and finally looked at Bertaud with a glint in his eyes. The king was not quite as tall as Bertaud and not quite as dark; though both men spent much time out of doors, the king’s skin went golden in the sun rather than brown, and his dark hair, untouched as yet by any gray, picked up sun-bleached streaks and became almost tawny. In looks, Iaor resembled his mother far more than his great black bull of a father. But when he gave Bertaud a sidelong glance and observed, “You’re bored,” the mocking edge to his tone was very like the old king’s.

Bertaud lifted his eyebrows. “Bored? How could I be?”

Iaor laughed—his own laugh. He was far less guarded in manner than his father had been, but with a wickedly sardonic edge to his humor, utterly unlike his mother.

The king’s laugh pulled at uncomfortably deep places in Bertaud’s heart. He couldn’t help it; couldn’t help that he admired and honored—and, yes, loved—Iaor Safiad above any other man in Feierabiand. Bertaud would never have insulted Iaor by claiming to feel toward him as toward his father. But as toward an older brother… the best and most admirable of older brothers… He might have admitted to that.

Bertaud could still remember how splendid and kind Iaor had seemed to him when he had first come to court from his own father’s huge cluttered house in the Delta, which had been always crowded and yet never companionable. He had been only ten; Iaor more than twice that. But Iaor had seen something in the awkward, silent boy Bertaud had been, and had made him his own page, holding him at court long past the time he had been due to return to his father’s house. Bertaud had tried to conceal his desperate fear of returning home, but Iaor had known it, of course. So he had kept Bertaud at his side for eight years, until Bertaud’s father had suddenly died in a frenzy of rage and drink and Bertaud himself, though barely grown, inherited title to the broad, fertile lands of the Delta.

But when, only a few years later, Iaor’s father too had suffered a stroke and died, it had been Bertaud whom Iaor Safiad had summoned to his side. And Bertaud had gladly left one of his many uncles to keep his own lands in order and returned to Iaor’s court. Lord of the Delta, Bertaud hated the Delta; he had a hundred cousins but cared for none of them; all that he valued lay in this court, and most of all, the friendship and trust of the king. But Iaor despised sycophancy, and Bertaud would never risk giving any such impression. Now he waited a moment, until he was certain his voice would show nothing he didn’t want it to show. Then he said, matching Iaor’s drily mocking tone, “How could I possibly desire anything other than what you desire, my king?”

Iaor laughed again. “Of course!” he said. “And what I desire is to enjoy the last of the spring and think, for a moment, of nothing more complicated than lilies.” Straightening his back, the king stretched extravagantly and then turned and stood for a long moment, looking around at the gardens and his house in palpable satisfaction.

The winter house of the king of Feierabiand nestled into the land at a place where three hills came together, where the little wavelets of Niambe Lake ran before the wind away from the rocky shore. A low, sprawling building built of the native stone, set against the winter gray of the lake, the king’s house seemed a part of the land. Like the hills, it might have simply grown there long ago. The Casmantian kings might build magnificent palaces to impress both their own people and travelers with their grandeur and their skill as builders; the Linularinan kings might raise delicate towers and airy balconies to the sky; but Iaor Safiad was a true king of Feierabiand, and the kings of Feierabiand wanted a warm and comfortable house, one with small rooms that could each be heated by a single fireplace, with thick walls and soft hangings to keep in the warmth during the long winters.

The town of Tihannad had grown up around the king’s winter house, or perhaps the king’s house had been built by the lake because of the town; no one in these latter years remembered. But the town was like the king’s house: low and plain and comfortable. Its homes were snugly built of stone, and its streets paved with more stone, with gutters to carry the spring’s melting snow to the river that curved along one wall of the town. The wall went all around the town, a tall, thick barricade, though no one living remembered a time the wall had held back any enemy. The gates in the wall stood open day and night, and the wall itself, forgetful of the purpose it had originally been made to serve, did not present opposition to travelers.

In winter, the people of Tihannad dressed in warm coats of poppy red or gentian blue, put bells and ribbons on the harnesses of their horses, and went skating on Niambe Lake. They lit bonfires in the town square around which young men and women gathered to dance in the long evenings. They carved blocks of thick ice from the lake to store in deep cellars for summer, and then carved more blocks into flowers and swans and other fanciful shapes.

But though the people of Tihannad enjoyed winter, they loved spring. As soon as the west wind warmed and the snow melted, every house in Tihannad put out boxes and pots and half-barrels of flowers—blue and white pansies, pink kimee with huge fringed petals and delicate blue-green foliage, white trumpet-flowered moonglow, soft saffron-and-pink spring lilies. All the girls wore flowers in their hair, and children braided flowers into the manes of their families’ horses on the slightest excuse.

The king’s house was no exception to this joy in spring, for the king, too, took pleasure in the warming days and the bright flowers. The King of Feierabiand was a Safiad; his full name was Iaor Daveien Behanad Safiad. Safiads had ruled Feierabiand for three hundred years, and had generally ruled it well. Iaor Safiad had inherited his father’s strong will along with his mother’s self-possession, and this combination made some of his opponents uneasy. Nevertheless, Feierabiand was accustomed to Safiad rule, and even Iaor’s most outspoken critics in his court did not truly expect to trouble his rule overmuch.

Iaor needed both assurance and determination, for no matter the season, he ordinarily had a good deal more to think about than lilies. As his father and grandfather had before him, Iaor Safiad kept a wary peace with Feierabiand’s neighboring countries. To the west lay Linularinum—sophisticated, imperious, haughty Linularinum, always ready to believe that Feierabiand peasants would one day learn to accept the natural superiority of their western neighbor.

Linularinum was not exactly warlike. But a mere hundred years ago, King Lherriadd Kohorrian, high-handed and overbearing, had offended the Lord of the Delta and lost the allegiance of the Delta, which at that time had been one of Linularinum’s more valuable coastal assets. And everyone also knew that if Linularinum’s current king, Mariddeier Kohorrian, ever saw a way to force the issue, he would not necessarily care whether the Delta wished to switch allegiance once more. No, if the old Fox of Linularinum glimpsed a chance to bring the Delta into his grasp, he would consider it a matter of pride to reach out and take it.

But in some ways Casmantium, across the mountains in the dry country of the east, presented a greater threat. Barely eighty years ago, it had conquered the small country of Meridanium to its northeast. Now Meridanium had a Casmantian governor and its people paid taxes to the Casmantian king in Breidechboden. Worse—from Feierabiand’s point of view—Meridanium had been more than conquered; it had been absorbed. As Meridanium no longer seemed restive under Casmantian rule, the kings of Casmantium were free to consider other projects. Everyone knew Brechen Glansent Arobern was ambitious to add another province to his possessions; everyone knew he did not necessarily consider the current border his country shared with Feierabiand to be the last word on the subject.

So Iaor Safiad kept the Feierabiand armies blatantly visible on both borders. And he encouraged trade and business, since prosperous merchants always preferred peace and were seldom much concerned with who claimed what chunk of territory as long as the trade moved briskly. The old Fox of Linularinum would press only subtly at the river border so long as all his wealthiest subjects preferred to use the bridges for peaceful—and lucrative—trade. Similarly, as long as roads and harbors yielded trade and wealth, even the restless young king of Casmantium seemed content to confine arguments over road tolls and harbor dues to strong words rather than flashing swords and spears.

Still, it was not astonishing that this spring Iaor Safiad would find a moment or two for flowers. He had married during the winter, his second marriage, and hardly before time, according to his court and kingdom. Iaor’s first wife had died without issue three years past and, by most accounts, the king had not been half forward enough in seeking another. Everyone hoped for heirs from his new young queen.

The new queen, Niethe, was a beautiful young woman from a good Tiearanan family, graceful as a fawn and playful as a kitten, delighted with Iaor and her new life and still charmingly amazed by her good fortune. And the king was captivated by her. Once spring had arrived, Iaor spent more time arranging flowers to please his new bride than he did attending to the business of the kingdom, a propensity greeted with tolerant amusement by the town, and with displeasure only by those of his court who suspected that his preoccupation was merely a ruse and that they might be targets of it.