Bertaud son of Boudan is coming here
, said Kairaithin, still gazing downhill.
Your king is coming with him.
“Here?” Jos was dismayed—then he asked himself, Why dismay? On his own account, or merely at the thought of his silent mountains being overrun by the king and his company? Either way, he smothered that first sharp reaction and asked instead, “Why? I mean, what do they expect to do?” Something useful? He could not imagine what.
The griffin’s long lion-tail tapped once, twice, on the ground at his feet. Though he had been acquainted with Kairaithin for some years, and on tolerably good terms for several of those years, Jos could not guess whether that movement signified annoyance or satisfaction or nervousness or predatory intent or something else entirely. When Kairaithin spoke, he could recognize nothing in his voice but a strange kind of patient anger, and that had informed the griffin for as long as Jos could remember—since the Wall, indeed. Which Kairaithin had helped to build, after which he’d been cast out by his own people. Jos knew little more about it than that, for the griffin had never spoken of it. But he thought he understood Kairaithin’s anger. What he did not understand was the patience.
I carried word to Bertaud son of Boudan
, Kairaithin said.
I, as though I were a courier, bearing a white wand and the authority of your king.
The idea of the griffin as an official Feierabianden courier made Jos smile. He turned his head to hide his expression. In Feierabiand, nearly all the royal couriers were girls of decent but not high birth; they tended to form a tight-knit alliance, married one another’s brothers and cousins when they retired from active service, and brought up their daughters to be couriers as well. And they were all, that Jos had ever met, passionately proud of their calling. However Kairaithin viewed the service he had performed—and it seemed both a wise and a very small service, to this point—Jos thought he understood the griffin well enough to be certain he was not
proud
of it.
Jos wondered whether Kairaithin was, in fact, ashamed of his role in building the Wall, whether he was ashamed of once again defying the will of his people in carrying word of the damage to the Wall to human authorities. If he were a man rather than a griffin, that was a question that Jos—Jos in particular, all things considered—might even have found a way to ask him. But even when he wore the shape of a man, Kairaithin was nothing like a man. Jos could not imagine a way to pose such a question to the fierce, proud, incomprehensible griffin, whatever shape he wore. He said instead, “When will they get here?”
The griffin turned his narrow eagle’s head to look at Jos.
He was angry, Jos realized. The griffin’s black gaze was so powerful he half expected the granite of the mountain to crack and shatter under that stare. Jos stopped himself from taking a step backward by a plain act of will. It helped that he was sure—well, almost sure—that the griffin was not angry with
him
.
Soon
, said Kairaithin.
Within the hour.
“Oh.” Jos hadn’t realized that when the griffin said King Iaor and Lord Bertaud were coming, he meant
right now
. He glanced uncertainly around the meadow, down the slope where riders might come at any moment around the corner of the mountain. He did not know what Kairaithin had in mind, but he was almost completely certain that he did not want to meet the king or Bertaud or anyone in their party. “I could go… I could go somewhere, I suppose.” Though he did not know where. He would need the shelter of the cottage at dusk…
You will stay here. You will speak for me
, said the griffin.
Jos stared at him. “I will? What would I possibly say?”
What occurs to you to say.
But Kairaithin paused then, and Jos realized he was not as arrogant as that command had made him seem; that he was, in some way, actually uncertain. He said,
Bertaud son of Boudan knows me… as well as any man. But you have gazed down at that Wall from almost the time it was made, and you know it well. And you know Kes.
“Not anymore,” said Jos grimly.
As well as any creature living. Better, I believe, than I. In some ways, better even than her
iskarianere.
I wish you to explain what you know to the king of men and to his people. It is better for a man to speak to men.
The belief that the King of Feierabiand would listen to
Jos
, of all men living, showed a certain wild optimism coupled with a complete lack of understanding of the way men made decisions. Or possibly, Jos realized bleakly, it showed an accurate assessment of how dangerous matters
were, that Kairaithin considered that, regardless of all else, the King of Feierabiand would indeed feel himself compelled to listen respectfully to a Casmantian spy—an ex-Casmantian spy, a traitor to his own king, a man who had betrayed his own people for the sake of a Feierabianden girl. And—to cap the tale—a man who had then not even managed to keep the girl.
Iaor Daveien Behanad Safiad was not an overtall man, nor overbroad, nor did he care to make an excessive display, except now and then and to produce a specific effect, at court—usually at his more formal summer court, in high northern Tiearanan. Or so Jos had heard, long ago, when he had heard everything from everyone. Then, poised at a small, neat inn at Minas Ford, on the road that led from Terabiand on the coast up the length of Feierabiand to graceful Tiearanan, he had been so placed as to hear and overhear both the most urgent tidings from the indiscreet servants of important lords and merchants and the most trivial gossip from farmers’ wives and the servants of courtiers. Though Jos was generally quiet himself, other men tended to speak freely in his presence. This was a natural gift that had served him well… until the time came when he had been commanded to definitively act against Feierabiand, and chose not to. For Kes’s sake.
He hardly remembered the state of mind and heart that had driven him at that time.
But he remembered Iaor Safiad, who, though he was not an exceptionally big man and though he made no great display, nevertheless drew the eye. And he remembered Lord Bertaud, the king’s servant and friend, whom Jos had once gone out of his way to mislead regarding
the number and disposition of the griffins that had come into Feierabiand… None of that had ended in any way as Jos or his master in the Casmantian spy network had expected. No. Events had unrolled down a different path. Because of Kes. Who now was still driving events, and still in no manner anyone could have foreseen.
Jos strongly suspected that neither King Iaor nor Lord Bertaud had forgotten him, or the role he had played—the role he had tried to play. No more than he’d forgotten them.
And Kairaithin thought he could speak to those men?
Jos stood in front of his cottage, his arms crossed uneasily across his chest, watching the riders come around the curve of the mountain. Kairaithin lounged near at hand, his great catlike body curved in a comfortable, relaxed pose against a shining granite cliff. Above him, sheets of ice became, under the griffin’s influence, plumes of mist. Jos was grateful for his supportive presence, but he knew that Kairaithin’s relaxed pose was an illusion—though it was a good pose and he was not quite certain how he could tell it was false. Nor did he understand the griffin’s tension. Kings and lords, all the formal titles of men, what did they mean to a griffin? To one of the most powerful of all griffins; a griffin mage who, exile or no, undoubtedly still cast even his own former students thoroughly in the shade?
Nevertheless, Jos knew that Kairaithin was tense. The knowledge made him anxious in his turn. He had had a lot of practice, once, in masking his thoughts and emotions from the eyes of men. He hoped he had not lost the knack of it.
Iaor had brought only half a dozen men, besides Lord
Bertaud. Well, that was reasonable. They had come merely to look at the Great Wall, Jos presumed, and getting an army up into these rugged mountains would be a nightmare. If it could be done at all. This broken rock where the nameless river had its birth might be called a pass, but that was nearly a courtesy term rather than a strictly accurate description. One could get horses less than a third of the way, and to get all the way up to this high meadow, even mules needed considerable luck, shoes made specially by the best makers to provide better grip, and perfect weather. Jos tried to work out the logistics that would be required to bring an actual army through these mountains and gave up at once. Definitely a nightmare.
Probably King Iaor hoped that
looking
was all he and his people would be required to do. They would come up to this vantage, look down at the Wall, and worry over the cracks where the steam plumed out into the air. But then they would find that the cracks after all grew no worse. That the damage, whatever had caused it, had ceased. That the Wall would after all hold for a hundred years, or a thousand, and that no one now living would need to concern himself about the antipathy between fire and earth because the two would not, in this age, come actively into conflict. That was probably what they hoped. Jos had no conviction that they would discover any such happy outcome. He certainly could not give them any reassurance.
The riders slowed as they breasted the crest of the path—if one could call that rugged cut through the stone a path—crossed the silver thread of the stream, came single-file into the little meadow and up to the cottage, and reined in their mules. The mules were too tired and
too glad of the meadow to object very strenuously to Kairaithin’s presence, though the goat, wiser or not as weary, had not ventured from its hidden nook beneath the bed.
King Iaor had changed very little, was Jos’s immediate judgment, but Lord Bertaud had changed a great deal.
The king had grown perhaps a touch more settled, a touch more solid—that was how Jos described the quality to himself. More solid in his authority and his confidence. Though by no means an old man, Iaor Safiad had been king now for some decades and had grown by this time comfortable with his kingship. He had married just before the… trouble, six years ago. Jos knew nothing of recent events at the Feierabianden court, or any court, but looking at the king now, he was willing to lay good odds that the Safiad’s marriage had prospered. He had that air of satisfaction with himself and with life, though rather overlaid just now by weariness and unease.
King Iaor was a hard man to read, kings having as much need to conceal their thoughts and emotions as spies. But to Jos, as the king gazed down at the Wall and the plumes of steam rising from it, he looked tired and a little disgusted, as though he found the possible failure of the Wall a personal provocation. That, too, was the reaction of a man with a family as well as the reaction of a king who was concerned to protect his people.
Then Iaor pulled his gaze from the imposing, disturbing sight below to give Jos a little nod of recognition and acknowledgment.
Jos nodded back, not bowing because this was not his king. He said formally, “Your Majesty,” which was the proper form of address in Feierabiand.
“Jos,” said the king in a neutral tone. His gaze shifted to the griffin lounging near at hand. “Anasakuse Sipiike Kairaithin. What have we here?” He nodded down the pass toward the Wall.
Kairaithin did not answer, leaving Jos to speak—a man to speak to men, indeed. Jos said, “The plumes show where the Wall is cracked through. The cracks appeared some days ago.” He was embarrassed to admit that he did not know precisely how many days. In these latter years, he had become unaccustomed to counting off each passing day according to the proper calendar and found the habit difficult to reacquire. He said instead, which was perhaps more to the point, “The fire mages on the desert side have been trying to split the Wall open along those cracks. Not Kairaithin. Two young griffin mages. And Kes.” He glanced at the somber Kairaithin, whose student the girl had been, then turned his gaze back at the king, who had known her, briefly, when she had been human. Or mostly human.
King Iaor lifted an eyebrow, but it was Lord Bertaud who spoke. “She has become wholly a creature of fire, then.” It was a statement rather than a question, and there was an odd note to the lord’s voice, a note that Jos did not understand. He gave Lord Bertaud a close look.
Where the king had grown a bit more solid and comfortable over the past years, Jos thought that Lord Bertaud had grown darker of mood and more inward. There was a grimness underlying his manner and tone, not something born of the anxieties of the moment, Jos thought, but something that had been shaped out of a deeper trouble or grief. Some grief of love lost, or some private longing deferred? Or something less recognizable? Jos saw
the deliberation with which Bertaud avoided meeting Kairaithin’s eyes, and wondered at it.
I carried word to Bertaud son of Boudan
, the griffin had said. Why to Bertaud?
Jos knew very little about Lord Bertaud; nothing about what the man had done with himself after those strange and difficult events six years ago. He had not been curious about the world for years. He had, indeed, been determinedly incurious, and it left him uncomfortably ignorant now.
In the early years, when she had still remembered dimly what she had been, Kes had come sometimes to tell him about her life among the griffins. She had described to Jos the beauty of fire and the empty desert, and sometimes she and Opailikiita had carried him high aloft through the crystalline fire of the high desert night. It had been beautiful, and Jos had longed for wings of his own, that he might ride those high winds himself. But Kes had never been very interested in the human world even when she had been human, and after she became a creature of fire she cared even less for the affairs of men.