Lord of the Changing Winds (37 page)

The griffins themselves had drawn aside, going up into the red spires that were their halls and their homes. Few remained among the men, and those were reaching out with immense wings and pulling themselves, one after another, back into the sky.

Weary men moved slowly across the sand, heavy earthbound creatures, nothing that belonged to the desert, though some of them were gathering the jewels that blood and fire had spilled out across the sand. Kes understood: Thus they would keep a small piece of the desert with them when they departed, as was only right. Their own blood had flowed like water and left only stains little redder than the sand.

The victors wore the undyed linen of Feierabiand uniform and the vanquished wore the brown and black of Casmantium, so she could tell the difference between them. Men were putting up awnings to shield the wounded from the hammer of the desert sun, and passing out skins of water and watered wine. Men of both countries bore injuries, but these did not call themselves to Kes’s attention as griffin wounds would have done. There were not many men in brown left alive, Kes saw, which was only as it should have been: It had been a day for death, and their deaths had been good. The exaltation of the fire had ebbed, but she was still very happy.

She looked for the King of Casmantium among those who had survived, but she could not find him. She found the King of Feierabiand, however, in the shade of a great twisted tower of stone. She slipped down from Opailikiita’s back and went toward him.

He was limping, she saw, and he looked very tired, but also deeply satisfied. He clapped another man on the shoulder as Kes approached, sending him off with a word that made the man laugh, though wearily. Then he turned to Kes with a quick nod of greeting and satisfaction. “Well done!” he said. “Your griffins turned the day handily, young Kes. We, now—we have wounded, though nothing like so many as we might have had facing the Casmantians alone. Can you heal them as you healed the griffins?”

“I could heal them, I think,” Kes answered, feeling fire roll within her blood, desiring to spill flames across the world. She could loose it, she thought, and stitch with flames ragged patterns that should be smooth. She wanted to. It would be pleasant to run fire through her hands. Even for men.

“I don’t think that would be wise,” Meriemne answered, from a cushioned chair in the shade where Kes had not noticed her. “Men are not meant to be filled with fire.”

Kes looked at the mage, whom she had not realized was there, first with startlement and then with dislike and confusion. Meriemne did not seem as unpleasant and frightening as Beguchren had when he had caught her in the desert and trapped her with his cold bindings. But she simply did not
like
her. The instant warmth of the smile the king turned toward the old woman confused and upset her.

“Fortunately,” added the old mage, “I can heal them myself. Once they are out of this atrocious desert. No offense, fire child,” she added to Kes, who only blinked at her in a confused muddle of aversion.

“Yes,” the king began to say to the mage, but interrupted himself at the shout of one of his men and looked out across the desert where the man was pointing.

Kes backed quickly around Opailikiita to put the griffin between herself and Meriemne, and looked too.
Can you see?
she asked her.

A feather’s weight of men
, Opailikiita answered. She tilted her eagle’s head and studied the approaching riders.
One of them is the lord of men who is beholden to Kairaithin—Bertaud son of Boudan.

“Bertaud?” said the king, in a pleased tone. “Well, and timely arrived, for all I left him sternly in Riamne. Still, of course, he would know I would welcome him now. Well, well… he can join us at least for the ride out of this terrible desert. No offense,” he added to Kes, who gazed at him in confusion.

They come in haste
, Opailikiita observed, her attention still on the handful of approaching riders.

“Do they?” the king shaded his eyes and stared hard at the approaching riders. “So they do. They are not pursued? You see them in no difficulty?”

I see only those men, King of Feierabiand. If there is difficulty, I do not see it.

“Well, we shall discover the reason for their haste soon enough,” the king said, faint unease in his tone, and turned to speak to officers of his men. Kes did not listen. She was looking across the desert at the men. They came slowly, slowly, until she wanted to blaze a path for them through the sand that would bring them directly to this one point of sand in all the vastness of the desert. It seemed momentarily strange to her that she should be impatient, she who had always been by nature patient; but then Opailikiita called to her and she turned back to the griffin.

Kairaithin summons me.

Then go
, Kes said.
But listen for me.

Your voice is in my blood
, said the griffin, and shifted herself away through the desert in the manner of griffin mages.

The men came at last into the Feierabiand company and were temporarily lost from sight behind the awnings set up for the wounded men. The king turned expectantly, smiling, to greet the new arrivals; his smile faded as they came back into view and rode up. Kes, her eyes on the distressed, blowing horses, did not at once look at the men. But then the king’s attention pulled hers after it at last, and she lifted her eyes to the strained face of the riders.

“Bertaud!” The king strode forward to greet them.

One of the men murmured something about water and took the young lord’s horse as he dismounted, leading it and the other animals away to be walked and watered.

Lord Bertaud strode rapidly to the king. He said sharply, urgently, “I could not stay in Riamne.”

“No, I understand so—your friend Kairaithin found me and said, what was it, something about how you had persuaded him of the justice of our cause. Well done, well done, my friend! I would have sent for you then, but there seemed no time—we would have had a hard time of it without griffin assistance—”

Lord Bertaud seized the king’s arm, fierce as a griffin in his urgency. “Iaor. I might not have been in time for the battle, but I saw part of it from a high cliff. Answer me this. Where is the Arobern? Captured? Killed?”

The king shook his head, studying the other man in obvious concern. “No, no—we did not see him. A griffin took him, I suppose. The Casmantian army was a good deal smaller than I’d feared—it seems your report was overanxious—”

“Overanxious?” Lord Bertaud gave a short, harsh laugh, looking more tense and strained than Kes had ever seen him. “Overanxious! No, Iaor! The rest of the Casmantian army is simply somewhere else.
And
the Arobern. I will lay any wager for it. And where else would he be but slipping down the edge of this terrible desert to strike unopposed as he sees fit?”

The king stared at him. He, too, clearly saw the truth of it at once—now that he had the leisure to think on it. “I should have realized.”

“You were occupied.”

“Yes, as the Arobern intended. Earth and iron! That man is far too bold. And now we shall all pay the cost of our own lack of imagination. How many men do you suppose he has with him? Three thousand? More?” He turned, shouting for his officers—one came up hastily from somewhere and said rapidly, not waiting for the king to speak, “Your majesty, that spy who came to us—he tells us we should have faced twice as many men here.”

“So we have been discovering,” said the king, and he gripped the man’s arm, giving him a small shake. “Go get the best information you can about the number that should have been here. See if the man has any guess about what the Arobern might have done with the rest.”

Bertaud, for his part, shouted for Kairaithin while Kes was still distracted by the mention of Jos.

The griffin arrived even before the officers, falling out of the red sky, half fire and half griffin: He reared up as he struck the ground and his wings, streaming behind him, were sheets of flame. Men fell back from him, shouting in alarm. Horses reared and wanted to scatter in panic; horse speakers ran to take lead lines and bridles, calming them and holding them still. Kes thought it was a pity no one could do the same for the men, but at least none so forgot themselves as to loose arrows at the griffin.

What?
the griffin flung at Bertaud, rage blazing within as he burned with fire without.
Well? And do you not find this outcome satisfactory, man?

Kes stared, shocked at the naked violence of Kairaithin’s manner, of his voice; so much more ferocious than even when he had been angry at her for defying him to go to the king.

“Where is the Arobern?” Bertaud shouted back at him, appearing, to Kes’s astonishment, neither surprised nor cowed by Kairaithin’s violence.

Kairaithin stared hard into the man’s eyes. His own were filled with rage and, strangely, something stronger, which might have been despair. But a more rational thought crept into them as Kes watched, and she was no longer certain what she had seen at first.

He gathered himself into a form winged with feathers rather than flames, and settled more solidly to the sand.
Is he not here?

“No!”

“Nor is Beguchren,” Kes added.

I will seek the cold mage
, said Kairaithin, and flung himself back into the sky.

“But what about the Arobern?” Bertaud shouted after him.

Wincing at his shout, Kes shook her head and laid her hand on the lord’s arm. “Let him go. Let him go. He will look for Beguchren.”

“Forget about the cold mage,” snapped the king, leaning forward intensely. He had the reins of a horse in his hand and was clearly preparing to mount. “Bertaud is right—it’s the Arobern who concerns us now!”

Kes shook her head again, but she also called into the silence of the desert, so little disturbed by the shouts of men,
Eskainiane! Eskainiane?

And the copper-and-gold griffin, riding the winds of the burning heights and resting as griffins rest, answered. He plunged from the wind to the red sand, from the side of the Lord of Fire and Air to Kes’s side, so that the king’s horse reared and had to be calmed by a horse speaker who ran hastily to it.

Kereskiita
, Eskainiane said joyfully, ignoring man and horse and king.
Well flown, on a fierce wind! Do you call me? I declare I will hear you!

Kes laughed and lifted her hand to touch the side of his beak, a gesture he returned by turning his head to brush her palm lightly with the cutting edge. He was still exultant from flight and battle, passionately joyful with victory and the speed of the wind. And he had come, as he said, to answer her call, though he was brother and more than brother to the Lord of Fire and Air.

Kes had known that he would. After this day’s battle, where she had come to know them all, she loved this griffin above any other save only Opailikiita. Powerful and brilliant and generous, she trusted Eskainiane Escaile Sehaikiu to come to her call out of that open-hearted generosity and listen to her.
Eskainiane
, she said. And aloud, after the manner of humankind, “Eskainiane, where is the King of Casmantium? Would you ride the wind and search for an army that did not come into the desert? Would you send your people to look to the north and the east and the south, beyond the sand, where men might have gone and we not known?”

For you
, kereskiita,
we will fly beyond the powerful sun and search
, answered Eskainiane, and touched her face with his beak in a griffin caress.
All will search: I will ask Kiibaile Esterire Airaikeliu to send all save Kairaithin, who is about business of his own, and after this day, I tell you, Kiibaile will hear your name in the wind through his wings.
The griffin flung himself back into the sky.

“Kiibaile—what?” asked the king, bemused.

“Kiibaile Esterire Airaikeliu,” Kes said absently. “The Lord of Fire and Air.
You
shouldn’t call him by his first name. That’s for his
iskarianere
—his intimate…” she began to say
friends
, but that wasn’t quite right and she stopped, frowning.

“Well, whatever his name, if he will set his people to searching, that will do,” said the king, reaching again for his horse’s reins once the griffin was gone. “Thank you, Kes. We will not wait. I want out of this desert, and if the Arobern did not watch from above and take himself back off across the mountains, it’s to the east he’ll be. Where is your horse, Bertaud? Has the creature a run left in it? How fast do you suppose we can make it out of this savage desert? And be in decent shape to fight? If we can find the Arobern to give him a fight! How can I have been so blind?” He paused. “I wonder if Eles found him? Earth and iron! I didn’t give Eles half enough men to face any such threat!”

Lord Bertaud took a step forward, looking surprised and cautiously relieved. “Eles?”

The king frowned at him. “Well, what else was I to do when I must ride into a trap but make provision? It did not seem wise to leave all Feierabiand to depend only on my army. Eles was to get me another, as many men as he could, and to come south on his own, and on any account to stay out of the desert. I meant to keep him safe from the griffins and safe from the first thrust of the Arobern, but now I do not know where he is or what he may have met on his road.”

For the first time, the tension that had tightened the lord’s face and manner eased. He laughed and clapped the king on the shoulder. “My horse will have to do,” he said, and beckoned to the man who had taken it away.