Land of the Burning Sands: The Griffin Mage Trilogy: Book Two

by Neumeier, Rachel

  “I believe I can probably walk back to the house now,” Beguchren said. He glanced at Gereint, half smiling. “And if I can’t…”

  “I’m sure that won’t be necessary.” Gereint got to his feet and offered the other man a hand up.

  Beguchren made it back to the house on his own feet. But once they were back in the house, he shook his head quietly as Gereint turned toward his room. “I’ll speak to Eben Amnachudran. And Lady Emre.”

  Gereint said, puzzled, “You can do that from your bed—”

  “No,” said Beguchren. Quietly but definitely.

  By which Gereint understood that Beguchren did not want to chat with Amnachudran or his wife. He wanted to talk to them in some more formal place than a bedroom, in some more formal capacity than that of their guest. And since he was no longer a mage, that most likely meant he wanted to speak to them as a king’s agent. “Likely they’ll be in Amnachudran’s office,” he guessed, and hailed a passing servant with the query.

  Both Eben Amnachudran and his wife were in the office-music room. Amnachudran was, of course, at his desk and surrounded by books, but somewhat to Gereint’s surprise, Lord Bertaud was also leaning over the desk. Both men were poring over a large open book bound in pale linen and illustrated all around the text with dragons and griffins in gold and red and black ink. Tehre was a few steps away, gazing down at a sketch of a bridge and absently rolling a quill pen between her fingers. Lady Emre was seated, as she had been the first time Gereint had seen her, at her spinet. This time she was playing, her expression abstracted. The music was a northern children’s song, very simple and plain. In Lady Emre’s hands, it recovered the charm that too great familiarity might have stolen from it and became not merely plain, but elegant.

  But she lifted her hands from the keys, turning with everyone else when Gereint and Beguchren came in. Amnachudran moved hastily to pull chairs around for them. Beguchren sank into his with a slight nod, but Gereint merely drifted a step away to lean his hip against the edge of the big desk, watching curiously.

  “I’ll leave tomorrow morning,” Beguchren began. “So if I may trouble you, honored sir, for the loan of a carriage and driver? Thank you.” He paused and surveyed them all. The cool authority of his tone and manner could be estimated, Gereint thought, by the lack of overt protest at the idea of his traveling. The effort that matter-of-fact coolness cost him was less easy to estimate.

  “I am grateful for all your efforts over the past days,” Beguchren continued. “On my behalf, and in the Arobern’s voice, I thank you. We can only imagine how else events might have unfolded. With, to be sure, the most profound gratitude that we need imagination to view those events.” He gave them each a slight nod and said to Lord Bertaud, “I am quite certain the king will wish to thank you personally for your assistance. I hope you will accompany me back to the court in Breidechboden?” He accepted the Feierabianden lord’s murmured assurance with another nod.

  Then Beguchren leaned back in his chair, took a breath, turned his storm-gray eyes to Eben Amnachudran, and added, “The only question that remains to be settled before my departure, then, is this: Was it you yourself who removed Gereint Enseichen’s brand? Or was it your lady wife?”

  There was a deep, deep silence. Gereint hadn’t seen that coming at all. But, he gradually realized, Amnachudran had. The scholar looked shocked by the question, but he did not, somehow, look surprised. He stood with his palms flat on his desk, his head slightly bowed, not looking at any of them. After a moment he lifted his head and glanced at his wife. Lady Emre looked stricken. Her eyes were on Beguchren, not on her husband; she shook her head very slightly in a motion that might have been disbelief or might have been a plea, and either way was probably involuntary. But she did not say anything or make any overt gesture.

  Amnachudran said at last to Beguchren, “My lord, it was I.”

  Beguchren inclined his head. “Then I will have to ask you, also, to accompany me tomorrow.”

  “Of course,” said Amnachudran, just a little stiffly.

  No one else said a word. Tehre opened her mouth, but her mother half lifted a hand and shook her head quickly, and, to Gereint’s surprise, Tehre closed her mouth again without making a sound. Her eyes snapped with anger, but then narrowed, and Gereint knew she was thinking hard. He wished he knew what conclusion she might come to. He himself felt torn between wanting to exclaim to Beguchren, in outrage, How can you? and at the same time wanting to plead with Amnachudran and the rest, He’s the king’s agent; what else can he do? He said nothing at all.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Arobern received them, two days after their return to Breidechboden, in an intimidating room large enough for thirty men to gather, a room that held enough large, heavy, ornately carved chairs to accommodate all thirty as well as a single massive and ornate desk. The king had heard the whole account from Beguchren, or so Gereint surmised. Certainly Beguchren had gone to him at once on arriving in the city. No one else had; no one else had been invited to.

  Gereint had stayed, of course, at the Amnachudran townhouse, with Tehre and her father, and Sicheir, who, he gathered, had gone on to Breidechboden with the king’s agent after Tehre had defied the agent to go north. The other party to that defiance, Lord Bertaud, alone among them presumably not at personal risk of the king’s displeasure, had returned to whatever apartment within the palace was allotted for his use. Tehre had received two messages from the Feierabianden lord, one each day, and returned three of her own, which was only natural. Gereint set his teeth against any ill-considered comment he might have made about this correspondence.

  There had been no word from either Beguchren or the king until at last, and to everyone’s unspoken relief, the command to appear for an audience had been brought by an extremely elegant royal chamberlain. The waiting had been difficult for Eben Amnachudran and his children, Gereint knew. But if any of them had said a word about their nervousness, it had not been to Gereint.

  The king was not seated at the desk, nor in the room at all, when the chamberlain ushered them within. This was not a surprise; he would hardly have arrived early to wait for suppliants to come before him. No; they had been sent for and had come, and now would wait the king’s pleasure. Nothing rested on the desk save an elegant gold-and-crystal four-hour sand timer, turned recently, so that perhaps half the sand had run through to the bottom glass. Gereint hoped the sand did not mark the wait they were expected to endure: Two hours might not realistically be long to wait for a royal audience, but at the moment it seemed an intolerable span of time.

  Though the room was not without interest. Blue-and-teal abstract mosaics rippled all along three of the walls, high up, near the ceiling, which was painted pale blue with flying larks. The remaining wall held only a large painting framed with long velvet hangings of blue and violet, showing Breidechboden from above as a lark might see it. The light that poured across the painted city possessed a crystalline clarity, as though the city had been created in just the instant the painting captured and had not yet begun to age. It occurred to Gereint, for the first time but with a curious sense of inevitability, that the artist was certainly Beguchren Teshrichten himself.

  Gereint found the room, as a whole, rather alarming. And yet… it might have been far worse. It might have been a formal audience hall, all porphyry columns and vaulted, echoing marble, with a chill to it that bit worse than any northern midwinter. This room, though it fairly radiated authority, was not nearly so formal, and the chamberlain who guided them invited them all to enter with an expansive gesture that suggested welcome rather than command. It was not the sort of reception they might have expected from an angry king. But it was a little hard to estimate what sort of reception it actually was.

  Lord Bertaud was already present. Gereint could not decide whether the foreigner’s earlier arrival was accidental or meant to indicate something, or, if it was deliberate, what it was meant to indicate. Probably he was reading too much into mere happenstan
ce.

  Tehre went at once to greet the Feierabianden lord, Gereint and Eben Amnachudran and Sicheir following more slowly. Tehre’s father had been very quiet and inward for the days of the journey from his house to Breidechboden, and after their arrival in the capital he had become quieter still. But there was a new quality to his silence now. Gereint understood that, or thought he did. He believed the Arobern would forgive any of them anything, as well he ought to—he believed that—but the king was well known to despise corruption or vice or any dishonesty in his appointed judges. So Gereint did not know, none of them knew, exactly what the king would do.

  The Feierabianden lord had a smile for Tehre; rather too warm a smile for any foreigner to direct toward a Casmantian lady, was Gereint’s impression. The nod of greeting he himself gave the man was perhaps a little stiff. Neither of them spoke; it did not seem a place or moment for idle conversation, and what could they possibly say? But the foreigner offered in return a gesture that seemed oddly poised midway between a nod and a bow, and the same to Eben Amnachudran. Amnachudran inclined his head in response, glanced briefly at his daughter, and drew breath as though he might speak. But then he said nothing.

  “You may all sit,” the chamberlain told them, arranging chairs in a loose semicircle by the desk. “You, honored sir—you, sir—you, sir—Lady Tehre, if you wish—over here, my lord, if you would be so kind.”

  No one ventured to protest these arrangements, which placed Lord Bertaud a little away from the rest and in a distinctly more ornate chair. Gereint’s chair was close enough to Tehre’s that he might have held her hand, and he was tempted to, save any such gesture would have been thoroughly inappropriate under the circumstances. Not to mention the eye of her father.

  The entrance of the king interrupted Gereint’s thoughts, which was perhaps as well.

  The Arobern, as was his widely reputed habit, was not wearing court dress. He was dressed only a little more elaborately than a soldier, in black, except his belt was sapphire blue and his buttons, probably, were sapphire in truth. He wore around his throat the thick gold chain of the Casmantian kings, and around his left wrist a wide-linked chain of black iron.

  Beguchren Teshrichten walked not behind the king, like a servant, but beside him, like a friend. Beguchren might, next to the dark bulk of the Arobern and with the smooth fineness of his face, have looked rather like an elegant, wealthy, arrogant child. But despite the strain and weariness that still clung to him, there was too much authority in the tilt of his fine head to support that illusion, and far too many years in his storm-dark eyes. Those eyes met Gereint’s, unfathomable as ever, but he did not even nod, far less speak.

  Everyone rose hastily, even the Feierabianden lord, but the Arobern turned a big hand palm upward to signal that no one need kneel, and then turned the gesture to a casual little wave that invited them all to resume their seats. The courtesy made Gereint uncomfortable.

  Beguchren settled quietly into a particularly ornate chair set next to the heavy desk, rested his hands on the arms of the chair, and gazed at them with impenetrable calm.

  The Arobern did not sit but leaned his hip against the polished edge of the desk, crossed his arms over his chest, and surveyed them all. When his forceful, dark gaze crossed Gereint’s, Gereint wanted to flinch and drop his eyes; a slave’s impulse, or the deference any Casmantian owed his king, or the impulse of a guilty man? It felt oddly like guilt, though he knew very well he had nothing for which to atone. He set his jaw and stared back.

  “I believe,” the Arobern said, in his deep, guttural voice, “that I have the tale plain and clear. Does anyone believe it necessary to add to the account my agent Beguchren Teshrichten has given to me?”

  No one appeared to, though Gereint could not stop himself from glancing at Amnachudran.

  “So,” said the Arobern. He turned to the Feierabianden lord, inclining his heavy head. “Lord Bertaud, you spoke for Casmantium before the representative of the griffins. Their mage, yes? It was your word that caused the griffin mage to align his power with ours in the building of that wall. That is so, yes?”

  Lord Bertaud hesitated for a long moment. At last he said quietly, “It was a little more complicated than that. Sipiike Kairaithin himself favored the solution Lady Tehre devised. I know he set himself against the will of his own king to support the building of that wall. We—you owe him a debt, which I doubt you will ever have an opportunity to repay. But I hope you’ll keep in mind, Lord King, that at the end, not every griffin strove for the destruction of your country.”

  The Arobern paid the foreign lord careful attention. When the foreigner had finished speaking, he answered, “As you say so, Lord Bertaud, I will remember it. I know well your people, and you particularly, have forged a much greater understanding with the griffins than Casmantium has ever managed, despite all our long experience.”

  Lord Bertaud inclined his head. “Perhaps it’s our lack of violent history that allows Feierabiand to approach the People of Fire and Air more, ah—”

  “More productively,” suggested Beguchren, quietly. “I think it’s clear that earth mages, particularly cold mages, should not determine policy when dealing with the… People of Air and Fire. Certainly the counsel of mages is suspect in that regard, and so I’ve advised my lord king.”

  Lord Bertaud looked startled and satisfied in approximately equal measure. He said after a moment, “I’m… that is, I think perhaps you may be correct, Lord Beguchren, and I’m very much hopeful that this, ah, caution, may lead to a better outcome along the border between earth and fire. If, ah…”

  “If the wall should fail,” Beguchren completed the thought. He turned his head, regarding Gereint, one pale brow lifting. He said, not quite a question, “As it should not, however.”

  Gereint shook his head uncertainly. “I don’t think so, my lord. I don’t—I can’t well judge, but I don’t think so.”

  “It should last for a long time,” Tehre put in earnestly. “Quite a long time, really. It’s structurally very sound. Because of how wide it is, you know. Width and weight always stabilize a wall—”

  The Arobern smoothly interrupted what might have become a detailed digression on the nature and stability of walls. “Lady Tehre,” he said formally, “Casmantium is amazed by your skill and prowess as a builder and an engineer. Casmantium and I are grateful for your insight and your skill, laid down at great risk and in despite of my command.” His manner became less formal and more expansive. “Which, hah, I think I might forgive! My agent Detreir Enteirich was most alarmed at your defiance and the defiance of Lord Bertaud, but I have assured him that, under the circumstances, he need not be concerned at his failure to complete the charge I gave him.”

  From her air of startlement, Gereint rather thought Tehre might have genuinely forgotten about this incident herself. Lord Bertaud’s mouth crooked in a wry smile.

  The king, too, looked amused, as though he also suspected Tehre had forgotten. “I think I will send you west, with your honored brother and with Lord Bertaud if he will agree, to where my engineers and builders are working on my new road,” he told her. “I think you have ideas for bridges and roadwork. And more than ideas, I think! You are not any ordinary maker, hah? My friend Beguchren tells me that we need a new word to describe what you are: not a mage, but not exactly a maker. You and he can decide. But I will send you west, and send my agent Detreir Enteirich with you, to ensure my engineers know to regard your views with respect.”

  Tehre had flushed, but her face was alight with enthusiasm. “Oh, yes! I have this wonderful idea for a new kind of bridge; it has—well.” Surprising Gereint, she cut herself off and said merely, “I’m sure it will work. Nearly sure.” But then she frowned, suddenly cautious. “Oh! But the Fellesteden heir, what is his name? I don’t know, maybe he—it’s possible he might—”

  “I think Casnerach Fellesteden will not further trouble you or your family,” the king assured her, smiling affably and somehow almost as fi
ercely as a griffin. “So you will go west. That is good.” He turned at last to Gereint. “And you, Gereint Enseichen. What should I say to you?”

  Gereint knew he had flushed. He truly had no idea how to respond. The king’s gaze was uncomfortably intense when it was aimed precisely at him, Gereint found.

  The Arobern said, “So we gain at very least a respite, maybe for years, maybe for our generation. Maybe for an age. And you did this for us.”

  This was unanswerable. Gereint managed a small nod.

  “I am very satisfied with your work in the service of my friend Beguchren Teshrichten, and of Casmantium—that is, my service. Beguchren hoped you would do well for him. Neither of us, I think, understood how well you might do. Or under what circumstances. Or at what cost.”

  Gereint shook his head. “The cost wasn’t mine. Not really. Not in the end.” His eyes met Beguchren’s, and he looked away again at once. He said to the Arobern, “It wasn’t any of my doing that put me in a position to stumble into a way to be useful. I know that very well. I’m grateful Lord Beguchren’s foresight and courage brought us all through that night of fire.” He met Beguchren’s eyes again, this time deliberately. “If not quite as we expected, still we came through to the dawn.”

  “As you say,” the Arobern said, as gently as his gravelly voice permitted.

  Beguchren bowed his head a little, and there was a pause.

  Then the Arobern said, turning to the last of them, “Eben Amnachudran, your role, also, I have heard described. I commend your decisiveness and your steady courage in those days of fire. And through that last night. And your kindness to my friend Beguchren, among all the men who fell under your care.”