Land of the Burning Sands

by Rachel Neumeier

  CHAPTER 13

  The road between Dachsichten and Breidechboden was much too good, Tehre decided. Even if you weren’t in a great hurry, your carriage would travel smoothly and swiftly, and if you were in a hurry, well, you could travel very quickly indeed. Even with the very best roads, however, no one but a courier or a king’s agent could cover the whole distance from Dachsichten to Breidechboden in one day. Which was just as well, Tehre thought.

  Sicheir rode his own horse, not too near Detreir Enteirich. Though Meierin rode with Tehre in the carriage, the girl was silent and pale. She sat with her hands folded primly in her lap like a child, and her gaze fixed on her hands. She evaded Tehre’s eye and said very little. Tehre was aware she should reassure the girl, but did not know what she might say. She would have liked to send her out to ride with Sicheir so that she could speak privately with Lord Bertaud, but of course that was impossible. Lord Bertaud had turned his carriage south without apparent hesitation, but his eyes were secretive and bleak, and Tehre knew his grim mood had nothing to do with fears of the Arobern’s anger.

  She said at last, speaking straight across Meierin since there was no choice, “Will you go all the way back to Breidechboden?”

  Lord Bertaud lifted his eyes to meet hers, but he did not answer.

  “You needn’t,” Tehre said firmly. “Did I make that clear? But you need to tell me what I should do.”

  “Lady—” Meierin said tentatively.

  “Hush,” Tehre told her. She hadn’t looked away from Lord Bertaud. “You know, if you simply turned about and headed north again, there wouldn’t be anything at all the Arobern’s agent could do to prevent you.”

  “He could prevent you, however,” Lord Bertaud said, frowning.

  “Not necessarily, if I were with you. If he had to set himself against you, honored lord, I don’t know what he’d do. The Arobern’s agents have wide authority. But they have to use it with discretion. It would even be an act of war to raise a hand against you. Wouldn’t it?”

  “And an act of treason for you to defy him. Isn’t that so?”

  “Lady!” Meierin exclaimed.

  “Hush!” Tehre said, more firmly this time. “Meierin, hush. Not even Fereine will blame you for anything I do, you know.”

  “Yes, she will—”

  “Well, tell her I said she mustn’t.” Tehre turned once more to Lord Bertaud. “Well?”

  The Feierabianden lord said nothing for a long moment. His expression had become abstracted, but some of the bleakness had gone from it. Tehre said nothing, did not move, tried not even to breathe obtrusively. She heard his voice in her memory: I think it may be worse than even your king suspects. I have a suspicion about this.

  At last Lord Bertaud lifted his gaze to meet Tehre’s. He said, “What you did with language… I said you must be a mage. You said you are not. Tell me, lady, are you in truth a mage as well as a maker?”

  “No,” Tehre said, surprised. “No, I’m a maker, and maybe something of an engineer, but not a mage. I’m sorry—if you need a mage, I’m afraid there aren’t any more—”

  Lord Bertaud dismissed this concern with a wave of his hand. “The one remains. The king’s mage. The cold mage. Beguchren.”

  “Beguchren Teshrichten,” Tehre agreed, mystified. “Yes.”

  “He went north.”

  “Yes?” Tehre couldn’t see where the foreign lord was heading with this. She tried to wait patiently for him to explain.

  “Mages of earth and fire…” Lord Bertaud began, and stopped.

  “There is an antipathy,” Tehre said cautiously. “All the philosophers agree there is an antipathy.”

  “Yes.” Lord Bertaud’s mouth tightened. His gaze had turned inward. Whatever he was seeing, Tehre thought, it was not the interior of the carriage or the neat fields that lined the road. He turned to her with sudden decision. “You’re very powerful. But you are not a mage.”

  Tehre nodded to each statement, baffled.

  “Your king should have sent you north. Not his mage, but you. And me, perhaps. Well, we shall see what this Detreir Enteirich does with his authority and his discretion,” Lord Bertaud declared, and leaned forward to speak to his driver.

  Detreir Enteirich appeared beside the carriage almost before it had completed its turn. “Stop!” he ordered the driver. But the driver was one of Lord Bertaud’s retainers and not Casmantian at all, and he did not stop, but instead clucked to the horses and made them trot more briskly than ever. Northward.

  “Lord Bertaud!” the king’s agent said, falling back to ride alongside the carriage so he could speak to them through the window.

  “I said I would escort the lady wherever she might wish to go,” Lord Bertaud said blandly. “It appears she wishes to go north.”

  The agent digested this for a moment. Then he leaned down a little in the saddle, peering past Lord Bertaud to Tehre. “Lady Tehre—”

  “Yes, I know,” said Tehre.

  “This defiance is treason, lady—”

  Yes, Tehre began to repeat. But agreeing made it seem more real, and she found herself flinching from the word. She said instead, almost pleadingly, “But the Arobern gave me the wrong command. He’s given me the wrong command twice! I don’t want to defy the king, truly, but he should have told me to go north. We have in Lord Bertaud someone who’s even allied to the griffins, and the Arobern won’t listen to him, either!”

  Detreir Enteirich’s mouth tightened. “Lady Tehre Amnachudran Tanshan, is that what you will tell the king?”

  “No!” cried Sicheir, from the agent’s other side. “Tehre—”

  “You’d better go to Breidechboden,” Tehre said sharply. “One of us needs to, if that Fellesteden heir is going to make trouble.”

  “Tehre—”

  “I can’t!” Tehre said. “Sicheir, I can’t! I have to know what’s happening in the north! Don’t you see I have to?” Before her brother could answer, she closed her eyes, clenched her hands into fists, and broke the solid roadway behind and to either side of the carriage. She didn’t understand exactly what she did. It was a little like getting that sword to shatter, when Fellesteden’s thug had tried to cut Fareine; it was a little like exploiting a weakness in a mechanism such as a catapult so that it would break. But it was not exactly like either of those things. There was a deep-set maker’s virtue in the road, so that no matter the weather, it would not erode or crack or grow muddy. But Tehre broke it anyway. Beside them and behind them, all the mounted riders fell away, shouting.

  “But you are not a mage,” Lord Bertaud said seriously, peering out the window of the carriage.

  Tehre didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “No! I didn’t know I could do that. But it wasn’t magecraft, anyway. More like making, only backward. Can you stop the carriage?”

  Lord Bertaud’s expression grew even more serious. “You have changed your mind? You wish to go back?” He hesitated. “It is a grave matter to defy your king.”

  “No!” repeated Tehre. “I mean, yes, it is, but no, I haven’t changed my mind! Only we need to let Meierin out.” She looked at the girl, sitting stiff and horrified beside her. “Meierin, tell them… I don’t know. Anything you like. Tell them I’m sorry, but I know there’s something terribly wrong in the north and I’m going, and Lord Bertaud is, and you tried to stop me but I wouldn’t listen. That’s all true, so you ought to be able to sound very sincere.”

  “Lady Tehre—honored lady—”

  “Go on,” Tehre said inexorably, and reached past the girl to open the carriage door. “And tell them not to bother coming after us! Not even the Arobern’s agent has any right to stop Lord Bertaud, and they should think carefully about whether they want to offend him by trying to make me go back. And I won’t, anyway. Remind them about the road!”

  “I think I won’t need to,” Meierin said shakily. “I think you’re right; I think the lord mage should have asked you to go with him, maybe the honored Gereint too, but he should have a
sked you. If you think you should go now, then I think so, too. Honored lady—good fortune go before you and beside you! I’ll tell them just what you said. Only, if something is so terribly wrong in the north, fix it; please fix it! My family’s in the north, too, you know!”

  Tehre did know this once Meierin reminded her, and blushed because she had needed the reminder. She nodded wordlessly, and the girl stepped back—carefully, because the road was rough and broken where she stepped. And Lord Bertaud leaned forward and rapped hard on the back of the driver’s high seat, and the driver lifted the reins again, and the horses strode forward. Not running. Merely at a collected trot. Because they were not running from anybody, because if they had to run they had already lost their ability to assert their own independent action.

  But they did not have to run. No one, not even Lord Bertaud’s other retainers and servants, came after them.

  It was nearly dusk when they stopped, neither at a farmhouse nor at a campsite, but simply drawing off the road behind a small copse of oaks and hickories. Not out of fear of pursuit, Tehre knew. Merely because Lord Bertaud had no inclination to seek out any kind of company. Neither did she.

  Tehre had barely noticed the change in the light. She had been thinking about making, and magecraft, and risk, and treason, and had not really noticed time passing at all. She walked the stiffness out of her bones while the driver saw to the horses and Lord Bertaud made up a fire. None of them spoke much. The driver modestly produced bread and hard sausage from his personal supplies, and they toasted these rough provisions over the fire.

  “I can rest in the carriage, I suppose,” Tehre said, a little doubtfully, as the last glimmering glow of the sun sank low in the west. She had not had to think about such practicalities herself for a long time. Ever, really. “But I don’t know… maybe we should have found a house to stop at, after all—”

  “We won’t need a house,” Lord Bertaud said abruptly, and stood up.

  The fire had burned down to low embers; the flames now were sparse, flickering low amid ashen coals. Lord Bertaud stood close by the fire, a featureless black shape against its ruddy light. Tehre couldn’t see his expression. But his voice was grim.

  A man flickered into existence by the fire, shaping himself out of the rising night wind and the glow of the fire, and Tehre stared. So did the driver. So did Lord Bertaud, but there was something different in his startlement, as though he was surprised, but not at the same thing that had startled Tehre or the driver. Tehre rather thought he had been startled by the man’s sudden appearance, but only by the suddenness, not by the appearance itself.

  The newcomer was cloaked in black, but the firelight picked out a crimson gleam at his throat and wrist—the shimmer of fine cloth. His hair was black as the night; blacker, for the silvery moonlight could have relieved any ordinary darkness, but it barely seemed to touch this man. The firelight showed a face that was spare, strong boned, haughty; deep-set eyes; an arrogant tilt of the head. And the man’s shadow, Tehre saw with a dawning sense of amazement and dismay—his shadow, pulled into shape by the light of fire and moon, billowed out huge and strange, not dark at all, but fiery in the dimness. It was not at all the shadow of a man. Feathers of flame lifted and fluttered around the shadow’s head and its long graceful neck; its eyes were black as the coals at the heart of a fire.

  But then, she realized, nothing about the man, save the shape he wore like a cloak, was actually human.

  Lord Bertaud stepped forward to greet the stranger, and Tehre was bewildered by what she saw in his face: gladness and relief and anger and an odd kind of dread—a strange and complex blend of emotions that should have been contradictory and yet seemed all of a piece. But amazement, she thought, was notably lacking. He said sharply, heatedly, as though answering a challenge or continuing an argument, “I did not call you!”

  “You called me in your dreams,” the man answered. “I heard my name in your dreams. You called me with your intentions.” His voice was exactly as Tehre might have expected: harsh, angry, edged with challenge. “I came so that you would not need to call me aloud. Why are you here so far from your own country, man, if not to stand between men and the People of Fire and Wind?”

  The Feierabianden lord did not answer.

  The griffin mage—clearly he was a griffin, and if he wore the shape of a man and pulled himself out of the wind he must surely be a mage—this man who was nothing like a man waited a long, stretched moment. Then he said, “Why else are you on this road but to come up to the new desert we have made? And what do you mean to do there? What has the Casmantian king offered you to persuade you to ally with him against us despite all your oaths?”

  “I am not—” Lord Bertaud began, sounding outraged, but then stopped himself, his breath coming hard. He said instead, “What are your people doing in the north?”

  “We are breaking Casmantium’s power,” the griffin mage said harshly. “Should we wait for another cohort of cold mages to be raised up? For Casmantium to strike again into our desert and kill us as it pleases? Should we yield all the country of fire to the soft wind, to the dim, pale sun, to the steel plow and the growing grain, the stone walls and roads of men? I think not.

  “Our fiery wind will sing through the northern hills; we are bringing our country east below the high lake. We will turn Casmantium’s great rivers to dry dust; its tame fields will crack and wither. The Arobern flung ice and earth against us; we will return wind and fire. Let him send ten thousand soldiers against us: He will discover we have become impervious to even the coldest steel. Thus all men will see the people of fire are strong and dangerous to offend.”

  Tehre could see at once what would happen to Casmantium if the Teschanken River went dry; withered fields were only the beginning of it. Light-headed with horror, she swayed and put a hand out, but there was nothing to support herself with but air. The griffin mage turned his head, a sharp birdlike movement. His fierce eyes caught her out of the darkness, and she stood frozen under that black, contemptuous stare, as a mouse frozen under the fierce gaze of a hunting falcon, unable to look away or move.

  “No!” Lord Bertaud said sharply. He came swiftly to her side and put a protective hand on her arm, turning to stand beside her.

  Tehre, somehow freed by his touch or voice, blinked and shuddered. The Feierabianden lord seemed nearly as horrified by the griffin mage’s words as she had been, but he was not shaking. His grip on her arm was almost painful—she would be bruised, later—but she put her hands over his and clung.

  Despite the griffin’s brutal speech, there was a strange edge to his ruthlessness and arrogance, as though he were waiting. As though he expected… something… Tehre could not imagine what. His stare, when his eyes met hers, was indifferent. Pitiless. But there was something else in his face when he met Lord Bertaud’s eyes. But Tehre could neither recognize nor understand what she saw, just as she could not recognize or understand what she saw in the face of the Feierabianden lord.

  “You agreed with this plan?” Lord Bertaud asked in a low voice. “I thought your people were content simply to take back the city of Melentser. And instead, you do this? Without even telling me? This is a wind you agreed to ride? Or was this Tastairiane and Esterikiu Anahaikuuanse?” The flowing griffin names came to his tongue much more easily than Casmantian names had, which seemed ironic. He went on: “You’ve shown before, if you have to, you can bring your king around to your opinion—”

  The griffin mage held up a hand, a sharp gesture that cut Lord Bertaud off nearly in midword. “Eskainiane Escaile Sehaikiu was sometimes my ally and yours, man. Now that he is gone, the Lord of Fire and Air has little patience with moderation. Taking Melentser might have pleased some of us. But once we claimed Melentser and perceived the strength its return brought us, then we saw what other wind had risen up to call us to fly. Then we discovered what more we might do. I will admit,” he added harshly, “I did not expect you to present any opposing argument. Certainly not personally.
This is nothing to do with Feierabiand. A weakened Casmantium is even to your benefit. Is it not?”

  Tehre didn’t understand why the griffins cared what argument Lord Bertaud might make—it must have to do with his role in the summer’s war, and earth and iron, what had his role been? But to her dismay, Lord Bertaud did not immediately refute the griffin mage’s suggestion. She said urgently, “If the lower Teschanken goes dry, Casmantium won’t only be weakened. We’ll be destroyed! They can’t do this, can they? Can they? If we send ten thousand men, surely they couldn’t really defeat us?”

  But Lord Bertaud looked as though he thought they could, and Tehre stopped, horrified. She cried, “If the griffins will listen to you—if this Lord of Fire and Air will listen to you—you mustn’t let them do what he says they mean to do!”

  “Woman, do you think any man of earth may instruct the people of fire as to which wind to ride, or whether to call up fire or let it die?” demanded the griffin mage, directing the hot force of his attention on Tehre for the first time.

  Flinching under that stare, she nevertheless made herself meet his eyes; she even managed to speak. “No, but you said—you implied—” But she could not manage any sort of coherence, stuttered to a halt, tried to collect her wits, and appealed instead to Lord Bertaud. “Your country is allied with the griffins now, isn’t it? Your king is an ally of their king, isn’t that right? You’re an agent of the Safiad. Don’t you speak with his voice? Isn’t there something you can do? Are you certain there’s nothing you can do?”