Law of the Broken Earth: The Griffin Mage Trilogy: Book Three

by Neumeier, Rachel

  The queen, seated in the room’s most delicate and expensive cherrywood chair, leaned her chin on her palm and let them argue. She looked less frightened than Mienthe had expected, but thoroughly exasperated. Half a dozen of her ladies hovered around her, whispering behind their hands to one another, looking uncertain and worried and far less sophisticated and ornamental than they had a few hours earlier. The rest of the court ladies, to Mienthe’s considerable relief, were not in evidence; they had been replaced for the moment by several grim-visaged royal guardsmen who did not speak at all. They looked exactly as embarrassed about the failure of their guard as she felt about her own lack of forethought.

  The door across the room opened, and Geroen came in. Iriene came with him, which was a little bold of her, since that brought her into the queen’s presence when she hadn’t been sent for. Mienthe decided she didn’t care.

  Geroen gave the queen a low bow and turned, quite correctly, to Mienthe as the Lady of the Delta. “Lady,” he said stiffly. “There’s no sign of any of those dog-livered Linularinan cowards anywhere in the city. Not that my men seem overdependable in setting eye or hand on them. But the esteemed Iriene agrees.”

  “Not that I might know,” the mage said, wryly acknowledging her own lack of power.

  “I think Istierinan’s mage must be uncommonly skilled,” Tan murmured. “How else would it be possible to come and go so silently in so crowded a house? Never mind so boldly,” he added, with a nod to the queen.

  “We’d all be glad to know how they could be so bold,” Geroen growled.

  Niethe was silent for a moment. Then she touched a graceful hand to her temple for a moment, dropped her hand, and asked, “How exactly did we send those… those dog-livered Linularinan cowards… on their way?”

  “Lady Mienthe did it,” Geroen growled. He gave Mienthe a quick look. “The esteemed Iriene says.”

  “I?” asked Mienthe uncertainly.

  “You did,” Iriene said crisply. She was looking at Mienthe with something like sympathy, but without doubt. “I don’t understand it, but I’m sure.”

  “I don’t…” Mienthe hesitated. She rubbed her forehead, searching for… something. The memory of pain? The echo of a shape she had drawn into herself, into the earth? “I don’t… I don’t truly know. I don’t think… I don’t think I did anything, exactly. There was something strange, something about shadows, and spirals…”

  “You most certainly did do something. You did magecraft. I saw it.” Iriene’s voice had gone oddly gentle. “You sat down on the path and drew in the gravel, and the Linularinan working tangled up in the shape you drew and spun away and out.”

  Mienthe stared at the mage. Iriene had said she couldn’t be a mage because she didn’t hate her cousin’s griffin friend. And she didn’t feel at all like a mage. And yet… yet… she supposed she didn’t really know how a mage was supposed to feel. And if she’d done magecraft, didn’t that mean she had to be a mage? She said uncertainly, “No one in my grandfather’s family has ever been a mage. Hardly any of us are even gifted…”

  “Well, you will be the first, then,” Iriene said practically. “Perhaps you have it from your mother.”

  Mienthe stared at the mage. She had never been able to recall the least detail about her mother. Tef had described her for Mienthe long ago, when she’d wondered with a child’s curiosity about the mother she’d never known. A pale little mouse of a woman, he had said, always tiptoeing about in terror of drawing the attention of some stalking cat. A woman with colorless eyes and delicate bones and a pretty voice, though she seldom spoke. She had been afraid of Mienthe’s father. Mienthe understood that perfectly, but she wished now that she could remember her mother.

  “Fortunate for us, wherever you have it from!” declared the queen, speaking for the first time in several moments. She studied Mienthe with a lively curiosity that made Mienthe feel rather like a fancy caged songbird. “You must have a great deal of natural talent, surely, to notice this skillful Linularinan mage and know without training or study how you might expose and dismiss him. And you truly had no least inkling of your power?”

  Mienthe truly had no least inkling of it now, except she couldn’t deny that she seemed to have somehow used it. She began to answer the queen, found she had no idea what answer to give, and stopped.

  “We all have an inkling of it now!” said Tan. “I would kiss your hands and feet, esteemed Mienthe, except I would have to rise, so I hope you will excuse me. How very splendid you are! An ornament to the Delta, to the city, and to your cousin’s house!”

  Somehow this excessively flowery speech settled Mienthe where the queen’s warm approval had only worried her.

  “I don’t know about ornaments,” Iriene said, with a lowering glance toward Tan, “but it seems to me that broad events are tending to pivot here, that this year the Delta has become a linchpin for the world. I suppose that’s Mienthe, too, or else those Linularinan mages. I don’t know. Everything looks strange.”

  “It’s not me!” Mienthe said at once. She thought she might understand what the mage meant about pivot-points and linchpins, and this made her almost more uncomfortable than being accused of being a pivot-point herself, because she could see that no one else in the room understood at all.

  “I don’t know,” Iriene said doubtfully. “It seems to me it is you, lady, but then everything looks strange in this house right now. I could almost think it was him”—she nodded toward Tan and finished—“except if anybody’s at the heart and the hub of whatever’s moving in the Delta, lady, it should be you and not some nice young Linularinan legist.”

  Tan tilted his head, looking curious and amused at this characterization.

  Mienthe understood the amusement. So little of that description was actually true. How very strange and uncomfortable, to be aware that someone’s appearance was deliberately cultivated and thoroughly false. She wondered whether Tan could possibly be at the heart and hub of all these recent events. That seemed much more likely than that she was. She said aloud, “It isn’t me they’re trying to kidnap.”

  “That’s true,” said Geroen, and glowered at Tan. “What was it you brought away with you from Linularinum, huh? What did you steal from the old Fox’s house?”

  Tan opened his mouth as though to say, as he had said all along, Nothing. But then he looked suddenly extremely thoughtful. He said instead, “Esteemed Captain… I’d have said I took nothing from Mariddeier Kohorrian save information. But it’s clear Istierinan believes I took something more, ah, tangible. He must indeed hold this as an adamant conviction. I thought… I had concluded that someone else was using my, ah, my work to disguise his own theft. But before this, I would not have said the Fox’s spymaster could so easily be led astray by mere clouds of obfuscation. Certainly not to acts of war.”

  “War!” exclaimed Queen Niethe, and then, as she realized this was obviously the case, looked sorry she had spoken.

  Tan politely pretended not to notice the queen’s embarrassment. “The Linularinan actions can hardly be seen in a less serious light. Only King Iaor’s generosity will allow it to be cast otherwise—if he is generously inclined.”

  “To be sure—yet he will surely wish to be generous—no one can want a war,” the queen said earnestly.

  “Anyone would suspect, from the actions of his agents, that the Fox is in fact inclined toward war,” Tan said, and looked around at them all. “But I have observed Mariddeier Kohorrian closely for better than six years, and I would swear he is never pointlessly aggressive. He might wish to reclaim the Delta, so often held by Linularinum and not by Feierabiand—”

  Everyone nodded, fully aware of the Delta’s complicated history.

  “But he is not as, ah, forcefully acquisitive by nature, as, say, the Arobern of Casmantium. I still suspect Istierinan is acting alone and without Kohorrian’s knowledge. But if the Fox himself is directing these activities, I believe it is with some restricted object, and not with any desire to
provoke His Majesty to answer directly.”

  From Geroen’s pessimistic glower, he was not confident of this assessment. Queen Niethe, on the other hand, seemed to have been rather too thoroughly reassured. Mienthe suspected that this might be because the queen simply did not want to believe that anything very dramatic was likely to happen. Niethe thrived in her well-ordered life and hated uproar and all disarray.

  Mienthe herself thought that Tan would not have put his conclusion quite so firmly if he was not confident, but she also wondered just how infallible his judgment was. He’d thoroughly underrated the Linularinan spymaster’s determination, evidently. And the Linularinan mage’s ability to find him. Whom else might he have underrated? But she said only, “If either Kohorrian or Istierinan acts to gain a limited object, then that must be recovering the thing they believe you stole. I think it would be nice to know what that thing is supposed to be.”

  “It certainly would,” Tan said fervently. “I would try to write it out, assuming it’s a legist-magic of some sort, only after, well, everything, I confess I’m afraid of what Istierinan’s mages might do if I pick up a quill.”

  “Nothing,” the queen said firmly. “Not while we are all alert and watching—not while I am actually here in this room, surely, do you think?”

  Mienthe did not find herself confident of this.

  “I’ll just write out the briefest line—I’ll see what comes to me,” Tan promised. He looked sidelong at Mienthe. “If you will permit me? It’s your house—and you I’ve depended on, all unknowing, for rescue. Twice, now. Shall I risk a third time?”

  “Perhaps not,” murmured the queen, gazing at Mienthe with concern.

  “Lady Mienthe?” Tan asked.

  Mienthe wanted to refuse, but somehow, with Tan seeming to expect her to bravely agree, it was hard to say no. “Well,” she said, not entirely willingly, “I want to know, too. All right. All right. Geroen, could you bring Tan a quill and a leaf of paper, from the desk over there?”

  Captain Geroen handed Tan a long black feather, which he ran through his fingers. Nothing happened. Tan smiled reassuringly at Mienthe, dipped the quill in the bottle of ink Geroen wordlessly held for him, and, for lack of a proper table, set the paper on his knee.

  Mienthe fell asleep before the ink touched the paper. She fell asleep sitting up, with her eyes open. That was how it seemed to her. She dreamed about a thin black spiral that glistened like ink. It was a different kind of spiral than the one she’d drawn earlier. This kind of spiral led inward and down to a concentrated point rather than rising and diffusing outward. She closed her eyes and followed the spiral down and down, and in, and farther in… She blinked, words writing themselves in spidery black script against the emptiness of her inner vision. Though the writing itself was black, colors bloomed behind the script: emerald and dark summer-green, primrose yellow, rich caramel gold and brown, the blues and slate colors of the sea. The fragrance of honeysuckle and spring rain filled the air, and behind those fragrances, the heavier, more powerful scents of new-turned earth and sea brine.

  She could not read even a single letter of the words she saw. Nor did she hear them. Though they seemed real and meaningful, they were not at all like spoken words. But she knew what they said. Or she knew, at least, that part of their purpose was to close tight and hold hard, and yet another part was to flex and move against pressure, only all those concepts were wrong—Mienthe didn’t mean “hold” or “flex” or “pressure,” or even “purpose.” It was very strange to have concepts in her mind that she couldn’t actually grasp.

  Then Mienthe found herself blinking once again at the ordinary sitting room. Tan was sitting with his head bowed against his hand, his face hidden. He made no sound, but obviously he was in some distress, though she did not know exactly why. There were no marks of any kind on the paper that rested on his knee.

  Iriene was staring at both of them. “Well,” she said. “Well… that was no ordinary mageworking, was it? It wasn’t anything I recognize. How strange. Was that legist-magic?”

  “Yes,” said Tan, not looking up. “Though it wasn’t anything I recognize, either.”

  “Oh,” said Mienthe. “Legist-magic? That explains the words, and why they’re written out rather than spoken, and I suppose it also explains why I couldn’t read them—because I’m not a legist.”

  “Words?” asked the queen, puzzled.

  “Written?” said Iriene, at nearly the same time. “Did you see something, Lady Mienthe? What did you see?”

  “Purposeful words?” asked Tan, looking up at last.

  “But surely you saw them, too?” Mienthe asked him. “You’re a legist—didn’t you understand them?”

  Tan touched his forehead gingerly with the tips of two fingers, as though not perfectly certain the top of his head was still attached. “I don’t… nothing’s very clear… I wonder what Istierinan had hidden in that study of his? Something that only a legist could take, and not even quite realize he’d taken it?”

  “Oh!” Mienthe jumped to her feet and was through the door before she’d even realized that she’d forgotten to take proper leave of the queen. But the book was right there on the shelf where she had known she would find it. The fat little book with its expensive leather binding and its thick, heavy, blank pages, with no sign that anybody had ever written a single word in it.

  Mienthe found she had no difficulty imagining thin, ornate writing filling the book, black and spidery across all its fine pages. She only wondered what the writing might have said.

  CHAPTER 6

  Tan recognized the book, of course—recognized it at last not merely as the blank-paged book Istierinan had brought to that memorable interview in the barn, but from before that as well—from that last rushed day and frantic night in Teramondian, when everything had suddenly fallen into order and he’d slipped past Istierinan’s watchful eye and into his private study. Years of work used up in that one night, years of moving in all the right circles to gain knowledge of disaffected younger sons and yet with all the right steps to gain the trust of their weary fathers as well… Tan had not in the least minded acting as one of Istierinan’s close-held Teramondian agents. He’d gradually established himself as one of Istierinan’s most useful agents in the Fox’s court, and that night he’d poured out every last drop of credit he’d ever gained. But he’d judged it worth the cast, and so it had been.

  And now here this one small book was again, which he had hardly noticed at the time. Not that it was poorly made. It was, in fact, superior workmanship all through: top-quality paper that would take ink beautifully, a tooled leather binding. He was afraid to touch it himself in case that, too, might serve as a trigger for Istierinan’s mage—and surprised again by the blaze of anger he felt at being forced to such timidity. But he asked Mienthe to page through the book for him. He watched in growing unease as the young woman turned one blank page after another. Finally he asked her to shut the book again.

  Queen Niethe, curious, held out her hand, but one of her ladies took the book instead and held it for her so the queen would not touch it. That seemed a wise precaution to Tan, though he doubted it was necessary. Nevertheless, a weak-minded fear of the book ironically filled him now, when it was too late to evade whatever magic it had contained.

  He had looked at this book and evidently taken the writing out of it, and he did not even remember what it had said. It was some trap Istierinan had left for a thief or a spy, and he had fallen into it. The writing in the book had got into his mind. Of course it had. Where else would it have gone? What had it done to him? What might it be doing still? No doubt it had rendered him vulnerable to Istierinan’s mage—no doubt he was still vulnerable—and who knew what Istierinan might be able to do to him through it? Tan wanted to run in circles, screaming. Only years of hard-held discipline, a disinclination to look like a hysterical fool in public, and his injured knee allowed him to stay sitting calmly in his chair.

  He said, trying for a calm
tone, “I’m only surprised I did not recognize it at once. But I had other things to think about when Istierinan was, ah, making inquiries.” He hesitated. Then he admitted, “This book was in Istierinan’s study, on a shelf with a few others and a trinket or three and several jars of ink. I glanced through it… it wasn’t set apart. I didn’t think it special. I suppose I thought it might contain the key to a cipher or such, but…” He stopped.

  “But it was blank?” Mienthe said.

  “No…” Tan said absently. Why had he concluded that this little book held nothing of interest? Not because its pages were empty; at the time, it had held writing. But he had no memory now of what writing it had held. That… that was unexpected. Both the current state of the pages and the failure of memory. Tan could read a dozen books in quick succession and afterward give a very close approximation of what each had said; a fine memory for written language was part of the legist gift. He rubbed his palms on his sleeves as though he had touched something unclean and looked at Iriene.

  The mage, frowning, held her hand out for the book. The queen’s lady gave it to her.

  The mage ran her fingers across the leather of the book’s binding, opened it to touch the fine, thick, unmarked paper within, closed it again, held it briefly to her lips, shook her head, and declared, “I can’t tell a thing about it, but I don’t think it’s ever held any kind of magecraft.”

  “Of course not,” Tan said, just as Queen Niethe asked, “Oh, but surely it must have, esteemed Iriene?” and Mienthe said in a surprised tone, “But that can’t be right,” and Captain Geroen snapped, “Of course it has! Why else would Linularinan agents be so interested?”