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

by Neumeier, Rachel

  Nor did the Feierabianden lord seem to know how to speak to Jos. He had too much natural tact, it appeared, to ask anything like, So, how have you lived? How has it been for you here in these mountains, belonging neither to fire nor to earth? Far less would he ask any such question as, How long was it before Kes forsook your company for that of Tastairiane? And if Lord Bertaud—thankfully—possessed too much delicacy to ask any of those questions, Jos certainly did not intend to volunteer answers.

  Or it might have been that Lord Bertaud simply despised Jos too much to speak to him, aside from the commonplaces necessary in such close accommodations. Though Jos would have liked to ask about the world below the mountains, he did not care to invite any rebuff by asking questions. He did not speak. Nor did Lord Bertaud. So it was a silent day that stretched out after King Iaor had departed. There was only the clucking of the hens to break the quiet, and the song of a hardy finch or two that had come bravely up from the lower meadows, and the muted hum of the bees, and the ceaseless winds above that always sang with more or less violence through the heights.

  And after the long day, it was a silent evening, and later still a deathly quiet night. The dawn that followed was cold, of course, as every dawn was cold in these mountains. But the stream did not freeze. It seldom froze even in the depths of the most savage winter; its own inherent wild magic kept it running freely across the clean stone when any sensible water would have turned to shimmering ice and frozen mist.

  Jos filled his single pot and made tea from his small store. He was glad to see Lord Bertaud’s saddlebags still held some good bread and hard cheese, and some dried beef, and a handful of last fall’s wrinkled apples. As it happened, Jos did have two mugs, for occasionally Kairaithin took the form of a man to visit him and then the griffin mage liked tea—or perhaps was simply amused to go through the motions of human hospitality; Jos was never confident he understood the griffin’s motivations in even so simple a matter. But there were two mugs. He added sugar and a pat of goat’s-milk butter to the tea in each mug and handed one, steaming, to his… guest, he supposed. For a sufficiently flexible understanding of the word.

  Bertaud set out the bread and other things, and took the offered mug with a nod that seemed civil enough. He took the chair nearest the fire, less inured than Jos to the chill that seemed to creep through the stone walls of the cottage. There was actually an abundance of chairs—four, recalling the days when Kes and Opailikiita and Kairaithin had all occasionally come to visit Jos. Opailikiita had never, so far as Jos knew, taken human shape, but in those days he had thought it best to be prepared in case one day she might.

  Instead, Kes had gradually lost her own human form, in every sense but the least important, and had ceased to visit the cottage. Jos had more than once thought of flinging two of the chairs down from the heights, letting them shatter on the stone below. He did not know whether it was hope or apathy or sheer blind obstinacy that had held him back from doing it.

  “Is it all Tastairiane Apailika?” Lord Bertaud asked at last. He was not looking at Jos. He was staring into the fire. If he had noticed that the fire burned ceaselessly without wood or coal, he had not commented. Perhaps he had not noticed. A lord would not be accustomed to building up or maintaining his own fires. And he seemed much absorbed in his own thoughts. He asked again, “Is this Tastairiane, all this determination to defeat the Wall? Without him, would the People of Fire and Air so passionately desire to burn their way across the world?”

  He, too, spoke of the Wall with the slight pause and distinct emphasis that Jos felt the Great Wall deserved. And, Jos noticed, the lord called the griffins by the name they called themselves without hesitation, without even appearing to think about it. He thought once more of how Kairaithin had said, I carried word to Bertaud son of Boudan, and again he wondered what the relationship between the two comprised.

  But he did not know the answer to the lord’s question, and only shook his head.

  Lord Bertaud looked Jos in the face for a moment and then suddenly got to his feet and turned away, the sharp motion of a man who could not bear to sit still. He said harshly, “I cannot—they cannot be permitted to do as they wish to do.” Going to the cottage’s single tight-shuttered window, he put back the shutters with quick, forceful motions and let in the cold, brilliant morning light. Then he stood perfectly still for some time, gazing out. From the direction of his gaze, he was staring down toward the Wall.

  The pale dazzling light that poured in through the open window was welcome, the harsh cold much less so. Jos opened his mouth to say, Close the shutters, man, are you mad? but then, watching the Feierabianden lord, he did not speak. The constraint he felt was, he realized, due far less to his fear that Lord Bertaud would take offense than to his surety that the lord would not even hear him. Jos thought the other man was so deeply absorbed in his own thoughts and fears that he would not have heard the crash and roar of an avalanche coming down from the frozen heights. For the first time, it occurred to Jos that the lord’s enduring silence might be due to his own distraction and worries and not to any distaste or scorn he felt for his company.

  After a moment, Jos went to stand behind Lord Bertaud and look over his shoulder. The Wall glowed in the morning light, but the light that struck it from either side was entirely distinct. On the desert side, the molten sunlight poured down from a savage white sky that seemed oddly metallic. The light on that side of the barrier seemed to pool against the barrier of the Wall, thick as honey, pressing against the huge granite blocks as though it possessed actual body and weight. On the other side, ice flashed and glittered in a pale, thin brilliance that came down from the high, blue vault of the heavens, carrying no warmth at all.

  From both sides, light seemed to gather and pool in the cracks in the Wall. Light ran down from the cracks like liquid; steam billowed up from them, glowing in the sunlit air, gradually dispersing as it rose into the sky.

  And the griffin mages flicked abruptly into view high against the white-hot brilliant desert sky and plunged downward like striking falcons, crying in their high, fierce voices.

  Ashairiikiu Ruuanse Tekainiike, youngest and most arrogant of the fire mages, burned in fiery metallic colors, bronze and gold with flickers of blazing copper. Opailikiita Sehanaka Kiistaike, a smaller and more graceful griffin of gold-flecked brown, carried Kes on her back. Even at this distance, the girl was visible as a streak of white and gold against the darker, scorching colors of the griffins.

  They blazed downward without pause, straight toward the burning sands of the red desert, far too fast. But at the last moment before they would have struck the sand, they blurred into wind and light and reshaped themselves, at rest and laughing beside the towering Wall. At least Jos imagined they were laughing—at least Kes would be laughing, and the griffins blazing with their fierce silent humor, so like and yet unlike the humor of men.

  Kes stepped forward and laid her hands on the Wall. Fire blazed up at her touch, licking in rich, blazing sheets up the side of the wall. Fire found the longest, deepest crack and poured into it, filled it, pried at it. Great white clouds of steam plumed upward. Jos could hear, in his mind if not in truth, the hiss of fire meeting ice. He fancied he heard the stone shift and crack under the assault of the flames; he imagined he could even hear the powerful magic of making and building that had been woven into the Wall groan with the strain as it tried to maintain the cohesion of a Wall that suddenly wanted to explode into a chaotic storm of shattered, knife-edged shards of granite and crystal.

  Beside Jos, Lord Bertaud uttered a low oath. He had stepped back in shock at the deadly plunge of the griffins, and now, recovering himself, he gripped the cold stone of the windowsill and stared downward. His expression was odd. Jos had seen creatures of fire many times, but was still struck anew each time by their ferocity and beauty. He was not surprised by Bertaud’s shock. What he did not understand was the intensity of grief and longing hidden behind the man’s hard-held calm.


  Bertaud spoke at last, his tone flat with the effort it took to contain his emotions. “Tastairiane Apailika is not there.”

  “If the Wall breaks, I’m sure he’ll come,” Jos said. He kept his voice light, dry, inexpressive.

  Nevertheless, something in his tone must have caught Bertaud’s attention, for the lord turned his head, his glance sharp and, at last, attentive. But what he said was, “I’m sure he will. When he does…” But his voice trailed off, and he did not complete this thought. He turned instead, caught up his fur-lined coat, and stepped across to the door. He fumbled for a moment with the cold iron of the latch and the stiff leather of the hinges, then thrust the door open and stepped out into the chilly light of the morning.

  Jos followed, though his coat was nothing like as good. He found Lord Bertaud standing out in the middle of the meadow, scowling down through the brilliant freezing air toward the distant Wall. His arms were crossed over his chest. Despite his forbidding expression and solid stance, something about his attitude struck Jos not as aggressive but as defensive, even hesitant. But when he spoke, he did not sound hesitant at all. He sounded sharp and commanding, every bit the court lord.

  He did not speak to Jos, however. Instead, he called out into the crystalline silence of the heights, “Kairaithin!”

  At once, as though the griffin had been waiting for that call, fire blurred out upon the meadow. Anasakuse Sipiike Kairaithin drew himself out of fire and air and the piercing stillness of the mountains. For that first moment, he wore his true form: fierce black eagle head and feather-maned neck and chest, black-clawed red lion rear, his eyes blazing with fiery darkness. Then his wings beat once, scattering fire through the air, and closed around him like a cloak as he reared up and dwindled to the shape of a man. But the black eyes he turned toward them were unchanged, strange and unsettling in the face of a man, and his massive winged shadow stretched out behind him with the same fiery black eyes.

  He said, his tone unreadable, “I am here.”

  Lord Bertaud gave an uneasy little nod, but now that the griffin mage had come, he did not seem to know what to say.

  Jos came forward, with a deferential glance for Lord Bertaud and a welcoming nod for the griffin. “Kairaithin,” he said, and gestured down the slanting, jagged pass toward the Wall. “What shall we do? Shall we go down and speak to them?”

  “They will not hear you,” the griffin mage answered, his tone strangely bleak. He glanced at Bertaud, half lifting a hand. But when he spoke, it was to Jos. “I will take you down to them, if you wish. But a day of blood and fire is coming, and I see no way to prevent it. Only to turn it in one direction or the other. But whether it turns right or left, still there will be blood and fire.”

  Jos waited a moment, but still Lord Bertaud did not speak. So he asked, “If your king and the fire mages you trained and all your people call for a wind to carry them to that day of fire, why should you want to turn it?”

  He thought at first that Kairaithin would not answer. The griffin mage did not look at him, but glanced once more at Bertaud and then down toward the wall. But Kairaithin said at last, “If the People of Fire and Air try to ride that wind, they will find an unexpected storm which carries all before it. They believe the earth alone will burn, but fire and earth alike will be torn asunder.”

  Bertaud still said nothing, but somehow Jos found that his very silence commanded attention. He looked from man to griffin and, with a spy’s trick to encourage others to speak, refused to say anything himself that would disguise or slip over the palpable tension that sang between them.

  “You should go down to the Wall,” Kairaithin said abruptly. His black gaze was on Bertaud’s face, but he was speaking to Jos. He said, “You should go speak to Keskainiane Raikaisipiike. Kes. Perhaps she will hear you. Neither Opailikiita Sehanaka Kiistaike nor Ruuanse Tekainiike are important. Kes calls their common wind and sets its direction. If Kes is turned toward a different wind, all the mages of fire will turn, and the Wall may yet stand.”

  “I have spoken to her,” Jos protested. “You know she will not listen to me.” Then he paused, because Kairaithin did know that. Jos belatedly understood that Kairaithin wished to speak to Lord Bertaud and did not want Jos to overhear what they would say to each other. He looked from one of them to the other, seeing that Lord Bertaud, too, understood Kairaithin’s intention.

  Bertaud did not seem surprised by this, however. He stood looking aside, down toward the Wall, his shoulder turned toward both Jos and Kairaithin. His expression was closed and forbidding. Jos thought the man was not angry, or upset, or even frightened—he would have understood any of those emotions. He did not understand what he saw in that set, rigid face. He did not understand the strange relationship between the Feierabianden lord and the griffin mage, but he was abruptly certain that it was somehow important.

  Jos wanted to argue, insist upon staying here by the cottage. He wanted badly to know what the other two had to say to each other that they did not want him to overhear. But no argument of his would matter if Kairaithin did not choose to hear him. Kairaithin could simply take the Feierabianden lord elsewhere if he wished to speak to him privately. Or if the griffin mage commanded Jos to leave, Jos had no power to defy him.

  But Lord Bertaud said unexpectedly, “We might all go down to the Wall, perhaps. We might all speak to Kes. I’m curious to see her.” He glanced at Jos. “If you say she has forgotten us, forgotten the country of earth, then of course I believe you. But even so, I would like to speak to her.”

  Jos found he wanted to know what the Feierabianden lord might find to say to Kes—and what answer Kes might give him. He nodded wordlessly.

  Bertaud turned back to Kairaithin. “Those young griffins, they were your students, were they not? Have you so little influence with them now? Or have they sufficient strength to challenge you? I admit, that would astonish me.”

  Kairaithin did not answer at once. He regarded Lord Bertaud with close attention, as though wondering, as Jos was, what might lie behind these comments. But he said at last, “Neither Ruuanse Tekainiike nor Opailikiita Sehanaka Kiistaike could challenge me. You might well be astonished at such a suggestion. But your Kes has become in all truth Keskainiane Raikaisipiike—her intimates may perhaps still call her Kereskiita, the little fire-kitten, but she is no more a kitten.”

  The griffin mage looked for a moment down along the broken stone of the pass, at the white fire that blazed around Kes and poured away from her to tear at the crack in the Wall. But at last he added in a low voice, “Well, I thought that one day she might challenge me. That day has long since come. I should never have made that human child into a creature of fire. Though that was not the greatest of errors I made six years ago.” He glanced back at Bertaud and away again.

  Bertaud said quietly, even gently, “We can none of us turn time to run back, nor say what would have happened if we had acted other than we did. We all do as best we can. Who is to say that we would not have come to this in the end, your people and mine, whatever we did?”

  After an almost imperceptible pause, the griffin mage answered. “Not to this. Not without the wind I called up. Not without Kes.” He paused again, very briefly, and corrected himself. “Keskainiane Raikaisipiike.”

  Bertaud looked down toward the pass. “Even now, I can’t think of her by any name but Kes.”

  Jos wanted to say, Speak with her for five minutes together, and you will learn to. But he kept silent, not wishing to stop either of the others from speaking further if he wished.

  Besides, even Jos, who had spoken to her not so long ago, still thought of her by the human name she had long since ceased to use.

  “We will go down,” Kairaithin said, and on that word shifted them all out of the bright airy heights and straight down into the powerful desert.

  For the first moment, the heat was welcome, even pleasant. Jos found his numbed fingertips and his ears thawing instantly. He had almost forgotten what it was like to be really
warm. This heat spread through him, unknotting muscles in his back and neck, so that he relaxed and stretched and stood straight.

  After that one moment, the desert heat rapidly became excessive, and then overwhelming. The red sands were alive with delicate flames that flickered upward with every motion and then subsided, ebbing like water. The air sparkled not only with red dust but also with sparks of fire that settled downward as flecks of gold. The wind was hot and gritty and bone-dry. The very sunlight was entirely different here than it ever was in the country of earth: It hammered down upon them, brazen and heavy.

  Kes turned. The young griffin mages turned with her: Opailikiita Sehanaka Kiistaike, as dependably good-humored as any griffin ever could be, the rich brown of her feathers flecked and stippled with gold, slim and beautiful. A pace to the rear, Ashairiikiu Ruuanse Tekainiike, dark bronze and gold, his eyes brilliant gold and his temper far less certain.

  Kes herself looked less human even than Kairaithin, for where the griffin mage had deliberately put on human form as a mask and a convenience, Kes was not making any pretense of being human. Only her shape was human. She seemed to have been formed out of white gold and alabaster and porcelain; she glowed from within as though white fire flowed in her veins. Maybe it did. Fire filled her hands and poured down her arms, pale fire scattered from her hair when she turned to look at them. Fire glowed in her eyes, pale and brilliant and terrible. Her shadow, flung across the red sand, was as molten as her eyes.

  She was smiling, an expression that expressed nothing human. She looked happy, even joyful, but hers was a dangerous joy that held nothing of ordinary affection or gentleness. She said, “Jos!” and came to take his hands.

  Jos was absurdly flattered that she would speak to him first, that she would come to greet him before she even acknowledged Kairaithin, much less Bertaud. Though he knew she spoke to him first partly as a deliberate slight against Kairaithin, though he knew she had her griffin iskarianere now and never thought of him, he could not help but find the pleasure in her voice flattering. But he stepped backward as she came toward him. He could not help but step back, for the fire that filled Kes, unleashed as it was now, would burn him to the bone and she had plainly forgotten this.