Lord of the Changing Winds

by Rachel Neumeier

  This time she took it.

  General Jasand, it was clear, was not entirely displeased by the outcome of their first venture up the mountain.

  “They must be aware of our numbers,” Bertaud warned him. “They can fly—they will know what dispositions we make of our men.”

  “So? What will they do? Griffins do not use bow or shield. They can retreat, or they can come down to us. Even if there are a hundred, we’ll claim victory. As Casmantium did, by what you say. And we’ll then have soldiers blooded against griffins, which can only be useful if we are to have these creatures coming across the mountains once and again.”

  “Mmm.” Bertaud did not feel at all comfortable with that thought. What, would griffins come again and again down from the mountains, and Feierabiand slaughter them over and over? He did not like the idea of Feierabiand being used by Casmantium for any such purpose, if Casmantium had, in fact, decided to rid itself of the desert on its northern border.

  But the general did not notice Bertaud’s discomfort, or else he attributed it to a different cause. “You may trust our men’s training, my lord, and our weaponsmiths. Arrows properly made fly true; spears properly made strike hard. Griffins can hardly be better armed than boar or bear. When all’s said, beak and talon are no match for well-crafted steel. With the esteemed Diene to stop any mage from interfering, my men can handle this.”

  Bertaud, for all his lack of enthusiasm for Jasand’s plan, could see no honest reason to disagree with his assessment. Nor did Diene contradict the general’s words. The men, drawn up in two orderly companies, looked dangerously competent. The spears and arrows knew what they had been made for; the deadly magic of their making glittered along their edges.

  The plan of battle was simple. Bertaud thought the griffins would attack, and he thought there was every chance they would indeed be slaughtered like the animals Jasand was evidently so willing to consider them. He said bleakly, “If they were boar or bear, any man born with an affinity for boar or bear could turn them and send them into the wild, far from settled land. Would that earth magic ruled these creatures also!”

  Jasand only shrugged. “We’ll go up there, and there. With your approval, my lord,” he added absently. “The griffins are straight up that way.” There was no question of that: One could tell by the way the light lay on the land and the taste of the air where the griffins had made the country their own. “If they come straight down, that’s fine. If they go after each company separately, that’s not as neat, but it will still do. Archers on the inside, you know, and spears on the edge. I can see nothing the griffins can do that will give the men enough trouble to matter. We’ll be back at Minas Ford in time for a late supper.”

  “Yes,” said Bertaud. He tilted his head back and stared into the sky. It was blank, giving nothing back. Foreign heat poured out of it. The sun, lowering in the west, cast its light across the face of the hills. He wanted to say, No. He wanted to go back up into the red desert the griffins had made of this country, to find the griffin mage and speak with him again, find some other option. Anything but take Feierabiand soldiers into that desert. Whether it was the men or the griffins who would die of it.

  Diene stood to one side, thin arms crossed across her chest, mouth a thin, straight line. Looking at her, Bertaud doubted himself. He could put his judgment above hers, except how could he trust his own judgment? She might have been instantly hostile to the griffin mage, but she had at least been coherent. Fool, she had called him. Perhaps she had been right. He thought of the griffin mage and shut his eyes at the memory of how tongue-tied he had suddenly become in that creature’s presence. He was dismayed by his own irresolution. In retrospect, it seemed more and more likely that that had been some subtle form of attack. If it had been, it had worked. How could a man blinded by the power of the desert possibly see what he should do to serve his king?

  He said again, reluctantly, “Yes.”

  Jasand gave a satisfied nod and signaled, and the horns sounded, bright clear notes in the golden afternoon.

  The men strode forward, in step. The Feierabiand banner flew above each company: golden barley sheaf and blue river. Spear points glittered and threw back the light. War, they said. War. War. Bows of horn and wood, light sliding down their sinew strings, were in the hands of the men protected by those spears. Most of the archers already had arrows nocked, ready to draw. Some, those who made their own arrows, were already speaking to the shafts they had crafted, heads bent over their bows, whispering of true flight and blood. General Jasand led one company, one of his captains the other; Bertaud, who might have claimed the honor, stood with the mage Diene on a rock outcropping and left it to the captain, who was a good deal more experienced in military matters.

  “If something goes wrong,” Jasand had said, “the king will need to learn of it. I certainly won’t trust villagers to carry proper word! And we can’t leave the mage unprotected.” He had given Bertaud a horn, in case a man standing apart might see some urgent necessity those in the thick of battle might have missed. He had not had to say that he expected Bertaud not to use it. Leave the fighting to the soldiers, and keep well out of it—that was the expectation.

  Bertaud had taken the horn, and he had not argued. Both points were good. And he thought, though he did not say, that if he went up into this desert, he might find himself unable to think or speak. Where would the men be then? He set his face in the blank expression he had first used to deal with his father and then found useful for tedious or unpleasant court functions. He did not allow himself to pace.

  “They’ll be perfectly fine,” said Diene, tense and straight beside him. He had suggested she sit. She would not.

  “Of course,” Bertaud said, but wondered whether his tone rang as false as hers.

  And the griffins came down. They came straight down the red mountain, straight into the killing field between the two companies, as though they had no fear of bows, or no knowledge men used such things. They flew in irregular formation, some alone and some by threes or fours. Two dozen. Four dozen. Six.

  “Earth and iron,” Diene breathed. Bertaud was speechless. They were huge, big as the white bulls bred in the Delta, but nothing so tame. They flew out of the light as though the light itself had formed them. Red dust drove before their wind, stinging, whipping into a blinding veil. Bertaud, shielding his eyes with upraised hands, could nonetheless see that fire fell on the wind from their wings and tongues of flame leaped up from the sand beneath them. The griffins, wreathed in dust and fire, stooped like hunting falcons, talons shining. They screamed as they fell, savage high cries that cut through the air like knives.

  Men cried out in answer. Bertaud could not blame them. Precious seconds were lost before the soldiers remembered discipline and drew their bows. Arrows rose; the light that struck off the steel tips was red as flame, and flame fell past the arrows as they mounted. Some of the griffins were surely struck; Bertaud could not tell, but well-made arrows would seek living flesh and turn to find it. Even so, a vicious rain of fire fell into the companies of men, which became suddenly ragged. Spears rose, almost in order despite the flames, and he caught his breath: If the men held, Jasand would be proved right, because even with fire and wind, the griffins would not be able to breach that curtain of steel—not without spilling their own blood out onto the sand. And the men would hold. He was sure the men would hold.

  Then griffins came past the rock where Bertaud stood with the mage—griffins with wings folded, moving with great bounds like running lions. Diene cried out, thinly. A passing griffin, powerful muscles rolling under the dark bronze hide of its haunches, turned its head and fixed her with one fierce coppery eye. It went past without pausing.

  They would take the men from behind, Bertaud understood at once. The griffins on the ground would come against the soldiers like scythes striking barley stems; hidden by the dust and by the terror of their brethren aloft, they would come and strike below the lifted spears. He found the military horn
in his hand with a feeling of surprise, and lifted it to his mouth.

  A great white griffin, gleaming even through the veils of whipping dust, cleared the rock where they stood in a bound that was half flight. Talons white as bone closed on Bertaud’s arm; a wing like a hammer struck him in the chest. He would have screamed with pain except he could not get the breath to cry out. The griffin’s other wing struck Diene and flung her from the rock; she fell without a sound, like a child’s crumpled doll.

  The griffin struck at Bertaud’s face with a beak like a blade, but somehow Bertaud’s sword was in the way; he had no notion how it had come into his hand—his left hand, for the white griffin had his right pinned in its grip. He cut at its head, so close to his own, and it flung him away. He fell hard, to sand that flickered with little ripples of fire; he rolled fast to get up, beating at a charred patch of cloth over his thigh, but he made it only so far as his knees. He could not move the arm the griffin had torn. White agony lanced through his chest: Ribs were broken. He could not get his breath, did not yet know if broken bones had pierced his lungs, could not imagine the pain would be worse if they had. He had lost his sword in the fall. The loss did not seem likely to matter. The griffin, above him on the rock, wings spread wide, seemed immense as the sky. It stared at him with fierce eyes of a hard fiery blue, and sprang like a cat.

  “No,” he cried at it without breath, without sound. He found himself more furious than terrified. He tried to fling himself to his feet, but his right leg would not hold, and he was falling already as the white griffin came down upon him. Darkness rose up like heat, or he fell into it, and it filled his eyes and his mind.

  CHAPTER 5

  Despite everything Kairaithin had said about mages and battle, Kes had hoped that perhaps no one would come against the griffins. She had spent days playing with flames, learning to love fire, and if sometimes she thought of Tesme, she found it easier, as measureless time passed, to turn her thoughts away from home, back again toward the fire Opailikiita showed her. But she hoped no one would come. The Casmantian mages would stay in Casmantium, and the griffins would linger here in Feierabiand for a little while and then go home, and Kes would go home as well…

  But then an army came after all. Word of it came flickering from mind to mind like beacon fires lighting one after another, and Kes spent a tense, anxious afternoon pacing around the edges of the great, high hall Kairaithin had made upon the cliff of the plateau. But the griffins won their fight, so all was well, after all. That was what Kes thought, when Kairaithin came at last to bring her to the field of battle.

  But there is little enough for you to do, the griffin mage told her with grim satisfaction. He was in his true form, beautiful and terrible as the embers at the heart of a great bonfire. Our enemies here do not know how to do battle against us: This time, they came openly rather than in stealth, in the high heat of the day rather than in the dark reaches of the night, and without cold magecraft to shield them or strike at us. Thus, the blood that was poured out upon the sand was theirs and not ours.

  Kes thought, Our enemies here? And she wondered why men so little prepared had come against the griffins. But she did not understand exactly what Kairaithin meant until the griffin mage shifted them across the desert and brought her to the place where the few wounded griffins waited for her, and she saw the innumerable dead men lying where they had fallen, all across the burning sand.

  They were not Casmantian soldiers. They were soldiers of Feierabiand, and they were all dead. Kes stared out across the red desert where they lay, speechless.

  They died well, Kairaithin told her, in a tone of reassurance, as though he thought that this would make it all right that they were dead.

  Kes slowly turned her head to stare at him. Looking at the griffin was much easier than looking out at the dead soldiers. She fixed her attention on his fiery black gaze, trying to see nothing else. She found she was trembling, but she couldn’t stop.

  The worst of our injured lies there. Kairaithin indicated the first of the wounded griffins, a bronze-and-black female who lay beside a low, sharp ridge of stone quite close to the edge of the battlefield.

  Kes glanced that way, found her gaze caught by the abandoned dead, flinched from the sight of the twisted bodies of men, and closed her eyes. She had not previously met the injured griffin. But her name sang through Kes’s awareness even from that brief glance: Riihaikuse Aranuurai Kimiistariu. Kes knew she was badly wounded—she already knew that there was a deep cut across her chest and belly. But she did not move. She whispered, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Kairaithin tilted his eagle’s head, puzzled. Did I not tell you?

  “Days of fire and blood, you said!” Kes was not whispering now. She was nearly shouting. “But you didn’t say—you didn’t tell me—” she gestured blindly toward the men who lay scattered across the sand.

  The griffin mage was silent for a moment. He said at last, I did not mean to do you harm by this. Indeed, I sought to turn the day, for I think it wiser to reserve our strength for use against Casmantium. The King of Feierabiand sent an emissary, which was wise. But the emissary brought an earth mage to advise him, which was not wise at all, for she feared me and loathed the desert and thus he would not speak to me. Thus, the day became a day for blood and fire, and their deaths came upon them.

  Kes stared at him.

  But they died well, Kairaithin assured her. And there is still a need for your gift of healing.

  Kes didn’t move. She didn’t think she could move. She was still trembling. She knew she definitely could not approach the field of battle—no matter how many wounded griffins lay there. And anyway—she asked Kairaithin, hearing her voice shake and not caring, “Should I heal your people? When you kill mine?”

  There was a silence. Kes thought that the griffin-mage was not ashamed or even disturbed at what his people had done, that he didn’t understand why she was upset, that when he said It was a day for death, he meant something other than, and more than, what she heard. She realized that when she did not understand him, he did not know how else to answer her.

  But he said at last, The emissary of your king yet lives. He may die. But it would please me if he lives. I cannot heal his wounds. I do not know whether even you might heal human injuries with fire. But perhaps you may find a way to save this man. Will you try?

  “Of course!” Kes looked around at once, as though she might find the man lying near at hand. She even made herself look across at the field of battle, but flinched again from it—anyway, she could not believe anyone lying there might live. The sand and overpowering heat were already claiming the dead men, who no longer looked as though they’d ever really been alive.

  He is not there, said Kairaithin. I will take you to him. I think you should first remind yourself of fire and of healing. Aranuurai Kimiistariu will die if you do not see her whole. Will you let her die?

  Kes hesitated, looking once more toward the battlefield. She took a step toward the wounded griffin, but stopped. “I can’t go over there!”

  Kairaithin regarded Kes from the fierce, impenetrable eyes of an eagle. Then he stretched out his wings and brought the wounded female griffin from where she lay, shifting her through the desert afternoon to lie close by Kes’s feet.

  Riihaikuse Aranuurai Kimiistariu lay almost upright, in a near-normal couchant position, but her head was angled oddly downward and she panted rapidly. Her eyes were glazed with pain, or even possibly with approaching death. Crimson blood rolled down from savage wounds, scattering as rubies and garnets across the sand.

  See her whole, Kairaithin said, or she will surely die.

  Kes wanted to weep like a child. But weeping would not bring back the dead, and anyway, she found, despite the pressure behind her eyes, that she had no tears. Nor would the death of Aranuurai Kimiistariu bring back the dead. It would be wrong to let her die. Wouldn’t it be wrong? Kes hesitated one more moment. Then she let the wounded griffin’s name run through her
mind and her blood and held up her cupped hands to gather the hot afternoon light. But she did not at once kneel down by the bronze-and-black female, but glared instead at Kairaithin. “You’ll take me to the injured man after this? Next after this? If he dies before I come to him,” she said fiercely, “I won’t heal any other of your people! Do you hear?” Even Kes herself did not know whether she meant this threat. But she tried very hard to sound as though she meant it.

  Little kitten, you are grown fierce, said Kairaithin. His tone was amused and ironic, but he also spoke as though he approved. No other of my people are so badly injured that they cannot wait. Make Aranuurai Kimiistariu whole, and I will take you to the man of your own kind. Though it is, in all truth, a day for death, I, too, wish this man to live. An emissary to send to your king is precisely what I desire.

  Kes stared at the griffin mage for another moment. Then she knelt down to pour the rich light she held in her hands out across the griffin’s injuries.

  * * *

  The injured man lay high atop the red cliffs, within the pillared hall. The stone roof blocked the direct sun, but the heat even in the shade was heavy—it seemed somehow more oppressive than it had been out in the open light. Opailikiita lay near the man but had, so far as Kes could see, done nothing at all to help him. Kes spared the slim young griffin hardly a glance before falling to her knees beside the man; she was barely aware that Kairaithin followed her, or that he had once more taken the shape of a man so that he would not crowd her when he looked over her shoulder. Her attention was all for the man.