Lord of the Changing Winds

by Rachel Neumeier

  They come in haste, Opailikiita observed, her attention still on the handful of approaching riders.

  “Do they?” the king shaded his eyes and stared hard at the approaching riders. “So they do. They are not pursued? You see them in no difficulty?”

  I see only those men, King of Feierabiand. If there is difficulty, I do not see it.

  “Well, we shall discover the reason for their haste soon enough,” the king said, faint unease in his tone, and turned to speak to officers of his men. Kes did not listen. She was looking across the desert at the men. They came slowly, slowly, until she wanted to blaze a path for them through the sand that would bring them directly to this one point of sand in all the vastness of the desert. It seemed momentarily strange to her that she should be impatient, she who had always been by nature patient; but then Opailikiita called to her and she turned back to the griffin.

  Kairaithin summons me.

  Then go, Kes said. But listen for me.

  Your voice is in my blood, said the griffin, and shifted herself away through the desert in the manner of griffin mages.

  The men came at last into the Feierabiand company and were temporarily lost from sight behind the awnings set up for the wounded men. The king turned expectantly, smiling, to greet the new arrivals; his smile faded as they came back into view and rode up. Kes, her eyes on the distressed, blowing horses, did not at once look at the men. But then the king’s attention pulled hers after it at last, and she lifted her eyes to the strained face of the riders.

  “Bertaud!” The king strode forward to greet them.

  One of the men murmured something about water and took the young lord’s horse as he dismounted, leading it and the other animals away to be walked and watered.

  Lord Bertaud strode rapidly to the king. He said sharply, urgently, “I could not stay in Riamne.”

  “No, I understand so—your friend Kairaithin found me and said, what was it, something about how you had persuaded him of the justice of our cause. Well done, well done, my friend! I would have sent for you then, but there seemed no time—we would have had a hard time of it without griffin assistance—”

  Lord Bertaud seized the king’s arm, fierce as a griffin in his urgency. “Iaor. I might not have been in time for the battle, but I saw part of it from a high cliff. Answer me this. Where is the Arobern? Captured? Killed?”

  The king shook his head, studying the other man in obvious concern. “No, no—we did not see him. A griffin took him, I suppose. The Casmantian army was a good deal smaller than I’d feared—it seems your report was overanxious—”

  “Overanxious?” Lord Bertaud gave a short, harsh laugh, looking more tense and strained than Kes had ever seen him. “Overanxious! No, Iaor! The rest of the Casmantian army is simply somewhere else. And the Arobern. I will lay any wager for it. And where else would he be but slipping down the edge of this terrible desert to strike unopposed as he sees fit?”

  The king stared at him. He, too, clearly saw the truth of it at once—now that he had the leisure to think on it. “I should have realized.”

  “You were occupied.”

  “Yes, as the Arobern intended. Earth and iron! That man is far too bold. And now we shall all pay the cost of our own lack of imagination. How many men do you suppose he has with him? Three thousand? More?” He turned, shouting for his officers—one came up hastily from somewhere and said rapidly, not waiting for the king to speak, “Your majesty, that spy who came to us—he tells us we should have faced twice as many men here.”

  “So we have been discovering,” said the king, and he gripped the man’s arm, giving him a small shake. “Go get the best information you can about the number that should have been here. See if the man has any guess about what the Arobern might have done with the rest.”

  Bertaud, for his part, shouted for Kairaithin while Kes was still distracted by the mention of Jos.

  The griffin arrived even before the officers, falling out of the red sky, half fire and half griffin: He reared up as he struck the ground and his wings, streaming behind him, were sheets of flame. Men fell back from him, shouting in alarm. Horses reared and wanted to scatter in panic; horse speakers ran to take lead lines and bridles, calming them and holding them still. Kes thought it was a pity no one could do the same for the men, but at least none so forgot themselves as to loose arrows at the griffin.

  What? the griffin flung at Bertaud, rage blazing within as he burned with fire without. Well? And do you not find this outcome satisfactory, man?

  Kes stared, shocked at the naked violence of Kairaithin’s manner, of his voice; so much more ferocious than even when he had been angry at her for defying him to go to the king.

  “Where is the Arobern?” Bertaud shouted back at him, appearing, to Kes’s astonishment, neither surprised nor cowed by Kairaithin’s violence.

  Kairaithin stared hard into the man’s eyes. His own were filled with rage and, strangely, something stronger, which might have been despair. But a more rational thought crept into them as Kes watched, and she was no longer certain what she had seen at first.

  He gathered himself into a form winged with feathers rather than flames, and settled more solidly to the sand. Is he not here?

  “No!”

  “Nor is Beguchren,” Kes added.

  I will seek the cold mage, said Kairaithin, and flung himself back into the sky.

  “But what about the Arobern?” Bertaud shouted after him.

  Wincing at his shout, Kes shook her head and laid her hand on the lord’s arm. “Let him go. Let him go. He will look for Beguchren.”

  “Forget about the cold mage,” snapped the king, leaning forward intensely. He had the reins of a horse in his hand and was clearly preparing to mount. “Bertaud is right—it’s the Arobern who concerns us now!”

  Kes shook her head again, but she also called into the silence of the desert, so little disturbed by the shouts of men, Eskainiane! Eskainiane?

  And the copper-and-gold griffin, riding the winds of the burning heights and resting as griffins rest, answered. He plunged from the wind to the red sand, from the side of the Lord of Fire and Air to Kes’s side, so that the king’s horse reared and had to be calmed by a horse speaker who ran hastily to it.

  Kereskiita, Eskainiane said joyfully, ignoring man and horse and king. Well flown, on a fierce wind! Do you call me? I declare I will hear you!

  Kes laughed and lifted her hand to touch the side of his beak, a gesture he returned by turning his head to brush her palm lightly with the cutting edge. He was still exultant from flight and battle, passionately joyful with victory and the speed of the wind. And he had come, as he said, to answer her call, though he was brother and more than brother to the Lord of Fire and Air.

  Kes had known that he would. After this day’s battle, where she had come to know them all, she loved this griffin above any other save only Opailikiita. Powerful and brilliant and generous, she trusted Eskainiane Escaile Sehaikiu to come to her call out of that open-hearted generosity and listen to her. Eskainiane, she said. And aloud, after the manner of humankind, “Eskainiane, where is the King of Casmantium? Would you ride the wind and search for an army that did not come into the desert? Would you send your people to look to the north and the east and the south, beyond the sand, where men might have gone and we not known?”

  For you, kereskiita, we will fly beyond the powerful sun and search, answered Eskainiane, and touched her face with his beak in a griffin caress. All will search: I will ask Kiibaile Esterire Airaikeliu to send all save Kairaithin, who is about business of his own, and after this day, I tell you, Kiibaile will hear your name in the wind through his wings. The griffin flung himself back into the sky.

  “Kiibaile—what?” asked the king, bemused.

  “Kiibaile Esterire Airaikeliu,” Kes said absently. “The Lord of Fire and Air. You shouldn’t call him by his first name. That’s for his iskarianere—his intimate…” she began to say friends, but that wasn’t quite right a
nd she stopped, frowning.

  “Well, whatever his name, if he will set his people to searching, that will do,” said the king, reaching again for his horse’s reins once the griffin was gone. “Thank you, Kes. We will not wait. I want out of this desert, and if the Arobern did not watch from above and take himself back off across the mountains, it’s to the east he’ll be. Where is your horse, Bertaud? Has the creature a run left in it? How fast do you suppose we can make it out of this savage desert? And be in decent shape to fight? If we can find the Arobern to give him a fight! How can I have been so blind?” He paused. “I wonder if Eles found him? Earth and iron! I didn’t give Eles half enough men to face any such threat!”

  Lord Bertaud took a step forward, looking surprised and cautiously relieved. “Eles?”

  The king frowned at him. “Well, what else was I to do when I must ride into a trap but make provision? It did not seem wise to leave all Feierabiand to depend only on my army. Eles was to get me another, as many men as he could, and to come south on his own, and on any account to stay out of the desert. I meant to keep him safe from the griffins and safe from the first thrust of the Arobern, but now I do not know where he is or what he may have met on his road.”

  For the first time, the tension that had tightened the lord’s face and manner eased. He laughed and clapped the king on the shoulder. “My horse will have to do,” he said, and beckoned to the man who had taken it away.

  CHAPTER 14

  The desert was as cleanly and elegantly beautiful as any airy palace or many-towered citadel built by men, Bertaud thought. But it was not a place meant for men, or for any creature of earth. Its starkness invited meditations on mortality and on the silence that lay behind life; the voice of the wind that sang across its twisted sharp-angled spires offered a suggestion of that greater music that lay behind the ordinary melodies of men. Its fierceness encompassed the fierceness of the griffins that made it; the passionate beat of its light and heat echoed the passion of griffin nature. Bertaud could imagine griffins emerging directly from the red silence of sand and stone, engendered by that powerful light, carved into shape by that ceaseless wind.

  But it was not a place meant for men. It was drawing the very life out of them as they stood within its boundaries, as the sand might absorb blood spilled out upon it. And, it was clear, not even the earth mages, not even Meriemne, could resist that power. Not while it surrounded her, binding her strength and cutting her off from the living earth.

  So there was a confusion and a haste that seemed utterly out of place in the patient desert: haste to load wounded men into litters and shaded carts, to cover dead men and lay their bodies out in other carts; haste to form men already fainting with heat and dazed by light into company ranks and send them east toward the cool country that waited so little distance away. Haste to lay plans for what they might find when they came there.

  Iaor rode back and forth, with the vanguard for a short length and then back to the rear to check on the slowest of the carts. Here, he leaped down from his horse to lend a hand with an awning that would not stay up; there, he gave watered wine from his own supply to a wounded man. That was a king’s task: to be seen everywhere, to inspire. Bertaud left him to it and made his own slow way through the company, studying the men.

  Two thousand and more men, he knew, had ridden south with the king from Riamne. Some, probably, had gone with Eles when Iaor had divided the army. Most had followed the king into the desert, and though Casmantium had not broken them, nor the griffins flung fire down upon them, still the battle, and even more the desert, had taken a toll. For every man struck down by spear or sword or arrow, Bertaud estimated, likely two had collapsed from heat and lack of water—though the army had carried a great deal of water, a man could not fight and drink simultaneously, and exertion under the pounding sun had sucked the moisture out of them.

  Of whatever number had come into this desert with the king, perhaps a thousand remained strong enough and with heart enough for battle… if they should get out of the desert and into the green country and have time to rest and recover a little from the desert.

  Kes rode with the army, perched high on the shoulders of the slim brown griffin who was her constant companion. Of them all, Kes rode with her face turned up to the sky as though she could not get enough light. She still wore the short brown dress she had made out of a Casmantian soldier’s shirt, and with her skin ruddy with sun and her tangled hair down her back like a fall of pale light, she looked little more human than the griffin. And yet in a strange way her very unearthliness seemed to suit her, as though she had somehow always been meant for fire.

  Kes brought her gaze down from the brilliant sky when Bertaud looked at her. She smiled at him, a sweet, perfectly human smile, but her eyes were edged and lit with fire. When she slid down from the griffin’s back and ran across the sand to Bertaud’s horse, men shied out of her way. She did not seem to notice this, either, but turned to walk beside his horse and lift trusting, unhuman eyes to his. If she had not clearly been able to see, he would have thought her blind.

  “Yes?”

  Bertaud strove for a neutral tone. “Eskainiane Escaile Sehaikiu?”

  “Yes—Eskainiane.” Her voice lingered over the name as though she spoke poetry. Her voice was not really a human voice any longer, although Bertaud could not have said precisely where the difference lay. Even the girl’s steps seemed to have lightened, as though at the next step, or the next, she might walk right off the ground and into the air. “Eskainiane Escaile Sehaikiu… he will find them. Indeed, I think he has found them. You know,” she said earnestly, patting the horse’s neck, “you can trust Eskainiane. He is open-hearted and… not kind, exactly…”

  “Generous,” said Bertaud.

  “Yes—generous. He will send… ah.” She said then, in a different tone, “He has sent Kairaithin, I think.”

  The griffin mage came this time in a long, slow, smooth flight that carried him easily over the column of men and left him walking, in the shape of a man, beside Iaor’s horse. He did not even glance at Bertaud, who was forced to take a moment to put down a violent and extremely stupid surge of jealousy.

  “Esteemed mage,” Iaor said to Kairaithin, with a nod.

  Kairaithin gave the king a taut smile. “There is battle,” he said. “Beguchren Teshrichten is with the Arobern, and both are with the main part of their army outside the town called Minas Ford.”

  “Minas Ford?” said Kes, much like someone told that the town of her childhood, distantly remembered, lies just beyond the next turn in the road.

  “Eles engaged him?” Iaor said, in a completely different tone. “There is battle now?”

  “The griffins must aid us again, then,” Bertaud said, trying for no tone at all.

  Kairaithin turned to him swiftly. “I have destroyed the cold mages sent against us here. But outside this desert, I cannot match Beguchren. And would you have us come down outside our place of power, with our fire turned all to ash, upon soldiers armed with cold steel? Bows made with purpose to kill creatures of fire? No, man. We would be destroyed, and is that your desire?”

  Iaor said, “We haven’t enough men to face down another army the size of the first—and our men spent with heat, and his men near fresh? Esteemed mage—”

  “They will help us, my king,” said Bertaud with resolve, and stared into fiery black eyes.

  Kes gazed, clearly curious and alarmed, from him to Kairaithin.

  Kairaithin did not glance at her. His attention, hot as the savage desert, was narrowed to Bertaud. “I will find a way,” he said, straight to Bertaud, “if you will trust me for that, and do nothing on your own account.” There was no anger in the griffin’s voice, belying the anger in his eyes and his heart: He was, Bertaud understood, making a fierce effort to keep his tone neutral. It was, perhaps, the closest Kairaithin could publicly come to a plea.

  Bertaud hesitated. He could imagine no greater dereliction of his duty to Iaor and Feierabia
nd than to allow the Arobern to strike through Minas Ford and then, unopposed, for Terabiand on the coast. Nor did he believe Iaor had any real chance of turning the Arobern from that purpose with a bare thousand sunstruck soldiers.

  Yet at the same time he could imagine no greater wrong than to compel the wild, brilliant-hearted griffins to the service of men. No matter how desperately Feierabiand needed their service. He had dreamed of violent winds and lakes of molten stone: What would his dreams contain if he broke the griffins to harness like oxen? Or if he drove them all to their deaths in a cool green country where their fire could not burn?

  He said at last, “Who could do so better than you, esteemed mage?”

  Kairaithin inclined his head, backed up a step—waiting, Bertaud saw, to see that he would indeed be allowed to go—and then folded himself through space into the far heart of the desert.

  Bertaud let his breath out. He said casually to Iaor, just as though nothing untoward had taken place, “He will do his best, I think, if only to humble the pride of Casmantium. I think he resents how his people were used as tools against us.”

  The king nodded sharply. “I should certainly think so.” He glanced ahead and added with a good deal more interest, “Earth and iron, is there no end to this cursed desert?”

  Kes, who had been gazing at Bertaud with alarming intensity, shifted her attention to the king. “You see that flat-topped spire? That one, with the double arch on the eastern side? The boundary is just there.” She added at the king’s raised-eyebrow look, “I always know.” Her tone was almost wistful. “But cannot you see it? It is dark, like the edge of night against the day.”

  Bertaud thought he could. Iaor only shook his head.

  “It is not far,” said Kes, and walked away toward her griffin as though simply forgetful of the king, or of his rank. But she moved with that odd lighter-than-air grace, and Bertaud thought she had not so much forgotten Iaor’s rank, as become, griffinlike, disinclined to care for it.