Lord of the Changing Winds

by Rachel Neumeier

  Kes could not even think about the question in those terms. But she said, “We are iskarianere—I think that is like love, for a griffin.”

  “You aren’t a griffin, Kes.”

  “But I’m like a griffin now,” Kes said, trying to make her tone kind, trying to remember exactly what kindness was, so that she might be kind to this human woman who had been her sister. She remembered that men valued kindness, that once she herself had needed people to be kind to her.

  Tesme looked searchingly into her eyes. “Are you? Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  Tesme’s shoulders slumped again, and then squared as her head came up. “All right,” she said. She might have meant to speak firmly—her attitude was firm—but the words came out in a thread of sound. “Be well, Kes. Wherever you go, into whatever strange country. Be happy.”

  “I will be,” said Kes, and watched the woman who had been her sister walk away. Tesme looked back once. Then she turned her face forward and disappeared into the darkness.

  “You did not ask how she was,” Jos commented.

  It had not occurred to Kes to do so. She looked at him wordlessly.

  “She went to Nehoen’s house. Everyone from Minas Ford did, except the badly injured. His house and most of his lands are still outside the desert, you know.”

  Kes did know this, when she thought of it. She knew where the boundary of the desert lay, and though everything beyond that boundary seemed dim and distant, her memory of the land told her where Nehoen’s property lay.

  “He has been courting her. Ever since you… left. I think he had her in his eye before that. He’s been a great oak for her to lean on, this summer. I imagine that when everyone else leaves his house, she will stay.”

  “Oh,” said Kes. She was glad, in a distant sort of way. She thought she had once liked Nehoen. He seemed old for Tesme. But then… perhaps Tesme was not so young as all that, really. “Good.”

  “You should be pleased.” Jos regarded her with an expression she could not read. “The match will be good for both of them. Especially Tesme. She wore herself out with worry about you. Nehoen is the romantic sort. He’ll be just what she needs now.”

  Kes had no feel for such matters, but she presumed he was right.

  “They won’t stay around here, you know,” Jos added. “Tesme… well, Tesme hates the very sight of the desert. She was talking about Sihannas. That’s good country for horses, and she and Nehoen will easily be able to afford the move, what with the king directing a good chunk of the indemnity to the folk of Minas Ford.”

  Sihannas. Sihannas, at the edge of the Delta. Kes had never even dreamed of going so far from home. And now she had gone so much farther, even standing in this high pasture so near the ruined village. She smiled slightly, feeling the desert wind tug at the edges of her soul.

  “You don’t mind that she will go so far?”

  Kes blinked, recalled to the moment. “Everything in the country of earth is far, for me.” Then she asked, the question slowly welling up in her mind, “But where will you go?”

  Jos regarded her with an odd, intent expression. He said at last, “Not to Sihannas. The Safiad wants me either under his eye or out of his country, and who can blame him? Not to Casmantium: How could I face the Arobern? Not to Linularinum: I hate all the sly maneuvering that’s lifeblood to everyone on that side of the river.”

  It had not occurred to Kes that Jos, of them all, faced the greatest dislocation. For her, there was the desert; for the folk of Minas Ford, all of Feierabiand; everyone else could hope to return eventually to their homes and their people. But she could not imagine where Jos would go.

  “I thought,” he said, his eyes on her face, “that I might go with you, Kes. That I might remind you, from time to time, what it means to be human.”

  Kes did not understand him. “There is no place in the desert for a creature of earth.”

  “There are places where earth borders fire, Kes. Where the mountains meet the desert, north of Casmantium… there are places there a man might live. Or—” and he took a deep breath—“for you it was different, I know. But maybe your friend Kairaithin might find a way to make an ordinary man into a creature of fire.”

  Kes stared at him, taken utterly by surprise. “Why would you want to do that?”

  Jos took a step toward her, took a breath, started to speak, and stopped. Then he said, with careful restraint, “What is there for me in any of the countries of men? Hear me out, Kes. You may no longer be human, but among the griffins you will still be alone; you are not one of them, either. Think of that. You may learn to take the shape of a griffin, but you won’t ever really be one, any more than Kairaithin is a man when he takes the form of a man. Will you endure a lifetime of loneliness? Of being one alone among many?” His voice had quickened as he continued, until his words tumbled over one another at the last and choked him silent; he was still, then, his eyes on her face.

  Kes said slowly, “I would have been an earth mage. Kairaithin redirected what I should have been and made me a creature of fire. You are not a mage of any kind.”

  “He’ll find a way. Or you will. If you want to.”

  Kes took a step forward and lifted her hand to touch his face. She found she was smiling. She did not know what a creature of earth would feel at such a moment. But what she felt was a kind of fierce possessive pleasure, something like the iskairianaika she shared with Opailikiita, but not the same. She was pleased Jos had made this unanticipated offer. Loneliness was not something she feared; she feared very little, now. But even so… “Yes,” she said. “I would like your company in the country of fire. I think I would like that. Yes, I would. Yes.” And she folded both of them into a sweep of shifting time and silence and took Jos away with her into the heart of the desert.

  extras

  meet the author

  Rachel Neumeier started writing fiction to relax when she was a graduate student and needed a hobby unrelated to her research. Prior to selling her first fantasy novel, she had published only a few articles in venues such as The American Journal of Botany. However, finding that her interests did not lie in research, Rachel left academia and began to let her hobbies take over her life instead. She now raises and shows Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, gardens, cooks, and occasionally finds time to read. She works part time for a tutoring program, though she tutors far more students in math and chemistry than in English composition. Find out more about Rachel Neumeier at www.rachelneumeier.com.

  interview

  Have you always known that you wanted to write novels?

  I always made up stories in boring classes—as far back as I can remember. (Doesn’t everybody?) And I was never interested in short stories. Novel length is the only length that works for me. Or longer! It was hard to learn to write short novels.

  After a hard day of writing, is there anything you like to do in your free time?

  It would be nice if I could read, which has always been one of my favorite things. But when I’m actually involved in writing a book of my own, I read very little fiction. I read nonfiction, or cook, or work in the garden, or take the dogs for a walk, or if I have a show or obedience trial coming up I might work on, say, teaching one of my dogs to stand beautifully or heel backing up or something. Of course, if I work with one dog, they all want in on the fun, so training sessions can take a while.

  Do you have any particularly favorite authors who have influenced your work?

  Certainly! I love Patricia McKillip and Robin McKinley. And Patricia Wrede, Diana Wynne Jones, CJ Cherryh, and Lois McMaster Bujold, in no particular order, and I’m sure I’ve missed a couple of my favorites. But I have to say that I can only hope Patricia McKillip has influenced my writing; I think she writes the most perfect stories, in the most beautiful language.

  The connection between the desert and griffins is a unique take on griffin mythology. Where did you draw your inspiration from?

  Nowhere. It just happened. I didn’t ha
ve that connection in mind at all. I like griffins and wanted to do something with them, but I had no idea there was going to be a connection between griffins and fire. Then I wrote the very first paragraph, and boom, there it was, right out of a, so to speak, clear sky.

  Do you harbor a secret preference for any one griffin?

  Actually, yes, not that it’s secret. Eskainiane, the griffin who at the end—well, that would be giving too much away, I suppose. But to me, Eskainiane really exemplifies what the ideal griffin should be—generous, joyful, passionate, courageous, even exuberant. We don’t see too much of him, but he’s the sort of griffin who would make you think, Hey, being a griffin might be pretty neat.

  The subtle, earth-based magic is seamlessly woven into the fabric of Kes and Bertaud’s world. Was this an idea you had from the outset or did it develop over time?

  It was a necessary part of the structure of the world as soon as griffins became connected to fire. I immediately saw that fire should be intrinsically opposed to, or at least foreign to, something else, something human. The something else became earth. The exact nature of human magic developed and changed a lot over time, though, and is actually still changing now as I finish book two and think about book three.

  What’s in store for the next novel of the Griffin Mage series?

  That would be telling! Oh, okay, it’s set in the country of Casmantium, it concerns the ongoing problem of imbalance between humans and griffins, and it develops a different aspect of earth magic than we see in the first book.

  Finally, what has been your favorite part of the publishing process?

  You’d think it would be seeing the book actually on the shelf in real bookstores, wouldn’t you? But actually, by the time the book hits the shelves, I’m pretty accustomed to the idea that it’s going to. (Not that this isn’t still a fine thing!) No, the best part is when you first hear that an editor at a good publishing house loves one of your books and is making an offer.

  The funny part about LORD OF THE CHANGING WINDS is that I had just moaned to a friend that this book hadn’t found a home and I was starting to be afraid it wasn’t going to—twenty minutes later, I got the good news from my agent. That is a thrill that isn’t going to get old anytime soon.

  introducing

  If you enjoyed LORD OF THE CHANGING WINDS,

  look out for

  LAND OF THE BURNING SANDS

  THE GRIFFIN MAGE TRILOGY: BOOK TWO

  by Rachel Neumeier

  That evening, as the powerful sun sank low in the west, Gereint sat in the shade of a broken wall, waiting for sundown and looking out across the ruins of Melentser. The sun was blood red and huge; its crimson light poured across broken stone and brick, across streets drifted with sand. Dust hazed the air, which smelled of hot stone and hot brass. Narrow fingers of jagged red stone had grown somehow out of this new desert: a new inhuman architecture of twisted knife-edged towers. These strange cliffs were like nothing Gereint had ever seen. They pierced the streets, shattered townhouses, reached sharp fingers toward the sky. If one had torn its way out of the earth beneath the Anteirden house… but, though he flinched from the images that presented themselves to his mind, none had. Now the red towers cast long shadows across the shattered city.

  Nothing moved among those towers but the creeping shadows and the drifting sand. And the griffins. A dozen or so were in sight at any given moment, though rarely close. But three of them passed overhead as the sky darkened, so near that Gereint imagined he could hear the harsh rush of the wind through the feathers of their wings. He stared upward, trying to stay very small and still against the dubious shelter of his wall. If the griffins saw him, they did not care: They flew straight as spears across the sky and vanished.

  The griffins were larger than he had expected, and… different in other ways from the creatures he’d imagined, but he could not quite count off those differences in his mind. They looked to him like creatures made by some great metalsmith: feathers of bronze and copper, pelts of gold… Gereint had heard they bled garnets and rubies. He doubted this. How would anyone find that out? Stick one with a spear and wait around to watch it bleed? That did not seem like something one would be able to write an account of afterward.

  Spreading shadows hid the red cliffs, the streets, the kitchen yard where once the garden had grown. Overhead, stars came out. The stars looked oddly hard and distant, but the constellations, thankfully, had not changed. And he thought there was enough light from the stars and the sliver of the moon to see his way, if he was careful.

  Gereint stood up. His imagination populated the darkness around him with predatory griffins, waiting to pounce like cats after a careless rabbit. But when he stepped cautiously away from the wall, he found nothing but sand and darkness.

  He had already drunk as much water as he could from the barrel. Now he picked up his travelsack, slung its strap across his shoulder, and walked out into the empty streets. He carried very little: the candles and a flint to light them, the travel food, one change of clothing and a handful of coins, and the six skins of water. Nothing else. More than he had truly owned for years.

  The hot-brass smell of the desert seemed stronger now that he was moving. Heat pressed down from the unseen sky and hammered upward from the barely seen sand under his boots. He had read that the desert was cold at night. Though the furnace heat of the day had eased, this night was far from cold: The heat seemed both to weigh down the air in his lungs and drag at his feet. The sand, drifted deep across the streets, was hard to walk through. Both the heat and the sand bothered him far more than he had expected.

  He did not walk south, nor straight east toward the river. Those were the ways the people of Melentser had gone, and above all, he did not want to walk up on the heels of any refugees from the city. He walked north and east instead, toward the unpeopled mountains. His greatest fear seemed unfounded: The geas did not stop him choosing his own direction. He could tell that it was still alive, but it was not active. He felt no pull from it at all.

  Casmantium did not claim the country to the north, beyond the desert: No one claimed that land. Rugged and barren, snowcapped and dragon haunted, men did not find enough of value in the great mountains to draw them into the far north. But a single determined man might make his way quietly through those mountains, meeting no men and disturbing no sleeping monsters, all two hundred miles or more to the border that Casmantium shared with Feierabiand. The cold magecraft that shaped geas bonds was not a discipline of gentle Feierabiand: When a geas-bound man crossed that border, the geas should… not merely break. It should vanish. It should be as though it had never been set.

  Or so Waricteier said, and Fenescheiren’s Analects agreed. Gereint was very interested in testing that claim.

  Maps suggested that the foothills of the mountains should be little more than forty miles from Melentser. On a good road in fair weather, a strong man should be able to walk that far in one night. Two at the outside. Across trackless sand, through pounding heat… three, perhaps? Four? Surely not more than four. How far did the desert now extend around Melentser? All the way to those foothills? He had planned for each skin of water to last for one whole night and day; now, surrounded by the lingering heat, he suspected that they might not last so long.

  While in the ruins of the city, he found it impossible to walk a straight line for any distance: Not only did the streets twist about, but sometimes they were blocked by fallen rubble or by stark red cliffs. Then Gereint had to pick his way through the fallen brick and timbers, or else find a way around, or sometimes actually double back and find a different route through the ruins of the city. He could not go quickly even when the road was clear; there was not enough light. Yet he did not dare light a lantern for fear of the attention its glow might draw.

  So it took a long time to get out of Melentser; a long time to clamber over and around one last pile of rubble and find himself, at last, outside the city walls. A distance that should have taken no more than two
hours had required three times that, and how long were the nights at this time of year? Not long, not yet: They were nowhere close to the lengthening nights of autumn. How quickly would the heat mount when the sun rose? Gereint studied the constellations once more, took a deep breath of the dry air, drank a mouthful of water, and walked into the desert.

  The stars moved across the sky; the thin moon drew a high arc among them. The arrowhead in the constellation of the Bow showed Gereint true east. He set his course well north of east and walked fast. The night had never grown cool. There was a breeze, but it was hot and blew grit against his face. Sometimes he walked with his eyes closed. It was so dark that this made little difference.

  Already tired, he found that the heat rising from the sand seemed to lay a glaze across his mind, so that he walked much of the time in a half-blind trance. Twisted pillars and tilted walls of stone sometimes barred his way; twice, he almost walked straight into such a wall. Each time he was warned at the last moment by the heat radiating into the dark from the stone. Each time he fought himself alert, turned well out of his way to clear the barrier, and then looked for the Bow again. Usually the ground was level, but once, after Gereint had been walking for a long time, he stumbled over rough ground and fell to his knees; the shock woke him from a blank stupor and, blinking at the sky, he realized he had let himself turn west of north, straight into the deep desert. He had no idea how long he had been walking the wrong way.

  Then he realized that he could see a tracery of rose gray in the east. And then he realized that he was carrying a waterskin in his hand, and that it was empty. It had not even lasted one entire night.