Lord of the Changing Winds (3 page)

Kes looked at them all uneasily, wondering nervously whether she might guess what had drawn them all away from their ordinary business. She hoped she did not blush when she glanced at Kanne or Sef. How could Tesme possibly think—? Was Kanne even fourteen yet? And Sef! She looked hastily away from the smith’s apprentice, aware that she probably
was
blushing, now.

“You seem happy,” Jerreid was saying to Tesme. His smile, at least, seemed ordinarily cheerful. “How is your mare? River, wasn’t it? She must have done well by you, yes?”

“Yes, yes, yes!” Tesme came across the yard, leaving Kes to follow more slowly. She took Jerreid’s hands in hers and smiled at him. “A filly, healthy and big, and River’s fine. We’re celebrating. Have you any blackberry wine left, or did you drink it all yourself?”

“We’ve plenty—”

“But you might want to hold off on the celebrations,” said Chiad. Dark as the earth he worked, serious by nature and not given to celebrations at even the best of times, he looked at the moment even more somber than usual. He slapped the table with one broad hand for emphasis as he spoke.

“Give the woman a chance to catch her breath!” exclaimed Jerreid, shaking his head in mild disapproval.

Chiad gave him a blink of incomprehension and instantly transferred his attention back to Tesme. “You’ve got your young foals down by the house, haven’t you, Tesme? Do you know what Kanne saw this morning?” Kanne was Chiad’s son, and he now sat up straight in his chair and looked important.

Kes knew. She heard it in Chiad’s voice. She saw it in Kanne’s eyes.

Tesme arched her eyebrows, still smiling, if a little less certainly. “If it wasn’t someone underselling me with Delta-bred stock for cheap, I don’t think I’ll mind, whatever it was.”

“You will,” said Chiad, heavily, with a somber shake of his head. “Tell her, boy.”

Kanne laid his hands down flat on the table and sat up even straighter, looking proud and important. “Griffins!” he said.

This had not been what Tesme expected, and she looked blank.

“Griffins!” Chiad said. He slapped the table, shaking his head again in heavy disapproval. “Of all things! Half lion, half eagle, and all killer! My barley is likely safe enough, but you’d best look after your stock, Tesme!”

Tesme still looked blank. She said after a moment, “Kanne, are you sure they weren’t just eagles?”

“Now, that’s what I said,” Jerreid agreed, nodding.

“Sure, I’m sure,” Kanne said importantly. “I
am
sure! I know what eagles look like, Jerreid! These weren’t eagles or vultures or any bird!”

“Griffins never leave their desert,” said Heste, frowning. Her attitude suggested that she had said this before, repeatedly.

“They do,” said Nehoen, so patiently it was clear he’d said this before as well. “Griffins in the spring mean a hard summer.” Nehoen was not sitting at the table. He had gotten to his feet when Tesme and Kes had entered the courtyard. Now he moved restlessly, leaning his hip against one of the tables and crossing his arms over his chest. He was old, nearly fifty, but he was one of the few gentlemen of the village and thus showed his age far less than a farmer or smith.

“What?” said Tesme, blinking at him.

Nehoen smiled at her. He owned all the land out on the west side of the village near the river, and he could not only read, but owned far more books than all the rest of Minas Ford put together. His grandmother had been an educated woman of the Delta, and had put great store by books and written learning. He explained now, “Griffins in the fall mean an easy winter, griffins in the spring a hard summer. They say that in Casmantium. There wouldn’t be a saying about it if the griffins never left their country of fire to come into the country of earth.”

“But why would they?” Tesme asked. “And why come so
far
? Not just so far south, either, but all the way across the mountains into Feierabiand?”

“Well, that I don’t know. The mages of Casmantium keep them out of Casmantian lands—that’s what their cold mages are for, isn’t it?—so maybe if the griffins wanted to move, they had to cross the mountains. But why they left their own desert in the first place?” Nehoen shrugged. “Who can guess why such creatures do anything?”

“Griffins are bad for fire,” said Kanes. The smith’s deep voice rumbled, and everyone hushed to listen to him. “That’s what I know. They’re made of fire, and fire falls from the wind their wings stirs up. That’s what smiths say. They’re bad creatures to have about.”

Smiths knew fire. Everyone was silent for a moment, thinking about that.

“Griffins,” said Jerreid at last, shaking his head.

“Griffins,” agreed Nehoen. He began a rough sketch on a sheet of paper somebody had given him.

Chiad’s wife said, practically, as she was always practical, “Saying Kanne is right, as I think he is, then what? Fire and hard summers, maybe—and then maybe not. But it stands to reason a creature with eagle talons and lion claws will hunt.”

“Surely—” Tesme began, and stopped, looking worried. “You don’t think they would eat our horses, really?”

“Nellis stops wolves from eating livestock,” said Chiad, laying a broad hand on his wife’s hand.

She nodded to him and went on herself, “Jenned stops mountain cats. Perren stops hawks from coming after chicks.” Perren was a falconer as well as a farmer, and gentled hawks and falcons for the hunt. Chiad’s wife added, “I can keep foxes off the hens, and my little Seb stops weasels and stoats. But I don’t know who’s going to stop griffins eating your foals or my sheep, if that’s what they want. What we need is a cold mage. I wonder why our mages in Feierabiand never thought to train up a youngster or two in cold magic?”

“We’ve never needed cold magecraft before,” Chiad answered his wife, but not as though he found this argument persuasive.

His wife lifted her shoulders in a scornful shrug. “Well, and we don’t need ice cellars until the summer heat, or a second lot of seed grain until a wet spring rots the first sowing; that’s why we plan ahead, isn’t it? They should have thought ahead, up there in Tihannad—”

“Now, now.” Jerreid shook his head at Chiad’s wife in mild reproof. “Summer we have every year, and wet springs often enough, but if griffins have ever come across the mountains before, it was so long ago none of our fathers or grandfathers remember it. Be fair, Nellis.”

“Whoever thought or didn’t think, it’s my horses that are going to be eaten by griffins,” said Tesme, sitting down rather abruptly at the table in the chair Nehoen had abandoned.

“They wouldn’t eat them,” Nehoen said, patting her shoulder. “Griffins don’t eat. They may look part eagle and part lion, but they’re wholly creatures of fire. They hunt to kill, but they don’t eat what they bring down.”

“That’s even worse!” Tesme exclaimed, and rubbed her forehead.

Kes watched her sister work through the idea of griffins coming down on her horses. It clearly took her a moment. She wasn’t used to thinking of the danger a big predator might pose if no one in the village could speak to it or control it.

In every country there were folk with each of the three common gifts. But just as Casmantian folk were famously dark and big-boned and stocky, Casmantian makers and builders were famously the best. There were makers everywhere, but more and better makers in Casmantium; to find makers with the strongest gifts and the deepest dedication to their craft, to find builders who could construct the strongest walls and best roads and tallest palaces, one went to Casmantium.

In the same way, one could recognize Linularinan people because they commonly had hair the color of light ale and narrow, secretive eyes, but also because they were clever and loved poetry. Everyone in Linularinum could write, they said, so probably it wasn’t surprising that Linularinum had the cleverest legists. There were legists in Feierabiand, at least in the cities, but if you wanted a really unbreakable contract that would do exactly what you wanted, you hired a Linularinan legist to write it for you.

But everyone knew that if you needed someone with a really
strong
affinity for a particular sort of animal, you came to Feierabiand. As Tesme held an affinity to horses, others held affinities to crows or mice or deer or dogs. In Feierabiand, every town and village and tiny hamlet had one or two people who could call wolves and mountain cats—and more important, send them away. But griffins were creatures of fire, not earth. No matter how dangerous or destructive they might prove, no one, even in Feierabiand, would be able to send the griffins back across the mountains.

Tesme was looking more and more unhappy. “Maybe you and Edlin would let us borrow the use of your lower pasture for a while?” she said to Jerreid. “Mine isn’t big enough for all the horses. Will I have to move all the horses, do you think? How big are griffins? How many did you see, Kanne?”

“Dozens,” the boy said. He sounded pleased about it. “Big.”

Nehoen silently held out a sketch he’d drawn. It showed an animal with a savage look: a creature half feathered and half furred, with the cruel hooked beak and talons of an eagle and the haunches of a cat. Everyone crowded forward to look. Kes, peering over Kanes’s shoulder, winced a little. The monster in the drawing was a crude misshapen thing, neither bird nor beast; it looked clumsy and vicious.

“Yes,” said Kanne triumphantly. “Griffins!”

Kanes nodded heavily. “We need king’s soldiers. That’s what we need. Clean the creatures out before they settle in to stay.”

Kes continued to study the drawing for a moment longer, not listening as everyone else spoke at once. It was all wrong. And what she found, though she didn’t understand why it mattered to her, was that she couldn’t bear to have everyone believe Nehoen’s drawing showed the truth. So she silently took the paper from Nehoen’s hand and picked up the piece of charcoal he had used for his drawing. Nehoen looked startled, but he let her have the charcoal. Nellis stood up, giving Kes her place at the table, and waved for Kanne to move, too.

Kes turned the paper over to the blank side and sat down. She had already forgotten her audience. She was thinking of griffins. Her eyes filled with fire and beauty. She turned the charcoal over in her fingers and set it to the paper. The creature she drew was not like the one Nehoen had sketched. She had a surer hand with the charcoal than Nehoen, but that was not the difference. The difference was that she knew what she was drawing.

The griffin flowed out of the charcoal, out of Kes’s eyes. It was eagle and lion, but not mismade, not wrong, as Nehoen’s griffin had been wrong. She gave this griffin the beauty she had seen. She had seen griffins flying, but the one she drew was sitting, posed neatly like a cat. It was curled around a little, its head tilted at an inquisitive angle. It was fierce, but not vicious. The feathers around its eyes gave it a keen, hard look. Its sharp-edged beak was a smooth curve, exactly right for its eagle head. The feathers flowed down its forequarters and melted smoothly into a powerfully muscled lion rear. Its wings, half opened, poured through the sketch with the clean purity of flame.

Tesme, looking over Kes’s shoulder, took a slow breath and let it out.

Nehoen took the finished drawing out of Kes’ hands and looked at it silently. Kes looked steadily down at the table.

“When did you see them?” Nehoen asked gently.

Kes glanced up at him and looked down again. She moved her hand restlessly across the rough surface of the table. “This morning.”

Tesme was staring at her. “You didn’t say anything.”

Kes traced the grain of the wood under her hand, running the tip of her finger around and around a small knot in the wood. “I didn’t know how. To talk about them. They… are nothing I know words to describe.”

“You—” Chiad said incredulously.

“Hush,” said Nellis, laying a hand on her husband’s arm. “Kes, love—”

At the gate of the inn yard, someone moved, and everyone jumped and stared. Then they stared some more.

The man at the gate was a stranger. But more than a stranger, he was himself strange. He wore fine clothing, but unusual in both cut and color. Red silk, red linen, red leather—all red, a dark color like drying blood, except for low black boots and a black cloak. He did not wear a sword, though even in Feierabiand nearly all men of good birth carried one. But this man did not carry even a knife at his belt. He held no horse, and that was surely strangest of all, for how had a gentleman come to Minas Ford if not by horse or carriage?

The man’s hair was black and very thick, without a trace of gray—although it was somehow immediately clear that he was not a young man. The lines of his face were harsh and strong. His eyes were black, his gaze powerful. He had a proud look to him, as though he thought he owned all the land on which his gaze fell. His shadow, Kes saw, with a strange lack of astonishment, was not the shadow of a man. It was too large for a man’s shadow, and the wrong shape, and feathered with fire. Kes glanced quickly into her sister’s face, and then looked at Nehoen and Jerreid and Kanes, and realized that although everyone was startled by the stranger, no one else saw that his shadow was the shadow of a griffin.

The black-eyed stranger with the griffin’s shadow did not speak. No one spoke, not even Jerreid, who liked everyone and was hard to put off. Everyone stared at the stranger, but he had attention only for Kes. And rather than speaking, he walked forward, straight to the table where she sat. He clearly assumed everyone would get out of his way, and everyone did, although Nehoen, getting abruptly to his feet, put a hand on Kes’s shoulder as though he thought she might need protection.