Mienthe did not stop again until near dawn, after putting miles of tangled, difficult country between herself and Tiefenauer. She had not kept to the road but headed straight for Kames. Or, at least, straight for Tan. She knew exactly where he was. Despite everything, she felt a great lightening of her spirits to know that he was far away to the east and that she was heading toward him. She found it difficult to imagine how she had let him ride east without her, almost impossible to picture herself heading, now, either north after the queen or back toward Tiefenauer.
The ordinary night sounds of the marshes surrounded her: the rippling splash of a stream, the rattle of the breeze through reeds, the rustle of leaves and the creak of leather as her tired horse shifted his weight. Above, the moon stood low over the dark shapes of the trees. To either side, water glinted like metal. Mienthe was cold, shivering; she could not feel her feet and her fingers were cramped on the reins. No one else was in sight, and though she held her breath and listened, she could not hear any voices calling.
Birds called, though, sharp trills and buzzes and one rippling little song that rose and rose until it seemed it must go beyond sound to silence, but after the song had climbed as high as it could go, it tumbled down again in a burst of notes. Mienthe knew the bird that made that song. It was a little speckled brown bird with a yellow throat. Though she could not see it in the undergrowth, she realized that she could see branches against the paling sky and that dawn had arrived.
There was a raw chill in the air. Though she worried a little about the smoke, Mienthe made a small fire. Steam rose from her clothing and boots. The boots, which had been good ones, ankle-high and embroidered around the tops, were undoubtedly ruined. She hoped they would be wearable for a little while yet; a day at least, until she reached her father’s house in Kames. She did not know what she would find there. She did not actually expect a welcome, or, unexpectedly determined as Tan’s enemies seemed to be, much safety. But she thought she might at least hope for dry boots.
Now, on her own and more or less safe, she had time to think—too much time and far too much solitude for her peace of mind.
She wondered where the queen and the royal party might be. Safe in Sihannas? She wondered about Tan. How far in front of her was he? Would he find her father’s house—would he be safe there until she could come? Would she be safe until she got there?
If there was a Linularinan mage behind her, he was probably much better trained than Mienthe. Only stubbornness and luck had got her out of that strange magecrafted trap in Tiefenauer, and then more luck had kept her from falling right into Linularinan hands when she toppled off that roof. She hoped the guardsmen she had left behind were all right. She did not know enough to guess whether the two might have gotten away, or whether the Linularinan soldiers might have spared the one who had set himself in their way to guard her flight.
Where, she wondered, was the Linularinan mage now? As soon as the question occurred to her, Mienthe was certain he was somewhere close by, far too close—just out of sight—probably hidden at the edge of the tangled undergrowth on the far side of the stream, looking at her. Telling herself that this was unlikely to the very edge of impossibility did no good at all. Mienthe stood up, peering intently back across the stream, but she could see nothing. Birds called: long liquid trills and rattling buzzes and a sweet three-note song that sounded like someone calling mock-e-lee, mock-e-lee.
There was, Mienthe gradually realized, no one there. The birds would not be singing so freely if anyone was hidden there—and no one was, anyway. A Linularinan mage would hardly have crept after her by himself and hidden to watch her. How silly she had been, to feel one might have! The conviction was fading—it was gone, and Mienthe could not even really remember how it had felt to be so certain. A ridiculous certainty! No mage would be slipping about by himself, and she could hardly fail to notice a whole Linularinan company stomping through the marshes after her. And the Linularinan mage, whoever he might be, could not really be very powerful, or Mienthe would never have been able to wind herself backward out of his magecrafted trap.
There was nothing to fear. Any sensible person could see that there was nothing at all to fear in the marshes, however damp, or in this clear spring dawn, no matter how chilly or uncomfortable. She told herself this, firmly, and as she cast one final uneasy glance across to the west, the sun came up above the trees and the moon became pale and transparent against the brightening sky, and then it was full day. At last. The last of her nervousness lifted like mist, warmed away by the sun. She rose stiffly and, having nothing better, rubbed the horse’s legs down with handfuls of coarse marsh grass. The animal deserved better of her than muddy grasses and a tired pat, but she had no grain to give him. At least he seemed to have no serious cuts or bruises.
She could see no sign of pursuit, no suggestion that any Linularinan in the wide world had ever defied the proper bounds of his country to cross into Feierabiand. Indeed, now that her earlier fear had eased, Mienthe found it difficult to believe that any Linularinan soldiers had actually crossed the Sierhanan at all. She felt as though she had probably dreamed everything of the past night. She thought she might awaken at any moment to find herself in her own room, lilac-scented lanterns glowing in the predawn dimness and the gentle sounds of the stirring household around her. It was hard to believe that she was already awake, that she really was cold and muddy and in desperate need of hot water and soap and tea, and that the great house lay miles and miles behind her.
No maid called her name, and neither hot water and soap nor tea appeared, alas. Only the horse shifted restlessly across the damp hillocks of mud and grass, his hooves crunching through the winter’s litter and leaving deep marks in the muddy ground. Mienthe sighed, climbed to her feet—her joints creaked—and went to investigate whether there might be a bit of hard bread in the saddlebags.
There was no bread, but there was a little cloth bag of dried apples and another of tough jerky. Mienthe ate the jerky and fed the apples to the horse, and after that felt rather more cheerful. The horse, a big sorrel animal that looked as though he had Delta blood in him, pointed his ears forward and seemed a little more satisfied with the morning as well, even when Mienthe put on her wet boots, kicked out the fire, and lifted herself—rather awkwardly, with neither mounting block nor helpful groom—back into the saddle.
The horse picked his way slowly among broad-boled trees in woodlands that did not seem ever to have known an ax, lipping at leaves and the grasses that grew in sunny glades among the trees. While the horse might breakfast on leaves, Mienthe was not finding the jerky she’d eaten a wholly adequate breakfast with which to face the long day. And her feet slipped and chafed inside her clammy boots.
It was all rather disheartening.
Mienthe kept as far as possible to drier ridges, which provided brief, welcome respites from the mud of the lower-lying regions. Her boots had begun to dry at last, but water came chest-deep on her horse in some of the unavoidable marshy areas. Mienthe kicked her feet out of the stirrups, tucked her feet up, and stubbornly kept riding east, until at last she found herself emerging from the shadows of the marshes and riding down a final bank onto the broad, hard-beaten surface of a true road, and lying before her, in the brilliance of a clear afternoon, the wide brown width of the lower branch of the Sierhanan River.
She encouraged her horse to trot. He did not want to do that, laying his ears flat and jigging sideways when she tried to make him, and after the night and day they had had Mienthe could hardly blame him. But the horse was good-tempered enough to lengthen his stride into the fast, swinging walk that was almost as fast as a trot would have been, the walk that made Delta horses so desirable as plow animals. That was good enough. Mienthe did not really want to sit a jarring trot, anyway.
There were plenty of hoof marks and the tracks of wagons and carts in the packed earth of the road, and Mienthe practiced in her mind the sorts of things she might say to startled folk she might pass, to explain her solitude a
nd muddy, bedraggled appearance: I barely got out of Tiefenauer in front of Linularinan soldiers… I had to cross through the marshes. Perfectly true. Yet she did not feel she had any ability to explain what had really happened, what still might be happening. She could visualize merchants or farmers rolling their eyes: Chased out of Tiefenauer by Linularinan mages, were you? Mienthe knew she simply did not have the ability to make anybody believe anything of the sort. Especially not while her horse and skirts and boots were caked with mud, and her hair straggling down her back—she could not look less like a granddaughter of old Berdoen and a cousin of the Lord of the Delta.
But there were few other travelers, and although they gave Mienthe curious, sidelong glances, none of them stopped to speak to her. She passed the occasional farm-track, and from time to time pasture fences ran along the road for some way. Sometimes big, flat-faced white cattle gazed at her incuriously from behind those fences. Tall shaggy farm dogs watched suspiciously as she passed, in case she should be a swamp cat or a cattle thief, but they did not come out to the road.
This branch of the Sierhanan, like the northern branch, was cleaner and wider and better for traffic than any of the smaller Delta rivers. Boats ran along with the current—flatboats, mostly, heading downstream; now and again a keelboat being heaved back upstream by a team of oxen. But the keel road was on the other side of the river and the drovers much too far away to call to or see clearly.
For the first time, it occurred to Mienthe that even when she found her father’s house, the staff there might not know her. Certainly they would not be able to see in her the nine-year-old child she had been… Would any of them even have known her when she was nine? A sudden, vivid memory of Tef, in the cutting garden gathering flowers for the house, came into her mind. She could almost make herself believe he would be at her father’s house, living still. Tears prickled behind her eyes.
She would have felt so much more that she was riding to her proper home if she had really expected to find Tef there waiting for her. She couldn’t think of her father’s house as her home at all. It occurred to Mienthe that she did not even know exactly where her father’s house actually was. Well, she knew that it was set on the river a little north of Kames proper, so she must go right past it if she kept on south on this road, but would she recognize its drive when she came to it? She experienced a sudden conviction that this was impossible, that she would not, that she would have to ride all the way into Kames and ask there for directions, like a beggar hoping for generosity from some relative who had a place at the house as a maid or stablemaster… She flushed and checked her horse, looking indecisively left toward the river, and then right, up the low wooded hill that ran up away from the river… and there were the gates.
She somehow knew the carved wooden posts at once, and the wrought-iron bands that spiraled around them; she knew the graveled track that led between avenues of great oaks and how it would curve through neatly kept woodlands to the wide gardens surrounding the big house. Though she would have said she had no clear memory of any of this from her childhood, she knew it all. She checked her horse and sat for a long moment simply staring at the gates and the graveled drive. She did not feel excited or happy to have come back to this house; was she simply too tired? But she did not even feel very relieved to have arrived. She must be much more weary than she had thought.
Or more frightened of the reception she might meet.
As soon as she thought of this, Mienthe knew it was true. She knew the people in that house would not recognize her. She wondered if they would even admit her. They might think she was an impostor who was trying to mock them and steal things to which she had no claim. Or they might think she was a madwoman who claimed to be Berdoen’s granddaughter and Beraod’s daughter and Bertaud’s cousin because… because… Mienthe could not quite imagine why anybody would claim to be Beraod’s daughter. Probably that was because her memories of her father were a little too vivid…
But Tan would be there, and he could tell them who she was. Mienthe found she had no doubt that he was there. That was a heartening thought. She lifted the reins, clucked to the horse, and rode up the curving drive, between the oaks and through the woodlands, and out into the gardens in the last light of the day.
The gardens were not as well-kept as she remembered them, and the house was smaller, and down the hill the river blazed through the trees as though the slanting evening light had set the water afire. Someone called, and someone else answered, and there was a sudden confusion of movement and voices and faces. Suddenly nothing was familiar, and Mienthe tried to speak to an older man who had come out to hold her reins but could not think of anything to say. She wanted to dismount but was afraid to, although she did not know why she should be afraid—she told herself she should not be—she knew she was being foolish—
And then a familiar voice said, “Mienthe!” and Tan was beside her horse, offering her a hand to dismount. His was the only familiar face she saw. She took his hand gratefully and slid down from her horse with a sense that she had, after all, come at last to a place of safety, a place she knew.
CHAPTER 9
The griffins’ fire mages came again to test their strength against the Wall early in the afternoon on the second day following the arrival of the King of Feierabiand and his people.
King Iaor Safiad was not there to see them. After that first icy, brilliant night, the king had taken nearly all his people and gone away again, down the difficult mountain path. He would rouse his people and make them ready—his men, of course, but most especially his mages: the earth mages of Tihannad and all those in high Tiearanan. And he would set all the smiths of both cities to make arrowheads and spearheads infused with the most solid earthbound magecraft possible. So he had said, after looking down upon the cracked Wall and consulting the young earth mage he had brought, and Lord Bertaud, and Anasakuse Sipiike Kairaithin. He had not asked Jos for his opinion, but Jos had not disagreed.
“It might hold a hundred years like that, I suppose,” the king had said, not with any great conviction. “But it might break tomorrow, and then where will we be?” Then he had added, a touch more hopefully, to Kairaithin, “You are certain your people intend to come down upon Feierabiand if they can break that Wall? We have never offended them—or I had thought not. I had thought we had become something like allies…”
Had you thought so? Kairaithin had asked him. Well, something like, perhaps, for that brief moment caught out of time. But fire cannot truly ally with earth, king of men. That wall will not shatter along all its length; it will break here, at this end, where its balance has been disturbed and where it comes hard against the mountains. If the People of Fire and Air will come past its barrier, they will do so here, in this wild country, and thus they must strike into Feierabiand and not against Casmantium.
“But—” the king had protested.
“Tastairiane Apailika makes no distinction among the countries of men,” Lord Bertaud had put in, in a low voice. “He never has. And he likes killing and blood.”
Tastairiane Apailika means eventually to burn all the country of earth, Kairaithin had said. He is determined to leave nothing but fire in all the world, with the brilliant sky above and the world empty of everything but fierce wind singing past red stone.
“We won’t permit that,” Lord Bertaud had said. His voice had still been low, but Jos had heard odd notes of grief and anger and warning mingled in it. He had understood the anger and he’d thought he understood the grief, but he did not understand the warning at all. King Iaor had given him a sidelong glance, and Jos had wondered what the king might have heard in his voice. Kairaithin had not looked at him at all. Jos thought the griffin probably did not know how to hear all the undertones of a human voice.
“Indeed, we will not,” King Iaor had agreed, and at dawn the next day he had taken his very silent and subdued earth mage—struck dumb by the near edge of the desert or by the Great Wall or by the enormous, contained threat of Kaira
ithin himself, for Jos had not heard the young man utter a single word that day or all that night—the king had taken his earth mage and the rest of his retinue and gone down again from the mountain pass to Tihannad, to make what preparations seemed possible and practical.
Lord Bertaud alone had stayed to watch the Wall. He, with his mule and another, and Jos, and the goat, and the frightened chickens, rather crowded the cottage. The rear part of the building, built out in a simple lean-to, had provided ample room for one goat but was hard put to accommodate two mules as well. Their ears brushed the rough stones when they lifted their heads and they seemed rather inclined to eat the thatch. Fortunately, the goat and the mules were willing to be amicable even in their crowded quarters. Perhaps the memory of the griffin lingered even once Kairaithin had gone, so that the presence of any other creature seemed more welcome to all three animals.
In the griffin’s absence, the white cock and all but one of the hens had crept back at last to their roost, attached as it was to the cottage and providing the only reliable warmth in all the mountains. Jos was sorry about his missing hen, though. She had not been one of the most reliable layers of the flock, but he did not like to think of her lost in the cold. He gave the remaining birds an extra handful of grain to help them forget their fright, watching carefully to make certain the larger hens did not keep the smaller from the grain. Such small concerns occupied him when he did not want to go back into the main part of the cottage.
Once the king and his people had gone and the immediate subject of the Wall and its possible shattering had been exhausted, Jos did not know what to say to Lord Bertaud. Once, Jos had had the gift of speaking easily, of drawing out anyone to whom he spoke, of putting anyone he met at ease. Somewhere during the past six years, he had lost all those skills. Now he did not know how to speak to anyone but the echoing mountains and one griffin mage exiled from his own people.
Law of the Broken Earth: The Griffin Mage Trilogy: Book Three Page 20
