Jos nodded again, silent.
“I know,” Bertaud said, looking up suddenly to meet his eyes. “I know it must be done, and better the griffins are destroyed than Tihannad, and after us all the country of earth. But—”
“I—”
Bertaud slammed his hand down on the maps he had been studying. He did not shout, but said almost in a whisper, “Don’t… tell me you understand.”
Jos caught himself, barely, before he could take a step backward. “No, lord. I beg your pardon.”
The Feierabianden lord stared at him for another moment, his eyes narrow and his color high. Then his gaze fell, and he flung himself into a chair and rubbed his hands tiredly across his face. “Forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive, lord,” Jos said earnestly. He hesitated. “Kairaithin?”
“If he could bring me Tastairiane, or bring me to Tastairiane, he surely would have done it by this time, don’t you think?” This began as a cry of despair, but ended as a question that pleaded for reassurance. “Do you think so? Could there still be time for Kairaithin to succeed? If he will try, in the end, and not merely delay and delay and hope I am overwhelmed in the end—”
“Until the last seconds run through the glass, there’s still time.”
Lord Bertaud laughed bitterly. “Ah. Thank you.”
“It’s an aphorism because it’s true,” Jos said gently, and heard the gentleness in his own tone, and was surprised by it. He had not realized until that moment that he thought the other man fragile.
“Well,” said Bertaud, and hesitated, glanced around with an air of uncertainty that suddenly firmed into decision, and called into the air, “Kairaithin! Sipiike Kairaithin!”
The griffin mage came to that call, whispering out of the air like swirling ash. He drew darkness around himself as he came, rising to his feet out of black feathers and the sullen glow of a quenched fire. His shadow smoldered, brighter than either the lantern light or the pale daylight lingering outside the windows; the wooden floor under his feet smoked and charred.
Jos had never known the griffin mage to command his own power so ill. He wanted to exclaim, to remind Kairaithin to rule himself. Then the griffin turned his human face toward them, and they both saw the livid mark that ran across his cheek, and the way he held one arm tucked close to his body. Jos forgot what he had meant to say, and Lord Bertaud came to his feet, asking sharply, “Was that Tastairiane? Are you all right?”
“I am not defeated!” Kairaithin said fiercely. “Do not call me, man! Do you not understand I am doing all I can? Let me go!”
Bertaud lifted his hands in a helpless gesture of distress and grief, and the griffin shredded at once into the thin light, black feathers crossing the light like shadows, gone once more.
For a long moment, neither man moved or spoke. Then Bertaud laughed with no humor at all and pressed a hand across his eyes.
Jos said, “If he cannot get to Tastairiane Apailika…” He stopped.
“Do you know…” Bertaud began, and paused. But then he went on, speaking in a low voice. “He said once he would tell her. Kes. About me. About what she did, when she used fire to heal me, about how she’d woken this… gift… with her fire. He said the truth would do more than any lie to keep her from healing other men with fire; that she would understand she must never risk another man coming into this cursed affinity.”
This explained a good deal. Jos only nodded, allowing the other man to talk, as he clearly needed to. It might be the only useful service he could actually provide, listening to secrets Lord Bertaud could not tell anyone else.
“He can’t have done, of course. Or she would never support Tastairiane in this. And now it is too late. He’ll never be able to come at her now, no more than he can come at Tastairiane himself.”
Jos said quietly, “I suppose he saw, as the years turned on, how little she came to care for men. So he thought it was unnecessary to warn her not to heal men with fire. He thought, Great secrets are always safest if no one knows them. And he thought she would never care to heal a man so again. Even—” Me, he had meant to say, but that would sound hopelessly bitter. He did not finish the thought aloud.
“You’re Casmantian. Not much chance you’d find yourself waking with any affinity, I imagine, no matter how much fire Kes poured into you. Though—” Lord Bertaud hesitated, and then finished a little grimly, “I suspect Kairaithin would have killed you if she’d ever happened to heal you with fire, just to be certain of it.”
Jos winced a little. He had come to consider Sipiike Kairaithin as something almost like a friend. But he thought the lord was right. “I sprained my ankle once,” he recalled. “That was during my first winter in the mountains. Kairaithin brought me splints… Kes did not come, not for several weeks. I wonder whether Kairaithin prevented her. He did not want to tell her this secret, but he would not risk her healing me… How does a fire mage heal a creature of earth?”