Law of the Broken Earth(122)

She had settled her fire, contained it; he could touch her without danger. So he took her hands in his and looked down into her lovely, inhuman face. He said, “Kes.”

“You called me,” said Kes. “I came… I wished to see you one more time.” Her ethereal white brows drew together slightly in puzzlement. “I heard your voice, and I wished to come,” she repeated, speaking slowly, as though she found this curious.

“Kes,” Jos said again. And then, with dawning fear, “One more time?” He had closed his hands too tightly on hers. She did not flinch from his grip, but he realized the strength of his grip and flinched on her behalf, opening his hands.

She did not draw back. She did not seem even to realize he had let her go. “I broke the Wall,” she said simply. “This past noon, when the sun struck down with all its power. Only a very little is destroyed, but that part was the anchor that locked the Wall tight against the wild mountains. The pass is open to fire now. At dawn we will call up the fiery wind. Tomorrow will be a day for blood and fire.”

She did not speak, as Jos might have expected, with joyful delight. Instead her voice held an odd kind of wistfulness. She tilted her head to look at him, a quick, almost birdlike motion. She said, “I might take you away. Not into the pass. Somewhere the People of Fire and Air will not come…”

“They will come everywhere, eventually. Or they would. Kes—” Jos wanted to touch her face, run his thumb along the angle of her jaw. He did not let himself reach out, but said urgently, “Kes, I’m so glad you came. You don’t know what will happen. A day of fire and blood, you say, but it’s a day that will quench all fire. Bertaud—Lord Bertaud, whom you know—do you not realize he holds an affinity for griffins?”

For a long moment, Kes did not seem to understand what he had said. Then she did not believe him. “A creature of earth?” she cried. “An affinity for the People of Fire and Air? You speak fables and sunbeams, your words are as the ash that crumbles when the wind touches it! That cannot be true. It is not true. How could it be true?” She took a step back from him. Another. Cried even more sharply, her tone more plainly human than he had heard it for years, “How can you tell such lies?”

“You woke the gift in him yourself, when you used fire to heal him,” Jos told her urgently. “No one knows but Sipiike Kairaithin. Think of Kairaithin and tell me it’s all sunlight and ash! Think of what Kairaithin has done over these past years and what he has refused to do and tell me it’s a lie!”

The fire within Kes brightened, and brightened again, so fiercely that Jos had to take a step away himself. But Kes did not disappear into the wind. She had become a burning figure of white gold and porcelain, but she did not go.

“Kes!” he said, and made himself step forward again. “If the griffins come riding their wind of fire out of that pass tomorrow, they will all find out. Do you understand? Do you understand what that will do to them?”

“Yes,” said Kes.

“You must stop them. It’s Tastairiane Apailika driving this wind, isn’t it? You can go to him tonight—tell him—”

“I can’t tell him!” cried Kes.

“—tell him you’ve changed your mind, you won’t support this attack against Feierabiand; you can tell him something—tell him you remember your sister. Do you remember your sister, Kes? I’m sure she hasn’t forgotten you. It’s just the same this time as six years ago! All the power is in your hands. Tell Tastairiane you won’t support him and that we’re prepared, that if griffins come through that pass tomorrow, they’ll face ten thousand arrows and a thousand spears, and you won’t be there to make his griffins whole when they’re struck down—”

Kes shook her head. “He will never stop now. Not now that the Wall is broken. He will never stop, and even if I tell him, he won’t believe it can be true, he’ll think you lied to me. Or if he believes it, he’ll be so angry—it’s Bertaud, you say? Lord Bertaud son of Boudan who has this affinity to fire?”

“Yes—” Jos said, and realized as he spoke—too late!—that he should never have given her Bertaud’s name. She shredded into a blazing white wind, and Jos stared, appalled, for far too long a moment before he flung himself for the stairs.

Bertaud was still in the map room when Jos hurled himself through the door, and still alive, which Jos had not expected; it must have taken Kes a moment to find him—well, she did not know the Feierabianden lord well and he had not been fool enough to call her name out across the winds.