Kes stood still, her golden eyes on the man’s strained face. Her eyes held nothing human; her expression was unreadable. But she stood still, listening.
“Kereskiita,” said the dark man, “the storm Tastairiane Apailika wishes to ride will carry the People of Fire and Air to destruction.” He lifted a hand, pointed straight at Mienthe’s black spiral. “Here is a different storm, when I had all but given up hope that any countervailing wind might arise. It is perilous and terrible, but surely set in a direction none of us had anticipated. It is too late to turn Tastairiane Apailika’s wind. Call this wind, then, and let it burn!”
“Kes,” said the man. He cradled his burned hand against his body and stared at the girl, his eyes purely human. He said again, “Kes.”
“Jos,” said the girl very softly. “I do remember.” And, turning toward the spiral, she took a single step that suddenly whirled her around it and left her standing beside Mienthe.
Far too close, in Tan’s opinion, but though he flinched violently, Mienthe reached out and laid her hand against the hand of the girl of fire, palm to palm. Nor did she jerk back as away from fire, but only looked into her face for a moment, her expression very serious.
“No!” shouted Istierinan again, his voice cracking in furious despair.
Mienthe lifted her hand from the other girl’s, turned, and began to draw out her spiral: around and in, around and in. Kes turned in the opposite direction and began to draw a spiral of her own, this one a narrow line of white fire that turned outward, rising. Though they both sketched their parallel spirals on the same level floor, somehow the black spiral seemed to turn down and down, while the burning white spiral rose as it turned.
Tan saw at once what Mienthe had meant by fire balancing earth, for now Mienthe moved much more easily, with no sign that she had ever or would ever come against a limit to how tight she might make her spiral, how deep she might send it. And Kes moved as easily, every step as light as though she were actually rising as she went, walking away into the air.
Istierinan cried out, an articulate sound. He dropped to one knee and drove the tip of his white quill straight across the line of white fire. The quill caught fire and blazed up with a flame as white as its feather, and the red ink ran out of it, hissing as it came against Kes’s fiery spiral, quenching the flame and leaving only the black chasm of the spiral Mienthe had drawn.
Mienthe cried out, sounding furious as well as terrified. Then Kes cried out as well, her voice as piercing and inhuman as the shriek of a falcon. Their two voices blurred together until it was impossible to tell one from the other.
Tan began to stride forward, out of the center of the spiral, toward Istierinan.
“No!” said Kairaithin urgently. “No, man!”
“Yes, come to me!” called Istierinan grimly.
Tan stopped, looking helplessly from the griffin mage to the Linularinan legist, and Istierinan stood up and ran the white feather of his quill through his fingers. The fire that had caught in its feather went out, and he laughed.
Kairaithin, with no expression at all, took one step forward and exploded violently into fiery wind and driving red sand. The power of that wind slashed across the double spiral with incredible precision, slicing past Mienthe and Kes, scouring away the bloody ink and whipping up the white fire, hardly disturbing Tan’s hair as it whipped past him but driving against Istierinan with terrible force, tearing at his face and eyes, flinging him to his knees, ripping the white quill from his hands. But, though the quill blazed up once more, it did not crumble to ash but flew across the spiral like a burning arrow. It fell point-down at Tan’s feet, its tip deep in the wood of the floor, its feather burning on and on with white fire, like a slim taper that would not gutter out.
The power in that same great wind, unleashed, allowed Kes, even as she screamed in grief, to raise her fragile white hands and send her spiral racing infinitely wide and high, until it cracked the edges of the world and broke against the dome of the sky. Mienthe cried out, and her spiral leaped forward in equal measure as though dragged along by the fiery spiral, only hers broke open the day and the dark and twisted in and down until it shattered the center of the earth.
“Write down the law!” Mienthe cried.
As in a dream, Tan opened the book. He bent and took up the burning white quill.
“Write down fire and joy!” said Kes. She seemed to have forgotten grief. She lifted hands filled with blazing light and shook fire out of her hair, laughing.
“Write down earth and fire,” said Jos, leaning against a wall that was, amazingly, still standing. “Write down sorrow as well as joy.”