Law of the Broken Earth(45)

Mienthe shook her head, meaning she had no idea. “Only, I think, the griffins are very angry, and I think that if the Wall breaks, there will be a war…”

“Well, how many griffins can there be?” Tan asked reasonably. “It’s hard to imagine there could be more than a very small war, after all.”

Mienthe shook her head again. “I don’t know… That wasn’t what I thought he meant.”

Had her cousin’s visitor actually been a griffin? In human shape, Mienthe had said. But you would never mistake him for a man, she’d said. Why not? How could one tell? Especially if one had never encountered a griffin before at all, either in his true shape or disguised?

On the other hand, her cousin truly had, by all reports, been closely involved with the problems Feierabiand had had with griffins six years ago. He would certainly know a griffin when he saw one. And if anyone might find a griffin mage on his doorstep, it was likely Bertaud.

And if that much was true… He said at last, “Well, esteemed Mienthe, you’ve certainly given me a good deal to think over,” which was true.

“But you don’t know anything.”

“Very little,” Tan admitted. “Or very little about griffins. It’s amazing how seldom the subject comes up in Linularinum—except as a consideration for determining what the King of Casmantium might do.”

Mienthe drooped slightly with discouragement.

“Please don’t rush out, however,” Tan said quickly, afraid she might. “Perhaps you might try telling me everything you know about griffins. Lord Bertaud is your cousin. Perhaps you’ve learned a bit more than you think you have—”

“No, I don’t think so. He never speaks of those things.” Mienthe hesitated, and then added slowly, “He never has. Never. I think…” But she stopped, feeling perhaps that she had come too close to private things. She opened her hands in a shrug, then gazed down into her palms as though she might find the answer there.

Then she glanced up. “But… I’m so sorry. Here I am telling you all about the griffins and the Wall when there’s nothing either of us can do about the trouble there. How are you? Do you do well enough?”

“Well,” Tan said, trying not to laugh, “I’m here and not chained in some dismal barn on the other side of the river, so not only am I very well, I must also suppose no one’s been able to get past your care of me. For all of which I am, I assure you, very grateful indeed. I shall hope we are not so distracted by this other problem that Istierinan is permitted a second opening.”

“Oh, I’m sure Linularinum won’t—”

Tan dismissed this assurance with a wave of his hand. “It obviously took a mage to get me out of this house. I am not confident what this mage might do next, if Istierinan insists. Istierinan Hamoddian can be uncommonly single-minded.”

Mienthe looked at him expectantly. “So why did your Istierinan kidnap you at all, if you’d already finished writing everything out for Bertaud? Or did he not know you’d already finished?”

“After three days in the great house? He can’t have not known.” Tan paused. He rather thought Mienthe was clever, and he knew she had found him by some sort of odd magecraft. And he owed her a debt. And, besides that, he could think of absolutely no reason to keep this particular secret. So he said slowly, “Istierinan wasn’t after vengeance—or not only after vengeance. He asked me where ‘it’ was. Whether I still held ‘it’ myself or had given ‘it’ away. Not to the Lord of the Delta, he said. He said maybe I’d been able to give ‘it’ to one of Bertaud’s people.”

“Able to give it,” Mienthe repeated blankly.

“That’s what he said. Very odd, yes. He wanted me to return what I had taken. I never could get him to tell me what I was supposed to have stolen. Nor did I have enough time to guess its shape from the pattern of his questions. Fortunately, to be sure.”

“But you must know what it might have been?” Mienthe asked, leaning forward in intense curiosity.

Tan flung up his hands. “Nothing but information! Nothing I could return, even if I wanted to return it—no more than I could return spoken words to the past that existed before they were spoken.”

“Well,” Mienthe said reasonably, “Istierinan thinks you stole something else, doesn’t he?”

Tan opened his hands in a gesture of bafflement. “Nothing occurs to me. Except that someone else took advantage of my, ah, of the confusion I caused, to steal something else. Something more tangible. And Istierinan thinks I stole it.” Some lying dog-livered bastard was using Tan to conceal his own crime. Tan was offended, and then amused, since he hardly had any right to protest another man’s dishonesty.