But then, as Jos also knew, griffins had only the dimmest idea of human concepts like friendship and love. He said, “Not them either.”
Kairaithin was silent for a time, gazing down from the little meadow toward the Wall. The sun had slid down past the tips of the highest mountains, so that great shadows lay in the valleys in the lee of the mountains. The temperature was already falling—or would be, if not for Kairaithin’s presence in the meadow. Alpine bees made their determined way from flower to flower, taking advantage of the warmth the griffin had brought into their meadow. Jos wondered whether the griffin’s presence was, on balance, useful or detrimental to the meadow. He might shed warmth and light all about, but those grasses and flowers his shadow had burned would be a long time recovering.
Of course, if the Wall shattered, a little patch of burned grasses in a high meadow would be very far from the worst problem they would all face.
Bertaud son of Boudan is coming here, said Kairaithin, still gazing downhill. Your king is coming with him.
“Here?” Jos was dismayed—then he asked himself, Why dismay? On his own account, or merely at the thought of his silent mountains being overrun by the king and his company? Either way, he smothered that first sharp reaction and asked instead, “Why? I mean, what do they expect to do?” Something useful? He could not imagine what.
The griffin’s long lion-tail tapped once, twice, on the ground at his feet. Though he had been acquainted with Kairaithin for some years, and on tolerably good terms for several of those years, Jos could not guess whether that movement signified annoyance or satisfaction or nervousness or predatory intent or something else entirely. When Kairaithin spoke, he could recognize nothing in his voice but a strange kind of patient anger, and that had informed the griffin for as long as Jos could remember—since the Wall, indeed. Which Kairaithin had helped to build, after which he’d been cast out by his own people. Jos knew little more about it than that, for the griffin had never spoken of it. But he thought he understood Kairaithin’s anger. What he did not understand was the patience.
I carried word to Bertaud son of Boudan, Kairaithin said. I, as though I were a courier, bearing a white wand and the authority of your king.
The idea of the griffin as an official Feierabianden courier made Jos smile. He turned his head to hide his expression. In Feierabiand, nearly all the royal couriers were girls of decent but not high birth; they tended to form a tight-knit alliance, married one another’s brothers and cousins when they retired from active service, and brought up their daughters to be couriers as well. And they were all, that Jos had ever met, passionately proud of their calling. However Kairaithin viewed the service he had performed—and it seemed both a wise and a very small service, to this point—Jos thought he understood the griffin well enough to be certain he was not proud of it.
Jos wondered whether Kairaithin was, in fact, ashamed of his role in building the Wall, whether he was ashamed of once again defying the will of his people in carrying word of the damage to the Wall to human authorities. If he were a man rather than a griffin, that was a question that Jos—Jos in particular, all things considered—might even have found a way to ask him. But even when he wore the shape of a man, Kairaithin was nothing like a man. Jos could not imagine a way to pose such a question to the fierce, proud, incomprehensible griffin, whatever shape he wore. He said instead, “When will they get here?”
The griffin turned his narrow eagle’s head to look at Jos.
He was angry, Jos realized. The griffin’s black gaze was so powerful he half expected the granite of the mountain to crack and shatter under that stare. Jos stopped himself from taking a step backward by a plain act of will. It helped that he was sure—well, almost sure—that the griffin was not angry with him.
Soon, said Kairaithin. Within the hour.
“Oh.” Jos hadn’t realized that when the griffin said King Iaor and Lord Bertaud were coming, he meant right now. He glanced uncertainly around the meadow, down the slope where riders might come at any moment around the corner of the mountain. He did not know what Kairaithin had in mind, but he was almost completely certain that he did not want to meet the king or Bertaud or anyone in their party. “I could go… I could go somewhere, I suppose.” Though he did not know where. He would need the shelter of the cottage at dusk…
You will stay here. You will speak for me, said the griffin.
Jos stared at him. “I will? What would I possibly say?”
What occurs to you to say. But Kairaithin paused then, and Jos realized he was not as arrogant as that command had made him seem; that he was, in some way, actually uncertain. He said, Bertaud son of Boudan knows me… as well as any man. But you have gazed down at that Wall from almost the time it was made, and you know it well. And you know Kes.