The riders slowed as they breasted the crest of the path—if one could call that rugged cut through the stone a path—crossed the silver thread of the stream, came single-file into the little meadow and up to the cottage, and reined in their mules. The mules were too tired and too glad of the meadow to object very strenuously to Kairaithin’s presence, though the goat, wiser or not as weary, had not ventured from its hidden nook beneath the bed.
King Iaor had changed very little, was Jos’s immediate judgment, but Lord Bertaud had changed a great deal.
The king had grown perhaps a touch more settled, a touch more solid—that was how Jos described the quality to himself. More solid in his authority and his confidence. Though by no means an old man, Iaor Safiad had been king now for some decades and had grown by this time comfortable with his kingship. He had married just before the… trouble, six years ago. Jos knew nothing of recent events at the Feierabianden court, or any court, but looking at the king now, he was willing to lay good odds that the Safiad’s marriage had prospered. He had that air of satisfaction with himself and with life, though rather overlaid just now by weariness and unease.
King Iaor was a hard man to read, kings having as much need to conceal their thoughts and emotions as spies. But to Jos, as the king gazed down at the Wall and the plumes of steam rising from it, he looked tired and a little disgusted, as though he found the possible failure of the Wall a personal provocation. That, too, was the reaction of a man with a family as well as the reaction of a king who was concerned to protect his people.
Then Iaor pulled his gaze from the imposing, disturbing sight below to give Jos a little nod of recognition and acknowledgment.
Jos nodded back, not bowing because this was not his king. He said formally, “Your Majesty,” which was the proper form of address in Feierabiand.
“Jos,” said the king in a neutral tone. His gaze shifted to the griffin lounging near at hand. “Anasakuse Sipiike Kairaithin. What have we here?” He nodded down the pass toward the Wall.
Kairaithin did not answer, leaving Jos to speak—a man to speak to men, indeed. Jos said, “The plumes show where the Wall is cracked through. The cracks appeared some days ago.” He was embarrassed to admit that he did not know precisely how many days. In these latter years, he had become unaccustomed to counting off each passing day according to the proper calendar and found the habit difficult to reacquire. He said instead, which was perhaps more to the point, “The fire mages on the desert side have been trying to split the Wall open along those cracks. Not Kairaithin. Two young griffin mages. And Kes.” He glanced at the somber Kairaithin, whose student the girl had been, then turned his gaze back at the king, who had known her, briefly, when she had been human. Or mostly human.
King Iaor lifted an eyebrow, but it was Lord Bertaud who spoke. “She has become wholly a creature of fire, then.” It was a statement rather than a question, and there was an odd note to the lord’s voice, a note that Jos did not understand. He gave Lord Bertaud a close look.
Where the king had grown a bit more solid and comfortable over the past years, Jos thought that Lord Bertaud had grown darker of mood and more inward. There was a grimness underlying his manner and tone, not something born of the anxieties of the moment, Jos thought, but something that had been shaped out of a deeper trouble or grief. Some grief of love lost, or some private longing deferred? Or something less recognizable? Jos saw the deliberation with which Bertaud avoided meeting Kairaithin’s eyes, and wondered at it. I carried word to Bertaud son of Boudan, the griffin had said. Why to Bertaud?
Jos knew very little about Lord Bertaud; nothing about what the man had done with himself after those strange and difficult events six years ago. He had not been curious about the world for years. He had, indeed, been determinedly incurious, and it left him uncomfortably ignorant now.
In the early years, when she had still remembered dimly what she had been, Kes had come sometimes to tell him about her life among the griffins. She had described to Jos the beauty of fire and the empty desert, and sometimes she and Opailikiita had carried him high aloft through the crystalline fire of the high desert night. It had been beautiful, and Jos had longed for wings of his own, that he might ride those high winds himself. But Kes had never been very interested in the human world even when she had been human, and after she became a creature of fire she cared even less for the affairs of men.
In those years, and from time to time even now, it was Sipiike Kairaithin who brought Jos the odd tidbit of news from the human world. Certainly it had been Kairaithin who had explained how and why the Great Wall had been made, though never why he had bent his strength against his own people to help build it. The griffin had mentioned Bertaud now and again, however, and Jos understood, or thought he had understood, that Kairaithin stood as something of a friend to the man—as much as a griffin could befriend a man. He had envisioned a relationship something like the one he himself shared with the griffin: ill-defined, perhaps, and awkward to explain, but a relationship nevertheless.