Or more frightened of the reception she might meet.
As soon as she thought of this, Mienthe knew it was true. She knew the people in that house would not recognize her. She wondered if they would even admit her. They might think she was an impostor who was trying to mock them and steal things to which she had no claim. Or they might think she was a madwoman who claimed to be Berdoen’s granddaughter and Beraod’s daughter and Bertaud’s cousin because… because… Mienthe could not quite imagine why anybody would claim to be Beraod’s daughter. Probably that was because her memories of her father were a little too vivid…
But Tan would be there, and he could tell them who she was. Mienthe found she had no doubt that he was there. That was a heartening thought. She lifted the reins, clucked to the horse, and rode up the curving drive, between the oaks and through the woodlands, and out into the gardens in the last light of the day.
The gardens were not as well-kept as she remembered them, and the house was smaller, and down the hill the river blazed through the trees as though the slanting evening light had set the water afire. Someone called, and someone else answered, and there was a sudden confusion of movement and voices and faces. Suddenly nothing was familiar, and Mienthe tried to speak to an older man who had come out to hold her reins but could not think of anything to say. She wanted to dismount but was afraid to, although she did not know why she should be afraid—she told herself she should not be—she knew she was being foolish—
And then a familiar voice said, “Mienthe!” and Tan was beside her horse, offering her a hand to dismount. His was the only familiar face she saw. She took his hand gratefully and slid down from her horse with a sense that she had, after all, come at last to a place of safety, a place she knew.
CHAPTER 9
The griffins’ fire mages came again to test their strength against the Wall early in the afternoon on the second day following the arrival of the King of Feierabiand and his people.
King Iaor Safiad was not there to see them. After that first icy, brilliant night, the king had taken nearly all his people and gone away again, down the difficult mountain path. He would rouse his people and make them ready—his men, of course, but most especially his mages: the earth mages of Tihannad and all those in high Tiearanan. And he would set all the smiths of both cities to make arrowheads and spearheads infused with the most solid earthbound magecraft possible. So he had said, after looking down upon the cracked Wall and consulting the young earth mage he had brought, and Lord Bertaud, and Anasakuse Sipiike Kairaithin. He had not asked Jos for his opinion, but Jos had not disagreed.
“It might hold a hundred years like that, I suppose,” the king had said, not with any great conviction. “But it might break tomorrow, and then where will we be?” Then he had added, a touch more hopefully, to Kairaithin, “You are certain your people intend to come down upon Feierabiand if they can break that Wall? We have never offended them—or I had thought not. I had thought we had become something like allies…”
Had you thought so? Kairaithin had asked him. Well, something like, perhaps, for that brief moment caught out of time. But fire cannot truly ally with earth, king of men. That wall will not shatter along all its length; it will break here, at this end, where its balance has been disturbed and where it comes hard against the mountains. If the People of Fire and Air will come past its barrier, they will do so here, in this wild country, and thus they must strike into Feierabiand and not against Casmantium.
“But—” the king had protested.
“Tastairiane Apailika makes no distinction among the countries of men,” Lord Bertaud had put in, in a low voice. “He never has. And he likes killing and blood.”
Tastairiane Apailika means eventually to burn all the country of earth, Kairaithin had said. He is determined to leave nothing but fire in all the world, with the brilliant sky above and the world empty of everything but fierce wind singing past red stone.
“We won’t permit that,” Lord Bertaud had said. His voice had still been low, but Jos had heard odd notes of grief and anger and warning mingled in it. He had understood the anger and he’d thought he understood the grief, but he did not understand the warning at all. King Iaor had given him a sidelong glance, and Jos had wondered what the king might have heard in his voice. Kairaithin had not looked at him at all. Jos thought the griffin probably did not know how to hear all the undertones of a human voice.
“Indeed, we will not,” King Iaor had agreed, and at dawn the next day he had taken his very silent and subdued earth mage—struck dumb by the near edge of the desert or by the Great Wall or by the enormous, contained threat of Kairaithin himself, for Jos had not heard the young man utter a single word that day or all that night—the king had taken his earth mage and the rest of his retinue and gone down again from the mountain pass to Tihannad, to make what preparations seemed possible and practical.