Law of the Broken Earth(77)

Lord Bertaud alone had stayed to watch the Wall. He, with his mule and another, and Jos, and the goat, and the frightened chickens, rather crowded the cottage. The rear part of the building, built out in a simple lean-to, had provided ample room for one goat but was hard put to accommodate two mules as well. Their ears brushed the rough stones when they lifted their heads and they seemed rather inclined to eat the thatch. Fortunately, the goat and the mules were willing to be amicable even in their crowded quarters. Perhaps the memory of the griffin lingered even once Kairaithin had gone, so that the presence of any other creature seemed more welcome to all three animals.

In the griffin’s absence, the white cock and all but one of the hens had crept back at last to their roost, attached as it was to the cottage and providing the only reliable warmth in all the mountains. Jos was sorry about his missing hen, though. She had not been one of the most reliable layers of the flock, but he did not like to think of her lost in the cold. He gave the remaining birds an extra handful of grain to help them forget their fright, watching carefully to make certain the larger hens did not keep the smaller from the grain. Such small concerns occupied him when he did not want to go back into the main part of the cottage.

Once the king and his people had gone and the immediate subject of the Wall and its possible shattering had been exhausted, Jos did not know what to say to Lord Bertaud. Once, Jos had had the gift of speaking easily, of drawing out anyone to whom he spoke, of putting anyone he met at ease. Somewhere during the past six years, he had lost all those skills. Now he did not know how to speak to anyone but the echoing mountains and one griffin mage exiled from his own people.

Nor did the Feierabianden lord seem to know how to speak to Jos. He had too much natural tact, it appeared, to ask anything like, So, how have you lived? How has it been for you here in these mountains, belonging neither to fire nor to earth? Far less would he ask any such question as, How long was it before Kes forsook your company for that of Tastairiane? And if Lord Bertaud—thankfully—possessed too much delicacy to ask any of those questions, Jos certainly did not intend to volunteer answers.

Or it might have been that Lord Bertaud simply despised Jos too much to speak to him, aside from the commonplaces necessary in such close accommodations. Though Jos would have liked to ask about the world below the mountains, he did not care to invite any rebuff by asking questions. He did not speak. Nor did Lord Bertaud. So it was a silent day that stretched out after King Iaor had departed. There was only the clucking of the hens to break the quiet, and the song of a hardy finch or two that had come bravely up from the lower meadows, and the muted hum of the bees, and the ceaseless winds above that always sang with more or less violence through the heights.

And after the long day, it was a silent evening, and later still a deathly quiet night. The dawn that followed was cold, of course, as every dawn was cold in these mountains. But the stream did not freeze. It seldom froze even in the depths of the most savage winter; its own inherent wild magic kept it running freely across the clean stone when any sensible water would have turned to shimmering ice and frozen mist.

Jos filled his single pot and made tea from his small store. He was glad to see Lord Bertaud’s saddlebags still held some good bread and hard cheese, and some dried beef, and a handful of last fall’s wrinkled apples. As it happened, Jos did have two mugs, for occasionally Kairaithin took the form of a man to visit him and then the griffin mage liked tea—or perhaps was simply amused to go through the motions of human hospitality; Jos was never confident he understood the griffin’s motivations in even so simple a matter. But there were two mugs. He added sugar and a pat of goat’s-milk butter to the tea in each mug and handed one, steaming, to his… guest, he supposed. For a sufficiently flexible understanding of the word.

Bertaud set out the bread and other things, and took the offered mug with a nod that seemed civil enough. He took the chair nearest the fire, less inured than Jos to the chill that seemed to creep through the stone walls of the cottage. There was actually an abundance of chairs—four, recalling the days when Kes and Opailikiita and Kairaithin had all occasionally come to visit Jos. Opailikiita had never, so far as Jos knew, taken human shape, but in those days he had thought it best to be prepared in case one day she might.

Instead, Kes had gradually lost her own human form, in every sense but the least important, and had ceased to visit the cottage. Jos had more than once thought of flinging two of the chairs down from the heights, letting them shatter on the stone below. He did not know whether it was hope or apathy or sheer blind obstinacy that had held him back from doing it.