Land of the Burning Sands (46 page)

“Oh,” Tehre said, surprised. Pieces of a puzzle she’d barely glimpsed in outline fell suddenly into place. She said with conviction, “Beguchren’s made Gereint into a mage, and now he’s using Gereint’s strength to support his own. Gereint would have had plenty of strength to give, I expect—”

Bertaud was shaking his head. “Wait, wait, he did what?”

“As Kairaithin made your Feierabianden girl into a fire mage,” Tehre said patiently, surprised he hadn’t grasped this at once. “It’s not quite the same thing—in fact, it should be much easier. I wonder if it takes a maker who’s already got a little magecraft woven through his gift? Or if any maker can be made into a mage? I wonder if
I
…” She stopped. It was a disquieting idea.

Another griffin came slanting out of the fire-streaked wind and landed neatly on the sand by Kairaithin, and another after that. The first was large, not as massive as Kairaithin, but heavy and muscular: a powerful griffin with golden eyes and bronze feathers; the feathers of his wings were bronze streaked with copper and gold and his lion rear a dark bronze gold. The second, smaller, griffin was a rich gold-stippled brown.

On the back of the smaller griffin perched a human girl, only even without Bertaud’s explanation, Tehre would never have mistaken her for anything human. She was fine boned, small, pretty—but she looked even less human than Kairaithin had when he’d taken human form. She seemed spun out of white gold and fire; her eyes were filled with fire; bright little tongues of fire flickered in her pale hair and ran down her bare arms. She was smiling, a dangerous expression that was also somehow joyous. She slipped down from the brown griffin’s back to stand between it and Kairaithin, but she left a hand buried in the feathers of its neck.

Beguchren, frowning, took one step forward. Ice rimed his white eyes and his hands; ice glittered on the sand where he’d set his feet and sparkled in the air around him; near him, the dark of the desert night was lit by a pearly light that sparkled with frost. He took another step.

Kairaithin folded his heavy black wings, a gesture that somehow seemed contemptuous, and tilted his head downward so that his savage beak pointed at the burning sand under his feet. The other griffins swayed forward, their wings still half spread; the bronze one snaked its head out low and hissed. Kes tossed her head, dropped her hand away from the brown griffin’s neck, and stood straight, smiling.

Behind them and to either side, a net of fire spun itself between one stone pillar and the next, and the next, and the next after that: a tight-woven web of fire wound itself around the griffin mages and Beguchren, and around Tehre and Bertaud where they knelt beside Gereint. All around the circle flames sprang up, burning tall and smokeless, white and gold and blood crimson, columns and sheets of fire that towered straight up toward the sky in a sudden, shocking absence of wind.

Beguchren took one more step forward, and a broad, nebulous bolt of mist and frost speared out toward—not Kairaithin, Bertaud had been right—toward Kes.

The girl did not move. But she did not need to. The attack never touched her. Fire rose up and swallowed the cold mist and absorbed it, and then burned higher, reaching out to engulf Kes entirely. Any normal human girl would have burned alive in that fire. Kes stood amid the flames, her smile never faltering, her body blurring into fire and then reshaping itself out of fire once more.

“They’re all mages,” Bertaud said quietly, to himself as much as to Tehre. “Kairaithin’s brought some of his young students into their power—including Kes. I don’t think your Beguchren can match them, however much power he’s taken from your friend.”

Tehre shook her head, wanting to deny this, but actually she thought he was right. The frost surrounding Beguchren had closed in around him, and she doubted the mage was contracting his power of his own accord. His face was taut and strained. He bowed his head and lifted his hands, but the spear of ice he shaped out of his need flung itself only halfway toward the human fire mage before the fierce heat of the surrounding fire trapped it and it dissolved back into the air.

Beguchren made a low sound, lifting his head again. In his frost-white eyes was frustration and anger and the terrible knowledge of failure, and Tehre found herself holding her breath in sympathy—she leaped to her feet and ran to him, in her mind a confused idea of telling him to make her into a mage, to use her power, she was ready to argue,
I have more strength than you’d think. Use it. Use me
. But the thought came too late and she had no chance to make the offer: Even as she reached Beguchren, his eyes rolled back and he folded slowly to his knees and then to the sand. She caught him, went down with him, supported his head on her knee, setting her hand against his face as she tried to determine whether he’d actually died or only collapsed—he was cold, cold as ice to the touch, but she found a weak pulse beating against the fine skin of his throat.

But she already knew it didn’t matter: If the mage still lived, he wouldn’t for long. She could feel the ferocity of the surrounding desert without even looking up.

Then she looked up.

The fire woven between the stones had begun to die—or, not die, but ebb slowly back into the sand and the wind. The stone pillars stood like plinths of hot emptiness against the sky; far above, an unseen griffin cried out, a high, wild shriek, fierce and exultant. The sound sent icy prickles down Tehre’s spine. Kairaithin and his companions, lit by their own fire, were still visible, and that was worse than the unseen griffins in the air above.

Kes was laughing, delight in her eyes, in her face. She said to Kairaithin in a light, fierce voice that was nothing like the voice of a human woman, “This was a night for victory and the living fire!”

And we shall finish the victory, lest we dishonor the night that has given it to us
, agreed the griffin mage, his voice slicing not quite painfully around the edges of Tehre’s mind.

Kes shook off fire as an ordinary woman might shake drops of water off her hands. Then she flung herself onto the back of the brown griffin, which dipped its wings to make room for her to mount. The griffin was laughing too, not aloud, but joy blazed from every line of its slender body. It hurled itself aloft, the girl bending low over its neck, and the fiery wind blazed around them both, the darkness opening to let them through.

The bronze griffin said to Kairaithin, its voice terrifyingly eager,
Shall we end this?
It swayed forward a step, its wings flaring, the rising wind hissing through the feathers with a deadly sound. Tehre thought it might simply bite Beguchren’s head off and she crouched defensively down over the mage. Though probably that would simply prompt the griffin to bite
her
head off instead…

“No,” said Lord Bertaud. He stood up, walked quietly to stand beside Tehre, dropped a hand to touch her shoulder. But he did not look at her. He was looking only at Kairaithin. He said flatly, as though he really thought the griffin would care what he said, “It’s not acceptable to Feierabiand that Casmantium be destroyed.”

Is it acceptable to you that the country of fire be destroyed?
asked the griffin mage, his voice terrible with contained anger.
Is it acceptable to you that the People of Fire and Air be destroyed?

“No,” said Bertaud. “Find another way.”

Kairaithin’s wings flared; he flung his head up, his terrible beak snapping shut with a horrifying, deadly sound.
If there is no other way?

“There must be,” Lord Bertaud insisted, but to Tehre he looked grim and ill, as though he thought maybe there was not.

The griffin mage caught fire from the wind, drew fire from the sand, sent fire running in a thin loop around the circle of pillars. He was going to kill them all, Tehre thought; whatever alliance existed between the griffins and Feierabiand, he was going to burn them all to ash, she and Lord Bertaud and Gereint, and below them all those men with their useless spears, and then the griffins were going to ruin the rivers on which all of southern Casmantium depended and laugh as the country of earth withered… She said, “No,” and stood up, lowering Beguchren gently to the sand. Everyone was staring at her, but she barely noticed. All her attention was on Gereint, who was unchanged, tucked down against the sand, not quite unconscious, but certainly not aware. Alone of them all, he had noticed neither battle nor defeat and was now innocent of their imminent death.

His strength had been taken by Beguchren. But he hadn’t been injured. He was only weak. If he regained his strength, he’d be a mage, probably. Untrained, of course. That hadn’t mattered to Beguchren. The king’s mage might even have found it an advantage. It wouldn’t be an advantage now. But still… Tehre knelt beside Gereint, laid a hand on his shoulder, and spun off some of her own strength, feeding it to him as a healer might support an injured man. She’d watched her mother do this, and although she’d never done it before herself, it seemed easy enough. She had told Beguchren the truth: She was stronger than she looked; she could draw strength from her gift, plenty to spare.

Under her hand, Gereint’s shoulder tensed. His head came up. Awareness came into his eyes. He looked first up into her face. He was pleased to see her: that, first. Then surprised. Then frightened, as memory and thought came back to him. He looked past her, then to Lord Bertaud, whom he did not know. He dismissed him, looked farther. Saw Beguchren, lying abandoned and insensible on the sand. The fear was replaced by anger, and then, as he turned his attention instead toward Kairaithin and the other griffin, by grim revulsion. Tehre stared at him. She had understood the surprise, the fear, the anger. But the depth of loathing she saw in Gereint’s eyes astonished her. Or, no. Hadn’t somebody… probably Andreikan Warichteier… said something about a violent antipathy between mages of earth and mages of fire? And Gereint was a mage now.

Not taking his eyes off of Kairaithin, he got to his feet, and Tehre jumped up and backed away, suddenly not certain whom, or what, she’d woken from an exhausted stupor and brought back into the desert night.

G
ereint was aware first only of Tehre’s presence, which for an instant seemed ordinary, expected, part of the natural order of the world. Then he remembered that he’d left her in Breidechboden, and although he didn’t yet recall where he was now, he knew it wasn’t the capital. So then he wondered, How she had come to this place? Puzzled, he looked past her. But he did not understand at once what he saw: a man he did not recognize, and a hillside that fell away into the darkness; sand and fire; pillars of twisted stone standing black against the dark sky—inimical fire linking one pillar to the next in a thin circle; crushing heat rising from the sand underfoot and pressing down from above. He remembered the desert at last, and looked for Beguchren. Found him: collapsed and unconscious. He was immediately angry: why had no one helped the mage? Couldn’t they see he needed attention, care? He began to push himself up.

Then he finally saw the griffins, and the anger he’d felt on Beguchren’s behalf flared into a cold white fury laced with loathing. Memory crashed back with an almost physical shock, and he found himself on his feet, glaring toward the creatures, outraged by their very existence. If he’d known how to attack them, he would have done it then. Though, an instant later, it occurred to him that Beguchren
had
known how to fight them and
he
was lying helpless on the sand. And if the king’s own mage had been defeated, what chance did an ignorant, untrained new-made mage have in any battle? He hesitated, caught between furious antipathy and an awareness of his own helplessness.

Then Tehre caught his hand.

Startled out of his anger, Gereint stared down at her. She was tiny, covered with red dust, her hair singed and her hands blistered from the fire that scattered from the wind. Her mouth was set in determination, her eyes snapping with forceful thought. She did not seem frightened at all. She looked exactly as she always did when absorbed by a difficult problem: intense and absorbed and distracted. She said quickly, “Either the griffins will destroy Casmantium, or we’ll destroy them, and we don’t have the strength to stop them, but there’s another way, there really is—as long as you’ll help me, are you a maker at all, anymore?”

“I—” began Gereint. He meant to say,
I’m a stranger to myself. I don’t know what I am.
Only Tehre did not wait for him to say anything at all.

She put her other hand on Gereint’s arm, whether to steady herself or to somehow balance her gift against his unskilled mage power or to take back some of the strength she’d given him or even to give him more of her strength; he couldn’t tell.