Land of the Burning Sands (50 page)

“Farther south, it will seem more familiar,” Beguchren said quietly.

“Well, lord, I’m sure that’s true, and probably just as well. I’m not sure anyone would want to put a boat out in the river amid that mist.”

Beguchren nodded, his storm-gray eyes unreadable. “And this Feierabianden lord? Lord Bertaud, yes?”

“Bertaud son of Boudan,” Tehre put in quickly. “He helped us, helped me…”

“Yes?”

“The griffin mage told me he helped build and seal the wall because of Lord Bertaud’s influence,” Gereint added.

Beguchren’s expression became even more inscrutable.

Tehre traded a glance with her father, which Gereint found impossible to decipher. “I’ll find him, ask him to speak with you,” she suggested.

“Please do,” Beguchren said softly, and sent everyone else away so that he might speak to the foreign lord alone.

“Though I don’t know why,” Tehre told Gereint later. “Bertaud said he only asked perfectly normal, straightforward things. Just what happened.”

Bertaud?
Gereint thought. Tehre was so informal with the foreign lord? She called him by name like that, without even thinking? But he said only, “Perhaps he was simply tired of being attended by a crowd, and I don’t blame him.”

“Perhaps that’s so,” Tehre agreed, and began absently to sketch equations containing the square root of the ratio of crack length over the radius of crack tip, or so Gereint supposed. She was, she’d said, trying to work out whether you indeed simply doubled that value in her stress calculations, or whether the multiplicative factor merely
approximated
two. And she thought there was some small additive factor as well… Gereint left her to it. At least any Feierabianden lords who happened to wander by would probably find the calculations even more impenetrable than he did himself.

The day after that, Beguchren got up from his bed and made his way through the halls and out into the courtyard, speaking to no one save for a polite murmur of acknowledgment to an astonished man-at-arms at the front gate. The man-at-arms hurried to tell Eben Amnachudran, and Amnachudran told Gereint, and Gereint found Beguchren sitting, pale and exhausted, underneath a big old apple tree. He was leaning against its knotted trunk, his face tipped back toward the leafy branches, his eyes closed, looking so ethereal it seemed strange the light breeze did not carry him away.

The tree had recovered well from the brief encroachment of the desert wind. Sweet golden apples hung thickly overhead. Their fragrance drifted in the quiet air. Amid the grasses, windfall apples buzzed with wasps too busy to notice or resent the intrusion of men.

“You don’t need to fetch your own, you know,” Gereint said, sitting down beside Beguchren. “The children brought plenty right into the kitchens.”

The smaller man smiled wryly, not opening his eyes. After a moment, he said, “It’s just as well. I think I could neither climb the tree for the hanging fruit, nor chase away the wasps from the fallen.”

“You’re stronger. You think you can walk back to the house from here?”

“Oh, yes. In a little while. After I sit here for a few moments…”

“Shall I leave?”

“It doesn’t matter. Stay, if you wish.”

They sat in companionable silence for a time. Eventually, Gereint ventured, “The Arobern will value you anyway, you know,” and then flushed, immediately realizing how stupid that sounded.

Beguchren mercifully didn’t even open his eyes, much less respond.

After a while, Gereint gathered his nerve and tried again, more simply and directly. “I’m sorry. I’d give it back to you, if I could. I suppose you can’t make yourself back into a mage as I did? Recover magecraft through the side door, as it were?”

“No. I’m not a maker.” Beguchren paused, and then added, “We both lost what we valued, I suppose. It’s fair enough. It’s not that different from what I did to you. In reverse.”

“It worked.”

“Not in anything like the manner I’d intended. Nor at the price I’d prepared to pay. Not even in the same
coin
I’d prepared to pay.” He suddenly sounded exhausted. “Thus the world teaches us humility.”

“But it still worked.”

“… true.” There was a small silence. Beguchren said, “I suppose I’ll become accustomed to it, in time.”

In much the same way that a man might become accustomed to being blind and deaf. Just so. Gereint did not answer. He stood up after a moment, reaching high into the branches for a couple of apples. He had a belt knife, but it was too large and clumsy a thing to peel apples with. If he’d still been a maker, he could have coaxed the knife to exceed its design, encouraged it to hold the sort of edge such delicate work demanded… He cut each apple in quarters, cored them, and handed half the pieces to Beguchren without trying to peel them. They sat under the tree and ate the apples, surrounded by the quiet autumn sunlight and the buzzing of wasps. In the distance voices called, indistinct but cheerful.

“I believe I can probably walk back to the house now,” Beguchren said. He glanced at Gereint, half smiling. “And if I can’t…”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary.” Gereint got to his feet and offered the other man a hand up.

Beguchren made it back to the house on his own feet. But once they were back in the house, he shook his head quietly as Gereint turned toward his room. “I’ll speak to Eben Amnachudran. And Lady Emre.”

Gereint said, puzzled, “You can do that from your bed—”

“No,” said Beguchren. Quietly but definitely.

By which Gereint understood that Beguchren did not want to
chat
with Amnachudran or his wife. He wanted to talk to them in some more formal place than a bedroom, in some more formal capacity than that of their guest. And since he was no longer a mage, that most likely meant he wanted to speak to them as a king’s agent. “Likely they’ll be in Amnachudran’s office,” he guessed, and hailed a passing servant with the query.

Both Eben Amnachudran and his wife were in the office-music room. Amnachudran was, of course, at his desk and surrounded by books, but somewhat to Gereint’s surprise, Lord Bertaud was also leaning over the desk. Both men were poring over a large open book bound in pale linen and illustrated all around the text with dragons and griffins in gold and red and black ink. Tehre was a few steps away, gazing down at a sketch of a bridge and absently rolling a quill pen between her fingers. Lady Emre was seated, as she had been the first time Gereint had seen her, at her spinet. This time she was playing, her expression abstracted. The music was a northern children’s song, very simple and plain. In Lady Emre’s hands, it recovered the charm that too great familiarity might have stolen from it and became not merely plain, but elegant.

But she lifted her hands from the keys, turning with everyone else when Gereint and Beguchren came in. Amnachudran moved hastily to pull chairs around for them. Beguchren sank into his with a slight nod, but Gereint merely drifted a step away to lean his hip against the edge of the big desk, watching curiously.

“I’ll leave tomorrow morning,” Beguchren began. “So if I may trouble you, honored sir, for the loan of a carriage and driver? Thank you.” He paused and surveyed them all. The cool authority of his tone and manner could be estimated, Gereint thought, by the lack of overt protest at the idea of his traveling. The effort that matter-of-fact coolness cost him was less easy to estimate.

“I am grateful for all your efforts over the past days,” Beguchren continued. “On my behalf, and in the Arobern’s voice, I thank you. We can only imagine how else events might have unfolded. With, to be sure, the most profound gratitude that we need imagination to view those events.” He gave them each a slight nod and said to Lord Bertaud, “I am quite certain the king will wish to thank you personally for your assistance. I hope you will accompany me back to the court in Breidechboden?” He accepted the Feierabianden lord’s murmured assurance with another nod.

Then Beguchren leaned back in his chair, took a breath, turned his storm-gray eyes to Eben Amnachudran, and added, “The only question that remains to be settled before my departure, then, is this: Was it you yourself who removed Gereint Enseichen’s brand? Or was it your lady wife?”

There was a deep, deep silence. Gereint hadn’t seen that coming at all. But, he gradually realized, Amnachudran had. The scholar looked shocked by the question, but he did not, somehow, look
surprised
. He stood with his palms flat on his desk, his head slightly bowed, not looking at any of them. After a moment he lifted his head and glanced at his wife. Lady Emre looked stricken. Her eyes were on Beguchren, not on her husband; she shook her head very slightly in a motion that might have been disbelief or might have been a plea, and either way was probably involuntary. But she did not say anything or make any overt gesture.

Amnachudran said at last to Beguchren, “My lord, it was I.”

Beguchren inclined his head. “Then I will have to ask you, also, to accompany me tomorrow.”

“Of course,” said Amnachudran, just a little stiffly.

No one else said a word. Tehre opened her mouth, but her mother half lifted a hand and shook her head quickly, and, to Gereint’s surprise, Tehre closed her mouth again without making a sound. Her eyes snapped with anger, but then narrowed, and Gereint knew she was thinking hard. He wished he knew what conclusion she might come to. He himself felt torn between wanting to exclaim to Beguchren, in outrage,
How can you?
and at the same time wanting to plead with Amnachudran and the rest,
He’s the king’s agent; what else can he do?
He said nothing at all.

T
he Arobern received them, two days after their return to Breidechboden, in an intimidating room large enough for thirty men to gather, a room that held enough large, heavy, ornately carved chairs to accommodate all thirty as well as a single massive and ornate desk. The king had heard the whole account from Beguchren, or so Gereint surmised. Certainly Beguchren had gone to him at once on arriving in the city. No one else had; no one else had been invited to.

Gereint had stayed, of course, at the Amnachudran townhouse, with Tehre and her father, and Sicheir, who, he gathered, had gone on to Breidechboden with the king’s agent after Tehre had defied the agent to go north. The other party to that defiance, Lord Bertaud, alone among them presumably not at personal risk of the king’s displeasure, had returned to whatever apartment within the palace was allotted for his use. Tehre had received two messages from the Feierabianden lord, one each day, and returned three of her own, which was only natural. Gereint set his teeth against any ill-considered comment he might have made about this correspondence.

There had been no word from either Beguchren or the king until at last, and to everyone’s unspoken relief, the command to appear for an audience had been brought by an extremely elegant royal chamberlain. The waiting had been difficult for Eben Amnachudran and his children, Gereint knew. But if any of them had said a word about their nervousness, it had not been to Gereint.

The king was not seated at the desk, nor in the room at all, when the chamberlain ushered them within. This was not a surprise; he would hardly have arrived early to wait for suppliants to come before him. No; they had been sent for and had come, and now would wait the king’s pleasure. Nothing rested on the desk save an elegant gold-and-crystal four-hour sand timer, turned recently, so that perhaps half the sand had run through to the bottom glass. Gereint hoped the sand did not mark the wait they were expected to endure: Two hours might not realistically be long to wait for a royal audience, but at the moment it seemed an intolerable span of time.

Though the room was not without interest. Blue-and-teal abstract mosaics rippled all along three of the walls, high up, near the ceiling, which was painted pale blue with flying larks. The remaining wall held only a large painting framed with long velvet hangings of blue and violet, showing Breidechboden from above as a lark might see it. The light that poured across the painted city possessed a crystalline clarity, as though the city had been created in just the instant the painting captured and had not yet begun to age. It occurred to Gereint, for the first time but with a curious sense of inevitability, that the artist was certainly Beguchren Teshrichten himself.

Gereint found the room, as a whole, rather alarming. And yet… it might have been far worse. It might have been a formal audience hall, all porphyry columns and vaulted, echoing marble, with a chill to it that bit worse than any northern midwinter. This room, though it fairly radiated authority, was not nearly so formal, and the chamberlain who guided them invited them all to enter with an expansive gesture that suggested welcome rather than command. It was not the sort of reception they might have expected from an angry king. But it was a little hard to estimate what sort of reception it actually
was
.