The White Gryphon v(mw-2 Read online

  “And that is—?” Zhaneel asked.

  Makke lowered her voice still further. “That there is a magic which is more forbidden than any other. I would say nothing of it, except that I fear your people may treat it with great casualness, and if you revealed that, there would be no treaty, not now, and not in the future. Have your people the magic that—that looks into—into minds—and hears the thoughts of others?”

  “It might be,” Zhaneel said with delicate caution, suddenly now as alert as ever she had been on a scouting mission. All of her hackles prickled as they threatened to rise. There was something odd about that question. “I am not altogether certain what you mean, for I believe our definitions of magic and yours are not quite the same. Why do you ask?”

  “Because that is the magic that is absolutely forbidden to all except the priests, and only then, the priests who are called to special duties by the gods,” Makke said firmly. “I do not exaggerate. This is most important.”

  “Like Leyuet?” Zhaneel asked in surprise. She had not guessed that Truthsayer Leyuet was a priest of any kind. He did not have the look of one, nor did he wear the same kind of clothing as Palisar.

  “Yes.” Makke turned to look into her eyes and hold her gaze there for a long moment, with the same expression that a human mother would have in admonishing a child she suspects might try something stupid. “This magic is a horror. It is unclean,” she said, with absolute conviction. “It allows mortals to look into a place where only the gods should look. Even a Truthsayer looks no farther than to determine the veracity of what is said—only into the soul, which has no words, and not the mind. If your people have it, say nothing. And do not use it here.”

  We had better not mention Kechara, ever, to one of these people! And Amberdrake had better be discreet about his own powers!

  That was all she could think at just that moment. While Zhaneel tried to digest everything she’d been told, Makke stood, and carefully put the palm fan on the small pile left for the use of visitors. “I must go,” she said apologetically. “A certain amount of rest is permitted to one my age, but the work remains to be done, and I would not trust it to the hands of those like that foolish gardener, who would probably think that Jewel and Corvi wish to rend him with their fearsome claws.”

  Since neither Jewel nor Corvi had anything more than a set of stubby, carefully filed down nails, Zhaneel laughed. Makke smiled and shuffled her way back into their suite.

  The gryphlets looked ready to sleep for the rest of the afternoon; not even all that talking disturbed them in the least. Zhaneel settled herself on a new, cooler spot, and lay down again, letting the stone pull some of the dreadful heat out of her body.

  She closed her eyes, but sleep had deserted her for the moment. So Makke is an untitled Scholar! No wonder she looks as if she were hiding secrets. Now, more than ever, Zhaneel was glad that she and Gesten had made friends with the old woman. Next to the Silver Veil, it seemed they could not have picked a better informant. That explains why she bothered to learn our language, anyway. She must have been very curious about Silver Veil and the north, and the best way to find out would have been to ask Silver Veil. It must have taken a lot of courage to dare that, though.

  But Makke was observant; perhaps she had noticed how kind Silver Veil was to her servants, and had decided that the kestra’chern would not take a few questions amiss.

  An amateur scholar would also have been fascinated by the gryphons and the hertasi. Perhaps that was why Makke had responded to the overtures of friendship Zhaneel and Gesten had made toward her.

  And when it became painfully evident how naive we were about the Haighlei—Zhaneel smiled to herself. There was a great deal of the maternal in Makke’s demeanor toward Zhaneel, and there was no doubt that she thought the twins were utterly adorable, even if they looked nothing like a pair of human babies. Perhaps Makke had decided to adopt them, as a kind of honorary grandmother.

  She said, only daughter. She could have meant only child as well. And if her child is now a priest—do the Haighlei allow their priests to marry and have children? I don’t think so. Zhaneel sighed. I wonder if her daughter is ashamed of Makke; she is only a cleaning woman, after all. For all that most priests preach humility, I never have seen one who particularly enjoyed being humble. If that were the case, Makke could be looking on Zhaneel as a kind of quasi-daughter, too.

  I shall have to make certain to ask her advice on the twins. I don’t have to take it, after all! And that will make her feel wanted and needed. Zhaneel sighed, and turned so that her left flank was on the cool marble. But the warning about magic—that is very disturbing. Except, of course, that we can’t do much magic until the effect of the Cataclysm settles. That might not even be within our lifetimes.

  She would warn Skandranon, of course. And he would warn Amberdrake. Zhaneel was not certain how much of what Amberdrake did was magic of the mind, and how much was training and observation, but it would be a good thing for Drake to be very careful at this point. Winterhart, too, although her abilities could not possibly be as strong as Drake’s. . . .

  Healing. I shall have to ask Makke about Healing. Surely the Haighlei do not forbid that!

  But the one thing they must not mention was the existence of Kechara. If the Haighlei were against the simpler versions of thought-reading, surely they would be horrified by poor little Kechara!

  The fact that she is as simple-minded as she is would probably only revolt them further. And she is misborn; there is no getting around that. It’s nothing short of a miracle that she has had as long and as healthy a life as she has. But she is not “normal” and we can’t deny that.

  So it was better not to say anything about her. It wasn’t likely that anyone would ask, after all.

  Let me think, though—they may ask how we are communicating so quickly with White Gryphon. So—this evening, Skan should ask permission from King Shalaman and Palisar to “communicate magically” with the rest of the Council back home. Since they do that, they shouldn‘t give Skan any problems about doing the same. He’s clever; if they ask him how he can communicate when things are so magically unsettled, he can tell them about the messages we send with birds, or tell them something else that they’ll believe, and not be lying. Then, when we get instant answers from home, they won’t be surprised or upset because we didn‘t ask permission first.

  So that much was settled. If the Haighlei sent resident envoys to White Gryphon, there was no reason to tell them what Kechara was—

  And since she is there among all the other children of the Silvers, her room just looks like a big nursery. Would they want to talk to her, though?

  Would an envoy have any reason to talk to any child, except to pat it on the head because its parents were important? Probably not. And Cafri could keep her from bounding over and babbling everything to the envoys; he’d kept her from stepping on her own wings before this.

  With all of that sorted out to Zhaneel’s satisfaction, she finally felt sleep overcoming her. She made a little mental “tag” to remind her to tell Skan all about this conversation and the things she’d reasoned out, though. Gryphonic memory was excellent, but she wanted to make certain that nothing drove this out of her mind, even on a temporary basis.

  Then, with her body finally cooled enough by the stone to relax, she stretched out just a little farther and drifted off into flower-scented dreams.

  Four

  Winterhart moved easily among the Haighlei in their brilliant costumes of scarlet, vermilion, bittersweet and sunset-orange, wheat and burnt umber and the true gold of the metal; she seemed one of them despite her dress and light skin. She was distinctive, a single, long-stemmed lily among a riot of dahlias. Lady Cinnabar’s refitted gown of white silk gauze and emerald silk damask was as startling in this crowd as one of the common robes of the Haighlei would be in a Northern Court.

  A Northern Court. . . .

  Assuming there was such a thing as a Northern Court anymore. The few b
its of information trickling in seemed to indicate that the Cataclysm had a far more widespread effect than any of the Kaled’a’in had dreamed.

  We were so concerned with our own survival, we never thought about what would become of the lands we left behind, she reflected, as she exchanged a polite greeting with a highborn maiden and her bored brother. Oh, we knew that Urtho’s Tower was gone, and the Palace with it, but we never thought about other lands.

  Without Ma’ar at the helm, the kingdoms he had conquered—the few that survived the Cataclysm—fell into chaos and intertribal warfare, the same kind of warfare that had devastated them before he came to rule.

  And Winterhart could not help but feel a certain bitter satisfaction at that. If they had not been so eager to listen to his mad dreams of conquest, he would never have gotten as far as he had. Now, from being the acme of civilization, they were reduced to the copper knives and half-wild sheep herds of their ancestors, with the hand of every clan against members of any other clan. Their cities were in ruins, their veneer of civilization lost, all because they had followed a madman.

  But beyond Ma’ar’s lands, the Cataclysm utterly devastated other nations who relied heavily on magic. A few refugees had reached the Wtasi Empire to the east, on the Salten Sea, after all this time, and the word they brought of far-reaching consequences of the double explosion was terrible. Many lands had once relied on Gates to move supplies and food, especially into the cities. It wasn’t possible to erect Gates anymore; there was no certainty that they would work. With no Gates, these cities starved; once people were starving and desperate, order collapsed. And worse was to come, for no sooner had the authorities—or what passed for them—sorted out some of the chaos, in poured hordes of leaderless troops who took what they needed by force of arms. Winterhart could only hope that those were Ma’ar’s leaderless troops who were acting that way—but in her heart she knew better. It was likely that their own people, when faced with privation, would act just the same as their former enemies.

  It is easy to assign the persona of a monster to the faceless enemy, but the fact is that most of them were just soldiers, following orders, no worse than our own soldiers. It had taken her a long time to work her way around to that conclusion, and it still wasn’t a comfortable thought. But that was one unexpected result of living with Amberdrake: learning to seek or reason out truth, and accept it unflinchingly, no matter how uncomfortable it was.

  The result of the Cataclysm was that there were no central governments worthy of the name up there now. For the most part, the largest body of organization was the small town, or the occasional place that those aforementioned soldiers had taken over and fortified. Old skills that did not require magic had to be relearned or rediscovered, and that took time. Civilization in the north was gone, as far as the Haighlei were concerned.

  And where the Clan k’Leshya was concerned, as well, and all the adopted Kaled’a’in with them, Winterhart among them. There had been no communication from any of the other Kaled’a’in Clans, and no one really expected there to be any. K’Leshya had traveled far beyond the others, the distance of the maximum that two Gates could reach, rather than just one. That was too far for anyone except Kechara to reach with Mindspeech, and too far for the messenger-birds to go, assuming anyone was willing to risk them.

  We are on our own, and we can only hope that the other Clans survived as well as we did. Our future is here, and we had better build a firm foundation for it.

  So she walked among these strange people in their strange garb and accustomed herself to them, until they no longer seemed strange, until it was her dress and her pale skin that seemed odd. She moved through the gathering like one of the graceful slim silver fish that lived in the ponds with the fat, colorful ones. Unconsciously she imitated the slow, deliberate pace of their steps and the dancelike eddies and flows of the Court itself. She took all that into herself and made it a part of her.

  That was, after all, precisely what she had been trained to do, so long ago. This was what she had been before she became the Trondi’irn Winterhart, serving the Sixth Wing gryphons in the army of Urtho, the Mage of Silence. Before, when she had borne another name, and a title, and the burden of rank, she had moved to the dancelike pattern of another Court.

  Now rank was no longer a burden, but a cloak that trailed invisibly from the shoulders. The name she wore was hers, with no invisible baggage of long and distinguished lineage. The title? Hers as well, truly earned, like the name.

  But the rest was familiar, as familiar as the feel of silk sliding along her body, as real as the exchange of banal courtesies and pleasantries. And since this was a Court like any other—with the folk of White Gryphon a strange and possibly hostile presence—there was caution and even malignity beneath the courtesies, and fear beneath the pleasantries. It was her task to discover where, who, and what hid under the posture and counterposture.

  She often felt at a time like this as if she were a sword sliding into an old, well-worn sheath, or a white-hot blade sinking into a block of ice. She was Winterhart, the trondi’irn—but she was also much more than the Winterhart her fellow refugees knew. She had not used these old skills in a very, very long time, but they were a significant part of her, long disregarded. She stretched muscles long unused, and she relished the sensation.

  Amberdrake, to her bemusement, simply smiled and bid her follow her instincts and her inclinations. “I have been among the well-born,” he’d said this very evening, before they made their entrance. “I know how to act with them and comfort them. But I never was one of them. You were, and all that early training makes you something I cannot be, and can only imitate. It gives you an assurance that is part of you rather than assumed. Believe me, my love, it shows. So go and be your own gracious self, and show me how it is done. After all,” he said with a grin and a wink, “I enjoy gazing at you anyway.”

  Like a hawk with the jesses cut, he sent her off, trusting she would return to his glove. And she would, of course, for like a true falconer and his bird, they were partners.

  Or perhaps we are more like those Kaled’a’in scouts with their specially-bred birds, the bondbirds, who Mindspeak with the ones they are bonded to. She wondered what the Haighlei would make of those! They had relatively few domesticated animals, and most of them were herdbeasts. No horses, though—

  They have sheep, goats, and cattle. They have those misshapen, hairy things that need so little water for riding and bearing burdens in the deserts, and donkeys for pulling carts. Dogs the size of small ponies! A few, a very few, of the Great Cats that have been partly domesticated. No house cats, no horses, no birds of prey. She smiled and nodded and exchanged small-talk with the envoy from the Kumbata Empire, and let part of her mind consider the possible impact that the introduction of each of these domesticated creatures could have on the Haighlei. The cats alone would cause a stir—those huge dogs had been bred to hunt equally large cats, and she could well imagine the delight that the elegant Haighlei would take in the graceful “little tigers” that the adopted Kaled’a’in had brought with them from their homes.

  Trade and the possibilities of trade . . . it would be much easier on the citizens of White Gryphon if they could get their hands on proper plows, and not the trial-and-error instruments they had now, made by a weapon-smith who thought he recalled the one lesson he’d had in forging such things, twenty years ago. Proper boats, made for fishing, would save lives if the fishing fleet was ever caught by a big storm. Seeds bred to grow here—and the odd plants that the Haighlei themselves grew to eat—that would not fail in the heat, or sprout too late or too soon.

  And in return—horses and cats, for a beginning. Lionwind, the k’Leshya Clan Chief, would be happy to learn of a “proper” market for his riding horses, which just at the moment were, to his injured pride, often trained to harness for pulling carts and plows. After that, there were surely skills they could exchange. Haighlei jewelry, for instance, was lovely and costly, but massive. No
t crudely made, but with none of the detail that—for instance—the silversmith who made the Silver Gryphon badges could produce. Would the Haighlei like that sort of thing? They’d certainly admired the delicacy of Winterhart’s ornaments, so they might—particularly if the northern jewelry became a fad item.

  Odd. I feel so at home here, as if I were bom for this place and this court, so rigidly structured, so refined in its subtleties. . . . The longer they were here, the more comfortable she felt.

  The Haighlei ruled a territory more vast than anyone up north had ever dreamed; two Kingdoms—or Empires, for they had aspects of both—here, sharing the land between the Salten Sea and the Eastern Sea. Four more farther south, dividing yet another continent among them, a continent joined to this one by a relatively narrow bridge of land. The Haighlei called their rulers both “King” and “Emperor” indiscriminately, something that sounded strange to Winterhart’s northern ears.

  Another member of the Court greeted her, and Winterhart smiled warmly into Silver Veil’s eyes, oddly relieved to see that she was no longer the only pale face with a northern gown here this evening. Silver Veil wore her hair loose, as always, and a pale gray silk gown that echoed the silver of her hair. “You are doing well, little sister,” Silver Veil said softly. “I have been listening, watching. Amberdrake is respected for his office and his training, but you are acknowledge to be a Power.”