The Care and Feeding of Griffins (16 page)

Antilles stopped frozen.  He did not blink, did not even seem to breathe.

Tonka lowered his head.  Weariness was in him, scouring as sand in his veins.  He felt like weeping.

“
What,” Antilles began, very quietly, and that was all he said for a long time.  Eventually, he moved his axe to its holding place on his back strap and took two uneven steps towards Tonka.  “What is it you say to me?”

“
The words were ugly enough on the first speaking,” Tonka answered, still without raising his eyes.  “Do not force me to repeat them.”

It could not be silent.  There was life on every side of them
—nyati in the far plains lowing to one another, fish leaping in the chattering river, birds calling in the trees and fletcher minks mimicking them as they hunted.  Over all, the wind blew endlessly while branches fiddled their bony fingers and grass gave up its dying breaths.  Somewhere to the east, the human surely made her imprints to this web of breath and struggle that was life.  So it could not be silent, but there was a quiet and it was more than could be heard with ears.

“
Speak to her,” Tonka said, the same command that had proved his own undoing.  “Look into her eyes yourself.  See that there is no lie in them.  And if you see suspicion,” he said, passing a hand over his eyes, “know that it was I who put it there.  But I was wrong to do so.”  He dragged his gaze up to meet with his lord’s.  “As you are wrong.”

The distance between them pulled invisibly further.

“All these years,” Antilles said hoarsely.

“
Would I cast them aside so lightly?”

“
That you could be ready to cast them aside at all—”

“
Should stand a testament to my conviction.”  Tonka went to his foreknees and then fully knelt.  He bent, his hands flat on the damp ground and his hair brushing over them.  “If my beliefs would mean anything to you, know that I believe her innocent.  Know that every hunter I have sent to watch over her believes her innocent.”

“
That has the sound of wizardry to my ears.”

“
Then hear it in her voice!” Tonka cried.  “I cannot convince you and it is not for me to convince you!  If you will have her dead, than stand as her judge yourself, but speak to her!  I tell you, she is innocent!”

He heard a snort and then a sigh.  Antilles came to him, touched his bent head, and then lowered himself to sit beside Tonka.  He leaned his bent arm on his drawn-up knee and stared at the river.  Slowly, Tonka raised his head, but remained folded on the ground.  He watched his lord watch the world flow by them both.

“If I see her now,” Antilles said finally, “I will kill her.  Knowing that, I will not see her this day.”

Tonka looked away, staring over the plains in the direction of the human
’s camp.  Beside him, Antilles raised his head and stared broodingly into his palm.  The great fist clenched, then opened and dropped once more.

“
But I will see her,” Antilles finished.  “And I will move her on.  Painlessly, if possible.”

“
Thank you, lord.”

“
Mm.”  Antilles turned his head and met Tonka’s eye with detached speculation.  He said, “What did she say to you?  What could a human possibly have to say to make you run as you did…and then to come back and face me?”

Tonka heard a laugh tumble from his tired lips. 
“My lord, she said she would not eat a turtle.”  He heaved himself up with a sigh and turned himself toward home.  He did not look to see how his words were met.  He didn’t need to.  He could feel the stare that fell on him and he felt it burning long after Antilles was lost from sight.

26.  The Wizard

T
he wizard heard a scratching at his door and went to let his cat in.  She moved past him, brushing her tail against his leg with a clumsy purr of greeting and took herself directly back to lie upon his bed.  The wizard remained in the open doorway, breathing the fresh air and watching the orange light of sunset through the trees. 

A beautiful evening.  He did not dare to venture out and admire it fully, but he was tempted to all the same.  The fat, full moon of Last-Harvest was rising.  Stars would soon be fading into life.  All the world was stilling as the creatures of the Valley bedded down and the predators wakened to play.

The wizard did not sleep at night.

He removed himself to his hearth, but left the door open for now.  Just for a little while.  His wards would alert him to any foreign step with time enough to set the bar, and anyway, the cottage needed freshening.  He was expecting a visitor soon.

And it had been such a long time, hadn’t it?  Twelve years at least since the last party of Men had blundered to find him, but that hardly counted since the wizard hadn’t summoned them.  He’d kept them, at least long enough to put certain of them to use, but he hadn’t really wanted them.  This one, now, this one he wanted.  After all the long years of passing time, he found himself looking forward to something again and it was a fine feeling.

The clay was nearly ready.  The wizard gave it another stir, then made himself leave it be and went to his casting chamber.  The cat rolled away from him, grumbling, but the wizard simply eased around his circle and went to the other side of the bed.  He laid his hand over the cat
’s head and touched the mind beneath, drawing thought and memory from her in little sips to savor.

The girl
’s camp lay well east, almost to the Tumbled Downs, and very close to the riverbank.  She had a little blue tent, Earth-made, very new.  She had quite a cunning little cookfire dug, stone-lined, with an iron cauldron to keep in it.  It was the one thing she seemed to be master of in the pitiful camp.  Her firewood was uncut and haphazardly stacked.  There were broken stones all about the mouth of her tent and there were no tools in sight.  There was a patch of bare dirt and a great lump of pulled grass beside it to indicate she was attempting a garden, but it was a sad attempt, if so.  All the grains had been removed from the grass stems.  She was eating them.

The wizard lingered over this scene of crudely-hewn domesticity, smiling.  She was struggling, and struggle was always a good thing to see in one
’s prey.  But there was a determination in the sorry little camp that could not be denied, indicative of a bold strength of will, and that wasn’t such a good thing.  The wizard could feel his excitement building anyway.  It was so much more satisfying to feel that killing snap as a mind was taken than to simply crush something soft from the start.

With reluctance, the wizard moved on, ambling through the cat
’s memories until he came to the thing he’d wanted most:  a vision of the girl herself.  She’d been coming back from the river with a fish in each hand, walking slowly, her head turned.  The cat had been crouched low and grass obscured much of her body from the hips down, but it was a clear enough glimpse to satisfy him.  The wizard halted the flood of thought to admire her.

The humans who came most often to Arcadia were warriors; the women they brought, mere spoils of conquest, used for the breeding of new generations of warrior
s.  A son each year from first menses until death was the lot of the female’s life, and it left a telling mark on them.  Not this one.  No broad-hipped, worn and dim-eyed wench, this.  No brood cow of conqueror’s keeping or barren camp whore.  Her shape inside her Earth-cut clothes was slim and supple, delightfully voluptuous and fresh.  Her face was fine-boned, nobly-cut, and clean of disease or scarring.  Clean even of the lines of rough use and worry, for all that her little camp was so bare.

She was new-come to this hard life, oh yes.  Her skin was pale and fresh as her face, lightly-kissed with freckles across her cheeks and over one round shoulder where her shirt had coyly slipped, but it had not time enough to toughen or chap.  Her hands would be soft as silk still.  Her hair was the only thing that showed the roughened conditions of her new life.  It was long and tumbled free to her full hips, and was as red as live embers with the sun caught behind her like this, but it needed washing and brushing.  After that was done, though, it would make a silken glove to sink his hands into.

A true beauty, this girl.  And from Earth, so full-human.  The gods of that world were long slipped away and no other races remained to share that dying soil.  Only Man…but life had proved kind enough there to produce such fruits as this, and it was a sweet-seeming one indeed.

The wizard eased his grip on the cat
’s mind and let the girl walk on with her fish.  The reason for her stately speed came pouncing up behind her—the griffin.  He could not make the species, save that it was not griffawn, but that was no matter.  He would have a closer look presently and regardless of the breed, the benefits were all the same.  It was terribly young, which was at once intriguing to his curiosity and a damned nuisance.  He had assumed the thing to be full-grown, the girl’s companion, not a foundling pet.  And yet, there were possibilities there as well.

His clay must surely be done and the cat had nothing vital to show him.  He released her mind, gave her a pat, and returned to his hearth.

The clay was indeed ready, white as milk and torpidly bubbling.  The wizard pulled it from the slow coals and dipped it out onto the flat stones of his hearth to cool.  He stayed close and watchful, but his mind wandered.

How best to go about this?  She was pretty enough.  He
’d approach with the idea of securing a long prize.  She was no small distance, however, so he’d need at least one drawing stone and perhaps two.

The wizard reached into the warm puddle of clay and began to pull up lumps for shaping.  He rolled one in his hands, speaking Words of power, infusing the substance with drawing magic, and giving it what direction he could
—female, human, Earth-born.  He could trust nothing else, not even the color of her hair, but those three should surely be enough to suit his purposes.  His sigil appeared, sinking down into the soft clay in lines of charred black as it took the wizard’s spell.  He set it aside to finish cooling and picked up another, this one small, merely a pinch between his fingers.  One for the girl to carry.  One for her to touch.  He spoke Words of anchoring to this clay, knowing that when it had touched her skin, the distance between them would drop away.  The wizard would always be able to feel her then.

The wizard shaped his clay, all his concentration aligned to this purpose, but he was relaxed and even happy as he worked.  He was old, as pure humans reckoned such things, though he did not look it, and he
’d had entire lifetimes to practice his arts.  The plot to take another’s mind and enthrall it for his own was a daunting one for many mages, but not for him.  But then, his blood was not pure, and his power was greater for it. 

The wizard had been sired of human stock
—wizarding stock, even, from Avalon itself—but the womb that had carried him to first breath was human only in appearance, and that only when she wished to be.  She was Mab, the Great Deceiver, witch-queen of Chaos, seductress, goddess of dreams and delusions.  Mab, his mother, and she had, for whatever passing whim, birthed him and let him live.

He was mule, of course, and he had suffered for it under the ridicule of his father
’s folk, but not for long.  Mab’s blood warmed his veins.  Mab’s spells were sung to him in her arms as she gave suck.  From her lips had come the name that no other lips had spoken and which time itself now held forgotten.  Even he did not know it, and so was secure as no other mage in all of the Remembered Realms could ever be.  He was more wizard at the age of six than any full-blood human who dared to teach him.  His dead seed held more power for that it came of him over any who could produce a bastard of their own.  So he was mule, what of it?  He needed no fathered get to ensure his bloodline.  He would live a thousand years and be his own legacy.  And when he was master of every magic, he would return to the world that had borne him and rule it, ha, with a grip of iron.

But for now, there was peace.  Little competition ever came to Arcadia in the form of wizards, and those that did were swiftly dealt with.  He had years to pass in the shelter of his cottage, with nothing to disturb his sorcerous meditations but for the occasional diversion of squabbling warlords, rebellious natives, or girls like this one.

This one…and her griffin.

The wizard left one cake of
sorcerer’s clay to dry for crumbling and settled the sigils he had made in an orderly row.  They could be placed tonight, in the small hours before dawn.  The girl would be sleeping then, no doubt.  It was dark enough, the wizard saw as he glanced out his open door, so perhaps she was sleeping even now.

The thought produced a pleasant jump in him.  He rose from his hearth and returned to his casting room, closing and barring the door as he passed it.  He chased the cat from his bed and shut her out, then stripped off his robe and began to make his way to the center of his circle.

He lit a candle from the bowl of dragon’s heart-blood (after two hundred years, it had begun to cool; in another fifty, perhaps it would no longer be hot enough to light a tallow wick) and seated himself before its flame.  He gazed into the white flicker of its fire, relaxing his body even as his mind strengthened.  When he could hear the squalling of the innocent whose fat had been rendered for the candle, the wizard untethered of his physical self and went looking for the girl.

He slipped through the walls and past his cat (like all cats, she could see him.  Like most cats, she did not appear to care) and out into the young night.  Invisible, he flew at wind
’s speed through his woods and over the plains, following the river east.  The tethering pulse of his heart faded with distance.  He let it fall behind him.  He was vulnerable, yes, but there was no danger to his body while it was safely shut in his cottage, and no Farasai witch-nag would dare to challenge him, even if one were to notice his passage here.  His only danger would come from sileni, and he knew none would be so near to the human’s camp.

Ah, there she was.  Her fire had been banked, but he could see the glow of her sleeping mind through the walls of her thin tent.  The wizard circled once, for caution
’s sake, but the astral night was still as the material one.  He pushed through into her denning place, meeting with no resistance, not even a child’s rune of ill-banishment.

She was nothing but a tuft of hair at one end of a lumpy bundle of bed.  Her mind was a fire swirling, sleeping, delicate and vulnerable.  The griffin was a second glow at her hip, pale green and alien.  The wizard dipped his hand down into that green etherlight, touching dreams of color without shape, sound without substance.  The griffin
’s mind held the dream-feel of the girl’s soft breast against his small body, the dream-sound of her steady heart and her singing.  Whether beast-dreams or baby-dreams, it was too soon to know, so the wizard withdrew.

He floated up and touched the girl, sinking his hands into head and heart both, transported instantly to the world she had invented for herself.  His feet found the ground as gravity was reasserted.  He clothed himself with an idle thought, examining his surroundings.  Earth, of course.  A city of Men.  A great stone building w
ith black glass windows, carved of a single piece of rock.  No, poured.  Concrete, they called it.  He remembered now.

There were people moving back and forth on the stair that led to the building
’s entry, and the wizard adjusted his robe to match their attire.  His prey was standing on the stair.  She hadn’t noticed him yet.

The wizard approached her, keeping at her back.  She was dreaming of paper dragons, all in flight over the stone stairs.  The fluttering of their thin wings, the fla
sh of their colors in the sun.  Like true draconids, they flocked and looped and sung and spun in the air.  He admired them with her for a time, enjoying himself, content to let her control the scene they shared.

She turned around, started to move off, and then paused and looked back at him with a puzzled frown.  Her subconscious mind had recognized he was not part of this dream, but she would not understand that.  She would know only that there was something about him
…something strange and special.

“
Do I know you?” she asked.

“
Would you like to?”

She smiled uncertainly.  Such a charming girl.

The wizard stepped closer and touched her soft cheek, tracing his thumb from one freckle to another.  “Fairy kisses, they used to call these,” he said.

“
They still do.”

The wizard moved his hand to her hair, now clean and brushed and neatly braided.  So beautiful.  It had been such a long time since he had seen something so beautiful.  He teased out a strand from the thick rope she had made and rubbed it between his fingers.