Land of the Burning Sands (21 page)

It was a dismissal as well as a command. Gereint got to his feet, turned his back on the king’s mage, and walked out.

Fareine opened the door of Tehre Amnachudran’s house when Gereint knocked. Her smile held surprise and delight; her glance downward toward Gereint’s feet seemed perfectly involuntary.

Gereint was still wearing the sandals he had been given. He obligingly turned one foot so the woman could see his ankle. “Legally,” he added. As he said it, it came home to him, almost for the first time, that this was true. Legally free, as he had never truly expected to be again in his life. It should have been a realization of powerful joy. Perhaps it would be, eventually. But he remembered the Arobern throwing the silver
geas
rings down on the desk and declaring,
I have no use for these, unless I think of another use
. He said, “I need to speak to Tehre.”

“Of course. The honored lady’s in the library. You are most welcome! She has been very worried for you.” Fareine stepped back and swung the door wide.

Tehre Amnachudran was sitting at the library’s largest table, surrounded by heavy books and scrolls, most of them open. A sheaf of blank papers lay at her elbow and she was holding a long quill in one fine-boned hand. Gereint did not expect her to notice any intrusion, but she looked up sharply when the door opened. Then her small face lit with an unconsidered smile and she jumped to her feet. “Gereint!”

Gereint turned his foot to show her, too, his ankle. “They tell me I have you to thank for this,” he said. Not directly, but Tehre had clearly forged the first link of that chain and hammered it into shape. “You went to the
king
?”

“Well, I had to,” Tehre said simply. “They said you would go to Lord Fellesteden’s heirs; they said I couldn’t even petition to buy you. So I had to go to the Arobern. No one else can overrule a judge, you know.” Then she stood still for a moment, her formidable attention focused on him. “He said he would give you to Beguchren Teshrichten. Did he?” And, deeply suspicious, “Are you all right?”

“He did,” Gereint answered. “And I don’t know. But I’m free of the
geas
, and that’s not something I ever expected. What did you tell the Arobern? You told him the truth? That was foolish—”

“I had to,” Tehre repeated, surprised. “Not quite
all
the truth—not the part I’ve only guessed at myself.” She meant she had carefully left out any speculations about just who might have removed Gereint’s brand. “But most of the truth, yes. How else could I persuade him to listen to me? It worked: He believed me about Fellesteden, you know. He said he needed a man who could be loyal. I told him you would do very well.”

“He might have put
you
under the
geas
—”

“But he didn’t.”

Gereint didn’t say,
He still might
. He thought again of the Arobern’s heavy voice declaring,
I have no use for these, unless I think of another use
. He said harshly, “You should never have gone to him!”

“But I did,” Tehre said reasonably, “and it’s done. And the Arobern freed you, so everything is fine. I didn’t tell him my father interfered with your brand, you know. Only that you didn’t have it when you came to my door.” She gave a little nod, as though to add,
So that’s all right
, and turned back toward the table. “As you suggested, I’ve been working on synthesizing our current understanding of the philosophy of materials—”

Gereint was sure she had been.

“It’s slow work,” Tehre added, staring down at the piled and scattered books with a dissatisfied expression. “It takes me away from actually working on the mathematics—I think I’m close to formulating a useful equation about the velocity of propagation in a crack once it actually starts to run, and here I am looking up what other makers and philosophers have said about things that are only obliquely related.” The woman began idly sketching parabolas down the margin of a book, fitting tangent lines to them as she went. She added, “I would greatly prefer to have you do this for me,” and turned her head to give Gereint an intent look.

“I am to go north in the morning,” Gereint told her. “With Beguchren Teshrichten.” He was surprised at the regret this statement caused him: He had not realized that he did, in fact, want simply to say “yes,” and take the quill out of Tehre’s hand.

“Oh!” said Tehre. She paused, her eyes narrowing. “How far north? Tashen?”

She meant,
Anywhere near my family’s house?
Gereint opened a hand in a gesture of uncertainty. “I don’t know. So you had better write your father, if you haven’t already.”

“Oh, I have. I will again. You came to tell me that? Thank you, Gereint. That may be important, if you—and the lord mage—should go so far.” Tehre paused. Then asked, “Why north? What does the king’s mage want with you?”

Gereint shrugged ignorance. “I would tell you if I knew. There’s evidently some trouble in the north. With the new desert, I suppose. I don’t know what or why the lord mage thinks I’d be useful to his hand in dealing with it.”

“Trouble. Huh. In the north, but you don’t know what it comprises.” Tehre glanced down at her sketches, then back up at Gereint. “I wonder what this ‘trouble’ is, and how close it’s come to my parents’ house. Maybe… hmm. Maybe… there are all those refugees, and Fereine says they say the desert pursued them south. I wonder how large the new desert actually is?”

“Larger than one would think necessary to encompass Melentser,” Gereint said, a little too quickly for a man who was supposed to be from some town in Meridanium and not from Melentser at all. He added, “Or so I’ve heard.”

Tehre nodded, looking thoughtful. “I wonder if it’s still growing? Beyond the agreed bounds? It could be very hard on the north if the desert presses too close to the towns. And on the south if any more people have to leave the north. The prices of everything are already high, even with only the people of Melentser forced to leave their homes.” Her eyes were dark with worry. “My family… Well, but Beguchren Teshrichten is very powerful. I suppose he will be able to settle this ‘trouble,’ whatever it is.”

Gereint, remembering the mage’s hooded eyes and inscrutable smile, thought this was probably true. “But in any case, I wished to see you, honored lady, to thank you for interceding for me. And, yes, to ask whether you’d sent a letter to your father, and urge you to send another. And… that is, if you don’t find it an imposition, I find I would rather leave Breidechboden from the house of a friend.”

“Of course.” Tehre sounded faintly surprised, but she looked pleased. “If you’re not leaving until tomorrow morning, you can help me break your catapult. I thought you would miss that; I’m glad you’ll be here for it. I want to see if I can slow the fracturing process enough to let me really study how the materials break. Do you think you can help me with that? You’ve probably tried to slow down something that was in the process of breaking, haven’t you?”

“Carriage wheels, and an axle once.”

“Perfect!” Tehre declared, and headed for the garden, abandoning the books without a backward look.

Gereint gazed after her for a moment, smiling. The woman’s focus on work was… soothing. Comfortable, in a way he couldn’t really put into words. He could feel knots of tension in his neck and back relaxing. He didn’t know what he thought about Beguchren; he barely knew what he thought of his freedom, such as it was—but he knew he was glad to find Tehre Amnachudran absolutely unchanged. He knew that whatever lay to the north, he would be glad to think of her in this house, breaking mechanisms and developing equations to describe how they fractured.

T
ehre did not know what she thought of Gereint’s going north with Beguchren Teshrichten, but she knew she was glad he was going north as a free man. Or, if not free, at least no more bound than anyone subject to circumstance and the ordinary pressure a powerful man could bring to bear. On the other hand, that was surely compulsion enough. But it was much better than being
geas
bound to whatever brute was the heir of Perech Fellesteden. She was quite sure that, whoever the heir might be, he was a brute. What other sort of heir could a man such as Lord Fellesteden possibly have engendered?

Gereint left her house well before dawn. Fareine woke Tehre, as she had asked, and Tehre flung on the simple dress she’d laid out ready, pinned her hair up, and ran down to the main door to bid him a proper farewell. He had said,
I would rather leave Breidechboden from the house of a friend
. It had been important to him. So he had come here. To tell her about the king’s mage and urge her to write her father—of course. But also because it had been important to him to have the house of a
friend
behind him when he left the city. He evidently had no family—or no family to whom he could go. Tehre had found herself shaken by pity at the idea that Gereint had been abandoned by his family. Whatever he had done. No matter what
she
might do, she knew
her
family would never close their house to her.

So she met Gereint at her door to bid him farewell, as a friend would do. He was surprised and, she thought, touched. Tehre wished him luck and fair weather, as she might have wished any friend going out on the road from under her roof.

The tall man tilted his head and quirked an eyebrow at her. “I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to build you a whole series of catapults.”

So was Tehre. She nodded wistfully. “I’ll break other things, I suppose,” she said, and he chuckled, though she hadn’t meant to say anything funny. But she didn’t mind. Gereint laughed at her in a way that made it seem that he was inviting her to share the joke.

“You do that,” he told her. “Thank you, Tehre. Fareine.” He nodded to them in a way that made it plain he was sorry to leave. Then he left.

“Beguchren Teshrichten,” Tehre said thoughtfully, looking out at the dim street after he was gone. “And ‘trouble’ in the north.”

“Tehre?”

“Nothing. I just wonder… nothing, Fareine.” Tehre shut the door on the faint pearly light of the false dawn and went back to her room to dress properly.

* * *

The Arobern’s palace was an exercise in the builders’ craft: ornamented nearly, but not quite, to the point of absurdity. As a child, Tehre had loved the sheer extravagant excess of it; even now, she loved the pinnacles and great statues that lined the tops of the walls—especially the shorter walls, of course. She understood now, as she had not as a child, that the higher walls had enough extra weight of their own that they did not need the weight of statues to stabilize them against the sideways thrust of the slanted roofs. But the statues were nice in their own right, and the stonecarvers had no doubt enjoyed making them.

Tehre’s carriage passed a long colonnade where the columns, otherwise simple, had been painted purple and crimson—except where they had been gilded—and through a marble gate topped by a short, thick architrave. A straight stone lintel such as an architrave was not, of course, structurally stable. This one had cracked exactly as one might have expected: twice symmetrically on the upper surface and once, in the middle, on the lower, thus turning itself into a much more stable three-hinged arch.

Tehre would simply have suggested constructing an arch in the first place, but it was interesting to think about the way the stone had responded to the stresses it had found unacceptable. An interesting example of why one needed to consider the tensile stresses and thrust lines that bore on any given point within a structure; it was hardly coincidence that the straight lintel had cracked at those precise three points; those were the hinge points of the “arch” ring, of course. There should be a way to represent the relationship of the tensile stresses and the resulting thrust lines to the thickness of the stones used in the construction… One might let thrust
t
represent the ratio between the strength of the thrust at a given location within the structure and the cross-sectional area of that location, and that might let one calculate… Oh, had they arrived?

Tehre blinked and gazed out the window; it seemed the trip had gone rather quickly. She wished she had paper and a quill to note down her thoughts about architraves and thrust lines and the forces at work on the stone. She even glanced around the carriage vaguely, as though she might find such supplies on the seat beside her. Of course, there was nothing so useful in the carriage, on the seat, or elsewhere. She ought to put a box of writing things in all her carriages… She had thought of that before, but she never remembered.