Lord of the Changing Winds Read Online Free PDF

and Kes felt, strongly if incoherently, that her sister’s presence would only have offended the griffins and weakened Kes herself.
    The guardian griffin had feathers of brilliant gold overlaid with a copper tracery. He sat up as they approached, tail wrapped neatly as a cat’s around his feet, and fixed Kes with a brilliant copper-gold stare. She faltered, but Kairaithin drew her forward.
    “There are others injured,” Kairaithin said. He sounded… not concerned, precisely. Not like a man might sound, whose friend was injured. Kes did not understand what she heard in his voice, but it was nothing human. He went on, “But this is the worst. This is our… king. He must live. Far better for your people, as well as mine, if he should live.”
    Kes could not tell if he meant this as a threat, or merely as a statement. She moved forward hesitantly, kneeling by the wounded griffin. She put her hand to its chest, parting the feathers delicately. The injured griffin did not move; the other one shifted a foot, talons scraping across stone. Kes flinched back, but he did not move again. And Kairaithin was waiting.
    The wound she found was a puncture, deep… she could not tell how deep… wide as well as deep. It was bleeding only a little, a slow welling of crimson droplets that ran, each in turn, along the lie of the feathers to fall, glittering and solid, to the sand. Tiny gemstones, rubies and garnets, sparkled in the sand under her knees. Kes blinked at them, fully understanding for the first time that these were truly not creatures of earth. That they were wholly foreign to this land and to her own nature. And she was expected to heal them? She cast Kairaithin a frightened glance.
    “An arrow made of ice and ill intent,” said the griffin mage, watching her face. “I drew the arrow and slowed the blood. But I have no power to heal. That is for you.”
    Kes laid her hand over the wound. She had no herbs, no needles, no clean water, nothing a healer would use at her craft… She touched the griffin’s face, traced the delicate shadings of gold and bronze under the blind eye, moved her hand to rest on the rapid pulse beating under the fine feathers of the throat. She said, trying to sound helpless rather than defiant, “But… truly, lord, I know nothing but herbs.”
    “You know what you see. You know what we are. Are you not aware of your own power, poised to wake? Did you not know me at once?”
    Kes did not know what the man meant by “your own power.” True healers were mages, not mere herb women. She was not a mage. She knew very well she was not a mage. Mages were not simply gifted, as Tesme was gifted with her affinity for horses, as makers or legists might be variously gifted. There was always magic in making, in made things; everyone had that to at least a small degree. There was magic in spoken and, especially, written words—especially in Linularinum, where everybody learned to write. But the affinity to an animal, the ability to make or build, the legist’s gift of setting truth down with quill and ink… all of those things were part of inborn, natural earth magic. Anybody could be gifted.
    But mages were not merely gifted. They
were
gifted, but the gift wasn’t enough to make a mage. Or so Kes had always believed. Mages studied for years and years, learning… Kes could not imagine what. And there were never many of them: the necessary combination of power and dedication were vanishingly rare.
    It had never occurred to Kes to wonder how an old mage chose an apprentice, or how a young person, perhaps, found within herself the desire or capacity or… whatever it might be that might lead her to want to be chosen. Kes had never wanted anything like that. Kes had only wanted to be left alone, to walk in the hills and look at the sky and the pools and the growing things. Hadn’t she? If the idea of being a mage had ever occurred to her…
would
she have wanted that? Did she want it now?
    Now that the