The Phoenix Endangered (24 page)

At least he was able to entertain himself once they got into the water—and keep warm—by trying to duck Tiercel, who howled loudly about it. Harrier pointed out mercilessly that
he
wasn’t the one who’d decided to grow his hair as long as an Elf’s, and he was just doing Tiercel a favor by helping him rinse it. Even with the horseplay, though, they were both in and out of the water in less than a chime, and standing huddled between the fires, rubbing each other dry (and snapping at each other’s legs with the damp towels) before struggling into sets of fresh-washed clothing. They were still a little damp, but neither of them wanted to wait. Besides, they still had to wash what they’d been wearing today, which meant the clothes they had on
would only get damp again anyway. Perhaps by the time they were finished with the laundry something else would be
completely
dry.

Ancaladar caught them fish for dinner, and Harrier cleaned and cooked it.

“Can you read me something out of your Books?” Tiercel asked that evening. “I mean, is it allowed?”

Harrier supposed Tiercel must miss books. Back in Armethalieh he’d never been without one—or two, or half-a-dozen—for as long as Harrier had known him. But the only books he had with him now were High Magick books, which were, well, about as interesting as tide-charts. Which fascinated Harrier and every captain he knew—because you had to know the tides if you were going to sail—but they didn’t have a lot of
plot.
And, really, only one use. Sighing, Harrier reached for his shoulder bag. It was never far from his side these days.

“Tyr, how do
I
know what’s allowed or isn’t? It’s not like I’ve ever had a Wildmage to teach me anything about this … stuff.”
Stupid stuff
, he’d wanted to say, but couldn’t quite bring himself to. The Wild Magic wasn’t stupid. It was just that he really wasn’t cut out to be a Wildmage. At least in his opinion. He opened
The Book of Moon
at random. He half-expected the pages would have suddenly turned blank, but they hadn’t. He looked around warily.

“Expecting to be struck by lightning?” Kareta asked. Her face might not be able to smirk, but her voice could.

“Shut up,” Harrier said absently. He chose a passage at random and began to read. “
‘The Knight-Mage is the active agent of the principle of the Wild Magic, the Wildmage who chooses to become a warrior or who is born with the instinct for the Way of the Sword, who acts in battle without mindful thought and thus brings primary causative forces into manifestation by direct action.’”
He stopped. Nothing happened.

“Huh,” Tiercel said. “Well, ‘without mindful thought’ pretty much describes you.”

Harrier didn’t even bother to reach out and smack
Tiercel. He was mulling over what he’d just read. “Okay,” he said. “You—” he nodded at Kareta “—say I’m a Knight-Mage.”

“That’s right,” she said brightly. “The first one born since—”

“Ah!” he said, holding up a hand. “Not now.” Being compared to Kellen the Poor Orphan Boy just made him feel creepy. “So what this sort of … says, is that Knight-Mages have an, um,
instinct
for ‘The Way of the Sword,’ which is, I guess, sword-fighting.”

“That’s what it sounds like,” Tiercel said seriously.

“Aren’t you sorry now you didn’t take lessons from those nice Elves when they offered?” Kareta asked.

“Aren’t you sorry you didn’t show up sooner to tell me I should?” Harrier sniped back. “Because I’m sure that Elunyerin and Rilphanifel would have been
happy
to stick around longer if they’d known they got to train an actual Knight-Mage.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Kareta muttered.

“What? You being helpful?” Harrier demanded.

“Elunyerin and Rilphanifel were not chaste and virginal,” Ancaladar said, in tones indicating that he had no interest in listening to another argument tonight. “Kareta could not approach you while they were near.”

Harrier thought back. What were practically the first words Kareta had said to him? “
I thought those two would
never
leave.”
That must be why. He couldn’t make up his mind whether to turn red or burst out laughing in disbelief, and from Tiercel’s expression, neither could he. “Oh,” he finally said.

“I wish you people—” Kareta said huffily.

“I wish you unicorns—” Tiercel said, echoing her tone exactly.

Harrier did laugh then.

I’
M NOT QUITE
sure where we’re going, but we’re making good time.

A sennight later, they’d settled into a comfortable—and peaceful—routine. Up before dawn, breakfast, horses harnessed, and onto the road in the dark. Why there was a road, and where it went, and who used it, were questions none of them had answers to yet. If there were any villages here, they weren’t near the road—and “near” was a pretty relative term for Ancaladar.

If it was a trade-road, who were they (whoever “they” were) trading with? Not the Elves, because neither Aressea nor Aratari nor anyone else at Blackrowan Farm had seemed to have much notion about humans—or, in fact, anything on the other side of the Veil.

“Could be for a lot of things,” Kareta said, continuing one of their usual conversations. “Could be only used in summer. Maybe people just come and
live
here in summer. Or come here to gather tasty berries.”

Harrier looked around. “
‘Tasty berries’?”
he said in disbelief. “They’d have to be pretty damned tasty.” The road wended along through fairly open country. A few hundred miles away on his right hand, the Bazrahils rose up into the sky, their slopes white with snow. There were a couple of miles of open country to either side of the road, but beyond that it became hilly and—soon thereafter—forested again—Ancaladar had looked.

The only water they’d found since they’d left the lake was up in the hills. The last time they’d needed to fill the water barrels, Tiercel had needed to fly them up to a stream one by one, strapped to Ancaladar’s saddle. There’d be water near the road soon, but the wagon wouldn’t reach it for another sennight, Ancaladar calculated. Sometimes Harrier wondered how he’d gotten so good at guessing how many miles the wagon could cover in a day, but it wasn’t that hard to figure out. Ancaladar had traveled with Kellen’s army. He knew exactly how slow a freight wagon went.

“Well, you’re grumpy today!” Kareta said, tossing her head. “It’s probably because you aren’t doing magic,” she added confidentially. “If you were doing spells, I’m sure you’d feel better.”

“Wrong,” Harrier said comprehensively.

“You have to do some sometime,” she said coaxingly.

“No I don’t.”

“What about just one nice little one? You could summon up a sword teacher for yourself. You know you need one.”

If a Knight-Mage had to know anything about swordsmanship, then yes (Harrier knew), he did need one. But that wasn’t the point. “And what would the Mageprice be for that?” he asked. “Do you have any idea? Light, Kareta, I don’t even know whether all the things I
think
I know about Wildmages are even true! I know—I guess—that there are two prices to pay for every spell: the energy it takes, and then the Mageprice that’s for, I guess, the
right
to cast it at all. Or for the Gods’ help in keeping it from going wrong. And the first price is why Wildmages ask people to lend energy to a spell, and that’s okay—not that I’ve got the first idea of how to take or use what they’d give me. It’s the second part I’m worried about.”

“Well, in that case,” Kareta said pragmatically, “why not just do the ones that don’t carry Mageprice? There must be some.”

“Figuring that out in advance is—huh.” He broke off. “That doesn’t look right.” The wagon had just rounded a bend in the road, and ahead, a good distance off the road itself, there was a fluttering movement. Ravens. A whole flock of them. “Something’s dead. Something big.” He clucked to the team, urging it to move faster.

By the time the wagon reached the place, Tiercel and Ancaladar had already spotted what Harrier had seen and landed. He jumped down from the wagon and ran over—Harrier didn’t
actually
worry about Tiercel’s safety when Ancaladar was right there to watch over him, but now that Tiercel’s nightmares were back, Harrier was pretty sure Tiercel’s enemies weren’t that far behind. And whoever this was had certainly had enemies of his own. His robes were filthy and blood-soaked, and
something
had killed his horse, though by now it was hard to tell what and how.
The dying beast had rolled onto the dead man, trapping him beneath it, and Ancaladar had fastidiously plucked it free and set the body aside.

“I guess we should bury him,” Harrier said, crouching down beside the body. The man was wearing a strange armor that didn’t seem to be made out of metal—the face-piece had protected his eyes from the ravens, not that that really mattered much.

“Best not,” Ancaladar said soberly. “He’s still alive.”

At Ancaladar’s words, Harrier eased the helmet off. The face he saw was dark—both naturally, and burned dark by the sun. He looked a little like the Selkens Harrier had seen at Dockside Armethalieh, and his age was hard to estimate. Harrier felt for a pulse and couldn’t find one at first. It was slow and weak, and the man’s skin was cold. “Won’t be for long,” he said reluctantly. The horse hadn’t died today, or even yesterday, and its rider had been lying trapped beneath it since it had gone down. And he’d been hurt even before that.

Harrier looked up at Tiercel hopefully. “Unless you can, uh, do a spell?”

“A Healing spell.” Tiercel’s voice was flat. He shook his head fractionally. “I don’t know whether the High Magick didn’t have them, or … if Jermayan just didn’t have those books. But I don’t know any. You have to.”

“Me?”
Harrier’s voice rose to a near-shout.

“He’ll
die!”
Tiercel’s voice cracked on the second word.

“How much water do we have?” Apparently he’d made up his mind to do this without thinking it over. Or at least to try.

“Three-quarters of a barrel.” Tiercel’s voice was rough and quiet.

“Bring a blanket. The heavy ground one.”

While Tiercel went to fetch it, Harrier unbuckled the man’s belt and started cutting open his clothes. There was more armor beneath the robes he wore—still no metal, but a heavy quilted shirt sewn with disks of what looked like bone, and buckled arm-guards of thick leather. The shirt
wasn’t enough to stop an arrow going into his shoulder—Harrier saw when he cut the shirt open—but that wasn’t what had taken him down, because there was a crude bandage over it. He pulled the dressing away and caught the unmistakable whiff of infection. The wound was red and angry, too inflamed for him to be able to tell if any part of the arrow was still in the shoulder.

Tiercel got back with the blanket.

“Help me lift him onto it,” Harrier said.

“You’ll kill him,” Tiercel protested.

“Then I won’t need to Heal him, will I?” Harrier answered brutally. “I can’t do anything here.”

He wasn’t sure why he said it. He wasn’t sure he could do anything anywhere. It just felt right.

When they lifted him to move him, Harrier saw that he’d been lying on a set of long curved swords. They looked familiar, but he didn’t have time to think about it just now. He swept the swords and their harness aside and then placed them on the blanket beside the man when they laid him down again.

“Is he …?” Tiercel asked.

“Still alive,” Harrier said. “And probably bleeding all over the blanket, now, so come on.”

They carried him back beside the wagon. At least some of the wind would be cut here. If it got much colder, he and Tiercel were going to have an argument about actually sleeping inside the wagon, even if that did mean messing up all of Tiercel’s
stuff.

“What do you want me to do?” Tiercel asked nervously.

“Nothing,” Harrier said shortly. “Start tea. I don’t know.”

“You cannot lend power to his spell, Bonded,” Ancaladar said quietly. “You do not yet have the skill.”

“It takes skill?” Harrier muttered. The man’s long black hair was matted with dried blood, and there was a crude bandage on one thigh; nothing more than a torn rag wound several times around the leg and hastily tied over his trousers. It was black with blood, and the fabric of the man’s pants below the wound had been so sodden with
blood that it was still damp enough to stain Harrier’s fingers. He decided to leave the bandage where it was.

“Skill,” Ancaladar said, “to set aside the shields every High Mage must learn to place about himself, in order to share his power with another. To have such shields is important for the spells.” The dragon sounded regretful, but at the moment, Harrier was just as glad that the High Magick had one more weird requirement.

“Fine. Find me a piece of charcoal, would you?” He wiped his hands as clean as he could, and started digging through his bag. He’d pulled out the tiny brazier—he thought he was going to need it—and then
The Book of Moon.
Real Wildmages might know how to do these things off the top of their heads, but he didn’t.
Okay. Okay. I’ve got this. Willow, ash, and yew. Burn them. Hair and blood. Oh … yuck. And here are the words. It looks simple. If it was this simple, everyone would do it. Eternal Light, this isn’t going to work!

But when Tiercel came back with the charcoal, all Harrier said was: “Looks simple enough. Now, if you don’t mind, light that for me, because I’m damned if I’m going to learn two spells in one day.”

That made Tiercel smile, just a little. Harrier put the cake of charcoal into the brazier, and Tiercel set it alight. It would take a few seconds to burn down to the point he could use it. Then they both looked up and saw Kareta standing several hundred yards up the road, shivering and looking miserable.

“Why is she …?” Tiercel began.

“Probably because this guy has a wife and kids somewhere waiting for him,” Harrier snapped. “Why don’t you go get a handful of honey disks and keep her company?” He was really trying hard to not think about what he was going to have to do next.