The Phoenix Endangered (25 page)

Tiercel shrugged and walked off. Harrier saw the wagon rock as he climbed in and out of it, and a moment later saw Tiercel trudging up the road, carrying an entire tin of honey-disks under his arm.

“You did not need to do that, you know. There is no danger to him,” Ancaladar said.

“Fine,” Harrier repeated, hardly paying any attention to his own words. He got up and got one of the buckets, opened the water-keg and ladled out some water to wash his hands. He would have tried to get the guy to drink if he could, but he wasn’t conscious. He rinsed his mouth and spat; thirsty but too nervous to drink.
Should have had Tyr make that tea
, he thought, but there wasn’t time.

He went back and knelt on the blanket and sorted through his bag again. All the leaves Lanya had packed for him were in tiny bags, labeled in a language he couldn’t read, but he recognized them by sight and smell. Half of them were familiar from his mother’s kitchen, the other half, from half a year of trudging through forests. He pulled out the three he needed, then picked up his knife.

“A circle,” Ancaladar said quietly. “You will need one.”

Harrier took a deep breath and nodded. He folded the heavy blanket in around the stranger as much as he could, exposing the pale packed earth of the trail, then drew the heavy knife Roneida had given him. He scraped a ragged circle around them both. It wasn’t all that circular, but he was careful to make sure that the line of the end and beginning met exactly. He sheathed his knife again. “Thank you.”

“I wish there were more aid I could provide,” Ancaladar said.

“Just take care of Tiercel,” Harrier said.

“Forever,” Ancaladar promised, but Harrier had already stopped listening. He was concentrating too hard on his task.

Hair from the person to be healed. Blood from the person to be healed. Not hard to get when the stranger was covered in it, and to top it all off, moving him had started the shoulder wound bleeding again. Hair from the Wildmage (him). Not too hard.

His
blood.

Harrier took a deep breath and ran his thumb over the
blade of his small belt knife. Not his eating knife—that wasn’t very sharp—but the one he wore to use for any little task that needed doing.
A sharp knife is a safe knife
, his Da always said, telling him that more fools cut themselves on dull knives than ever did on a properly honed blade.
Oh, Da, if you could see me now….

He was nervous, so he pressed harder than he meant to, and he only realized he’d cut himself when he felt the blood running down his wrist. He swore, scrabbling to soak the ball of hair in his blood and then throw it onto the charcoal. Almost as an afterthought, he added the leaves.

Light blast it, this had better work!

As the hair spat and crackled, Harrier realized that wasn’t exactly what he was supposed to say.

Um, Light? This is Harrier. I want you to Heal this guy. And I guess there’s a Mageprice I’m supposed to pay. And I’m supposed to pay it willingly, and I don’t want him to die, but I don’t want anything to happen to Tiercel, either, and I’ve known him longer, and, so, if I could just help Tiercel first before I have to go off someplace else to do something for you that would be great, because then I’d be happy to do, okay, anything, all right? But this is so important
—

For a moment he was sure it hadn’t worked. He
knew
it wouldn’t work—who was he, Harrier Gillain, son of the Harbormaster, to be casting spells? He closed his eyes tightly in pure frustration.

And he thought about his Da, in the kitchen teasing Ma, and the way she’d look when she’d turn and laugh at him, and he thought of the man lying on the blanket in front of him, and sure, he didn’t know anything at all about him, and maybe he was a bad man, but maybe he had a wife somewhere, or a sister, and oh, Light, maybe he just wanted to go
home
, and certainly he didn’t want to just die, and all Harrier could feel was panic and something like anger, and the need to be able to help, if it was at all possible to help—

And suddenly the constant cold wind that he hadn’t even noticed, because he’d gotten so used to it after almost a moonturn on this side of the Veil… stopped. And
there was stillness and warmth all around him, and that should have frightened him, but it didn’t. Cautiously, Harrier opened his eyes, and saw that he was completely surrounded by a dome of shimmering green. And that didn’t frighten him either. He just felt… purposeful.

He needed to know what to do now, but even as he wondered, he knew. It wasn’t as if he was being told, but as if he was—somehow—
remembering.
He reached out and placed both hands gently on the stranger’s chest.

The moment he did he felt as if a great weight settled on his shoulders, but only for a second. Then it broke through, and the weight was still there, but now Power was flowing through him, through his hands, into the stranger, as if Harrier had become a narrow harbor-mouth and the tide was racing in. It was power and Power, strong and sweet and wild, and he didn’t have to tell it what to do—it wasn’t a Power you
told
—he’d asked, and that was enough. All he had to do now was offer himself as its hands in the world, to do what needed to be done.

That was all any Wildmage did. Ever. What needed to be done. They—the Wildmages—offered themselves to the Wild Magic, and the Wild Magic gave them …

Everything
, Harrier thought.
It gives you everything.

He could still watch. He could still think. In this moment, Harrier could see the body beneath him as clearly and starkly as the drawings for a new sailing ship in the hands of the shipwright: how it should be, and how it was damaged. The Power raced through him, into the stranger, knitting up broken bones, closing open wounds, curing infections, healing damaged flesh.

He didn’t know how long he spent, watching the body beneath his hands come back into true, but he knew—he sensed, he saw—that the work was nearly done. In moments the Power would depart.

Tell me!
he thought.
What do you need? What do you want?

He didn’t know what he expected to hear. He didn’t
hear
anything at all. He just had the same sense of remembering, and a feeling like a key turning in a lock.

You must become an Apprentice.

That was the last thing Harrier knew for a very long time.

T
HE FIRST THING
Harrier noticed was that he was lying down. The second was that he smelled woodsmoke. He tried to sit up and managed—with infinite effort—to open his eyes.

“He’s awake!” Kareta cried.

A moment later Tiercel was tugging him into a sitting position and trying to get him to hold a mug. When that didn’t work out—he couldn’t quite get his hands to close around it—Tiercel held it up to his mouth. Harrier drank greedily. He was thirsty—and as soon as he stopped being thirsty, he realized he was
starving.

“You—I—what?” he said.

Tiercel laughed with relief. “Oh, Light, Har, you’ve been asleep for
two days!
Kareta wanted to wake you up, and Ancaladar said it was better to let you wake up on your own, and—I didn’t know what to do.”

“Yeah. Well. Next time you become a Mage, learn healing spells.” He felt strong enough to hold the mug this time, and drained it. “More.”

After a second cup of broth he was ready to take stock of the situation. They were still right where they had been. They now had a big woodpile. There was a pot of stew hanging over the fire, and the tea-brazier was steaming. The stranger was wrapped up in blankets, lying next to Harrier. And still breathing.

“He been asleep, too?” Harrier asked. He was so thirsty!

“I got him to wake up a couple of times to drink some broth,” Tiercel said. “But he just went right back to sleep. He hasn’t said anything. We, uh,
Ancaladar
took the horse
back up into the pines and dumped it, and brought back a couple of dead trees. I cut them up to keep you both warm. We filled up the water barrels, too.”

“What’s in the pot?” Harrier asked.

“Rabbits,” Tiercel said. “Hares, actually. I didn’t want to have to deal with a whole deer, so I set some snares in the woods yesterday. They worked fine.”

“Tiercel the Bunny-killer,” Harrier said, grinning.

“And I’ve been very bored,” Kareta said, “because he’s been no fun at all! He’s either been chopping wood, or cooking, or had his nose in one of his silly books. Him and Ancaladar both!”

“I’m pretty sure Ancaladar couldn’t fit his nose into one of Tyr’s books,” Harrier said. He yawned.

“You aren’t going back to sleep, are you?” Tiercel asked. He sounded worried.

“No,” Harrier said. “I think I’m done sleeping.” He yawned again. “I’m hungry, though.”

By the time he’d eaten two full bowls of stew—which had a lot more things than rabbit in it, and he just hoped Tiercel hadn’t poisoned both of them with all these wild-gathered vegetables—he felt almost like his old self again. He was a little unsteady when he got to his feet, but not so unsteady that he couldn’t wave Tiercel off.

As soon as she’d seen he was all right, Kareta had retreated to what she obviously felt was a comfortable distance again. Harrier was touched that she’d been willing to come close enough to the stranger to see that he was all right—not that he’d ever tell her so, of course. And if she was passing up the opportunity to stick around and tease him now, it was clear that not going near people who weren’t, well, “chaste and virginal” wasn’t just a matter of personal preference for unicorns, but something they really couldn’t do. At least not for long. He wondered, not “why” exactly, but what it was that stopped them. Did it hurt? Or was it some kind of barrier like the Veil around the Elven Lands?

He wanted to walk down the road to tell her that everything
was fine, but it actually seemed like that might be a little too far to go just now. Maybe later. He settled for walking around to the back of the wagon and sitting down on the step.

Tiercel—of course—followed him.

“What was it like?” Tiercel asked.

“Getting knocked flat on my ass for two days? I’m pretty sure whatever I did, I did it wrong,” Harrier said.

“Ancaladar says he thinks that happened because you didn’t have anyone to share the—the
other
price of the Healing,” Tiercel said. He looked a little embarrassed.

“Well, you couldn’t, and Ancaladar couldn’t, and Kareta sure couldn’t. And hey, it worked.” He knew it had. He didn’t even have to ask.

“So I just…” Tiercel said, and stopped.

Tiercel wondered what it was like. And Harrier couldn’t tell him. Not because he felt he was forbidden to. He just didn’t have the words to explain it. Nice? Awful? Terrifying? Wonderful? Somehow they were all true at the same time. And the High Magick wasn’t anything like it—somehow Harrier was certain of that. What had Tiercel kept calling it back in the beginning? “
A magick anyone could learn.”
But you didn’t
learn
the Wild Magic. You just sort of said: okay. And then
did
it. It was … it was
just
like being a Harbor Pilot. Watching the water constantly for every shift and change, so you could bring the ship you were guiding safely to port—or out to sea. Listening to the wind. If you did that, your ship was fine. If you didn’t…

“Harrier?” Tiercel said doubtfully.

“I’ve never been that good at listening,” Harrier said, half to himself. He blinked, focusing on Tiercel again.

“Are you okay?” Tiercel asked suspiciously.

“I’m … um. It was probably nothing like that stuff you do, okay?” Harrier said, because he knew he needed to say
something
. “And I don’t know if I could say what it
is
like. You’re the one who reads all those books.”

“Which say next to nothing about the Wild Magic. And
nothing particularly useful about the High Magick, come to that,” Tiercel pointed out.

“Don’t look at me.
I
didn’t write them. But if I had, there’d be a whole chapter about how a guy who shows up stuck full of arrows was probably being chased by somebody who was shooting the arrows,” Harrier said. He was starting to feel more himself by the minute.

“Believe it or not, we actually managed to think of that ourselves. Ancaladar took a look around—‘around’; meaning ‘for about a moonturn by wagon down the trail.’” Tiercel shrugged. “He found about a dozen dead bodies scattered through the hills, and more tracks leading south. He says it looks like two groups, chasing each other and stopping to fight a couple of times. He said there was a fight where we found the injured man, and another horse ran away, but the man who was riding the horse was dead.”

“Useful. What happened to the horse?”

Tiercel made a face. “It was tasty.”

“Just as long as
I
don’t have to eat it. Well, I guess we’ll find out the whole story when he wakes up, won’t we?”

“I guess so. Har?”

“Yeah?”

“The Wild Magic’s going to want you to do something now, isn’t it?”

Harrier sighed deeply. “Yeah. But it isn’t urgent.”
I
hope it isn’t urgent.
He also hoped he’d get more details about whatever this …
Mageprice …
was when the time came to pay it, or else there might be a real mess.

H
ARRIER HAD WOKEN
up around midday. After a couple more hours of being up and around, he decided he felt well enough to go see Kareta. He wrapped up in his stormcloak, filled his pockets with cold flatcakes, and walked up the trail.

“It’s about time somebody thought about me,” she said sulkily.

“I did,” Harrier said. “I thought about how you wouldn’t want to have to carry me back to the wagon if I fell on my face.”

Kareta snorted rudely. Harrier looked around until he saw a likely looking rock by the side of the road—there were enough of them all along the edges of the road to make him think they’d been rolled out of the roadbed itself by whoever’d made the road, and
that
made him think this might have been a riverbed at some point—and sat down. He dug around in his pocket, pulled out a piece of flatcake, and offered it to her.