The Phoenix Endangered (28 page)

He stood there looking after her until he decided she wasn’t coming back, and that he was cold, and that he should probably get back to the wagon and see if he’d picked out the right sticks, and see what he needed to do about the evening meal.

W
HEN
T
IERCEL AND
Ancaladar arrived back at the wagon a couple of hours later, the Telchi was cleaning his quilted mail shirt with rags and a small knife and a bowl of
water—the stains would remain, but perhaps some of the stiffness could be worked out of the heavy quilted cloth—and Harrier was making flatcakes. He’d added some of the bacon and a little of the dried beef to the stew, and it was cooking down nicely. Tomorrow, the Telchi told him, they would begin their lessons.

Tiercel peered up the road, then looked around in all directions, frowning.

“Don’t bother,” Harrier said, not looking up. “She’s gone.”

“Gone?” Tiercel echoed, startled.

“Gone, left, said I could take care of myself now, said her Price was paid, wouldn’t tell me what that meant, and … gone.”

“Oh,” Tiercel said.

“Yeah.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Harrier hitched up the horses, and Tiercel saddled Ancaladar, and they started out again. It was interesting and a little strange to have company—
human
company—during the long day of travel. At their stops, Harrier found that the Telchi was a welcome extra pair of hands for all the chores involved in setting up and taking down camp. By the end of a sennight, their days had settled into another new routine.

At midday, and in the evening, there was practice for Harrier. He’d been worried—at first—that it would involve something like what he’d seen the Elves doing, but Macenor Telchi told him that it was far too soon for him to begin such practice. For now, Harrier was learning to stand, to move, to turn—and most of all, to keep his balance while doing all of it. It was much harder than he’d thought it would be, especially while holding a stick in each hand. And even more difficult once the Telchi armed himself with a long wooden spoon out of their kitchen utensils and started sneaking around behind Harrier and poking him with it at odd moments.

In self-defense, Harrier quickly learned to develop a
sense
of when someone was behind him. To move out of the way of the irritating poking. To keep the unexpected sharp jabs from pushing him off-balance—though that took longer.

With Kareta gone (he refused to admit that he missed her) Harrier felt an odd guilty sense of
duty.
With the addition of Macenor Telchi to share the workload, he had more free time than he had when it was only him to do all the work of keeping up the camp, so he combed through
The Book of Moon
for simple spells that didn’t require him to pay a Mageprice. There were only three he was certain of: Scrying, Coldfire, and Fire.

It made no sense at all to Harrier why Scrying (a spell the book described as “a spell to show the Wildmage those things he needed to see” and which didn’t seem a lot like Tiercel’s High Magick distance-viewing spells) would be lumped in with two spells that seemed to him to be actually simple useful spells that someone would actually want to do, but even if he wanted to try it, he didn’t have any of the necessary materials—wine, fern-leaf, and a spring of water.

He could practice Fire and Coldfire, though, and he did.

His first attempts at each were disappointing. If he hadn’t already had the experience of Healing the Telchi, he would have given up on Fire long before he managed to make his first stick of wood burst into flame—it took him an entire sennight, spending every spare moment he could snatch in concentration, before he got his first results. As for Coldfire, while Tiercel’s problem had been in making the blue globes of shining mist
go away
once he’d created them, Harrier’s Coldfire tended to vanish the moment he forgot about it—which meant he’d be using a ball of Coldfire to light his way down to the stream to get water after supper, start thinking about something else, and suddenly find himself plunged into complete darkness.

The odd thing was, when Harrier used his power, it bothered Tiercel. Not in the sense of making him cross or
anything—Tiercel
wanted
him to use his Wildmage gifts. But the first time Harrier had tried to Summon Fire, Tiercel had been a couple of yards away with his back to Harrier, and he’d made a “
whoof
”-ing noise and sat down on the ground suddenly. They’d quickly determined that any time Harrier tried using his magic, Tiercel felt weak—but that it didn’t work the other way around. Tiercel muttered something about this being a good chance to practice his shielding, but Harrier noticed he still moved down to the other end of the camp any time Harrier practiced. And he guessed (now) that it had been a good thing after all that he’d sent Tiercel out of the way when he’d Healed the Telchi, or else all three of them would probably have been lying around on the ground out cold.

But no matter how inconvenient it was to make sure Tiercel was safely out of the way (or well-shielded), Harrier kept working at both spells. He supposed he should practice at more and different spells of his new magic (whether he wanted to or not), but it seemed somehow
ungrateful
to the Wild Magic to just play around with it as if it were a toy sent to entertain him. He decided that for right now he’d mostly stick to practicing the thing that he knew needed to be practiced—getting better at flailing around with a pair of wooden sticks.

And the days passed.

Macenor Telchi was a reliable and even-tempered companion. Nothing flustered him—not even the information that they were heading to the Madiran to seek out a place where the Endarkened sought rebirth.

“T
HIS DOESN’T BOTHER YOU
?” Harrier asked.

They were sitting cross-legged in front of the fire. It was several hours before dawn, but Tiercel’d just had the vision again, and he never wanted to go back to sleep afterward, and neither did Harrier. From the position of the moon, Harrier thought it might be almost First Dawn Bells, and if
he were home he’d be getting out of bed and dressing up warm and heading down to the docks for the day. Before Tiercel had his latest vision, he and Harrier hadn’t quite made up their mind whether or not to tell Macenor Telchi everything about who they were and where they were going, but Tiercel’s nightmares really did require a lot of explaining, and they always reminded Harrier that there might be
something else
out here after them. It wasn’t fair not to give the Telchi as much warning as they possibly could. And so far, he’d taken everything calmly: Ancaladar, and the news that Tiercel was a High Mage, and—now—the news that they were following Tiercel’s visions into the Madiran in search of Darkness Reborn.

Harrier stared at the sky again. He wondered if it was Kindling already, and if he’d missed his Naming Day and Flowering Fair.

“It would bother any man of sense,” the Telchi replied calmly. “But it would bother me more if no one were doing anything at all.”

Harrier laughed shakily. The idea that he and Tiercel were actually “doing something” required more of a leap of faith than he was capable of at the moment.

“I think, my apprentice, that you value yourself and your friend too lightly. I cannot speak to the magic which either of you may hold. But I know something of courage, and of honor. And I know that both of you have left the safety of your homes to set yourselves against a peril thinking that you have little hope of victory, merely because you feel that you must.”

“I just—” Harrier protested.

“Have followed your friend past the end of your world. Risked your life to help a dying man. Go now, into what you believe is certain death, for friendship’s sake. Have taken up obligations which you did not wish, because you felt they were your duty. I am proud to teach you all that I can.”

Harrier ducked his head, embarrassed into speechlessness.
Macenor Telchi made it sound as if he was a hero. As if he was someone like Kellen the Poor Orphan Boy. And he wasn’t. He was just … him.

“W
E’RE GOING TO
have to figure out what to do about Ancaladar,” Tiercel said seriously.

They’d been on the road for another moonturn and a half. The Bazrahils would soon be behind them completely, and Macenor Telchi said that another moonturn after that—at most—would see them at the walls of Tarnatha’Iteru. Though he had not recognized the Lake of Fire from Tiercel’s description of it, he had agreed that such a place might well exist. There were many learned men in Tarnatha’Iteru who might know for certain, and—better than scholars—traders. Scholars might wish to know the history of a place, but traders wished to know its geography. If anyone had ever seen such a place as Tiercel described, the tradesmen of Tarnatha’Iteru would know of it.

“Why is it that I must have something done about me?” Ancaladar asked with mild interest.

Tiercel and Harrier exchanged looks. Harrier smirked.

“It’s not as if dragons are exactly … common … outside the Veiled Lands,” Tiercel said carefully.

Ancaladar blinked slowly, amused. “You fear my presence will disturb them.”

“Send them running screaming in all directions, more likely,” Harrier said bluntly. “Until you open your mouth and say something. Then they’re likely to just drop down dead from shock.”

“You do not feel I could convince them of my peaceful intentions?” Ancaladar asked innocently.

“Ah … eventually,” Tiercel said. “I’m sure you could convince them eventually. But maybe you won’t have to. I mean, if we find out we aren’t staying in Tarnatha’Iteru very long, we …”

“And perhaps, Bonded, it is best if you go first to this
city and see what you may see,” Ancaladar said. Harrier knew perfectly well by now that Ancaladar possessed his own odd dry sense of humor, but the great black dragon also never teased Tiercel for very long. “Indeed, I am well aware that it has been many centuries since my kind has been seen in the lands of Men, and it is kind of you to concern yourself with my safety.”

“Which brings us right back to the question of what we do with you,” Harrier said firmly, because he’d learned from bitter experience that if he let them, Ancaladar and Tiercel were perfectly capable of discussing a subject for hours and never
coming to the point
. “It’s not as if we can stuff you inside the wagon. And the Telchi says that from here south, we could start to run into people.”

“I’m pretty sure I could keep them from seeing us,” Tiercel said. “At least, from seeing Ancaladar and me. People don’t look up, you know. And—at night, while we’re camped—Ancaladar could just take off.”

“Tiercel,” Harrier said warningly.

Tiercel sighed and ran a hand through his hair. It was damp, and clung to his forehead and neck—even though it was deep winter, they were far enough southward that even their lightest clothes were too heavy. “I know,” he said, sighing. He looked up at Ancaladar. “You must have had this problem before.”

“Not precisely, Bonded,” Ancaladar said. “But I remember how to hide.”

Harrier saw Tiercel wince. “I don’t want you to have to—”

“Be practical?” Ancaladar and Harrier said, almost in chorus—though in entirely different tones. Harrier stopped, and Ancaladar continued.

“This time, my concealment shall serve quite a different purpose than it did a thousand years ago. I shall merely make it more … convenient… for you to enter a city you have never visited before, and to learn all it may have to teach you. And when you are ready to proceed, it
will be a simple matter for you to let me know, for you and I can never truly be separated. I shall know when it is time to rejoin you.”

“But … what will you
do?”
Tiercel asked. Harrier thought he sounded a little bewildered.

“I shall take a nap,” Ancaladar said reassuringly. “I have seen many promising caves in the landscape over which we have flown. I shall find one and wait for you to summon me.”

“See?” Harrier demanded.

B
Y A FORTNIGHT
later they’d left hills and trees and anything that looked even remotely familiar to either Tiercel or Harrier far behind. The landscape was broad, and dun-colored, and
hot
, and the fact that the Telchi said that it was winter—and comparatively cool—didn’t make either of them feel any better at all. They rationed their water carefully, and were fortunate to have the Telchi with them, or they would never have found the traveler’s wells along the way, for they were nearly always covered with a large slab of stone to keep the precious water from evaporating. While this wasn’t the Trade Road that led across the Armen Plains, into the Delfier Valley, and—eventually—to Armethalieh the Golden—it
was
a road, and a well-traveled one. The Telchi said that rich merchants from the
Iteru
-cities often sought the cool of the Tereymil Hills in high summer, and that healers and perfumers would send apprentices there to gather the ingredients of their mixtures.

All traffic along the road depended upon the wells for its survival, and Harrier had no trouble understanding why. At midday the air shimmered with heat, and the only ones who were really comfortable were Ancaladar and the Telchi. Ancaladar had taken to spreading his wings to give them all a little sheltering shade through the midday heat, and they’d adopted what the Telchi said was the local custom of a long midday halt to spare the horses, starting earlier
in the morning and going on for several hours after dark. At night, Harrier led the team, because no matter how much more sensible it was to travel at night, horses were happier when they could see where they were going, and they just couldn’t see very well at night.

The idea that they were going to have to—eventually—go someplace that was even hotter than this was now was worrying Harrier, but there wasn’t much he could do about it at the moment. He couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to live here if they had a choice. Sometimes, he thought, people were idiots.

But apparently goats had more sense than people, because twice now they’d encountered boys heading northward on the road insisting—upon encountering the wagon—that they were in search of a lost goat.