The Phoenix Endangered (32 page)

“Yes,” Tiercel said, frowning. “I guess it doesn’t happen the way it does in the wondertales, does it? I mean, when the Gods of the Wild Magic help someone.”

That wasn’t exactly what Harrier had been thinking. “You mean the Gods of the Wild Magic killed off all the Telchi’s men and nearly killed him just to make things easy for us?”

Tiercel made a face. “Idiot. No. It’s like a … puzzle. And all the pieces interlock. The Telchi’s men died because they fought the hill bandits, and there were a lot of them, and they needed to be stopped. I think the Telchi
survived
because we needed him.”

Thinking about it that way bothered Harrier just a little. More than a little, really. It seemed so … large. And while it was silly to think that the Wild Magic and the Light Itself would be anything small, he’d never had to think about what that really meant before. It bothered him more than he had words for to have to trust something he
couldn’t see or touch, something he couldn’t have a conversation with, the way he could talk to Tiercel or his Da or one of his brothers. And if he
could
—he remembered the not-quite-voice in his mind when his Mageprice had been set—that idea bothered him even more.

“Yeah, right, okay,” he muttered.

O
VER THE EVENING
meal, the Telchi discussed his plans for Harrier’s immediate future. Now that they had arrived in Tarnatha’Iteru, Harrier’s training could begin in earnest.

“What about him?” Harrier demanded, pointing at Tiercel.

“I
am going to be trying to figure out if anybody knows anything at all about any place that looks like the place I’ve been seeing,” Tiercel said, just a little huffily. “And trying to figure out how to get there.”

“If it is indeed somewhere in the deep desert, you will need to hire Isvaieni guides,” the Telchi said, scooping a large portion of some kind of pickled vegetable onto a piece of soft flatbread. Harrier had discovered that while the main dish at a meal was usually hot, nearly all the side-dishes were cold. He supposed that made sense if you lived in a desert.

“We ought to figure out where we’re going first,” he said, trying the idea on for size. “I mean, otherwise, we won’t even have any idea of what supplies to buy.”

“Indeed, that is so,” the Telchi said. “Your horses will certainly fetch a good price, for they are very fine animals, and a buyer can undoubtedly even be found for your wagon.”

“Sell them?” Tiercel said, and Harrier said: “Why?”

The Telchi smiled slightly. “To journey deeper into the Madiran—and especially into the Isvai—you will need
shotors
, not horses. And while wheeled carts may make the journey between the
Iteru
, and upon the Trade Road, your wheels will be useless in sand.”

“Sand?” Tiercel said.

“You’ve heard of it, Tyr. It’s like mud, only dry.” Harrier frowned. It hadn’t occurred to him that they wouldn’t be able to take the wagon with them wherever they went. He sighed, and thought about the fact that the wagon would come in handy for their trip north again, and realized that if Tiercel found what he was looking for, they probably wouldn’t
be
heading north again. “We can sell the horses now, but let’s wait to sell the wagon until we’re ready to go.” He’d seen mules here, after all, and if it turned out that what they were looking for wasn’t out there in the desert, they could buy some to draw the wagon and go somewhere else.

Tiercel nodded, frowning faintly.

I
N THE COOL
of the morning and the cool of the evening, Harrier practiced with the Telchi in the sand-covered courtyard at the back of the house. Both of them used only wooden swords—the Telchi promised that proper swords would be ready for Harrier when the time came, for Harrier was learning the Selken two-sword style.

It was a little frightening to him—when he let himself think about it at all—how fast he was learning. He knew he was
tired
all the time, and the Telchi said he must not worry about that, for he was retraining his muscles so that he no longer staggered through life like a drunken
shotor
—a remark that Harrier thought was enormously unfair (not that he’d ever seen a drunken
shotor)
, because no one had ever called him “clumsy” before, even by indirection. But the Telchi also told him that once his muscles caught up with his skill, he would perhaps be nearly formidable, since after even a handful of days, his skills surpassed those of students whom the Telchi had had in his teaching for many years.

For as Harrier quickly discovered, he was not the Telchi’s only student. During those seasons of the year in which caravans did not make their way between the
Iteru
,
the Telchi taught sword skills to any who wished to learn, instructing them in the heavy curved southern
awardan
, and in the Southern fighting style—which involved, as far as Harrier could tell, hoping your enemy wasn’t armed.

“Why do you teach them, if none of them are very good?” he asked one day, when they’d been in Tarnatha’Iteru for nearly a fortnight. Just as he’d said he would, Tiercel spent his days wandering around the city trying to find things out, but Harrier didn’t worry too much, as Tiercel was accompanied by a man named Ophare, who was one of the Telchi’s servants. On the first day the two of them had set out together, Harrier had heard the Telchi tell Ophare that if any sort of misfortune befell Tiercel as he wandered about the city, Ophare shouldn’t bother to return home.

“It entertains me. It passes the time. It adds coin to my purse. Perhaps I looked for one I could make into an apprentice.”

“Perhaps you didn’t,” Harrier said pleasantly, knowing that this last remark had not been made in true seriousness. None of the Telchi’s students was good enough—Harrier watched them when he wasn’t practicing himself. Not dedicated enough, or not capable enough, or just… not
good
enough. He wasn’t sure how he could tell just by looking at them, but he could. And he was also pretty sure that even armed with nothing but a pair of light wooden practice swords, he could disarm—and then
hurt
—any of the Telchi’s other students any time he wanted to. And thinking that was a little disturbing.

“Perhaps I did not,” the Telchi agreed, his tone just as easy. “Undoubtedly I was waiting for the Lady of Battles and the Sword-Giver to lead you to my side.”

Harrier shifted, a little uneasy now with the turn the conversation had taken. They were sitting on cushions in the main room of the Telchi’s home. It had become too hot to practice, but it was not yet time for the midday meal, which meant it was time for Harrier’s other lessons—lectures on what to do in every possible situation that
might involve killing somebody. Since he didn’t want to kill anyone at all, he usually did his best to distract his teacher at this point, sometimes with more success than at other times.

“You know we’ll be leaving, don’t you? As soon as Tiercel finds whatever he’s looking for?” He didn’t want the Telchi to think he’d be here forever, and he knew—
now
—that a normal apprenticeship to a Selken Master of Swords lasted years. Of course, it also began when the apprentice was a child, first presented to the Sword Temple as a promising acolyte.

The Telchi picked up his cup and sipped. The drink was called
kaffeyah
—they had it in Armethalieh, but it wasn’t popular there—and Harrier had tried it and loathed it. Fortunately, the Telchi didn’t insist he drink it.

“Yes. And I know—too—that no one to whom your friend has spoken, whether they be scholar or trader, recognizes this place he speaks of. But I know another thing that disturbs me more, that perhaps you should be mindful of.”

Harrier sat up straighten “What?”

“You know that this is the season for trading with the desertfolk.”

“Yes. It’s winter. You trade with them all winter and when spring comes and the snow melts in the Delfier Valley, the caravans head north.”

It wasn’t really winter. It was actually
spring
—it was already Rains, so he’d missed his Naming Day, and Flowering Fair, and everything else pretty thoroughly. In a sennight or two, the caravans would begin going north.

“Not this year. Tiercel does not know how to weigh the information as he should, but I do. It has been almost three moonturns since any Isvaieni was seen here in the Madiran, or lit their signal fire at Radnatucca Oasis to say they wished to trade. Ophare brings me the household gossip, and so I have the gossip of the marketplace, and thus I am told that it is so elsewhere as well.”

“So they’re all… gone?” Harrier asked, baffled.

The Telchi shrugged. “They are not here, nor in Kabipha’Iteru, nor in Laganda’Iteru, nor, one must imagine, in any of the rest of the String of Pearls either. And so they will be difficult to hire as guides.”

“W
E COULD SEND
letters home,” Tiercel said hesitantly one evening a few days later. Even without the goods usually provided by the Isvaieni, there were more than enough items to make up a payload, and the first caravans would be leaving Tarnatha’Iteru for Akazidas’Iteru in a sennight or so. The Telchi had already turned down several offers of employment as a caravan guard.

“A caravan takes about a moonturn on the Trade Road, maybe a little more,” Harrier said meditatively, staring at the ceiling. “A dispatch rider showing the Magistrate’s Seal could cover the same distance heading the other way in a sennight—less, if he rode straight through and didn’t mind killing his horses under him. Do you want to bet the future on the idea that your father wouldn’t write to the Consul here to yank you home the moment he knew where you were? Or that we’ll be gone in that time, and far enough away that we can’t be followed?”

Tiercel sat up and stared at him. “You don’t think …”

“What I think is that first you were sick, then you vanished, and whatever letters home our families have actually gotten out of all the ones we’ve written—and there haven’t been all that many—haven’t been all that reassuring. And if your family got the last one, the one you wrote from the Elven Lands, well… I know what
I’d
think.”
I’d think you’d written it while you were out of your head with fever somewhere, that’s what I’d think. Light knows that would be more comfortable than believing it’s all real.

“But it’s all true! I can prove it! Well, I mean … there’s Ancaladar. And you’ve got the Three Books.” Tiercel sounded as upset as if Harrier had said that
Harrier
didn’t believe him.

“Yeah, and if I have to choose between being eaten by
the Endarkened and telling my Da I’m a Wildmage, I’m not sure which I’d pick. But what I’m saying is, having to try to prove anything is going to slow us down. A lot. And attract a lot of attention. And were you
listening
when Macenor Telchi said the other day that all the Isvaieni just upped and vanished a while ago?”

“I was trying not to,” Tiercel answered simply. “Because I keep thinking of that … town.”

Windy Meadows. Where the Goblins had come up out of the ground and devoured all of the inhabitants. Where Simera had died.

“Maybe we should call Ancaladar back now,” Harrier said, frowning at the ceiling. Ancaladar’s saddle was built for two. He could carry both of them.

“I don’t want to … wake him up … until I know where we need to go. Or until I’m sure we can’t possibly find it,” Tiercel said.

“Okay. Fine.”

T
IERCEL
H
EARD
H
ARRIER
turn over, and a moment later, heard the not-quite-snoring that indicated he was already asleep. It was just as well that Tiercel had an entire city to occupy him, because all Harrier seemed to be doing these days was getting up before dawn, going off to spend several hours banging away at straw practice dummies (or at their host) with a pair of wooden swords, and then doing the same thing in the evening. As far as Tiercel could tell, Harrier wasn’t even practicing Fire or Coldfire any more—not that he really could without giving away the fact that he was a Wildmage, because (as Tiercel knew perfectly well) there was no privacy to be had in a house filled with servants.

Tiercel wasn’t quite sure why they’d both come to the conclusion that it was so important to, well, hide what they were. The fact that
he
had the ancient Magegift, yes. That would be awfully hard to even begin to explain. But Wildmages were revered everywhere, and the Telchi said
that they wandered around the Madiran, wearing blue robes that were practically a
uniform
and nobody bothered them because their magic was so necessary to everybody’s survival.

Tiercel frowned, momentarily distracted. He hadn’t seen anybody at all wearing blue robes, and he’d walked up and down and through what he was willing to bet was every single street and alley of this city.

Anyway. The
point
was that Harrier wasn’t practicing his magic (which was kind of a
sub
-point of the fact that both of them were pretending that they didn’t have any magic at all, because Tiercel had been careful not to do any spells either, at least not where anyone could see him, at least not any spells that anybody would recognize as spells) and all he said when Tiercel asked him what he was doing was “nothing.” If Tiercel hadn’t known that Harrier was a Knight-Mage, and that the Telchi was teaching him everything he knew about fighting, Tiercel might actually have believed it.

But he’d watched the two of them spar one evening. Harrier hadn’t known about it. But their bedroom window overlooked the practice area, and Tiercel had come in from another fruitless day trying to chase down some kind of clue to where they needed to go, and heard an odd clattering sound coming from outside the window. He’d gone over and looked out, and the two of them—Harrier and the Telchi—had been out there, training.

While they’d still been on the road, Tiercel had seen Macenor Telchi practice by himself many times, doing the exercises that he called “sword-dances.” When he’d still been recovering, they’d been slow and stately, but later he’d moved through the forms with blinding speed.