The Phoenix Endangered (48 page)

It was ridiculous for such a little thing to upset him after everything else that had happened tonight, but somehow it was the last straw. Harrier felt his heart hammer with fury, and he couldn’t really tell
why
he was angry—that they killed so lightly, that they thought it could be as easy for him as it was for them—all he knew was that when the man came forward again—shuffling, flat-footed (and Harrier thought, wild with grief, that the Telchi would never have allowed any of his students to perform so poorly), Harrier spun into him and cut him down without another thought.

As the body fell to the stones the other Isvaieni shouted in shock and drew their weapons, rushing forward, and Harrier was shouting too, crying out as if he were the one being cut, though he wasn’t. He only knew that something had to
stop
, and he didn’t know what: the killing, the pain he felt at having killed, having to know that the Telchi was dead, the city was dying, that people were dying all around him and
he couldn’t do anything about it.
He moved forward into his attackers.

Blood sprayed into his face and he was blinded, but it
didn’t matter. He didn’t need to see. He knew where his opponents were. Men were running across the square toward him now; he was surrounded by bodies and his swords left arcs of blood behind them in the air as the blades flickered in the rising sun.

He wasn’t here at all. Only his body was here, his body that did what it had been trained to do, what the Wild Magic had told him it must. He thought of birds. Herons flying through the morning mist on the Great Plains. Simera had been with them then. He remembered the sight of their wings in the dawn light, how gracefully they’d flown.

He never felt the blow from the club that brought him down.

I
T WAS A
long time later before Harrier came back to himself at all, and he wasn’t really fully conscious. For some reason he couldn’t see, and he couldn’t move his hands. Someone was dragging him into a sitting position, and forcing his jaws open, and a tube of hard leather was shoved into his mouth, and liquid was poured into it. The liquid was sweet and thick and burning, and he coughed and choked and gagged, trying not to swallow, but when he struggled, all he got for his troubles was a blow to the head.

If he didn’t swallow, he’d choke, so he swallowed. After what seemed like an eternity, the pouring stopped, and the tube was withdrawn. “I—What—Who—” he said. His voice was slurred, and he felt weak and sick.

He didn’t get any farther than that. The same hands that had held him up forced a length of rag between his jaws and tied it behind his head. He thought he should try to work it loose as soon as they left him alone, but he didn’t remember anything after that.

After that sometimes he’d waver near consciousness—always just before someone came to force more wine down his throat. He knew it was wine, now, just as he knew he was being held prisoner somewhere. His head hurt terribly, and he was painfully thirsty, but the one time he’d asked
for water when the gag was removed, whoever’d been there had hit him in the face until he’d tasted blood, and then kicked him until someone else had stopped them. He still hadn’t gotten any water. Just more of that nauseating wine—date wine, the same wine he’d used to cast the Scrying spell that had been so useless.

Then—after he didn’t know how long—there were sounds loud enough to rouse him from his drugged sleep. Roaring. Screams. The bawling of
shotors.

“Flee, human vermin! Flee or I will destroy you all!”
a deep voice bellowed.

Ancaladar.

There was a sudden strong gust of wind. It raised a choking cloud of dust, making Harrier sneeze and cough, and that wasn’t a good idea right now, because he realized he still had a gag in his mouth.

Ancaladar roared again, and there were … crunching noises. Harrier rolled over on his stomach, groaning. Whatever he was lying on was dusty, making the intense desire to cough and sneeze even worse, and when he rolled, his legs banged into something hard. His ankles were tied together—and his hands were tied behind him—letting him know just how helpless he was, but the pain helped rouse him further. He rubbed his face against the ground, trying to work the blindfold off so he could see where he was. His face hurt, but every twinge of pain brought him closer to awareness.

“Tiercel!”
Ancaladar bellowed, and Harrier realized that the one bright spot in all of this was that if Ancaladar was alive, Tiercel was too. He rubbed harder, ignoring the pain in his bruised face. Suddenly there was brightness—though not because he’d gotten the blindfold off—and he could feel sun on his back. He’d been in a tent all along, Harrier realized groggily.

“Harrier,” Ancaladar said. “Hold still.”

The sunlight went away—Ancaladar’s body was blocking it. Harrier froze where he was, imagining a very large black dragon peering at him. He felt a gust of hot breath as
Ancaladar inspected him. “You are so small,” Ancaladar said unhappily.

Harrier wanted to thrash, to somehow explain that Ancaladar needed to
do something right now
, because Tiercel might not even be here where they were. He held still with an effort, and felt the ground shake, and heard things go crunch as Ancaladar shifted around. Finally he felt a long dragon talon laid, with utmost delicacy, in the middle of his back.

“Your hands are tied,” Ancaladar explained unnecessarily. “But my claws are very sharp. If you can scrape your bonds against my claw, you can sever them.”

It took several minutes for Harrier to work himself free. He didn’t know how long his hands had been tied. He couldn’t really feel them. Ancaladar kept telling him to be careful, but he didn’t want to be careful. He wanted to get loose and go look for Tiercel. Finally whatever was holding his wrists broke. He felt a burning ache in his shoulders as his arms flopped to his sides, and as soon as he could, he rolled onto his back again and dragged the blindfold off.

He immediately wished he hadn’t. The sunlight stabbed into his eyes like knives, making his headache flare into a constant drumbeat that made lights flash behind his eyes in time with his heartbeat. He dragged the gag out of his mouth and pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes. “Find Tiercel,” he croaked. “I’ll come when you find him.”

Needles of returning circulation coursed through his hands and all the way to his elbows, as if his hands had been asleep for a very long time. After that they simply settled down to ache as if they were badly bruised, and Harrier thought they must be swollen, because when he tried to flex his fingers, they were so stiff he could hardly move them. But he knew he needed to untie his feet as soon as possible.

Cautiously, he uncovered his eyes. The sunlight still made them ache, and he could barely force them open. They
were watering so much that tears were trickling down his face, but if he squinted, he could see. He looked around. The contents of the tent had been reduced to ruin by Ancaladar, but there were several pieces of broken glass in the ruins. Harrier coughed and gagged as he caught the scent of the syrupy date wine that he’d been drugged with for Light knew how long. Better that than killed, though he couldn’t imagine why they’d bothered to keep him alive. He picked up a shard of glass—only then noticing that he had several deep scratches along his wrists from Ancaladar’s claw—and sawed clumsily through the rags that had been used to tie his ankles together.

His feet were in better shape than his hands were, since he’d still been wearing his boots when they’d tied his ankles, and so the bonds weren’t as tight. But he still couldn’t quite manage to make it to his feet until he crawled to where one of the tent poles lay on the sand and used it as a makeshift walking stick.

When he dragged himself to his feet, he got a good look at where he was for the first time. It was the orchard outside Tarnatha’Iteru. The canals were filled with water again, and the sight and smell of even muddy irrigation ditch water was enough to make Harrier’s mouth and throat ache with thirst. The last time he’d gotten a really good look at the orchard, when Tiercel had dropped the MageShield the first time—it had been filled with hundreds of Isvaieni tents. Now less than a dozen remained—if you included the ones that Ancaladar had obviously torn up by their roots looking for the two of them.

“Here,” Ancaladar said, sounding unhappy. “He’s in here.” The dragon nosed at the opening of one of the tents that was still standing.

“I hope—” Harrier’s mouth was so dry he had to start again. “I hope there’s water here other than what’s in those ditches, because I’m about ready to drink that.”

“The goatskins hold water,” Ancaladar said gently.

It took Harrier a long time to stagger across the space
between the ruined tent he’d been in and the one Ancaladar was waiting outside of.

“Drink first,” Ancaladar said. There was a waterskin hanging outside the tent. “You cannot help Tiercel if you are unconscious. And—Harrier—I cannot help him at all.”

“You told me that once. I remember,” Harrier whispered hoarsely. He wrestled the goatskin down from its hook. The water was warm and tasted of leather, and nothing in Harrier’s life had ever tasted so sweet. He drank until his stomach ached, until he didn’t think he could hold another mouthful no matter how much he wanted to, and even though everything still
hurt
, he felt stronger. He went inside the tent. Tiercel was lying on the dusty carpet, blindfolded and bound and gagged just as Harrier had been. His head moved from side to side, and he was thrashing feebly.

“Hang on,” Harrier said. “I’ll get you loose in just a second.”

There was a tray of food—bread and cheese and dates—sitting out on a low metal table, as if somebody had been going to sit in here and have lunch and gloat over Tiercel. There was a knife on the tray—one of the same kind of knives that all the Isvaieni seemed to carry—and Harrier picked it up without thinking and then dropped it with a cry.

He thought of the knife in the hand of the man he’d killed. The
men
he’d killed. He remembered that morning on the steps of the palace, and realized he didn’t even know how many men he’d killed that day, and realized it had all been for nothing, because they’d ended up here anyway. His hands began to shake, and he forced them to stop, and he forced himself to pick up the knife again. It was just a knife. A tool. It was what people did with tools that mattered.

He cut the rags around Tiercel’s ankles first, then sat him up and cut the ones around his wrists. The center pole of the tent was sturdy enough to lean against; he checked before propping Tiercel against it. Then he cut through the gag and pulled it out.

“Oh, Light deliver us,” Tiercel said. His voice was hoarse and slurred and his lips were dry and cracked.

“I’d leave the blindfold on,” Harrier said. “Really.”

He went back to the door of the tent to get the waterskin, but by the time he came back, Tiercel had pulled off the blindfold and was groaning and wincing at the light from the open side of the tent, bringing his swollen hands up to block as much of it as possible.

“Told you,” Harrier said without sympathy. He held up the waterskin for Tiercel to drink, and once Tiercel had drunk his fill, washed his own hands and face to remove as much of the dust as he could and then squirted some of the rest of the water over Tiercel.

“Hey,” Tiercel said weakly.

“You could use a bath,” Harrier said unsympathetically.

“Well, so could you,” Tiercel said. He took a deep breath. “I thought you were dead. I didn’t know what had happened. When I came to, I knew I’d been tied up. The first time I could manage to concentrate, I yelled for Ancaladar as loud as I could.”

“And I came, Bonded,” Ancaladar said from the doorway, sounding agitated. “I woke, and came as fast as I could.”

“You’re here, and we’re alive,” Harrier said soothingly, because Ancaladar seemed really upset. He went over to the table. Even the smell of the dates was nauseating, but he picked up the bread and the cheese and brought them back to where Tiercel was sitting. “Have some food,” he said, sitting down carefully. The floor of the tent was carpeted; he wondered if the carpets had come from the city, or whether the Isvaieni had carried them here with them. “I don’t know how long we’ve been held prisoner, but I know they didn’t feed us. Or give us any water.” He tore off a piece of the bread and chewed slowly. It was hard and stale, but it only served to make him aware of how hungry he was. After a couple of bites he handed the bread to Tiercel and accepted the cheese in return.

“What happened?” Tiercel asked.

“You passed out,” Harrier said, staring over Tiercel’s shoulder.

“After that. Harrier, I already know the city fell,” Tiercel added, when Harrier didn’t say anything.

“Rial and I got you inside—we were on the roof, if you don’t remember. Everybody who was going to fight went out. There was an ambush. I guess. I think the Isvaieni heard the horns and knew the shield wasn’t going to come back up this time.” He shrugged. “It didn’t matter. They were supposed to be too weak to fight back. After six days without water, they should have been.”

“They weren’t, though,” Tiercel said.

“No. But you were right,” Harrier said, looking for something to distract Tiercel. “You said that the Red Man—you remember, he was following us all the way to Ysterialpoerin? You said he was here, and he was.”

Tiercel frowned. “I said that? I don’t remember.”

“You raved about him for three days.”

“Yeah, well I probably said I was an enchanted Silver Eagle, too, I mean—wait. He was here?”

“Yeah. We had a wonderful conversation, and he asked what I’d do—pretty much—to get you out of the city alive, and then I got captured by a bunch of Isvaieni and I guess you did, too.”

Tiercel gave him an odd look. “That was all that happened?”

“Does there have to be more? Oh, he said I was
real
now, which I found very, very comforting. Not.”

“Because he could see you. And you could talk to him,” Tiercel said, guessing.