The Phoenix Unchained (27 page)

TIERCEL shooed the two of them back to their wood-gathering and resumed his practice, drawing as many of the sigils in the air as he could: some of them were too complicated for him to manage without more practice. Each one appeared as a different color. They all faded quickly.

He would have practiced longer, but after a short time he started to feel dizzy and weak again, the same way he had when he’d cast MageLight on the bear. Just as he had back at the inn, and back in his room in Armethalieh.

In fact—Tiercel was coming to realize—every single time he used the High Magick in any big important way, he got sick. And that didn’t seem right. Magic was supposed to be normal and natural, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t have the Magegift if he wasn’t supposed to use it.

Unless he really
was
dying.

He shook his head. He’d better not let Harrier find out, or the one thing he’d be hoping for was to die
sooner
. He grinned in spite of himself. And when Old Mother Death showed up, Harrier would be certain to want to fight with her, too.

Then he sobered. He didn’t want to be sick, and he didn’t want to die, and more than he wanted both of those things, he wanted to know the meaning—and the purpose—of his visions. He hoped they’d find a suitable place to try the Summoning soon.

That night he dreamed again.

IN his dream, once more Tiercel was back on the shore of the Lake of Fire. The Fire Woman was there, and as always she seemed familiar and desirable and terrible all at once. The other presence was there as well—the one he could never see—the one who was the true subject of her attention.

She wanted something from him—the other one. Tiercel only wished he knew what it was. But he didn’t even know what
she
was. And in the middle of the dream, he never wondered. He only watched in terror as she coaxed the other unseen watcher to come to her, over and over.

But this time, when he woke up, he realized, for the first time, that he had sensed something of the unseen watcher’s thoughts as well as of the Fire Woman.

And that he had reason to fear the unseen watcher’s plans as well.

A sennight’s journey due north brought them onto the Great Plains. The Mystrals were visible in the distance, their highest peaks still covered with snow. Simera would be able to take them
through the mountains; it would take them a moonturn, two at most, to reach them.

Assuming they had to go that far.

By now their letters would have reached Armethalieh, and their parents knew that they weren’t coming home. Tiercel tried very hard not to think about that. His constant practice with his wand helped distract his thoughts, though he was careful to practice out of sight of the others at all times. The bouts of weakness that came from using his Magegift didn’t fade, and he didn’t want the others to worry. He didn’t know what the problem was, but it didn’t get better, and it didn’t go away. It was as if—each time he used the High Magick—he hit some sort of invisible wall, and afterward, he couldn’t even see the shapes of the glyphs inside his mind. As if whatever fuelled his power to do magic had vanished for a while.

It was always back by the next evening, though.

EVER since they’d met up with the bear-that-wasn’t-a-bear, Harrier had done his best to keep his thoughts and feelings to himself. Letting the others know what he thought wouldn’t do anybody any good anyway.

This was crazy. But he didn’t have any better ideas.

Had there been a Wildmage in Sentarshadeen, that would have solved all their problems. They could have done . . . whatever . . . turned around, gone home, and gone on with their lives.

They wouldn’t have had to do this. Or maybe gotten to do this. Sometimes Harrier wasn’t sure, even in his own mind, which way he thought of it anymore. If everything hadn’t been so just plain weird, this journey would have actually been fun. He’d spent all his life in a big city next to the ocean, growing up around ships, with the sound of the waves in his ears and the smell of the sea in his nostrils.

This was nothing like that.

From Armethalieh to Sentarshadeen they’d traveled through woodlands—nice enough, but just as closed-in as a city, really, when you stopped to think about it. And north of Fort Halacira, the land was cut up by little hills and groves of trees and herds of cattle, so you never really got a sense of how
big
it was, though he’d never lost his sense of strangeness at not being able to smell or hear the ocean.

He’d liked it.

This was what he wanted to do with his life, Harrier realized. Go new places and see newthings. Not just hear about them from the captains of the ships that docked in Armathalieh Harbor, but go and see them himself. And not see them from the deck of a ship, either, but on his own two feet—or at least from horseback. It almost felt like treason, to want to give up the sea so completely, but he guessed he was more like Uncle Alfrin than anybody in the family had ever suspected.

But when they reached the Great Plains, that was when Harrier truly fell in love with the land.

AS the gentle rise and fall of the Avribalzar grasslands disappeared behind them, the horizon dropped away, receding to infinity. Here the landscape was as flat as a dish, with nothing between them and the distant Mystrals but the wind.

It was like riding across the ocean itself. Just as empty. Just as trackless. Ondoladeshiron lay somewhere far to the west, but it was nowhere to be seen. Except for the hawks wheeling through the sky—and a distant glimpse, once, of what Simera said was a Silver Eagle—there was nothing to be seen but summer-yellow grass.

Of course the Plains were not as empty as they looked. They were home to deer, and wild bulls, herds of free-roaming horses, and hundreds of other animals. Simera’s snares were always full.
But they never saw any of them. It was strangely peaceful. And everything would have been perfect, if Tiercel weren’t waving a wand and making things glow in the dark and behaving like something out of a Flowering Fair play, because Harrier just didn’t know what to think about that at all. Especially if a Wildmage really
wasn’t
going to appear to set things right.

All his life Harrier had been used to pulling Tiercel out of scrapes. And now this was the biggest scrape ever, and all he could really do was watch as things kept getting worse in new and exciting ways. He didn’t like the idea that the only thing Tiercel could think of to do was cast another spell, because Tiercel was compulsively honest, and if they hadn’t known everything that could go wrong with this Summoning thing a sennight ago, they certainly did now.

But Harrier also knew that the only alternative was to keep going north the way they were until they either ran into the peaks of Pelashia’s Veil or met up with a Wildmage who might not be coming at all.

One of the things he really hated to admit (and wouldn’t admit unless there was a really good reason for it, which there rarely was) was that Tiercel was often right about things. Well, more than often. Usually. Even most of the time. He didn’t brag about it, or even make a point of it, and he certainly didn’t draw attention to it. And that didn’t mean that his
ideas
weren’t pretty half-baked most of the time. But when Tiercel said something like “I think it’s going to rain” or “that dog won’t bite” or “Javiard Kalborn is going to try to pick a fight with you during lunch,” Harrier had learned to pay close attention, because Tiercel was almost always right.

So when Tiercel had said that a Wildmage might not be coming—because he might already have the power to solve his own problems—Harrier had hated the thought. But he’d listened.

And he’d hated the idea of Tiercel trying another spell. But he had to admit that he couldn’t think of anything better to try. Magic had caused the problem. Magic had to be the solution.

“SOMEONE’S coming,” Tiercel said.

He only saw it first because on horseback he was taller than Simera, and because he happened to be looking ahead while Harrier was looking off to the side, marveling once again at the sheer amount of
space
all around them.

At Tiercel’s words, Harrier looked to where Tiercel was looking. There was a faint speck on the horizon. Someone on horseback.