The Phoenix Unchained (48 page)

Slowly Tiercel got to his feet and began ineffectually brushing at his own damp trousers, though that would do nothing to dry them.

“And I am very late for last night’s dinner,” Ancaladar said, spreading his wings with a crisp snap. Open, the black membrane between the ribs of the great wings was translucent, like oiled silk, and shimmered with rainbow colors. “Go that way,” the dragon added, swinging his head toward the western edge of the meadow, “and you will find a trail. Follow it, and you will certainly know what to do when the time comes.”

“Wait!” Tiercel cried. “Will we see you again?”

“Inevitably,” Ancaladar answered.

Tiercel opened his mouth to ask another question, but Ancaladar had already turned to go. As the two boys watched, the dragon bounded away, breaking first into a trot, then a run, then a gallop, his wings half-spread. It seemed to his observers that Ancaladar was simply going to run head-first into the trees and crash, but at the last possible moment, he spread his wings fully and gave a leap upward. To Tiercel and Harrier’s amazement, Ancaladar spun almost completely around, like a kite in an updraft, and began to angle upward into the sky in long, seemingly-lazy zig-zags. Long seconds passed before the first time the great black dragon stroked his wings downward against the morning air, and seconds after that he’d vanished against the sky.

“Okay,” Harrier said for no reason in particular, finally getting up off the grass. He regarded Tiercel with disgust, as if the fact that he was damp and thousands of miles from home with nothing
but the clothes on his back was entirely Tiercel’s fault. “Now what?”

“What he said,” Tiercel said, sighing. “We’re bound to run into some Elves sooner or later.” Without waiting to hear what Harrier had to say—about Elves, Dragons, jumping into glowing pools of water, or the extreme likelihood that he was going to miss breakfast—Tiercel turned and began to trudge off in the direction Ancaladar had indicated.

ACTUAL forests—Tiercel couldn’t keep from thinking of this one as something different—were messy. Trees fell in all directions and rotted where they lay; new trees grew up haphazardly. Not here.

They’d found the trail that Ancaladar had told them about as soon as they reached the edge of the meadow, though it was hardly worth the name; a narrow deer-track through the moss and low-growing plants of the forest floor, less than a handspan wide. It was obviously the trail they sought; the trace went in the right direction, and the earth was pounded down to claylike hardness with the passage of many feet, both animal and human.

By the time they’d reached the forest, their trouser legs and the hems of their cloaks were both thoroughly saturated with morning dew. But it was hard to be preoccupied with simple physical discomfort—even their own growing hunger and thirst—when their surroundings were so unimaginably strange.

“It looks like . . . Remember the time we visited your cousin?” Harrier said half an hour later.

“My mother’s uncle, Lord Morlade?”

“Breeds pigeons, and has a big estate in the Delfier Valley,” Harrier agreed. “You know; he had this big fake ruin out in the back, and a bunch of trees planted around it to look like an overgrown
forest, only the whole thing was fussed over by his gardeners day and night.”

“You mean all this looks artificial, as if someone’s taking care of it,” Tiercel said.

“I guess,” Harrier said doubtfully.

In fact, the forest
did
look like a garden of a sort, and the air was as filled with scent as if this were a perfumer’s shop, from the green scent of mosses and leaves, to the intense fruit scent of the berries and the exotic fruit-bearing trees, to the host of sweet scents coming from the flowers that seemed to bloom everywhere. Everything was tidy and organized, polished and tended. Though under Simera’s tutelage—remembering her still brought pangs of dull angry grief—he’d started to become at least a little familiar with the forest, and the way it had changed as they’d moved north and east, Tiercel didn’t recognize a single one of the trees around him now. There was something like an oak, but it had fruits like apples; something almost like a maple, but it had large pale-orange flowers. Clustered at the bases of the trees were low-growing bushes heavy with bright-colored summer berries. Since there were deer in the forest, the bushes should have been chewed over and stripped of berries, but as far as he could see, that was not the case.

The berries looked delicious, but they also didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen before, and poor Simera might not have had time to teach him everything about the edible plants of the forest, but he’d been eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the capital of the Nine Cities for the past sixteen years, and Tiercel was pretty sure that if it grew anywhere from the Dragon’s Tail to the Western Ocean, it had appeared on the Rolfort table at some point. If he didn’t recognize it, eating it was probably not a good idea, whether he was hungry or not. Everything Tiercel saw reminded him that he was far from home.

He wondered if all the caretaking of the forest was done by
magic spells, because it was hard to imagine the amount of labor that would have had to go into tending even the part of the forest they saw—and this forest could be only a small part of the whole Elven Lands.

The birds in the trees were not feathered in the familiar blues and greys of the sea and forest birds of Armethalieh, but in green and yellow and even purple. And birds weren’t the only winged things roosting in the trees. Tiercel looked up, his eye drawn to a by-now-familiar flash of color, and found himself staring at what he thought at first was a giant butterfly. He’d thought it was more than a little strange, not only because it was more than a foot across, but because it glowed as if it were made of MageLight.

He supposed butterflies might do that in the Elven Lands, but then the butterfly had reached out a hand to pluck a cluster of berries growing from a vine coiled around the tree branch the butterfly was perched on, and Tiercel realized that it wasn’t a butterfly of any kind, but a tiny glowing humanshape with something like butterfly wings. Then another movement caught his eye and he glanced away from it, toward the oak-with-apples, sure that he’d seen a female figure standing there against its trunk, but when he looked at the tree directly, he saw nothing. He looked back toward the tree branch. The winged creature had been joined by several more of its kind. They were all sitting on the branch, eating berries. Tiercel thought they were staring at him.

“You’re awfully jumpy,” Harrier said idly.

Tiercel stared at him, wondering if Harrier had decided to be particularly irritating, or if it was possible he actually wasn’t seeing what Tiercel was seeing.

“The forest is alive.”

Harrier regarded him condescendingly. “Ye-e-s-s-s . . . Trees, grass . . .”

Tiercel pointed silently toward the glowing butterfly-creatures
and watched Harrier’s jaw drop in shock. He felt reassured that Harrier could at least see the little butterfly creatures, but he had the odd feeling that Harrier wouldn’t be able to see the tree-women, or the half-invisible shapes in the air that Tiercel thought he might have seen earlier. “I’m pretty sure those are pixies. And I think I saw some women in the trees over there, too. If I did, they’re probably dryads. I don’t know.”

Harrier sighed and hunched his shoulders. “Not Elves?” he asked hopefully.

“Not yet.”

There was a pause.

“That couldn’t have been Ancaladar,” Harrier said, as if he were trying out the idea to see if he could convince himself. “Not the—”

“Why not?” Tiercel demanded. “Dragons live forever.”

“So,” Harrier said. “The
actual
Ancaladar.”

Tiercel nodded. A year ago, if someone had offered him the chance to meet Ancaladar in the flesh—or even see him—he would have been so thrilled he would hardly have been able to breathe.

“Why you?” Harrier asked, in an uncanny echo of his thoughts. “I mean, not that it isn’t a great honor and all.”

Tiercel shook his head. “To bring me here,” he said.

“To meet Jermayan,” Harrier said.

Tiercel nodded.

“Not
the
—”

“I don’t know!”

They continued along the trail. Unlike the other trails they’d followed in human lands, this trail really didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular, and a couple of times Tiercel was certain they turned around and headed back the way they’d come. To make things worse, he continued to glimpse shapes out of the corner of his eye; moving shimmers that were never quite
there
when he turned to gaze at them full-on. He got the strong feeling that the forest was even more thoroughly inhabited than he could see, with
kinds of Otherfolk that were either invisible to the human eye or that were just very
very
good at hiding. He listed the possibilities in his mind: Pixies, Dryads, Fairies, Fauns, Selkies, Salamanders, Undines, Gnomes, Sylphs, Air-Sprites, Water-Sprites, Flower-Sprites, Forest-Fae, Unicorns, of course . . .

“I see you,” a voice out of nowhere said formally.

Tiercel stopped with a hiccup of surprise. He’d been staring off to the side of the path at a particularly strange looking tree; its bark was silvery-white—though it looked nothing like the birch trees he’d seen—and its long slender leaves were nearly black. The thing was, when you glanced at the whole forest together, it looked like a perfectly normal forest. It was only when you started looking carefully at the trees that you realized you’d never seen anything like any of them before.

“Hello?” he responded cautiously. He wondered if the stranger had been invisible until he’d chosen to reveal himself. After the events of the past day, Tiercel thought anything was possible.

Besides, he was an Elf.

He was about Tiercel’s height—which made him an inch or two shorter than Harrier—and his skin was nearly as pale as whatever material the portal that had carried Tiercel and Harrier here had been made of. He was wearing a hooded tunic and close-fitting leggings in a dull green that blended in with the leaves of the forest—and both tunic and leggings were embroidered with an elaborate pattern of spirals and lines in a thousand shades of brown and grey and gold. The long hood of the tunic was pushed back to expose his waist-length hair, which was elaborately-braided with strips of cloth in greens and browns that matched his clothing. High soft boots in dull fawn suede, stitched with a pattern of green leaves, completed his outfit. A delicate hand-held crossbow was balanced at his hip, and he held a quarterstaff in his other hand. His black eyes gazed at Tiercel and Harrier without expression.

“Perhaps it would be good to be gentle with the human for
whom Father has been waiting, and not simply kill him outright for his presumption in speaking to you,” a new voice said.

This time Tiercel was staring right at the first Elf as the second one appeared right beside him, and he still wasn’t sure what happened. One moment there was one Elf standing in front of him. A moment later, there were two.

Like the first one, she—he was pretty sure it was a “she”—was dressed in a soft heavily-embroidered green tunic. She, too, had long black hair in a beribboned braid. The only difference between the two of them that Tiercel could see was that her crossbow was slung over her shoulder, and not pointed at him.

“We do not know that this is he,” the first Elf said.

“It would make good hearing did you share with me your knowledge of the many other humans whom Ancaladar has brought through the Doorway to Karahelanderialigor in recent years,” the second Elf said, and though she did not raise her voice in the slightest, and though her tone was completely courteous, Tiercel had the impression that if this were back home in Armethalieh and they were human, the two of them would already be yelling at each other at the top of their lungs—and not politely.

“Uh, hey? Excuse me? I’m Harrier Gillain and this is Tiercel Rolfort, and this Ancaladar sent us this way, but I think we might be lost,” Harrier said, stepping forward.

“It would be difficult for you to lose yourself, did you properly follow Ancaladar’s direction,” the woman said, preparing to turn back to her argument.

“Well, you see,” Harrier plowed on stubbornly, “that’s the thing. He said we were supposed to end up at Kara-Hela-Dragon-Lore, or some place like that, and all we’ve seen is this forest, where we’ve been wandering around for about a bell and a half. Now it’s a great forest, but do you think that maybe—”

“
Harrier
!”

Harrier regarded Tiercel with stubborn irritation. “Tyr, it’s either
too late or too early to watch a couple of Elves stand around and argue about whether or not you’re who you are. I mean,
Elves
. They’re supposed to be wise and all-knowing, right? So either they can be useful, or I figure they aren’t really Elves.”

Both of the Elves were now staring at Harrier with identical expressionless faces. It gave their features an eerie correspondence; that, combined with their identical mode of dress, made them look more alike than twins.

The male of the pair bowed, very slightly. “I greet you, travelers, in the name of Leaf and Star, and welcome you to the lands beyond the Veil. I am Rilphanifel and this is Elunyerin. We see you.”