The Phoenix Unchained (50 page)

THE house was large, and ought to have reminded him of his uncle’s country place—which both Tiercel and Harrier had always found to be very formal and somewhat intimidating—but it actually reminded Tiercel most, of all the places he’d ever been, of Harrier’s house, though on the surface it had nothing in common with it. No matter how exotic, and, well,
Elven
, House Malkirinath was, it still seemed like the sort of place where people raised children and children ran through the halls.

“Here are the rooms that have been prepared for you,” Rilphanifel said, stopping before a closed door. “I believe you will find all within that you may require—and, as Farabiael most properly reminds me, you will wish to recover from your journey. I shall return later so that you may come and drink tea with our Greatfather, for perhaps you will find that he is the goal of your long travels.”

“Ah, perhaps,” Tiercel agreed, not really knowing what else to say. Behind him the door began to open, though neither of the Elves had moved. He turned toward it, distracted, and when he turned back again—he had more questions, like “
when are you coming back
” and “
what if we need something
”—both Elves where gone.

“Did you? . . .” he asked.

Harrier shrugged in answer, a sour look on his face. Obviously he hadn’t seen them leave either.

However it had opened, the door shut in the ordinary way.

“I’m taking my boots off,” Harrier announced immediately, sitting
down on the bench just inside the door. “These carpets may be ordinary to the Elves, but I know what they’d cost back home, and I just can’t walk on them in muddy boots.”

Tiercel looked down at his own feet. He’d scraped off most of the muck from the forest trudge walking across the lawn and the portico—the surface of the terrace might almost have been designed for cleaning muddy boots—but looking at the lush patterned carpet, he didn’t want to go tromping across it in dirty boots either. He shoved Harrier sideways and began pulling off his own boots and socks.

“That feels better,” Harrier said with a sigh. He wiggled his toes. “Hey, food.”

Tiercel sighed. The treasures of the Elven Lands—things that Men hadn’t seen for centuries—were spread out before them, and Harrier wanted breakfast. Tiercel’s stomach rumbled. Well, maybe Harrier was right.

The room they were in was obviously a sort of sitting room. Low deep benches lined two of the walls, and in the center of the room were several comfortable chairs set around a large octagonal table inlaid with the green and white squares of a
shamat
board, the pieces already set up for a game. In the far corner was a large standing harp with a stool beside it, and hung upon the wall behind it were several other instruments; Tiercel recognized a gittern and a flute. There was a small glass-fronted case of books as well, on the wall opposite the windows, but though he longed to explore it—what sort of books did Elves read?—his immediate attention was claimed by the table beneath the windows, where Harrier was already lifting the covers off of dishes and exploring the contents of baskets.

“Everything’s cold,” Harrier announced through a mouth full of cheese, “but there’s a lot of it. Come and eat.”

Tiercel did as he was bid.

THERE was indeed a lot of it; either the Elves had known Harrier was coming, or they were simply excellent hosts. Some of it Tiercel recognized—bread and cheese and jam were pretty much the same everywhere—and a lot of it he didn’t. None of the fruits were familiar, though they were certainly fruit, and all delicious. He wasn’t quite sure what sort of smoked cold bird he was eating, or what it was stuffed with, or, considering the size, how the cook had managed to get all the bones out, but he ate three of them. And he had no idea what the little pastries were stuffed with (fruit? vegetables? meat?), or what the other meat on the platters was at all. Fish? Pork? But it was pink and tender and he grabbed two slices of it before Harrier ate all of it, because the one thing he was certain of was that nothing here would poison him.

After they’d both eaten as much as they could hold—and tidied up afterward as well as they could—Harrier began to investigate the items on the table that weren’t immediately edible.

“There’s a brazier here—pretty fancy one—and sugar and honey—so this must be the tea,” he said, gingerly picking up an Elvenware canister and opening it. He sniffed, and shook his head. “No. Smells like some kind of leaves. Maybe we were supposed to put it on the food?” He offered it to Tiercel.

Tiercel took the narrow gleaming cylinder carefully. The secret of the manufacture of Elvenware was one secret the Elves had not shared, and the only Elvenware still in Armethalieh was centuries old; in museums or in private collections. While he was sure it was as common as glass in the Elvenlands, he couldn’t get over the idea that he was handling something rare and precious.

He sniffed its contents as Harrier had done, but he didn’t smell tea, only a faintly peppery grasslike scent. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Well, we don’t need tea. There were two kinds of cider.”

“And three kinds of leaves,” Harrier said, investigating the other cylinders. “Okay. What do we do now?”

“Well, Farabiael said we were to ‘bathe and rest and eat.’ And we’ve eaten.”

The other doors off the sitting room led to identical bedrooms. In addition to a bed, each held a small writing-desk and a clothes-press, and the bed was turned down invitingly. After peeking into one room, they walked into the other to investigate it more thoroughly.

The clothes-press proved to contain a few items of clothing: a house-robe and chamber-boots, and a tunic, leggings, and boots similar to what they had seen Elunyerin and Rilphanifel wearing.

“Well,” Harrier said, holding the pale fawn-colored tunic up against himself, “I guess that settles whose room is which.”

“What?” Tiercel said. He was looking out the window. All he could see was more lawn, though the first-floor rooms were obviously at the back of the house, since there was a large garden outside the window. He didn’t see anything that looked like a city. He heard Harrier sigh in exasperation.

“These won’t fit me. But they’ll fit you. So this is obviously your room. Hope mine has a bath, too.”

“If it doesn’t, you’ll just have to stand outside and hope it rains.”

THERE was, naturally, a bath in Harrier’s room as well, and the clothing provided for him was all in shades of pale russet. He waved cheerfully to Tiercel and went off to investigate the mysteries of Elven plumbing, and soon Tiercel heard water running.

The bath in Tiercel’s bedroom was very much like what Tiercel was used to back home in Armethalieh, except for the fact that using it was like bathing in a piece of jewelry, which made him just a little nervous. The entire bathroom, just to begin with, seemed to be made out of Elvenware, and Elves seemed to use a
lot
more perfume than he was used to. But the flowery scents weren’t as strong
as they seemed at first, and to his relief, they seemed to dissipate quickly—or at least, he couldn’t smell them after a while.

When he came out, wrapped in the houserobe, he looked around for Harrier, but didn’t see him anywhere. He ate an apple-ish fruit and went to inspect the
shamat
board—only to discover that the game set up wasn’t
shamat
after all; there were too many playing pieces and he didn’t recognize any of them. And Harrier still hadn’t appeared.

He went to investigate Harrier’s room, only to discover Harrier sprawled out across his bed, damp from his bath and fast asleep.

Figures
, Tiercel thought with amusement. They might not have the freedom of the whole house to explore, but there was enough in these few rooms to keep anybody occupied for hours. And all Harrier wanted to do was sleep.

Well,
he
didn’t want to sleep. He went back into the other room and turned to investigate the bookshelf.

Several of the books were in an alphabet he couldn’t read—fascinating, but frustrating. The next book he selected he
could
read, but it was a book of poems—nice, but not as informative as he was hoping for. The one after that was on gardening, and he spent a few minutes leafing through it, admiring the pictures. The next seemed to be the same book but in the other alphabet, so if he had enough time, he could probably learn the language. The book after that was about fans: how to make them, how to decorate them, how to use them. He’d just about given up hope of finding anything really useful when, at the bottom of the last shelf, he found six thick volumes bound in matching blue leather. The title on the spines was
A Brief Essay on Recent Events
.

This looked promising. He pulled the books out of the shelves and took them over to the chair, moving the not-
shamat
pieces aside so he could pile the books on the game-table. He opened Volume One and began to read.

A few minutes later he looked up, making an amused face.
Brief? Recent? He wondered when this had been written. The unknown author—there was no name anywhere on the books—began with events from two thousand years ago—Tiercel knew that, because the author said at the beginning of his “brief essay” that he would begin his narrative with the founding of Armethalieh. Personally, Tiercel would like to meet someone for whom the founding of Armethalieh was a “recent event.”

Still, he liked history, and anything that went back that far was sure to have plenty about the High Magick in it. He kept reading.

Thirteen

In the House of Malkirinath

T 
IERCEL DIDN’T KNOW how long he read, though he got up once to get a cup of cider from the pitcher, and then a couple of times more to refill it, but eventually Harrier came wandering out into the main room again.

“Trust you to find a book,” Harrier said, heading over to the table. “See any Elves?”

“No,” Tiercel said. He looked around.

From the position of the sun, it was now several hours past midday, and Tiercel was abruptly aware that he was lounging around in a loose robe when their hosts might reappear at any moment; Harrier, of course, was already dressed in the clothing their hosts had provided. He got to his feet.

“I’ll be right back.”