The Phoenix Unchained (55 page)

WHEN Harrier got back to his rooms, he was surprised to see Tier-cel there, though it was still midafternoon. He rarely saw Tiercel until the evening meal. But today Tiercel was sitting in the chair facing the
shamat
-board, rearranging the pieces desultorily. The Elven version was actually called
xaique
, and involved a lot more
pieces and different rules. Harrier wasn’t sure if he dared ask any of the Elves to teach it to him.

“You’re back early. Did you blow up your new schoolhouse?” he asked.

“I need a dragon,” Tiercel answered.

Coming on the heels of Harrier’s conversation with Ithoriosa, this seemed like an awfully strange thing for Tiercel to say. Had Ithoriosa known Tiercel was going to say it? Harrier didn’t quite put anything past dragons, after spending the past sennight talking to one. But he couldn’t explain that to Tiercel, because he couldn’t actually remember the last time he’d had a real conversation with Tiercel. Maybe back in Ysterialpoerin. Certainly not since he got to the Elven Lands.

“Jermayan and Ancaladar are going to die,” he said instead.

“What? When? Why?” Tiercel demanded.

Harrier summarized his afternoon’s conversation. He’d had enough time to think about it that he was pretty sure he had all the important details right: Jermayan was really old. He and Ancaladar were Bonded. Bonded dragons died when their Bondmates did.

“Well, I don’t think that’s fair,” Tiercel said.

Harrier laughed. Tiercel never thought anything was fair. “No,” he said, “it isn’t. But apparently dragons can’t breed unless they’re Bonded, and Elves can’t do magic unless they have dragons, and the dragons like being Bonded to the Elves—Ithoriosa says so, anyway, and since she’s a dragon, I guess she’d know. So what do
you
need a dragon for?”

Tiercel just looked stricken. “I’ve changed my mind,” he muttered.

“Oh, okay. So why
did
you need a dragon?” Harrier said long-sufferingly.

TIERCEL sighed. After spending the last moonturn finding out just how unlikely it was he was ever going to be able to do anything
more useful with the High Magick than light candles and make MageLight, the last thing he needed was a conversation like this. But a dog with a rat was nothing to Harrier looking for an explanation on the rare occasions when he actually wanted one. It would actually be easier to answer than to explain why he didn’t want to talk.

“All spells require power,” he said, keeping his explanation very simple. “Like bodies need food, like trees need water, like a ship needs wind.”

“Wildmages don’t have dragons,” Harrier pointed out.

And then again, maybe beating Harrier up would be simpler. Except for the fact that Tiercel had never managed to actually win a fight with Harrier, and after Harrier was sitting on his chest, he’d still be asking questions.

“They get their power from the Gods of the Wild Magic, and from the people involved in their spells. Because everybody has a little of the . . . power . . . that magic needs. But only Mages can use it.”

“Okay. That’s why you can do some magic already,” Harrier said. “Because you have a little power. Like a lamp with just a little oil.”

It was always easy to underestimate Harrier, but Harrier wasn’t stupid just because he wasn’t interested in most of the things Tiercel was interested in. Thinking of the power as lamp-oil was as good a way to imagine it as any.

“Yes. The books I’ve been reading call it ‘innate power.’ I do a spell, I use up what I have, and I have to wait for it to renew itself; that’s why I can’t do much more than light a few candles. In order to do the big spells of the High Magick, I’d have to have a lot more power to use all at once; the power in hundreds—maybe thousands—of people. Or the power of a dragon.”

“Just one dragon can do all that?” Harrier asked, sounding impressed.

“Well, apparently they can’t actually
do
anything. They just
are
.
But once they Bond, whoever they bond with can draw on the dragon’s power to fuel his—or her—spells,” Tiercel said.

“Like having a whole barrel of lamp-oil,” Harrier said, nodding. “And either you get a dragon, or you have to drag a couple of thousand people around with you all the time and figure out how to get
their
power. Or you can’t do any magic at all. And if you did have a dragon, it would die when you did, and . . . you’re only sixteen, Tyr, but that still isn’t a very long time from a dragon’s point of view.”

“No,” Tiercel said quietly. “It isn’t.”

“The High Mages didn’t have dragons either,” Harrier said, after a moment.

Tiercel sighed.
Dog with a rat
. But Harrier was his best friend, and he owed it to him to try to explain. “They all lived in Armethalieh. And they
did
drag a couple of thousand people around with them all the time, in a way. You can harvest the power that people have, like harvesting grain, and store it in talismans and reservoirs until you need it. But it’s a complicated process, and, well, you need all those people.”

“So you can learn the spells, but you can’t do them,” Harrier said, nodding.

Tiercel was surprised. He’d explained all he knew about the High Magick for moonturns, but he hadn’t thought Harrier was listening. Once he would have given anything to know that he had been. Now he wished he hadn’t been, because that just made all of this—given what he knew now—a thousand times harder.

“I can’t even learn them properly, because I can’t practice them. Remember when I tried to cast MageShield? It would be like that. And that’s just half the problem. Even if I had the power to cast the spells, I don’t have a High Mage to teach me what isn’t in the books—and that’s a lot—and even if I did have a High Mage to teach me all that, what I don’t have is
time
. It would take me at least twenty years to learn everything I’d need to know. But just imagine
that I could, and managed to make myself into a High Mage as good as any there ever was—as good as High Magistrate Cilarnen, even. What use is just one High Mage? As far as I can tell, all the other times it took hundreds of High Mages, Elven Mages, and Wildmages, all working together, to destroy the Endarkened, and every single time they actually failed.”

“Fine. That’s settled. You can’t be a High Mage and it wouldn’t do any good even if you could. Let’s go home,” Harrier said.

“And do what? I haven’t had any dreams since I’ve come here, but I’m sure they’ll start again once I leave the Elven Lands, and I haven’t forgotten what they’re like. Do I just go home, and try to ignore them, and wait until some kind of horrible army shows up at the City gates? The Elves—Jermayan—expect me to figure out a solution.”

Harrier shook his head. “Tyr, you can’t. I mean, I know you would if you could, but you’re not Kellen Knight-Mage. You just
aren’t
.”

It was nice to know that Harrier had so little confidence in him, Tiercel thought irritatedly, but he actually knew just how Harrier felt. Kellen Knight-Mage had been a
hero
.

Hadn’t he? Tiercel thought about it carefully. For his entire life he’d thought of all of them: Kellen, Jermayan, Idalia, Cilarnen, Ancaladar, Shalkan, as not really being real. As being
different
from the people he’d known all his life: myths, heroes. Even meeting Jermayan, Ancaladar, and Idalia hadn’t changed that: he’d somehow kept the people he spoke to and had come to know separate from the wondertale images inside his mind, but they really weren’t.

“Well, Kellen Knight-Mage wasn’t
Kellen Knight-Mage
when he started out, either, Har,” Tiercel said slowly, reasoning his way through the idea even while he was speaking. “All those people in all those stories they tell at Flowering Fair? They were just people. They didn’t know they were going to be heroes. They certainly
didn’t know we were going to turn them into wondertales a thousand years later, and we got a lot of the facts wrong anyway. Jermayan isn’t King of the Elves, and remember when we called Ancaladar ‘Star Crowned?’ I thought he was going to laugh until he choked. So I guess maybe back in the beginning Kellen wasn’t a Knight-Mage either, and didn’t have any more idea of what to do next than I do.”

Harrier sighed and ran a hand through his hair, looking unhappy. “Tyr, you know
exactly
what to do next. You just don’t want to do it. Well, neither would I.”

Suddenly Tiercel realized what Harrier’s harsh words had really been about. It wasn’t that he thought Tiercel was either helpless or incompetent. And it wasn’t, really, that Harrier thought he should just
give up
, either. Harrier knew as well as he did just how important it was for Tiercel to master the powers of a High Mage. Doing that was the only way to figure out exactly what his visions meant—no, more than that. Tiercel already knew that they meant that the Dark was coming back. But he thought they might also contain information on how to stop it.

“I’m not going to kill a dragon,” he said desperately.

“See?” Harrier said inarguably.

IT had been a sennight since his conversation with Harrier, and it was time to face facts: there was no point in sitting around any longer hoping he could become a High Mage in time to avert the disaster that was definitely coming, although the Elves apparently weren’t certain whether it was coming tomorrow or a thousand years from now. He couldn’t. It was possible that he wasn’t even supposed to; maybe Tiercel’s entire function was to found the next great school of High Mages, because in a century or two, they could
probably figure out how to get the High Magick working again the way it had used to work.

Unfortunately, he really thought that was unlikely.

Not the part about getting the High Magick to work, but the part about what he was supposed to do. If all he was supposed to do was found a new school of magic, he didn’t think the visions he’d had would have been quite so . . . urgent.

Tiercel looked down at the page in the spellbook. The ancient vellum glowed brightly in the afternoon light. No magic was involved; just a clear cloudless day and the large windows of what Harrier called his
schoolhouse
—although all he’d really learned here was that he couldn’t learn anything. “To See That Which Is Forbidden,” the title of the spell said. He turned the page. “To Call Down Lightning From The Sky.” Another page. “To Turn Water Into Ice.” Page after page of spells, involving hours, even days, of preparations. Each needed to be cast at the right time, with the right tools, after the right prayers, accompanied by the right incenses. And even if he did every single preparation correctly, none of that would matter if he didn’t have a source of Harrier’s “lampoil.” A big one.

Tiercel sighed, closing the useless spellbook, and rested his elbows on the table, staring off into space. He was pretty sure that the Fire Woman and the Lake of Fire in his visions were real things in a real place, and that he was meant to go there. He couldn’t really imagine why else he’d kept seeing them. It was the very last place in the entire universe that he wanted to go, but he really couldn’t think of anything else to do. He’d already figured out that the Elven sense of time was different from that of humans, and that while the Elves kept saying that this was a matter of “the utmost urgency,” that meant that they’d start thinking of doing something more about it than asking him for advice in five or ten years. And there were already Goblins on the Plains and kraken in the oceans.
By the time the Elves decided they needed to stop being cautious and careful, everybody would probably already be dead.