CHILDREN OF AMARID

by DAVID B. COE

  A stunned silence fell over the hall. Several of the mages traded looks of astonishment in response to what Sonel had said.

  “You’ve spoken with the Wolf-Master?” Ursel asked breathlessly after a moment, as if uncertain that she had heard correctly.

  “Once, yes. When I was young and newly bound to my first hawk, I sought him out,” she explained. “I guess I looked upon confronting an unsettled mage as a rite of passage, something I was supposed to do now that I had joined the Order. As it turned out, though, ‘confront’ was the wrong word. I remember Phelan as a kind man, welcoming. I sensed in him none of the hostility or bitterness that I had expected.”

  “You never told me about this,” Baden said quietly.

  Sonel shrugged. “I never told anyone until now. It was a strange experience: frightening, as you might imagine, but more than that. Even though he was kind to me, I felt as though I was intruding in some way. So I never spoke of it, I guess out of deference to Phelan.”

  Baden looked at her keenly. “Despite those feelings, you think he’ll be sympathetic to our need?”

  “Under the circumstances, I do.”

  Baden gazed at her for a moment longer. Then he nodded. “It sounds like a good choice, then. Unless someone has another option,” he added, raising his voice. No one responded, and the Owl-Master turned to Toinan. “How many mages do you think we can send to Phelan Spur?”

  The older woman glanced around the chamber, weighing Baden’s question. “Five or six,” she said finally. “Any more than that would leave too few to lend their power to the stone.”

  “I would suggest that Sonel be included in this delegation,” Baden said, looking at the other mages. “Given that she’s spoken with Phelan before, she may well be our best hope of convincing him to help us.”

  Toinan shook her head. “I don’t doubt that she’d be a valuable member of this company,” the older woman argued, “but she’ll be much more useful as our conduit. She’s been to the spur; she knows where Phelan can be found. The safety of those we send will best be served if she remains here.”

  Orris saw Baden and Sonel exchange a long look. At length, Sonel nodded. “Very well,” she agreed. “I’ll stay. But then who should we send?”

  “Jaryd and Alayna spoke with Theron and brought back the Owl-Master’s staff,” Trahn reminded them all. “They must go.”

  “I agree,” Baden added. “As to the others, it makes no difference to me. I volunteer to make the journey, but if there are those who would rather go in my stead, or who feel, in light of recent events, that I shouldn’t go, I understand.”

  The mages discussed the composition of this new delegation for a few minutes longer. Normally, Orris would have been an active participant in the making of such a decision. But, for the second time in this strange and difficult day, he found himself growing acutely conscious of his powerlessness and, thus, it seemed to him, his insignificance. Listening as the Order selected Trahn, Baden, Niall, and Ursel to join Jaryd and Alayna on their journey, Orris felt a tumult of conflicting emotions rising within him. He knew that the mission carried great dangers, and yet he felt jealous at not being able to join them. Of course he hoped that they would succeed, yet the idea that they could do so without his help disturbed him greatly. He could do nothing except watch and wait. The notion of it galled him, made him want to scream in frustration. He had expected that Sartol’s death would ease some of this terrible burden, but, in the end, the way the Owl-Master died only served to intensify it. Two weeks before, under a starry sky on Tobyn’s Plain, Orris had sworn that he would kill Sartol. Today Sartol had died, and Orris had nothing at all to do with it. As he had nearly every day since Pordath’s death, the Hawk-Mage felt utterly alone.

  Having chosen their delegation, the other mages immediately began making preparations to send them to Phelan Spur. While Sonel retired into the sage’s quarters to focus her mind on an image of the terrain, Toinan began to arrange those mages who would remain in Amarid around the stone. Wary of getting in the way, and still feeling self-conscious, Orris turned and began to retreat to a far corner of the hall. He was stopped, however, by a voice calling his name. He turned, and saw Niall walking in his direction.

  The older man looked ill at ease as he stopped in front of Orris. They had never been entirely comfortable with each other, and the last two days in particular had put a strain on their already tense relationship. “I just want to say that I’m sorry I snapped at you,” Niall said at last. He gave a rueful smirk. “It seems even when I agree with you, I sound angry.”

  Orris chuckled softly. “I deserved it this time. I owe Odinan an apology.”

  “Perhaps. Sometimes he needs to be prodded a bit. As do I,” Niall added pointedly. He hesitated. “I also want to say that I’m sorry about your hawk.”

  As always seemed to happen when someone mentioned Pordath, Orris sensed his color rising and felt a queer constriction in his heart. He wished he could make himself disappear, and he wondered how much longer the effects of his loss would linger. Still, he held Niall’s gaze. “I’ll bind again soon,” he said, hoping that he sounded confident. “And, in the meantime, you can strike a blow for me against the outlanders.”

  The older man grinned at that. “Count on it.”

  They stood together for a short while longer, saying nothing. Then the Owl-Master turned and started back toward the Summoning Stone. After a moment, Orris followed. He would bear witness to as much of it as he could, he decided; he could still be a part of it, even without his power. He owed them that much.

  Toinan and the other mages stood in a semicircle, facing the Summoning Stone with their cerylls held out before them. The six members of the new delegation, looking tense with anticipation, had positioned themselves a few paces away, clustered with their backs to one another, pointing their cerylls in front of them so that they appeared to create a six-pointed star. And between the two groups, those whose power would feed the stone, and those who would be transported to Phelan Spur, stood Sonel, her eyes gazing without focus toward the center of the Gathering Chamber.

  “Are you ready, Baden?” she called, her voice sounding small and distant.

  “Yes.” The Owl-Master looked as if he might say more, but, instead, he took a breath and closed his eyes.

  An expectant stillness settled over the hall. The mages gathered around the stone remained motionless, their backs turned toward Orris, but Jaryd, standing between Alayna and Baden, was looking directly at him, waiting. Orris offered a reassuring smile, but Jaryd showed no sign that he had noticed. Still, nothing happened. One of the attendants at the far end of the hall coughed nervously. Orris felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise and prickle, sending a shiver down his spine.

  And in that instant, without any warning, lavender light burst from Toinan’s ceryll and began to flow into the Summoning Stone. A moment later, as if they had been waiting for Toinan’s mage-fire as a signal, the other mages unleashed their brilliant power as well. A myriad of colors hurtled into the great crystal, uniting in a dazzling blaze of white light, and then streaming like sunlight into Sonel’s ceryll, which somehow retained its green hue, even as the white bolt of magic poured through it and on toward the stones held forth by the delegation. There, though, the beam changed radically. Meeting Baden’s stone, and then flowing in a hexagon around the six mages, the light became striated with their colors. Like ribbons strung together around the God’s pole at the Feast of Arick each spring, the hues spun together around the delegation. Baden’s orange and Trahn’s brown, Ursel’s grey and Niall’s maroon, Alayna’s purple and Jaryd’s blue. Faster and faster they turned, brighter and brighter, until the radiance grew so powerful that Orris had to avert his eyes. A sudden gust of wind—who could say where it came from?—swirled through the Great Hall, whipping around the green cloaks of the masters and mages and forcing hawks and owls to raise their wings in an effort to balance themselves on the shoulders of their mages. And then, as abruptl
y as it all had begun, the gale subsided and the light vanished, leaving the chamber in the relative darkness of normal daylight, and in the grip of an awed, uncertain silence. Slowly, as his eyes adjusted to the new light, Orris gazed forward once more, knowing already what he would find. Or rather, what he would not find. In the space where the delegation had stood, there was nothing. Nothing at all. His friends were gone.

  At first there was darkness, as thick as swamp mud and absolute, save for the faint blue glimmer of his ceryll, to which Jaryd clung with his eyes as he would a beacon in a raging storm. It was strange, because Orris, who had been standing before him in the middle of the Gathering Chamber, seemed to shield his eyes as from a glaring light, just as the shadows began to descend. But Jaryd saw only blackness and the besieged point of sapphire crystal. Then a stillness came over him—over them all, he supposed, though he was aware of no one else except Ishalla, whose talons sank painfully into his shoulder—and a bone-numbing cold encompassed him, ripping a gasp from his chest. Which alerted him to the third thing: he could not breathe, could not replace the air that the chill had torn from his now burning lungs. He felt a tremendous pressure, as though someone were kneeling on his chest. Panic rose within him; he tried to break free, to run, to escape from the frigid void into which he had fallen. But he could not move. He felt his limbs straining to thrash about, as might a drowning man in the murky, cold waters of some nightmare sea. But the darkness held him, freezing him, suffocating him.

  Releasing him. Suddenly, it was over. He stood on a windy beach in the warm sun of a summer afternoon. The others were there with him, looking disoriented but unharmed. The strand on which they stood stretched for miles in each direction, its white sands littered with the worn, bone-white trunks of ancient, gnarled trees. Huge breakers, their crests swept into a fine mist by the wind, pounded ceaselessly at the shoreline, crashing down on the sand like the fists of some pitiless giant. And opposite the surf, on a tide-ravaged ledge that rose thirty feet above the beach, loomed a shadowy wood of towering, weather-beaten pines. Misshapen by centuries of potent, brine-laden winds, beaten back by season after season of ocean squalls, the trees appeared to shy away from the sea, as if afraid of joining their brethren, whose bleached skeletons lay on the sand below.

  “This looks like the right place,” Trahn commented over the rhythm of the surf. “But is there any way to be certain?”

  Baden shook his head as he looked around at the coastline and surveyed the line of evergreens. “Not that I know of. At least not until nightfall.”

  Jaryd shuddered involuntarily. Even after facing Theron, he could not help but feel a certain foreboding at the thought of confronting another of the Unsettled. Glancing at Alayna, he saw the same disquiet written in her dark eyes. She stepped closer to him, placing a hand on his shoulder.

  “I have no doubt that Sonel sent us to the correct spot,” Baden assured them all after a brief pause, his thin hair tousled by the wind. “We need only wait and prepare ourselves.” He gazed up at the sun. “It won’t be dark for a few more hours, and we should all use that time as we’d like. We’ll meet back here at dusk.”

  The others nodded and began to disperse. Ursel set out southward along the beach, scaring up a flock of gulls as she walked. Trahn moved off a short distance and sat down, facing the tide. Closing his eyes, he was soon lost in meditation.

  “I was considering walking up the strand a ways,” Baden said, approaching the young mages. “I don’t get to do much beachcombing anymore. Would you care to walk with me?”

  Jaryd looked at Alayna, who smiled and nodded. “Sounds like fun,” he replied, drawing a grin from his uncle.

  In the end, Niall joined them as well, and the four of them wandered slowly up the shoreline, saying little, stooping occasionally to pick up a sand-polished stone or a shining fragment of shell. Glancing back once over his shoulder, Jaryd saw Trahn’s dark form, already small with the distance they had covered, framed against the light sand, and the pale tree trunks, and the foaming waters of the incoming tide.

  “What can you tell us about Phelan?” Alayna asked Baden, after they had walked for some time. “I know that he bound to wolves rather than birds, and I know that he led the Order for several years. But, other than that, I know very little.”

  “I don’t know too much more than that, actually,” Baden answered, “although I do know that he bound only once in his lifetime, and that, when his familiar died, he chose never to bind again.”

  “Chose?” Jaryd asked sharply. “You mean he let himself die unbound?”

  Baden nodded.

  “But why?”

  The Owl-Master shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “I do,” Niall offered. The three mages looked at him. “When my sister and I were growing up, my father often told us Phelan’s story,” he explained. “He was a hero of my father’s, I think. It’s ironic, really,” he added, stopping to gaze thoughtfully at the advancing surf, “since my father ended up dying unbound as well.”

  The others said nothing, waiting as Niall allowed the memory of his father to wash over him. A minute later he turned back toward them and smiled. “Forgive me,” he said to Alayna. “You asked for Phelan’s tale, not mine.” They began to walk again. “Phelan was born not far from here, in the village of WoodSea, near where the River Halcya meets the ocean. His father was a woodcutter. Phelan had no siblings, and he never knew his mother, she having died while giving birth to him. His father never fully recovered from the loss of his wife, and, perhaps as a product of his grief, man and son were estranged from the very beginning of Phelan’s life. As a boy, Phelan spent a great deal of time on his own, exploring the forests and shoreline near his home. During one of these excursions, early in the spring of his eighth year, he was caught in an unexpected blizzard. Ill-prepared for such severe weather, too far from his home to make it back safely, Phelan nearly died.

  “He tried to bury himself beneath the fallen leaves of a dense grove, hoping that he could keep himself warm enough to survive. But, as he later told the story himself, he had actually passed out before nightfall. He awoke the following morning, in a warm, dark, foul-smelling den, surrounded by a family of wolves. Both adults were there, with several pups.” Niall allowed himself a small smile. “Some of the legends that came later, after Phelan died, claimed that Kalba, the animal to which he later bound, was one of these pups—a sibling of sorts to the man.” The Owl-Master shook his head, though his smirk lingered.

  “You don’t believe this?” Alayna asked.

  “Phelan did not bind to Kalba for another dozen years, and their binding lasted longer than any binding in the history of the Order. Had he been one of those pups, Kalba could not have survived that long.” They walked a few paces listening to the advance and retreat of the breakers. “At first, naturally, Phelan was afraid,” Niall began again, his tone deepening once more as he returned to the cadence of his tale. “But he soon recognized that the wolves meant him no harm, and he stayed with them for several days, eating and sleeping as they did. When finally he returned to his home, he was perfectly healthy, save for the frostbite he suffered in the blizzard, which cost him two fingers on his left hand. But always after, he claimed, he felt a kinship to the wolves of what was known then as Ellibar Spur. The animals often traveled with him during his wanderings, and there are many other tales describing these encounters which have little to do with what Phelan achieved later in his life as a member of the Order.

  “Soon after he left his home, however, as a young man seeking both his path and peace from the conflicts that had consumed what remained of the relationship he had with his father, he was joined by a young wolf, silver in color, that followed him for several days. No one else saw them, and even when he later shared so many of the stories of his life with curious admirers, he never described what happened during those days they spent in the forests of the spur. But when next Phelan walked among people, he had bound himself to Kalba and, thus, become a mage
.

  “The two of them, wolf and man, sailed from the spur to Ceryllon that winter, braving squalls and seas that would have daunted the most adept sailors of the land. Many feared them lost. But they returned in the spring, and Phelan bore a staff mounted with a ceryll whose silver tone was an exact match for Kalba’s fur. They journeyed to Amarid that year for the Midsummer Gathering, and though the mages eventually admitted Phelan to the Order, they did so only after a great debate. Many opposed opening the Order to someone who hadn’t bound to a hawk or owl, and others objected to the fact that the Wolf-Master had never been anyone’s Mage-Attend. Phelan, however, impressed enough of the mages with his courage and his honesty to gain their support, and in the years that followed, he more than justified their ultimate decision to welcome him as a colleague. Within six years of his entrance into the Order he had become Wolf-Sage, and none doubted that his was the strongest magic to be wielded in Tobyn-Ser since the days of Amarid and Theron. His reputation even traveled beyond the borders of this land, to Abborij, where fear of Phelan prevented an invasion for nearly twenty years, until he no longer led the Order. These were years of peace and tremendous prosperity in Tobyn-Ser, and Phelan became a hero of the land.

  “Throughout this time, his bond with Kalba deepened. Never had a mage and familiar been closer, people said at the time, and certainly no binding since has rivaled it. Like brothers, they were. Though he was sage, Phelan never lived in the Great Hall, preferring to sleep and hunt in Hawksfind Wood alongside his familiar. And while he was a wise leader, compassionate and caring, he remained proud and a loner. He chose a first because the laws of the Order demanded it, but he never consulted the Owl-Master he chose, preferring his own counsel and such guidance as Kalba might offer. When Kalba finally died, twenty-four years after their binding, Phelan was devastated by grief. So much so that he vowed never to bind to another creature.” Niall shrugged. “It was a vow he kept.