The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  If it was a trade-road, who were they (whoever “they” were) trading with? Not the Elves, because neither Aressea nor Aratari nor anyone else at Blackrowan Farm had seemed to have much notion about humans—or, in fact, anything on the other side of the Veil.

  “Could be for a lot of things,” Kareta said, continuing one of their usual conversations. “Could be only used in summer. Maybe people just come and live here in summer. Or come here to gather tasty berries.”

  Harrier looked around. “‘Tasty berries’?” he said in disbelief. “They’d have to be pretty damned tasty.” The road wended along through fairly open country. A few hundred miles away on his right hand, the Bazrahils rose up into the sky, their slopes white with snow. There were a couple of miles of open country to either side of the road, but beyond that it became hilly and—soon thereafter—forested again—Ancaladar had looked.

  The only water they’d found since they’d left the lake was up in the hills. The last time they’d needed to fill the water barrels, Tiercel had needed to fly them up to a stream one by one, strapped to Ancaladar’s saddle. There’d be water near the road soon, but the wagon wouldn’t reach it for another sennight, Ancaladar calculated. Sometimes Harrier wondered how he’d gotten so good at guessing how many miles the wagon could cover in a day, but it wasn’t that hard to figure out. Ancaladar had traveled with Kellen’s army. He knew exactly how slow a freight wagon went.

  “Well, you’re grumpy today!” Kareta said, tossing her head. “It’s probably because you aren’t doing magic,” she added confidentially. “If you were doing spells, I’m sure you’d feel better.”

  “Wrong,” Harrier said comprehensively.

  “You have to do some sometime,” she said coaxingly.

  “No I don’t.”

  “What about just one nice little one? You could summon up a sword teacher for yourself. You know you need one.”

  If a Knight-Mage had to know anything about swordsmanship, then yes (Harrier knew), he did need one. But that wasn’t the point. “And what would the Mageprice be for that?” he asked. “Do you have any idea? Light, Kareta, I don’t even know whether all the things I think I know about Wildmages are even true! I know—I guess—that there are two prices to pay for every spell: the energy it takes, and then the Mageprice that’s for, I guess, the right to cast it at all. Or for the Gods’ help in keeping it from going wrong. And the first price is why Wildmages ask people to lend energy to a spell, and that’s okay—not that I’ve got the first idea of how to take or use what they’d give me. It’s the second part I’m worried about.”

  “Well, in that case,” Kareta said pragmatically, “why not just do the ones that don’t carry Mageprice? There must be some.”

  “Figuring that out in advance is—huh.” He broke off. “That doesn’t look right.” The wagon had just rounded a bend in the road, and ahead, a good distance off the road itself, there was a fluttering movement. Ravens. A whole flock of them. “Something’s dead. Something big.” He clucked to the team, urging it to move faster.

  By the time the wagon reached the place, Tiercel and Ancaladar had already spotted what Harrier had seen and landed. He jumped down from the wagon and ran over—Harrier didn’t actually worry about Tiercel’s safety when Ancaladar was right there to watch over him, but now that Tiercel’s nightmares were back, Harrier was pretty sure Tiercel’s enemies weren’t that far behind. And whoever this was had certainly had enemies of his own. His robes were filthy and blood-soaked, and something had killed his horse, though by now it was hard to tell what and how. The dying beast had rolled onto the dead man, trapping him beneath it, and Ancaladar had fastidiously plucked it free and set the body aside.

  “I guess we should bury him,” Harrier said, crouching down beside the body. The man was wearing a strange armor that didn’t seem to be made out of metal—the face-piece had protected his eyes from the ravens, not that that really mattered much.

  “Best not,” Ancaladar said soberly. “He’s still alive.”

  At Ancaladar’s words, Harrier eased the helmet off. The face he saw was dark—both naturally, and burned dark by the sun. He looked a little like the Selkens Harrier had seen at Dockside Armethalieh, and his age was hard to estimate. Harrier felt for a pulse and couldn’t find one at first. It was slow and weak, and the man’s skin was cold. “Won’t be for long,” he said reluctantly. The horse hadn’t died today, or even yesterday, and its rider had been lying trapped beneath it since it had gone down. And he’d been hurt even before that.

  Harrier looked up at Tiercel hopefully. “Unless you can, uh, do a spell?”

  “A Healing spell.” Tiercel’s voice was flat. He shook his head fractionally. “I don’t know whether the High Magick didn’t have them, or … if Jermayan just didn’t have those books. But I don’t know any. You have to.”

  “Me?” Harrier’s voice rose to a near-shout.

  “He’ll die!” Tiercel’s voice cracked on the second word.

  “How much water do we have?” Apparently he’d made up his mind to do this without thinking it over. Or at least to try.

  “Three-quarters of a barrel.” Tiercel’s voice was rough and quiet.

  “Bring a blanket. The heavy ground one.”

  While Tiercel went to fetch it, Harrier unbuckled the man’s belt and started cutting open his clothes. There was more armor beneath the robes he wore—still no metal, but a heavy quilted shirt sewn with disks of what looked like bone, and buckled arm-guards of thick leather. The shirt wasn’t enough to stop an arrow going into his shoulder—Harrier saw when he cut the shirt open—but that wasn’t what had taken him down, because there was a crude bandage over it. He pulled the dressing away and caught the unmistakable whiff of infection. The wound was red and angry, too inflamed for him to be able to tell if any part of the arrow was still in the shoulder.

  Tiercel got back with the blanket.

  “Help me lift him onto it,” Harrier said.

  “You’ll kill him,” Tiercel protested.

  “Then I won’t need to Heal him, will I?” Harrier answered brutally. “I can’t do anything here.”

  He wasn’t sure why he said it. He wasn’t sure he could do anything anywhere. It just felt right.

  When they lifted him to move him, Harrier saw that he’d been lying on a set of long curved swords. They looked familiar, but he didn’t have time to think about it just now. He swept the swords and their harness aside and then placed them on the blanket beside the man when they laid him down again.

  “Is he …?” Tiercel asked.

  “Still alive,” Harrier said. “And probably bleeding all over the blanket, now, so come on.”

  They carried him back beside the wagon. At least some of the wind would be cut here. If it got much colder, he and Tiercel were going to have an argument about actually sleeping inside the wagon, even if that did mean messing up all of Tiercel’s stuff.

  “What do you want me to do?” Tiercel asked nervously.

  “Nothing,” Harrier said shortly. “Start tea. I don’t know.”

  “You cannot lend power to his spell, Bonded,” Ancaladar said quietly. “You do not yet have the skill.”

  “It takes skill?” Harrier muttered. The man’s long black hair was matted with dried blood, and there was a crude bandage on one thigh; nothing more than a torn rag wound several times around the leg and hastily tied over his trousers. It was black with blood, and the fabric of the man’s pants below the wound had been so sodden with blood that it was still damp enough to stain Harrier’s fingers. He decided to leave the bandage where it was.

  “Skill,” Ancaladar said, “to set aside the shields every High Mage must learn to place about himself, in order to share his power with another. To have such shields is important for the spells.” The dragon sounded regretful, but at the moment, Harrier was just as glad that the High Magick had one more weird requirement.

  “Fine. Find me a piece of charcoal, would you?” He wiped his hands as clea
n as he could, and started digging through his bag. He’d pulled out the tiny brazier—he thought he was going to need it—and then The Book of Moon. Real Wildmages might know how to do these things off the top of their heads, but he didn’t. Okay. Okay. I’ve got this. Willow, ash, and yew. Burn them. Hair and blood. Oh … yuck. And here are the words. It looks simple. If it was this simple, everyone would do it. Eternal Light, this isn’t going to work!

  But when Tiercel came back with the charcoal, all Harrier said was: “Looks simple enough. Now, if you don’t mind, light that for me, because I’m damned if I’m going to learn two spells in one day.”

  That made Tiercel smile, just a little. Harrier put the cake of charcoal into the brazier, and Tiercel set it alight. It would take a few seconds to burn down to the point he could use it. Then they both looked up and saw Kareta standing several hundred yards up the road, shivering and looking miserable.

  “Why is she …?” Tiercel began.

  “Probably because this guy has a wife and kids somewhere waiting for him,” Harrier snapped. “Why don’t you go get a handful of honey disks and keep her company?” He was really trying hard to not think about what he was going to have to do next.

  Tiercel shrugged and walked off. Harrier saw the wagon rock as he climbed in and out of it, and a moment later saw Tiercel trudging up the road, carrying an entire tin of honey-disks under his arm.

  “You did not need to do that, you know. There is no danger to him,” Ancaladar said.

  “Fine,” Harrier repeated, hardly paying any attention to his own words. He got up and got one of the buckets, opened the water-keg and ladled out some water to wash his hands. He would have tried to get the guy to drink if he could, but he wasn’t conscious. He rinsed his mouth and spat; thirsty but too nervous to drink. Should have had Tyr make that tea, he thought, but there wasn’t time.

  He went back and knelt on the blanket and sorted through his bag again. All the leaves Lanya had packed for him were in tiny bags, labeled in a language he couldn’t read, but he recognized them by sight and smell. Half of them were familiar from his mother’s kitchen, the other half, from half a year of trudging through forests. He pulled out the three he needed, then picked up his knife.

  “A circle,” Ancaladar said quietly. “You will need one.”

  Harrier took a deep breath and nodded. He folded the heavy blanket in around the stranger as much as he could, exposing the pale packed earth of the trail, then drew the heavy knife Roneida had given him. He scraped a ragged circle around them both. It wasn’t all that circular, but he was careful to make sure that the line of the end and beginning met exactly. He sheathed his knife again. “Thank you.”

  “I wish there were more aid I could provide,” Ancaladar said.

  “Just take care of Tiercel,” Harrier said.

  “Forever,” Ancaladar promised, but Harrier had already stopped listening. He was concentrating too hard on his task.

  Hair from the person to be healed. Blood from the person to be healed. Not hard to get when the stranger was covered in it, and to top it all off, moving him had started the shoulder wound bleeding again. Hair from the Wildmage (him). Not too hard.

  His blood.

  Harrier took a deep breath and ran his thumb over the blade of his small belt knife. Not his eating knife—that wasn’t very sharp—but the one he wore to use for any little task that needed doing. A sharp knife is a safe knife, his Da always said, telling him that more fools cut themselves on dull knives than ever did on a properly honed blade. Oh, Da, if you could see me now….

  He was nervous, so he pressed harder than he meant to, and he only realized he’d cut himself when he felt the blood running down his wrist. He swore, scrabbling to soak the ball of hair in his blood and then throw it onto the charcoal. Almost as an afterthought, he added the leaves.

  Light blast it, this had better work!

  As the hair spat and crackled, Harrier realized that wasn’t exactly what he was supposed to say.

  Um, Light? This is Harrier. I want you to Heal this guy. And I guess there’s a Mageprice I’m supposed to pay. And I’m supposed to pay it willingly, and I don’t want him to die, but I don’t want anything to happen to Tiercel, either, and I’ve known him longer, and, so, if I could just help Tiercel first before I have to go off someplace else to do something for you that would be great, because then I’d be happy to do, okay, anything, all right? But this is so important—

  For a moment he was sure it hadn’t worked. He knew it wouldn’t work—who was he, Harrier Gillain, son of the Harbormaster, to be casting spells? He closed his eyes tightly in pure frustration.

  And he thought about his Da, in the kitchen teasing Ma, and the way she’d look when she’d turn and laugh at him, and he thought of the man lying on the blanket in front of him, and sure, he didn’t know anything at all about him, and maybe he was a bad man, but maybe he had a wife somewhere, or a sister, and oh, Light, maybe he just wanted to go home, and certainly he didn’t want to just die, and all Harrier could feel was panic and something like anger, and the need to be able to help, if it was at all possible to help—

  And suddenly the constant cold wind that he hadn’t even noticed, because he’d gotten so used to it after almost a moonturn on this side of the Veil… stopped. And there was stillness and warmth all around him, and that should have frightened him, but it didn’t. Cautiously, Harrier opened his eyes, and saw that he was completely surrounded by a dome of shimmering green. And that didn’t frighten him either. He just felt… purposeful.

  He needed to know what to do now, but even as he wondered, he knew. It wasn’t as if he was being told, but as if he was—somehow—remembering. He reached out and placed both hands gently on the stranger’s chest.

  The moment he did he felt as if a great weight settled on his shoulders, but only for a second. Then it broke through, and the weight was still there, but now Power was flowing through him, through his hands, into the stranger, as if Harrier had become a narrow harbor-mouth and the tide was racing in. It was power and Power, strong and sweet and wild, and he didn’t have to tell it what to do—it wasn’t a Power you told—he’d asked, and that was enough. All he had to do now was offer himself as its hands in the world, to do what needed to be done.

  That was all any Wildmage did. Ever. What needed to be done. They—the Wildmages—offered themselves to the Wild Magic, and the Wild Magic gave them …

  Everything, Harrier thought. It gives you everything.

  He could still watch. He could still think. In this moment, Harrier could see the body beneath him as clearly and starkly as the drawings for a new sailing ship in the hands of the shipwright: how it should be, and how it was damaged. The Power raced through him, into the stranger, knitting up broken bones, closing open wounds, curing infections, healing damaged flesh.

  He didn’t know how long he spent, watching the body beneath his hands come back into true, but he knew—he sensed, he saw—that the work was nearly done. In moments the Power would depart.

  Tell me! he thought. What do you need? What do you want?

  He didn’t know what he expected to hear. He didn’t hear anything at all. He just had the same sense of remembering, and a feeling like a key turning in a lock.

  You must become an Apprentice.

  That was the last thing Harrier knew for a very long time.

  THE FIRST THING Harrier noticed was that he was lying down. The second was that he smelled woodsmoke. He tried to sit up and managed—with infinite effort—to open his eyes.

  “He’s awake!” Kareta cried.

  A moment later Tiercel was tugging him into a sitting position and trying to get him to hold a mug. When that didn’t work out—he couldn’t quite get his hands to close around it—Tiercel held it up to his mouth. Harrier drank greedily. He was thirsty—and as soon as he stopped being thirsty, he realized he was starving.

  “You—I—what?” he said.

  Tiercel laughed with relief. “Oh, Ligh
t, Har, you’ve been asleep for two days! Kareta wanted to wake you up, and Ancaladar said it was better to let you wake up on your own, and—I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Yeah. Well. Next time you become a Mage, learn healing spells.” He felt strong enough to hold the mug this time, and drained it. “More.”

  After a second cup of broth he was ready to take stock of the situation. They were still right where they had been. They now had a big woodpile. There was a pot of stew hanging over the fire, and the tea-brazier was steaming. The stranger was wrapped up in blankets, lying next to Harrier. And still breathing.

  “He been asleep, too?” Harrier asked. He was so thirsty!

  “I got him to wake up a couple of times to drink some broth,” Tiercel said. “But he just went right back to sleep. He hasn’t said anything. We, uh, Ancaladar took the horse back up into the pines and dumped it, and brought back a couple of dead trees. I cut them up to keep you both warm. We filled up the water barrels, too.”

  “What’s in the pot?” Harrier asked.

  “Rabbits,” Tiercel said. “Hares, actually. I didn’t want to have to deal with a whole deer, so I set some snares in the woods yesterday. They worked fine.”

  “Tiercel the Bunny-killer,” Harrier said, grinning.

  “And I’ve been very bored,” Kareta said, “because he’s been no fun at all! He’s either been chopping wood, or cooking, or had his nose in one of his silly books. Him and Ancaladar both!”

  “I’m pretty sure Ancaladar couldn’t fit his nose into one of Tyr’s books,” Harrier said. He yawned.

  “You aren’t going back to sleep, are you?” Tiercel asked. He sounded worried.

  “No,” Harrier said. “I think I’m done sleeping.” He yawned again. “I’m hungry, though.”

  By the time he’d eaten two full bowls of stew—which had a lot more things than rabbit in it, and he just hoped Tiercel hadn’t poisoned both of them with all these wild-gathered vegetables—he felt almost like his old self again. He was a little unsteady when he got to his feet, but not so unsteady that he couldn’t wave Tiercel off.