The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  As soon as she’d seen he was all right, Kareta had retreated to what she obviously felt was a comfortable distance again. Harrier was touched that she’d been willing to come close enough to the stranger to see that he was all right—not that he’d ever tell her so, of course. And if she was passing up the opportunity to stick around and tease him now, it was clear that not going near people who weren’t, well, “chaste and virginal” wasn’t just a matter of personal preference for unicorns, but something they really couldn’t do. At least not for long. He wondered, not “why” exactly, but what it was that stopped them. Did it hurt? Or was it some kind of barrier like the Veil around the Elven Lands?

  He wanted to walk down the road to tell her that everything was fine, but it actually seemed like that might be a little too far to go just now. Maybe later. He settled for walking around to the back of the wagon and sitting down on the step.

  Tiercel—of course—followed him.

  “What was it like?” Tiercel asked.

  “Getting knocked flat on my ass for two days? I’m pretty sure whatever I did, I did it wrong,” Harrier said.

  “Ancaladar says he thinks that happened because you didn’t have anyone to share the—the other price of the Healing,” Tiercel said. He looked a little embarrassed.

  “Well, you couldn’t, and Ancaladar couldn’t, and Kareta sure couldn’t. And hey, it worked.” He knew it had. He didn’t even have to ask.

  “So I just…” Tiercel said, and stopped.

  Tiercel wondered what it was like. And Harrier couldn’t tell him. Not because he felt he was forbidden to. He just didn’t have the words to explain it. Nice? Awful? Terrifying? Wonderful? Somehow they were all true at the same time. And the High Magick wasn’t anything like it—somehow Harrier was certain of that. What had Tiercel kept calling it back in the beginning? “A magick anyone could learn.” But you didn’t learn the Wild Magic. You just sort of said: okay. And then did it. It was … it was just like being a Harbor Pilot. Watching the water constantly for every shift and change, so you could bring the ship you were guiding safely to port—or out to sea. Listening to the wind. If you did that, your ship was fine. If you didn’t…

  “Harrier?” Tiercel said doubtfully.

  “I’ve never been that good at listening,” Harrier said, half to himself. He blinked, focusing on Tiercel again.

  “Are you okay?” Tiercel asked suspiciously.

  “I’m … um. It was probably nothing like that stuff you do, okay?” Harrier said, because he knew he needed to say something. “And I don’t know if I could say what it is like. You’re the one who reads all those books.”

  “Which say next to nothing about the Wild Magic. And nothing particularly useful about the High Magick, come to that,” Tiercel pointed out.

  “Don’t look at me. I didn’t write them. But if I had, there’d be a whole chapter about how a guy who shows up stuck full of arrows was probably being chased by somebody who was shooting the arrows,” Harrier said. He was starting to feel more himself by the minute.

  “Believe it or not, we actually managed to think of that ourselves. Ancaladar took a look around—‘around’; meaning ‘for about a moonturn by wagon down the trail.’” Tiercel shrugged. “He found about a dozen dead bodies scattered through the hills, and more tracks leading south. He says it looks like two groups, chasing each other and stopping to fight a couple of times. He said there was a fight where we found the injured man, and another horse ran away, but the man who was riding the horse was dead.”

  “Useful. What happened to the horse?”

  Tiercel made a face. “It was tasty.”

  “Just as long as I don’t have to eat it. Well, I guess we’ll find out the whole story when he wakes up, won’t we?”

  “I guess so. Har?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The Wild Magic’s going to want you to do something now, isn’t it?”

  Harrier sighed deeply. “Yeah. But it isn’t urgent.” I hope it isn’t urgent. He also hoped he’d get more details about whatever this … Mageprice … was when the time came to pay it, or else there might be a real mess.

  HARRIER HAD WOKEN up around midday. After a couple more hours of being up and around, he decided he felt well enough to go see Kareta. He wrapped up in his stormcloak, filled his pockets with cold flatcakes, and walked up the trail.

  “It’s about time somebody thought about me,” she said sulkily.

  “I did,” Harrier said. “I thought about how you wouldn’t want to have to carry me back to the wagon if I fell on my face.”

  Kareta snorted rudely. Harrier looked around until he saw a likely looking rock by the side of the road—there were enough of them all along the edges of the road to make him think they’d been rolled out of the roadbed itself by whoever’d made the road, and that made him think this might have been a riverbed at some point—and sat down. He dug around in his pocket, pulled out a piece of flatcake, and offered it to her.

  “Yours is better,” she said, chewing.

  “My Ma’s is much better,” he said, taking a bite of the other half of the flatcake. He thought for a moment. “Don’t know what we’re going to do when it’s time to move on. Maybe Tyr can cast some kind of a spell.” Something so Kareta wouldn’t have to trail the wagon by a dozen horse-lengths or more.

  “Huh,” Kareta said dismissively.

  “Well, we could have just given him a horse and sent him on his way, but… Ancaladar ate the horse.”

  “You don’t even know who he is,” Kareta said, after a moment.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Harrier said.

  “It does so! What if he’s an—an—an—a bandit?”

  “Oh, like you’d know anything about bandits?” Harrier scoffed.

  “I’ve heard stories,” Kareta said darkly.

  “I bet you have,” Harrier said. He sighed. “If he’s a bandit, or—somebody who was being chased for a good reason, and we ask him about it, he’ll just lie. I wonder, though.”

  “What could you possibly be wondering about?” Kareta demanded.

  “Well, what he was doing here. What they were all doing here. Ancaladar said it was two groups, chasing each other and fighting. And he’s the only one left. And there’s nothing out here—Ancaladar looked. No villages, no towns … no people but them. So what were they all doing here? Why come this way?”

  “Obviously so you’d finally do a spell,” Kareta said.

  “Do you want more flatcake or not?” Harrier demanded.

  “I don’t see why the truth annoys you.”

  “If it’s truth that several dozen people had to die so I could be tricked into doing a spell, then I’m annoyed whether it’s truth or not. And it better not be truth,” Harrier said darkly.

  “Well, of course that part isn’t,” Kareta said, as if it should be self-evident.

  Harrier didn’t bother to pursue the conversation any further. Figuring out Kareta’s logic was a difficult task at the best of times, and he still felt as if he’d put in a full day’s work on the docks. He supposed—in a way—he had. Because the stranger was alive, and if making him live was something that could be done by fetching and carrying, Harrier had done it. And like any job of heavy lifting, it would have gone easier if there’d been others there to help.

  It was easier to think of the Wild Magic in terms like that. He still didn’t quite understand it, but he had the vague idea that he might be able to do it. If he absolutely had to.

  He spent a while longer with Kareta, then walked back to the wagon. By the time he got there he was so tired his muscles were shaking, but he tried not to let Tiercel know. He just sat down on the blanket again with a thump. “This really isn’t the place I’d pick to spend a lot of time,” he said, looking around.

  Tiercel tossed another log on the fire and laughed. “Ancaladar says you’d have to go a pretty long way to find any place that isn’t like this place. Unless you want to go up into the hills.”

  “No
thanks.”

  ABOUT THE TIME it started to get dark, the stranger woke again. Tiercel helped him to sit up, while Harrier watched warily.

  “I am … alive,” the stranger said slowly. He looked first at Tiercel, then at Harrier, his dark eyes confused. “You do not wear the blue robes.”

  “Uh … no,” Tiercel said, sounding equally puzzled. “Who are you? What’s your name? What happened to you?”

  “I am Telchi,” the stranger said.

  “Were the people in the blue robes after you?” Tiercel asked.

  The man stared at Tiercel as if Tiercel had lost his wits. “Why would Wildmages pursue me?” he asked. He regarded both of them with sudden suspicion.

  “Wildmages wear blue robes where you come from,” Tiercel guessed.

  “No,” Harrier said. “They don’t.”

  Suddenly both Tiercel and the stranger were looking at him.

  “I thought I’d seen those swords he carries before. I had,” Harrier said. “‘Telchi’ isn’t his name. It’s what he is. He’s a Telchi. The Selkens hire them to guard their ships. They’re … some kind of warrior caste among the Selkens. And as far as I know, there aren’t any Wildmages in the Selken Isles.”

  The Telchi smiled at that. “No, young master. There are not. But I have not seen the shores of home since I was a young man, nor shall I again, I think. And in the land I now call home, those who bear the Three Books wear the blue robe so that all may know and honor them.”

  “Well, that’s dumb,” Harrier said flatly. “If everybody knows you’re a Wildmage, wouldn’t they be bothering you all the time to—I don’t know—do things?”

  The Telchi smiled faintly. “In the Madiran, we depend upon the Wildmages for life itself. It would be foolish to offend one of you.” He glanced from Harrier to Tiercel, obviously certain that one of them was a Wildmage, but not knowing which of them it was. “But perhaps you would tell me to whom I am indebted for my life?” the Telchi prompted.

  “Oh.” Harrier could tell that Tiercel would much rather be asking questions than answering them—especially once the Telchi had mentioned the Madiran—but he also had the good grace to be embarrassed at his lapse of manners. “I’m Tiercel Rolfort, and this is my friend Harrier Gillain. We’re from Armethalieh. He’s, um …”

  “I’m sort of the one who Healed you,” Harrier said awkwardly. He wanted to add: But I’m not really a Wildmage, only that wouldn’t really be true. It was just that saying he was a Wildmage seemed awfully close to lying.

  “Alone?” the Telchi asked. He looked more impressed than Harrier was really comfortable with.

  “There was no one to help,” Ancaladar said, craning his neck over the top of the wagon to regard their guest.

  Confronted by this unexpected sight—for Ancaladar was on the far side of the wagon, his massive body out of the Telchi’s line of sight—the Telchi uttered a choked cry and scrabbled backward.

  “Light and Darkness, Ancaladar, do you want me to have to Heal him all over again?” Harrier snapped. “It’s all right. It’s just Ancaladar. He’s Tiercel’s dragon.”

  “Sort of,” Tiercel muttered.

  “One of the ancient Shining Folk,” the Telchi said. He’d recovered his composure quickly, and was regarding Ancaladar with both curiosity and awe.

  “Well, he’s a dragon, anyway,” Harrier said. He was just as glad that the Telchi was more interested in Ancaladar than he was in him, really.

  Though Tiercel might have—in fact, definitely did—want to hear all about the Madiran, their guest had just awoken from a long sleep, and even now was far from fully recovered. He drank several mugs of broth, and then accepted a bowl of stew, but before he’d finished more than half of it, he was already asleep again. Harrier was barely in time to catch the bowl and keep its contents from spilling stew all over him. At least before he slept, the Telchi was able to tell them that he and his men had been following bandits into the Tereymil Hills, and that of all his men, he was the only survivor.

  “WELL, WE KNOW where we are now,” Tiercel said. “That’s something.”

  They’d moved away to keep from disturbing the Telchi’s rest, going around to the other side of the wagon to sit leaning against Ancaladar. The dragon spread a wing over them both to shelter them from the wind.

  “Not that knowing that is particularly helpful,” Harrier pointed out. “I could call this place ‘Garnodin’ or ‘Bordron’ and it wouldn’t tell you anything.”

  “But—” Tiercel said.

  “Knowing he’s from the Madiran, now that’s useful,” Harrier said. “Because we’re going there, and he can tell us about it.”

  Tiercel regarded him curiously. “Do you trust him?”

  Harrier shrugged. “He’s a Telchi, and … I kind of want to know why he’s here, instead of back in the Selken Isles. But if he says he was chasing bandits, then … yeah. He probably was.”

  Ten

  The Paging of Prices

  IN THE MORNING, Harrier felt pretty much like his normal self again, and the Telchi was ready to take his first careful steps.

  The clothing and armor that had been taken off him days before were too filthy and blood-soaked to clean, even if there’d been all the water in the world to wash them in. The armor might be salvageable, though not without work. For now, the Telchi was wearing a spare set of Harrier’s clothes. He was several inches shorter than Harrier, but so broad-shouldered that nothing of Tiercel’s would fit him.

  The first thing he asked for was his swords.

  Harrier was the one who found them and brought them to him, since with Harrier up and (he swore) fine, Ancaladar had insisted that Tiercel resume his practicing. Tiercel hadn’t wanted to leave Harrier alone with the Telchi, but Harrier had pointed out that he was probably—at least for the moment—both stronger and faster than a man who’d been all-but-dead three days before.

  The swords were the same sort Harrier had seen the Telchi guards wearing on the Armethalieh docks—long, slim, and curved. One was a little longer than the other. They were worn crossed upon the back—as he remembered—and he thought of watching Elunyerin and Rilphanifel spar. He couldn’t imagine how you’d even draw swords worn this way, let alone fight with two at once.

  The Telchi reached for the swords the same way Harrier had seen Tiercel reach for his Wand. Or for Ancaladar, sometimes. As if they were a part of himself that had somehow gotten too far away. He carefully fitted the harness on over the tunic and buckled the straps into place. Then he reached up—

  There was a flicker of movement too fast for Harrier to follow, and suddenly both swords were in his hands. Harrier stepped back, his hand going automatically to his belt. He was wearing the sword Roneida had given him, of course, but he knew perfectly well it wouldn’t do him any good if the Telchi meant to kill him.

  “Do you think I would harm you, Wildmage?” the Telchi asked. “I could never enter the Hall of Heroes burdened by such shame.”

  “Ah … right,” Harrier said. He didn’t let go of his swordhilt, though.

  “But I see that you, too, are a warrior,” the Telchi added. He looked both interested and pleased.

  Harrier couldn’t repress a grimace. I’m not. That’s the problem.

  The Telchi cocked his head, regarding Harrier. “You disagree?”

  “Let’s say that I’m probably about as good a warrior as I am a Wildmage,” Harrier said. He didn’t want to tell a flat lie, but he didn’t want to come out and say that he knew nothing about using a sword, either. Not when he wasn’t quite sure why the Telchi had drawn his.

  But the answer seemed to satisfy the man, because he nodded, and took a few steps away, and began a slow series of movements with the twin blades. The forms were unfamiliar to Harrier, but their purpose wasn’t. He’d seen Elunyerin and Rilphanifel do something similar often enough: a kind of warm-up; a stylized version of all the moves that might be used in actual combat, performed much more slowly.

  But after only
a few minutes of careful exercise the Telchi sheathed his swords with shaking hands, and would have slumped to his knees if Harrier had not rushed to catch him.

  “I am … perhaps … not as … strong as I might be,” the Telchi said, when he was seated on the blanket once more.

  “Give it a little time,” Harrier said. He found a mug and ladled out some broth. The nice thing about being stopped for a long time was being able to cook things that took more than an hour or two. The bad part was that this wasn’t getting them any closer to the place they needed to be. Or even to the place where they needed to start looking for it.

  “Had I possessed such patience in my youth, we should never have met,” the Telchi said, taking the mug.

  “Yeah, well, I’m kind of wondering why we’ve met now,” Harrier said. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “My debt to the man who returned my life to me cannot be easily or simply repaid,” the Telchi answered. “My story is yours to hear.”

  “Urn … great,” Harrier said, getting his own mug of broth and settling down on the blanket opposite the Telchi. “Because Tiercel’s kind of worried about the bandits and everything.”

  The Telchi smiled faintly. “The tale begins long before that. Before—I think—either you or your friend first saw the light of day, when I was young and rash and thoughtless. Had I been less of any of these things, I would not have accepted an oathbond from Inzileth to sail across Great Ocean. But in those days I was certain I knew better than my elders, and those who would offer guidance and advice. And I was curious to see the land which lay beyond Great Ocean.

  “By the time we had reached Armethalieh, I knew Inzileth for a dishonorable man, fit to hold no Telchi’s oathbond. I weighed—so I thought—the matter carefully in my mind, and chose to break my sworn contract with him rather than stay one more hour upon the deck of his ship. Of course, no other Selken captain would bond a Telchi who had broken his oathbound contract.” The Telchi shrugged. “I was young and foolish, as I have said.”