The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  “I’m hungry,” he said, because he realized he was. It might be ridiculous to think about breakfast at a time like this, but he’d already been up for hours, and his stomach didn’t care whether there was an army outside the city or not.

  “I do not think the Consul means to starve us,” the Telchi said. “I shall go and see what may be arranged.”

  When the Telchi was gone, Harrier went and found Tiercel. He was in one of the inner rooms, staring out the window through the closed lattice. The room was set up for sleeping; the coverlet on the single low bed was heavy silk—the most expensive sort there was, the kind that shifted between colors depending on how the light hit it. Most silk of this kind only showed one other color: this silk showed three—there were gold and blue and even pink highlights in the green, and it was another slightly-unwelcome reminder of how rich and powerful the man was who currently had them as so-called guests beneath his roof.

  “Hey,” Harrier said, sitting down on the bed. His clothes were dusty and smelled of horse, and he realized it didn’t really matter if he ruined the expensive silk or not. One way or another, nobody was going to care.

  “What?” Tiercel said sullenly.

  “Breakfast’s coming,” Harrier said. “And … I figured you were going to explain to me, oh, why you didn’t want to call up Ancaladar to chase those guys off.”

  “It wouldn’t work,” Tiercel said, flopping into a chair. It creaked alarmingly, but he didn’t even wince.

  “You could try.”

  “If MageShield didn’t scare them off, what in the name of the Light will? They might scatter for a day or so, but they’ll regroup and come back. And they have javelins. I’ve read about the Isvaieni. In the desert, they hunt using spears and arrows and a kind of heavy curved sword called an awardan. They throw their spears.”

  “Ancaladar has scales.”

  “He has wings, too. And if he flies low enough to scare them at all, he flies within javelin range. If his wings are badly damaged enough, he can’t fly.”

  “So—really—you’re saying there’s pretty much no point because he wouldn’t really scare them anyway,” Harrier said. Tiercel flashed him a grateful smile, then turned back to the window.

  “Tyr,” Harrier said, hating himself. “The Telchi won’t think of it because he wasn’t there—at Windy Meadows—but … you could cast Fire.” He knew Tiercel didn’t want to think of it. He didn’t want to think of it either. But the words had to be said.

  “No,” Tiercel said.

  “Tyr—” Harrier said desperately.

  Tiercel turned away from the window again. “They won’t leave! You know they won’t! And you said it yourself—unless they’re all dead, the survivors will attack the city! I’d have to set five thousand people on fire,” he finished quietly. “I can’t. I’m sorry.” He gazed at Harrier, and his expression was suddenly more bitter and angry than Harrier had ever seen. “Could you?”

  “Me?” Harrier asked in shock.

  Tiercel smiled coldly. “Fire. The first spell. The simplest spell. Of the High Magick and the Wild Magic both. If I can set the Isvaieni army on fire, Har, so can you. You’re already pretty good at Fire. Still, you might need to practice for a day or two, on little things. Stray dogs, maybe, or horses—”

  “Stop it.”

  “Why? Easy enough for you to ask me to do. Do you think they wouldn’t scream as they died? The Goblins did.”

  “They killed Simera!”

  “I know! I know,” Tiercel said again, more quietly. “If I could have—if I’d thought, if I’d known—I would have killed them sooner. But I can’t stop hearing their screams.” He turned away, back to the window, and Harrier saw him bring his hands up to rub his eyes.

  Tiercel would have killed the Goblins. If Harrier had possessed the Three Books—and the power—back at Windy Meadows, he would have done it too. But this was different. This was five thousand people, and Tiercel was right. They’d been tricked into doing this.

  And Tiercel was wrong. Harrier could no more cast Fire as a spell to burn several thousand people to death—people who were not Tainted—than he could run through the streets of Tarnatha’Iteru and slit throats with his swords. He thought of his disastrous attempt at Scrying, of the vision he’d refused to confide to Tiercel or to anyone else.

  The day was bright and the sky was clear, and he stood on a plain, in the midst of a lake, not a lake of fire, but a lake of water, and a quiet sad voice—it came from outside, but somehow it was his—spoke, saying: “This is Tarnatha’Iteru. This is all that remains,” and he didn’t know if Tiercel was alive, if he was alive, what had happened to the people who lived there, or to the army that was coming to attack them (then), or even when he was seeing. And he’d done the spell three times, and he’d never seen anything different.

  “We’ll think of something else,” Harrier said. “Maybe there’s something in one of your High Magick books. Something you haven’t studied yet.”

  “Maybe,” Tiercel said wearily.

  WHEN THE TELCHI returned with servants bearing trays of food, both boys were grateful for his arrival. Their own company didn’t seem to be leading to much of anything but fighting right now, and Harrier didn’t really want to fight with Tiercel.

  The Telchi had brought a large pot of kaffeyah along with the meal, and insisted that Tiercel drink several cups. He said it was known in the south to be a strong stimulant which promoted wakefulness and alertness, and that Tiercel would need both in the coming days.

  Harrier picked up a naranje from the tray and tossed it into the air. “Haven’t seen one of these in a while,” he said, catching it and starting to peel it. Naranjes and most other delicacies had vanished from the marketplace at the first hint of danger, vanishing into a network of secret—outrageously priced—transactions.

  “It is perhaps one of the advantages of being the Consul,” the Telchi said blandly.

  “I hope there are others,” Harrier said. “Tiercel needs his books. All of them.”

  “I don’t—” Tiercel began.

  “You want to look for something that will work,” Harrier said. “For all you know, there’s some spell in there that will just convince them all to pack up and leave. You’d feel pretty dumb if you didn’t look for it, right?”

  “I guess I would,” Tiercel said reluctantly.

  THEY COULD OPEN the shutters on the windows, but there wasn’t much to see. From the bedrooms, all they could see was a private garden thirty feet below. There was no balcony, and no way to climb down the wall, and even if they had, there was no gate leading out of the garden that either of them could see. And where could they go if they got out? Tiercel had sealed the city, and they were inside the shield. From the windows in the sitting room, they could see out toward the city wall, though it was some distance away. They were almost level with the top of it—only a few feet below it—and they could see the guards patrolling along its top. If they looked straight down, they could see a sort of back-courtyard, a private space between the palace and the wall. Because (Harrier supposed) it was private and protected, it was where the Nobles went to get some fresh air. Not that there was really any actual fresh air in the city right now. Everything was sealed beneath the MageShield.

  Harrier was getting very tired of purple.

  IT WAS LATE in the day before Tiercel’s books arrived, and by then both boys had become very tired of their suite of rooms. Its lavishness didn’t impress either of them, there was no point in bathing when neither of them had clean clothes, and they couldn’t leave. There were guards on the door—very polite, but guards nonetheless.

  When the men came bringing what they said were Tiercel’s books, Harrier expected to see one or two men carrying parcels. Instead, two dozen palace servants, and a dozen City Guards, and several attendants, came bustling in. The servants were carrying six enormous brass-bound leather chests on poles—from their size and weight, they must have brought, not just Tiercel’s books, but e
verything: the entire contents of their room.

  Accompanying the procession of chests and servants and guards—an additional surprise, though they were both amazed already by the arrival of their luggage—was Preceptor Larimac. He had two men with him that he introduced as Sub-Preceptor Daspuc and Sub-Preceptor Rial. Both young men looked nervous.

  “I thought perhaps they could assist you in your work,” Larimac said.

  “Ah,” Tiercel said. “No.”

  Larimac raised his well-manicured brows. “They are very well schooled, young man.”

  “They are not High Mages,” Tiercel answered, sounding faintly irritable. “Or if they are, sir, I’ll be very surprised. And if you please, the proper form of address is ‘my lord.’ My father is Lord Rolfort of Armethalieh; I am his eldest son.”

  Harrier stared fixedly at the carpet so that nobody there would see his shock. Tiercel never used his title. Never.

  Of course Harrier knew that Tiercel was really “Lord Tiercel” just as he knew that Tiercel’s parents were Lord and Lady Rolfort, but Tiercel never used his title. Nobody was allowed to use their titles in school of course (even if they had any), but Tiercel thought it was foolish to use his at all; it wasn’t as if the Rolforts were anything but the most minor nobility.

  “I beg your pardon, Lord Tiercel,” Preceptor Larimac said stiffly. “I had not been informed.”

  Tiercel shook his head. It wasn’t quite an apology, Harrier knew. “I’ve been traveling anonymously,” Tiercel said. “But the time for anonymity is past. I don’t object to your people staying, if that’s what you want. But the High Magick is something that takes a long time to learn, and one must be born with the ability. If they had been, you’d already know.”

  “I see,” Larimac said, and Harrier was grateful that he didn’t ask Tiercel what the signs were that someone was born with the Magegift. The two of them were both fairly sure by now that without the intervention of the Wildmage who had tended Tiercel as a child, the appearance of his Magegift last year would have simply killed him.

  He glanced at Daspuc and Rial, and if they’d looked nervous before, they looked practically terrified now. “Perhaps they can be of some use to you nonetheless,” Larimac said.

  “They can certainly help me unpack, if they’re willing to do that,” Tiercel said, relenting. “I’m not really sure where I’m going to put all of this.”

  Preceptor Larimac looked faintly surprised. “You have but to ask for anything you need,” he said. He bowed, and withdrew. The guards left, and all of the servants who’d brought the chests left as well, taking the carry-poles with them. Harrier supposed that if they actually got the chests emptied, they could call the servants all back, and they’d bring their poles and take the chests away again.

  “The first thing you should ask for is a bookcase,” he told Tiercel, flipping the catch up on the nearest chest and lifting the lid. “Hey, they brought our clothes.”

  “I wonder where the Telchi is?” Tiercel said.

  The Telchi had gone to the door about half an hour after they’d finished eating. The guards had let him leave, and when they had, Harrier had suspected that they’d let him leave as well—he was, after all, a member of the City Militia. But he wasn’t about to leave Tiercel alone here.

  “He sees to the defense of the city, Lord Tiercel,” Rial said, swallowing hard. He glanced at Harrier, obviously wondering if Harrier was “Lord” anything, and Harrier had no intention of telling him that he was. He had no intention of telling him he was the son of the Harbormaster of Armethalieh, either, although it wouldn’t really make much difference one way or the other. If the information that Tiercel Rolfort, son of Lord Rolfort, was in Tarnatha’Iteru got back to Armethalieh, the Gillains would be pretty sure their son was there, too.

  “Is it very bad out there?” Tiercel asked.

  “Consul Aldarnas has announced that the light in the sky defends us from our attackers,” Rial said. “He has said that it is a spell of the Wild Magic, cast in secret by Wildmages who have come to defend our city.”

  “But that isn’t true!” Tiercel said, aghast.

  “What else could he say?” Harrier asked patiently, after he’d thought about it for a moment. “I’m pretty sure the mob in the streets aren’t in the mood for long explanations. And at least they’ve heard of Wildmages.”

  “But…?” Daspuc said, looking from one of them to the other in confusion.

  “It was my spell,” Tiercel said. “I’m not a Wildmage. I’m a High Mage, like—like they had a long time ago.”

  “But you will defend us?” Daspuc asked.

  “I’ll try,” Tiercel said grimly.

  AS THEY UNPACKED—and Harrier realized that whoever had gone to the Telchi’s house to get Tiercel’s things had simply brought every single item that wasn’t obviously a piece of furniture—he began to worry. What was he going to do if Daspuc or Rial pulled out the Three Books? Everyone here knew what Wildmages were—either of them would be sure to recognize them immediately. And Tiercel had already said he wasn’t a Wildmage. He wasn’t sure what he could do about it, though.

  “Lord Tiercel, what do I do with the blank notebooks that were in this bag?”

  Harrier’s head whipped around. Rial was holding up his traveling bag, and had obviously felt the need to dig through it. Harrier didn’t know what Rial’d done with the packets of herbs—possibly thrown them out; they’d had to call for a container into which to toss items that never should have been packed at all—and the little brazier that had been in the traveling bag was sitting on top of one of the empty chests. Harrier restrained himself from slapping the books out of Rial’s hands with an effort. The man is a Preceptor of the Light, you idiot—when did you ever start thinking it was a good idea to hit Preceptors of the Light?

  But all Tiercel said was, “Here. I’ll take them.” Rial passed them to him without comment, and only after Tiercel had set them safely out of the way, did Harrier’s brain catch up to his ears.

  “Blank notebooks.” Rial had called them “blank notebooks.”

  He hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary at all.

  THEY WOULD ALL have been finished sooner if Tiercel hadn’t insisted on organizing everything as they went and making friendly conversation. By the time the chests were empty the two of them knew that Rial and Daspuc were only a few years older than they were, that Daspuc’s family had left the city when the first warning had come—though Daspuc had remained to serve the Temple—and that Rial’s family was all still here.

  “It is not so bad, Tiercel,” he said (Tiercel had insisted that there was no need to use his title except when Preceptor Larimac was around). “The Temple has been allowed to keep special stores of food, and we are allowed to supply our families even though they draw rations in the Marketplace as well. So they have not suffered.”

  Except that they might be going to die, Harrier thought, and didn’t say.

  “Do you need all these books to cast your spells?” Daspuc asked curiously.

  Tiercel laughed, not happily. “Ten times this number, if I could have carried them with me. And not to cast them. Just to learn them. Look at them if you like. I don’t know all the spells written down here. Some I haven’t learned yet. Some I can’t learn—they take many High Mages to cast, or years of study. Or equipment I don’t have.”

  “It seems very complicated,” Rial said hesitantly. “I think the Wild Magic might be simpler.”

  “It probably is,” Tiercel said.

  WHEN THEY WERE finished, Rial went to the door to call for the servants to take away the empty chests, and Harrier began taking armloads of clothing into two of the bedrooms. As soon as he could do it without attracting any particular attention, Harrier picked up the three “blank notebooks” and slipped away. Tiercel was getting along just fine with the two Sub-Preceptors (Harrier thought that at least Daspuc had been sent to spy on them, though he wasn’t really sure what Larimac thought he’d learn), and Harri
er, well …

  He hated to admit that anyone else was ever right. And he especially hated to admit that Tiercel was right. Not because Tiercel never was (because he was a lot of the time) but because—back in the old days, in Armethalieh—when Harrier told Tiercel he was right about something, at least something they’d argued about, Tiercel would usually take that as a license to go off and do something really, really stupid. Like exploring the old sewer system when they’d been kids. Or going off to that abandoned warehouse at night, the one that had turned out not to be abandoned. Or making umbrastone up in the attic because he’d found a recipe in an old book—and after they’d both been caught and thoroughly punished—Harrier’s middle brother Carault told him that if they’d been stupid enough to get the recipe just a little different (but still wrong) they’d have blown up Tiercel’s family townhouse.

  And here they were, and the stakes were much higher, but he had the same fear: that if he said that Tiercel was right, Tiercel would use it as a justification to do something that had nothing at all to do with common sense. Because he thought it needed to be done, or it was the right thing to do.

  And Harrier was afraid of what it might be.

  So he turned to the Three Books, hoping there were answers there. Too late now to wish he’d practiced the spell-casting part of being a Wildmage just a little harder, and he still wasn’t sure that the Wild Magic was something you practiced. But if he’d done a Scrying Spell moonturns ago—the first time Tiercel had asked, long before they’d even heard there was an army—what would it have showed him? The Book of Moon said the Scrying Spell showed you what you needed to see, but he didn’t understand how he could possibly have needed to see what it had shown him when he’d actually done it. Despite what he’d experienced when he’d Healed the Telchi, incurring Magedebt and having to become the eyes and hands of the Wild Magic still disturbed him, and at last he realized why. The Wild Magic was good. But what was good wasn’t always kind—you could be kind without being good, and good without being kind, and Harrier was honest enough to admit that he was afraid to take that final step. He still wanted to be both.