“Light, no!” Harrier said fervently.
“Then you would have no basis for comparison.”
“But Jermayan and Ancaladar are going to die—together—because they’re Bonded,” he said, wanting to be sure he had what she was saying right.
“Yes. It certainly takes a long time to make you understand things.”
“They don’t exactly teach Dragonology in Armethalieh Normal School,” Harrier answered grumpily. “And Jermayan is going to die soon.” Because he’s over a thousand years old.
“Yes. You seem to have grasped the basics of what I’m telling you. I’m relieved to know that,” Ithoriosa said.
“But . . . Can’t somebody . . . fix that?”
Ithoriosa lifted her head and looked down at him. The shadow that she cast blotted out the sun.
“Harrier,” she said quietly, “ ‘fixing that’ is what—among, perhaps, many other things—caused human Wildmages to take their dragons to fight for the Endarkened during the Great War. The Demons promised them immortality, so that their Bonded would not die at the end of their short human span of years. The Bond is for one, and forever. Nor would I wish to love another were I alive and my Bonded was gone.”
Harrier sighed. If it was awful thinking of a dragon dying at the end of an Elf’s long lifespan, it was even worse thinking of one dying at the end of a human’s short one. “I wish you hadn’t told me.”
“You would find out eventually,” Ithoriosa pointed out reasonably. “And the Elves will not think to tell you until it is too late. They are always certain that ‘tomorrow’ is soon enough.”
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 E
lven 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.
Maybe, at least, if he actually went to the Lake of Fire, that would prod the Wild Magic into doing something a little more useful than almost turning one person into a High Mage. The Wild Magic never did anything for you if you didn’t at least try to do something for yourself; he’d been taught that all his life. So Tiercel was going to do anything he could think of, even if he didn’t think it would do any good.
Of course, he thought with resignation, the Elves were probably telling themselves the same thing right now.
But to go to the Lake of Fire meant he had to figure out where the Lake of Fire was. Rilphanifel had said that it wasn’t anywhere inside the Elven Lands, and Tiercel knew by now that the Elves were great Mages. They’d certainly know if there was something Dark within the borders of the Veiled Lands. But if the Lake of Fire wasn’t here, the Elves had excellent maps, and should at least be able to give Tiercel some idea of where to look for it.
He’d made the mistake of mentioning something along these lines to Harrier a few days ago. He’d known that Harrier didn’t have much to do here, but it hadn’t really occurred to him until he’d started talking to Harrier again that Harrier would be spending his time wandering around Karahelanderialigor talking to everyone he met, including dragons. Or that Harrier—who by now knew almost as much about Tiercel’s visions as Tiercel did—would be determined to be helpful. Harrier had cheerfully assured Tiercel that he’d find out where they needed to go next—not that Tiercel intended to take Harrier with him—and last night he’d told Tiercel that while not even the dragons recognized the description of the place, the Madiran Desert seemed like the best place to start looking.
For one thing, the Lake of Fire had to be someplace deserted, and there were no people in the Madiran Desert. For another, it had to be someplace where there was nothing that could burn, and there was nothing but sand in the waterless wasteland of the far south.
How Tiercel himself was going to survive in a place where there was no water and no people, he didn’t know. That was something he’d have to figure out later. For now, it was enough to have a plan and a destination. So he might as well stop sitting around here, pretending he might turn into a High Mage, and go back up to the house to find somebody to tell.
He was walking up the low hill that concealed the “schoolhouse” from the main house when he looked up and saw that there was a dragon in the garden—and not just any dragon. Ancaladar. It was difficult to miss something the size of a full-rigged sailing ship that glittered like a piece of black glass, and for a moment Tiercel stopped to admire the sight, though part of him wondered why Ancaladar was here. He hadn’t seen Ancaladar since the day they’d arrived, and he was pretty sure Harrier would have mentioned it if he had.
But admiration quickly gave way to discomfort. Ancaladar was just going to . . . die. Not because he was old or sick—because apparently dragons didn’t get either old or sick—but because Jermayan was dying of old age. For a moment, Tiercel thought about just going back to the schoolhouse until Ancaladar had left, but he thought that would be like cheating somehow. As if he wer
e afraid to meet him. Or ashamed to.
So he kept on walking up the lawn and into the garden, and only when he’d gone too far to turn back did he realize that Ancaladar wasn’t alone. He was talking to someone Tiercel couldn’t see.
“I don’t even like him,” Ancaladar said.
Tiercel stopped. Ancaladar’s head was turned away from him, and whoever he was speaking to was completely concealed by the bulk of the dragon’s body.
“You will grow to love him, Bonded,” a familiar voice answered.
Jermayan! Tiercel thought. Now would be a really good time to leave. Or hide.
“I won’t have time. He’ll be dead in less than a century. And so will I,” Ancaladar answered.
“Better then than now. And you are needed,” Jermayan answered. Though his voice was thin with age, it was still uncompromising.
He’d already heard too much of this. Tiercel turned to retrace his steps, hoping Ancaladar was too involved in his conversation to notice, but he couldn’t help hearing Ancaladar’s next words as well.
“I won’t do it. And whether I consent or not is irrelevant. It can’t be done. If it could—” There was a moment of silence. “And here is Tiercel now,” Ancaladar added, in a different tone entirely. “You might as well stop trying to slink off. You aren’t very good at it.”
Tiercel sighed and came back, walking around Ancaladar. One of the large cushioned couches had been brought outdoors, and Jermayan lay upon it with Ancaladar coiled around him.
“I’m sorry,” Tiercel said. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop on a private conversation. I was just . . . I’ve made up my mind what I’m going to do, and I thought I should tell someone, and when I realized that Ancaladar wasn’t alone, it was too late to leave.”
“It does not matter. And to learn of this decision would make good hearing,” Jermayan said. “Ancaladar and I were speaking of decisions just now as well.”
The Enduring Flame Trilogy 001 - The Phoenix Unchained Page 33