There was a sudden scrabble of claws on stone above his head.
“You’re sitting outside the wall, you know,” Saravasse said, craning her neck down to inspect him.
“I know. I kind of went for a walk,” Tiercel answered.
“You aren’t walking now. You’re sitting. Out there in the cold,” Saravasse explained. “Come in and have a nice mug of soup.”
“In a minute.”
“ ‘Now’ is a good time, too,” she said implacably.
From what she was saying, it was obvious that Saravasse hadn’t seen—or heard—anything of his conversation with the Firecrown. Tiercel would have been tempted to dismiss it as a dream or vision or hallucination or whatever he was supposed to call the experiences he had these days that weren’t quite real, except that when he got to his feet to go inside, he could plainly see his footsteps in the sand walking out, and the black smudges of ash in the distance, and his footsteps walking back.
And just a little past them—also visible on the sand in the moonlight—a short row of footsteps that walked up to the circle of ash . . . and didn’t walk away again.
TIERCEL walked through the tunnel that led through the wall—sneezing several times as he crossed the wards, and stopping to breathe hard as his stomach lurched—and went to find the Night Herd Guards. In this new world of abundance, the Night Herd Guards kept a pot of soup hot all night long. It seemed a little strange—after so much privation—to be able to eat whenever he chose, and for there to be pots of soup and gruel warming at all times, as well as flasks of fruit tea, both cold and hot, always available to drink. Tiercel wasn’t sure he’d ever take food for granted again—or would have, he reminded himself. His long ordeal had a fixed and definite end now, and knowing that was strangely liberating. He’d need help to get to where he needed to go, and he knew there would be more deaths before the end—but at least it wouldn’t be an end that left Ahairan triumphant and a new race of Demons ruling over everything.
If it worked. If the Firecrown could do what it had said it could. If it kept its bargain.
He was too edgy to sleep, and so he wandered around for hours, as the sun rose and the camp woke to life. The green smells of growing things were jarringly unfamiliar after so much time spent in the Isvai, but it was good to see trees and even flowers again. It was a little like getting a last chance to say “goodbye” to everything, and it didn’t hurt as much as he’d once thought it would. Now it seemed like a last gift to him from the world, and Tiercel thought maybe one of the reasons Harrier fought so hard with the Wild Magic was that because for Harrier (now), the whole world was alive and always talking to him, and Harrier had always gotten into arguments with people, with the weather, with just about everything. Tiercel wasn’t sure if he’d ever be comfortable with thinking of the world as a person, but thinking that the world might understand what he was doing for it and want to give him a farewell gift was kind of nice. In a very strange way.
“THERE you are,” Harrier said with satisfaction. “I thought I was going to have to teach one of the puppies how to track.”
“It’s not as if I could go that far,” Tiercel muttered mutinously, staring up at the sky. He was lying on his back near the wall, in the middle of the olive grove, staring up through the leaves at the sky. The grove was still in shadow—it was only a couple of hours past dawn—but the air was warm, and the morning dew had already burned away. “And anyway, you could just do another Finding Spell,” he added.
“I hate paying MagePrice,” Harrier complained.
“I know,” Tiercel said. “But they’re light for Finding Spells, aren’t they?”
“Yeah.” Harrier sat down beside him. “But they’re weird.”
“What was this one?” Tiercel asked. Harrier hadn’t cast a spell to find him, but—as he’d told Tiercel a few sennights back—every time he did anything beyond Calling Fire or Coldfire, he incurred MagePrice, and he’d done a Finding Spell to track the Armethaliehans.
“You might have noticed I haven’t gone to any of the evening councils lately,” Harrier answered dryly.
“Well, yeah, but I just thought . . .” Tiercel stopped. Oh come on, Tyr. You couldn’t possibly have thought that Harrier was being tactful and staying out of the council meetings because he still won’t let Magistrate Perizel attend? “That was your MagePrice?”
“I told you they were weird,” Harrier said in disgust. “And don’t ask why me not going serves the Wild Magic, because I don’t know.”
The two of them sat in silence for a while. Harrier snapped stalks of ripened grain off behind their heads and winnowed them absently, rubbing the heads between his palms and catching the grain in his lap. The barley stalks here were tall and ripe, ready for harvest. It was difficult work with nothing more than awardans or geschaks to scythe the grain, but there were many hands to do the work. Anything the people didn’t harvest, the animals would eat, or else it would re-seed itself as part of the next crop. In an hour or so, Tiercel knew, people would come into the olive orchard to begin harvesting the fruit. They were lucky to have any olives at all, since the Isvaieni usually ate them pitted and boiled in brine, but the Hinturi had been carrying some that were whole and fresh dried. Olives were a source of oil—if they could figure out how to press them—and they didn’t need oil for light, but they needed it if they wanted to set anything on fire . . .
“If I told you there was a solution to all of this, what would you say?” Tiercel said at last.
“I’d wish it were true,” Harrier said after a long moment of silence.
“What if it is?” Tiercel said. “What if there’s a way to stop Ahairan—really stop her—put her somewhere that she can’t do any of the things she wants to do? That would be good, right?”
He heard Harrier sigh. “Sure it would, Tyr. And if we could do it, I kind of think we might have done it a moonturn or two—or four—ago. You know: before all of our friends died?”
“I know,” Tiercel said. “You know, Har, we’ve known each other for a really long time.”
Harrier laughed quietly. “Let’s see. You’re seventeen now and I’m eighteen, so . . . about fifteen years, more or less. It was 17 Fruits back in ’forty-nine, Da said, when I kept you from going off the end of that pier, and it’s ’sixty-four now, I guess, whatever moonturn it is. Why?”
“So fifteen years means I know you well enough to know when you aren’t telling me something, and considering what I’m trying to tell you right now, I’d kind of like to know what it is.” Tiercel sat up so he could look Harrier in the face.
Sun and wind and starvation and maybe even being a servant of the Wild Magic had etched marks of care into his friend’s face. Harrier’s skin was tanned so dark that his hazel eyes looked green even when he wasn’t angry—as if the sun had bleached them—and his beard, thick and curly now, was a true red instead of auburn, with strands of pale copper threaded through it. It wasn’t so much that Harrier looked old—no one would mistake him for Eugens Gillain if the two of them were placed side-by-side, though moonturns of privation and hard labor had given both of them much the same build, and Harrier and his older brother were much of a height. It was that Harrier looked aged. His eyes had an ancient look to them that not even Liapha’s did, the look of someone who’d lived lifetimes of sorrow and unendurable choices compressed into little more than a year.
“Tell me what you . . . think,” Tiercel said quietly. “I swear to you, Har. Whatever it is, no matter what it is, I won’t be angry.”
Harrier sighed, and looked away. He reached out and took one of Tiercel’s hands in both of his. Harrier’s hands were rough, heavily-calloused from day after day of holding a sword, until the calluses were almost sharp against Tiercel’s skin.
“I think—I thought—I think,” he said slowly, fumblingly, “that whatever you think, whatever you want to tell me . . . Whatever it is, it will be something I can’t trust. Because you’ve never stopped dreaming of Ahairan, and now
we know she can walk into people’s minds and make them say whatever she wants.”
Tiercel drew a quick harsh breath. Of all the responses he’d expected from Harrier, this hadn’t been one of them.
“And I know Bisochim told me that I’d know when she was here. I think I would. But I wouldn’t . . . What I wouldn’t know—I am so sorry, Tyr—is if she’d come and told you something, and made you believe it was your idea, and left you alone to convince me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Harrier said, over and over.
“It’s all right,” Tiercel said quietly, even though Harrier’s response was a devastating blow. “I guess you have to think that way. I guess we all do. It wouldn’t be right if you didn’t. There are—what?—six thousand people here?”
“Six thousand, eight hundred, and eighty nine,” Harrier answered bleakly.
“And if you don’t think of things like that, Light Above knows what could happen. But that’s not how it was. Harrier, you sleep right next to me, and during the day you ride right next to me. Ahairan would have to be damned quick to show up and convince me that something was my idea and vanish again without you knowing she’d been there, and . . . When I dream about her, you never notice,” Tiercel said.
Mentioning that fact didn’t strengthen his argument, but it was something he had to say. Honesty and truth—all the truth, as much as he had—was the only thing that would help Harrier trust him. Tiercel knew Harrier wanted to trust him. That was their problem. Harrier would actually trust him less on something like this than he’d trust Zanattar—or Fannas—simply because he’d know he wanted to believe.
“You think that doesn’t worry me?” Harrier said harshly. “Knowing you’re thinking her thoughts, and seeing through her eyes, and that I’m supposed to notice when there’s a Demon around—and I don’t?”
“Maybe it’s because she isn’t,” Tiercel answered steadily. “Maybe I’m just listening to her, the way I did from the beginning. Maybe that’s just what I’m supposed to be able to do.”
Harrier growled and said nothing, still holding onto Tiercel’s hand in wordless apology. Tiercel wondered how long Harrier had thought these things about him. He couldn’t remember now just when he—and Harrier—had realized the visions of Ahairan had never stopped. They’d both thought they had. They should have. They’d been a warning, after all, and when it was too late for the warning to do any good, it should stop.
“But it doesn’t matter,” Tiercel went on quietly. “If you trust me or not, I mean. You see, it isn’t even really my plan.” He knew that if he couldn’t manage to convince Harrier that this plan didn’t come from some Overshadowing of Ahairan’s, he had no hope of convincing anyone else. He didn’t think Harrier had told very many people what he was worrying about. Shaiara, certainly. But probably not even Bisochim. If the Isvaieni had talked seriously about killing Eugens and Kave and Magistrate Perizel just because Mistress Pallocons had been possessed by Ahairan, they wouldn’t have been any happier with the news that Tiercel had ongoing visions of Ahairan. “Last night, when all of you were asleep, I went out into the desert. And I summoned the Firecrown. The Red Man. The thing that’s been chasing us ever since Sentarshadeen.”
Tiercel remembered the days when Harrier would have greeted an outrageous statement like this—and it was outrageous, Tiercel knew that—with a yelp of displeasure followed by ranting and even open-handed hitting. But both of them had changed so much. Now Harrier just released Tiercel’s hand so that he could shove his hands under his chadar, pushing it down to lie around his neck then scrubbing his hands through his hair.
“You didn’t,” Harrier said flatly.
“I did,” Tiercel assured him.
“Saravasse would have seen you do it.”
“Saravasse saw that I was outside the wall last night. You can ask her. As for seeing the Firecrown . . . We were wrong, or—I guess we weren’t exactly, because we never did know what it was that was chasing us. We thought it was just some kind of Otherfolk, and Bisochim said it was an Elemental Creature that he conjured up at the Firesprite Shrine, and he guessed that it became an ally of Ahairan’s when it wouldn’t help him Bind her. But it isn’t, and it didn’t. Do you know what the Firecrown is?”
“No, and this isn’t really the—” Harrier began.
“It’s a Great Power. Do you know what that is?”
Harrier groaned in exasperation. “Yes. No. Kind of. They’re . . . things. Somewhere between us—Mages—and the Wild Magic. They aren’t older than the Wild Magic—exactly—but people used to worship them and now they don’t.”
“ ‘Used to’ as in back in Great Queen Vieliessar Farcarinon’s time, when people actually lived in Abi’Abadshar, and when ‘people’ didn’t include people like you and me,” Tiercel said after a pause. The things Harrier knew always surprised him. “Although we had a Great Power too, I think, a long time ago, before we started worshiping the Eternal Light. The point is, the Firecrown is the Great Power of the Firesprites. The Firesprites were wiped out by the Endarkened in the Great War.”
“The one Kellen fought in?” Harrier asked.
“No. The one before that.”
“That’s a long time ago.”
“Yes,” Tiercel said. More than two thousand years of “a long time ago,” actually, and he knew just enough about Otherfolk and the Great Powers to know that twenty centuries was a stretch of time that meant about as much to the Firecrown as a sennight meant to him. “It is. And all the Firecrown’s people were gone, so it just . . . went to sleep, I guess. Telinchechitl was the Firesprite Shrine. That’s why Bisochim went there to conjure up Ahairan. Because the Blessed Saint Idalia—”
“Oh, don’t call her that—you’ve met her!” Harrier protested involuntarily.
“Well, she died at one of the other Shrines when Savilla the Queen of the Endarkened killed her—before”—Tiercel said crossly, since he didn’t want to say before she was reborn as an Elf any more than Harrier did—“and all of the Shrines are linked together, so that meant—because Jermayan Dragon-rider killed the Queen of the Endarkened in the same place—that Bisochim could use the Firesprite Shrine to summon up Ahairan.”
“You know, telling me that Bisochim used the Firesprite Shrine to call up Ahairan isn’t doing a lot to convince me that the Firesprite god is on our side,” Harrier said waspishly.
“The Firesprites fought on the side of the Light in the Great War,” Tiercel said. “And the Firecrown could have killed both of us a dozen times over—Bisochim sent it to kill me at least—and it didn’t. When I Summoned it—that really isn’t the right word, because I didn’t, really, I just told it I knew it was there and it should show itself—”
“Great magical technique you have there, O’ High Mage,” Harrier muttered.
“Shut up. It told me it was testing me. I don’t think it’s . . . I think the Firecrown is even less, well, less like a person than Ahairan is. I think it’s been trying to understand. Us. People. The world.”
“‘The world is a dance of light and fire,’ ” Harrier said slowly, frowning. “‘We are the heirs and the children of stars.’ ” He sounded as if he were quoting something.
“Is that from the Three Books?” Tiercel asked.
“No. The Firecrown said it to me in Tarnatha’Iteru. Just before it handed the two of us over to Zanattar’s . . . army.” The way Harrier hesitated on the last word told Tiercel he’d been about to say something else in its place. “Murderers?” Probably.
“Oh,” Tiercel said.
It hurt, sometimes, to watch Harrier and Zanattar together. Not because Tiercel begrudged Harrier the chance to make friends among the Isvaieni, but because he thought Harrier and Zanattar could be good friends, close friends—and every time Harrier got near to admitting that to himself, guilt over Macenor’Telchi’s death and Harrier’s inability to save the people of Tarnatha’Iteru drove him away from that last step. The fact that Harrier couldn’t hate Zanattar—or even blame him
for what he’d done any more—probably made things worse.
Overhead the leaves of the olive trees rustled. In the distance Tiercel could hear the ikulas puppies barking, the blatting of the sheep and goats, the conversation of the Isvaieni as they went about the tasks of the camp. Here and there he could even hear a snatch of song.
“I asked it to help us,” Tiercel said, when he realized the silence had stretched too far.
“And of course it agreed,” Harrier answered sardonically.
“It said if we could get her back to Telinchechitl, it could bind her there for . . . for as long as Telinchechitl burns.” He didn’t think Harrier would ask if there would be anything more involved in the “binding.” As much as he’d told was unbelievable enough. It seemed insane that the future of the world could come down to what was decided between two men, not yet twenty, talking quietly under some olive trees in a desert oasis. But it had.
“Tyr, Telinchechitl isn’t burning at all,” Harrier pointed out. “It’s a lake.”
“It wasn’t always a lake,” Tiercel pointed out doggedly. “It was a lake of fire before it was a lake of water. Bisochim destroyed his palace, sunk the cliff, made the lake, because Ahairan was going to make all the Isvaieni climb the cliff and throw themselves into the Firecrown’s Shrine. Don’t you think the Firecrown can put it back the way it was?”
“I don’t know,” Harrier said flatly. “I don’t know about any of this. How do we know this Great Power of yours isn’t just working for Ahairan the way Bisochim thinks it is?”
The thought of Harrier picking now to decide that Bisochim was a reliable authority on any subject at all was almost enough to madden Tiercel, except that he understood why Harrier was doing it. The stakes were just too high. Six thousand eight hundred and eighty-nine people—including Harrier’s brother, including the woman Harrier loved—were at stake. Harrier felt personally responsible for trying to keep all of them alive.
The Phoenix Transformed Page 55
