The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  When he stepped beneath the awning and into the gloom of the tent itself, he saw Kamar, Shaiara, Marap, Raffa, Natha, Narkil, and—surprisingly—Liapha sitting around a kaffeyah service. There were only six adult Nalzindar and eight children ranging in age from three to nine years—all orphans—left. Tiercel remembered that once—a long time ago—Shaiara had told him that no Nalzindar child could be an orphan so long as the tribe endured: well, it had come very close to not enduring this year.

  He found himself looking for Bisochim, still expecting to see him, still surprised when he didn’t. It didn’t seem right that he was dead. It didn’t seem real, either—Tiercel had still been so stunned by Ancaladar’s reappearance, so focused on keeping Harrier from jumping into the Lake of Fire, that he’d nearly missed the moment when Bisochim had surrendered his life. And for what? The Firecrown had never appeared. It had never done anything at all. Bisochim could still be here, alive, able to seek out the peace and healing and absolution he deserved.

  “Come! Join us! There is food!” Liapha said cheerfully. “Though—alas—no rekhattan.”

  “Meddlesome old woman—this is not your tent or your carpet,” Shaiara snapped. “Nor does Tiercel High Mage of the Cold North require your invitation or mine to enter.”

  “That may be, daughter’s daughter, but live as long as I, and we shall see who meddles and who does not,” Liapha said, undaunted. “But the great Ummara Shaiara bids you welcome to a tent you need no welcome to, Great Mage! We have need of your wisdom.”

  “Better we had fed you to the Demon moonturns ago, Kadyastar, and won our victory easily,” Shaiara growled, and Kamar chuckled.

  Tiercel shook his head, but sat down in the circle of Isvaieni anyway. He accepted the traditional cup of kaffeyah—he wasn’t sure where all this stuff was coming from, but he was glad it was here—and took a cautious sip. He still didn’t think he’d ever like kaffeyah, but this had been so heavily sweetened—and spiced—that it hardly tasted like kaffeyah at all.

  In addition to the kaffeyah service, there was a basket of stuffed glazed apricots and dates, and another one of the round white cakes that Tiercel knew were made of ground almonds and egg whites and honey. Last, there was a platter of plain dried figs and fresh flatbread. It wasn’t that Tiercel was hungry, exactly, but all of these things were luxuries that he’d lived without for a long time, and he’d always had a sweet tooth. When he’d lived in Tarnatha’Iteru, he’d found the almond-paste cakes almost too sweet—now he finished three and only stopped then because he didn’t want to look like a glutton.

  “Queen Vairindiel wants to send people—Mages—to examine Abi’Abadshar. She’s asked Ummara Shaiara if she’ll give permission. Ummara Shaiara . . . seeks counsel before giving her answer.”

  Tiercel hadn’t realized that Kave was in the tent until he spoke. He was surprised to see Kave there instead of with Magistrate Perizel in one of the Elven pavilions. He was even more surprised to see that though Kave had obviously bathed and shaved, he was still wearing desert robes. Their color was the same sober gray-dun of the tent fabric, making him almost disappear in the dimness.

  Tiercel turned to address his answer to Shaiara. “I’m sorry, Shaiara. I don’t understand.”

  Shaiara frowned in distress. “The High Ummara of the Elder Kin speaks as if I should own a place, as if it were a shotor or a falcon or a tent, to say ‘you may come’ and ‘you may go.’ How shall I say to such a one that this is not so? I cannot say she may go. I cannot say she may not.”

  “Oh,” Tiercel said. Certainly Shaiara could have said as much to Queen Vairindiel in so many words. And Shaiara obviously dreaded giving offense to the Queen of the Elves by telling her she was an idiot. “Why don’t you tell Harrier about this and have him bring your answer to her? Harrier can tell her that since Great Queen Vieliessar Farcarinon built Abi’Abadshar in the first place, the Elves don’t need to ask permission to go there.”

  “And Harrier of the Two Swords will wrap up his speaking in such soft words that the High Ummara of the Elder Kin will surely be charmed,” Liapha drawled.

  Tiercel laughed despite himself. “He’s terrified of her.” He glanced again at Kave, curiously.

  “I’m hiding,” Kave said frankly. “I was hoping to find either you or Harrier without leaving this tent, because . . . I wanted to ask a favor.”

  Tiercel opened his mouth to speak.

  “A wise man would find out what it is first,” Kamar told him reprovingly, and Kave smiled.

  “Your friend is a wise man,” he said. “Magistrate Perizel and Master Gillain want to go back to Armethalieh as soon as they can, and from what you told me about Darkspawn showing up for moonturns before Ahairan got loose—well, even now that she’s gone, some of them might still be out there, so Magistrate Perizel needs to report to the Chief Magistrate immediately so that the Nine Cities can take precautions. And . . . you know, from the moment we saw those Shamblers beneath the walls of Akazidas’Iteru, I’ve been wishing with all my heart that I was back in Armethalieh every bell of every day. And now I can be home by Evensong Bells. And I don’t want to go. I want to stay here.”

  “In the Barahileth?” Tiercel asked blankly.

  Kave shook his head in amusement. “In the Isvai would be better, I think. After everything I’ve seen and done, going back to the City to be a Magistrate’s Clerk is going to be very dull. And it’s never been what I really wanted. You’re going to have a lot to do to rebuild here, and it all can’t be done by waving your hands and wishing. You need to replant most of the desert, just to begin with. What are you going to re-plant it with?”

  “Uh . . .” Tiercel hadn’t thought that far. This morning he’d been planning to jump into the Lake of Fire.

  “You can’t make buried roots grow this time. The rain’s rotted all of them. You need to bring in new plants. But if they aren’t the right ones, they’ll die. Or poison the desert. So you start by finding out what was here—I can help you do that—and bringing it here. You’ll have to start small, of course, but—”

  “Wait—Wait—Wait—I believe you,” Tiercel said hastily. He looked at Shaiara. “I think he’s right about the plants. If the whole Madiran isn’t going to just be a wasteland where nobody can live, we need to figure out how to fix it.”

  “Is this then the favor you wish to ask?” Shaiara asked, looking at Kave. “To live among us, as one of us, until the end of your days?”

  “I want to find out how the world is put together,” Kave answered. “Putting a piece of it back together seems like a good place to start.”

  “Northerners!” Liapha said. “Never one word when twenty will do! When the Nalzindar she-pahk casts you from her tents, boy, come to me. If you can do nothing else, you can amuse me.”

  “Huh,” Shaiara said. “See to it that he does not make all the foolish errors you made in the beginning,” she said, regarding Tiercel severely. “For I will have more things to occupy my time than keeping one northerner from leaving his bones upon the sand.”

  “She means that you can stay,” Tiercel said to Kave.

  Kave smiled with relief and pleasure. “I suppose I’d better go tell Magistrate Perizel my decision. And write a letter for her to take to my father.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Tiercel said. “It just occurred to me that if somebody doesn’t find something clean for Harrier to wear, he may never come out of that bathhouse.”

  THE bath house was just like the one Harrier had been in at Blackrowan Farm—and, for that matter, like every Elven bathhouse he’d encountered on his travels, though this one was somehow portable, and in addition to the usual bathtub, bench, towels, and soap, it held a mirror and a table with scissors, razors, combs, and a variety of creams and lotions. Harrier took the opportunity to regard himself in the mirror and blinked in disbelief. His skin was so sun-bronzed that his eyes looked green instead of their normal hazel, and there were deep lines around his eyes. He’d known he had a beard, but he’d n
ever seen it. The face in the mirror was a stranger’s.

  He picked up one of the razors and hesitated, then put it down again unused and turned to the bath. There was a small tub to stand in to catch the water while you scrubbed yourself clean, and a ladle to dip water out of the larger bath. It took a while before Harrier felt clean enough to get into the bath, and the thought of putting his old clothes back on again afterward made him shudder, but fortunately he didn’t have to. While he was trying to decide if it would be too much of a breach of etiquette if he just washed them in the soaking tub—he would have lazed there longer, except for the fact that it just seemed too weird to soak in a tub of warm water in the middle of the Barahileth—Tiercel came back into the pavilion carrying a large bundle in a familiar shade of blue.

  “Ugh,” Tiercel said, regarding Harrier’s cast-off garments. “I don’t know why they’re still here. You’d think they could walk off by themselves.”

  It was something that Tiercel might have said a year ago—or two—but now it seemed forced: an effort. An act. Harrier could tell how very hard Tiercel was working to project the illusion that nothing had changed—that he hadn’t changed—and the sad and crazy thing was, he was trying to do it with the one person in the world it would never work on again.

  “Blue?” Harrier asked, nodding at the pile.

  “Mondalinwael said to bring you this to wear,” Tiercel said, shrugging. “And Gens is looking for you, so if you don’t want him looking in here . . .”

  “Fine. Right. Go away,” Harrier said hastily.

  HARRIER barely needed the towels to dry himself, since the desert air sucked the moisture from his skin and hair almost at once. When he walked over to the bench to see what Tiercel had left for him, he discovered that it was a copy of his desert robes. The fabric was finer, and this set was tailored to fit him (as much as Isvaieni garments were tailored at all), and the new boots that were included with it were blue as well. He’d managed to forget just how blue a Wildmage’s robes were.

  He dressed, shook out the rags he’d been wearing, tucked his Three Books into the sash of his new robes, tucked his geschak through the sash, buckled his Selken blades over his back, and went off to find out what Gens wanted.

  WHEN he came out, he saw that two of the dragons—a red one that wasn’t Saravasse, and another one that was sort of an in-between color that he couldn’t quite decide whether it was gray or lilac—were standing out on the desert, saddled. He walked toward them.

  “Har! What are you doing dressed like that? Da’s going to have cat fits! And you haven’t shaved, either. Well, come on. We have to go. The Elves say they’ll take us back to the City now.”

  Harrier turned at the sound of the voice, but it took him a moment to recognize his brother. Like Tiercel, Eugens had bathed and shaved and dressed in the Elven style, only Eugens was wearing shades of green and tan and russet red. No chadar (of course), and Harrier realized, with a pang of sorrow, that he could see bright threads of silver in Eugens’s hair that hadn’t been there a year ago.

  For just an instant, Harrier was tempted. Home and Armethalieh and the house on Grindon Road, and oh, he could be home by suppertime, and Ma would cry over him, and Da would thump his back and clear his throat gruffly . . .

  And then he looked around, his eye passing over the bright pavilions of the Elves until they settled on the homely dun-colored tents of the Isvaieni. Armethalieh wasn’t home anymore. It wouldn’t have been if he weren’t Dragonbond. It wouldn’t have been if he weren’t a Wildmage. He’d come too far to go back to what he’d been. Even if it were possible, it wasn’t what he wanted.

  “I’m not going back, Gens,” Harrier said. “I told you that, remember?”

  Eugens made a face, shaking his head. “Look, Har. I won’t tell Ma you’re a Wildmage. Just come home. Bring Shaiara, too. Just for a visit.”

  Harrier shook his head and held out a hand to Eugens, and then turned to walk toward the waiting dragons. He knew that Eugens thought that if he could get him to come home for just a sennight or two, sennights would stretch to moonturns and he’d never come back to the Isvai at all. “I have work to do here,” he said, as they walked toward the waiting dragons.

  “Here?” Eugens said blankly. “It’s a desert.”

  “Yes,” Harrier said. “And it always will be, Light be praised. But it needs to be a better desert than it is now.”

  “Well . . . how are you going to manage that, Har?” Eugens asked.

  “We’ll think of something,” Harrier answered. “Shaiara and I will think of something.” And Tiercel. And Ancaladar. And the Wild Magic. But you don’t need to know any of that, Gens, because I don’t think you’d understand it at all.

  They walked on until they reached the dragons.

  “I hope they intend to feed us in Armethalieh,” the pale dragon said, sighing gustily.

  “Do you ever think of something other than your belly, Atuona?” the scarlet one demanded.

  “Yes, Falirohntar. My shocking beauty,” Atuona replied. “Ah, here comes the little human lawgiver now. I hope she enjoyed her interview with Vairindiel Elvenqueen.”

  “You are a terrible gossip, my Bonded,” the Elf standing beside Atuona said reprovingly. She bowed slightly, in acknowledgment of Harrier’s arrival, and Harrier returned the greeting meticulously.

  “How is that gossip, Nerindanamar?” Atuona asked, sounding hurt. “I merely observe what anyone might and extend my good wishes. I am ever misjudged.”

  Falirohntar snorted loudly and said nothing. Falirohntar’s Bonded said something too quietly for Harrier to make out.

  Since both dragons were ignoring him, and Falirohntar’s Bonded was far enough away that politeness didn’t require Harrier to notice him, Harrier was free to turn and look back the way he’d come. Magistrate Perizel was just walking out of Vairindiel Elvenqueen’s green pavilion. Like Eugens, she was dressed in the Elven fashion. Harrier didn’t know what the two of them had said to each other, but he suspected that the report Magistrate Perizel made to Chief Magistrate Vaunnel would say exactly what he hoped it would. The whole truth, as tangled and complicated and unbelievable as it was.

  “Wait,” he said. Two dragons. Two passengers. “Where’s Kave Breulin?”

  Kave has decided to stay here, Harrier, Ancaladar said.

  “Oh,” Harrier said aloud. Eugens looked at him oddly. “I . . . just remembered,” Harrier said hastily. “He isn’t going back either.”

  There was a moment’s awkward pause. “Look. You aren’t just going to vanish again, are you?” Eugens asked, and now he sounded truly frightened. He reached out to grip Harrier’s arm. “Maybe I should stay for a few days. Really. I—”

  “Gens, I promise you. I won’t vanish. I’ll be here. And once Magistrate Perizel gets to Armethalieh, the news about what’s happened here will be all over the City immediately. If you ever want to be let into your house again—or Ma’s—you’d better be first to Grindon Road with the news that you’ve survived. And that I have. But . . . I’ll write. And someday—not soon, but someday—I’ll visit.”

  “You’d better mean that,” Eugens said, pulling him into a fierce hug. “All of that. Or I’m coming back here—and you’ll find out that Knight-Mage or no, you’re not too grand for me to beat your head down between your elbows.”

  “If Brelt doesn’t get to you first, you mean,” Harrier said. “He’ll make a better Apprentice Harbormaster than I ever would have. All goes as the Wild Magic wills.”

  He almost winced to hear himself say those words; twice over because he’d said them with perfect seriousness. He wasn’t really sure who he was anymore, and the sooner Eugens left, the sooner he could start figuring that out. He’d never get used to his new life with his old one pulling at him.

  But a few moments later, Magistrate Perizel had joined them. The Elves made mounting into their dragons’ saddles look graceful, but it took both Harrier and Eugens to get Magistrate Perizel onto Falirohntar
’s saddle and then Harrier made a stirrup to boost Eugens up into Atuona’s. Fortunately these were proper Elven saddles, with straps, so there was no possibility any of the dragons’ riders could fall from their backs.

  First Atuona ran along the desert, snapping his (or her) wings wide with a whipcrack sound and leaping into the sky. Harrier heard Eugens’s whoop of exhilaration as the dragon began its slow climb into the sky, though when Falirohntar followed, Magistrate Perizel maintained a silence born of either dignity or terror.

  AS the hours passed, and awareness of victory became conviction that they had not only won, but would live to see not merely tomorrow, but all the tomorrows that Sand and Star saw fit to grant them, the Isvaieni’s stunned accep tance turned to joy and then to quiet celebration. In the cool of the evening, all of the Isvaieni tents had been opened out as far as possible to become the heart of the gathering, for the Isvaieni might revere the Elder Brethren, but they were also daunted by them. For their part, the Elves had supplied the Isvaieni with truly staggering amounts of food and drink—not charity, for as Harrier had explained, the Isvaieni and the Elves had been battle-comrades in this war, and as such shared one tent—then tactfully withdrew.

  It was understood that tomorrow would bring many things. The beginning of plans and understandings of how it was they must live now. The northerner-who-had-come-to-live-in-the-tents-of-the-Nalzindar spoke many wise and hopeful words about restoring the Isvai to what it once had been, and spoke them in a way that any man or woman might grasp, for nearly all upon whose ears his words fell had herded, or hunted, or gathered the desert’s bounty into their two hands, or even planted and harvested. And so all knew that when Kave Northerner spoke of bringing plants to the Isvai and leaving them to flourish, he spoke not of a work to be completed in one wheel of the seasons, or two, but ten or twenty, or even more. If the Isvaieni must live as exiles until that work was done, it would be in the knowledge that their true home would someday be restored to them. For tonight there would be joy.