The Enduring Flame Trilogy 001 - The Phoenix Unchained

by James Mallory

  “He can’t be Ancaladar!” Harrier snarled back in a loud whisper. “He’d be a thousand years old!”

  “You argue with him,” Tiercel snapped back, and stomped off after Ancaladar. This was impossible to believe—part of him was sure this was all still part of the cave-dream, and he’d never really woken up—but the one thing he was sure of was that when the Star-Crowned Ancaladar told you to do something, you did it.

  The ball of MageLight he had created followed.

  THEY walked for most of another hour deeper into the caves, into places that Tiercel suspected had never been explored even by the park guides. He’d been cold before, but he wasn’t now: Ancaladar’s body gave off heat as if it were a giant sun-warmed rock. He walked beside the dragon when he could, and behind him when the passage narrowed—but since the paths they took all had to be wide enough for Ancaladar, there were never any really narrow ones. He wasn’t really thinking. He was still too stunned. It would have been more reasonable—in his imagination—for the bronze statue of High Magistrate Cilarnen, who had founded the Law Courts that now ruled the Nine Cities, to get down from its pedestal in front of the Magistrate’s Palace and give him advice about his future than . . .

  Than to meet someone who had known High Magistrate Cilarnen in the flesh.

  Harrier trudged along several yards behind, radiating deep disapproval of the entire proceedings. At least he hadn’t opened his mouth again to say anything else irritating or stupid, because Tier-cel could tell that Harrier was still refusing to believe that Ancaladar was who he said he was, and Tiercel didn’t think that Ancaladar would take kindly to being doubted. Tiercel was pretty sure that Ancaladar wouldn’t simply whip his head around and swallow Harrier up in one gulp, but he wasn’t completely sure. And Harrier could be really annoying when he wanted to prove a point, especially when he wasn’t quite sure what the point was.

  Finally they stopped.

  “We’re here,” Ancaladar said.

  The cavern looked very much like the others they’d passed through, except for the fact that there was a pool in the middle of it. Tiercel stared at it, then blinked. He’d thought it was reflecting the light of the ball of MageLight that was traveling with them, but no—it was glowing all by itself. And he couldn’t actually see the surface of the water, just a thin fuzzy layer of mist laying over the surface of where water probably was. It sparkled faintly, and he wasn’t really sure whether that was the mist, or the water that might lay beneath. What he was sure of was that the faint queasy feeling he’d felt when he’d gotten near Ancaladar—it hadn’t gone away, but he’d gotten used to it—had gotten even stronger.

  Harrier caught up to them and cleared his throat meaningfully. Ancaladar sighed.

  “This is magic,” the dragon said, nodding toward the glowing pool. “A doorway that leads from the Caves of Imrathalion to a place near Karahelanderialigor. You need to step through.”

  “Jump in, you mean,” Harrier said resentfully. “It looks wet.”

  Tiercel bet that it wasn’t wet, and even if it was, there were probably dry clothes on the other side. In order to avoid listening to any more of Harrier’s grumbling, he stepped quickly to the edge of the pool and jumped in.

  HE didn’t know what he’d expected when he jumped into the cave-pool, but what Tiercel got was a terrifying sense of falling. He felt as if every experience of light and warmth that he’d ever had had been suddenly stolen from him: this was more than cold, more than darkness, and he had the terrifying certainty that it was going to last, not just for the rest of his life, but forever.

  Then it was over.

  He staggered forward a step or two, tripped, and fell flat on his face, because though he’d jumped feet-first into a pool, he exited from a standing archway. He was given no time at all to register his surroundings, because the first sound he heard was Harrier’s stunned roar of shock as he exited the same portal, and the first thing he was sure he felt wherever he was, was Harrier landing right on top of him.

  Harrier rolled away, growling and panting—and muttering something about “bloodsucking spawn of the Endarkened”—and Tiercel opened his eyes just in time to see Ancaladar step, daintily and sinuously, through the doorway and over both of them. Tier-cel sat up. He wasn’t wet—not jumping-into-a-pool-of-water wet—but the grass was very damp and he was lying on it. It was early morning here, and his mind spun dizzily at the thought. Had they been underground that long? Or had they simply traveled that far East?

  There was too much to look at all at once, though he tried to look at all of it. There was Ancaladar himself. Now Tiercel could see the dragon clearly for the first time. He didn’t look quite like the drawings and paintings of dragons that Tiercel had seen, and certainly nothing like the creatures in the Flowering Day plays. His neck was much longer, and his forelegs were much shorter—though still quite long enough that Tiercel was certain that Ancaladar could canter like a horse if he had to, but why run if you could fly? Both front and hind feet had long hooked claws—like a bear’s—that gleamed as black as the glittering black iridescent scales that covered most of the rest of his body.

  He had the huge ribbed wings that were in all the drawings, but none of the drawings had ever shown the way that they caught the light and gleamed like rainbows. Or that his head wasn’t covered with scales like the rest of him, but with huge flat smooth plates of—maybe—bone. Or that the long whiplike tail that ended in a flat arrow-shaped barb was easily as long as head and neck and body put together.

  Ancaladar blinked his enormous golden eyes, amused by Tier-cel’s scrutiny, and Tiercel looked back the way he’d come.

  There was an archway standing upright in the grass behind him—large enough for Ancaladar to pass through comfortably; thinking back, Tiercel realized that the cave-pool must have been a very tight fit for him. The archway was made of something white and faintly glistening, and was as ornate as one of his sister Hevnade’s carved hairclips, and the interior of the semicircle enclosed by the elaborately-carved material was filled with sparkling, shifting blue-green fire. He stared at it, half-hypnotized.

  “Don’t walk back through that, unless you want to go back to Imrathalion again,” Ancaladar said. “You could come back here again, of course—the doorway is always open—but apparently humans find the trip distressing.”

  There was a heartfelt groan from the ground beside Tiercel, where Harrier lay.

  “Is the pool a spell of the High Magick?” Tiercel asked.

  Ancaladar snorted in amusement. “That, Master Rolfort, would be most unlikely, since you are the first High Mage to cast a spell of the High Magick in nearly a thousand years. No, this is Elven Magery, merely the product of the labors of several centuries of spells of a dozen Elven Mages. An improvement over the last Doorway Spell I saw cast, which was the Master Spell of a dying Elven Mage, and which didn’t last very long at that.”

  “Oh,” Tiercel said.

  Harrier sat up with a last fervent groan.

  “You did that on purpose!” he said to Ancaladar accusingly.

  It was just like Harrier, Tiercel thought, to try to pick a fight with a dragon.

  “I don’t think Ancaladar knows what going through the doorway feels like to humans,” Tiercel said conciliatingly.

  “Of course I know,” Ancaladar said reprovingly. “Humans described the sensation quite vividly the last time they experienced it, and none of you care for it. But it’s unpleasant, nothing more.”

  “And now we’re in the Elven Lands, and our troubles are over,” Harrier said sarcastically. He drew breath to add a further comment, then fell silent as he took a first good look at where he was.

  Since it seemed as if Tiercel would be spared from having to referee a fight between Harrier and Ancaladar, he looked around too—beyond Ancaladar and the Doorway—and abruptly understood why Harrier had fallen so unexpectedly silent.

  The portal stood in the middle of a lush green meadow filled with wildflowers he cou
ldn’t name. The broad flat expanse of wild-grass was ringed with trees; a forest in full summer leaf. At its very edge, Tiercel could see a herd of red deer, their morning’s feeding over, making their leisurely way back into the forest for a day’s sleep. At the back of the party of does, a young buck stopped and gazed at him, head raised; not frightened by these interlopers in his domain, merely curious.

  Between Armethalieh and Ysterialpoerin Tiercel and Harrier had seen plenty of trees, forests, meadows, and flowers, but nothing like this. Everything here, as far as the eye could see, was perfect. The grass still glistened with early-morning dew, and there were no withered blades of grass, no misshapen flowers—there weren’t even any flowers in clashing colors growing next to each other. And while it was a wild meadow, and not one that had been trimmed or landscaped in any way, seeing it, Tiercel could not escape the idea that someone had come along and arranged each blade of grass and every flower, removing every imperfection.

  Because it was perfect. Tiercel thought he could sit there on the ground forever, just staring at it. Harrier smacked him on the shoulder. Hard.

  “Ow,” Tiercel said. “What was that for?”

  “I’m wet and I’m hungry, and we’re in the middle of nowhere, and—in case you haven’t noticed—everything we own is back in Ysterialpoerin, including our dry clothes.”

  Slowly Tiercel got to his feet and began ineffectually brushing at his own damp trousers, though that would do nothing to dry them.

  “And I am very late for last night’s dinner,” Ancaladar said, spreading his wings with a crisp snap. Open, the black membrane between the ribs of the great wings was translucent, like oiled silk, and shimmered with rainbow colors. “Go that way,” the dragon added, swinging his head toward the western edge of the meadow, “and you will find a trail. Follow it, and you will certainly know what to do when the time comes.”

  “Wait!” Tiercel cried. “Will we see you again?”

  “Inevitably,” Ancaladar answered.

  Tiercel opened his mouth to ask another question, but Ancaladar had already turned to go. As the two boys watched, the dragon bounded away, breaking first into a trot, then a run, then a gallop, his wings half-spread. It seemed to his observers that Ancaladar was simply going to run head-first into the trees and crash, but at the last possible moment, he spread his wings fully and gave a leap upward. To Tiercel and Harrier’s amazement, Ancaladar spun almost completely around, like a kite in an updraft, and began to angle upward into the sky in long, seemingly-lazy zig-zags. Long seconds passed before the first time the great black dragon stroked his wings downward against the morning air, and seconds after that he’d vanished against the sky.

  “Okay,” Harrier said for no reason in particular, finally getting up off the grass. He regarded Tiercel with disgust, as if the fact that he was damp and thousands of miles from home with nothing but the clothes on his back was entirely Tiercel’s fault. “Now what?”

  “What he said,” Tiercel said, sighing. “We’re bound to run into some Elves sooner or later.” Without waiting to hear what Harrier had to say—about Elves, Dragons, jumping into glowing pools of water, or the extreme likelihood that he was going to miss breakfast—Tiercel turned and began to trudge off in the direction Ancaladar had indicated.

  ACTUAL forests—Tiercel couldn’t keep from thinking of this one as something different—were messy. Trees fell in all directions and rotted where they lay; new trees grew up haphazardly. Not here.

  They’d found the trail that Ancaladar had told them about as soon as they reached the edge of the meadow, though it was hardly worth the name; a narrow deer-track through the moss and low-growing plants of the forest floor, less than a handspan wide. It was obviously the trail they sought; the trace went in the right direction, and the earth was pounded down to claylike hardness with the passage of many feet, both animal and human.

  By the time they’d reached the forest, their trouser legs and the hems of their cloaks were both thoroughly saturated with morning dew. But it was hard to be preoccupied with simple physical discomfort—even their own growing hunger and thirst—when their surroundings were so unimaginably strange.

  “It looks like . . . Remember the time we visited your cousin?” Harrier said half an hour later.

  “My mother’s uncle, Lord Morlade?”

  “Breeds pigeons, and has a big estate in the Delfier Valley,” Harrier agreed. “You know; he had this big fake ruin out in the back, and a bunch of trees planted around it to look like an overgrown forest, only the whole thing was fussed over by his gardeners day and night.”

  “You mean all this looks artificial, as if someone’s taking care of it,” Tiercel said.

  “I guess,” Harrier said doubtfully.

  In fact, the forest did look like a garden of a sort, and the air was as filled with scent as if this were a perfumer’s shop, from the green scent of mosses and leaves, to the intense fruit scent of the berries and the exotic fruit-bearing trees, to the host of sweet scents coming from the flowers that seemed to bloom everywhere. Everything was tidy and organized, polished and tended. Though under Simera’s tutelage—remembering her still brought pangs of dull angry grief—he’d started to become at least a little familiar with the forest, and the way it had changed as they’d moved north and east, Tiercel didn’t recognize a single one of the trees around him now. There was something like an oak, but it had fruits like apples; something almost like a maple, but it had large pale-orange flowers. Clustered at the bases of the trees were low-growing bushes heavy with bright-colored summer berries. Since there were deer in the forest, the bushes should have been chewed over and stripped of berries, but as far as he could see, that was not the case.

  The berries looked delicious, but they also didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen before, and poor Simera might not have had time to teach him everything about the edible plants of the forest, but he’d been eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the capital of the Nine Cities for the past sixteen years, and Tiercel was pretty sure that if it grew anywhere from the Dragon’s Tail to the Western Ocean, it had appeared on the Rolfort table at some point. If he didn’t recognize it, eating it was probably not a good idea, whether he was hungry or not. Everything Tiercel saw reminded him that he was far from home.

  He wondered if all the caretaking of the forest was done by magic spells, because it was hard to imagine the amount of labor that would have had to go into tending even the part of the forest they saw—and this forest could be only a small part of the whole Elven Lands.

  The birds in the trees were not feathered in the familiar blues and greys of the sea and forest birds of Armethalieh, but in green and yellow and even purple. And birds weren’t the only winged things roosting in the trees. Tiercel looked up, his eye drawn to a by-now-familiar flash of color, and found himself staring at what he thought at first was a giant butterfly. He’d thought it was more than a little strange, not only because it was more than a foot across, but because it glowed as if it were made of MageLight.

  He supposed butterflies might do that in the Elven Lands, but then the butterfly had reached out a hand to pluck a cluster of berries growing from a vine coiled around the tree branch the butterfly was perched on, and Tiercel realized that it wasn’t a butterfly of any kind, but a tiny glowing humanshape with something like butterfly wings. Then another movement caught his eye and he glanced away from it, toward the oak-with-apples, sure that he’d seen a female figure standing there against its trunk, but when he looked at the tree directly, he saw nothing. He looked back toward the tree branch. The winged creature had been joined by several more of its kind. They were all sitting on the branch, eating berries. Tiercel thought they were staring at him.

  “You’re awfully jumpy,” Harrier said idly.

  Tiercel stared at him, wondering if Harrier had decided to be particularly irritating, or if it was possible he actually wasn’t seeing what Tiercel was seeing.

  “The forest is alive.”
r />   Harrier regarded him condescendingly. “Ye-e-s-s-s . . . Trees, grass . . .”

  Tiercel pointed silently toward the glowing butterfly-creatures and watched Harrier’s jaw drop in shock. He felt reassured that Harrier could at least see the little butterfly creatures, but he had the odd feeling that Harrier wouldn’t be able to see the tree-women, or the half-invisible shapes in the air that Tiercel thought he might have seen earlier. “I’m pretty sure those are pixies. And I think I saw some women in the trees over there, too. If I did, they’re probably dryads. I don’t know.”

  Harrier sighed and hunched his shoulders. “Not Elves?” he asked hopefully.

  “Not yet.”

  There was a pause.

  “That couldn’t have been Ancaladar,” Harrier said, as if he were trying out the idea to see if he could convince himself. “Not the—”

  “Why not?” Tiercel demanded. “Dragons live forever.”

  “So,” Harrier said. “The actual Ancaladar.”

  Tiercel nodded. A year ago, if someone had offered him the chance to meet Ancaladar in the flesh—or even see him—he would have been so thrilled he would hardly have been able to breathe.

  “Why you?” Harrier asked, in an uncanny echo of his thoughts. “I mean, not that it isn’t a great honor and all.”

  Tiercel shook his head. “To bring me here,” he said.

  “To meet Jermayan,” Harrier said.

  Tiercel nodded.

  “Not the—”

  “I don’t know!”

  They continued along the trail. Unlike the other trails they’d followed in human lands, this trail really didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular, and a couple of times Tiercel was certain they turned around and headed back the way they’d come. To make things worse, he continued to glimpse shapes out of the corner of his eye; moving shimmers that were never quite there when he turned to gaze at them full-on. He got the strong feeling that the forest was even more thoroughly inhabited than he could see, with kinds of Otherfolk that were either invisible to the human eye or that were just very very good at hiding. He listed the possibilities in his mind: Pixies, Dryads, Fairies, Fauns, Selkies, Salamanders, Undines, Gnomes, Sylphs, Air-Sprites, Water-Sprites, Flower-Sprites, Forest-Fae, Unicorns, of course . . .