Rilphanifel simply looked at him.
“It’s not against the rules for you to tell Tyr if the place he’s seeing in his head is some place that you recognize, I mean, oh, Light blast it, I can’t figure out how to say it except as a question!” Harrier burst out.
“ ‘If Tiercel may tell you what he recollects of his visions, it would be good to hear, of your courtesy, if perhaps the terrain he has seen in those visions is familiar to you,’ ” Rilphanifel prompted patiently.
“Yeah,” Harrier said. “That.”
“And this he may certainly do, but I tell you now that the place he dreams of does not lie within the Elven Lands, for we would certainly know of so great a disturbance herein. And all things need not be accomplished today. You have come far, and the weariness of a long journey cannot be erased with a single sleep.”
“Could you stop talking about me as if I weren’t here?” Tiercel demanded irritably.
He turned his back on both of them and opened one of the cabinets at random. One side was filled with boxes and jars. The other side contained several pieces of wood—from one that looked like the wand that Tiercel had made, and which was probably still back in Ysterialpoerin along with their spare clothes, to something that looked like a quarterstaff. Next to the quarterstaff was a sword that was nearly as big as Tiercel was.
“Very well,” Riphanifel said.
“It would be good to know—of your courtesy—if you have any notion of how long it takes to learn the spells of the High Magick,” Tiercel said. Though his back was to them, he sounded to Harrier as if he was gritting his teeth.
“Of that I am not certain, but Greatfather has spoken somewhat of Cilarnen High Mage, who faced his own difficulties in mastering his Art. He said to me that upon many occasions Cilarnen said to him that High Mages began their studies in infancy, and labored into old age to master the intricacies of the High Magick.”
“In that case, I think we’re in trouble,” Harrier said.
FOR the next moonturn, Harrier didn’t see much of Tiercel. The two of them had been welcomed completely into Jermayan’s household, and were treated far more like family than like even the most honored of guests. They were fed and clothed—Harrier actually had more clothes here than he had back in Armethalieh—and everyone in House Malkirinath was happy to do anything at all for them, as far as Harrier could tell, except answer questions. And even that wasn’t quite fair, because the Elves were almost always willing to provide information, if Harrier could figure out how to phrase it in a nota-question way—something he was getting better at as the days passed. He was even given a horse of his own to ride, once Elunyerin had found out he wasn’t actually horrible at it. She insisted on giving him riding lessons, too, but he didn’t mind too much.
He was bored.
It was okay for Tiercel. Tiercel got up every morning between First and Second Dawn Bells (assuming they’d kept the Bells in the Elven Lands, which of course they didn’t), got breakfast from the kitchen, packed a lunch, and went off down to the house at the bottom of the garden to spend the day reading his magic books and probably doing other things as well. He’d come back at dinner time, quiet and irritated, and . . . not talk about what he’d been doing.
Harrier wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. He’d known Tiercel all his life, and every time Tiercel started studying something new, he always wanted to talk about it. Not this time, it seemed. The one time Harrier had tried to get him to talk about what he was doing all day, they’d almost gotten into a fight.
So Harrier had to find other ways to amuse himself.
Elunyerin and Rilphanifel had apparently been appointed his unofficial guardians. This meant that he followed them around, or they followed him around, much of the time, at least until Rilphanifel decided that Harrier probably wouldn’t insult strangers the first time he opened his mouth. He didn’t mind the riding lessons particularly—he could see the point to those—but he drew the line at the fighting lessons.
“COME and watch.”
It was the beginning of his second sennight at House Malkirinath, and Harrier had gotten used to seeing very little of Tiercel.
“Watch—Er, it would be good to know what it is I am to watch,” he amended hastily.
Elunyerin nodded in approval. The brother and sister were dealing with his lapses from polite speech by simply ignoring everything he said until it was phrased to their satisfaction. This was very annoying, but it meant that Harrier was learning quickly. “If you come and see, then you will know.”
Harrier shrugged—a gesture the Elves didn’t use, but which didn’t precisely count as being rude—and followed the two of them to a room of the house he had never been in before. He hadn’t been in every room of House Malkirinath, because despite his immense curiosity and the Elves’ great politeness, Harrier knew it was rude to go wandering around somebody’s house exploring just for the fun of it, but by now he had a fair idea of the layout of the place. This was a ground-floor room at the far end of the east wing; very private.
And very large. It was larger than the suite of rooms he and Tiercel were staying in, larger than Jermayan’s solar, larger than any of the rooms he’d yet seen here. That surprised him, as he’d gotten the idea that the Elves just didn’t go in for enormous rooms somehow. The room had no furniture, and a floor of plain stone, though there was a ring of stone in a different color inlaid in the center of the floor. All around the edges of the room stood suits of the most beautiful—and impractical-looking—armor Harrier had ever seen, and the walls were hung with weapons.
“It is not the House of Sword and Shield in Githilnamanaranath, but it will suffice for a dance or two,” Rilphanifel said.
Both he and his sister were dressed in extremely simple clothing this morning, nothing more than close-fitting tunics and leggings. Though the Elves often wore what Harrier considered extremely elaborate costumes, fortunately neither he nor Tiercel had been asked to attempt to follow their example.
The room didn’t look much like a place where anyone would dance to Harrier, but he didn’t bother to think of how to find out just what it was they were going to do here. As Elunyerin had said, once he saw, he’d know. There was a bench along one wall, beneath a display of swords that reminded him of the one in Tiercel’s cottage. He sat down and waited to see what would happen next.
To his surprise, each of the Elves went to one of the suits of armor along the wall and began removing it from its rack. Elunyerin chose one in a pale peach-gold, while Rilphanifel chose a set of armor that was a deep silvery violet. Once they had armored themselves—there were swords racked beside the suits of armor—they stepped to the edges of the circle.
“Since my sister has seen that you carry a sword, we thought this might be of interest to you,” Rilphanifel explained. He raised his helmet and placed it upon his head, concealing his features completely. Then Elunyerin raised her sword—it was very large and very sharp—and attacked her brother.
Harrier watched with a mixture of fascination and horror. He was fairly certain that the two Elves weren’t going to kill each other, but the room rang with the sounds of metal on metal, and there didn’t seem to be any rules at all to the fight. They didn’t just use their swords, they kicked and punched each other, hammered at each other with the sword-pommels, even wrestled. It looked nothing like the decorous mock-battles he’d seen onstage at the Flowering Fairs, and certainly nothing like the formal parades of the City Militia. He had no idea how much time passed before they stopped.
“I know that you will not be familiar with the Elven style, and I will not expect you to have had my years of training in the House of Sword and Shield, any more than you would expect me to know how to go about upon your Armethaliehan docks,” Elunyerin said, removing her helmet. “But it would please me greatly did you give me the opportunity to match blades with you. Though the crafting of a suit of armor is a matter of many moonturns, it is a simple matter to use padded suits and wooden blades,
and practice forms only.”
Oh, no thanks. Harrier thought. He might be carrying a sword he didn’t have any idea how to use, but Harrier didn’t think this was the place to get lessons. Obviously Elves studied swordplay the way High Mages were supposed to study magic—from the cradle. After watching Elunyerin and her brother practice, Harrier didn’t think she could teach him anything. Not because she wasn’t good enough, but because she was too good. His idea of fun wasn’t being told he was an idiot over and over again—and after seeing the two of them, the idea that he could ever be a tenth as good as they were even if he studied for even an Elven lifetime was just . . . silly.
“I thank you,” he began, fumbling his way through the sentence. “The Wildmage Roneida gave me the sword, and I’m not sure why. I know nothing of the sword, or fighting. My family are merchants, not warriors. I don’t think it would be of much use to either you or me if you tried to teach me to use it. But I enjoy watching you.”
Elunyerin regarded him for a moment longer, her face unreadable. “Then certainly you must watch, for Rilphanifel and I practice together nearly every day. Those skills which are not honed are lost, even among the Elves.”
AND so Harrier had gotten into the habit of watching the two of them practice. It was like watching an extremely violent sort of dancing (something he was much better at than he was willing to admit, even to Tiercel). Sometimes others joined them, all wearing the colorful enameled armor that looked like jewelry, but which could apparently turn the hardest sword-strike. Sometimes they practiced alone. Just as with watching master dancers over a long period of time, Harrier reached the point where he could begin to predict their preferred moves, and also tell whether or not they were fighting at their best. But the idea that he could ever match either of them in skill was foolish. Only Kellen Knight-Mage had ever equaled the Elves in their mastery of the sword. He was satisfied merely to watch.
He did a number of other things, too, since for the first time in his life, his time was entirely his own. In Armethalieh he’d been learning his eventual trade, spending part of every day at the Docks from the time he could walk. Here, Tiercel was the one undergoing the apprenticeship, and there was literally nothing for Harrier to do. His hosts didn’t expect him to work, even if there were any tasks he was capable of performing in the Lands Beyond The Veil, and he certainly couldn’t study to be a High Mage. And so he went for long rides around and through Karahelanderialigor, finally finding the rest of the city. He met more Elves. He purchased food in the marketplace, and had fascinating conversations there about subjects he did understand—prices and trade-routes and what items were wanted in which markets around the Elven Lands. The merchants in the marketplace were patient with his halting attempts to be polite; he thought they were intrigued, just a little, by his tales of other marketplaces in other lands so far away.
He’d even written long—very long—letters to both his parents and to Tiercel’s, explaining that they were in the Elven Lands, and safe. Elunyerin had promised to get the letters to Ysterialpoerin, but Harrier knew that it would probably be most of a year before the letters reached Armethalieh.
And he met dragons.
Karahelanderialigor was the Mage City; everyone in the Elven Lands who practiced magic lived here, and every Elven Mage was Bonded to a Dragon. (He’d long since found out that no, Jermayan wasn’t King of the Elves, and never had been; a lot of the stories of Ancient Times as they knew them back in the Nine Cities were just flat-out wrong.) Among the dragons, the prohibition against asking direct questions did not exist, and—as Harrier discovered immediately—dragons were even more outrageous gossips than sailors.
Fourteen
Ithoriosa’s Tale
THERE YOU ARE,” Ithoriosa said. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”
It was the end of Harrier’s first moonturn in the Elven Lands, and the idea that he’d just ridden through a forest full of little winged people on his way to talk to a dragon didn’t even strike him as strange anymore. Harrier dismounted and walked forward. Reilafar would stay pretty much wherever he was left; that was one of the nice things about Elven horses, he’d discovered.
The enormous gold dragon—the same one he’d seen the first day, as a matter of fact—was sunning herself on one of the terraces that had been built for that purpose. It had taken Harrier a while to find them, but someone in the market had mentioned on his second sennight here that if he wanted to see dragons up close (sounding as if she couldn’t imagine why anyone would wish to do such a thing) then he should ride out beyond the edge of the Flower Forest to where the Sunning Terraces had been built. In the late afternoon, Asima had said, the dragons often gathered there to bask in the warmth gathered by the smooth stones.
It had taken Harrier a little while to work up the courage to go, because he didn’t actually want to run into Ancaladar again—now that he knew that Ancaladar was actually the Ancaladar, he felt pretty embarrassed about the way he’d behaved when they’d first met—but when he finally convinced himself to go—the dragons wouldn’t actually eat him, Harrier was pretty sure—Ancaladar wasn’t there.
“Of course I came back,” Harrier said. “I like talking to you.”
“Like listening to me, you mean,” Ithoriosa corrected smugly. “You think I’ll tell you something the Elves won’t. And who knows? I might. I know more than they do.”
“I just bet you do,” Harrier muttered.
“Dragons’ hearing is incredibly sharp,” Ithoriosa said. “So, for that matter, is Elves’. If you’ve been saying nasty things about those pretty little children Elunyerin and Rilphanifel—who, by the way, are older than your grandmother—behind their backs, I assure you, they’ve heard every word.”
“I haven’t. Much,” Harrier muttered.
“Don’t worry, then. They’re sure to be polite to you at least until Jermayan dies, and Idalia can certainly keep them in line until she dies, and she’s no Kindling snowblossom, but I’m sure she has a decade or two of years left to her after Jermayan is hung in the trees.”
“I—hey. Wait. What?” Harrier sputtered. Ithoriosa always delivered her gossip in this indirect fashion, but this was the first time it had been about people he actually knew.
The great gold dragon sighed gustily. “Jermayan is dying, little human boy. Very fast. If you and Tiercel had come next year, you might not have seen him. If you had come in ten years, you certainly would not. He taught Kellen Knight-Mage to hold a sword, and he was no child then—even you must realize how old he is. And now he is dying, for Elves are not immortal, only Dragons can lay claim to that. And not even we, once we are Bonded. So when Jermayan dies, Ancaladar will die with him, the oldest of the Bonded. I shall miss him.”
Harrier regarded her for a long moment, though it was completely impossible to judge a dragon’s expression. The long flat scales of her enormous head gleamed like bright metal. Hesitantly, he reached out and touched her face.
“Higher, behind the ridge, where the skin is soft.”
He walked back and found the place. The skin there was soft and silky-rough, like the finest quality of suede.
“You’ve told me this much, you demon bat. Tell me the rest. This is what you meant me to know, isn’t it? Not a bunch of stories about people I don’t know and probably won’t ever meet. And I really don’t think you care that much about what goes on in Armethalieh.”
“Not even my Bonded calls me such terrible names. Is it a human thing, I wonder? Ancaladar has told me tales of humans, and of the Endarkened. He survived two of Their wars, you know. He helped to win the second one, and without him, all dragonkind would have perished.”
“Really? You’re not going to distract me, you know. Tell me more about Jermayan.”
“I will. But I wish to tell you this, first. Only a Bonded dragon can create more of its kind, since the time of the Great Bargain. In the Great War—the one before the world you know began—many races of the Light perished entirely, and dragonki
nd was thought to be among them. We were never a numerous race, and there was great need of us in that time. Bonded and Unbonded, dragonkind died on the battlefields of that war, but Ancaladar survived. And though he had hidden himself to escape the Bonding which brings us mortality and death, in the end he could not find it in himself to refuse the greatest joy our kind can know. He accepted the Bond with Jermayan, and the first Elven Mage since the time of Vieliessar Farcarinon was created from that Bonding.
“Then came the Great Flowering, and peace. And Jermayan and Ancaladar searched the land for many years before finding any females of our kind, and it was longer still before they could persuade them to Bond, and then to find them Bondmates. From Ancaladar, Cortiana, and Mebadaene our race was reborn. And now he will die.”
“Why?” Harrier asked bluntly. “I thought you said dragons were immortal.”
“You must frustrate your teachers terribly. Unbonded dragons are immortal. Bonded dragons are not. Ancaladar has Bonded to Jermayan, and so he must die when Jermayan does. If Ancaladar had found some reason to die first—we are more durable than you soft creatures, but we can be killed—Jermayan would have died instantly as well. But Elves and humans age, and we do not.”
It was hard for Harrier to imagine why any dragon would want to Bond, in that case. “So you, um, Bond to, er, breed?”
“Huh. Why bother?” Ithoriosa sounded both amused and uninterested. “If it were only that, we could conduct a lottery; an immortal race does not need that many children. No. The Elven Mages need us for their spells. Some say it is our reason to be. And I would never give up my Bonded. She is everything to me. Gladly did I cast off eternity to gaze into her eyes.”
“You, er, um, like being, um, Bonded?”
Ithoriosa snorted gustily and rolled her head sideways to gaze up at him with one enormous golden eye. “Harrier, have you ever been in love?”
The Enduring Flame Trilogy 001 - The Phoenix Unchained Page 32
