The Phoenix Endangered by James Mallory Page B

grown up with—about the Blessed Saint Idalia, and Kellen the Poor Orphan Boy, and the Great Flowering—told about how difficult the victory of the Light had been a thousand years ago, and how high a price the Armies of the Light had paid to gain it. And that made Harrier afraid that this might be their best chance to win, even if it didn’t look like a very good chance at all.
    And that brought him right back around to becoming a Knight-Mage.
    I’m only seventeen; I shouldn’t have to think about things like this.
    But he didn’t really have a choice. Any more than Tiercel’d had a choice about accepting Ancaladar’s Bond. The Bond was the only way Tiercel could gain the power to work his High Magick spells. Becoming a Knight-Mage might be the only way Harrier could keep Tiercel alive long enough to use them.
    “You’re awfully quiet,” Kareta said chirpily.
    “I’m wondering if they know any recipes for roast unicorn at Blackrowan,” Harrier muttered.
    T IERCEL AND H ARRIER had spent nearly two moonturns in Karahelanderialigor, one of the most important of the Elven cities, and it had been sennights before they had realized they were in a city at all, because the Elven notion of how a city should seem and the human one were quite different. The Elves believed that everything they built should exist in harmony with the world of Nature, and they were so good at what they did that (to human eyes) what they built often seemed to simply vanish into the landscape. Even great Elven cities were only discernible—to human eyes—as a few scattered cottages, and without the help first of Elunyerin and Rilphanifel, and later of Ancaladar, Tiercel and Harrier would simply have gone right past the villages and farms and steadings that lay along their road.
    At least Blackrowan was easy to find. Not because it was visible, but because Ancaladar was. Harrier clicked his tongue at Nethiel and Dulion, urging them off the road and in the direction of the stand of trees where the enormous black dragon lay sunning himself.
    As he drew closer, what had looked like a woodland underwent one of those odd transformations that Harrier was becoming used to. Suddenly, between one moment and the next, it was no longer simply a group of trees, but a long, low-roofed house in the midst of trees. Though there were great Mages among the Elves, there wasn’t, as far as Harrier knew, any magic involved in the way Elven settlements seemed to appear out of nowhere—just the sort of misdirection and trickery the mock-Mages used to delight their audiences at the Flowering Fairs. But on a much grander scale.
    “Do you suppose they’d …?” he said, glancing around. He stopped, frowning in disbelief, and stood up on the stepof the gently rocking wagon to get a better look around himself.
    Kareta was nowhere to be seen.
    “Huh,” Harrier said, sitting back down again. That was odd. He would have been prepared to swear that she intended to stick to him until he read those Books and memorized every line. Instead, she’d vanished without a single word. There wasn’t much he could do about it, though, so he concentrated on finding his way to where he was supposed to go. As he knew from experience, it wasn’t all that easy; the Elves might be able to tell a farmhouse from a stables from a drying shed, but to Harrier, the buildings all looked pretty much alike. Fortunately Tiercel was there to greet him, along with an Elf he introduced as Aressea, the mistress of Blackrowan.
    “Be welcome in my home and at my hearth, Harrier son of Antarans. Stay as long as you will, and when you go, go with joy,” she said, bowing as he stepped down from the wagon’s bench.
    “To be freely welcomed is to be made doubly welcome,” Harrier answered, bowing in return. “It would be good to know, of your courtesy, where I might see to my horses before I bathe.”
    He knew he wasn’t being in the least presumptuous by assuming that a bath would be the first