The Phoenix Unchained by James Mallory Page A

age often has.” No matter how long and how hard Tiercel argued with him, he could not convince the man otherwise. In Preceptor Maver’s mind, Tiercel’s problems could not have anything to do with the High Magick because . . . the High Magick simply didn’t work. Hadn’t worked for hundreds of years. And if it hadn’t worked for hundreds of years, it couldn’t be a problem now ; could it?
    Tiercel would have liked to have lit a candle with magic to prove to Preceptor Maver that it did work, but Tiercel actually had no idea how he’d done it the first time. And he had absolutely no intention of fooling around with magic ever again.
    By then his lack of sleep—because he slept as little as possible—was visibly taking its toll, and his mother had taken him back to the Healers again. He’d told the Healer, perfectly honestly, that his problem was that he was having nightmares so bad that he was afraid to sleep, and the Healer gave him a strong sweet cordial that—she said—would allow him to sleep without dreams.
    She was right. But he could only take it for a sennight, and after that the nightmare was back, more frequent and vivid than ever. It was always the same one, and he took what comfort he could from the fact that while it was undoubtedly real —whatever that meant when you were dealing with magic—it was also symbolic. He’d learned a lot more about symbolic dreams in the past few sennights, too, since he spent every free moment he had in the Closed Archives of the Great Library, reading through everything they had on the High Magick. He was hoping to find out what his dreams meant, and how to cure them, but instead all he found out was what an idiot he’d been.
    Protective shields, for example. He should have had them uparound any place he was working, if he actually meant to do magic. He should have drawn Glyphs of Protection before he’d cast his spell, too. And Knowing was a Student Apprentice spell, not an Apprentice spell, as he’d thought. Far beyond his capability, even if he’d had an actual capability. You needed to study for years to become a High Mage. The Mageborn had begun their training at the age of eight.
    Mageborn.
    Another thing he’d apparently been wrong about was the High Magick being a magic that everyone could learn. It was true that a lot more people could learn it than could be Wildmages, but apparently you still had to be born with a mysterious something called the Magegift . And if you didn’t have it, you could study the High Magick forever and not be able to cast a single spell.
    Still . . .
    Apparently many more people had been High Mages in the old days than were Wildmages now. And certainly the training was long and hard—but so was the training to be a Healer, or a Ship’s Pilot, or an Architect, or even a Blacksmith. So why weren’t there any High Mages anymore? Had people stopped being born with this Magegift? Or was there some other reason? Unfortunately, Tiercel knew just enough by now to know how much he didn’t know, because although there were an enormous number of pre-Flowering books in the Closed Archives, and in the past moonturn he had (with his teachers’ approval) cut a lot of his classes to spend most of his time down there reading them, comparatively few of them dealt directly with the High Magick, and a lot of those assumed you already knew about the High Magick to begin with. Many of them referred to books that the Archives didn’t have, and the more he read, the more it seemed to Tiercel that a lot of the High Magick had been taught directly, Mage to Mage.
    And that meant—as far as he could tell—that he was really introuble now. Because—if he had really cast that Fire Spell—he had the Magegift. And not only were there no High Mages left to teach him, but the one thing the surviving books were all very clear on was that an awakening Magegift had to be taught.
    Or else the new Mageborn died.

Three

    The Beginning of the Quest
    I  T