Masques

NINE

From her station on the couch, Aralorn watched Wolf deposit another armload of books on the floor beside the worktable. The table, her chair, and most of the floor space were similarly adorned. He’d been silently moving books since she woke up, even less communicative than usual. He wasn’t wearing his mask, but he might as well have been for all she could read on his face.

“Have you given any more thought to our invisible friend?” she asked, just to goad him. They’d worried and speculated for hours last night. During which time, Wolf had spent ten minutes lecturing her about how real invisibility was a myth, impossible to achieve with magic for a variety of reasons laid out in theories proposed over centuries.

She wasn’t fishing for answers from him now; she was fishing for a response. Some acknowledgment that he was aware she was in the room.

He grunted without looking her way and went back into the stacks.

She might have been more concerned with their invisible—to all intents and purposes, no matter what Wolf maintained—visitor. But whoever it was had made no move against them; quite the contrary, in her opinion. If their visitor had meant mischief, he’d had plenty of opportunity. This was the Northlands, after all, full of all sorts of odd things.

It was Wolf she worried about.

He’d never allowed her to get as close as they had been last night. But always, whenever he’d opened up to her, let down the barrier that separated him from her, from everyone, he’d abruptly leave for weeks or months at a time. She thought this morning’s distance might be the start of his withdrawal.

Having experienced the ae’Magi’s touch firsthand, if only for a brief time compared to whatever he’d gone through, she finally understood some of what caused Wolf to be the way he was. It increased her patience with him—but it didn’t mean she was going to let him pull away again without a fight.

“Did our apprentice write all of these?” Aralorn made a vague gesture toward the stacks before continuing to put a better edge on her knife.

Wolf turned to survey the piles. He let the silence build, then growled a brief affirmative before stalking back into the forest of bookcases. It was the first word he’d said to her since she’d woken up.

Aralorn grinned, sheathed her knife, and levered herself to her feet, still annoyingly weak. Scanning the nearby shelves, she found a book on shapeshifters and wobbled with it to the table, careful not to fall. Wolf had made it clear that he would rather that she stay put on the couch for a couple of days. She had no intention of giving in; but if she fell, there would be no living with him. So she’d save it for desperate measures if he didn’t start talking to her. If she fell deliberately, it wouldn’t be as humiliating.

She cleared off her chair and space enough to read. Now that the search had been narrowed to books that were likely to be trapped, Wolf had forbidden her to help. Aralorn decided if she couldn’t be useful, at least she could enjoy herself.

Wolf balanced the books he carried on another stack and eyed her narrowly without meeting her eyes. He took her book and looked at it before handing it back.

“I thought human mages were supposed to keep their secrets close—not write down every stray thought that comes into their heads.” With a tilt of her head, Aralorn indicated the neat piles of books he’d brought out.

He followed her gesture and sighed. “Most mages restrict their writings to the intricacies of magic. Iveress fancied himself an expert on everything. There are treatises here on everything from butter-making to glassblowing to governmental philosophy. From the four books of his I’ve already looked through, he is long-winded and brilliant, with the annoying habit of sliding in obscure magic spells in the middle of whatever he was writing when the spell occurred to him.”

“Better you than me,” said Aralorn, hiding her satisfaction in having gotten him to respond at last.

She must not have hidden it quite well enough. He stared at her from under his lowered brows. “Only because his books were considered subversive a few centuries back, and mages spelled them to keep them safe. Otherwise, I’d make you help me with this mess.” He took a stride toward the shelves again, then stopped. “I might as well start with what I have.”

“No use discouraging yourself with an endless task,” she agreed.

He growled at her without heat.

She grinned at his familiar grumpiness—much better than silence—and settled in to read. It was fascinating, but not, Aralorn fancied, in the fashion the author meant it to be. In the foreword, the author admitted she had never met a shapeshifter. Regardless, she considered herself an expert. The stories she liked best were the ones that represented shapeshifters as a “powerful, possibly mythic race” whose main hobby seemed to be eating innocent young children who lost themselves in the woods.

“If I were one of a powerful, possibly mythic race,” muttered Aralorn, “I wouldn’t be bothering with eating children. I’d go after pompous asses who sit around passing judgment on things they know nothing about.”

“Me, too,” agreed Wolf mildly without looking up. Evidently the reading he was doing was more interesting than hers, because even his grumpiness had faded. “Do you have someone in mind?”

“She’s been dead for years . . . centuries, I think.”

“Ah,” he said, turning a page. “I don’t eat things that have been dead too long. Bad for even the wolf’s digestion.”

She snorted and kept reading. Aralorn learned that shapeshifters could only be killed by silver, garlic, or wolfsbane. “And all this time I’ve been worried about things like arrows, swords, and knives,” she told Wolf. “Silly me. I’d better get rid of my silver-handled dagger—it would kill me to touch the grip.”

He grunted.

The author of her book was also under the mistaken impression that shapeshifters could take the shape of only one animal. She devoted a section to horrific tales of shapeshifter wolves, lions, and bears. Mice, Aralorn supposed, were too mundane—and unlikely to eat children.

She shared bits and pieces of the better wolf tales with Wolf, as he waded through a volume on pig training. He responded by telling her how to train a pig to count, open gates, and fetch. Pigs were also useful for predicting earthquakes. Iveress had helpfully included three spells to start earthquakes.

Aralorn laughed and returned to her reading. At the end of the book, the author included stories “which my research has proven to be merely folktales” to entertain her readers. After glancing through the first couple, Aralorn decided that the thing that distinguished truth from folktale was whether or not the shapeshifters were evil villains. Most of the tales were ones she’d heard before. Most, but not all.

She read the final story, then thoughtfully closed the book and glanced curiously around the room. Nothing was moving that shouldn’t be. Wolf had set the pig book aside and was sorting through a pile near his chair.

“Once long ago, between this time and that, there was a woman cursed by a wizard when she was young, for laughing at his bald head.” She didn’t need to use the book to help her memory, but kept her eyes on Wolf. “She was married, and her first child was born dead. Her husband died in an unfortunate accident while she gave birth to her second, a daughter. When she was three, it became apparent to one and all that the second child bore a curse worse than death—she was an empath. Upon that discovery, her mother killed herself.”

“A useless thing to do,” murmured Wolf, pulling a book out of the pile and setting it before him. He made no move to open it. “You’d have gone hunting for the wizard.”

Aralorn raised her eyebrow, and said coolly. “I’m not finished.”

He smiled and lifted both hands peaceably. “No offense meant, storyteller.”

“The girl child was taken to a house outside the village and cared for as best the villagers could. Her empathic nature meant that none of them could get too close without causing her pain.”

“I thought your book was about shapeshifters,” Wolf said, when Aralorn paused too long.

She nodded. “She grew up and learned to glean herbs from the woods to pay for her keep. When she was sixteen, a passing shapeshifter saw her. He took to following her around in the guise of a crow or squirrel. But whatever shape he took, she knew him.”

Wolf’s eyes grew reserved. “Indeed?”

Aralorn frowned at him. “This isn’t about you and me—and you would have found me the first time though if you’d thought about looking for someone who didn’t look like me.”

He looked away. She decided to ignore him and continued with the story.

“She knew when he fell in love with her, too. And he was able to guard his touch so she could bear it. When the villagers came to her home, he was her invisible guardian. She loved him and was happy.

“Once a month, the shapeshifter returned to his village to assure his people that he was well. They were not happy with his choice, and eventually his mother decided to solve the problem herself. She saw to it that a Southern slaver became aware of the girl and took her the next time the shapeshifter left her to visit the shapeshifter village. He returned to find the cottage empty, with the door swinging in the wind.

“The Trader was wary and, hearing that she had a magical lover, he took her through the Northlands, where no mage could follow. But her lover was no human mage, and he found them—too late.”

A moaning sound echoed through the caves. Wolf tilted his head slightly so she knew that he heard as well.

“When the shapeshifter reached the slavers’ camp,” she continued, “he found nothing left of the would-be slavers except mindless bodies. The girl, terrified and alone, had evoked an empath’s only defense, projecting her terror and pain onto her tormentors. She was alive when the shapeshifter found her, so he took her to a cave, sacred to his kind, where he tried to heal her. The worst of her wounds were of the spirit that even a shapeshifter’s magic may not touch; and though her body was whole, she spoke not a word to him but stared through him, as if he were not there. Not entirely sane from his grief, the shapeshifter swore to keep her alive until he could find a way to heal her soul. And so he lives on, an old, old man tending his beloved from that day until this—and that is the story of the Old Man of the Mountain.”

The moaning waned to a hesitant sigh that whispered through the library and faded to nothing.

Wolf raised an eyebrow at her. “I have never heard of a shapeshifter with the power that the Old Man is supposed to have.”

Aralorn rubbed her cheek thoughtfully, leaving behind a streak of black dust. This was a secret—but she didn’t feel like keeping secrets from Wolf. “The older a shapeshifter is, the more powerful he is. Like human mages, it is not unusual for a shapeshifter to live several hundred years. A really powerful shapeshifter can make himself younger constantly and never grow old. The reason that you don’t see a shapeshifter much older than several hundred years is that they are constantly changing to new and more difficult things. It’s hard to remember that you are supposed to be human when you change into a tree or the wind. An uncle of my mother once told me that sometimes a shapechanger forgets to picture what he is changing himself into, and he changes into nothing. There is no reason why our Old Man of the Mountain couldn’t be several thousand years old rather than just a few hundred. That would make him incredibly powerful.”

She stopped as something occurred to her. “Wolf, there was a snowstorm the night before the Uriah came. If it hadn’t slowed them down, they would have come upon us at night and slaughtered the camp.”

Wolf shrugged. “Snowstorms are unpredictable here, but I suppose that it could have been he who caused the storm. I suspect that we’ll never know.”

Wolf opened his book and went back to reading.

Aralorn found another book and managed not to show Wolf how unsteady she was. But when he’d checked it for her, and she opened it, it was difficult to concentrate as the little energy she’d regained dissipated. The words blurred in front of her eyes and soon she was turning pages from habit.

She dozed off between one sentence and the next. When Wolf touched her shoulder, she jumped to her feet and had her knife drawn before she opened her eyes.

“Plague it, Wolf!” she sputtered. “One of these days, you are going to do that, and I’ll knife you by mistake. Then I’ll have to live all my life with the guilt of your death on my hands.”

Her threat didn’t seem to bother him much as he caught her and lowered her to her chair as her legs collapsed under her. “You are trying to do too much,” he said with disapproval. He started to say something else, then lifted his head.

She heard it, too, then, the sound of running feet. Stanis popped into the room at a dead run—he was one of the few people who knew his way to Wolf’s private area. He was pale and panting when he stopped, looking as though he’d sprinted the half mile or so of cave tunnels that connected the main camp with Wolf’s library. “Uriah,” he panted.

Aralorn tangled with her chair when she tried to push it out of the way too fast, but kept from falling with the aid of a hand on her arm. She was firmly sat down on her seat.

Wolf, who had somehow donned his mask again, looked her straight in the eye, and said, “You stay here.” His voice left no room for arguments. He shifted into the wolf and melted into the tunnel.

With the scary mage gone, the library felt safer than the outer cave to Stanis. But his mates were out there; he wasn’t going to stay safely behind.

“Hey now,” he said when Aralorn used the table to get to her feet. She looked like she weighed half what she had the first time he’d seen her—all pared down to bone and sinew. But she walked without limping to the little padded bench and shuffled under it until she came up with a sword and scabbard she belted on. He didn’t miss that the scabbard was stained with blood—from the Uriah who’d killed Astrid.

“He told you to stay here.” Maybe she hadn’t heard the mage.

Aralorn glanced up as she sheathed the sword. “It says in my files—I know because Ren showed them to me—‘Does not take orders, will occasionally listen to suggestions.’ Did Wolf sound like he was suggesting anything to you?”

Stanis shook his head. “No.” He shuffled his feet a little. “I don’t follow no orders either, but if that one ever told me to do anything in that tone of voice, I can’t help but think I’d be sitting where he wanted me until I was covered in dust.”

She laughed. “Yes, he’s a little intimidating, isn’t he?” She checked the draw of the sword, adjusted it a little, and said, “But there’s no way I’m sitting here while everyone else gets to fight.” She looked at him. “You know your way to the rest of them? I might be able to find my way out, but I don’t know how this cave connects into the rest.”

Stanis squirmed.

She smiled. “No need to tell him that I couldn’t find my own way there,” she said.

“I’m not afraid of him,” Stanis stated belligerently, though his mam had taught him better than that.

“Of course not,” she said stoutly. “Nothing to be afraid of.”

After about the halfway point, she put her hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, Stanis, we’re going to have to slow down.”

“No trouble,” he said. “Why don’t you lean on me a bit?”

She muttered something he didn’t catch but put some of her weight on him. For a while that was all she did, but eventually her arm wrapped around his shoulders, and she honestly leaned on him.

“Good thing you’re short,” he said. “You should have stayed. What would have happened if I weren’t here to help you?”

“Then I’d have crawled,” she said grimly.

He glanced up at her face, visible in the light of one of those little glowy balls Wolf had shown him how to make.

“Right,” he said. She didn’t look like a nice Lady right now, she looked like someone who could lick her weight in Uriah and then some. Maybe she was a match for that Wolf after all.

Aralorn swung a leg over the barricade erected to keep people—except for runners like Stanis, whose magic seemed capable of keeping them from getting hopelessly lost—from wandering the tunnels.

She listened for sounds of battle, but the tunnel was suspiciously silent.

“Where were the Uriah when you came running?” she asked, as the passageway floor took a steep upward bend.

“Don’t know.” Stanis shook his head. “Somebody spotted ’em outside and sprinted to the caves like an idiot. They’re sure to have followed ’em here.” He paused. “I don’t hear nothin’.”

“If they were inside our camp when Wolf came, you’d still be hearing things,” she told him stoutly, finding that she couldn’t quite believe it. What if they’d taken him by surprise? What if he hadn’t had a chance?

“What if they took him by surprise?” asked Stanis, echoing her thoughts, his voice a bare whisper as they crept closer to where there should be a bunch of people fighting for their lives.

Her hands were sweating—from effort, she told herself. “No one takes him by surprise,” she told Stanis. “He works things the other way.”

And that was truth. She could breathe better, doubtless because the floor had flattened out again.

Stanis stopped. “Big cave’s just around the corner,” he mouthed. “The main one where everyone’s camped. We should—”

“Not his wards?”

Oh, she recognized that voice. She stood up straight and strode around the corner, where the whole camp—as far as she could tell at a glance—was standing armed and ready. She couldn’t see the owner of the loud voice, but she could hear him just fine.

“What does he mean ‘not his wards’? Why didn’t you ask him more? Do we expect them to come running in?”

She pushed her way through—not hard once people realized where she was going.

“It means that they aren’t his wards,” said Myr neutrally.

The big nobleman who stood in front of him was used to getting his way—with money or intimidation.

“Boy,” he boomed. “You don’t let that strippy bugger get away with half-assed answers. He’s not in charge here.”

She couldn’t get there any faster without falling on her face, but . . . Myr hit him. A quick, decisive blow that dropped the ox like a stone.

Aralorn pulled her sword and held it to the downed man’s throat, making sure he felt the sharp edge. A foot on his shoulder.

The fear that had held her since she realized that it was too quiet made her testy, and she would have been quite happy to put the sword all the way through the blasted man’s neck and take care of the problem. But her father had been a canny politician when it suited him, and she could hear his voice in her ear.

So instead of killing him, she said coolly, “Do you desire this man dead, my king? I assure you it would be a pleasure. We could display his body on a stake just outside for the crows to eat.”

“And attract every scavenger in twenty leagues,” said Myr regretfully. “No. Not just yet.” She couldn’t read his voice and wouldn’t lift her eyes from her enemy to look at his face.

She grimaced at the triumph in the eyes of the nobleman at her feet. He started to say something, then stopped. Maybe it was the weight of her heel on a nerve just in front of his shoulder, maybe it was that her arm dropped just a bit, letting the sword dig a little deeper.

“Permission to deal with him as my father would?” she asked.

“I recall the stake incident,” said Myr dryly. “My grandfather told me about it. No one disobeyed the Lyon’s orders for a few years afterward. Effective but extreme, you have to admit. We are a little short of numbers here—so I find myself reluctant to give you my unqualified permission.”

The nobleman paled. “The Lyon?” he said.

Aralorn bared her teeth at him, but continued to talk to Myr. “Your Majesty, if you please. Haris?”

“Aye?”

“Haris, I think that you’ve been working too hard. You need an assistant.”

“Don’t need no nobleman to help me cook,” said Haris grumpily.

“Haris,” said Myr in silky tones, “I have no intention of allowing this man to interfere with your efforts. However . . . skinning, turning the spit, or taking out the refuse—how much could he hurt?”

“Oh aye,” said Haris, sounding remarkably happier. “That I’ll do, sire.”

“Aralorn, let him up,” Myr said.

She pulled her sword away after wiping the blood off on the idiot’s shirt.

“Oras,” Myr said. “A week of helping Haris is a gift. Do not make me regret it.”

The nobleman swallowed. Perhaps he recognized, as Aralorn did, the old king in his grandson’s face.

Myr turned his attention to Aralorn then, ignoring the man on the ground. “I need you to go out and find Wolf. Is this an assault we need to prepare ourselves for—or can I take people off alert?”

“What’s going on?” she asked, sheathing her sword.

“The Uriah tried to come into the caves after our hunting party and were stopped by wards on the cave mouth. Wolf says they aren’t his wards and sent us all back here to cool our heels and guard the narrow entrance.”

Aralorn looked at the opening Myr indicated, where daylight shone through.

“Oras aside,” Myr said, “it would be useful to have a bit more information. I’d like an update, and you’re likely to get more information out of our wizard than anyone else.”

Once in the tunnel to the outside, she drew her sword and held it in a fighter’s grip. Someone had painted signs on the walls of the tunnels to facilitate travel, and it was a simple matter to follow the arrows to the outside by the magelight she held cupped in one hand.

The howls were louder as she turned into a cave marked “Door to Outside” over the top. She smiled at the awkward lettering even as the cold sweat of fear gathered on her forehead. Cautiously, she crept forward through the twisted narrow channel.

The Uriah were there, howling with frustrated rage at the wall of flame that covered the entrance. Someone, Aralorn noted with absent approval, had set up the wood for a bonfire where the tunnel began to narrow—it sat unlit, a good ten feet behind the magical fire that blocked the entrance. Aralorn couldn’t feel the heat from the fire, but toasted bodies of Uriah lay twitching feebly just outside the cave as evidence of the effectiveness of the barrier.

Aralorn leaned against the side of the cave and watched as another Uriah, incited by her presence just inside the barrier, dove into the flames. Nausea touched even her hardened stomach as she watched the hungry flames engulf it.

“I told you to stay in the library.”

She’d been expecting him, knowing that the situation would mean that she probably wouldn’t hear him. She didn’t jump, didn’t start, just turned to look at him a little faster than strictly necessary. It wouldn’t have mattered except for the low spot in the roof of the cave.

“Ow,” she said with a hiss of indrawn breath, putting her hand to her head where the rock had cut it.

He came out of the shadows and set his staff down—the crystals on the top blazed as soon as its clawed feet touched the ground. She shut her eyes against the light.

With a hand on her chin, Wolf used the other to explore the damaged area despite the fact that she squirmed and batted at his hand. In clipped tones, he said, “It seems like every time I’ve turned my back on you lately, you are getting hurt one way or another.”

To her surprise, he bent down and pressed his cheek against hers. She hadn’t experienced the healing of a green-magic user very often, barring her more recent experience. Generally she hadn’t been in any shape to know exactly what it was that they did, but she knew enough to know that this was very different. This was not purely physical, there was an emotional link, too—a meeting on a more primal level.

It was over before she could analyze it further. Wolf stepped back as if bitten, and she could hear him gasping for breath beneath his mask. She looked at him in wonder—she knew enough about human magic to know that he shouldn’t have been capable of doing what he had just done.

“Wolf,” she said, reaching out to touch him. He backed away, keeping his head away from her and his eyes closed.

“Wolf, what’s wrong?” When he said nothing, she took a step back to give him room.

He flung his head up then, and blazing yellow eyes met hers. When he spoke, it was a whisper that his ruined voice made even more effective. “What am I? I should not be able to heal you. The other things—the shapeshifting, the power I wield—they could be explained away. But magic doesn’t work this way. It doesn’t take over before I can react and do things that I don’t ask of it. I swore that I would never . . . never let anything control me the way my father did. In the end, even he could not eat my will entirely. This . . . does.”

“It was you who healed my eyes.” She wanted to give herself time to think. There was something that she should be grasping, a puzzle solved if she could just figure out how to look at it.

“Yes,” he said.

“Were you trying to, then?”

He forced himself to adopt a relaxed posture, leaning against the wall as he spoke. “If you mean did I try to heal you with a spell, no. I just . . . wanted you to quit hurting.”

She could almost see the effort he made to open up to her, this man who was so private. It was, she thought, maybe the bravest thing she’d ever seen anyone do.

He continued with his eyes on the mouth of the cave where three Uriah—none of whom resembled anyone she knew—stood motionless, watching them.

“I was so tired,” Wolf told her. “I hadn’t slept much since I found that you were gone.” He looked at her. “You were getting worse, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I do not recall what I was thinking, precisely. I had done all that I could for you and knew that it would never be enough and something made me lie beside you and this magic took over.” He clenched his hands in what was very near revulsion.

“Who was your mother? Do you know?” asked Aralorn. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about Cain, the son of the ae’Magi, but none of them ever mentioned his mother.”

Wolf shrugged, and his voice had regained its cool tones when he answered. “I only saw her once, when I was very young, maybe five years old. I remember asking Father who she was, or rather who she had been, for she was quite dead, killed by some experiment of his, I suppose. I don’t remember being particularly worried about her, so I suspect that it was the only time I saw her.”

“Describe her for me,” requested Aralorn in a firm voice that refused to condemn or to sympathize with the boy he had been. He wouldn’t want that. The Uriah weren’t coming in anytime soon, she thought. She folded her legs and sat on the ground—healing or no, her legs had done as much as they were going to for a while, and it was sit down or fall down.

“I was young, I don’t remember much,” Wolf said. “She looked small next to my father, fragile and lovely—like a butterfly. The only time I ever heard him say anything about her was when some noble asked about my mother. He said she was flawlessly beautiful. I think he was right.”

Aralorn nodded, her suspicions confirmed. “I would have been surprised if she had been anything else.”

He narrowed his gaze.

“Your mother must have been a shapeshifter, or some other green-magic user—but the ‘perfectly beautiful’ sounds a lot like a shapeshifter. That feeling that the magic is taking control of you is fairly common when dealing with green magic because you are dealing with magic shaped by nature first, and only then by magician. You need to learn to work with it so that you can modify it. If you fight it, it will prove stronger than you.”

He stared at her a bit and joined her on the floor without speaking. Maybe his legs wouldn’t hold him up any longer either.

“I suspect,” continued Aralorn, as blandly as she could manage, “if you hadn’t been taught how magic should work, you would have discovered your half-blooded capabilities long since. You were told that you couldn’t heal, so you didn’t try.”

Two of the Uriah stepped forward at the same time. The wards flared, and they burned. Aralorn caught a brief hint of burnt flesh, like cooking pork, then nothing.

“Your theory fits,” said Wolf finally.

“I should have thought about it sooner,” apologized Aralorn. “I mean, I am a half-breed. It’s just that I’ve never met another half-breed. I could tell that you weren’t a shapeshifter, so I just assumed that you were simply an extraordinarily powerful human magician.” She hesitated. “Which you are.”

Wolf gave a half laugh with little humor in it. “It sounds just like an experiment the ae’Magi would try. To a Darranian like him, it would be the ultimate form of bestiality. Just the thing to spark his interest.”

Aralorn leaned over, pulled down his mask, and bussed him on the unscarred mouth with a kiss that was anything but romantic. “You beast, you,” she said, and he made an unpracticed sound that might have been a laugh.

He got to his feet and pulled her to hers, his eyes warmed with relief, humor, and something else. Gripping her shoulders, he kissed her with a passion that left her breathless and shaken. He stepped back and returned the mask to its usual position.

“We’d better get back and tell Myr he can relax. It doesn’t appear that the Old Man is going to welcome the Uriah into his cave anytime in the near future,” he said, offering her his arm to lean on.

“You think those are his wards?” she asked.

“Someone has powered them up since I looked at them last. It wasn’t me and no one else here has the skill or the power.”

She caught her breath, smiled, and tucked her arm through his. “Do we tell the whole camp that we are being protected by the Old Man of the Mountain?”

“It might be the best thing, even if it scares a few of them silly. I have the feeling that we shouldn’t push his hospitality by wandering around too much. The best way to see that it doesn’t happen is to tell them the whole truth—if they’ll believe it.” Wolf slid though a narrow passage with his usual grace, towing Aralorn beside him.

“We are dealing with people who have some minor magic capabilities; are following a dethroned king who just barely received his coming-of-age spurs; who number among their acquaintances not just one half-breed shapeshifter, but two half-breed shapeshifters—one of whom, incidentally, wears a silly mask. We could tell them that we were in the den of the old gods and that Faris, Empress of the Dead, conceived a sudden passion for Myr and it probably wouldn’t faze them,” Aralorn told him.

Wolf laughed, and Aralorn pulled him to a halt. “Wait. Did you say that the ae’Magi is Darranian?”

“Peasant stock,” he confirmed. “Apparently his master was very surprised to find a magician who was Darranian—used to tell jokes about his Darranian apprentice. My father smiled when he talked about how he killed his teacher.”

“Not the first Darranian mage,” Aralorn said.

Wolf grunted and started to walk.

Aralorn let her hand drop and followed thoughtfully.

Wolf was first in the tunnel that opened into the main chamber. He hissed and jumped back, narrowly avoiding Myr’s sword.

“Sorry,” said Myr. “I thought that you were one of the Uriah. You should have said something before you came in. Did you find out why the Uriah aren’t coming in?”

“Is there a reason the King of Reth is guarding the doorway instead of someone more expendable?” asked Wolf.

“Best swordsman,” said Myr. “Are you going to answer me?”

“Let’s do this where everyone can hear,” Aralorn said, continuing on so she could do just that. “The Uriah aren’t going to be coming in here.”

She stepped out into the main cave and saw that most of them had heard her last remark. “Our guardian of the cave doesn’t want them in.” She was in her element, with a captive audience and a story to tell. She projected her voice and told them the story about the origin of the Old Man of the Mountain and finished with the barrier that was keeping the Uriah out.

She made the tale sound as if it were part of shapeshifter history, Wolf decided, rather than a forgotten story in an obscure book. Usually, she did it the other way around—turning an unexciting bit of history into high adventure. He hadn’t realized that she could do it backward.

As she had predicted, the refugees seemed reassured by her story, not questioning just how far the Old Man’s benign stance would continue. Right then, they wanted a miracle, and Aralorn was giving one to them.

Responding to Wolf’s look, Myr joined him just outside the cave, leaving Aralorn to her work.

“We may be locked in here for some time,” Wolf informed Myr. “They might not be coming in, but there is no way to determine how long they are going to howl at our door. Do we have enough food to last us a week or so?” He should have been paying attention, but it was an effort to remember that he was supposed to care about these people. He was trying to be . . . something other than what he was. Someone Aralorn could be proud of. When she’d been hurt, he’d lost all interest in the extraneous details.

Myr shrugged. “We have enough grain stored to last us into next summer, feeding animals and people. We’re short on meat, which is why I sent out the hunters this morning. They came back with Uriah instead of deer. For a week or two, we can do without. If it turns into a month we can always slaughter a goat or sheep to feed ourselves. Our real problems are going to be morale and sanitation.”

Wolf nodded. “We’ll have to deal with morale as it comes. I might be able to do something about the sanitation, though. The blocked-off tunnel where you’re storing grain leads to a cave with a pit deep enough that you can throw a rock into it and not hear it hit bottom. It’s fairly narrow, so you should be able to put some sort of structure over it to keep people from falling into it.” Solving logistic problems helped center him.

“That should relieve Aralorn,” commented Myr, a smile lighting his tired face for the first time since he’d heard the Uriah. “She was really worried that before this was all over, she’d be pressed into digging latrines.”

Myr laughed wearily and pushed his hair out of his face. “I should have asked this right away. Is it possible that the Uriah can find their way in here through another entrance?”

“Maybe,” answered Wolf, starting to head toward Aralorn, who was swaying wearily as she finished her story. “The Old Man has been here a lot longer than we have. If this entrance is protected, I suspect that all of them are.”

Outside, the Uriah quieted and sank to their knees as a rider came into view. His horse was lathered and sweating, showing the whites of its eyes in fear of the Uriah. But it had learned to trust its rider, and Lord Kisrah was careful to keep the Uriah motionless with the spells of control that the ae’Magi had taught him.

He dismounted at the entrance to the cave. He could see the runes just inside the entrance, but he couldn’t touch them to alter their power.

In the air, he sketched a symbol that glowed faintly yellow and passed easily through the entrance. The symbol touched a rune and fizzled as a man walked into the cave and approached the mouth.

“You are not welcome, leave this place,” he said. In the light, the man was almost inhumanly beautiful, and Lord Kisrah caught his breath in admiration. Abruptly, the mouth filled with flames, the heat uncomfortably harsh on his face.

Kisrah backed up and tried to push the flames down again, with no effect. The third time he tried it, the Uriah began stirring as his hold on them weakened. With a curse he desisted. He led the horse back through the Uriah until he had some space.

“You will stay here until the ae’Magi releases you,” he ordered briskly. “If someone comes out of the cave, you will not harm them. Take them prisoner—you know how to contact me if that happens.” He mounted the horse and let it choose its own speed away from the Uriah.

“Thank you, Lord Kisrah. I am sure that you did your best with the warding—but the old runes are tricky at best, and in the Northlands, they could easily be the work of one of the races that use green magic.” The ae’Magi smiled graciously.

Lord Kisrah looked only a little less miserable in his seat in the ae’Magi’s study. “I got a look at some of the runes there, and I’ll look them up and see what can be done about them. The magician had no trouble with my magic, though. He’s more worrisome than the runes.”

“I agree, Kisrah,” purred the ae’Magi. “I intend to find out just who he is. Can you describe him for me again?”

Lord Kisrah nodded and set aside the warmed ale he’d been drinking. “No more than medium height. His hair was blond, I think, although it could have been light brown. His eyes were either blue or green—the overall effect was so spectacular, it was difficult to pay attention to the details. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four or -five and could have been younger except that he was so powerful. His voice was oddly accented, but he didn’t say enough that I could tell much about the accent other than that the Rethian he spoke was not his native tongue.”

“There was no way that his hair could have been darker? His eyes golden? No scars?” queried the ae’Magi softly.

Lord Kisrah shook his head. “No. His eyes, maybe. They were some light color. But his hair was light.” He yawned abruptly.

The ae’Magi stood and offered his arm for support to the other mage. “I am sorry, I have kept you up talking, and you are almost dropping from exhaustion.” He led him to the door and opened it, clapping his hands lightly. Before he clapped a second time, a pretty young serving girl appeared.

“Take Lord Kisrah to the blue room, Rhidan, and see to his comfort.” The ae’Magi turned to his guest. “Pray follow the girl—she will attend to your every need. If you want anything, just ask.”

Kisrah brightened visibly and wished him a good night.

Alone in his study, the ae’Magi brooded, disliking the thought of yet another magician in his way. Who could it be? He’d been sure that his son was the last mage of any power who stood against him.

Abruptly, he got to his feet; all this worry could do no good. It was too late at night to try to think, and he was too frustrated to sleep. He motioned abruptly to the pale young girl who had sat in her corner unnoticed by Lord Kisrah. Obedient to his gesture, she dropped the clothes she wore and stood naked and submissive before him.

He cupped her chin in one hand and stroked her body gently with the other. “Tonight,” he said, “I have something special in mind for you.”