Masques

FOUR

When Aralorn awoke to face her first full day at Myr’s camp, it was still dark. She slipped out through the tent opening, moving quietly to avoid disturbing the two women who had shared their quarters with her. She retied the crude flap so the cold early-morning air would stay outside.

Most of the tents in the camp were makeshift. Several were little more than a rug stretched over a stick or rope in true field-soldier style. The only tent she’d seen that had been worthy of the name belonged to Myr, who shared it uncomplaining with a number of the smaller children.

As she passed Myr’s tent, near the fire pit, she gave the royal dragon embroidered on the side a respectful nod, but it glared balefully at her anyway. The flickering light of the fire gave the illusion of life to the green-gold eyes.

Also near the fire pit was one of the few wooden structures in the camp. The kitchen was little more than a three-sided shed, but it kept the food dry. The camp cook was already up, chopping something by lantern light, but he stopped long enough to give Aralorn a look no more friendly than the dragon’s had been. Aralorn grinned cheerfully at him and kept on her way.

The camp was located in a small dale, no bigger than the largest of the riding arenas in Sianim, that lay half a day’s ride north of the Rethian border. It was long and narrow, with a stream in the middle that she suspected would cover a much larger area in the spring, when the top layer of snow melted off the mountain peaks. As it was, the ground near the stream was marshy and made soft, slurping sounds when she walked over to take a drink and throw water on her face.

The tents were all in the eastern end of the valley near the only obvious trail down the steep, almost clifflike sides. Those sides, heavily covered with brush on the top, were the strongest defense the camp could have, rendering it almost invisible to anyone not already in the valley.

By the simple expedient of running a split-rail fence across the valley the narrow way, the western end had been turned into a pasture for most of the livestock—two goats, four donkeys, several horses, and a scrawny cow. It was toward this part of the valley that Aralorn headed.

Knowing how well Wolf liked people, she thought that he would be as far from the tents as he could get—although she couldn’t see him anywhere in the dale. As she neared the pasture, she was welcomed with a soft whinny. Sheen, only slightly inconvenienced by the soft leather hobble that bound his front legs, bounced up to her to get his nose rubbed. She’d hobbled him outside the pasture so that the owners of the two mares didn’t end up with unwanted foals. He followed her for a while before wandering off to forage.

It took her a little time to find the faint trail running up the steep slope near the fence. The terrain was rough and treacherous with loose stones, and she thought ruefully that a person would have to be part mountain goat to try this very often—or part wolf.

Grabbing a ragged piece of brush, she pulled herself up a particularly steep area and found herself unexpectedly in a hollow that hadn’t been visible from below. A small smokeless fire burned near a bedroll. The rather large, lank wolf turned amber eyes to her and swayed his tail in casual welcome.

Since he wasn’t using it, she seated herself on the bedroll and rested her chin on her raised knees. Casually, she threw a few more sticks onto the fire, leaving it for him to break the silence. Typically, he explained nothing but questioned her instead.

“Tell me about the camp.” His voice was mildly curious.

“Why? You’ve been here much longer than I have.”

He shook his head. “I just want to know what you see—how much I need to explain to you.”

“Well,” she began, “there has been a camp here for several months, probably starting in the spring. Originally, the person or people who started it didn’t know much about camping in the woods, so I’d guess that they weren’t locals. It looks like someone is in the process of reorganizing camp. If I were a gamester, I would place gold that Myr is the reorganizer—since I suspect you wouldn’t bother.” She looked to the wolf for confirmation.

Wolf nodded, and Aralorn continued to speak.

“From what I can tell, most of these people came with not much more than the clothes on their backs. There are what, maybe fifty people here?”

“Fifty-four with you,” Wolf replied.

“Then over a third of them are children. There is no common class among them. I’ve seen peasants, townsfolk, and several aristocrats. The children are, as far as I’ve seen, without family. They are almost all Rethian.” Aralorn lay back and made herself comfortable. “They have all the earmarks of refugees, and I’d lay my last gold that they are running from the ae’Magi.”

Wolf grunted an affirmative.

“How did they all get here, though? I could see northerners finding this valley, but I heard southern Reth accents, too.”

“You, of all people, should know the reputation of the northern mountains,” replied Wolf.

Aralorn frowned at him. “I saw you transport the merchant, and my understanding is that teleportation is a difficult, high-level spell. And you managed it in the Northlands.”

Wolf shook his head. “I wouldn’t have tried it this far north even if we weren’t worried about the ae’Magi finding the valley. Small spells seem unhampered here, but more delicate spells are harder to control. Some people it affects more than others—the ae’Magi won’t travel even as far as the northern lands in Reth. It doesn’t seem to have much effect on my magic”—he nodded at the fire, which flared up, dancing wildly with purple and gold flames—“but I wouldn’t have bet even the merchant’s life on it; so we traveled south.”

“The stories about that aspect of the Northlands are common enough, even in southern Reth,” agreed Aralorn. She gave him a look. “I suppose that this area would be a good place to run to if you were trying to hide from a human magician.”

“I”—he hesitated a minute, and Aralorn got the distinct feeling that he changed what he was going to say—“previously located this valley as a possible refuge although I never intended to set up a camp of this size here.”

He gazed with an air of bemusement over the camp. “I don’t know how these people found this valley in particular. You can ask, but everyone has a different story. It is unreasonable that fifty people, most of whom have never been a mile away from their own front doors, would wander blithely into a hanging valley that would be hard for a forester or trapper to find.”

After a slight pause, he continued, “As you speculated, they are all running from the ae’Magi in a manner of speaking—the way that you would have been fleeing from Sianim if you had made a few more negative comments about the ae’Magi. Most of them were driven from their villages by the townspeople.

“Except for Myr, everyone in camp can work a little magic. The adults didn’t have enough ability to be trained as magicians and escaped the ae’Magi’s control that way. The children are young enough that they had not yet been sent for training.”

“How far does that control go?” she asked him. “Are they his puppets?”

“No more than Ren or any of the other nonmages who do as he wants. He just takes away the advantage their magic gives them, and so they only see what he wants them to see.”

Aralorn turned until she faced him. “Why aren’t you under his control?” She expected him to avoid answering as he usually did when her questions became too pointed.

But Wolf moved in a lupine version of a shrug. “I either broke the ties of the binding, or I wasn’t in training long enough. I am not sure which.”

Aralorn and Wolf sat in silence, watching the camp stir in the valley below them. Aralorn stretched her feet out to the fire, which still flared uneasily, as if waiting for another command.

Watching the red play of flame reflected on her feet in the dim light, she ventured another question. “How long have you been helping Myr?”

She noticed with self-directed amusement that her tone was disinterested, revealing none of the jealousy she felt. It had surprised her to feel resentful of Myr, but Wolf was hers. When she found out that not only was there someone else close to him but that Wolf had revealed himself as a human mage to him—it bothered her.

Wolf spoke slowly. “I have been looking for a way to move against the ae’Magi for a long time. It came to my attention that Myr didn’t hold the ae’Magi in the same esteem that most people do: Apparently, Myr is not susceptible to magic. I am still not sure what use he will be against the ae’Magi, but it seemed prudent to watch him. At first I did little more than observe, but after Myr’s parents were killed, I introduced myself and offered my help. For the most part, all that I did was offer advice and block a few spells that might have resulted in fatal accidents.”

“Accidents like a carriage overturning unexpectedly,” offered Aralorn, remembering Myr’s parents.

Wolf nodded. “Or an archer’s arrow going astray, things that immunity to magic does not shield against. I am not sure if I helped much in the end. The last attack that the ae’Magi set against Myr was more subtle. Did you hear what happened?”

Aralorn shook her head. “The first thing that I heard about it was back at the inn, when some messengers from the capital rode in and spouted nonsense. Myr was supposedly crazed with grief and attacked one of his own men.”

Wolf snorted. “Myr was in his private courtyard in the palace when he was attacked by an elemental—a lucky choice for Myr, as most of an elemental’s ability to harm is magical.” So maybe she’d convinced the ae’Magi that Myr wasn’t immune to magic, or maybe he was testing it.

Wolf continued with the story. “They made enough noise that I went out to investigate. I think that Myr would have won even if I hadn’t been there.” Wolf shrugged. “When it was dead, the demon transformed into a more mundane creature—one of Myr’s personal guards. We were still standing over the body when the better part of the castle guard ran into the courtyard. They attacked, and we managed to flee. Here is where we’ve been ever since.”

“What now?” asked Aralorn, drawing pictures in the dirt near the blankets.

Wolf let out a sound that passed as a laugh. “Now, Myr is trying desperately to prepare this camp for winter, and I am trying to find a way that I can move against the ae’Magi.” He paused, then said in a tone that reeked of frustration, “It’s not that I don’t have the power. It is the training I lack. Most of what little I do know I’ve learned myself, and it’s not enough. If I could find just one of the old magicians not under his spell, I could find something to use against him. Instead, I have to wade through piles of books that may be utterly useless.”

“I will help with the books,” offered Aralorn. He wasn’t worried about power? Against a mage strong enough to turn Sianim into his worshipping congregation? “But this is the ae’Magi you’re going up against, Wolf. He’s not just some hedgewitch.”

He ignored her worries about the ae’Magi. Instead, he said, “If I have to read through the dusty old relics, you might as well suffer, too.” He was teasing her; she could tell by his tone of voice. He knew she would devour every time-scarred tome with a zealot’s passion—she loved old books. “How many languages do you read? I’ve heard you speak three or four.”

Aralorn shrugged. “Including dialects? Ten, maybe twelve. Sometimes I can pick out the essentials in a related language. Father was a fanatic about it—he got caught in a battle one time trying to negotiate a surrender, and the only person who spoke both languages had been killed. So he started us all when we were children. After I came to Sianim, I learned a lot of others. Anything very old, though, will be in the Ancients’ tongue. I can pick my way through that, but I’m not fluent.”

He gave her a wolfish grin. “And they always said that collecting folktales was a useless hobby.” He continued more seriously, “The two of us can get through more material than I can alone. If I even had the name of a magician with a spell that could stop him, I could save time. I have a library near here, and if you can go through the secular books, it would leave me free to work with the grimoires.”

Aralorn made a point of looking around at the mountain wilderness that surrounded them. “You have a library nearby?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” she repeated.

Gravely, he met her eyes. If she hadn’t known him as well as she did, she might not have seen the faint humor in the amber depths.

“I did notice that you ignored me earlier,” she said. “This is the ae’Magi you are talking about facing. Do you really think you can take him?”

“No,” Wolf answered softly. “But I’m the only chance we have, aren’t I?”

From the valley rose the distant sound of a metal spoon hitting a cooking pot—the time-honored call to gather for a meal.

Wolf rolled lithely to his paws, changing almost as he moved into the tall, masked figure that was his human form. Courteously, he extended a hand to help her to her feet.

Aralorn accepted the hand a little warily, finding that Wolf in his human form was somewhat more intimidating than the wolf was. As a human, he maintained the grace that he had as a wolf. She watched with envy as he easily negotiated the slope that she scrambled and slid down.

A stray thought caught her. At the valley bottom, she touched his arm to stop him.

“Wolf, I think that I may have caused a problem for you.” Anxiously, she bit her lip.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“During the ball at the ae’Magi’s castle the night I left, Myr saw me in the cage where he should have seen only a bird. The ae’Magi saw him talking to me and questioned me about it. I told him that I’d seen a magician help Myr break the illusion spell, hoping to keep Myr’s immunity to magic from the ae’Magi.” She kept her eye on the contrast her hand made against the black silk of his sleeve: It was hard to remember that the masked figure was Wolf. “Did I cause you any trouble?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. That was probably why he progressed beyond straying arrows to an elemental—the timing is about right. But since we survived it, there was no harm done.”

Myr was up and arranging breakfast with a dexterity that Aralorn, who liked to arrange people as well, found fascinating to watch. She let herself be organized with a bowl of cooked grain that made up in amount what it lacked in flavor. After the food she’d eaten at the inn, she felt no inclination to complain. Wolf neither ate nor removed the mask, a situation that seemed an established pattern since no one commented on it.

As she ate, Aralorn took the time to observe the people. The introductions she’d received the night before had been needfully brief, and many of the people had been asleep. She could only place the names to a few of the faces.

The sour-faced cook was a smith from a province in southern Reth. A large snake tattoo wrapped itself around one massive forearm, disappearing into his sleeve. She noticed that for all of his gruffness, his voice softened remarkably when he was talking with the children. His name was Haris.

Edom sat a little apart from the rest. He had the dark straight hair and sallow skin typical of parts of western Reth, the legacy of interbreeding with the dark Darranians. His hands were the soft, well-cared-for hands of an aristocrat. He was an oddity in the camp. Too old to be a child, yet younger than any of the adults. He was a recent arrival and still looked as if he felt a little out of place.

All but two of the children had been sleeping when she’d arrived at the valley. Those two who she’d met were now seated as close to Myr as they could get. Stanis had the red hair and freckles of the Southern Traders and the flamboyant personality to go with it. The second boy, Tobin, was a quiet shadow of his friend. Stanis tugged impatiently at Myr’s shirt until he had the young king’s attention. Then he settled back on his knees and started talking with grand gestures of his arms that looked a little odd on a boy of ten or eleven summers.

Aralorn was just about to look away when she saw Myr’s expression sharpen with alert interest. He looked around for Wolf and waved him over. Aralorn followed.

“Stanis, tell Wolf what you just told me.”

Stanis hesitated for a moment, but the enjoyment of being the object of attention manifestly won out over any shyness that he felt around the intimidating magician.

“Yesterday afternoon, when it was time to eat lunch, nobody could find Astrid. Me and Tobin thought that she might have been playing up near the old caves. So we all went up there to see if she still was. Edom was too scairt to go in, but I wasn’t. We looked for hours and hours. Then when we all got back out together, she was waiting with Edom.

“She said that she was lost in the dark. She cried and a nice man who knew her name found her and took her out of the caves. Edom says that he didn’t see no one with her when she came out. And Haris said that he thinks that she wandered into the mouth of one of the caves and fell asleep and dreamed about the man. But I think that she met a shapeshifter, and Tobin does, too. Only he thinks that it could have been a ghost.”

Aralorn suppressed a smile at the boy’s delivery—he’d gotten most of that out in one breath.

“What do think, Wolf? Astrid doesn’t tell stories, for all that she’s but a child. Who do you think she saw?” Myr’s tone was quiet, but it was evident that the thought of someone living in the caves (wherever they were) bothered him.

Wolf said, “It’s entirely possible that she did meet someone. Those caves interconnect with cave systems that run throughout the mountain chain. I have seen many strange things in these mountains and heard stories of more. I know for a fact that there are shapeshifters in this area.” He didn’t even look at Aralorn as he said that, nor did Myr, though the young king twitched. “I’ll keep an eye out—but if he were going to harm us, I’d think he’d have already done so.”

Myr relaxed a little, relying on the older man’s judgment. Stanis looked pleased with himself—Wolf had agreed with him.

After breakfast, Aralorn found herself cornered by Myr, and before she knew it, she was agreeing to give lessons in swordsmanship. Myr divided the adults into four groups to be taught by Aralorn, Myr, Wolf, and a one-armed ex-guardsman with an evil smile and the unlikely name of Pussywillow. The other three teachers were, in Aralorn’s estimation, all much better with a sword than Aralorn was, but luckily none of her students were good enough to realize how badly outclassed she was.

The first part of any low-level lesson was a drill in basic moves. Haris Smith-Turned-Cook handled the sword with the same strength and sureness that a good smith uses in swinging a hammer. He learned rapidly from a word or a touch. Edom had the normal flaws of adolescence—all elbows and awkwardness. The others were in the middle range. Given three or four years of steady sword work, they would be passable, maybe.

It didn’t really matter, she thought. If it came down to hand-to-hand fighting, they were all doomed anyway. But it was something to keep the people busy and make them feel as though they were working toward a common goal.

She fought her first bout with Haris, deciding to face the best fighter first—when she was fresh. It was a good idea. He might not have had much experience with a sword, but he had been in more than one dirty fight. If she’d had to rely on only her swordsmanship to fight him, she might have lost, but she’d been in a few dirty fights herself.

When she finally pinned him, Haris gave her the first genuine smile she’d seen on his face. “For a little bit of a thing, you fight pretty well.”

“For a hulking brute, you’re not too bad yourself,” she said, letting him up. She turned to the observers. “And that is how you fight on a battlefield. But not in a training session on swordsmanship. The sword got in his way more than it helped him. If he were fighting in a battle today, he’d be better off with a club than with a sword. That will not be true in a month, for any of you—I hope.”

The others were easier, so she lectured as she fought. By the time she was facing the last student, Edom, she was short on breath. Cleaning the inn had been good for keeping in shape, but a two-hour workout with a sword was enough to test her powers of endurance.

She opened with the same move that she’d used in all the other fights—a simple sidesweep that all the others had been able to meet. Edom fell, which should have shown him to be an utter idiot with a sword. She heard a few suppressed sniggers from the audience. But something about the fall struck her as a little off; if he had fallen from the force of the blow, he shouldn’t have fallen quite as far as he had. She wasn’t big enough to push him that distance without more leverage than a sidesweep allowed for.

She helped him up and handed him his sword. Grasping his wrist, she showed him the proper block and swung again. He met it that time, clumsily. She worked slowly with him at first, gradually speeding up. He progressed slowly, with nothing more odd than ineptness showing in his fighting.

She worked with him on three blocks, aiming different attacks at him and showing how each block could be used. She was getting tired, and made a mistake that a better swordsman would never have made. She used a complex swing, difficult to execute as well as counter, and misjudged it. Horrified, she waited for her sword to cut into his leg.

He blocked it.

He shouldn’t have been able to, not at his level. She wasn’t sure that she could have blocked it. She certainly couldn’t have executed the combination that he used. She stepped back and met his eyes. Softly, so that no one but she could hear, he said, “Can I explain in private?”

She considered a minute and nodded. Turning back to the others, she dismissed them, sending them to watch Myr, still fighting nearby.

Alone, Edom met her gaze. He shuffled a foot in the dirt. “You . . .” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat and tried again. “You know that I’m not quite what I appear to be. I’m not even Rethian; I’m from Darran. I don’t know if you know it, but Darran is under the ae’Magi’s influence, too.”

“Darran?” Darranians hated magic. People who could work magic left, or risked being killed. Impossible to imagine Darranians approving of the ae’Magi.

He saw her expression.

“Yes. It was pretty obvious when it happened,” he said. “Scary. I said the wrong thing, and I had to run for my life.” He shrugged. “I don’t know why I came here. Something . . . drew me here, I guess. It seemed as good a place to go as any. I found the valley full of people like me, hiding from the ae’Magi. But they were all Rethians. Given current feelings between Darran and Reth, I could hardly tell them that I was a noble-born Darranian.

“So I told them that I was the son of a Rethian merchant. I thought that it was a good idea, I speak Rethian with a faint enough accent that I could pass for any number of western provinces—and it explained the richness of my clothes.

“Then Myr came and started this swordsmanship training. Where would a merchant’s son get trained in Darranian-style swordsmanship? So I faked it.”

Aralorn looked him over. “Quite a problem, I agree. What you will do is tell this all to Myr. You do it, or I will.” She put a bite into her last sentence. She’d trained her share of new recruits before she became a spy—some of them needed orders that sounded like orders.

Edom balked; she saw it in his eyes. Whether it was the order, the idea of telling Myr his secret, being told what to do by a woman, who was also obviously Rethian (prejudice went both ways between Reth and Darran), or all of the above, she didn’t know. Though she suspected all three. She waited while he worked it out, saw him swallow his pride with an effort.

“I’ve heard he’s not as prejudiced as most Rethians.” She waved a hand in the vague direction of the rest of the camp. “And with the lack of trained fighters here, Myr can’t afford to be too picky.”

Edom stared at her a moment. “I guess I’ll go do that now, then.” He gave her a small smile, took a deep breath, and seemed to relax. “If he doesn’t kick me out, I guess it might be nice to be useful, instead of sitting on the sidelines all the time.” After a brief bow to her, student to teacher, he ran off to where Myr was fighting.

Aralorn stretched wearily. Tired as she was, it had felt good to work out with a sword rather than a mop—it was almost as good as playing at staff.

The exercise had made her hot and itchy, so she wandered over to the creek. It took her a while, but she found a place deep enough to wash in, with a large flat rock that she could kneel on and avoid the worst of the mud. She ducked her head under the water—its icy temperature welcome on her overheated skin.

As she was coming up for air, she heard a newly familiar voice say, “See, I told’ja she had a funny-looking sword. Look, the handle’s made out of metal.”

Aralorn took her time wiping her face on her sleeve and smoothing her dripping hair away from her face. Stanis and his silent-but-grinning companion, Tobin, stood observing her. She hid a smile when she recognized Stanis’s solemn-faced, feet-apart, hands-behind-his-back pose. She’d noticed that Myr did that when he was thinking.

“Have you killed anyone?” Stanis’s voice was filled with gruesome interest.

She nodded solemnly as she rolled up the long sleeves of the innkeeper’s son’s tunic again. Maybe she should cut them, too. The boots were giving her blisters.

“You’re not supposed to fight with swords that don’t have wooden handles,” said Stanis worriedly. “If you kill a magician with your sword, his magic will kill you.”

She could have explained that any mage powerful enough to be problematical that way would certainly not need a sword to kill her. But she didn’t want to scare them any worse than they already were.

“That’s why I only wound magicians with my sword,” she explained. “When I kill magicians, I always use my knife. It has a wooden grip.”

“Oh,” said Stanis, apparently satisfied with her answer.

They were silent for a moment, then Stanis said, “Tobin wanted to know if you would tell us about killing someone?”

“All right,” agreed Aralorn. Far be it from her to give up the chance to tell stories. Her friends rolled their eyes when she started one, but children were always a good audience. She looked around for a good place. She settled on a grassy area, far enough away from the stream so that the ground was relatively dry, and sat down cross-legged. When her audience joined her, she cleared her throat and began the story.

That was where Wolf found her. Her audience had grown to include most of the camp, Myr’s raggle-taggle army as enthralled as any bunch of hardened mercenaries at her favorite tavern. He walked quietly closer until he could hear what she was saying.

“. . . so we snuck past the dragon’s nose a second time. We had to be careful to avoid the puddles of poison that dripped from the old beast’s fangs as it slept.”

She had just thrown away her career and her home—no matter what the outcome of this, she had disobeyed orders. If she returned to Sianim, it would be as a criminal and a deserter. She knew that. Knew that Myr’s little band of refugees was doomed unless they had the luck of the gods—and he didn’t believe in luck, not good luck, anyway. Yet here she was, entertaining this grim and hopeless bunch with her relentless cheer.

“Dragon’s ears”—she spoke in such serious tones that several people in her audience nodded, including, to Wolf’s private amusement, Myr—“though you can’t see them at all, are very acute. There we were, the four of us, loaded down with all sorts of treasures, sneaking past this huge beast that could swallow us all in one gulp. We held our very breath when we neared it. Not a sound did we make, we stepped so soft.” Her voice dropped to a carrying whisper. “Now you remember those bejeweled golden goblets Wikker’d liked so well? Just as we crossed in front of the dragon . . . that great beast, he breathed out, and it was as if we were caught in a spring storm the wind was so bad. It grabbed one of Wikker’s goblets, and it landed right on that giant fiend’s scale-covered muzzle.” She closed her eyes and looked sorrowful for a moment, waiting . . .

“What happened?” asked a hushed voice from the crowd.

Aralorn shook her head and spread her arms. “What do you expect happened? It ate us.”

There was a short silence, then sheepish laughter as they realized that she’d been telling them a tall tale from the beginning. Wolf was close enough to hear Stanis’s disgruntled, “That’s not how it should have ended. You’re supposed to kill the dragon.”

Aralorn laughed, hopped to her feet, and ruffled the boy’s hair as she passed by him. “There is another ending to the story. I’ll tell you it later. Now, though, I think that I hear someone calling us for lunch.”

Aralorn ate the last of the bread and cheese that was lunch, and Wolf touched her on the shoulder. She dusted off her hands and followed him without a word. They slipped out of camp and scaled one side of the valley. Once on the top, they followed a faint trail through the trees that led to a cliff with several dark openings, including a large, shallow-looking cave.

Wolf walked past that and took her into a smaller opening twenty paces farther along. As he entered the dark tunnel, the crystals on his staff began emitting a pale blue light. Aralorn hadn’t noticed that he was carrying the staff while they were walking, but she supposed that it was just part of being a mysterious mage . . . or maybe it was just Wolf.

“These caves would make a much better shelter than the tents. Why aren’t you using them?”

Wolf motioned to a small branch and halted her with a hand on her arm. He tilted the staff slightly until she realized that directly in front of them was a dark hole. “Aside from the problem of lighting them—which could be managed—there are several of these pits. That one goes down far enough to kill someone, and there are some holes deeper than that. If there were no children, you might risk it, but it’s too difficult to keep them from wandering. We are storing a lot of the supplies in a few caves near the surface, and I drew up a map for Myr of a section that is pretty isolated from the main cave system. If it becomes necessary to move the camp into the caves, we can. But it is safer in the valley.”

Aralorn looked at the blackness in front of them and nodded. She also stayed close to Wolf the rest of the way through the caves.

They came to a large chamber that he illuminated with a flick of a hand. The chamber was easily as spacious as the great hall in the ae’Magi’s castle. Carved into all the walls were shelves covered with books. Wooden bookcases were packed tightly with more books and stacked in rows with only a narrow walkway between them. Here and there were careful stacks of volumes waiting to find places on the crowded shelves.

Aralorn whistled softly. “I thought that Ren’s library was impressive. We’re going to read all of these?”

Wolf shrugged. “Unless we find something before we have to read them all.” As he spoke, he led her through one of the narrow pathways between bookcases to an open area occupied by a flat table that held an assortment of quills, ink, and paper. On either side of the table were small, padded benches.

Aralorn looked around, and asked, “Where do you want me to start?”

“I’ll take the grimoires. Normally, I know, you can tell if something is magic, but for your safety let me look at the books before you open them. There are spells to disguise the presence of magic, and some of the grimoires are set with traps for the unwary. I’d prefer not to spend valuable time trying to resurrect you,” he said.

“Can you resurrect people?” She kept her voice mildly curious though she’d never heard of such a thing actually happening. He’d brought all of this here from somewhere, just as he’d transported that merchant and the supplies. She was ready to believe he might bring people back from the dead.

“Let’s not find out,” he said dryly.

“So, what do I look for, I mean other than a book titled Twenty-five Foolproof Ways to Destroy a Powerful and Evil Mage?”

He gave a short laugh before he answered. “Look for the name of a mage who fought other mages. Some of these books go back a long ways, when dueling was allowed between mages. If I have a name, I might be able to find his grimoire. You also might note down any object that could be of use. Magical items are notoriously hard to find—even if they’re not the creation of some bard’s overactive imagination—and we don’t have the leisure time to go on a quest.”

She could go though the books methodically. Doubtless that was what Wolf was doing. But sometimes . . . She blew on her fingers and thought hard on how much a little luck right now would be of use. She didn’t pull more than a breath of magic for it—luck magic could backfire in unexpected ways. It was best to keep such things small. Then she walked to a random shelf and took out the first book that caught her eye. She ran her fingers lightly over the metallic binding of the book. Originally, it had been silver, but it had tarnished to a dull black.

She could read the title only because she once coaxed Ren into teaching her the words inscribed on the old wall mosaics in some of the older places in Sianim. Reluctantly, she put it away without opening it, knowing that it wouldn’t have anything of use. The people who used that language had disliked magic to such an extent that they burned the practitioners of it. They had been a trading people, and merchants in general were not overly fond of mages. She thought about the chubby merchant she’d seen in another cave and smiled; maybe merchants had good reason to dislike magic.

It took several more tries before she found a book that suited her and passed it by Wolf for inspection. He handed it back to her with a perfunctory nod and went back to his work.

This book was, in her estimation, about three hundred years old and told the history of a tribe of tinkers that used to roam the lands in great numbers. They were scarcer now and tended to keep to themselves. Whoever wrote the book she was reading still believed in the powers of the old gods, and he intermixed history and myth with a cynicism that she thoroughly enjoyed. Taking a piece of blank paper, she kept careful note of anything that might be potentially useful.

Her favorite was the story of the jealous chieftain whose wife was unfaithful. Frustrated, he visited the local hedgewitch, who gave him a fist-sized bronze statue of the demi-god Kinez the Faithful. When his wife kissed a man in its presence, it would come to life and kill the unlucky suitor. The chieftain had the statue placed in his wife’s wagon, and after several of her favorites died, she sinned no more. Or, noted the author of the book, at least she found another place to sin.

At last satisfied that his wife would be faithful, the chieftain entered her wagon to engage in his husbandly duties. He forgot to remove the statue first. His widow became chieftain, enjoyed her widowhood, and ruled for many prosperous years.

Wolf wondered why it was that mages had such wretched handwriting. The fine motor skills prerequisite to spellcasting should be reflected in decent writing: His own was very nearly flawless. He painstakingly cross-checked the word he was trying to decipher with several others to compare the letters. As he was writing the actual word neatly in the space above the original in case he ever had to read the book again, he heard Aralorn laugh softly.

Safe behind the mask, he smiled at the picture she made with her quill scritching frantically along the paper. Her handwriting wasn’t any better than what he’d just been attempting to read. The hand moving the quill was callused and ink-spattered. Ink also resided in blotchy patterns across her face where she’d pushed back her hair.

Reluctantly, he returned to his reading.

Aralorn finished her book and replaced the slender volume on its shelf. When she found another likely-looking candidate, Wolf was deeply engrossed in his grimoire, so she sat to wait.

“Wolf,” she said suddenly, startled by a strange thought.

He held up a hand to ask her to wait while he finished, which she did with some impatience. Finally, he looked up.

“What is the difference between standard and green magic to you? I have always been told that human mages draw the magic from themselves while green-magic users draw power from the outside world, but didn’t you say that the ae’Magi had found a way to link to outside power? That that’s how he manages to push his influence all the way out to Reth and Sianim? Does that make him a green mage, too? His magic doesn’t feel like green magic to me.”

In typical Wolf fashion, he started his answer with a question. “How much training have you had in magic?”

She grinned at him. “Not much. You mages are not especially open to sharing knowledge even among yourselves, and the shapeshifters are not exactly fascinated by intellectual pursuits. The only thing I know even about green magic is how to use it, and in that I’m by no means an expert. I spent enough time with my mother’s people to learn how to shapeshift and a few minor magics. I can feel the difference between the types of magic”—she put a fist against her heart—“here, but I don’t know exactly what it means.”

He grunted in acknowledgment and paused to choose his words. “I’ve heard that explanation, too. I would even venture that most mages believe it. That human magic is more powerful than green magic.” He tapped his fingers on the table a couple of times, which surprised her. He was so shut down, so self-controlled, that to see him make a movement for no other reason than that he was collecting his thoughts was unusual.

Finally, he said, “The Ancients believed magic existed in a secret pool in the castle of the goddess of nature, and she used this magic to make the seasons change and the grass grow. One day, a clever man found a way to steal some water out of the pool without the goddess’s knowing about it. He was the first human magician.

“Picture magic as a pool of raw, unshaped power that gradually seeps into the natural world to act as nature would have it—making the trees grow and the sun rise. My understanding of green magic is that it is the magic already harnessed by nature the green magician uses, persuading it with nudges here and there to take a different course. The magic that he uses is nature’s magic already shaped to a purpose. It is safer and perhaps easier to use, but it is not as flexible as the raw stuff.

“If you accept that story—even just as imagery—then normal . . . human magic . . .” He hesitated. “At least for most magicians, it works in steps. First, the human magician must tap into the magical pool. It is like drinking through a straw—when one runs out of breath, the liquid stops flowing. The magician then takes the raw power he has gathered and uses it to form a spell or pattern that he shapes himself. The more magic the magician can pull, the stronger he is, but he needs to know the patterns into which to shape the magic and begin the shaping immediately, while he is still drawing it out, so it doesn’t overwhelm him.”

He looked over her head. Aralorn took a quick look, too, but didn’t see anything that would hold his attention.

“If he cannot shape the magic, he must release it as raw power. Raw magic let loose in the world will take the form of fire and burn itself out. Few mages can call enough power that their uncontrolled magic will do much more than start a campfire. Because for most mages, it is the gathering of magic that is the most difficult. Containing it and making it follow one’s will is generally a matter of memorizing a spell or two, although a large amount of raw magic is more difficult to shape than a smaller amount.”

“Are you going to get kicked out of the secret society of mages for telling me all of this?” asked Aralorn, feeling a little breathless at the amount of knowledge he’d just given her.

“Secret society of mages?” His voice was amused, but it wasn’t happy. “If there were such a society, I ripped myself free of that a long time ago. Trust me, sharing a few stories is the least of my crimes.”

He looked down at the book in front of him, but she didn’t think he was reading it.

“The ae’Magi, powerful as he is, could not do this—” His whole body was tight, and he flung a hand outward—she supposed toward outside, though she’d have to think about it for a minute before she could be sure which direction was “outside.” “Could not take over the minds of a whole people without turning to older ways.”

“Older ways?”

He slumped, his hands petting the book as if it gave him comfort. “There is a lot of knowledge stored in the ae’Magi’s castle. They brought the things—books, artifacts, and the like—that could not be destroyed there, where they would be safely guarded against misuse. In the forbidden books, the ae’Magi found a way to leach energy so that he could use it to hold open the magical channels longer than he otherwise could have. He has greatly increased the amount of power that he can capture at any one time, making him stronger than any wizard living.”

She looked at him and thought again about Cain, the ae’Magi’s son. But the ae’Magi, by his actions, betrayed a lot of people. The personal knowledge that Wolf had could have come from any of the wizards who’d been close to the ae’Magi. One of his apprentices maybe. There were several who had “died” or disappeared five years or more ago—the study of magic at the higher levels wasn’t any safer than being a mercenary.

“Earlier, you said that human magic works this way for most magicians, not for you?” asked Aralorn carefully.

His yellow eyes caught hers like a bird of prey’s. He seemed a stranger to her, hostile almost.

Aralorn set her chin and stubbornly refused to let herself feel threatened. “How does it work for you?” she rephrased her question.

Suddenly, he relaxed and loosened his shoulders. Mildly he said, “I forget sometimes, how difficult it is to intimidate you. Very well, then; yes, it is different for me. When I started working magic, it wasn’t obvious just how different I was. Not until I started working the more powerful spells did the difference make itself felt. Most magicians are limited by the magic they can draw into themselves; I am limited more by the amount of magic I can shape into a spell.”

A lot, Aralorn thought, remembering the merchant he’d transported.

“I suspect that the ae’Magi”—he paused and touched her hand lightly—“who was my teacher, as you suspect”—he’d learned to read her, too, over the past few years—“knew long before I did, and separated me from the rest of his apprentices. From then on, I lacked anyone with whom to compare myself. When I was fifteen, the ae’Magi decided to try to use me to gather more power. He had me gather all the magic that I could so that he could use it.”

Wolf fell silent. Aralorn waited for a minute, then asked, “Something happened?”

Wolf made a sound that could have been a laugh. “Yes, something happened. Either the method that he was trying to use wasn’t successful, or he wasn’t ready for the amount of power I drew; but before he could do anything, I destroyed most of the tower we were in. The stones were melted. I don’t know how he managed to keep us alive, but he did. It was three months before I could bring myself to collect enough magic to light a candle.” He paused for a minute, collecting his thoughts or dealing with the memory.

Aralorn waited patiently for him to continue or not, as it suited him. He had told her more about himself in the last five minutes than he’d told her in the four years she’d known him. If he chose to stop, she wasn’t going to push him.

In time, he began again. “That was when he turned to the older texts. He began to experiment with drawing power from others. Not with me, because that first experiment had proved such a disaster. It was during these experiments that he found that with the aid of certain rituals—rituals forbidden even before the Wizard Wars, if you can imagine anything those wizards would have forbidden—he could use the power of untrained magic-users, especially children. They don’t have the defenses that others do.” He stopped again, his golden eyes bleak.

I should stop here, he thought. She knew what he did now about the ae’Magi. If something happened to him, she might be about to find another mage—surely some of the more powerful mages could work themselves free, if the half-trained wreck that he’d been had managed it. But he was consumed by the desire, the need to let her glimpse the monster that he was, to destroy her belief that Wolf, her wolf, was some kind of paladin for right and justice.

“For a long time, I helped him,” he continued. To his surprise his voice was still its sepulchral self, cool tones that gave no hint of the volcano of emotion that seethed within him. It sounded as though he were telling the story about someone else. “You need to know that.” I need you to know that. “Even though I knew what he was. I used dark magic, knowing it was evil. I worked his will and gloried in the power and the madness of it. Knowing what he was, I tried to please him.”

His hands gripped the table until they were white-knuckled, he noticed, but he couldn’t force them loose. Maybe she wouldn’t see them. Maybe he didn’t care if she did.

“What happened?” she asked. As if she were pulling information for an assignment, something that had nothing to do with her.

When he didn’t speak, she did. “What happened? What changed?”

Didn’t she understand what he’d told her? Where was her fear? Her disgust? Then he remembered—she was a green mage, not a real one. She wouldn’t know exactly how bad it was, how evil the things he’d done. The screams of the innocent and the not-so-innocent—he could still hear them sometimes when he permitted himself to.

He released his grip on the table abruptly. He didn’t want to hurt her, he reminded himself, and if he let himself get . . . She wanted a story, something pleasing, something hopeful. Something he could talk about without touching on things best left alone.

He started almost at random. “When I was young, the passages of the ae’Magi’s castle fascinated me.” That was good, he could feel something settle down. “I wandered through them for hours, sometimes days.” When he could. While the ae’Magi traveled, or had to attend to others who couldn’t know what he did. “There are places in the passages that haven’t seen human hands for generations.” The discovery of those safe, dark ways had saved him, he thought. “About a year before I left the castle, I found an abandoned library. A whole library that no one but me had been in for a very long time.” A private library, he thought later. Some ae’Magi had picked out favorite books and tucked them away where he could keep them to himself.

“It fascinated me. Almost everything that I had read before I found the library was grimoires and the like. Books I had been told to study.” Endless lists, useless, weak, or broken spells, he figured out later. Things to keep him busy without really educating him. “There were books in the little room of another ilk entirely. Someone had collected books about people—histories, biographies, myths, and legends. I learned from what I read.” He hesitated, understanding for the first time that he’d actually been answering her question—what had happened to change his path. He looked at her, but her face was still, intent on picking through every word he gave her. Impossible to tell what she was thinking, when she was just listening.

“What I learned made my current occupation . . . more distasteful. So I left.” Those were Aralorn’s words when she told people why she was no longer filling the role of daughter to one of the best-loved heroes in Reth. He wondered if those words covered up as much for her as they did for him.

She smiled at him and touched her finger to her temple in salute. She’d heard the echo.

The smile let him end his story as lightly as he’d tried to begin it. “Departing the castle was easy enough; but changing what I am has proven to be more challenging.”

“If you change into one of those zealots who give everything they have to the poor and go around all the time telling everyone else to do the same, I will feed you to the Uriah myself.”

She startled a laugh out of him, and he shook his head in mock reproof. “You ought to watch what you say around me. I might forget that I have repented of my evil ways and turn you into something really nasty.”