Masques

FIVE

Myr, Aralorn decided approvingly, had the soul of a sergeant where a king’s should have been. Sometime during the night, he had apparently decided that the camp needed improvement more than the refugees’ weapons skills did.

After breakfast, anyone who could ply a needle was sent to turn yards of fabric into a tent. The design of the tent was Myr’s own, based loosely on tents used by the northern trappers.

When the project was finished, there would be three large tents that could house the population of the camp through the winter. The tents would be stretched over sturdy frames, designed to withstand the weight of the snow. The exterior of the tent was sewn with a double wall so it could be stuffed with dry grass that would serve as insulation in the winter. A simple, ingenious flap system would make it possible to keep a fire inside the tent.

Those who could not sew, or who were too slow to grab the needles Myr had also procured, were put to work building what Myr termed “the first priority of any good camp”—the lavatories.

The risk of disease was very real in any winter camp, and any military man knew stories of regiments destroyed by plagues because of the lack of adequate waste facilities. Myr’s grandfather had been a fanatic on the subject. Myr, thought Aralorn with private amusement, was more like his grandfather than some people in the camp could appreciate.

Aralorn, needleless and worried that Myr would notice, searched futilely for Wolf and noticed Edom looking frustrated as he was trying to stop the tears of a little girl in a ragged purple dress.

“I want Mummy. She always knows how to fix it so her hat doesn’t come off.” Clutched in the child’s grubby hand was an equally grubby doll.

“Astrid, you know that your mum isn’t here and can’t help you,” said Edom impatiently. This was the child who’d been rescued by a stranger in Wolf’s caves. Aralorn looked at her with interest. How had a girl as young as Astrid made it to the camp safely without kin? Maybe someone had brought her—she’d ask Wolf. In the meantime, she couldn’t leave Edom so obviously over his head.

“Hello, Astrid,” Aralorn said, and got a suspicious look in return.

After a wary second, the girl said, “Hullo.”

“Boys don’t know how to dress dolls,” said Aralorn, squatting down until she was at eye level.

Astrid looked at her distrustfully for a minute before slowly holding out doll and hat.

Years of being the oldest daughter of fourteen gave Aralorn the experience to twist the hat on at just the right angle so that it slipped firmly over the doll’s wooden head and caught on the notch that had been carved to hold it in place. Astrid took the doll in one hand and smeared her tear-wet cheeks with the other.

“Can you see if you can get all of you young ones over here?” asked Aralorn. Astrid nodded and ran off.

Turning to Edom, Aralorn said, “I take it that you are supposed to be keeping an eye on the children?”

Edom rolled his eyes. “Always.”

“I can relieve you for a while if you like.”

He nodded and took off with a grin before she could take it back. She wondered if he’d be as pleased when Myr cornered him for latrine duty.

She had the children sit in a semicircle around her. Some of them did it with a sort of hopelessness that broke her heart. Astrid was the youngest by several years. Most of them were ten or eleven, with a few older and a few more younger. There were more girls than boys. Wary eyes, eager eyes, restless eyes, children were a much more difficult audience than adults because no one had yet had a chance to teach them that it was better to be polite than honest.

Before she began, she looked at their faces to help her select a story. At breakfast, Stanis had told her that most of them hadn’t been there much over a month. None of them had any family at the camp, and judging by Astrid’s tears, they were all feeling lost.

She sat cross-legged and looked at them. “Do you have a favorite story? I won’t claim to know every story anywhere, but I know most of the common ones.”

“ ‘Kern’s Bog’?” suggested one girl. “Kern’s Bog” was a romantic story about a boy and his frog.

“ ‘The Smith,’ ” said Tobin in a rusty little voice. Everyone looked at him, so Aralorn guessed that it wasn’t just in her company that he was mute. “My pa, he told me it. Right before I had to leave.”

It wasn’t a gentle story, or, really, a children’s story. But, she supposed, sometimes a story isn’t about entertaining.

“All right,” she agreed. “But you will have to help me if I get parts wrong or forget things. Can you do that?”

She waited until they agreed.

“Very well,” she said, sitting back and settling into the proper frame of mind. “Once upon a time, when the old gods walked the earth and interested themselves with the affairs of men, there lived a smith in a small village. The smith was skilled, and his name was known far and wide. Although he was a gentle man, he lived in a time of war and so spent most of his day shoeing the great warhorses of the nobility, mending their weapons, and creating and repairing their armor.”

A hand went up.

She stopped and tilted her head, inviting a dirty girl with two mismatched braids to speak.

“He didn’t do it to get rich,” she said. “It was because the war made food expensive. And if he didn’t make swords and stuff, his family would have starved.”

Aralorn nodded. “These things he did so that he would have money to live, for food was scarce and dear. But at night, in the privacy of the forge, he created other things. Sometimes they were practical, like rakes and hoes or buckles. Sometimes, though, he made things whose only purpose was to be beautiful.”

“The war god,” said a boy, one of the younger ones, jumping to his feet. “The war god comed. He comed and tried to take the beautiful thing for himself.”

“Hands, please,” said Aralorn.

The boy’s hand shot up.

“Yes?”

“The war god comed,” he said in a much more polite voice.

“So he did,” she agreed. “Temris, the god of war, broke his favorite sword in battle. He heard of the smith’s skill and came to the village one night and knocked upon the smithy door.

“The smith had been working on a piece of singular beauty—a small intricately wrought tree of beaten iron and silver wire bearing upon each branch a single, golden fruit.” It had always sounded to her like something a gold-smith or silversmith might make, but it was an old story. Maybe back then a smith did all those things: shod horses, made armor and jewelry. “Temris saw it and coveted it and, as was the custom of the gods when they wanted something from a mortal, demanded it.”

“’Cause he was greedy,” someone said.

She looked around, but no hands went up, so she ignored the comment. They were all old enough to know proper protocol for storytelling. “The smith refused. He said, ‘You who are creator of war cannot have something that is rooted in the hope of peace.’ ”

Stanis raised his hand. “How come a tree with fruit is rooted in the hope of peace?”

Tobin said, “My father said it was because during a war there aren’t any fruits on any trees.”

Aralorn looked at the solemn little faces and wished Tobin had chosen a happier story. “The smith cast the statue to the ground, and such was his anger, he shattered it into a thousand thousand pieces. Temris was angered that a lowly smith would deny him anything.” Aralorn dropped her voice as low as she could and spoke slowly, as befitted a god of war. “ ‘I say now, smith, that you will forge only three more pieces, and these will be weapons of destruction such as the world has never before seen. Your name will be forever tied to them, and you will be known forever as the Smith.’

“The smith was horrified, and for many days he sat alone in the forge, not daring to work for fear of Temris’s words. During this time, he prayed to Mehan, the god of love, asking that he not be forced to build the instruments of another man’s destruction. It may be that his prayer was answered, for one day he was seized by a fit of energy that left all the village amazed. For three fortnights he labored, day and night, neither eating nor sleeping until his work was done.”

“My ma said that if you spent six weeks not eating, you’d starve to death,” said one of the older girls.

“Not if the gods don’t want them to,” said Tobin fiercely. “Not if they have things to do that are important.”

“Quiet, please,” Aralorn told them. “Raise your hand if you have something to help me.”

They settled down, so she resumed the story. “The weapons he created could only be used by humans, not gods. He made them to protect the weak from the strong. He built Nekris the Flame, which was a lance made of a strange material: a red metal that shimmered like fire.”

A hand was raised. “It kills sea monsters,” Aralorn’s newest helper informed her.

Aralorn nodded. “It was Nekris that King Taris used to drive the sea monster back into the depths when it would have destroyed his city.

“The second weapon was the mace, Sothris the Black. The weapon that, according to legend, was responsible for one of the nine deaths of Temris himself. It was used during the Wizard Wars to destroy some of the abominations created in the desperate final days.

“The last weapon was the sword, Ambris, called also the Golden Rose. There are no stories about Ambris. Some say that it was lost or that the gods hid it away for fear of its power. But others, and I think they are right, say it was hidden until a time of great need.”

“Donkey warts!” exclaimed Stanis wide-eyed. “Your sword is a rosy color and kind of gold.”

She raised her eyebrows and pulled it out so all the children could see it. “Well, so it is.”

“It’s kinda puny, though,” said one young boy a year or two older than Stanis, after careful inspection.

She nodded seriously. “I think you’re right. Ambris is big enough that only a strong warrior could hold her. This sword was built for a small person—like me or you.”

The boy gave her a little grin of solidarity.

“A big strong warrior like our King Myr?” asked someone else.

She sheathed her sword before someone decided to touch it and got cut. “Exactly like our King Myr.”

Stanis, evidently deciding the topic of Ambris had been covered enough, said, “Do you know any other stories? Other ones about swords an’ gods an’ stuff? I like ’em with blood an’ fight’n, but Tobin says that it might scare the young’uns.”

Aralorn grinned and started to reply, but noticed that Wolf was waiting nearby. Beside him was Edom. “It looks like I’ll have to wait and tell you a story another time. Remind me to tell you the one about a boy, his dog, and a monster named Taddy.”

Edom came up to her. “Thank you for the break,” he said with a short bow. “I am most grateful. But Wolf says he needs you more than Myr needs another hand at the trenches.”

“Watching the children is better than digging?” she asked.

He grinned. “Absolutely. Hey, Stanis, how about you help me get a game of Hide the Stone going?”

And a moment later they were all running for the bushes to search for just the right stone.

“So you wield Ambris now?” Wolf commented, walking toward her when Edom and the children were gone.

She hopped to her feet. “Of course. I am Aralorn, Hero of Sianim and Reth, didn’t you know?”

“No.” She heard the smile in his voice. “I hadn’t heard.”

She shook her head and started for the caves. “You need to get out more, have a few drinks in a tavern, and catch up on the news.”

“I think,” he said, “even as isolated as we are here, I should have heard of the woman who wields Ambris.”

Aralorn laughed. “Half the young men in Sianim paint their maces black. And at the Red Lance Inn of the Fortieth’s favor, just a few blocks from the government building, there’s a bronze ceremonial lance on the wall that the innkeeper swears is Nekris. I guess we don’t have to worry about the ae’Magi, you and I. We’ll just take Nekris and Ambris to destroy him.”

After a few silent steps, she said, “I will admit, though, that when I found it in the old weapons hall at Lambshold, when I was a kid not much older than these, I used to pretend I’d found Ambris.”

She drew the sword and held it up for his inspection. It gleamed pinkish gold in the sunlight, but aside from the admittedly unusual color, it was plain and unadorned. “It was probably made for a woman or young boy, see how slender it is?” She turned the blade edgewise. “The color is probably the result of a smith mixing metals to make it strong enough not to break even if it is small enough for a woman. Even the metal hilt isn’t unusual. Before the population of magic-users began to recover from the Wizard Wars, there were many swords made with a metal grip. It has only been in the last two hundred years that metal hilts have become rare.” As if he needed her to tell him that. “Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “That’s what happens when I’ve been storytelling to the children.”

“How long did you pretend she was Ambris?” asked Wolf.

“Not long,” she said. “No magic in her. Not human, not green, not any. And I was forced to concede that the Smith’s Weapons would be rife with magic.” She gave him a rueful smile. “Not to mention bigger, as is fitting for a weapon built to slay gods.”

“She might not be Ambris, but”—Aralorn executed a few quick moves—“she’s light and well balanced and takes a good edge. Who can ask anything more than that? I don’t need a sword for anything else, so she suits my purposes. I don’t use a sword when a knife or staff will do, so I don’t have to worry about accidentally killing a magician.” She sheathed the sword and gave it a fond pat.

The route that they took from the cave mouth to the library was different this time. Aralorn wasn’t sure whether it was deliberate or just habit. Wolf traversed the twisted passages without hesitating, ducking the cave formations as they appeared in the light from the crystals in his staff, but she had the feeling that if she weren’t there, he wouldn’t need the light at all.

The library was as they had left it. Aralorn soon started skimming books rather than reading them—even so, the sheer volume of the library was daunting. Once or twice, she found that the book that she arrived at the table with wasn’t the one that she thought she had picked up. The fourth time that it happened, she was certain that it wasn’t just that she had picked up a different book by mistake: The book that she had taken off the shelf was unwieldy. The one that she set in front of Wolf to look over was little more than a pamphlet.

Intrigued, she returned to the shelf where she’d gotten the book and found the massive tome she thought she’d taken sitting where she’d found it. She tapped it thoughtfully, then smiled to herself—wizards’ libraries, it seemed, had a few idiosyncrasies. It certainly wasn’t her luck spell—that had dissipated a few minutes after she cast it.

Wolf had taken no notice of her odd actions but set the thin, harmless book on her side of the table and returned to what he termed “the unreadable scribbles of a mediocre and half-mad warlock who passed away into much-deserved obscurity several centuries before: safe from the curses of an untrained magician, however powerful.”

Aralorn, returning to the table, listened to his half-voiced mutterings with interest. The mercenaries of Sianim were possessed of a wide variety of curses, mostly vulgar, but Wolf definitely had a creative touch.

Still smiling, Aralorn opened the little book and began reading. Like most of the books she chose, this one was a collection of tales. It was written in an old Rethian dialect that wasn’t too difficult to read. The first story was a version of the tale of the Smith’s Weapons that she hadn’t read before. Guiltily, because she knew that it wasn’t going to be of any help defeating the ae’Magi, she took quick notes of the differences before continuing to another story.

The writer wasn’t half-bad, and Aralorn quit skimming the stories and read them instead, noting down a particularly interesting turn of phrase here and a detail there. She was a third of the way through the last story in the book before she realized just what she was reading. She stopped and went back to the beginning, reading it for information rather than entertainment.

Apparently, the ae’Magi (the one ruling at the time that the book was written, whenever that was) had, as an apprentice, designed a new spell. He presented it to his master to that worthy’s misfortune. The spell was one that nullified magic, an effect that the apprentice’s two-hundred-year-old master would have appreciated more had he been out of the area of the spell’s effect.

Aralorn hunted futilely for the name of the apprentice-turned-ae’Magi or even any indication when the book was written. Unfortunately, during most of Rethian history, it had not been the custom to note the date a book was written or even who wrote it. With a collection of stories, most of which were folktales, it was virtually impossible to date the book reliably within two hundred years, especially one that was probably a copy of another book.

With a sigh, Aralorn set the book down and started to ask Wolf if he had any suggestions. Luckily she glanced at him before a sound left her mouth. He was in the midst of unraveling a spell worked into a lock on a mildewed book as thick as her hand. She’d grown so used to the magic feel of the lighting, she hadn’t noticed when the amount of magic had increased.

He didn’t seem to be having an easy time with it, although it was difficult to judge from his masked face. She frowned at his mask resentfully.

“Doesn’t that thing ever bother you?” she asked in an I-am-only-making-conversation tone as soon as the lock popped open with a theatrical puff of blue smoke.

“What thing?” He brushed the remaining blue dust off the cover of the book and opened it to a random page.

“The mask. Doesn’t it itch when you sweat?”

“Wolves don’t sweat.” His tone was so uninterested that she knew that it was a safe topic to push even though he was deliberately avoiding her point. And he did, too, sweat—when he was in human form, anyway.

“You know,” she said, running a finger over a dust pattern on a leather book cover, “when my father took me to visit the shapeshifters, I thought that it would be really fun to be able to be someone else whenever I wanted. So I learned and worked at it until I could look like almost any person I wanted. My father, though, had an uncanny knack of finding me out, and he was a creative genius when it came to punishments. Eventually, I got out of the habit of shapechanging at all.

“The second time that I visited with my mother’s people, I was several years older. I noticed something that time that I’d missed the first time. If a shapeshifter doesn’t like something about himself, she can just change it. If her nose is too long or her eyes aren’t the right color, it is easily altered. If she did something that she wasn’t proud of, then she could be someone else for a while until everyone forgot about it. They, all of them, hide from themselves behind their shapes until there isn’t anything left to hide from.”

“I assure you,” commented Wolf dryly, “that as much as I would like to hide from myself, it would take more than a mask to do it.”

“Then why do you wear it?” she asked. “I don’t mean out there.” She waved impatiently in the general direction of camp.

“It’s that way,” Wolf said, moving her hand until it pointed in a different direction.

“You know what I mean,” she huffed. “I am sure that you have your reasons for wearing a mask out there. But why do you use it to hide from me, too? I am hardly likely to tell everyone who you are if that is what you’re hiding.”

He tensed but answered with the same directness that she had shown. “I have reasons for the mask that have nothing to do with trust or the lack of it.”

She held his eyes. “Don’t they? There are only the two of us in this room.”

“Cave,” he interjected mildly.

She conceded his correction but not the change of subject. “ ‘Cave,’ then. A mask is something to hide behind. If I am the only one here to look at your face, then you are hiding from me. You don’t trust me.”

“Plague take it, Aralorn,” he said in a low voice, stealing her favorite oath. “I have reasons to wear this mask.” He tapped it. There was enough temper in his eyes, if not his voice, that a prudent person would have backed down.

Not even her enemies had ever called Aralorn prudent.

“Not with me.” She wouldn’t retreat.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath and opened them again. The glitter of temper had been replaced by something that she couldn’t read. “The mask is more honest than what is beneath it.” There was emotion coloring his voice, but it was disguised so it could have been as mild as sorrow or as wild as the rage portrayed by the mask.

She waited, knowing that if she commented on his obscure statement, he was fully capable of sidetracking her into his peculiar philosophical mishmash until she forgot her purpose.

When he saw that she wasn’t going to speak, he said softly, “I find that trust is hard for me to learn, Lady.”

There was nothing obvious holding the mask on his face, no hidden straps to hinder him when he put his hands up and undid the simple spell. He gripped the mask and took it off smoothly. She probably only imagined the slight hesitation before his face was revealed.

She’d been certain it was his identity that he hid. If she had been another person she might have gasped. But she had seen burn victims before, even a few who were worse—most of those had been dead. The area around the golden eyes was unscarred, as if he’d protected them with an arm. The rest of his face matched his voice: It could have belonged to a corpse. It had that same peculiar tight look as if the skin was too small. His mouth was drawn so tightly that he must have trouble eating. She knew now why his voice had sounded muffled, the words less clearly enunciated than they had been when he took wolf shape.

She looked for a long time, longer than she needed to so that she could think of the best way to react. Then she stood up and walked around the table, bent over, and kissed him lightly on the lips.

Returning to her seat, she said quietly, her eyes on his face, “Leave your mask off when we are here alone, if you will. I would rather look at you than a mask.”

He smiled warmly at her, with his eyes. Then he answered what she didn’t feel free to ask. “It was that spell of which I lost control. I told you that uncontrolled magic takes the shape of flame.” As he spoke, he clenched his fist, then opened it to show her the fire it held. “Human flesh burns easier than stone, and the ae’Magi wasn’t able to extend his shield to me fast enough.”

When he was fifteen, he’d said. It took effort, but she sensed that he was still uncertain, so she grinned at him and playfully knocked his hand aside. “Get that out of here. You, of all people, should know better than to play with fire.” She knew by his laugh that she had taken the right tack, and she was glad for the years of acting that allowed her to lighten the mood.

Obediently, he extinguished the flame, and with no more ceremony than he usually exhibited, he turned back to his book. Aralorn went to the nearest bookcase and picked out another book.

After it had been duly inspected for traps and pitfalls, she opened it and pretended to read as she pondered several other questions that popped up. Things like: Why couldn’t a magician, who could take on the form of a wolf indefinitely, alter his face until it was scarless? The most likely answer to that was that he didn’t want to. That led to a whole new set of questions.

She was so engrossed in thought that she jumped at the sound of Wolf’s voice as he announced that it was time to leave. She set the book she’d opened on the table, on top of the book she’d forgotten to tell Wolf about. Tomorrow was soon enough for both books. As she started after Wolf, she caught a motion out of the corner of her eye; but when she turned, there was nothing there. Nonetheless, she felt the itch of being watched by unseen eyes all the way through the caverns. Places where magic was worked often felt like that, so she didn’t say anything.

As they left the caves, Aralorn noted that there were faded markings just inside the entrance. Some sort of warding was her guess because they had been drawn around the cave mouth. There had been people here long before them, she thought while touching the faint pattern lightly. Under her fingertips, she felt a sweet pulse of green magic.

Outside, the gray skies carried the dimness of early evening. Reluctant drops of rain fell here and there, icy and cold on her skin. There was no wind near the caves but Aralorn could hear its relentless spirit weaving its way through the nearby trees. She looked apprehensively at the sky. It was still too early for snow, but the mountains were renowned for their freak storms, and the icy rain boded ill.

Seeing her glance, Wolf said, “There will be no snow tonight at least. Tomorrow, maybe. If it hits too soon, we might have to move them into the caves. I would rather not do it; it’s too easy to get lost, as has already been demonstrated. Next time there might not be a rescue.” She saw that he had replaced the mask without her noticing when he did it.

Though it did not snow, it might as well have. The storm that hit that night was violent and cold. The wind carelessly shredded the makeshift tents that still comprised most of the camp. Everybody huddled in the tents that leaked the least and waited out the storm. It left as abruptly as it had struck. With the wind gone, the body heat from the huddled people warmed the remaining overpopulated tents. Tired as they were, everyone, with the exception of the second-shift night watch, was soon fast asleep.

Aralorn woke to the sound of a stallion’s whistle. There was probably a mare in heat. She swore softly, but when Sheen whistled again, she knew she had to go quiet him before he woke the camp. It probably would be a good idea to check on the horses after the storm anyway.

She reached under the furs she slept on—not an easy feat with so many others sleeping on the furs, too—and strapped on her knife. Carefully, she stepped over the slumbering bodies and threaded her way to the door.

Once outside, she jogged toward the corral. Sheen’s light gray underbelly was easy to see against the darkness. Just as he was about to cry out again, he saw her and came toward her, hopping because of the hobble. She looked him over, but saw nothing unusual.

He shifted abruptly, as if the wind brought a scent to his nose. His attention was focused high on the ridge surrounding the valley. Every muscle tensed, and only a quick word from Aralorn kept him quiet.

It could have been only the scent of one of the two guards Myr posted every night in shifts or, more probably, a wild animal of some sort. For her own peace of mind, Aralorn decided to trek up the side of the valley and see if she could locate whatever was disturbing the stallion. She commanded him to silence again, told him to wait, and started the climb.

The terrain was more cliff than anything else. There was an easier trail over more-exposed ground, but she chose to stay in the sparse cover of the tough brush that grew here and there. Once on the crest, crouched in the dense thicket of young willows that surrounded the valley, she glanced back down to see if Sheen was still upset.

His attention was still focused, but he could have just been watching her. Swearing softly to herself, she crept through the brush. If it had been a wild animal, it was probably long gone, or waiting for a nice tasty human to join it for its evening meal—wasn’t it dragons that were supposed to enjoy feasting on young women?

She tripped over it before she saw it—or rather him. He was very dead. She called a dim light ball that would allow her to get a better look at the corpse without drawing attention to herself.

It was one of the guards—Pussywillow, the one-armed veteran. He had been killed recently, because the body was still warm, even in the chill of the wet foliage. What really bothered Aralorn was the way he’d been killed. He’d probably been knocked out, judging by the lump on his head. With him unconscious and unable to struggle, it had been an easy matter to cut his heart out of his chest and carve the skin of his chest with runes. The same runes she’d seen the ae’Magi cut into living skin.

Impulsively, she traced a symbol over one of the bloody runes. She knew that certain symbols and runes held a power of their own, independent of green or human designation. Once when she and Wolf had been traveling, she had seen him trace the symbol with a stick held in his jaws (he’d been in his wolf guise). Curious, as always, she asked him the meaning of it. Wolf told her that it was a symbol that simply promoted good rest and taught it to her at her request. She hoped it would help.

She started to run around the edge of the valley without worrying about cover. She almost hoped to draw the attention of the killer; she was able to take care of herself better than almost anyone else in the camp. From the signs around the body, there had been only one person, but he was skillful.

Heart pounding, and not from effort, she searched the darkness for some clue as to his whereabouts. Less than halfway around the camp, she found the other guard. The woman’s heart lay, still hot, on the grass that was too dark even in the night.

She had probably been killed after Aralorn found the first body. The killer, safe in his knowledge that there was no second guard to worry about, had taken his time and done the ritual more properly, though still without active magic use that might have alerted Wolf (or anyone else in the camp, for that matter). The guard had been awake for the ceremony, gagged so that she could make no sound. A small pewter drinking glass lay near the body, stained dark with blood.

Gently, Aralorn closed the open eyes.

Taking stock of her position, Aralorn realized that she was no more than a hundred yards from Wolf’s camp. It would be wiser to have two people looking for the killer. Finding the camp from her position on top of the rim was not as easy as finding it from the bottom, though; there were no trails to lead her to it.

Just as she decided that her time would be better spent trying to locate the enemy, she saw the light from the meager campfire Wolf preferred. With a sigh of relief, she made her way down the steep slope, taking the path slowly to avoid twisting an ankle.

Without warning, a violent surge of magical backlash drove her to her knees. She waited until the wash of magic dulled to a point that it was no longer painful before struggling back to her feet. Forgetting caution, she grabbed a stick and used it for balance as she slid down the hill, announcing her presence with a modest avalanche of stones and dirt.

She slid to a stop just above the small, flat area that Wolf had appropriated as his camp. Wolf, in human form, lay unmoving on his back, eyes glistening with rage. Narrow luminous white ropes lay across his legs, chest, and neck.

Edom stood over him, his attention momentarily diverted to Aralorn. Half-raised in his right hand, he held a sword that was not the sword he’d been using in the sparring match. It glowed gently, with a pulsating lavender light.

The sight of it sent a cold chill up Aralorn’s back as she recognized the weapon for what it was: a souleater. The last of them was supposed to have been destroyed centuries ago—but, she reminded herself grimly, that was storytelling for you: You could only trust it so far.

Even minor wounds from a souleater could be mortal.

The section of the ledge that she stood on was just far enough above Edom to be out of the sword’s reach. Crying out an alarm to the camp, she drew her knife and shifted it lightly by the blade in a thrower’s grip. At this distance she didn’t even need to aim, so she had it in the air before he would have been able to see what it was she threw. He certainly shouldn’t have been able to dodge it, but her blade landed harmlessly on the ground behind him.

The speed of his move told her that he was a much better fighter than he had shown himself to be. Easily good enough that he could have fooled her into thinking him unskilled if he’d wanted to. Darranians being singularly prejudiced against women, she thought, Edom probably simply hadn’t bothered.

His face, revealed more by the light of the souleater than the modest campfire, appeared older—although that could simply have been an effect of the light. He smiled at her.

She was unarmed against him. Normally that wouldn’t have worried her, but the souleater made the situation anything but normal. She could only hope to hold out until someone from the camp got there. Preferably lots of someones.

All the shapes that she could take quickly were suited to her chosen trade as a spy: the mouse, several types of birds, a few insects. Nothing that would hold off an experienced swordsman for long enough to keep both her and Wolf alive.

She took an apparently involuntary step sideways, away from Edom, and lost her footing. She made sure that the fall carried her past Wolf’s ledge and on down the hill into some brush.

Edom had two options, either he would follow her down, getting more distance between that sword and Wolf, or he would turn to finish Wolf off—giving her the extra few seconds that she needed. She planned for either—and he turned back to finish his business with Wolf.

She chose the first form that she could think of; it was deadly, though small. The icelynx had no trouble with the steep climb and launched herself at Edom’s back before he even had his sword raised at Wolf.

Warned by the brief shadow she caused when she ran in front of the fire, Edom turned—sweeping aside her rush with his sword arm, but not before she raked his back with her formidable claws. Hissing, she faced him as she crouched between him and Wolf, still held captive on the ground.

Pale sword and paler cat feinted back and forth: she, just out of reach of the lethal blade; he, careful not to expose himself to the poisonous fangs of the icelynx.

Suddenly, Edom spoke softly as if not to antagonize the cat, though his tone carried anxious desperation. “It’s Aralorn. She’s a shapeshifter, don’t you see it? She’s here to destroy us, betray us. I came up to ask Wolf about something, and I found her here, with Wolf like that. You’ve all heard of the arcane practices of shapeshifters. Help me before she kills him. Quick now.”

Aralorn didn’t have to look to see what her nose had belatedly informed her. A half dozen armed people from camp had just shown up to rescue the wrong person. They were too far to do anything—yet. It wouldn’t take them long to reach her.

She couldn’t speak when in animal form without more preparation—which she was too busy to do—and so was without her most formidable weapon.

Edom continued, even as he tried to maneuver closer to Wolf. “I’ve heard that shapeshifters need to kill when the moon is full. I guess that Wolf, out here alone, seemed an easy victim. I found this sword near, it must be Wolf’s. She seems afraid of it.”

Aralorn knew that she had to do something before the time to act was gone entirely. If he succeeded, Wolf would be dead. Disregarding the sword, she leapt at his throat while Edom was still distracted by the sound of his own voice.

She missed as he threw himself flat on the ground. However, Edom managed to nick her with the sword as she passed him. Her rear leg became icily numb and folded underneath her, but worse was the strange sucking sensation that consumed her. The sword was alive, and it was hungry.

Edom quickly regained his feet. On three legs, fighting the pull of the sword, she didn’t have much of a chance. Aralorn watched as the sword descended.

Abruptly, it was jerked out of its intended path. Aralorn could feel the sword’s intense disappointment as Edom was suddenly consumed in flames. The smell of burning flesh offended her feline-sensitive nose almost as much as the light bothered her nocturnal eyes.

Apparently, someone—she found out later that it was Stanis—had finally thought to remove the ropes holding Wolf down. The spells that allowed the ropes to hold him unable to move or work magic didn’t keep someone from simply pulling them off.

Wolf did a more thorough job of burning Edom than was absolutely necessary, but then it must have been maddening to lie there and know what was going on without being able to do anything about it.

She yowled at him demandingly. With her leg numb and the odd dizziness that accompanied the wound, she was stuck where she was—too close to the flames. He also made her nervous, putting so much effort into burning a dead body. He needed a distraction. When the yowl didn’t do it, she rolled until she could bite him on the ankle, hard enough that he could feel it, but not hard enough to release the venom in the glands underneath her fangs.

Abruptly, she was gathered up and set gently down on his bedroll. Wolf grabbed his staff from wherever he put it when he wasn’t using it and balanced it on its feet so that he could examine her wound in more certain light. She noticed with interest that the rest of the camp was staying well away from them. Well, Wolf’s pyrotechnics had been pretty impressive.

Wolf traced a quick design over the wound with a finger; Aralorn decided that it was to break the sword’s hold rather than close the wound, since human magic-users were not the best healers. Nothing seemed to change. He frowned and traced it again, and this time she could feel the power that he used. Still nothing happened. She meowed at him nervously. He ignored her and chanted a few words.

Abruptly he stood and looked toward the crispy skeleton that was all that was left of Edom. Aralorn rolled to stand shakily on her three good legs to see what he was looking at. At first she didn’t see it, but a flicker of movement caught her eye. It was the sword. Edom, or the thing that was Edom, had kept its grip on the sword. Now it lay a good foot away from the body. Except for the flicker that caught her eye at first, she hadn’t seen it move again—but it was undeniably closer to her than it had been when she’d first seen it.

The coldness that numbed her leg seemed abruptly to be spreading. It could have been her imagination, spurred by the thought that the sword was coming for her. Aralorn lost her precarious balance and fell, missing exactly what Wolf did.

With a harsh, almost human cry of anguish that she heard only partly though her ears, the sword broke. Abruptly, the numbness ceased, and for a brief moment the pain made her wish it back; then it was only a small cut that bled a little.

The icelynx twitched its stubby tail and exploded to its feet with legendary speed. When she was sure all her legs were working, Aralorn arched purring against Wolf, who was still kneeling beside the blankets.

When she’d stood, she heard someone cry out, reminding her that there was an audience. Looking at all the fear and hostility in the surrounding faces, Aralorn decided that it might defuse matters if they weren’t being reminded that she was a shapeshifter. She transformed herself into her usual shape and dusted off the innkeeper’s son’s tunic that was looking the worse from her roll down the wet hillside. Surreptitiously, she kept a close eye on the others. She’d expected them to be worried about her, but they were all staring at Wolf.

He had furnished an excellent display of what happens when a wizard with his strength lost his temper. They all must have known that he was powerful, but knowing something and seeing it were different matters.

Most people also lacked the casual acceptance of gore that mercenaries had. It didn’t help that Wolf didn’t wear his mask to sleep in, and his horribly scarred visage had been clearly revealed in the flaring light. He wore his mask now, but the knowledge of what lay underneath it was with them all. What was really needed at that moment was someone to take control.

Aralorn looked around to see if she could find Myr, but he was conspicuous by his absence. There was always the possibility that he was still asleep, unaffected by the magic disturbance that had waked the rest of the camp; but, given what she knew about him, Aralorn thought that unlikely. The noise alone should have brought him out.

As the thought crossed her mind, Myr—his clothes covered with bits of brush and blood—took the same path down the side of the hill that she had. Plague it. She must have woken him up when she went to check on the horses. If he’d been following her around, there was a good chance that he thought that she’d been the one who murdered the guards. As she had not been trying to hide anything, her footprints would be much more conspicuous than Edom’s.

Myr ignored the commotion in favor of investigating the blackened corpse. Aralorn wondered how much he hoped to learn from the scorched, skeletal remains, and suspected he was using the time to think. When he stood up, he seemed slightly paler, though it could have been a trick of the light.

Composedly, he directed his question at Wolf. “Who was it?”

“Edom,” answered Wolf, his chilling voice even rougher than usual. If Wolf’s hand hadn’t been locked on her shoulder with a bruising grip, Aralorn would have thought him unaffected by the events of the night. It was obvious from the incredulous looks they directed at Wolf that most in the little gathering were disturbed by his calmness.

“Is he the victim or the attacker?” asked Myr, voicing the question that was on almost everyone’s mind.

“The attacker and the victim, though he didn’t intend to be the latter,” answered Aralorn, deciding to take part in her defense. Myr, at least, had already known what she was. She continued to tell them what she had done and the discovery of the dead guards. “I came to see if Wolf wanted to help track him down and found Edom with his nasty little sword drawn, standing over Wolf.”

An unfamiliar voice asked, “How do we know she’s telling the truth? She could have laid a spell on Master Wolf so that he thinks that she has the right of it. Shapeshifters can do things like that. Edom was just a boy. Why would he attack Wolf? As for magic rituals, I spent three days teaching him how to move a stick without touching it. He didn’t have hardly any magic at all.”

Wolf spoke, and even the most unobservant could see that he was not in control of his temper yet. “I assure you”—he looked at the man who’d spoken, and the man took a quick step back and stumbled over a rock—“I am certain of what took place tonight.”

Silence fell.

Wolf’s gaze found the ropes that had been left tangled on the ground. He gestured and the ropes burst into flame so hot it was blue and white rather than orange. The three or four people nearest them flinched, even Myr.

“Also,” growled Wolf in a voice like a coffin dragged over rock, “the sword Edom fought with was a souleater. It did not belong to me. Aralorn, with her shapeshifter blood, could not have held anything so unnatural for long enough to draw it.”

Good to know, Aralorn thought. In the unlikely event of her running into another one.

Myr said, “Our guards were dead before Aralorn found them.”

Tobin spoke up from his position as Stanis’s shadow, his eyes on the blackened bones. “Edom had a lot of books in his tent written in Darranian.”

There was a brief silence. Aralorn almost smiled as she saw the meaning of Tobin’s words echo in the minds of all present. It was Tobin’s testimony that bore the most weight. A shapeshifter, being, after all, native to the Rethian mountains, was better than a Darranian. If Edom was a Darranian, it put an entirely different light on the events of the night.

All the same, nobody but Myr met her eyes as they left to collect the bodies.

They buried the guards in rough graves dug in the night, as Wolf said that it was the best. He had counteracted the runespell as best he could, but the runes enacted on the living flesh of dying people were stronger than they might otherwise be. He never made clear the exact purpose of Edom’s runes, but he said that burying the bodies would give strength to his own spells.

When the last shovelful of dirt had been spread Wolf raised his hands and spoke words of power and binding. It was coincidence, Aralorn knew if no one else did, that it started pouring rain at the moment Wolf finished speaking.

The huddled group of people stood uneasily for a minute under the rain. The sting of death was no new thing to any of them, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant. They all shared guard duty, and it could have been any of them. None held any illusions that they would have escaped better than Pussywillow had. The magic they had witnessed this night had its effect as well. Most of them were not quite comfortable with magic even though they could work a touch of it themselves.

Gradually, they drifted back to their tents until Aralorn, Myr, and Wolf were the only ones left by the new graves.

Myr hit the stone he was standing near with a clenched fist, hard enough to break the skin. He spoke with quiet force. “I am tired of feeling like a cow waiting for slaughter. If we didn’t realize before this that the ae’Magi is just biding his time until there isn’t something more interesting to turn his attention to, we know that now. Edom is . . . was too young to be anything but a minor servant, and we almost didn’t stop him in time. When we face the ae’Magi, we don’t stand a chance.”

“Edom was older than he looked, and more than a minor servant if he worked the runes that were on the bodies,” commented Wolf calmly, having recovered most of his usual control. “Carrying and hiding a souleater from me is not much easier. Don’t make the same mistake that the ae’Magi is: He is not invincible.”

“You think that we have a chance against the ae’Magi?” Myr’s tone was doubtful.

“No, but we can bother him for longer than he thinks that we can,” said Aralorn briskly. “Now, children, I think that it is time for us to go to sleep. Don’t forget that we have the sanitary facilities to dig in the morning. Wolf, if you don’t mind, I think that everyone would be a little more comfortable if I sleep in your camp rather than the tent I’ve been sharing.” Me, too, she thought, I’ll be much happier here. “Let them meet their shapeshifter in the light of day.”