Wolfsbane s-2

by Patricia Briggs

  “Neither would Nevyn,” said Aralorn somberly.

  Wolf sighed. “I don’t want it to be him. I like him, Aralorn.” Wolf didn’t like many people. Aralorn suspected that he could count them on the fingers of one hand, with fingers left over. “Shortly before I left, when I was at my most vicious, he cornered me. He told me he was concerned about rumors he’d been hearing. Things that might get a man killed if the wrong person heard about them. He suggested that the rumors might die down without more sparks to fuel them.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  Wolf’s scarred lips quirked in an attempt at a smile. “I invited him to meet me at the next full moon and find out if they were true.”

  “Not overly intelligent on your part, my love,” observed Aralorn dryly. “If he’d gone to the council, they’d have been able to pull you in for questioning.”

  “I was young.” He shrugged.

  “It amazes me,” she said thoughtfully, “how many people knew you were working black magic and never stopped to ask how you learned such things on your own—or wondered why the ae’Magi didn’t stop you.”

  “Everyone knows that there are books if you know where to look for them.” He sighed softly and returned to the original topic. “It could be Kisrah, I suppose. Hatred and vengeance are corrupting emotions. Perhaps they could have caused him to use black magic. I would hate to see him caught in a web spun by my father.”

  “It could be Nevyn,” she offered. “He might have found the connections between you and me, and between us and the ae’Magi’s death. He knows that I am a spy in Sianim, and he knows Kisrah. Kisrah could have told him about seeing me at the ae’Magi’s castle the night he died, described me well enough that Nevyn identified me. Nevyn loved your father—he used to tell me stories about him—and he certainly loves my father. Since he distrusts magic of any kind, black magic might not bother him as much as it would Kisrah.”

  Wolf thought a moment—or else he dozed; Aralorn couldn’t tell which—then he shook his head. “The croft, perhaps, might have been possible for Nevyn. It wouldn’t have called for much skill, but the spell binding your father was done with both power and craft. Poor Nevyn had more teaching than he wanted, but he fought it. I heard Kisrah fussing over him to my father—all that talent and too scared of magic to use it.” He gave Aralorn a bleak look. “My father would pat him on the back and commiserate with him. Told him that a Darranian mage was bound to be a mess.” Geoffrey ae’Magi, Wolf’s father, had been Darranian. “They would laugh and then my father would tell his good friend how worried he was about me, about how I was fascinated by the darker magics.” He closed his eyes for a deep breath. When he opened them again, he said, “My father was afraid to teach me, I think, for fear that the monster he created would be too powerful for him to control. Kisrah tried his best with Nevyn, but I doubt that he knows much more than I do.”

  He turned to her, a mockery of his usual graceful movements, and made a negating gesture. “He was given to Kisrah to apprentice partially because of Kisrah’s easy nature but also because Kisrah had the power to control a rogue sorcerer. When he was first apprenticed to Santik, Nevyn had the potential to become a master, maybe even ae’Magi. By the time he went to Kisrah, he was capable of little more than lighting candles. Santik was brought up on charges of abuse and neglect, his powers sealed away from him by the ae’Magi. Ironic isn’t it, that my father convicted another mage of abuse? Kisrah worked with Nevyn, but finally gave in to Nevyn’s own wishes once he was certain that Nevyn knew enough for safety. So Nevyn is much like me—a powerful mage who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Which is why I don’t think he’s our villain. He simply does not have the skill to create something like the spell that holds your father. He’s a good man, Aralorn. I don’t think he did this.”

  Aralorn looked at Wolf, surprised at his long speech.

  It made her suspicious.

  She thought about what had happened that night and realized why Wolf was painting such a clear picture for her. Poor Nevyn indeed. A decade of spying and influencing the thoughts of others without attracting their attention had honed her instincts: She knew when someone was trying to manipulate her in return.

  So Nevyn was a powerful mage, was he? Hurt by someone who should have protected him. A good man.

  Wolf, on the other hand, was a devious man, her lover: She had a weakness for devious men.

  “I am certain,” she said slowly, “that you believe Nevyn had nothing to do with this.” Or he wouldn’t have offered the man to her on a platter.

  Sometimes, she thought, you had to tell someone that you loved them; sometimes you had to beat them over the head with it.

  “I don’t love you for your powers, Wolf. Nor for the beauty of your body.” His hand twitched toward his scarred face. “I certainly don’t love you because you were abused by your father.” Her voice began to take on the bite of her anger, not all of which was feigned. “I certainly don’t love you because you are a powerful mage. Nevyn’s powers or lack of same may have made a half-grown child look at him twice, where one look at you would have sent her running—but I’m grown now and have been for some time. So tell me”—she was snarling at him now—“why are you trying to turn my attention to Nevyn with the skill of a village matchmaker?” She changed her voice, giving it an elderly quaver and a Lambshold crofter’s accent. “ ‘Look at this wonderful man, wounded, yet noble—a powerful mage in need of tender care. So he’s married to tha sister, so he hates shapeshifters—what’s a little challenge?’ ”

  She needed him to talk about what was bothering him in order to address it. She needed to goad him; perhaps a shift to gentleness would work—he hadn’t experienced enough to be entirely comfortable with it. “I don’t need Nevyn, dear heart. I have you.”

  “Of course,” he snapped. She was glad to see anger because sadness in his eyes tore her soul. “Oh, I am any maiden’s dream. A master wizard—except the only magic I know, other than a few basic spells, is black magic, and it will, at some future time, ensure my death at the hands of any mage who can back me into a corner. Without my conscious will, green magic randomly chooses to use me to call itself into being and do whatever the”—he paused and drew in a deep breath and deliberately relaxed his shoulders—“and do whatever seems fit at the time. You are better off without me.”

  The prudent thing, Aralorn considered, would be to allow him to work it out on his own. She knew he’d never hurt her, not even with magic he couldn’t control; she was even fairly certain he wouldn’t hurt anyone else who didn’t deserve it—and she thought that when he had a chance to reason it through, he would come to the same conclusions.

  What really bothered him was the nature of green magic. You coaxed it, you asked it, but you couldn’t always force it to do exactly what you wanted—but he’d dealt with much worse than that. She was confident he would again; she would just have to be patient until he worked it out.

  The prudent thing, she told herself, would be to leave him alone. He had a nasty temper when he was pushed.

  Since prudence wasn’t one of her attributes, she said, “Self-pity never accomplishes much, but sometimes it’s nice to wallow in it for a while. Do hurry up though—I’m getting hungry.” She tilted her head to indicate the sounds of people gathering on the other side of the curtain for their meal. “I’m tired of eating cold food.”

  Wolf closed both eyes. He stretched his neck to the left, then to the right. Only then did he open his eyes. Baleful lights glittered in their amber depths as he closed his hands ever so gently around her neck and pulled her forward until she had to tilt her chin up to look at him.

  “Someday,” he whispered, bending down until his lips were next to her ears, “you’re going to step into the fire and find out that it really is hot.”

  “Burn me,” she said in equally soft tones, and for a few moments he did—without a single spell.

  When he released her, there was a measure of peace in his eyes. �
�Shall we go eat?”

  She turned to go, and her eyes touched her father. Smile fading, Aralorn approached him and put her hand on his face.

  “Got rid of the creepy crawly, but no luck yet, sir, on your entrapment,” she murmured. “But tomorrow’s another day.”

  Wolf’s warm hand came down to rest on her shoulder. “Come.”

  SEVEN

  Wolf changed back into his four-footed form, then staggered. Aralorn put a hand on his shoulder to steady him, and he leaned against her with a sigh and an apologetic look.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “You need food,” she replied, and pulled back the curtain, only to find that not only was the great hall filled with people dining, but every head was turned to her. By the intentness of their gazes, she figured that the guard told them all that she’d brought her uncle to look at the Lyon.

  She bowed, and said, “We’ve made some progress, but the Lyon still sleeps.”

  She closed the curtain and set her own wards against casual interlopers since Wolf was in no condition to be working magic. By the time she was through, most of the diners had turned their attention back to their plates.

  Aralorn snagged a clean trencher from a passing kitchen servant and sat at the nearest table, Wolf collapsing at her feet. She took one of her knives and cut a bit of this and that from the platters arrayed on the table and tossed a large piece of roasted goose breast at Wolf, who caught it easily and ate it with more haste than manners.

  She took a hunk of bread from her trencher and put a piece of sliced meat on top of it. This she kept, placing the plate and its remaining contents on the floor for Wolf.

  “There she is! I see her.”

  A loud voice drew her attention away from her meal as she saw two towheaded children running toward her.

  “Aunt Aralorn. Hey, Aunt Aralorn, Father said you would tell us a story if we cornered you.”

  Putting their ages roughly at eight and five, Aralorn quickly came up with the identity of “Father.” Falhart was the only one of her brothers old enough to have sired them.

  “All right,” she said, hiding her pleasure—as tired as she was, storytelling opportunities were not to be lost. “Tell Falhart you cornered me. I’ll do some tale-telling in front of the fireplace after I’m finished eating.”

  The two scurried off in search of their father, and Aralorn finished the last of her bread. Wolf yawned as she picked the empty trencher off the floor and got to her feet.

  “Come on, we’ll take this to the kitchen and ...” Her voice trailed off as she saw Irrenna making her way toward her.

  It wasn’t Irrenna that made her lose her train of thought, but the man who walked beside her. Flamboyantly clothed in amber and ruby, Lord Kisrah looked more like a court dandy than the holder of age-old power.

  It was too soon for Irrenna’s message to have reached him; he must have come for the Lyon’s funeral.

  Well, Aralorn thought, if he didn’t know who it was that he met in the ae’Magi’s castle the night Geoffrey died, he will now. Even if he wasn’t involved with her father’s collapse, he was not going to be friendly. If he was responsible for her father’s condition . . . well, she wasn’t always friendly either.

  She let none of her worries appear on her face, nor did she allow herself to hesitate as she approached them, dirty trencher in hand.

  “You said that you weren’t able to wake him?” asked Irrenna.

  Kisrah, Aralorn noted warily, was intent, but not surprised at all at seeing her face in this hall. He had known who she was before coming here. He moved to the top of her suspects.

  “That’s right,” said Aralorn. “My uncle agreed to come and look. He didn’t know the spell that holds Father, but he was able to dispose of the baneshade—”

  “Baneshade?” Kisrah broke in, frowning.

  She nodded. “Apparently the one who did this has a whole arsenal of black arts—”

  “Black arts?” he interrupted.

  “You must not have looked in on him yet,” she said. “Whoever laid the spell holding the Lyon used black magic. I’m not certain if you’d call the baneshade black magic precisely, but it attacked me the first time I worked magic in the room—the mage must have set it to guard my father. My uncle—my mother’s brother, who is a shapechanger—is the one who identified it and rid us of it as well.”

  “My apologies,” Irrenna broke in. “Allow me to present the Lady Aralorn, my husband’s oldest daughter, to you, Lord Kisrah. Aralorn, this is Lord Kisrah, the ae’Magi. He came here as soon as he heard what happened to Henrick.”

  “It took me a while to connect Henrick’s daughter with the Sianim mercenary the ae’Magi had me fetch for him,” replied the Archmage, bowing over Aralorn’s hand. “I suppose I had expected someone more like your sisters.”

  At her side, Wolf stiffened and stared at Kisrah with an interest that was definitely predatory. She took a firm grip on a handful of fur. She’d never told him of Kisrah’s role in her capture and subsequent torture by the ae’Magi because she’d worried about his reaction.

  “How did you make the connection?” asked Irrenna, unaware of the coercive nature of Kisrah’s “fetching” of Aralorn. “She has very little contact with us; she says she is afraid her work will draw us into jeopardy.”

  Sadness crept across his features, an odd contrast to the rose-colored wig he wore—like an emerald among a pile of glass jewels. “The council appointed me to investigate Geoffrey’s death even before they called me to assume his role. I looked into the backgrounds of anyone who had anything to do with him in his last days. You”—he directed his speech to Aralorn—“provided me with a particularly odd puzzle and kept the investigation going much longer than it otherwise would have. It was especially difficult until I discovered that the Lyon’s eldest daughter was of shapeshifter blood.” He was almost as good with a significant pause as she herself was. After a moment, he turned back to Irrenna. “It was the Uriah that were his downfall. He was looking for a way to make them less harmful and lost control of the ones he had with him. There was not even a body left.”

  “It was an accident, then?” asked Irrenna. “I had heard that it was—though there were all of those rumors about his son.”

  “The council declared it an accident,” confirmed Kisrah. “A tragedy for us all.”

  Aralorn noted how carefully he avoided saying that he believed the council’s decision that his predecessor’s death had been an accident. Surely he didn’t—he’d been there.

  “Would you care to look at my father? Or would you prefer to rest from your travels?” she asked.

  Lord Kisrah turned back to her. “Perhaps I will eat first. After that, would you consider accompanying me to your father? I tried to open the wards when I arrived, but I couldn’t get through.”

  It had been Kisrah, then, who’d tried the wards. Did he know Wolf’s magic well enough to tell that he’d set the spells? Stinking wards, she thought. If she’d had the sense of a goose, she’d have set them herself in the first place.

  “. . . at first it might have been Nevyn’s work, but I know his magic.” He looked at her inquiringly, and Aralorn wondered what she’d missed while she was cursing herself.

  “No, not Nevyn’s, nor mine either—my mother’s gift of magic is green magic. I can set wardings, of course, but the baneshade’s presence called for a stronger magic. I did a favor for a wizard once, and he gave me an amulet ...” Wizards were always giving tokens with spells on them, weren’t they? At least in the stories she told they were. At her feet, Wolf moaned softly, so maybe she was wrong.

  Kisrah’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “An amulet? How odd. I’ve never heard of a warding set on an amulet. Do you have it with you?”

  Yep, I was wrong.

  Aralorn shook her head and boldly elaborated on her lie. “It wasn’t that big a favor. The amulet itself was the main component of the spell—so it could only be activated once. I thought the baneshade warranted
using it. But my uncle killed the creature, so it’s safer now. I’ll come with you to take them off.”

  He stared at her a moment, his pale blue eyes seeming blander than ever. But she had been a spy for ten years; she knew he saw only what she intended him to see. Innocently, she gazed back.

  She was lying. He knew she was lying. He wasn’t going to call her on it, though—which made her wonder what he was up to.

  “I see,” he said after a moment. “With the baneshade gone, did you look at the spell holding Henrick?”

  She nodded. “I’m not an expert, though I can tell black magic. My uncle said that it feels as if there was more than one mage involved in the spelling.”

  “Black magic,” he said softly, and she had the impression that it was the real man speaking and not his public face. For an instant, she saw both shame and fear in his eyes. Interesting.

  “Why don’t you get some food, Lord Kisrah,” said Irrenna.

  “That would be good,” agreed Aralorn. She wanted to give Wolf time to recover a little before they went back to the bier room with Kisrah. “My brother sent a pair of his hellions to force me into telling a story or two, and I gave them my word of honor I would entertain them after I’d eaten.”

  Irrenna laughed. “You’ll have to stay for it, Lord Kisrah. Aralorn is a first-rate storyteller.”

  “So I have heard,” agreed the mage, smiling.

  * * *

  Aralorn sat cross-legged on the old bench near the fireplace where she’d spent many long winter hours telling stories. The children gathered around were different from the ones she remembered, but there was a large number of her original audience present, too. Falhart sat on the floor with the rest, a couple of toddlers on his lap. Correy leaned against a wall beside Irrenna and Kisrah, who stood with his food so that he could be close enough to hear.

  “Now then,” Aralorn said, “what kind of story would you like?”