She stopped as something occurred to her. “Wolf, there was a snowstorm the night before the Uriah came. If it hadn’t slowed them down, they would have come upon us at night and slaughtered the camp.”
Wolf shrugged. “Snowstorms are unpredictable here, but I suppose that it could have been he who caused the storm. I suspect that we’ll never know.”
Wolf opened his book and went back to reading.
Aralorn found another book and managed not to show Wolf how unsteady she was. But when he’d checked it for her, and she opened it, it was difficult to concentrate as the little energy she’d regained dissipated. The words blurred in front of her eyes and soon she was turning pages from habit.
She dozed off between one sentence and the next. When Wolf touched her shoulder, she jumped to her feet and had her knife drawn before she opened her eyes.
“Plague it, Wolf!” she sputtered. “One of these days, you are going to do that, and I’ll knife you by mistake. Then I’ll have to live all my life with the guilt of your death on my hands.”
Her threat didn’t seem to bother him much as he caught her and lowered her to her chair as her legs collapsed under her. “You are trying to do too much,” he said with disapproval. He started to say something else, then lifted his head.
She heard it, too, then, the sound of running feet. Stanis popped into the room at a dead run—he was one of the few people who knew his way to Wolf’s private area. He was pale and panting when he stopped, looking as though he’d sprinted the half mile or so of cave tunnels that connected the main camp with Wolf’s library. “Uriah,” he panted.
Aralorn tangled with her chair when she tried to push it out of the way too fast, but kept from falling with the aid of a hand on her arm. She was firmly sat down on her seat.
Wolf, who had somehow donned his mask again, looked her straight in the eye, and said, “You stay here.” His voice left no room for arguments. He shifted into the wolf and melted into the tunnel.
* * *
With the scary mage gone, the library felt safer than the outer cave to Stanis. But his mates were out there; he wasn’t going to stay safely behind.
“Hey now,” he said when Aralorn used the table to get to her feet. She looked like she weighed half what she had the first time he’d seen her—all pared down to bone and sinew. But she walked without limping to the little padded bench and shuffled under it until she came up with a sword and scabbard she belted on. He didn’t miss that the scabbard was stained with blood—from the Uriah who’d killed Astrid.
“He told you to stay here.” Maybe she hadn’t heard the mage.
Aralorn glanced up as she sheathed the sword. “It says in my files—I know because Ren showed them to me—‘Does not take orders, will occasionally listen to suggestions.’ Did Wolf sound like he was suggesting anything to you?”
Stanis shook his head. “No.” He shuffled his feet a little. “I don’t follow no orders either, but if that one ever told me to do anything in that tone of voice, I can’t help but think I’d be sitting where he wanted me until I was covered in dust.”
She laughed. “Yes, he’s a little intimidating, isn’t he?” She checked the draw of the sword, adjusted it a little, and said, “But there’s no way I’m sitting here while everyone else gets to fight.” She looked at him. “You know your way to the rest of them? I might be able to find my way out, but I don’t know how this cave connects into the rest.”
Stanis squirmed.
She smiled. “No need to tell him that I couldn’t find my own way there,” she said.
“I’m not afraid of him,” Stanis stated belligerently, though his mam had taught him better than that.
“Of course not,” she said stoutly. “Nothing to be afraid of.”
After about the halfway point, she put her hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, Stanis, we’re going to have to slow down.”
“No trouble,” he said. “Why don’t you lean on me a bit?”
She muttered something he didn’t catch but put some of her weight on him. For a while that was all she did, but eventually her arm wrapped around his shoulders, and she honestly leaned on him.
“Good thing you’re short,” he said. “You should have stayed. What would have happened if I weren’t here to help you?”
“Then I’d have crawled,” she said grimly.
He glanced up at her face, visible in the light of one of those little glowy balls Wolf had shown him how to make.
“Right,” he said. She didn’t look like a nice Lady right now, she looked like someone who could lick her weight in Uriah and then some. Maybe she was a match for that Wolf after all.
* * *
Aralorn swung a leg over the barricade erected to keep people—except for runners like Stanis, whose magic seemed capable of keeping them from getting hopelessly lost—from wandering the tunnels.
She listened for sounds of battle, but the tunnel was suspiciously silent.
“Where were the Uriah when you came running?” she asked, as the passageway floor took a steep upward bend.
“Don’t know.” Stanis shook his head. “Somebody spotted ’em outside and sprinted to the caves like an idiot. They’re sure to have followed ’em here.” He paused. “I don’t hear nothin’.”
“If they were inside our camp when Wolf came, you’d still be hearing things,” she told him stoutly, finding that she couldn’t quite believe it. What if they’d taken him by surprise? What if he hadn’t had a chance?
“What if they took him by surprise?” asked Stanis, echoing her thoughts, his voice a bare whisper as they crept closer to where there should be a bunch of people fighting for their lives.
Her hands were sweating—from effort, she told herself. “No one takes him by surprise,” she told Stanis. “He works things the other way.”
And that was truth. She could breathe better, doubtless because the floor had flattened out again.
Stanis stopped. “Big cave’s just around the corner,” he mouthed. “The main one where everyone’s camped. We should—”
“Not his wards?”
Oh, she recognized that voice. She stood up straight and strode around the corner, where the whole camp—as far as she could tell at a glance—was standing armed and ready. She couldn’t see the owner of the loud voice, but she could hear him just fine.
“What does he mean ‘not his wards’? Why didn’t you ask him more? Do we expect them to come running in?”
She pushed her way through—not hard once people realized where she was going.
“It means that they aren’t his wards,” said Myr neutrally.
The big nobleman who stood in front of him was used to getting his way—with money or intimidation.
“Boy,” he boomed. “You don’t let that strippy bugger get away with half-assed answers. He’s not in charge here.”
She couldn’t get there any faster without falling on her face, but . . . Myr hit him. A quick, decisive blow that dropped the ox like a stone.
Aralorn pulled her sword and held it to the downed man’s throat, making sure he felt the sharp edge. A foot on his shoulder.
The fear that had held her since she realized that it was too quiet made her testy, and she would have been quite happy to put the sword all the way through the blasted man’s neck and take care of the problem. But her father had been a canny politician when it suited him, and she could hear his voice in her ear.
So instead of killing him, she said coolly, “Do you desire this man dead, my king? I assure you it would be a pleasure. We could display his body on a stake just outside for the crows to eat.”
“And attract every scavenger in twenty leagues,” said Myr regretfully. “No. Not just yet.” She couldn’t read his voice and wouldn’t lift her eyes from her enemy to look at his face.
She grimaced at the triumph in the eyes of the nobleman at her feet. He started to say something, then stopped. Maybe it was the weight of her heel on a nerve just in front of his shoulder, maybe it
was that her arm dropped just a bit, letting the sword dig a little deeper.
“Permission to deal with him as my father would?” she asked.
“I recall the stake incident,” said Myr dryly. “My grandfather told me about it. No one disobeyed the Lyon’s orders for a few years afterward. Effective but extreme, you have to admit. We are a little short of numbers here—so I find myself reluctant to give you my unqualified permission.”
The nobleman paled. “The Lyon?” he said.
Aralorn bared her teeth at him, but continued to talk to Myr. “Your Majesty, if you please. Haris?”
“Aye?”
“Haris, I think that you’ve been working too hard. You need an assistant.”
“Don’t need no nobleman to help me cook,” said Haris grumpily.
“Haris,” said Myr in silky tones, “I have no intention of allowing this man to interfere with your efforts. However . . . skinning, turning the spit, or taking out the refuse—how much could he hurt?”
“Oh aye,” said Haris, sounding remarkably happier. “That I’ll do, sire.”
“Aralorn, let him up,” Myr said.
She pulled her sword away after wiping the blood off on the idiot’s shirt.
“Oras,” Myr said. “A week of helping Haris is a gift. Do not make me regret it.”
The nobleman swallowed. Perhaps he recognized, as Aralorn did, the old king in his grandson’s face.
Myr turned his attention to Aralorn then, ignoring the man on the ground. “I need you to go out and find Wolf. Is this an assault we need to prepare ourselves for—or can I take people off alert?”
“What’s going on?” she asked, sheathing her sword.
“The Uriah tried to come into the caves after our hunting party and were stopped by wards on the cave mouth. Wolf says they aren’t his wards and sent us all back here to cool our heels and guard the narrow entrance.”
Aralorn looked at the opening Myr indicated, where daylight shone through.
“Oras aside,” Myr said, “it would be useful to have a bit more information. I’d like an update, and you’re likely to get more information out of our wizard than anyone else.”
* * *
Once in the tunnel to the outside, she drew her sword and held it in a fighter’s grip. Someone had painted signs on the walls of the tunnels to facilitate travel, and it was a simple matter to follow the arrows to the outside by the magelight she held cupped in one hand.
The howls were louder as she turned into a cave marked “Door to Outside” over the top. She smiled at the awkward lettering even as the cold sweat of fear gathered on her forehead. Cautiously, she crept forward through the twisted narrow channel.
The Uriah were there, howling with frustrated rage at the wall of flame that covered the entrance. Someone, Aralorn noted with absent approval, had set up the wood for a bonfire where the tunnel began to narrow—it sat unlit, a good ten feet behind the magical fire that blocked the entrance. Aralorn couldn’t feel the heat from the fire, but toasted bodies of Uriah lay twitching feebly just outside the cave as evidence of the effectiveness of the barrier.
Aralorn leaned against the side of the cave and watched as another Uriah, incited by her presence just inside the barrier, dove into the flames. Nausea touched even her hardened stomach as she watched the hungry flames engulf it.
“I told you to stay in the library.”
She’d been expecting him, knowing that the situation would mean that she probably wouldn’t hear him. She didn’t jump, didn’t start, just turned to look at him a little faster than strictly necessary. It wouldn’t have mattered except for the low spot in the roof of the cave.
“Ow,” she said with a hiss of indrawn breath, putting her hand to her head where the rock had cut it.
He came out of the shadows and set his staff down—the crystals on the top blazed as soon as its clawed feet touched the ground. She shut her eyes against the light.
With a hand on her chin, Wolf used the other to explore the damaged area despite the fact that she squirmed and batted at his hand. In clipped tones, he said, “It seems like every time I’ve turned my back on you lately, you are getting hurt one way or another.”
To her surprise, he bent down and pressed his cheek against hers. She hadn’t experienced the healing of a green-magic user very often, barring her more recent experience. Generally she hadn’t been in any shape to know exactly what it was that they did, but she knew enough to know that this was very different. This was not purely physical, there was an emotional link, too—a meeting on a more primal level.
It was over before she could analyze it further. Wolf stepped back as if bitten, and she could hear him gasping for breath beneath his mask. She looked at him in wonder—she knew enough about human magic to know that he shouldn’t have been capable of doing what he had just done.
“Wolf,” she said, reaching out to touch him. He backed away, keeping his head away from her and his eyes closed.
“Wolf, what’s wrong?” When he said nothing, she took a step back to give him room.
He flung his head up then, and blazing yellow eyes met hers. When he spoke, it was a whisper that his ruined voice made even more effective. “What am I? I should not be able to heal you. The other things—the shapeshifting, the power I wield—they could be explained away. But magic doesn’t work this way. It doesn’t take over before I can react and do things that I don’t ask of it. I swore that I would never . . . never let anything control me the way my father did. In the end, even he could not eat my will entirely. This . . . does.”
“It was you who healed my eyes.” She wanted to give herself time to think. There was something that she should be grasping, a puzzle solved if she could just figure out how to look at it.
“Yes,” he said.
“Were you trying to, then?”
He forced himself to adopt a relaxed posture, leaning against the wall as he spoke. “If you mean did I try to heal you with a spell, no. I just . . . wanted you to quit hurting.”
She could almost see the effort he made to open up to her, this man who was so private. It was, she thought, maybe the bravest thing she’d ever seen anyone do.
He continued with his eyes on the mouth of the cave where three Uriah—none of whom resembled anyone she knew—stood motionless, watching them.
“I was so tired,” Wolf told her. “I hadn’t slept much since I found that you were gone.” He looked at her. “You were getting worse, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I do not recall what I was thinking, precisely. I had done all that I could for you and knew that it would never be enough and something made me lie beside you and this magic took over.” He clenched his hands in what was very near revulsion.
“Who was your mother? Do you know?” asked Aralorn. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about Cain, the son of the ae’Magi, but none of them ever mentioned his mother.”
Wolf shrugged, and his voice had regained its cool tones when he answered. “I only saw her once, when I was very young, maybe five years old. I remember asking Father who she was, or rather who she had been, for she was quite dead, killed by some experiment of his, I suppose. I don’t remember being particularly worried about her, so I suspect that it was the only time I saw her.”
“Describe her for me,” requested Aralorn in a firm voice that refused to condemn or to sympathize with the boy he had been. He wouldn’t want that. The Uriah weren’t coming in anytime soon, she thought. She folded her legs and sat on the ground—healing or no, her legs had done as much as they were going to for a while, and it was sit down or fall down.
“I was young, I don’t remember much,” Wolf said. “She looked small next to my father, fragile and lovely—like a butterfly. The only time I ever heard him say anything about her was when some noble asked about my mother. He said she was flawlessly beautiful. I think he was right.”
Aralorn nodded, her suspicions confirmed. “I would have been surprised if she had been anything else.”
; He narrowed his gaze.
“Your mother must have been a shapeshifter, or some other green-magic user—but the ‘perfectly beautiful’ sounds a lot like a shapeshifter. That feeling that the magic is taking control of you is fairly common when dealing with green magic because you are dealing with magic shaped by nature first, and only then by magician. You need to learn to work with it so that you can modify it. If you fight it, it will prove stronger than you.”
He stared at her a bit and joined her on the floor without speaking. Maybe his legs wouldn’t hold him up any longer either.
“I suspect,” continued Aralorn, as blandly as she could manage, “if you hadn’t been taught how magic should work, you would have discovered your half-blooded capabilities long since. You were told that you couldn’t heal, so you didn’t try.”
Two of the Uriah stepped forward at the same time. The wards flared, and they burned. Aralorn caught a brief hint of burnt flesh, like cooking pork, then nothing.
“Your theory fits,” said Wolf finally.
“I should have thought about it sooner,” apologized Aralorn. “I mean, I am a half-breed. It’s just that I’ve never met another half-breed. I could tell that you weren’t a shapeshifter, so I just assumed that you were simply an extraordinarily powerful human magician.” She hesitated. “Which you are.”
Wolf gave a half laugh with little humor in it. “It sounds just like an experiment the ae’Magi would try. To a Darranian like him, it would be the ultimate form of bestiality. Just the thing to spark his interest.”
Aralorn leaned over, pulled down his mask, and bussed him on the unscarred mouth with a kiss that was anything but romantic. “You beast, you,” she said, and he made an unpracticed sound that might have been a laugh.
He got to his feet and pulled her to hers, his eyes warmed with relief, humor, and something else. Gripping her shoulders, he kissed her with a passion that left her breathless and shaken. He stepped back and returned the mask to its usual position.
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