Masques (16 page)

“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.”

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.”