Masques (29 page)

“No,” said Wolf, and the hint of a smile played around his mouth—more importantly, he no longer looked like he’d rather be anywhere than there. “I forgot.” He waved a hand in the general direction of his face. “The scars are legitimate. I acquired them as I told you. It wasn’t until I left there . . .” Left his father, she thought. “I realized that I could get rid of them the same way that I could take wolf shape. But for a long time, it didn’t matter because I was the wolf. When I decided to act against him instead of continuing to run—all things considered, I preferred to keep the scars.”

Aralorn certainly understood why that would be. “So why change now?”

“When I got you out of the dungeon, it was necessary to appear to be the ae’Magi in order to get past the guards. I was . . . I forgot to resume the scars, the mask.” He sat beside her. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

With an expression that didn’t quite make it to being the smile she intended, Aralorn told him, “When I die of heart failure the next time you frighten me like that, you can put that on my gravestone—‘I didn’t mean to startle her.’”

As she talked, she looked at him carefully. Seeing things that hadn’t been apparent at first. His face was without the laugh lines around the eyes and mouth that characterized the ae’Magi’s. There was no gray in the black hair, but the expression in his eyes made him look much older than his father had. Wolf eyes, Wolf’s eyes they were—with a hunter’s cold, amoral gaze.

“So why didn’t I know that Cain was scarred?” she asked him.

“My father kept them hidden.”

“Does Myr know who you are?” She found that was important to her—which told her that she’d never given up Reth, being Rethian, the way she’d given up Sianim. Myr was her king, and she wouldn’t have him lied to.

He nodded. “I told him before I offered my assistance. It was only fair that he knew what he was getting into. And with whom.”

There was a slight pause, then Aralorn said, “The ae’Magi asked me about you, about Cain.” That much she could remember.

“Did he?” Wolf raised an eyebrow, but he wasn’t as calm as he appeared. If he had been in his wolf shape, the hairs along his spine would have been raised: She recognized that soft tone of voice. “What did you say?”

Aralorn raised her eyebrow in return. “I told him that you were dead.”

“Did he believe you?” he asked.

She shrugged and started to tug discreetly at the heap of blankets that intermingled with her feet. “At the time he did, but since you chose to rescue me, he’ll probably come to the conclusion that I lied to him.”

“Let’s get you into a more comfortable position”—he indicated her troublesome hobble with a careless hand—“and back under the covers with you before you catch your death, shall we?” His voice was a wicked imitation of one of the healers at Sianim.

Even as he untangled her and restored her makeshift bed to its previous order, she could feel an imp of a headache coming on. “Wolf,” she said softly, catching his hand and stilling it, “don’t use the scars. You are not the ae’Magi—you don’t have to prove it.”

He tapped her on the nose and shook his head with mock despair. “Did anyone ever tell you that you are overbearing, Lady?” That “Lady” told her that things were all right between the two of them.

That knowledge meant that the crisis was over, and she was suddenly exhausted. He resumed his efforts and tucked a pillow behind her head.

“Where are we, and how long have we been here?” It was an effort to keep her eyes open any longer, and her voice slurred as she finished the sentence, ending in a racking cough. As she hacked and gasped for breath, he lifted her upright. She didn’t notice that it helped any, but the feel of his arms around her was pleasant.

The hazy thought occurred to her that the greater part of the reason she’d left Reth to go to Sianim in the first place was to get away from the feeling of being protected. Now she was grateful for it. She didn’t think that he’d notice that the last few coughs were suppressed sounds of self-directed amusement.

“We’re about a day’s brisk walk away from the Master Magician’s castle. We’ve been here for three days. As soon as you wake up, we’ll start on our way.”

He said something more, she thought, but she couldn’t be bothered to stay awake for it.

He bent down and whispered it again. This time she heard it. “Sleep. I have you safe.”

The next time Aralorn regained consciousness, she was ruthlessly fed and dressed in a tunic and trousers she recognized as her own before she had a chance to do any more than open her eyes. She was propped up with brisk efficiency beside a tree and told to “stay there.” Wolf then piled all of the blankets, clothes, and utensils together and sent them on their way with a brisk wave of his staff.

“Where did you get my clothes?” Aralorn asked with idle curiosity from where she sat leaning against a tree. Her tree.

“From Sianim, where you left them.” With efficient motions, he was cleaning the area they had occupied until only the remains of the fire would give any indication that someone had camped there.

She’d known that. Had just needed him to admit it to her.

She raised an eyebrow at him, crossed her arms over her chest, and said in a deceptively mild tone, “You mean the whole time that I was all but bursting out of the innkeeper’s son’s clothes, wearing blisters on my feet with his boots—you could have gotten mine for me?”

He grunted without looking at her, but she could see a hint of a smile in his flawless profile. He was, she decided, without it soothing her ire in the least, more beautiful than his sire.

“I asked you a question,” she said in a dangerously soft tone she’d learned from him.

“I was waiting for the tunic seams to finally give way . . .” He paused to dodge the handful of grass she threw at him, then shrugged. “I am sorry, Lady. It just never occurred to me.”

Aralorn tried to look stern, but the effort turned into a laugh.

Wolf brushed the grass from his shoulders and went back to packing. Aralorn leaned back against her tree and watched him as he worked, trying to get used to the face he now wore.

In an odd sort of way, he looked more like his father than his father did. The ae’Magi’s face was touched with innocence and compassion. Wolf’s visage had neither. His was the face of man who could do anything, and had.

“Can you ride?” he asked, calling her back from her thoughts.

Aralorn considered the state of her body. Everything functioned—sort of, anyway. Riding was certainly better than any alternative she could think of. She nodded. “If we don’t go any faster than a walk. I don’t think that I could sit a trot for very long.”

He nodded and said three or four brisk words in a language she didn’t know. He didn’t bother with the theatrics in front of her. The air merely shimmered around him strangely. Not unpleasant—just difficult to look at, much nicer than when she changed shape. The black horse who had replaced Wolf snorted at her, then shook himself as if he were wet. His eyes were as black as his hide, and she found herself wishing he’d kept his own eyes no matter how odd it would have seemed for a horse to have yellow eyes.

She stood up stiffly, trying not to stagger—or start coughing again. When she could, she walked shakily up to him, grateful to reach the support of his neck.

Unfortunately, although Wolf-as-a-Horse wasn’t as massive as Sheen, he was as tall, and she couldn’t climb up. After her third attempt, he knelt in the dust so that she could slip onto his back.

He took them down an old trail that had fallen into disuse. The only tracks on it were from the local wildlife. The woods around them were too dense to allow easy travel, but Wolf appeared to know them—when the trail disappeared into a lush meadow, he picked it up again on the other side without having to take a step to the left or right. Wolf’s gaits, she found, were much smoother than Sheen’s; but the motion still hurt her ribs.

To distract herself when it started to get unbearable, she thought up a question almost at random. “Where did you find a healer?”

A green magic-user would never be anywhere near the ae’Magi’s castle. Other than her, she supposed, but she was no healer—green magic or not.

Speaking had been a mistake. The dust of the road set her coughing. He stopped, turning his head so he could watch her out of one dark eye.

When she could talk again she met his gaze and didn’t like the worry in it. She was fine. “You got rooked if you paid very much; any healer worth his fee would have taken care of the ribs and cough, too.”

Wolf twitched his ears and said in an odd tone, even for him, “He didn’t have enough time to do much. Even if there had been the time, I wouldn’t have trusted him to do more than what was absolutely necessary—he . . . didn’t have the training.”

Aralorn had an inkling that she should be paying more attention to the way he phrased his explanation, but she was in too much misery between her ribs and her cough to do much more than feel sorry for herself.

Then she had it. The conviction when she’d first heard his voice after waking alone in the little camp he’d set up. Of course Wolf had gotten her out and fixed her eyes so she could see.

But Wolf was a human mage. Son of the ae’Magi. And human mages might be okay at some aspects of healing—like putting broken bones together. But no human mage could have dealt with what had been done to her eyes.

Wolf kept to a walk, trying to make the ride as smooth as possible for her. He could discern that she was in a lot of pain by the way her hands shook in his mane when she coughed, but she made light of it when he questioned her. As the day progressed, she leaned wearily against his neck and coughed more often.

Worse, after that one, brief conversation, she’d quit talking. Aralorn always talked.

He continued until he could stand it no more, then he called a halt at a likely camping area, far from the main thoroughfares and out of sight of the trail they’d been following. As soon as he stopped, before he could kneel to make things easier, Aralorn slid off him, then kept sliding until her rump hit the ground. She waved off his concern, breathing through her nose, her mouth pinched.

Wolf regained his human form, then turned his attention to making a cushion of evergreen boughs and covering the result with the blankets, keeping a weather eye on his charge. By the time he finished, Aralorn was on her feet again—though, he thought, not for long.

“I’m moving like an old woman,” she complained, walking toward the bed he’d made. “All I need is a cane.”

She let him help her lie down and was asleep, he judged, before her eyes had a chance to close.

While Aralorn slept, Wolf stood watch.

The night was peaceful, she thought, except for when she was coughing. It got so bad toward the morning that she finally gave up resting and stood up. When she would have reached for the blankets to start folding them, Wolf set her firmly down on the ground with a growl that would have done credit to his wolf form and finished erasing all traces of their presence.