Masques (31 page)

It was the sound of voices that woke her the second time, a few minutes later, much more alert. The nausea that was the usual companion to beggersblessing use had dissipated.

She noticed that she was in the library, covered with a brightly colored quilt. A familiar cloak, Wolf’s, lay carelessly tossed over the back of the sofa. Men’s voices were approaching.

She wondered how she’d slept through the trip to camp—because he’d said that he couldn’t have brought the merchant all the way here.

She started to sit up, only to realize that the clothing scattered on the floor was what she had been wearing. Hastily, she pulled the blankets up to her neck to protect her dignity just as Myr came around a bookcase.

“So,” said Myr with a wide smile, “I see that you’re more or less intact after your experience with the ae’Magi’s hospitality. I must say, though, that it will be a long time before I loan you any of my clothes again. I didn’t bring many with me.” The pleasure and relief in his voice was real, and she was surprised and not a little flattered that he cared so much about someone he’d known such a short time.

Aralorn smiled back at him and started to say something, but noticed that Wolf, who had followed Myr, was focusing intently on her hands. She followed his gaze to where her hands gripped the top of the blanket. Ten healthy nails dug into the cloth. The beggersblessing had left her wits begging, too; she hadn’t even noticed that she didn’t hurt at all.

Aralorn answered Myr absently. “Yes. Though he wasn’t the best of hosts. I only saw him once or twice the whole time I was there.”

Myr perched on the end of the sofa near Aralorn’s feet and looked, for once, as young as he was. “And he prides himself on his treatment of guests,” he said with a mournful shake of his head. “It doesn’t even look like he left you any mementoes.”

“Well,” said Aralorn, looking at her hands again, very conscious of Wolf’s doing the same thing. “You know he did, but I seem to have lost them. The last time I looked, my hands were missing the fingernails.”

“How is your breathing?” asked Wolf.

Aralorn took a deep breath. “Fine. Is this your healer’s work?” She wouldn’t have asked, would have assumed that it had been Wolf, but he was looking particularly blank.

Wolf shook his head. “No, I told you that he was not experienced enough to do more than he did.”

Wolf glanced at Myr. “I saw a few new people here, are any of them healers?”

“No,” replied Myr, disgust rich in his voice. “Nor are they hunters, tanners, or cooks. We have six more children, two nobles, and a bard. The only one who is of any help is the bard, who is passably good with his knives. The two nobles sit around watching everyone else work or decide to wander out in the main cave system so that a search party has to be sent after them.”

“You might try just letting them wander next time,” commented Wolf, whose attention was back on Aralorn’s healed hands.

Myr smiled. “Now there’s an idea.” Then he sighed. “No, it wouldn’t work. With my luck, they’d run into the dragon and lead it back here.”

“Dragon?” asked Aralorn in a startled tone, almost dropping her blanket.

“Or something that looks an awful lot like one. It’s been seen by two or three of the hunting parties although it hasn’t seen them, yet,” replied Myr.

Dragons were even more interesting than her healed hands. She remembered something. “That day I went out”—she glanced at Wolf and away again, not wanting to set him off—“I found some tracks. Tracks of something big. It was about six miles away and traveling fast. Where have you sighted it?”

“East and north, never closer than ten miles. Do you know anything about dragons? Something along the lines of whether or not they eat people would be helpful,” asked Myr in a hopeful tone, sitting down on one arm of the couch. “Some of my people are inclined to panic.”

“’Fraid not,” she answered. “The only ones that I’ve heard of are in stories. They do eat people in stories, but for some reason, they seem to confine themselves to virgins chained to rocks. Since I haven’t heard of anyplace nearby where there is a steady supply of virgins chained to rocks, I would suppose that it is a safe bet that this one has differing dietary requirements.” She nodded at Wolf. “Why don’t you ask the magical expert around here?”

Wolf shrugged. “The closest that I’ve ever gotten to one was the one asleep in the cave underneath the ae’Magi’s castle. Since it had been asleep for several centuries, I didn’t learn much. I thought, though, that it was supposed to be the last of its kind—the reason that it was ensorcelled rather than killed.”

“Well,” said Myr, with a lifted eyebrow, “if this creature isn’t a dragon, then it is closely related.”

“Wyverns are supposed to resemble dragons,” Aralorn suggested. “Smaller, dumpy dragons.”

“Wyvern or dragon, I’m not too sure that I’m comfortable with its being so close,” Myr said.

“Maybe it’ll eat the nobles that are giving you such a bad time,” suggested Aralorn. “You might try chaining them to a rock.”

She found that she was starting to get tired, so she leaned back against a cushion and closed her eyes. She didn’t sleep but drifted quietly, listening to the other two talk. She found it comforting. There was something she wanted to ask. She sat up abruptly when she remembered what it was.

“Astrid,” she said, interrupting them in the middle of a discussion on the best method of drying meat—something neither of them seemed to be too sure of—“did someone find her?”

“Yes,” said Wolf.

“The Uriah got her,” answered Myr at the same time.

Aralorn swallowed, and in a hoarse voice not at all like her own she asked, “Will she . . . ?”

“Will she what?” asked Myr.

Aralorn watched her hand as it traced patterns in the quilt, and asked in a low voice, “Will she become one of them now?”

Myr started as if to say something, but held back, wanting to hear Wolf’s answer first.

“No,” answered the ae’Magi’s son, “there is a ritual that must be followed to turn men into Uriah. She was simply eaten.”

Myr looked at him sharply.

“I’d always heard that they were the creation of some long-forgotten magician who left them to infest the Eastern Swamp,” Aralorn said. “Maybe protecting something hidden there, long forgotten. I assumed that the ae’Magi just found some way of controlling them.”

“He found out how to control them, yes. He also found out how to make them—it was in the same book”—Wolf reached casually to a shelf near Myr’s head and pulled out a thin, ratty volume—“this book, as a matter of fact. His version has only the first half of the book.”

Myr said, “That’s why you spelled the graves of the two people Edom killed.”

Wolf nodded, replacing the book on the shelf. “The runes that Aralorn traced over the bodies, and the fact that Edom hadn’t completed the ritual—the heart must be consumed—should ensure that they rest quietly. I just didn’t want to take chances.”

“Talor was one of them,” Aralorn told Wolf. “I was starting to head back to camp that day when I heard Talor’s signal.”

“He always was a little off pitch,” said Wolf.

“I thought that he was caught by the Uriah and needed help.” Her agitated hands gripped the quilt with white knuckles although her voice was calm. “I guess that was more or less the case, but there was no way that I could help him.”

There had been more than just Talor, she realized. She hadn’t even noticed at the time—or she’d been too dazed from the blow to the head to realize what she had been seeing: the features of friends in the faces of the Uriah.

A sharp sting on her cheek brought her back shaking and gasping. Wolf sat on the couch beside her, and she buried her head against his shoulder and shuddered dry-eyed, grateful for the firm arms wrapped around her back.

“He knew me, too,” she whispered. “It was still Talor, but he was one of
them
. He talked to me, sounded just like himself—but he looked at me like a farmer looks at dinner after a hard day’s work. I didn’t even know that Uriah could talk.”

Then, with difficulty, because she didn’t have much practice, she cried.

Myr took Wolf’s cloak and covered her back where the quilt left her exposed. He touched her hair a little awkwardly, and said quietly to Wolf, “She won’t appreciate my presence when she recovers. I’ll tell the others that she’s well. Stanis has been blaming himself for her capture—he won’t eat. It will be a weight off his back to find out that she’s been rescued and is here unhurt.”

Wolf nodded and watched him go. He rocked Aralorn gently and whispered soft reassurances. He was concentrating on her so that the voice took him by surprise.

“Tell her to stop that.”

Wolf brought his head up, alarmed at the strange voice. It was heavily accented and firmly masculine if a bit fussy. It also didn’t seem to come from anywhere, or rather there was no one where the voice came from.

“Tell her to stop that, I said. She’s driven my Lys away, and I simply won’t abide that. I have allowed her here because Lys likes her—but now she’s made Lys go away by thinking of all of those bad things. Tell her to stop it, or I will have to ask her to leave no matter what Lys says.” The voice lost a little of its firmness and became sulky.

The sound of someone else in the room distracted Aralorn, and she pushed herself up away from Wolf’s chest. Reaching down, she grabbed her tunic off the floor and used it to wipe her nose and eyes.

She, too, looked at the conspicuously empty space at the end of the sofa near her feet. Magical invisibility consisted of blending into shadows and turning eyes away rather than absolute invisibility; when someone actively
looked
, the invisible person could be seen. Wolf knew what she was doing—but there was nothing at the end of the sofa.

“Can you see him?” she asked Wolf.

When he shook his head, she directed her questioning to the man who wasn’t there. “Who are you?”

“That’s better,” said the voice, and there was a distinct pop of air that accompanies teleportation.

That pop made Wolf confident enough to say, “He’s gone.”

“What do you think?” asked Aralorn, settling back onto Wolf, her voice husky from crying. “Was that our friend who gives us a hand with the books and healed me?”

“I can’t imagine that there is an endless supply of invisible people here.”

Wolf knew he should be more concerned, but he’d suddenly become aware that Aralorn was naked under the quilt. It hadn’t bothered him before, when she’d been upset.

He started to shift her off him, with the end goal of getting as much distance on his side as possible. But as soon as his hands touched her hip—on top of the blanket—they wanted to pull her toward him, not push her away.

Self-absorbed, he only caught the tail end of Aralorn’s question. “Say that again?” he asked.

“I asked how long you left me alone in the library.”

“Not more than fifteen minutes. Less probably.”

She made a sound of amazement. “I’ve never heard of anyone who could heal that fast. No wonder I feel like a month-old babe; by all rights I should be comatose now.”

“Powerful,” Wolf agreed.

Aralorn nodded. “It was odd in a voice that young, but he sounded a bit querulous, maybe even senile.” She closed her eyes, and he couldn’t make himself shove her away. More asleep than awake, she murmured with a touch of her unquenchable curiosity, “I wonder who Lys is.”

When Wolf made no attempt to add to or answer her question, she drifted off to sleep.

Wolf cradled her protectively against him. He thought about shapeshifters, children, and refugees who unerringly found their way to Myr’s camp. And he remembered the ae’Magi’s half-mad son who wandered into these caves to find solace one night, led by a small gray fox with ageless sea-green eyes.

NINE

From her station on the couch, Aralorn watched Wolf deposit another armload of books on the floor beside the worktable. The table, her chair, and most of the floor space were similarly adorned. He’d been silently moving books since she woke up, even less communicative than usual. He wasn’t wearing his mask, but he might as well have been for all she could read on his face.