Masques (34 page)

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.

“We’d better get back and tell Myr he can relax. It doesn’t appear that the Old Man is going to welcome the Uriah into his cave anytime in the near future,” he said, offering her his arm to lean on.

“You think those are his wards?” she asked.

“Someone has powered them up since I looked at them last. It wasn’t me and no one else here has the skill or the power.”

She caught her breath, smiled, and tucked her arm through his. “Do we tell the whole camp that we are being protected by the Old Man of the Mountain?”

“It might be the best thing, even if it scares a few of them silly. I have the feeling that we shouldn’t push his hospitality by wandering around too much. The best way to see that it doesn’t happen is to tell them the whole truth—if they’ll believe it.” Wolf slid though a narrow passage with his usual grace, towing Aralorn beside him.

“We are dealing with people who have some minor magic capabilities; are following a dethroned king who just barely received his coming-of-age spurs; who number among their acquaintances not just one half-breed shapeshifter, but two half-breed shapeshifters—one of whom, incidentally, wears a silly mask. We could tell them that we were in the den of the old gods and that Faris, Empress of the Dead, conceived a sudden passion for Myr and it probably wouldn’t faze them,” Aralorn told him.

Wolf laughed, and Aralorn pulled him to a halt. “Wait. Did you say that the ae’Magi is Darranian?”

“Peasant stock,” he confirmed. “Apparently his master was very surprised to find a magician who was Darranian—used to tell jokes about his Darranian apprentice. My father smiled when he talked about how he killed his teacher.”

“Not the first Darranian mage,” Aralorn said.

Wolf grunted and started to walk.

Aralorn let her hand drop and followed thoughtfully.

Wolf was first in the tunnel that opened into the main chamber. He hissed and jumped back, narrowly avoiding Myr’s sword.

“Sorry,” said Myr. “I thought that you were one of the Uriah. You should have said something before you came in. Did you find out why the Uriah aren’t coming in?”

“Is there a reason the King of Reth is guarding the doorway instead of someone more expendable?” asked Wolf.

“Best swordsman,” said Myr. “Are you going to answer me?”

“Let’s do this where everyone can hear,” Aralorn said, continuing on so she could do just that. “The Uriah aren’t going to be coming in here.”

She stepped out into the main cave and saw that most of them had heard her last remark. “Our guardian of the cave doesn’t want them in.” She was in her element, with a captive audience and a story to tell. She projected her voice and told them the story about the origin of the Old Man of the Mountain and finished with the barrier that was keeping the Uriah out.

She made the tale sound as if it were part of shapeshifter history, Wolf decided, rather than a forgotten story in an obscure book. Usually, she did it the other way around—turning an unexciting bit of history into high adventure. He hadn’t realized that she could do it backward.

As she had predicted, the refugees seemed reassured by her story, not questioning just how far the Old Man’s benign stance would continue. Right then, they wanted a miracle, and Aralorn was giving one to them.

Responding to Wolf’s look, Myr joined him just outside the cave, leaving Aralorn to her work.

“We may be locked in here for some time,” Wolf informed Myr. “They might not be coming in, but there is no way to determine how long they are going to howl at our door. Do we have enough food to last us a week or so?” He should have been paying attention, but it was an effort to remember that he was supposed to care about these people. He was trying to be . . . something other than what he was. Someone Aralorn could be proud of. When she’d been hurt, he’d lost all interest in the extraneous details.

Myr shrugged. “We have enough grain stored to last us into next summer, feeding animals and people. We’re short on meat, which is why I sent out the hunters this morning. They came back with Uriah instead of deer. For a week or two, we can do without. If it turns into a month we can always slaughter a goat or sheep to feed ourselves. Our real problems are going to be morale and sanitation.”

Wolf nodded. “We’ll have to deal with morale as it comes. I might be able to do something about the sanitation, though. The blocked-off tunnel where you’re storing grain leads to a cave with a pit deep enough that you can throw a rock into it and not hear it hit bottom. It’s fairly narrow, so you should be able to put some sort of structure over it to keep people from falling into it.” Solving logistic problems helped center him.

“That should relieve Aralorn,” commented Myr, a smile lighting his tired face for the first time since he’d heard the Uriah. “She was really worried that before this was all over, she’d be pressed into digging latrines.”

Myr laughed wearily and pushed his hair out of his face. “I should have asked this right away. Is it possible that the Uriah can find their way in here through another entrance?”

“Maybe,” answered Wolf, starting to head toward Aralorn, who was swaying wearily as she finished her story. “The Old Man has been here a lot longer than we have. If this entrance is protected, I suspect that all of them are.”

Outside, the Uriah quieted and sank to their knees as a rider came into view. His horse was lathered and sweating, showing the whites of its eyes in fear of the Uriah. But it had learned to trust its rider, and Lord Kisrah was careful to keep the Uriah motionless with the spells of control that the ae’Magi had taught him.

He dismounted at the entrance to the cave. He could see the runes just inside the entrance, but he couldn’t touch them to alter their power.

In the air, he sketched a symbol that glowed faintly yellow and passed easily through the entrance. The symbol touched a rune and fizzled as a man walked into the cave and approached the mouth.

“You are not welcome, leave this place,” he said. In the light, the man was almost inhumanly beautiful, and Lord Kisrah caught his breath in admiration. Abruptly, the mouth filled with flames, the heat uncomfortably harsh on his face.

Kisrah backed up and tried to push the flames down again, with no effect. The third time he tried it, the Uriah began stirring as his hold on them weakened. With a curse he desisted. He led the horse back through the Uriah until he had some space.

“You will stay here until the ae’Magi releases you,” he ordered briskly. “If someone comes out of the cave, you will not harm them. Take them prisoner—you know how to contact me if that happens.” He mounted the horse and let it choose its own speed away from the Uriah.

“Thank you, Lord Kisrah. I am sure that you did your best with the warding—but the old runes are tricky at best, and in the Northlands, they could easily be the work of one of the races that use green magic.” The ae’Magi smiled graciously.

Lord Kisrah looked only a little less miserable in his seat in the ae’Magi’s study. “I got a look at some of the runes there, and I’ll look them up and see what can be done about them. The magician had no trouble with my magic, though. He’s more worrisome than the runes.”