Masques (45 page)

She screamed, and his smile widened incongruously, catching her attention.

It wasn’t Wolf’s smile. She knew his smile: It was as rare as green diamonds, not practiced as this was. Fiercely, she denied what she saw.

Under her hot stare, her tormentor’s yellow eyes darkened to blue. When he spoke a second time it was in the ae’Magi’s dulcet tones. “Come, my son, it is time for you to learn more.”

“No.”

Something shifted painfully in Aralorn’s head with rude suddenness and jerked her from the table to somewhere behind the ae’Magi, whose knife pressed against the neck of a pale woman who was too frightened even to moan.

Truth,
thought Aralorn, feeling the rightness in this dream.

The boy stood apart from his father, no longer so young as her earlier vision of him. Already, his face had begun to show signs of matching the Archmage’s, feature for feature—except for his eyes.

“Come,” repeated the ae’Magi. “The death you deal her will be much easier than the one I will give her. It will also be easier for you, Cain.”

“No.” The boy who had been Cain before he was her Wolf spoke softly, without defiance or deference.

The ae’Magi smiled and walked to his son, caressing his face with the hand that still held the bloody knife. Some part of Aralorn tensed as she saw the Archmage’s caressing hand. Bits and pieces of things Wolf had told her coalesced with the sexuality of the ae’Magi’s gesture.

“As you will,” said the sorcerer softly. “I, at least, will enjoy it more.”

Rage suffused her with hatred of a man she knew to be dead. She stepped forward, as if she could alter events long past, and the scene changed again.

The boy stood on the tower parapet, a violent storm raged overhead. He was older now, with a man’s height, though his shoulders were still narrow with youth. Cold rain poured down, and Wolf shivered.

“It’s power, Cain. Don’t you want it?”

Slowly the boy lifted his arms to embrace the storm.

But that taint of wrongness had returned, and Aralorn called upon her magic, girded in the truth of natural order, to pull it right. She had no more magic than the average hedgewitch, but it seemed to be enough for the job. Once more, the scene shifted subtly, as if a farseeing glass were twisted into focus.

“It’s power, Cain. Don’t you want it?”

“It comes too fast, Father. I can’t control it.” Wolf spoke the words without the inflection that would have added urgency to them.

“I will control the magic.” When Wolf appeared unmoved, the ae’Magi’s voice softened to an ugly whisper. “I can assure you, you won’t like the alternative.”

Even in the storm-darkened night, Aralorn could see Wolf’s face blanch, though his expression never altered. “Very well, then.” There was something quiet and purposeful in his voice that Aralorn wondered at. Something that only someone who knew him well would have heard.

Wolf bent his head, and Aralorn was aware of the currents of magic he drew. The Archmage closed his hands on his son’s shoulders; Wolf flinched slightly at the touch, then resumed passing his power on to his father. Lightning flashed, and the magic he held doubled, then trebled in an instant. Slowly, Wolf lifted his arms, and lightning flashed a second time, hitting him squarely in the chest.

He called it to him on purpose, thought Aralorn, stunned. If he had been wholly human, he would have died there, and his father with him. For a green mage, whose blood comes from an older race, lightning contains magic rather than death—but he would have had no way of knowing that. He didn’t know what his mother had been, not then.

For an instant, the two stood utterly still, except for the soundless, formless force Wolf had assembled; then a stone exploded into rubble, followed by another and another. The broken bits of granite began to glow with the heat of wild magic released without control. Aralorn couldn’t tell if Wolf was trying to control the magic at all, though the ae’Magi had stepped back and was gesturing wildly in an attempt to stem the tide. Shadow was banished by the heat of the flames. Aralorn saw Wolf smile . . .

“No!” cried the ae’Magi, as molten rock splattered across Wolf’s face, from a stone that burst in front of him. Wolf screamed, a sound lost in the crack of shattering stone.

The ae’Magi cast a spell, drawing on the very magic that wreaked such havoc.

A warding,
thought Aralorn, as a rock fell from a parapet and bounced off an invisible barrier that surrounded the ae’Magi as he knelt over his unconscious son.

“I will not lose the power. You shall not escape me today.”

The scene faded, and Aralorn found herself back in the corridor, but she was not alone.

The ae’Magi stepped to her, frowning. “How did you . . .” His voice trailed off, and his face twisted in a spasm of an emotion so strong she wasn’t able to tell what it was. “You love him?”

Though his voice wasn’t loud, it cracked and twisted until it was no longer the ae’Magi’s voice. It was familiar, though; Aralorn struggled to remember to whom it belonged. “Who are you?” she asked.

Awake, Aralorn listened to the muffled sounds of the inn. Hearing no urgent footsteps, she decided that she must not have screamed out loud. This was not the kind of place where such a sound would have been dismissed. She sat up to shake off the effects of the nightmare, but the terror of the eerie, hungry emptiness lingered. She might as well get up.

She’d begun having nightmares when Wolf had disappeared a few weeks ago. Nightmares weren’t an unexpected part of being a mercenary, but these had been relentless. Dreams of being trapped in the ae’Magi’s dungeon unable to escape the pain or the voice that asked over and over again, “Where is Cain? Where is my son?” But this dream had been different . . . It had been more than a dream.

She pulled on her clothes. Her acceptance of what she had seen had been born of the peculiar acceptance that was the gift of a dreamer. Awake now, she wondered.

It had felt like truth. If the ae’Magi were still alive, she would have cheerfully attributed it to an attack by him—a little nasty designed to make her doubt Wolf and make his life a little more miserable. An attack that had failed only because she had a little magic of her own to call upon.

But the ae’Magi was dead, and she could think of no one else who would know the intimate details of Wolf’s childhood—things that even she had not known for certain.

It was a dream, she decided as she headed out to the stables. Only a dream.