Wolfsbane Read online

  The innkeeper, whom she found in the kitchen, was a different man from the one she remembered, but the room he led her to was familiar and clean. She closed the door behind him, stripped off her boots and breeches, then climbed between the sweet-smelling sheets. Too tired, too numb, to dread sleeping as she’d learned to do in the past few weeks, she let oblivion take her.

  The dream, when it came, started gently. Aralorn found herself wandering through a corridor in the ae’Magi’s castle. It looked much the same as the last time she had seen it, the night the ae’Magi died.

  The forbidding stairway loomed out of the darkness. Aralorn set her hand to the wall and took the downward steps, though it was so dark that she could barely see where to put her feet. Dread coated the back of her throat like sour honey, and she knew that something terrible awaited her. She took another step down and found herself unexpectedly in a small stone room that smelled of offal and ammonia.

  A woman lay on a wooden table, her face frozen in death. Despite the pallor that clung to her skin and the fine lines of suffering, she was beautiful; her fiery hair seemed out of place in the presence of death. Arcanely etched iron manacles, thicker than the pale wrists they enclosed, had left scars testifying to the years they’d remained in place.

  At the foot of the table stood a raven-haired boy regarding the dead woman. He paid no attention to Aralorn or anything else. His face still had that unformed look of childhood. His yellow eyes were oddly remote as he looked at the body, ancient eyes that revealed his identity to Aralorn.

  Wolf, thought Aralorn. This was her Wolf as a child.

  “She was my mother?” the boy who would be Wolf said at last.

  His voice was unexpected, soft rather than the hoarse rasp that she associated with Wolf.

  “Yes.”

  Aralorn looked for the owner of the second voice, but she couldn’t see him. Only his words echoed in her ears, without inflection or tone. It could have been anyone who spoke. “I thought you might like to see her before I disposed of her.”

  The boy shrugged. “I cannot imagine why you thought that. May I return to my studies now, Father?”

  The vision faded, and Aralorn found herself taking another step down.

  “Even as a child he was cold. Impersonal. Unnatural. Evil,” whispered something out of the darkness of the stairwell.

  Aralorn shook her head, denying the words. She knew better than anyone the emotions Wolf could conceal equally well behind a blank face or the silver mask he usually wore. If anything, he was more emotional than most people. She opened her mouth to argue, when a scream distracted her. She stepped down, toward the sound, into blackness that swallowed her.

  She came to herself naked and cold; her breath rose above her in a puff of mist. She tried to move to conserve her warmth, but iron chains bound her where she was. Cool metal touched her throat, and Wolf pressed the blade down until her flesh parted.

  He smiled sweetly as the knife cut slowly deeper. “Hush now, this won’t hurt.”

  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, if you do as I ask.”

  “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 unti
l 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.

  The figure of the ae’Magi melted away, as did the corridor, fading into an ancient darkness that began to reach for her. She screamed and . . .

  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 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.

  TWO

  The path to Lambshold was all but obscured by the snow, but Aralorn could have followed it blindfolded even though she hadn’t been here in ten years.

  As Sheen crested the final rise, Aralorn sat back in the saddle. Responsively, the stallion tucked his convex nose and slid to a halt. The roan gelding threw up his head indignantly as his lead line pulled him to an equally abrupt stop.

  From the top of the keep, the yellow banner emblazoned with her father’s red lion, which signaled the presence of the lord at the keep, flew at half mast, with a smaller, red flag above.

  Aralorn swallowed and patted Sheen’s thick gray neck. “You’re getting old, love. Maybe I should leave you here for breeding and see if I can talk someone out of a replacement.”

  Sheen’s ear swiveled back to listen to her, and she smiled absently.

  “There’s the tree I found you tied to down there, near the wall.”

  She’d thought she was so clever, sneaking out in the dead of night when no one would stop her. She’d just made it safely over the wall—no mean feat—and there was Sheen, her father’s pride and joy, tied to a tree. She still had the note she’d found in the saddlebags with travel rations and some coins. In her father’s narrow handwriting the short note had informed her that a decent mount was sometimes useful, and that if she didn’t find what she was looking for, she would always be welcome in her father’s home.

  The dark evergreen trees blurred in her sight as Aralorn thought about the last night she’d lived at Lambshold. She swallowed, the grief she’d suppressed through the journey home making itself felt.

  “Father.” She whispered her plea to the quiet woods, but no one answered.

  At last, she urged Sheen forward again, and they walked the perimeter of the wall until they reached the gate.

  “Hullo the gate,” she called briskly.

  “Who?” called a half-familiar voice from the top.

  Aralorn squinted, but the man stood with his back to the sun, throwing his face into shadow.

  “Aralorn, daughter to Henrick, the Lyon of Lambshold,” she answered.

  He gestured, and the gates groaned and protested as they opened, and the iron portcullis was raised. Sheen snorted and started forward without urging, the roan following behind. She glanced around the courtyard, noting the differences a decade had made. The “new” storage sheds were weathered and had multiplied in her absence. Several old buildings were no longer standing. She remembered Lambshold bustling with busy people, but the courtyard was mostly empty of activity.

  “May I take your horses, Lady?”

  The stableman, wise to the ways of warhorses, had approached cautiously.

  Aralorn swung off and removed her saddlebags, throwing them over one shoulder before she turned over the reins for both horses to the groom. “The roan’s a bit skittish.”

  “Thanks, Lady.”

  Not by word or expression did the stableman seem taken aback at a “Lady” dressed in ragged clothes chosen more for their warmth than their looks. By then, both the clothes and Aralorn had acquired a distinct aroma from the journey.

  Knowing the animals would be well cared for, she started toward the keep.

  “Hold a moment, Aralorn.”

  It was the man from the wall. She turned and got a clear look at his face.

  The years had filled out his height and breadth until he was even bigger than their father. His voice had deepened and hoarsened like a man who commanded others in battle, changed just enough that she hadn’t recognized it immediately. Falhart was several years older than she was, the Lyon’s only other illegitimate offspring. It was he who had begun her weapons training—because, as he’d told her at the time, his little sister was a good practice target.

  “Falhart,” she said, her vision blurring as she took a quick step forward.

  Falhart grunted and folded his arms across his chest.

  Hurt, Aralorn stopped and adopted his pose, waiting for him to speak.

  “Ten years is a long time, Aralorn. Is Sianim so far that you could not visit?”

  Aralorn met his eyes. “I wrote nearly every month.” She stopped to clear the defensiveness out of her voice. “I don’t belong here, Hart. Not anymore.”

  His black eyebrows rose to meet his brick red hair. “This is your home—of course you belong here. Irrenna has kept your room just the way you left it, hoping you’d visit. Allyn’s toadflax, you’d think we were Darranians the way you—” He stopped abruptly, having been watching her face closely. His jaw dropped for a moment, then he said in a completely different voice, “That is it, isn’t it? Nevyn got to you. Father said he thought it was something of the sort, but I thought you knew better than to listen to the half-crazed prejudices of a Darranian lordling.”

  Aralorn smiled ruefully, hurt assuaged by the realization that it was anger, not rejection, that had caused his restraint. “It was more complicated than that, but Nevyn is certainly the main reason I haven’t been back.”

  “You’d think that a wizard would be more tolerant,” growled Hart, “and that you would show a little more intelligence.”

  That turned her smile into a grin. “He’s not all that happy about being a wizard—he just didn’t have any choice in the matter.”

  “You could have won him over if you had wanted to, Aralorn.” He had not yet decided to forgive her. “The man’s not as stupid as he acts sometimes.”

  “Maybe,” she conceded. “But, as I said, he wasn’t the only reason I left. I was never cut out to be a Rethian noble-woman, any more than Nevyn could have lived in Darran as a wizard. Sianim is my home now.”

  “Do they know you’re a shapeshifter?” he inquired coolly.

  “No.” She grinned at him. “You know that the only people who would believe such a story are barbarians of the Rethian mountains. Besides, it’s much more useful being a shapeshifter if no one knows about it but me.”

  “Home is where they know all of your secrets, Featherweight, and love you anyway.”

  Aralorn laughed, and the tears that had been threatening since she heard about her father fell at last. When Falhart opened his arms, she took two steps forward and hugged him, kissing his cheek when he bent down. “I missed you, Fuzzhead.”

  He picked her up and hugged her, stiffening when he
looked over her shoulder. He set her down carefully, his eyes trained on whatever he had seen behind her. “That wolf have something to do with you?”

  She turned to see a large, very black wolf crouched several paces behind her. The hair along his spine and the ruff around his neck was raised, his muzzle fixed in an ivory-fanged snarl directed at Falhart.

  “Wolf!” Aralorn exclaimed, surprise making her voice louder than she meant it to be.

  “Wolf!” echoed an archer on the walls, whose gaze was drawn by Aralorn’s unfortunate exclamation. The astonishment in his voice didn’t slow his speed in drawing his bow.

  Lambshold had acquired its name from the fine sheep raised here, making wolves highly unpopular in her father’s keep.

  Aralorn threw herself on top of him, keeping herself between him and the archer, knocking Wolf off his feet in the process.

  “Aralorn!” called Falhart behind her. “Get out of the way.”

  She envisioned the large knife her brother had tucked in his belt sheath.

  “Hart, don’t let them . . . ooff—Damn it, Wolf, stop it, that hurt—don’t let them shoot him.”

  “Hold your arrows! He’s my sister’s pet.” Falhart bellowed. In a much quieter voice, he added, “I think.”

  “Do you hear that, Wolf?” said Aralorn, an involuntary grin pulling at the corners of her mouth. “You’re my pet. Now, don’t forget it.”

  With a lithe twist, Wolf managed to get all four legs under him and threw her to one side, flat on her back. Placing one heavy paw on her shoulder to hold her in place, he began to industriously clean her face.

  “All right, all right, I surrender—ish . . . Wolf, stop it.” She covered her face with her arms. Sometimes he took too much joy in fulfilling his role as a wolf.

  “Aralorn?”

  “Irrenna.” Aralorn turned to look up at the woman who approached. Wolf stepped aside, letting Aralorn get to her feet to greet her father’s wife.