Masques s-1 Page 21

  “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.

  “Have you given any more thought to our invisible friend?” she asked, just to goad him. They’d worried and speculated for hours last night. During which time, Wolf had spent ten minutes lecturing her about how real invisibility was a myth, impossible to achieve with magic for a variety of reasons laid out in theories proposed over centuries.

  She wasn’t fishing for answers from him now; she was fishing for a response. Some acknowledgment that he was aware she was in the room.

  He grunted without looking her way and went back into the stacks.

  She might have been more concerned with their invisible—to all intents and purposes, no matter what Wolf maintained—visitor. But whoever it was had made no move against them; quite the contrary, in her opinion. If their visitor had meant mischief, he’d had plenty of opportunity. This was the Northlands, after all, full of all sorts of odd things.

  It was Wolf she worried about.

  He’d never allowed her to get as close as they h
ad been last night. But always, whenever he’d opened up to her, let down the barrier that separated him from her, from everyone, he’d abruptly leave for weeks or months at a time. She thought this morning’s distance might be the start of his withdrawal.

  Having experienced the ae’Magi’s touch firsthand, if only for a brief time compared to whatever he’d gone through, she finally understood some of what caused Wolf to be the way he was. It increased her patience with him—but it didn’t mean she was going to let him pull away again without a fight.

  “Did our apprentice write all of these?” Aralorn made a vague gesture toward the stacks before continuing to put a better edge on her knife.

  Wolf turned to survey the piles. He let the silence build, then growled a brief affirmative before stalking back into the forest of bookcases. It was the first word he’d said to her since she’d woken up.

  Aralorn grinned, sheathed her knife, and levered herself to her feet, still annoyingly weak. Scanning the nearby shelves, she found a book on shapeshifters and wobbled with it to the table, careful not to fall. Wolf had made it clear that he would rather that she stay put on the couch for a couple of days. She had no intention of giving in; but if she fell, there would be no living with him. So she’d save it for desperate measures if he didn’t start talking to her. If she fell deliberately, it wouldn’t be as humiliating.

  She cleared off her chair and space enough to read. Now that the search had been narrowed to books that were likely to be trapped, Wolf had forbidden her to help. Aralorn decided if she couldn’t be useful, at least she could enjoy herself.

  Wolf balanced the books he carried on another stack and eyed her narrowly without meeting her eyes. He took her book and looked at it before handing it back.

  “I thought human mages were supposed to keep their secrets close—not write down every stray thought that comes into their heads.” With a tilt of her head, Aralorn indicated the neat piles of books he’d brought out.

  He followed her gesture and sighed. “Most mages restrict their writings to the intricacies of magic. Iveress fancied himself an expert on everything. There are treatises here on everything from butter-making to glassblowing to governmental philosophy. From the four books of his I’ve already looked through, he is long-winded and brilliant, with the annoying habit of sliding in obscure magic spells in the middle of whatever he was writing when the spell occurred to him.”

  “Better you than me,” said Aralorn, hiding her satisfaction in having gotten him to respond at last.

  She must not have hidden it quite well enough. He stared at her from under his lowered brows. “Only because his books were considered subversive a few centuries back, and mages spelled them to keep them safe. Otherwise, I’d make you help me with this mess.” He took a stride toward the shelves again, then stopped. “I might as well start with what I have.”

  “No use discouraging yourself with an endless task,” she agreed.

  He growled at her without heat.

  She grinned at his familiar grumpiness—much better than silence—and settled in to read. It was fascinating, but not, Aralorn fancied, in the fashion the author meant it to be. In the foreword, the author admitted she had never met a shapeshifter. Regardless, she considered herself an expert. The stories she liked best were the ones that represented shapeshifters as a “powerful, possibly mythic race” whose main hobby seemed to be eating innocent young children who lost themselves in the woods.

  “If I were one of a powerful, possibly mythic race,” muttered Aralorn, “I wouldn’t be bothering with eating children. I’d go after pompous asses who sit around passing judgment on things they know nothing about.”

  “Me, too,” agreed Wolf mildly without looking up. Evidently the reading he was doing was more interesting than hers, because even his grumpiness had faded. “Do you have someone in mind?”

  “She’s been dead for years . . . centuries, I think.”

  “Ah,” he said, turning a page. “I don’t eat things that have been dead too long. Bad for even the wolf’s digestion.”

  She snorted and kept reading. Aralorn learned that shapeshifters could only be killed by silver, garlic, or wolfsbane. “And all this time I’ve been worried about things like arrows, swords, and knives,” she told Wolf. “Silly me. I’d better get rid of my silver-handled dagger—it would kill me to touch the grip.”

  He grunted.

  The author of her book was also under the mistaken impression that shapeshifters could take the shape of only one animal. She devoted a section to horrific tales of shapeshifter wolves, lions, and bears. Mice, Aralorn supposed, were too mundane—and unlikely to eat children.

  She shared bits and pieces of the better wolf tales with Wolf, as he waded through a volume on pig training. He responded by telling her how to train a pig to count, open gates, and fetch. Pigs were also useful for predicting earthquakes. Iveress had helpfully included three spells to start earthquakes.

  Aralorn laughed and returned to her reading. At the end of the book, the author included stories “which my research has proven to be merely folktales” to entertain her readers. After glancing through the first couple, Aralorn decided that the thing that distinguished truth from folktale was whether or not the shapeshifters were evil villains. Most of the tales were ones she’d heard before. Most, but not all.

  She read the final story, then thoughtfully closed the book and glanced curiously around the room. Nothing was moving that shouldn’t be. Wolf had set the pig book aside and was sorting through a pile near his chair.

  “Once long ago, between this time and that, there was a woman cursed by a wizard when she was young, for laughing at his bald head.” She didn’t need to use the book to help her memory, but kept her eyes on Wolf. “She was married, and her first child was born dead. Her husband died in an unfortunate accident while she gave birth to her second, a daughter. When she was three, it became apparent to one and all that the second child bore a curse worse than death—she was an empath. Upon that discovery, her mother killed herself.”

  “A useless thing to do,” murmured Wolf, pulling a book out of the pile and setting it before him. He made no move to open it. “You’d have gone hunting for the wizard.”

  Aralorn raised her eyebrow, and said coolly. “I’m not finished.”

  He smiled and lifted both hands peaceably. “No offense meant, storyteller.”

  “The girl child was taken to a house outside the village and cared for as best the villagers could. Her empathic nature meant that none of them could get too close without causing her pain.”

  “I thought your book was about shapeshifters,” Wolf said, when Aralorn paused too long.

  She nodded. “She grew up and learned to glean herbs from the woods to pay for her keep. When she was sixteen, a passing shapeshifter saw her. He took to following her around in the guise of a crow or squirrel. But whatever shape he took, she knew him.”

  Wolf’s eyes grew reserved. “Indeed?”

  Aralorn frowned at him. “This isn’t about you and me—and you would have found me the first time though if you’d thought about looking for someone who didn’t look like me.”

  He looked away. She decided to ignore him and continued with the story.

  “She knew when he fell in love with her, too. And he was able to guard his touch so she could bear it. When the villagers came to her home, he was her invisible guardian. She loved him and was happy.

  “Once a month, the shapeshifter returned to his village to assure his people that he was well. They were not happy with his choice, and eventually his mother decided to solve the problem herself. She saw to it that a Southern slaver became aware of the girl and took her the next time the shapeshifter left her to visit the shapeshifter village. He returned to find the cottage empty, with the door swinging in the wind.

  “The Trader was wary and, hearing that she had a magical lover, he took her through the Northlands, where no mage could follow. But her lover was no human mage, and he found
them—too late.”

  A moaning sound echoed through the caves. Wolf tilted his head slightly so she knew that he heard as well.

  “When the shapeshifter reached the slavers’ camp,” she continued, “he found nothing left of the would-be slavers except mindless bodies. The girl, terrified and alone, had evoked an empath’s only defense, projecting her terror and pain onto her tormentors. She was alive when the shapeshifter found her, so he took her to a cave, sacred to his kind, where he tried to heal her. The worst of her wounds were of the spirit that even a shapeshifter’s magic may not touch; and though her body was whole, she spoke not a word to him but stared through him, as if he were not there. Not entirely sane from his grief, the shapeshifter swore to keep her alive until he could find a way to heal her soul. And so he lives on, an old, old man tending his beloved from that day until this—and that is the story of the Old Man of the Mountain.”

  The moaning waned to a hesitant sigh that whispered through the library and faded to nothing.

  Wolf raised an eyebrow at her. “I have never heard of a shapeshifter with the power that the Old Man is supposed to have.”

  Aralorn rubbed her cheek thoughtfully, leaving behind a streak of black dust. This was a secret—but she didn’t feel like keeping secrets from Wolf. “The older a shapeshifter is, the more powerful he is. Like human mages, it is not unusual for a shapeshifter to live several hundred years. A really powerful shapeshifter can make himself younger constantly and never grow old. The reason that you don’t see a shapeshifter much older than several hundred years is that they are constantly changing to new and more difficult things. It’s hard to remember that you are supposed to be human when you change into a tree or the wind. An uncle of my mother once told me that sometimes a shapechanger forgets to picture what he is changing himself into, and he changes into nothing. There is no reason why our Old Man of the Mountain couldn’t be several thousand years old rather than just a few hundred. That would make him incredibly powerful.”