Masques (24 page)

She had little talent as a mindspeaker, but she sent a distress cry on a thread of magic to Wolf or any gods who happened to be listening anyway. Then she bit her lip and grimly hacked away.

Her arms were numb by the time that it dawned on her what was going on. She timed her strokes to the refrain in her head:
stupid, stupid, silly bitch
.

They could have killed her anytime they wanted to, but they didn’t want to. They were trying to capture her to take back to the ae’Magi for questioning. The thought of that redoubled her efforts. If she could win herself enough space, she could draw her knife and eliminate the chance of being questioned by the ae’Magi again. Her sword, although shorter than normal, was still too awkward to kill herself with before they stopped her.

She spun around, slicing a creature open across the belly when she heard some disturbance behind her, more a lack of attackers than a noise. She caught a quick glimpse of Talor’s face before she struck. Frantically, she avoided hitting him by a narrow margin, leaving her sword in an awkward place for defense. But that was all right, because it was Talor.

She blinked sweat out of her eyes. Something was wrong with him. Bile rose in her throat as she brought the sword back up again, but before she could strike she was caught from behind and held helpless.

What happened next was enough to top her worst nightmares. Talor smiled—and it was Talor despite the rotting flesh—and it said in Talor’s teasing voice, “I told you to always follow through on your strokes, or you would never make a swordmaster.”

She thought that she screamed then, but it might have been just the sound of a Uriah lucky enough to feast on the horse.

SEVEN

The wolf leapt neatly over the small stream that hadn’t been there the week before, and landed in the soft mud on the other side. The moon’s light revealed other evidence of the recent storm—branches bent and broken from the weight of a heavy snowfall, long grass lying flattened on the ground. The air smelled sweet and clean, washed free of heavy scents.

Knowing that the camp was near, Wolf increased his speed to a swift lope despite his tiredness. He reached the edge of the valley and found it barren of people. He felt no alarm. Even if the storm hadn’t driven them to the caves, the meltwater from the heavy snow that turned most of the valley bottom to marsh would have.

With a snort, he started down the valley side nearest where he had made his private camp. He decided to stop there and get his things before going on to the caves. Aralorn’s bedroll was gone, but his was neatly folded and dry under its oilcloth cover.

He muttered a few words that he wouldn’t have employed had there been anyone to hear and took on his human form. Wearily, he stretched, more than half-inclined to stay where he was for the night and join the others in the morning.

He’d always been solitary. As a boy and while an apprentice, he’d spent time alone as often as he could manage. He had become adept at finding places where no one would look.

When he left his apprenticeship behind him, he’d taken wolf shape and run into the wilds of the Northlands, escaping from himself more than the ae’Magi. He had avoided contact with people at all costs. People made him uncomfortable, and he frightened them—even Myr, though that one hid it better than most. He had a grudging respect for the Rethian king but nothing that approached friendship.

For Wolf, the only person who mattered was Aralorn.

Absently, Wolf moved his bedroll with the toe of his boot. He made a sound that was not humorous enough to be a laugh. He’d been running away from and back to Aralorn for a long time. She had caught him in a spell, and he hadn’t even known that she was weaving one.

Four years ago, he’d told himself that he followed her because he was bored and tired of hiding. Maybe it had even been true at first. She was always
doing
something. But then he’d heard her laugh. Until then, laughter had never made Wolf feel anything but repulsed (the ae’Magi laughed so easily).

He needed to see her.

Needing someone made him
very
uncomfortable. He didn’t remember ever needing anyone before, and he hated the vulnerability of it almost as much as he . . . as he loved her.

It wasn’t until he’d found out that Aralorn was spying on the ae’Magi that he knew how much she meant to him. Even the thought of her there made him shake with remembered rage and fear.

He wasn’t quite certain when his interest had turned to need. He needed her to let him laugh, to be human and not a flawed creation of the ae’Magi. He needed her trust so that he could trust himself. Most of all, he needed her touch. Even more than laughter—he associated touch with the ae’Magi—a warm hand on his shoulder (cut it so, child), an affectionate hug (it won’t hurt so much next time . . .).

Aralorn was a tactile person, too, but her touch didn’t lie. It still made him uncomfortable to feel her hands on him, but he craved it anyway. He picked up the bedroll and went down into the valley since it was the shortest way to the caves. When he arrived at the valley floor, even his dulled human nose caught the scent.

Uriah.

Not panicking, he took a good look around him and noticed the signs of hasty packing as well as the fact that the tents (including the one that Myr had worked so hard to get finished) had been torn into pieces by something other than the wind. He also noticed that there were no obvious bones.

He walked briskly though the camp to get a closer look. Here the scent was stronger, and everywhere were signs of anger vented on inanimate objects. That was good, he assured himself. Anger meant they had missed their prey.

There was a small bone—chicken. Haris would be unhappy about that. Human bones were conspicuously absent, and he felt a faint sense of relief. Myr must have had enough warning to get the camp into the caves. As long as the Uriah hadn’t been within sight when the people entered the caves, the wards would keep the entrances hidden from them.

Wolf had started once more for the caves when he saw something white in the drying mud: a horse’s skeleton. Too small to be Sheen.

It was picked clean, with only a wisp of mane to distinguish it. The leg bones had been cracked so that all the marrow could be sucked out. It wasn’t until he noticed the distinctive patterns on the silver bit that lay nearby that he knew that Aralorn had been riding the horse.

He found another pile of bones, also picked clean, fifteen or twenty paces away. They all had the peculiar twists of the Uriah. He found several skulls—she’d accounted for three of them. He had hoped that he would find her among the dead—something inside him howled with mocking laughter at the thought. But dead would be . . .

He could have followed her there easily.

He left his bedroll forgotten among the ruins of the camp and took wolf shape to run toward the caves because it was faster. On the way there he found the pitiful remains of a small child—a dirty battered doll lay nearby. Astrid—he remembered the doll. He knew then why Aralorn had confronted the Uriah.

Rage sang in his blood. He restrained it with a pale sense of hope that Myr would know something to help his search. If he let the rage take him, there was no telling who would die. If everyone was dead, he reminded himself, no one could tell him if a search had been made. And Aralorn wouldn’t want him to kill her friends.

He planned quickly as he ran so that he wouldn’t think too much about the wrong things. He was conscious of a numbness that crept over him, covering hot rage with a thin coating of ice.

The furious arguments were audible even before he entered the darkness of the cave.

“Silence!” Myr’s voice cracked with tiredness but its power was still enough that it stopped the bickering. “There is nothing that we can do. Aralorn and Astrid are gone. I will not send out parties to be picked off two at a time by the Uriah. We will wait here until I am satisfied that they are gone. Even if Aralorn and Astrid were still alive, even if our whole party went down to the camp and found them prisoners of the Uriah, it wouldn’t matter. We could not take them. A hundred, she said, and she didn’t strike me as a person who exaggerated.”

Only in her stories,
Wolf thought.
Not when it mattered.

He stopped in the shadows of the entrance to one of the great caverns. Myr stood in front of him, facing the main room so that Wolf had a clear view of his profile. The light from the torch revealed the tired lines of his face. “It wouldn’t matter because twenty Uriah could destroy all of us, however we were armed. They would kill us, and we’d be lucky if we killed ten of them. Aralorn knew that when she went out looking for Astrid. She stood a better chance than any of us because she has dealt with them before. Had I known what she was doing, I would have stopped her, but I didn’t. I will, however, stop any of you who try to leave now. When the sun comes up, I will look.”

“Afraid of the dark, princeling?” A swarthy man stepped out of the crowd. His face was unfamiliar, so he must have arrived after Wolf left. He was an aristocrat, from his clothes—less impressed with the king than the peasants were.

Wolf spoke then from the darkness of the entryway, almost not recognizing his own voice. “As you should be,” he said. “If I were he, I would send you out on your own to find out what happens to fools in the dark.”

Wolf stepped to the left of Myr, clearly revealing himself in the light of Myr’s torch. When he was sure that all eyes were upon him, he took his human form with all the theatrics that even the ae’Magi could have used. Masked and cloaked, he stood with a hand on his glowing staff that made Myr’s torch look like a candle.

“As it happens, though, it is unnecessary for anyone to go out. Astrid is dead.” Wolf pitched his voice so that it carried to everyone in the room without echoing. “I found her remains as well as those of the horse that Aralorn was riding. I found no trace of Aralorn’s body. I suspect that she is a prisoner of the ae’Magi.”

He had to quit speaking after those words left his throat. From the reaction of the people facing him, he could tell that they hadn’t realized that this attack, too, had been engineered by the ae’Magi. He couldn’t work up the effort to care. As long as the ae’Magi didn’t know that Wolf was here helping Myr and as long as he didn’t know what Aralorn was to him, the Archmage probably wouldn’t torture Aralorn himself—he wouldn’t consider any information she had to be vital. She had to be important enough that he didn’t just kill her for the power he might gain, but not so important that he concentrated on her himself. That would buy Wolf time. It would keep her alive for him to find. It all rested upon how independent Edom had been.

The ae’Magi tended to give his tools more autonomy because he could trust that they had his best interests at heart. So Wolf would believe that he had time to find Aralorn. He had to believe he had time.

Wolf continued in a voice that sounded disinterested even to his own ears, this time speaking directly to Myr. “My advice is for you to stay here for now. It is probably quite safe for you to go out for a while yet. The ae’Magi won’t expect you to be this close to the original camp. If I am not back in a fortnight, it would be best for you to move on.” Wolf started to leave but turned back. He might not care for them, but Aralorn would want them safe.

“I would find a way to block off the paths that I didn’t map for you so that no one is hurt or lost. You could follow these caves for a hundred miles if you wanted to.” He left then, as quietly as he had come in.

He knew all the ae’Magi’s holdings, even those acquired after he’d left. He had made a point of exploring each of them, partially to see if he could do it without getting caught, but also because he might find that he needed the knowledge. Even as he had done so, he’d been amused that Aralorn’s passion for information had passed on to him. Now he was grateful for the habit.

First, he went, traveling by magic, as soon as he was far enough south that his spells worked, to the ae’Magi’s castle since it was the ae’Magi’s preferred residence as well as the closest one to the camp. He took the time to see if the ae’Magi was in residence, not that it would have kept Wolf out if he had been. He searched the dungeon twice, certain that she would be there—but he didn’t see her among the pitiful captives. He looked through the castle, even the stables, but saw no sign of her anywhere. Then he continued to the next hold.