She grinned. “I’ll try to keep that from happening.” She threw back the bedcovers, restless with prebattle nerves. She knew how to deal with those. “Rather than wait around for Wolf, I’m going to visit Falhart and persuade him to fight with me. You’re welcome to come if you’d like.”
She found Falhart, finally, in the accounting room, slaving over the books. As she walked into the little room, she heard him swear, and he began to scratch out what he’d written.
“Why don’t you find someone who likes those things?” asked Aralorn with a certain amount of fellow feeling. Give her a scroll of stories or a five-volume history, and she’d devour them, but account books were a whole different kettle of fish. Somewhere in the volumes stacked neatly against the walls was a large number of accounting sheets in her own poorly scribed hand.
Falhart looked up and scraped the hair from his eyes. “No one, but no one, likes to keep the accounts. Father, Correy, and I switch off, and this is my month.” He eyed the hawk on her shoulder, nodded at it, then focused on the pair of staves she carried in one hand.
She grinned. “Want to play, big brother? Bet you a copper I can take you two times out of three.”
“Make it a silver, and I’ll do it,” he said, pushing back his chair. “But I get to use my staff.”
She shook her head at him. “Your staff is fine, but someone has given you an inflated idea of what they pay us mercenaries, Hart. I’ll go three coppers and not a bit more.”
“Three coppers isn’t enough to make it worth my time,” he said.
“I guess you’ll just have to stay here and do the books then,” replied Aralorn with a commiserating pat on his arm. “Come on, Halven, let’s see who else we can find.”
“All right, all right, three coppers it is,” grumbled Falhart, then he brightened. “Maybe I can find someone else to lay a bet with.”
Aralorn examined his bearlike form and shook her head as she started for the training grounds. “And who are you going to find who will bet on a woman against a brute like you?”
“You did,” he pointed out.
“Yes, but I’ve fought you before.”
They faced off in the old practice ground. It was cold, and the sand was packed hard, though the snow had been swept away. Once they started fighting, the cold wouldn’t matter. Aralorn wielded one of her staves while Falhart held a quarterstaff half again as large and twice as thick as hers. Halven had opted for a better perch on the corner of the stable roof.
“You’re sure you don’t want to use a quarterstaff as well?” Falhart asked, watching her warily.
“Only a brute like you gains an advantage wielding a tree,” she replied. “It’s all right, though; you’ll need all the advantages you can find, big brother.”
Falhart laughed and tossed his staff lightly in the air. “You may have learned something in the past ten years, Featherweight. But so have I. What are the rules for this bout?”
“Three points,” said Aralorn. “Any hit between the shoulders and waist is good. Arms, head, and below the waist doesn’t count.”
“Right,” said Falhart, and he struck.
His swing had more speed than a man of his size had any right to have. Aralorn stepped respectfully out of its path and tapped him gently on the temple.
“Zap,” she murmured as she darted away, “you’re dead.”
“No point,” grunted Falhart, sweeping at her knees.
Rather than avoiding the sweep, Aralorn stepped lightly on the center of the quarterstaff between his hands and vaulted over his back. She touched her staff to his back twice in rapid succession before he had time to turn, and quickly bounced away.
“Two points,” called one of the onlookers in a gleeful voice.
She didn’t get away free though; as she jumped back, one end of his staff caught her in the diaphragm.
“Oof.” Though the blow was light, Aralorn expelled a breath of air unexpectedly.
Falhart backed away quickly, clearly worried. “Are you all right?”
She shot him a mock-disgusted look. “I said ‘oaf,’ you ox. You’re going to lose this round if you treat me like your little sister.”
“Just like to make certain my prey is feeling all right before I destroy it.” Falhart gave her a gentle smile as he circled her warily. “It’s more sporting that way. My point.”
Aralorn shook her head. “Poor babbling fool, I think I must have hit his head harder than I meant to.”
The two combatants exchanged merry grins before they went at it again. Falhart gained another point with a feint that he pulled back after she thought he was committed to the blow past the point he could alter it. In revenge she stuck her staff between his legs and toppled him to the ground.
“’Ware, down it comes,” she deadpanned in the carrying cry of an axeman felling a tree.
He caught her in the ribs as he came rolling to his feet. “Too busy being funny, Featherweight. Lost you the game.”
She shook her head in mock despair. “Beaten by a man . . . I’ll never live it down.”
Falhart patted her gently. “Poor little girl—oof.”
Aralorn removed her elbow from his midsection. “Don’t patronize me after you’ve beaten me. Losing puts me in a foul temper.”
“I’ll remember that,” said Lord Kisrah cordially, stepping onto the training grounds, Wolf at his heels. “Lady, if you would walk with me a bit? In private?”
She’d barely had a chance to warm up and had been planning on a few more rounds with Falhart before she was done. But she preferred the real battle to sparring bouts.
“Certainly, Lord Kisrah. I will leave the scene of my defeat, and my opponent can go back to accounts.”
The triumphant look faded from Falhart’s face. “Thanks for the reminder—but remember, you owe me three coppers.” He waited until she started fumbling with her purse, then he said, “Double or nothing this time tomorrow?”
He was planning something; she could hear it in his voice. “Five coppers altogether. No more,” she said.
“You’ve got it, Featherweight.” He gave in much too easily. He was planning some mischief or other.
She frowned at him, and he grinned unrepentantly. “I’d better get back to the accounts,” he said, and took his leave.
Kisrah extended his arm, and Aralorn set her staves against the stable wall before shaking her head at him. “You don’t want to touch me right now,” she said, pulling on her overtunic, sweater, and cape. “Save good manners for when I’m not sweaty.”
He gave a half bow, sending the long ribbons in his hair a-fluttering as he let his arm fall gracefully to his side. “As you wish, Lady Aralorn.”
“We could go to the gardens,” she suggested, trailing her fingers over Wolf’s ears.
Kisrah and Wolf fell in step on either side of her as she led the way to Irrenna’s pride and joy.
In the summer, the gardens were beautiful, but the winter left nothing more than frost-covered barren branches and gray stalks pressing up through the snow. The walks were swept, though, so they didn’t have to wade through the drifts.
“I know it’s chilly,” apologized Aralorn, “but no one much comes here in the winter.”
He raised an eyebrow. “So why didn’t we come here yesterday instead of riding out in the cold?”
“Because now you know who Wolf is,” she said. “I was worried how you would react. A body is much easier to hide outside the keep walls.”
He stopped walking. “I’d laugh if I didn’t think you were serious.”
“Maybe a bit,” she said. “Come, let’s move while we talk; it’ll keep us warm.” She was aware without actually looking at him that her uncle had followed them and was making lazy circles around them.
“Did you see Falhart’s face?” asked Wolf. “He thinks you threw the fight.”
“What do you think?” she asked blandly.
“I think you got cocky and lost.”
“You know me so well,?
?? she admitted.
Kisrah gave Wolf a baffled frown. “Are you sure you’re Cain?”
Wolf tilted his head considering, then said, “I am.”
They walked for a while between sleeping flower beds. Aralorn turned her sweaty face into the cold air and paced beside the Archmage and felt grateful that there was no wind this morning.
“I have thought upon yesterday’s conversation,” Kisrah said finally. “In the end, there is only one answer. Black magic is evil. Good never breeds from evil—and I can see no good in this in any case. But I cannot remove the spell. If you are able to do so, I’ll help in any way I can. I know that Nevyn is one of the mages who added to the spell, but there is another.”
“We know the other,” said Aralorn. “My brother Gerem.”
“Gerem?”
“Sometimes magic ability doesn’t show until adolescence,” commented Wolf, answering Kisrah’s surprise.
“But Nevyn would have seen it,” said Kisrah. “He would have told me.”
Aralorn pursed her lips, and said, “Nevyn is very fond of my brother. Do you think that he would encourage anyone he cared for to go through the same abuse he suffered?”
“That’s a very serious charge,” observed Kisrah softly. “Untrained wizards are a danger to themselves and everyone around them.”
“So are trained wizards,” said Aralorn. Before the wizards she strolled with could comment, she continued blandly. “My brother cast a spell in his sleep. He didn’t have a chance to resist. My understanding, from the stories I’ve heard, is that a formal apprenticing would have protected him from such use.”
“Yes,” agreed Kisrah. “There are not many mages who can control the minds of others in such a fashion, anyway—even with black magic at their call. But given that the consequences of such control are dire, precautions are always taken. Apprentices are safeguarded.”
“You’ll have problems with my brother,” predicted Aralorn. “Nevyn is convinced that magic, any magic, is evil. I think he’s managed to persuade my brother. Most especially, shapeshifters are abominations.”
“Magic isn’t evil,” said Kisrah.
“All Darranians believe magic is evil,” said Aralorn. “Geoffrey ae’Magi believed that and embraced it. Nevyn believes it, and he’s trying his best to protect my brother. We need Gerem’s cooperation to save my father. We need you to get Nevyn to ask him to help.”
“I can get Nevyn to help,” agreed Kisrah, a bit more optimistically than Aralorn felt was warranted, but maybe he knew Nevyn better than she. “Shall we meet tonight in the bier room?”
Wolf shook his head. “This kind of black magic doesn’t require the night. You all will be more comfortable in the daylight.”
“Black magic?” questioned Kisrah sharply. “It shouldn’t be necessary to unwork the spell with black magic.”
“This spell was set with blood and death by three wizards. It will require sacrifice to unwork,” Wolf said.
“I thought that black magic couldn’t be worked in the day,” said Aralorn.
“It can be worked anytime,” answered Kisrah.
“Sometimes it works better at night,” corrected Wolf. In the shadows of the hedge, his pale golden eyes glittered with light reflected from the snow on the ground. The harsh macabre voice somehow made the barren garden something strange and frightening. “Terror can add power to a spell, and fear is easier to inspire in the night.”
Aralorn noticed that Kisrah’s even pace had faltered. Wolf only did things like this when he was in a particularly dark mood. She hoped that it was nothing more than talking about black magic that had brought it on and not something about unworking the spell to free the Lyon.
She hid her worry, and said dryly, “You sound like a ghoul, Wolf.” Her words cut through the mood Wolf had established, and the garden was merely a collection of plants awaiting spring again. “Is there something you haven’t told me about yourself?”
He flattened his ears in mock irritation, and said direly, “Much. But if the thought of my late sire’s ghost has failed to touch your undeveloped sense of prudence, nothing I have done will accomplish that either.”
Aralorn watched Kisrah’s expression out of the corner of her eye and was satisfied when humor replaced the unease that had been in his face earlier. The gods knew that Wolf was not a soothing man to associate with, but there was no need to worry Kisrah at this point.
“Tomorrow morning, then?” said Kisrah. “At first dawn?”
Aralorn nodded. “Tomorrow.”
“Kisrah,” said Wolf. “What did you kill to work your spell?”
“A Uriah,” he said uncomfortably. “I had intended to use my own blood—it should have been enough. I was working the spell in the basement workroom when a passageway door opened, and the Uriah came stumbling in. It must have escaped the Sianim mercenaries who took care of cleaning up the Uriah Geoffrey left scattered about. I killed it, and the spell slipped my control and used the creature’s death instead of my blood.”
“Ah,” said Wolf. “Thank you.”
Kisrah nodded and turned on his heel with every sign of a man escaping.
“Uriah,” said the hawk after Kisrah was gone, settling on the top of a trellis that bore the thorny gray vines of a climbing rose. “Human sacrifice. Aralorn, I begin to believe what you told me this morning. Maybe I have been underestimating human mages.” He stared coldly down at Wolf.
“How did you know what the Uriah are?” asked Aralorn.
“Human mages are very good at warping things unnaturally,” said Halven. “Any shapeshifter looking at a Uriah can see the true nature that human magic has perverted. Only a human mage could be so blind as to not understand his own work. Why didn’t you tell him that he’d made your task more difficult?”
“I would rather the secret of their making die with my father,” Wolf said. “I do not expect that Kisrah would be anything but repelled—but he might tell others or write it down for someone to discover.”
“Ah,” said Halven. “Sometimes it is a good thing that human mages are so blind, and some knowledge is best lost. But Kisrah’s ignorance has caused you trouble.” Halven sighed. “I had better help you control your magic, Nephew. So much of your magics require balance—of which Kisrah has some, you have little, Gerem has none, and Nevyn has less than that.”
“He’s in worse shape than I am?” asked Wolf, sounding surprised, but Aralorn thought it was more because Halven named him nephew than her uncle’s assessment of Nevyn.
Halven laughed. “Nevyn has been broken and badly mended. Your spirit is strong as an oak, wolf-wizard. It may be a bit battered, but as long as you don’t misdirect it, you’ll be fine.” He cocked his head at Aralorn. “There is something different since your marriage. You may be right.”
“She’s right about what?” asked Wolf.
“You keep out of this, Uncle,” snapped Aralorn. “Wolf, can we talk of this later?”
She could have sworn that there was laughter in Wolf’s eyes, but it was gone almost before she saw it. She couldn’t think of anything they’d said that he would find funny.
“If you’d like,” Wolf said.
“I can’t do anything about the nature of the sacrifice,” said Halven. “I can’t do anything about Nevyn. But I think I can help you with your magic problem. Aralorn, haven’t you taught him to center?”
“I can’t center,” she said, exasperated. “Just how do you expect me to teach someone else? Besides, centering is more of an exercise in ...” Her voice trailed off as she realized what she was going to say.
“Control.” Her uncle’s voice was smug. “We need someplace warm and private.”
“We can work in my room,” suggested Aralorn. “That would allow us some privacy and warmth as well.”
“I’ll meet you there,” said the hawk, taking flight.
“Wolf,” said Aralorn, once they were alone.
“Yes?”
“You haven’t worked black magi
c since you left your father’s home, have you?”
“No.”
Aralorn tilted her face into the sun, though she felt no warmth on her skin. “I don’t know a lot about human magic, but I do know that good seldom comes from evil. I don’t want you to hurt yourself to save my father.”
“Aralorn,” said Wolf, “you worry too much. I have worked such magic before.”
“And chose not to do it again, until now.” She turned a rock over with the toe of her boot and kicked it into the snow.
“This is not your doing, Lady. It is my father’s work.”
“Would you work black magic if it were not my father?” she asked.
“Would he be ensorcelled if he weren’t your father?” he returned. “We’d best not keep your uncle waiting. I’ll be all right, Aralorn.”
Wolf is the only expert I have, thought Aralorn. If he says there will be no harm in it for him . . . He’d never tell her if there was.
Frowning unhappily, she started back for the castle, with Wolf padding by her side.
Aralorn lay on the bare floor of her room and reconsidered calling her room warm—without the rugs to cover it, the floor was icy. Halven was taking Wolf through some basic meditation exercises, things she’d learned the first summer she’d spent with him.
In honor of the lesson, her uncle had taken on the shape of a venerable old man, with a rounded face and belly—someone to inspire confidence, she supposed.
Wolf, to Aralorn’s surprise, had left the mask off. Halven had already seen the scars, of course—but Wolf used the mask as much for a shield as he did to cover his scars.
“Now, stop that,” her uncle admonished Wolf, in tones Aralorn would bet tomorrow’s winnings against Falhart that no one had used on Wolf in a very long time, if ever. “I don’t want you to do anything to the wood—just feel it. See the growth patterns, the years where water was hard to come by and the years where it was abundant. Feel the difference between the old oak of the original floor and the plank of maple that someone used to replace an old board—yes, that’s the one. Let yourself feel how much easier magic slides through the oak than it does through the maple. Aralorn, an exercise does no good unless you do it.”