Patricia Briggs - Wolfsbane

Slowly, his hand moved away from the small sword, but Aralorn could hear a nearby creaking that told her that someone held a nocked bow. “I will tell her.”

She nudged Sheen with her knees and left the bandit behind.

She crossed the first mountain pass late that night, and the second and last pass before Lambshold the following afternoon.

The snow was heavier as she traveled northward. Aralorn switched horses often, but Sheen still took the brunt of the work since he was better suited for breaking through the crusted, knee-deep drifts. Gradually, as new light dawned over the edge of the pass, the mountain trail began to move downward, and the snow lessened. Aralorn swayed wearily in the saddle. It was less than a two-hour ride to Lambshold, but she and the horses were going to need rest before then.

The road passed by another small village with an inn. Aralorn dismounted and led her exhausted horses to the stableyard.

If the hostler was surprised at the arrival of a guest in the morning, he gave no sign of it. Nor did he argue when Aralorn gave him the lead to the roan and began the task of grooming Sheen on her own. The warhorse was not so fierce that a stableboy could not have groomed him, but it was her habit to perform the task herself when she was troubled. Before she stored her tack, she untied the scrap of ribbon from Sheen’s bit. She left the horses dozing comfortably and entered the inn through the stable door.

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.