Patricia Briggs: Wolfsbane

The secret of fighting against a man using a tree was never to be where he thought you were going to be. Her staff could turn his, but if she was stupid enough to try to block his directly, it would snap.

For the first few minutes, they fought silently, trying to take each other by surprise before it turned into an endurance contest. Falhart had to move more bulk around than Aralorn, but she had to move hers faster because of the length of his reach, so they were both breathing heavily when they backed off.

“There’s a story I once heard,” she said, pacing around the ring without taking her eye off him, “about a thief-taker who worked for the king of Southwood several generations back. His name was Anslow.”

“Never heard of him,” grunted Falhart, moving at her in a rush. She dove under his blow, tucked her stick neatly between his knees, and twisted. He fell to the ground, rolling, and she jumped lightly back out of his reach. “Don’t try that move on me again,” he warned. “Twice is pushing it.”

She shrugged, grinning. “Some moves bear repeating, if only for entertainment value. That’s the trouble with your being so large—it’s too much fun to watch you fall.”

They circled warily for a moment. Without the protection of a shirt, Falhart was more cautious than he’d been the day before. “Why don’t you continue with your story?”

Aralorn nodded, walking backward as he stalked her. “Anslow solved crimes that had stumped many before him, winning a reputation as the best of his kind. There are stories of cases he solved with nothing but a bit of thread or a single footprint.”

Falhart closed, taking a swing at her middle. Aralorn didn’t even pause in her story as she avoided the blow. “He was a legend in his own time, and lawbreakers walked in fear of his shadow. But there was one criminal who did not fear him.”

“Stay put, you runt,” he snapped, as she dodged past him, catching him a glancing hit on his ribs.

“Point,” she crowed. “This criminal was a killer who chose women for victims.”

“I can see his— point ,” muttered Falhart as he caught her squarely in the back, knocking the breath out of her.

Chivalrously, he stepped back and waited for her to breathe again. It took her a moment before she came to her feet.

“Allyn’s toadflax, Hart, that’s going to hurt tomorrow.”

He grinned, showing not the least hint of remorse. “That’s the point of the whole thing.”

“Right,” she said dryly, though she couldn’t help smiling.

This was fun . She hadn’t been able to really cut loose since her last good sparring partner had been killed. If you didn’t trust the skills of your opponent, you couldn’t use your best moves against him unless you wanted to kill him. With a wild yell, she launched an attack designed to do nothing more than tire Falhart out.

“You were telling me about the thief-taker,” he said, matching her blow for blow and adding a few moves of his own to show her she wasn’t in control of the fight.

“Ah,” she said, slipping nimbly out of the path of his quarterstaff. “So I was. The killer took his prey only once a year, on the first day of spring. He laid his victims out in some public place in the dark of the night. As the years passed, the killer taunted Anslow, sending him notes and clues that did the thief-taker no good.”

While he was extended in a thrust that she’d turned aside, she slipped the end of her staff sideways and hit him squarely in the breastbone, where it left a bruise to match the one on his ribs. “Two.”

He growled and circled. She stuck her tongue out at him; he made a face.

“The night before the killer would take his fifteenth victim,” she continued, “Anslow took every note the killer had sent him and set them before him, trying to find a pattern. He thought it was someone he knew, for the notes contained a few private references—things that only Anslow should have known.”

She broke off speaking, for Falhart moved in with a barrage of blows that required all of her concentration to counter. At last, he managed to hit her staff directly, snapping it in two. The blow continued more gently, but she came out of the encounter with sore ribs.

“Two,” he said.

She snapped in with the remnants of the staff and poked him in the belly—gently. “Three—my match.”

There were loud groans from the audience as they sorted out who owed what to whom. Falhart grinned and leaned on his staff.

“So, tell me the rest of the story,” he said, breathing heavily.

She sat down briefly on the ground, but the cold drove her to her feet. “About Anslow? Where was I?”

“He had the notes from the killer in front of him.”

“Ah, yes. Those notes. He set them out on his desk, oldest to newest. He had noticed early on that the killer’s handwriting bore a strong resemblance to his own—but it was the last letter he stared at. The killer’s hand had developed a tremor; the letters were no longer formed with a smooth, dark flow of ink. Just recently, Anslow had noticed that his hands shook when he wrote. He himself was the killer.”

She touched the broken end of one of the sections of her staff in the dirt and dragged it back and forth gently in random patterns.

Falhart frowned. “How could he be the killer and not know it?”

Aralorn contemplated her broken staff as if it might hold the secrets of the universe. “There is a rare illness of the spirit in which a person can become two separate beings occupying the same body. There is a shadow that forms, watching everything the primary person does, knowing what he knows—but the real person may have no knowledge of what the shadow does when he controls the body.” She flipped the piece into the air and caught it.

“Strange,” observed Falhart, shaking his head.

Correy came up to them and took Aralorn’s hand in his, turned her palm upright, and placed six copper coins in it, talking to Falhart all the while. “Thanks for the tip, Hart. I got ten-to-one odds. It was only six to one before they had a chance to compare your manly figure with the midget here—you can put your shirt back on now.”

Wolf stared at the rows of books in his shelves, caressing the bindings gently. He didn’t pull any out—that could wait. He knew which ones held the information he needed. But he already knew what the spell would cost, had known, really, since Kisrah had told him that he’d killed a Uriah to set his spell, though he’d held out some hope until he’d heard everything that had been put into the binding magic holding the Lyon. He had known that his father had at last succeeded in destroying him.

A human had died to power the spell created by three mages. A human death was needed to unmake it. A Uriah counted as a person, ensorcelled and altered though he was—he had been a man once. If Kisrah had known the nature of the Uriah, he would have known such a sacrifice was necessary. He might have told Aralorn, then she would believe it was her decision to make. Wolf knew that it was his, and he had made it as soon as he realized what would be needed.

How ironic that when he finally decided that he might actually deserve to live, he discovered that he was going to have to die. How had his father known that he would love Aralorn enough to sacrifice himself for her? Except that it wasn’t really for her, he realized, though that was part of it.

He touched the backs of a half dozen of his favorite books, not rare grimoires but heroes’ tales. It was his father who had caused this, and only Geoffrey ae’Magi’s son could put an end to his father’s evil once and for all—if Cain ae’Magison could stiffen his will to it.