Patricia Briggs - Masques

Talor took the refuge she offered. “You need to pay more attention to your opponent’s eyes. You watch the body too much, and that doesn’t give you much advance warning. If you’d been watching more closely, you could have avoided that last hit.”

She dropped her staff and waved her hands out in the traditional surrender, and said, “Okay, you beat me. My reputation is in tatters. Just do me one favor and don’t tell your brother about it. Last time you beat me, he challenged me, then I had to put up with his sulks for a week.” It was important to act naturally.

“You only got it for a week because we had to go out on maneuvers. He sulked for almost a month. Okay, I won’t tell him. Besides”—here he struck up an obviously false pose and looked down his nose at her—“it ill becomes a man to brag about beating a woman.”

For all of his humor, Aralorn could tell that he was feeling uncomfortable. She wished she was only uncomfortable. She wasn’t surprised when Talor excused himself though they generally would have drunk a couple of rounds before they left. When she turned to watch him leave, she noticed the wolf lying just inside the doorway, his head on his front paws. Talor stooped and patted him on the back, which Wolf answered with a small movement of his tail, but his clear yellow eyes never wavered from Aralorn’s face.

Aralorn waited until Talor was gone before dropping exhausted to the floor, her back against the barrier. She patted the space beside her in invitation. The wolf obligingly got up, trotted over, and resumed his relaxed pose, substituting Aralorn’s shins as his chin rest.

They sat like that for a while, Aralorn running her hand through the thick fur—separating the coarse dark hair from the softer, lighter-colored undercoat. When her breathing had returned almost to normal, she broke the silence.

“It’s good to have you back,” she commented. “I take it that they didn’t kill you.”

“I think that is a safe assumption to make.” His voice was more noncommittal than it usually was.

She gave him a halfhearted grin.

“How long had you been watching?”

“Long enough to see you put your foot in it and almost let that clumsy young fool remove you from this life.”

She obligingly rose to his bait. “Clumsy? I’ll have you know that he is the second-best staffsman in Sianim.”

“You being the first?” Amusement touched his voice.

She cuffed him lightly. “And you know it, too.”

“It looked to me as if he had you beaten. You might have to step into second place.” He paused, and said in a quieter voice, “Finally noticed that people are a bit touchy concerning the ae’Magi, have you?”

She gave him an assessing look. “Has it been going on for a long time?”

He grunted an affirmative. “I first saw it about a year ago, but recently it has gotten much more intense.”

“It seems to be some sort of variation of the spells that he had at his castle, but I didn’t think that anyone could create a spell of this magnitude alone.” Aralorn’s tone was questioning.

“He’s not doing it alone,” replied the wolf. “He started small. The villages near the ae’Magi’s castle have quite a few inhabitants who are strong in magic. The side effect of having so many young virile magicians apprenticing at the castle for several hundred generations.” His tone was ironic. “The adults that he couldn’t subdue he killed because their deaths provide more of a kick to his power than people with no magic at all. But the ones he craves are the children, who have raw power and no training . . .”

Aralorn shuddered and rubbed her arms as if chilled.

“You’ve seen what he does with the children.” Wolf’s tone gentled. “Fifteen years ago, if you made a negative remark about the ae’Magi, only the reaction of the villagers just outside the castle would be as strong as Talor’s. Now the streets of that village are empty of all but old men and women because the rest are dead. He has taken them and used them. As far away as Sianim, people are affected by the ae’Magi’s spell. He needs still more prey to continue to increase the strength of his magic, so he’s looking elsewhere. Sianim, I think, is merely getting the backlash of the main focus.”

“What is the main focus?” she asked.

“Where is magic at its strongest? Where do many of the common villagers have the ability to work charms? Where has magic flourished, protected by strong rulers from the persecution that magic-users were subject to after the great wars?”

“Reth,” she answered.

“Reth,” he agreed.

“Crud,” she said with feeling.

The inn lay about halfway between the small village of Torin and the smaller village of Kestral. It had been built snugly to keep out the bitter cold of the northern winters. When the snow lay thick on the ground, the inn would have been picturesque, nestled cozily in a small valley between the impressive mountains of northern Reth. Without the masking snow, the building showed the onset of neglect.

The inn had had many prosperous years because the trappers of the Northlands were bringing down the thick pelts of the various animals that inhabited the northern mountain wilds. For many years, merchants from all over flocked to Kestral each summer because it was as far south as the reclusive trappers would travel. However, over the last several years, the trappers had gradually grown fewer, and what furs they now brought to trade were hardly worth owning—and the inn, like the villages, suffered.

The Northlands had always been uncanny: the kind of place that a sensible person stayed away from. The trappers who came to stay at the inn had always brought with them stories of the Howlaas that screamed unseen in front of the winter winds to drive men mad. They told of the Old Man of the Mountain, a being who was not a man, no matter what he was called, who could make a man rich or turn him into a beast with no more than a whisper.

But now there were new stories, though the storytellers were fewer. One man’s partner disappeared one night, leaving his bedding and clothes behind although the snow lay thick and trackless on the ground. A giant bird hovered over a campsite where four frozen bodies sat in front of a blazing fire. One trapper swore that he’d seen a dragon, though everyone knew that the dragons had been gone since the last of the Wizard Wars.

Without the trappers or the merchants who came to buy the furs, the inn depended more heavily on the local farmers’ night out and less on overnight guests. The once-tidy yard was overgrown and covered with muck from horses and other beasts, some of them two-legged.

Inside, greasy tallow candles sputtered fitfully, illuminating rough-hewn walls that would have lent a soiled air to a far-more-presentable crowd than the one that occupied the inn. The chipped, wooden pitchers adorning the tables were filled with some unidentifiable but highly alcoholic brew. The tabletops themselves were black with grease and other less savory substances.

Rushing here and there amid the customers, a woman trotted blithely between tables refilling pitchers and obviously enjoying the fondles that were part of any good barmaid’s job. She wasn’t as clean as she could have been, but then neither was anyone else. She also wasn’t as young as she claimed to be, but the dim light was kind to her graying hair, and much was forgiven because of her wholehearted approval of the male species.

The only other woman in the room was wielding a mop across the uneven floor. It might have done more good if both the water and the rag mop she used weren’t dirtier than the floor. The wet bottom of her skirt did as much to remove the accumulated muck as the mop.