Patricia Briggs - Masques

It had been a lot more complicated than that, but that had been the heart of the matter. The rest of it wouldn’t matter to the King of Reth. As she talked, she worked at rolling up her pant legs. Finally, she cut the bottom off with her dagger. There was nothing to be done for the boots.

“Somehow that sounds like the Lyon of Lambshold. He’s the only man I know who is unconventional enough to do that.” Myr shook his head.

Straightening up to her unimpressive height, Aralorn continued, “He said, if memory serves, that if no one had the nerve to laugh in his face when he was addressed as the ‘Lyon of Lambshold,’ no one would say anything about an absent daughter.”

“If you are through talking, it might be best if we left for camp.” The harsh voice was distracted, and Wolf’s eyes focused on some distant point.

“Someone coming?” Myr changed in an instant from courtier to warrior.

Wolf grunted, then said, “Not here, but near enough that we ought to move out. So much magic was bound to attract attention.”

Aralorn left them to their packing and ducked through the trees to grab her horse. As she checked the girth, she muttered to Sheen, “I wonder what mischief our friend Wolf has been up to?”

When Aralorn awoke to face her first full day at Myr’s camp, it was still dark. She slipped out through the tent opening, moving quietly to avoid disturbing the two women who had shared their quarters with her. She retied the crude flap so the cold early-morning air would stay outside.

Most of the tents in the camp were makeshift. Several were little more than a rug stretched over a stick or rope in true field-soldier style. The only tent she’d seen that had been worthy of the name belonged to Myr, who shared it uncomplaining with a number of the smaller children.

As she passed Myr’s tent, near the fire pit, she gave the royal dragon embroidered on the side a respectful nod, but it glared balefully at her anyway. The flickering light of the fire gave the illusion of life to the green-gold eyes.

Also near the fire pit was one of the few wooden structures in the camp. The kitchen was little more than a three-sided shed, but it kept the food dry. The camp cook was already up, chopping something by lantern light, but he stopped long enough to give Aralorn a look no more friendly than the dragon’s had been. Aralorn grinned cheerfully at him and kept on her way.

The camp was located in a small dale, no bigger than the largest of the riding arenas in Sianim, that lay half a day’s ride north of the Rethian border. It was long and narrow, with a stream in the middle that she suspected would cover a much larger area in the spring, when the top layer of snow melted off the mountain peaks. As it was, the ground near the stream was marshy and made soft, slurping sounds when she walked over to take a drink and throw water on her face.

The tents were all in the eastern end of the valley near the only obvious trail down the steep, almost clifflike sides. Those sides, heavily covered with brush on the top, were the strongest defense the camp could have, rendering it almost invisible to anyone not already in the valley.

By the simple expedient of running a split-rail fence across the valley the narrow way, the western end had been turned into a pasture for most of the livestock—two goats, four donkeys, several horses, and a scrawny cow. It was toward this part of the valley that Aralorn headed.

Knowing how well Wolf liked people, she thought that he would be as far from the tents as he could get—although she couldn’t see him anywhere in the dale. As she neared the pasture, she was welcomed with a soft whinny. Sheen, only slightly inconvenienced by the soft leather hobble that bound his front legs, bounced up to her to get his nose rubbed. She’d hobbled him outside the pasture so that the owners of the two mares didn’t end up with unwanted foals. He followed her for a while before wandering off to forage.

It took her a little time to find the faint trail running up the steep slope near the fence. The terrain was rough and treacherous with loose stones, and she thought ruefully that a person would have to be part mountain goat to try this very often—or part wolf.

Grabbing a ragged piece of brush, she pulled herself up a particularly steep area and found herself unexpectedly in a hollow that hadn’t been visible from below. A small smokeless fire burned near a bedroll. The rather large, lank wolf turned amber eyes to her and swayed his tail in casual welcome.

Since he wasn’t using it, she seated herself on the bedroll and rested her chin on her raised knees. Casually, she threw a few more sticks onto the fire, leaving it for him to break the silence. Typically, he explained nothing but questioned her instead.

“Tell me about the camp.” His voice was mildly curious.

“Why? You’ve been here much longer than I have.”

He shook his head. “I just want to know what you see—how much I need to explain to you.”

“Well,” she began, “there has been a camp here for several months, probably starting in the spring. Originally, the person or people who started it didn’t know much about camping in the woods, so I’d guess that they weren’t locals. It looks like someone is in the process of reorganizing camp. If I were a gamester, I would place gold that Myr is the reorganizer—since I suspect you wouldn’t bother.” She looked to the wolf for confirmation.

Wolf nodded, and Aralorn continued to speak.

“From what I can tell, most of these people came with not much more than the clothes on their backs. There are what, maybe fifty people here?”

“Fifty-four with you,” Wolf replied.

“Then over a third of them are children. There is no common class among them. I’ve seen peasants, townsfolk, and several aristocrats. The children are, as far as I’ve seen, without family. They are almost all Rethian.” Aralorn lay back and made herself comfortable. “They have all the earmarks of refugees, and I’d lay my last gold that they are running from the ae’Magi.”

Wolf grunted an affirmative.

“How did they all get here, though? I could see northerners finding this valley, but I heard southern Reth accents, too.”

“You, of all people, should know the reputation of the northern mountains,” replied Wolf.

Aralorn frowned at him. “I saw you transport the merchant, and my understanding is that teleportation is a difficult, high-level spell. And you managed it in the Northlands.”

Wolf shook his head. “I wouldn’t have tried it this far north even if we weren’t worried about the ae’Magi finding the valley. Small spells seem unhampered here, but more delicate spells are harder to control. Some people it affects more than others—the ae’Magi won’t travel even as far as the northern lands in Reth. It doesn’t seem to have much effect on my magic”—he nodded at the fire, which flared up, dancing wildly with purple and gold flames—“but I wouldn’t have bet even the merchant’s life on it; so we traveled south.”

“The stories about that aspect of the Northlands are common enough, even in southern Reth,” agreed Aralorn. She gave him a look. “I suppose that this area would be a good place to run to if you were trying to hide from a human magician.”

“I”—he hesitated a minute, and Aralorn got the distinct feeling that he changed what he was going to say—“previously located this valley as a possible refuge although I never intended to set up a camp of this size here.”

He gazed with an air of bemusement over the camp. “I don’t know how these people found this valley in particular. You can ask, but everyone has a different story. It is unreasonable that fifty people, most of whom have never been a mile away from their own front doors, would wander blithely into a hanging valley that would be hard for a forester or trapper to find.”