Patricia Briggs - Masques

Most mornings Aralorn spent entertaining the children. Occasionally, she went out with a hunting party—or alone to exercise Sheen and check the traps. The afternoons she spent in the library with Wolf, keeping him company and reading as many books as she could.

The nights she spent in the library as well, for she was still having nightmares and didn’t want to wake the whole camp. Night after night she woke up screaming, sometimes seeing Talor’s face, alive with all that made him Talor, but consumed with a hunger that was inhuman and wholly Uriah. Other times, it was the ae’Magi’s face that she saw, a face that changed from father’s to son’s.

Wolf didn’t know about her nightmares, as far as she knew. She had no idea where he was sleeping, but it wasn’t the library.

Late in the afternoons, Myr usually joined them, talking quietly with Aralorn while Wolf read through books on rabbit breeding, castle building, and three hundred ways to cook a hedgehog.

After discovering that the spell he’d been looking for wouldn’t work for him, Wolf had continued to look through the old mage’s books in the hopes of discovering a way to manage the spell more crudely. Most spells, he’d told Aralorn, were refined so they required less power. He had all the power he needed, and an earlier version might work for him. If he could find it.

His temper was biting, and he didn’t rein it in for Myr, nor after the first few visits did he bother with his mask. Myr answered Wolf’s sarcasm with cool control—and sometimes a hidden grin of appreciation. Aralorn rather thought that Wolf’s lack of common courtesy was why Myr liked to visit the library. Here he was a fellow conspirator rather than the King of Reth.

“What’s he doing?” asked Myr, setting his torch to sputter on the stone floor, where, with nothing to burn, it would eventually go out.

Instead of reading, Wolf had cleared the table of everything except a collection of clay pots filled with a variety of powders. When Aralorn had gotten there, Wolf had already been grinding various leaves in a mortar.

She waved a lazy hand at Myr, but didn’t take her attention off what Wolf was doing. “He thinks he’s found a way to manage the spell. We’re going to try it outside when he’s finished. No telling what would happen if he worked it in here with all of the grimoires, especially since we don’t know the range of effect.”

She caught Myr’s arm when he would have approached the table closer. “He doesn’t want us any closer than this,” she said.

They both watched, fascinated, though neither she nor Myr could work this kind of magic or probably even understand half of what was going on. Wolf took a small vial from the leather pack on the table. Opening it, he poured a milky liquid into the gray powder mixture, which became red mush and gave off a poof of noxious fumes. He donned his mask and cloak, then, ignoring his audience, he put a lid on the pot and took it and an opaque bottle and strode toward an exit route that would take them directly outside rather than through the lived-in areas, leaving Aralorn and Myr to trail behind.

“Won’t the spell be affected by whatever it is that restricts human magic in the Northlands?” asked Myr in a whisper to Aralorn, but it was Wolf who answered.

“No,” he said. “It is a very simple spell—its complexity has to do with power management. It should work fine here.”

He led them to the old camp in the valley, where they were unlikely to have anyone interrupt them. Aralorn found herself holding the containers while, at Wolf’s direction, Myr paced off circles, each bigger than the last until the dirt looked like an archery target. The ground was muddy with last night’s melted snowfall and held the marks of Myr’s feet well.

Wolf disappeared into the underbrush and reappeared, holding a handful of small stones. He set several of them in each ring Myr had shuffled off, though maybe “set” was the wrong word, because they floated about knee high above the ground.

“This shouldn’t be a particularly powerful spell,” Wolf said. “If I can get it to work, it doesn’t need to be. If he doesn’t know that it’s coming, then he won’t know to block it. All that I need it to do is to throw him off-balance for long enough to turn our battle from magic to more mundane means. Aralorn, stand behind me. It won’t hurt Myr, but I don’t know what this would do to a shapeshifter.”

“If I’m behind you, I can’t see what’s going on,” Aralorn complained. “How about if I stand over by the old fire pit?”

It was well off to the side, a dozen paces away from the target range that Myr had drawn out.

“Fine,” he said. “This should be a straight, line-of-sight spell, with a limited range.”

He sat on the cold ground in the middle of the innermost circle.

“How old is the ae’Magi?” asked Aralorn from the fire pit.

Wolf shrugged gracefully and gave her a half smile. “You aren’t going to kill the ae’Magi the way that Iveress killed his master. His master was ill and near death, kept alive only by magic. As far as I know, the ae’Magi is nowhere near death, unfortunate as that may be—at least not from disease.”

“What are our chances if the spell works as it is supposed to?” asked Myr. “Will you be able to kill him? I’ve seen him fight.”

Wolf shrugged. “If the spell takes him by surprise, then the odds are about even. I used to spar with him often, and sometimes I beat him, sometimes not. This spell gives us a chance, but that’s all it does. If he recognizes the spell, it is easy enough to counter. That would leave us with only magic.”

He looked at Aralorn. “I’ve learned some things about what I can do that he doesn’t know, but even so, he would easily best me that way. Without magic, at least we stand a chance of killing him. Perhaps.” No one, not even Aralorn, could have told how he felt about it from his voice.

Aralorn and Myr watched as he emptied the contents of the bottle into the pot. He counted to ten, then poured the mixture onto the ground in front of him, where it gathered into a glowing pool of violet patterned with inky swirls. Dipping a finger into the pool, he used the liquid to draw several symbols in the air. Compliantly, the purple substance hung in the air as if on an invisible wall. Wolf repeated the procedure with his left hand.

He picked up the pool in both hands. It swayed and oozed, never quite escaping the confines of his hands. He held it up in front of his face, then blew on it gently.

Pain hit Aralorn hard enough to knock her to her knees. She fought to maintain consciousness for a moment, but she never felt herself hit the ground.

When she recovered, she felt the hard strength of Wolf’s thigh underneath her ear.

“I don’t know,” said Wolf, sounding vicious.

She blinked cautiously, and when her head didn’t fall off, she pushed herself up.

“Fine,” she told Wolf. “I’m fine. My fault.”

Sitting up, she could see what had happened. The spell was directional all right, but mostly in a forward and backward kind of direction rather than the direction of a loosed arrow. It had knocked down the floating stones in a wide “V” pattern, with Wolf at the apex. The stones directly to either side of where he’d been sitting were still floating, but every stone more than two feet in front of him was on the ground.

She had been sitting on the edge of the path of the spell, but apparently the fire pit hadn’t been far enough away.

“How long was I out?” she asked, noticing that her ears were buzzing and her balance was off. Even sitting flat on the ground, her upper body wanted to sway.

She was propelled down again with a none-too-gentle hand, as Wolf answered, “Not very.”