Patricia Briggs - Masques

It caused the ae’Magi to turn to Wolf. While he was watching his son, Aralorn pulled one of her knives and threw it at the ae’Magi. She hit him in the chest. She only had a moment to congratulate herself before the knife passed through him without effect and clattered harmlessly to the floor behind him. The ae’Magi didn’t even glance her way.

With a philosophical shrug, she stayed on the floor and prepared to watch the fight. It would have looked odd to someone who was not sensitive to magic and could only see two men gesturing wildly at each other. Aralorn could feel the currents of magic moving back and forth, gaining momentum and power with each countermove, but the only gesture that her limited experience with human magic allowed her to recognize was the deceptively simple spell that Wolf had been working on.

She had a moment to consider the results of an antimagic spell let loose in the dungeon of the ancient seat of the master magicians. A dungeon steeped in the magic of centuries of spells.

Since she was already on the floor, all that she had to do was flatten herself tighter and hope that it was enough. Then the antimagic spell hit, and chaos reigned.

She didn’t know if it knocked her out, or just blinded her: Either way, she lost track of time. The first thing she could see clearly was Wolf sitting on the floor and leaning awkwardly against a wall, his staff clenched in his right hand. She crawled to him on hands and knees.

“Are you all right?” She patted his arm anxiously, afraid to touch him without knowing where he was hurt.

“Yes,” he said, holding his staff out to her, as if he needed both hands to stand up.

Aralorn heard the noise behind her and twisted her head to see the ae’Magi getting to his feet even as she reached for the staff. She turned back to Wolf to warn him, and noticed something she would have seen right away if she hadn’t been so dazed—she’d been in enough fights to know a broken back when she saw it. She saw the same knowledge in Wolf’s face.

He smiled at her with a haunting sweetness as she touched the staff. He said something that might have been “I love you, too” but a jolt of magic traveled up her arm, and she blacked out.

When she woke up, the floor she was looking at was bare stone, not cobbled as the floor in the dungeon was. Wolf’s staff lay beside her, the crystals in the top smoky dark. The musky smell of the books told her where she was.

“ No! You stupid son of a . . . Plague take you, Wolf!” Her scream was muffled by the rows of bookshelves in his library. Helplessly, she pounded a fist on the floor, letting rage keep back her tears.

“The sword.” She didn’t see anyone, but a firm hand pulled her to her feet. The Old Man materialized and shook her by the shoulders. Who else could it have been? His features were the too-perfect features of a shapeshifter.

“The sword, you stupid girl. Where is the sword?”

Aralorn had been through a lot. She had long since outgrown any patience with being manhandled. With a deceptively easy twist recently learned from Stanis, she freed herself and backed away.

With the distance between them, she could see the aura of age that clung to him despite the smooth skin on his face. He was only a few inches taller than she was and far more beautiful to look upon. At another time, she would have been more courteous to the Old Man of the Mountain, but Aralorn wasn’t in the mood for politeness.

“What sword are you talking about, old man?” she spat. Hundreds of miles away, Wolf was fighting for his life—she refused to believe that he was dead. She had no patience left.

“The sword! The sword!” His arms swung widely in one of the overblown gestures that shapeshifters favored. He dropped into their language, and Aralorn had to struggle to understand the dialect he spoke. “You haven’t let the ae’Magi get his hands on it, have you? Where is it? He mustn’t have control over it.”

“What sword?” Aralorn’s voice was harsh with impatience; she needed to travel back to the castle, and a goose wasn’t the swiftest of fliers. It would take her days. Too late. She would be too late. “Sir, you will have to explain yourself more clearly.”

“Your sword , did you leave it there? Didn’t . . .” He stopped and looked behind her.

Curious, she looked behind her and saw her short sword, the one that she had left in its usual place under the couch, floating gently in the air behind her. She could almost see the person holding the sword—it was like looking at an image in rough water, impossible to discern any specific features.

“You didn’t take it?” The Old Man’s voice was filled with disgust. “What is wrong with you? I told you. Told you . If it weren’t for the fact that Lys cares about that Wolf, I would let you stew in your own pot.”

He stalked to the sword and took it from the apparition that held it. He unsheathed it and swung it once. “ This is the third of the Smith’s great weapons. Ambris.” He gave it another name, but Aralorn was too distracted to translate it. “If the ae’Magi gets his hands on her and realizes what he has, there will be no one who can stand against him. You were supposed to take her with you and use her. I take it that your silly little spell didn’t work?”

He didn’t wait for her nod, but continued, “I thought that he just might pull it off. Here”—abruptly the shapeshifter’s voice lost its force and became querulous like that of a very old man—“take it and go back. I’m very tired—maintaining this shape is burdensome. Lys?” He shoved the sword at Aralorn and was gone with an abrupt pop.

Aralorn took the sword and looked at it. It looked no more magical than it ever had, but still . . . it did match the description given for the Smith’s sword.

And the sword gave her another idea. Sheathing it abruptly, she slipped it onto her belt. With Wolf’s staff in one hand, she ran out of the library to find Myr.

Myr was never difficult to locate. Aralorn simply had to look for the largest group of people and head in that direction. She found him just outside the cave entrance, giving knife-fighting lessons to a group of the younger refugees. He glanced up and saw her as he was avoiding a crudely wielded blade; the distraction almost cost him a slit throat.

He spoke for just a minute to his former opponent, who was white-faced and shaking. It was no light thing to come so close to killing a king. Aralorn shifted impatiently from one foot to the other as Myr dismissed the class and strode to her.

He took a long look at her, noting the scrape on her cheek that she’d gotten rolling across the floor; the filth that clung to her; and Wolf’s staff, which she held clutched in one hand. He didn’t demand any explanations, merely asking in a businesslike tone, “What do you need?”

“I need you to call the dragon to take me back to the ae’Magi’s castle. I can’t get there fast enough by myself.” She noticed with detached surprise that her voice was steady.

Myr nodded, gestured for her to wait for him, and ducked back into the caves. He returned carrying his sword in one hand, the belt dangling from its sheath, and led the way through a thicket of brambleberry to a smallish clearing.

Carefully, he unsheathed his sword and gave a rueful look to the blade that years of his grandfather’s warring had left unmarred. Then he drove it into the sandy soil, trying not to wince at the grating sound. Another time, Aralorn would have smiled.

When he was done calling the dragon, he stood quietly beside her, not asking her what had happened. It was Aralorn who finally broke the silence.

“We made it into the ae’Magi’s castle. He was waiting for us in the dungeons. I think that Wolf’s spell would have worked anyplace else. There was too much old magic, and the spell wasn’t strong enough and backlashed. I was on the floor already so it didn’t hit me very hard. The ae’Magi was knocked out momentarily. Wolf . . .” Her voice cracked and she stopped, swallowed, and tried again. “Wolf’s back is broken, he tricked me into touching his staff and sent me back here. I don’t know how fast a dragon can fly. Even if it consents to take me to the castle, it will probably be too late.”