Masques (12 page)

“Hopefully our mutual enemy will not think to question all of the merchants traveling in Reth.” There was something about the tone of the magician’s voice that was familiar, but the odd accent kept throwing her. She should be able to figure out what kind of an accent it was, she
knew
languages—which was why Ren had pulled her out of the rank and file in the first place.

“He wouldn’t learn much even if he did. The merchant doesn’t know where you brought him to.”

The magician grunted. “He knows that it was in the north because of the cold. He knows that it was in the mountains because of the cave. That is more than we can afford to have the ae’Magi know.”

Myr gave no vocal reply; but he must have nodded, because when he spoke again, it was on a different topic. “What was that you grabbed off the floor?”

“Ah yes. Just a . . . spy. Small but effective nonetheless.” Was that amusement she picked up in his tone?

The bag was opened, and she found herself hanging by her tail for the perusal of the two men. She twisted around and bit the hand that held her, hard. The mage laughed, but moved his hand so that she sat comfortably on his palm.

“My lord, may I present to you the Lady Aralorn, sometime spy of Sianim.”

She was so shocked she almost fell off her perch. How did he know who she was? It wasn’t as if she were one of the famous generals that everyone knew. In fact, as a spy, she’d worked pretty hard to keep her name out of the spotlight. And no one,
no one
knew that Aralorn could become a mouse.

Then it hit her. Without the additional muffling of the bag she recognized the voice. It was altered through the mask, a human throat, and that odd accent—but she knew it anyway. No one else could have that particularly macabre timbre. It was Wolf.

“So”—Myr’s voice was quiet—“Sianim spies on me now.” Aralorn turned her attention to Myr. In the short time since she’d seen him, he’d aged years. He was thinner, his mouth held taut, and his eyes belonged to the harsh old warrior who had been his grandfather instead of the boy she’d met. He wore clothing that a rough trapper or a traveling merchant might wear, patched here and there with neat stitches.

Deciding that the mouse was no longer useful—and it was easier to talk as a human—Aralorn jumped nimbly off her perch and resumed her normal shape, which was not the one that he would recognize. “No, my lord,” she answered. “Or at least that wasn’t my assignment. Sianim has spies on
everyone
. In fact, this is a rather fortunate meeting; I was looking for you to tell you that the ae’Magi’s messengers have reported your fit of madness to all the nearby townsfolk.” She spoke slowly and formally to give him a chance to adjust to her altered state.

Rethians were not less prejudiced against shapeshifters, just more likely to admit their existence. Since her mother’s people lived in the northern mountains of Reth and paid tribute yearly to the King of Reth in the form of exquisite tapestries and well-crafted tools delivered in the night by unseen persons, the Rethians had a tougher time dismissing them as hearsay.

Folktales warned villagers to stay out of the forests at night, or they would be fodder of the shapeshifters or other green-magic users who might still be lurking in the impenetrable depths of the trees. Given the antagonism that the shapeshifters felt toward invading humans, Aralorn was afraid that the stories might not have it all wrong. But the royal family tended not to be as wary, probably the result of the yearly tribute they received—and the fact that they lived in southern Reth, far from any possible outpost of shapeshifters.

Myr glanced at the mage, who nodded and spoke. “That she means you no harm, I will vouch for.” The slurred quality was not a product of the muffling of the pouch; if anything it was stronger than it had been. Maybe it was the mask.

“She has a gift for languages,” Wolf continued. “I need someone to help me in my research. If she is not occupied with other things, it would do no harm to bring her to camp with us. She can fight, and the gods know we have need of fighters. Also, she stands in danger from the ae’Magi if he should discover who it was that spied on him.”

“You spied on the Archmage?” Myr raised an eyebrow at her.

Aralorn shrugged. “It wasn’t my favorite assignment, but definitely one of the more interesting.” She let her face shift quickly to the one he’d seen in the ae’Magi’s castle, then went back to normal.

Myr looked a little sick—watching someone’s face move around could do that—then he blinked a couple of times. Finally, he smiled. “Yes, I see. Welcome, then, Lady. I invite you to join our small camp.”

Myr gave a short bow of his head, which she appreciated as exactly the correct height for a male sovereign to give in polite invitation or acceptance to a female who was neither his subject nor fellow royalty.

She in her turn, dressed in the clothes of the dead son of the innkeeper, gave him the exact curtsy she would have given him as her father’s daughter. Rethian nobility overdid manners, so she knew he’d catch the subtle difference.

He did. “
Who
are you?”

She gave him an apologetic smile as she pulled at the uncomfortably tight front of the tunic. “Lady Aralorn of Lambshold, at your service.”

“One of Henrick’s daughters.” Myr’s voice carried a hint of incredulity.

Aralorn nodded, smiling apologetically. “I know, I don’t look much like him, do I? He didn’t think so either. I was quite a disappointment to him.” She rolled up the sleeves until she could see her hands again.

“No, that’s not what I mean,” said Myr. “I’ve seen you in court—a long time ago. You’re his oldest child?”

She laughed. “You must have been all of ten. I’m the oldest daughter, but I have a brother a year older than I am. We two are the illegitimate get of youthful folly. My older brother’s mother was a household maid, and my mother was a shapeshifter who seduced poor Father in the nearby woods. With fourteen of us, I can see where you could have trouble keeping us straight. My siblings are all copies of our father, rather unfortunate for my sisters, but my brothers are all considered quite handsome.”

She startled a laugh out of Myr at her descriptions of her family. Her sisters were all quite beautiful, golden like their father—and like their father, they overtopped most men by a good handspan.

“How did you end up in Sianim?”

She tilted her head, thinking about how best to frame a reply. “I am too much my father’s daughter to be content with sewing a dress or learning how to converse. He taught me swordplay with my brothers because I asked him. When it came time for me to go to court, it was obvious to both him and me that as a Lady I was hopeless. He gave me his own horse and sent me on my way.”

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?”

FOUR

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.