Masques (32 page)

“Have you given any more thought to our invisible friend?” she asked, just to goad him. They’d worried and speculated for hours last night. During which time, Wolf had spent ten minutes lecturing her about how real invisibility was a myth, impossible to achieve with magic for a variety of reasons laid out in theories proposed over centuries.

She wasn’t fishing for answers from him now; she was fishing for a response. Some acknowledgment that he was aware she was in the room.

He grunted without looking her way and went back into the stacks.

She might have been more concerned with their invisible—to all intents and purposes, no matter what Wolf maintained—visitor. But whoever it was had made no move against them; quite the contrary, in her opinion. If their visitor had meant mischief, he’d had plenty of opportunity. This was the Northlands, after all, full of all sorts of odd things.

It was Wolf she worried about.

He’d never allowed her to get as close as they had been last night. But always, whenever he’d opened up to her, let down the barrier that separated him from her, from everyone, he’d abruptly leave for weeks or months at a time. She thought this morning’s distance might be the start of his withdrawal.

Having experienced the ae’Magi’s touch firsthand, if only for a brief time compared to whatever he’d gone through, she finally understood some of what caused Wolf to be the way he was. It increased her patience with him—but it didn’t mean she was going to let him pull away again without a fight.

“Did our apprentice write all of these?” Aralorn made a vague gesture toward the stacks before continuing to put a better edge on her knife.

Wolf turned to survey the piles. He let the silence build, then growled a brief affirmative before stalking back into the forest of bookcases. It was the first word he’d said to her since she’d woken up.

Aralorn grinned, sheathed her knife, and levered herself to her feet, still annoyingly weak. Scanning the nearby shelves, she found a book on shapeshifters and wobbled with it to the table, careful not to fall. Wolf had made it clear that he would rather that she stay put on the couch for a couple of days. She had no intention of giving in; but if she fell, there would be no living with him. So she’d save it for desperate measures if he didn’t start talking to her. If she fell deliberately, it wouldn’t be as humiliating.

She cleared off her chair and space enough to read. Now that the search had been narrowed to books that were likely to be trapped, Wolf had forbidden her to help. Aralorn decided if she couldn’t be useful, at least she could enjoy herself.

Wolf balanced the books he carried on another stack and eyed her narrowly without meeting her eyes. He took her book and looked at it before handing it back.

“I thought human mages were supposed to keep their secrets close—not write down every stray thought that comes into their heads.” With a tilt of her head, Aralorn indicated the neat piles of books he’d brought out.

He followed her gesture and sighed. “Most mages restrict their writings to the intricacies of magic. Iveress fancied himself an expert on everything. There are treatises here on everything from butter-making to glassblowing to governmental philosophy. From the four books of his I’ve already looked through, he is long-winded and brilliant, with the annoying habit of sliding in obscure magic spells in the middle of whatever he was writing when the spell occurred to him.”

“Better you than me,” said Aralorn, hiding her satisfaction in having gotten him to respond at last.

She must not have hidden it quite well enough. He stared at her from under his lowered brows. “Only because his books were considered subversive a few centuries back, and mages spelled them to keep them safe. Otherwise, I’d make you help me with this mess.” He took a stride toward the shelves again, then stopped. “I might as well start with what I have.”

“No use discouraging yourself with an endless task,” she agreed.

He growled at her without heat.

She grinned at his familiar grumpiness—much better than silence—and settled in to read. It was fascinating, but not, Aralorn fancied, in the fashion the author meant it to be. In the foreword, the author admitted she had never met a shapeshifter. Regardless, she considered herself an expert. The stories she liked best were the ones that represented shapeshifters as a “powerful, possibly mythic race” whose main hobby seemed to be eating innocent young children who lost themselves in the woods.

“If I were one of a powerful, possibly mythic race,” muttered Aralorn, “I wouldn’t be bothering with eating children. I’d go after pompous asses who sit around passing judgment on things they know nothing about.”

“Me, too,” agreed Wolf mildly without looking up. Evidently the reading he was doing was more interesting than hers, because even his grumpiness had faded. “Do you have someone in mind?”

“She’s been dead for years . . . centuries, I think.”

“Ah,” he said, turning a page. “I don’t eat things that have been dead too long. Bad for even the wolf’s digestion.”

She snorted and kept reading. Aralorn learned that shapeshifters could only be killed by silver, garlic, or wolfsbane. “And all this time I’ve been worried about things like arrows, swords, and knives,” she told Wolf. “Silly me. I’d better get rid of my silver-handled dagger—it would kill me to touch the grip.”

He grunted.

The author of her book was also under the mistaken impression that shapeshifters could take the shape of only one animal. She devoted a section to horrific tales of shapeshifter wolves, lions, and bears. Mice, Aralorn supposed, were too mundane—and unlikely to eat children.

She shared bits and pieces of the better wolf tales with Wolf, as he waded through a volume on pig training. He responded by telling her how to train a pig to count, open gates, and fetch. Pigs were also useful for predicting earthquakes. Iveress had helpfully included three spells to start earthquakes.

Aralorn laughed and returned to her reading. At the end of the book, the author included stories “which my research has proven to be merely folktales” to entertain her readers. After glancing through the first couple, Aralorn decided that the thing that distinguished truth from folktale was whether or not the shapeshifters were evil villains. Most of the tales were ones she’d heard before. Most, but not all.

She read the final story, then thoughtfully closed the book and glanced curiously around the room. Nothing was moving that shouldn’t be. Wolf had set the pig book aside and was sorting through a pile near his chair.

“Once long ago, between this time and that, there was a woman cursed by a wizard when she was young, for laughing at his bald head.” She didn’t need to use the book to help her memory, but kept her eyes on Wolf. “She was married, and her first child was born dead. Her husband died in an unfortunate accident while she gave birth to her second, a daughter. When she was three, it became apparent to one and all that the second child bore a curse worse than death—she was an empath. Upon that discovery, her mother killed herself.”

“A useless thing to do,” murmured Wolf, pulling a book out of the pile and setting it before him. He made no move to open it. “You’d have gone hunting for the wizard.”

Aralorn raised her eyebrow, and said coolly. “I’m not finished.”

He smiled and lifted both hands peaceably. “No offense meant, storyteller.”

“The girl child was taken to a house outside the village and cared for as best the villagers could. Her empathic nature meant that none of them could get too close without causing her pain.”

“I thought your book was about shapeshifters,” Wolf said, when Aralorn paused too long.

She nodded. “She grew up and learned to glean herbs from the woods to pay for her keep. When she was sixteen, a passing shapeshifter saw her. He took to following her around in the guise of a crow or squirrel. But whatever shape he took, she knew him.”

Wolf’s eyes grew reserved. “Indeed?”

Aralorn frowned at him. “This isn’t about you and me—and you would have found me the first time though if you’d thought about looking for someone who didn’t look like me.”

He looked away. She decided to ignore him and continued with the story.

“She knew when he fell in love with her, too. And he was able to guard his touch so she could bear it. When the villagers came to her home, he was her invisible guardian. She loved him and was happy.

“Once a month, the shapeshifter returned to his village to assure his people that he was well. They were not happy with his choice, and eventually his mother decided to solve the problem herself. She saw to it that a Southern slaver became aware of the girl and took her the next time the shapeshifter left her to visit the shapeshifter village. He returned to find the cottage empty, with the door swinging in the wind.

“The Trader was wary and, hearing that she had a magical lover, he took her through the Northlands, where no mage could follow. But her lover was no human mage, and he found them—too late.”

A moaning sound echoed through the caves. Wolf tilted his head slightly so she knew that he heard as well.

“When the shapeshifter reached the slavers’ camp,” she continued, “he found nothing left of the would-be slavers except mindless bodies. The girl, terrified and alone, had evoked an empath’s only defense, projecting her terror and pain onto her tormentors. She was alive when the shapeshifter found her, so he took her to a cave, sacred to his kind, where he tried to heal her. The worst of her wounds were of the spirit that even a shapeshifter’s magic may not touch; and though her body was whole, she spoke not a word to him but stared through him, as if he were not there. Not entirely sane from his grief, the shapeshifter swore to keep her alive until he could find a way to heal her soul. And so he lives on, an old, old man tending his beloved from that day until this—and that is the story of the Old Man of the Mountain.”

The moaning waned to a hesitant sigh that whispered through the library and faded to nothing.

Wolf raised an eyebrow at her. “I have never heard of a shapeshifter with the power that the Old Man is supposed to have.”

Aralorn rubbed her cheek thoughtfully, leaving behind a streak of black dust. This was a secret—but she didn’t feel like keeping secrets from Wolf. “The older a shapeshifter is, the more powerful he is. Like human mages, it is not unusual for a shapeshifter to live several hundred years. A really powerful shapeshifter can make himself younger constantly and never grow old. The reason that you don’t see a shapeshifter much older than several hundred years is that they are constantly changing to new and more difficult things. It’s hard to remember that you are supposed to be human when you change into a tree or the wind. An uncle of my mother once told me that sometimes a shapechanger forgets to picture what he is changing himself into, and he changes into nothing. There is no reason why our Old Man of the Mountain couldn’t be several thousand years old rather than just a few hundred. That would make him incredibly powerful.”

She stopped as something occurred to her. “Wolf, there was a snowstorm the night before the Uriah came. If it hadn’t slowed them down, they would have come upon us at night and slaughtered the camp.”

Wolf shrugged. “Snowstorms are unpredictable here, but I suppose that it could have been he who caused the storm. I suspect that we’ll never know.”

Wolf opened his book and went back to reading.

Aralorn found another book and managed not to show Wolf how unsteady she was. But when he’d checked it for her, and she opened it, it was difficult to concentrate as the little energy she’d regained dissipated. The words blurred in front of her eyes and soon she was turning pages from habit.

She dozed off between one sentence and the next. When Wolf touched her shoulder, she jumped to her feet and had her knife drawn before she opened her eyes.

“Plague it, Wolf!” she sputtered. “One of these days, you are going to do that, and I’ll knife you by mistake. Then I’ll have to live all my life with the guilt of your death on my hands.”

Her threat didn’t seem to bother him much as he caught her and lowered her to her chair as her legs collapsed under her. “You are trying to do too much,” he said with disapproval. He started to say something else, then lifted his head.

She heard it, too, then, the sound of running feet. Stanis popped into the room at a dead run—he was one of the few people who knew his way to Wolf’s private area. He was pale and panting when he stopped, looking as though he’d sprinted the half mile or so of cave tunnels that connected the main camp with Wolf’s library. “Uriah,” he panted.

Aralorn tangled with her chair when she tried to push it out of the way too fast, but kept from falling with the aid of a hand on her arm. She was firmly sat down on her seat.

Wolf, who had somehow donned his mask again, looked her straight in the eye, and said, “You stay here.” His voice left no room for arguments. He shifted into the wolf and melted into the tunnel.