Wolfsbane (14 page)

The creatures were rare, even in the Northlands, where they hunted with the winter winds. She’d never heard of one this far south, but, she recalled abruptly, the trappers had been whispering about an increase in the magical creatures of the Northlands for the past few years. Frightening as the beast was, the storyteller in her captured images of the creature.

Her fascinated gaze traveled from the howlaa’s fangs to its glittering diamond eyes and stopped. Awareness of anything but the howlaa faded to insignificance. Distantly, she felt an odd dizziness that rapidly increased to nausea. Though she knew she stood firmly planted on the ground, she could feel nothing solid under her feet. As she swayed, torn adrift from her moorings, the wind touched her—gently at first.

Sadness, despair. It is out of place here and dying from the warmth.
Aralorn winced away from the alien deluge but could not escape the net the howlaa had caught her in.

A pained whine added itself to the growing cacophony surrounding her. Ice-colored eyes turned from her.

Without the grip of the colorless gaze, Aralorn fell to her hands and knees, unable to feel the bite of the snow, for she’d been touched by something even colder. The wind blew past her. Gathering its chill thoughts and whispering to her in a thousand thousand voices, voices that murmured and shrieked of death, of evil and all its incarnates. She couldn’t pull any one thing out of the deluge, only flinch from it and cower in terror.

A muffled grunt sounded from nearby, this time as human as the howlaa’s whine was not.

Wolf,
she thought. The thought of him allowed her to pull her hands to her ears, and the voices ceased with blessed suddenness. Awareness returned, and she looked up at Wolf in human guise, his back to her, confronting the howlaa.

Despite the blood that dripped from his shirt to melt the snow, Wolf wielded his black staff with cool grace. The crystals that grew from one end of the staff glittered like the eyes of the howlaa, while the finger-long, sharp metal talons on the other end dripped blood.

The talons were a weapon of a sort. Against a human opponent, they could be deadly—but against the howlaa’s thick hide and inner layer of fat, the short blades were virtually useless. It was unlike him to choose such an inept method of attack—unless he hadn’t known the things were immune to magic. His education in such matters was a bit haphazard—gleaned from books rather than teachers. His magic would have been an excellent weapon against a natural creature like a bear or wild boar, but it would help him not at all against the howlaa.

Stumbling to her feet without using her hands (as they were covering her ears against a cacophony of voices that couldn’t possibly be there), Aralorn noticed there was something wrong with her vision as well. Some things were blurry, while others were incredibly detailed.

Focusing on the fight, she drew her hands away from her ears and frantically stripped away her hampering cloak before the voices could claim her again. She had left her sword at Lambshold, worried that such a powerful weapon would antagonize the shapeshifters; now she wished she’d brought it along.

Aralorn drew her knives, one in each hand, and watched the rhythm of the fight to see where she could best attack.

Come on, concentrate,
she thought. The effort of ignoring the muttering tones caused her to break out in a light sweat in spite of the ice and wind.

Wolf struck with the clawed end of his staff, and the howlaa turned away, bawling angrily as the sharp points scored its side. With a growl, it snapped at the staff and received another slash. Had the talons on Wolf’s staff moved, or was it merely an effect of whatever the howlaa’s gaze had done to her?

Aralorn shook her head in an attempt to drive away thoughts and voices alike. She needed to know where the battle would move, not what Wolf’s staff was doing. It was hard to read the purpose of Wolf’s pattern of attack. He wasn’t looking for a possible fatal hit, just using his staff to poke and prod the creature in the sides. He wasn’t trying to back away to the woods, where the howlaa’s size would work against it. It was as if . . . of course, Wolf was trying to pull the howlaa away from her—just like one of the idiotic, plaguingly foolish heroes in a bard’s tale. He probably could have backed off and conjured something more useful than his pox-eaten staff if he hadn’t been worried about her.

Wolf’s next attack should come
there
, and the howlaa would close from the right. Just as it had kept away pain, cold, and terror over the years, the taste of battle forced the voices into the background at last.

As silent as Wolf himself, Aralorn edged around the battle until she was behind the howlaa. When all of its attention was on Wolf, she ran and sprang into the air, leaping on the howlaa’s back as if it were a horse and she a youngster trying to show off. She clamped her legs beneath its shoulder blades and plunged her sharp steel knives into either side of its neck, where the fat was not as thick.

Rising on its haunches, the howlaa sang, a high, piercing death-song that the wind answered and echoed. Aralorn clung to its back as it rose, her face against the coarse, musky-smelling fur while the creature’s blood warmed her cold hands and made the hafts of her knives slick.

The howlaa jerked again as Wolf hit it in the throat with his staff, sinking the talons deep into flesh. He shifted his grip on the staff and braced his weight against it to force the dying animal sideways.

If not for Wolf’s quick action, the howlaa would have fallen backward on top of Aralorn. As it was, she loosed her hold on her knives, jumped off the animal, and ran out of the reach of the powerful claws, which were flailing about wildly.

From opposite sides, she and Wolf watched the creature’s death throes. It struggled for a moment more, then lay still. Aralorn shivered and retrieved her cloak from the snow where she’d tossed it.

“One of your relatives?” asked Wolf, cleaning the end of his staff in the snow.

Aralorn shook her head, pulling the enveloping folds of wool around her, trying to still the shudders of cold and battle fever. “No, it’s a howlaa.”

The fight done, the murmuring voices fought for her attention, though they were quieter than before. She knew she should do something, but she couldn’t remember what.

Wolf finished cleaning the ends of his staff, then buried it in the snow so he could tuck his hands under his arms to warm them. He walked over to the dead animal and nudged it gently with a foot. “What is a howlaa doing so far south?”

“Hunting,” replied Aralorn softly. She noticed that the wind was dying down.

Wolf left off examining the dead beast. “Aralorn?”

“It was sent to get you, I think. I ...” The wind died down to nothing, taking the voices with it. Cautiously, she relaxed.

“Are you all right, Lady?”

She smiled at him, trying for reassurance. “Ask me tomorrow. What about your shoulder?”

He shook his head. “A scratch. It’ll need cleaning when we get to the keep, but it’s nothing to worry about.”

She insisted on seeing it anyway, but he was right. She’d held on to the rush of battle until she was certain he was all right. Her worry satisfied, she relaxed.

Taking the edge of his black velvet cloak, Wolf wiped the smudges of tree sap and howlaa blood off her face. Finishing her nose, he pulled a few sticks out of her hair and pushed it back from her eyes.

“I don’t know why you bother,” said Aralorn. “Ten steps through the trees, and it will look just as bad.”

Wolf’s amber eyes glittered with amusement. He made a motion toward his mask as if he were going to take it off, when his gaze passed by her, and he stopped. Aralorn turned to see the red-tailed hawk perched on the dead howlaa.

“Where did you find a shapeshifter powerful enough that I could not tell he was anything other than a wolf who followed at your heels?” Her uncle spoke in his native tongue.

Without replying, Aralorn translated his speech into Rethian for Wolf. She was too tired for verbal battles—though translating wasn’t much better.

“She found me, and I followed her home,” said Wolf dryly.

“So why do you need me, child?” Halven switched to Rethian, though his tone lost none of its hostility. “I felt the force of the magic he called when you were imperiled; your shapeshifter is surely as capable as I.”

“No,” said Wolf.

“He only knows human magic,” said Aralorn, when it became obvious that Wolf had said all that he would on the matter.

Her uncle let out a coughing sound and ruffled his feathers. “I am not stupid. No human mage could hold the shape of a wolf for so long without being trapped in his own spelling.”

“His father, who raised him, was a human mage,” she said cautiously, not wanting to give too much away. “We think his mother was a shapeshifter or some other kind of green mage. His ability to work green magic . . . fluctuates.” She wouldn’t tell her uncle how badly it fluctuated, not now. Perhaps later, when he was in a better mood. “In green magic, he has only the little training that I’ve been able to give him, and you know how poorly trained I am.”

“Your own fault,” he snapped.

“Of course,” she said, happy to have distracted him to a more familiar frustration. “Wolf has already looked at the spells holding Father. Perhaps you might be able to tell how they were cast, but neither of us could figure it out. There is this also: Father is guarded by some sort of creature that I have never even heard stories about. We thought you might be able to identify it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about all this before?” asked Halven in a dangerously soft voice.

Tired as she was, Aralorn found the energy to grin.

“What?” she said. “And use my best ammunition first? I thought that you would be much harder to convince, and I’d have to pull out the shadow-thing to draw you to the keep out of curiosity. I wasn’t counting on Kessenih doing half the work for me.”

She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw an answering amusement rising in her uncle’s eyes.

“We think,” said Wolf slowly, “that your people have nothing to do with this. If you can banish the creature who guards him, or tell us how to do it, then with luck we can unwork the spell and identify the caster.”

Halven raised his eyebrows. “I hadn’t heard that you could trace a black spell back to the wizard.”

“If it is human cast, I can,” said Wolf.

The shapeshifter cocked his head. “So if I can help you rid the Lyon of this creature, you can deal with the black magic binding him?”

“If it is black magic, worked by human hands—yes.”

“I thought,” said Halven with soft intent, “that human mages proscribed black magic. A mage caught using it is killed.”

“Working black magic is,” replied Wolf. “But unworking it usually requires no blood or death.”

“You are very familiar with something that is supposed to have been forbidden for so long.”

“Yes, and you are not the first to note it,” agreed Wolf, without apparent worry, though Aralorn curled her hands into fists. He took such a risk. Her uncle would figure out who he was, and she no longer knew him well enough to predict what Halven would do. If he told any of the humans about it, Wolf would become a target for anyone. The Spymaster, Ren, liked to say that anyone could be killed, given enough time, money, and interest in accomplishing that person’s death.

“If I am seen by a human mage,” Wolf continued, “he will most certainly attempt to see that I am killed. It is to spare myself needless effort defending myself that I spend so much time as a wolf.”

The wind had been teasing the treetops, but as the sun moved down and removed that slight source of warmth, it began to blow in earnest once more. Aralorn lost track of the conversation, unable to tell one voice among many. Keeping her face impassive, she slipped her hand onto the curve of Wolf’s elbow and kept her mouth closed for fear of echoing the shrieks reverberating in her head.

Wolf glanced at her face, then said something to Halven.

The hawk cocked its head and gave a jerky nod. With a leap and a thrust of wings, it took flight.

Wolf waited until the hawk was out of sight before turning back to Aralorn. The wind howled through the trees, making Wolf’s cloak snap and crackle around her as he drew her under its shelter.

“What is it, Lady?” he asked, the rough velvet of his voice penetrating the chaos that rang in her head.

“The wind,” she whispered. “It’s the wind. I can
hear
them.”