“Aunt Aralorn. Hey, Aunt Aralorn, Father said you would tell us a story if we cornered you.”
Putting their ages roughly at eight and five, Aralorn quickly came up with the identity of “Father.” Falhart was the only one of her brothers old enough to have sired them.
“All right,” she said, hiding her pleasure—as tired as she was, storytelling opportunities were not to be lost. “Tell Falhart you cornered me. I’ll do some tale-telling in front of the fireplace after I’m finished eating.”
The two scurried off in search of their father, and Aralorn finished the last of her bread. Wolf yawned as she picked the empty trencher off the floor and got to her feet.
“Come on, we’ll take this to the kitchen and ...” Her voice trailed off as she saw Irrenna making her way toward her.
It wasn’t Irrenna that made her lose her train of thought, but the man who walked beside her. Flamboyantly clothed in amber and ruby, Lord Kisrah looked more like a court dandy than the holder of age-old power.
It was too soon for Irrenna’s message to have reached him; he must have come for the Lyon’s funeral.
Well, Aralorn thought, if he didn’t know who it was that he met in the ae’Magi’s castle the night Geoffrey died, he will now. Even if he wasn’t involved with her father’s collapse, he was not going to be friendly. If he was responsible for her father’s condition . . . well, she wasn’t always friendly either.
She let none of her worries appear on her face, nor did she allow herself to hesitate as she approached them, dirty trencher in hand.
“You said that you weren’t able to wake him?” asked Irrenna.
Kisrah, Aralorn noted warily, was intent, but not surprised at all at seeing her face in this hall. He had known who she was before coming here. He moved to the top of her suspects.
“That’s right,” said Aralorn. “My uncle agreed to come and look. He didn’t know the spell that holds Father, but he was able to dispose of the baneshade—”
“Baneshade?” Kisrah broke in, frowning.
She nodded. “Apparently the one who did this has a whole arsenal of black arts—”
“Black arts?” he interrupted.
“You must not have looked in on him yet,” she said. “Whoever laid the spell holding the Lyon used black magic. I’m not certain if you’d call the baneshade black magic precisely, but it attacked me the first time I worked magic in the room—the mage must have set it to guard my father. My uncle—my mother’s brother, who is a shapechanger—is the one who identified it and rid us of it as well.”
“My apologies,” Irrenna broke in. “Allow me to present the Lady Aralorn, my husband’s oldest daughter, to you, Lord Kisrah. Aralorn, this is Lord Kisrah, the ae’Magi. He came here as soon as he heard what happened to Henrick.”
“It took me a while to connect Henrick’s daughter with the Sianim mercenary the ae’Magi had me fetch for him,” replied the Archmage, bowing over Aralorn’s hand. “I suppose I had expected someone more like your sisters.”
At her side, Wolf stiffened and stared at Kisrah with an interest that was definitely predatory. She took a firm grip on a handful of fur. She’d never told him of Kisrah’s role in her capture and subsequent torture by the ae’Magi because she’d worried about his reaction.
“How did you make the connection?” asked Irrenna, unaware of the coercive nature of Kisrah’s “fetching” of Aralorn. “She has very little contact with us; she says she is afraid her work will draw us into jeopardy.”
Sadness crept across his features, an odd contrast to the rose-colored wig he wore—like an emerald among a pile of glass jewels. “The council appointed me to investigate Geoffrey’s death even before they called me to assume his role. I looked into the backgrounds of anyone who had anything to do with him in his last days. You”—he directed his speech to Aralorn—“provided me with a particularly odd puzzle and kept the investigation going much longer than it otherwise would have. It was especially difficult until I discovered that the Lyon’s eldest daughter was of shapeshifter blood.” He was almost as good with a significant pause as she herself was. After a moment, he turned back to Irrenna. “It was the Uriah that were his downfall. He was looking for a way to make them less harmful and lost control of the ones he had with him. There was not even a body left.”
“It was an accident, then?” asked Irrenna. “I had heard that it was—though there were all of those rumors about his son.”
“The council declared it an accident,” confirmed Kisrah. “A tragedy for us all.”
Aralorn noted how carefully he avoided saying that he believed the council’s decision that his predecessor’s death had been an accident. Surely he didn’t—he’d been there.
“Would you care to look at my father? Or would you prefer to rest from your travels?” she asked.
Lord Kisrah turned back to her. “Perhaps I will eat first. After that, would you consider accompanying me to your father? I tried to open the wards when I arrived, but I couldn’t get through.”
It had been Kisrah, then, who’d tried the wards. Did he know Wolf’s magic well enough to tell that he’d set the spells? Stinking wards, she thought. If she’d had the sense of a goose, she’d have set them herself in the first place.
“. . . at first it might have been Nevyn’s work, but I know his magic.” He looked at her inquiringly, and Aralorn wondered what she’d missed while she was cursing herself.
“No, not Nevyn’s, nor mine either—my mother’s gift of magic is green magic. I can set wardings, of course, but the baneshade’s presence called for a stronger magic. I did a favor for a wizard once, and he gave me an amulet ...” Wizards were always giving tokens with spells on them, weren’t they? At least in the stories she told they were. At her feet, Wolf moaned softly, so maybe she was wrong.
Kisrah’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “An amulet? How odd. I’ve never heard of a warding set on an amulet. Do you have it with you?”
Yep, I was wrong.
Aralorn shook her head and boldly elaborated on her lie. “It wasn’t that big a favor. The amulet itself was the main component of the spell—so it could only be activated once. I thought the baneshade warranted using it. But my uncle killed the creature, so it’s safer now. I’ll come with you to take them off.”
He stared at her a moment, his pale blue eyes seeming blander than ever. But she had been a spy for ten years; she knew he saw only what she intended him to see. Innocently, she gazed back.
She was lying. He knew she was lying. He wasn’t going to call her on it, though—which made her wonder what he was up to.
“I see,” he said after a moment. “With the baneshade gone, did you look at the spell holding Henrick?”
She nodded. “I’m not an expert, though I can tell black magic. My uncle said that it feels as if there was more than one mage involved in the spelling.”
“Black magic,” he said softly, and she had the impression that it was the real man speaking and not his public face. For an instant, she saw both shame and fear in his eyes. Interesting.
“Why don’t you get some food, Lord Kisrah,” said Irrenna.
“That would be good,” agreed Aralorn. She wanted to give Wolf time to recover a little before they went back to the bier room with Kisrah. “My brother sent a pair of his hellions to force me into telling a story or two, and I gave them my word of honor I would entertain them after I’d eaten.”
Irrenna laughed. “You’ll have to stay for it, Lord Kisrah. Aralorn is a first-rate storyteller.”
“So I have heard,” agreed the mage, smiling.
Aralorn sat cross-legged on the old bench near the fireplace where she’d spent many long winter hours telling stories. The children gathered around were different from the ones she remembered, but there was a large number of her original audience present, too. Falhart sat on the floor with the rest, a couple of toddlers on his lap. Correy leaned against a wall beside Irrenna and Kisrah, who stood with his food so that he could
be close enough to hear.
“Now then,” Aralorn said, “what kind of story would you like?”
“Something about the Wizard Wars,” said one of the children instantly.
“Yes,” said Gerem softly, as he approached the group from the shadows. “Tell us a story about the Wizard Wars.”
Startled, Aralorn looked up to meet Gerem’s eyes. They were no more welcoming than they had been earlier that day.
“Tell us,” he continued, taking a seat on the floor and lifting one of the youngsters onto his lap, “the story of the Tear of Hornsmar, who died at the hands of the shapechangers in the mountains just north of here.”
She was going to have to teach her brother some subtlety, but she could work with his suggestion. She needed a long story, to give Wolf as much time to recover as possible. One came to mind as if it had been waiting for her to recognize it.
“A story of the Wizard Wars, then, but the story of the Tear is overtold. I have instead a different tale for you. Listen well, for it contains a warning for your children’s children’s children.”
Having caught their attention, Aralorn took a breath and sought the beginning of her tale. It took her a moment, for it wasn’t one of the ones she told often.
“Long and long ago, a miller’s son was born. At the time, this hardly seemed an auspicious or important event, for as long as there have been millers, they have been having children. It was not even an unusual occurrence for this miller, because he’d had three other sons and a daughter born in a similar fashion—but not a son like this. No one in the village had ever had a son like this.” She saw a few smiles, and the hall quieted.
She continued, punctuating her story with extravagant gestures. “When Tam laughed, the flowers bloomed, and the chairs danced; when he cried, the earth shook, and fires sprang up with disconcerting suddenness. Concerned that the child would set fire to the mill itself and ruin his family, the miller took his problem to the village priest.
“In those days, the old gods still walked the earth, and their priests were able to work miracles at the gods’ discretion, so the miller’s action was probably the wisest one he could have taken.
“And so the boy was raised by the village priest, who became used to the fires and the earthquakes and quite approved of the blooming flowers. The miller was so relieved that when the temple burned down because of a toddler temper tantrum, he didn’t even grumble about paying his share to rebuild it—and he grumbled about everything.
“Now, in those days, there was trouble brewing outside the village. Mages, as you all know, are temperamental at best, and at their worst ...” Aralorn shuddered and was pleased to see several members of her audience shiver in sympathy. At her feet, Wolf made a soft noise that might have been laughter. Kisrah smiled, but in the dim light of the great hall, she couldn’t tell if it was genuine or not.
“Kingdoms then were smaller even than Lambshold, and each and every king had a mage who worked for him. Usually, the most powerful mages worked only for themselves, for none of the small countries could afford to hire them for longer than it took to win a battle or two. The strongest mages of them all were the black mages, who worked magic with blood and death.”
Gerem straightened, and said, “I never knew black magic was more powerful than the rest.”
Aralorn nodded. “With black magic, the sorcerer has only to control the magic released; with other magics, he must gather the power as well. Collecting magic released in death takes nothing out of the mage . . . except a piece of his soul.”
“You sound as if you’ve had personal experience,” said Gerem challengingly.
Aralorn shook her head. “Not I.”
When Gerem looked away from her, she continued the tale. “This balance of power had worked for centuries—until the coming of the great warrior, Fargus, and the discovery of gold in the mountains of Berronay.” She rolled out the names with great ceremony, like the court crier, but added, much less formally, “No one knows, now, where Berronay or its mines were. No one knows much more about Fargus than his name. But it was his deeds that came close to destroying the world. For he ruled Berronay shortly after its rich mines were discovered and before anyone else knew how rich that discovery was. He amassed a great army with the intent of conquering the world—and he hired the fourteen most powerful mages in the world to ensure that he would do so.
“Tam’s village was the smallest of three in the kingdom of Hallenvale—that’s ‘green valley’ in the old tongue. It was located in the lush farmland in the rolling hills just northwest of the Great Swamp.” Aralorn paused, sipping out of a pewter mug of water someone had snagged for her.
“But there isn’t any farmland there,” broke in a tawny-headed girl of ten or eleven summers.
“No,” agreed Aralorn softly, pleased that the child had added to the drama of her story. “Not anymore. There’s just an endless sea of black glass where the farmland used to be.”
She paused and let them think about that for a little while. “As I said, Tam was raised in the small farming village by the priest. When the boy was twelve—the age of apprenticing—he was sent to the king’s wizard for training. By the time he was eighteen, Tam was the most powerful wizard around—except for those using black magic.”
Aralorn surveyed her audience. “There were a lot of black mages, though. Black magic was common then, and most people saw nothing wrong with it.”
“Nothing?” asked Gerem.
“Nothing.” Aralorn nodded. “Most of the mages used the blood and death of animals—if they used human deaths, they kept it quiet. If you kill a pig for eating, its death releases magic. Isn’t it a waste if you take the animal’s hindquarters and throw them in the midden? Why then is it not a waste to leave the magic of its death to dissipate unused?” She waited. “They thought so. But our Tam, you see, was different. He’d been raised by a priest of the springtime goddess—a goddess of life. Out of respect to her, he didn’t sully himself with death.”
Satisfied that she’d given them something to think about, she continued the story. “Fargus, with the wealth of the gold mines of Berronay behind him, bade his mages ease the way for his armies, and he took over land after land. As each new country added to his wealth, he hired more mages. Even the Great Swamp was no barrier to Fargus’s mages, whose powers only grew as the number of the dead and dying mounted.
“Now, Fargus was not the first warlord to conquer others using the power of the black mages. A score of years earlier, the battles between Kenred the Younger and Agenhall the Foolish had raged wildly until the backlash of magic had sunk the whole country of Faen beneath the waves of the sea. A hundred years before that, the ravages of the Tear of Hornsmar destroyed the great forest of Idreth with the magic of his sorceress mistress, Jandrethan.” Aralorn looked up and saw several members of her audience nodding at the familiar names. “But it was Fargus’s war that changed everything.”
“Hallenvale,” she went on, “came at last to Fargus’s notice, and he sent his magic-backed army to fight there. But it was not an easy conquest. The king of Hallenvale was a warrior and strategist without equal—called Firebird for his temperament and the color of his hair. Ah, I see several of you have heard of him. Hallenvale was a prosperous little country, as it had been ruled wisely for generations. The Firebird used his wealth to gather together wizards of his own, including Tam. The small unconquered countries all around, knowing that if Hallenvale fell, their lands would be next, aided him any way they could.
“A battle was fought on the Plains of Torrence. The armies were equally matched: Thirty-two black mages fought for Fargus, a hundred and seven wizards stood beneath the Firebird’s banner—though these were mostly lesser mages.”
She let her voice speed up and drop in pitch as she fed them details of the fight. “. . . Spells were launched and countered until magic permeated the very earth. After three days, a pall hung over the plain, an unnaturally thick fog, a fog so dense they could not see t
wenty paces through it. To the mages, whichever side they fought upon, the air was so heavy with magic that it took more power to force yet more magic into the area. Fortunately”—she let her tongue linger on the word and call it to her audience’s attention—“there were so many dead and dying on the field that there was power enough to work more and greater magics.
“Tam, his power exhausted, was sent to the top of a nearby hill that he might get a better view of the battlefield. He did so. What he saw sent him galloping for the Firebird’s personal mage, Nastriut.”
“Wasn’t the mage who escaped the sinking of Faen on a boat called Nastriut?” Falhart asked.
She nodded. “The very same. He was an old man by then, and tired from the battle. Tam coaxed him onto a horse and hauled him up to the top of the hill.”
She sipped water and let the suspense build.
“Only a very great mage could have seen what Tam had, but Nastriut was one of the most powerful wizards of his generation. From the vantage point of the hill, Nastriut and Tam could see that the fog that had grown from the first day of the battle was not what either had thought. It was not a spell cast by one of Fargus’s wizards or some side effect of the sheer volume of magic.
“ ‘Just before Faen fell into the sea,’ Tam said, ‘you saw a dark fog engulf the whole island.’
“ ‘There was magic so thick it hurt to breathe,’ said Nastriut. ‘Death, more death, and dreams of the power of blood. From the sea I saw it like a great hungry beast.’ The old man shuddered and swallowed hard. ‘Have you been dreaming of power, Tam? I have. Dreams of the power death brings and the lust that rises through my blood. It promises me youth that has not been my state for a century or more.’
“ ‘If I use black magic,’ whispered Tam, ‘my dreams tell me that I can end all the fighting and go back to my home. Are you saying this thing is in my dreams?’
“ ‘Such dreams we all had before Faen died,’ the old man said. ‘I dreamed that we created this with the taint of death magic, but I had no proof. When this beast killed the island, it was half the size it is now. But it is the same, the same.’ ”