Experimentally, she swung the sword at the bench. It bounced off as if propelled, the force of it almost making Aralorn lose her grip. Shifting her stance, Aralorn tried simply setting the sword against the warding. The repelling force was still there, but by locking her forearms and leaning into the sword, she managed to keep it touching the spell. She held it there for a while, before she gave up and let the sword fall away.
“You need to follow through better,” said Wolf with such earnestness that she knew he was teasing.
Aralorn turned and braced both hands on her hips and glared at him, but not seriously. “If I required your opinion, I’d give you over to my father’s Questioner and be done with it.”
He raised his eyebrows innocently. “I was only trying to help.”
She snorted and spun, delivering a blow to the bench that should have reduced it to kindling, but it did no damage at all.
“I don’t think it works this way,” she said. “It’s not heating up at all, and when I used it on the ae’Magi, it was so hot I couldn’t hold it.”
“All right,” said Wolf. “Let’s try this. I’ll try to work a spell on you while you hold the sword up between us.”
Aralorn frowned. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you being a little rash? If that’s why it killed your father, then it could do the same to you.”
He didn’t say anything.
She had a sudden remembrance of the look on his face as he’d called lightning down upon himself in her dream. It was only a dream, she told herself fiercely.
“Plague take you, Wolf,” she said as mildly as she could. “It’s not important enough to risk your life over. If it won’t work on the spells, it can’t help us here.”
“It might work against the shadow-thing we both saw,” he said. “Then perhaps you and I could examine the spells holding your father more closely.”
“Fine,” she said. “Then we’ll try it on that. Do you want to go down now?
Wolf shook his head. “Wait until morning. There are a lot of creatures who are weakened by the rising of the sun—and I’m tired.”
Aralorn nodded and slid Ambris back into the sheath before storing her in the wardrobe. She watched Wolf release the spells he’d laid on the bench, creating quite a light show in the process. Reaching out with the sixth sense that allowed her to find and work magic, she could feel the shifting forces but not touch them—what he was using was wholly human in origin.
Later, when the banked fire was the only light in the room, Aralorn snuggled deeper into Wolf’s arms.
It will be all right, she thought fiercely.
Late in the night, long after the inhabitants of the castle had gone to sleep, a man emerged from the shadows of the mourning room and stepped to the curtained alcove that contained the slumbering Lyon, his path lit by a few torches left burning in their wall sconces. He pulled back the curtains and started to step into the room but found himself unable to do so.
He placed a hand on the barrier of air and earth that Wolf had erected.
“Yes,” he said softly, “he is here.”
The warding would keep out human visitors, but he was something more. The tall, robed figure dissolved into the darkness and reappeared inside the room. Before he materialized completely, a shadow slipped from the side of the man on the bier.
“Ah, my beauty,” crooned the intruder. “It’s all right. I know, you were never meant to face his powers. I forget things now. I had forgotten that he could take the form of a wolf, or we would have been ready for him.” The shadow stroked against his legs like a cat, emitting squeaks and hisses as it did so. “Hold the Lyon fast, little one. We will force them to come to us.”
FOUR
The chill wind weaved its way through Aralorn’s heavy woolen cloak with the ease of a skilled lover, and she shivered in spite of the layers of clothing she wore. Although the keep was barely out of sight, the bones of her hands ached from the bitter chill. It always took weeks for her to acclimate to the cold northern winter.
Wolf, warm under his thick pelt, observed her attempts to tame her cloak, and asked, “Why did you decide to walk? Sheen would be much faster, not to mention warmer.”
“The shapeshifters’ village is difficult to reach by horse—sometimes impossible—and that area of Lambshold is too dangerous to leave him tied for any length of time.” Aralorn winced at the sharpness of her voice. His question had been reasonable; there was no need to give him the edge of her tongue because she was disappointed.
Before first light, they had visited the bier room and attempted to use the sword to slay the creature. Neither she nor Wolf, who, plague take the man, was a much better swordsman, had been able to even touch the shadow-thing with Ambris. The shadow had melted away from the sword with laughable ease.
Wolf hadn’t been able to tell anything more about the spells that held her father than he had before. Black magic had been used, but the pattern of the spelling was too complex to decipher while distracted by the creature who lurked in the bier room.
The only good thing to come out of the visit was that, as far as Wolf could determine, her father was no worse off this morning than he’d been last night. Scant comfort when his condition was so close to death that most people could not tell he was alive.
Wolf gave the clear skies a skeptical glance. “No clouds—I suspect it will be colder than sin. Why don’t you shapechange? Your mouse and goose aren’t much good here, but the icelynx is adapted for this area.”
The wind gusted, blowing snow into Aralorn’s face.
“Good idea” said Aralorn. “Then the shepherds will attack me, too.” She took a deep breath and reined in her temper. Snapping at Wolf was not going to free her father any faster, and for all that Wolf appeared so impassive, she knew better than most how easy it was to wound him. “Sorry. It’s all right. I’ll warm up as we walk.”
“I would not fret much about a bunch of sheepherders.”
Aralorn slanted a glance at him, unable to tell if he was serious or teasing. “They are my father’s men. No use stirring them up unduly if we don’t have to—besides, I’d just as soon talk to anyone we see. You never know what kernels of information might prove useful.”
They followed one of the main paths for several miles; this close to the keep, it was usually well traveled even in the dead of winter. They didn’t meet anyone, but it surprised her how much livestock had been left in the high pastures. Usually, they’d have been brought down to the lower, warmer valleys before any snow fell.
The first few herds they passed were distant, but she could tell they were not sheep from their color. When she had lived in Lambshold, there had been few herds of cattle; they were better suited for more temperate climates.
By chance, they came upon a herd unexpectedly close, and she caught a good look at the short, stout animals with long red hair that would have done credit to one of the mountain bears.
She stopped where she was and frowned at them a moment. Softly, so the animals wouldn’t be alarmed and charge, she said, “Ryefox.”
“Crossbred, by those horns,” Wolf replied. “I saw a ryefox drive away a bear once. Good eating, though.”
“If they’re only half as nasty as their full-blooded relatives, I’d rather face a half dozen Uriah,” commented Aralorn. “Naked,” she added, as one of the animals took a step toward them.
“They’re almost as sweet-tempered as you are this morning,” observed Wolf.
“Hah,” she said, forgetting that she’d been trying to keep quiet so as not to arouse the ryefox crossbreeds. “Look who’s talking, old gloom and doom.”
Wolf wagged his tail to acknowledge the justice of her comment, but only said, “I wonder that he found a cow or bull willing to go near enough to a ryefox to breed.”
“This must be the livestock experiment that Correy was talking about last night. The one my uncle was helping my father with.”
She kept a wary eye on the herd as they walked, but the
ryefox appeared to be satisfied that their territory wasn’t being threatened and stayed where they were.
A chest-high rock wall marked the boundary where the grazing ended and the northern croplands began. Aralorn caught the top of the wooden gate barring the path and swung over without bothering to open it. Wolf bounded lightly over the fence a few feet away and landed chest deep in a drift of snow. He eyed her narrowly as he climbed back onto the path. Aralorn kept her face scrupulously blank.
She cleared her throat. “Yes, uhm, I was just going to advise you that this area gets windy from time to time—the mountains, you see. And . . . uh, you might want to watch out for drifts.”
“Thank you.” replied Wolf gravely, then he shook, taking great care to get as much of the snow on Aralorn as he could.
As they continued their journey, the path began to branch off, and the one that they followed got narrower and less well-defined with each division.
“Why farm this?” asked Wolf, eyeing the rough terrain. “The land we just traveled through is better farmland.”
“Father doesn’t do anything with this land. His farms are along the southern border, several thousand feet lower in altitude, where the climate is milder. But there is good fertile soil here in the small valleys between the ridges—the largest maybe twenty acres or so. The crofters farm it and pay Father a tithe of their produce for the use of the land and protection from bandits. He could get more gold by running animals here instead—but this makes good defensive sense. The lower fields are easily burned and trampled by armies, but up here it’s too much trouble.”
“Speaking of burning,” said Wolf, “something has burned here recently. Can you smell it?”
She tried, but her nose caught nothing more than the dry-sweet smell of winter. “No, but Correy said that one of the crofts had been burned. Can you tell where the smell is coming from?”
“Somewhere a mile or so in that direction.” He motioned vaguely south of the trail they were following.
“Let’s head that way then,” she said. “I’d like to take a look.”
They broke with the main path to follow a trail that twisted here and there, up and down, through the stone ridges. It had been well traveled lately, more so than the other such trails they had passed, although a thin layer of snow covered even the most recent tracks. As they neared the farm, Aralorn could smell the sourness of old char, but it didn’t prepare her for the sight that met her eyes.
Scorched earth followed the shape of the fields exactly, stopping just inside the fence line. The wooden fence itself was unmarked by the blaze, which had burned the house so thoroughly that only the base stones allowed Aralorn to see where the house had been. All around the croft, the fields lay pristine under the snow.
Wolf slipped through the fence and examined the narrow line that marked the end of the burn.
“Magic,” he said. He hesitated briefly, his nostrils flaring as he tested the air. “Black magic with the same odd flavor of the spells holding the Lyon. Look here, on the stone by the corner of the fence.”
She stepped over the fence and knelt on the blackened ground. Just inside the corner post, there was a fist-sized gray rock smudged with a rust-colored substance.
“Is it human blood?” she asked.
Wolf shook his head. “I can’t tell. Someone used this fire and the deaths here to gather power.”
“Enough power to set a spell on my father?”
Before he could answer, the wind shifted a little, and he stiffened and twisted until he could look back down their path.
Aralorn followed his gaze to see a man coming up the trail they had taken here. By his gray beard, she judged him to be an older man, though his steps were quick and firm. In ten years a child might become a man, but a man only grayed a bit more: She matched his features with a memory and smiled a welcome.
“Whatcha be doing there, missy?” he asked as soon as he was near enough to speak, oblivious to Aralorn’s smile.
“I’m trying to discover what kind of magic has been at work, Kurmun. What are you doing here? I thought your farm was some distance away.”
He frowned at her, then a smile broke over his face, breaking the craggy planes as if it were not something he did often. “Aralorn, as I live and breathe. I’d not thought to see tha face again. I told old Jervon that I’d have a look at his place, he’s still that shook. Commet tha then for tha father’s passing?”
She smiled. “Yes, I did. But as it turns out, Father’s not dead—only ensorcelled.”
Kurmun grunted, showing no hint of surprise. “Is what happens when tha lives in a place consecrated to the Lady. Bad thing, that.”
She shook her head. “Now, that was taken care of long since. You know the family’s not been cursed by the Lady since the new temple was built. This is something quite different, and it may take a few days to discover what. I thought the burning of the farm might have something to do with it.”
The old man nodded slowly. “Hadn’t thought there was a connection, but there might, there might at that. Have a care here, then. Tha father, he took ill here.”
“I didn’t know that.” But she could have guessed.
Black magic had long carried a death penalty. A mage would avoid it as much as possible. It only made sense that the black magic Wolf felt here would belong to the spell on the Lyon.
“Aye, he come here tha day after it burned. Walked the fence line, he did. Got to the twisted pole over there and collapsed.”
“Now, that’s interesting,” said Aralorn thoughtfully. “Why didn’t anyone at the hold mention it?”
“Well,” replied Kurmun, though she hadn’t expected him to answer her question, “reckon they didn’t know. Just he and I here, and I tossed him on his horse and took him to the hold. They was in such a state that no one asked where it’d happened. Only asked what, so that’s all I told they. This is some young men’s mischief, thought I then.” He made a sweeping gesture that encompassed the burnt farm. “Tha father was felled by magic. Didn’t rightly think one had much to do with t’other myself. But if tha thinks it so, then so think I now.”
“I think it does,” she said. “Thank you. Did we lose any people?”
He shook his head. “Nary a one. Jervon’s oldest daughter come into her time. The missus and Jervon gathered they children and went up to attend the birth. Lost a brace of oxen, but they sheep was in lower pastures.”
“Lucky,” said Aralorn. “Or someone knew that they were gone.”
Kurmun grunted and scratched his nose. “The Lady’s new temple ha’ been cleaned and set to rights. Word is that there’s a priestess there now; I be thinking tha might want to be stopping in and talking to her. Happens she may help tha father. Happens not.” He shrugged.
“Ridane’s temple is being used?” There had been a lot more activity in the gods’ temples lately. She didn’t see how that could have any bearing on the Lyon’s condition, but she intended to check out anything unusual that had happened recently. “I’ll make certain to visit.”
“I’ll be on my way then,” he said, tipping his head. “Told my son’s wife I’d find a bit of salt for her out of the hold stores.” As he turned to go, his gaze met Wolf’s eyes. “By the Lady,” he exclaimed. “Tha beast’s a wolf.”
“Yes,” agreed Aralorn, adding hastily, “He doesn’t eat sheep.”
“Well,” said the old man, frowning, “see that he don’t. I’d keep him near tha so some shepherd doesn’t get too quick with his sling afore he has a chance to garner that tha wolf doesna eat sheep.”
“I intend to.”
“Right.” Kurmun nodded, and, with a last suspicious look at Wolf, he was on his way.
As soon as he was out of sight, Wolf said, “He called the death goddess the Lady?”
Aralorn smiled briefly. “Lest speaking her name call her attention to him, yes. The new temple is nearly five centuries old. ‘New,’ you understand, differentiates it from the ‘old’ temple that my long-d
ead ancestor had razed to build a hold. There wasn’t much left of the new temple when I last saw it; it’s been deserted for centuries. I wouldn’t think it would be possible to resurrect anything from the piles of stones. In any case, the temple is on the other side of the estate, so we’ll have to go there another day.”
She tapped her finger on a fence post. “This burned down before my father came here. Wouldn’t it have to happen at the same time?”
“There are ways to store power or even set spells to complete when certain conditions are met—like having your father come to this place.”
“It was a trap,” said Aralorn, “set for my father. The burning of the croft served both as bait and bane. Anyone who knew my father would know that he’d investigate if one of his people’s houses burned.” She shuffled snow around. “This farm is not too far from the shapeshifters’ territory. Other than knowing that it is possible for them to use blood magic, I don’t know what they would do with it or how. My uncle will know.”
“It could be a human mage,” said Wolf. “But any mage who came by here could tell that there was black magic done here. Why would they risk that? My father’s reign excepted, the ae’Magi’s job is to keep things like this from happening. They kill black mages, Aralorn. Only my father’s assurances and his power kept them from killing me—and they had no proof such as this. When we discover who did this, he will die. Why risk that merely to imprison the Lyon when killing would have been easier? What did he accomplish that was worth that?”
Silence gathered as Aralorn stared at the blood-splattered rock.
“Nevyn could do this,” said Wolf. “As long as no one knows I’m here, he will be the first one Kisrah ae’Magi will suspect. Nevyn first trained under old Santik.”
Aralorn frowned. She’d forgotten that as the ae’Magi’s son, Wolf would know a lot of the politics and doings of the mageborn. “Santik is someone Kisrah would associate with black magic?”
Wolf sighed. “His reputation wasn’t much better than mine—it wouldn’t surprise me or anyone else to find that he’d slipped into dark ways. Certainly, his library would have had the right books; nearly all the great mages have books they aren’t supposed to.”