Stef knew that look, the one Vanyel was wearing now. He finished the song he was on, just about the same time as Van made a polite end to his conversation and headed back to their room.
He gave the lute back to its finder, claiming weariness, and ignoring the knowing looks as he hurried after the Herald.
The guest room did not have a fireplace, and it was in the area of the barracks farthest from the chimneys. Given his choice, this was not where Stef would have gone. The corridor was lit by a couple of dim, smoking lanterns, and Stef would have been willing to swear he saw the smoke freeze as it rose into the air. Vanyel was a dim white shape a little ahead of him; he managed to catch up with the Herald before he reached their door.
“What was it?” he asked, seizing Van's elbow. “What did she say?”
He was half afraid that Van would pull away from him, but the Herald only shook his head and swore under his breath.
“I can't believe how stupid I was,” he said quietly, as he opened the door to their room and motioned Stef to go inside. The candle beside the door and the one next to the bed sprang into life as they entered - the kind of casual use of magic that impressed Stef more than the nightly creation of their shelter, because the use of magic to light a candle implied that Van considered it no more remarkable than using a coal from the fire for the same purpose. That was frightening - that Van could afford to “waste” power that way. . . .
“How were you stupid?” Stef persisted. “What did she tell you other than the fact that they're having odd weather this winter?”
“Odd weather?” Vanyel grimaced. “That's rather like saying Randi's a little ill. You heard her, they've had weeks of snow, not the couple of days' worth they should have had.”
He took his cloak down from the hook next to the door and bundled himself up in it. “Do you still want to be useful?” he asked, sitting down on the edge of the bed and looking up at Stef with the candle flames reflecting in his eyes.
“Of course I want to be useful -” Stef said uncertainly.
“Good. Stand by the door and make sure nobody comes in.” Vanyel put his back against the wall, and pulled the cloak in tightly around himself. He cocked an eyebrow at Stef as the Bard shuffled his feet, hesitantly. “That's not a light request. I'm going into trance. I made the basic mistake of assuming that since I didn't sense any magic in the weather around us that it wasn't wizard weather. Obviously I was wrong.”
“Obviously,” Stef murmured, seeing nothing at all obvious about it.
“So, I'm going to be doing some very difficult weather-working, but I'm going to have to do it at some distance, where these snowstorms are being generated. When I do that, I'll be vulnerable.” He waited for Stefen to respond. After a moment, light did dawn. “Oh - so if there're any agents here -”
“Right. This would be the time for them to act. And since my magical protections are pretty formidable, the easiest thing would be to come after me physically.” Vanyel settled back and closed his eyes.
“Van, what do you want me to do if somebody forces their way in here?” Stef asked, feeling for the hilt of his knife.
Vanyel opened his eyes again. “I want you to stop them however you have to,” he said, his eyes focusing elsewhere. “This is one place where your street-fighting skill is going to do us some good. Take them alive if you can, but don't let them touch me. One of those leech-blades just has to touch the skin to be effective.”
“All right,” Stefen replied, feeling both a little frightened, and better than he had since this trip started. At least now he was doing something. And Van had admitted to needing him to do it. “You can count on me.”
“If I didn't think I could,” Van told him, closing his eyes again, “I wouldn't have asked you, lover.”
Stef started at another noise; the candle had long since burned down to nothing, but he hadn't dared light another. Several times he'd thought he'd heard something outside the locked shutters on the room's single window, but nothing had ever happened.
The sound came again, but this time he realized it was coming from the bed. He groped his way over and sat down; the shapeless bundle of Van moved, and the cloak parted, letting out a faint mist of golden light. Stef gaped in surprise; his present, the amber mage-focus around Van's neck, was glowing ever so slightly. The light it gave off was just enough to see by.
“Anything happen?” Van asked, shaking long, silver-streaked hair out of his eyes. He looked like the old Vanyel; his face had lost some of that hard remoteness. And he sounded like the old Van, as well, his voice held concern for Stef as well as need to know if anything had gone wrong.
“I thought I heard something a couple of times, but other than that, nothing,” Stef told him, still staring at the pendant. “Does it always do that?”
“Does - oh, yes, at least it has for a while. That's the best gift anyone's ever given me, especially now,” Van said, his eyes and voice both warming. He stretched, throwing his cloak back a little and reaching high over his head, ending with one hand lying lightly on Stef's knee. “Having the focus to feed raw power through has made a lot of this much easier on me. I don't always have time to use it, but when I do, it extends my reach and my strength. I'm glad you cared enough about me to find it for me, ashke.” He smiled, and Stef warmed all through. “The snow should stop in about a candlemark, and it won't start again the way it has been.”
The abrupt change of subject didn't confuse Stef as much a it might have this time. “So it was wizard weather, then. Did you find out where it was coming from?”
“Vaguely. On the other side of this forest; possibly up in the mountains.” Van massaged his right hand with his left. “That's the strange part, Stef, I've never heard of a powerful mage coming out of that area before. A few tribal shamans, certainly, but never an Adept-class mage.”
“Who says he has to have come from there?” Stef replied, taking Van's hand and massaging it for him. He's treating me like a partner now, and not like a liability. “He could have come from somewhere else, the Pelagirs or Iftel, maybe, and moved in there because there's no one there. That's what I would do if I were a mage and wanted to build myself up before I took on the world. I'd go up where there aren't any mages. No rivals, no competition.”
“That's reasonable, I suppose,” Van admitted. “Listen, lover, how upset would you be at not staying the couple of days we planned here - at leaving at first light?”
“I told you I wasn't going to hold you back,” Stefen said, with a purely internal sigh of regret. “I'm not going to start now by breaking that promise. If you want to leave, we'll leave.”
“I was hoping you'd say that,” Van replied, kicking off his boots. Stef took his cloak from him, and started peeling off his own clothing, expecting that, as usual, the use of magery would have left Vanyel too tired to do anything but sleep.
Until he felt Van's hands sliding under his shirt.
“Here,” the Herald breathed in his ear. “Let me help you with that. This may be our last real bed for a while...”
In the morning, that brief glimpse of the old Vanyel was gone. Van was back to his new patterns; remote, silent, face unreadable, eyes wary. Stef sighed, but he hadn't really expected anything different. At least I know that down under the obsession, he's still the same person, he thought, dressing quickly in a room so cold that his breath frosted. So when this is over, I'll have him back again the way he was. It was beginning to look like I'd lost the Van I love. . . .