She followed the sound of men’s voices and the smell of smoke through a thicket of bushes—she had to use a tendril of magic to keep quiet going through that—and around a huge boulder that had tumbled down from a cliff above. Peeking around the side of the boulder, she saw a cave mouth, the walls of the entrance reflecting light from a fire deeper inside.
The voices were louder, but still too far away to be distinguishable.
The wonderful thing about mice, Aralorn reflected as she shifted forms, was that they were everywhere and never looked out of place. A mouse was the first shape she’d ever managed—and she’d since worked hard on a dozen different varieties and their nearest kin. Shrew, vole, field mouse, she could manage any of them. The medium-sized northern-type mouse was just the right mouse to look perfectly at home as she scampered into the cave.
Two men stood by a large pile of goods that ranged from swords to flour, but consisted mainly of tarps and furs. The scent of fear drifted clearly to her rodent-sharp nose from the more massive (at least in bulk) man as he cowered away from the other. He bore the ornate facial tattooing of the merchant’s guild of Hernal, a larger city of Ynstrah, a country that lay several weeks’ travel to the south on the west side of the Anthran Alliance. He was wearing nothing but a nightshirt.
The second man had his back to her. He was tall and slender, but something about the way he moved told her that this man knew how to fight. He wore a hooded cloak that flickered red and gold in the light. Underneath the hood of the cloak he wore a smoothly wrought silver mask in the shape of a stylized face.
Traveling players used such masks when they acted out skits, allowing one player to take on many roles in a single play without confusion to the audience. Usually, these masks were made out of inexpensive materials like clay or wood. She’d never seen one made of silver, not even in high-court productions.
Each mask’s face was formed with a different expression denoting an explicit emotion that mostly bore only a slight resemblance to any expression found on a real face. As a girl from a noble house, Aralorn had spent many a dreary hour memorizing the slight differences between concern and sympathy, weariness and suffering, sorrow and defeat. She found it interesting that the mask this man wore displayed the curled lips and furrowed brow of rage.
In one hand the slender man held a staff made of some kind of very dark wood. On the lower end was the clawed foot of a bird of prey molded in brass, and its outspread talons glowed softly orange in the darkness of the cave as if it had been held in hot coals. The upper end of the staff was encrusted with crystals that lit the cave with their blue-white light.
The staff made it obvious that this man was the mage responsible for the magic that had so startled Sheen. If he had spirited the merchant and his goods from wherever he’d been to here—she assumed the man hadn’t been traveling in his nightshirt—then he was a sorcerer of no little power.
Hmm, she thought, maybe this mouse idea wasn’t such a good one. A powerful mage on alert might find a nearby mouse that wasn’t really a mouse, and he wasn’t likely to be very pleasant about it. Even as she started to back away, the mage looked over his shoulder and gestured impatiently. She didn’t even have time to fight the spell before she was stuffed into a leather bag that smelled strongly of magic.
She tried once to shift back into her human shape, but nothing happened. He’d trapped her, and until she figured a way out, she was stuck.
“How much, merchant?” the mage asked in Rethian. His voice was distorted with a strange accent—or maybe it was just the leather bag.
“Fourteen kiben.” The merchant, too, spoke good Rethian, but his voice was hoarse and trembling. Still, Aralorn noticed, the price he’d quoted was at least twice what the items were worth, unless there was something extremely valuable among them.
“Six.” The magician’s voice may have had an odd slur to it, but it was still effective in striking terror into the heart of the merchant—who squeaked in a most unmanly fashion. Aralorn had the feeling that it wouldn’t take much to achieve that result.
“Six, I accept,” he gasped. There was the sound of money changing hands, then a distinctive pop and an immense surge of magic, which Aralorn decided signaled that the merchant had been sent back to wherever he’d come from in the first place.
There was a moment’s pause, then a third person’s voice spoke.
“It worked.” He sounded as if he hadn’t expected it to. He also sounded young and aristocratic, probably because Myr was both.
She hadn’t planned on finding him quite so soon, not a half day’s ride from the inn. It was too convenient. Had Ren known that something was going on here? Was that why he’d sent her out to the backside of nowhere? She might have to take back months of heartfelt curses if that was so.
“Hopefully our mutual enemy will not think to question all of the merchants traveling in Reth.” There was something about the tone of the magician’s voice that was familiar, but the odd accent kept throwing her. She should be able to figure out what kind of an accent it was, she knew languages—which was why Ren had pulled her out of the rank and file in the first place.
“He wouldn’t learn much even if he did. The merchant doesn’t know where you brought him to.”
The magician grunted. “He knows that it was in the north because of the cold. He knows that it was in the mountains because of the cave. That is more than we can afford to have the ae’Magi know.”
Myr gave no vocal reply; but he must have nodded, because when he spoke again, it was on a different topic. “What was that you grabbed off the floor?”
“Ah yes. Just a . . . spy. Small but effective nonetheless.” Was that amusement she picked up in his tone?
The bag was opened, and she found herself hanging by her tail for the perusal of the two men. She twisted around and bit the hand that held her, hard. The mage laughed, but moved his hand so that she sat comfortably on his palm.
“My lord, may I present to you the Lady Aralorn, sometime spy of Sianim.”
She was so shocked she almost fell off her perch. How did he know who she was? It wasn’t as if she were one of the famous generals that everyone knew. In fact, as a spy, she’d worked pretty hard to keep her name out of the spotlight. And no one, no one knew that Aralorn could become a mouse.
Then it hit her. Without the additional muffling of the bag she recognized the voice. It was altered through the mask, a human throat, and that odd accent—but she knew it anyway. No one else could have that particularly macabre timbre. It was Wolf.
“So”—Myr’s voice was quiet—“Sianim spies on me now.” Aralorn turned her attention to Myr. In the short time since she’d seen him, he’d aged years. He was thinner, his mouth held taut, and his eyes belonged to the harsh old warrior who had been his grandfather instead of the boy she’d met. He wore clothing that a rough trapper or a traveling merchant might wear, patched here and there with neat stitches.
Deciding that the mouse was no longer useful—and it was easier to talk as a human—Aralorn jumped nimbly off her perch and resumed her normal shape, which was not the one that he would recognize. “No, my lord,” she answered. “Or at least that wasn’t my assignment. Sianim has spies on everyone. In fact, this is a rather fortunate meeting; I was looking for you to tell you that the ae’Magi’s messengers have reported your fit of madness to all the nearby townsfolk.” She spoke slowly and formally to give him a chance to adjust to her altered state.
Rethians were not less prejudiced against shapeshifters, just more likely to admit their existence. Since her mother’s people lived in the northern mountains of Reth and paid tribute yearly to the King of Reth in the form of exquisite tapestries and well-crafted tools delivered in the night by unseen persons, the Rethians had a tougher time dismissing them as hearsay.