She dropped her gaze away from his and knelt to examine his hips, humming softly as she moved closer.
She didn’t stink of fear, was all he could think. Everyone feared him. Everyone. Even Him, even the one who searched. She smelled of horse, sweat, and something sweet. No fear.
He snarled, and she wrapped one hand over his muzzle. Sheer astonishment stopped his growls. Just how stupid was she?
“Shh.” Her voice blended into the music she was making, and he realized that her humming was pulling magic out of the ground around and beneath them. “Let me look.”
He was as surprised at himself as he was at her when he let her do just that. He could have torn out her throat or broken her neck while she examined every inch of him. But he didn’t—and he wasn’t quite certain why not.
It wasn’t that killing her would bother him. He’d killed a lot of people. But that was before. He didn’t want to do that anymore. So perhaps that was part of it.
He knew she was trying to help him—but he didn’t want help. He wanted to die.
Her magic swept over and around him, cushioning him. The wolf whined softly and relaxed, leaving the mage in him fully in charge for the first time since the illness had hit. Maybe even longer ago than that.
Her magic didn’t work on the mage because he knew what it was—and, he admitted to himself, because it wasn’t coercive magic. He was mage enough to read her intent. She didn’t want the wolf to become a lapdog but only to relax.
But the woman’s helpful intent wasn’t why he didn’t kill her. Not the real reason. He hadn’t been interested in anything in longer than he could remember, but she made him curious. He’d only ever met a practitioner of green magic, wild magic, once before. They hid from the humans in the land—if there were any still left. But here was one wearing the clothes of a mercenary.
She could pick him up—which surprised him because she didn’t weigh much more than he did. But she couldn’t hoist him high enough to reach the edge of the trap, so she set him down again.
“Going to need some help,” she told him, and clambered to the top. She almost didn’t make it out of the pit herself; if it had been round, she wouldn’t have.
When she departed and took her magic with her, it left him bereaved—as if someone had covered him with a blanket, then removed it. And only when she left did he realize that her music had deadened his pain and soothed him, despite his being a mage on his guard against it.
He heard the horse move and the sound of leather and something heavy hitting the ground. The horse approached the pit and stopped.
When the mercenary who could do green magic hopped back into his almost grave, she had a rope in her hand.
He waited for the wolf to stir as she tied him in a makeshift harness that somehow managed to brace his bad leg. But the wolf waited as meekly as a lamb while she worked. When he was trussed up to her satisfaction, she climbed back out.
“Come on, Sheen,” she told someone. Possibly, he thought, it was the horse.
The trip out of the hole was not pleasant. He closed his eyes and let the pain take him where it would. When he lay on the ground at last, she untied him.
Freed at last, he lay where he had fallen, too weak to run. Maybe too curious as well.
ONE
FOUR YEARS LATER
Aralorn paced, her heart beating with nervous energy.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time. She intended to sneak in as a servant—she was good at being a servant, and people talked in front of servants as if they weren’t there at all. But then there had been that slave girl, freshly sold to the very Geoffrey ae’Magi whose court Aralorn was supposed to infiltrate and observe . . .
Maybe if the slave girl hadn’t had the gray-green eyes of the old races, eyes Aralorn shared, she wouldn’t have given in to impulse. But it had been easy to free the girl and send her off with connections who would see her safely back to her home—proof that though she had lived in Sianim all these years, Aralorn was still Rethian enough to despise slavery. It was even easier to use the magic of her mother’s people to rearrange her body and her features to mimic the girl and take her place.
She hadn’t realized that slaves could be locked away until they were needed; she’d assumed she’d have work to do. It was well-known that the Archmage’s passions were reserved for magic, and he seldom indulged in more fleshly pleasures. She’d figured that the girl had been purchased to do something—not sit locked in a room for weeks.
Aralorn had been just about ready to escape and try again using a different identity when she’d been brought up to the great hall of the ae’Magi’s castle four days ago and put into the huge silver cage.
“She’s to be decoration for the ball,” said the servant who put her in the cage, in response to another servant’s question. “It won’t be for a week yet, but he wanted her here so he could see the decorations and her at the same time.”
Decoration. The ae’Magi had purchased a slave to decorate his great hall.
It had seemed out of character for the Archmage, Aralorn had thought. It took more than power to become the ae’Magi. The man or woman who wore that mantle of authority was, in his peers’ eyes, a person of unassailable virtue. Only such a one could be allowed the reins to control all of the mages—at least all those west of the Great Swamp—so there was never again a wizard war. Purchasing a person in order to use her as decoration seemed . . . petty for such a one as the ae’Magi. Or so she’d thought.
Four days ago.
Aralorn shivered. Her shoes made no sound on the marble beneath her feet, not that anyone would have been able to hear them over the music.
Beyond the silver bars of her cage, the great hall of the ae’Magi’s castle was resplendent. By reputation, if not fact, the room was nearly a thousand years old, kept beautiful by good maintenance and judicious replacement rather than magic.
Though this room was the heart of the ae’Magi’s home, by tradition no magic was to be done here. This was the place the rulers of men conducted business with the ae’Magi, and the lack of magic proved to one and all that there was no magical coercion taking place. Aralorn now knew that the current ae’Magi didn’t particularly care about following tradition, and coercion was something he used . . . on everyone.
That first day, she’d been shocked when the stone beneath her feet vibrated with magic. She looked out at the room. Ten centuries old, or at least ten centuries of care and careful preservation by the finest craftsmen available. And the ae’Magi had saturated the stone with magic. No one would think to check, would they? And if they did, they’d just suspect another ae’Magi, an earlier one, because Geoffrey ae’Magi would never defy tradition.
This evening it was lavishly decorated for the pleasure of the people who danced lightly across the floor. Late-afternoon rays of sunlight streamed through the tear-shaped crystal skylights etched on the soaring ceilings. Pale pillars dripped down to the highly polished ivory-colored marble floor that reflected the jewel-like colors of the dancers’ clothing.
Aralorn’s cage sat on a raised platform on the only wall of the room that lacked a doorway. From that perch, she could observe the whole room and be observed in return. Or rather they could see the illusion that the ae’Magi had placed on the cage.
Instead of the tall, white-blond woman that the ae’Magi had purchased to decorate his great hall with her extraordinary beauty, observers would see a snowfalcon as rare and beautiful, the ae’Magi had told her, as his slave, but not so controversial. Some people, he’d told her, licking blood off his hands, disliked slavery, and he disliked controversy.
He’d decorated the room around his slave for his own amusement. Disguising her as a rare predator was simply a joke played upon the people who’d come here for entertainment.