She shied away and found another piece of memory. Magic horribly distorted and twisted, making dead men breathe. It frightened her. There was no safety in death here, and she wanted the sanctuary that death should offer. Then the cold iron cut off her awareness of the dead things that shared her space. She had never felt so helpless; it gave her a dispirited claustrophobia that made her strain repeatedly against the bonds, until she exhausted herself. Bonds that most well-trained, full-blooded shapeshifters might have gotten out of, but she had all the weaknesses and too little power.
There . . . while she was fighting . . . she almost had it. The thing that had pulled her back and made her hurt again. It was sound, familiar sound. Why should that bother her?
She was so tired. She was losing her concentration, and pictures came more rapidly until she was lost in her nightmare memories again.
They’d been camped in the same place for three days. It worried him because they were much too close to the ae’Magi’s castle, but the thought of moving her worried him more. Instead of getting better since being out of the cell, she seemed worse. Her eyes were seeping with the pus of infection. Her fever was no higher, but it was no lower either. Her breathing was more difficult, and when she coughed, he could tell that it hurt her ribs.
As he watched her, he tormented himself with guilt. Had he been quicker to find her, she would have stood a better chance. The needles had been used on her eyes only recently. He could have found her in his first search if he’d only remembered that she might be wearing someone else’s face.
As it did when he was angered, the other magic in him flickered fey—nudging him, tempting him. Usually he used it, twisting it toward his own ends, but this time he was tired with worry, guilt, and sleeplessness. The magic whispered, seducing him with visions of healing.
His eyes closed, without conscious thought he stretched out carefully beside Aralorn. Gently, he touched her face, seeing the wrongness there—the slight fracture in the skull that he hadn’t been aware of.
As he gave control away to the seductive whispers of his magic, he found that he could feel her pulse, almost her thoughts. Sex notwithstanding, this was closer than he’d ever been to another human being. With anyone else, he would have lashed out, done anything just to get away—to be safe alone.
But this was Aralorn, and he had to heal her, or . . . He caught a flick of the desperation of that thought, but was soon lost in the peace of his magic. He floated with it for what could have been a hundred years or a single instant. Gradually, his fear of the loss of control, so well learned when his searing magic had leapt out burning, hurting, scarring, crept upon him—breaking the trance he’d fallen into.
He opened his eyes and gasped for air. His heart was pounding, and sweat poured off his body. Great shudders racked him. He turned his head enough to look at Aralorn.
The first thing that hit him was that he was looking at Aralorn. The guise she’d donned was gone. The bruises on her legs looked much worse on her own relatively pale skin. Fever had brought unnatural color to her pale cheeks.
When he could, he bent over and removed the bandage from her eyes. The swelling had almost completely gone and her eyes appeared normal when he carefully lifted her eyelids. He hadn’t looked before—he knew what those needles had done. He felt carefully with his fingertips where he’d seen the break in her skull and could locate nothing.
Almost too tired to move, he pulled her head onto his shoulder and drew blankets neatly around them. He knew he should stay up and keep watch—there was no warhorse to share guard duty with—but he hadn’t been this tired since his early apprentice days.
It was morning when Aralorn awoke, still slightly delirious. She’d had dreams of the quiet sounds of the forest before, and she let herself take that comfort now. She knew that all too soon she would have to face reality again. The nice thing was that the times reality crept in were getting farther and farther apart.
She thought about that for a minute before she realized that there was a man beside her. Delirium took over then, and she was drowning slowly. It was very hard to breathe, and she lost track of the forest while she strangled.
The soft sounds of a familiar voice lent her comfort and strength, but there was something wrong with the voice. It was too soft, it should be cold and rough, harsher. She associated unpleasant things with the warmer tones. The voice she wanted to hear should be dead like the Uriah, like Talor. She could hear someone whimpering and wondered who it was.
She ate and it tasted very good, salty and warm on her sore throat. She drank something else and a part of her tasted the bitter herb with approval, knowing that it would help her breathe. Wasn’t there some reason that she didn’t want to get better?—but she couldn’t decide why she wouldn’t want to get well, and while she thought about it, she drifted back to sleep.
Wolf watched her and waited. Without the unquenchable energy that characterized her, she looked fragile, breakable. Awake, she had a tendency to make him forget how small she was.
He gritted his teeth and controlled his rage when she cried out in terror. Although she babbled out loud, she said nothing that would have been any use to the ae’Magi were he listening.
She was quiet finally, and Wolf sat propped up against a tree, near enough to keep an eye on her but far enough away that he wouldn’t disturb her slumbers.
He should never have been able to heal her. Indisputably, he had. Even if he did nothing more than eliminate the paths the needles had cut into her eyes, it was more than human magic allowed for. Less dramatic but even further outside the bounds of magic, as he understood it, was the fact that she now wore the appearance that was hers by birth.
He’d always had the ability to do things beyond the generally accepted bounds of human magic—taking wolf shape for extended periods of time was one of those. Always before he could have attributed this to the enormous power he wielded. Human magic could heal, but it required a more detailed knowledge of the human body than he had acquired—killing required much less precision. Human magic could not recognize a shapeshifter’s natural shape and restore her to it . . . as he had done.
His magic had blithely crashed through the laws of magic established for thousands of years. What was he that he could do such things?
He found no answers. He’d seen the woman who bore him only once that he could remember. She’d seemed ordinary enough—for a woman who had spent a decade in the ae’Magi’s dungeon. But the ae’Magi had got a son on her and kept her alive afterward. She must have been more than she seemed.
Wolf had been the result of an . . . experiment perhaps: one that had gotten out of hand.
Aralorn stirred, catching his attention. He got to his feet with relief at being drawn from his thoughts, and went to her.
EIGHT
Aralorn was in the habit of waiting until she knew where she was and who she was supposed to be before she opened her eyes—a habit developed from frequently being someone other than herself. For some reason, it seemed more difficult than usual. The warm sun on her face seemed as much out of place as the sound of a jay squeaking from its perch somewhere above her.
She moved restlessly and felt a warning twinge from her side that was instantly echoed from various other parts of her body. As a memory aid, she found it effective—if crude.
The problem was, she had no idea how she had gotten from the ae’Magi’s dungeon to where she was.
Deciding that it was unlikely that she would come to any earth-shattering conclusions lying around feigning sleep, she opened her eyes and sat up—an action that she had immediate cause to regret. The abrupt change in position caused her to start coughing—no pleasant thing with cracked ribs. She collapsed slowly back into her prone position and waited for her eyes to quit watering.