She nodded. “She grew up and learned to glean herbs from the woods to pay for her keep. When she was sixteen, a passing shapeshifter saw her. He took to following her around in the guise of a crow or squirrel. But whatever shape he took, she knew him.”
Wolf’s eyes grew reserved. “Indeed?”
Aralorn frowned at him. “This isn’t about you and me—and you would have found me the first time though if you’d thought about looking for someone who didn’t look like me.”
He looked away. She decided to ignore him and continued with the story.
“She knew when he fell in love with her, too. And he was able to guard his touch so she could bear it. When the villagers came to her home, he was her invisible guardian. She loved him and was happy.
“Once a month, the shapeshifter returned to his village to assure his people that he was well. They were not happy with his choice, and eventually his mother decided to solve the problem herself. She saw to it that a Southern slaver became aware of the girl and took her the next time the shapeshifter left her to visit the shapeshifter village. He returned to find the cottage empty, with the door swinging in the wind.
“The Trader was wary and, hearing that she had a magical lover, he took her through the Northlands, where no mage could follow. But her lover was no human mage, and he found them—too late.”
A moaning sound echoed through the caves. Wolf tilted his head slightly so she knew that he heard as well.
“When the shapeshifter reached the slavers’ camp,” she continued, “he found nothing left of the would-be slavers except mindless bodies. The girl, terrified and alone, had evoked an empath’s only defense, projecting her terror and pain onto her tormentors. She was alive when the shapeshifter found her, so he took her to a cave, sacred to his kind, where he tried to heal her. The worst of her wounds were of the spirit that even a shapeshifter’s magic may not touch; and though her body was whole, she spoke not a word to him but stared through him, as if he were not there. Not entirely sane from his grief, the shapeshifter swore to keep her alive until he could find a way to heal her soul. And so he lives on, an old, old man tending his beloved from that day until this—and that is the story of the Old Man of the Mountain.”
The moaning waned to a hesitant sigh that whispered through the library and faded to nothing.
Wolf raised an eyebrow at her. “I have never heard of a shapeshifter with the power that the Old Man is supposed to have.”
Aralorn rubbed her cheek thoughtfully, leaving behind a streak of black dust. This was a secret—but she didn’t feel like keeping secrets from Wolf. “The older a shapeshifter is, the more powerful he is. Like human mages, it is not unusual for a shapeshifter to live several hundred years. A really powerful shapeshifter can make himself younger constantly and never grow old. The reason that you don’t see a shapeshifter much older than several hundred years is that they are constantly changing to new and more difficult things. It’s hard to remember that you are supposed to be human when you change into a tree or the wind. An uncle of my mother once told me that sometimes a shapechanger forgets to picture what he is changing himself into, and he changes into nothing. There is no reason why our Old Man of the Mountain couldn’t be several thousand years old rather than just a few hundred. That would make him incredibly powerful.”
She stopped as something occurred to her. “Wolf, there was a snowstorm the night before the Uriah came. If it hadn’t slowed them down, they would have come upon us at night and slaughtered the camp.”
Wolf shrugged. “Snowstorms are unpredictable here, but I suppose that it could have been he who caused the storm. I suspect that we’ll never know.”
Wolf opened his book and went back to reading.
Aralorn found another book and managed not to show Wolf how unsteady she was. But when he’d checked it for her, and she opened it, it was difficult to concentrate as the little energy she’d regained dissipated. The words blurred in front of her eyes and soon she was turning pages from habit.
She dozed off between one sentence and the next. When Wolf touched her shoulder, she jumped to her feet and had her knife drawn before she opened her eyes.
“Plague it, Wolf!” she sputtered. “One of these days, you are going to do that, and I’ll knife you by mistake. Then I’ll have to live all my life with the guilt of your death on my hands.”
Her threat didn’t seem to bother him much as he caught her and lowered her to her chair as her legs collapsed under her. “You are trying to do too much,” he said with disapproval. He started to say something else, then lifted his head.
She heard it, too, then, the sound of running feet. Stanis popped into the room at a dead run—he was one of the few people who knew his way to Wolf’s private area. He was pale and panting when he stopped, looking as though he’d sprinted the half mile or so of cave tunnels that connected the main camp with Wolf’s library. “Uriah,” he panted.
Aralorn tangled with her chair when she tried to push it out of the way too fast, but kept from falling with the aid of a hand on her arm. She was firmly sat down on her seat.
Wolf, who had somehow donned his mask again, looked her straight in the eye, and said, “You stay here.” His voice left no room for arguments. He shifted into the wolf and melted into the tunnel.
With the scary mage gone, the library felt safer than the outer cave to Stanis. But his mates were out there; he wasn’t going to stay safely behind.
“Hey now,” he said when Aralorn used the table to get to her feet. She looked like she weighed half what she had the first time he’d seen her—all pared down to bone and sinew. But she walked without limping to the little padded bench and shuffled under it until she came up with a sword and scabbard she belted on. He didn’t miss that the scabbard was stained with blood—from the Uriah who’d killed Astrid.
“He told you to stay here.” Maybe she hadn’t heard the mage.
Aralorn glanced up as she sheathed the sword. “It says in my files—I know because Ren showed them to me—‘Does not take orders, will occasionally listen to suggestions.’ Did Wolf sound like he was suggesting anything to you?”
Stanis shook his head. “No.” He shuffled his feet a little. “I don’t follow no orders either, but if that one ever told me to do anything in that tone of voice, I can’t help but think I’d be sitting where he wanted me until I was covered in dust.”
She laughed. “Yes, he’s a little intimidating, isn’t he?” She checked the draw of the sword, adjusted it a little, and said, “But there’s no way I’m sitting here while everyone else gets to fight.” She looked at him. “You know your way to the rest of them? I might be able to find my way out, but I don’t know how this cave connects into the rest.”
Stanis squirmed.
She smiled. “No need to tell him that I couldn’t find my own way there,” she said.
“I’m not afraid of him,” Stanis stated belligerently, though his mam had taught him better than that.
“Of course not,” she said stoutly. “Nothing to be afraid of.”
After about the halfway point, she put her hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, Stanis, we’re going to have to slow down.”
“No trouble,” he said. “Why don’t you lean on me a bit?”
She muttered something he didn’t catch but put some of her weight on him. For a while that was all she did, but eventually her arm wrapped around his shoulders, and she honestly leaned on him.
“Good thing you’re short,” he said. “You should have stayed. What would have happened if I weren’t here to help you?”
“Then I’d have crawled,” she said grimly.
He glanced up at her face, visible in the light of one of those little glowy balls Wolf had shown him how to make.
“Right,” he said. She didn’t look like a nice Lady right now, she looked like someone who could lick her weight in Uriah and then some. Maybe she was a match for that Wolf after all.