“Wolf,” she said, reaching out to touch him. He backed away, keeping his head away from her and his eyes closed.
“Wolf, what’s wrong?” When he said nothing, she took a step back to give him room.
He flung his head up then, and blazing yellow eyes met hers. When he spoke, it was a whisper that his ruined voice made even more effective. “What am I? I should not be able to heal you. The other things—the shapeshifting, the power I wield—they could be explained away. But magic doesn’t work this way. It doesn’t take over before I can react and do things that I don’t ask of it. I swore that I would never . . . never let anything control me the way my father did. In the end, even he could not eat my will entirely. This . . . does.”
“It was you who healed my eyes.” She wanted to give herself time to think. There was something that she should be grasping, a puzzle solved if she could just figure out how to look at it.
“Yes,” he said.
“Were you trying to, then?”
He forced himself to adopt a relaxed posture, leaning against the wall as he spoke. “If you mean did I try to heal you with a spell, no. I just . . . wanted you to quit hurting.”
She could almost see the effort he made to open up to her, this man who was so private. It was, she thought, maybe the bravest thing she’d ever seen anyone do.
He continued with his eyes on the mouth of the cave where three Uriah—none of whom resembled anyone she knew—stood motionless, watching them.
“I was so tired,” Wolf told her. “I hadn’t slept much since I found that you were gone.” He looked at her. “You were getting worse, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I do not recall what I was thinking, precisely. I had done all that I could for you and knew that it would never be enough and something made me lie beside you and this magic took over.” He clenched his hands in what was very near revulsion.
“Who was your mother? Do you know?” asked Aralorn. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about Cain, the son of the ae’Magi, but none of them ever mentioned his mother.”
Wolf shrugged, and his voice had regained its cool tones when he answered. “I only saw her once, when I was very young, maybe five years old. I remember asking Father who she was, or rather who she had been, for she was quite dead, killed by some experiment of his, I suppose. I don’t remember being particularly worried about her, so I suspect that it was the only time I saw her.”
“Describe her for me,” requested Aralorn in a firm voice that refused to condemn or to sympathize with the boy he had been. He wouldn’t want that. The Uriah weren’t coming in anytime soon, she thought. She folded her legs and sat on the ground—healing or no, her legs had done as much as they were going to for a while, and it was sit down or fall down.
“I was young, I don’t remember much,” Wolf said. “She looked small next to my father, fragile and lovely—like a butterfly. The only time I ever heard him say anything about her was when some noble asked about my mother. He said she was flawlessly beautiful. I think he was right.”
Aralorn nodded, her suspicions confirmed. “I would have been surprised if she had been anything else.”
He narrowed his gaze.
“Your mother must have been a shapeshifter, or some other green-magic user—but the ‘perfectly beautiful’ sounds a lot like a shapeshifter. That feeling that the magic is taking control of you is fairly common when dealing with green magic because you are dealing with magic shaped by nature first, and only then by magician. You need to learn to work with it so that you can modify it. If you fight it, it will prove stronger than you.”
He stared at her a bit and joined her on the floor without speaking. Maybe his legs wouldn’t hold him up any longer either.
“I suspect,” continued Aralorn, as blandly as she could manage, “if you hadn’t been taught how magic should work, you would have discovered your half-blooded capabilities long since. You were told that you couldn’t heal, so you didn’t try.”
Two of the Uriah stepped forward at the same time. The wards flared, and they burned. Aralorn caught a brief hint of burnt flesh, like cooking pork, then nothing.
“Your theory fits,” said Wolf finally.
“I should have thought about it sooner,” apologized Aralorn. “I mean, I am a half-breed. It’s just that I’ve never met another half-breed. I could tell that you weren’t a shapeshifter, so I just assumed that you were simply an extraordinarily powerful human magician.” She hesitated. “Which you are.”
Wolf gave a half laugh with little humor in it. “It sounds just like an experiment the ae’Magi would try. To a Darranian like him, it would be the ultimate form of bestiality. Just the thing to spark his interest.”
Aralorn leaned over, pulled down his mask, and bussed him on the unscarred mouth with a kiss that was anything but romantic. “You beast, you,” she said, and he made an unpracticed sound that might have been a laugh.
He got to his feet and pulled her to hers, his eyes warmed with relief, humor, and something else. Gripping her shoulders, he kissed her with a passion that left her breathless and shaken. He stepped back and returned the mask to its usual position.
“We’d better get back and tell Myr he can relax. It doesn’t appear that the Old Man is going to welcome the Uriah into his cave anytime in the near future,” he said, offering her his arm to lean on.
“You think those are his wards?” she asked.
“Someone has powered them up since I looked at them last. It wasn’t me and no one else here has the skill or the power.”
She caught her breath, smiled, and tucked her arm through his. “Do we tell the whole camp that we are being protected by the Old Man of the Mountain?”
“It might be the best thing, even if it scares a few of them silly. I have the feeling that we shouldn’t push his hospitality by wandering around too much. The best way to see that it doesn’t happen is to tell them the whole truth—if they’ll believe it.” Wolf slid though a narrow passage with his usual grace, towing Aralorn beside him.
“We are dealing with people who have some minor magic capabilities; are following a dethroned king who just barely received his coming-of-age spurs; who number among their acquaintances not just one half-breed shapeshifter, but two half-breed shapeshifters—one of whom, incidentally, wears a silly mask. We could tell them that we were in the den of the old gods and that Faris, Empress of the Dead, conceived a sudden passion for Myr and it probably wouldn’t faze them,” Aralorn told him.
Wolf laughed, and Aralorn pulled him to a halt. “Wait. Did you say that the ae’Magi is Darranian?”
“Peasant stock,” he confirmed. “Apparently his master was very surprised to find a magician who was Darranian—used to tell jokes about his Darranian apprentice. My father smiled when he talked about how he killed his teacher.”
“Not the first Darranian mage,” Aralorn said.
Wolf grunted and started to walk.
Aralorn let her hand drop and followed thoughtfully.
Wolf was first in the tunnel that opened into the main chamber. He hissed and jumped back, narrowly avoiding Myr’s sword.
“Sorry,” said Myr. “I thought that you were one of the Uriah. You should have said something before you came in. Did you find out why the Uriah aren’t coming in?”
“Is there a reason the King of Reth is guarding the doorway instead of someone more expendable?” asked Wolf.
“Best swordsman,” said Myr. “Are you going to answer me?”
“Let’s do this where everyone can hear,” Aralorn said, continuing on so she could do just that. “The Uriah aren’t going to be coming in here.”
She stepped out into the main cave and saw that most of them had heard her last remark. “Our guardian of the cave doesn’t want them in.” She was in her element, with a captive audience and a story to tell. She projected her voice and told them the story about the origin of the Old Man of the Mountain and finished with the barrier that was keeping the Uriah out.