She reached out to touch a scarred and pitted cheek. Her flesh still quailed from the contact, but only a little. "For me, Shield. Please."
Pouting—which his tusks made a truly alarming sight—he nodded his huge head. Zaranda stood and faced the ranger.
Why— ? he started to sign.
"Because someone has to keep Shield of Innocence out of trouble," she said. "The countryside's less risky for him, but only just. Something's going to break soon, old friend, and whichever way it falls, I'll have need of all the help I can get. His as well as yours."
Stillhawk raised his head and managed somehow to look even more grimly stoic than usual—his form of outraged protest and reproach. I cannot tell you the real reason, old friend, Zaranda thought. In my selfish-ness I brought you here among these gray stone walls you hate. And here you can do nothing but pace like a wilderness beast condemned to a cage, feeling the pres-sure of those walls like acid on the skin. The least I can do is redeem my misdeed. But of course she could not say she did this for his benefit, or he would refuse to go.
"Please, I ask that you do this for me. If you would help me, this is the best way."
Stillhawk's brown eyes gazed deep into Zaranda's smoke-gray ones. Then he nodded and turned to pick up his bow, which leaned against a chimney with a beaten-tin cover shaped like a wizard's peaked hat. Shield resumed his cowled robe and strapped on the harness that held his scimitars crossed over his back. After a moment's debate by eye, he slithered over the edge of the roof and swung in through the hallway window Zaranda had left open and under Chen's guard. Stillhawk followed.
Zaranda stood, stretched, gazed up at the stars, trea-suring an evanescent moment alone with them. The sullen light-froth from tens of thousands of candles and lanterns, the smokes of the city, and high tattered clouds skidding across the sky from the Trackless Sea hid most of them from her sight. She wished she
were alone in her tower at Morninggold, with nothing to im-pair her intimacy with the stars, neither in the sky nor in her future.
I'll be doing well to keep my freedom out of all this, she thought, much less Morninggold and my astronomy tower.
But she wasn't yet dead, which meant, on principle, that she refused to give up. She turned and made her cautious way down.
"Zaranda!" A familiar call—as clear and beautiful as the cry of a soaring eagle—made her turn from the en-trance to her chamber on the Winsome Repose's third floor.
"Farlorn," she said, shifting without thought to in-terpose herself between the half-elf and Chenowyn. "Where have you been?"
He caught her in an embrace that lifted her off the floor—though he'd inherited the delicate appearance of his mother's people, he also had the strength of his fa-ther's. "Zaranda! I'm terribly sorry. I came as soon as I heard."
"About what?" Zaranda said. It took her a moment to make the decision to disengage herself from his arms after he had set her down again. Damn him! she thought. Or, perhaps, damn me.
"About the orc and Stillhawk! How the guard ar-rested them."
"Stillhawk?"
He shrugged. "I know the ranger well. He cared as little for the beast as I, but he'd die before he'd fail your trust. They cannot have taken the orc without having him as well."
"They took neither," Zaranda said. "Both hid. I've sent them outside the city."
The half-elf's huge hazel eyes blinked. "But that's wonderful news," he said, "at least so far as Vander Stillhawk's concerned, though I cannot say the same for the evil creature you insisted on adopting."
As Zaranda wound up to unload on him, he lifted his head so that his pointed ears made him resemble a wary forest creature, sniffed the air in the hallway, lit amber by an a single ancient fly-specked lantern hung on the wall. "Whatever is that smell?" he asked before Zaranda could speak. "It's truly prodigious. You must ask for new quarters, Zaranda; a rat—a giant one, by the whiff—has crept among the rafters and expired."
The hair at the back of Zaranda's neck rose. Some-thing was gathering behind her. It reminded her of the first time she had ever felt dweomer, mustering her first halting spell under the gentle but exacting eye of Alshayn, her mentor. This was similar, yet not the same. It was power, and it was menace.
"Farlorn," she said, taking her new charge by the arm and feeling the hairs on her own arm rise in re-sponse, "I'd like you to meet Chenowyn. She'll be stay-ing with us for a while. Chen, this is Farlorn Half-Elven, called the Handsome."
Farlorn shied back, a look of distaste on his face. "In-deed? This ragamuffin's the source of the smell, I war-rant. Have you decided to open your own museum of grotesques, Zaranda?"
"Don't take what he says to heart, Chen," Zaranda said. "He's a bard, and bards love the sound of their own voices too well. He doesn't mean anything by it."
"I don't like him," the girl said.
"Where have you been the past few days?" Zaranda asked, interposing herself between the two.
"I was visiting among my mother's people. Do you know, that darkling I slew the other night matched the description of a Moon Elf maid from Tethir Forest who vanished six weeks ago? Her people were much grieved to learn of her fate."
"Did they say where she'd vanished, or what she was doing at the time?"
"All they knew was that she went abroad on the streets at night upon some errand, and was seen no more."
"So the darklings enslave their victims somehow?"
"That was no slave I fought. Her thirst for my blood was genuine. Would a slave fight with such will?"
"Enchanted, then. Perhaps." She shrugged. "Well, we've troubles enough of our own. Good night to you, Farlorn, and I'm glad to see you well."
"Need you rush away?" He took her shoulders in his hands and began to knead her neck muscles with fine, strong fingers. "I was thinking we might share a bottle of wine together. Perhaps I could sing you a song to soothe your cares."
She disengaged herself deftly from his grasp. "Just now I need a balm more powerful even than your words, and that's sleep. Good night." She undid the lock, guided Chen inside, and shut the heavy wooden door on his frustration.
She turned then, slumped against the wall, allowed herself to slide down until her rump touched the rush-strewn floor. "Damn him."
Chen stood to one side, looking as out of place as a dragon in the tidy if threadbare chamber, with its mod-est furnishings, its whitewashed walls and dark-stained wood trim. "Why do you curse him?"
Zaranda shook her head. "To keep from cursing my-self." She picked herself up. "Now what we need to do is summon the help and have them bring round a straw pallet and some bedding for you. Also a tub and plenty of hot water."
"Why?"
"Because you're long overdue for a bath, my fine young friend."
Chen straightened and in defiance shook back her clotted strands of hair. When she did that, she looked as if she might conceivably be pretty beneath that coat of grime. "Why should a mage be concerned with such matters?"
"A mage may do whatever she wishes," Zaranda said. "And so can you. But, if you wish to stay with me—much less become my apprentice—you'll have to be less a burden on my nose. Farlorn was right about the state of your hygiene."
Chen scowled thunderously. Angry lights danced at the backs of her amber eyes, and sparks seemed to gather at the roots of her hair. Zaranda felt that omi-nous force gathering itself again.
She crossed her arms. "Go ahead, strike me to a cin-der," she said. "I won't stop you. But you'll never master magic if you can't first master yourself."
Chen glared at her with wild fury in her eyes, and for a moment Zaranda thought she had overplayed her hand. What alarmed her most was that she wasn't alarmed.
Then Chen exhaled explosively, and it seemed her anger passed forth as well as her breath, leaving her small, wilted, and vulnerable. "I'm sorry," she said, then began to cry.