“Luck and the Lady be with you,” he said, then executed an about-face and continued on his way.
As soon as the guard was out of sight, Wolf trotted to the entrance to the alcove where the Lyon lay in state. He sniffed at it suspiciously.
“What is it?” asked Aralorn.
Wolf shifted abruptly to human form, wearing his usual mask to hide his face from her uncle. He ran his fingers carefully over the edge of the entrance.
“Someone’s attempted the warding,” he said.
“What?” asked Aralorn. She touched the stone where he had, but she could only feel the power of his wards. The human magic was beyond her ability to decipher for subtleties.
“Someone started to unwork the wards I set this morning. He left off halfway, as if something interrupted him, or he decided not to go on with it.”
“Maybe he couldn’t get through,” she suggested.
He shook his head. “No, he knew what he was doing—he could have dispelled it.”
“Nevyn?” she suggested.
He shrugged, then touched the air just in front of the curtain, letting his hands rest on the surface of the warding. “I can’t tell, but it must have been him. Unless there are other mages who live in Lambshold. I wonder if he recognized my work.”
“Could he?”
“Maybe.”
“Irrenna said she was calling on Kisrah for help—though I wouldn’t have thought she could get a message to him so soon,” Aralorn said. “Nevyn is the more likely candidate. As far as I know, there are no other trained mages on my father’s lands right now. I’ll ask around, though.” What if Nevyn figured out Wolf was here?
“If the wards were not breached, what does it matter?” asked Halven.
“Wolf is not very popular among the wizards right now,” said Aralorn. Though Geoffrey ae’Magi had disappeared without a trace in a keep filled with hungry Uriah, rumor had attributed his death to his son Cain—who was also her Wolf.
“Oh Mistress of the Understatement,” murmured Wolf, “I salute you.”
Her uncle clacked his beak in an irritated fashion and launched off her shoulder, taking human shape as he landed.
“I know of a human mage that many of the mages are searching for,” he said.
Aralorn raised her chin, and Halven laughed. “No need to look daggers at me, child. I can hold my tongue. What need have I to please a scruffy lot of bungling human mages?”
She stared at him, but Wolf, either easier to appease or not as worried, released the warding with a quick gesture of his left hand, saying, “Past time we attended to our immediate business.” He threw back the curtain and exposed the Lyon’s dark chamber to the light from lamps in the mourning room.
Aralorn’s father lay unchanged upon the bier. Wolf reached into a shadowed area and pulled out his staff from wherever it had been since he left it in the woods. As he took it up, the crystals that grew out of the top flared brightly before settling into a blue-white glow that chased the darkness from the room where the Lyon rested.
Halven strode through the entrance and Aralorn followed him, leaving Wolf to close the curtains and hide their activities from prying eyes.
Halven looked closely at the bier for a moment before turning to Aralorn. “I thought you said there was a creature guarding him. I see—by faith!”
Aralorn twisted around to look toward Wolf also. Against the wall, where there should have been no shadows at all, there was a subtle dimness that oozed slowly down the stone. It was only a little darker than the room itself, almost as if it were her imagination painting monsters. She turned back to Halven and opened her mouth to speak, when her uncle’s rough grip pulled her aside and behind him.
Wolf, too, had turned to see what caused Halven’s exclamation. The shadow caught his eye just as it touched the floor and abruptly shot forward. It rippled swiftly over the stones, flowing around Wolf on both sides, like a stream of water around a rock—though no part of the shadow touched him. It drew to a halt in front of Halven, stopped by the barrier of the shapeshifter’s magic.
Shielding, thought Wolf, recognizing the patterning though the magic Halven used was different. Even as he thought it, the shadow-thing oozed through a hole in the shield spell that hadn’t been there an instant before. Halven responded with another shield, but that obviously wouldn’t answer for long.
The power of Halven’s magic called answering force from Wolf. He could feel magic seeping in from the old stones that surrounded him, enticing him with its nearness, but he feared its ability to do more than its designated task. With an effort so fierce that it left him with a headache, he forced the green magic away.
Instead, he reached for the more familiar forces he had always worked with. Though outwardly more destructive than green magic, the raw magic that was the stuff human mages could weave responded to his control as a harp to an old bard.
With careful dispatch, he created an adaptation of the magelight spell, seeking to cancel shadow with light. His spell should have flared with white light as it touched the shadow, but nothing happened. The creature might have expanded a little, but he wasn’t certain. It paused, then threw the light spell at Halven.
Wolf felt the surge of force Halven called upon to block both the light and the creature, felt it as if it were coming from his own hands. The brilliant light was swallowed by Halven’s open palm, and once more, the creature was turned away.
Wolf knew the other mage had begun to tire; the flow of Halven’s magic had become erratic though no less powerful. The shapeshifter was doing all he could to keep the creature back; it was up to Wolf to stop it from getting Aralorn. Oh, it might have been trying to get her uncle, but bone-deep instinct told him that was not true.
Something about the way the thing absorbed his spell reminded him of demons—which reminded him of a spell.
Before he started to gather magic, he found himself abruptly filled with more than he could use. Startled, he paused, and the magic began to form its own spell. It wasn’t until that moment that he realized the magic he held was green magic.
He controlled his frustration and ruthlessly broke the weaving already begun, stripping the natural magic of its essence and turning it back to the chaotic energy of the wild, but less willful, magic human wizards used. This he wove and focused, ignoring the pain that backlashed through him from his struggles.
The spell he chose was only to be found among the books of the black mages, for it had one use: to hold demons safely when they were summoned unbound. However, the spell required neither death nor blood, so he patterned it—hoping anything that could hold a demon would hold the shadow-creature as well.
The spell finished, he threw it at the creature, careful that it did not touch Halven. To his relief, it fell as it should have, a glowing circle of light containing everything in the room between Halven and Wolf. He held his breath as the shadow touched the light and drew back from the binding, prowling restlessly within the circle’s confines.
Wolf shrank the boundaries until the shadow was enclosed in a circle the size of a foot soldier’s shield. The creature cowered in the small area in the center of the spell, where it shivered, small and dark, like a slug exposed to open air.
The green magic he had not used continued to fight him, struggling for the freedom to complete the pattern it had begun. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it when he got it under control. Human mages were very careful to draw only as much power as they needed, since magic left unformed was dangerous. He had no idea what a similar situation with green magic would do.
The magic fought against his dominance like a wild stallion bridled for the first time, and he found himself losing his grip on it. Reaching for a firmer hold, he found that he was grasping nothing; the green magic had faded, dissipating like fog in the sun.