What really bothered him was the nature of green magic. You coaxed it, you asked it, but you couldn’t always force it to do exactly what you wanted—but he’d dealt with much worse than that. She was confident he would again; she would just have to be patient until he worked it out.
The prudent thing, she told herself, would be to leave him alone. He had a nasty temper when he was pushed.
Since prudence wasn’t one of her attributes, she said, “Self-pity never accomplishes much, but sometimes it’s nice to wallow in it for a while. Do hurry up though—I’m getting hungry.” She tilted her head to indicate the sounds of people gathering on the other side of the curtain for their meal. “I’m tired of eating cold food.”
Wolf closed both eyes. He stretched his neck to the left, then to the right. Only then did he open his eyes. Baleful lights glittered in their amber depths as he closed his hands ever so gently around her neck and pulled her forward until she had to tilt her chin up to look at him.
“Someday,” he whispered, bending down until his lips were next to her ears, “you’re going to step into the fire and find out that it really is hot.”
“Burn me,” she said in equally soft tones, and for a few moments he did—without a single spell.
When he released her, there was a measure of peace in his eyes. “Shall we go eat?”
She turned to go, and her eyes touched her father. Smile fading, Aralorn approached him and put her hand on his face.
“Got rid of the creepy crawly, but no luck yet, sir, on your entrapment,” she murmured. “But tomorrow’s another day.”
Wolf’s warm hand came down to rest on her shoulder. “Come.”
SEVEN
Wolf changed back into his four-footed form, then staggered. Aralorn put a hand on his shoulder to steady him, and he leaned against her with a sigh and an apologetic look.
“Sorry,” he said.
“You need food,” she replied, and pulled back the curtain, only to find that not only was the great hall filled with people dining, but every head was turned to her. By the intentness of their gazes, she figured that the guard told them all that she’d brought her uncle to look at the Lyon.
She bowed, and said, “We’ve made some progress, but the Lyon still sleeps.”
She closed the curtain and set her own wards against casual interlopers since Wolf was in no condition to be working magic. By the time she was through, most of the diners had turned their attention back to their plates.
Aralorn snagged a clean trencher from a passing kitchen servant and sat at the nearest table, Wolf collapsing at her feet. She took one of her knives and cut a bit of this and that from the platters arrayed on the table and tossed a large piece of roasted goose breast at Wolf, who caught it easily and ate it with more haste than manners.
She took a hunk of bread from her trencher and put a piece of sliced meat on top of it. This she kept, placing the plate and its remaining contents on the floor for Wolf.
“There she is! I see her.”
A loud voice drew her attention away from her meal as she saw two towheaded children running toward her.
“Aunt Aralorn. Hey, Aunt Aralorn, Father said you would tell us a story if we cornered you.”
Putting their ages roughly at eight and five, Aralorn quickly came up with the identity of “Father.” Falhart was the only one of her brothers old enough to have sired them.
“All right,” she said, hiding her pleasure—as tired as she was, storytelling opportunities were not to be lost. “Tell Falhart you cornered me. I’ll do some tale-telling in front of the fireplace after I’m finished eating.”
The two scurried off in search of their father, and Aralorn finished the last of her bread. Wolf yawned as she picked the empty trencher off the floor and got to her feet.
“Come on, we’ll take this to the kitchen and ...” Her voice trailed off as she saw Irrenna making her way toward her.
It wasn’t Irrenna that made her lose her train of thought, but the man who walked beside her. Flamboyantly clothed in amber and ruby, Lord Kisrah looked more like a court dandy than the holder of age-old power.
It was too soon for Irrenna’s message to have reached him; he must have come for the Lyon’s funeral.
Well, Aralorn thought, if he didn’t know who it was that he met in the ae’Magi’s castle the night Geoffrey died, he will now. Even if he wasn’t involved with her father’s collapse, he was not going to be friendly. If he was responsible for her father’s condition . . . well, she wasn’t always friendly either.
She let none of her worries appear on her face, nor did she allow herself to hesitate as she approached them, dirty trencher in hand.
“You said that you weren’t able to wake him?” asked Irrenna.
Kisrah, Aralorn noted warily, was intent, but not surprised at all at seeing her face in this hall. He had known who she was before coming here. He moved to the top of her suspects.
“That’s right,” said Aralorn. “My uncle agreed to come and look. He didn’t know the spell that holds Father, but he was able to dispose of the baneshade—”
“Baneshade?” Kisrah broke in, frowning.
She nodded. “Apparently the one who did this has a whole arsenal of black arts—”
“Black arts?” he interrupted.
“You must not have looked in on him yet,” she said. “Whoever laid the spell holding the Lyon used black magic. I’m not certain if you’d call the baneshade black magic precisely, but it attacked me the first time I worked magic in the room—the mage must have set it to guard my father. My uncle—my mother’s brother, who is a shapechanger—is the one who identified it and rid us of it as well.”
“My apologies,” Irrenna broke in. “Allow me to present the Lady Aralorn, my husband’s oldest daughter, to you, Lord Kisrah. Aralorn, this is Lord Kisrah, the ae’Magi. He came here as soon as he heard what happened to Henrick.”
“It took me a while to connect Henrick’s daughter with the Sianim mercenary the ae’Magi had me fetch for him,” replied the Archmage, bowing over Aralorn’s hand. “I suppose I had expected someone more like your sisters.”
At her side, Wolf stiffened and stared at Kisrah with an interest that was definitely predatory. She took a firm grip on a handful of fur. She’d never told him of Kisrah’s role in her capture and subsequent torture by the ae’Magi because she’d worried about his reaction.
“How did you make the connection?” asked Irrenna, unaware of the coercive nature of Kisrah’s “fetching” of Aralorn. “She has very little contact with us; she says she is afraid her work will draw us into jeopardy.”
Sadness crept across his features, an odd contrast to the rose-colored wig he wore—like an emerald among a pile of glass jewels. “The council appointed me to investigate Geoffrey’s death even before they called me to assume his role. I looked into the backgrounds of anyone who had anything to do with him in his last days. You”—he directed his speech to Aralorn—“provided me with a particularly odd puzzle and kept the investigation going much longer than it otherwise would have. It was especially difficult until I discovered that the Lyon’s eldest daughter was of shapeshifter blood.” He was almost as good with a significant pause as she herself was. After a moment, he turned back to Irrenna. “It was the Uriah that were his downfall. He was looking for a way to make them less harmful and lost control of the ones he had with him. There was not even a body left.”
“It was an accident, then?” asked Irrenna. “I had heard that it was—though there were all of those rumors about his son.”
“The council declared it an accident,” confirmed Kisrah. “A tragedy for us all.”
Aralorn noted how carefully he avoided saying that he believed the council’s decision that his predecessor’s death had been an accident. Surely he didn’t—he’d been there.
“Would you care to look at my father? Or would you prefer to rest from your travels?” she asked.