Lord Kisrah turned back to her. “Perhaps I will eat first. After that, would you consider accompanying me to your father? I tried to open the wards when I arrived, but I couldn’t get through.”
It had been Kisrah, then, who’d tried the wards. Did he know Wolf’s magic well enough to tell that he’d set the spells? Stinking wards, she thought. If she’d had the sense of a goose, she’d have set them herself in the first place.
“. . . at first it might have been Nevyn’s work, but I know his magic.” He looked at her inquiringly, and Aralorn wondered what she’d missed while she was cursing herself.
“No, not Nevyn’s, nor mine either—my mother’s gift of magic is green magic. I can set wardings, of course, but the baneshade’s presence called for a stronger magic. I did a favor for a wizard once, and he gave me an amulet ...” Wizards were always giving tokens with spells on them, weren’t they? At least in the stories she told they were. At her feet, Wolf moaned softly, so maybe she was wrong.
Kisrah’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “An amulet? How odd. I’ve never heard of a warding set on an amulet. Do you have it with you?”
Yep, I was wrong.
Aralorn shook her head and boldly elaborated on her lie. “It wasn’t that big a favor. The amulet itself was the main component of the spell—so it could only be activated once. I thought the baneshade warranted using it. But my uncle killed the creature, so it’s safer now. I’ll come with you to take them off.”
He stared at her a moment, his pale blue eyes seeming blander than ever. But she had been a spy for ten years; she knew he saw only what she intended him to see. Innocently, she gazed back.
She was lying. He knew she was lying. He wasn’t going to call her on it, though—which made her wonder what he was up to.
“I see,” he said after a moment. “With the baneshade gone, did you look at the spell holding Henrick?”
She nodded. “I’m not an expert, though I can tell black magic. My uncle said that it feels as if there was more than one mage involved in the spelling.”
“Black magic,” he said softly, and she had the impression that it was the real man speaking and not his public face. For an instant, she saw both shame and fear in his eyes. Interesting.
“Why don’t you get some food, Lord Kisrah,” said Irrenna.
“That would be good,” agreed Aralorn. She wanted to give Wolf time to recover a little before they went back to the bier room with Kisrah. “My brother sent a pair of his hellions to force me into telling a story or two, and I gave them my word of honor I would entertain them after I’d eaten.”
Irrenna laughed. “You’ll have to stay for it, Lord Kisrah. Aralorn is a first-rate storyteller.”
“So I have heard,” agreed the mage, smiling.
Aralorn sat cross-legged on the old bench near the fireplace where she’d spent many long winter hours telling stories. The children gathered around were different from the ones she remembered, but there was a large number of her original audience present, too. Falhart sat on the floor with the rest, a couple of toddlers on his lap. Correy leaned against a wall beside Irrenna and Kisrah, who stood with his food so that he could be close enough to hear.
“Now then,” Aralorn said, “what kind of story would you like?”
“Something about the Wizard Wars,” said one of the children instantly.
“Yes,” said Gerem softly, as he approached the group from the shadows. “Tell us a story about the Wizard Wars.”
Startled, Aralorn looked up to meet Gerem’s eyes. They were no more welcoming than they had been earlier that day.
“Tell us,” he continued, taking a seat on the floor and lifting one of the youngsters onto his lap, “the story of the Tear of Hornsmar, who died at the hands of the shapechangers in the mountains just north of here.”
She was going to have to teach her brother some subtlety, but she could work with his suggestion. She needed a long story, to give Wolf as much time to recover as possible. One came to mind as if it had been waiting for her to recognize it.
“A story of the Wizard Wars, then, but the story of the Tear is overtold. I have instead a different tale for you. Listen well, for it contains a warning for your children’s children’s children.”
Having caught their attention, Aralorn took a breath and sought the beginning of her tale. It took her a moment, for it wasn’t one of the ones she told often.
“Long and long ago, a miller’s son was born. At the time, this hardly seemed an auspicious or important event, for as long as there have been millers, they have been having children. It was not even an unusual occurrence for this miller, because he’d had three other sons and a daughter born in a similar fashion—but not a son like this. No one in the village had ever had a son like this.” She saw a few smiles, and the hall quieted.
She continued, punctuating her story with extravagant gestures. “When Tam laughed, the flowers bloomed, and the chairs danced; when he cried, the earth shook, and fires sprang up with disconcerting suddenness. Concerned that the child would set fire to the mill itself and ruin his family, the miller took his problem to the village priest.
“In those days, the old gods still walked the earth, and their priests were able to work miracles at the gods’ discretion, so the miller’s action was probably the wisest one he could have taken.
“And so the boy was raised by the village priest, who became used to the fires and the earthquakes and quite approved of the blooming flowers. The miller was so relieved that when the temple burned down because of a toddler temper tantrum, he didn’t even grumble about paying his share to rebuild it—and he grumbled about everything.
“Now, in those days, there was trouble brewing outside the village. Mages, as you all know, are temperamental at best, and at their worst ...” Aralorn shuddered and was pleased to see several members of her audience shiver in sympathy. At her feet, Wolf made a soft noise that might have been laughter. Kisrah smiled, but in the dim light of the great hall, she couldn’t tell if it was genuine or not.
“Kingdoms then were smaller even than Lambshold, and each and every king had a mage who worked for him. Usually, the most powerful mages worked only for themselves, for none of the small countries could afford to hire them for longer than it took to win a battle or two. The strongest mages of them all were the black mages, who worked magic with blood and death.”
Gerem straightened, and said, “I never knew black magic was more powerful than the rest.”
Aralorn nodded. “With black magic, the sorcerer has only to control the magic released; with other magics, he must gather the power as well. Collecting magic released in death takes nothing out of the mage . . . except a piece of his soul.”
“You sound as if you’ve had personal experience,” said Gerem challengingly.
Aralorn shook her head. “Not I.”
When Gerem looked away from her, she continued the tale. “This balance of power had worked for centuries—until the coming of the great warrior, Fargus, and the discovery of gold in the mountains of Berronay.” She rolled out the names with great ceremony, like the court crier, but added, much less formally, “No one knows, now, where Berronay or its mines were. No one knows much more about Fargus than his name. But it was his deeds that came close to destroying the world. For he ruled Berronay shortly after its rich mines were discovered and before anyone else knew how rich that discovery was. He amassed a great army with the intent of conquering the world—and he hired the fourteen most powerful mages in the world to ensure that he would do so.
“Tam’s village was the smallest of three in the kingdom of Hallenvale—that’s ‘green valley’ in the old tongue. It was located in the lush farmland in the rolling hills just northwest of the Great Swamp.” Aralorn paused, sipping out of a pewter mug of water someone had snagged for her.