Lupi 04 - Night Season

warriors that even the sidhe respected. They would have protected their prize.
    The Ahk had been among those who died here, though. And someone had tried to kill Cynna on the barge. Someone able to hire obab assassins to take care of a problem for them. Someone who didn’t want her Finding the medallion.
    In spite of his fear and urgency, Cullen didn’t speak. He didn’t want to distract the two peering into the recent past. A pair of sidhe—male and female, but almost identical otherwise—stood in the center of the trampled, blood-soaked ground, holding hands. Their eyes were closed. The magic swirling around them was mostly purple tinged with gold. Now and then it dipped into a muddy brown.
    It had taken days to get here—bloody, be-damned days, too many of them spent arguing, beguiling, manipulating while trying desperately not to be manipulated in turn. And probably failing. The sidhe prized subtlety, and manipulation was warfare at its most subtle. Given the centuries they’d practiced on each other, they’d developed it into an art form.
    He’d been at a disadvantage in many ways in their delicate negotiations, but perhaps his chief liability was that they knew what he wanted. He could only guess at their goals. Being sidhe, those would be varied and shifting. In the end, the deal they appeared to make was simple enough. He would dance for them, and they would rescue Cynna.
    The sidhe prized subtlety, but their passion was beauty in all its forms. Still, Cullen didn’t fool himself. Being both lupus and beautiful made him interesting to them, but not interesting enough to risk their lives. He danced well, but their dancers were grace itself. No, his performance had been either a tangible excuse to do what they intended to do anyway, or a cover for what the Rohen liege truly wanted. Or both.
    As for what Theil of Rohen really wanted…he glanced at the tall woman sitting so lightly on a horse the color of smoke, surrounded by members of her court. He wasn’t sure—how could he be?—but he thought he’d guessed right. She wanted the medallion, yes, but even more important was making sure none of the other sidhe lieges in Edge obtained it. She claimed that the medallion was moving from one person to the next intentionally, that it was seeking its proper holder. She might be telling some form of the truth about that.
    But Cullen thought there was something she wanted just as much. He had shields the sidhe couldn’t break, couldn’t affect at all. The first time Theil had tried tickling his shields, he’d seen shock in her eyes, however fleetingly.
    He suspected she’d wanted badly to learn how he acquired such shields.
    Not that she’d asked directly. The testing of his shields had been mild and gentle and constant, but she’d made only a single comment on them three bloody days after he’d been yanked to the court of Rohen. How amazing, she’d said with the small smile that was her usual expression, to find such shields on one from Earth. Did all lupi possess natural shields?
    That question had, at last, tipped her hand. She knew the shields were an artifact, not a natural ability. Cullen wasn’t sure how sidhe perceived magic. Not the way he did—he knew that much. Their awareness of it was visceral, or perhaps it comprised a sense for which he had no analogue.
    God knew they were unlikely to explain, had he been foolish enough to ask. But Theil would have been able to tell the difference between an innate ability and craft, however sophisticated.
    â€œNot at all,” he’d answered Rohen’s liege. “There is quite a story attached to my shields. Perhaps I will attempt to entertain you with it once we are on our way. There should be time for storytelling. Cynna is over a day’s ride away.”
    â€œPerhaps a little less than a day,” Theil had told him, smiling. “We travel fast when we wish to.”
    Cullen had known where Cynna was because of a map—theirs—and a hair. Cynna’s. Bleached along most of its short length, dark at the root, it had clung to his shirt, riding with him through the miserable maelstrom of translocation.
    Not his preferred means of travel at all. He’d damned near thrown up first thing upon arriving at Rohen’s court. Sheer stubbornness had kept the contents of his stomach inside long enough for the nausea to fade.
    Cullen supposed he