Magic Rises

were clear and calm. “We’ll be back before you know it.”
    I was still looking at Curran’s eyes when the face around them grew and changed. Gray fur sheathed him. An enormous gray lion stood in his place.
    People froze. Some stared, slack-jawed. Some blinked. Curran in lion form was shocking.
    “Consort?” he said, human words coming out perfectly from a lion’s maw.
    I had to say something. “Good luck.”
    He raised his head and roared, the sound of his voice scattering through the mountain. Shapeshifters cringed.
    Hugh shook his head, stuck his finger in his ear, and wiggled it.
    Lorelei shed her dress and stepped forward, completely nude, shoulders back, head held high. The nakedness lasted only a moment before her body boiled and a lean gray wolf dropped on all fours, but a moment was enough. Curran had seen her.
    She was going to hunt with him, while I was stuck here. Damn it all to hell.
    Our group surrounded Desandra. Her body swirled, stretching, the transformation so fast it was almost instant, and she became a huge black wolf.
    All around me people shifted. Mahon, a hulking dark mountain of a Kodiak, snarled next to George, who wasn’t much smaller. Keira roared, a lithe dark jaguar. Wolves, lynxes, and jackals filled the clearing. Was I the only nonshapeshifter here?
    Curran charged down the slope. Our people and Desandra followed. Barabas halted, still human.
    “Go,” I told him. Having him with me wouldn’t make that much difference, and Hugh would find some pretext to send him off.
    Barabas’s body jerked. A Rottweiler-sized weremongoose dashed down the slope after them.
    Curran was off hunting with Lorelei. The thought stung me, refusing to go away. It shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did. I didn’t want him to go.
    A pack of gray wolves ran left—Belve Ravennati leaving. Jarek’s crew—wolves, bears, and a couple of rats—headed southeast, while the Volkodavi, sand-colored lynxes, shot to the right. In a breath the clearing was empty. Discarded clothes littered the ancient stones. Horses snorted in their enclosure. Everyone was gone.
    “So,” Hugh said. “You never told me. Did you like the flowers I sent?”

CHAPTER 10

    I turned and looked at Hugh. He sat on his throne, left arm bent, the elbow propped on the armrest, leaning his head on the curled fingers of his hand. Comfortable, are we?
    I’d been anticipating this moment for most of my life. Now it was here and I had no clue what to do with it. Anxiety rushed through me in an icy flood. In my head I’d always imagined this meeting would involve bloody swords and stabbing. The lack of stabbing was deeply perplexing.
    “Tell me, what do you do if there is no throne handy? Do you carry a portable model with you, or do you just commandeer whatever is handy, like lawn chairs and bar stools?”
    “Your father once told me that a dog sitting on a throne is still a dog, while a king in a crumbling rocking chair is still a king.”
    Nice choice of words, considering his official title was preceptor of the Iron Dogs. “My father?”
    Hugh sighed. “Come on. I saw the sword, I walked through what remained after Erra’s destruction, and I found your flowers where you and the shapeshifters fought the Fomorians a year ago. I felt the magic coming off them. Don’t insult my intelligence.”
    It was like that, then. “Fine. What do you want?”
    Hugh spread his arms. “What do you want, that’s the question. You came here, to my castle.”
    “That insulting-intelligence remark goes both ways. You set a trap, lured me across the ocean into it, and now I’m here. If you wanted small talk, we could’ve done that in Atlanta.”
    Hugh smiled. Your teeth are too perfect, Hugh. I can totally help you with that.
    I pretended to study the Golden Fleece. These were just opening feints. Soon he would get serious and go in for the kill, one way or the other. The fleece looked in too great a shape to be centuries old.
    “Did you really kill a ram with gold wool?”
    “Gods, no. It’s synthetic,” he said.
    “How?”
    “We took a ram pelt, coated it in magic to keep it from burning, and dipped it in gold. The real trick was getting the proportion of gold and silver right. I wanted to keep the flexibility of gold, but it’s so heavy the individual hairs kept breaking, and too much silver made it stiff. In the end we went with a gold-copper alloy.”
    “Why go through all this trouble?”
    “Because kingdoms are built on