Sianim 01 - Masques

to wake the whole camp. Night after night she woke up screaming, sometimes seeing Talor’s face, alive with all that made him Talor, but consumed with a hunger that was inhuman and wholly Uriah. Other times, it was the ae’Magi’s face that she saw, a face that changed from father’s to son’s.
    Wolf didn’t know about her nightmares, as far as she knew. She had no idea where he was sleeping, but it wasn’t the library.
    Late in the afternoons, Myr usually joined them, talking quietly with Aralorn while Wolf read through books on rabbit breeding, castle building, and three hundred ways to cook a hedgehog.
    After discovering that the spell he’d been looking for wouldn’t work for him, Wolf had continued to look through the old mage’s books in the hopes of discovering a way to manage the spell more crudely. Most spells, he’d told Aralorn, were refined so they required less power. He had all the power he needed, and an earlier version might work for him. If he could find it.
    His temper was biting, and he didn’t rein it in for Myr, nor after the first few visits did he bother with his mask. Myr answered Wolf’s sarcasm with cool control—and sometimes a hidden grin of appreciation. Aralorn rather thought that Wolf’s lack of common courtesy was why Myr liked to visit the library. Here he was a fellow conspirator rather than the King of Reth.

    “What’s he doing?” asked Myr, setting his torch to sputter on the stone floor, where, with nothing to burn, it would eventually go out.
    Instead of reading, Wolf had cleared the table of everything except a collection of clay pots filled with a variety of powders. When Aralorn had gotten there, Wolf had already been grinding various leaves in a mortar.
    She waved a lazy hand at Myr, but didn’t take her attention off what Wolf was doing. “He thinks he’s found a way to manage the spell. We’re going to try it outside when he’s finished. No telling what would happen if he worked it in here with all of the grimoires, especially since we don’t know the range of effect.”
    She caught Myr’s arm when he would have approached the table closer. “He doesn’t want us any closer than this,” she said.
    They both watched, fascinated, though neither she nor Myr could work this kind of magic or probably even understand half of what was going on. Wolf took a small vial from the leather pack on the table. Opening it, he poured a milky liquid into the gray powder mixture, which became red mush and gave off a poof of noxious fumes. He donned his mask and cloak, then, ignoring his audience, he put a lid on the pot and took it and an opaque bottle and strode toward an exit route that would take them directly outside rather than through the lived-in areas, leaving Aralorn and Myr to trail behind.
    “Won’t the spell be affected by whatever it is that restricts human magic in the Northlands?” asked Myr in a whisper to Aralorn, but it was Wolf who answered.
    “No,” he said. “It is a very simple spell—its complexity has to do with power management. It should work fine here.”
    He led them to the old camp in the valley, where they were unlikely to have anyone interrupt them. Aralorn found herself holding the containers while, at Wolf’s direction, Myr paced off circles, each bigger than the last until the dirt looked like an archery target. The ground was muddy with last night’s melted snowfall and held the marks of Myr’s feet well.
    Wolf disappeared into the underbrush and reappeared, holding a handful of small stones. He set several of them in each ring Myr had shuffled off, though maybe “set” was the wrong word, because they floated about knee high above the ground.
    “This shouldn’t be a particularly powerful spell,” Wolf said. “If I can get it to work, it doesn’t need to be. If he doesn’t know that it’s coming, then he won’t know to block it. All that I need it to do is to throw him off-balance for long enough to turn our battle from magic to more mundane means. Aralorn, stand behind me. It won’t hurt Myr, but I don’t know what this would do to a shapeshifter.”
    “If I’m behind you, I can’t see what’s going on,” Aralorn complained. “How about if I stand over by the old fire pit?”
    It was well off to the side, a dozen paces away from the target range that Myr had drawn out.
    “Fine,” he said. “This should be a straight, line-of-sight spell, with a limited range.”
    He sat on the cold ground in the