Sianim 01 - Masques

since.”
    “What now?” asked Aralorn, drawing pictures in the dirt near the blankets.
    Wolf let out a sound that passed as a laugh. “Now, Myr is trying desperately to prepare this camp for winter, and I am trying to find a way that I can move against the ae’Magi.” He paused, then said in a tone that reeked of frustration, “It’s not that I don’t have the power. It is the training I lack. Most of what little I do know I’ve learned myself, and it’s not enough. If I could find just one of the old magicians not under his spell, I could find something to use against him. Instead, I have to wade through piles of books that may be utterly useless.”
    “I will help with the books,” offered Aralorn. He wasn’t worried about power? Against a mage strong enough to turn Sianim into his worshipping congregation? “But this is the ae’Magi you’re going up against, Wolf. He’s not just some hedgewitch.”
    He ignored her worries about the ae’Magi. Instead, he said, “If I have to read through the dusty old relics, you might as well suffer, too.” He was teasing her; she could tell by his tone of voice. He knew she would devour every time-scarred tome with a zealot’s passion—she loved old books. “How many languages do you read? I’ve heard you speak three or four.”
    Aralorn shrugged. “Including dialects? Ten, maybe twelve. Sometimes I can pick out the essentials in a related language. Father was a fanatic about it—he got caught in a battle one time trying to negotiate a surrender, and the only person who spoke both languages had been killed. So he started us all when we were children. After I came to Sianim, I learned a lot of others. Anything very old, though, will be in the Ancients’ tongue. I can pick my way through that, but I’m not fluent.”
    He gave her a wolfish grin. “And they always said that collecting folktales was a useless hobby.” He continued more seriously, “The two of us can get through more material than I can alone. If I even had the name of a magician with a spell that could stop him, I could save time. I have a library near here, and if you can go through the secular books, it would leave me free to work with the grimoires.”
    Aralorn made a point of looking around at the mountain wilderness that surrounded them. “You have a library nearby?”
    “Yes.”
    “Yes,” she repeated.
    Gravely, he met her eyes. If she hadn’t known him as well as she did, she might not have seen the faint humor in the amber depths.
    “I did notice that you ignored me earlier,” she said. “This is the ae’Magi you are talking about facing. Do you really think you can take him?”
    “No,” Wolf answered softly. “But I’m the only chance we have, aren’t I?”
    From the valley rose the distant sound of a metal spoon hitting a cooking pot—the time-honored call to gather for a meal.
    Wolf rolled lithely to his paws, changing almost as he moved into the tall, masked figure that was his human form. Courteously, he extended a hand to help her to her feet.
    Aralorn accepted the hand a little warily, finding that Wolf in his human form was somewhat more intimidating than the wolf was. As a human, he maintained the grace that he had as a wolf. She watched with envy as he easily negotiated the slope that she scrambled and slid down.
    A stray thought caught her. At the valley bottom, she touched his arm to stop him.
    “Wolf, I think that I may have caused a problem for you.” Anxiously, she bit her lip.
    “What’s that?” he asked.
    “During the ball at the ae’Magi’s castle the night I left, Myr saw me in the cage where he should have seen only a bird. The ae’Magi saw him talking to me and questioned me about it. I told him that I’d seen a magician help Myr break the illusion spell, hoping to keep Myr’s immunity to magic from the ae’Magi.” She kept her eye on the contrast her hand made against the black silk of his sleeve: It was hard to remember that the masked figure was Wolf. “Did I cause you any trouble?”
    He shook his head. “I don’t think so. That was probably why he progressed beyond straying arrows to an elemental—the timing is about right. But since we survived it, there was no harm done.”

    Myr was up and arranging breakfast with a dexterity that Aralorn, who liked to arrange people as well, found fascinating to watch. She let herself be organized with a bowl of cooked grain that made up in amount what it lacked in flavor. After the