Sianim 01 - Masques

self, cool tones that gave no hint of the volcano of emotion that seethed within him. It sounded as though he were telling the story about someone else. “You need to know that.” I need you to know that. “Even though I knew what he was. I used dark magic, knowing it was evil. I worked his will and gloried in the power and the madness of it. Knowing what he was, I tried to please him.”
    His hands gripped the table until they were white-knuckled, he noticed, but he couldn’t force them loose. Maybe she wouldn’t see them. Maybe he didn’t care if she did.
    “What happened?” she asked. As if she were pulling information for an assignment, something that had nothing to do with her.
    When he didn’t speak, she did. “What happened? What changed?”
    Didn’t she understand what he’d told her? Where was her fear? Her disgust? Then he remembered—she was a green mage, not a real one. She wouldn’t know exactly how bad it was, how evil the things he’d done. The screams of the innocent and the not-so-innocent—he could still hear them sometimes when he permitted himself to.
    He released his grip on the table abruptly. He didn’t want to hurt her, he reminded himself, and if he let himself get . . . She wanted a story, something pleasing, something hopeful. Something he could talk about without touching on things best left alone.
    He started almost at random. “When I was young, the passages of the ae’Magi’s castle fascinated me.” That was good, he could feel something settle down. “I wandered through them for hours, sometimes days.” When he could. While the ae’Magi traveled, or had to attend to others who couldn’t know what he did. “There are places in the passages that haven’t seen human hands for generations.” The discovery of those safe, dark ways had saved him, he thought. “About a year before I left the castle, I found an abandoned library. A whole library that no one but me had been in for a very long time.” A private library, he thought later. Some ae’Magi had picked out favorite books and tucked them away where he could keep them to himself.
    “It fascinated me. Almost everything that I had read before I found the library was grimoires and the like. Books I had been told to study.” Endless lists, useless, weak, or broken spells, he figured out later. Things to keep him busy without really educating him. “There were books in the little room of another ilk entirely. Someone had collected books about people—histories, biographies, myths, and legends. I learned from what I read.” He hesitated, understanding for the first time that he’d actually been answering her question—what had happened to change his path. He looked at her, but her face was still, intent on picking through every word he gave her. Impossible to tell what she was thinking, when she was just listening.
    “What I learned made my current occupation . . . more distasteful. So I left.” Those were Aralorn’s words when she told people why she was no longer filling the role of daughter to one of the best-loved heroes in Reth. He wondered if those words covered up as much for her as they did for him.
    She smiled at him and touched her finger to her temple in salute. She’d heard the echo.
    The smile let him end his story as lightly as he’d tried to begin it. “Departing the castle was easy enough; but changing what I am has proven to be more challenging.”
    “If you change into one of those zealots who give everything they have to the poor and go around all the time telling everyone else to do the same, I will feed you to the Uriah myself.”
    She startled a laugh out of him, and he shook his head in mock reproof. “ You ought to watch what you say around me. I might forget that I have repented of my evil ways and turn you into something really nasty.”

FIVE

    Myr, Aralorn decided approvingly, had the soul of a sergeant where a king’s should have been. Sometime during the night, he had apparently decided that the camp needed improvement more than the refugees’ weapons skills did.
    After breakfast, anyone who could ply a needle was sent to turn yards of fabric into a tent. The design of the tent was Myr’s own, based loosely on tents used by the northern trappers.
    When the project was finished, there would be three large tents that could house the population of the camp through the winter. The tents would be stretched over sturdy frames, designed to withstand the weight of the snow.