Sianim 01 - Masques

did, too, sweat—when he was in human form, anyway.
    “You know,” she said, running a finger over a dust pattern on a leather book cover, “when my father took me to visit the shapeshifters, I thought that it would be really fun to be able to be someone else whenever I wanted. So I learned and worked at it until I could look like almost any person I wanted. My father, though, had an uncanny knack of finding me out, and he was a creative genius when it came to punishments. Eventually, I got out of the habit of shapechanging at all.
    “The second time that I visited with my mother’s people, I was several years older. I noticed something that time that I’d missed the first time. If a shapeshifter doesn’t like something about himself, she can just change it. If her nose is too long or her eyes aren’t the right color, it is easily altered. If she did something that she wasn’t proud of, then she could be someone else for a while until everyone forgot about it. They, all of them, hide from themselves behind their shapes until there isn’t anything left to hide from.”
    “I assure you,” commented Wolf dryly, “that as much as I would like to hide from myself, it would take more than a mask to do it.”
    “Then why do you wear it?” she asked. “I don’t mean out there.” She waved impatiently in the general direction of camp.
    “It’s that way,” Wolf said, moving her hand until it pointed in a different direction.
    “You know what I mean,” she huffed. “I am sure that you have your reasons for wearing a mask out there. But why do you use it to hide from me, too? I am hardly likely to tell everyone who you are if that is what you’re hiding.”
    He tensed but answered with the same directness that she had shown. “I have reasons for the mask that have nothing to do with trust or the lack of it.”
    She held his eyes. “Don’t they? There are only the two of us in this room.”
    “Cave,” he interjected mildly.
    She conceded his correction but not the change of subject. “ ‘Cave,’ then. A mask is something to hide behind. If I am the only one here to look at your face, then you are hiding from me. You don’t trust me.”
    “Plague take it, Aralorn,” he said in a low voice, stealing her favorite oath. “I have reasons to wear this mask.” He tapped it. There was enough temper in his eyes, if not his voice, that a prudent person would have backed down.
    Not even her enemies had ever called Aralorn prudent.
    “Not with me.” She wouldn’t retreat.
    He closed his eyes and took a deep breath and opened them again. The glitter of temper had been replaced by something that she couldn’t read. “The mask is more honest than what is beneath it.” There was emotion coloring his voice, but it was disguised so it could have been as mild as sorrow or as wild as the rage portrayed by the mask.
    She waited, knowing that if she commented on his obscure statement, he was fully capable of sidetracking her into his peculiar philosophical mishmash until she forgot her purpose.
    When he saw that she wasn’t going to speak, he said softly, “I find that trust is hard for me to learn, Lady.”
    There was nothing obvious holding the mask on his face, no hidden straps to hinder him when he put his hands up and undid the simple spell. He gripped the mask and took it off smoothly. She probably only imagined the slight hesitation before his face was revealed.
    She’d been certain it was his identity that he hid. If she had been another person she might have gasped. But she had seen burn victims before, even a few who were worse—most of those had been dead. The area around the golden eyes was unscarred, as if he’d protected them with an arm. The rest of his face matched his voice: It could have belonged to a corpse. It had that same peculiar tight look as if the skin was too small. His mouth was drawn so tightly that he must have trouble eating. She knew now why his voice had sounded muffled, the words less clearly enunciated than they had been when he took wolf shape.
    She looked for a long time, longer than she needed to so that she could think of the best way to react. Then she stood up and walked around the table, bent over, and kissed him lightly on the lips.
    Returning to her seat, she said quietly, her eyes on his face, “Leave your mask off when we are here alone, if you will. I would rather look at you than a mask.”
    He smiled warmly at her, with his eyes. Then he answered what