Sianim 01 - Masques

someone to take control.
    Aralorn looked around to see if she could find Myr, but he was conspicuous by his absence. There was always the possibility that he was still asleep, unaffected by the magic disturbance that had waked the rest of the camp; but, given what she knew about him, Aralorn thought that unlikely. The noise alone should have brought him out.
    As the thought crossed her mind, Myr—his clothes covered with bits of brush and blood—took the same path down the side of the hill that she had. Plague it. She must have woken him up when she went to check on the horses. If he’d been following her around, there was a good chance that he thought that she’d been the one who murdered the guards. As she had not been trying to hide anything, her footprints would be much more conspicuous than Edom’s.
    Myr ignored the commotion in favor of investigating the blackened corpse. Aralorn wondered how much he hoped to learn from the scorched, skeletal remains, and suspected he was using the time to think. When he stood up, he seemed slightly paler, though it could have been a trick of the light.
    Composedly, he directed his question at Wolf. “Who was it?”
    “Edom,” answered Wolf, his chilling voice even rougher than usual. If Wolf’s hand hadn’t been locked on her shoulder with a bruising grip, Aralorn would have thought him unaffected by the events of the night. It was obvious from the incredulous looks they directed at Wolf that most in the little gathering were disturbed by his calmness.
    “Is he the victim or the attacker?” asked Myr, voicing the question that was on almost everyone’s mind.
    “The attacker and the victim, though he didn’t intend to be the latter,” answered Aralorn, deciding to take part in her defense. Myr, at least, had already known what she was. She continued to tell them what she had done and the discovery of the dead guards. “I came to see if Wolf wanted to help track him down and found Edom with his nasty little sword drawn, standing over Wolf.”
    An unfamiliar voice asked, “How do we know she’s telling the truth? She could have laid a spell on Master Wolf so that he thinks that she has the right of it. Shapeshifters can do things like that. Edom was just a boy. Why would he attack Wolf? As for magic rituals, I spent three days teaching him how to move a stick without touching it. He didn’t have hardly any magic at all.”
    Wolf spoke, and even the most unobservant could see that he was not in control of his temper yet. “I assure you”—he looked at the man who’d spoken, and the man took a quick step back and stumbled over a rock—“I am certain of what took place tonight.”
    Silence fell.
    Wolf’s gaze found the ropes that had been left tangled on the ground. He gestured and the ropes burst into flame so hot it was blue and white rather than orange. The three or four people nearest them flinched, even Myr.
    “Also,” growled Wolf in a voice like a coffin dragged over rock, “the sword Edom fought with was a souleater. It did not belong to me. Aralorn, with her shapeshifter blood, could not have held anything so unnatural for long enough to draw it.”
    Good to know, Aralorn thought. In the unlikely event of her running into another one.
    Myr said, “Our guards were dead before Aralorn found them.”
    Tobin spoke up from his position as Stanis’s shadow, his eyes on the blackened bones. “Edom had a lot of books in his tent written in Darranian.”
    There was a brief silence. Aralorn almost smiled as she saw the meaning of Tobin’s words echo in the minds of all present. It was Tobin’s testimony that bore the most weight. A shapeshifter, being, after all, native to the Rethian mountains, was better than a Darranian. If Edom was a Darranian, it put an entirely different light on the events of the night.
    All the same, nobody but Myr met her eyes as they left to collect the bodies.
    They buried the guards in rough graves dug in the night, as Wolf said that it was the best. He had counteracted the runespell as best he could, but the runes enacted on the living flesh of dying people were stronger than they might otherwise be. He never made clear the exact purpose of Edom’s runes, but he said that burying the bodies would give strength to his own spells.
    When the last shovelful of dirt had been spread Wolf raised his hands and spoke words of power and binding. It was coincidence, Aralorn knew if no one else did, that it started pouring rain at