Sianim 01 - Masques

being hot, she was also wet and sticky. The pain was dimmed to bearable levels; even the ache in her side was less. There was something that attracted her attention and she concentrated—trying to figure out what it was. It had called her back from her nothingness into a place she’d much rather not be. She decided in a moment of pseudorationality that she needed to find it and kill it so she could be free to go away.
    She looked for it in her dreams and fragments of impressions touched her. There was something terribly wrong with her eyes. Cold iron whose wounds were permanent. It had bitten and chewed and . . .
    She shied away and found another piece of memory. Magic horribly distorted and twisted, making dead men breathe. It frightened her. There was no safety in death here, and she wanted the sanctuary that death should offer. Then the cold iron cut off her awareness of the dead things that shared her space. She had never felt so helpless; it gave her a dispirited claustrophobia that made her strain repeatedly against the bonds, until she exhausted herself. Bonds that most well-trained, full-blooded shapeshifters might have gotten out of, but she had all the weaknesses and too little power.
    There . . . while she was fighting . . . she almost had it. The thing that had pulled her back and made her hurt again. It was sound, familiar sound. Why should that bother her?
    She was so tired. She was losing her concentration, and pictures came more rapidly until she was lost in her nightmare memories again.

    They’d been camped in the same place for three days. It worried him because they were much too close to the ae’Magi’s castle, but the thought of moving her worried him more. Instead of getting better since being out of the cell, she seemed worse. Her eyes were seeping with the pus of infection. Her fever was no higher, but it was no lower either. Her breathing was more difficult, and when she coughed, he could tell that it hurt her ribs.
    As he watched her, he tormented himself with guilt. Had he been quicker to find her, she would have stood a better chance. The needles had been used on her eyes only recently. He could have found her in his first search if he’d only remembered that she might be wearing someone else’s face.
    As it did when he was angered, the other magic in him flickered fey—nudging him, tempting him. Usually he used it, twisting it toward his own ends, but this time he was tired with worry, guilt, and sleeplessness. The magic whispered, seducing him with visions of healing.
    His eyes closed, without conscious thought he stretched out carefully beside Aralorn. Gently, he touched her face, seeing the wrongness there—the slight fracture in the skull that he hadn’t been aware of.
    As he gave control away to the seductive whispers of his magic, he found that he could feel her pulse, almost her thoughts. Sex notwithstanding, this was closer than he’d ever been to another human being. With anyone else, he would have lashed out, done anything just to get away—to be safe alone.
    But this was Aralorn, and he had to heal her, or . . . He caught a flick of the desperation of that thought, but was soon lost in the peace of his magic. He floated with it for what could have been a hundred years or a single instant. Gradually, his fear of the loss of control, so well learned when his searing magic had leapt out burning, hurting, scarring, crept upon him—breaking the trance he’d fallen into.
    He opened his eyes and gasped for air. His heart was pounding, and sweat poured off his body. Great shudders racked him. He turned his head enough to look at Aralorn.
    The first thing that hit him was that he was looking at Aralorn. The guise she’d donned was gone. The bruises on her legs looked much worse on her own relatively pale skin. Fever had brought unnatural color to her pale cheeks.
    When he could, he bent over and removed the bandage from her eyes. The swelling had almost completely gone and her eyes appeared normal when he carefully lifted her eyelids. He hadn’t looked before—he knew what those needles had done. He felt carefully with his fingertips where he’d seen the break in her skull and could locate nothing.
    Almost too tired to move, he pulled her head onto his shoulder and drew blankets neatly around them. He knew he should stay up and keep watch—there was no warhorse to share guard duty with—but he hadn’t been this tired since his early apprentice days.

    It was