Sianim 01 - Masques

who had replaced Wolf snorted at her, then shook himself as if he were wet. His eyes were as black as his hide, and she found herself wishing he’d kept his own eyes no matter how odd it would have seemed for a horse to have yellow eyes.
    She stood up stiffly, trying not to stagger—or start coughing again. When she could, she walked shakily up to him, grateful to reach the support of his neck.
    Unfortunately, although Wolf-as-a-Horse wasn’t as massive as Sheen, he was as tall, and she couldn’t climb up. After her third attempt, he knelt in the dust so that she could slip onto his back.
    He took them down an old trail that had fallen into disuse. The only tracks on it were from the local wildlife. The woods around them were too dense to allow easy travel, but Wolf appeared to know them—when the trail disappeared into a lush meadow, he picked it up again on the other side without having to take a step to the left or right. Wolf’s gaits, she found, were much smoother than Sheen’s; but the motion still hurt her ribs.
    To distract herself when it started to get unbearable, she thought up a question almost at random. “Where did you find a healer?”
    A green magic-user would never be anywhere near the ae’Magi’s castle. Other than her, she supposed, but she was no healer—green magic or not.
    Speaking had been a mistake. The dust of the road set her coughing. He stopped, turning his head so he could watch her out of one dark eye.
    When she could talk again she met his gaze and didn’t like the worry in it. She was fine. “You got rooked if you paid very much; any healer worth his fee would have taken care of the ribs and cough, too.”
    Wolf twitched his ears and said in an odd tone, even for him, “He didn’t have enough time to do much. Even if there had been the time, I wouldn’t have trusted him to do more than what was absolutely necessary—he . . . didn’t have the training.”
    Aralorn had an inkling that she should be paying more attention to the way he phrased his explanation, but she was in too much misery between her ribs and her cough to do much more than feel sorry for herself.
    Then she had it. The conviction when she’d first heard his voice after waking alone in the little camp he’d set up. Of course Wolf had gotten her out and fixed her eyes so she could see.
    But Wolf was a human mage. Son of the ae’Magi. And human mages might be okay at some aspects of healing—like putting broken bones together. But no human mage could have dealt with what had been done to her eyes.

    Wolf kept to a walk, trying to make the ride as smooth as possible for her. He could discern that she was in a lot of pain by the way her hands shook in his mane when she coughed, but she made light of it when he questioned her. As the day progressed, she leaned wearily against his neck and coughed more often.
    Worse, after that one, brief conversation, she’d quit talking. Aralorn always talked.
    He continued until he could stand it no more, then he called a halt at a likely camping area, far from the main thoroughfares and out of sight of the trail they’d been following. As soon as he stopped, before he could kneel to make things easier, Aralorn slid off him, then kept sliding until her rump hit the ground. She waved off his concern, breathing through her nose, her mouth pinched.
    Wolf regained his human form, then turned his attention to making a cushion of evergreen boughs and covering the result with the blankets, keeping a weather eye on his charge. By the time he finished, Aralorn was on her feet again—though, he thought, not for long.
    “I’m moving like an old woman,” she complained, walking toward the bed he’d made. “All I need is a cane.”
    She let him help her lie down and was asleep, he judged, before her eyes had a chance to close.
    While Aralorn slept, Wolf stood watch.

    The night was peaceful, she thought, except for when she was coughing. It got so bad toward the morning that she finally gave up resting and stood up. When she would have reached for the blankets to start folding them, Wolf set her firmly down on the ground with a growl that would have done credit to his wolf form and finished erasing all traces of their presence.
    Dawn’s light had barely begun to show before they were on their way.
    Once she was sitting up rather than lying down, Aralorn’s coughing mercifully eased. It helped that today they were cutting directly through the woods, which were thinned by the