Sianim 01 - Masques

the firm arms wrapped around her back.
    “He knew me, too,” she whispered. “It was still Talor, but he was one of them . He talked to me, sounded just like himself—but he looked at me like a farmer looks at dinner after a hard day’s work. I didn’t even know that Uriah could talk.”
    Then, with difficulty, because she didn’t have much practice, she cried.

    Myr took Wolf’s cloak and covered her back where the quilt left her exposed. He touched her hair a little awkwardly, and said quietly to Wolf, “She won’t appreciate my presence when she recovers. I’ll tell the others that she’s well. Stanis has been blaming himself for her capture—he won’t eat. It will be a weight off his back to find out that she’s been rescued and is here unhurt.”
    Wolf nodded and watched him go. He rocked Aralorn gently and whispered soft reassurances. He was concentrating on her so that the voice took him by surprise.
    “Tell her to stop that.”
    Wolf brought his head up, alarmed at the strange voice. It was heavily accented and firmly masculine if a bit fussy. It also didn’t seem to come from anywhere, or rather there was no one where the voice came from.
    “Tell her to stop that, I said. She’s driven my Lys away, and I simply won’t abide that. I have allowed her here because Lys likes her—but now she’s made Lys go away by thinking of all of those bad things. Tell her to stop it, or I will have to ask her to leave no matter what Lys says.” The voice lost a little of its firmness and became sulky.
    The sound of someone else in the room distracted Aralorn, and she pushed herself up away from Wolf’s chest. Reaching down, she grabbed her tunic off the floor and used it to wipe her nose and eyes.
    She, too, looked at the conspicuously empty space at the end of the sofa near her feet. Magical invisibility consisted of blending into shadows and turning eyes away rather than absolute invisibility; when someone actively looked , the invisible person could be seen. Wolf knew what she was doing—but there was nothing at the end of the sofa.
    “Can you see him?” she asked Wolf.
    When he shook his head, she directed her questioning to the man who wasn’t there. “Who are you?”
    “That’s better,” said the voice, and there was a distinct pop of air that accompanies teleportation.
    That pop made Wolf confident enough to say, “He’s gone.”
    “What do you think?” asked Aralorn, settling back onto Wolf, her voice husky from crying. “Was that our friend who gives us a hand with the books and healed me?”
    “I can’t imagine that there is an endless supply of invisible people here.”
    Wolf knew he should be more concerned, but he’d suddenly become aware that Aralorn was naked under the quilt. It hadn’t bothered him before, when she’d been upset.
    He started to shift her off him, with the end goal of getting as much distance on his side as possible. But as soon as his hands touched her hip—on top of the blanket—they wanted to pull her toward him, not push her away.
    Self-absorbed, he only caught the tail end of Aralorn’s question. “Say that again?” he asked.
    “I asked how long you left me alone in the library.”
    “Not more than fifteen minutes. Less probably.”
    She made a sound of amazement. “I’ve never heard of anyone who could heal that fast. No wonder I feel like a month-old babe; by all rights I should be comatose now.”
    “Powerful,” Wolf agreed.
    Aralorn nodded. “It was odd in a voice that young, but he sounded a bit querulous, maybe even senile.” She closed her eyes, and he couldn’t make himself shove her away. More asleep than awake, she murmured with a touch of her unquenchable curiosity, “I wonder who Lys is.”
    When Wolf made no attempt to add to or answer her question, she drifted off to sleep.
    Wolf cradled her protectively against him. He thought about shapeshifters, children, and refugees who unerringly found their way to Myr’s camp. And he remembered the ae’Magi’s half-mad son who wandered into these caves to find solace one night, led by a small gray fox with ageless sea-green eyes.

NINE

    From her station on the couch, Aralorn watched Wolf deposit another armload of books on the floor beside the worktable. The table, her chair, and most of the floor space were similarly adorned. He’d been silently moving books since she woke up, even less communicative than usual. He wasn’t wearing his mask, but he might as well have been