Sianim 01 - Masques

I saw her.”
    “Describe her for me,” requested Aralorn in a firm voice that refused to condemn or to sympathize with the boy he had been. He wouldn’t want that. The Uriah weren’t coming in anytime soon, she thought. She folded her legs and sat on the ground—healing or no, her legs had done as much as they were going to for a while, and it was sit down or fall down.
    “I was young, I don’t remember much,” Wolf said. “She looked small next to my father, fragile and lovely—like a butterfly. The only time I ever heard him say anything about her was when some noble asked about my mother. He said she was flawlessly beautiful. I think he was right.”
    Aralorn nodded, her suspicions confirmed. “I would have been surprised if she had been anything else.”
    He narrowed his gaze.
    “Your mother must have been a shapeshifter, or some other green-magic user—but the ‘perfectly beautiful’ sounds a lot like a shapeshifter. That feeling that the magic is taking control of you is fairly common when dealing with green magic because you are dealing with magic shaped by nature first, and only then by magician. You need to learn to work with it so that you can modify it. If you fight it, it will prove stronger than you.”
    He stared at her a bit and joined her on the floor without speaking. Maybe his legs wouldn’t hold him up any longer either.
    “I suspect,” continued Aralorn, as blandly as she could manage, “if you hadn’t been taught how magic should work, you would have discovered your half-blooded capabilities long since. You were told that you couldn’t heal, so you didn’t try.”
    Two of the Uriah stepped forward at the same time. The wards flared, and they burned. Aralorn caught a brief hint of burnt flesh, like cooking pork, then nothing.
    “Your theory fits,” said Wolf finally.
    “I should have thought about it sooner,” apologized Aralorn. “I mean, I am a half-breed. It’s just that I’ve never met another half-breed. I could tell that you weren’t a shapeshifter, so I just assumed that you were simply an extraordinarily powerful human magician.” She hesitated. “Which you are.”
    Wolf gave a half laugh with little humor in it. “It sounds just like an experiment the ae’Magi would try. To a Darranian like him, it would be the ultimate form of bestiality. Just the thing to spark his interest.”
    Aralorn leaned over, pulled down his mask, and bussed him on the unscarred mouth with a kiss that was anything but romantic. “You beast, you,” she said, and he made an unpracticed sound that might have been a laugh.
    He got to his feet and pulled her to hers, his eyes warmed with relief, humor, and something else. Gripping her shoulders, he kissed her with a passion that left her breathless and shaken. He stepped back and returned the mask to its usual position.
    “We’d better get back and tell Myr he can relax. It doesn’t appear that the Old Man is going to welcome the Uriah into his cave anytime in the near future,” he said, offering her his arm to lean on.
    “You think those are his wards?” she asked.
    “Someone has powered them up since I looked at them last. It wasn’t me and no one else here has the skill or the power.”
    She caught her breath, smiled, and tucked her arm through his. “Do we tell the whole camp that we are being protected by the Old Man of the Mountain?”
    “It might be the best thing, even if it scares a few of them silly. I have the feeling that we shouldn’t push his hospitality by wandering around too much. The best way to see that it doesn’t happen is to tell them the whole truth—if they’ll believe it.” Wolf slid though a narrow passage with his usual grace, towing Aralorn beside him.
    “We are dealing with people who have some minor magic capabilities; are following a dethroned king who just barely received his coming-of-age spurs; who number among their acquaintances not just one half-breed shapeshifter, but two half-breed shapeshifters—one of whom, incidentally, wears a silly mask. We could tell them that we were in the den of the old gods and that Faris, Empress of the Dead, conceived a sudden passion for Myr and it probably wouldn’t faze them,” Aralorn told him.
    Wolf laughed, and Aralorn pulled him to a halt. “Wait. Did you say that the ae’Magi is Darranian?”
    “Peasant stock,” he confirmed. “Apparently his master was very surprised to find a magician who was Darranian—used to tell jokes about