Sianim 02 - Wolfsbane

“Smart.”
    “Always,” she said smugly.
    “I love you,” he said.
    “Of course you do,” she said, to make him laugh—which it did. “I love you, too. Now you can kiss me.”
    He bent down to her ear again, and whispered, “How long were you going to take before you told me that the priestess bound us together unto death?”
    Now it was her turn to still. She felt guilty for half a breath, then she realized what his words really meant.
    “How long have you known? Plague take you, Wolf.”
    She tried to take a step away, but he held her too tightly. His breath seemed to be behaving oddly—then she realized he was laughing. She hit him—not hard enough to hurt, just enough to express her displeasure.
    “Aralorn, Aralorn,” he tried to croon between laughs and pretending her halfhearted blows were hurting him. “Did you think I wouldn’t feel it when the priestess set a blood-bond between us? I am a black mage, my love. I understand about blood-bonds—and I can break them if I wish.”
    “This one was set by a goddess,” she informed him.
    “Maybe she could set a bond between us I could not break,” he told her. “But this one I could. If I wanted to.”
    He lifted her off the floor to allow himself better access to her mouth—as well as various and sundry other sensitive areas. Aralorn caught her breath and braced her hands on his shoulders.
    “I know you love me,” he told her, the laughter dying from his eyes.
    She found herself blinking back tears as she heard how profoundly that knowledge had affected him.
    “I know you love me, too,” she said, before her mouth was occupied by things other than speech.

    Afterward, he slept. Snuggled tightly against him, Aralorn closed her eyes and wished she didn’t have to ask him to use the dark arts. He had tried to kill himself once rather than use them, but for her he would take the part he had been given. She didn’t know that she was worth it.
    No good comes from black magic, Kisrah had said. Ridane’s priestess had told her that someone would die before long. Aralorn shivered and shifted closer to Wolf as if she could protect him by her presence.
    It hadn’t been said, but the assumption Wolf had led them all to was that he would remove the spell tomorrow. Surely that would give the dreamwalker something to fret about.
    Maybe he’d be walking again tonight.
    She decided the best place to keep watch would be in Nevyn’s room. It might already be too late, but there was still a fair portion of the night left—and it had been about this time that she’d seen “Geoffrey” talking to Kisrah.
    She started to slide out of bed.
    “Aralorn?” Wolf sounded sleepy.
    “I’m going spying for a couple of hours,” she said quietly, though he was already awake. She should have known that she couldn’t sneak out on him. “I have a few questions to clean up, and this might be my only chance to do it.”
    He cupped her face in the darkness and pulled her until she rested her forehead on his for a moment. “All right,” he said. “Be careful.”
    She tilted her face until her lips met his. “I will.”
    She dressed in the dark, not bothering with shoes. Though, after a brief moment of thought, she grabbed her sword to go along with her knives. If she ended up facing an enraged sorcerer, she’d just as soon have Ambris’s help as not.
    In the darkness, Wolf said softly, “I love you.”
    Aralorn looked back, but the bed was too shadowed. She could distinguish nothing more than the shape of him in it. “I love you, too. See you in a few hours.”
    “Yes,” he said.
    He waited in the darkness and counted slowly to a hundred before getting to his feet. He dressed with care. He’d done many hard things in his life; in some ways this was not the worst. At least this time it was clearly the best answer for everyone.
    He wished that he could postpone it, but he was unlikely to get another such opportunity soon. He’d been cudgeling his brain for a way to keep her away from him for long enough. Trust Aralorn to make things easy for him. He took his knife from his belt and tested it lightly against the ball of his thumb. A drop of dark liquid ran down the edge of his hand, and he licked it clean.

    Aralorn was making her way up the stairs when a soft sound alerted her to someone else’s presence. She froze where she was, searching the darkness above her for any hint of movement. At last she saw a flash of lighter color where the minimal light