Sianim 02 - Wolfsbane

this way exactly. All that’s necessary is to find someplace in this part of Lambshold that is not often traveled. Then you can find the maze.”
    “The maze?” Wolf sounded intrigued.
    She smiled, stopping to knock the snow that had packed itself around the short nails that kept the leather soles of her walking boots from slipping on the ice and snow. “You’ll see when we find it. But if you’d care to help, keep your eye out for a bit of quartz. I need it to work some magic. There should be quite a bit of it in the steep areas, where there’s no snow to cover it.”
    They came to a small clearing bordered on two sides by the sharp sides of a mountain. Aralorn crossed the clearing and began searching for rocks on the steep areas where the sun and wind had left large sections bare.
    “It doesn’t have to be quartz,” she said finally. “Sandstone would work as well.”
    Wolf lifted his snow-covered nose from a promising nook under a clump of dead brush. “You could have said so earlier and saved yourself a case of frostbite. There is sandstone all over here.”
    Aralorn tucked her cold, wet hands underneath her sweaters and warmed them against her middle as Wolf searched back and forth over the area they’d just covered. She’d taken her gloves off to push aside the snow that the afternoon sun had begun to thaw. They had too far to travel to risk getting her gloves wet. When she could feel her fingers again, she pulled the gloves out of her belt and slipped them over her hands.
    “You know,” she said, as he seemed to be having no success finding the sandstone, “aren’t the crystals on your staff quartz?”
    “I ought to let you try casting a spell using one of them,” said Wolf, not lifting his gaze from the ground, “but I find that I have become more squeamish of late. Ah, yes, here it is.”
    Aralorn bent to pick up the smooth yellowish brown stone Wolf had unearthed and polish it free of dirt on her cloak.
    “Sandstone is for perseverance,” she said, “quartz for luck. Which is why I started out looking for quartz: I suspect we’ll be spending the night up here.”
    Wolf lowered his eyelids in amusement. “If you want luck, I have some opal you could use.”
    “Thanks, but I’ll pass,” Aralorn demurred. “Ill luck I don’t need.”
    She held the stone in her closed hand and raised her arm to shoulder height. Closing her eyes, she began singing. The song she chose was a children’s song in her mother’s tongue—though the words didn’t matter for the magic, just the pattern of the music, which would be their key to entering her mother’s world.
    Slowly, almost shyly, awareness of the forest crept upon her. She could feel the winter sleep encasing the plants: wary curiosity peering at them from a rotted-out cedar in the form of a martin; the brook waiting for spring to allow it to run to the ocean far away. Finally, she found what she had been searching for and brushed lightly against the current of magic threaded throughout the forest. When she was certain it had perceived her, she stopped singing and allowed the awareness to pass from her. She looked down at the rock in her hands and, just for a moment, could see an arrow.
    “Now, why doesn’t it surprise me that we have to travel up the side of the mountain?” she grumbled. She showed the arrow to Wolf, then tossed the stone back on the ground since it had served its purpose. “I should have brought some quartz from home. Irrenna won’t have disturbed my stashes of spell starters.”
    “The maze would have been different?” asked Wolf, pacing beside her as she started up the mountain.
    “It’s always different,” replied Aralorn. “The magic I worked to find the start of the maze will only work with sandstone or quartz—someone’s idea of a joke, I suspect. You know—‘Only with luck or persistence will you find the sanctuary hidden in the heart of the mountains.’ The kinds of words storytellers are fond of. I prefer to start with luck.”
    The mountainside looked rougher from the bottom than it actually was, an unusual occurrence in Aralorn’s experience. All the same, she almost missed the stone altogether, hidden in plain sight as it was in the midst of a dozen other large boulders.
    “Good,” she said, turning abruptly off her chosen path upward and taking a steep downward route that brought her skidding and sliding to the cluster of granite boulders. “The maze remembers