Sianim 02 - Wolfsbane

breast at Wolf, who caught it easily and ate it with more haste than manners.
    She took a hunk of bread from her trencher and put a piece of sliced meat on top of it. This she kept, placing the plate and its remaining contents on the floor for Wolf.
    “There she is! I see her.”
    A loud voice drew her attention away from her meal as she saw two towheaded children running toward her.
    “Aunt Aralorn. Hey, Aunt Aralorn, Father said you would tell us a story if we cornered you.”
    Putting their ages roughly at eight and five, Aralorn quickly came up with the identity of “Father.” Falhart was the only one of her brothers old enough to have sired them.
    “All right,” she said, hiding her pleasure—as tired as she was, storytelling opportunities were not to be lost. “Tell Falhart you cornered me. I’ll do some tale-telling in front of the fireplace after I’m finished eating.”
    The two scurried off in search of their father, and Aralorn finished the last of her bread. Wolf yawned as she picked the empty trencher off the floor and got to her feet.
    “Come on, we’ll take this to the kitchen and ...” Her voice trailed off as she saw Irrenna making her way toward her.
    It wasn’t Irrenna that made her lose her train of thought, but the man who walked beside her. Flamboyantly clothed in amber and ruby, Lord Kisrah looked more like a court dandy than the holder of age-old power.
    It was too soon for Irrenna’s message to have reached him; he must have come for the Lyon’s funeral.
    Well, Aralorn thought, if he didn’t know who it was that he met in the ae’Magi’s castle the night Geoffrey died, he will now. Even if he wasn’t involved with her father’s collapse, he was not going to be friendly. If he was responsible for her father’s condition . . . well, she wasn’t always friendly either.
    She let none of her worries appear on her face, nor did she allow herself to hesitate as she approached them, dirty trencher in hand.
    “You said that you weren’t able to wake him?” asked Irrenna.
    Kisrah, Aralorn noted warily, was intent, but not surprised at all at seeing her face in this hall. He had known who she was before coming here. He moved to the top of her suspects.
    “That’s right,” said Aralorn. “My uncle agreed to come and look. He didn’t know the spell that holds Father, but he was able to dispose of the baneshade—”
    “Baneshade?” Kisrah broke in, frowning.
    She nodded. “Apparently the one who did this has a whole arsenal of black arts—”
    “ Black arts?” he interrupted.
    “You must not have looked in on him yet,” she said. “Whoever laid the spell holding the Lyon used black magic. I’m not certain if you’d call the baneshade black magic precisely, but it attacked me the first time I worked magic in the room—the mage must have set it to guard my father. My uncle—my mother’s brother, who is a shapechanger—is the one who identified it and rid us of it as well.”
    “My apologies,” Irrenna broke in. “Allow me to present the Lady Aralorn, my husband’s oldest daughter, to you, Lord Kisrah. Aralorn, this is Lord Kisrah, the ae’Magi. He came here as soon as he heard what happened to Henrick.”
    “It took me a while to connect Henrick’s daughter with the Sianim mercenary the ae’Magi had me fetch for him,” replied the Archmage, bowing over Aralorn’s hand. “I suppose I had expected someone more like your sisters.”
    At her side, Wolf stiffened and stared at Kisrah with an interest that was definitely predatory. She took a firm grip on a handful of fur. She’d never told him of Kisrah’s role in her capture and subsequent torture by the ae’Magi because she’d worried about his reaction.
    “How did you make the connection?” asked Irrenna, unaware of the coercive nature of Kisrah’s “fetching” of Aralorn. “She has very little contact with us; she says she is afraid her work will draw us into jeopardy.”
    Sadness crept across his features, an odd contrast to the rose-colored wig he wore—like an emerald among a pile of glass jewels. “The council appointed me to investigate Geoffrey’s death even before they called me to assume his role. I looked into the backgrounds of anyone who had anything to do with him in his last days. You”—he directed his speech to Aralorn—“provided me with a particularly odd puzzle and kept the investigation going much longer than it otherwise would have. It was especially difficult until