Sianim 02 - Wolfsbane

remember is you standing in front of me and my face hurt where you slapped me. ‘Screams only agitate it,’ you said. ‘It can’t get out.’ ”
    Kisrah’s lips twitched in something that might have been a faint smile. “Then you said, ‘It doesn’t like to eat sorcerers anyway—especially those without half the sense of a cooped chicken.’ ”
    Wolf said, “Two days before, that thing had been my father’s whore. I believe she was fifteen. A peasant, of course, and so of little account except for her beauty. Father liked beautiful things. He also liked to experiment. He showed you some of them. I believe you referred to them as my father’s ‘unfortunate hobbies.’ ”
    A myriad of expressions flittered across Kisrah’s face. Anger, disbelief . . . then dawning horror.
    “The night I met you in the ae’Magi’s castle,” said Aralorn quietly, “after you were unconscious, the girl you’d slept with sprouted fangs and claws. I suppose I could have just left rather than killing her: She was far more interested in eating you than me.”
    Kisrah didn’t say anything.
    Aralorn spread her hands to show they were empty, the universal sign of truce. “If you want to ride by yourself a bit—the horse knows the way back to the keep. We can leave you.”
    Kisrah hesitated, then nodded. “If you would, please. That might be best.”

    “Well?” asked Aralorn.
    Wolf, who’d shifted in front of Kisrah into his four-footed form for travel, shook his head. “I don’t know. It depends upon which he loves best, my father or the truth.”
    He put on a brief burst of speed that precluded talk. Like Kisrah, she thought, he wanted a moment to himself.
    The wind had picked up again as they’d ridden back onto less sheltered ground. It was not enough to send her shrieking for cover, but it was a near thing. It spoke to her in a hundred whispers that touched her ears with bits and scraps of information directly out of her imagination.
    “Wolf?” she asked, when the sound grew too much.
    “Ump?”
    “Wizards have their specialties, right? Like the farseer who works for Ren.”
    “Ump.”
    A conversation takes two people, one of whom says something other than “Ump.” She thought about letting him be. His past was a sensitive topic, and she and Kisrah, between them, had all but beaten him over the head with it. The wind carried the sobs of a young child, bringing with the sound a hopeless loneliness that chilled her to the bone in an echo of her dreams of Wolf’s childhood. She tried again. She remembered a story about the gaze of the howlaa driving a man mad; too bad she hadn’t recalled that before she looked into its eyes.
    “What is Kisrah’s specialty?”
    “By the time a mage becomes a master, he has more than one area of expertise.”
    “You knew him before that,” she persisted. “What was his field?”
    “Moving things.”
    “Like translocation?” asked Aralorn.
    “Yes.” Wolf sighed heavily and slowed. “But he worked more with objects and delicate things—like picking locks or unbuckling saddle girths.”
    “No wonder Father likes him,” she observed, relieved that he’d decided to talk. “Saddle girths and horseshoes have lost as many battles as courage and skill have won. What was Nevyn’s specialty?”
    “Nevyn?” said Wolf. “I don’t know that I remember. By the time he got to Kisrah, he was in pretty rough shape—and the two of them didn’t really spend a lot of time with my father, in any case. He is fortunate he went to Kisrah; if he’d come to my father, he’d have been a babbling idiot for the rest of his life—I thought at the time that it looked like it might go either way.” His voice reflected the indifference he’d felt at the time, showing Aralorn how badly he’d closed down because she’d reminded him of what he’d once been.
    “I hadn’t realized it had been so bad for him.” Aralorn pulled her scarf from the pocket she’d stashed it in and wrapped it around her ears. This conversation hadn’t helped either of them as much as she’d hoped it would. It hadn’t distracted her from the voices, nor had it restored Wolf’s mood. “I guess he was lucky to come out of all that with only a few quirks about shapeshifters.”
    The wind swayed the larger branches now and sent odd bits of snow to swirl in place.
    “Come on,” said Wolf. “See if that old fleatrap can move out a little; no sense wasting what’s left of the day playing in the