Masques (Sianim #1)(19)

It took her a little time to find the faint trail running up the steep slope near the fence. The terrain was rough and treacherous with loose stones, and she thought ruefully that a person would have to be part mountain goat to try this very often - or part wolf.

Grabbing a ragged piece of brush, she pulled herself up a particularly steep area and found herself unexpectedly in a hollow that hadn't been visible from below. A small, smokeless fire burned near a bedroll. The rather large, dark wolf turned amber eyes to her and swayed its tail in casual welcome.

Since he wasn't using it, she seated herself on the bedroll and rested her chin on her raised knees. Casually she threw a few more sticks into the fire, leaving it for him to break the silence. Typically he explained nothing, but questioned her instead.

"Tell me about the camp." His voice was mildly curious.

"Why? You've been here much longer than I have."

He shook his head. "I just want to know what you see - how much I need to explain to you."

"Well," she began, "there has been a camp here for several months, probably starting this spring. Originally the person or people who started it didn't know much about camping in the woods, so I'd guess that they weren't locals. It looks like someone is in the process of reorganizing camp. If I were a gamester, I would place gold that Myr is the reorganizer." She looked to the Wolf for confirmation.

Wolf nodded and Aralorn continued to speak.

"From what I can tell, most of these people came with not much more than the clothes on their backs. There are what, maybe fifty people here?"

"Fifty-four with you," Wolf replied.

"Then over a third of them are children. There is no common class amongst them. I've seen peasants, townsfolk, and several aristocrats. The children are, as far as I've seen, without family. They are almost all Rethian." Aralorn lay back and made herself comfortable. "They have all the earmarks of refugees, and I'd lay my last gold that they are running from the ae'Magi."

Wolf grunted an affirmative.

"How did they all get here, though? I could see northerners finding this valley, but I heard southern Reth accents too."

"You, of all people, should know the reputation of the northern mountains," replied Wolf.

Aralorn thought about what she had heard about the Northlands. "You mean the stories about how human magic doesn't work? I thought that was nonsense. I saw you transport the merchant, and my understanding is that teleportation is a mage-level spell."

Wolf shook his head. "I wouldn't have tried it this far north even if we weren't worried about the ae'Magi finding the valley. Small spells seem unhampered, but more delicate spells seem harder to work. Some people it affects more than others - the ae'Magi won't travel into northern Reth. It doesn't seem to have much effect on my magic" - he nodded at the fire, which flared up, dancing wildly with purple and gold flames - "but I wouldn't have bet even the merchant's life on it; so we traveled south. The effect seems to be highly localized, so we didn't have to travel very far."

"The stories about that aspect of the Northlands are common enough, even in southern Reth. I suppose that this area would be a good place to run to if you were trying to hide from a human magician," commented Aralorn.

"I ..." He hesitated a minute and Aralorn got the distinct feeling that he changed what he was going to say. "I located this valley as a possible refuge, although I never intended to set up a camp of this size here."

He gazed with an air of bemusement over the camp. "I don't know how these people found this valley in particular. You can ask, but everyone has a different story. It is unreasonable that fifty people, most of whom have never been a mile outside of their own front doors, would wander blithely into a hanging valley that would be hard for a forester or trapper to find."

After a slight pause he continued. "As you speculated, they are all running from the ae'Magi, in a manner of speaking - the way that you would have been fleeing from Sianim if you had made a few more negative comments about the ae'Magi. Most of them were driven from their villages by the townspeople.

"Except for Myr, everyone in camp can work a little magic. The adults didn't have enough ability to be trained as magicians and escaped the ae'Magi's control that way. The children are young enough that they were not yet sent for training."

"The ae'Magi controls the trained magicians?" Aralorn was startled into silting up. "I know that he is the ae'Magi, but I thought that was like a guildmaster. You make it sound like it's more than that."

"It is," replied Wolf, his hoarse voice softened to keep it from carrying. "After the Wizard Wars, it was decided that the magicians could not be allowed to go without controls. I don't know exactly what the means of control are, but I do know that the control is real. The ae'Magi can stop a trained magician from using his magic, rendering them as vulnerable to the ae'Magi's spells as magicless people are."

Aralorn turned until she faced him. "Why aren't you under his control?"

Wolf moved in a lupine version of a shrug. "I either broke the ties of the binding, or I wasn't in training long enough, I am not sure which."

Aralorn and Wolf sat in silence, watching the camp stir in the valley below them. Aralorn stretched her feet out to the fire, which still flared uneasily, as if waiting for another command.