Masques (Sianim #1)(47)

She shied away and found another piece of memory. Magic horribly distorted and twisted, making dead men breathe. It frightened her. There was no safety in death here, and she wanted the sanctuary that death should offer. Then the cold iron cut off her awareness of the dead things that shared her space. She had never felt so helpless; it gave her a dispirited claustrophobia that made her strain repeatedly against the bonds, until she exhausted herself. Bonds that most well-trained, full-blooded shapeshifters could have gotten out of, but she had all the weaknesses and too little power.

There ... while she was fighting ... she almost had it. The thing that had pulled her back and made her hurt again, it was sound, a familiar sound. Why should that bother her?

She was so tired. She was losing her concentration, and pictures came more rapidly until she was lost in her nightmare memories again.

* * *

THEY'D BEEN CAMPED IN THE SAME PLACE FOR THREE DAYS. IT worried him because they were much too close to the ae'Magi's castle, but the thought of moving her worried him more. Instead of getting better since being out of the cell, she seemed worse. Her eyes were seeping with the pus of infection. Her fever was no higher, but it was no lower either. Her breathing was more difficult, and when she coughed he could tell that it hurt her ribs.

As he watched her, he tormented himself with guilt. Had he been quicker to find her, she would have stood a better chance. The needles had been used on her eyes only recently.

As it did when he was angered, the magic in him flickered fey; nudging him, tempting him. Usually he controlled it, twisting it toward his own ends, but this time he was tired with worry, guilt and sleeplessness. The magic whispered, seducing him with visions of healing.

His eyes closed, without conscious thought he stretched out carefully beside Aralorn. Gently he touched her face, seeing the wrongness there - the slight fracture in the skull that he hadn't been aware of. As he gave control away to the seductive whispers of his magic, he found that he could feel her pulse, almost her thoughts. Sex notwithstanding, this was closer than he'd ever been to another human being. With anyone else he would have lashed out, done anything just to get away - to be safe alone.

But this was Aralorn and he had to heal her, or ... he caught a flicker of the desperation of that thought, but was soon lost in the peace of his magic. He floated with it for what could have been a hundred years or a single instant. Gradually the fear of the loss of control, so well learned when his searing magic had leapt out burning, searing, hurting, crept upon him - breaking the trance he'd fallen into.

He opened his eyes and gasped for air. His heart was pounding, and sweat poured off his body. Great shudders racked him. He turned his head enough to look at Aralorn.

The first thing that hit him was that he was looking at Aralorn. The guise she'd donned was gone. The bruises on her legs looked much worse on her own relatively pale skin. Fever brought unnatural color to her pale cheeks.

When he could, he bent over and removed the bandage from her eyes. The swelling had almost completely gone, and her eyes appeared normal when he carefully lifted her eyelids. He felt carefully where he'd seen the break in her skull, but could locate nothing.

Almost too tired to move, he pulled her head on his shoulder and drew blankets neatly around them. He knew he should stay up and keep watch - there was no warhorse to share guard duty with - but he hadn't been this tired since his early apprentice days.

* * *

IT WAS MORNING WHEN ARALORN AWOKE, STILL SLIGHTLY delirious. She'd had dreams of the quiet sounds of the forest before, and she let herself take that comfort now. She knew that all too soon she would have to face reality again. The nice thing was that the times reality crept in were getting farther and farther apart.

She thought about that for a minute before she realized that there was a man beside her. Delirium took over then, and she was drowning slowly. It was very hard to breathe, and she lost track of the forest while she strangled.

The soft sounds of a familiar voice lent her comfort and strength, but there was something wrong with the voice. It was too soft; it should be cold and rough, harsher. She associated unpleasant things with the warmer tones. The voice she wanted to hear should be dead like the Uriah, like Talor. She could hear someone whimpering and wondered who it was.

She ate and it tasted very good, salty and warm on her sore throat. She drank something else, and a part of her tasted the bitter herb with approval, knowing that it would help her breathe. Wasn't there some reason that she didn't want to get better - but she couldn't decide why she wouldn't want to get well, and while she thought about it, she drifted back to sleep.

Wolf watched her and waited. Without the unquenchable energy that characterized her she looked fragile, breakable. Awake, she had a tendency to make him forget how small she was.

He raged when she cried out in terror. She was not a mindspeaker, but he had some talent in that direction. Her mind called out to him, out to her father, to no one, almost ceaselessly at times. Although she babbled out loud, she said nothing that would have been any use to the ae'Magi were he listening.

She was quiet finally, and Wolf sat propped up against a tree, near enough to keep an eye on her, but far enough away that he wouldn't disturb her slumbers.

He should never have been able to heal her. Indisputably he had. Even if he did nothing more than eliminate the paths the needles had cut into her eyes, it was more than human magic allowed for. Less dramatic but even further outside the bounds of magic, as he understood it, was the fact that she now wore the appearance that was hers by birth.