by Barb Hendee
Stacked, emptied crates and bottles waited to be taken away. And there also, spare cloaks hung on wall pegs, for anyone who had to take milk bottles or refuse out. She grabbed the largest one and pulled it on over her own. Although it was too big for her, this was easier than carrying it, and the extra bulk might further disguise her. When she reached the courtyard again, still trying to think of some way to get Shade out through the library, another notion came to her.
Pawl a’Seatt had come to escort his staff home from working all day in the guild. But had they already left, or were they still inside? Either way, what Wynn had in mind was a gamble. She hoped none of the guards outside had ever seen her before.
Wynn pocketed the crystal, smothering its light, and crouched before Shade.
She didn’t know how to explain with memories that Shade needed to keep quiet. She reached out carefully for Shade’s nose—again hoping she didn’t get bitten—and clamped her hand over the dog’s muzzle. She quickly covered her own mouth in like fashion.
Shade let out a brief grumble and fell silent. Wynn hoped that meant the dog understood.
She headed down the gatehouse tunnel with Shade padding behind her. Before she was close enough to touch the closed portcullis, someone shifted beyond it.
In the light of the outer torches, a bearded face leaned close between the stout bars. He wore the red tabard of Rodian’s men and held the shaft of a polearm in one hand.
“What’s this?” the man demanded. “It’s after dark . . . orders are that no one goes out.”
“Do I look like a sage?” Wynn answered, trying to sound indignant. “I’m with Master a’Seatt, from the Upright Quill.”
The man lifted his head, looking away, and Wynn lost sight of his face.
“He already left,” another voice outside answered.
The first guard peered in again. “Where were you?”
“Domin High-Tower had a fit about some mislaid notes,” Wynn answered, and sighed as deeply as she could. “I got stuck finding them for him.”
The bearded guard scowled, but he appeared more annoyed than suspicious.
“Open the damn gate!” Wynn snapped.
His eyes widened. “Girl, you’d better—”
“Come on!” Wynn cut in. “I’m tired, I haven’t had supper, and I’ve been dealing with stuffy, petty little scholars all day. Or do you want to tell my employer—and your captain—why I was stuck in here all night?”
The guard let out a long hissing breath and vanished from the space in the portcullis.
Wynn’s stomach clenched. She was stuck. They were just going to ignore her.
“Take it up!” someone shouted.
The gatehouse tunnel filled with the racket of chains and gears as the portcullis began to rise. Wynn tried to remain still and not duck under and bolt out. She stepped onward only when the way was fully open.
“What is that?” one guard barked.
She was only three steps down the outer path to the bailey gate when she had to stop and look back. Both guards had their long halberds lowered, the wide head blades aimed at Shade.
“A wolf?” one guard uttered.
The only thing Wynn could think of was another insult.
“Oh, good, you’ve got eyes . . . very useful, since you’re standing watch.”
“Watch your little tongue!” the second guard warned. “What’s a wolf doing inside the guild?”
“Domin Parisean said it was supposed to walk with me,” Wynn countered, “since I missed my escort.”
“A wolf? What do you take me for?”
“What do you expect?” Wynn snarled back. “All the nonsense in there, you wouldn’t believe it . . . I don’t! But you think I’m gonna argue?”
With that she turned away, walking steadily down the path as Shade trotted out ahead. But Wynn didn’t feel steady.
She was shaking, waiting to be grabbed from behind. She was still shaking when she reached the gate and stepped out onto the Old Bailey Road.
And no one followed.
Wynn ran a hand over Shade’s silky ears as they set out for the Graylands Empire. How she would get both of them back inside the guild was something she didn’t care to think about just yet.
Cringing in bed, Chane cursed his weakness, and another wave of anxiety choked him.
Pain had beaten him down, and he could not banish it. He had finally succumbed and sent a message to Wynn.
Slipping it along with two silver pennies under the innkeeper’s door, he had then rushed back to his room before he was seen. Not long after, the reality of what he had done caught up to him. And fear became companion to the pain.
How could he have drawn Wynn out alone into the night? Or would she just send a reply? No, she would come.
“You coward!” he hissed at himself.
If he sent another message telling her not to come, it might not reach her in time. And he needed to know if she had recovered from whatever had made her collapse. There were also questions about the Suman who had appeared from nowhere to carry her off.
Chane sat up, groaned, and struck the sulfur stick on the stool to light his one candle.
He had fed on a blacksmith working late the night before, but that one fresh life had not been enough to fully heal him. The burns on his hands were still severe, though he had carefully peeled away flecks of charred skin. The ones on his face felt worse. If not for the cloak’s hood shielding his hair, he would have lost some of that as well.
His shirtsleeves and one side of his cloak had caught fire from his own flesh. Tearing charred cloth from his forearms had been excruciating. He had an extra shirt, though he was not wearing it. The touch of the cloth on his wounds was too much. But he possessed no other cloak. Without one he could not hunt effectively, as the sight of him would shock his prey into flight and cries before he could close for a kill.
Chane had never been in such a state, never needed help like this—and he had no one to trust except Wynn.
A soft knock sounded at his door.
Chane could not separate shame, relief, and fear.
“Wynn?” he whispered.
“Yes. The innkeeper sent me up.”
Shame and fear grew—one for calling her here and the other at the thought of her looking upon him. But he was no longer alone in his suffering.
He lunged for the door and whimpered as he gripped the handle with his burned hand. When he cracked the door, he saw the charcoal-colored majay-hì.
Wynn pushed in past him, and the dog followed. Chane quickly shut the door, retreating to the wall beyond it and lowering his head. The one candle barely lit the room from the other end near the bed. It was enough for Chane to see, with his sight opened wide, but he cowered back as far as he could from its light.
Wynn whipped off one cloak and tossed it on the bed, along with a staff, its upper end covered in a leather sheath. She glanced at him, about to untie a second cloak beneath the first, but her fingers stopped with the strings pulled out straight.
A shudder ran through her when she peered at him.
“Oh,” she whispered. “I . . . ah, no!”
He must look worse than he realized.
“It will pass,” he rasped, and then cringed. He had become accustomed to the sound of his maimed voice, but hearing it when he spoke to her made him hate it more.
“I should not have asked you to come,” he whispered.
The majay-hì began sniffing sharply, watching him. Its jowls curled.
“Stop it,” Wynn said, sweeping a hand before the dog’s nose.
When she looked back to Chane, her mouth opened. A frown passed briefly over her face, and her lips closed, possibly in some abandoned question she decided not to ask.
She pointed to the bed. “Sit down.”
Chane stepped closer, and the dog did growl. Wynn flinched at a clearer sight of him, and a flicker of fright rose as her gaze shifted rapidly between him and the dog. He settled on the bed’s edge, loathing hims
elf for the relief her presence brought him.
Wynn gasped softly. “Your back! Did that happen last night?”
It took an instant before he understood. She had never seen him without a shirt, and his back was covered in white scars.
“No, those are old,” he said. “From . . . before.”
This was not the time or place to tell her of his life before death, or about his father. Changing the subject, he gestured at the staff lying behind him on the bed.
“Is that what you carried last night?”
Wynn remained silent too long. When Chane finally glanced up, she averted her eyes. She began digging in the pocket of her yellow tunic.
“Without Magiere or Chap,” she said, “I needed my own defense.”
So it was the same staff—and under the leather sheath was the searing crystal.
“Where did you get it?”
“Our guild alchemists make certain things, such as the cold lamp crystals,” she answered, her tone careful and matter-of-fact. It was obvious she did not want to say much about it. “I’m still learning to use it properly,” she added.
Chane considered himself intelligent, though only moderately skilled in conjury, but to create or even conceive of a crystal that carried light that burned like the sun . . .
There were moments when Wynn still astonished him. What the making of the crystal had taken was beyond what he could imagine—much like most of Welstiel’s items.
She drew a small ceramic jar from inside her pocket. “A healing salve,” she explained.
“That will not help . . . me.”
“You’re suffering,” she said bluntly, and knelt down. “It may still numb the pain.”
Chane kept quiet, fearing she might vanish. It was hard to believe she was here, tending to his comfort. Only the pain seemed truly real. The rest felt as though one of his fantasies harbored over the last year had suddenly swelled into a full delusion.
Her light brown hair hung in loose wisps, sticking to one olive cheek at the corner of her small mouth. Candlelight warmed her brown eyes as she reached for his right hand resting on his knee. Her eyes flickered briefly to his bare chest, and he wished he had donned his spare shirt. Wynn’s fingers hung for a moment above his hand.
“This may hurt,” she said. “I didn’t mean to injure you. I was trying to drive off that . . . thing, just before Domin il’Sänke appeared.”
Wynn slowly applied salve to Chane’s right hand. Discomfort heightened under the delicate pressure, but he did not care.
“Il’Sänke?” he echoed. “The one who carried you off?”
“Yes, and—”
“And he’s a mage.”
Wynn glanced up. “Yes.”
“Perhaps the one who created your crystal?”
Wynn frowned. “He’s the only one who believes that we’re dealing with an undead, besides you . . . and Shade.”
The dog behind Wynn, so akin to Chap, sniffed at him. Her ears flattened as her jowls twitched.
It would sense nothing of his nature—not while he wore the ring. Likely the female smelled that he was not right, or at least was not like other people. Chane wanted to ask Wynn about the animal, but the mention of the Suman brought back images of the night before.
The black figure attacking Wynn, the dog trying to protect her, the flash of the crystal’s light.
Chane flinched. Wynn jerked her fingers from a spot of raw skin on his wrist, where he had ripped away a charred sleeve.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
But her voice sounded distant, as if he were some stranger she tended to. She leaned back to dip her fingers in the salve jar on the floor and looked about his small attic room.
The shabby walls, the slanting ceiling below the roof, the stool for a table, and the dusty, chipped water basin . . .
Chane was not accustomed to embarrassment. The son of a nobleman in life, he had lived in a lavish manor, worn fine clothes, and had even educated himself beyond what most would gain—beyond what most gentry thought was worthwhile. Now he lived—existed—in squalor, with little more than his studies to distract him.
For once he had no one else to blame, not even Welstiel.
Wynn began gently reapplying salve, working around the brass ring on his left hand without seeming to notice it. Then he realized the sting in his right hand was beginning to dull. The ointment might not heal him, but something in it still affected his dead flesh. He loosely closed his right hand, and the pain barely increased.
“Have you learned anything about the scroll?” he asked.
Wynn’s expression shifted with a hint of interest. “No, I haven’t had time. I was in the catacombs, studying translated portions of the texts. By evening I began to figure out which sections of the translations had been stolen.”
He froze, for her words confused him on several levels.
“You have had no access before? You brought those texts back—they are yours.”
Wynn sighed. Picking up the salve jar, she stood and began dabbing at his face.
“It’s complicated . . . but no, not until today. Only masters and domins working on the project are allowed access. There is precedence for this decision.”
She sounded defensive, even resentful. This was a sensitive subject, so he did not press for more.
“Do you have any idea what is in the missing pages?” he asked.
She stopped dabbing, and her eyes drifted.
“Li’kän’s wall writings mentioned two companions—Volyno and Häs’saun. I don’t know what became of them, but I read some translations that came just before one set of missing pages. . . .”
She told him of ancient undead, like the white woman with strangely shaped eyes in the castle of the Pock Peaks. And of something called “Beloved,” among other names, that might have been what had whispered to Welstiel and sent Magiere her dreams of that castle. And also of how those undead had “divided.”
Chane wondered at those other names Wynn mentioned. Did others like the white woman still roam free in the world after centuries?
Wynn paused, lost in thought, and then looked intently down at Chane.
“Did Welstiel ever speak to you about his patron . . . the thing in his dreams? Magiere suspected something was guiding him.”
Chane shook his head. “I know only that someone whispered to him in dormancy, perhaps telling him where to go. But in the way we wandered, I believe he was not told much. He was obsessed with herding Magiere ahead of him, as if he needed her. When you and yours entered elven land, I think he tried to turn to finding his artifact on his own.”
Even speaking Magiere’s name made Chane’s insides heat up. He thought he saw Wynn’s eyes flicker once, perhaps glancing at the scar around his neck.
“Some of what Welstiel was told in dormancy turned out to be false,” Chane went on. “When did Magiere start having these dreams?”
“When we reached the northern bay of the Elven Territories,” Wynn answered. “We were promised a ship to take us south.”
Chane shook his head. He had wandered the Crown Range with Welstiel for so long it was impossible to match the time frames.
“The night we found the monastery, Welstiel began shouting at the night sky. He must have believed he was being led to the castle, but that was not what we found. I think he broke with his . . . ‘patron’ . . . that night, after being tricked too many times. Whatever spoke to him, perhaps it decided to let Magiere find the orb without him. And she shares the nature of the Noble Dead.”
Wynn studied him, perhaps wondering if he told the full truth. Chane’s thoughts slipped back to the names she had spoken—and the black-robed figure hunting sages, folios, and her.
“Do you think one of these other old undead is the black-robed mage?” he asked. “Some ancient vampire, grown powerful over so much time?”
Wynn started slightly. “It’s not a mage, but it is a Noble Dead.”
“No . . . vampires are Noble Dead.”
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br /> Wynn tiredly closed her eyes. “Not only vampires. There is something else . . . a wraith.”
Before he could ask, she shook her head.
“It’s the word I use for it, among older ones, though none of them may be accurate. Just something mentioned in old Numan folklore.”