Sons of Destiny Prequel Series 003 - The Shifter

by Jean Johnson

  Resecuring the window, Kenyen relaxed his features once they were safe from any spies, his mind already turning back to the problem at hand. "I think the best time to attack would be at night. Preferably while they were distracted by a bonfire meeting. If it's night, they won't be able to see you fly away—though I do want to see that spell, first. If you cannot fly very fast, then it might not be a good choice, even at night," he warned her. "Shifters who can mold the right shape can fly as fast as a real bird."

  She shrugged. "It's about as fast as a small bird, I think. I agree that night would be better than day, to help evade any pursuit. I'm not as sure about helping Traver to escape during a bonfire meeting. For one, we don't know when they'll hold the next one. For another, that might be a long wait. And for the third, I'd have to rescue him on my own, since they'd expect you to be there."

  Wrapping his arms around her, Kenyen shook his head. "No, you're right. As convenient as it would be to have many of them all in one place, giving us a greater chance to slip away undetected, I'll not leave you to face them alone. Sleep-inducing spells or not, you shouldn't face them alone. I'm nervous enough doing that myself, and I'm just pretending to go along with their plans, not trying to double-cross them."

  She hugged him back. "I'm just glad you've said they aren't hurting him. That gives us more time to figure out what to do. He shouldn't be left there, but there are only a few people I know aren't shifters. Untrustworthy ones, I mean. I know my parents aren't, because it's too difficult to fake being either a fully trained Healer or a blacksmith, but I don't want to involve them, either, in case the... the curs get their hands on them."

  It felt good to hold her and be held. Kenyen mulled over her words, considering the possibilities. "What if we went tonight?"

  Solyn lifted her head from his shoulder. "Tonight? Right now?"

  "In an hour or so, when it's more likely the others are asleep," he murmured. "We are newly married, after all. Everyone would expect us to stay in bed, tonight."

  "But I thought we were going to twine fully," she whispered, disappointed at the prospect otherwise. Her complaint earned her a kiss on her brow.

  "We will. After he is safe. And after he knows that we are indeed wed," Kenyen added. "Although we really shouldn't, since it was done in his name, not mine."

  "Husband," Solyn growled under her breath, poking the Shifterai in the chest, "I married you. Not him. He has no say in who I twine with, other than maybe asking me not to do it in front of him. Which I wouldn't, anyway."

  His delightful new wife had a rather sharp finger, for all her nails were trimmed and thus blunt. Suppressing a grunt at the poke, he caught her hand and lifted it to his lips, kissing her knuckles. "Then go find your spells and study them while we wait for things to settle down. We'll free him and then..."

  "And then?" she prodded.

  For a moment, Kenyen drew a blank. His gaze fell on the tea bowl, recalling her questioning his ability to pay for it. That gave him an idea.

  "Then we'll find an inn and settle him at it with some of my coins. Somewhere far enough away, it'd be unlikely that he'd encounter anyone who knows his face. As soon as he's safe, you and I will return here, and I'll continue to pretend to be him while we wait for reinforcements," he said. "If they come after us in force... it'll be ugly. Shapeshifters who know how to fight are worse than feral livestock. All the horns, the claws, the teeth, and the ferocity, but with the full cunning of a human being directing the fight."

  Solyn mulled it over in her mind. His logic was sound. "I think your plan could work. We know that bluesteel can prevent a shifter from changing shape, so I'll see what my father has in stock. Or maybe even find a way to convince him to make more of it. Or maybe there's a spell I can adapt that could force a shifter to stay un-shifted. I did get a new book the other day, and I haven't read all of it yet."

  As much as he wanted to keep holding her, Kenyen released Solyn so that she could find the book in question. "You sound a little bit like my brother and sister-in-law. They're both mad for books."

  That made her snort. Glancing over her shoulder, she shook her head. "I'm much more of a see-and-do kind of learner." Plucking the right book from the shelf, she turned and gestured with it. "Mother was able to teach me some of the basics, but mostly only what pertains to her branch of magic. Coaxing flesh to knit itself whole. Bolstering the body's defenses to thwart infections. Setting a broken bone so that it'll heal right. None of which have anything to do with... with controlling fire, or making paper birds fly, or... or scrying with a mirror.

  "Which I still don't know how to do," she added in an aside. "Mainly because I can't make heads or tails of some of the terminology they use, though it's also because the best scryings are done with a glass mirror, and all I have is a small scrap of polished steel," she told him, lifting her chin at the framed piece of metal over the small washstand by the door. "There's enough of it different from what Mother does, it keeps tripping me up when I try certain things."

  "Uh, is it safe for you to try some sort of containment spell on a shapeshifter, if you're that uncertain of the results?" Kenyen asked. He barely remembered to keep his voice low.

  "Well, I wouldn't try it on you," she countered tartly, struggling to keep her own retort quiet. "I wouldn't try it at all unless it was an emergency... and only on the evil shifters. If something did go wrong, I'd feel less guilty if it hurt them. They'd deserve it." Subsiding, she shook her head. "I wouldn't think shaping flesh would be all that easy, but I'd still think it easier than shaping magic."

  "I wouldn't know," Kenyen returned dryly. Backing up to the bed, he sat on its edge. "I can't shape magic. Let's see that book. I'm not the scholar my brother is, but maybe two heads can make more sense than one?"

  Nodding, she sat down next to him and opened the book. Flipping through the pages, she found the ribbon marking the spot where she had last finished. "This is a grimoire, a personal spellbook. Some of the things in here are very simple, while others are complex. There are notes on the purpose of each spell and possible variations, of course, but most were written to make sense to the mage who originally wrote them. Others are from those who've used this book for their own studies in the years since, but all of them were from trained mages, so naturally I haven't had much luck in deciphering them..."

  * * *

  Eleven

  The basket spell, Kenyen decided, was both terrifying and exhilarating. He supposed it might've been less perilous to have flown in the daylight, where the trees and hills weren't shades of gray to his owl-shaped eyes. It was always easier to see things in full color than with night sight. It might also, he acknowledged privately, have been more alarming to be flying about in the daylight, because then he'd be that much more aware of how flimsy the flower basket was and how far off the ground it carried him.

  It was exhilarating because it worked... and it wasn't the power of his own wings that lofted him into the air, but rather a simple tugging pull on the broad loop of the wicker handle. Flying like this was unnatural. Undeniably, indisputably unnatural, and remarkably fun.

  To rise up, he simply pulled straight up. To fly forward, he first lifted up, then pushed the handle forward. To slow down, he pulled it back, toward his chest. A turn involved a combination of twist and tilt toward the necessary direction, and sometimes he swooped a little too fast, but it wasn't difficult to stop.

  The only drawback to this mode of locomotion was that Solyn couldn't reshape her eyes to see in the dark, and hadn't the first clue how to cast a spell to give herself the magical equivalent of owl-vision. She could craft little glowing balls of light, which she somehow fixed onto the back end of his basket, allowing her to follow him. That meant he was responsible for her safety as well as his own, but because she was following him, he couldn't see where she was in relation to him.

  Some shifters could literally grow eyes in the backs of their heads, but Kenyen wasn't one of them. Twisting to look behind him made his basket f
ly oddly, so he couldn't do that, either. When they came near the high meadow where Cullerog and his sheep lived, he maneuvered carefully between the trees flanking the fields, picking a path down to the ground with plenty of room.

  Once the basket was on the ground, with his legs stretched out in front of him, getting the spell to stop was as easy as grasping it firmly with both hands. The soft noise of her landing in the grass behind him was a relief, and a glance showed her faintly illuminated in the blue glow of the three tiny mage-lights she had created.

  Getting out of the basket required an awkward wiggle. He heard her trying to smother a giggle and shushed her quietly. They both worked themselves free and stood. Clad as she was in baggy spare clothes of Traver's, hair pinned tight to her head and reeking of lanolin grease applied to the soles of her sandals and the palms of her gloves, she grinned at him. Then again, he wasn't much better, with his hair bound up and his gloves and sandals coated in sheep grease as well, though at least Traver's clothes did fit him better.

  The trick of clothes and grease were needed to minimize their own scent as much as possible, hiding it behind the familiar smell of the real Traver and the much stronger smell of sheep. With Cullerog being a shepherd, that meant he was surrounded by the woolly beasts, and the scent would already be everywhere in the cabin. It was Kenyen's idea to dress in the spare sets of clothes, partly for the smell but also to ensure he would have fresh changes while staying elsewhere. It was Solyn's idea to use a lanolin-heavy ointment she had fetched from the herb-room, along with thin wool gloves that could be discarded quickly.

  Each of them had an oilcloth sack. The one Solyn carried was filled with a change of clothes for her and a pot of softsoap, so they could wash the ointment from their sandals and hands. The other, slung over Kenyen's head and shoulder, contained bread and fruit filched from the kitchen for Traver to eat and several slices of greenvein cheese.

  "Ready?" he whispered.

  Nodding, she picked up her basket with one hand and gestured with the other. A single murmur extinguished the lights. His nose itched, warning him that the effects of the cheese were starting to wear off. Removing one glove, he dug into the bag, broke off a chunk of cheese, and stuffed it in his mouth; sneezing from her magics could get them in serious trouble if it happened at the wrong moment.

  He tugged the garment back on and picked up the basket. Overhead, stars twinkled through the treetops. Neither the large white form of Brother Moon nor the smaller orb of Sister were visible at the moment; the larger celestial orb of Brother Moon had already set for the night, being close to the new, and the smaller one of Sister Moon wouldn't rise for another hour or so. That didn't leave a lot of light for the normal, non-shifter eyes of his wife, but it did help reduce their chances of being spotted by any Mongrels in the shepherd's home.

  "Can you see anything?" he asked, concerned about her safety.

  "Well enough," she returned, keeping her voice low. Though he had explained to her he would be using an owl's sight to see a dozen times better than any human could, Solyn didn't think her own night vision was bad. "If we stay out of the heaviest cover and move slowly, I should be fine."

  "We'll head uphill, and approach from near the ridge, where there aren't windows to look out from," he told her. "Crouch low, keep the basket on the far side of you from the cottage, and use your hands if you need to. Try to move like a sheep."

  Though he was little more than a silhouette with a hint of details thanks to the starlight, Solyn smirked at him. "Is that something you do often? Imitate sheep?"

  "No, but I have moved like an animal—as an animal—when sneaking up on bandit holds. This is no different. Be ready with your spells," he warned her. "If I gesture for you to stop, get low to the ground and hold still. When we're close, I'll scout the cabin and see how many are in there and whether they're asleep or awake."

  Nodding, she moved slowly and carefully. Noise was his biggest concern; he had learned in the warbands how to move through a forest at night, but she didn't move too badly, testing each footstep for noisy dry twigs before trusting her weight to the ground. It took a while to move up through the woods at that pace, and it took time to move slowly out across the upper meadow, pausing now and then to lower their heads, as if cropping at the grass.

  No one charged out of the cabin. Nothing slithered out of the grass or flew down out of the sky. Insects chirped, night birds twittered, the wind occasionally whistled along the ridgeline off to their right, and the stars slowly moved by overhead. When they were within just a few lengths of the moss-dotted slates of the cottage roof, he gestured for her to stop and wait. Obediently, she hunkered down.

  Shaping horselike ears, Kenyen listened. Night sounds from all directions but the cabin. Someone in the cottage was talking; from the muffled low level, he thought it might be coming from the basement. Creeping forward, he enlarged his ears and tested the wind with his nose, since its direction was in his favor, blowing from the cabin to him.

  Sheep, of course, and smoke from the hearthfire. Cullerog the shepherd, the shifter who was the dog... and two familiar smells, one feminine, the other masculine. He couldn't place it immediately, but someone was visiting the small structure. Easing closer, he set his basket under the eaves and listened intently, creeping an inch at a time toward the hole he had used to escape, earlier.

  "... And how do you like that?" a male voice murmured. It was followed by a grunt of pain and a faint clank of metal. "I wonder if he can rut on her as many times in a single night as I can?"

  The boastful tone, the smell, and the voice clicked together. Tarquin is in there?

  "Lick harder, bitch; he's getting soft again. We can't have poor Traver rutless on his wedding night."

  At that taunting, an ugly suspicion rose in Kenyen's mind. He found the right hole by the gleam of light coming from within and squeezed his upper body into the shape of a snake. The partial shift was difficult to maintain, but it allowed him to extend his serpentine head into the hole far enough to have his guess confirmed.

  It wasn't easy for one man to violate another without doing so personally, but Tarquin had found a way. The same middle-aged woman from the bonfire meeting now crouched over Traver, who had his—Kenyen's—gathered trousers pulled down to his ankles. Her tangle of messy dark hair hid exactly what she was doing at his groin, but that much was obvious. It was the bruises covering Traver's legs that concerned Kenyen. Several of them looked like they were days old, while others were fresher.

  He hadn't checked Traver's body visually past that first night, just the face and general build. Guilt rose up in Kenyen at that neglect, guilt prodded further by the memory of how Traver had flinched when he had drawn letters on that unknowingly mottled leg. Of course he couldn't have told me about it; if he had, I would've had to fake an equal level of ruthlessness... and this does lend weight to the thought that they're just going to kill him as soon as they have what they want.

  Tarquin moved into view. The curly-haired shifter was naked and blatantly ready to do some rutting. He knelt behind the woman, and Kenyen quickly retreated, drawing his upper body back through the hole. He shifted awkwardly in position, rearing up to peek through a crack in the shutters. Cullerog was awake, along with an equally age-grizzled shifter. They were playing some sort of grid-and-counter game. Kenyen had seen a similar board in Traver's home, but didn't know how it was played.

  This time, the grunting from below was feminine. The exclamation, rough and coarse, was masculine. "... See this? This is how a real man ruts!"

  It was accompanied by worse sounds and a mock-howl. Moving one of his pieces, the gray-haired, gray-bearded shifter asked, "You gonna rut on 'er, later?"

  "Thinking about it," Cullerog muttered, moving one of his pieces. "If my sap'll rise."

  His companion chuckled. "That boy's got 'nough sap for both of us."

  Seeing no one else in the building, Kenyen reshaped his head and chest. Easing back, he turned and gestured. The brownish l
ump on the hillside moved, creeping down the slope toward him. By the time Solyn reached his side, a few clouds had drifted into view from the east. They were lighter around the edges than they should have been, suggesting the rise of Sister Moon wasn't that far off.

  The sounds coming from the root cellar, a mix of grunts, slapping flesh, and crude observations, were obvious enough that Solyn blushed. Focusing firmly on Kenyen's gestures, she watched him point at the window and hold up two fingers, then point down below and hold up three. He folded down one of those. She guessed that meant one of the three was Traver, leaving two other targets for her.

  Nodding, she set her basket not far from his and rose up on her knees. Putting her eye to the crack between the two shutters, she peered into the cabin. Two elderly men sat at a table not far from the hearth. Between the crackling of the fire and the flickering of two oil lamps, she could see their faces easily enough.

  I can't put either of them to sleep suddenly. If I did it to the first one, that would alarm the other one, not to mention the sound of either man falling out of his chair would put the idiot down in the cellar on his guard... assuming he'd notice it over the noises he's making, she acknowledged. So the gentle dreams spell will have to be the first choice. That way, they'll lie down of their own accord. Then, I put them out firmly with the anesthetic spell.

  Focusing on the one with the beard, she reached for him with the part of her senses, her mind, that could sense his living energy. Dormanuuu, she thought, shaping the meaning behind the word, the sense of exhaustion and the need for slumber. The other man's nose twitched. He finished his move in the game and rubbed at his nostrils, pinching them briefly. The bearded one started to reach for his piece... and yawned.