Wolfsbane

by Patricia Briggs

  “Nevyn’s first master was a great mage, too? Was that because of his family’s station?” Aralorn asked. “I thought the reason they married him off to my sister was that he wasn’t good enough to be a wizard proper. I’ve never seen him use magic at all.”

  “He can work magic,” Wolf said. “They’d never have wasted Kisrah—or Santik, for that matter—on just any apprentice. But between Santik and being a Darranian-born mage, Nevyn learned to hate being a wizard. When Kisrah was satisfied that Nevyn could control his magic, he let him choose his own path.”

  “You knew Nevyn,” said Aralorn slowly. It wasn’t in the details; those were something any wizard might know of another. It was the sympathy in Wolf’s voice. “Why didn’t you say something to me before?”

  “We weren’t friends,” he said. “Not even acquaintances, really. Kisrah was a particular favorite of my father’s—”

  “Because your father enjoyed playing games with honorable men,” muttered Aralorn.

  “—whatever his reason,” continued Wolf, “and Kisrah brought Nevyn to the ae’Magi’s castle several times. Nevyn was quiet, as I remember him, always trying to disappear into the background. He had plenty of courage, though. I think I frightened him to death, but he never gave ground.”

  “Ten years ago you were just a boy,” said Aralorn. “Nevyn’s a couple of years older than me—which makes him more than five years older than you.”

  “I frightened a lot of people, Aralorn,” Wolf said.

  She ruffled the fur behind his ears. “Not me. Come, let’s go visit my uncle so you can frighten him, too.”

  As they climbed higher in the mountains, the area became heavily wooded, and they left behind all signs of cultivation. Here and there great boulders were scattered, some the size of an ox and others as big as a cottage. The narrow path they followed was obviously traveled by humans and game alike, and few enough of either. The dense growth, steep slopes, and snow made it difficult to find a place to leave the path. At last, Aralorn found a shallow, frozen creek to walk on.

  “It must be uncomfortable to do this in the spring,” commented Wolf, stepping onto the snow-covered ice.

  “It’s not easy anytime,” replied Aralorn, momentarily busy keeping her footing. After a moment, she realized his comment had more to do with the streambed they followed than the difficulty of the trail. “You don’t have to come this way exactly. All that’s necessary is to find someplace in this part of Lambshold that is not often traveled. Then you can find the maze.”

  “The maze?” Wolf sounded intrigued.

  She smiled, stopping to knock the snow that had packed itself around the short nails that kept the leather soles of her walking boots from slipping on the ice and snow. “You’ll see when we find it. But if you’d care to help, keep your eye out for a bit of quartz. I need it to work some magic. There should be quite a bit of it in the steep areas, where there’s no snow to cover it.”

  They came to a small clearing bordered on two sides by the sharp sides of a mountain. Aralorn crossed the clearing and began searching for rocks on the steep areas where the sun and wind had left large sections bare.

  “It doesn’t have to be quartz,” she said finally. “Sandstone would work as well.”

  Wolf lifted his snow-covered nose from a promising nook under a clump of dead brush. “You could have said so earlier and saved yourself a case of frostbite. There is sandstone all over here.”

  Aralorn tucked her cold, wet hands underneath her sweaters and warmed them against her middle as Wolf searched back and forth over the area they’d just covered. She’d taken her gloves off to push aside the snow that the afternoon sun had begun to thaw. They had too far to travel to risk getting her gloves wet. When she could feel her fingers again, she pulled the gloves out of her belt and slipped them over her hands.

  “You know,” she said, as he seemed to be having no success finding the sandstone, “aren’t the crystals on your staff quartz?”

  “I ought to let you try casting a spell using one of them,” said Wolf, not lifting his gaze from the ground, “but I find that I have become more squeamish of late. Ah, yes, here it is.”

  Aralorn bent to pick up the smooth yellowish brown stone Wolf had unearthed and polish it free of dirt on her cloak.

  “Sandstone is for perseverance,” she said, “quartz for luck. Which is why I started out looking for quartz: I suspect we’ll be spending the night up here.”

  Wolf lowered his eyelids in amusement. “If you want luck, I have some opal you could use.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll pass,” Aralorn demurred. “Ill luck I don’t need.”

  She held the stone in her closed hand and raised her arm to shoulder height. Closing her eyes, she began singing. The song she chose was a children’s song in her mother’s tongue—though the words didn’t matter for the magic, just the pattern of the music, which would be their key to entering her mother’s world.

  Slowly, almost shyly, awareness of the forest crept upon her. She could feel the winter sleep encasing the plants: wary curiosity peering at them from a rotted-out cedar in the form of a martin; the brook waiting for spring to allow it to run to the ocean far away. Finally, she found what she had been searching for and brushed lightly against the current of magic threaded throughout the forest. When she was certain it had perceived her, she stopped singing and allowed the awareness to pass from her. She looked down at the rock in her hands and, just for a moment, could see an arrow.

  “Now, why doesn’t it surprise me that we have to travel up the side of the mountain?” she grumbled. She showed the arrow to Wolf, then tossed the stone back on the ground since it had served its purpose. “I should have brought some quartz from home. Irrenna won’t have disturbed my stashes of spell starters.”

  “The maze would have been different?” asked Wolf, pacing beside her as she started up the mountain.

  “It’s always different,” replied Aralorn. “The magic I worked to find the start of the maze will only work with sandstone or quartz—someone’s idea of a joke, I suspect. You know—‘Only with luck or persistence will you find the sanctuary hidden in the heart of the mountains.’ The kinds of words storytellers are fond of. I prefer to start with luck.”

  The mountainside looked rougher from the bottom than it actually was, an unusual occurrence in Aralorn’s experience. All the same, she almost missed the stone altogether, hidden in plain sight as it was in the midst of a dozen other large boulders.

  “Good,” she said, turning abruptly off her chosen path upward and taking a steep downward route that brought her skidding and sliding to the cluster of granite boulders. “The maze remembers me.”

  “Ah?”

  Aralorn nodded, touching a stone half again as tall as she was and twice as wide. “This stone is the first. The identity stone—for me that has always been granite.”

  “Granite for compromise,” rumbled Wolf, “or blending.”

  “Right,” she smiled. “Blending—that’s me. You’ll have to touch it, too.”

  Wolf pawed it gently, drawing back quickly as if he had touched a candle flame. “That’s not magic,” he said, startled.

  “No,” agreed Aralorn, waiting.

  “It’s alive.”

  “That’s the secret of the maze,” she agreed.

  She drew a simple rune on the granite boulder with a light touch of her finger. As with the sandstone, a directional arrow appeared, outlined in shimmering bits of mica. It pointed across the mountain.

  As they started on the indicated route, Wolf was silent. Aralorn left him to his thoughts and concentrated on staying aware of their surroundings. The stones could be difficult to find. She was so busy peering under bushes that she almost missed the waist-high rock standing directly in her path, as out of place in its environment as a wolf in a fold.

  “Obsidian,” observed Aralorn soberly, touching the black, glasslike surface. The second stone would be Wolf’s. The maze’s choice surprised her at fir
st; she’d half expected hematite, for war and anger. But the stones of the maze had read deeper than that, identifying Wolf’s nature as clearly as they had seen hers. He wore the mask of anger on his face, but his heart was enclosed in sorrow.

  “This one’s yours,” she told him, in case he’d missed its significance. “Obsidian for sorrow. The rest we find will be something about both of us.”

  “Sorrow?” commented Wolf.

  “Yes,” said Aralorn. “Like the maze as a whole, the first stones can tell you more than that. They’ll show you a bit about yourself and the pattern you’re living now—if you interpret what they’re saying correctly. I’ve always mostly ignored what the maze had to say about me, but you can try it if you’d like. Touch the stone for a minute or two, and it will tell you something.”

  He hesitated, then took a step sideways and leaned against it, saying as he did so, “I’m not certain this is wise. I’ve never been fond of prophecy.”

  “Mmm. Remember, it’s not a prediction of things to come: It’s an assessment of who you are now. And they’re not infallible.”

  After a bit, he stepped away. He didn’t say anything, so she didn’t ask him what he’d seen. She drew the rune she’d used before, and the arrow appeared on the top of the stone, sending them at a shallow angle downward.

  “The next stones are less personal and intended to help predict the near future—some of the time. The language of stones is pretty limited. Mostly it will just present attributes we have or will need.”

  “Not very helpful,” said Wolf, and Aralorn grinned at him.

  “Not that I’ve ever noticed.”

  During the next several hours, they wandered from stone to stone, finding serpentine for wit, quartz for luck, and malachite for lust (she snickered a bit at that one). They ate the salted meat and cheese Aralorn had brought with them. As the sun reached its zenith, they started down the path the malachite had chosen for them. The stone they found was amethyst, protection against evil. When they came to a second, then yet a third amethyst, Aralorn grew concerned.

  “I wonder if the stones will let us through,” she said, crouching in the snow beside the melon-sized crystal. “They might not if they think that harm will enter with us.”

  “Do you want me to wait here?” Wolf asked softly. “You might find this easier on your own.”

  Realizing he’d taken the message incorrectly, she raised her eyebrow. “Amethyst may be protection from evil, but the stones have already appraised you and have named you sorrowful. If they had judged you as harshly as you judge yourself, we would never have come this far.”

  “Then you took quite a chance not coming here alone.”

  She braced both hands on her hips. “I took no chances.”

  “Stubborn as a pack mule,” he said.

  Since she’d heard a number of people claim that, she couldn’t disagree.

  She drew another rune and saw that their path led upward, as it had for the past few stones.

  “I hope this ends soon,” she grumbled. “I really don’t want to spend the night outside. It’s cold, it’s getting late, and we still have to make the trip back.”

  Waiting at the top of the climb was a wolf-sized chunk of white marble.

  “Judgment,” said Aralorn in satisfaction. She thought it would be the last one, but found another maze stone at the top of a twisting bramble-and-brush-filled gorge.

  “Rose quartz,” murmured Wolf. “It seems we are welcome here.”

  Even so, Aralorn was unsurprised when the stone pointed them down the gorge.

  “I knew I should have held out for luck,” she said. “Sometimes, there are ways around the gorge.”

  There was no trail. Aralorn tore the knee out of her pants and almost lost her cloak before they arrived safely at the bottom. Wolf, of course, had no difficulty at all.

  They emerged from the deep undergrowth into a small grotto. From the cliffs overhead, a solidly frozen waterfall plunged into an ice-covered pool. The transformation from the dense gray vegetation to the pristine little valley was shockingly abrupt, as if they had stepped into someone’s neatly kept castle garden. Even the snow that covered the ground was evenly dispersed, unmarred by footprints.

  “This is it,” announced Aralorn with satisfaction. After a moment, she nodded toward the waterfall. “I spent one summer trailing streams in this part of Lambshold, trying to find every stream anywhere near here, and never found one that came through this grotto. I even tried to back-track this one, but I never managed it. I’d look away for a moment, and the stream would be gone.”

  “I could do that with a variation of the lost spell.” Wolf eyed the rushing water speculatively.

  “If you say so.” She heaved a theatrical sigh. “ ‘Frustrating’ is what I called it.”

  He laughed. “I’ll bet you did. Isn’t there supposed to be someone here?”

  “No, this is just the end of the maze. There’s a trail over by the waterfall,” Aralorn said, and began picking her way up the path that edged the pond.

  A thin layer of snow turned to a sheet of ice as they approached the waterfall. Aralorn set her feet carefully and kept moving. Wolf drew to a halt and growled.

  “I know,” said Aralorn quietly, stepping behind the shimmering veil of the frozen waterfall. “Someone’s watching us. I had expected them earlier.”

  The difference between the bright daylight and the shadow of the falls caused her to stop to allow her eyes to adjust. Wolf bumped into her, then slipped past, examining the stone surface of the cliff face behind the waterfall. Behind a thin sheet of ice over the rock where a few last trickles of water had frozen, there was a small tunnel in the rock.

  “That goes in about ten feet and ends,” said Aralorn. “I stayed there overnight once, but it was summer.”

  The far end of the narrow path behind the falls was frozen over, but a few hits with the haft of one of her knives broke a small hole, and her booted foot cleared a space large enough to climb through.

  Once out from under the waterfall, their way twisted up the side of the mountain. The path was cobbled, and the smooth stones were slicker than the natural ground. Aralorn tried to walk beside the path as much as she could. The climb was thankfully short, only to the top of the falls.

  Over the years, the stream that formed the waterfall had cut a deep channel between the two mountains that fed it with the runoff from the snowy peaks. The path was cut into the side of one mountain several feet above the stream, winding and twisting with the course of the water.

  After walking a mile or so, the path turned abruptly away from the mountain, through a thicket of brush and into a wide valley.

  Wolf could still feel the eyes watching them, though he couldn’t tell where the spy was. It was not magic that told him so much, but the keen senses of the wolf. Not scent, nor sight, nor hearing, but faint impressions gathered from all three. It distracted him as he examined the place to which Aralorn had brought them.

  The valley was surrounded by steep-sided hills that reminded him of the valley in the Northlands where he’d spent the past winter, although that had been far smaller. Someone had taken a lot of time to find a place this sheltered. The stone path, now half-buried in the snow, led up a slight incline to a pair of gateposts. Other than those, the valley appeared empty. Perhaps, he thought as he followed Aralorn, the village was located over the next rise.

  Then, between one step and the next, magic rose over him from the ground, momentarily paralyzing him with its strength. Defensively, he analyzed it: a blending illusion that utilized the lay of the land to hide something in the valley.

  Without conscious act, he found himself holding the magic to break the spell, magic that had nothing to do with the familiar, violent forces he normally worked. This was a surge of power that took its direction from the brief alarm he’d felt at the sudden wall of magic. It flared in an attempt to twist out of his fragile hold and attack the ensorcellment before him. The effort it took to
restrain it challenged his training and power both.

  “Wolf?”

  Even wrapped as he was in the grip of his power, her voice reached him. Fear of what his magic would do to her gave him the strength to contain it, just barely.

  “Wolf?” Aralorn said again, kneeling beside him.

  She didn’t dare touch him as he swayed and shook with rhythmic spasms. Gradually, the spasms slowed and stopped. He took a deep, shuddering breath and looked up at Aralorn.

  “Problems?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to wait for me back by the waterfall?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s all right now. It just took me by surprise.”

  She looked at him narrowly for a moment before deciding to accept his word on the matter.

  “Fine, then. There is some kind of protective illusion over the village. I don’t think we ought to tamper with it, but if we approach, I suspect we’ll be met.”

  “Such an illusion is not the usual practice?” He sounded as controlled as he usually did, though he was so tense she could see the fine trembling of his muscles.

  Aralorn shook her head in answer. “Not when I lived here.”

  Though the village was hidden, the gateposts that marked the entrance were still there. Wolf, the ruff on his neck still raised from his battle for control of his magic, ranged in random patterns to either side.

  “Stay on the path,” she warned him. “They wouldn’t have left the gateposts here if they didn’t have something nasty protecting the village from people who aren’t polite enough to enter by the proper way.”

  When she tried to walk between the gateposts, a barrier of magic stopped her. It wasn’t painful, just solid.

  Aralorn drew the rune she’d used in the maze on the left-hand pillar, but the barrier remained. She frowned but didn’t try to force her way through the gate.