Masques Read Free Page B

part of it.
    He knew she was trying to help him—but he didn’t want help. He wanted to die.
    Her magic swept over and around him, cushioning him. The wolf whined softly and relaxed, leaving the mage in him fully in charge for the first time since the illness had hit. Maybe even longer ago than that.
    Her magic didn’t work on the mage because he knew what it was—and, he admitted to himself, because it wasn’t coercive magic. He was mage enough to read her intent. She didn’t want the wolf to become a lapdog but only to relax.
    But the woman’s helpful intent wasn’t why he didn’t kill her. Not the real reason. He hadn’t been interested in anything in longer than he could remember, but she made him curious. He’d only ever met a practitioner of green magic, wild magic, once before. They hid from the humans in the land—if there were any still left. But here was one wearing the clothes of a mercenary.
    She could pick him up—which surprised him because she didn’t weigh much more than he did. But she couldn’t hoist him high enough to reach the edge of the trap, so she set him down again.
    “Going to need some help,” she told him, and clambered to the top. She almost didn’t make it out of the pit herself; if it had been round, she wouldn’t have.
    When she departed and took her magic with her, it left him bereaved—as if someone had covered him with a blanket, then removed it. And only when she left did he realize that her music had deadened his pain and soothed him, despite his being a mage on his guard against it.
    He heard the horse move and the sound of leather and something heavy hitting the ground. The horse approached the pit and stopped.
    When the mercenary who could do green magic hopped back into his almost grave, she had a rope in her hand.
    He waited for the wolf to stir as she tied him in a makeshift harness that somehow managed to brace his bad leg. But the wolf waited as meekly as a lamb while she worked. When he was trussed up to her satisfaction, she climbed back out.
    “Come on, Sheen,” she told someone. Possibly, he thought, it was the horse.
    The trip out of the hole was not pleasant. He closed his eyes and let the pain take him where it would. When he lay on the ground at last, she untied him.
    Freed at last, he lay where he had fallen, too weak to run. Maybe too curious as well.

ONE

FOUR YEARS LATER
    Aralorn paced, her heart beating with nervous energy.
    It had seemed like a good idea at the time. She intended to sneak in as a servant—she was good at being a servant, and people talked in front of servants as if they weren’t there at all. But then there had been that slave girl, freshly sold to the very Geoffrey ae’Magi whose court Aralorn was supposed to infiltrate and observe . . .
    Maybe if the slave girl hadn’t had the gray-green eyes of the old races, eyes Aralorn shared, she wouldn’t have given in to impulse. But it had been easy to free the girl and send her off with connections who would see her safely back to her home—proof that though she had lived in Sianim all these years, Aralorn was still Rethian enough to despise slavery. It was even easier to use the magic of her mother’s people to rearrange her body and her features to mimic the girl and take her place.
    She hadn’t realized that slaves could be locked away until they were needed; she’d assumed she’d have work to do. It was well-known that the Archmage’s passions were reserved for magic, and he seldom indulged in more fleshly pleasures. She’d figured that the girl had been purchased to do something—not sit locked in a room for weeks.
    Aralorn had been just about ready to escape and try again using a different identity when she’d been brought up to the great hall of the ae’Magi’s castle four days ago and put into the huge silver cage.
    “She’s to be decoration for the ball,” said the servant who put her in the cage, in response to another servant’s question. “It won’t be