“Wolf, stop that—it tickles. It isn’t your father.”
“How did you come to that conclusion?”
He switched his attentions to her ear, and she shivered at the effect of his warm breath against her sensitive skin.
“He would—Wolf ...” She couldn’t speak for a moment.
“Hmm?”
“I asked Ridane’s priestess. She says he’s dead and not influencing anyone here.”
He stilled, then kissed the top of her head. “Smart.”
“Always,” she said smugly.
“I love you,” he said.
“Of course you do,” she said, to make him laugh—which it did. “I love you, too. Now you can kiss me.”
He bent down to her ear again, and whispered, “How long were you going to take before you told me that the priestess bound us together unto death?”
Now it was her turn to still. She felt guilty for half a breath, then she realized what his words really meant.
“How long have you known? Plague take you, Wolf.”
She tried to take a step away, but he held her too tightly. His breath seemed to be behaving oddly—then she realized he was laughing. She hit him—not hard enough to hurt, just enough to express her displeasure.
“Aralorn, Aralorn,” he tried to croon between laughs and pretending her halfhearted blows were hurting him. “Did you think I wouldn’t feel it when the priestess set a blood-bond between us? I am a black mage, my love. I understand about blood-bonds—and I can break them if I wish.”
“This one was set by a goddess,” she informed him.
“Maybe she could set a bond between us I could not break,” he told her. “But this one I could. If I wanted to.”
He lifted her off the floor to allow himself better access to her mouth—as well as various and sundry other sensitive areas. Aralorn caught her breath and braced her hands on his shoulders.
“I know you love me,” he told her, the laughter dying from his eyes.
She found herself blinking back tears as she heard how profoundly that knowledge had affected him.
“I know you love me, too,” she said, before her mouth was occupied by things other than speech.
Afterward, he slept. Snuggled tightly against him, Aralorn closed her eyes and wished she didn’t have to ask him to use the dark arts. He had tried to kill himself once rather than use them, but for her he would take the part he had been given. She didn’t know that she was worth it.
No good comes from black magic, Kisrah had said. Ridane’s priestess had told her that someone would die before long. Aralorn shivered and shifted closer to Wolf as if she could protect him by her presence.
It hadn’t been said, but the assumption Wolf had led them all to was that he would remove the spell tomorrow. Surely that would give the dreamwalker something to fret about.
Maybe he’d be walking again tonight.
She decided the best place to keep watch would be in Nevyn’s room. It might already be too late, but there was still a fair portion of the night left—and it had been about this time that she’d seen “Geoffrey” talking to Kisrah.
She started to slide out of bed.
“Aralorn?” Wolf sounded sleepy.
“I’m going spying for a couple of hours,” she said quietly, though he was already awake. She should have known that she couldn’t sneak out on him. “I have a few questions to clean up, and this might be my only chance to do it.”
He cupped her face in the darkness and pulled her until she rested her forehead on his for a moment. “All right,” he said. “Be careful.”
She tilted her face until her lips met his. “I will.”
She dressed in the dark, not bothering with shoes. Though, after a brief moment of thought, she grabbed her sword to go along with her knives. If she ended up facing an enraged sorcerer, she’d just as soon have Ambris’s help as not.
In the darkness, Wolf said softly, “I love you.”
Aralorn looked back, but the bed was too shadowed. She could distinguish nothing more than the shape of him in it. “I love you, too. See you in a few hours.”
“Yes,” he said.
He waited in the darkness and counted slowly to a hundred before getting to his feet. He dressed with care. He’d done many hard things in his life; in some ways this was not the worst. At least this time it was clearly the best answer for everyone.
He wished that he could postpone it, but he was unlikely to get another such opportunity soon. He’d been cudgeling his brain for a way to keep her away from him for long enough. Trust Aralorn to make things easy for him. He took his knife from his belt and tested it lightly against the ball of his thumb. A drop of dark liquid ran down the edge of his hand, and he licked it clean.
Aralorn was making her way up the stairs when a soft sound alerted her to someone else’s presence. She froze where she was, searching the darkness above her for any hint of movement. At last she saw a flash of lighter color where the minimal light touched the railing to the right of the stairway.
She darted up the stairs, blessing the stone under her feet for its silence—it was far more difficult to sneak up a wooden stairway. If she had been in a hall, she would have found a dark corner to hide in, but the stairway was too narrow for that. The best that she could hope for was to meet them at the top of the stairs.
She told herself that there was no reason to feel nervous about meeting someone walking the halls here, but she had been a spy for too long. Her instincts kept her on edge.
As she rounded the last stair, she came face-to-face with Gerem. He couldn’t have heard her, but he gave no evidence of surprise.
“Gerem?” she asked.
He frowned at her, but vaguely, as if he were concentrating on something else. “What are you doing here?” he asked, but without real interest.
“I was just going to ask you that.” There was something wrong with him, she thought. His words were soft and slurred as if he’d been drinking, though she smelled no alcohol when she leaned closer to him.
“Death walks here tonight,” he said, not at all dramatically, rather as if he were talking about grooming his horse.
An ice-cold chill swept up her spine, as much from his tone as from what he said. “Gerem, why don’t I take you to your room. Wouldn’t you like to go back to sleep?”
He nodded slowly. “I have to sleep.”
He took a step forward, forcing Aralorn down a step from the landing, giving him as much of an advantage in height as Falhart had over her.
Gently she took his arm and tried to turn him, stepping up as she did so. It was a move she often used on stubborn pack animals that refused to go where she wanted them; turning worked much better than pushing or pulling. “Your room is this way, brother mine. You can sleep there.”
He shook his head earnestly. “You don’t understand. I have to go to the stables.”
“The stables? What’s in the stables?”
He stopped tugging against her hold and bent down until his face was level with hers. “I killed Father,” he whispered.
“Stuff and nonsense, Gerem. Father is not dead.” She looked around for the nearest source of help. This wasn’t near anyone’s sleeping chambers—those were a floor above them. No one would hear her . . . But then she remembered that Irrenna had given Kisrah the Lyon’s library to sleep in.
“Kisrah!” she shouted, hoping her voice would penetrate the thick oak door.
“Let me go. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“No more do I,” she muttered.
Gerem pulled a knife with a slow and awkward movement. Once he had it out, he held it as if he didn’t know what to do with it now that it was in his hand.
Misled by that and by his earlier claim of clumsiness, Aralorn tried a simple grab to relieve him of the weapon. She should have realized that the Lyon wouldn’t let any of his sons go without training. As smoothly as he must have done it a hundred times in practice, he caught her hand in his free one and used leverage to twist her around until her back was against him, her arms caught firmly by his off hand, and the cool edge of his knife laid against her throat.