Date: 2017-04-20 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy
Description: A novelette of 10,000 words, sequel to the Sun Wolf and Starhawk series. When the lovely Mira visits the hermitage of the local wizard, the former barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf, to beg his help in rescuing her sweetheart from a traveling mage, Sun Wolf suspects that this is a trap set for him. In his duel with the enemy wizard, Sun Wolf is not only ignorant of how much magical technique his opponent knows, but is fairly certain that if he, Sun Wolf, uses magic at all, his own soul will be enslaved.

HAZARD
By
Barbara Hambly

Published by Barbara Hambly at Amazon

Copyright 2017 Barbara Hambly

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Table of Contents
Hazard
About the Author

Hazard

They said he was a wizard.

Mira didn’t believe it. She’d seen him outside the Pissing Dog Tavern in Wrynde, when she’d gone into the little town with her uncle to help with the milk-jars on market-day. The man they called Sun Wolf looked far more like the mercenaries whose camp lay some ten miles to the north of Wrynde – the camp which was the reason her father would only take her into town in the summer, when the soldiers were away at war. A tawny man, like an ageing lion: red-gold hair thinning back from his forehead, a single yellow eye in a broken-nosed face crossed with scars. A damaged voice like chain scraping on stone. He carried a sword, and a dagger large enough to gut a bull.

From the path below his hermitage she stood for a long time watching him in the shadows of the red and golden trees.

Because a man is ugly and hard doesn’t mean he’s evil.

The other wizard she had met had the grave, smooth face and gentle voice of a priest, and she knew – to the deeps of her soul – that he was not good.

For Nicky, she thought, steeling herself. I have to speak to him to save Nicky.

They said he shared his hermitage, halfway up Sprites Mountain, with a woman, and that a gray-haired scholar occupied the hut behind the kitchen. In the end, Mira waited til the woman emerged from the kitchen with a water-jar and crossed toward the stream: a tall woman, slender, maybe ten years older than Mira. Her pale hair was cropped short like a soldier’s but her face had the cool serenity of a nun. By the way she glanced toward Mira as the girl stepped from the concealment of the forest-edge, Mira realized that the woman had been waiting for her. Had known she was there.

Despite her seventeen years – and her total responsibility for her father’s herd and household – a Mira felt very childish.

The woman – someone in town had said her name was Starhawk – swept the edge of the trees around the clearing with a gray glance as Mira approached, as if making sure that the visitor wasn’t a diversion to cover an attack. Then she set down her jar and moved toward her visitor, like a teen-aged boy in breeches, boots, and a man’s patched doublet smutched with flour. Even doing work about the kitchen, she wore a dagger and had another in her boot.

“Welcome,” she said. “Can we help you?”

*

“It’s Nicky.” Mira had meant to be calm and not cry, and struggled hard against the fear that suddenly threatened to close her throat. She took a deep breath. “My—“ She faltered, since it was forbidden for a slave to be betrothed to a free woman and her father would have boxed her ears even for describing Sarve Bridgeward’s slave as my young man. “A friend of mine. A good friend.”

The man Sun Wolf nodded. Up close he was more forbidding than he’d been glimpsed coming and going from the tavern, unshaven and sweaty. He’d been practicing with sword and staff on the far side of the herb garden, and his long hair was sleek-wet from a ducking in the water-trough as he’d come up to the veranda around the kitchen to speak to her. That single pale-amber eye was like a wolf’s as it studied her, and his mouth was hard and heavy beneath a badly-trimmed ginger mustache.

His voice was as scarred as his face. “This would be Nicky Spurren, Bridgeward’s slave?”

Mira nodded, and pressed her hand briefly to her mouth to hide its involuntary flinch. “That’s right, sir. Master Bridgeward’s going to sell him to a wizard, an evil wizard, who’s staying at the Dog.”

The long red eyebrow, tufted like that of a lynx, shot up; the gold eye didn’t waver. “You got a wizard at the Dog? Since when? You want some ale?” he added. “Small ale – or plain water, the water up here is as good as any ale I’ve had…” He started to rise, powerfully-built as his namesake, the great golden wolf of the northern steppes, and Starhawk said,

“I’ll get it, Chief.”

He resumed his seat on one of the empty barrels that did duty as chairs on the kitchen’s wide veranda. His hand, knotted and furred with gold, like the paw of an animal, rested on his knee. His single eye narrowed: “Your father’s Barsed Heddle, isn’t he? Over on the other side of Wrynde? He came up here last month, asking would I put a love-spell on his eldest daughter so she’d fall in love with the son of one of their neighbors…”

“That was me.” Mira rolled her eyes, exasperated. His matter-of-fact account of the negotiation steadied her, and the fact that he didn’t look at her the way the men did, when she’d go with her father to the tavern in the village. Nicky often told her she was beautiful, but that, she suspected, could be because he loved her. The men who whistled at her, or tried to touch her long braids – dark as a blood-bay horse – only made her wonder if she was pretty or not.

This man looked at her as if it didn’t matter.

“Of all the… He’s been telling me for months how much he’d love me to marry Murmis. I hope you didn’t—”

“Oh, hell, no.” The big man waved away the incident. “For one thing, I have no idea how to make a love-spell.”

“The best one I know,” put in Starhawk, emerging from the kitchen with a pitcher of small ale, “is to write I love you on a piece of paper and wrap it around a gold piece.”

“Works better than anything I know,” rumbled Sun Wolf in his scratchy voice. “I don’t do this for a living, you know. Your father go to this new wizard that’s staying at the Dog?”

“He probably did.” Mira pressed her lips together, fighting the sudden urge to weep. “This… This mage, this wizard… He’s called Pushad. Pushad Alorsen, out of Dalwirin. A gentleman,” she added. “He speaks like a man of learning, and a scholar.”

“We’re a damn long way from Dalwirin.” Starhawk set down her pitcher and cups. “What’s he doing out here?”

Mira shook her head. “He says there are things – magical things – which are only found in the wild lands: the bones of the great lynxes of Serrend, and the roots of the sitchend that grows in the Kammy Bogs. But Opium – Bron’s wife, who runs the Dog – told me that Lord Pushad has a stone, or a glass jar of stones, in which he imprisons the souls, the lives, of dying men, and so makes magic from them. That he cuts their throats and catches their blood and their breath—”

She pressed her hand quickly to her mouth again, and steadied her voice. I will NOT cry…

“Then yesterday Father learned about me and Nicky. He… He saw us together, and he went storming to the Dog in his anger to find Master Bridgeward, to demand that Nicky be punished. Lord Pushad was there, dicing with the men, and said he would buy Nicky. And I’m afraid…”

She swallowed, and struggled to keep her breath steady.

“What do you want me to do?”

He didn’t use her father’s tone – What do you want ME to do about it, girl? – and that, too, was reassuring.

Rather, What COULD be done about it? An invitation, to hear what ideas she had.

But for the moment all she could do was whisper, “Help me.”

*

Sun Wolf sat for a time pulling on the ends of his mustache while Starhawk poured out ale for the three of them. “The Wolf makes it,” she explained, when Mira remarked on how good it was: the light sort of ale that one drank in the daytime, when there was still an afternoon’s work to be done. “A woman in Ciselfarge taught him. Me, I couldn’t make the stuff if my life depended on it. At the convent they’d never let me anywhere near the brew-houses.”

If she had been a nun, reflected Mira, it had been a long time ago. In addition to her cropped hair, the woman’s delicate nose had the bump of an old break in it, and the pinkish line of a sword-scar marred one high cheek-bone.

Mira glanced across at the wizard, who was gazing out past the shadows of the sheltered veranda and into the chilly autumn sunlight. The herb-garden had the ragged look of plants that have been harvested repeatedly of their leaves – only a few late-bloomers remained to be picked when they were large enough, or when the moon’s dark had passed. This high mountain land was too rough for crops, but a line of thatched outbuildings marked where chickens were raised, and pigs that were pastured in the woods. Mira knew also that in the two years that the mage and his woman had been there, folk from the tiny settlement of Deepvale, and even from Kammy, had begun to bring him their sick, for healing. So, too, she had heard, did the mercenary troops that camped in the winter on the far side of Wrynde. Rumor had it – again, from Opium at the tavern – that Sun Wolf had been the mercenaries’ captain, before it had become safe for wizards to practice their art.

Curiously, though his face was still the face of a hard-bitten warrior, his eye now suddenly seemed to her the eye of a wizard, trained on distance while thoughts flickered in the shadows behind it.

“And Bridgeward’s willing to sell?” he asked at last.

Mira nodded. “Pushad offered him twenty-five pieces of silver.”

“Twenty-five?” Starhawk whistled. “You can get a man – How old is he? Nineteen? – You can get a man that age for five, anywhere in the Middle Kingdoms.”

Mira flinched, tears stinging her eyes once more. She knew that buying Nicky free was out of the question, even had she dared to ask a stranger to do such a thing.

“And it’s three weeks ride down there,” rumbled the Wolf. “And with winter coming on, if Bridgeward doesn’t get his butt in motion he’s going to be all winter without a plow-hand and someone to keep his ditches clear and his stables mucked… That’s still a lot of money. And a lot of coin money for a man to be carrying around in his pockets, even if he is a wizard.”

“Some of it he won at dice,” offered Mira. “He dices constantly—”

“I wonder he can find anyone to play him,” remarked the Hawk. “I wouldn’t.”

“He doesn’t cheat.” Mira saw the expressions on their faces, and went on – unwilling to ascribe even that virtue to Pushad, but determined to be fair, “He loses as often as he wins. More, really. He says it would be a… a desecration of the noblest game of mankind, to tamper with it with magic. The gods of fortune control the fall of the dice, he says – Otys, Melkoth, and the lady Jodurian – and if he tried to cast spells on the dice while they’re rolling, those gods would take against him in indignation, and fortune would desert him in all other things. I didn’t believe him either,” she said. “But he really does lose a great deal some nights.”

“And he still keeps playing?”

“Chief,” said Starhawk patiently, “the Big Thurg back in the troop lost every cent of an entire summer’s pay to Opium, and he kept playing until the boys had to take up a collection to buy him a shirt.”

Sun Wolf made a hoarse growl in the deeps of his throat, but nodded agreement in time. “Maybe. But there’s still something about this that smells funny.” Cold wind – the reminder that winter was no more than a half-moon away – stirred his long hair and flattened the threadbare linen of his shirt against his body. His glance returned to Mira. “Can you get a look at this crystal, or ball of crystals, or whatever it is that he’s supposed to store lives in to make magic? Sketch a picture of it, if you can. But don’t touch it. Tell Opium I told her to to help you… and find out when this sale’s supposed to take place. I’m betting,” he added, as if reading Mira’s frightened protest in her in-taken breath, “that old Bridgeward isn’t going to turn loose of a good slave til after the winter plowing’s done.”

His hoarse voice was almost kind. “And find out if you can – again, Opium would be the best person to ask – what this Pushad has to say about the sale being delayed for a couple of days. He’s trying to get sitchend-root from the Kammy Bogs at this time of the year, and he’s still hanging around the Pissing Dog playing dice in the middle of the day? Can you come back tomorrow?”

Mira nodded, feeling much better at this prosaic estimate of the situation. She, too, knew Sarve Bridgeward and knew this big, golden man was perfectly correct: Bridgeward (who had also been hanging around the Pissing Dog playing dice in the middle of the day) wasn’t about to let Nicky out of his household until the heavy work was done. “Most of Father’s cattle are drying, so I’m supposed to be out collecting cranberries in the Sourbogs. He won’t miss me, because he hires out to help Shesu Hay – that’s our neighbor, the one whose son Papa wants me to marry – with his fall plowing.”

“Good girl.” He rose, and gave her his hand (unnecessarily but politely) to help her up. “Bastard’s up to something,” he grumbled. “I’ve spent two years trying to find another wizard to teach me something – anything – about my powers, and I haven’t found one yet I’d trust across a room. While you’re digging around for that soul-crystal-bottle of his, check and see if he’s got any books in his luggage.”

Mira nodded, and glanced toward the open doors of the hermitage. Against the wall of the room within she could see two chests, of the sort that merchants kept money in, and, on the low table, an age-blackened old codex, a scattering of waxen note-tablets, a battered scroll and a couple of loose parchment pages. Scholars’ litter, incongruous in the house of this scarred, heavy-muscled man.

“Again, don’t touch ‘em,” he warned. “Just let me know if he’s got any.”

“All right.”

When Mira walked down the steps of the kitchen veranda, and back toward the trail, she felt better than she had for two days.

*

“Can you win him at dice?” she suggested timidly, when on the following afternoon she sat once more on the wide veranda which surrounded the kitchen. The day was chill and damp, but soft warmth flowed from the kitchen’s open doors, and the scent of baking bread. “I went with Father to the tavern last night, and watched the men play hazard. Lord Pushad plays very recklessly, and when he runs out of money he’ll wager anything – his horse, his gloves, his boots – just to go on playing. You’re… You’re a mage,” she added, made even hesitant by the narrowing of that yellow eye. “Just because Lord Pushad thinks the gods of good fortune wouldn’t approve of him putting spells on the dice doesn’t mean you couldn’t.”

“I think,” said Sun Wolf slowly, “that’s exactly what he wants me to do.” He glanced sidelong to the man who sat beside him at the little worktable. A little to her surprise, Mira recognized that thin, gray-haired, bespectacled gentleman as Moggin Aerbaldus, who taught the winter school in Wrynde. He must, she realized, be the “scholar” reputed to share this odd mage’s hermitage.

Aerbaldus took the little drawing Mira had made of the wizard Pushad’s “soul-bottle” – scratched carefully in wax on one of Opium’s kitchen-tablets – and studied it, both Sun Wolf and Starhawk leaning over his shoulders.

“It looks like salt-crystals inside it,” provided Mira, shivering at the recollection of her fear that morning. Both her father’s voice and that of the wizard had risen to her from downstairs the whole time she’d searched the wizard’s chamber. Opium’s soft contralto, rich as date wine, had purred over some trivial item of gossip she shared with the two men, and though Mira could readily believe that no man would break off conversation with a woman of such beauty, her heart had been pounding at the thought of what her father would do were she caught.

Of what Lord Pushad would do…

They’d been dickering innocuously enough, she recalled, over the purchase of a love-spell (As if even WITH a love-spell I’d look twice at Murmis Hay!). And Lord Pushad’s long-jawed face and pleasant dark eyes were as gentle and friendly as a trusted uncle’s. Yet she remembered what Opium had told her about what this gentle-looking man intended to do to Nicky – with his vile bottle of crystals and salts – and she sensed that the face he showed to the world was a false one. A mask, donned to deceive those whom he deemed stupider than himself.

The thought of what he’d do if he found her searching his room had nearly stopped her breath.

“That’s a chersyn, all right.” The scholar handed Sun Wolf the tablet, and carefully opened the book that lay on the table at his elbow: stained, decrepit, and missing whole signatures of pages. His spectacles flashed as he turned toward Mira. “Was there anything besides salt in the bottle? Bits of crystal of a different color?”

She nodded, recalling it with the detail that she used on hedgerow flowers and variations in the color and consistency of the cream in her father’s dairy. “Purple – light purple – and a couple that were light brown. I thought they’d stained that way from… from blood. There was a little dried blood in the bottle as well. Old blood. Opium told me,” she added hesitantly, as Moggin glanced at the pages under his hand and nodded, “that Lord Pushad spoke of… of old wizards putting the blood of young men – and young girls – into bottles like that, to make magic with, after they’d killed them.”

Only the thought of Nicky having his throat cut, Nicky dying as that smooth, smiling wizard in his expensive velvet robe dripped some of his blood into the bottle, had given her the strength to take her time in sketching it, to stay in the room long enough to make sure she had every detail exactly so.

“Wizards did that,” agreed Sun Wolf in his rasping voice. “Still do, for all I know. But not in a bottle like that. Was it sealed? I see you’ve drawn a stopper separately.”

“The stopper was separate, sir. It was wrapped up in the same piece of chamois-leather as the… the chersyn…” She pronounced the word carefully. “And I wrapped a kerchief around my hand before I touched anything…”

“Good girl,” approved the Wolf. “Did the thing look old or new?”

“Old,” said Mira promptly. “There was dust and bits of cob-web there—“ She touched the drawing, “—where the bulb of the bottle joins the neck, and here where the neck flares out at the top. And the glass was discolored, the way old glass gets. But if the chersyn isn’t… isn’t to hold the blood of… of a young man…” She felt her cheeks getting pink at the thought of Nicky. “Why did Lord Pushad tell Mistress Opium that? And what does he want with it? And with Nicky? I – He…” Her voice faltered again, and she took a deep breath to steady it.

“I think Nicky is worth twenty-five pieces of silver, or twenty-five hundred pieces… But his mother sold him to Master Bridgeward for only one, back when he was seven and his father died. And Opium says that Lord Pushad has been buying supplies and fodder for himself and his horse, for a journey, but nothing that would support two men.” Her gaze fleeted from Sun Wolf’s face – grim and scarred and ironic – to Moggin’s lined one, and then to Starhawk, frightened by the glinting anger in the warrior woman’s gray eyes.

“What does he want?”

“What he wants,” said Sun Wolf grimly, “is me.” He glanced again at the scholar beside him. “My magic. My soul. How much power does a mage need, to make a chersyn, Moggy?”

“A great deal.” Moggin carefully shut his book. “It almost sounds counter-intuitive: if you have the power to make one, you don’t need it. I expect if you could get past the spells and traps that still guard ruins of the Wizard King’s old fortress at Grimscarp, you’d find a dozen of the things hidden in the foundations. In his later years he was powerful enough to destroy every mage in the west of the world, but I’d be willing to bet that when he was coming up, he wasn’t doing it all on his own strength.”

“A chersyn—“ Sun Wolf turned to Mira, “—is a power-sink, like Pushad told Opium… knowing Opium would tell you after he purchased Nicky. It holds a living soul in its crystals. But not the souls of regular men and women – not the blood-energy of their lives. It’s a mage-trap. If a wizard’s soul is trapped in one of those things, the mage who trapped him – who holds the trap – can use his prisoner’s magic as his own. Or else, he can command his prisoner like an automaton – I’ve heard it both ways. I’ve never seen one of the things and I don’t want to.”

“But I suspect,” remarked Starhawk, “you’re going to, Chief, if you try to get Nickleberry back out of pawn.”

Mira gasped at her off-hand tone and started to speak, then bit her lip. She couldn’t – it was impossible – that she should ask this tawny warrior to risk such a thing for her. But her eyes flooded with tears, as she guessed what would be done with the young man. The fact that Pushad’s trap was designed to catch a mage’s soul and power didn’t preclude him having some lesser talisman that would be fed by the blood and life of an ordinary man.

“I’m guessing—” The Wolf pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket and tossed it across the little table to Mira, “—that our friend Pushad’s got the same problem I do. He knows he has some power but doesn’t have anybody to teach him. He’s probably never passed the Great Trial, to unlock his power – maybe he’s never even heard of it. He just knows he needs to increase his powers somehow.”

He folded his big hands, heavy as a butcher’s, on the table’s scrubbed top. “The Wizard King croaked anybody who could have been competition for him, so Pushie has maybe a few books, a few scrolls… and somehow got his mitts on a chersyn. Possibly from whoever he got the books from, and I’m surprised he didn’t trap himself in the thing before he figured out what it was and how it’s used. When the trap is set – when spells have been laid on the crystals within it – any mage in the vicinity who uses a spell gets his power – or his soul, or maybe his consciousness – sucked into it.”

“So instead of looking for a mage to teach him,” concluded Starhawk softly, “the way the Chief has been doing for the past two years, Pushie started looking around for a mage to enslave.”

Mira, who had been wiping her eyes, now went pink with indignation. “Oh! That… That blackguard!”

“We’ve been around enough, in two years,” went on the Hawk, “for somebody out in Dalwirin to have heard of us. If Pushie’s been hanging around the tavern losing his boots to strangers playing hazard, sounds like he’s counting on the Wolf coming in tomorrow night with you on his arm, and offer to play hazard for Nickleberry’s life. He’s already announced to everybody in the village that he doesn’t believe in cheating, so he figures the Wolf is going to put a spell on the dice when he throws them—”

“OH!” Mira clenched the handkerchief in her hand. “So he was just using poor Nicky as a hostage – and me as a cats-paw! He knew all about me already from Papa trying to buy that silly love-spell! And of course he heard about Nicky and me at the inn – everybody hears everything there! – and he told Opium he was going to kill Nicky, knowing I’d come to – OH!”

Then the tears rushed back and her throat closed with terror, and Sun Wolf raised a finger as if to shut up a wailing child, and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll get him.”

She could barely whisper the words, “I can’t ask you to put yourself in danger…”

The Wolf shook his head. “Better tomorrow night at the gaming-table where I can see him,” he said, “than to have Pushie wandering around the countryside with that thing open in his pocket, waiting for me to conjure rain or make myself invisible to avoid Mayor Brewman. What’s the range on a chersyn, Moggy? How close does he have to be to me?”

The philosopher shook his head, and tapped the cover of the book. “It only says, ‘close upon him,’ which could be anything from on the other side of the room to standing on your toes. And it may be one of those spells that only works in line of sight. Once the wizard’s soul – or power – is trapped in the chersyn,” he added, “it says that the wizard himself is unable to touch the bottle – an obvious precaution, when you think of it. And that if the chersyn is broken without the proper rite of opening, the prisoner’s soul will be unable to return to his body.”

“This is getting better and better.”

“But how can you defeat him?” asked Mira desperately. “How can you fight another wizard, if he… if he can imprison you the first time you cast a spell?”

“You think he’d go for arm-wrestling?” inquired Starhawk, straight-faced.

“Very goddam funny. Hawk, you have any word yet on—”

He broke off, his head – and Starhawk’s – turning as one toward the red-and-gray of the woods. With the same movement, the Wolf’s hand went to the sword at his waist, and Starhawk moved in two strides to conceal herself around the corner of the kitchen, her own sword already in her hand.

The next moment men emerged from the woods, mercenaries: spiked doublets plated with iron and bows strung in metal-gloved hands. Mira sprang to her feet and ducked around the table, ready to follow Starhawk behind the kitchen but wondering if there were more of these sinister warriors in the woods behind the hut.

But Sun Wolf only got to his feet, and the dark-haired young man in the vanguard raised a hand in greeting.

“About time,” the Wolf called out. “I hope you tosspots brought beer.”

*

For as long as anyone in the cold northern badlands could remember, Bron Hagchild had owned the Pissing Dog Tavern in Wrynde. Every year he’d pack up his ale and his beer, and the stronger waters he distilled – or acquired in trade from the few merchants who made the long trek to the mines in the Silver Hills – and would spend the summer on campaign with the mercenary bands who camped in the hills beyond Wrynde. For many years this had meant that the tavern was closed for the summer – its nearest competition being Mother Trask’s house twenty miles away in Deepvale. But latterly Bron had taken a wife, the beautiful Opium, who remained to run the place (and broker loans, locate day-help, set up trade agreements and arrange for the sale of surplus produce) from May through November.

Coming into Wrynde with her father the evening following her second visit to Sun Wolf’s hermitage, Mira feared she would have no opportunity to see Nicky before Sun Wolf went to the inn to meet his adversary. But Bron the innkeeper, it transpired, had returned to Wrynde the previous evening. As Mira’s father was loading the last of the milk-jars into the wagon outside Gesto Fussage’s house, the pleasant-faced, wiry little man happened by and asked him to come celebrate his safe return.

“Stay with the horse, girl,” grunted Mira’s father, handing her the reins. “I won’t be long.”

Mira knew he’d be at the inn until well past moon-rise. The moment the two men vanished into the big stone tavern, Mira sprang from the wagon-seat, darted to Fussage’s kitchen door, and promised Nadge the kitchen-girl two eggs and some honey (which she knew Nadge would immediately sell to buy ribbons) if Nadge would bring the wagon around to the lane and keep an eye on it. From there she darted by means of the muddy back-lanes to the big house beside the stone bridge, where Nicky, she knew, was locked in a little cell behind Sarve Bridgeward’s stable.

At the sound of his name he pressed himself to the bars of the little window, reached through to take her hand. “He’s coming tonight,” Nicky whispered, drawing her hand up and covering her fingers with kisses. At nineteen, despite what Mira knew had been a desperately hard childhood, the young man was handsome and still had, in his brown eyes, the calm independence of spirit that thralldom had never managed to crush. Perhaps it was because his two sisters – whom his mother had kept instead of selling them, as had been her original plan when their father’s death had reduced the family to destitution – were married now, to good men, laborers on outlying farms. Maybe it was the fact that, even at seven years old, he had asked to be the one sold. Whatever the reason, she had known from the moment they had met that he was different, that he was better than his condition. That he was someone whom she could trust with her life, and the lives of her children unborn.

She whispered, “Did he say so?”

Nicky nodded, his fair hair falling into one eye. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, Mira. Yetta—“ He named Bridgeward’s kitchen-girl-cum-concubine, “—has said all kinds of things, about what this wizard is going to do—“ He put his hands through the bars, to gently frame her cheeks. “Whatever happens, I love you. If he takes me away from here, I swear to you I’ll find a way to come back. If…”

She knew he was going to say, If he kills me, and she shook her head, put her hand over his lips. “Don’t.”

“I can’t let you—”

“Don’t!” Don’t speak, don’t tell me, don’t remind me that I may never see you again…

Feet crunched the gravel in the yard and Mira gathered up her faded skirts, darted behind the corner of the stables as Sarve Bridgeward’s thick voice pierced the evening gloom. “I’ll be just as happy to keep the boy here tonight, you know—”

“Thank you, Master Bridgeward,” returned the deep, pleasant voice of the wizard Pushad. “I do appreciate your offer, but last night there were some – ah – fairly deep doings with the dice, and one of the merchants who came in yesterday mentioned he might be interested in purchasing a good boy for the silver mines. I’m sure it won’t come to that, but just in case I need to raise the wind…”

Mira’s heart went cold in her chest at the mention of the mines. Worse, even, than when Tenna, one of her father’s dairy-maids, had whispered to her that morning that that evil wizard who was staying at the Dog had bought an iron knife of the blacksmith, the sort that witches used to make sacrifices with. Through the evening’s shadows Mira watched them, Sarve Bridgeward broad-shouldered and heavy, never releasing his hold on his heavy club even as he unlocked the cell door, Lord Pushad taller and slimmer, even in his simple traveling-clothes giving the impression of an aristocrat. His hair, cropped at his shoulders, was still a young man’s hair, light-brown and thick; she guessed he was only a few years past thirty. He wore over his doublet and breeches a long, open robe, such as the merchants sometimes wore, yellow velvet and reasonably new. Mira was near enough to see that his gloves were embroidered, and near enough to smell the last traces of perfume in them.

He took Nicky’s arm and said quietly, “I trust you’ll be a good lad, Nickandar? You remember the mark I put on you yesterday? What I said would happen, if you ran off?”

Nicky said quietly, “I remember, sir.” He turned back to the cell and stooped to pick up his little bundle of possessions.

Pushad had passed his hand over the bars of the window, and the wood of the door, and Mira found herself remembering that Sun Wolf had warned her not to touch the chersyn, nor any of the wizard’s possessions if she could help it. Can he feel my presence? Feel that I was just here? By the way he turned his head, glanced toward the corner of the stable behind which she hid – by the slight, satisfied smile that tucked up one corner of his mouth – she had the sinking feeling that he knew exactly where she was.

But he only turned back to Nicky and said, “Leave that. You won’t need it.”

Nicky hesitated, then said, “Yes, sir.”

It was everything he had in the world. He followed Pushad from the stable-yard, empty-handed and with only what he stood up in. Mira, trembling, trailed behind.

*

Sun Wolf was in the common-room of the tavern, playing hazard with Shesu Hay – who farmed a couple of acres a few miles from those of Mira’s father – and Flaye Cooper the barrelmaker. Flaye’s wife Prinna was examining the dice suspiciously and Sun Wolf was grumbling, “Hell, if I wanted to get money with spells I’d just make everybody in the room fall asleep and save myself the trouble. You play dice to have fun, not to line your…”

He broke off when he saw Pushad enter. The southern wizard wore an air of self-satisfied innocence, and Mira, slipping through the kitchen door, was almost certain he knew she watched him. He’d glanced around as he’d locked Nicky into the tack-room of the inn’s stable, and Mira felt herself flush again with anger at the thought that Sun Wolf had been right. Pushad was counting on her going to the Wolf for help.

And counting on the Wolf’s pity for her innocence and youth, as if she were a puppy or a kitten.

She and Nicky both were no more than the bait in his trap.

Her hair prickled on her scalp, and more than anything else she wanted to storm into the common-room and smite Pushad over the head with one of Opium’s stew-pans. The more so, since she knew that Sun Wolf might be risking enslavement himself, to win Nicky free.

I shouldn’t have asked him, reflected Mira wretchedly. I shouldn’t have told him about us, shouldn’t have dragged him into this.

If anything happens to him Starhawk will hate me forever.

Completely aside from her misery at endangering the man who’d agreed to help her, the thought that chilly-eyed warrior woman’s anger was terrifying.

So she pressed herself to the arch of the kitchen doorway, and looked out into the shadowy gloom of the common-room and wished she’d never spoken to Nicky in her life.

Only the thought of never having done so was unthinkable.

Sun Wolf glumly shoved ten coppers and two vowels – promises to put rat-wards on the Hay farmstead – across to Shesu, and got to his feet as Pushad crossed to the players. “Pushad Alorsen?” He held out his hand. “Sun Wolf of Wrynde. I have the hermitage up the mountain.”

“I’ve heard tell of you, sir. A pleasure.” The younger mage smiled, and inclined his head, his long face kindly but something in his voice whispering of calculation, of playing a role.

“I understand you’ve bought a slave from Bridgeward.” The Wolf signed to Opium to bring ale. “Local boy. His mother and sisters live over near Deepvale. They’ve been saving for years to buy him his freedom, but could never come to what Bridgeward was asking. I don’t know what you paid for him, but they can offer you – we can offer you – three silver, which you’ll admit is a good price.”

Pushad chuckled. “I’m sure it is – for an ordinary slave. But Nickandar is a youth of…” He gestured, somehow theatrical, as if hinting of terrible usages to which he would put his new slave. “A youth of strength… of pure blood, if you know what I mean.” His smile was redolent of unspoken and unspeakable rites. “I’m afraid I couldn’t sell him for a penny less than I paid for him – which was, I’m sorry to say, twenty-five silver.”

Sun Wolf looked shocked (As well he should! reflected Mira, indignant and terrified all over again); then appeared to think deeply. “Is there any favor – any teaching – that I might trade for the young man, in addition to the money? I’ve heard you’re a mage, as I am. I don’t know who your master is…”

“I have had none, alas.” Pushad shook his head, and there was genuine anger, genuine resentment in the movement. “I always knew I had the power, but in the days before the death of the Wizard King, I had the good sense to keep quiet about it. What I have learned, I have gleaned myself from experience and experimentation. Indeed,” he went on, a trifle smugly, “I have been traveling to find the wherewithal to increase my power, to strengthen my abilities.”

Sun Wolf’s face remained impassive, but Mira could see the words, I’ll just bet you have, glint in his single baleful eye.

But all he said was, “As have I. Let me bargain with you, then, sir. You let the boy go, and you stay with me at my hermitage for the winter. Study the few books I have. Work with me, that we may exchange what we have both learned, and both grow the stronger thereby.”

Mira held her breath, remembering that the chersyn did and how it was used. If this smooth, smiling southerner moved into the hermitage for the winter, it would only be a matter of time before he could find some means of trapping the Wolf’s soul in his dreadful bottle, wouldn’t it? Sun Wolf, she knew, must have thought of this, too – or at least his eye remained watchful on Pushad’s smiling face – but he didn’t look as if he much feared Pushad taking him up on this, and it appeared that he was right.

For Pushad chuckled again and raised a large, slender hand. “I fear I cannot face the prospect of a winter in the north. Indeed, I’ve over-stayed my time here already, and will journey south again tomorrow.” In a colder voice – though still trying to sound pleasant – he added, “But I will take your books in trade for the youth.”

Sun Wolf was silent for a long time. In the gloom is was difficult to see Pushad’s face, but something in the set of his shoulders made Mira wonder whether he seriously expected the Wolf to agree. Very quietly, the Wolf said, “I can’t do that,” and Pushad shrugged, and again made an airy, theatrical gesture of not-very-heartfelt regret.

“Ah, well, we all have things we cannot part with.” And taking the ale from Opium’s tray, he turned to the hazard-players and settled onto the bench, eagerly watching as Flaye called an eight and rolled a four for a chance, and then a six, with Pushad betting silver and (to Mira’s indignation) Mira’s father leaning in to cover the bets. Flaye rolled out; then rolled out again. Pushad bent eagerly toward the play, calling loudly on the luck-gods of the south. Sun Wolf sat back with his big arms folded, his golden eye glittering in the firelight and the dim tallow-glow of the smoky candles overhead.

When Flaye rolled out the third time and the dice passed to Sun Wolf, the Wolf said, “Will you wager the boy?”

Pushad looked up from gathering in his winnings. His smile was the smile of a man who sees matters fall out as he wishes. After a long moment he lifted his brows with assumed casualness. “Will you wager your books?”

At the hermitage, Mira had seen how Sun Wolf had touched those crumbling volumes which he had gleaned from the forgotten corners of old libraries or the ruins of dwellings destroyed by the Wizard King. Some, he had said, were incomprehensible, others written in the forgotten tongues of bygone realms. She’d heard his voice as he’d spoken of the secrets he was trying to coax from their soot-darkened, mold-stained pages, like a lover speaking of his beloved. Remembering the evil gleam of the chersyn, tucked away in Pushad’s baggage, she thought of what such a man as that would do with the knowledge in those volumes, if he were to lay hands on them.

She thought, Don’t do it… even as Sun Wolf nodded.

“I will,” he said, and held out his hand for the dice.

Pushad, however, took them first from Flaye’s palm and studied them for a moment, gauging their weight as Shesu had done a quarter-hour before. Then, satisfied, he passed them along, and where the firelight touched the angle of his face Mira could see the smile he tried to hide. Not just anticipation and the eagerness of a man who sees a rabbit bobble cautiously towards his snare.

But something of a spoiled, clever child hugging itself with delight as it thinks it has scored over a playmate. I’m smarter than you. You don’t even see what’s coming. What an idiot you are, you big golden oaf!

He slipped his hand – with a carefully-rehearsed casualness – into the long folds of his yellow velvet robe.

He did not – Mira noticed – ask for any kind of written assurance that the books would in fact be handed over to him if Sun Wolf lost. Opium said worriedly, “Wolf, don’t—“ and the Wolf shook his head and waved her off. Bron and a half-dozen others crowded around the table. A few people began to mutter side-bets on the play.

Sun Wolf held the dice in his fist for a moment, considering, then called a seven – the safest call in hazard – and rolled a seven. He studied the dice where they lay for a moment, and Mira shivered at the way Pushad bent toward him, as if straining his ears for the whisper of a spell. Then the Wolf gathered the little cubes of bone into his hand and considered again for a time. From what Mira understood of the game – which was only what she’d overheard when some of her father’s friends would come and dice in the kitchen of an evening – if a man rolled seven for the “main,” then on the second roll he will win if his roll is eleven, lose if his roll is two, three, or twelve (Who invents these silly games anyway?), and anything in between is a “chance,” the number he must roll a second time in order to win. A roll of seven – his “main,” – would lose him both Nicky and the books that she knew were his treasure, books that a man might well cheat for, if he could lay a spell on the dice.

This was clearly what Pushad expected him to do. Mira could almost hear the southern wizard draw in his breath in eagerness as the dice skipped from the Wolf’s scarred hand, but they came up a five, a difficult “chance” to repeat.

Pushad’s pink tongue slipped out to moisten his lips.

The next roll was a nine. Then a six. Mira held her breath – How long could a man go on rolling dice without coming up either a five or a seven? Nicky, her father, her friend Dani Sweeting, had all spoken of the speed of the game and the vicious fights that could break out over its random wins and losses…

Sun Wolf rolled a ten and cursed. Still the dice were his.

An eight.

Shesu Hay put down two silver pieces, and Baykus Brownbeard covered them.

Pushad leaned forward now, frowning, watching the dice with concentrated intentness. The firelight slipped over the velvet of his robe where his elbow moved, his hand caressing the bottle hidden in his belt. The bottle Mira had observed so painstakingly in the dimness of his chamber while her father talked to the wizard downstairs… round bellied and about the size of a pearmain apple, with a short thick neck to it, sticky with old dust and cobweb. She remembered how the crystals within it had glinted in the light of her candle, cold-looking and sharp; how they’d been mingled with what looked like dust or sand, and filmed in places with brown, as if they’d been rolled in blood.

Looking for a mage to enslave, Starhawk had said. Sun Wolf’s soul – his consciousness – sucked into that round ball of glass, lost among those evil crystals… Not able to escape, not even able to die. Who knew what Pushad would or could do to him then? Hazard was a dangerous game, a game that got men killed, that could bankrupt a man in a single roll.

He’s waiting for Sun Wolf to use magic…

Once the younger mage took up the dice, turned them in his fingers, his dark eyes shooting sharply at the Wolf. But the dice had fallen – thought always in Sun Wolf’s favor – on too many different combinations of numbers for them to be weighted.

No magic. Only luck…

She put her hand before her mouth, tears stinging her eyes, knowing how quickly luck could turn. Otys, Melkoth, she breathed, making a little superstitious sign to the luck-gods that the priests of the north had taught her not to believe in. He’s doing this to help me and that vile man KNEW he’d do it to help someone, as surely as if he held a knife to my throat.

Dally Wintersedge who sold eggs at the market put down eight copper. Bron laid a silver bit beside them. Pushad’s gaze was locked on the dice, as if willing them to jounce into a three or a two.

A four.

Another ten.

Sun Wolf, I’m sorry. Nicky, I’m so sorry…

The outside door crashed open and a man yelled, “That’s him!”

Every man and woman of the mob gathered around the gaming-table jerked upright as the mercenaries stormed into the room – Pushad nearly leaped out of his skin. Shaggy, dirty, their patched doublets plated with iron and chain-mail and stained with old blood, the spikes on their wrist-bracers and pauldrons glinting wickedly in the firelight. The man in their forefront, bearded like a holly-bush and seamed with scars, bore a short-sword in a fist the size of a ham. His other hand lanced out, pointing at Pushad, and he shouted, “Kill the bastard.”

The soldiers surged forward. His mind yanked from concentration on the dice, Pushad dodged back into the crowd, dashed for the kitchen door. I should stop him, thought Mira in panic…

And was thrust aside by Starhawk and two other mercs who’d come quietly into the kitchen behind her and waited, swords drawn.

Pushad skidded to a halt, darted back into the mill of bettors and Mira lost sight of him for a moment. Then there was a hoarse, gasping scream and he became visible again, staggering, doubled over clutching his breast like a man smitten by the gods. His eyes bulged as he fell to his knees, and Sun Wolf stepped unhurriedly across to him, yanked aside his yellow velvet robe, and pulled the chersyn out of his belt. The younger mage croaked like a dying man and reached to stop him, but his hands shook too badly and the Wolf slapped them casually aside.

While Pushad’s body jerked like a landed fish, Sun Wolf dug in the yellow robe’s pockets and pulled out the bottle’s stopper, and pushed it home.

Then he stood back, arms folded, and watched as the other man’s convulsions slowly ceased.

“Give… it…” Pushad’s words dribbled from lips that seemed half-paralyzed. He sat up, clumsily, and shook his head. When he spoke again his diction was clearer, but there was still a stammering quality to it, as if he’d been chewing cowbane. “Give it to me.”

Starhawk sheathed her sword and stepped past Mira into the common-room, pulling a thin roll of southern paper from her doublet. This she spread out on the table beside the dice, and helped Pushad to his feet. “Sign this,” she said.

Bron produced an ink-bottle and a quill with suspicious readiness.

Save for the mud they’d tracked onto the floor, the mercenaries had vanished as if they’d never been,.

“Cheat!” Pushad managed to gasp. “Thief—”

“What did I do?” rumbled Sun Wolf. “You were the one who made that spell, Pushie. You knew this thing—“ He held up the chersyn, “—was in your belt, and open. Where’d you get it, anyway?”

“May your cods wither – may your eyes… your eyes… fungus… destroy…” He staggered again, grabbed for the edge of the table for support, then screamed in terror as Sun Wolf casually tossed the bottle into the air over the stone of the hearth, and caught it again.

And then – as if the fright had broken something within him – Pushad crumpled to his knees, laid his face on his arms on the tabletop, and, to the embarrassment of every person in the tavern, began to weep.

It was not faked weeping. Mira knew that instinctively. Gut-wrenched, broken, blind; sobs of sheer fright, like a tortured child. Quickly she stepped forward, and laid her hands on his heaving shoulders. Pushad slapped at her, shrieked, “Get away from me, you bitch!” and wept afresh, as if the sobs would tear his body apart.

Quietly, Sun Wolf said, “Sign the paper. You have only yourself to blame.” His face was impassive, but Mira thought he looked a little ill at the sight of the other man’s hysterical tears. In a kinder voice he added, “Were there books with the thing, wherever you got it? They may have an opening-spell, to release your soul from the bottle.”

“I can’t read it!” The mage raised a face bloated with tears and twisted with hatred and terror. “There was only one and it’s writ in a tongue only the gods know!”

“I can help…”

“You stay away from me!” The mage dragged himself to his feet, scrawled his name at the bottom of the bill of emancipation – for that’s what it was, Mira saw – with a violence that nearly tore the coarse sheet. “Keep him!” he sobbed, whirling to face Mira. “Marry him! Fuck him! May your father cast you out, and all your babies breech and die!”

He grabbed at the bottle that the Wolf laid gently on the table before him, then jerked his hand away from the glass with a cry of pain. He stood, almost ludicrous, glaring around from face to face of the watchers with snot dripping from his nose and eyes bloodshot and streaming tears that he could not seem to control. He made another attempt to pick up the chersyn – the prison which contained, now, his soul and his magic – and couldn’t. The flame of the hearth gleamed on the glass, so it was difficult for Mira to tell whether what she saw was correct, but she thought that something like specks of light – like infinitely tiny, glowing insects – crawled and crept among the crystals, as if seeking a way out.

Her heart aching with pity, she stepped back into the kitchen and found a string-net shopping-bag and the notched stick that Opium used to hook open the door of the boiler’s firebox. Returning to the common-room, she glanced at Sun Wolf, who nodded, then put the wicked little bottle into the bag, and hung it on the end of the stick. This she held out to Pushad, who snatched it from her with hands that shook so violently that she feared he would drop it – shatter it – himself.

“Bitch!” he spat at her again, and stumbled to the outer door.

Even Mira’s father, standing mute in the crowd, had nothing to say.

When the wizard was gone, Sun Wolf and Starhawk walked Mira out to the stables to let Nicky free.

*

“Nevertheless,” said Nicky, the following evening, “that was a terrible risk you ran.”

His fingers tightened reassuringly around Mira’s, as they sat together on the bench on the veranda of the hermitage kitchen, though the mercenaries who’d been gathered there when Mira and Nicky had emerged from the woods had proved to be, if not harmless, at least in a genial mood. Sun Wolf had introduced them: Ari, Dogbreath, a ferocious fat giantess named Battlesow with the cooing voice of a fifteen-year-old heartbreaker. Penpusher, the accountant of Ari’s mercenary troop, which Sun Wolf had once himself commanded. The Big Thurg – the scar-faced monster who’d led the invasion of Bron’s inn – and a small man who was his double at about a third his size called the Little Thurg. Hog – the troop’s cook – presided over a sheep roasting between the kitchen and the main hermitage, with the assistance of a short-legged mongrel dog. Moggin poured out ale.

“Not really.” The Wolf shrugged. “I wasn’t about to use magic in that room, but I was pretty sure our boy would panic if he was taken by surprise – especially if he was concentrating on the dice. And on waiting for me to tilt the dice with a spell.”

Quietly, Mira asked, “Is he… Is he really in that bottle?”

“Oh, yes,” said the Wolf. “I could feel him in there, when I touched the glass. That was… It was like laying my hand through an open wound into a man’s chest, and touching his beating heart. Horrible.”

“Did you know it would be like that?”

“Not really.” He frowned, one long-furred red brow making the patch move a little over his missing eye. “Like I said, I’d heard about chersyn, but I’d never seen one, or seen one work. I didn’t even really know what to expect, though I’m not surprised he went into shock. Even worse than not being able to use his own magic, and having to learn to control his body at second hand from the glass of his prison, is that now he’s got to carry it with him – and live in terror that some other mage is going to guess – or know – what that thing is, and steal it. Or else he has to lock it up someplace, and live with the fear that somebody, somehow, is going to figure out where it is and what it is…”

“Which means,” said Starhawk softly, “that he’s never really going to sleep again.”

“I’m not sure that isn’t worse than having somebody else have charge of the glass,” spoke up the mercenary Ari. “At least that way you’d know. What happens when his body gets old and dies? Can he, like, latch into somebody else’s body…?”

“Moggy?”

All eyes turned to the scholar.

“I shouldn’t think so.” Moggin set his ale-pitcher down, perched on the end of the table, and propped his spectacles with one thin forefinger. “You’d need magic to displace the soul within the new body, and a mage trapped in a chersyn can’t really use of his own magic. Magic resides – at least according to most authorities – primarily in the flesh, the physical body. If a mage tried to take over the body of another mage I doubt he could do it, even if he knew a viable spell. And if he somehow took over a non-mage, what good would it do him? But to be honest,” he added, removing one of the half-dozen hermitage cats from the table, “what I’ve been able to read of the books we have doesn’t really say.”

Dogbreath sighed. “Kind of makes me glad to be just a garden-variety head-breaker.”

The first thing Mira had asked about, when Starhawk had greeted her at the edge of the woods that afternoon, had been Pushad. Ari’s mercenary troop had tracked the defeated wizard south along the Silver Road for some ten miles last night, presumably headed for Kwest Mralwe, and had scoured the countryside for him again that morning. “Doesn’t hurt to be sure,” Dogbreath had said, with his toothy grin.

Pushad was definitely gone, and in fact was heard of no more in the north-country.

“Though it might pay us to ride down to Dalwirin when spring comes,” rumbled Sun Wolf, as Battlesow and the Big Thurg started unpacking other ingredients for supper which they’d brought with them: bread baked that morning, crocks of honey and butter which bore the marks of some of the wealthiest merchant houses in the Middle Kingdoms, great round puddings still in their fine linen wrappers, which Hog the Cook set in a cauldron over the fire to boil. “A city that size, stands to reason there’d have been wizards there at one time. Looks like at least some of their goods escaped the Wizard King. We can ask around.”

“All the way to Dalwirin for books?” Ari looked appalled at the thought.

“Without books,” said the Wolf, “I’m exactly what Pushie was. Power that can only guess at what can or should be done. Power that can kill me – and everybody around me – without the slightest idea of what I’m doing.”

In a quieter voice, as if to himself, he added, “Power that keeps me awake at night, knowing I could be more.”

The bare trees around the hermitage rustled in the sudden rise of the wind, the smoke of the cook-fire streaming away down the little vale. By the smell of the sky it would rain before morning.

Ari glanced up at him, and murmured, “Or die trying.”

“Or die trying,” the Wolf agreed. “At least I seek that power in books, and not in stealing the souls of other men.”

He nodded toward the hermitage across the yard, where his treasury was: two small chests of books, and a box of fragments. All that remained, Starhawk had told Mira, of a great and perilous learning; of knowledge that the world could not live without.

Nicky said quietly, “You shouldn’t have risked what you have, sir. Hazard is a perilous game. You never know which way the dice will fall. You risked handing that knowledge – that power – to… to a wicked and venal man. Men lose everything they have, on a single roll. I wouldn’t have liked to think—”

“Perilous?” Dogbreath, cutting bread, looked mortally offended. “With my dice?”

Sun Wolf laughed, and took them from his pocket; held them closed in his fist for a moment, then said, “You think magic is the only way to get dice to roll a seven?”

He rolled a seven.

“Or a nine?” He swept them into his hand again, held them with an expression of concentration, then rolled a nine.

“The world’s full of magic—“ He rolled another seven, “—and some wizards get so wrapped up in what they can do that they forget that most people get along just fine without their help.”

He rolled another nine, then handed the dice to Nicky. “They’re hollow,” he said. “Filled with a mixture of oil and beeswax and God’s grandmother only knows what-all else. But whatever it is, there’s a lead pellet floating in it. Floating slowly, in something about the thickness of butter. Regular loaded dice, about the tenth time your opponent rolls a seven, you start wondering how he’d look with all his fingers broken. These…”

He held them out on his palm, with four and three uppermost, then closed his hand over them again. “Doesn’t take long for the heat of your hand to soften the muck inside. The weights float down…”

He tossed them against the side of the box that Starhawk had brought from the kitchen, containing plates. They bounced, and fell with four and three up.

“He could tell there was something funny going on,” said the Hawk to Mira, as she picked up the dice. “But there was no magic involved, so it took up the whole of his mind trying to figure out what it was. When Ari and the boys broke in, he got taken flat-footed, and panicked. And forgot for a minute that he couldn’t take the easy way out. No magic in sight.”

She held up her hands, palms open and empty.

With a conjuror’s grin, Sun Wolf reached over to Mira and took the dice out from behind her ear. “If you’re someplace where it’s dangerous to use violence, sometimes these things can be the difference between dinner and going hungry. The world doesn’t run on magic.”

“But it does,” said Mira softly, and leaned a little into the circle of Nicky’s arm. “Just not the magic that people want to control.”

“Yeah, well, on the subject of magic,” sighed Starhawk, “you know your Dad’s going around saying Nicky put a love-spell on you—”

Mira’s mouth popped indignantly open. “Of all the nerve—”

“Great.” Sun Wolf sighed. “That’s what I need. A disgruntled father coming up here—”

“There should be a spell in one of those books,” said Moggin, removing the cat from the table again, “to cause him to get lost on his way here…”

“At my level of experience,” growled the Wolf, “he’d either never be found again and end up in Gnissmaul, or I couldn’t take the spell off and then nobody would be able to find their way here again, ever. Or we’d end up getting lost between the kitchen and the house.”

“I don’t think you need to worry,” said Nicky, and tightened his gentle grip on Mira’s shoulders. “Master Heddle knows me – My family is from these parts. Once he gets over Mira not marrying Murmis Hay, he’ll come around. When he sees that our love is real. That Mira is happy, and that I can care for her.”

“That,” said Sun Wolf quietly, “is the real magic. But just to be on the safe side, as soon as I can figure out how to do it without turning the milk blue or the cows into tortoises, I’ll come by your Daddy’s farm, Mira, and lay a good word on the herd. That should put the old man in a better mood to accept a son-in-law he didn’t pick out himself.”

As the ravens squawked down from the darkening sky to the bare branches of the trees, Starhawk watched the young lovers pick their way down the path and across the stream, to where the path led back to the village. Other mercs had come down from the camp, bringing firewood and more food; their voices made a kind of rough music against the rustle of the wind. Dogbreath, Penpusher, the Goddess and the Little Thurg were playing hazard by the light of the fire. The smell of roasting meat blessed the night.

“At least we didn’t end up being run out of town this time,” rumbled the Wolf, putting his heavy arms around her from behind.

“Yet,” she concluded, and felt the soft, ironic snort of his laughter against her ear. And then, in another voice, “You think he’ll be back? Pushie, I mean.”

“I doubt it. Not in his own body, anyway.” He tilted his head, gazing into the darkness. “But whatever wizard gets that chersyn away from him… Who maybe learns to make one of his own… That’s why I need to raise my own powers, Hawk. That’s why I need to find books. That’s why I need a teacher I can trust.”

“Every merc knows,” she said after a time, “that there’s always somebody better out there. Younger, stronger, and better.”

“It’s not just that. The Wizard King knew what he was doing when he not only killed off the other mages, but destroyed anything that could teach magic to his competitors. But unless somebody gets that teaching – unless somebody learns to wield real power – it’s only a matter of time before some damn disaster’s going to occur.”

“To you?”

“To the world.” His grip tightened momentarily. Then he stepped back, and took her hand, like the young lovers who had vanished into the dark of the woods. Another gust rattled the trees, and he shook his head and sighed. “That sound you hear is my ancestors laughing at me,” he said, and led her toward their friends around the fire. “Let’s go get some ale.”

About the Author

Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. She currently concentrates on horror (a vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, but the various fantasy series she wrote in the 1980s and 1990s for Del Rey still hold a strong place in her heart.

For this reason, in 2009 Barbara started writing the “Further Adventures” series - short tales about the further adventures of the characters from her Del Rey fantasy series: the Darwath series centering on the Keep of Dare, the Unschooled Wizard stories about the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers, the Winterlands tales about the scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest, the Windrose Chronicles which recount the adventures of exiled archmage Antryg Windrose trying to make his way - with the assistance of his computer-programmer partner Joanna - in Los Angeles in the 1980s. To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War; the stories that she has written for various Sherlock Holmes anthologies; and a couple of entertaining stand-alones.

She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.

Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.