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her. Unlike Aralorn, his magic, human or green, was much better than the average hedgewitch’s: But her fear would hurt him more surely than a knife in his throat.
    “I should have told you before,” he said without looking at her. “I thought it was just my imagination when things first started happening around me. They were little things. A vase falling off a table or a candle lighting itself.” He stopped speaking and drew in his breath.
    When he spoke again, his ruined voice crackled with the effort of his suppressed emotion. “I wish I had never discovered I could work green magic as well as the human variety. It was bad enough before, when I was some sort of freak who couldn’t control the power of the magic I could summon. At least then it only came when I called. Ever since I started using green magic, I’ve been losing control. It tugs me around as if I were a dog, and it held my leash. It would be better for you if I left and never came back.”
    As he spoke the last words, he made a swift gesture, and the steam clouds disappeared from the room. Aralorn stepped in front of him, so he had to look at her.
    Smiling sweetly, she reached up to touch his face with both hands. “You leave, and I’ll follow you to Deathsgate and back,” she said pleasantly. “Don’t think I can’t.”
    His hands covered hers rather fiercely.
    “Gods,” he said, closing his eyes. Aralorn couldn’t tell if it was a curse or a prayer.
    “Green magic has a personality of its own,” she said softly. “One of the elders who taught me likened it to a willful child. It responds better to coaxing than force.”
    Yellow eyes slitted open. “Do you not have to call your magic? Just as any human mage would do?”
    “Yes,” agreed Aralorn, though reluctantly. She hated it when he shot down her attempts to make him feel better.
    Wolf grunted. “A human mage is limited by the amount of pure, unformed magic he can summon and the time he can hold it to his spell. The magic you call is already a part of the pattern of the world, so you have to respect that limit. I tell you that this magic ”—he spat the word out—“comes when it wills. If you are not frightened by that, you should be. Remember that my magic is not limited except by my will. This does not heed my will at all. I cannot control it, I cannot stop it.”
    Aralorn thought about that for a moment before a cat-in-the-milk-barn smile crossed her face. “I do so hate being bored. You always manage to have the most interesting problems.”
    She caught him off guard and surprised a rusty laugh out of him.
    “Come,” she said briskly, “help me dry off, and we’ll eat. My mother’s people live near here—maybe they can help. We’ll stop there before we go back to Sianim.”

THREE

    Aralorn walked to the great hall, with Wolf ghosting beside her, once more in lupine form. When she’d told him he didn’t have to accompany her, he had merely given her a look and waited for her to open the door. When he wanted to, the man could say more with a look than most people managed with a whole speech.
    She’d searched through the clothing still in her closet, trying to find a long-sleeved dress that would cover the scars on her arms. The dresses were all in beautiful condition (many having never been worn), but the fashions of ten years ago had tight sleeves that she could no longer fit into thanks to a decade of weapons drills. She’d settled for a narrow-skirted, short-sleeved dress and ignored the scars.
    The room was crowded, and for a moment she didn’t recognize anyone there. Ten years had made changes. Some of the crowd were tenant farmers and gentry who held their manors in fief to her father; but from the number of very tall, blond people in the room, Aralorn thought most of them were her family, grown up now from the ragtag bunch of children she remembered.
    Wolf received some odd looks, but no one asked about him. It seemed that mercenaries would be allowed their