Read Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic for Free Online

scared . . . I don’t want to lose you.”
    “I never did like bugs,” he rumbled, and pulled the blanket up to cover them both.
    She laughed softly, putting aside the memory of that fear, and said, “Then we’ve come to the wrong inn.”
    He was too weary and still in too much pain to feel much desire for her, but it was good only to lie together, to feel the warmth of that long bony body at his side, to hear her cool voice and see the faint shape of her delicate, broken nose outlined in the darkness.
    At length she asked him, “You going to kill that wizard in Vorsal?”
    Trust the Hawk,
    
     he thought, and sighed heavily. The question had been cruising, sharklike, beneath the surface of his own thoughts for hours. “I don’t know.”
    “You help the folks who are trying to sack his town and skrag his family and friends, I doubt he’ll feel like teaching you much, you know.” He could feel the steel in her light voice, like a finely made dagger flexing, and wished sometimes she wouldn’t put her finger so unerringly on his own thoughts.
    “I didn’t say I was going to help them.”
    “It’s what Ari’s asking,” she pointed out. “For you to use your magic to help them take the town.”
    “No,” he said quietly. “They’re asking my help against a wizard, and against a wizard’s curse. That’s different.”
    “You feel up to explaining the difference to them when you get there? Or to him?”
    She paused, turning her head sharply at the sound of a swift patter of footsteps on the gallery outside the door; then relaxed as a child’s treble voice whispered urgently, “Niddy, come back here!” There was the happy giggle of a toddler, and Starhawk smiled in spite of herself, as an older child evidently caught up with its wayward sibling and hustled it, unwillingly, up several flights of creaking backstairs to the attic once again. Earlier the Wolf had seen them scurry past the door of his room, two little towheads in the clumsy white linsey-woolsey smocks of peasant children, and had heard their mother scolding them to stay away from the common room and the guests.
    And well she should, he’d reflected. Dogbreath and Firecat looked as if they’d split a baby between them for supper and feed the scraps to the pigs.
    Her voice soft in the darkness, Starhawk went on, “The boys aren’t going to see it that way, Chief. They’re my friends, yeah—I’d say my brothers, if my brothers weren’t . . . Well, anyhow. But in the past year I’ve been friends with the people who live in the towns we used to sack. That’s something you can’t think about if you’re a merc—and maybe that’s why mercs only hang around with other mercs. When you torch a house, you can’t explain to the woman whose kids are trapped upstairs while she’s being raped in the yard by six of your buddies that this is just your job. You do what you think best, Chief, and you know, when you finally make it to the bottommost pit of Hell, I’ll be there at your side, but I gave up war. I’m not going back.”
    “I wouldn’t ask you to,” he said softly. Then, in a burst of honesty, “Well, not unless I was in trouble real bad,” and she chuckled softly, a faint vibration through the bones of his chest that stirred in him an odd, passionate tenderness. She lay on his blind left side; he had to turn his head to look down into her face. “And I need a teacher. You remember those hotshot kids who used to come to the school at Wrynde, the ones who seemed as if they’d been born with a sword in their hands. Those are the dangerous ones, the ones who leave a trail of dead and maimed until they learn what they’re doing—learn when to keep the sword sheathed.
    “I’m like that, Hawk. It isn’t just that I want it, need it—need someone to show me what this magic is. Most mageborn get some kind of teaching before the Trial brings on their full power. I have power and, by all my ancestors, I saw in Wenshar what