Free Wolfsbane by Patricia Briggs Page B

full-grown man. Except for the metal hilt, it could have been newly forged—but no one made swords with metal grips anymore. After the Wizard Wars, when most of the mages were dead, metal hilts hadn’t been much of a problem. Being connected to a dying magician by metal was a very bad idea. Now hilts were made of wood or bone, and had been for the past few centuries as the mageborn slowly became more numerous again.
    The metal hilt hadn’t worried Aralorn when she’d chosen it from the armory before she’d left Lambshold. She’d always been able to tell mageborn from mundane. The sword had been the right size and well balanced, so she’d taken it. For years, she’d carried it, never realizing that she held anything other than an odd-colored, undersized sword fit for an undersized fighter.
    She approached the bench and examined it thoughtfully.
    “It won’t attack back,” said Wolf, apparently amused at her caution. “You can just hit it.”
    She gave him a nasty look. She always felt awkward with the blasted weapon even though years of practice had made her almost competent. The recent change in their relationship had made her, to her surprise, a bit shy around him. She wanted to impress him, not remind him just how poor a swordswoman she was.
    Experimentally, she swung the sword at the bench. It bounced off as if propelled, the force of it almost making Aralorn lose her grip. Shifting her stance, Aralorn tried simply setting the sword against the warding. The repelling force was still there, but by locking her forearms and leaning into the sword, she managed to keep it touching the spell. She held it there for a while, before she gave up and let the sword fall away.
    “You need to follow through better,” said Wolf with such earnestness that she knew he was teasing.
    Aralorn turned and braced both hands on her hips and glared at him, but not seriously. “If I required your opinion, I’d give you over to my father’s Questioner and be done with it.”
    He raised his eyebrows innocently. “I was only trying to help.”
    She snorted and spun, delivering a blow to the bench that should have reduced it to kindling, but it did no damage at all.
    “I don’t think it works this way,” she said. “It’s not heating up at all, and when I used it on the ae’Magi, it was so hot I couldn’t hold it.”
    “All right,” said Wolf. “Let’s try this. I’ll try to work a spell on you while you hold the sword up between us.”
    Aralorn frowned. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you being a little rash? If that’s why it killed your father, then it could do the same to you.”
    He didn’t say anything.
    She had a sudden remembrance of the look on his face as he’d called lightning down upon himself in her dream. It was only a dream, she told herself fiercely.
    “Plague take you, Wolf,” she said as mildly as she could. “It’s not important enough to risk your life over. If it won’t work on the spells, it can’t help us here.”
    “It might work against the shadow-thing we both saw,” he said. “Then perhaps you and I could examine the spells holding your father more closely.”
    “Fine,” she said. “Then we’ll try it on that. Do you want to go down now?
    Wolf shook his head. “Wait until morning. There are a lot of creatures who are weakened by the rising of the sun—and I’m tired.”
    Aralorn nodded and slid Ambris back into the sheath before storing her in the wardrobe. She watched Wolf release the spells he’d laid on the bench, creating quite a light show in the process. Reaching out with the sixth sense that allowed her to find and work magic, she could feel the shifting forces but not touch them—what he was using was wholly human in origin.
    Later, when the banked fire was the only light in the room, Aralorn snuggled deeper into Wolf’s arms.
    It will be all right, she thought fiercely.

    Late in the night, long after the inhabitants of the castle had gone to sleep, a man