Masques by Patricia Briggs

settled into stride, only occasionally breaking gait to bounce over an obstacle in his way.
    As evening wore on, the light began to fade, and Aralorn slowed him into a walk. In full dark, his eyesight was better than hers, but in the twilight, he couldn’t see the rocks and roots hidden by shadows. They had a few miles before the sun went down completely, then they could pick up the pace again.
    Being unable to see clearly made the seasoned campaigner nervous, and he began to snort and dance at every sound. There was a sudden burst of magic nearby—she didn’t have time to locate it because that was the last straw for Sheen, who plunged off the trail and down the steep, tree-covered side of the mountain.
    She sank her butt into the saddle and stayed with him as he dodged trees and leapt over brush. “Just you behave, you old worrywart, you. It’s all right. Nothing’s going to get us but ghosts and ghoulies and other nice things that feed on stupid people who ride in the woods after dark.”
    The dark mountainside was too treacherous to allow her to pull him up hard, especially at the pace he was going, so she crooned to him and bumped him lightly with the reins—a request rather than an order.
    He sank back on his haunches to slide down a steep bit instead of charging down it, and stopped when the ground leveled some. He took advantage of the loose rein to snatch a bit of grass as if he hadn’t been snorting and charging a minute before.
    Aralorn stretched and looked around to catch her bearings. As she did so, she heard something, a murmur that she just barely caught. Sheen’s ears twitched toward the sound as well. Following the direction of the stallion’s ears, she moved him toward the sound. When she could pick up the direction herself, she dismounted and dropped his reins.
    She crept closer, moving as slowly as she could so as not to make any noise. Several yards from Sheen, she picked up the smell of a campfire and the residue of magic—it tasted flat and dull: magic shaped by human hands despite the nearness of the Northlands. Probably the remnant of the spell that had startled Sheen into charging down the hill, toward danger, just as any good warhorse would have done.
    She followed the sound of men’s voices and the smell of smoke through a thicket of bushes—she had to use a tendril of magic to keep quiet going through that—and around a huge boulder that had tumbled down from a cliff above. Peeking around the side of the boulder, she saw a cave mouth, the walls of the entrance reflecting light from a fire deeper inside.
    The voices were louder, but still too far away to be distinguishable.
    The wonderful thing about mice, Aralorn reflected as she shifted forms, was that they were everywhere and never looked out of place. A mouse was the first shape she’d ever managed—and she’d since worked hard on a dozen different varieties and their nearest kin. Shrew, vole, field mouse, she could manage any of them. The medium-sized northern-type mouse was just the right mouse to look perfectly at home as she scampered into the cave.
    Two men stood by a large pile of goods that ranged from swords to flour, but consisted mainly of tarps and furs. The scent of fear drifted clearly to her rodent-sharp nose from the more massive (at least in bulk) man as he cowered away from the other. He bore the ornate facial tattooing of the merchant’s guild of Hernal, a larger city of Ynstrah, a country that lay several weeks’ travel to the south on the west side of the Anthran Alliance. He was wearing nothing but a nightshirt.
    The second man had his back to her. He was tall and slender, but something about the way he moved told her that this man knew how to fight. He wore a hooded cloak that flickered red and gold in the light. Underneath the hood of the cloak he wore a smoothly wrought silver mask in the shape of a stylized face.
    Traveling players used such masks when they acted out skits, allowing one player to take