She bowed, as if accepting his praise.

He laughed softly. “Irrenna will probably be sending something up for lunch, in case you don’t want to eat with the crowd that will be gathering shortly in the great hall. I’ll see that someone carries hot water up here as well.”

“Falhart,” said Aralorn, as he started to turn away. “Thank you.”

He grinned and flipped her a studied gesture of acknowledgment (general to sublieutenant or lower), then strode lightly down the hall.

Aralorn stepped into the room and, with a grand sweep of her arm, invited Wolf to follow. As she closed the door, she glanced around the bedchamber and saw that Falhart was closer to the mark than she’d expected. Her room wasn’t exactly as she’d left it—the coverlet was drawn neatly across the bed, and the hearth rug was new—but it was obvious that it had been left largely as it had been the last time she’d slept here. Given the size of Lambshold and the number of people in her family, it was quite a statement.

“So,” commented the distinctive gravel-on-velvet voice that was Wolf’s legacy from the night he destroyed a tower of the ae’Magi’s keep, “tell me. Why haven’t you come here in ten years?”

Aralorn turned to find that Wolf had assumed his human shape. He was taller than average, though not as tall as Falhart. There was some of the wolf’s leanness to his natural form, but his identity was more apparent in the balanced power of his movements. He was dressed in black silk and linen, a color he affected because it was one his father had not worn. His yellow eyes were a startling contrast to the silver player’s mask he wore over his scarred face.

It wasn’t actually a player’s mask, of course: No acting troupe would have used a material as costly as silver. The finely wrought lips on its exaggerated, elegant features were curled into a grimace of rage. She frowned; the mask was a bad sign.