LEGALLY BINDING

Chapter Ten

*bounces* Look! An update! I finally got my problems sorted! Thanks very much for all your kind reviews so far…

"It reminds me of the paintings my mother showed me when we was all cubs," he said, turning the thin pages carefully in his huge clawed hands. "Of the Old Days. Pictures of battles that pack alphas fought. Sorry, Sy."

The elf, at the mention of any combat-related word, had set up a shuddering as violent as if he was sick with fever. Kiannon raised one open palm, wreathed in golden mage-fire, and gestured warningly. Sy subsided and returned to rocking on his heels and muttering.

Alessa took the book back from the werewolf and tucked it into her cloak. "I shouldn't have kept it," she said. "Since the Temple - well, since the novices were disbanded, this book should have gone back to the Library with all the others."

"Stop. Go back," said Kiannon sharply. "They've disbanded the Temple's novices?"

Alessa stared at him coldly. "Years ago," she said. "Where have you been, mage? Under a rock?"

"I thought we were only there for a few weeks..."

Kiannon was pacing again. Sy watched with luminous eyes, his inhuman sight tracking the curls of ugly magenta fury pouring from the mage like smoke. One Nine was a blue oasis of calm, his fur and finger-tips brindled with silver light as he tried (unsuccessfully) to calm Kiannon down. Alessa was bathed in red as she fought to control her own anger at the mage's reaction.

When you're a special sort of elf, like Sy, something as simple as watching people having a conversation could become a polychromatic piece of art. It was almost enough to distract him from the memories that he could not fully recall and the bellows of the beast in his mind. He chirruped to himself, happily, beginning to cheer up as he watched Kiannon's fury deepen to black with gold flecks in it.

"Six years?!"

Scraps of litter incinerated at the mage's feet as he paced, and One Nine winced. "That damn dragon's been dead six years? How did they do it? How did they keep me from knowing?"

"Kiannon, we've all been fooled somehow." One Nine's rough voice was regretful. Six years? That was a long time in the life of a wolf-pack. It seemed barely possible. He had watched the waxing and waning moon himself from the hospital’s windows, and the knowledge that he was still connected to the lunar cycle had been a comfort to him – but now it seemed it had all been a cruel deception. He'd been intending to return home after three years in the city, maybe challenge his sister for pack leadership, have cubs of his own...but six years? He was practically a senior. None of the she-wolves would take him seriously as a mate. "Let it go. I don't want to think about that place, with the pain and the drugs that made me sick to my stomach. It's over."

"Oh, no," came the response, and both Alessa and the werewolf winced this time as Kiannon's hands abruptly flared like a lit strip of magnesium, blinding and white. "This is not over. You, what's-your-name, tell me what I've missed while I've been under my rock."

Alessa, her mouth open slightly in disgust at his arrogance, almost made a comment she might well have regretted very much - but One Nine gripped her arm gently and wordlessly shook his head.

"When the dragon died," she began, "Kiannon, you were a hero..."

"...defeated by our very own legal necromancer Meru Kiannon, who is sadly in hospital suffering from wounds inflicted during the battle..."

Alessa and two of the other novices turned away from the announcer at the town hall, bored with hearing it.

"Wasn't Kiannon one of your marks, Alessa?"

"Shut up."

"I heard," said Simona, archly, "that you couldn't kill him because he was so handsome. That you were so enamoured of him you fumbled the mark."

"The agents of the Un-Goddess are always handsome," said Maria, darkly. Alessa and Simona exchanged half-amused, half-annoyed glances. Maria was one of the most devout novices at the Temple, and had been known to harbour odd ideas about the Un-Goddess and her many minions, including necromancers and the like.

"It's not important, and it's not true anyway," said Alessa crossly. "He cast a spell on me. That's why I couldn't kill him."