That was a surprise. “You said you’ve known the others your whole life.”
“I did say that.”
I sat in the chair and slid my hand across the table to a small wooden figurine that had tipped over. It was a crudely carved toy pony. Something made me lift it to my nose. Smoke and resin and something particular touched my nostrils. Familiarity, comfort. Dorian’s scent.
Faint, but unmistakable.
This really had been his home. Perhaps this had been his toy. With the pony in my hand, my thumb rubbing over it, my shaking began to slow. My heart didn’t beat so hard. It reminded me of a toy horse my almost-father had once whittled for me, though mine had been far cruder. This was smooth, sanded, crafted by a skilled hand.
I wondered whose hands had crafted his. I wondered if they’d sometimes loved Dorian in the way Aldric had sometimes loved me. Occasionally, like the afternoon rains skipping a day.
I set the pony aside on the table while Dorian rummaged through a dresser with one drawer intact. He extricated a piece of folded cloth and allowed it to unroll with a flap of his hands.
“This’ll do for a night.”
A night. A whole night here.
“The Hunt will come back here,” I said. “Won’t they?”
“Yes.” Dorian dropped the blanket onto the mattress. “Not tonight, but they will return.”
I leaned forward. “Something stopped them, Dorian. What was it?”
“This place. It’s magicked to mask scent at night.”
Scent? At night?
He pressed his hair back from his face. “But we’ll at least have until morning.”
Here was another dimension of magic I didn’t understand. A thing could be magicked. That sounded permanent, or at least more enduring than Dorian snapping his fingers to create a spark.
My mind turned toward the more pressing issue.
In the Kingdom of Storms, each district had a minstrel who sang songs in various pubs. Our minstrel had sometimes sung of great hunts in ancient times, of dogs and foxes and men who rode horses in pursuit of the foxes. At the start of the hunt, the dogs always circled, sniffing the ground, seeking?—
“The wolves,” I said. “They have our scent now.”
Dorian avoided my eyes. He busied himself with unslinging his belt. “That was inevitable. They had our scent the moment the trial began.”
How could that be? Unless… “It isn’t our bodies they scent.”
Dorian jerked toward me, surprise cracking his guarded face. “And how would you know that?”
“It’s just a suspicion.”
He shook his head and set his belt and sword on the dresser. Then he unclasped his cloak and tossed it onto the mattress. “Well, you’re right.”
“What is it they smell, then?”
Still turned away from me, he raked his hands through his sweaty hair. I tried not to stare at the curve of his back and failed. “Fear,” he said.
My gaze moved from his shoulders to the back of his head. “What do you mean, fear?”
He turned only his face toward me, his profile sharp in the dim light. “The wolves scent our fear.”
That waswhy Dorian had asked me to think of a happy memory. Not comfort, camouflage. He hadn’t wanted the wolves to scent fear.
"It was my fault," I said. "I couldn’t think of anything happy."
