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Aralorn: Masques and Wolfsban

To the lovely people who’ve made the journey with the Arabian horses so much fun: Brenda, who was there at the beginning; terrific travel companions Ed and Adriana; Alice, Bill, and Joan of Rieckman’s Arabians, who made the trek before I did and tendered useful advice along the way; Dolly, Doug, and Peggy at Orrion Farms, who provided a jump start and guidance; Deb, Kim, and Portia at High Country Training for turning my ponies into good citizens; Robert and Dixie North, who love the horses as much as I do; and Nahero, my big Arab gelding, who has been my companion these twenty-eight years. But mostly to my very patient husband, who is particularly gifted at making dreams come true.

PROLOGUE

The fae lord stalked back and forth in his cell of gray stone. Three steps, turn, four steps, turn, three steps. He could do it all day. Had, in fact, done it for two weeks.

His boots were soft and he made no sound as he paced. Sound distracted him unduly from his purpose—which was to bore himself to the point where he no longer thought about anything.

His clothes, like his boots, were practical, but still representative of his position as High Court Lord—though he no longer remembered much about that part of his life. Even so, his long red hair was confined in a complicated series of braids that trailed on the floor behind him, a court fashion of at least a millennium ago. Doubtless if there were still courts, still High Courts, he would be considered out of fashion entirely.

He’d worn High Court dress for the first week he was here, but there was no one to impress, so he’d left them off and exchanged them for the more comfortable clothing. He could have put on jeans, he supposed, but he was losing that long-ago lord a day at a time, and the clothes served as a reminder of what he had once been—though some days, some years, he could not remember why it was that remembering what he had once been was so important.