by Lynn Kurland
“Oh, there’s no need for that,” Acair said, then he shut his mouth around whatever other protestations he might have offered. The look Ehrne was giving him left him thinking that might be a very prudent thing to do.
“That is the price for the horse,” Ehrne said coldly.
If the ancient elf wanted to put it that way, Acair realized he had no choice but to watch as the pair set off, as the saying went, to the races.
There wasn’t a damned piece of mischief they didn’t examine at great length, tripping over themselves to top the other with things Acair had to admit he had definitely said and done. He did his best to ignore the endless list of his misdeeds that the king, his captain, and his steward, who had apparently dropped in to add a few things to the conversation, seemed determined to spew out.
It was a very long list.
It was a collection of things he was very familiar with, though, so he had little trouble ignoring it. Unfortunately, they didn’t limit themselves to simply that. They soon moved to a great whacking list of people he had done dirty, as his mother would have said. Mages, monarchs, maidens, mavens: there wasn’t a damned one of them they didn’t identify and have a wee chuckle over.
“Is it possible that there is anyone left for him to ply his black magic on, do you think, Surdail?”
“I daresay there might be, Your Majesty. The world is a very large place.”
“Large and uninteresting when it doesn’t find itself within our borders.”
“True, my liege. Very true.”
Acair wondered if breakfast might be forthcoming if he looked hungry enough. He had begun shifting a good half hour before, but he decided the time had come to perhaps make his position a bit more obvious. He yawned, stretched, then looked about himself purposefully for what he hoped might be a servant bearing a tray laden with fine edibles.
Ehrne glared at him. “Are you listening?”
“I grew bored,” he said, before he could stop himself. “In truth, I don’t believe I’ve heard anything but a great, bloviating bit of hot wind. Odd for this time of year, but there you have it.”
Ehrne spluttered, gestured when words seemed to fail him, then glared at his captain. “Throw that little whoreson in the dungeon.”
Acair looked at him in surprise. “I beg your pardon?”
“Aye, you’ll do that and more before I send you to your death. Surdail, put the woman there with him. Who knows who she truly is.”
“Not her,” Acair said immediately. “She knows nothing.” Good lord, elves. Such mercurial blowhards with absolutely no sense of humor. There was a reason he avoided Ainneamh so religiously. He would never make the mistake of misjudging that border again.
“She might be a black witch,” Ehrne said darkly.
Acair suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. “There are no such things,” he said, “and I would know, wouldn’t you think?”
Ehrne ignored him and looked pointedly at Surdail.
Acair held out his hands. “Not her,” he said quickly, trying not to sound as unnerved as he suddenly was. “Put her across the border and content yourself with just me. In truth, she knows nothing of me or my business—”
Ehrne shot him a look that Acair had to admit he would have admired in different circumstances. He shut his mouth because he wasn’t a fool. Saying anything else would get him nowhere. He could scarce believe how things had unraveled so quickly, but he had little trouble recognizing the feel of hands on his arms as he and Léirsinn were escorted away.
“My horse,” Léirsinn protested.
“He’ll be fine,” Acair managed. He didn’t dare hope as much for either of them, but Falaire at least would be well cared-for.
Damn that Soilléir of Cothromaiche. If he survived the next few hours, he would find him and repay him. It wasn’t possible that the man would be peering into the gloom, as it were, and see their rather dire straits, then come to rescue them, was it? Nay, he would have to see to things himself, as usual. He turned his attentions to memorizing the path to the dungeons. He would need it so he might retrace his steps when he managed to liberate himself and his companion.
A year with no magic. What had he been thinking?
If things didn’t change very soon, he wasn’t going to be thinking any longer because he was going to be dead.
He put that thought aside as something to think about later, then concentrated on making certain he could get them back out of where he most certainly didn’t want to go.
Thirteen
Of all the places she had ever thought she would find herself, Léirsinn had to admit a dungeon was the very last.
They had been escorted there politely, all things considered, though with a fair amount of suspicion. She thought that might have had to do with Acair. She couldn’t imagine it had had anything to do with her.
She currently sat on a stone bench that was as cold as she would have expected it to be and looked at the man sitting under the window who was not at all what she expected him to be.
She wasn’t sure what to think at the moment. She had listened to him plead for the life of her horse, volunteering to suffer what had sounded rather like the word anything if the king would heal Falaire, then listened further to a rather thorough and robust recounting of his past misdeeds. It had been a list that had made her hair stand on end.
Was it possible to drain the world of its magic?
Magic. She could hardly believe she was allowing the word to take up any sort of residence in her head. It was just too ridiculous a notion to take seriously. She supposed that if she repeated that often enough, she might be able to ignore all the things she had seen over the past pair of days, things that had left her wondering about the world in a way she never would have otherwise.
She started with the thing she had closest to hand, namely the man sitting across the dungeon from her. She studied him and tried to reconcile what she was seeing with what she’d heard about him. If she’d met him at a grand ball, she likely would have thought him terribly handsome but too important for someone as simple as herself. If she had encountered him first in a barn, she would have thought him impossibly easy on the eye but absolutely useless with a pitchfork.
She paused and considered that. Perhaps he’d never had to use a pitchfork before. If he possessed unusual means to see to his business, then he certainly wouldn’t have had to do any sort of manual labor. Indeed, it was possible he didn’t know how to do any manual labor.
She realized with a start that he was watching her. She wondered briefly if she should be afraid of him, but hard on the heels of that came the memory of how far he’d been willing to go to save her horse.
Evil men didn’t do that, she didn’t think.
“This was not in my plans,” he said. “On the off chance you were wondering if this was part of our grand tour of the Nine Kingdoms.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, squinting up at the weeping ceiling. “I imagine there are worse places.”
“There are.”
She looked at him then. “And you would know?”
“I would know.”
She nodded, because she wasn’t quite sure what to say. She was in a dungeon, which was unusual, and she was there with a man who had reputedly made so much mischief over the years that kings and guard captains had an apparently inexhaustible supply of items to discuss, which was also unusual. Her life had become, she had to admit, very strange.
She thought it might have all started when her horse had sprouted wings.
Nay, it had been before that. It might have been the first time she’d seen Acair attempting to muck out a stall while Falaire had been eyeing him as a potential morsel to enjoy before supper. In truth, she wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t at some point before that occasion wished for a new direction in her life.
She would have to remind herself to av
oid that sort of wishing in the future.
She returned to her study of the man sitting several paces away from her. He didn’t look evil. He looked rather tired, actually, and as if he would rather have been sitting in a sunny spot, having a bit of breakfast and offering to pour her some tea. Him, a black mage? Even if she’d believed in magic, which she most assuredly did not, she wouldn’t have believed that of him.
Perhaps King Ehrne and his cohorts were simply having a bit of sport at his expense. What did she know of great men and their ways save how rude they could be to those they thought were their inferiors?
She looked about herself, desperate for a distraction. She’d had faery tales read to her as a child, of course, a cherished memory from her time with her parents. Either her mother or her father had read to her every night, then she’d listened to them continue the tradition with her younger sister, even past the point where she’d been too old for the same. She had never argued and they had seemingly taken great pleasure in handling one of the trio of books they had owned.
Dungeons had of course tended to figure prominently in Heroic tales and she had spent many an hour in delicious terror over the thought of just how awful they must be. The dungeons, not the Heroes. She thought the reality was less horrifying and more musty-smelling, but that was just her opinion.
“Where are we?” she asked absently.
“The Kingdom of Ainneamh.”
She looked back at him. “And what do they do here?”
“They talk a great deal,” he said, then he shrugged. “They’re elves. They go about sparkling and glittering and generally leaving everyone who encounters them wishing they were very far away.”
“Elves,” she repeated with a smile. “Of course.”
He leaned his elbows on his knees and folded his hands together. “Don’t believe in them either?”
“Of course not,” she said, but she couldn’t manage it with her customary snort of derision.
Her world was shifting underneath her and she didn’t like it at all. Things she had fully believed to be a certain way had become things she was being forced to consider might be another way entirely. And it was becoming increasingly hard to deny what she was seeing.
The king of the, er, elves had put his hands on her horse, spoken a few words under his breath, and Falaire had leapt to his feet, completely whole and sound. That had been odd in itself, but there was more. Those men, the king and his men, didn’t look like average blokes. The more she thought about it, the more she realized they had been frighteningly beautiful, as if they had stepped out of a dream that she thought she might be able to remember with enough effort.
She looked at Acair and wondered if what they had said about him was true as well. He didn’t look evil, but he didn’t look harmless either. In truth, he had a bit of that elvish look about him, though perhaps not so unearthly as the men who had escorted them rather politely into the dungeon.
She was accustomed to the powerful men who came to Fuadain’s stables to purchase the best horses in the barn, so she didn’t find herself particularly intimidated by Acair’s mien or his looks. But if he had magic . . .
He had told her he was a mage, hadn’t he? He’d also told her that he never lied. If he were telling the truth, then that meant that there were things in the world that existed beyond her imagination.
Magic.
Power.
Mischief of a dangerous and unwholesome sort.
“Léirsinn?”
She took a deep breath. “I’m thinking about things I haven’t thought about before.”
He smiled gravely. “The world is very large and full of unusual things.”
“And you would know.”
“I would.”
She rubbed her arms. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I am—unwillingly, I might add—silenced about my identity by the threat of a spell of death. Not that you would have believed me anyway.”
“I wouldn’t have,” she agreed. “I didn’t, if you’ll remember, when you tried to slip that sort of ridiculousness into polite conversation. But a spell of death?” She tried to smile, but she feared she was less successful at it than she might have liked. “Really.”
He pointed to a shadow in the corner.
There was certainly something there, but it didn’t look terribly intimidating. She rose and started toward it. Acair held out his hand to stop her.
“Don’t,” he warned. “The man who fashioned it is not one you would want to tangle with and his spells are a reflection of that, to be sure.”
“Soilléir?”
“The very same.”
“Is he so powerful then?” She looked down at him. “You realize that deep down I still think this is all rubbish, don’t you?”
“I know.”
She looked at him and tried not to be dazzled by the fairness of his face. She couldn’t help but wonder how many of his victims—alleged victims, rather—had simply agreed to whatever he wanted so he would favor them with one of those smiles.
She frowned, then avoided his hand and walked over to where there was definitely a shadow of something slouching in the corner. It did shift a little as she approached, which startled her. She gave it a stern look, which seemed to intimidate it into shrinking back from her. It folded itself into itself, then slid down to land in a tidy heap on the floor.
She almost joined it there.
“Ah,” she managed, “I think I’ll resume my seat.”
“Very wise,” Acair said.
She walked back to where she’d come from, then turned and sat down heavily. When had the damned place become so terribly cold?
“Who are you?” Her voice broke on the last word, but she didn’t imagine Acair would care. She felt cold and frightened and very, very lost. “In truth.”
He rose, took off his cloak, then walked across the dungeon and draped that cloak around her. He hesitated.
“I could sit next to you,” he offered. “Warmer that way, if the thought isn’t utterly repulsive.”
She studied him for a moment or two. “Not very good at the chivalry thing, are you?”
He sighed. “My manners are generally much better than this, no thanks to my mother. Blame her for their occasional lack and my father for my terrible arrogance and evil intentions. But given that I’m not completely without the odd, redeeming moment of pleasantness, I’ll sit next to you and keep you warm.”
“Fair enough.” She patted the spot next to her and found that she wasn’t unhappy for a bit of company. She considered for a moment or two, then looked at him. “Will they hurt my horse? You know, after they put us to death.”
“They won’t put us to death,” he said with a snort. “Ehrne will bluster about it, but he won’t actually do anything. At the very least I’ll see that you are set safely across the border. Once you’re there, go east to Lake Cladach. Seek out Prince Sgath and tell him what madness Ehrne is about. He’ll fetch your horse for you.” He looked at her. “He is my father’s father, but I’m not sure you should give him my name as a character, if you know what I mean. He is a good man, though.”
She felt her mouth become suddenly quite dry. “And you?” she asked. “What will they do with you?”
He pursed his lips. “Absolutely nothing.” He nodded toward the spell in the corner. “I am examining that beast there for flaws even as we speak. When Ehrne sends men to come fetch me, he will find them returning empty-handed . . . or not at all.” He looked at her seriously. “I don’t fancy ending my life here.”
She considered what troubled her most for rather a long time before she managed to look at him. “Is what the king said about you true?”
“Well—”
“Don’t you think that since I already heard a lifetime’s worth of your achievements upstairs, that thing over there won�
�t mind if you fill in the bits the lads upstairs missed?”
Acair looked at the spell folded neatly in the corner, then looked at her. He shifted a little on the stone, but not farther away, which surprised her. She didn’t argue. She was freezing and miserable and even rusty chivalry was very welcome.
“What the king said about me was true,” he said with a sigh.
“And those other two, er—”
“Elves,” he supplied.
She shook her head. “I refuse to believe it, but go on. Don’t forget what those other two said.”
He slid her a sideways look. “You don’t have anything approaching the proper respect for my terrible reputation.”
“You saved my horse, not once but twice. How bad can you be?”
“I’m worse,” he said, “something of which I was extremely proud in the past.”
“I don’t think you sound any worse than your average rich man’s spoiled son,” she said. “Ever lusting after power and gold.”
He sighed. “You weren’t listening very carefully, something for which I find myself surprisingly grateful.”
Actually, she had listened quite carefully, openmouthed and absolutely stunned at what she was hearing. If the king of the, ah, elves was to be believed, Acair had been cutting a swath across the Nine Kingdoms for decades, leaving behind in his wake destruction, the thefts of priceless treasures, and an ever-growing collection of important people who wanted him dead.
“How old are you?”
He looked at her in surprise. “After all you’ve heard, that’s what you want to know?”
“You don’t look any older than I am, but I’m rather old at almost score and ten. I was going to be impressed that you had squeezed so much bad behavior into so few years.”
“I’m a pair of years shy of a century,” he said grimly. “Very old indeed.”