by Lynn Kurland
“Don’t.”
She had supposed that had been directed at her, but once she regained her footing and caught the breath she’d lost in a terrified rush, she realized she was holding on to Mansourah’s forearm and Acair was definitely not talking to her.
“I believe—”
“That you won’t live till sunrise if you don’t compliment this stunning woman on her gown, then take yourself off to the safety of a seat behind your brother the king? A quite useful thought, I daresay, and one I suggest you pursue with all diligence.”
Léirsinn gingerly released Mansourah’s arm and eased backward a step. If there was one thing she knew very well, it was never to step between two stallions in the midst of the usual business of asserting their positions. She smiled briefly at Mansourah, noting his very elegant suit of clothes, then looked at the man who had absolutely no business mucking out stalls to earn his bread. Acair of Ceangail was, she had to admit in a way that left her feeling as if she’d never done anything more substantial in her life besides admire handsome men, absolutely stunning.
It was no wonder he spent so much time hobnobbing with nobility. If she’d had a crown hiding in the back of her tack room, she would have issued him a standing invitation to supper herself.
He reached for her hand and tucked it under his elbow in his accustomed way, then looked at Mansourah and flicked at him as if he’d been an annoying fly.
“Begone. Live another day.”
Mansourah only pursed his lips. “You, my friend, have absolutely nothing to use to enforce your threats.”
“I won’t embarrass your brother by breaking your nose before supper with my fists alone,” Acair said shortly.
Mansourah looked at him, smirked briefly, then turned to Léirsinn and made her a low bow. “A dance later, if milady would be so inclined. Thank you for a lovely afternoon. And you are stunning in that gown.”
Léirsinn caught the look Acair sent Mansourah and would have smiled but there was something about him that was . . . changed. She waited until the prince of Neroche had departed for safer ground before she turned to another lad with royal blood in his veins and studied him.
“What happened?” she asked bluntly.
He smiled, but it was the sort of polite smile she’d watched him give to others without truly meaning it. “Nothing.”
“You don’t lie.”
He blew hair out of his eyes. “Please don’t ask.”
“Did you see Prince Soilléir?”
“Aye.”
She looked behind him to find the spell that followed him standing there, obviously still following him. She met Acair’s eyes quickly. “Oh.”
He took a deep breath, turned toward her, then put his hands lightly on her shoulders. He very carefully leaned forward and rested his forehead against hers.
“You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
She would have smiled, but she could feel his hands trembling as they rested on her shoulders. “I’m sure that isn’t the case, but I appreciate the compliment just the same.” She reached up and covered his hands with hers. “What can I do?”
“Stop being kind to me before you drive me to tears.”
“Put the whip to you instead, is that it?”
“If you have any pity in you at all, aye.” He straightened and smiled, but he wasn’t entirely successful. “If you would.”
She supposed he would tell her what had befallen him earlier or he wouldn’t. She wasn’t going to force it out of him. She released his hands, then reached out and brushed a few stray bangs out of his eyes before she thought better of it. He caught her hand before she pulled away.
“Thank you.”
“You look a little scattered.”
He tucked her hand under his elbow again and nodded at the page to carry on before he looked at her. “My sister did me the honor of turning me into a bitter wind on our way back. I’m still feeling the effects of it.”
“Pleasant?”
“Today, I’m not sure,” he said quietly. “I’ll let you know later.”
She had the feeling that was the last thing he would do, which meant he intended to leave her behind, which meant she was going to have to watch him very closely before he slipped out without her. She looked at him pointedly.
“Don’t go without me.”
“And why would I do that?” he asked. “The most beautiful woman in the hall on my arm and an evening stretching ahead of me in which to admire her? You must be mad. I have no intention of going anywhere but to table with you, then spending the evening begging you to dance with me.”
Which wasn’t, as she was well aware, any sort of answer or promise.
She didn’t suppose she could have expected anything else.
• • •
She remembered very little of supper save that she thought she might just have to thank Acair of Ceangail for his very lovely manners and his ability to discreetly indicate which fork should be used when without drawing attention to the same. What she ate she couldn’t have said, but she was confident she’d eaten it with the right piece of silverware.
The dancing was planned for what she understood was the grand audience chamber. She walked into the place and felt as if she were walking into a dream. The floor was made of some blue stone that looked as if it still lay in the bed of a river with water flowing over it, the walls were hung with tapestries finer than anything she’d ever imagined, and she was fairly certain she couldn’t see the ceiling. Behind the lord’s high table was an enormous hearth and over that hearth hung two swords, crossed. She knew nothing about blades save what Mansourah had taught her that morning, but she wondered about that steel there.
She wasn’t able to wonder about it for more than a moment or two before she realized Prince Cathar was asking her for a dance.
“I only know two patterns,” she warned him.
“That’s one more than I know,” he said gallantly. “I’ll attempt not to embarrass you. I don’t know where Mansourah collected all these guests, but tell me if they bother you overmuch. I know the fastest way to the kitchen.”
“I’ll remember that,” she managed. “Thank you.”
And that was, quite honestly, the last bit of conversation she had with anyone past commenting on the weather, the refreshments, and the quality of the players. A good hour passed before she managed to plead weariness and escape to the high table and hide behind Miach who was leaning there, chatting up some well-dressed nobleman. She accepted the glass of wine he handed her, drank, then wished for somewhere more permanent to hide. She set her glass down on the table, turned, then ran bodily into Acair.
He held out his hand to steady her, then made her a low bow. “If you’ll permit me?”
She looked at him blankly. “To do what?”
“Claim this dance.”
“I only know two patterns,” she warned him as she had Cathar. “I might embarrass you.”
“I only know three.”
She smiled in spite of herself. “You’re lying.”
“But ’tis a white lie,” he said seriously. “I don’t think they count.”
She wasn’t about to offer an opinion on that, so she accepted his hand and walked with him out to the middle of the floor. They had been seated together at supper, but she hadn’t seen him once they’d adjourned to the great hall for the entertainments. Perhaps he’d been off brooding somewhere or picking locks on the king’s private chambers or stirring up some other sort of trouble. With Acair, one just never knew.
What she did know, however, was that when he had said he danced divinely, he hadn’t been exaggerating. It was no wonder he managed to get in high places so easily. Whether he managed to get back out of them as easily was perhaps debatable, but she suspected he didn’t have much trouble with it.
She had no idea how long she danced
with him. All she knew was that when he invited her to take a bit of air by way of the stables, she didn’t argue. Finery, lovely music, and decent food were all very good things, but she suspected that if she ever had to exist on a steady diet of the three, she would need to season them liberally with an equal amount of time in the stables. It was no wonder Morgan spent so much time in the lists.
“My shoes,” she managed as they walked through the kitchens. “Mistress Wardrobe will scold me if I get them dirty.”
“They keep extra boots by the back door.”
She looked at him in surprise. “How do you know that?”
“Miach’s mother kicked me in the arse with a pair of them,” he said with a weary smile. “Then she made me polish the manure off the bloody lot of them—and there were many pairs—then put them all back where they’d come from. Your kind of woman, that Queen Desdhemar.”
Léirsinn supposed that might be the case, accepted a pair of boots in exchange for her shoes, then happily walked through the gardens and to the stables with a man who seemed to know where he was going.
Falaire was quietly dozing in his stall and Sianach celebrated Acair’s arrival by trying to reach out his stall window and bite him.
“And all is right with the world,” Acair said with a sigh. “Bad horse.”
She supposed Sianach would take that personally, but perhaps that was an observation better made at a different time. She held up her skirts with one hand, held Acair’s hand with the other, then walked out with him into the courtyard. The moon was waxing toward full, which she appreciated, and there were torches lit that made the pathways easily marked.
It also revealed that they weren’t alone.
If she’d been able to do something besides try to keep from tripping on her gown as she was yanked behind her escort, she might have found words to comment on the handiness of being able to see where she was hopping. When Acair snarled at her to run, she thought she might have to find Miach’s gardener and apologize for the plants she was currently trampling in her haste to do just that.
She stopped after a pace or two because she wasn’t about to run away, no matter what Acair had told her to do. She turned around to watch him catch a rapier that Rigaud had flung at him.
“You have no spells,” Rigaud spat, “so I’ll kill you in a more gentlemanlike way.”
“You might try,” Acair said, looking at the sword casually. He leveled a very cool look at Miach’s brother. “I imagine you won’t succeed.”
Léirsinn wondered if she would have time to run back to the hall and fetch help before something dire happened, but couldn’t force herself to move. She was trapped by her fear of what might befall Acair, a fear that left her standing in the midst of brittle leaves and the last of autumn’s flowers.
In time, she realized that the middle of a battlefield wasn’t a wise place to be. Before she could decide which way she should bolt, Acair lost his sword. She had to admit that Prince Rigaud looked as surprised as Acair over that turn of events, but he wasted no time in weaving a spell that gave her chills just to listen to it. She had no idea what language the prince was using; she only knew that the magic was not of a pleasant sort.
Rigaud continued to weave his spell slowly and distinctly, no doubt so Acair would know exactly what was coming his way. It seemed as if he were creating a blanket meant to smother a fire. She suspected it was intended to smother Acair’s ability to breathe, but what did she know? She could do nothing but stand there and watch Rigaud draw himself up, then step forward, no doubt to intimidate a bit more as he flung his spell toward his enemy.
Unfortunately, he caught his foot in a bit of garden foliage. She would have considered that a fortuitous turn of events except that what he had been directing at Acair had gone off course and was currently coming her way. Acair leapt toward her, though she wasn’t sure what he thought he was going to accomplish by that. She took a step backward, trying to find her footing beneath her, but then she realized what she had stepped into.
A spot of shadow.
Time slowed to a crawl and her heart seemed to slow right along with it. She tried to hold up her hands to ward off that spell coming toward her or reach for Acair’s hands he was holding out to her to pull her out of the way, but she found she could do neither. All she could do was stand there, motionless, and try to keep breathing. Her astonishment at what was happening to her was so great, she wasn’t sure she would manage that last bit for very long.
She could see. It was as if until that exact moment she had lived her entire life in a chamber with nothing in it. No windows, no paintings, nothing on the floor, nothing but bland, colorless wood. All of that had disappeared, leaving her standing in the midst of a garden, dumbfounded by the sight of flowers, trees, stone pathways—even the air was alive with a sparkling awareness she had never imagined, never could have imagined . . .
Miach was suddenly there in front of her, holding off with his hand and will alone a spell that was so full of horrors, she wept just looking at it. Death, but death only after agony and a despair that would have brought her to her knees if she’d been able to move. The path that contained that despair was so bleak and so relentlessly beguiling that it was all she could do not to set foot to it and hope that the torment would end eventually. The agony was so sharp and clear that it took whatever willpower she had left not to reach out toward it as well and see if it might be cool against her hands, quenching the pain that seemed to burn within her with a heat she thought might soon consume her.
And all those things were wrapped up in the magic that Rigaud had thrown at Acair to slay him, a magic that seemed to have no end . . .
She let out a breath that was as unsteady as her knees beneath her.
Magic existed. She could no longer even pretend to deny it.
Rigaud’s power was great, she could see that. See it, rather, in a way that left her wondering if she had ever looked at anything real before in her lifetime. The prince’s power was part of him, locked in his veins, drawn from his forebearers, simply waiting for him to use it or not as he willed.
She looked away, but finding Miach in her sights was worse. Whatever it meant to be king of Neroche in practical terms was nothing when compared to what it meant for him to be a mage king in that realm. He was Neroche and Neroche was him and she couldn’t begin to separate the two or find the words to describe what she saw in him. She fancied he could have cracked the world in two with a word if he’d so chosen, but she knew just as surely that he would never consider it. He held Rigaud’s spell of death at bay with very little effort, then caused it to disappear with a single word.
Rigaud was full of a white-hot rage that should have singed anyone who dared come near him, but he cursed his brother, shot Acair a murderous look, then turned and strode away.
Léirsinn watched Acair turn to face her, then saw realization dawn as he understood where she was standing. And in the trio of heartbeats it took him to reach her, she saw him.
How she had ever thought him anything but what he was, she couldn’t have said. He wasn’t a cultured man with a deliciously posh accent and perfect table manners, he was a mage with power to rival the king of Neroche’s. He might not have been able to use it, but it coursed through his veins and drenched his soul, enough power to have brought kingdoms to ruin. She half wondered how he managed to live inside himself. The light and the dark were perfectly balanced in him, something she had the presence of mind to assume he wouldn’t want to hear.
He held out his hand to her as if he feared to touch her. She almost feared she wouldn’t be able to reach him, but the moment she touched his skin, he jerked her out of the circle she’d stepped in and into his arms.
“Léirsinn,” he said urgently.
“I’m fine,” she managed.
“You were screaming.”
She looked up at him, then felt her eyes closing. S
he surrendered, because she simply couldn’t look at anything else. Everything she’d seen whilst standing in that shadow was gone. Miach and Acair were just men, the garden was nothing more than dirt and leaves, and the moon shone down with nothing more than an ordinary and quite pedestrian light.
She thought she just might weep.
She closed her eyes and saw no more.
Twenty-two
It was useful, Acair decided, to periodically take stock of one’s life and examine it for strengths and weaknesses, and occasionally simply for things that were so odd as to be scarce believed. Such as, for instance, sitting in the solar of the king of a realm full of magic ripe for the picking and not having any desire to bean the man over the head and make off with as many spoils as possible before he woke.
He paused. Well, perhaps he wasn’t entirely free of that desire, but he was who he was after all. Old habits died hard.
“I’m afraid my selection of libations isn’t vast,” Miach said solemnly, “though I do have some Durialian bitter ale you might want to accustom yourself to.”
“On the off chance I actually set foot inside that irascible old fool’s borders and find myself in his dungeon?”
Miach smiled. “It might soften his heart to watch you toss back without flinching something that generally brings lesser men to their knees.”
Acair took a deep breath. “Pour away, then. I like to be prepared.”
“I’ll return posthaste. Don’t poach any spells whilst I’m away.”
Acair smiled wearily. “Too tired tonight, though don’t think the thought hasn’t already crossed my mind.”
“I would be disappointed by anything else.”
Acair listened to him close the door behind him, then looked around himself in something he might have called consternation if he’d been prone to that sort of emotion. The archmage-now-king of Neroche’s private tower chamber was the last place he would have ever thought to find himself. Well, find himself unfettered, that was. He was torn between walking over to Miach’s table and rifling through papers there, or pulling the exceptionally lovely and fierce Léirsinn of Sàraichte up out of her chair and kissing the hell out of her.