by Lynn Kurland
“I think I will,” he said quietly.
Mhorghain nodded, then walked on with him in silence for so long, he wondered if she would ever say anything again. She seemed to be chewing uncomfortably on a thought she couldn’t bring herself to voice. She finally looked up at him, her expression very grave.
“Do you think,” she asked slowly, “that spells are all you’ll find? In your search for that book?”
“What else would there be?” he asked in surprise.
“Oh, I don’t know.” She was silent for several more very long moments before she looked up at him. “You might find someone you didn’t expect to find.”
“Father?” he asked easily.
She looked profoundly unsettled. “I don’t know. I’ve been surprised by so many things over the past few months, I think I might be prepared to find just about anything.”
“I won’t say that the thought hasn’t occurred to me,” Ruith admitted reluctantly. And it had, and not just the night before when Miach had suggested as much. In fact, making sure Ruith was acquainted with that unthinkable thought was what had sent Miach on his very long journey east. “I’ll also not admit to all the useless hours I spent in my youth, wondering if he were alive and inventing terrible ways to repay him for his evil. But as for the truth of it?” He shrugged. “There is no conceivable way he could have survived, no matter what Miach thinks he suspects.”
Mhorghain closed her eyes briefly. “Still, I don’t envy you this task.”
“And I don’t envy you,” Ruith said with a mock shudder. “Trapped in that rustic lean-to in the Nerochian hills for the rest of your life? Do they cook the meat these days or simply eat it right off the bone raw?”
Mhorghain blinked in surprise, then laughed a little. “You’re insulting my adopted country. You’d best cease with that before I take you out to the lists and beat respect into you.”
He imagined she would be able to quite easily if that mark over her brow was what he thought it was. He attempted a look of mock horror.
“Better that than being forced to face your betrothed over spells. He has a substantial collection of very nasty ones.”
She looked at him with a slightly wistful expression. “Did you filch them together?”
“A goodly number of them, if you can believe it,” Ruith said, “though I daresay you wouldn’t remember it. You were very young and Miach and I were too busy poking our noses into places they shouldn’t have gone for him to have made much of an impression on you. Well, that and Grandfather was determined to keep you out of the reach of any foul influences—and I imagine I don’t need to tell you whose influence he considered foul. If you saw Miach more than twice from a distance in your youth, I would be greatly surprised. But, because I am a generous brother, I will tell you all manner of embarrassing tales about your betrothed when we have time later.” He felt his smile fade. “I just hope your future will be repayment enough for a past not spent at Seanagarra.”
She nodded. “It will, I daresay. If I hadn’t walked that thorny path, I wouldn’t have Miach.”
“And the future crown of Neroche.”
“I didn’t say it was all perfection,” she said with a snort, then she smiled. “As strange as it seems, I find myself willing to endure quite a bit to have him. He makes time to train with me in the lists and ride our superior Angesand steeds. And he flies with me almost every day.”
Ruith clucked his tongue. “Elves do not shapechange.”
She shot him a look. “Don’t think I won’t be asking him all the shapes you taught him before the day is out, though I will do it out of Grandfather’s hearing lest your evening prove uncomfortable because of it.”
He nodded, then watched her surreptitiously for several minutes. He finally cleared his throat. “Are you happy?”
She looked up at him, and he had the oddest feeling of time layering his past over his present and finally settling itself where it should have been. She was still that fearless lass of six summers who had been as willing to follow him into any number of adventures as she had been to sit next to their mother and, well, not stitch, but submit to having her fingernails inspected and her pockets checked for substances that should have been left behind in the woods. Ruith didn’t know, never having thought to ask, but he had the sneaking suspicion that their mother had collected her share of interesting-looking rocks and sticks in her own pockets.
He also suspected that Mhorghain would be the same sort of mother their mother had been: willing to tromp about in the mud when called upon yet equally capable of drawing children onto her lap and wrapping them in copious amounts of safety and affection.
“Am I happy?” she echoed, then she smiled. “Very. And you?”
He took a deep breath. “Aye, happier than I deserve.”
“And determined to have a lifetime in which to enjoy it with your lady.”
“That too.”
“Does she love you?”
“I like to believe she might have some small bit of affection for me,” he conceded. “In spite of my heritage, it should be noted.”
“I’ll watch her today and see if I can find ways for you to improve your chances with her.”
“That’s good of you,” he said dryly.
“My pleasure.” She looked up at him suddenly. “You haven’t changed, you know.”
“Haven’t I?”
She put her arm around his waist and hugged him as they walked. “Nay, you haven’t, for which I’m very grateful. I assume Rùnach hasn’t either.”
“Nay, he’s still the same as he ever was. Well, save for all the untoward habits he’s acquired, having been in such close quarters to Soilléir all these years.”
“I daresay.”
Ruith looked up at the inn that was now but a hundred paces away, then stopped with the rest of them. “I don’t suppose Morag will start a battle in the common room, do you think?”
Miach shook his head. “Not with Sìle there, I don’t imagine.” He looked at Mhorghain. “I think our other business is better conducted outside the inn, however, wouldn’t you agree?”
Mhorghain nodded gravely. “I imagine it is.”
Ruith watched them exchange a look that he had to admit bothered him more than perhaps it should have. There was something going on, something unspoken that they understood which he didn’t. And that something had to do with him.
Mhorghain took a deep breath. “It is why I came, after all. Well, to find you as well, but mostly because of…well, that other business. But now that it comes down to it, however, I’m not sure I can do this.”
“I think, my love,” Miach said very quietly, “that you haven’t any choice. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me that this meeting was predestined.”
Mhorghain pursed her lips. “I’ve little liking for that sort of thing.”
“I doubt you are the first one to say that,” Miach said with a faint smile, “but you know that already.”
Ruith would have asked them what in the hell they were talking about, but he was surprised enough by the tears in Mhorghain’s eyes not to. She smiled very briefly at Miach—a smile that was actually rather strained—then turned to look at him. He suppressed the urge to bolt. He was, after all, a man, not a lad, and he had faced worse things than whatever his sister might have to tell him.
Surely.
“I have something of interest,” Mhorghain said, putting her shoulders back and lifting her chin. “Miach’s been keeping it, actually, for a pair of months.” She paused. “I just didn’t realize he was keeping it for you.”
“What is it?” Ruith asked, feeling rather pleased that he sounded no more interested than if he’d been sitting down for tea and the hostess had announced the sort of sandwiches they might be looking forward to. At least it wasn’t some dreadful piece of news. It was likely some trinket she’d kept from her youth, something she thought he should have.
Mhorghain dug about in a purse at her belt, then pulled out something wrapp
ed in cloth. She unwrapped it, then held it out.
He supposed he would look back on that moment and quickly bring to mind several things that would explain several other things. It had been a very long winter. He had come within a hairsbreadth of losing Sarah to Morag of An-uallach’s very utilitarian spell of death. He had spent the previous several fortnights facing things he had thought to have put happily behind him. But mostly, he’d had a tremendously nasty morning in the lists after an equally disgusting breakfast followed by the shock of seeing a sister he had for most of his adult life supposed to be dead.
All of that had left him feeling less than himself.
That was surely the only reason he fainted.
Four
S
arah stood to one side of the window that overlooked the back garden of the inn and was grateful that all she saw was dirt, last year’s rotting vines, and the occasional weed hardy enough to have survived the winter. She looked up at the late-morning sky, heavy with clouds and spitting a combination of rain and snow, and was relieved to find it also was just sky and not full of spells and things she wouldn’t normally have expected to see. The only thing unusual was that owl perched just on the other side of the stables, but perhaps that was more ordinary than it appeared. After all, Soilléir of Cothromaiche had gifted her and Ruith two horses—two shapechanging horses—who were prone to restlessness. No doubt one of them had wearied of standing in his stall and decided to take a bit of air. Perhaps the air was better fifty feet off the ground than it was below.
She was half tempted to join him. At least then she might be able to catch her breath, something she’d been struggling without much success to do all day. And that had everything to do with the company gathered and the conversation going on behind her.
She glanced over her shoulder to see if things had changed any in the previous handful of moments. Ruith was still sitting there in front of the hearth with his face buried in his hands whilst his sister sat across from him, looking no less unsettled. Miach was still standing behind Mhorghain’s chair with his hands on her shoulders, his expression very grave. Sarah watched Mhorghain reach up and put her hand over one of his briefly, then go back to rubbing her fingers on her knees as if her hands pained her. Perhaps they did, and that seemed to have everything to do with the ring she’d handed Ruith.
The one that had left him with his eyes rolling back in his head as if he’d just witnessed his own death.
Miach had caught him, for the most part, before he’d hit the ground. Ruith had recovered his senses quite quickly, though his color hadn’t returned. Miach had taken one side, Mhorghain the other, and they had half carried him the rest of the way to the inn and up the stairs. Sarah had followed them, gingerly bearing a ring that didn’t cause her the same distress that it had Ruith but did, she had to admit, leave her feeling slightly uneasy.
She turned back to the window and opened her hand. It lay there, that flat onyx stone set in silver, innocently presenting itself as nothing more than what it seemed to be. Even looking at it, looking at it with more than just her natural sight, revealed nothing unusual—which she supposed in itself was unusual. She whispered the spell Soilléir had given her to augment her sight and, to her surprise, she found that she saw nothing more than she’d seen before.
Or…perhaps not.
She lifted it up to see if the dull light from the window might aid her, then felt herself beginning to fall into an endless darkness—
“Sarah?”
Sarah jerked herself back from the abyss she had almost pitched into, then hid the ring behind her back. She wasn’t sure why she was so unwilling to have anyone see her with it in her hand, but she was.
She looked at the man standing near her and assumed he was a cousin to Ruith and Mhorghain, but she couldn’t have said for sure. She attempted a casual expression as she slipped Gair’s ring onto her finger. It made her feel slightly ill, so she took it off and wished desperately for some sort of pocket. She couldn’t shove the damned thing down her boot and putting it in the purse attached to her belt would have been too conspicuous. All she could do was hold it behind her back and hope she didn’t look as panicked as she felt. How Miach had carried it with him for so long she couldn’t have said. There might have been nothing to see in its depths, but it definitely possessed a power she could feel pulsing up her arm. Indeed, her arm bearing the wounds left by Gair’s spell began to hurt her so badly, she thought she just might have to sit down soon.
She forced herself to focus on her companion, then realized with a start that he did indeed look a bit familiar. She had encountered another man who looked a great deal like him in Slighe at the end of a long, unpleasant afternoon that had come after an equally unsettling journey on the back of a horse-turned-dragon across the plains of Ailean. That man had been Thoir, the youngest son of the crown prince of Tòrr Dòrainn. Sarah would have bet money if she’d had any that the elf standing next to her was one of his brothers. She cleared her throat.
“I believe I’ve met your brother, Thoir,” she ventured.
“And I believe I’ve met your mother,” he said politely.
She was very grateful for a trunk pushed up under the window, conveniently put where she could sit on it abruptly instead of copying Ruith’s earlier actions and landing on the floor. The elf sat down next to her just as quickly, as if to spare her any embarrassment, then looked at her gravely.
“Forgive me,” he said quietly. “I thought you knew.”
“Oh, I know about her,” she said faintly, “I just don’t know very many people who knew her.”
“You might be surprised,” he said with a smile. “Of course, I didn’t know her well, but I did have the pleasure of encountering her a pair of times at Seanagarra.” His smile faded. “I heard tell of her fate, of course, but I had assumed that King Seannair had taken you back home. I begin to think I assumed where I shouldn’t have.” He smiled briefly. “You needn’t elaborate, if you don’t care to. I’m nosy by nature and tend to ask questions where I shouldn’t. A bad habit I share with Thoir, who is indeed one of my younger brothers.”
She started to tell Thoir’s brother that she didn’t mind talking about her past, but the truth was, she minded it very much. Thinking about who she was rumored to be whilst still feeling herself living quite fully in the skin she’d grown up with…well, it was a bit like having a tooth that was perfectly behaved until it encountered the wrong sort of supper and made itself unmistakably known. She was able to carry on as just Sarah, daughter of the witchwoman Seleg and a father she’d didn’t know, until she bit down on memories of someone who had known her true parents.
Painful, that’s what it was. Painful and unexpected and impossible to either ignore or hope would go away.
“I understand Ruith was lingering in Shettlestoune,” the elf said, and he almost managed the last name without a shudder. “Beastly country.”
“The worst,” she agreed.
“I’m Iarann, by the way, Thoir’s elder, much more responsible brother. I can tell you of your mother, if you like. She and Athair visited my grandsire’s hall only a pair of times, but they were lengthy stays. Your parents were very welcome guests.”
“Ah,” Sarah began, because she couldn’t say aye but she wasn’t sure how to refuse without sounding ungracious. She’d almost decided to plead the excuse of a headache when the door opened and Sìle strode inside. He slammed the door behind him with a curse.
“That ill-mannered, ill-bred, uncouth—” He walked over to the fire and cast himself down into the chair next to Mhorghain. “If I could find a way to toss her off the Council, believe me, I would. Nemed, be a good lad and fetch me some wine.”
Sarah shook her head as she watched the blond man who’d come with Mhorghain earlier make Sìle a low bow, then go off to find wine. She couldn’t say that she had been particularly giddy as a girl, but she had, with Franciscus’s help, learned all the names of the princes of Neroche on the off chance tha
t she might have the opportunity to drop them a curtsey. The thought of actually meeting one of them had never been one she’d ever seriously entertained. Sìle had, the night before, refused to put any of the Neroche lads on the list of noblemen he thought Sarah might want to look over before she made a final decision on Ruith, leaving her laughing at the ridiculousness of the thought. A prince of Neroche not good enough? That she should be considering a liaison with the grandson of the king of the elves was even more difficult to believe.
She suppressed the urge to shift uncomfortably. She was fairly comfortable with Ruith and Miach and, if she were to be completely honest, even King Sìle. If it had been just the three of them, she thought she might have been able to at least make polite conversation. But now there were too many people in the chamber for her comfort, too many souls whose lineage and importance so overshadowed hers that she could scarce look at them. No matter who her parents might have been, she was still an obscure girl from an even more distant village in a country all sensible souls avoided. Associating with creatures from legend and even a pair of the very eligible princes of Neroche as well as the king and future queen of that realm was something she wasn’t sure she could ever do with any degree of enjoyment.
It was tempting to see if she could slip down to the kitchens and head out the back door.
She realized with a start that Ruith was looking at her. She was rather glad she was already sitting down, for she would have needed to do so very quickly if she hadn’t been. Ruith was every bit as handsome as any of the lads there, but there was something about him that left her feeling a bit weak in the knees. Perhaps it was that in addition to that elvishness that ran through his veins, he had magic to match anyone else in the chamber. If she’d been the sort of gel to admire that sort of thing, which she wasn’t sure she was.
Nay, it was more that along with all that magic, he could start a fire without a spell, or feed whoever he was traveling with by his wits alone, or rummage through a stall in an obscure little city in the south and lay his hands upon a pair of knives that had been fashioned years earlier for a dreamweaver whose daughter would subsequently have a use for them.