Gift of Magic

by Lynn Kurland

  Ruith would have happily put off discussing that indefinitely, but knew he couldn’t. Sarah was going to be walking with him into darkness. She couldn’t not know what he feared. He took a deep breath, then looked at her seriously.

  “Miach suspects so.”

  “That was what he came to tell you?”

  Ruith nodded.

  “And you?”

  He shook his head, then shrugged helplessly. “I don’t want to believe it. I don’t think it’s possible that he could have survived that slaughter at the well, but what do I know? A pair of my brothers apparently have, along with Mhorghain and me. But if he had, I can’t imagine that he would have remained in obscurity all these years. His enormous ego wouldn’t have survived the lack of adulation.” He continued on with her silently for a moment or two before he could spew out his next words, words that almost burned his mouth as he spoke them. “I’m not sure there is anyone else who would have scattered his spells, though.”

  “Not his natural sons?”

  “Nay, they would rather have had the spells for themselves.”

  She frowned thoughtfully. “But if your sire is alive—which seems impossible—why would his spells be laid out in two separate paths?”

  “I have no idea,” he said honestly. “He was nothing if not logical about his method of carrying on with his life. It wouldn’t be like him to simply scatter his book about without some sort of plan to gather it back up again, which leads me to believe that he can’t have been the one to hide the pages hither and yon.”

  “Your future brother-in-law came a very long way to suggest differently.”

  He would have smiled if he’d had the energy. “Aye, he did, but he has a very vivid imagination so perhaps he’d had too much rich food at his crowning.”

  She looked up at him searchingly. “Do you think so?”

  “Nay, but I’m not sure I can consider the other without becoming rather ill, so it seems the safer of the two possibilities at the moment. We’ll press on and be careful.”

  She nodded and fell silent.

  Ruith looked around him as they continued on, wishing he could ignore their conversation but realizing that he couldn’t. He had spent the occasional happy hour as a lad perusing books of spells and wondering which of them might inflict the most damage on his father did he have the man immobile before him. But he had never seriously considered that he might have such an encounter.

  He didn’t like the fact that he was considering it now and that if he found his sire, he likely wouldn’t find him helpless.

  He looked about him as they walked, more to keep himself awake and alert than anything else. If that unnaturally harsh sunlight hadn’t been shining down on him, he would have found their current surroundings quite beautiful. The mountains were magnificent, covered as they were with a heavy forest of evergreens capped with the last of winter white. There was a stream that ran alongside the path, tumbling endlessly over rocks and fallen logs.

  Despite that, though, all was silent. He could hear nothing being whispered in the trees, no rills of delight from the rushing water, no sounds of birds venturing out to herald the potential arrival of spring.

  It was as if the entire countryside had been silenced.

  He pulled himself away from his uneasy contemplation of their surroundings in time, and looked at Sarah.

  “What were we talking about?” he asked absently.

  She shook her head with a grave smile. “I don’t remember.”

  Unfortunately, neither could he. He took her hand, partly because he wanted not to lose track of her and partly because he simply wanted to have someone ground him where he was. He wasn’t altogether certain he was walking where he was. In fact, he wasn’t at all sure he wasn’t dreaming. He looked at Sarah.

  “Am I awake?”

  “If you’re not, then we’re both asleep.”

  He was vaguely dissatisfied with that answer, but couldn’t press her for a better one. He was too busy concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. It was more difficult than he would have expected it to be. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be any end to the current dream, though there was, apparently, an end to the road.

  The road continued to run along the river, disappearing into the dark forest in front of them, but Sarah had stopped. Ruith stumbled to a halt next to her and looked at her blearily.

  “Is this it?” he managed.

  She bent over to look at a clutch of rocks that had been laid in a particular way to make an enclosure. Only the rock that should have acted as the lid was gone. Sarah straightened, then looked at him.

  “This is where the spell should be,” she said slowly, “and where it lay before.”

  “Is the spell still lingering in the area, do you think?”

  She looked around her uneasily. Ruith saw nothing, but he hadn’t expected to. That the spells were moving at all was unsettling in the extreme. He couldn’t imagine they were doing it on their own, which meant—

  “Ruith!”

  Ruith spun around in time to see a man coming out of the trees and making straight for him, as if something left him powerless to do anything else but rush forward. Before Ruith could even open his mouth to demand to know his intentions, the mage, who looked as if he hadn’t seen the business side of a comb in at least a month, started hurling spells at him.

  Spells that made no sense, truth be told. Ruith fought them off easily, which allowed him time to examine them as they flew toward him. They were shards of spells, jagged, disjointed, having no pattern or organization about them. The mage seemed to find nothing amiss with them. He simply flung whatever came to hand at Ruith, frantically, as if he weren’t quite in his right mind but had no realization of that fact.

  And then the mage threw himself at Ruith. Ruith knew he shouldn’t have been surprised at being assaulted not only by spells but by a sword the mage drew and seemed to know how to use, but he was. It was perhaps the oddest altercation—magical or not—he had ever found himself in. He studied the other man as he fought with an increasing desperation that was difficult to watch and wondered if perhaps it wasn’t his own sweet self the other mage wanted.

  And then something else occurred to him.

  What if what the man wanted was the spells Ruith was carrying shoved down the side of his boot?

  Ruith sent the man sprawling by means of his foot in the other’s gut, then pulled the spells out of his boot and held them up.

  The mage heaved himself to his knees, saw the spells, then shrieked.

  Ruith tossed the spells to Franciscus, who certainly could have been of some use—calling out encouraging words or helpful suggestions—then waited to see what the mage would do.

  The mage stopped in mid-howl, looked from one of them to the other, then charged Ruith.

  Ruith had the unfortunate opportunity to look in the other’s eyes at close range. There was no sanity there, nothing that could have even been called human. The man was nothing but unassuageable desire for something he couldn’t have. It was with regret as well as a great deal of pity that Ruith forced the mage to meet his end on the end of Athair of Cothromaiche’s sword.

  The man died with a sob.

  Ruith laid him on the ground, cleaned his sword, then resheathed it, feeling a grimness settle over him. He took a step backward and folded his arms over his chest. He had gotten rid of all his father’s spells, yet still the man had come for him.

  Why?

  He studied the mage for several moments in silence, wondering if he had perhaps seen him before and the mage had been seeking revenge, but there was nothing familiar about him. Ruith could safely say he had been out of circulation, as it were, for enough years that the list of wizards he had offended was very short.

  He considered a bit longer, then rolled the man over onto his belly and pulled away his cloak. He was wearing a pack, which wasn’t surprising. Ruith riffled through its contents briskly, drawing forth something that surprised him not
at all.

  It was his father’s spell for making werelight, a fairly useless thing, but Ruith had to admit Gair had taken the art to a new level. Not only could he light up an entire room with a handful of words, he could twist the light into all manner of shapes to delight and astonish. Or horrify, as had often been the case.

  The spell itself was wrapped in remarkably clean linen and folded very carefully, as if it had been a great treasure. Ruith took it and walked over to where Sarah was standing with Franciscus. He looked at the older man and frowned.

  “He didn’t want me.”

  Franciscus nodded. “I’d have to agree.”

  “He wanted the spells, I thought, but that doesn’t seem to be entirely the case, does it?” Ruith handed Franciscus the spell to put with the others. “It seems that if he’d wanted the spells, he would have turned to attack you, doesn’t it?”

  “You’re sure there’s nothing left down your boot?” Franciscus asked seriously.

  “Nothing—”

  “Ruith.”

  He looked at Sarah, who was very pale. “What, love?”

  “The pieces of the spell of Diminishing,” she said faintly. “Where are those?”

  “In my—” Ruith felt himself sway. “In my pocket, but surely he couldn’t have known that.” He looked at her. “Can you see them on me?”

  She took a deep breath, then nodded. “Aye.”

  “But no more clearly than the other spells, surely.”

  She swallowed with difficulty. “No more clearly,” she said unhappily, “but there is something different about them.”

  “That damned spell is going to be the death of me,” he said, dragging his hand through his hair. He looked at Sarah grimly. “Is there something specifically different about the spell of Diminishing, do you suppose, or is it just its usual destructive self?”

  “It is more…compelling—if that’s how to describe it. I didn’t notice it before, but I don’t think there was anything there to notice.” She met his gaze. “I think something on the spells has awoken—”

  “A visitor,” Franciscus said suddenly, quite loudly, “and it looks as if we might know this one.”

  Ruith spun around to find none other of Amitán of Ceangail stumbling out into the clearing, blurting out a spell of death. Ruith listened to the garbled words and realized Amitán was intending it for him alone.

  He was somehow quite unsurprised.

  He fended off the spell without thinking, leaving Amitán gaping in surprise.

  “You have your magic,” he stammered.

  Ruith had to think for a moment about what he meant, then he realized that the last time they’d met, his magic had been securely buried inside him, covered with that eminently functional and quite lovely spell of hiding created by Uachdaran of Léige. The lesser spell, apparently, but useful enough for the rabble. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

  “I never lost it,” he admitted. “It was just unavailable before.”

  Amitán’s expression was inscrutable, but that might have been courtesy of the scars covering his face that were still an angry red. Ruith wasn’t sure if he could say pity was what he felt for his bastard brother. He had, after all, been without magic and not precisely in a position to defend himself against a mage of Amitán’s stature yet still Amitán had tried to slay him. The only reason he hadn’t managd it was that he’d been assaulted by a spell of Olc that had been, ironically, laid over Ruith by someone else to protect him.

  Ruith had given that spell a good deal of thought over the ensuing days. There had been something else attached to it, something that had taken the spell of death Amitán had thrown at Ruith, turned it into something quite a bit more vicious, and flung it back at Amitán. Ruith hadn’t spared too much worry over Amitán’s fate, though he seemed to remember having told his bastard brother how he might free himself. Apparently he had done so eventually, but not soon enough to save his now-ruined visage.

  Amitán stared at him, nonplussed, then glanced to his left. His mouth fell open.

  “You,” he gasped, pointing with a trembling finger at Franciscus. “You destroyed my father’s hall!”

  Franciscus lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “I thought a bit of rock on your wee head, lad, might knock sense into you. I can see I was wrong.”

  Ruith listened to Amitán begin to hurl insults and spells at Franciscus, all of which were absorbed by the spell of protection Franciscus had cast over himself and Sarah both. Oddly enough, it seemed to not only repel Amitán’s spells but cast a bit of something back with them. Though the end results were different—Amitán was enveloped in the lovely smell of flowers and pines—the execution was exactly what had happened with the spell that had ruined Amitán’s visage. Ruith looked at Franciscus in surprise.

  “I was covered by a spell of Olc just outside Ceangail,” he said, not sure how he felt about what he thought he now knew, “and it was sweetened—”

  “If that’s the word you should use,” Franciscus interrupted dryly.

  Ruith shot him a look. “Very well, it was mixed with something else that turned it into something else indeed. The same thing happened to a spell of protection that Soilléir cast over me—over me and Sarah, actually—in Beinn òrain. It is the same something you’re using there.”

  Franciscus glanced him briefly. “’Tis nothing more than a piece of the more pedestrian magic of Cothromaiche, lad. I draped what I dared over you near Ceangail before I dragged myself off to hide in the witchwoman of Fàs’s potting shed. If you saw it in Beinn òrain, you can be sure it was Soilléir to use it. And if you’d stop talking long enough to finish your business with your half brother there, I might teach you a few useful spells in that language.”

  “Who are you?” Amitán demanded, starting toward Franciscus, his ruined face contorted in rage. He froze suddenly, as if he’d run into a wall.

  Ruith suspected he’d run into a very useful sort of spell of binding. Which seemed, unfortunately, to work on everything but Amitán’s mouth.

  “Where did you obtain that power?” Amitán shouted.

  “From my grandsire,” Franciscus said. “Seannair of Cothromaiche.”

  “That farmer?” Amitán said in astonishment. “I don’t believe it. He can scarce find his way to the ale keg, much less the Council of Kings.”

  “You underestimate what you don’t understand, Amitán my boy,” Franciscus said seriously. “There is power from other sources than what your father dug up from wells he shouldn’t have been drawing from. You might consider that the next time you look at the ruin that is your visage.”

  “It wasn’t my father’s power that did this to me,” Amitán snarled. He glared at Ruith. “It was his.”

  Ruith shook his head. “I told you, Amitán, that it wasn’t me, and apparently it wasn’t Prince Franciscus either. It was nothing more nefarious than a quite lovely spell of Olc, cast by one I can’t name. I suppose you could take yourself off to search for him, if you cared to do so.”

  “You lie,” Amitán spat.

  “Why would I?”

  Amitán opened his mouth, then shut it suddenly, as if words had quite abruptly failed him.

  Ruith studied his bastard brother. “Why are you here?”

  “Release me and I will consider telling you.”

  Ruith returned his look steadily. “I’m not sure you’re in the position to be demanding anything. Let’s instead say that if you tell me what I want to know, I won’t kill you.”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” Amitán bluffed, then he looked at the mage dead at his feet and seemed to reconsider. He looked at Ruith. “I want something for the tale. Besides my life.”

  “What?” Ruith asked.

  “A restoration of my visage,” Amitán said without hesitation. He nodded in Franciscus’s direction. “Done by him, with those spells he knows.” He looked at Ruith angrily. “They all know them, those barbarians from that hellhole in the north, so don’t believe him if he tells you o
therwise.”

  Ruith wasn’t about to argue the point, but he did glance at Franciscus, who nodded just the slightest bit. Ruith turned to Amitán.

  “Very well. Your handsome visage for the truth.” He bit his tongue before he said, if you can spew out the truth without it burning your mouth, which he would have said under other circumstances. No sense in provoking the man unnecessarily, especially if there were details Amitán might have that would save him trouble further down the road.

  Amitán looked about himself as best he could, then back at Ruith. His eyes were full of something Ruith couldn’t quite identify at first. Not fear, nor triumph. Something a bit like what Ruith had seen in the eyes of the mage who lay dead at his feet.

  Something unnatural.

  “I was told,” Amitán said in a low voice, “that if I found you—which given that you’ve done an abysmal job of covering your tracks since you left Léige wasn’t that hard—and killed you, the wench would lead me to a cache of our father’s spells. The ones from his book. The ones that were supposed to be in the library but were apparently rescued by persons unknown and unauthorized after that fool Táir set the bloody place afire.”

  Ruith realized he’d flinched. He didn’t want to speculate on which wench Amitán was referring to, but he didn’t have to. Amitán was smiling.

  “Aye, Ruith, that gel over there. The one who sees.”

  “You’re imagining things,” Ruith managed.

  Amitán’s expression didn’t change. “As I said, you should have covered your tracks more carefully and kept your mouth shut more often.”

  “Have you been following us?” Ruith asked in astonishment.

  A brief something flickered over Amitán’s face, which led Ruith to believe he was about to tell an impressive lie.

  “Well, not all the time. Not entirely.”

  “Who was, then?” Franciscus demanded. “Surrender the name if you want me to do anything for your face.”

  “I don’t know, for I never saw him. Because I cannot see,” Amitán said pointedly. “I just heard his voice.”