by Lynn Kurland
“A ruffian, was he?” Ruith asked flatly. “Or a man of culture?”
“I believe,” Amitán said, obviously taking quite a bit of pleasure in his secret, “that he was an elf.”
Ruith kept his mouth from falling open only thanks to years of austere living and self-denial. He managed to simply look at Amitán dispassionately whilst at the same time his mind was racing furiously.
There were two possibilities: either Amitán was lying or he was telling the truth. If he were lying, that meant that the someone who was following them—and Ruith had to allow he fully believed that was happening—could still have been anyone. Well, save Morag, who was no doubt still traveling quite uncomfortably on her way back to An-uallach. The list of likely suspects then could include any of his bastard brothers affecting an accent that wasn’t their own or Urchaid of Saothair, who knew Sarah could see because she’d seen him hiding behind a spell in the keep at Ceangail.
But if Amitán were telling the truth, who did that leave? Ardan of Ainneamh? That was stretching things a bit much. Ardan was annoying, not evil. As for anyone else, who could he possibly put on a list? His own relations? The very thought was preposterous.
Ruith considered Amitán a bit longer, then looked abruptly at Franciscus. “I believe we’ve had all the answers from him we’ll get. If you wouldn’t mind restoring him to his former loveliness, we’ll send him on his way and be on ours. Surely Díolain has seen fit to put the keep at Ceangail back together. Our good lord Amitán will have somewhere to lay his head.”
Franciscus nodded, then walked over to Amitán. Ruith turned away and found himself with Sarah’s arms around his waist. He looked at her and smiled grimly.
“Afraid I’ll fall over?”
She didn’t smile. “He could be lying, you know.”
“Aye, he could be,” Ruith agreed. “Or not.”
“How many bad elves do you know?”
“One,” Ruith said shortly, “and his name is Ardan of Ainneamh, but I’m not sure I could credit him with mischief past mixing purples with red.” He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know what to think. I’m not even sure whom to trust any longer, save our company and my family—with the possible exception of Miach of Neroche. He is always on the hunt for a few more spells to add to his unwholesomely large collection.”
She smiled then. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do. He knows too many spells, and he is always adding to them from sources he should leave alone. But given that he already knows all the spells in my father’s book and does seem to love my sister, I think we can safely cross him off the list.”
“Are you ready to do that with any others?”
“Not yet,” he said with a sigh. “I’ll think on it as we travel. Perhaps something will present itself that will clear up the mystery for us.” He put his arm around her shoulders and turned to watch as a squirrel ran over and sat up in front of Franciscus.
Franciscus had some sort of conversation with the little beast, who then chirped and ran across the glade.
Ruith blinked and in the next moment, a large, sturdy horse stood there. Chirruping.
“I am not riding that,” Amitán exclaimed. “I can tell already the gait will be dreadful.”
“Come, Ruith, and let us hoist him up into the saddle,” Franciscus said with a smile. “An uncomfortable ride home might be just the thing for him.”
“I’ll see you both dea—”
Sìlence suddenly filled the small clearing thanks to another of Franciscus’s spells. Sìlence save the decidedly unhorselike comments being made by Amitán’s mount. Ruith aided Franciscus in hoisting his more presentable but substantially more irritated half brother atop that rather unstable squirrel-turned-horse, then watched Franciscus secure the load, as it were. A slap on the rump sent the beast trotting off into the forest. After a fashion.
Ruith looked at Franciscus. “I think we should press on.”
“Perhaps after you see to your new guests.”
Ruith spun around, his sword halfway from its sheath, only to find Ardan and Thoir walking into the glade. He was surprised to see them, yet not surprised at all. All he could say for himself was that he was not paying his surroundings the attention he needed to. He put up his sword, slowly.
I believe that he was an elf.
Ruith took a deep breath and shoved aside Amitán’s words. Thoir was his cousin and Ardan, while completely devoid of the smallest collection of good manners, was also his cousin. They would have sooner given up their lives than to have associated themselves with Olc or anything like it.
He wasn’t, however, above making certain that Franciscus was standing next to Sarah before he walked over to greet his kin.
“Well met,” he said, shaking their hands. “You look to have had a fair time of it.”
Ardan sighed gustily. “I am counting the days, believe me, until I can sit in the hallowed halls of King Ehrne’s palace and have first a decent meal, then a retreat to a long, hot bath. Of course, the company will be more suited to my station as well, but let’s not dwell on that.”
Ruith glanced to his left to find Ned and Oban gaping at the newcomers as if they’d just seen something from legend. Seirceil was only watching with no expression at all on his face, but that one rarely gave anything away. Ruith turned back to his cousins.
“How was your hunting?”
Thoir pulled a roll of scorched sheaves from within his cloak and handed them over without comment. Ruith didn’t bother looking at what Thoir had found. He would go through them when he had the stomach. The collection was thick enough, but Ruith knew there was one thing missing.
The first half of the spell of Diminishing.
He glanced down at the topmost spell there. It was a spell of Summoning. ’Twas nothing special, that spell. It didn’t call souls back from the dead or draw anything of a demonic nature to a mage. It was merely a spell of calling, quite useful if one wanted his boots to come find him, or his valet to bring him his tea on time without having to be reminded. The uses for it were benign and numerous.
A pity he couldn’t have said that about the rest of his father’s spells.
He looked up at the sky which was now a dingy grey with unnaturally flat clouds, and wondered why it was that his father had chosen darkness over light. Had it been a gradual thing, that choosing, or had he simply woken one day and announced to the world that he intended to become one of the most feared black mages in the history of the Nine Kingdoms?
Ruith could only imagine how his grandmother Eulasaid would have reacted to hearing that at the breakfast table.
He turned away from the thought, then took the remainder of the spells Franciscus handed him and put them in his pack. If they were attacked again, he could chuck his gear to Franciscus and have his hands free to see to the resulting chaos. If a potential attacker went for Franciscus instead, that would answer a question or two. Perhaps there was something on those sheaves of paper, something more powerful than just decent handwriting.
The same sort of thing that was apparently on the scraps of the spell of Diminishing he had in his pocket.
He looked at Ardan and Thoir. “We’re going to carry on to the last spot on the map, if you care to come along. I assume you’ll determine your own shapes?”
“Naturally,” Ardan said, walking away.
Thoir only smiled, rolled his eyes a bit, and turned to follow after his traveling companion. Ruith watched Franciscus go to gather up their own company, which left him alone with Sarah. He found her watching him closely.
“Did they find them all?” she asked.
“Thoir didn’t say he hadn’t found what we sent him for, so I’ll assume he did. I don’t think I have the stomach to look through them right now.”
“We’ll press on, then.”
“I think we must.” He paused. “Do you think there is a spell there still, at the end of our road?”
She looked off into the distance for a moment, stari
ng at things he couldn’t see, then frowned. It took her a moment or two to come back to herself, but when she did, her expression was inscrutible.
“I’m not sure.”
“Is there a mage there, do you think?” he asked. “Loitering with spell in hand, waiting for us?”
“That I can’t say either.”
And it was for damned sure he wasn’t going to ask her to look any harder. He shouldered his pack, reached for hers, then turned and walked with her over to where Ruathar stood waiting for them.
And he tried not to think about what might be awaiting them at the last point on the map.
Fourteen
S
arah stood on the ground near Ruathar’s head and held on to his neck, finding her legs less steady than usual. There was nothing in particular that inspired that weakness. Nothing past a general feeling of uneasiness, as if there were a mighty thunderstorm brewing and even the air held its breath waiting for something to break. Not that she had all that much experience with thunderstorms. Doìre was, as it happened, famous for its habit of watching the clouds gather just beyond its borders, as if the entire county was simply too polite to ask the clouds to come any closer. She supposed that two or three storms in the spring and perhaps the occasional cluster of clouds in the fall overcame their shyness to venture inside the provincial confines, but the general condition of relentless sun could safely sum up the weather for every year she’d spent in that accursed place.
Perhaps all the unsettling things she’d been through over the past pair of months had finally pushed her over the edge of comfort into a place she wished she could leave as quickly as possible.
Or her unease could have come from the fact that she was standing on the edge of the most desolate patch of ground she’d ever seen. And given where she’d come from, that was saying something.
She was actually a little surprised that the countryside wasn’t more beautiful. They were somewhere in the wilds north of Léige, a country full of impressive mountains, spectacular fjords, and more water than she’d suspected the Nine Kingdoms might be home to. The road that ran under her feet and traveled north was large, but not so wide that it cut an ugly swath through the trees, and the mountains to her left were covered with a forest of evergreens. There was a river to the right of the road, and the music of it should have been pleasing to the ear.
But somehow, it wasn’t.
It was possible it was disappointment that soured her, disappointment over reaching the end of the trail and finding it nothing at all remarkable. Or it could have been because even though she had led Ruith to where a spell had been, the spell was there no longer.
Again.
She wished desperately for a place to sit down, but there was nowhere other than the middle of the road, and that was made very inhospitable by a combination of melting snow and mud. There were a few boulders languishing up against the mountain face in front of her, but she couldn’t bring herself to go any closer. There was something about the rock there that bothered her, though she couldn’t have said why.
She looked to her right to see if rest of the company was equally as unhappy with the results of their journey. Ned, Oban, and Seirceil were standing together, watching with various expressions of curiosity—and alarm, on Ned’s part—as Ruith simply stood in the middle of the road and looked at the mountain in front of him. Franciscus was standing a little ways apart from him, his arms folded over his chest, his expression inscrutable.
Ardan looked equally as disinterested, though she couldn’t believe that was the case. He had spent the past pair of fortnights either looking for spells or looking for signs of black mages and had made no secret of his irritation that such had been his task. His boots were encrusted with numerous layers of mud, his cloak was travel-stained, and he looked hungry.
She shifted a little to ease a sudden pulling in her back, then turned her attentions to Ruith’s cousin. She ignored the more quotidian things and looked at him. Him being who he was, not what he wore.
He was, as she had come to expect from full-blooded elves, difficult to look at it. Not only was he handsome, there was something surprisingly, painfully beautiful about his soul, as if he had sprung to life in a place where the ceilings were covered in stars and the floors glittered with a thousand facets of whatever rare and exclusive rock they’d been hewn from before being polished to glass. She had no idea how old he was, but his power was immense, descending into depths that refused to be plumbed by her paltry eye. She couldn’t speak to his skill, but if he had taken a mind to challenge Ruith to a duel of spells, he wouldn’t best Ruith because Ruith couldn’t counter the words. It would have been because, as powerful as Ruith was, Ardan’s roots went deeper.
The only thing that bothered her was that there was something slightly dark about him, as if he were a window that wasn’t quite clear. She suspected it was less a fascination with evil magic than it was simply his sour personality clouding whatever he did, but she couldn’t have said for sure.
He looked at her, blinked in surprise when he realized she’d been staring at him, then lifted an eyebrow. His glance of superciliousness would have been comical if she hadn’t suspected he meant it in full.
She looked away before she felt any smaller than she already did.
She turned to Thoir, who was standing to Ruith’s right, there in the middle of the road. She had to admit she hadn’t had either the time or the heart to look at him before either, and she couldn’t say she was particularly interested at the moment, but it took her mind off the fact that they had reached the end of the trail and it seemingly had led them to nothing, so she carried on with it.
She expected him to remind her of his grandfather Sìle, and he did. The magic that flowed through his veins was the same claimed by all the elves of Torr Dorainn she’d encountered. He didn’t possess the almost terrifying stature that his grandfather did, but she could see how he had indeed grown from an acorn that had fallen
from that mighty tree. She had no idea how old he was—surely older than Ruith. His magic was, again, not necessarily more substantial, but its roots went much deeper.
She almost turned away, then she found herself freezing. She frowned thoughtfully as she turned back toward him and looked more closely. There was something about him, something different from his grandfather and his brother. The trails that Fadaire had carved into their souls were crisp and defined, as if they had put their hands on Fadaire alone
Thoir’s magic, truth be told, looked a little bit like her arm. She could see the traces of it, but the lines were blurred.
She found the sight of it…disturbing.
She came back to herself to find Thoir watching her. She smiled quickly, as if she’d been about nothing any more nefarious than a decent daydream. It was a surprising relief when he only frowned at her and turned back to watch Ruith.
Ruith was currently removing sheaves of parchment from his pack. If he felt revulsion at touching his father’s hand-penned spells, he didn’t show it. He simply held them in his hand without comment.
“Well?” Thoir prodded. “What now?”
Ruith dragged his hand through his hair. Clouds were rolling in, which gave some relief from the dull flatness of the garish sun. “I have no idea.”
“You know,” Thoir suggested slowly, “you might ask if your lady could see something we have missed.”
“Nay,” Ruith said shortly, “I could not.”
“Then are we to stand here all day and do nothing?”
Sarah watched Ruith turn on his cousin and say something to him, but she couldn’t bring herself to listen. It had been a morning full of bickering, with Ardan complaining about the locale and Thoir poking at Ruith to do something sooner rather than later. Even Ruith was short-tempered, for he didn’t hesitate to respond to his cousins with unusually curt answers.
She looked at the mountain in front of her and wished there was something there for her to see. A spell had been there, lying in a
stone box beneath a scraggly bush, but it was there no longer. There was nothing left but the echo of Gair’s handiwork.
In fact, the whole place was nothing more than an unremarkable spot where the feet of the mountain had given way, sheering off and leaving a smooth face behind. Piles of rock lay on the ground there, grouped—
She froze.
Grouped as if they were flanking a path.
She walked past Ruith, who was pacing and cursing, and Thoir, who was beginning to sound slightly impatient that more progress wasn’t being made, and Ned, who only squeaked and ducked behind Seirceil. Sarah ignored them all and whispered Soilléir’s first spell under her breath.
And then she saw.
She stood in front of a doorway. She looked up and realized that the entire face of the mountain wasn’t just rock that had lost its outer covering of greenery. It was the outer walls of a keep. Cut into the mountain like some sort of façade.
She heard someone—Ruith, perhaps—call her name, but she couldn’t answer him. She put her hands on the face of the rock, then brushed aside what looked to be years of dirt and small, stubborn fauna, and a few bugs she didn’t want to identify. It hurt her hands to do so, but she kept at it, because she had no choice.
She soon had help. Hands brushed away the layers the years had placed upon what was soon revealed as a front door.
It wasn’t a very impressive front door, as front doors went, but it was undeniably an entrance. Thoir elbowed her aside in his enthusiasm and ran his hands over the rock. He turned and frowned at her.
“Where’s the key?”
She blinked. “How would I know?”
There was something halfway out of his mouth, words that were colored with an unpleasant sentiment, but he bit them off and they fell to the ground, unused. He took a deep breath, then smiled.
“Forgive me. It has been a very long journey.” He ran his hand over the rock again, then looked at her with another polite smile. “Do you see any sort of lock here, my lady?”
“Well, she might be able to if you’d give her a bit of space to breathe,” Ruith said, giving his cousin a friendly push.