by Lynn Kurland
“You would have every reason to at the moment, but I promise I won’t let harm come to you.” He paused. “I think, though, that I will make a brief change to myself.”
She knew what he was going to do even before he whispered the spell under his breath. She couldn’t see it, of course, because she could see nothing. She wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t be able to at least see something if she tried Soilléir’s spell, but she found herself hesitating. She wasn’t sure it would work, which left her without any desire to try it.
She didn’t want to think about what might happen if she desperately needed to use the spell and it didn’t work.
“Well,” he said finally, “by my count, we have twenty-two spells including Diminishing, and we have the bloody cover to the book. All we need to do now is to see if we can’t pry the proper total number out of him, then find a way to dispose of the lot before he kills me.” He paused. “Assuming he’s there to be pried, of course.”
Sarah tried to swallow, but it was impossible. “Do you think he is?”
Ruith blew his hair out of his eyes. “Sarah, my love, I have absolutely no idea. A sneaking suspicion, but nothing sure.” He looked at her. “Shall we press on?”
She could only nod, because her mouth was too parched to allow her to manage speech. She watched Ruith pull his bow over his chest and sling the quiver of arrows over his shoulder. She tried not to notice that they were back to just two, marching on into the unknown with no magic at their disposal. Somehow, after all they’d been through over the past few weeks, it seemed a great deal more dangerous than it perhaps should have.
“Do you know where you’re going?” she asked at one point, after they’d been walking for quite some time in silence.
“Aye.”
She took an unsteady breath. “I wish we were anywhere else.”
He stopped suddenly, pulled her into his arms, and held her close. She didn’t protest the string of his bow pressing into her cheek or the way resting her cheek against his chest left her with an all-too-accurate knowledge of how hard his heart was beating. She didn’t like being terrified, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t even bring herself to enjoy the fact that the grandson of Sìle of Tòrr Dòrainn was holding her in his arms. Not even the thought of dragging him along behind her to the home of Dierdhra Higgleton—Prunella’s cousin—and watching the admittedly stunning but undeniably dim lass attempt to throw herself at Ruith and find herself rebuffed was any consolation.
“What are you thinking?”
“That Dierdhra Higgleton would poke my eyes out with hatpins if she thought it would earn her a turn where I’m standing.”
He laughed softly. “You and I, my love, have had a very interesting few years.”
She nodded, but she couldn’t say what she was thinking, which was that she desperately hoped they would have something besides those interesting few years to carry with them past the grave. While she wasn’t sure she wanted glittering elven palaces with sharp-eyed courtiers watching for any misstep, she was absolutely sure she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life living in Doìre.
She didn’t protest when Ruith pulled away and took her hand, though she would be the first to admit she would have happily turned and bolted in the opposite direction.
She realized as they continued on that she recognized her surroundings. She had roamed through those woods countless times over the years to escape her mother—
She took a deep breath. Nay, Seleg wasn’t her mother. She couldn’t even call her her guardian. She supposed she couldn’t call her anything but what she had been: a woman who had been given charge of her and had fulfilled that charge grudgingly.
In time, she began to wonder if she were dreaming or awake, for she felt as if she’d walked the path before her not once but several times before, either in dream or waking vision. It lay first through unimpressive scrub oaks that eventually turned into taller, mightier trees as it climbed a fairly decent incline.
By the time they walked without warning out from the trees and into a clearing, she was winded. Handy, that, given that what she saw took away the rest of her breath.
It was a modest, unremarkable house enclosed by a low fence, a house such as any woodsman might have built for himself. There was a well there to the side, a small barn huddled behind the house, a garden laid out to the side where it might best catch what sun it could. The path that wound from where they stood to the front door was paved with flat stone. Moss grew in the cracks, which was surprising given how little rain Shettlestoune as a whole enjoyed during the year.
There was no light pouring from the windows, but Sarah realized with a start that there didn’t need to be. She had lost track of the time they had walked, or the brief pauses when she’d fallen instantly asleep, but she supposed now that they had walked through at least one entire night and a morning. It was noon, for she could see the sun overhead, but it was obscured by something. She wondered if perhaps there was a darkness that lived there in that glade that couldn’t be dispelled by any amount of sunlight, however relentless.
And then the front door opened.
A tall, grey-haired man, bent and obviously crippled, leaned heavily on a cane as he carefully stepped over the threshold of his door. He inched a pace or two forward, then stopped and looked at them.
Sarah would have caught her breath, if she’d had breath to catch. He looked like Sgath, if Sgath had actually shown his age. She didn’t dare look at Ruith, though she could certainly feel the tenseness in him.
The wizened man had eyes only for Ruith. He stared at him in silence for several minutes, his face betraying no emotion at all. And then he cleared his throat.
“I was wondering,” he said in a ruined voice, “when you would come to tea, son.”
Sarah imagined he did.
Nineteen
R
uith stared at the old man hunched there in front of a sturdy but very modest house and could hardly believe his eyes. There was no denying, though, what his eyes were seeing.
It was his father.
Ruith was so surprised to see him—not just in Doìre, but at all—that he could hardly take it in.
“I’m wondering,” Gair said in that same voice that sounded as if it had been caught between the stone cap of a well and its walls, then pulled out by force and left in his throat, “why it is you never came to call on me before.”
“I didn’t know you were here,” Ruith said, because he could think of nothing else to say. Actually, he realized that wasn’t quite true. There were several things that came readily to mind, beginning with how the hell did you get here? and ending with how could you do what you did to my family, you heartless . . .
He took a deep breath. There was little point in calling his father names only because he feared once he started, he wouldn’t be able to stop.
“Ah, well, that is quite a tale,” Gair said, sounding as happy as if Ruith had asked him to recount in great detail a magnificent day spent betting on horses in Cearracas. He shuffled to his left until he was standing in front of a bench pushed up against the house, then he sat with a deep sigh. He smiled. “Care to join me? You and young Sarah?”
Ruith pulled Sarah behind him, because it was profoundly disturbing to him that his father knew Sarah’s name. And once she was there, he supposed there was no reason not to keep her there.
“Thank you, but nay,” he said. “We’ll stand.”
“Suit yourself.” Gair settled painfully on the bench, then rested his hands over his cane. “It is rather interesting, isn’t it, how disaster turns to good fortune?”
Ruith could hardly believe his father was talking about the disaster at the well, for nothing good had come from it that he could see. Not even that his sire, the most powerful and feared black mage in the history of the Nine Kingdoms, should find himself crippled and keeping house in the ugliest country of the Nine Kingdoms was good fortune enough for the price it had cost.
Pe
rhaps Gair had lost his wits along with his magic at the well.
Assuming he’d lost his magic.
“I was off on a walk through the woods hereabout, as is my custom,” Gair continued, apparently needing no prompting to continue with his lofty conversation, “when I dropped something.”
“What?” Ruith asked finally, when it looked as though his sire wouldn’t continue on without prodding. Ruith thought it best to prod. Better that than giving the man time to consider things he shouldn’t. The list of what those things could have been was one Ruith couldn’t begin to consider, but he suspected how in the hell his father had known Sarah’s name would begin and end it.
He forced himself not to shake his head, and not to continue to shake his head until it spun endlessly. He could hardly believe he was standing where he was, such a short distance from his house where he’d felt so safe. It was almost more appalling that Sarah had been so close for so many years, never dreaming that Gair of Ceangail was taking the air just up the way.
“The second half of my spell of Diminishing.”
Ruith almost wished he’d taken his father up on that seat. “What?”
“You heard me.”
Ruith frowned. “You had it?”
“Of course I had it,” Gair said sharply. “How would I have dropped it if I hadn’t had it to drop?”
Ruith felt himself shrinking right there before his father as if he’d been nothing more than a ten-year-old boy facing a man who towered over him both in stature and power. He tried to ignore the feeling but it was so strong, he was having trouble breathing. “What happened then?” he managed.
“Well, the spell was stolen, of course,” Gair said crossly, “but only after I dropped it, which was an accident. It was picked up by that ridiculous boy, the witchwoman Seleg’s son. No magic to speak of in him, but a vastly overrated sense of his own magnificence. That sort of thing is useful, if you didn’t know, in helping weaker souls do for you what you don’t particularly want to do for yourself.”
Ruith imagined it was. He wondered why it was someone hadn’t noticed that about his father and used it against him centuries earlier.
“Well?” Gair demanded. “Aren’t you going to ask me what it was I didn’t want to do myself?”
“What didn’t you want to do?” Ruith asked dutifully, because he supposed since his father was being so verbose, there was no sense in not having a few answers out of him.
But he knew he needed not only to listen, but watch at the same time. With Gair, the attack rarely came from the place one expected.
“I didn’t want to carry that spell out of Shettlestoune,” Gair said impatiently, as if it should have been obvious, “but I couldn’t leave it here any longer. It certainly wasn’t going to awaken the other half if it loitered here under this magic sink.”
Ruith frowned. “I don’t think Shettlestoune is much of a magic sink. Not in the truest sense—”
“Oh, be silent,” Gair said, waving his stick impatiently. “I don’t want to know what you think it is. As far as I’m concerned, the whole damned place is a magic sink. The point is, I didn’t want to stir myself to dirty my hands with such a menial task, so I sent that boy off to do it for me.”
“He didn’t do it very well,” Ruith said.
“Nay, he didn’t, did he? Got too high on himself, didn’t he? I’d intended he merely go as far as Bruaih, which is far enough from this hellish country that the spell could do its work, but apparently the lad took it upon himself to collect the rest of my spells.”
“Then you are the one who scattered them,” Ruith said.
Gair made a noise of exasperation. “Well, of course I scattered them. What else was I going to do? Keep the book on my person and possibly have it stolen?” He shot Ruith a look that was so full of hate, Ruith almost flinched. “I needed time to recover from the betrayal my family perpetrated on me at Ruamharaiche’s well.”
“Betrayal?” Ruith echoed, coming close to choking on the word.
“Of course, betrayal,” Gair snapped. “You turned on me, every one of you, just as I’d suspected you would.” He lifted his chin. “One does not recover from that sort of mutiny in a fortnight. I suffered for years.”
Ruith listened to his father carry on about the pain he’d endured, and watched him grow angrier by the word. And though his first instinct was to shrink back as he’d done countless times as a child, he realized with a start that that impulse wasn’t coming come from himself.
It was coming from a spell his father was casting over him.
He would have spared a thought or two to wonder how often that had been the case in his youth, but he had more pressing matters to consider at the moment. He simply folded his arms over his chest, ignored the spell, and sifted through the threads of the spell to see his father for what he was. Not mad, not power-hungry, not selfish.
He was evil.
Ruith had known it, of course, but now he could see how his father had become what he’d chosen. Gair was a man full grown, with centuries of living behind him, centuries of opportunities to look at the world and fashion himself a destiny that could be looked back on by future generations and admired.
But his father had chosen differently.
He had chosen a path that demanded he be admired, not for his strength of character, but for all the evil he could loose into the world. He had chosen a destiny that left countless others shivering in fear when his name was mentioned, while still others worried that their peaceful lives would be irreparably damaged by actions that weren’t simply an unthinking assault, but a deliberate campaign to eradicate anything good.
Ruith realized in that moment that one thing he’d tried to convince himself of as a youth and attempted to put behind him as a man was actually true.
He was not his father.
There was not a part of him that belonged to his sire. Not his anger, nor his disgust, nor his heart. Where his sire had chosen evil, Ruith knew he had chosen good. Where his sire had chosen darkness, Ruith had chosen light.
Where his father had chosen Olc, Ruith had chosen Fadaire.
He was not his father.
He would have sat down right there just inside his father’s pretty wooden picket fence if he’d dared, just so he could allow the relief to wash over him, but the battle was not won and the time for reveling in success had not come. He permitted himself a very careful sigh, then resigned himself to a very long afternoon of listening to his father complain.
“None of you were loyal to me, but I have put it all behind me,” Gair groused, huddling over his cane, “because after several years of suffering, I knew I couldn’t bear the hurt any longer. And once that foolish Daniel stole the spell I’d inadvertently left behind, I knew the time to take my place in the world again had come.”
Ruith decided it would be ill-advised to point out to his father that he didn’t look as if he could walk to his garden much less walk back onto the world’s stage.
“Daniel, being the weak-minded lad he is—”
“Was,” Ruith interrupted.
Gair looked at him blankly, as if he had heard that there was only regular ale and not anything more delicate at the pub and couldn’t quite understand why that was, then shrugged. “As you say, then. I saw him leave on his little journey to try to collect more of what he’d found, which then involved his do-gooding sister standing behind you, and then you trotting off to follow her.” He leaned to the right. “You can come out from behind him, my dear Sarah. You need have no fear I’ll discover your true identity.”
“She’ll stay where she is, thank you just the same,” Ruith said, putting his arm out to keep Sarah behind him. That was unnecessary, he found, because she wasn’t moving.
“No matter,” Gair said with a shrug, though his eyes were glittering with anger. “’Tis a poorly kept secret by those with two good eyes that she has no magic. Though those from Cothromaiche have magic that isn’t quite the norm, don’t they?”
Ruith wished that he had left Sarah behind, anywhere, at any point on their way south. He cleared his throat and attempted a distraction. “What did you intend to do when Daniel collected all your spells?”
“Oh, I didn’t intend that he collect them all,” Gair said smoothly. “I intended that you collect them.” He smiled, but there was no warmth to it. “You always were one for a good mystery, weren’t you, Ruithneadh? I knew once you realized what Daniel had, you would trot out your chivalry and attempt to rescue the world from my spells.”
Ruith inclined his head, conceding the point. “I suppose you’re fortunate I have any chivalry at all.”
“I am,” Gair agreed, “though you can’t be fool enough to suppose I didn’t have something else in place.”
Ruith frowned. “And what would that be?”
Gair laughed, a horrible scraping sound that set Ruith’s teeth on edge. “Ah, well, have yourself a look there, my son, and you’ll see who I’m talking about.” Gair nodded to Ruith’s left. “That elven princeling there, who thinks he was so clever in trying to ferret out my magic.” Gair looked down his nose. “How arrogant, young Thoir, to think someone from that collection of mountain huts in Tòrr Dòrainn could possibly outthink me.”
Ruith looked at Thoir standing ten paces from him on his left, looking very much the worse for wear. Or perhaps that was because he had looked into the face of the man he apparently admired to the depths of his soul and discovered that his idol was not exactly what he’d thought him to be.
Ruith lifted his eyes in time to see a magnificent owl come to rest in a tree just behind Thoir. That wasn’t one of the horses, for he assumed they were safely tucked in the stables at Seanagarra. He didn’t suppose it was Franciscus either, but he couldn’t be sure. He suspected ’twas Urchaid of Saothair, come to enjoy the show and hopefully outlast all the players for a chance at the spoils.
All of which left him wondering where Franciscus was. He couldn’t believe the man was dead, but it was a possibility.