by Lynn Kurland
The negotiations came to an abrupt end after a final volley of disparagements, then Sìle himself parted his guards and strode over to Rùnach and Aisling.
“Let’s be off,” he said briskly. “He’ll go back to his hovel and we’ll make for luxury. Come along, children.”
Rùnach left Iteach in the care of his grandfather’s guardsmen, who seemed properly impressed with his spectacular self, then offered Aisling his arm. Or he would have if his grandfather hadn’t beaten him to the courtesy. He found himself walking behind the pair as Sìle made his way toward a path that opened up suddenly in front of him, wide enough for three to walk comfortably together. Rùnach remained behind, however, because it was easier that way to catch glimpses of Aisling’s face as she stole looks at the king.
He suspected he knew what she was thinking. She had made it very clear whilst they had been at Gobhann together a pair of fortnights earlier that she fully believed that elves, dwarves, and other legendary figures were simply myths. Watching her discover that the world was full of more things than she had considered before had been less amusing than it had been rather heartbreaking. That she should have passed the bulk of her life in what she had described as an unrelentingly grey, unpleasant, and surely unmagical weaver’s guild whilst he himself had grown to manhood for the most part in the absolutely glorious palace of Seanagarra . . .
She shot him a look over her shoulder as his grandfather gave instructions to his guardsmen, a look Rùnach had no difficulty interpreting.
She was going to have to sit and think, sooner rather than later.
He smiled to himself and continued on behind them, listening to his grandfather make polite small talk with her with an effort Rùnach had never seen his grandfather use even with ambassadors from countries he actually liked. Aisling watched him as if she simply couldn’t believe he was real.
“Is something amiss, Mistress Aisling?” Sìle asked finally.
“How did you know my name, Your Majesty?”
Sìle scratched his head. “Didn’t Rùnach tell me?”
“I don’t believe so, Your Majesty.”
“Then perhaps ’twas the border that said as much.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “Does something trouble you?”
“No indeed, Your Majesty, save that ’tis difficult to look at you, if you’ll forgive my saying so.”
“I don’t think I had time to comb my hair,” he admitted, smoothing down his snowy crown that was indeed standing up in quite a few places. “But it was worth it to see Ehrne in his nightshirt.”
“It isn’t that, Your Majesty,” Aisling said seriously, “’tis your runes. So many layers upon layers of them. You didn’t put them on yourself, though, did you?”
Rùnach almost ran into his grandfather who had stumbled to a halt and was looking at Aisling in astonishment, apparently unable to find a single thing to say.
Aisling looked at Rùnach quickly. “Should I not have said that?”
“Oh, you definitely should have,” Rùnach said, trying to suppress a smile. “Not many people manage to leave him speechless. It’s good for him.”
Sìle frowned at him, then turned a softer look on Aisling. “What do you mean, missy?”
“Well,” she said hesitantly, “there are runes around your wrist, of course, but they claim your father put them there.”
“He did,” Sìle said faintly. “As it happens.”
“The rest I think have come from the land somehow.” She paused. “I think it loves you and is grateful for your care of it.”
Rùnach wasn’t sure who would weep first, he himself or his grandfather. Sìle was standing there, as winded as if Iteach had casually kicked him full in the belly.
“Miach doesn’t wear his kingship in that same way, though,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s less visible.”
“Well,” Sìle said finally, “that’s a bit of a surprise, isn’t it, given how those lads from Neroche feel the endless need to show off. Now, let’s speak of our journey home this morning. It is a long walk to my house, and I imagine you both have been traveling for quite some time. Is that so, Rùnach?”
Rùnach nodded. “Since yesterday morning.”
Sìle harrumphed. “I’ll talk to you about the care of this sweet girl later, when we’ve a hot fire in front of us and breakfast inside us. For now, I believe we’ll see if there might be a less tedious means of travel save our feet.”
Rùnach watched his grandfather go confer with his guards and assumed that less tedious meant something besides the shapechanging his grandfather had obviously done to get to the border so quickly. He looked at Aisling and was slightly surprised to find she didn’t look nearly as relaxed as he felt.
“What is it?”
She looked up at him with her fathomless eyes. “Two more days.”
He knew exactly what she meant. “We’ll find the answers here.”
She didn’t look convinced, but he knew things she didn’t. The only thing that remained was finding the proper time to give them to her.
His grandfather finished with his business and returned to stand in front of them. Rùnach supposed he would be wise not to remark on the fact that Sìle had found a comb and acquired a cloak from some no-doubt-magical source. His grandfather held out a wrap for Aisling that he had likely procured from the same source, namely his own imagination.
“I believe, Mistress Aisling, that we’ll find our carriage awaiting us just beyond the break in the trees ahead. The snows have given way to more springlike conditions already, as you can see, which leaves the ground a bit soft. I think we might consider making the journey a bit off the ground, just to be safe.”
Aisling took a deep breath. “As you wish, Your Majesty.”
“You won’t notice, my gel.”
“I always notice, Your Majesty.”
Rùnach smiled to himself because his grandfather was trotting out his best court manners and he knew Aisling was speaking the absolute truth. He did the honors of settling the cloak about Aisling’s shoulders, then found himself invited to try to catch Iteach for his own ride east. He watched Aisling be handed into a very luxurious sleigh pulled by snowy white horses with golden wings on their feet. Trappings fit for royalty indeed.
“Don’t dawdle, Rùnach,” Sìle said, clambering into the sleigh himself.
Rùnach nodded, then faced off with his horse. He had the feeling things would go much less smoothly there. His horse started his demands with griffin-shape, but Rùnach negotiated him down to something with wings that Iteach claimed he had seen in a book of Eulasaid’s. Just imagining how and why Eulasaid had felt the need to give a shapechanging horse any ideas, never mind provide him with illustrative instructions as well, was almost enough to leave Rùnach longing for a nap.
He climbed aboard the back of something mythical he didn’t attempt to identify, refrained from complaining about the lack of saddle, and contented himself with knowing that for at least the next day or so, he had provided Aisling with a place of safety. He wouldn’t be unhappy for the respite either, regardless of his earlier intentions of blending into a nameless garrison. It was obvious that sort of obscurity was not going to be in his future any time soon.
After he’d seen Aisling settled at Seanagarra and had taken a walk to clear his head, he would look at the book residing in his pack and turn his mind to the unsettling question of why it had found itself in the library at Eòlas.
And who had put it there.
Three
Aisling sat in a sleigh apparently conjured up on the spot by the king of the elves, whose very existence she would have argued against until she ran out of breath if she’d been asked a sixmonth previous, and tried not to gape at the palace in front of her.
She would admit that she had been overwhelmed by her first sight of the palace of Chagailt with its soaring wings flung out from the main body, its lovely gardens stretching out as far as the eye could see, and all of it draped in a lushness that apparently only months o
n end of rain could provide. Tor Neroche, on the other hand, had been starkly imposing, sitting on a bluff as it did, and intimidating by its sheer size and location alone. She honestly couldn’t bring to mind the particulars of the palace at Beul, mostly because she hadn’t, even with all her years spent in the city, had much of a look at it.
But she was having a very good look at what lay before her, and the sight was leaving her without a single thing to say.
She couldn’t say Seanagarra was enormous. It seemed to have only one level, though she could see from where she sat that there were parts of it that had to have ceilings that likely were so high, they were difficult to make out as one looked upward at them. It was clear that there were many wings built off the main building and many gardens surrounding those wings. She had never heard a tale about an elf that didn’t involve some sort of garden, so obviously they wanted to have them at the ready. She wasn’t much of a gardener herself. Then again, it wasn’t as if she’d had the chance to do much gardening at the Guild.
She had to pause for a moment and think about that. She had few memories of her childhood, but she did remember a garden reached by a path that led from her family’s kitchen. Beyond that garden had lain a forest, one she had often wished she’d had the chance to explore. Perhaps there were forests enough in Tòrr Dòrainn to satisfy even her longing to wander through them.
Nay, it wasn’t the size of the palace that left her speechless or the king’s glamour, which was draped over the entire place like a fine mist. It was that she was sitting in a sleigh so fine that not even any of the writers of the fables she’d read in her youth could have imagined it up, that the sleigh in question found itself currently in Tòrr Dòrainn—a mythical place if ever there were one—and that she was watching the elven king of that same realm hold out his hand to help her down from that sleigh as if she were a grand lady come to visit.
She’d made no secret to Rùnach of the fact that she was well acquainted with creatures that belonged only to the realm of myths, nor had she shied away from listing those same creatures even though she had supposed that disabusing him of any notions he might have had about their existence might cause him a loss of innocence. Painful perhaps, but necessary. Only the tables had been well and truly turned on her the longer she’d traveled with him. First had come flying horses, then magic and black mages, and then even more unusual things like elven princes and their grandfathers. She had definitely come to eat her words.
She considered the palace before her. It was easier to look on now that she was through the magic that guarded the king’s palace itself, a protection that was different from what lay over the entire kingdom though no less serviceable or formidable. It took her a moment before she could lay her finger on exactly what struck her about the place, but when she hit upon it, she was surprised it hadn’t occurred to her right away.
Seanagarra looked as if it belonged in a dream.
“Mistress Aisling?”
She looked at the king of the realm. She was a little surprised to find his hair white when those around him seemed to be eternally a score and ten, but she had the feeling that sorrow and trouble had given him that snowy crown. His eyes, eyes remarkably similar to Rùnach’s, were less full of sorrow than they were an endlessly running stream of memory that stretched back through centuries of tending his soil and caring for his family.
A creature from myth, indeed.
She accepted his hand out of the sleigh, then smiled. “Thank you for the lovely ride, Your Majesty.”
“The height didn’t bother you too much, then?”
“It was the comfort of sitting on something solid, I think, that saved the day,” she said. “Iteach brought us south as a rushing wind. Or at least I think he was wind. I spent most of the journey in a faint.”
“I can’t say that I blame you,” Sìle said with a snort. “That pony has a wild streak in him that I’m not sure my grandson will ever root out of him, no matter the time spent at the task.”
Time. Aisling found herself coming back to face the reality of her situation with a nasty jar. She had two days left. The sands of time were falling in a way that she couldn’t stop, couldn’t ignore, couldn’t wish away, no matter how much she wished she could. She had failed to find the mercenary she’d been sent off to acquire. She was due to be at Taigh Hall in . . . she took a deep breath. She was due there in two days, mercenary in tow, which she obviously wasn’t going to manage.
Unless the truth was indeed that everything she had been told was a lie. She had left the Guild and lived, crossed the border and lived, spun wool and lived. Who was to say that she couldn’t walk away from the task she’d been given, against her will as it happened, and live as well?
Besides, even if she could find a man to take on the task, how would she get him where he was supposed to go in time? Worse still, who with any sense would want the burden of rescuing Bruadair from its all-powerful ruler when there was nothing to be gained but the promise of gold after the deed was done? The man would have to be mad.
“You look weary, my girl,” Sìle said. “Perhaps you would care for a bit of a rest before we seek out something edible?”
She nodded, because it would have been rude to tell him that she was so nervous she wasn’t sure if she could manage to down even something from what she was sure were his most remarkable kitchens.
Two days. How was she going to possibly save herself with only two days left?
She watched the king have a quiet word with one of his men, then turn to look at Rùnach. Iteach was standing there, pawing at the ground impatiently, as if he assumed he would have a decent meal as well but wondered why it was taking so long.
“So this one chose you,” the king said. “Gifted from Sgath, I assume.”
“Aye,” Rùnach said. “Out of Geasan.”
“It shows. And aye, Iteach, I know who you are. We met at Lake Cladach, don’t you remember? You may now stop scattering your name on the area around you like claps of thunder. Here comes a pair of lads to see to your comfort. I would suggest you remember which side of the border you are safest on, should you feel the need to roam.”
Iteach tossed his head, then snorted at the king before he allowed himself to be escorted off to what Aisling was fairly sure would be kingly accommodations. She also suspected that Iteach didn’t think borders applied to him, but she didn’t dare say as much.
The king of the elves rubbed his hands together. “Very well, children, now that you’re safely arrived, let us see to your comfort. Rùnach, your grandmother will no doubt be looking for the both of you to see you settled, so perhaps you can take this lovely gel here and walk in a garden until she arrives. I’ve the usual business to attend to, so I’ll take my leave.”
“Going to send a polite missive to Ehrne inquiring about his health?” Rùnach asked.
“Commenting on his nightclothes, rather. Mistress Aisling, it has been a pleasure.”
Aisling shook hands with the king, then watched him deliver a fond slap or two on Rùnach’s back before walking away. She watched him go, watched his guardsmen bow one by one to Rùnach before they followed him, then found herself quite alone with a man she had once thought was nothing more than an ordinary lad.
Well, that wasn’t precisely true. She had always thought him more handsome than was good for feminine consumption, but perhaps that was beside the point. She had once imagined that his lordly qualities could be credited merely to a decent upbringing. She had learned a trio of days before that he was something far more than that, but she supposed she hadn’t realized exactly what that meant until that moment when she had seen the locale where he’d spent his youth.
It was little wonder he’d kept that a bit of a secret.
She supposed there was no reason not to frown a little at him so he knew that hedging was bad. She pointedly ignored the fact that she had done nothing—up to and including the current moment—but hedge, but as she had once told him, she was less important than
he was, so it didn’t matter.
“You grew up here,” she accused.
He smiled. “Part of the time, at least.”
She blinked, then realization dawned. “Oh, I see. Not all the time, then?”
He shook his head. “Had to visit my father now and again.”
“I’d forgotten.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I think.”
She wasn’t sure she wanted the details, but she supposed that since she’d begun the conversation, she couldn’t play the coward and duck out of it. “Is your father’s hall not so lovely, then?”
“It’s a hellhole,” he said easily, “and I pray you’ll never have the pleasure of seeing it. Seanagarra more than made up for any time we spent there. After the wedding my father never returned here, so it made our time here that much more pleasant. I think some of it was that he was uncomfortable with the goodness of the souls here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most of it was because my grandfather’s glamour kept him out.”
She revised her opinion of the perfection of his youthful years. “I have a thought,” she said.
“I cannot wait to hear it.”
“Let’s not talk about your father anymore.”
He laughed a little and reached for her hand to tuck it into the crook of his elbow. “What a marvelous idea. What shall we talk about instead? All the answers you owe me to questions I’ve already asked, or shall we just dive right in and you reveal all the secrets you’ve been keeping from me?”
“Oh, look at those flowers over there.”
“You can run, Aisling, but you can’t hide,” he said with a pointed look. “Not here. I know all the bolt-holes.”
“I think I could hide quite a while,” she said, “so instead why don’t you tell me what it was like to grow up here? Or you can give me the six answers you owe me.”