by Lynn Kurland
There was something foul afoot in the world, and he didn’t care for it at all.
* * *
A handful of hours later, he was convinced there were things afoot in his grandfather’s kingdom, as well. Several of those foul things were in the middle of the hall, slobbering on an ethereal Bruadairian lass—they likely would have termed it dancing, but he knew better—and if they didn’t stop, blood would be spilt. His grandmother had abandoned him to his fate half an hour earlier, and his grandfather was sitting a chair or two away, smirking at him. It was shaping up to be a perfectly horrendous evening.
And all he could think about was why in the world his book would have been hidden in the library at Eòlas, who had put it there, and why his spells were missing from between those inexpertly tooled leather covers.
Someone dropped down in the chair next to him, interrupting his gloomy thoughts. He looked to find his uncle Sosar sitting there, looking unpleasantly cheerful.
“How are you?” Sosar asked.
“Trying to make my way in the world without magic,” Rùnach asked, “which leaves me singularly unable to glue a handful of my cousins to their seats.”
Sosar laughed a little. “Poor you.”
Rùnach looked at him seriously. “I’m sorry, Sosar, about what happened to you at the well. For what that’s worth.”
“It’s worth a great deal, actually,” Sosar said frankly. “At least you’ll speak of it. No one else will.”
Rùnach wasn’t sure quite what to say. He and Sosar had talked at Mhorghain’s wedding and Ruith’s as well, of course, but they hadn’t discussed anything of substance. Rùnach had quite frankly been too overwhelmed at the return to the boyhood home he hadn’t dared hope he would ever see again, and Sosar had no doubt been too raw still from the recent loss of his power. Rùnach hadn’t asked the details, though Miach had mentioned very briefly that Sosar had been with them at the closing of the well and been attacked by Lothar. That had been more than enough to know at the time.
Now, though, sitting in comfort at his grandfather’s table and looking at the uncle he’d not only always admired but been quite good friends with, he couldn’t help but mourn a bit for the loss. His own loss of power had come because he had deliberately risked it for the chance to stop his father’s madness; Sosar’s had been lost simply because he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rùnach toyed idly with the glass of wine he hadn’t touched.
“It isn’t fair,” he remarked.
Sosar smiled. “You’re too old to believe that life is fair, Rùnach.”
“I know,” Rùnach said with a sigh, “but one does hope for it now and again, don’t you think?”
“And how dull things would be if that were the case, don’t you think?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Rùnach said dryly. “I could do with a bit of boredom.”
“Didn’t you have enough of that haunting Soilléir for all those years?” Sosar asked innocently.
Rùnach laughed a little in spite of himself. “Now you sound like Ruith. I’m not sure what Soilléir ever did to him to earn his endless irritation, but it must have been terrible.” He looked at his uncle sitting there next to him and couldn’t help but pity the man in a way he never allowed himself to pity himself.
Sosar of Tòrr Dòrainn could have perhaps gotten lost a bit in the press of the seven children Sìle had sired, but somehow he hadn’t. He had the full complement of power from both his parents—or he once had, rather—and possessed more beauty than was good for him, all wrapped up in a wry wit that annoyed his father and baffled potential brides’ fathers. It was no wonder he was still unwed.
There were times, Rùnach had to admit, that elves took themselves far too seriously.
“You know what she is, don’t you?”
Rùnach pulled himself back to the present and focused on Sosar. “Aisling?”
Sosar only nodded.
Rùnach blew out his breath. “You know, I’m never quite sure what anyone is driving at with that question. Is she a woman? Why, yes, I believe she is. Does she have magic? Why, nay, I believe she doesn’t.”
Sosar smiled, obviously amused. “Are you sure?”
Rùnach rubbed his hand over his face before he could stop himself. “Tonight I’m not sure of anything save that I am going to do damage to a cousin or two if they don’t leave that girl alone long enough for me to dance with her. Do you think she has magic?”
“I think they all do, in one form or another.”
“Who?”
“Those Bruadairians.”
Rùnach looked at him narrowly. “How did you know where she was from?”
“How could you not know?”
“Because I’m an idiot?”
“Well,” Sosar said, smiling deeply, “I wouldn’t go that far. Blinded by the fairness of her face, aye, perhaps, which I can understand. She is very lovely in a very unusual way—and here she comes to perhaps give you the opportunity to rescue her from the slobbering clutches of your dastardly cousins.”
Rùnach looked up to see that was indeed the case. He stood up as Aisling was escorted around to the back of the table by some cousin he feared to identify lest he feel the need to take him outside the hall and explain to him just exactly where his interest in the woman standing there should end. Sosar had stood as well, vacating what had been Aisling’s supper chair.
“I think she likes me,” he said, elbowing Rùnach firmly in the ribs. “She’s watching me.”
“She’s dazed by your bad manners,” Rùnach said with a snort.
“Introduce us and we’ll see which of us she likes better.”
Rùnach rolled his eyes briefly, then turned a pleasant look on Aisling. “Uncle, if I might present Mistress Aisling, who is my, ah . . . well, my—”
“Questing companion,” Aisling supplied.
Sosar laughed. Rùnach wasn’t sure he found anything particularly amusing about that, but there it was. It was perhaps ridiculous to even be contemplating any sort of alliance with the woman in front of him, but he was beginning to wonder if he could bear even the thought of anything else.
“Rùnach always has had the best of fortune in finding questing companions whose loveliness leaves the entire room gasping for breath.”
Aisling was looking at Sosar gravely. “I imagine he has.”
“I, on the other hand, am always looking for a lovely woman to take pity on me and lower herself to at least sit with me at table. I don’t suppose we could shove Rùnach down to one of the lower tables and you take his seat whilst I have yours, could we?”
“Of course, Prince Sosar.”
Sosar looked at Rùnach. “You’ve been talking about me,” he said with a knowing nod.
“Not a word,” Rùnach said.
Sosar smiled slightly, then looked back at Aisling. “Then my father told you who I was.”
She shook her head. “I just knew.”
“What else do you know?”
Rùnach would have warned his uncle he was wading out into deep waters, but his elbow in Sosar’s ribs went unheeded.
“I know you’re one of Sìle’s sons,” she said slowly. “The youngest.”
“As it happens,” Sosar agreed.
“And you’ve lost your power.”
Sosar went very still. “How do you know that?”
Her expression was very grave. “Because I know who has it.” She reached out and put her hand on Sosar’s arm. “I don’t think you would want your magic back now.”
“Ah,” Sosar managed, “I imagine not.”
She studied him a bit longer. “You know, he didn’t take your birthright.”
Sosar sat down abruptly on the edge of the table. Rùnach wasn’t exactly sure Sosar hadn’t sat down in a bit of Aisling’s unfinished dinner, but since he’d joined his uncle in that sitting activity, he supposed he couldn’t complain about the condition of his uncle’s backside when his likely looked the same.
“What are yo
u talking about?” he asked faintly, realizing only after the fact that Sosar had said the same thing.
Aisling winced. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Nay,” Sosar said faintly, “go on. I’m curious.”
“A trait you share with your nephew,” she noted.
“Aye, and look at what trouble it lands him in. I know I should avoid all displays of it, but I’ll take my own advice tomorrow. What were you saying?”
Rùnach found himself the recipient of a questioning look from Aisling, which he answered with a helpless shrug. Sosar had asked, after all, and he was not a weak-stomached fop. Aisling took a deep breath.
“Lothar of Wychweald,” she said very carefully. “He didn’t take your birthright.”
“I believe I need to sit,” Sosar said thickly.
“You are sitting,” Rùnach pointed out. “In Aisling’s supper.”
“Did you tell her?”
“About her supper? Nay, not yet.”
Sosar shot him a weak glare. “About me.”
“What do you think?”
“I think I need to sit closer to the floor, but that may happen all on its own.” He looked at Aisling with a mixture of astonishment and horror. “What do you mean?”
Aisling struggled to put it into words. “It is,” she began slowly, “as though he came along and cut down a mighty forest that had been growing for several centuries.” She paused. “You have been alive for several centuries, haven’t you?”
“To my continued surprise, aye.”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t imagine you were born with a full complement of skills, were you?”
“I was too young at the time to remember.”
She smiled. “I like you.”
“Thank heavens.”
Rùnach would have laughed, but he was too busy watching Aisling and wondering where indeed she had come from. Obviously he knew where she had come from, but as to the things she could do . . . He shook his head.
There was a mystery there.
And because he was who he was, he could hardly allow that sort of intriguing bit of unknowing to pass by without his notice. Her ability to see was something he could explain away readily enough, having known Soilléir of Cothromaiche for so many years. Perhaps there was something in the water in the north that infected both Bruadairians and Cothromaichians. But that was where understandable ended and things too odd for coincidence began.
For example, it was odd, wasn’t it, that ability she had of spinning things most spinners wouldn’t dream of putting on a bobbin? Not to mention what she was capable of fashioning the wheel itself from; that was something he’d never heard of in the whole of his life spent haunting libraries reading the obscure and usual. And what of that business in the garden earlier? She had touched that tree, held one of its blossoms, and suddenly she was speaking his tongue as if she had grown up doing just that.
None of that was magic, at least not in the traditional sense of the same.
He focused on the conversation going on in front of him and forced himself to catch up the thread of it. He didn’t particularly care to let a mystery slip by him, but he would revisit it very soon.
“Just as a mighty forest doesn’t grow overnight,” Aisling was saying, “I would think your power grew as time passed.” She paused. “Is that right? I don’t know, you see, never having had much to do with elves.”
Sosar looked at his nephew. “I feel like I’m talking to Soilléir.”
“I understand,” Rùnach said, with feeling, “believe me.”
Sosar looked at her. “I think that might be right. That bit about growing.”
“Then,” she began, “if I could offer an opinion, I think the roots are still there. Rather scorched, I’m afraid, but still there. If you want the truth.”
Sosar put his hand over his eyes. “I’m not sure I can bear any more truth.”
“You might have to find a particular sort of soil to grow in for a bit, if you know what I mean.” She paused. “Not that this wouldn’t be a lovely place to garden.” She looked at him. “I’m not sure it can give you what you need.”
“What I need, I believe, is a very strong drink.” He pushed himself up off the table, took Aisling’s hand, and bent low over it. “I thank you, lady, for that.” He straightened and looked at her seriously. “You have given me hope.”
Aisling only nodded, looking slightly green. Rùnach would have pulled her down to sit next to him and asked her to explain what she had seen, but he hardly had the chance to open his mouth before another one of his cousins—one of his aunt Ciatach’s extremely handsome lads who seemed to move quite easily between his mother’s home in Tòrr Dòrainn and his father’s in Ainneamh—had appeared at Aisling’s side and lured her away to the middle of the hall for yet another dance. Rùnach watched her go, sighed, then dropped down into his chair. He looked up at his uncle who was far greener in the face than Aisling had been.
“How are you?”
“Almost speechless,” Sosar said faintly. He shook his head slowly. “I also have a lovely chicken supper on the seat of my trousers.”
“So you do.”
Sosar eyed him. “I was going to spell them clean, but I don’t suppose that’s possible.”
“Well, don’t look at me.”
Sosar bowed his head and laughed, though it sounded a miserable laugh indeed. He shot Rùnach a look. “We are quite a pair.”
“So we are, but I avoided my plate.”
“Which was clean anyway, so you needn’t have worried.”
“You could ask Còir or one of the other lads for aid,” Rùnach pointed out.
“They would make the cloth disappear with the chicken remains, and then where would I be?”
Rùnach clucked his tongue. “Wishing you had instilled the proper fear and loathing into them several decades ago.”
“I’ve been too busy being my charming and sunny self. Where is my mother? She wouldn’t leave me humiliated.”
Rùnach watched his uncle stumble away and had to admit there was something about what Aisling had said that left him feeling just the faintest bit of envy.
And no small bit of curiosity, it had to be said.
If Sosar’s birthright were still there in his veins, then perhaps . . .
He cut off the thought before it had the chance to grow. It didn’t matter what his own birthright might or might not have been; what mattered was the power of the mage who had stripped that birthright away. And the simple but undeniable truth was that Lothar of Wychweald, for all his bluster and arrogance, had never been and never would be anything but a neophyte when compared to Gair of Ceangail.
Would that the roles were reversed and his own power had been taken by someone with Lothar’s lack of skill.
He immediately turned away from the thought, because it smacked too much of self-pity and because he wouldn’t have traded the possibility of his having his own power back for Sosar’s hope of the same.
Never mind that, in spite of the fact that he sat there in absolute mythological luxury, surrounded by souls whose beauty it was almost difficult for him to look at and he’d grown to manhood looking at them, all he had to his name was his name, his father’s reputation that clung to him despite any attempts to dispel it, a pair of mysteries that perplexed him, and his own poor magicless self and ruined face.
It was almost enough to have him trotting after Sosar to see what his uncle might have languishing in bottles that needed to be emptied.
Instead, the moment the current song ended and another threatened to begin, he popped up out of his chair, walked with all due haste around the end of the table, and marched out purposefully onto the floor where he relieved yet another damned cousin of the exertion of partnering Aisling of Bruadair in yet another dance.
“You dance as well?” she asked in surprise, then she laughed a little. “I’m sorry. I forget who you are.”
“I think, my lady, that that was a complime
nt.” And he would have accepted those sorts of compliments far into the evening if it meant he could see her for a change looking as if the sword of death wasn’t hanging over her head.
So he danced with her. He was slightly surprised that he remembered any of the steps but somehow less than surprised that she seemed to have learned a great many that evening thanks to her numerous tutors. When he thought he might fall asleep on his feet if he didn’t close his eyes, he begged her to put him out of his misery and allow him to walk her back to her bedchamber. The older members of his family had already retired, and he wasn’t about to humor the younger ones with any more time spent in Aisling’s presence, so he led her out of the hall without saying any fond farewells.
She was silent on the way to her chamber, but she didn’t look unhappy. Perhaps she was mulling over her choices for dancing partners on the morrow.
He stopped in front of her doorway and looked at her gravely. “How are you?”
“Tonight was a great diversion,” she said slowly, “but even though I’ve eliminated a handful of things that should have sent me to an early grave, I still face one.”
“The need for a mercenary?” he said.
She nodded. “You know, ’tis one thing to consider something from the safety and distance of time and place. It’s another thing entirely to be coming up hard against it and know there is no more time for considering.” She looked up at him. “But you know that, don’t you?”
He had to lean against the wall, not because his knees were weak, but because she said the damndest things. “I think I might.”
“There might still be something attached to the finding of my mercenary,” she said reluctantly. “I can’t be sure about that.”
He supposed that now most of her secrets were out in the open there was no point in not telling her what he’d been planning, yet something stopped him. He reached out and tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “You’ll find what you need.”
“I’m supposed to be at Taigh Hall tomorrow.”
“Mercenary in tow?”
She nodded. “Unless I’ve counted amiss.” She drew her hand over her eyes. “At the moment, I’m not sure of anything. Perhaps all I must do is secure a lad by tomorrow. The peddler didn’t tell me I had to be at Taigh Hall myself.” She started to speak, then shook her head. “I don’t know what must happen exactly.”