by Lynn Kurland
She closed her eyes because that blocked out the sight in front of her, but it left her seeing the loom of air she had strung with fire and woven his power into, so she decided there was no comfort in that. Instead, she looked at the man lying there on the bed and forced herself to mark if there was anything changed about him.
Well, whatever she’d done to him, she had changed his aspect more than she’d anticipated. The scar that had webbed his cheek wasn’t entirely gone, but it was so faint, she supposed that unless a body looked closely, he wouldn’t notice it. She reached out and brushed his hair from his brow. She could see King Sìle’s rune there, of course, because it was difficult to overlook, but she could also see a hint of Weger’s mark as well. His grandfather wouldn’t be pleased to see that, she was sure.
She put her hand on his chest, over his heart, and tried to concentrate on feeling the beating there, strong and steady. Unfortunately, all she could do was look at his face and wonder how it was possible one man could be so beautiful.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t now have a rather large number of other exceptionally handsome men to compare him to. One could say what one cared to about their egos, but only a fool would say that those lads from Neroche were not exceptionally easy on the eye. And if that hadn’t been enough, she had spent a trio of days in Seanagarra, trying to concentrate on testing different bows whilst simultaneously being presented with an endless array of elven males to admire. But neither they nor even Rùnach’s brother Ruith, as great as the familial resemblance was, could compare to the man lying senseless before her.
She almost wished he were still wearing the entirety of the scar on his face.
A soft knock on the door almost left her clinging to the marvelously carved stone of the ceiling. She got to her feet, smoothed down her gown, then hastened to open the door. A very serious– looking man stood there with a satchel over his shoulder.
“I am His Majesty’s physick,” he announced, “Ollamh.”
“Oh,” she managed. “How lovely. Unfortunately, Prince Rùnach is still sleeping—”
“Nay, my lady, I was sent to see to you.”
She blinked in surprise. “Me?”
He nodded. “The king said the prince would recover on his own but that you might need a draught of something strengthening.”
Aisling had the feeling the king would enjoy telling Rùnach that, assuming Rùnach woke with the ability to hear it. She considered Ollamh’s offer of a medicine, then shook her head.
“I am well,” she managed. “You could, if you were willing, have a look at the prince.” She hesitated, then decided if there were anyone who might be able to offer an opinion on Rùnach’s health, it was the dwarf standing in front of her. “I worry about him.”
Ollamh frowned at her as if he thought she might indeed still be the one who needed tending, but he nodded just the same. “If you like. The king said he’d had a bit of a shock.”
Well, that was one way to describe it. She supposed it was best to keep her thoughts to herself and allow the king’s physick to make his own assessment of the damage she’d caused. She stood back and welcomed the man into the chamber. He didn’t seem shocked to see Rùnach lying on the bed with his boots still on, but perhaps he had seen worse.
Ollamh felt Rùnach’s pulse, checked for fever, then pried open his eyes and looked in them. Or, rather, pried open one eye and looked in it. The other was rather too swollen to do anything with.
“A bottle fell on him,” Aisling said quickly. “An accident.”
“I wouldn’t have thought otherwise,” Ollamh said absently. He considered for a bit, then looked at her. “A shock, was it?”
“Of a magical sort,” Aisling said carefully. There was perhaps no point in giving him too many details. “A very great shock, I believe.”
Ollamh stroked his chin. “There’s little to be done for that, I’m afraid. Time will either heal that or it won’t.” He looked at her. “I think, however, that you, my lady, might be best served at present by a bit of fresh air. You look as if you’ve had a bit of a shock as well.”
She wasn’t sure that quite described it. The truth was, she felt as if her soul had been the one to be cracked open instead of Rùnach’s. It wasn’t a physical weariness. She simply didn’t feel as if she were quite who she had been before. She was rather surprised to find, quite suddenly, that she thought she could hear something running.
A thread of the king’s dreams running under her feet.
She looked at Ollamh. “Where is the king, if you don’t mind my asking?”
The dwarf looked rather apologetic. “I believe he has retired to his chamber, my lady.” He hesitated, then leaned closer. “These particular traders try the limits of his patience, I fear. I have on more than one occasion in the past given him the odd though very small sleeping draught, though he didn’t seem to require it today.”
Aisling nodded. “If you think the prince will be well enough for a few minutes, I think I will take your advice and seek out some fresh air.”
Ollamh smiled and nodded back over his shoulder. “I have brought an entire group of assistants with me. We will take perfect care of His Highness the Prince of Tòrr Dòrainn. The air in the king’s garden is particularly healthful, if you’re interested.”
She supposed Rùnach would be safe enough in the care of a small battalion of healers. She nodded, had a final look at Rùnach, then made her way from the chamber.
She hadn’t gone twenty paces before she had bowled a dwarf over before she realized he was in her way. She thought he might have reached out to steady her, or perhaps that had been her to keep him on his feet. All she knew was they both were suddenly leaning heavily against one of the passageway walls.
“My lady,” the dwarf said, his hand to his heart. “Forgive me.”
“My fault,” she said quickly. “I didn’t see you.” She started to move past him only to realize that he was moving with her. She stopped and looked at him. “Can I help you?”
“I am Eachdraidh,” he said nervously. “Bard to the king and keeper of perilous books.”
Heaven help her, she didn’t need any more of either of those. She looked at the book he was holding in front of him as if it were so hot it was fair to scorching his hands. “Is that a perilous book there?”
“Extremely.”
Of course. She wondered why she would have thought anything else. She looked at him hopefully. “Taking it to the king, are you?”
“Nay, my lady, I was asked to bring it to you. By the king himself, if you must know.” Eachdraidh swallowed with difficulty. “Very dangerous if you ask me, but no one generally asks me my opinion on these matters.”
Aisling took the book only because he shoved it into her hands and scurried away before she could shove it back at him. She supposed she had two choices: she could either put it with the other extremely perilous tomes she was carrying—tomes she realized at the moment she had left in the king’s solar—or she could keep the book and do what the king had obviously intended, which was to read it.
She hesitated, then cast caution to the wind and opened the plain cover of the book in her hand to read the title page:
The Lore of Bruadair.
She supposed it said something about the state of her life over the past pair of months that she didn’t even flinch. She shut the book, tucked it under her arm, and decided that she might as well try to find the king’s garden. Master Ollamh would see to Rùnach well enough for a bit, she supposed, no doubt much better than she could have.
She was halfway down a passageway she’d never seen before when it occurred to her that she had no idea where she was going. She stopped the first likely looking soul she came across and asked for directions. It was entirely possible that she didn’t take a decent breath until she found herself being allowed through heavy wooden doors. She stepped outside, then looked at what was in front of her.
She wasn’t sure even garden could describe what she was seei
ng. It was more of a maze of trees adorned with the first tentative blooms of trees used to the vagaries of a mountain spring. She stepped down onto a path of finely laid stone and walked through the trees there until the perfect spot for a bit of reading appeared in front of her. A stone bench sat there, surrounded by torches that weren’t lit as yet. Perhaps someone would come later to light them, perhaps even whilst the sky was still light so that there would be no chance of a guest having to strain her eyes whilst about the heavy labor of reading things about the country of her birth she might not particularly want to read.
She shivered briefly, wishing she had thought to fetch a cloak out of her chamber, then opened the book and hoped she would survive the reading of it.
It was less taxing than she’d feared it might be. The initial few chapters at least seemed to be more of a history of her country than anything else. She read of rulers and houses that had provided rulers and wars and fierce border disputes with Gairn and An-uallach.
And then things took a turn for the more mythical.
She read about the magic that drenched everything from simple milchmaids to less simple kings and queens, how it ran through the rivers like silver and gold shot through fine cloth, how it turned a spectacularly lovely realm into something that left inhabitants and visitors alike believing that they were dreaming. Not everyone had a mighty magic, of course, but that didn’t seem to matter. The air was full of it, and somehow that left it touching all who breathed that air.
She left her finger in the spot where she was and closed the book around it, then looked off into the distance. It occurred to her that she was holding that book in the same manner Rùnach had been holding the book from his grandfather’s library on that fateful day when she’d discovered that he knew far more about her than she’d suspected.
Was he conscious yet or . . .
She found it difficult to swallow all of a sudden, perhaps because whilst she’d been able to ignore it for the past half hour or so, the truth was she wasn’t sure she hadn’t damaged him permanently. After all, who did she think she was? It wasn’t a flawed weave she’d tried to correct or a miswritten pattern she’d tried to amend—not that she’d ever been allowed to do anything but weave plain, dull broadcloth—this was a man’s life. It was not only his life, but his magic.
Rùnach had said it hadn’t mattered to him, the loss of that magic. She had believed that initially, because she’d had no reason not to. But now that she’d seen Seanagarra for herself, full of magic and beauty and the song of a land that loved those who dwelt within its borders, she had to think differently. It wasn’t as if any of his kin had done any mighty magic in her presence, but she had seen it shimmering in their veins, a profoundly lovely something that she suspected was what bards were describing when they talked about elves looking as if they’d stepped from dreams.
She supposed that was what had started her thinking about things perhaps she shouldn’t have. Rùnach had claimed his father could drain a mage of all his power, to the very last drop in every single case. Once she had seen the king’s cavern so far below his palace, she had started to wonder about things lying hidden far beneath the surface of other things. When she’d seen that strand of magic beneath Rùnach’s scars—
She had to take a deep breath. Perhaps she shouldn’t have even attempted anything. What if she had taken Rùnach’s only chance to have his power back and she had ruined it?
She looked at the mountain to her right to judge how close the sun was to going behind it only to find that the sun had already dipped behind that enormous peak. Then she realized something else.
She wasn’t alone.
She stood up, feeling the book slide from her fingers as she did so. Rùnach was standing some twenty paces away, under a tree, watching her. He was breathing, which she supposed was a good sign. He didn’t seem to be moving, though, and his expression was unreadable, which worried her. She actually couldn’t see him very well, but perhaps her eyes were blurry from too much reading.
The point came when she simply couldn’t stand there any longer and look at a man who seemed to have been turned to stone.
“How—” She had to clear her throat. “How are you?”
“Staggered,” he said quietly. “And you?”
Where to begin? She was terrified that she had damaged him beyond what even his father had done whilst at the same time appalled by her own presumption in thinking she might do something that no one else could. She swallowed, but that didn’t solve anything. It just reminded her that her mouth was as dry as a pile of dusty waste yarn that hadn’t been tidied up in months.
“I don’t know how I am,” she admitted.
He pushed away from his tree. She supposed she might have panicked if it had been anyone but Rùnach, fearing for her life. But he didn’t look menacing. He looked . . . staggered.
He walked until he was a pace or two in front of her, then stopped. “I am,” he said slowly, “almost completely unable to see out of my right eye.”
She blinked, then smiled. “I didn’t drop that bottle on you, you know.”
“Are you sure?”
She considered. “Honestly, I don’t remember.”
“I’m a little fuzzy on the whole affair myself,” he admitted. “As for anything else, I feel as if Uachdaran has taken his entire collection of mining tailings and dropped them on my head.”
“That could be from the bottle somehow having found its way onto your face, which still wasn’t my doing even though I can’t remember anything about it.”
He smiled. It was the same smile he’d been giving her for almost as long as she could remember. Small, grave, full of something she might have called affection if she’d been a more hopeful sort of woman.
“Oh, I don’t think it was from the bottle,” he said. “I think it came from something else entirely. I wonder what that something else might have been?”
She would have speculated with him, but she just couldn’t. She had already spent a pair of hours fretting over what she might or might not have done to him. Spending any more time at it wasn’t something she could bear to do. She took her courage in hand and looked him full in the face.
“Do you have your magic back?”
He didn’t answer. He simply looked at her with an expression she had great difficulty in identifying. It wasn’t horror, surely, nor disgust. It certainly wasn’t amusement. She studied him for a moment or two, then decided that the only thing she could say was that the look on his face was one a man might wear after he’d seen something that awed him.
He held out his hand, his open palm facing toward the sky.
A ball of light appeared.
She looked at him in surprise—and no small bit of relief, actually. “Then you do have your magic back?” she asked breathlessly.
He tossed that ball up into the air and above them exploded a canopy of light that turned into petals of various springtime colors, which subsequently fell down toward her as she looked up at them, disappearing with the faintest of scents of the flowers she had smelled in King Sìle’s garden before they touched her skin.
She closed her eyes, then she did something she had never done in the course of her whole life.
She burst into loud, noisy, extremely messy tears.
At some point during that truly appalling display of blubbering—she suspected it had been at the very onset—Rùnach had pulled her into his arms. She found herself clinging to him as if he were a life raft and she adrift in perilous seas. He put a handkerchief into one of her hands at one point, which she appreciated, but otherwise, he simply held her. Well, he held her so tightly, she thought she might soon perish from lack of air, but she didn’t think she should complain. She thought she might have trembled a bit. She was absolutely sure he had, and she suspected it hadn’t been from laughter.
She dabbed at her eyes and wiped her face, finally, then started to lift her head off his soggy shoulder, but he put his hand against the back of her hai
r.
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want you to see me weeping.”
She pulled her head away from his hand. “Don’t be daft.” She looked up at him, then dabbed at his cheeks as well. “I take it that means aye.”
He looked at her for a moment or two in silence, then he released her only long enough to take her face in his hands. He took a deep breath, turned his face to wipe his eyes against his shoulder briefly, then he turned back to her.
And he kissed her.
Aisling realized just how much she had sobbed onto his shoulder mostly because she could feel his soggy tunic beneath her hands as she clutched him to keep from falling flat upon her, ah, well whatever it was she would have fallen onto from shock.
“Well,” she managed, when he lifted his head and looked at her. “Is that a thank-you?”
“Nay,” he said with a faint smile. “This is.”
He kissed her again. She was no less prepared for it that time than she had been the first. It occurred to her at some point that there was a reason those ladies fair in the tales she’d read as a youth put their arms around their heroes’ necks whilst about the activity of being kissed, and it had everything to do with not landing ungracefully upon their . . . well, there was a reason for it.
“If that was a thank-you,” she managed finally, “what was the first?”
“Convenient timing.”
She laughed because his joy was contagious.
Or at least she laughed until she realized with an unpleasant start that perhaps she shouldn’t have been laughing.
He had his power back.
She stepped back away from him, out of his arms, though doing so almost did her in. She dragged her sleeve across her eyes, then looked at what she was now able to allow herself to see: the magic in his veins.
It was beautiful.
“Oh, nay,” he said, reaching for her.
She backed up another pair of steps to elude his hands. “I’m fine.”