The Dreamer's Song

by Lynn Kurland

  She was going to trust.

  She scrambled to her feet and took a pace or two toward him. “Change me.”

  He frowned. “I beg your par—”

  “Change me,” she said impatiently. “Change me into a mage. Then I can help Acair and save my grandfather. Change me.”

  He didn’t look at all startled, which led her to believe that he hadn’t expected anything else.

  “Give you magic, you mean?” he asked quietly.

  She could hardly speak for the terror that had lodged in her throat. She knew she had come to the place where she was for exactly the step she was preparing to take, but that didn’t make that step any easier. If she continued on the way she intended, she would never be able to turn off that path. Her life would be altered in a way that could never be undone.

  She knew it was a choice she had to make, one she needed to make, one she would make freely and call the consequences her own.

  “Aye,” she managed. She pulled out the charm that Mistress Cailleach had given her. “Acair’s great-aunt told me I could breathe fire, so I shall. You can help me.”

  Soilléir smiled faintly. “I don’t think you want me to turn you into a dragon.”

  “Nay, but you could give me magic, then I could turn myself into a dragon.”

  “I don’t think you understand—”

  “What I understand,” she said shortly, “is that.” She stepped aside and gestured toward Acair. “I understand that. I understand that Acair used magic to try to save us and this is the price he paid. Mansourah of Neroche is likely dead and there’s a damned mage over there where I can no longer see him who would likely slay us before he took the trouble to find out our names.” She glared at him. “Look you what’s become of us all. I can’t save Mansourah, but I can save Acair.”

  He looked at her gravely. “There is a price and that price is dear.”

  “I know that,” she said, through gritted teeth. “A piece of my soul or some other such rot. I don’t care. We’re in a bit of a rush here, if you haven’t noticed. I think Acair is still breathing, but I’m afraid that won’t last unless I do something fairly soon.”

  Soilléir considered. “There are many types of gifts, Léirsinn.”

  “I’m speaking of magic.”

  He nodded. “I know. And if you want the truth, there is none in your blood. No magic in the sense you’re talking about. Sight, perhaps, but that is all.”

  “Then change that!”

  He clasped his hands behind his back. “I could instead give you a handful of spells—”

  “And if we encounter something that those spells won’t see to, what then? Acair used that sort of thing and look where it got him.”

  “I imagine he didn’t limit himself to a spell that worked on its own,” Soilléir said with a faint smile.

  “Does it matter?” she asked, hearing her voice break but finding herself unable to care. “This might count as his good deed for the day. I cannot stand by and see him repaid with death.”

  He sighed deeply. “I do this so rarely—”

  “Make this one of those times.”

  He smiled very faintly. “You are persuasive.”

  “Terrified, rather,” she said frankly. “And desperate to save those I love.”

  “I daresay,” he said gently. He took a deep breath. “You should know that changing one’s essence can produce results that I cannot foresee.” He paused, then shook his head. “Let me rephrase that. I can change your essence and I might be able to see how it will affect you, but there are also things that might happen that I cannot control. You may find yourself facing parts of yourself that you don’t necessarily care for.”

  “I’m traveling with Acair of Ceangail,” she said pointedly. “Can I be worse than he is?”

  He lifted his eyebrows briefly. “Time will tell, I suppose. I believe you are fond of him.”

  “Quite possibly, which is why I would prefer to have him alive. Since I don’t think you’re interested in coming with us on this journey, I need to be able to help him myself.”

  She realized she was talking more than she wanted to, but the truth was, she was almost out of her head with fear. Any hope of telling it to go off and linger in the verge was long gone. Fear was right next to her, with its arm around her shoulders, occasionally blowing down her neck with a cold, hard, unrelenting breath of ice.

  She looked at Soilléir. “A favor first.”

  He tilted his head and looked at her in surprise. “What?”

  She gestured toward Acair. “Heal him—but slowly. He’ll try to stop me if he awakens too quickly.”

  Soilléir closed his eyes briefly, as if the thought pained him, then he opened his eyes and nodded. He walked over, knelt, then put a hand on Acair and wove his spell. Léirsinn supposed that if she’d been serious about becoming a mage she would have memorized what he was saying, but she couldn’t. All she could do was listen to the words he spoke, words that caused bones to knit together and blood to run in its proper course, and the very essence of Acair of Ceangail to find its home in the usual way inside his admittedly superior form.

  Then Soilléir rose, put his hand on her arm to draw her aside a bit more, then looked at her with pity in his eyes.

  “Are you—”

  “Aye.”

  Aye, she was certain, because there was only one path laid out before her, one way to escape a barn full of locked stalls and blocked passageways. The only way out was forward and she was the only one who could walk that path.

  She looked at him and nodded, once, sharply. It was the best she could do.

  He lifted his eyebrows briefly, then he began to speak. She supposed he did that for her benefit, mostly because she suspected he didn’t need to give voice to the words he was saying. He might have spoken but a handful of words, or scores. She had no idea and felt no passage of time. All she knew was that she felt as if her soul had been turned inside out.

  It was excruciating.

  At one point, she found herself reaching out for something to hold on to. Acair’s minder spell was there in its usual spot at her elbow. It nodded politely to Soilléir, then offered her its arm. She didn’t think to find it strange that it had an arm or that she could use it to lean on. Or that might have been Soilléir’s. She honestly couldn’t tell.

  “I need to breathe fire,” she whispered.

  She knew she had said those words, but she could hardly hear them for the song in her head. It felt familiar, as if she’d heard it before, but she couldn’t place it.

  “Let’s start with simply calling fire. Here is a spell for that.”

  Soilléir’s voice sounded very far away and small, but she memorized the words anyway. She wasn’t particularly good at memorizing things, but she supposed that would need to change. She repeated the words faithfully, then heard a loud snap.

  “Léirsinn!”

  She looked up to find the entire forest alight with flame. She realized someone was calling her name. She was fairly confident it wasn’t Soilléir because he was still standing there, simply watching her. She supposed it might have been Acair, but she was so tired, she couldn’t keep her eyes open long enough to tell.

  She felt arms go around her, which was very handy because they would likely save her from a nasty fall.

  She fell just the same.

  Eighteen

  What the bloody hell did you just do?” Acair snarled.

  Nay, he didn’t snarl. That didn’t begin to describe the place of agony he’d spoken from. If he’d had any soul left to shred, he would have been crying out from a place in the midst of the tatters. He held a senseless Léirsinn of Sàraichte in his arms and wasn’t entirely sure she would survive what she’d just done.

  She was still breathing, which he supposed was something, but she was as pale as death. Acair
looked at her, then at the trees on fire around them, then glared at Soilléir of Cothromaiche, that empty-headed wielder of ridiculous magic.

  “Put out the fire,” he snapped.

  The trees returned to their unscorched state without even a single word being spoken, something that galled Acair to his very depths.

  He was also exceedingly annoyed by the fire that appeared from nothing fifty paces in front of him in a clearing that also hadn’t been there before. He growled at his spell to follow him, shot Soilléir a look that should have had him scampering back to hide behind his grandfather’s ermine-trimmed skirts, then carefully carried Léirsinn over to warmth and what he could only hope was a bit of safety. He looked over his shoulder, but the glade in the distance was empty from what he could tell.

  Empty of that mage, empty also of Mansourah of Neroche.

  Worst of all, though, was the seemingly lifeless woman he held on to. He sat down on a stump, cradled her in his arms, and tried not to weep.

  “She asked me to give her magic,” Soilléir said quietly.

  Acair looked at the man who had sat down across the flames from him and wished he had the means to slay him, but then that would definitely end any hope of restoring Léirsinn to her proper state. He would slay him later, when he’d forced the damned worker of essence changes to put things to rights.

  “You should have ignored her,” Acair said bitterly.

  Soilléir looked at him. “As you’ve managed to do?”

  Acair felt his mouth working, but could find nothing in his extensive collection of slurs dire, disgusting, or damning enough to use in cursing the man sitting across the fire from him.

  That Soilléir didn’t mock him for it was even more alarming.

  “I hate you,” Acair managed finally.

  “I know.”

  He supposed the bastard also knew that Acair never wept, ever. He couldn’t bring to mind a single moment in the whole of his ninety-and-eight years of moving from one piece of mischief to the next where he had so much as troubled himself with a sniffle of emotion.

  That tears were streaming down his cheeks at the moment was quite possibly the most—

  Nay. Nay, that wasn’t the truth. The most devastating moment of his life had been regaining his senses in time to watch the whoreson sitting across from him weaving one of his absolutely vile spells of essence changing over a red-haired gel who couldn’t possibly have understood what she was asking for.

  That she had done it for him was the single worst thing he’d ever heard in a lifetime of hearing terrible things.

  He gathered what was left of his wits and looked at Soilléir.

  “I will slay you,” he said flatly.

  “Do what you must.”

  Acair suspected that if he spluttered any more, his tongue would simply fling itself out of his mouth to spare itself any more frustration.

  “When I have my magic back to hand,” he said, “I will steep my worst spells in a mixture of loathing and bitterness until perfection is reached, then I will unleash the whole on you at a time and location when and where you cannot defend yourself. You will die a lingering, horrific death and I will stand over you the entire time and watch until the light fades from your eyes and you breathe your last.”

  “I look forward to it—”

  “Shut up!” Acair shouted. “Have you no idea of what you’ve done to her?”

  “I’m well aware of it,” Soilléir said quietly. “And I’m sorry for it.”

  “Then why did you—never mind,” Acair finished bitterly. “Because she asked you to.”

  “Because she loves you.”

  “Ye gads, what absolute rot,” Acair spluttered. He gathered Léirsinn a bit closer to him because he was afraid he would drop her, not because he was unsettled.

  If he clutched her to him with a desperation that frightened him, well, who was to know? He wasn’t altogether certain she didn’t squeak, but that could have been that damned spell he couldn’t seem to shake, leaning over his shoulder and peering down into her face. He flicked it away, looked at the woman in his arms that he lo—er, was fond of, rather—and watched her eyelids flutter.

  That could have been from his tears dripping onto her face, but he wasn’t going to investigate that any further.

  She opened her eyes and looked at him. “You’re shouting,” she said hoarsely.

  “’Tis better than weeping,” he muttered. He glared at Soilléir just so the man wouldn’t forget where his doom was sitting, then looked at Léirsinn. “I’m angry.”

  “Why?”

  Where to start? He looked at her seriously. “Let’s discuss it when I’m less angry and the focus of my ire has flapped away to seek safety behind the walls of the schools of wizardry.” Not that he couldn’t have tracked Soilléir down there and slain him on his way to the buttery, but that was perhaps not a useful thing to say at the moment.

  Léirsinn sat up with more of his help than he supposed would be polite to mention. He situated her next to him on his perch, but kept his arm around her just in case. If she looked at Soilléir with a mixture of awe and horror, she was justified.

  All he knew was that he wasn’t at all ready to have the conversation with her he would need to about magic and magery of any stripe, so he continued to keep her close and turned back to his own business of wondering how best to put that damned prince across the fire from him to death.

  “How has your journey been so far?” Soilléir asked politely.

  Acair swore at him. It was the very least of all the things he wanted to do, so limiting himself to calling the crown prince of Cothromaiche’s son names seemed like it could possibly qualify for his good deed for the day.

  “Perhaps it would be more interesting to discuss instead where you’ve been so far,” Soilléir suggested.

  “Haven’t you been watching?” Acair asked shortly.

  “I try to leave people their privacy.”

  Acair gaped at him. “How do you say those kinds of things without your tongue catching on fire?”

  Soilléir smiled. “Centuries of practice, my friend.”

  Acair realized Léirsinn was shivering. He would have given her his cloak, but he remembered having left it behind in his grandmother’s gates. He jumped a little as a lovely thing came flying his way, but it had been that sort of day so far. It was a gentleman’s garment, but it would certainly serve Léirsinn well enough. He grunted a thanks in the direction of its maker, then wrapped the damned thing around his lady.

  He sighed. There was no point in trying to call her anything else any longer.

  He put his arm back around her, settled her as comfortably as he could, then looked at his primary tormentor. He supposed there would come a time when he would have to examine what the bastard had used to heal him, but for the moment, he would leave the prancing Cothromaichian stuff dancing a set with the Fadaire already trapped inside his poor chest alone. There would be time enough later to see if both could be rooted out of him.

  He looked at Soilléir. “After I saw you in Neroche where I promised you a lingering death—something that keeps coming up, it seems—we decamped south for the library in Eòlas, where I thought I would see what sort of trouble looking for a book stirred up.”

  “It seems you managed that well enough,” Soilléir said.

  Acair sent the man his most murderous look simply because he was fairly certain there wasn’t a damned thing in the whole of the Nine Kingdoms that Soilléir of Cothromaiche hadn’t foreseen to some extent. Why he didn’t lend a hand more often was a mystery.

  “I’m beginning to wonder if I just met what’s hunting me,” Acair said pointedly. “I don’t suppose you would have an opinion on that.”

  Silence fell. As always, Acair didn’t care for that sort of thing because he knew what it generally indicated, which was somethin
g coming his way he absolutely wasn’t going to like. Léirsinn was still breathing raggedly, but she had put her hand on his knee in perhaps a good-hearted attempt to keep him from kicking the life from the man across from them.

  Soilléir, that preening do-gooder, was only apparently sifting through an enormous pile of words in an effort to choose the ones that would inflict the most pain.

  “I might be able to offer that, at least,” he said finally.

  Léirsinn snorted. Acair was surprised enough by the sound that he looked at her. She smiled apologetically, but he shook his head. What a sterling gel she was and obviously possessing a superior ability to judge character. He patted her shoulder, then looked at the man he would happily crush like a bug under his boot the first chance he had.

  “Do tell,” he drawled, feeling slightly more like his old self than he had but a moment ago.

  “I will tell you, but I need your help.”

  Acair blinked. “You what?”

  “I need you to steal a spell.”

  Acair spluttered. He spared a moment to wonder if he would manage to take the dull dagger down his boot and bury it in Soilléir’s gut before the man turned him into a slug.

  “You want me to steal a spell,” he repeated in disbelief.

  Soilléir looked at his hands for a moment or two, no doubt deciding whether or not he should wring them, then looked at Acair and nodded. “Yes.”

  “Without my magic.”

  “Considering where you’ll need to go to begin the hunt for it, I don’t think magic would serve you.”

  Acair felt his eyes narrow. “And where, if I might be so bold, does this spell find itself—or do I even need to waste the breath it would take me to ask?”

  Soilléir lifted his pale eyebrows briefly, but said nothing.

  Acair realized he was on his feet pacing only because he ran into a rock so abruptly that it felt as if he weren’t wearing boots. He cursed at the pain that shot up his leg, then cursed a bit more because the moment seemed to call for that sort of thing.