by Lynn Kurland
“Try calling fire again,” he said mercilessly.
She shoved aside thoughts of murder and mayhem, firmly refusing to acknowledge how delightful they sounded at the moment, and looked at the pile of wood there before her. She knew the spell of fire-calling so well that she thought she might even be able to write it down and teach it to someone else. Five words, that was all, that caused the air to shudder around her, the magic in her veins to leap up and dance a merry jig across her soul, and flames to burst to life atop those poor charred bits of felled tree.
She took a deep breath, stilled her mind and her heart, and summoned fire. She was almost too weary to be satisfied that it had come as commanded.
“Contain it.”
She would have cursed Acair as her fire began to spill off the wood—his doing, obviously—but she was afraid it might find its way to her and burn her very lovely boots that the admittedly impossible man next to her had also given her that morning.
She used her lone spell of containment. The fire stopped in its tracks and sighed.
Then it burst into towering flames, something she most definitely hadn’t given it permission to do.
Acair cursed, smothered it again, then looked at her.
“Again.”
She called on every smidgen of self-control she possessed to keep herself from reaching out and bloodying his nose.
“I’ve done it well already this morning,” she said tartly. She decided that adding mostly was not going to help the situation any. “Shall I drop it on your sorry head?”
“You might try,” he said rather coolly.
She wondered absently if he could possibly be as merciless to those whose magic he wanted as he was presently being to her. Deciding that it was likely nothing she wanted to investigate further, she took a step back, away from things she couldn’t face any longer.
“I’m finished.”
He wasn’t having any of it. “One more time.”
“Nay.”
“One more time.”
She looked at him, then did the most sensible thing she’d done all morning.
She turned and walked away.
“I didn’t say you could go.”
She froze, then turned around slowly and looked at him. Admittedly, she could hardly see him for the pain that burned like a bonfire behind her forehead, but he didn’t need to know that.
“Do not,” she said crisply, “tell me what to do.”
“Fine,” he said, throwing up his hands. “Go, then.”
“I will, thank you very much.”
She supposed he was swearing at her. She wasn’t sure, only because she couldn’t hear him over the curses she was throwing over her shoulder at him. She walked inside his house, slammed the door shut behind her, and looked for something to drink. Water, because she was already ill from spells and anger and no small bit of confusion and dismay.
What in the hell was he doing?
He didn’t follow her, which didn’t surprise her. He hadn’t been particularly polite, but he hadn’t been nearly as rude to her as she had been to him. Perhaps all those years of having to bite her tongue had finally added up to one time too many and he had borne the brunt of all that pent-up fury.
She stood in front of the kitchen fire and fought to simply stay on her feet. Magic did not come without a price to be paid, as she’d already known, but the exhaustion she felt at present was terrible. At least she’d managed to use the two spells she knew without completely destroying Acair’s house.
He had tried to teach her a spell of un-noticing, but that had been just too complicated. Not even having him write it down had helped, though she had to admit he hadn’t said a single insulting word about her having needed such a concession.
That man was, as she’d noted before, a mystery.
She was tempted to shuffle over to the back door and have a little look outside to make certain he was still there, but decided that perhaps she needed a bit of distance from the scene of her earlier triumph and he needed a bit of distance from her own surly self. That didn’t mean, though, that she couldn’t at least keep him company from a different part of his garden.
She finished her cup of water she wasn’t entirely certain hadn’t come from an enspelled well, filched his cloak he’d left draped over the back of a kitchen chair, and went to look for a different exit to the outside.
She walked into a room at the back of his house that overlooked the garden. It was, as seemed to be a common thing for him, full of enormous glass windows. She’d used it previously to gawk at the mountains behind his home, though she could see how it might be a lovely place to sit and look at things when the weather was foul.
She opened the door that led out to the garden, quietly eased outside, then came to a skidding halt. She felt her way down onto the closest bench, not caring in the slightest if it might be covered with snow or dew or bird droppings.
Acair was standing on the edge of his vegetable patch. That wasn’t noteworthy. That he was using magic that made her ill just to watch certainly was.
She looked up at the sky. Mid-day light was harsh anyway, but at the moment there was no lovely curtain of un-noticing for the sunlight to filter through. His spell of protection was still covering the house and gardens, but there was nothing there to warm that cold, pale winter sunlight. There was also no delicate veil to shield him from prying eyes.
Eyes belonging to that mage she could see standing on the edge of the forest behind the garden.
She imagined she didn’t need to point that out to Acair. She also realized very quickly that what she’d seen in Uachdaran’s lists had been Acair being polite.
He wasn’t being polite presently.
Perhaps that black mage there had spent too much time doing good and felt the need to return to his roots. Perhaps he thought a little display might encourage his enemy to hike up his robes and dash off to less dangerous locales.
All she knew was that if she’d first met Acair of Ceangail in his present mood, she would have turned tail and fled and felt perfectly justified in doing so.
What he was doing was spectacularly horrifying. Spell after spell, terrible magic after terrible magic, things built, things torn down. His rage took shape into things that he subsequently destroyed so thoroughly that nothing was left, not even a shadow of what had been there before.
She should have gone back inside, but she found she couldn’t move. She was exhausted from what she’d already done in the garden that morning, true, but what kept her firmly planted on that bench was something different.
If Acair could use that magic, she could watch him do it.
If he thought to intimidate his enemy, she couldn’t think of a better way to do it. She was frightened almost to the point of senselessness and she was fairly certain he had a few warm feelings for her. What he was showing that mage out there should have left the man fainting in truth from fear over the possibility that any of it might be used on him.
It turned into a very long day, indeed.
The sun was well into its afternoon trail toward the west before Acair finished. He snapped the spell shielding them back together as if it had been a crisp, invisible velvet drape, then turned and saw her.
She hoped he wouldn’t mind if she simply turned and used one of his tidy hedges as a place to lose that crust of bread she’d ingested earlier, which she did. She didn’t expect him to help her, and he didn’t. She finally stopped heaving, dragged her sleeve across her face, then straightened and looked at him.
He was standing a handful of paces away watching her, terrible, beautiful, conflicted man that he was.
She could feel the power pouring off him in waves and that more than anything she’d seen in so many days of encountering impossible things convinced her that she had completely underestimated him.
He was not a ho
rse who could eventually be controlled. He wasn’t a stable lad who could be reasoned with. He wasn’t one of her uncle’s noblemen who could be ignored, or even her uncle himself who could be deferred to. He was a mage of staggering power and ruthless determination.
It was no wonder other mages wept and scattered when they saw him coming.
She took a careful breath. “What,” she asked, “was that?”
He only shook his head sharply.
“Acair—”
He stepped back. “If you touch me,” he said flatly, “I will shatter.”
She believed him. “I won’t.”
“I’m going to go wash off all this evil.”
“You do that,” she managed.
He walked past her, giving her a wide berth.
She didn’t watch him go.
She paced through the parts of his house that weren’t near his bedchamber, partly to give him privacy but mostly to give herself time to come to terms with what she’d seen.
She wondered if King Uachdaran had known how much restraint Acair had been showing down in his underground arena. Likely so only because she suspected the king was surprised by very little. The business with Aonarach had been strange, but perhaps there was some unwritten code amongst mages that said one didn’t slay the relatives of one’s host. She had the feeling if Aonarach had been sitting next to her an hour ago, he might think twice about provoking Acair again in the future.
Why Acair had felt the need for that sort of display that morning was curious. She understood the necessity of releasing a bit of pent-up energy. She had shooed countless ponies into turnouts where they could run until they had run themselves out.
But, as she’d noted before, Acair was not a horse and that business out there hadn’t been a mage simply taking his spells out for a canter around the arena.
She walked into his study without thinking and found him standing in front of the fire, his hands on the mantel, leaning against it as if he were simply too weary to stand. His hair was still damp and he looked fresh-scrubbed, but he was definitely not at peace.
She would have turned around and left him to himself if she’d been a different sort of woman, but she was accustomed to facing feisty stallions head on. She reminded herself of that as she walked across the room, sat down, and looked up at him. He didn’t look as if he intended to speak any time soon, so she opened the conversational stall door herself.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Remembering who I am,” he said hoarsely. “Darkness is my birthright and use it I shall until the world ceases to turn.”
She had no doubt he would. She leaned her head back against the very fine leather of that chair and studied him.
“Why did you do all that?”
He shot her a look that she was certain was exactly the sort of thing she slid stable lads who asked questions they already had the answers for.
She nodded. “To discourage him from coming after you.”
He took a deep breath, but said nothing. She would have assured him that no one with any of their wits still in their possession would have approached him after the display he’d put on, but she supposed he knew that already. If his intention had been to show the mage lurking in the shadows what he was capable of, he had definitely accomplished that. She wasn’t sure why that morning had seemed like a good time for it, but it wasn’t as if he’d been able to use his magic freely before then.
What she couldn’t understand was why he’d been so hard on her.
The truth was, he hadn’t until that morning pushed her to do anything but dabble in magic. In fact, if she were to be entirely honest, aside from a very easy morning of not much at all in Léige, he hadn’t pushed her to learn anything. She had no idea why he’d changed his mind…
She felt her thoughts come to ungainly halt.
There was no reason for him to indulge in that sort of flourishy display for himself. Surely the mage outside his spell knew who he was and what he was capable of.
There was even less reason for him to push her to learn any sort of spell beyond simply containing that spell of death so he could use his own magic.
Unless he didn’t fear for himself.
She found herself on her feet. Easier to run that way, perhaps, though she wasn’t sure where she thought she would go. She simply stood there, shaking, as things occurred to her that hadn’t before.
There was only one reason why Acair would want her to have more spells than a simple one to keep that spell of death bound so it wouldn’t slay him.
She felt her heart almost stop.
“He doesn’t want you,” she managed.
Acair only looked at her, silent and grave.
She felt a horror descend that was far worse than what had caught her by the throat when she’d realized her uncle was plotting her murder.
“Me?” she asked, but the word came out as barely a whisper.
He only shook his head slowly. “I don’t know.”
She was torn between weeping and howling, so she chose the most sensible reaction which was to do neither.
“But I’m nobody—”
He reached over and pulled her into his arms. She would have pointed out that he was robbing her of her ability to breathe, but she realized fairly quickly that he was the only thing holding her inside herself.
Her world was suddenly ripped from her as if by claws. She was beyond weeping, beyond fleeing, in a place so far beyond fear that she wasn’t sure she would ever feel anything else.
And the only thing keeping her from shattering was a man who was capable of creating and destroying horrors that she had never seen even in her worst nightmares.
“That’s why you made me do all that,” she said, finally, her words muffled against his shoulder.
“Aye.”
“And why you used all that…”
“I want him to know exactly what I’m capable of,” he said harshly. “And what I will do to him if he harms you.”
She laughed a little, wondering if it sounded as unhinged to him as it did to her. “A hero from Neroche could not have been more chivalrous.”
She wasn’t sure what to call the noise he made, but it was a decent mirror of the anguish she felt.
He held her for so long, she wondered if the rest of the afternoon had passed and night had fallen. She closed her eyes, pressed her face against his neck, and simply shook.
She realized he was smoothing his hand over her hair, as if he sought to soothe her. She took a deep breath, then let it out slowly.
“Thank you.”
He pulled back, kissed her quickly, then stepped away.
“Strong drink,” he said firmly.
She looked at him. “I can’t believe this, you know.”
He hesitated, then shook his head wearily. “He doesn’t want me, Léirsinn.”
“How do you know?”
“Because last night I stepped outside my spell, faced him, and he only yawned. He heard your voice and things changed.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He doesn’t want me.”
She caught his hand before he passed her. “I can’t do this,” she said, then she paused. “How do I do this?”
“How like you,” he said quietly. “Testing the ground, then rushing out to stomp the bloody hell from it.”
“Why does everyone want me dead?”
He smiled without humor. “I honestly don’t know, love. You haven’t done anything to merit it.”
She sighed. “I apologize. I said that unthinkingly.”
“Oh, I’ve earned the ire of those who would like to see me breathe my last,” he admitted. “You, on the other hand, haven’t. Perhaps your uncle hired that man out there because he thought you would one day rise up to challenge him for his hall.”
“Fuadai
n has sons of his own.”
“Sons can be poisoned.”
She gaped at him, but he only shrugged.
“It has been done before. I’m guessing your uncle wouldn’t be above it. I’ve found that men who suspect terrible things of others generally entertain those same thoughts themselves in the dead of night.”
She wished she could fly, though at the moment leaving the safety of his spell sounded like the worst idea she’d had in years.
“I think you’re wrong,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”
He nodded slightly. “As you say.”
“Agree with me, damn you!”
He only stopped and looked at her, his face full of pity. No fear, though, and that surprised her.
“You’re not afraid.”
“I am never afraid for myself,” he said slowly.
“And for me?”
“I’ll find a way to keep you safe.”
“That wasn’t an answer.”
“I refuse to give you an answer for that.”
She went into his arms. If her knees gave way, well, he was a gentleman after all and knew when to keep his mouth shut.
He also carried her with a fair amount of gallantry the entire three steps it took to reach one of the chairs in front of his fire. She thought sharing chairs with him might be becoming something of a bad habit, though she couldn’t remember when it had started—well, she supposed that wasn’t true. She had a vague and unpleasant memory of almost fainting in his arms after she’d shot bolts into two mages hovering over him, preparing to slay him. She thought they might have briefly shared a stool while those mages had simply vanished into thin air.
There were several things, she decided, that she might not want to think about again.
“I can move,” she said.
“Why?”
“So your legs don’t lose all feeling?”
“I’ll wiggle my toes occasionally.”
“Good of you.”
He sighed. “Altruism, I’m beginning to find, gets me into all sorts of trouble.”
She gave in and made herself comfortable, then leaned her head against the winged side of the chair back where she could watch him. His expression was grave, but there was no fear lurking in his eyes. Then again, he was accustomed to people wanting him dead.