“You’re insufferable,” she said, knowing she sounded as if she were choking but unable to do anything about it.
“Yet still so damned charming,” he said. “Prepare to be astonished.”
She listened to him use the same spell he’d given her while she’d been sitting outside his dungeon cell not a handful of days earlier, the one that in her hands had set the king’s hall—and his beard—alight. Now, she not only heard the words but felt the air shudder as fire came from nowhere and gathered itself onto that tidy pile of wood on the floor in front of her.
She took a deep breath. “You know I think this is ridiculous.”
“Even now?”
“You’re just engaging in theatrics.”
“Well,” he admitted, “itiswhat I do.”
“It doesn’t look all that evil, you know.”
His breath caught on a bit of a laugh. “Thank you, I think.” He took her hands and turned them palm up. “I’ll save that for later. For now, you try that not-evil rubbish. Be ginger this time.”
“Nooomphbehind it, is that what you mean?”
“You’ve been listening to my mother.”
“She’s the only witch I know.”
“So far, and you’re stalling.”
She was and she didn’t want to admit how comfortable she was doing just that.
He put his hands under hers and rubbed his thumbs over her palms several times. She imagined that was to soothe her, though she wasn’t sure anything would at the moment. She took a deep breath, then breathed most of it back out before she said the five words that had given her so much trouble before.
A modest but perfectly suitable fire spluttered to life atop that same tidy pile of wood.
She gaped at it.
Then she gasped out a hearty curse.
The fire erupted into a bonfire-sized business that Acair smothered with a spell she didn’t bother to listen to. He put his arms around her and laughed.
“Better,” he said, resting his chin on her shoulder. “You should try again, perhaps without theoomph.”
She rubbed the heels of her hands over her eyes and got hold of herself.
“Perhaps ’tis only that,” she said. “My being so overwrought with worry about you, I mean.”
“You wouldn’t be the first lass to work herself into a state over my delightful self, but perhaps those are details you don’t need at the moment.”
She sighed deeply, then turned around on her stool so she could look at him. “You aren’t at all what they say you are, are you?”
He caught his breath and looked as if a horse had just run him over. Having seen the results of that sort of thing more than once, she thought she might be qualified to judge the same.
“What a terrible thing to say,” he managed. “After what you saw last night?”
She shrugged with a casualness she most definitely didn’t feel. “We all have our flaws.”
“My ability to wield a nasty spell is hardly a flaw.”
She smiled because she suspected he was not quite as awful as he wanted everyone else to believe. “Even the worst horse can be reined in with the right master, you know.”
“Your lack of respect for my mighty power is appalling.”
