He released her only far enough to put his arm around her. He kissed her hair briefly. “I’ll keep you safe,” he murmured.
She looked up at him quickly, but he only smiled.
“Maps and whisky. ’Tis our only hope.”
She thought he might just be right about that.
Eleven
Acair suspected that if too many more mornings passed when he was up before dawn without a nefarious reason as inducement, he might as well resign himself to never having a decent morning’s lie-in again.
He came to himself to realize he was sitting at the table, pencil in hand, and a notebook was open in front of him. Worse still, a list had been made of all the things that vexed him, yet he had no memory of having made it.
Ye gads, he had become his mother.
He pushed the tools of her trade away from himself, rose, and began to pace. He walked along the walls, running his fingers occasionally over books that he had been collecting over decades of—mostly—lawful activities. No carefully made lists of evil mages flew off the shelves from their spots inside dust jackets. No tomes full of vile spells spewed out their contents so he had no choice but to catch hold of them. No massive volumes of Important Nerochian Virtues fell off shelves to clunk him on his head on their way to perhaps land on a toe and cause him pain.
He leaned against a shelf and wondered briefly what would happen if he chucked the whole business into the closest imaginary rubbish bin, gathered up his delightful horse miss, and decamped for some lovely piece of shoreline in the south where they might luxuriate in the sunshine and make inroads into many bottles of the local drink of choice.
After the previous night’s foray into matters of the heart, he suspected a better idea had never occurred to him.
Unfortunately, behind altruism and honesty, his next most prominent virtue was industry. He couldn’t leave the world to the whims of a lesser mage when there were stones he could be nudging aside. He blew out his breath, pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and walked back over to his table where the fray awaited.
The first thing he encountered was that damned map his grandmother had made him, which left him mentally back at her front gates, wondering what the hell she was up to. Cruihniche of Fàs never did anything without good reason, especially if she thought it might stick a staff in the proverbial spokes of someone’s heavily laden cart. He was beginning to fear that the spell she had given him had been less a gift than a means of sending him turning in circles, questioning every piece of magic he’d made over the course of his very long life.
That wasn’t to say that he hadn’t early on in his career as black mage extraordinaire taken a look at his grandmother and sized her up as a potential possessor of magical goods. It was a testament to his youth and arrogance that he’d noticed nothing past the rather ordinary business a pair of her daughters used to make lace and keep bees.
In his defense, he’d had no reason to expect anything more. His mother had power, of course, but she generally used it to torment houseguests and her various progeny. He couldn’t think of a single spell guarding her house that hadn’t come from someone else’s collection. Familiarity bred contempt, or so the saying went, and he’d launched himself out his mother’s front door without a backward glance, his sights set on the magic of the high and mighty of other lands. It had honestly never occurred to him that Fàs might have its own version of the same.
He was beginning to think that oversight on his part had been a grave mistake.
He set aside the map with its unsettling X drawn with many flourishes over his own damned house, tossed into the same pile a random sheaf of paper that had a series of rather rude doodles drawn alongside a decent representation of a fierce dragon spewing out lethal flames toward a certain essence-changing prince, and decided that perhaps a different approach might be called for.
He sat, pulled out a fresh sheet of paper, and started a list of people, not events. The cast of players in the drama that had become his life was haphazard, to say the least. It ranged from those he could name—Aonarach of Léige, his own grandmother, Soilléir, Léirsinn—to others he had no name for—the mage following them so relentlessly, a portly orchardist from his past, and a mage who had seemingly made the stealing of souls his life’s work.
He set aside the easier things first. Aonarach of Léige, that unruly royal spawn, had obviously spent too much time in his grandfather’s mines and the lack of air had led him to imagining things that couldn’t possibly be true. The boy’s spell had been unsettling only because it was so close to his own grandmother’s. The request for an introduction to Léirsinn’s sister had been nothing short of daft. Perhaps a carefully penned note suggesting the virtues of taking healthful air in the palace gardens would be the kindest thing he could offer.
His grandmother had more than enough incentive to want to keep him busy and out of her linen closet, which likely explained why she wanted him wandering in remote paths. He couldn’t think of any reason past that why she would find herself embroiled in his current quest, so he tucked her comfortably back in her solar where she couldn’t trouble him further.
He’d already consigned Soilléir to a fiery fate, if only on paper, which was no less than he deserved. At least the man wasn’t knocking on the front door, delivering more quests.
Léirsinn was last on that short list, but certainly not last in his thoughts. He was tempted to go check on her simply to have an excuse to look at her, but she was likely catching up on some very well-deserved rest. He would leave her in peace until he’d found at least one answer.
He turned to the collection of souls he couldn’t put a name to and considered each in no particular order.
First was the orchardist he had bumped off his ladder all those many years ago. His most vivid memory of the spell he’d tossed into the fire was his disappointment over its lack of desirability. Soilléir had insisted that it was the same spell that someone—presumably the orchardist—had cut from one of the books in his grandfather’s library, but Acair could hardly believe that.
For one thing, he couldn’t imagine anyone having bothered to steal what he remembered as a paltry spell of thievery. Second, if the spell had done what it had been intended to do, why hadn’t the orchardist used it long before now?
There were only two answers that made any sense: either the spell continued to be as pedestrian as he’d found it to be all those many years ago or it simply didn’t work at all.
But if the latter were the case, why wrap it up and use it to lure a bastard son of the black mage down the road into his house to steal it?
Acair had no illusions left about his father’s character, so whilst altruism would never have found itself on any list that applied to him, pride certainly would have. If someone had taken something of his—children, spells, his favorite dinnerware—Gair would have retaliated immediately and with a devastating fury. Only a fool would have provoked him thus.
Nay, either Soilléir was mistaken, something else had been stolen, or, as he feared, there was another, more unpleasant quest in the offing. Something about the whole thing didn’t smell quite right, but he couldn’t bring himself to start sniffing in that direction quite yet.
He looked at the second entry on that particular list, namely the mage who wanted the power of souls so badly. If that man was actually Sladaiche, as his mother had intimated, then tracking him down would take time, but it wouldn’t be impossible. After all, discovering secrets that didn’t want to be revealed was one of the things he did best. That, he suspected, might actually entail a lengthy troll through Seannair’s library. Heaven only knew what sorts of things that man had hiding amongst extensive studies on the art of taxidermy and the cultivation of root vegetables. Acair decided that could be penciled in near the top of his next to-do list for that reason alone.
