He was so thoroughly not what she’d expected to find anywhere along that road that had begun at her own family’s hearth with that same book, but she wondered how she could have expected anything else.
Thirteen
Acair dragged his sleeve across his forehead and sneezed. He wasn’t one for tidying with his own hands when magic could do it for him, but his current project of digging about in a trunk he’d found stashed behind a winerack in his cellar seemed to suggest that was the proper way to go about it. The whole damned thing reeked of something foul.
Dust, definitely. Magic, possibly.
He’d thought it best to proceed gingerly.
Or so he had when he’d first found the trunk, which for a change hadn’t been just after dawn. He’d managed to sleep well past sunrise, thankfully, but he’d woken with a pounding headache for his trouble. A finger or two of whisky hadn’t done anything but make him short tempered.
Léirsinn had promised him she wouldn’t apologize again for thinking him capable of slaying her family, which he’d begged her through his haze of pain and irritation not to do, then given him a wide berth.
Left to himself and firmly caught between regret for his reputation and fury that the thought of attempting to recapture the vileness of the same going forward left him feeling slightly uncomfortable, he’d donned the proverbial hairshirt and decided he would do things he didn’t particularly feel like doing.
Digging through the garden shed was one and that had gone about as he’d suspected it would, leaving him muddy and cross.
Rummaging about in the cellar had been but another slide down into a pit of misery and frustration. He could remember with unfortunate clarity the precise conversation he’d had with his very mortal master craftsmen whilst they had been about the noble labor of building his home.
What of this trunk, my lord?
Leave it, I’ll attend to it later.
So said every cavalier lad who hopedlatermeantseveral hundred years in the future when the bloody thing will have disintegrated.
He straightened, groaned at the ache in his lower back, and wished that he hadn’t started in the other end of his very large house. If he’d come straight to the cellar—yet another in a long series of lessons learned—he would have found the trunk before he’d wasted half the day looking for things he’d imagined he wouldn’t want to see. And what had he found at the very end of his tedious morning?
Horseshoes.
He knew he shouldn’t have been surprised. Those damned nags were going to be the death of him.
The trunk was full of all sorts of other things he supposed might have been useful in a barn. A record book listing the incomings and outgoings of necessities, several useful pieces of tack, and, as he’d already noted to himself, half a dozen horseshoes that he suspected not even Léirsinn would want.
He retrieved one just the same, slammed the trunk shut, then kept himself warm and happy with a few choice words as he climbed back up the stairs to the kitchen. He dropped the horseshoe on the table, glared at his horse-turned-useless-puss who was currently snoozing comfortably on the hearth rug, then took himself off to rid his clothes and person of dust and cobwebs.
Half an hour and a few more sneezes and curses later, he walked into his study with the sole purpose of finding something very strong to drink. He didn’t usually indulge before sunset, but it had truly been that sort of day so far. He almost plowed Léirsinn over before he realized she was coming out where he intended to go in. He caught her by the arms, looked at her, and cursed those bloody magics in his chest that were making absolute ruination of his poor heart.
He pulled her into his arms and held her perhaps for a bit longer than was polite, but she wasn’t elbowing him in the gut so perhaps she didn’t mind.
“Acair, I—”
“Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to apologize,” she said, her words muffled against his neck. “I was going to show you something interesting.”
He didn’t move. “Will I enjoy it?”
“It has to do with magic.”
He sighed and loosened his grip on her, but found that he couldn’t let her go. “I’m not sure I want to see it. Let’s go find something else to do. I have some ideas that involve you, me, and copious displays of affection.”
She laughed a little as she pushed away from him. “You’re impossible, and you’re still going to want to see this.”
“Might I have more whisky first?”
“Nay, you may not. Do you know what’s interesting?”
“My fetching, manly form?”
