Soilléir’s had said that the spell stolen from his grandfather’s library was the same spell—a copy, no doubt—that Acair had tossed into the fire all those decades ago. That was a spell for stealing souls, however, not creating shadows.
But if—if—the mage outside was the same one who had stolen Seannair’s spell—whatever its true purpose was—then that made that man standing under the trees of his forest the orchardist that he himself had insulted all those many years ago.
Ninety years was a very long time to wait for revenge.
It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been ample opportunity for the man to see to it long before the present moment. He himself had spent decades going about in the open, walking along dusty roads with no one guarding his back, gliding across ballrooms with naught but a woman’s gown to hide behind.
So many opportunities to execute a deft piece of payback, so why not before now?
Unless that mage outside didn’t want revenge.
He would have said that he couldn’t understand that, but unfortunately he did, all too well. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have had to look much further than his own family tree to find Gair of Ceangail perching there as the absolute embodiment of patience whilst about the vile work of herding his prey along an ever-straitening course that led to the end of the maze where there was no escape. There were others, to be sure, but he thought he might need to take a seat before he began scrutinizing that list.
Nay, he was missing something and he scarce had the stomach to wonder what.
What he needed to do was get above it. He was in the midst of the maze and there were simply too many possible pathways to see the pattern whilst looking at them from eye level.
He came to himself to find that he was standing in the middle of his library, staring at nothing. Léirsinn was watching from the doorway, hovering there as if she suspected she might need to make a hasty escape sooner rather than later.
He sighed. “Forgive me. Lost in thought.”
“What can I do?” she asked.
“Distract him so I can fly?”
She smiled gravely. “Of course.”
The pleasure of flight was undiminished, he found as he hurtled out to sea as a chilly winter wind. If he ever managed to be free of that damned thing that dogged his steps, he would never take it for granted again. He left his thoughts behind and turned north, out toward the open ocean where there was nothing but sea and sky.
He flew until the sun began to sink in the west and the shadows started forming over the coastline.
An unsettling sight if ever there were one.
He slowed his flight as the winds near the shore buffeted him, bringing some sense back into his poor overworked mind. What he needed, he decided as he kept himself from being dashed against the rocky shoreline to the north of his home, was a holiday. No wonder Soilléir seemed to take them with such regularity. Very restorative, no doubt.
He wandered over the same landscape he’d looked at the previous day, only things occurred to him that hadn’t before.
The track that lay to the south of that ruined keep, the keep that most definitely could have been merely the start of a rather substantial settlement, was less faint than he’d thought before. In fact, if the forest hadn’t taken it over, it could still have been considered an easy way to go from that ruin to his house. Perhaps there had been something important on that piece of land where his house currently stood.
He wondered if he should go have another rummage through that trunk in his cellar.
He decided that he would do just that before his thoughts carried him off to places where he was quite certain he wouldn’t want them to go.
It took less time than he was comfortable with to gain his own home. He slipped through his spell of protection and resumed his proper form, though when he moved to dissolve his spell of un-noticing, he hesitated. That might have been courtesy of the sight of his enemy standing a hundred paces away in a spot between his house and the shore.
That was something he simply couldn’t get past. Admittedly, he and Léirsinn hadn’t been wearing any sort of spell of un-noticing on their way to his house, but Sìle had given them a decent head’s start and he hadn’t seen anything behind them the entire time they’d flown home. In fact, the first he’d seen of that mage there had been when Léirsinn had noticed him standing in the shadows beyond the garden. How was it possible for him to have found them without having had any idea where they were going?
Unless he’d known the lay of the land himself.
That thought was startling enough all on its own, but still the question remained: why hadn’t he come before?
Acair studied the hooded figure standing close enough that a half-decent spell of death would have felled him instantly. It was definitely the mage from the glade. Acair could see shards wrapped around the man’s neck like a scarf.
Other things, though, struck him now that he was at his leisure to mark them. The man certainly knew how to be still, though perhaps that had been to his detriment. He himself had never been one to mock another for the measurement of their waistline, but that man there had obviously spent too much time sitting and thinking and not enough time rushing about from one bad deed to the next.
And that was, he had to admit with surprising reluctance, the same man who he’d knocked off his ladder all those many years ago.
The orchardist had been sporting a close-trimmed beard, if memory served, but not one of a handsome fashion. Too much scruff down the neck and not enough left on the chin, certainly. Even at the tender age of eight, Acair had possessed opinions on the same thanks to his sire. Gair, for all his faults, had at least possessed the commitment to cutting an acceptable figure.
