I’m watching her…
Acair heard something shatter. He realized as he looked down that it was his glass that was lying there in shards at his feet.
Shards. Ye gads, would the word never cease to torment him?
He thought he might understand how it felt to be kicked by a stallion. He couldn’t have lost his breath any more thoroughly or abruptly if hehadbeen. He would have staggered, crediting the same to a little foray into his cook’s hidden bottle of sherry, but his recent encounter with fierce ocean winds had left him perfectly sober.
Frighteningly sober and apparently lacking in the good sense that grounded a black mage to his higher purpose of making life a misery for everyone he came into contact with.
What if that mage hadn’t been chasing him?
What if that mage had been afterLéirsinnall along?
“Don’t move.”
He wasn’t sure he could. He sat there and watched stupidly as Léirsinn started to clean up the glass. He came back to himself as she reached for a particularly large, jagged piece, then sent the lot into oblivion with a quick and dirty spell. She blinked, sat back on her heels and looked up at him.
“Aren’t you handy,” she said slowly.
He could only look at her, mute. He rose, pulled her to her feet, then pasted on a smile.
“Would you do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Ah,” he said, casting about for something to say, “could you find me a bottle of wine? From the cellar?”
She looked at him as if he’d lost his wits. He understood. If he could have caught enough breath to agree with her, he would have.
“Anything special?” she asked.
“Whatever suits,” he said. “I left my boots at the front door. I need to go fetch them.”
He turned and walked away before he had to say anything else inane, realizing as he opened his front door a handful of moments later that he was already wearing his boots because he’d never taken them off to begin with.
He didn’t think, he simply walked down the pathway and through his spell.
He supposed he might later have the presence of mind to be relieved that his ever-present spell of death had detached itself from the spell protecting his home and come to stand next to him. That would no doubt be tempered by the knowledge that it was only standing so close because ’twas a bit easier to slay something if one had that something within arm’s reach.
The mage facing him, that rotund little man with the terrible power but so little imagination, merely stood there, a hundred paces away, doing nothing.
Saying nothing.
Simply watching.
“Acair?”
The mage turned his head sharply and looked in the direction of that voice.
Acair continued on with his newfound habit of not thinking. He merely stepped back inside his spell, ignoring the shrieking of his deathly shadow as it couldn’t follow him, and walked up to the front door. How he managed a smile he hoped was confident and unassuming, he wasn’t sure. Years of practice at theatrics, no doubt.
“Darling, ’tis cold outside,” he said, shooing Léirsinn inside and shutting the door behind them. If he locked it with a resounding click, so much the better.
“What were you—”
“Lost my spell there for a moment,” he said, lying with an abandon that might have almost rivaled his recent realizations for sheer awfulness. “A drink, love, don’t you think? Chilly out.”
She looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. He understood. He hardly recognized himself, either.
