She was starting to have sympathy for those horses she’d worked without pause until they’d been forced to acknowledge she was master.
“I’m tired,” she said, because that was understating it badly. She was so exhausted, she could hardly see the garden in front of her.
“Try calling fire again,” he said mercilessly.
She shoved aside thoughts of murder and mayhem, firmly refusing to acknowledge how delightful they sounded at the moment, and looked at the pile of wood there before her. She knew the spell of fire-calling so well that she thought she might even be able to write it down and teach it to someone else. Five words, that was all, that caused the air to shudder around her, the magic in her veins to leap up and dance a merry jig across her soul, and flames to burst to life atop those poor charred bits of felled tree.
She took a deep breath, stilled her mind and her heart, and summoned fire. She was almost too weary to be satisfied that it had come as commanded.
“Contain it.”
She would have cursed Acair as her fire began to spill off the wood—his doing, obviously—but she was afraid it might find its way to her and burn her very lovely boots that the admittedly impossible man next to her had also given her that morning.
She used her lone spell of containment. The fire stopped in its tracks and sighed.
Then it burst into towering flames, something she most definitely hadn’t given it permission to do.
Acair cursed, smothered it again, then looked at her.
“Again.”
She called on every smidgen of self-control she possessed to keep herself from reaching out and bloodying his nose.
“I’ve done it well already this morning,” she said tartly. She decided that addingmostlywas not going to help the situation any. “Shall I drop it on your sorry head?”
“You might try,” he said rather coolly.
She wondered absently if he could possibly be as merciless to those whose magic he wanted as he was presently being to her. Deciding that it was likely nothing she wanted to investigate further, she took a step back, away from things she couldn’t face any longer.
“I’m finished.”
He wasn’t having any of it. “One more time.”
“Nay.”
“One more time.”
She looked at him, then did the most sensible thing she’d done all morning.
She turned and walked away.
“I didn’t say you could go.”
She froze, then turned around slowly and looked at him. Admittedly, she could hardly see him for the pain that burned like a bonfire behind her forehead, but he didn’t need to know that.
“Do not,” she said crisply, “tell me what to do.”
“Fine,” he said, throwing up his hands. “Go, then.”
“I will, thank you very much.”
She supposed he was swearing at her. She wasn’t sure, only because she couldn’t hear him over the curses she was throwing over her shoulder at him. She walked inside his house, slammed the door shut behind her, and looked for something to drink. Water, because she was already ill from spells and anger and no small bit of confusion and dismay.
What in the hell was he doing?
He didn’t follow her, which didn’t surprise her. He hadn’t been particularly polite, but he hadn’t been nearly as rude to her as she had been to him. Perhaps all those years of having to bite her tongue had finally added up to one time too many and he had borne the brunt of all that pent-up fury.
She stood in front of the kitchen fire and fought to simply stay on her feet. Magic did not come without a price to be paid, as she’d already known, but the exhaustion she felt at present was terrible. At least she’d managed to use the two spells she knew without completely destroying Acair’s house.
