She lost him to hopefully peaceful dreams shortly after supper, so perhaps all that magick-making was more draining than he wanted to admit. She had no idea what the hour was, but it was full dark outside and a faint new moon had already risen.
She found she didn’t care for being alone. That was odd considering how alone she had been up until she’d met a black mage who taught her elven magic so she could hopefully not set his house ablaze.
She jumped a little at the shadow that appeared at her elbow, then realized it was simply Sianach having assumed the form of a great, hulking hound. He put his snout on her knee and looked at her pointedly.
She scratched him behind the ears. “Don’t bare your teeth at me,” she warned.
He lifted his head and displayed longer canine teeth than any hound should have had.
“Sianach,” she said in disapproval. “That isn’t reassuring.”
He licked her hand, then lay down and put his head on Acair’s foot. She supposed that if anyone came inside, he could snarl at them to discourage anything untoward. Short of that, she had no idea what she would do to protect any of them. Elvish werelight likely wasn’t going to be much use, so perhaps Acair had the right idea about other spells that would work all on their own.
She got up after a bit because she couldn’t sit still any longer. She wandered through his library, looking for anything that didn’t lay out spells or relate tales of mythical beasts and men. She was tempted by a treatise that discussed the trade routes through Tosan, but settled for a history of Fearranian lacemaking.
She tucked the book under her arm and walked through the house a final time, an enormous hound suddenly walking next to her with his head under her hand. There was nothing stirring, but she supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised. Acair’s spell was reputedly impenetrable. If she took a little detour to the kitchen and fetched the largest knife she could find, well, she suspected he would understand.
She went back to his study, shut the main door and the door leading to the library, then set the kitchen knife on the mantel, back so far that it wouldn’t fall off accidently yet be within reach if necessary.
She turned to her reading for the evening, a sleeping mage and terrifying hound at her feet, and hoped she could distract herself from the reality of her life until she was too weary to even dream about it.
That mage out there wanted her.
She couldn’t imagine why.
Fifteen
Acair walked through his house with a fair bit of unease, understanding in that moment what Hearn of Angesand might feel if he woke to find one of his barn doors open.
Whilst he suspected such a thing likely never happened to that good horse lord, he feared he might not be so lucky. He also suspected Hearn never waited until the morning sun was streaming through his great hall before being about his business. Perhaps there was a lesson there for him about the hours kept by horse people, more particularly a gel who hadn’t been sleeping peacefully next to him when he’d woken not a quarter hour earlier.
He paced through his house not because he feared Léirsinn had run away during the night but because it was a fine distraction from other lessons he might or might not have learned recently.
For instance, who would have thought that his arrogance—something he had never considered a flaw before—would have blinded him to the fact that perhaps he was not the one being pursued across the whole of the Nine Kingdoms? The idea that someone would see him and not want to kill him was something he wasn’t sure he cared for. One tended to reach a certain status in life and learned to appreciate the opportunities that came with that position. Being able to sneer at all those who wanted him dead was a simple pleasure, but one he’d come to enjoy.
But how was he who had never once considered the safety of another going to keep a magick-making horse miss safe?
He’d planned for it, of course, but—also something he had to admit with a fair bit of shame—as a corollary to his own neck-saving. That Léirsinn should be the primary target of a mage with the sort of vicious nature the lad in the woods seemed to possess was something he had completely missed.
He could hardly bear to think about all the other things he might have missed.
At the very least, he thought he might have a name for their enemy. He also supposed he could credit the man,Sladaiche, with having stolen his spell of shadow making from Odhran of Eòlas, for all the good it would do him. It had been meant as a distraction, not a means of stealing souls, though it did artistically scatter rats and snakes and other things he didn’t particularly care for in all directions when used. Perhaps he would suggest that Sladaiche hold onto it given that he would never have the imagination to create anything like it himself.
He might also suggest that Sladaiche accept that it would be the very last thing he saw before he was repaid for the slaying of a certain tailor of their acquaintance.
He turned away from thoughts of revenge and pressed on to things he had definitely missed in the past. According to Soilléir, whose busybody’s ways would certainly make him an authority on it, Sladaiche had lived next to Ceangail at least long enough for Acair to have knocked him off his ladder after having found his spell to be worthless, the same spell that Sladaiche had apparently stolen from Seannair of Cothromaiche’s library decades earlier, a theft that Soilléir couldn’t seem to solve himself.
Did no one make copies of anything any longer? He despaired for the world, truly he did. Even his mother duplicated her endless notes. He was fairly certain she had a copy or two of Diminishing hidden in her house, which was likely why the place was crawling with spells even Acair had made a point of avoiding.
The last thing that troubled him more than he wanted it to was why he was still so damned out of sorts over the thought that when Léirsinn had seen books that her parents had owned, her first thought had been to suspect him of stealing those tomes and her second had been that he might have been the one to murder her parents.
It was enough to make a black mage weep into his silk-lined cape, oy.
Then again, what else was she to think? Wasn’t he the one who had told her that after his stint of do-gooding was done, he fully intended to return to his life of villainy?
He realized he was staring stupidly out the glass walls of his front parlor into the blinding rays of a just-risen sun. He wondered if that damned Ubhan of Bruadair was sending him nightmares to be enjoyed during the daytime now. His house was just too close to their border. Who knew what sorts of nasty things leached over the same to vex and annoy?
Things had to change. He wouldn’t survive the spring with the way events were carrying on, dragging him along in their wake. The bouts of self-reflection alone were about to do him in.
