Gift of Magic

  Ruith smiled faintly. “Did I? I don’t remember that.”

  “They weren’t your father’s spells, if that eases you any,” Miach said. “I imagine they were things Rùnach had stumbled across in his endless search for the obscure and elegant. As for King Sìle’s tolerance of me now—” He shrugged. “’Tis nothing I’ve done, I assure you. I enjoy his favor simply because your sister was good enough to insist on it.”

  Ruith only avoided wincing because he had enormous reserves of self-control. He had just recently learned that his sister lived still, which had been startling enough. Standing five paces from her betrothed was substantially more wrenching. That Miach had passed so much time with her when he had still been laboring under the belief that she was dead—

  He took a deep breath, but that left him coughing miserably. It was several uncomfortable moments later before he regained control enough to wheeze out a few words. “Stubborn, is she?” he managed, because he had to say something. “My sister, I mean.”

  Miach smiled. “It is a characteristic that has served her well in the past, though I haven’t managed to convince her she doesn’t need it any longer. She has very definite opinions on quite a few things.”

  “Then I’m surprised she stayed at Tor Neroche, instead of coming here with you on your little jaunt to lands not your own.”

  “Well,” Miach said slowly, clasping his hands behind his back, “let’s just say I wasn’t entirely accurate about my reasons for the journey.”

  Ruith blinked. “You lied?”

  “I hedged,” Miach corrected. “I told her I needed to make a brief visit to Léige to discuss a trade agreement Adhémar had initially negotiated with King Uachdaran. Of course I had actually considered doing just that, though I was much more interested in several things going on elsewhere, things I thought merited my attention.”

  “And again, not within your borders.”

  Miach smiled grimly. “I find myself suddenly feeling responsible for things I could have easily ignored in years past.”

  “I doubt that,” Ruith said with a snort. “You were always poking your do-gooding nose into places it shouldn’t have gone. Obviously that gaudy crown of Neroche hasn’t changed you any, though I will say that in this instance, I’m grateful for it. I need every opportunity I can find to stretch what feeble powers I have left.”

  “I won’t flatter your enormous ego by choosing another word besides feeble,” Miach said dryly, “though I’ll concede that lazing about for the past score of years in your luxurious accommodations in Shettlestoune didn’t do much past coming close to turning you to fat. I’m not sure we can remedy that in the next pair of days, but we can try.” He started to turn, then paused and looked at Ruith closely. “What did you tell your lady you were planning on doing this morning?”

  “I told her the truth, but I gave her strict instructions to remain at the inn.”

  “Best of luck with that.”

  Ruith shook his head. “She had her reasons for not wanting to watch us this morning.”

  Miach nodded. “I imagine she did. And I imagine her sight makes mine pale by comparison.”

  “I suppose you two could spend the day trying to decide if that’s the case or not,” Ruith said, “though I’m not sure Sarah would oblige you. As for what she does see, aye, it is quite a bit. I locked her out of Uachdaran of Léige’s lists for that reason alone.” He suppressed a shiver. “I wish I’d locked myself out of his lists, for I’m heartily sorry I saw a fraction of what he threw at me.”

  “How were his spells?”

  “Very old,” Ruith said, “old and more tangled than anything my father had ever done, to be sure.”

  “More powerful, would you say?” Miach asked, looking more interested than was polite. “I wouldn’t know, of course, having only scratched the surface of his collection myself.”

  Ruith pursed his lips. “You can continue to bleat out that tale as often as possible in hopes that someone will eventually believe you. But as for the truth of it, I’m not sure there’s a way to qualify his spells. If you’re a weary traveler, are you more intimidated by a sheer mountain face jutting up hundreds of feet into the sky or a mighty river tumbling over man-sized boulders and fells?”

  Miach’s ears perked up. “I wouldn’t presume to offer an opinion, and I don’t suppose you memorized any of those very tangled spells—”

  “I suppose I did,” Ruith said shortly, “but I haven’t the stomach to teach them to you right now. The material point is that Uachdaran seemed determined to crush me under the vilest of the lot, no doubt as retribution for our having sneaked into his solar that one evening whilst our mothers and siblings were enjoying the delicate entertainments of his minstrels.”

  “I never stay long enough at Léige for any invitations to the king’s lists, which I can see now has worked in my favor.” He frowned. “I had no idea he even had lists, though now I wonder why it never occurred to me. I can’t imagine they were very comfortable.”

  “They weren’t,” Ruith agreed. “I was very happy to leave Sarah in his solar, enjoying the fire. Much as I’m hoping she’s doing at present.”

  “Whilst you stand here in the mud, shaking with weariness and fear?”

  Ruith snorted. “I’m not afraid of you.”

  The look Miach gave him made him wonder if he might have spoken too soon.

  “Then I’m obviously doing something wrong,” Miach said mildly. He turned and walked away. “I’ll rummage about in my memory and see if I can find things equal to keeping you awake.”

  Ruith took a deep breath, then quite suddenly found he couldn’t even do that any longer. Miach’s enthusiasm for the task at hand was matched only by his boundless imagination and what Ruith soon realized had been only the start of what he could do. Where Miach had dredged up those spells…well, it was likely best not to speculate. It was all he could do to keep himself from being crushed beneath things he couldn’t see coming at him, though he could certainly feel them when they arrived.

  A bit like his life, actually.

  Not that his life should have been shrouded in that sort of mist. The quest that lay before him was rather simple, all things considered. He was going to find all the scattered pages of his father’s private book of spells, put them back together, then destroy the whole bloody lot of them. There were several people he could bring to mind without effort who might want a different outcome once the spells were gathered, but with any luck he would have his task completed before any of them caught up with him.

  He studiously ignored the fact that he wasn’t entirely confident that would be the case.

  He wrenched his thoughts away from unproductive paths and concentrated on fighting off what Miach was throwing at him. He recognized the occasional spell, but he was the first to admit Miach seemed determined to keep him off balance with things Ruith imagined had come from places his future brother-in-law likely wished he hadn’t gone. Unfortunately, he could readily envision when and for what purpose he himself might need those very things.

  He began to wonder, after a bit, why it was that he recognized not so much what Miach was sending his way, but how he was arranging the battle. Of course Miach had trained with his father, no mean swordsman himself, but somehow Miach’s skills in using spells as a sword had improved to the point that Ruith wasn’t sure he could credit that to happenstance.

  “You haven’t been studying swordplay with Soilléir, I’m sure,” Ruith managed when the barrage paused long enough for him to gasp out a comment, “given that he wouldn’t know which end of the sword to point away from himself if his life depended on it. Who has improved your paltry skills to such a degree?”

  “You talk too much.”

  Ruith would have argued the point but found speech was simply behind him for quite a while. He would have considered it mean-spirited of Miach to leave him in such a state if it hadn’t been so useful. As he’d noted before, anyone else he faced would have absolutely no reas
on to show him any mercy.

  Time wore on in a particularly unpleasant way. Ruith suddenly noticed a streak of blue out of the corner of his eye, but supposed he was just imagining things. Considering how many spells Miach was flinging his way, seeing unusual things was perhaps nothing more than he should have expected.

  He froze, then frowned. There was something about that flash that seemed…off. It was perhaps unreasonable to assume he could tell as much given the alarming nature of what was assaulting him, but he couldn’t dismiss the impression. He countered a trio of very vile spells of Olc, then quickly held up his hand.

  “Did you see that?”

  “See what?” Miach asked, sounding not at all out of breath, damn him anyway.

  “That blue flash.”

  “You’re stalling.”

  Ruith would have protested, but he didn’t have the chance. He continued to fight off an alarming number of increasingly powerful spells until he realized that at some point during the past few moments, he had crossed the line from scarcely managing things to being completely overwhelmed. As unpleasant a conclusion as it was to come to, he realized that if he didn’t do something drastic very soon, he was actually going to perish.

  That was a dodgy place to be given that Miach wasn’t paying attention to him any longer.

  He opened his mouth to point that out only to watch Miach’s spells disappear as if they’d never been there. He looked up from where he’d fallen to his knees in the muck to find the king of Neroche trotting off the field.

  “Where are you going?” Ruith gasped.

  Miach paused, then swore just before he disappeared.

  Ruith supposed that was answer enough, then he froze. Miach hadn’t run off the field to search for a drink, he’d gone because there was something more in the surrounding woods than wildlife. Something Ruith had feared would find them.

  He cursed and crawled unsteadily back to his feet. The next time he left Sarah behind at an inn, he was going to either put a better spell on the door or spend more time pointing out the dangers of walking in woods that might potentially contain more than just the usual complement of man-eating creatures.

  Because the sinking feeling he had in his belly told him that Sarah had just encountered just that sort of thing.

  Two

  S

  arah of Doìre stood in the middle of a fairly well-used road that cut through a heavy forest of pines, facing what looked to be certain doom, and wondered where it was that morning that she’d taken a wrong turn. The possibilities were numerous, actually, and surely merited further investigation lest she make the same mistake again in the future. Assuming, that was, that she had a future in which to make those same sorts of mistakes.

  She turned her mind back to an hour ago when she’d woken from sleep with the feeling that there was something very foul going on in the world. Looking back on it now, she supposed that had simply been the smell of a breakfast that someone—or two someones, apparently—should have pitched onto the compost heap instead of leaving on the table. Instead of ignoring the smell and simply turning over to go back to sleep as she likely should have done, she had given up on any more rest and gotten up to face the day.

  She had tended a fire that had been still burning thanks to a spell left there by some enterprising mage or other, then spent a few minutes pacing quietly so as not to wake the other occupant of the large gathering chamber. She had stopped more than once to look at him, on the off chance that the king of the elves had felt something amiss and woken from sleep because of it, but apparently he’d felt safe enough in his surroundings to continue on with his very sensible rest.

  She wondered now if it had been a mistake to breakfast on bread that was almost free of bits of sand and butter that was still a few days away from rancid, or the extremely vile ale that tasted more like water that had merely been favored with a passing view of a few hops instead of enjoying a more substantial relationship with them. Not only had it not eased her hunger, it had left her looking desperately for any sort of distraction.

  Perhaps she had chosen poorly when she had ventured into her pack, for instead of putting her hand on a pair of knitting needles and a ball of perilously soft blue wool, she’d come up with a book. And once she’d taken the book in her hands, it had fallen open to a page she hadn’t asked for. At that point, there hadn’t been any reason not to read, had there?

  My dearest Sarah, I have given you the history of my people, but it is also the history of your people. Your mother was Sorcha, your father Athair, who was my cousin. I grieve for you that you didn’t know her for she was a very lovely gel, full of laughter and joy and dreams that were easily read in her eyes.

  She had shaken her head yet again because that’s what she’d been doing since she’d read those words a pair of days earlier. She was obviously going to need more time to accept that her mother was not the witchwoman Seleg as she’d been led to believe for a score and five years, but instead a dreamweaver who had also apparently taken a wrong turn at some point during her life and wound up in the sights of Queen Morag of An-uallach, whose lust for magic and power was the stuff of legends. Sarah was certain she would have been familiar with those legends if she hadn’t grown to womanhood in Doìre where the only tales told down at the pub were about how many attempts had been made so far that year to poach Farmer Crodh’s painstakingly bred milch cows and how much rain a farmer might reasonably expect during April. The last wasn’t even very interesting. The only things that grew successfully in Shettlestoune were scrub oak, sagebrush, and rumors about mages living in mountain cabins.

  If Morag had known you were alive, she would have carried you back to An-uallach without hesitation, out of spite, if for no other reason. She has never realized that Seeing is not a blood magic, but a magic of the soul that cannot be given to another—nor taken from the one who sees.

  Of course, Sarah wouldn’t have had any idea about that particular sort of magic or what it might mean to her if she hadn’t, several weeks earlier, marched off into the gloom after her alleged brother Daniel of Doìre to keep him from destroying the world. It had seemed so straightforward at the time, that marching, because all it promised to lead to was finding the fool, clunking him over the head to subdue him, then tying him up until she could deliver him to the place where ill-behaved mages were taken to be scolded into displaying good manners.

  She supposed it was more Fate than simply bad luck that she’d been plunged into all manner of adventures she hadn’t bargained for. She had traveled to Buidseachd to meet a particular master of wizardry named Soilléir, hobnobbed with the king of Léige, and most recently escaped from Morag of An-uallach’s castle on the back of a horse who had shapechanged himself into a dragon and carried her and Ruith off to safety.

  I am sorry, my dear Sarah, that the reading of this will grieve you. Know that you were—and are still—loved by those who have been watching you unseen over the years.

  Unseen, seen, seeing—all of that had left her thinking on things that made her truly uncomfortable. It had been one thing to discover early on during the journey that Ruith hadn’t been the ancient curmudgeonish wizard living like a hermit several leagues from her home, but instead Ruithneadh of Ceangail, youngest son of the most notorious black mage in the history of the Nine Kingdoms; it was another thing entirely to find out hidden details about herself. If those things discovered would have been limited simply to a new set of relations, she might have emerged from the experience unsettled but relatively unscathed. But unfortunately those revelations had included learning that not only could she see, she could see.

  The pages of Gair of Ceangail’s highly coveted book of spells, among other things.

  It didn’t matter where she was or what she was doing, she could see those pages. She could do something as simple as draw a map with her finger in the dust on a table and suddenly there in front of her would spring up the locations of those pages, as if they’d been little fires that burned without
consuming anything but her imagination. She had verified that for herself that morning in the dust on the table where the remains of breakfast had resided.

  And it was what she’d seen when those little fires had sprung up that had convinced her to leave King Sìle sleeping happily in front of the fire and take her chances with what lay outside the door. A pair of spells had been laid there, one to protect and one to trigger an alarm. The first had been created by Ruith and was the sort of thing she was accustomed to from him: beautiful on the side she was to see and terrible on the side meant to repel intruders.

  The other spell had been nothing more than a thin blue line laid across the threshold. She had readily seen that it had been fashioned by Miach of Neroche. Its purpose was to warn him if any mage crossed over it into the chamber, which she approved of. But since she hadn’t been a mage but instead a woman with a pressing need to deliver very unsettling tidings to her comrade-in-arms, she had carefully lifted Ruith’s spell, stepped over Miach’s, then thought nothing more of either.

  She had slipped out of the inn, then paused and considered her direction. She supposed if she were lucky, she would eventually run into Ruith and Miach. In preparation for that—and because she knew they were using spells she wouldn’t want to see—she had whispered a particular spell under her breath.

  She had no magic of her own, so spells were always nothing but words for her. The only reason she had any confidence at all in the spell she’d used that morning was because it had been one of Soilléir of Cothromaiche’s spells and his spells seemed, at least in her case, to come with power of their own. She had no idea how he managed that, but he managed several things she had no desire to investigate further.

  And once she’d whispered that spell and had it come with a power she hadn’t provided, her sight…well, there was no accurate way to describe what had happened to her. It wasn’t as if she stood in a chamber where a torch had been suddenly extinguished or a candle snuffed out, leaving her in the dark. She could still see her surroundings; she could simply see less.