Gift of Magic

  ’Twas also a possibility that Franciscus had done a bit of peeping into the future and decided that Thoir might have a part to play in the drama yet. Ruith wasn’t sure what that said about that owl sitting a safe distance off the ground, but he promised himself a thorough questioning of Sarah’s grandfather later.

  He refused to consider the very real possibility that he wouldn’t have that chance, either because Franciscus was dead or he himself soon would be.

  Thoir didn’t seem to be able to do anything but gape at Gair, so Ruith left him to it and continued with his plan to keep his sire talking.

  “Why now?” Ruith asked, stepping a pace or two back so he could keep both his father and his cousin in his sights. “Why send someone to gather the pages of your book now?”

  “Why now?” Gair echoed incredulously. “Have you been so long out of the world, Ruithneadh, that you’re ignorant of the events passing there? That damned Lothar of Wychweald has been using my spells!”

  “I don’t follow—”

  “You never did, so I’ll explain it slowly, so you might. Despite what has been said, I wasn’t vanquished at Ruamharaiche’s well. I simply decided to retreat and reconsider my spell of opening. To refine it, of course, not replace it. I rested for a bit thanks to the hospitality of those who truly cared for me, then went to the keep only to find my sons had done the unthinkable and burned the damned library almost to the ground. I rescued my spells, then decided that perhaps I should spread them about, so the fools I had spawned wouldn’t find them and destroy them in a fit of pique.”

  “So you did travel to the house cut into the rock,” Ruith said slowly.

  “Aye only to find I’d lost that bloody ring somewhere along the way and couldn’t get inside.” He scowled. “I hadn’t wanted to sentence myself to a lifetime here, but I had decided I could endure it for a year or two. ‘Twas a bloody inconvenience to come here, and by a different route, but I was afraid I’d been followed. That and I wasn’t about to leave the rest of my spells anywhere near the first ones. Wise, don’t you think?”

  “I wouldn’t think to offer an opinion,” Ruith demurred.

  Gair frowned, then continued. “I had spent a handful of years here, working on spells I had been considering before, when I heard from a very reliable source that Lothar had been using my well to fashion creatures whose task was to hunt down my descendants—if any lived—and carry them back to Riamh where Lothar could torture them until they revealed my secrets to him. Knowing the weakness of my progeny—and the deviousness of my children which led me to believe they knew more than I would want them to—I knew something had to be done. Unfortunately, I needed someone to help me counter the outrage, for I knew the moment of my full return had not come.” He looked down his nose. “I suppose I should have been grateful at least one of my offspring survived.”

  “Did you know I had lived?” Ruith asked.

  “Oh, aye,” Gair said softly. “After all, Franciscus did a rather poor job of covering his tracks, didn’t he? A pity I was left only with you. I would have preferred one of your brothers.”

  Ruith was tempted almost beyond what he could bear to tell his father his damned well had been shut by Mhorghain and Keir, and that Rùnach had spent the past twenty years searching for all the sources Gair had used for his spells and could likely improve upon all of them without any effort. If Rùnach had been willing to lower himself to use Olc, which Ruith was certain he wouldn’t have been.

  “So, when I recently saw that young fool there sniffing after my spells, I couldn’t help but use him.” Gair smiled at him. “Such a good fool you are, Thoir.”

  Ruith looked at his cousin, who had stopped staring at Gair with his mouth open and was now turning a rather robust shade of red.

  Gair leaned forward. “I think he harbors a secret wish to be my apprentice,” he whispered loudly. “I’m not sure he has the wit for it, but I’m willing to try him out for a bit.” He frowned suddenly, then sat back. “I must assume that one of you has all my spells, else you wouldn’t be here.” He looked from Ruith to Thoir and back several times before he finally settled on Ruith. He pursed his lips. “You?”

  “He does,” Thoir rasped, sounding as if he’d been running for days without rest or drink. “He has them all.”

  “Thank you, Thoir,” Gair said, waving him away. “You may go.”

  Ruith wasn’t sure his cousin’s face could darken any more, but he looked as if he were about to explode with rage. Ruith had to admire his ability to continue to stand there in spite of being so summarily dismissed. He kept his cousin in his sights and looked back at his sire.

  “I’m not sure I understand why you wanted them. Surely you can write them down again.”

  “Your problem, Ruithneadh,” Gair said shortly, “has always been your painful lack of imagination. Have you not noticed anything about the spells?”

  “They’re charred on the edges,” Ruith said flatly.

  The owl tittered. Ruith imagined that wasn’t Franciscus, for he likely would have hooted with derision. Nay, that was Urchaid which meant that Franciscus had either been overcome fully or taken by a bout of altruism that had left both Urchaid and Thoir flapping off into the sunset. Ruith didn’t dare hope that Franciscus was simply hiding in a different tree, disguised as a less showy bird.

  “Those spells also contain, you stupid boy, vast amounts of my power,” Gair said pointedly. “I imagine not even your little wench behind you could see that. And so aye, I had a rather compelling reason to collect them all, just as young Thoir there had a very compelling reason to want them for himself. Only our understanding of what they contain is far different, which I will show you if you’ll be so kind as to give me back my life’s work.”

  Ruith took off his bow and quiver of arrows and felt Sarah take them from him. He unslung his pack, keeping his eyes on his father at all times, and fished around in it for the black leather book. The spells were already inside it, for he’d put them there during that night at his house he’d considered such a safe haven for all those years. He continued to look at his sire as he held the book up.

  “Good,” Gair said, sounding far too pleased. “Let’s see if they’re all there, shall we?”

  “I will,” Thoir blurted out.

  “Very well,” Gair said benevolently. “Go and fetch them from my son, Thoir, and bring them to me.”

  Thoir strode over to Ruith and stopped in front of him. “Give them to me,” he snarled. “Before I destroy you.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Ruith warned.

  “Neither do you.”

  Ruith shrugged, then handed the book over without comment.

  “And my ring, Ruith?”

  Ruith shot his father a look. “What ring, Father?”

  “The one in your pocket.” Gair looked at him evenly. “You’ve forgotten the extent of my powers, lad. I know what you have. And I know you think your magic is buried.”

  Ruith opened his mouth to compliment his father on his sight only to have Thoir throw Gair’s spell of Diminshing at him. It sought for what was hidden, then slid away, useless. Thoir drew back and scowled, but said nothing.

  Ruith threw his cousin a look of disgust before he pulled the ring from his pocket and looked at his father. “And you expect me to hand this over to you?”

  “Aren’t you at all curious as to what will happen?” Gair asked with a mocking smile. “You were so curious as a lad.”

  Ruith shrugged. He had no magic to take, nor did Sarah. The ones in true danger were Thoir and that damned owl sitting up in the tree, preening. He handed the ring to Thoir, then held his hands behind him for his bow. He felt Sarah put that and a handful of arrows into his hands, then steeled himself to use a more pedestrian means of protection.

  Thoir made a production of starting across the glade, then stopped suddenly and shot Gair a triumphant look.

  “I believe I’ll have this now.”

  Gair only watched
him, smiling faintly.

  Thoir brushed aside spells Ruith hadn’t noticed there before, then pressed the ring into the square indentation on the cover. If he’d expected something to happen, he was disappointed, but that didn’t stop him from making several more attempts. He turned the ring this way and that, swore inventively for several moments, then looked at Gair.

  “It doesn’t work,” he said incredulously.

  “The lock’s tricky,” Gair said dismissively. “Bring everything to me, lad, and let me have a look. How many spells are there inside?”

  “A score and two,” Thoir said impatiently, finishing his journey across the glade to where Gair was waiting. “That’s how many Miach of Neroche said there were.”

  “Well, Miach of Neroche doesn’t know everything now, does he?” Gair said smoothly. “I wouldn’t choose a pedestrian number such as a score and two. It has no stature, no style, no presence. Though we might give it a go and see.” He took the book from Thoir with trembling hands, dropped the ring, then waited until Thoir had picked it up. He fumbled with the book and ring for another few minutes, then scratched his head.

  “We might be missing something.”

  “What?” Thoir demanded.

  Ruith watched as the owl flapped down from his perch and changed itself into Urchaid as he landed.

  “Perhaps a bit of power,” Urchaid said, brushing his hair carefully away from his face. “My dear Gair, why don’t you let me help you with that.”

  Gair looked at him, then laughed. “The son of Dorchadas?” he asked incredulously. “What could you possibly help me with?”

  “Taking your magic, for a start,” Urchaid said smoothly.

  Ruith watched the next handful of moments hang in the air there in front of him as if they intended to remain there forever, endlessly open to alteration, just waiting for someone with sense to say something useful.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t have a chance.

  Twenty

  S

  arah wondered, as she stood near the little clearing several leagues from the ruins of her mother’s house, if she would ever stop shivering. She was standing near a house that she had seen scores of times, thinking nothing of it on those mornings when she’d been roaming far afield for particular plants to use for the dyeing of her wool. How odd that the rare woad she had sought was only to be found on the path leading to the very small, tidy house that contained the old man she had greeted occasionally as he’d been outside tending his garden. Only now she realized who had been growing heaven only knew what in that garden.

  It occurred to her, as she looked at that garden, that even within the dampening influence of Shettlestoune, she could still see more than she’d been able to before. She whispered Soilléir’s spell in her mind and her vision sharpened far past what it ever had before, leaving her gaping at what she saw within Gair’s low garden walls.

  There were plants there that would have, with enough time, grown and blossomed into things she wouldn’t have picked if they’d been the last things edible on the face of the earth. She didn’t want to begin to identify them, for just the sight of them terrified her. She started to put herself behind Ruith only to realize that she was no longer behind him because he had stepped forward to try to stop events from spiraling out of control.

  Or, rather, careening toward a destination she now realized she should have seen approaching.

  Droch’s spell of Taking was rushing out of Urchaid’s mouth toward Gair, but slowly, as if time had ground to a halt along with everthing and everyone in it. Gair had the time to stand up and throw off the ruse he’d drawn about him like a cloak. In place of the old man stood a young man, scarred yet unbent by years and evil, full of energy and power.

  She had to admit she could see why Sarait had looked at him more than once. He was almost as handsome as Ruith, which was saying something. And sadly enough, there was an edge to him that was…mesmerizing.

  She looked away, because she realized it was a spell he was casting her way for precisely the purpose of distracting her. She realized at about the same time that her arm felt as if it had just caught fire. She had left her cloak on the far side of the glade, which left her arm bare to what little breeze blew through the clearing. She lifted her arm and looked at it.

  There were little flickers of flame dancing again along the black trails.

  She looked back in time to watch Gair bat away Urchaid’s spell as if it had been an annoying fly. Gair dismissed Droch’s brother with a snort of derision, then looked at Thoir.

  “The book doesn’t work, dear boy, because it is not complete.”

  Thoir gaped at him. Sarah knew Thoir was prepared to do anything to have Gair’s spells, but she suspected, based on his inability to stop his mouth working like a dying fish, that he had never considered that Gair might have anticipated that very thing. But before she could say anything to Ruith or blurt out a warning to Thoir—not that he would have listened if she had—the chess pieces were put into place and the movements begun.

  Gair produced from his person another spell, slid it into the back of the book, then placed his ring into the indentation on the cover.

  “Twenty-three,” Ruith said faintly. “It was a score and three.”

  His father shot him a look. “Divisible only by itself and one. You were always very good at maths, Ruithneadh. ’Tis fitting, isn’t it? I needed a number that was unique to itself, for obvious reasons.”

  Sarah couldn’t imagine what those reasons were except that Gair had an ego that was almost as vast as the limits of his power. Surely far beyond any attempt to control it.

  “And which spell is the last one?” Ruith asked.

  “I don’t suppose you’ll find that out,” Gair said pleasantly, “until ’tis everlastingly too late.”

  He opened his book of spells and flipped through them frowning thoughtfully. Sarah would have tried to move closer and have a look at what he’d added, but she didn’t dare. She watched him pause and look closely at one of the pages, then lift his head. He continued to frown as he looked around himself, as if he looked for something he’d lost.

  And then he looked at her.

  Before she knew what he intended, Gair had stridden over to her, caught hold of her hand and dragged her over to the house. He looked at her, smiled a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, then reached out and took hold of the thread of magic his spell had left in her flesh.

  “Last bit I needed, my dear,” he said in a loud whisper. “You know, the spell doesn’t work properly without this final word that you’ve been carrying for me all this time in your arm. The echo on Ruith’s arm was just for show.”

  Sarah almost fainted from the pain as what had been buried in her flesh was pulled free. She managed to stumble away from him only because he obviously didn’t need her any longer. She turned and fell into Ruith’s arms, becoming momentarily tangled in his bow, then finding herself freed as he cast the bow aside. She would have told him he shouldn’t, but there was no time for speech. Time remained at its excruciating crawl, but events took up even the time that was available to them, time that she supposed they should have used to stop Gair.

  But it was too late.

  He took the thread from her arm and wrapped it around his book.

  And he smiled.

  Magic swirled up out of the book, hovered in the air above Gair as he looked up and laughed, then poured into him as if he’d been parched earth and it a heavy, endless rain.

  The spell of Diminishing was spewing out of Thoir’s mouth almost before Gair was finished. Sarah watched it surround Gair, then pull to itself not only the magic still falling toward him, but the magic already in him. It gathered, in spite of the protests that were coming from Gair.

  Or perhaps that was a spell. Sarah listened to Gair’s murmured words, but her sight wasn’t equal to seeing if he was creating anything, and the spell didn’t sound familiar to her ears. He didn’t seem overly troubled by his own spell that Thoir was w
eaving over him, which surprised her. Thoir laughed as he sucked all of Gair’s power into himself.

  All save a drop Sarah could see there, hovering on the end of one of Gair’s fingertips, a drop that remained thanks to the spell he finished weaving before Thoir spoke his last word.

  A spell of Anti-Diminishing.

  She saw the name of it written there in that perfectly round drop of power clinging to that single fingertip. She couldn’t imagine that was enough to save Gair from being stripped of what he held dear, but apparently she knew less about magic than he did. Before Thoir’s cry of joy had even begun to ring in the glade, Gair had begun to smile.

  Using that single drop of power left him, he began his spell of Diminishing, the crowning achievement of all his centuries of evil, the one spell that no one had ever been able to match. Sarah looked quickly at Thoir, but he was too busy exulting in his triumph to realize that the thread of Gair’s spell had reached out and begun a sinewy path around not only Gair’s own power that Thoir was holding, but Thoir’s own power as well.

  And then complete darkness fell.

  Sarah felt panic slam into her. That fear wasn’t of Gair’s make, she was fairly sure. Nay, that was her own alarm, magnified beyond anything she’d ever felt before because she knew, with a certainty that frightened her, that she was going to die. Once Gair had left Thoir a lifeless husk, he would turn to Urchaid, and then Ruith, and then her. Whatever any of them possessed would be ruthlessly and remorselessly stripped from them.

  She dropped her pack, then dropped to her knees, fumbling in it for something she couldn’t name. She didn’t think her knitting needles would serve her, even if she plunged one of them into Gair’s black heart, nor the yarn Rùnach had gifted her, even if she’d managed to wrap it around Gair’s head and suffocate him—

  And then two things were under her hands before she realized she had touched them: the book Soilléir had written for her and the spindle Uachdaran of Léige had gifted her.

  And she knew, suddenly, what she had to do.