Ruith found himself suddenly back in his dream, walking along a path he couldn’t bear, breathing air that was full of putrid spells, reaching out to steady himself but finding his skin scorched each time he encountered other pages—
“I think that’s the village, don’t you?”
He’d never been more grateful for anything in his life than he was at the sight of a distraction not a league away. He caught Sarah by the sleeve, but carefully. He was walking on her right and ’twas her right arm that bore the wounds of ... his father’s spell.
He had to simply breathe for a moment or two until he thought he wouldn’t sick up onto her very sensible boots what he’d managed to eat as he walked.
“Can I fetch you wine?” she asked, looking up at him searchingly. “Truly, you look unwell.”
He shook his head carefully. “Forgive me,” he said without hesitation. “I was not growling at you.”
“I should have realized—”
“Nay, Sarah,” he said quietly, “it wasn’t your doing.” He paused for a very long moment. “I don’t care for magic.”
That was an understatement, but there was perhaps no sense in elaborating at present.
“Neither do I.”
He took another in a very long series of deep breaths. “It wasn’t you,” he said, again.
“One of your secrets?” she asked lightly.
He nodded.
“I won’t ask, but I will buy you breakfast if there’s a decent inn available. We’ll leave Daniel to his madness for the morning.”
He knew he could do neither—allow her to feed him or forget about her brother—but he agreed just the same and forced himself to carry on with renewed vigor. Perhaps they might manage a decent meal, which he would pay for, another blanket or two, and other things to take his mind off things he couldn’t face, such as dreams, scribblings of mages, wounds that couldn’t possibly be inflicted by swords...
It took only half an hour to reach the village. Ruith had planned to make a quick and very discreet visit to a seller of sundries for supplies, but he realized immediately that he wouldn’t manage it. Master Oban was recognized for what he was before they’d set foot past the most outlying house, and that seemingly called for pleasantries and formalities that Ruith was certain might carry on for the rest of the day.
He first leaned against a rock wall separating two fields, then he sat upon it, then he had to force himself not to stretch out and nap.
And given that he knew where that would lead, he resisted the urge without hesitation.
In time, the mayor stopped lavishing praise upon Master Oban and turned to the other members of their company. Ruith kept his seat on the rock wall in an effort to avoid either questions or praise. He was more than happy to watch it be bestowed on Sarah, whom the tall, thin politician seemed to think the next worthiest candidate for his attentions. Ruith listened to the flatteries with half an ear and kept his head down. He didn’t like the aftereffects of dreaming. His head hurt, his spirit was wearied, and he wanted nothing more than to sit with his feet up and do his best to work through several glasses of Master Franciscus’s latest offering. He glanced at the wagon in the distance, then sighed with genuine regret. Too far and too many souls to thread his way through to reach the prize.
“What happened?”
Ruith looked up at the sound of Sarah’s voice. He realized instantly that she wasn’t talking to him; she was conversing with the mayor. Her tone wasn’t so much panicked as it was full of unsurprised resignation, as if she’d anticipated the tidings, however unpleasant.
“Our mage,” the mayor said with a shiver. “He was fine yesterday when I saw him for the sowing of the ceremonial beet crop, but not this morning for the turnips, which is why I thought it wise to make a visit and see if aught ailed him. He paused. “I think it best to show you what befell him rather than attempt to tell you.”
Ruith met Sarah’s gaze and saw his own unease mirrored there. It was one thing to hope that Daniel was a fool and Oban had been an accidental success; ’twas another thing indeed to be faced with the possibility that perhaps Daniel had been more successful than they’d feared.
He hopped off the wall, then followed the company as they were shepherded to the local mage’s house, but he remained without as the others were ushered bodily inside. It wasn’t that crowds troubled him overmuch; he simply preferred to proceed only after he had investigated the lay of the land, unlike Sarah of Doire, who plunged ahead with enthusiasm, deciding upon a course and doing what needed to be done without hesitation. He envied her the ability to do so without thinking her choices to death.
Voices were raised in alarm and dismay. Spells came floating back out the door, spells that were of Oban’s make; of that he was certain. He ducked under a pair of them, then took a deep breath and steeled himself for the worst as he eased into the house.
He wasn’t prepared for what he saw.
He put his hand on the doorframe for support, because he had to. He schooled his features so they wouldn’t show what he didn’t want others to see.
Because he knew the man lying on his cot, a former shell of himself.
He forced himself to breathe evenly. He couldn’t say that he had known very many people in his past, but he knew the man lying there. Seirceil of Coibhneas, he was sure of it. Not a very famous mage as mages went, nor a very powerful one, but a profoundly decent and kindhearted one. The sort of man, Ruith had heard, that one would be overjoyed to meet on a rainy night after a long journey. Ruith had no doubt that Seirceil had opened his door to Daniel freely, invited him inside, fed him, made certain he had clothes and food enough for the rest of his journey, and then...
Well, ’twas obvious he had been repaid with harm.
A particular sort of harm that made Ruith quite ill. If Seirceil could be called more than barely alive, Ruith would have been surprised. Actually, it was worse than that. He was most certainly quite well in body, but his soul had been ravaged. Ruith rubbed his hand over his face. It was all he could do to stand where he was and not turn, walk out the door, and begin to run.
Away from what was before him.
Away from his past.
Away from the path he could now see had always been laid out beneath his feet, a path he didn’t want to walk, a path he was equally convinced couldn’t be walked by anyone else.
“Why don’t Sarah heal him?” Ned blurted out. “She’s a wit—”
Ruith watched Sarah clap a hand over Ned’s mouth before he finished. He was happy to see Ned contained as often as possible simply as a matter of principle, but he wondered that she wanted her skills to be hidden. Perhaps he shouldn’t have, given his own propensity for the like, but he did just the same.
He felt a light touch on his arm and looked to find Sarah standing next to him. Her face was full of exactly what he was feeling.
“Was it Daniel?”
He took a deep breath. “Aye, I imagine so.”
She looked up at him searchingly. “Can you not do something for this mage?”
He had to look away because he simply couldn’t bear having her look at him that way any longer. Unfortunately, that left him looking at Seirceil of Coibhneas, lying there ruined because he’d not recognized evil as it stood on his doorstep. And whatever else might be said about Daniel of Doìre, it had to be conceded that he was improving in his craft. Master Oban had suffered a glancing blow; Seirceil had taken a full, frontal assault. If he woke again, Ruith would have been surprised. If he woke to himself, ’twould be a miracle.
Ruith felt for Sarah’s hand, squeezed it briefly, then turned and walked out of the house. He had to, or he was going to make some unwholesome noise that would frighten more than just him.
I cannot use a spell was what he would have said to her if he’d been able to.
And he couldn’t. He had vowed, as he’d crawled into that empty house in a county that every last bloody one of his relations would have refused to even dignify with a
mention at supper, that he would never again use a spell. It was the only way he could guarantee that what had slain his entire family—
He began to run, but soon found himself standing still in the middle of a sunrise that couldn’t possibly penetrate the darkness that surrounded him. He wanted to, but he couldn’t deny the truth of what he was seeing.
Mages were being drained of their power. The spells for such a thing were few and the few keepers of those spells brutally determined to keep them private. Ruith could bring only three of them to mind: Lothar of Wychweald, Droch of Saothair, and the most famous practitioner of them all, Gair of Ceangail.
His father, as fate would have it.
He leaned over with his hands on his knees and wished for nothing more than ignorance. Ignorance, no magic, no memories...
And no woman with flaming hair who had come to him for aid and found him completely unequal to the task.
He continued to breathe in and out because it kept his gorge down where it belonged. He could no longer block out the vile, unseen forest that hemmed him in on all sides, the forest that he was quite certain was a symbol of all the evil his father had perpetrated over the course of his thousand years of life. He could no longer ignore the fact that it was one of his father’s spells that had first wrapped itself around his wrist—
Or that the same sort of spell had wrought the mark on Sarah’s wrist as well.
And if that was the case, and she had earned the wound by touching a page of spells on her brother’s table, he could no longer deny that somehow beyond reason and beyond any plot devised by King Darius of Gairn’s most clever and evil bard, Daniel of Doire had come by a page from his father’s private book of spells.
The questions now were how had he come by that page and was the spell of Diminishing written there? Worse still, if that page had been set free on the world, had others? And where were they?
He looked behind him, but Sarah was no longer standing by him. She was walking back to Seirceil’s house, no doubt to do for the poor man what she could.
He took a deep breath, then turned and walked away.
And then he began to run.
Nine
Sarah walked back into the house and wondered what in the hell she was going to do now.
She hovered on the edge of the little group clustered around the mage’s bed. Ned continued to look at her as if he couldn’t fathom why she didn’t just spew out a spell and relieve the man’s suffering. Master Oban was looking at her with equal expectation, his wand apparently at the ready to add to whatever she might combine. Only Master Franciscus wasn’t watching her as if he expected her to do something mighty.
She wondered, absently, why Ruith didn’t volunteer to do it for her.
“Mistress?”
She realized the mayor was talking to her, then nodded and walked over to stand next to him. She looked at the man lying there in the bed before her and frowned. He looked perfectly sound in body, but there was something missing, something she couldn’t quite see.
She turned to the mayor. “I think herbs will serve him best at first, so let me see what your fields will provide. I’ll return soon.”
He lookedterribly indebted, which made her feel very guilty indeed. She hurried out of the house and was very grateful for the chance to catch her breath. She walked away because she needed to at least look as if she were doing something, never mind that she suspected nothing she would be able to do could possibly aid that poor man inside.
She walked along a handful of rock fences but saw nothing particularly useful. There were more things than she would have found in hours of looking in Doìre, but nothing that spoke to her as a means of healing the mage’s distress. She walked until she realized she wasn’t alone.
Ruith was standing there on the edge of a field, breathing heavily as if he’d just run a great distance. He stood in the early-morning sunlight, staring into the north as if he saw horrible events unfolding right in front of his eyes. Sarah almost turned and walked away, but there was something about him that worried her. He was rigid, as if he stood on the edge of some terrible precipice and only luck was keeping him from throwing himself off.
She walked over to him quietly and touched his elbow. Too late, she realized it was his right elbow, the one that bore the marks apparently only she could see. He flinched, hard, then startled out of his dream. He turned and looked at her.
“I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely.
She didn’t need more words to know what he was talking about. He had already refused to help the man inside, and he was refusing again. She could see that rejection didn’t come without cost, though. There was obviously something dreadful going on inside him, something that wouldn’t—
Her thoughts screeched to a halt much like Castân on a good day in his youth.
Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t.
She realized with a startling flash that she now knew what the truth was. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to use any magic, or that he was purposely making her daft by leading her on merry chases through nests of thieves and thugs to look for her brother when all it would have taken was some sort of finding spell. Nay, it wasn’t that. The truth of it should have been plain from the start, but she hadn’t been looking hard enough to see it.
Ruith couldn’t aid her, because Ruith had no magic.
It was the only answer that made sense. How he had managed to live all those years up on the side of that mountain without it was a mystery, though she supposed it would have been easy to keep up that appearance of fierceness. Certainly his physical presence would have been enough to do it. Perhaps he had relied on spells left behind by the former mage. Any other sorts of terror could have been cultivated with words alone.
She took a deep breath and felt a great deal of tension ease out of her. She couldn’t even be angry with him. He had built his life around what others took to be true. Telling them they were mistaken, admitting that he might not possess what they assumed he did, would not only be a blow to his pride; it might spell the end of his life.
She understood that perfectly, actually.
She decided abruptly that the only thing she could do at the moment was continue on as they had been and pretend nothing had changed. It was one of the things she did best, that ignoring of what might upset the balance of everyone’s life but hers.
Somehow, though, when it came to preserving the equilibrium of the man standing in front of her, she didn’t mind it.
“I’m going to look for herbs in the village,” she said. “I’ll take everyone with me so they can fetch supplies.” And so you can have a few minutes to yourself.“Would it be inconvenient for you to go stand guard over that poor mage?”
He shook his head silently, his eyes full of terrible things.
She hesitated, then cast caution to the wind. “Can I help you, Ruith?” she asked very quietly.
He looked at her, startled, as if the thought of someone else offering to ease his pain was one he’d never entertained.
“Nay,” he said roughly. “I am well.”
He continued to say that, but she didn’t believe him. She wasn’t going to press him on it, though. Even mages who apparently weren’t mages but only men still had pride enough to want to save.
“I’ll be off, then,” she said. She wasn’t altogether sure she should leave him alone, but she was not his keeper, nor his mother, nor his... well, his anything else. He could surely get himself back across the fields to the mage’s house without her aid.
She turned and walked away. She would have to do one more sleight of hand and prepare herbs that passed for something more potent. Whether or not they would help that poor destroyed man lying in that bed was yet to be seen.
She entertained the idea of leaving her companions where they were, but she changed her mind when she saw them straggling out of the mage’s home. They would surely find Ruith with enough time and for some reason, she just couldn’t bear the thought of them seeing him in his pres
ent condition.
She collected them all, including the villagers, and shepherded them all into the center of town. It took only moments to reach it and even less time for Master Franciscus to suggest that a visit to the local pub to taste the wares, even at such an early hour, was an appropriate use of their time. Sarah shot him a grateful look, then waited until they’d all trooped off to be about their business.
She took a deep breath, then looked around. The village was only slightly larger than Doire, though considerably more attractive. The apothecary was located near the village green, and marked by an important-looking sign hanging over a sturdy door. Sarah went inside and stopped still to breathe.
The smells were almost as overwhelming to her as her first sight of the fields near Bruaih. She opened her eyes to look about her and could scarce believe the abundance there. Shelves upon shelves stocked with jars, bottles, and sachets full of wholesome-smelling things. Sarah put her hand on the doorframe for a moment to steady herself. Perhaps there was something strange about the shop, for she could have sworn she saw little shadows fixed to all the tinctures and potions and bags of herbs, shadows that bespoke their virtue and healing powers. She rubbed her eyes, then looked again, but echoes of the herbs were still there, faint but sure.
She pushed away from the door and floated along an aisle, seeing things she’d never seen before and hoping no one would notice how she periodically had to hold on to shelves and counters to keep herself from drifting away. By the time she made it to the far end of the shop, she wasn’t sure if she were dreaming or awake.
“Hello, dearie,” said a well-worn, comforting voice.
Sarah blinked, feeling as if she had just woken, to see a wizened old woman standing behind a counter, filling sachets full of good things.
“Ah, good morning,” Sarah managed. “I’ve come for a few herbs.”