“I have a suggestion,” he said. “Why don’t you go to bed, have a beautiful-dream-filled rest thanks to the bedding that will no doubt tell you tales all night, and we’ll discuss this tomorrow? All will be well.”
“How?”
He took her hand, kissed the back of it, then smiled at her. “We’ll discuss it tomorrow. My grandfather has a garrison, you know, and those lads are always ready for an adventure.” Never mind that he had no intention of sending any of them off on any kind of journey.
She frowned at him, but that was ruined by an enormous yawn she hid behind her hand. She looked at him blearily.
“Tomorrow, then.”
“Of course.”
She shot him a warning look, then went inside. He gave vent to his own yawn, then stumbled to his own chamber where he managed to do nothing more than get his boots off before he cast himself down onto his bed and felt himself falling under sleep’s spell.
But with his last conscious thought, he realized he was more lighthearted than he had been in years.
Perhaps there was something about the contemplation of a quest that was good for the soul of a man who had been too many years without one. Or perhaps it was the thought of coming back home—potentially—to a lass with pale hair and colorless eyes who might look on him with approval if he managed to see to that quest for her. He wasn’t sure which it was. He just knew, with the accompanying feeling of destiny being satisfied, that he was on the right path.
He could only hope setting foot to that path wouldn’t get him killed.
Seven
Aisling woke to a sudden weight upon her chest. She opened her eyes and looked into the bluish-brown eyes of an extremely noisy chestnut cat who had apparently decided that her throat was the perfect place to put his nose and purr. She would have dislodged him without hesitation, but two things occurred to her in rapid succession.
First, that purring feline was Iteach. If she hadn’t already suspected as much, his goooood morrrrrrning whispering across her mind would have identified him beyond any doubt.
Second, she was waking on a comfortable cot, which told her that either she had sleepwalked back to her bed or someone had seen her keeping watch over Rùnach’s door and taken pity on her by lifting her off the ground. That was useful for her back, she supposed, but it hadn’t done as much toward keeping her awake as repeated encounters with cold, dew-laden grass might have.
She squinted up at the sky above her and judged that whilst it might have been past dawn, it wasn’t that far past dawn. With any luck, Rùnach hadn’t managed to go anywhere yet.
Perhaps another might not have fretted over his whereabouts, but another likely wouldn’t have realized approximately five heartbeats after she had closed her bedchamber door just exactly what Rùnach of Tòrr Dòrainn intended to do.
He intended to go off and save Bruadair.
The moment the thought had crossed her mind the night before, she’d known with dread certainty that it was true. He would take his sword in hand, trot off into the darkness with a grace and courage that no lad from Neroche could ever have hoped to match, and then he would get himself killed.
She had toyed with the idea of either clunking him on the head to stop him or, as seemed to have worked well enough in the past, stealing his horse to prevent him from taking wing into the deepening gloom. The second option seemed more likely at present given that she had his horse now sitting on her belly, kneading her flesh to apparently see if he could elicit more flinches. She sat up, scratched Iteach absently behind the ears, then noted the luxuriousness of the couch and the delightful softness of the blanket she was covered with.
Dastardly elves about their foul business during the night, no doubt. In fact, she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn the chief instigator of her profound night’s sleep had been the very man she had been spying on. Or, rather, attempting to spy on. Which hadn’t gone all that well, she had to admit.
She put Iteach down on the ground, stood, then folded her blanket and left it on the couch. Then she looked down at Rùnach’s horse.
“Do you know where he is?”
Iteach stared unblinkingly at her for a moment or two, then licked his paw and commenced washing his face.
She scowled at him and looked about herself for other potential sources of aid. She jumped a little when she realized her page was standing twenty feet away, trying to be unobtrusive. “Do you know where Prince Rùnach is, Giollan?” she asked.
“I believe, my lady, that he was last spotted walking near the lists.”
Which was uncomfortably close to the gates. She suppressed the urge to indulge in one or two of Rùnach’s favorite curses. “I need to speak with him immediately. Let’s hurry and find him.”
Giollan didn’t seem inclined to question her, which she found somewhat terrifying. She had never been given charge of someone else. Even befriending other weavers in the Guild was severely frowned upon. There were times she wondered how she managed to move about in decent society with any success at all given the way she had passed almost the whole of her life. If it hadn’t been for Mistress Muinear, she wouldn’t have had any useful manners at all.
She hurried with Giollan through the palace itself, then had to stop at the gates to catch her breath, something she imagined Rùnach hadn’t needed to do. She put her hand on the metal—ignoring the tales it had to tell of its trip through the king’s forge—and waited until she thought she could carry on. She looked at Giollan, who was watching her with wide eyes.
“I’ll be fine from here,” she managed.
He didn’t look convinced. “But your safety, my lady—”
“The king’s glamour is impervious to assault, or so I understand,” she said, sincerely hoping that was the case. “I will deliver my message to Prince Rùnach, then return posthaste.”
Giollan didn’t move back toward the palace. “I’ll await you here.”
She supposed she could argue with him all day and never move him, so she simply nodded, then strode away purposefully. It occurred to her that she should have brought a cloak of some kind, but perhaps her enthusiastic striding would keep her warm. It was definitely useful in getting her to her quarry that much more quickly.
She stopped herself just before she stumbled out into a little clearing that looked remarkably familiar. It was, she realized, the same place where she’d come to a stop the day before after she had run from the library. That she hadn’t recognized her path already said much, perhaps, about her level of anxiety.
Rùnach stood in the middle of that glade, dressed for travel. She nodded to herself over the sight. She’d been right to suspect him of nefarious intentions—
Or perhaps not.
She brought her stampeding thoughts to an abrupt halt. She supposed she didn’t know terribly much about the man, but she did know he would never have gone on any sort of journey without his gear, and at the moment he was definitely not wearing his pack. She wondered what he was doing until he turned a little to use the sunlight falling down on him to better read the book in his hands.
She considered him for a few minutes, then nodded to herself over the decision she’d made the night before. He was not at all what she’d been thinking of when she’d set out to find an assassin. She had contemplated at great length on her way to Gobhann the type of man she would need to find for the peddler to take back to Bruadair. She had envisioned a rather craggy, battle-hardened, disposable sort of lad who cared little for his life and was willing to risk it all for a hefty bag of gold. She’d assumed that rough sort of lad would be willing to march off into the fray, hopeless as the battle might have been, leaving her free to scamper off to somewhere less dangerous.
She had never in her wildest dreams thought that the grandson of an elven king would be the one willing to do something she certainly wasn’t willing to do herself.
Not only did she not want to return to Bruadair and unseat Sglaimir, she also knew she couldn’t do it. She was just
a weaver who hated the art and wished for nothing more than to do something different, far away from where she’d spent almost the whole of her life as a slave to a loom. She had no interest in political intrigues and no skill with any sort of weapon save a modest ability to bend a bow and send an arrow in the vicinity of where she wanted it to go. Add to that her absolute terror over the thought of crossing back over the border into her land where she would immediately be captured and returned to the Guild, and she supposed she could consider herself singularly unqualified to take on any sort of noble quest.
I was too arrogant and stupid to be afraid.
Rùnach had told her that when she’d asked about his going to that horrible well of evil to try to save his family. The trouble was, she wasn’t arrogant, and she didn’t think she was particularly stupid. She was, however, definitely terrified. Though what she would face if she returned to Bruadair could be perhaps now classified as speculation, she had enough experience with the Guild to know what those who lived within Bruadair’s borders were capable of.
She didn’t want to die.
But she also didn’t want to see Rùnach die.
She wasn’t quite sure how to go about telling him either politely, so perhaps she would have to simply be impolite. She took a step forward but he didn’t turn. He seemed to be particularly engrossed in the text he was holding. Perhaps it was the same book he’d been looking at the day before, the book that had set his grandfather’s library to complaining so loudly.
She eased forward to have a look before he realized she was there and shut it up again. He was taller than she was by several inches, which made looking over his shoulder difficult but not impossible. She hadn’t merely learned to weave at the Guild. Eavesdropping and knowing how to steal peeks at forbidden correspondence had been invaluable skills. She could bring to mind many times when both had proved her salvation.
Well, save that once when she’d been a score and one and gone to listen at the Guildmistress’s door thanks to a suggestion from one of the less untrustworthy inhabitants of the place. She had listened to her parents sell her yet again without so much as a twinge of regret. She would have preferred to have been able to say that she hadn’t eavesdropped since, but things were what they were, and she had a keen sense of self-preservation.
She moved around Rùnach’s shoulder to get a better look at the pages in his hands. The writing there was in no language she had ever read. In fact, it looked like nothing more than scratches on the page, nonsensical and quite random.
Only when she looked at it, it felt as if she could indeed see a pattern. It was slippery somehow in a way that left her feeling as if she’d put her foot to the bank of a river and begun to slide toward its icy depths.
She looked up at Rùnach, but she couldn’t see him. All she could hear was the rushing in her ears, and all she could see were the shadowy outstretched arms that waited there to welcome her into a cold, watery grave. She tried to clutch at something to keep herself from falling, but everything she reached for slipped away from her.
Aisling.
Aye, that was her name, but she couldn’t hold on to it either.
She slid helplessly into oblivion.
* * *
Waking was, she had to admit, worse than falling. She couldn’t move her head or her limbs, and she couldn’t open her eyes. All she could do was struggle to breathe in and out, and hope she didn’t soon retch on whoever was holding her.
“Aisling?”
She couldn’t answer. All she could do was breathe.
“Can you open your eyes?”
She supposed if he could ask, she could try to oblige. She opened her eyes, then shut them up again right away to spare herself the humiliation of losing anything that might or might not have potentially been left inside her from supper the night before. It took her several minutes, she was fairly sure, before she had a sense of herself again.
She realized after a bit that she was sitting on Rùnach’s lap with his arms around her.
“I feel terrible,” she whispered.
“What in the world are you doing out here?” he asked.
She started to say stopping you from going off to save my country, but she realized immediately that if she admitted that whilst he had perhaps been merely out for a walk, she would make a colossal fool of herself. “Ah,” she said, “well, what are you doing out here?”
“Trying to get out from underneath my grandfather’s glamour so it wouldn’t shout at me when I attempted to open this book. And that wasn’t an answer to my question.”
“Best you’ll get at the moment,” she said. She put her hand over her eyes for a moment or two, then pushed herself out of his arms and stood. That lasted only a heartbeat before she found herself sitting quite hard on the bench next to him. She realized she had sat upon his book, which unsettled her almost as much as looking inside its covers. She stood up and waited for him to remove it before she collapsed back down next to him. “What is that thing?”
He dragged his hand through his hair. “I’m not sure I can answer that at the moment.” He hesitated, then shook his head. “I’m not sure what it is. Why don’t you tell me instead what you saw?”
She leaned forward and put her face in her hands. “I’m not sure I saw anything,” she managed. “Writing that didn’t look like writing, perhaps.”
“But you cried out,” he pressed. “What did you see that inspired that?”
“A river,” she said, though the memory of it wasn’t a pleasant one. “I slipped down its bank and into freezing water. I was sure I would drown. That is, as you might imagine, the sort of thing that tends to unsettle a body.” She shivered. “I feel as if I’ve been swimming in that icy stream in truth.”
“Well, if it explains anything, you’ve been unconscious for an hour, and I couldn’t call you back from wherever you were. If you hadn’t still been breathing, I would have been sending for someone with spells to see to you. You absolutely won’t be looking inside this bloody thing again.”
“I think I should,” she said gingerly. “I might see something useful.”
“And I might be regretting the fact that I had to bury you under one of those trees you are so chummy with in Queen Brèagha’s garden.” He shook his head. “This has nothing to do with your present business. How it figures into mine is something I don’t want to speculate on. Filching it was a whim; one I do truly regret. Now can you walk, or shall I carry you?”
She started to stand up, then realized immediately there was no point. “Neither. Not yet, at least.”
He put his arm around her shoulders. “Then lean on me, if you like, for a bit until you’re recovered.”
She did like, so she leaned on him. She closed her eyes and wished that made things better. “You can’t not tell me,” she said, wondering if she might find a distraction in conversation. “About that book, that is.”
He was silent for a moment or two, then sighed. “Very well, I’ll tell you, though I hesitate to do so. The truth is, the book is mine.”
“What do you mean, ‘it’s mine’?” she asked faintly. “That book?”
“Aye.”
“But that’s impossible. It’s so dark.”
“Thank you,” he said ruefully. “I think.”
She waited for him to say more, but all he did was rub the back of his neck. She could feel the tension in him, so she lifted her head and waved him away.
“Go pace,” she said.
“Why do you think I need to?”
“Because this subject makes you uncomfortable and you think better when you’re pacing.” She looked in his general direction because she still couldn’t quite focus on him. “I’ve watched you do it before.”
He reached for her hand, squeezed it, then rose. “I might make you dizzy.”
“I won’t watch you.” She put her hand over her eyes. “Go ahead and trot about to your heart’s content. And I believe you owe me three answers, so speak whilst you’re trotting.
”
“I owe you nothing,” he said with a snort, “which you have obviously forgotten in your enthusiasm over my recent lengthy and readily given responses. We can perhaps trade a few answers if you care to.”
She peeked at him from between her fingers. “I don’t have any more answers, yet you apparently have quite a few secrets left.”
He attempted a scowl, but he was either too unsettled to do it properly or he was simply too kind to frown at her. She took her hand away from her eyes and rested her chin on her fists instead. She smiled encouragingly.
“Go ahead. Spew away.”
“I want it noted that I am much more inclined to answer questions than you have been,” he grumbled.
“I’m not sure, Your Highness, that I would be boasting of anything in that regard, but I’ll let that go. Why was your book in Diarmailt, and did you leave it there?”
He started to speak, then apparently changed his mind about something. “I have never been to Diarmailt until I went with you. As to the other question, I have no idea why it would find itself there.”
She watched him pace for several minutes before she thought he might be willing to address what troubled her most. “Did you write what was on those pages? I know ’tis none of my affair, but . . .” She took a careful breath. “It was evil, Rùnach. I can’t believe you made those marks.”
He smiled grimly. “I appreciate the confidence in my goodness, and nay, I didn’t write what was there. It would seem that at some point in the past, my pages had been removed and others inserted.”
“I wonder why?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“Perhaps someone wanted what you had written down before.”
He came to a stop, rubbed his hands over his face briefly, then sighed before he looked at her. “I suppose they might have. It was my private book of spells.”
It was odd to think that at some point in the past, Rùnach had spent time writing down spells. She was so accustomed to him in his current incarnation, she could hardly imagine him with magic. She looked at him standing there with sunlight filtering down through his grandfather’s glamour and wondered what he had been like before.