River of Dreams

  Though she had to admit the thought of Rùnach pursuing other women was not one she entertained with pleasure. Hard on the heels of that came the thought that she was absolutely the most foolish woman in the Nine Kingdoms to think a man of Rùnach’s lineage would ever look at her with anything more serious in mind than helping her with her quest—

  “You know, you think too much.”

  She looked up at him. “Do I?”

  “I believe you do. Perhaps we should ask the king if we might go sit in his solar. I think it might be fairly quiet there.”

  “Aye, please,” she said, finding that she was suddenly very out of sorts. Perhaps dwarvish food didn’t agree with her.

  Or perhaps she was vexed by the thought of beautiful traders’ daughters looking at Rùnach and finding him lacking because of his scars. Aye, that was it. She might have to do damage to them if they were unkind to him.

  She was still contemplating what she might reasonably do or say to unruly females half an hour later as she sat with Rùnach in front of the fire in the dwarf king’s solar. In front of her sat a spinning wheel, provided apparently by the king for reasons she didn’t dare ask, and to her left, away from the flames, sat a basket full of wool dyed in a riot of colors. She sat with her hands in her lap, not sure she dared touch anything. She looked over the wheel at Rùnach who was sitting on a very comfortable sofa with his hands behind his head, watching her with a faint smile.

  “I might bring the mountain down atop us,” she warned.

  “I’m not sure you give Uachdaran’s spells of protection the credit they deserve,” he said mildly.

  “I moved your grandfather’s border.”

  “Aye, well, he moves it himself with regularity.”

  “Does he?” she asked in surprise.

  “Now and again, when things feel a little too peaceful for his taste. Besides, then you were spinning air which seems to lend itself to more esoteric substances. This is just a pedestrian wheel with ordinary wool. How much damage can you possibly do—nay”—he laughed a little—“don’t answer that. Start slowly and we’ll see what happens.”

  She couldn’t argue with that. She found yarn, tied a leader as Mistress Ceana had taught her, then selected a deep red that was almost a burgundy color.

  “I don’t normally like red,” she said, thinking that perhaps if she talked as she spun, she might not do anything untoward.

  “Then why did you choose it?”

  She looked at him. “I might make you a cap. It would go very well with your eyes.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Ah, you’ve noticed the color of my eyes.”

  “I’ve looked in them often enough.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “Rùnach, it’s difficult not to look at you,” she said, focusing on the fiber twisting beneath her fingers. “Which I’m sure you know already.”

  “I’ve forgotten.”

  “I’m sure you haven’t.”

  “Remind me.”

  She shot him a look. “I’m busy.”

  He only smiled and folded his hands across his belly as he stretched his long legs out toward the fire. “How do they woo in Bruadair?”

  “I have no idea. I suppose they must, but I’ve never seen it happen.”

  “None of your mates down at the pub tried to win your favor with a bit of flattery?”

  She looked at him in astonishment. “Those lads? Me? You must be mad. They never would have paid me any heed. Not that I would have been interested,” she added under her breath.

  “Not interested,” he echoed. “Why not?”

  “Because they were mannerless louts full of ego and bluster.”

  “Ah, so you want a lad with manners and no ego. Anything else? He should perhaps be easy on the eye, I suppose.”

  “Tolerably so, I should think.”

  “How tolerable is tolerable?”

  She stopped treadling. “Honestly, I hadn’t thought about it seriously.”

  “Truly, Aisling? Not once?”

  She put her hand on her flywheel, the wood solid and sturdy beneath her fingers. She looked at that very lovely wood for a bit, then looked at him.

  “I suppose,” she said slowly, “that I never thought to escape the Guild, so what was the use in thinking about something I could never have?”

  He closed his eyes briefly. The look he gave her then almost brought tears to her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said very quietly. “You deserved better.”

  She spun the wheel and went back to her work. “It’s over, and I’ll give them no more of my time than they’ve had already.” She shrugged. “As a young girl, of course, I imagined things that could never be.”

  “Heroes from legend coming to rescue you?”

  “They were usually lads from Neroche,” she said solemnly.

  He pursed his lips. “Unsurprising.”

  “Well, it is the sort of thing they do.”

  “Badly, with bad manners and too much ego,” he said darkly. “I think you should look in a different direction. Here, we’ll make a list of places that don’t qualify.”

  She watched him fetch paper and pen, then resume his seat. She turned back to her spinning, grateful for a generous host who had provided her not only with a wheel but a comfortable place to use it.

  She listened to Rùnach name then discard a lengthy list of places she absolutely shouldn’t go to look for a suitor. He then began a list of qualities she might be interested in. She commented on them when she heard them, though the truth was, she was too distracted by the wheel and her own thoughts. In time, though, even her thoughts ceased to distract her and she was able to look at other things.

  She found herself watching Rùnach’s hands as he continued with a list she could no longer hear. She realized she could see the runes on the back of his hands, runes she was tempted to sketch out that she might study them and see if she could understand what they meant. The impression they gave was one of power and protection, gifts from his grandfather who loved him so dearly.

  She could have sworn she saw something else there, a thread of something that was neither silver nor gold, but multihued. It reminded her sharply of a cluster of raw gems she had seen in the cavern below.

  She considered that for a bit, then shrugged it aside. It was obviously something that was part of the Fadaire his grandfather had used. She would have to ask him how that all worked, but perhaps on the morrow, when she wasn’t so tired.

  At least the hum of the rocks and veins of ore had subsided. In fact, she could hardly hear it at all. Instead, there was simply a solid and very lovely sense of security. All that was left to hear was the whir of her wheel, the crackle and pop of the wood in the hearth, and Rùnach’s mutterings over the undesirable characters foisted off upon the world, characters who always seemed to have their roots in Neroche somehow.

  “I dreamed of a house with no doors,” she said finally.

  “I know.”

  She looked at him to find he was watching her gravely. “Did you?”

  “That’s why I want to build it for you,” he said quietly. “Because it is something from your dreams, Aisling.”

  She considered, then met his eyes. “I’m not sure Prince Mansourah would build a house with no doors.”

  “I daresay he wouldn’t, but then again, he has no imagination and never tends to his teeth. You don’t want him.”

  “Nay, I don’t think I do.”

  But she knew what she did want. He was sitting across from her, holding a list of things she might want in a mate in his hand, and offering to build her something so beautiful, it resided only in her dreams.

  Queen Brèagha’s words came back to her, that in her future lay something so beautiful and sweet that perhaps the path she would walk to get there would be especially difficult.

  She wondered if she would be equal to paying that price.

  Or if the prize would still be there when she was finished.

  Sixteen

&nb
sp; Rùnach sat on the floor in the middle of Uachdaran of Léige’s lists, such as they were, and looked at the book he held in his lap.

  The book of his father’s spells.

  Looking inside was the last thing he wanted to do. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. The last thing he wanted to do was watch Aisling rush off to her wedding with someone he didn’t much care for—his cousin Còir, for instance—but memorizing his father’s spells came a very close second.

  He looked at the ceiling above him, sparing a moment to marvel at its height when he knew the entire chamber was below ground, then sighed deeply. He didn’t want the spells, but he could see the wisdom of having them. What he couldn’t believe was that another copy of the book existed. Nay, another two copies, though he supposed the witchwoman of Fàs was canny enough to know what would happen to her if one of her sons had Gair’s spell of Diminishing to hand. She would find herself drained of all her power without hesitation, and then perhaps repaid for all the manual labor she’d put her sons to in order to attempt to curry her favor. The thought of those attempts was almost enough to leave Rùnach with the urge to smile.

  Almost, but not quite.

  He opened the book, looked at the first page, then sighed and set to work.

  It was easier than he’d feared it might be and more distasteful than he’d imagined it would be. Worse still, by the time he was finished, he had reacquired a very grudging respect for his father’s skill as a mage. Admittedly, the man had had a thousand years to perfect his craft, but that wasn’t it. The spells were elegant, to the point, and ruthlessly effective. Rùnach could vouch personally for the last bit. He couldn’t imagine why in the world he would ever need to know them given that he had no magic with which to use them, but perhaps they would be useful as a bartering tool.

  He didn’t want to think about what sort of bargain might require them.

  He set the first book aside, then reached for the other one he’d brought with him, Acair’s pages of indecipherable gibberish sewn into the cover of his book of spells. He could assume, hopefully not wrongly, that Acair hadn’t managed to unlock those spells he had obviously removed. If he had, Rùnach suspected he would have known by the trail of destruction Acair would have left in his wake.

  As far as the scratches went, though, he had to admit they baffled him. He would have chalked that up to his bastard brother’s stupidity, but Acair was far from stupid.

  Rùnach turned the pages carefully, but they made no more sense to him at present than the previous times he’d looked at them. There wasn’t a single spell written on the pages, nor anything that looked like even half a spell. He wondered absently if perhaps the pages themselves were enspelled, only revealing their contents if commanded to in precisely the right way, but surely if that had been the case, Fionne of Fàs would have said as much. She was dangerous and treacherous, but she kept her word. He had paid the price of her opinion and felt sure she had told him the truth—

  She had said the symbols might represent points on a map.

  He started from the beginning again and tried to force the symbols into some semblance of a pattern. He read from front to back and back to front, all whilst holding the book from various angles. It made no more sense than it had from the start, which was no sense at all.

  He shut the book with a curse, then picked up both books and rose. He tested his memory and found to his disgust that there were bits of his father’s things he couldn’t remember properly. What he’d wanted to do was toss the book into Uachdaran’s hottest furnace, but it looked as if he would be holding on to it a bit longer.

  He left the lists and wandered aimlessly through the passageways, wondering where Aisling might be keeping herself at present. He turned a corner only to hear the unmistakable sound of traders hunting for chambers and food. He couldn’t imagine that any of those fathers would want to send their daughters off with a damaged, magicless elf, but stranger things had happened.

  He wondered, with a sharpness that brought him up short, what Aisling’s father would say if he were to present himself at the family hearth and ask the man for his daughter’s hand. Or, perhaps more fittingly, if he presented himself to the man in the most uncomfortable part of the mine available for the laboring of parents who deserved far worse. He supposed he would have preferred the latter, for Aisling’s sake, and he also supposed he should congratulate himself on his good manners even though he had the feeling that Aisling wouldn’t care what her father said.

  All of which assumed that he could convince her that what he wanted was the sort of arrangement requiring a father’s permission and that she would be interested in such an arrangement to start with.

  He could hardly believe that he was so turned about by a slip of a girl who sang with trees and listened to the dreams of a dwarf king’s veins of ore, but there it was. His mother would have considered it nothing more than he deserved, no doubt.

  He found his own bedchamber by sheer dumb luck, quickly shoved his books into his pack, then ventured to poke his nose out his door. Finding the passageway empty, he made straight for Uachdaran’s solar. It was the one place where Aisling had any peace, so he supposed it was the place he would find her.

  He knocked, was invited to enter, then walked inside and shut the door behind him. Aisling and Uachdaran were sitting in front of the fire, chatting animatedly in the dwarvish tongue. Rùnach was somehow not at all surprised at Aisling’s newfound skill. The king’s delight in her mastering his language was obvious. He looked up and beckoned.

  “Come and sit, Rùnach my boy.”

  Rùnach did. He listened for a bit, though he found it increasingly difficult to stay awake. He had to admit it had been a very long morning so far, begun too early after a terrible night’s sleep full of dreams of rivers running under things. Again. If he had to either dream about that sort of thing or hear about it from almost everyone he met—all of whom seemed determined to bludgeon him with details about their own foul dreams—he would . . . well, he would walk away from them whilst they were still speaking, that’s what he would do.

  The fire was very warm, which he appreciated. He appreciated it for an indeterminate amount of time before he fell asleep to the soothing conversation of a weaver and a king speaking of things that sparkled.

  * * *

  He woke, which is the only way he knew he had slept. It took him a moment or two to find his way out of his dream of rivers of diamonds and colored gems so he could focus on Aisling and Uachdaran. The king was still sitting in his chair, nursing a mug of something useful. Rùnach realized that Aisling, however, had vacated her chair and was currently leaning over his own poor self, looking at his hands. He frowned at her, then at the king.

  “What did you say?”

  They both ignored him.

  “I’m not the one to ask, gel,” Uachdaran said, shaking his head. “Ask the elf. Those are his grandpappy’s runes, after all.”

  Rùnach looked at Aisling. “What are you talking about?”

  She sank down into the chair next to him, a chair he didn’t remember having seen there before he fell asleep. Perhaps they had moved it there whilst he was otherwise occupied. She took his hand.

  “I was wondering about these,” she said, pointing to his scars. “Or, rather, the runes, actually.”

  Rùnach decided if that sort of wondering left her with a desire to hold his hand, he would explain runes to her all day long.

  “What do you want to know?”

  She frowned thoughtfully. “I wonder if you could draw them out for me.” She met his eyes. “So I could see exactly how they lay there on your hands.”

  “Happily,” he said. “You know, men often write down things for the women they woo. Poetry. Lays to their beauty.” He looked at her solemnly. “That sort of thing.”

  Uachdaran blew his breath out and rolled his eyes. Aisling simply looked at Rùnach as if she feared he had lost his wits and it was her sole responsibility to help him find them again.


  Uachdaran shoved paper and a sharp pencil at him. “Take that before you frighten the girl off.”

  Rùnach considered that rather good advice. He drew the runes on his left hand and on his right, adding with a good deal of reluctance what Còir had buried in his flesh. Not because of the rune itself, which might come in handy, but because he didn’t want Aisling thinking about that enspelled handkerchief any more than necessary. Especially since it would do for her what he could not.

  “Why are they laid one atop the other?” she asked after several minutes of studying what he’d drawn.

  “It has to do with their importance, partly,” he said, “and partly with how the magic is best used.” He pointed to the first rune he’d sketched. “That is a rune of protection,” he said, “but only of any efficacy at night or in shadow or under the shadow of a dark spell. It could mean just one of those things or all three depending on where it finds itself.”

  “On your hand, you mean?” she asked.

  “Partly, but also what it is linked to. That particular rune, Teasraig, lies next to and is intertwined with courage, Sonairte, which could mean that the protection only reaches its full power when the elf so marked finds himself lacking courage whilst facing an assault by a dark spell. Or it could mean that possessing courage in abundance causes Teasraig to drive back a spell of darkness that courage alone cannot best.”

  “Or it could mean that Sìle was just slapping them on your hands randomly to leave you scratching your head for the rest of your very long life,” Uachdaran said dryly.

  Rùnach smiled briefly. “There is that.”

  Uachdaran looked at Aisling. “You can speculate all day, gel, and never understand what Sìle was thinking, though I imagine in the end you can assume he marked that lad there because he loved him. I suppose of any of Sìle’s grandchildren, Rùnach might have the best guess at what his grandfather intended.”

  Aisling looked at his hand for a bit longer, then up at his face. “There is something over your brow.”

  “I imagine it’s a rune of protection and something to utterly rebuff Weger’s branding iron.”