“Unless he thought you had the spell of Diminishing and could best him,” Mhorghain pointed out.
“I’m sure that has given more than one mage uneasy dreams,” Miach said.
Rùnach knew he had been pacing. He was fairly sure that his feet knew they were still supposed to be taking him across that lovely blue grey slate, but somehow he suddenly found himself standing, rooted to one spot. He turned and looked at his brother-in-law. “What did you say?”
Miach looked at him with a frown. “I said the thought of someone with Gair’s spell of Diminishing taking his power has likely given more than one mage nightmares—”
Rùnach shook his head sharply. “That wasn’t how you said it. What did you say, exactly?”
“I don’t know,” Miach said, holding up his hands in surrender. “Something about dreams, mages, magic—how the hell do I know what I said?”
Rùnach rubbed his hands over his face and sighed wearily. “Forgive me. I’ve heard too much about dreams of late, I suppose, and rivers of things running where they shouldn’t be.”
Mhorghain frowned. “Things running?”
“Rivers,” Rùnach said crisply. “Rivers of dreams running through a captain’s belowdecks, rivers of unease running through Weger’s empty head—”
“I imagine that’s just supper,” Miach put in helpfully.
Rùnach glared at him, then turned to his sister. “Rivers of something he cannot name troubling the sleep of the former wizard king of Diarmailt. Lothar killing an innocent lad to get to me. Why?”
“You were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Miach said firmly. “That’s all. And this business of dreams…well, what does it have to do with anything?”
Rùnach felt his entire world grind slowly, almost imperceptibly to a halt. He stood there, simply breathing, until he thought he could form words that for some reason seemed to be lingering just outside his reach.
“What did you say?” he managed, finally.
“I said, What does this business of dreams have to do with anything,” Miach said, looking faintly alarmed. “Why do you ask?”
Rùnach felt the floor become slippery beneath his feet, as if it had suddenly become a river itself. He looked down and saw the spells lying there, glittering as if they’d been water sparkling in the sunlight as it slid over flat rocks. He took a deep breath, then looked at his brother-in-law. “Because I’ve been in your library,” he said hoarsely.
“What did you discover?” Miach asked.
“Bruadair.”
Miach no doubt thought he was doing a smashing job of keeping his thoughts to himself, but that little twitch at the corner of his mouth was almost enough to inspire Rùnach to do damage to him.
“Stop smirking,” he growled.
Miach only blinked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“And I don’t know what either of you is talking about,” Mhorghain said, looking at them as if they’d both lost their minds. “What is—”
“Don’t say the word,” Rùnach said sharply.
She looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. “What are you going on about?”
Miach reached out and pulled her over to sit on the high table next to him. “In this, I think it might be wise to humor your brother. The place he mentioned, which discretion suggests we not name aloud, is not unfamiliar to any of us, actually. Sarah hails from there, though she wouldn’t remember anything about it.”
“Oh,” Mhorghain said, drawing the word out. “I see.”
Rùnach found that he was being observed by the pair of them as if he’d turned out to be a much more interesting scientific experiment than they’d thought before. He scowled at them, but they only continued to study him.
“That is an interesting place,” Miach remarked. “Many lakes, very difficult to get in and out of. I’m curious as to why you’ve mentioned it.”
“You bloody well aren’t curious,” Rùnach said shortly.
Miach started to speak, then shut his mouth. He even went so far as to hop off the table and look a bit more like a man with responsibilities. Rùnach looked over his shoulder to find none other than that irrepressible flirt, Mansourah of Neroche, striding into the great hall as if he had something important to say.
Fortunately for them all, he said nothing. He merely handed Miach a scrap of something. It had been well mauled, as if it had been ripped off a larger piece of paper. Miach took it, looked at it, then his face shuttered.
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
“I thought you might want to see it,” Mansourah said, his expression equally guarded. “I know Cathar had been as thorough as possible, but my curiosity got the better of me.”
Rùnach was beginning to hate that word. He swore, then looked at Miach. “What did you find?”
Miach handed him the rather ragged scrap without comment. Rùnach looked down.
And then he wished quite desperately for somewhere to sit, for on that scrap of paper was scrawled a single word. A name, really. He didn’t have to match it up to put the whole message together.
Fair warning…Rùnach.
“He knows you’re alive, obviously,” Miach said.
“I don’t know how,” Rùnach said hoarsely.
Miach looked at Rùnach slowly. “Perhaps he saw you on Melksham after all.” He paused. “Or perhaps he found the notes you lost on the plains of Ailean.”
Rùnach thought he might be ill very soon. “No one would spend the time to gather them up, much less make sense of them. No one could know I wrote them.”
“Unless they knew your hand,” Miach ventured, “as Acair might have. He could have been following you before. I suppose in the end, it doesn’t matter. ’Tis obvious he plans to follow you now.”
Rùnach felt the world around him begin to spin. Dreams, Bruadair, Acair of Ceangail sending a message to him, losing his notes, finding himself in the company of a woman who spun things out of thin air—
“I think,” Miach said suddenly, taking the tattered scrap out of Rùnach’s fingers, “that you might want to keep this all to yourself for a bit.”
“Why?” Rùnach demanded.
Miach looked at his wife. “I don’t think this is going to go well, do you?”
She sighed lightly. “I don’t think so either.”
Rùnach found himself rather unwilling, all of a sudden, to turn around.
Because he had the feeling he knew what he would find there.
Twenty-four
Aisling stood in the middle of what she could only assume, having merely read about that sort of thing in books, was the great hall of Tor Neroche. It felt a little as if she’d stumbled into a dream, but perhaps that was the nature of the place. Or perhaps she was still trapped in the dreams she’d been having the night before, dreams of black mages and evil and things that troubled her. She had dreamed of rivers running under rock, carrying along with them everything that was beautiful and sparkling, terminating in an enormous lake that was full of black, poisonous water.
She had risen from her bed to find herself alone. She had dressed in gear meant for traveling, because she had felt the overwhelming need to flee. It had occurred to her as she had forced herself to sit and warm herself briefly in front of a fire obviously built up for her comfort that she was perhaps slightly overwhelmed. She had spent the whole of her life closeted in a building with just enough light to see by, soaking up every hard fact she could when she was allowed freedom from the terrible drudgery of her work. Anything of a more mythical nature had been limited to those rare peeks into Mistress Muinear’s book of lore.
Yet now, over the past two days, she had heard more about things she had believed to be the stuff of dreams than she had during the entirety of her life.
She had the feeling there were other things about to become reality for her, things she wasn’t going to like.
The great hall she had been allowed inside was spectacular. The floor was a polished, bluish sto
ne that looked as if water were running over it, though it wasn’t slick beneath her feet. Perhaps those were spells. At the moment, she was honestly past telling.
Fireplaces flanked the hall along with one massive hearth placed boldly behind the raised dais. Above the equally impressive hearth hung two swords, crossed. They were glowing, one blood red, one icy blue, and both were covered with runes that sparkled gold and silver.
She decided that she had definitely wandered into a dream. Swords did not glow. Water did not run dry over pavement. And people she knew as simple members of a very large castle didn’t loiter negligently around the lord’s table as if they were sitting in their own kitchen.
She felt herself floating over to them as if her feet weren’t quite touching that stone that was covered with water that wasn’t there. It was strange how the water made a sound—
That wasn’t the stone, that was the language the four souls in front of her were speaking.
She stopped several feet behind Rùnach and listened to it, drinking it in, feeling it fill a place in her soul she hadn’t realized was so parched. They stopped too soon for her taste and Rùnach spun around to look at her in surprise. She stepped to her right so she could see him and the rest of them at the same time.
They looked so different.
She realized there was something shimmering in the air there in front of her, something that surrounded the four in front of her, a spell of Un-noticing, fashioned from Fadaire. She drew a circle with her finger, sending the air spinning, then pulled a thread out of that…spell…shining there before her and put it onto a bobbin she created out of more air.
Perhaps that time with Neroche’s spinner hadn’t been wasted.
The spell unraveled so quickly she could hardly control the uptake—indeed, she found she couldn’t control it at all. The bobbin overflowed within moments and spilled out onto the floor, leaving her wondering what to do with it now. It sparkled with gold and silver runes that spoke of power and might. She watched that magic pooling there, then reached out to still her flywheel. She felt it come to a halt beneath her fingers. The magic lay there for a moment or two, then she breathed out and it vanished away. She looked up at the quartet standing before her.
They were watching her, openmouthed.
The fourth soul there, Miach’s older brother Mansourah, she thought, wished them well and walked away. Aisling didn’t bother with him. She turned first to Morgan, because while she hadn’t had many conversations with Rùnach’s sister, she had found her very much to her liking. Plainspoken and sensible, definitely a product of Weger’s best efforts. Plus, she tended to recite the same strictures Aisling had memorized, which was comforting.
Only now, Morgan didn’t look at all like a soldier. She was sitting on the table, clutching its edge, and looking as if she would have preferred to be anywhere but where she was. Aisling looked at her face. There was a mark above her brow, Weger’s mark that seemed to be a dark, steely sort of silver color.
But above that, upon her brow, sat a crown. It was a beautiful thing, filigreed silver, and adorned with diamonds and pearls. However, it wasn’t the crown of a princess.
It was the crown of a queen.
Aisling looked at her in stunned surprise. “You’re wearing a crown.”
“Well,” Morgan said faintly, “not now.”
“You’re not just a simple farmer’s wife,” Aisling managed.
Morgan looked at her, then shook her head slowly. “I’m afraid not.”
Rùnach started toward her, but Aisling held out her hand and he stopped. She found that she was starting to feel a slight bit of something she hadn’t felt in quite a long while. It wasn’t hurt or even surprise.
It was anger.
She didn’t want to believe it, but she was beginning to suspect that the three in front of her had lied to her. There was obviously far more to them than they had let on. If they had known who they were and they had declined to say anything—
She looked at Miach, who also had a crown hovering over his head. “Who are you?” she demanded.
He looked at her, his very pale blue eyes troubled. “Mochriadhemiach,” he said quietly. “King of Neroche.”
“Are you sure? You look very young.”
“I feel very old at the moment,” he said with a sigh, “but yes, I’m sure.”
“And your lady wife?”
“Mhorghain,” he said, glancing very briefly at Morgan, “granddaughter of Sìle, king of Tòrr Dòrainn.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” she asked him, pained.
“Because your friend here asked me not—oof.”
She was surprised how Rùnach had managed to get his elbow into Miach’s—nay, Mochriadhemiach’s—ribs from where he stood, but perhaps he was quicker than he had let on before. He was also a bigger liar.
“Again, this isn’t going to go well,” Miach murmured.
Aisling walked over to stand in front of Rùnach. “Who are you?”
“No one of consequence—”
He didn’t manage an oof, likely because he was too stunned to do so. She heard his neck snap back, watched his eyes roll back in his head, then watched Miach catch him before he cracked that head on the side of the lord’s table. Miach lowered him with relative gentleness to the floor. She shook out her hand because it felt as if she’d just cuffed a stone wall. Weger would have been impressed that his training had served her so well, but she found she was nothing but heartsick. She looked at the king of Neroche.
“He lied to me,” she whispered.
“You could consider it that,” Miach ventured, “or you might call it hedging.”
Morgan pushed off the table and drew Aisling’s arm through hers. “It doesn’t matter, does it, Aisling? Let’s leave these lads to their parsing of words and go off to find something to drink.”
Aisling would have protested—she was slightly curious as to whether Rùnach would wake again or not—but Morgan gave her no choice but to walk out of the great hall. The queen of Neroche was very persuasive.
That lasted until they were just outside the hall doors, because her anger gave her strength she hadn’t realized she had. She looked at Rùnach’s sister, fully intending to be quite direct about what bothered her, but then she saw the expression on Morgan’s face and felt all her anger dissipate. She was left with nothing but a chill that settled deep into her soul.
“I shouldn’t have hit him,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself. “He didn’t deserve it. Not truly.”
Morgan smiled briefly. “I can’t say that I blame you. I doubt he will either.”
Aisling took a deep breath. “I was angry.”
“I’ve done worse,” Morgan said with a shrug. “Shall I tell you of it? I guarantee you’ll feel better after you know.”
“I can’t stay,” Aisling said quickly. “And not because of…well, not because of what just happened.”
Morgan hesitated. “I think you would be safer here.”
“I’m not safe anywhere,” Aisling said frankly. “There is a curse of death laid upon me.”
“As I’ve said before, I don’t believe in curses. Yours was likely just something made up by some black mage—or any mage, actually—with delusions of grandeur who thought he could oppress your people with a few clever words.”
“I wish I could believe that—”
“Then believe this,” Morgan said seriously. “You are not prepared to face alone what lies outside the keep. Rùnach would be appalled by the thought. Or, he would, if he were conscious to express an opinion.”
“But my errand is not his,” Aisling said slowly. “He promised Weger he would bring me as far as Tor Neroche, but I know he has other things to be doing.”
Morgan looked at her in surprise. “Why did you want to come here?”
“I was sent to procure a mercenary.”
Morgan lifted her eyebrows briefly. “Gobhann was a good place to start, then, I suppose. Was there no one there
to suit?”
Aisling shook her head. “Weger didn’t think so. He told me to come here.”
“Then he had his reasons,” Morgan said promptly. “We could go look over the garrison here, if you like. Then you could send that lad off on your errand and remain here in safety.”
What Aisling wanted to do was find somewhere to lie down—preferably in Mistress Ceana’s weaving room—and sleep until she could wake and have everything make sense. Either everything she had been told was a lie, or it was the truth. If it was the truth, then she had four days left in which to find and convince a man to meet the peddler at Taigh Hall. And if it were all a lie, then it didn’t matter where she went or what she did.
Though she was beginning to wonder how anyone with the power to slay her would know when and if the bargain had been struck.
She looked at Morgan. “I am beginning to have doubts about several things.”
“Are you?”
Aisling nodded. “I think I must go. I need to find the truth.”
Morgan sighed. “I understand that, perhaps better than I’m able to tell you at the moment. Where will you go to find this truth?”
“Diarmailt, I think.” Aisling frowned thoughtfully. “Rùnach said there was a very important library there. I think I might at least begin to acquire the truth I need in such a place.”
Morgan looked at her in silence for another moment or two, then looked around her. A page sprang immediately to her side. She leaned down, whispered in his ear, then ruffled his hair before he ran off. She linked arms with Aisling.
“I think you might be right. Let’s go to the stables. I’m always happier out of doors. Thomas will bring your gear—or do his best to, that is. We’ll chat whilst we wait, if you don’t mind.”
Aisling didn’t suppose she minded much of anything at the moment, so she walked arm in arm with the queen of Neroche and jumped every time someone bowed to her companion.
It didn’t take long for them to reach the stables. Morgan asked for Iteach to be groomed and prepared for a journey, then sat down with Aisling on a bale of hay. The stable lads seemed to not quite know how to take their queen, which Aisling found rather charming, all things considered. She supposed she should have been annoyed that Morgan had been just as deceitful as the rest of them, but the truth was, she hadn’t been. She had promised to give the absolute truth for the questions she thought she could answer and she hadn’t answered the ones she presumably would have been forced to lie about.