Spellweaver (29 page)

“I’m not sure we would want to know what my grandfather Sìle would say to that,” he said dryly, “so perhaps we’ll keep it to ourselves.”

He walked with her over to Tarbh, realizing only then that he was feeling a sense of urgency he hadn’t felt before. Or perhaps he simply hadn’t noticed it before.

“I suppose I could have spent a bit more time being careful that I didn’t miss anything,” Sarah said slowly.

“You’re simply looking for a way to avoid flying again,” he said, struggling to keep his tone light.

“I might be,” she muttered. “Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s anything else here. No spells, no magic. Just darkness made by ordinary things.” She swallowed, hard. “Though I’m less sure of the last than I’d like to be.”

He was too, but he wasn’t going to say as much. “You’re certain there’s nothing else on the plains of Ailean?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then we’ll make for Slighe,” he said. “We could be there by dawn if we flew hard. It would give us the chance to see if the lads were there before we turned north.”

“Will Tarbh agree to it?”

He nodded toward the dragon, crouched and watching them with his glittering eye. “He doesn’t seem opposed to the idea. I gather his only regret is that you don’t much care for his takeoffs and landings.”

She started forward, then stopped and simply shook for a moment or two before she looked at him. “I’m not going to be much help if I don’t get over this.”

“You’ll accustom yourself to it,” he promised her. “I will admit that I too suffered a bit of ...” He paused, then supposed there was no point in not being honest. “Very well, the first time I threw myself off my grandfather’s battlements and changed into dragonshape, I thought I wouldn’t manage it before I hit the ground and died.”

“Which thrilled you so much that you immediately tried it again.”

He smiled sheepishly. “I was a lad.”

“Who were you with?”

“Miach of Neroche and, if you can believe this, Rùnach.”

“How old were you?”

“Five.”

“Your poor mother.”

He smiled a little at the memory. “Aye, I daresay. She spent the evening convincing my grandfather that beating us soundly for our cheek would only drive us to do it again.
Elves do not shapechange!
he bellowed periodically that evening at supper until the lot of us were simply bundles of nerves.”

“And what do elves do?” she asked. “Though I hasten to add I’m only asking out of polite and friendly curiosity.”

“We admire flame-haired weavers of exquisite cloth and always hurry about our business on the ground so we might fly with them again.”

She scowled at him. “I’m not going any farther on this quest of yours if you don’t stop that.”

He smiled and put his arm around her, because she was trembling. He imagined it wasn’t from the cold. “Where—” he began, then he stopped. The moonlight had broken through the clouds and cast the whole of the tableau in front of him into sharp relief, making his werelight unnecessary.

There was something standing twenty paces behind Daniel.

“Let’s go,” she said quickly. “I’ll try not to scream so much this time.”

He was happy to acquiesce. He climbed onto his horse-turned-dragon’s back, then pulled Sarah quickly up onto the saddle in front of him. He put his arms around her and held on as Tarbh leapt up, beating his wings against the chill air. He looked over his shoulder but saw nothing untoward following them. If someone had shapechanged to chase after them, he certainly couldn’t tell. He didn’t imagine Sarah would be willing to open her eyes long enough to look. Perhaps later, when she felt more secure.

He started to pull Sarah’s hood up over her hair only to have her shriek.

“Don’t let go!”

“I never plan to,” he assured her. He wrapped both arms around her again, then rested his chin on her shoulder. “I won’t let you fall. I promise.”

She didn’t relax, but she did pat his hands briefly before she went back to clutching the pommel of the saddle. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the feel of the chill wind against his face.

“I left my cloak behind,” she said suddenly. “The very lovely green one you made for me.”

“I know.”

“It was too fine for a journey such as this will be.”

He tightened his arms around her briefly. “We’ll fetch it after we’re finished. Soilléir will keep it for us.”

She nodded, then fell silent for quite a while. Ruith would have thought she had gone to sleep if it hadn’t been for the way she flinched every now and again, as if she’d almost fallen asleep but reminded herself unhappily of where she was. She finally leaned back.

“Ruith?”

“Aye, love?”

“I can’t help but wonder about that spell of Gair’s. The one of Diminishing. I tried not to listen too closely when Connail was speaking of it on our way north, but it was hard to avoid.”

“Given Connail’s unfortunate familiarity with its effects, I can understand why he was obsessed with it.”

“That was the spell that Daniel had half of, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. He could scarce believe he’d lost that half he’d had, which was indeed his fault. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been so fastidious about not using magic—

“I wonder why someone would want it so badly,” Sarah said, interrupting his thoughts.

He leaned up a bit so the wind wouldn’t carry away his words. “There are mages out in the world who aren’t satisfied with their limits. In the beginning of the world, I think there were boundaries set—by good taste, if nothing else. Over the years, though, there have been many who sought to cross those boundaries and do the unthinkable.”

“Taking someone else’s power?” she asked faintly.

He nodded. “Neònach of Carragh was the first to attempt it, but it went badly for him. He began with inanimate, enspelled objects that rendered him, in the end, quite inanimate himself.”

“So it is as Connail said,” she said. “When Gair took his power, he took his madness as well.”

“No one ever said it came without risks,” he said. “Lothar has his spell of Taking, but it is, from what I understand, a crude and inelegant thing that might siphon off half another mage’s power. Droch has his own variation of the same thing, loftily called Gifting, which produces about the same result.”

“But Gair’s?”

“Every last drop,” he said with a sigh, “as Connail also said. It is a spell that never should have been conceived, much less refined and certainly not written down. Why my father allowed such a thing to be let loose, I’ll never know.”

“Perhaps he never intended it be discovered.”

“I imagine he didn’t,” Ruith agreed. “He guarded it jealously, never uttering it in the presence of anyone but those whose power he took.”

“Then how do you and your brothers know it?”

“I was very young when Keir first determined that it was something we all should know,” Ruith said slowly. “He eavesdropped first, but refused to pass along what he’d heard—to his credit. He and Gille argued bitterly about that, for Gille thought the only way to counter my sire’s evil was to know how to name it thoroughly, but Keir feared the spell would somehow corrupt us.”

“Did it?”

“Nay,” he said simply, because he couldn’t blame her for asking. “Keir insisted that if we wanted it, we would have to have it for ourselves and watch with our own eyes what it could do. We all then made it a point to overhear my father using it, though we certainly never would have used it ourselves.”

“You were never tempted?” she asked casually.

He pursed his lips. “Never, you heartless disciple of Soilléir of Cothromaiche. Not even when my father was opening that damned well, though perhaps I should have been.” He sighed. “I’d never heard him spew out so many spells in such a short time. First he used his spell of Diminishing on my brothers, then, with their power in hand, he opened the well. He then turned his favorite spell on the well itself only to realize that he was sadly out of his depth. By the time the evil had raced up into the sky and was headed back down toward him, he was frantically trying spells of containment and closing. ’Twas too late for that, I fear.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “’Tis in the past, fortunately. I feel somewhat better about it, knowing that I’m doing something to stop his evil from spreading instead of merely sitting in the mountains, fretting over it.”

She fell silent. He wasn’t sure if she contemplated all his years hiding away in the mountains or wondered if he now had the power to protect her. Perhaps, in the end, it was just better not to know.

“Ruith?”

“Hmmm?”

She leaned her head back against his shoulder and turned toward him slightly. He had a difficult time concentrating on what she was saying. If he’d been a less gentlemanly sort of man—or one with more sense, perhaps—he would have kissed her right then, professed his undying love, then begged her to wed with him. But that might have caused both of them to fall off, so perhaps that was better left for another, less perilous perch.

“Are you listening to me?”

“Trying to.”

“Try harder.”

“The wind is fairly loud,” he said. “And you, if I may say so, are extremely distracting.”

She elbowed him firmly in the gut. He grunted, then wrenched his thoughts away from where they would have lingered quite pleasantly.

“What?” he asked.

“I was wondering,” she said loudly, “given that your father was so interested in taking the magic of others, if he ever worried about someone taking his?”

“Never,” Ruith said automatically, but then he found he couldn’t say anything else.

In truth, he’d honestly never considered it. His father had always seemed all-powerful, a towering figure full of arrogance and strength. The thought of anyone being able to do anything
to
Gair of Ceangail instead of running
from
him had certainly never crossed his mind as a child.

But now that he didn’t have his mother and brothers to protect him and he was exposed to the full brunt of whatever black mages wanted to throw at him, he certainly thought about his own mortality more often than he cared to. Surely his sire must have at least considered in passing the same sort of thing.

He tightened his arms around Sarah briefly. “Nay, he never would have, but I’ll think on it just the same, if you like.”

“At least it will keep you awake.”

He smiled. “I won’t fall asleep.”

“I know I certainly won’t,” she said with a shiver.

He wrapped his arms more securely around her, then rested his chin on her shoulder and gave some thought to things he hadn’t considered before. His father, who had spent more time than he would have admitted to looking over his shoulder, wouldn’t have left himself unprotected, in spite of his belief in his own invincibility. Surely.

What if he had created a spell to counter Lothar’s spell of Taking and Droch’s attempt at the like?

Or what if he had suffered a spontaneous and quite unwholesome bout of altruism and created a spell to restore what had been taken with his own spell of Diminishing?

The thought was intriguing, but Ruith wasn’t certain it was worth thinking on too seriously. His father never would have let his magic be taken, so he had likely never thought seriously about needing to find a way to have it restored. He certainly wouldn’t have given such a spell to anyone else. As for using it himself,
on
himself, he wouldn’t have had the magic to use it had all his own power been taken.

Then again, perhaps even if another mage managed to find and use the spell of Diminishing, anyone but Gair of Ceangail might not have managed such a thorough result—especially on Gair himself.

Which would have left Gair with perhaps enough power to save himself with a spell of Anti-Diminishing.

Ruith rolled his eyes at the thought. His sire was dead and gone. Whatever fools might have been left in the world were not his equal and would never harness the full power of the original spell.

Still, they might manage a good bit of damage, which left him with his original task, which was preventing the meeting of those two halves before someone with a decent bit of power put them together.

And in the meantime, he supposed he might be wise to actually do the unthinkable and create something of his own to fight whoever might be canny enough to have the entire spell at his disposal, though the thought of that was a bit like walking over his father’s grave.

He shivered, and not from the chill. That wasn’t a path he wanted to put even a single foot to.

Though he supposed he might not have a choice.

Sixteen

Sarah walked down the muddy street with Ruith, grateful she had him to duck behind if things became too dodgy. She’d never been in a place that was so overtly unpleasant, not even when compared to a few of the seedier villages in Shettlestoune she’d traveled to with her mother to hunt for new customers. The buildings had quite obviously taken their fair share of abuse from the weather, which was particularly nasty and had consisted of, over the past half hour, a driving rain that had turned to a painful sort of hail that had abated into a sleet that stung her face and gathered on her eyelashes until she could hardly see where she was going. If she hadn’t known better, she might have suspected it all to be the work of some vile mage.