The White Spell (3 page)

She realized with a start that there were no stable hands rushing to go hold the horses Doghail had surely selected. There was only Doghail, standing at the gate to the arena, waiting for her with only one horse in tow. She cursed under her breath and walked swiftly down the aisle to meet him.

“No lads?” she asked, feeling a little breathless.

“Later,” he said, handing her the reins. “I'll go tack up the other two. Save the best for last, aye?”

She nodded, put her questions aside, then led a perfectly serviceable but hardly spectacular gelding into the arena. A lad came skidding through the dirt to hand her the pair of gloves she'd apparently dropped in her haste, then backed away at a curse from Slaidear. If that one avoided a right proper sacking, she would be surprised. She consigned him to whatever fate awaited him without hesitation and turned her attentions to her own business.

It was obvious from the first turn she took about the arena that Fuadain's luncheon companion wasn't interested in a horse. He knew nothing about them and likely wouldn't have been able to afford what he was looking at even if he had.

That wasn't her affair, though, so she showed the first two ponies to their best advantage, because she couldn't in good conscience do anything else. She swung up onto the back of the finest of the lot, knowing it was pointless to ride him, but it would at least save her the time of working him later—

“Doghail, you'll ride the last one. Girl, get off him and let the man show us what he can do.”

Léirsinn didn't move at first, but that was only because she'd spent the better part of her life never allowing herself to show any reaction to anything her uncle said. She took her time dismounting but didn't dare exchange even a quick glance with Doghail as she fussed with the stirrups.

“Make haste, you stupid girl!”

Léirsinn bobbed her head toward her uncle. “Of course, my lord.” She handed Doghail the reins, then gave him a leg up. She
put her hand on the gelding's neck and bid him silently to be gentle. She was well hidden by the horse's head, so she took a chance and looked up at Doghail.

He was white with what she never would have suggested might be called fear. His morning ale likely hadn't agreed with him. The man had a reputation for having ridden horses that no one else would dare come close to; the pony he was on at present hardly qualified as uncontrollable. If he had, several years earlier, tempted fate one too many times and found himself fair trampled to death as a result, well, that sort of thing occasionally happened, didn't it? It was understandable that he hadn't been up on a horse since he'd managed to relearn to walk, something her uncle knew damned well—

“Put him through his paces, Doghail,” Fuadain boomed. “Surely you can manage that.”

Léirsinn didn't contemplate murder often—very well, she thought about it every time she saw her uncle, but it seemed counterproductive to slay him only to find herself in a dungeon as a result. Better to let him live out his miserable life in peace. Perhaps one day he would face himself and realize what he'd done to those around him.

She put her hand on Doghail's boot briefly, ignored the trembling she could feel there, then stepped away. There was nothing else to be done.

The gelding behaved perfectly in spite of the lump of man who simply sat on his back, no doubt concentrating only on not falling off. The horse showed his gaits because she clicked at him discreetly as he passed her. That, and he was a brilliant, reliable pony who likely could have even kept a fool like her uncle on his back.

Fuadain tired of his sport after a bit and suggested a return to his solar. He passed her and looked down his nose as he did so.

“Spend your afternoon shoveling,” he commanded. “'Tis all you're good for, isn't it?”

“Of course, my lord,” she said, keeping her eyes lowered. She felt the breeze from his hand as he attempted to cuff her and missed.
She supposed it might have gone badly for her if his guest hadn't laughed and pulled him along out of the arena. She remained exactly where she was until they had gone, then she ran over to where Doghail was still sitting atop his gallant steed.

He managed to get his feet out of the stirrups, dismount without falling on his face, then stumble over to the railing before he started heaving his guts out. Léirsinn pretended not to notice, biding her time by stroking a painfully soft horse's nose and finally wrapping her arms around that sweet gelding's neck in gratitude.

Doghail cursed his way back to her, then kept himself upright by means of a hold on the gelding's saddle. He patted the horse, then looked at her.

“Don't know how you put up with him,” he croaked.

“Fuadain?” she asked. “I suppose I manage, don't I?”

“I would never tolerate what you do.”

She pursed her lips. “Of course not, but you have more courage than I.”

Doghail dragged his sleeve across his mouth. “Today, lass, I'm not sure what I have.” He shook his head, then squinted at her. “Thank you.”

“No need.”

“You have a way with beasts.”

She smiled. It was a conversation they'd had scores of times as she'd tried to hold on to the faint memories she had of her parents. “I understand my mother was fond of horses.”

“Her blood runs through your veins, obviously.”

“I believe it just might.”

He took the reins from her. “I'll see to this one,” he said, his color starting to return a bit. “He deserves a few more oats than usual for not leaving me to make a fool of myself.”

“He had a care for you,” she conceded, “but what else could he have done? Your reputation precedes you.”

“Of course it does.” He shook his head. “Heaven knows what these ponies will be saying after this one here tells them what he's seen of
me this morning.” He paused, then nodded toward the arena opening. “I have the feeling Himself will be back after his guest is snoozing comfortably before the fire. Why don't you take yourself off toward town and fetch me some liniment from the apothecary?”

She looked at him evenly. “You don't have to protect me, you know.”

“You did me,” he said with a shrug. “Turn about, and all that. Get on with ye, gel. I'll see to your chores.”

She considered refusing but couldn't deny that a bit of freedom might be a good thing. She patted the gelding, thanked Doghail again, and left the barn with less regret than usual.

Her uncle was growing increasingly unreasonable, even she had to admit that. He had never managed to strike her save once or twice, a handful of years earlier, when he had caught her on the shoulder. She half suspected those times had been accidents, but he had seemingly taken a liking to how they had made him feel. Her respect for him, which had never been very great, had completely disappeared after that.

She had, out of necessity, grown very adept at staying out of his reach. She supposed she wouldn't manage that forever, which was perhaps why she needed to find more coins than she was going to be able to earn on her own. She had to leave Sàraichte soon, and she couldn't go without her grandfather.

She was sorely tempted to take one of those coins she'd hidden under filthy blankets, chuck it into the fountain in the midst of the village green, and wish with all her might for a Hero to come striding out of the gloom and rescue her from the unrelenting reality of her life—

And that would be exactly as far as any of it went because Heroes didn't exist, her reality was what it was, and if she used one of her coins in such a stupid fashion, she would be unrescued, red in the face, and holding on to one less coin.

Truly, she had to get hold of herself.

She concentrated on where she was going only because she was
desperate for some sort of distraction. She walked on the outside of the wall that surrounded the manor and its gardens—on the outside because only servants employed up at the house and family were permitted to walk on the inside and she was definitely not considered either of those. She had walked that path so many times she hardly thought about it any longer and she only looked at the house out of idle curiosity, not desperate longing.

The manor wasn't an ugly place, but there wasn't anything truly lovely to recommend it. Everything about it was designed to attract attention and lead anyone looking at it to believe that the lord who lived there was very important indeed. She thought it overdone and garish, but what did she know? In truth, she preferred a clean stable and a fast horse. She hardly cared where she laid her head and she had no desire to impress anyone who might be examining her flowerbeds for weeds.

She considered that for as long as it took her to leave the manor behind. She turned the corner toward town, then paused in mid-step. It wasn't a lad with less-than-chivalrous thoughts on his mind, or a dog eyeing her leg purposefully, or even a clutch of nettles that left her frozen in place.

There was something there on the ground.

She took a step backward, made a fruitless grasp for her good sense, then surrendered and simply stared at what lay there before it. It was a hint of shadow where there should have been none.

That might not have seemed so strange save that it was barely past noon, there were no clouds in the sky, and there was nothing around her to cast any hint of darkness on the ground.

She frowned thoughtfully. She realized with a start that it wasn't the first time she had seen something odd in the vicinity of her uncle's house. When had it been—oh, aye. A pair of fortnights past. She'd seen something similar on the ground but dismissed it as her having had not enough sleep, because shadows cast on the ground by nothing at all, in broad daylight no less, were impossible.

She was tempted to step on it and see what happened but
something stopped her. Good sense, perhaps. A finely honed sense of self-preservation, assuredly. She took a deep breath and walked around the patch of nothing, giving it a very wide berth.

She decided that perhaps the best use of that rather long walk into town would be to spend the time chiding herself for being a fool. Her imagination was getting the best of her. She might as well revisit her thought of wishing for a decently executed rescue as to give any credence to what she thought she had seen.

She would go to town, procure what Doghail wanted, then spend the rest of her day mucking out stalls.

It was obviously her only hope of having any of her good sense return.

I
f penance was best done in Hell, Acair thought he might have arrived at the right locale for it.

Sàraichte was without a doubt the ugliest place he had ever seen. He stood on a small bluff on the edge of town and examined what was to be his prison for the next year. It was a typical port town, only it didn't seem to have the usual niceties most port towns boasted such as a decent pub, a bustling market, and a stiff breeze to wash away the lingering odor of fish.

He wasn't sure how any of the ships in the harbor managed to escape its clutches once they were in them, but perhaps magic was needed to save the day. Why he couldn't have been saddled with that sort of work for the duration of his sentence, he surely didn't know. He could have stood on a hill and directed the ships in and out, offering a helping hand occasionally, collecting exorbitant fees always. It would have been altruistic from stem to stern, as it were, aiding those who couldn't aid themselves and pocketing a bit of coin in the bargain. Yet with all his magic simply begging to be used, where was he going?

A barn.

Somewhere, Rùnach of Tòrr Dòrainn and Soilléir of Cothromaiche were having themselves a right proper chuckle over the thought.

He could only muster up a lackluster amount of enthusiasm over the thought of murdering them both, which would have alarmed him if he'd had the wherewithal to examine his own appalling condition. He wasn't sure he could state it often enough: do-gooding had done him a terrible disservice. Gone, at least temporarily, were the days when he'd looked forward with glee to a well-planned and flawlessly executed piece of mischief. But a fond memory were the long afternoons when he had sat in this exclusive salon or that high-brow inn, ignored his hosts, and made with a languid hand lists of vulnerable mages and monarchs. All that was left was the shell of a man who couldn't put up a decent argument as to why he shouldn't spend the next year shoveling horse manure.

Damnation, he was a ruthless, remorseless seeker of power and a damned good conversationalist at dinner. That he'd had to remind himself of that more than once on his journey south was simply beyond the pale.

He rubbed his chest absently. That damned Fadairian spell of healing Rùnach had used on him the year before had somehow taken root inside him. He wasn't sure quite how to remove it short of either cutting his own chest open or making a polite social call to his half-brother and threatening him with something dire if he didn't undo what he'd done. There was the question of whether or not either would kill him, so perhaps that was something that could be put off for a bit longer.

The truth was, he was doomed to endure that damned spell for at least another year until he could remedy the situation himself. All that was left for him to do at present was soldier on as best he could and make note of slights that would need to be repaid.

Breakfast. He latched onto that idea with a fair bit of enthusiasm and in spite of his doubts about the quality of victuals he would find in a place that smelled so strongly of rotting fish. Food was food and he hadn't had anything to eat since the disgusting fare he'd choked down the night before.

He shook his head wearily. Ah, for the days when he had enjoyed
fine meals wrapped in elegant evenings spent in exquisite surroundings. He had enjoyed many of the same and, better still, he wasn't too stupid to understand why. Eligible—and not-so-eligible—maidens wanted him within reach because he was dangerous, their mothers wanted him in their salons because he knew which fork to use when, and husbands and fathers wanted him contained in their halls where they could keep an eye on him.

He had never bothered to inform those fathers and husbands that they would have been completely unable to stop him if he decided to do something vile. If they couldn't have seen that for themselves, he hadn't had the patience to enlighten them.

The women, though, now there was something he would miss. Sweet perfume, witty repartee, lovely gowns, decent entertainments . . . in short, he'd had all the benefits of being Gair's bastard son without any of the true dirty work of being black mage.

He paused, wrestled briefly with his damnable and quite inescapable propensity to always tell the truth, then relented. The truth was, he had walked in places that would have given his father nightmares, all in search of the elusive and unattainable. Those places had been very dark indeed.

Of course, he had balanced that out quite nicely by poaching spells and vexing other mages as often as his social schedule permitted, always taking time out to make life as much a hell on earth as possible for Sarait's children and those other bastards his father has sired, including his own brothers, but what else could he have done? A man needed things to do.

There was something to be said for settling down, he supposed, but his father had been much older than he when he'd had his first serious liaison, something that had resulted in Acair's eldest bastard half-brother, a dashing if not completely stupid man named Glamoach. The others, a motley collection of perhaps a dozen lads—it was impossible to get an accurate count—who seemed to have managed to escape their mothers' wombs without having had anything
heavy fall on them immediately afterward, were of varying ages but sharing the same unpleasant personalities and bitter feelings toward their sire.

Acair didn't share those feelings. He had learned over the years to be simply indifferent to Gair. He had watched his own brothers angst over winning their father's approbation, watched his other half-brothers spend their very long lives trying to match him, and watched his half-brothers by that elven princess do everything they could to stop him from doing what he damned well pleased. He had determined that, for himself, he would stay out of the fray, use his father's reputation to gain entrance where useful, and distance himself from the man everywhere else.

He had envisioned his life stretching out in front of him in a long series of glittering parties, his post endlessly containing large stacks of invitations to other things, and perhaps even another stab at draining the world of all its magic. His quiver, as it were, was full of useful skills and he had a code of honor that even one of those lads from Neroche might envy.

Added to all that magnificence had been the poaching of many terrible spells, the humiliating of many annoying mages, and an endless amount of the good-natured ribbing that went on amongst gentlemen of his class. If his peers had been less-than-pleased about his nicking their art, priceless treasures, and the occasional wife or daughter, what could he say? Some people just didn't have a sense of sport.

It had been a very good life indeed.

But it was obviously a life that was out of his reach for the foreseeable future. He glanced over his shoulder to find that damned spell standing a handful of paces behind him, peering at Sàraichte just as he was. If he hadn't known better, he would have suspected it shared his thoughts about the truly dismal appearance of the place.

“You could go away, you know,” Acair said pointedly.

The spell only tilted its head and regarded him. Acair rolled his
eyes, cursed a bit to make himself feel less like a fool than he already did for talking to nothing, then tugged on his cloak and marched off into the fray.

He knew exactly where he was going, where he was
intended
to go rather, because a breathless lad had caught him up at a derelict pub a pair of nights ago and told him as much. He had refrained from telling the lad where Soilléir could take himself off to and what he could do with himself once there simply because he hadn't wanted to cause the lad to forgo paying for their supper. It had been painful to watch that envoy eventually scamper off toward the road, then change himself into something with wings without so much as a sigh of exertion.

Acair sighed presently because he'd forced himself not to then. Truly, it was going to be a very long year.

He continued on his way with another sigh, asked the first soul he encountered where he might find the stables of Briàghde, and was somehow unsurprised to find that not only were they on the far side of town, they were a great distance past the far side of town. The only way it could have been more inconvenient would have been if he'd had to march through a wall of irritated mages with terrible spells to hand to get there.

It might behoove him, he decided reluctantly, not to alert anyone in the area as to his arrival. He refused to think about the fact that if someone he'd encountered before encountered him, things might become a bit dodgy. He had survived more dire situations than that and come away unscathed. Still, no sense in putting his foot in a pile of trouble if he didn't have to.

He purchased food on his way through town, trying not to shudder at the potential for untoward substances having found their way inside what he'd eaten, then found himself all too soon on the far side of town, looking at a manor he never would have lowered himself to frequent in the past without formidable inducement. He was halfway to the front door before he realized that he wasn't heading toward the right place.

He sighed, then turned away and followed his nose to the stables. They were, when smelled from the outside, rather less fragrant than other stables he'd been to, though he supposed he might not be the best one to judge. He looked for a likely opening for humans, took a deep breath, then walked in with what he hoped was an appropriately servile mien.

He stopped short and stared at his surroundings in shock. Good lord, horses. He could easily see a dozen of them and that was just from where he was standing.

They were looking at him as if he might make a tasty morsel to enjoy over the course of the afternoon, that much he could see right off. He didn't like horses as a rule, though he supposed the quality of steeds his father had kept had been very low. His only other experience with them had been hiding in their stalls whilst about some piece of mischief or another. He had discovered rather quickly that they didn't like that sort of thing.

“Help you?”

Acair looked at a small, wiry man who had simply appeared out of thin air. He would have suspected the other of magic, but could sense none of it in him. Perhaps he was just canny.

“I'm looking for—” He had to take a deep breath before he could carry on. “Work.”

“What can you do?”

That was a list worthy of lengthy examination, to be sure, but Acair wasn't sure the ability to pick any lock he faced, a deft hand at fleecing any card player he encountered, or the possession of magic that gave even the most powerful pause would be of any interest to the man standing in front of him.

“Whatever you need,” Acair said. He wasn't exactly sure how much confidence to display, so he settled for what he thought Rùnach might look like when faced with one of those damned dreamspinners his wife kept company with. “If it isn't too difficult.”

The man looked him over for a minute, then held out his hand. “Doghail.”

Acair assumed that was his name, not what he did for a living, so he shook the man's hand and nodded. “Acair.”

Doghail nodded. “Had a missive from one of your former employers this morning.”

Acair could only imagine. He gathered from Doghail's expression that it hadn't been anything too damning, so perhaps 'twas best to simply not ask too many questions.

“From whence do you hail?” Doghail asked.

“I've traveled so much, 'tis hard to say.”

Doghail studied him more closely than Acair was comfortable with. “Any experience working with horses?”

“I've ridden a pair of them,” Acair conceded.

“That doesn't sound too promising.”

Perhaps that recommendation had been less flattering than he'd supposed. He could hardly believe he was having to peddle himself to a man he would have walked past without noticing in any other situation, but perhaps that was simply part of the bargain. He had done worse.

“I am honest,” he said, latching onto his one virtue. “If that's worth anything to you.”

Doghail lifted his eyebrows briefly. “You might be surprised. And aye, 'tis enough. Fortunately for you, the master came through in a temper recently and sacked half the lads because they dared meet his eyes. You might keep that in mind for the future.”

Acair had no idea who the master was, but he didn't like him already. What sort of pompous blowhard walked through a place and terrorized those who dared look at—

Well, he was that sort of pompous blowhard, but perhaps that wasn't a useful thing to admit at the moment. And if he were more apt to meet many of pairs of eyes and reward them accordingly than insist they avert their gazes when he passed, who could blame him? The only thing he loved more than a well-stocked, inaccessible solar full of priceless treasures was a rollicking good skirmish with a mage who didn't make him yawn.

He was, in truth, a simple man.

“You'll earn ten coppers a week,” Doghail said. “Can't do more or I won't eat.”