“Distract him so I can fly?”
She smiled gravely. “Of course.”
The pleasure of flight was undiminished, he found as he hurtled out to sea as a chilly winter wind. If he ever managed to be free of that damned thing that dogged his steps, he would never take it for granted again. He left his thoughts behind and turned north, out toward the open ocean where there was nothing but sea and sky.
He flew until the sun began to sink in the west and the shadows started forming over the coastline.
An unsettling sight if ever there were one.
He slowed his flight as the winds near the shore buffeted him, bringing some sense back into his poor overworked mind. What he needed, he decided as he kept himself from being dashed against the rocky shoreline to the north of his home, was a holiday. No wonder Soilléir seemed to take them with such regularity. Very restorative, no doubt.
He wandered over the same landscape he’d looked at the previous day, only things occurred to him that hadn’t before.
The track that lay to the south of that ruined keep, the keep that most definitely could have been merely the start of a rather substantial settlement, was less faint than he’d thought before. In fact, if the forest hadn’t taken it over, it could still have been considered an easy way to go from that ruin to his house. Perhaps there had been something important on that piece of land where his house currently stood.
He wondered if he should go have another rummage through that trunk in his cellar.
He decided that he would do just that before his thoughts carried him off to places where he was quite certain he wouldn’t want them to go.
It took less time than he was comfortable with to gain his own home. He slipped through his spell of protection and resumed his proper form, though when he moved to dissolve his spell of un-noticing, he hesitated. That might have been courtesy of the sight of his enemy standing a hundred paces away in a spot between his house and the shore.
That was something he simply couldn’t get past. Admittedly, he and Léirsinn hadn’t been wearing any sort of spell of un-noticing on their way to his house, but Sìle had given them a decent head’s start and he hadn’t seen anything behind them the entire time they’d flown home. In fact, the first he’d seen of that mage there had been when Léirsinn had noticed him standing in the shadows beyond the garden. How was it possible for him to have found them without having had any idea where they were going?
Unless he’d known the lay of the land himself.
That thought was startling enough all on its own, but still the question remained: why hadn’t he come before?
Acair studied the hooded figure standing close enough that a half-decent spell of death would have felled him instantly. It was definitely the mage from the glade. Acair could see shards wrapped around the man’s neck like a scarf.
Other things, though, struck him now that he was at his leisure to mark them. The man certainly knew how to be still, though perhaps that had been to his detriment. He himself had never been one to mock another for the measurement of their waistline, but that man there had obviously spent too much time sitting and thinking and not enough time rushing about from one bad deed to the next.
And that was, he had to admit with surprising reluctance, the same man who he’d knocked off his ladder all those many years ago.
The orchardist had been sporting a close-trimmed beard, if memory served, but not one of a handsome fashion. Too much scruff down the neck and not enough left on the chin, certainly. Even at the tender age of eight, Acair had possessed opinions on the same thanks to his sire. Gair, for all his faults, had at least possessed the commitment to cutting an acceptable figure.
I’m watching you…
Watching, not acting? What sort of half-arsed business was that? Watching and waiting for what?
It wasn’t pleasant to think about, but how many times could that mage there have simply slain him in his sleep? More particularly after he’d been gang-pressed into servitude by those giggling gels who had left him no choice but to comply with their ridiculous and quite perilous demands?
I’m watching you…
Not a surprise, he supposed, given what he now realized. The only question was, how long had that man there been watching him, waiting for the perfect moment for revenge?
He turned and walked into his house, kicking off his spell of un-noticing like a pair of muddy boots just outside the door. He shut the front door behind him, leaned back against it, then sighed deeply. Well, there was one question answered, he supposed.
Naming the man, however, might be a bit…more…
Time slowed to a crawl before it simply stopped.
He felt as green as a village lad on his first journey to a city containing more than one pub. He also supposed that if he didn’t stop having to shake his head over his own stupidity, he was going to be forever lost for anything useful.
He walked through his house and into his kitchen. He continued on until he was standing by the table where he had honestly eaten only a handful of meals and most of those had been with that beautiful red-haired lass who was so fond of horses.
A horseshoe lay there, in the place where he’d left it, the single trophy he’d liberated from that bloody trunk languishing in his cellar. He looked at it and several things he hadn’t considered before clicked into place, in exactly the same way that pool of shadow Falaire had destroyed had come back together.
Was the mage standing outside his house Sladaiche?
He found it surprisingly difficult to breathe for all the questions that then came at him with the unrelenting ferocity of Durialian dark magic.
Was that why his grandmother had scrawled that damnable X over his house? Had she known? Had his mother known?
Had Soilléir known? Was that why he had intimated that Acair needed to go where he himself could not walk?
Because the answer was in the cellar of his own bloody house?
He heard Léirsinn come into the kitchens and groped for some sort of pleasant expression to put on his face.
“How was the sea?” she asked with a smile as she passed him.
“Glorious,” he said hoarsely. “Not to be missed. You’ll have to come with me sometime.”
“A thrilling prospect, truly.”
“You have been too long in my company,” he managed. “Listen to you being sardonic with so little effort.”
“’Tis contagious,” she agreed. She nodded at the table. “Starting a collection for your barn or is that something Sianach dragged in?”
He put his hand on the horseshoe because he suddenly felt a bit as if he weren’t precisely where he was, an alarming sensation if ever there were one. He supposed that might be as close as he would want to come to fainting from surprise.