“I think you need something to eat.”
He nodded, though a turn about the old place to make sure all the corners of his spell were tucked in tightly was definitely going to be called for first.
He followed her to the kitchen, furiously reassessing his strategy for keeping himself—and Léirsinn—safe and whole.
If he couldn’t protect her, he would have to arm her as best he could. He suspected she wasn’t going to like that at all, but he had no choice.
It might be the only way to keep her alive.
Fourteen
Léirsinn wondered if taking the heaviest thing within reach and beaning a black mage with it would be counted as murder or a service to mankind.
“Again,” that black mage said briskly.
She looked at him and wondered where the rather charming, conflicted man she’d fallen asleep next to on the floor of his study the night before had gone.
In his place was an impossible—and impossibly annoying—bastard son of the worst black mage in recent memory who was living up to every nasty thing she’d ever heard about him. If he had been tracking her with evil intentions at the ready, she would have found the first mage-king available and hidden behind his skirts for as long as necessary.
She would have looked around for Sianach to invite him to do some damage to his master, but even Acair’s horse had deserted her. She was simply left with a man who had perhaps lost all his wits during the night.
She should have insisted that he go sleep in his comfortable bed while she stayed in front of the fire. That glorious goose-feather pallet was so much more luxurious than anything she’d slept on in her uncle’s barn, it was as if she were sleeping in one of the palace guest chambers she had recently visited. Acair, however, was no doubt accustomed to much finer trappings.
Then again, perhaps that wouldn’t have mattered. He’d been silent during supper the night before, then seemingly consumed with rereading his grandmother’s notes and his own after that. He’d spent more time than not simply staring off into nothing, only occasionally shaking his head as if he couldn’t quite believe something.
She’d been afraid to ask what that something might have been.
She’d woken several times during the night to find him either sitting in the chair at her feet, staring into the fire, or gone. If she hadn’t seen the faint light coming from under his library door, she would have thought he’d decided to take a star-lit flight to the ruin up the way.
Dawn had provided her with a taskmaster who hadn’t let her have more than a crust of bread before he’d hustled her out to the back garden. The sun had been up, but had scarce managed to melt away any of the patches of frost. Acair had provided her with a very warm cloak and fine gloves, but that had been the extent of it.
He had then cast up a shield of sorts under his spell of protection. She’d hardly had time to admire it, much less ask why he thought it to be necessary, before he’d been hounding her to take her magic out of the stall and put it to work.
She’d complied because she’d been able to see the wisdom in it. She had practiced calling fire until, to her great surprise, she’d been able to do so without setting the entire garden alight.
But had that been enough? Nay, it had not. Without so much as a nod of approval, that damned mage there had demanded spells of containment.
She’d used the one Uachdaran’s stable lad had given her, which had been sufficient for grain but not entirely enough for that spell of death still trapped out front. It had, however, worked well enough against fire. Finally succeeding at it after countless attempts had earned her only a faint lessening of her spellmaster’s perpetual scowl before he’d turned to other things.
She was starting to have sympathy for those horses she’d worked without pause until they’d been forced to acknowledge she was master.
“I’m tired,” she said, because that was understating it badly. She was so exhausted, she could hardly see the garden in front of her.
“Try calling fire again,” he said mercilessly.
She shoved aside thoughts of murder and mayhem, firmly refusing to acknowledge how delightful they sounded at the moment, and looked at the pile of wood there before her. She knew the spell of fire-calling so well that she thought she might even be able to write it down and teach it to someone else. Five words, that was all, that caused the air to shudder around her, the magic in her veins to leap up and dance a merry jig across her soul, and flames to burst to life atop those poor charred bits of felled tree.
She took a deep breath, stilled her mind and her heart, and summoned fire. She was almost too weary to be satisfied that it had come as commanded.
“Contain it.”
She would have cursed Acair as her fire began to spill off the wood—his doing, obviously—but she was afraid it might find its way to her and burn her very lovely boots that the admittedly impossible man next to her had also given her that morning.
She used her lone spell of containment. The fire stopped in its tracks and sighed.
Then it burst into towering flames, something she most definitely hadn’t given it permission to do.
Acair cursed, smothered it again, then looked at her.
“Again.”
She called on every smidgen of self-control she possessed to keep herself from reaching out and bloodying his nose.
“I’ve done it well already this morning,” she said tartly. She decided that adding mostly was not going to help the situation any. “Shall I drop it on your sorry head?”
“You might try,” he said rather coolly.
She wondered absently if he could possibly be as merciless to those whose magic he wanted as he was presently being to her. Deciding that it was likely nothing she wanted to investigate further, she took a step back, away from things she couldn’t face any longer.
“I’m finished.”
He wasn’t having any of it. “One more time.”
“Nay.”
“One more time.”
She looked at him, then did the most sensible thing she’d done all morning.
She turned and walked away.
“I didn’t say you could go.”
She froze, then turned around slowly and looked at him. Admittedly, she could hardly see him for the pain that burned like a bonfire behind her forehead, but he didn’t need to know that.
“Do not,” she said crisply, “tell me what to do.”
“Fine,” he said, throwing up his hands. “Go, then.”
“I will, thank you very much.”