She supposed he was swearing at her. She wasn’t sure, only because she couldn’t hear him over the curses she was throwing over her shoulder at him. She walked inside his house, slammed the door shut behind her, and looked for something to drink. Water, because she was already ill from spells and anger and no small bit of confusion and dismay.
What in the hell was he doing?
He didn’t follow her, which didn’t surprise her. He hadn’t been particularly polite, but he hadn’t been nearly as rude to her as she had been to him. Perhaps all those years of having to bite her tongue had finally added up to one time too many and he had borne the brunt of all that pent-up fury.
She stood in front of the kitchen fire and fought to simply stay on her feet. Magic did not come without a price to be paid, as she’d already known, but the exhaustion she felt at present was terrible. At least she’d managed to use the two spells she knew without completely destroying Acair’s house.
He had tried to teach her a spell of un-noticing, but that had been just too complicated. Not even having him write it down had helped, though she had to admit he hadn’t said a single insulting word about her having needed such a concession.
That man was, as she’d noted before, a mystery.
She was tempted to shuffle over to the back door and have a little look outside to make certain he was still there, but decided that perhaps she needed a bit of distance from the scene of her earlier triumph and he needed a bit of distance from her own surly self. That didn’t mean, though, that she couldn’t at least keep him company from a different part of his garden.
She finished her cup of water she wasn’t entirely certain hadn’t come from an enspelled well, filched his cloak he’d left draped over the back of a kitchen chair, and went to look for a different exit to the outside.
She walked into a room at the back of his house that overlooked the garden. It was, as seemed to be a common thing for him, full of enormous glass windows. She’d used it previously to gawk at the mountains behind his home, though she could see how it might be a lovely place to sit and look at things when the weather was foul.
She opened the door that led out to the garden, quietly eased outside, then came to a skidding halt. She felt her way down onto the closest bench, not caring in the slightest if it might be covered with snow or dew or bird droppings.
Acair was standing on the edge of his vegetable patch. That wasn’t noteworthy. That he was using magic that made her ill just to watch certainly was.
She looked up at the sky. Mid-day light was harsh anyway, but at the moment there was no lovely curtain of un-noticing for the sunlight to filter through. His spell of protection was still covering the house and gardens, but there was nothing there to warm that cold, pale winter sunlight. There was also no delicate veil to shield him from prying eyes.
Eyes belonging to that mage she could see standing on the edge of the forest behind the garden.
She imagined she didn’t need to point that out to Acair. She also realized very quickly that what she’d seen in Uachdaran’s lists had been Acair being polite.
He wasn’t being polite presently.
Perhaps that black mage there had spent too much time doing good and felt the need to return to his roots. Perhaps he thought a little display might encourage his enemy to hike up his robes and dash off to less dangerous locales.
All she knew was that if she’d first met Acair of Ceangail in his present mood, she would have turned tail and fled and felt perfectly justified in doing so.
What he was doing was spectacularly horrifying. Spell after spell, terrible magic after terrible magic, things built, things torn down. His rage took shape into things that he subsequently destroyed so thoroughly that nothing was left, not even a shadow of what had been there before.
She should have gone back inside, but she found she couldn’t move. She was exhausted from what she’d already done in the garden that morning, true, but what kept her firmly planted on that bench was something different.
If Acair could use that magic, she could watch him do it.
If he thought to intimidate his enemy, she couldn’t think of a better way to do it. She was frightened almost to the point of senselessness and she was fairly certain he had a few warm feelings for her. What he was showing that mage out there should have left the man fainting in truth from fear over the possibility that any of it might be used on him.
It turned into a very long day, indeed.
The sun was well into its afternoon trail toward the west before Acair finished. He snapped the spell shielding them back together as if it had been a crisp, invisible velvet drape, then turned and saw her.
She hoped he wouldn’t mind if she simply turned and used one of his tidy hedges as a place to lose that crust of bread she’d ingested earlier, which she did. She didn’t expect him to help her, and he didn’t. She finally stopped heaving, dragged her sleeve across her face, then straightened and looked at him.
He was standing a handful of paces away watching her, terrible, beautiful, conflicted man that he was.
She could feel the power pouring off him in waves and that more than anything she’d seen in so many days of encountering impossible things convinced her that she had completely underestimated him.
He was not a horse who could eventually be controlled. He wasn’t a stable lad who could be reasoned with. He wasn’t one of her uncle’s noblemen who could be ignored, or even her uncle himself who could be deferred to. He was a mage of staggering power and ruthless determination.
It was no wonder other mages wept and scattered when they saw him coming.
She took a careful breath. “What,” she asked, “was that?”
He only shook his head sharply.
“Acair—”
He stepped back. “If you touch me,” he said flatly, “I will shatter.”
She believed him. “I won’t.”
“I’m going to go wash off all this evil.”
“You do that,” she managed.
He walked past her, giving her a wide berth.
She didn’t watch him go.
She paced through the parts of his house that weren’t near his bedchamber, partly to give him privacy but mostly to give herself time to come to terms with what she’d seen.
She wondered if King Uachdaran had known how much restraint Acair had been showing down in his underground arena. Likely so only because she suspected the king was surprised by very little. The business with Aonarach had been strange, but perhaps there was some unwritten code amongst mages that said one didn’t slay the relatives of one’s host. She had the feeling if Aonarach had been sitting next to her an hour ago, he might think twice about provoking Acair again in the future.