“Definitely not. I’m guessing he was already working on them before he could toddle across his nursery and keeping them to himself as soon as he understood what they could do. I’m honestly not certain how many of his family members have the key to the chest full of them. I’ve always suspected he has them written down somewhere, but I couldn’t begin to decide where that place might be. Those spells in the hands of someone truly evil…”
She didn’t want to follow that thought to where it would lead. Those spots of shadow were awful enough.
“The spells of ward on the border are more recent.” He frowned suddenly. “I would say within the last score of years, no longer. I told you about my having investigated the same to see how difficult it might be to simply saunter in and have a peep in the king’s armoire.”
“Or bean barrel.”
“Exactly that,” he agreed. He considered, then shook his head. “I built my house almost a score of years ago, but I’m not that undesirable a neighbor. Soilléir didn’t set those spells simply to keep me out.”
“Nor are you that close,” she pointed out. “I left my parents’ home almost a score of years ago. Nineteen, to be exact. Odd, isn’t it?”
He looked slightly green. “I assure you, darling, that I would not have gone down on bended knee at the time, if you’ll forgive my lack of enthusiasm over the idea. I would say, though, that we were engaging in far different activities at the same…ah—”
“Same time?” she finished for him, reaching out to steady him. “Why is that odd?”
He shook his head sharply. “I think too much. I would need to see what else was happening in the world at that time besides my paying exorbitant sums to have a house constructed whilst I wish I had been rescuing the youthful version of yourself to put you somewhere safe. And aye, I think it was about that time that Soilléir did something about his grandfather’s appalling lack of concern over his safety.”
“But someone could have gotten inside the library before then.”
“Having hid their essence?” Acair asked. “Possibly. There are certainly spells that will take everything that makes you yourself and smother it until you might forget who you are.”
“Have you ever done that?”
He shook his head. “Don’t care for it, actually. I can’t breathe. I have occasionally used something to still the magical waters, if that makes any sense. Saves burying your magic then having to dig it all back up again. There’s a layer of un-noticing that goes with it.” He lifted his eyebrows briefly. “’Tis a spell of my Gran’s, if you want the truth of it.”
“An interesting woman, your grandmother.”
“Shrewd and calculating is closer to the mark perhaps,” he said, “but aye, interesting nonetheless. It makes me wonder how many things I’ve simply walked right past without seeing them.” He looked off into the library for a moment or two, then blew out his breath. “Best not to think about that. Let’s see what we have here.”
She nodded and looked at the books she held in her hands. The first turned out to be an herbal that she supposed would have been useful, but she wasn’t one for medicines past horse liniment. She checked it for missing pages, then set it aside as complete. She held the second book up to the werelight she’d asked that beautiful elvish magic to make…
She wondered when she might stop seeing things that left her wanting to weep and howl at the same time.
The exact color of blue the cover had been dyed was difficult to discern in the faint light, but the dragon lying there with his head resting on his scaly tail certainly wasn’t.
She shifted to sit closer to Acair.
“Are you unwell, darling?”
“Just chilled,” she lied. She looked at the book in her hands and wondered if her soul would crack in two if she opened that one.
Dragons and Other Mythical Beasts
Of course. She hadn’t thought about the title in years, but there it was in front of her. ’Twas entirely possible, as she’d thought in Acair’s library, that printers made several copies of books to sell. There was no reason to suspect that the book she held in her hands was anything but a copy that had somehow found its way into a palace library.
What she was certain of was that she wouldn’t find her own addition to the book on the final page. If memory served, she had drawn a picture of an ocean she’d never seen, a wizard standing on the edge of that ocean casting his spell for his true love to come find him, and a dragon snoozing peacefully at his feet.
She had been, she had to admit, very silly as a girl of ten summers.
She opened the book, then froze. There had been a tale there of a dragon, that much she remembered, but that story was gone. She flipped through the rest of the book until she came to the endpapers.
She found she simply couldn’t turn the page.
“Léirsinn?”
She handed Acair the book. “The first tale is gone.”
“How do you—oh, I see.” He held the book up and looked at the front of the book where the pages had been cut out, then shut the cover and looked at the spine. He froze, then let out his breath slowly. “The second volume in the series, is it?”
She could only nod.
“Might there be an addition at the back?”
“Aye, but I don’t have the courage to look.” She met his gaze. “You do it.”
He simply looked at her for a moment or two. “Yours?”
“I’m not sure.” She hesitated. “It might be.”
He flipped through the pages from the beginning, gently, as if he held a great treasure, then he paused as well before he turned the final sheaf. He finally turned the page.
A child’s drawing was there of the sea, a dragon, and a man.
He ran his finger over it, then looked at her and smiled. “Breathing fire even all those years ago, were you?”
“Apparently,” she said, ignoring the crack in her voice.
“Handsome lad there. One could argue that the coast there looks a bit like my bay.”
“One could.”
“I hesitate to say it, but your sister was a better artist.”
She elbowed him in the ribs, perhaps harder than he deserved, but he only huffed out a bit of a laugh before he shifted and put his arm around her.
“I love you, even if you cannot draw.”
“I was a prodigious dreamer, though,” she said archly.
“I suspect you were.” He hugged her briefly, then released her and handed her back her book. “I think you should keep this one. I’ll repay Soilléir for it later by not slaying him whilst he’s asleep. What was the first tale about?”