She stood on the edge of a finely laid stone path and wondered how best to make her presence known. It only took a moment or two to decide that even if those swordsmen there might notice her, they wouldn’t dare take the time to acknowledge her. She considered shouting at them, then decided that there was no point. She knew better than to step between two feisty stallions, so she looked for somewhere to sit until they’d gotten out of their system whatever was bothering them.
The nearest bench was already heavily in shadow, but it looked far enough away from the field of battle that perhaps she wouldn’t be caught by a stray sword. She walked over to it and perched on the edge, shivering in spite of herself. She wrapped her cloak more closely around her, looked at the two men in front of her, then wished rather abruptly that she’d just remained upstairs.
Who would have thought that watching two extremely handsome, thoroughly angry men fight with elegant swords would be so overwhelming?
She rolled her eyes and grasped for her last vestiges of good sense. She was a woman of action, not a wide-eyed lord’s daughter who’d never been out of the nursery. If she occasionally found herself a bit weak-kneed over the thought of taking a peerless horse for a sprint across a large pasture with decent footing, who could blame her? That was the absolute limit of any propensity she might or might not have had to swoon.
Hadn’t she easily ignored the lads she had ordered about in her uncle’s barn? Even more quickly dismissed had been the men who had come to buy horses they couldn’t possibly appreciate from her uncle, one of the worst specimens of manhood she had ever encountered. Unpleasant, unchivalrous louts, all of them.
Nothing at all like the lads out there, trampling the last bits of fall’s brittle vegetation.
She considered, chalked most of her breathlessness up to the stress of her journey to Eòlas, then decided it couldn’t hurt to have a look at prince and prince’s bastard son about their noble business. For the sake of scholarly study, of course, which seemed particularly appropriate given her location.
She shifted to look at the man to her left. Mansourah of Neroche could have easily stridden across the pages of a Hero’s tale and captured the heart of any maid with a book in her hands. He was handsome, chivalrous, and he had a very nice nose. If he’d been a horse, she would have immediately paid a premium price for him and considered it an excellent investment. He was obviously skilled in the sort of dangerous swordplay he was currently engaged in and his ability to hurl slurs and curses with equal ease likely came from years of consorting with his brothers as they saw to their royal doings.
All in all, it was understandable that a gel of lesser self-control might feel the need to give him a second look.
She wasn’t at all sure what to say about the man facing him. Whatever Acair of Ceangail’s abilities with a foul spell might have been, if she’d been watching him come at her with that sword in his hand, she would have tossed hers at him, turned, and hoped she could outrun him. She half wondered why he bothered with steel when his terrible reputation alone was likely enough to send his enemies bolting off in the opposite direction.
Then again, perhaps most saw what she saw: a terribly handsome, thoroughly elegant, perfectly fashioned man any woman with any sense at all would want sitting next to her at supper, twirling her about in the patterns of an intricate dance, or hoisting a sword in her defense. He was absolutely worthy of the fluttering of a feminine heart or a very casual fanning of the face.
She shifted on the slab, not because she was uncomfortable with her thoughts, but because it was damned cold. Her thoughts were just the usual ones a body had while looking at a black mage and a prince who could spew out spells as easily as curses.
She looked about for something else to dwell on and found herself mentally trotting around in a circle and winding back up in about the same spot, only she realized her current unease didn’t come from the fact that she was consorting with those types of men out there, it came from the experiences she’d had in their company.
As she continued to feel compelled to remind herself, magic and all its accompanying ridiculousness was nothing more than what made up her parents’ most cherished nighttime tales.
It was a damned shame she couldn’t bring herself to believe that any longer.
Unfortunately, that had everything to do with what had befallen her while watching Acair fight off a different prince of Neroche but a pair of days earlier. She had seen things, and not just the sorts of things one might normally find loitering in a garden. She had been faced with a perfect view of what she had spent a lifetime believing couldn’t possibly exist.
She had seen magic.
Even the thought of that sort of thing possibly happening again was enough to leave her wanting to hop up and bolt back to her uncle’s barn where, though she might face her own demise, she absolutely wouldn’t encounter anything of a more otherworldly nature. She had to force herself to take several deep, steadying breaths to calm her racing heart, but it didn’t help all that much. It might have been easier, perhaps, to recapture her hold on a very normal, unmagical life if she hadn’t been watching the younger brother of a mage king and the bastard son of a different sort of mage prince go at each other with swords because they either didn’t care to or couldn’t use spells.
She was no coward, though, so she closed her eyes and thought back to that particular moment in Tor Neroche’s garden when she’d first encountered that otherworldly ability to see. There should have been nothing untoward in that garden save an untended vegetable patch or two, yet there seemingly had been. Stepping on a particular sort of spot on the ground had somehow sharpened her vision—or rendered her daft. At the moment, she wasn’t sure which it was. The simple truth was, she had stepped backward, apparently put her foot in a magic pool of shadow, and seen things—
She opened her eyes and squeaked.
Acair’s minder spell, the spell that was apparently tasked with slaying him should he use any magic, was sitting next to her on the bench. She shouldn’t have been able to see it, but there it was just the same. The damned thing had somehow taken the shadowy shape of a youth, slouching negligently on the stone next to her and watching its charge with a sullen tilt to its head. If spells could fashion themselves into something resembling a man, of course, which Léirsinn wanted to doubt.
Well, either it was a new shape for the beast or she was viewing it with clearer eyes than usual. She just knew she wasn’t about to ask it to lie on the ground in front of her so she could step on its belly as she’d stepped on that shadow in Tor Neroche and hopefully see things she shouldn’t have been able to—
Or perhaps she didn’t need a spell any longer.
She looked at Acair and Mansourah, fighting with the enthusiasm of men who wanted to do each other a goodly amount of damage, then closed her eyes. She willed herself not to see, but to see, then opened her eyes again.