“Auntie Cailleach told me she’d seen you in the market, trailing after that lass of yours like a lovesick pup.”
He didn’t want to know where that conversation had taken place or what else had been said. “’Tis true, that.”
“Where did you meet your horse miss?”
“That is an interesting wrinkle in this otherwise very dull piece of cloth,” he said, watching her to see if she might want to make a note of how poetically he was stating things. She snorted, which he supposed was the best he was going to get, so he moved on. “I had encountered Léirsinn because as part of my continuing punishment for, again, I haven’t a clue what, I was informed I would be spending a year in a barn, shoveling horse droppings and waiting for someone to steal my best pair of boots. That, by the way, happened before a single day had passed.”
His mother glanced at his feet, then lifted her eyebrows briefly. “Poor you,” she said unsympathetically. “So, you were in a barn, you met that red-haired beauty, then what?”
He made himself as comfortable as possible on his perch. “I’ve gotten ahead of myself, actually,” he said. “To rid myself of those two profoundly irritating busybodies—you know which ones—I agreed to a year without magic to avoid having to forgo giving the stuff up for a century.”
His mother gasped. “A century?”
“Appalling, isn’t it?” he asked. “’Tis no doubt why Soilléir opened the negotiations with such a span of years. I bargained it down to the aforementioned and equally preposterous year, but you can imagine my thoughts about that. After I left that whoreson and Rùnach trying to come up with funds to pay for their drinks and mine at that truly dire little pub in the middle of nowhere, I trotted off into the gloom, fully intending to duck off the road and scamper away to lie low until they’d forgotten about me.”
“Then to resume your usual business of making glorious mischief?”
“Exactly,” he said, feeling a rush of affection for that terrifying woman there. “Unfortunately, I hadn’t gone but half a league before I realized I was being followed by something vexatious.”
His mother glanced at the spell that was currently curled up in the corner, feigning sleep. It was starting to alarm him a bit more than usual, that thing there. He’d always felt it possessed some sort of shape, but the longer it followed him, the more it began to resemble a shadow of a youth. There were times he suspected it was making rude gestures at him from behind his back, but he knew he shouldn’t have been surprised. Whoever had created it had had a very rudimentary and juvenile sense of jest.
“What does it do?” she asked.
“I understand that its sole purpose is to do damage to my innocent self should I dare breathe out so much as a word of a spell.”
“Shocking,” she said, looking genuinely startled. “And if you, as they say, slip up?”
“That spell will slay me,” he said.
“Why the hell did you agree to such a stupid thing?” she asked in astonishment.
“I didn’t agree to it,” Acair said shortly. “I only agreed to the bargain of no magic and that only because your beloved Soilléir threatened to turn me into a birdbath if I didn’t.”
She pursed her lips. He wasn’t altogether sure she wasn’t trying to keep from laughing, but there it was. His situation was ridiculous.
“Well, he definitely could,” she allowed.
He looked at her suddenly, wondering why he’d never thought to ask her the question that had clouted him so suddenly on the side of his head. “Could you turn him into a birdbath?”
She clutched a pearl necklace she wore, something that he wasn’t entirely sure wasn’t made from calcified souls of those she’d frightened the very hell from, and manufactured what he imagined she supposed was a look of horror.
“Why would you ask?” she hedged.
“Because your dear aunt Cailleach said I possessed power that left Gair’s looking like rubbish,” he said. “Or words to that effect.”
“She exaggerates.”
He suspected his great-aunt didn’t do anything of the sort, but it was obviously going to take more effort than simply asking to have an answer from his dam.
“I’m not going to let that go,” he muttered.
She looked slightly pleased, if such a thing was possible for her, then tapped her pencil against her chin. “I have to ask—because I’m a bit pressed for anything interesting to do at the moment—why you find yourself somewhere besides Fuadain of Sàraichte’s barn, if that’s where you were meant to serve out your sentence.”
He wasn’t sure if she didn’t know or if she were simply trying to dig a few details out of him, but he supposed in the end it didn’t matter. Answers were the price for being allowed to hide under her very utilitarian but terrifying spells of protection, spells he would certainly be having a closer look at whilst she was napping.
“The tale is long,” he warned.
“I have all day.”
He started to thank her for having cleared the decks for him, as it were, when he was interrupted by trills of laughter coming from the front parlor. He was absolutely certain that wasn’t Léirsinn making that noise, though not altogether certain Mansourah of Neroche wouldn’t make that sort of noise if pressed, but he paused just the same and looked at his mother.
“Who is that?”
She smiled blandly. “I invited a pair of your cousins to come to take in the view. You’ll hit upon which ones without having to peek around the corner, I imagine.”
“Ah,” he said, wishing he weren’t so damned tired. “I remember Léirsinn having said something about that.”
“I wasn’t going to keep that handsome young prince all to myself.”
“Generous of you.”
“One of my greatest faults,” she said seriously. “Besides, I owe Fiunne a favor. Actually, I might want a favor from those two rapacious gels at some point, so no sense in not doling out those sorts of chits whilst I’m able, don’t you agree?”
“Heartily,” he said, not having to look far for where he’d obviously come by many of his best strategies.
“Now, continue on with your tale,” she said. “You were in Sàraichte, then what?”
He supposed there was no reason not to tell her about the entire sorry business. “This is where things become a bit dodgy,” he admitted. “I hadn’t been in the south but a day or two when I noticed that Léirsinn was seeing what I can only call spots of shadow. I thought perhaps they were patches of spells laid by the local wizard to lighten purses without the effort of leaving his fire, but I began to watch what happened to those who stepped in them and concluded that I was judging poorly.”
His mother frowned thoughtfully at him. “What happened when you stepped inside one?”