“How do you know so much about him?” Acair asked in astonishment. “And who is he?”
She waved away his question. “I’ve given you his name, you’ll find his place of birth on your own I’m certain, and his purpose was ever to steal souls.”
Acair gave it a decent bit of effort, truly he did, but there were times his mother talked in such circles that he honestly couldn’t make head nor tails of anything she said. He shook his head in frustration.
“I don’t understand why he would bother,” he said finally.
His mother rolled her eyes. “In truth, Acair? Name me a trio—nay, a single reason why you destroy men.”
“I don’t destroy them,” Acair said. “I woo the women, vex the husbands and fathers, and pilfer kingly jewels and priceless art because it gives them all something to talk about. What else has a king to do these days besides stomp about and weep over losing his favorite landscape?”
“You have a point there,” she agreed.
“The acquisition of power I can understand,” Acair said, “but what in blazes would you do with a soul?”
She fingered her pearls which he still wasn’t convinced weren’t more than they seemed.
“Why did your sire spend so much of his life perfecting his spell of Diminishing?” she asked.
“Because he was—still is, in theory—a peerless mage and an arrogant whoreson,” Acair said grimly. “What else was he to do with his days? There is never enough power to be had.”
“That isn’t the point of the question,” she said impatiently. “Why did he need that spell?”
“To obtain more power,” Acair said, “something we just discussed.” He looked at her helplessly. “What decent mage doesn’t want that?”
She blew a curl out of her eyes. “I despair, truly I do. Let’s look at this from a different direction. What did Gair leave of those whose power he stole?”
“Lads grateful they merited his notice, no doubt,” Acair said without hesitation, though he supposed he didn’t particularly want to think about that overmuch because he had seen what his father’s tender ministrations could do.
He had felt the shudder in the world when his sire had loosed the power of Ruamharaiche’s well, intending to take it for his own. He had himself managed to arrive too late to stop the madness, but he’d certainly had an eyeful of the aftermath. Actually, he’d closed Sarait of Tòrr Dòrainn’s eyes so even in death she wasn’t forced to look at what her husband had done.
He wasn’t sure he would ever forget that.
He had done what he could for his half-sister Mhorghain, at the very least, then watched from afar, wringing his hands like a fretful alewife until he was certain she would be safely hidden. If others had seen to the rest of Sarait’s children, he hadn’t argued. He’d been simply crushed with invitations to dinner and attempting to carve out the odd hour to make lists of foul deeds to be about as quickly as possible. He hadn’t had time for any of his other step-siblings.
He looked at his mother. “Father left them as shells,” he said flatly.
“Exactly.”
Acair thought of Hearn of Angesand telling him about his son—Tùr, he suspected—who had stepped in a spot of shadow once too often and wound up empty and mad as a result. He thought of Master Odhran, who had been left sitting, a lifeless shell of himself, before a cold hearth.
Was the same mage responsible for both deeds?
Did that mage now possess the spell of distraction he himself had left in Odhran’s back workroom?
He shoved aside the last thought as unimportant. Any mage worth being called such could have fashioned the same. More important was what was being done to those who had apparently simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He looked at his mother. “I don’t like the sound of this.”
“I’m not sure this cares what you like.”
“But surely this mage is dead by now,” Acair said, wondering if it would make him look weak to reveal how greatly he wished that might be so.
“Most likely.”
He didn’t like the way she’d said that, as if she wanted to believe it but couldn’t bring herself to.
“I recoil from the very idea of looking dense as a rock,” he said, “but I still don’t understand why any of this matters. Let’s assume, if we must, that this man is still roaming through the world, hunting for souls. The question is, why would he bother?”
She looked thoroughly disappointed. “You are a rock. What have we been discussing?”
“Magic.”
“Black magery,” she said pointedly, “for which there is a terrible price.”
“I haven’t paid a terrible price,” he pointed out.
“I’m not sure you’ve paused long enough in your wild swath-cutting through the Nine Kingdoms to know what sort of price you have or have not paid,” she said seriously. “Or it might be that whilst you trumpet your deeds as if they were fashioned of the depths of hell itself, you don’t use all that much dark magic.” She looked at him. “Or do I have that awrong?”
“I use what’s expedient—”
“Which is generally not Olc,” she said pointedly, “or Lugham, or a trio of other magics that I don’t even like to mention. General naughtiness, Acair, is not black magery in a proper sense, something you should understand by now.”
“I’m trying to turn over a new leaf,” he muttered.
“One could hope so,” she said with a gusty sigh, “which is why what I’ve told you is so important. Sift through all the knowledge I’ve put in that empty head of yours and tell me what you learned today.”
“A black mage loses a piece of his soul every time he uses an evil spell,” he said wearily. “So?”
She threw her napkin at him. “So?”
He set her napkin aside and suppressed the urge to swear. “What difference does it make? There is a price to be paid for using any magic. There is no possible way to avoid that. The only thing one could hope for was an endless supply . . .”
He stopped speaking. That happened, he supposed, when one actually listened to what was coming out of one’s mouth.
His mother only shook her head, no doubt in despair.
“There is no final price paid when one has an endless supply of something that sustains him,” he managed faintly.
“Such as what the country of Neroche gives its deliciously gallant young king,” she said, nodding. “I’d think twice about going up against Mochriadhemiach of Neroche, me lad. He has the entire reserves of that enormous country as his underpinnings and if you think he doesn’t know that perfectly well by now, you’re mad. He could throw all manner of spells at you for decades before he was even forced to yawn.”
“He does seem rather perky,” Acair conceded.
“As would any black mage with a proper supply of . . . well, what shall we call it? Power? Enthusiasm?”