Léirsinn looked at the back door as it opened and Acair’s cousins spilled out. They had obviously steeled themselves for another round of hunting.
“I’ll go keep those two busy if you’ll do me the very great favor of hurrying your lad along with his labors,” Mansourah said seriously. “I would very much like to escape this place at first light tomorrow, not that any future locales will be any less perilous than this one. At least in some foul lord’s dungeon I won’t find myself fighting off witches eyeing me as a potential husband.”
She supposed that might be preferable, but she also thought she might like to avoid any other dungeons. She’d already passed several hours in an elven king’s pit and she had no desire to repeat the experience.
She watched Mansourah walk off to collect his admirers, then leaned against the tree and thought about what he’d told her. A part of her wished she hadn’t heard any of it.
The less cowardly part of her decided that she couldn’t carry on any longer denying the truth.
She had latched on to every reasonable explanation for her recently acquired ability to see otherworldly things, everything from losing her eyesight all the way to losing her wits. Unfortunately, she currently found herself with no choice but to accept the undeniable and quite uncomfortable conclusion that the world around her was not at all what it seemed to be and she had no means of managing that.
She was beginning to have a painfully thorough amount of sympathy for Acair.
She looked at the spell sitting on the witchwoman of Fàs’s roof and contemplated the truly improbable nature of what she was seeing. Very well, so magic existed. It was also true that she could see the bloody stuff in broad daylight everywhere she looked, with the notable exception of not having seen anything in Eòlas. Either the city didn’t have very many spells cluttering up its streets or Acair’s childhood home was simply overrun with them.
She was beginning to think her parents might be responsible for some of her current troubles. With all those tales of magic and Heroes and improbable things that they had taken such pleasure in retelling, it was almost as if they’d had an especial fondness for magic—
She shook her head before she traveled any farther down that path toward madness. Her childhood had been ordinary, short, and thoroughly lacking in anything unusual. Her older brother had been protective, her younger sister ethereal, and she the plain, uninteresting middle child who had survived where they had not—
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She didn’t like to think about her past, mostly because there was nothing she could do to change it. Her parents and siblings were gone, and she was in a witch’s house—or, her yard, rather—thinking that she might want to look for a terrible black mage who had vowed he would try to help her.
She wondered if she might be forgiven for simply setting everything aside for a bit and passing a few minutes helping a man who apparently loved his mother enough to fix her roof for her. She walked back to the house just in time to meet him as he swung down off the roof. She picked up a small bucket of nails and held it for him as he attended to something loose on the side of the house.
“Your mother says you never do any work here,” she remarked.
It was surely a coincidence that his aim went awry and he hit himself instead of the intended nail. He cursed, sucked on his thumb, then glared at her.
“She might have that aright.”
She ignored his grumbles. He was, in the end, no worse than any other surly stallion she’d known.
“She also suggested to me earlier that you’re doing it to impress me,” she added.
“I’m doing it so she doesn’t poison my tea.” He drove another nail home, took the bucket from her, and set everything down on the ground. “Somehow, I think my terrible reputation is more than enough to impress you.”
She smiled. “Your cousins say you are a rogue of the first water.”
“Flattering, of course, but I’m unable to admit to anything.”
He didn’t need to. She’d been caught on the way to the stables that morning by his cousins, women who had seemingly felt compelled to fill her ears full of Acair’s conquests. One of the twins, she wasn’t sure which, had been very clear that he traveled in circles so far above their own social station that they couldn’t say for certain but suspected he had toppled more than just thrones.
Léirsinn wouldn’t have been at all surprised.
He dusted the snow off a stone bench pushed up against the house, then invited her to sit. He collapsed next to her and groaned.
“I’ve done all I can to this damned nest of hers,” he said, shaking his head. “If she poisons me, it will be a mercy. And don’t look at me that way. I will absolutely not admit to anything that might paint me in an unflattering light.”
She smiled, because he was absolutely incorrigible. “Do you ever have to use threats,” she asked, “or do you just charm your victims?”
He drew his hand over his eyes. “Ye gads, self-reflection,” he said with a shiver. “The places you’ve forced me to go, woman.”
She watched him watch her with eyes she suspected had seen far more things than he would ever admit to. They were beautiful eyes, though, she had to concede.
He looked at her, sighed, then shook his head. “I have lived a long, indulgent life full of things I might regret and many other things I don’t regret in the slightest. My lack of contrition over any of it is what keeps me heart protected, oy, as my mother would say. But since we’re sharing secrets—”
“Are we?”
He shot her a look that made her smile. “We are,” he said distinctly. “And given that such is the case, perhaps ’tis time you told me what happened to you in young Miach’s garden.”
“I deserve this,” she said grimly. She looked over his mother’s snow-covered ground for a bit before she turned to him. “I saw . . . things.”
“More than just pools of shadow and my superior swordplay?”
“Your swordplay was spectacular,” she agreed, “and I thought you fared very well against Prince Rigaud, who definitely looked as if he would have liked to have slain you. He is very powerful.”
He went very still. “Why do I suspect you’re not talking about his abilities with a blade?”
“Because I suspect you have a very suspicious nature which is no doubt what keeps you alive,” she said without hesitation. “And aye, I saw more than I bargained for. I stepped in that shadow that I hadn’t seen—”
“It was the middle of the night,” he said.
“Or close to it,” she agreed. She took a deep breath. “I don’t think I want to think too long about what it did to me.” She paused. “I’m not sure what it did do to me, but I could see Prince Rigaud’s magic.”
“What did you see of me?”
She blinked in surprise. “You’ve finished hearing about him?”