Obviously, they had arrived.
She looked at Acair, but he was only studying his grandmother’s house thoughtfully. He reached for her hand, but said nothing. He was wearing gloves his mother had gifted him, supple black leather ones that Léirsinn wasn’t sure his mother hadn’t laced with some sort of spell to aid him whilst he went about his nefarious deeds. The pair she was wearing was equally well made—and no doubt equally enspelled—but she hadn’t looked at them past putting them on.
At the moment, all she knew was that Acair’s hand was far steadier than hers, but perhaps she shouldn’t have expected anything less. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t climbed over walls in the dead of night before.
“I’m not sure I asked you what you saw,” he said absently. He looked at her then. “When was it?”
“Yesterday morning,” she said faintly, “at that mage’s house, and do you think this is the proper time to discuss it?”
He shrugged. “A bit of distraction before battle.”
She’d heard of worse ideas, she supposed, but not many. “I can’t remember,” she lied. “What about you?”
He smiled grimly. “I saw the mage I stole that spell from.”
“Did you?” she asked in surprise. “And?”
“Nothing more interesting than that,” he said, “and fortunately for us all, I’ve decided it was simply my imagination fueled by my mother’s profoundly undrinkable coffee.”
“You must have a good imagination, then.”
“Either that, or she’s a terrible cook,” he said solemnly. He paused, then shook his head. “The man I imagined I saw looked damned familiar, I’ll admit, but I still can’t place him.” He paused. “’Tis possible but highly unlikely that I was too busy being startled to take a proper note of his features.”
She wasn’t sure if startled quite described his reaction, but she thought it might be better to move right past that. “I thought you were just putting on a show to throw Mansourah off.”
He shot her a brief smile. “Of course. It wouldn’t do to have him see my softer, less murderous side. One must keep up appearances, you know.”
“Must one?”
He sighed deeply. “In my business, darling, I fear ’tis all too true. Black magery is a ruthless trade. A terrible reputation is sometimes all that lets me sleep peacefully at night.”
She was beginning to wonder if he ever had a peaceful night’s sleep, but she decided that it wasn’t a useful thing to wonder aloud. She didn’t protest when he pulled her close and wrapped his arms around her. If he trembled, he didn’t say anything about it and she didn’t point it out to him. She was too busy trying to smother her own unease.
That’s all it was, of course. She was never afraid. She had faced feisty stallions and come away the victor. She had bested the demons that flanked her uncle—metaphorically, of course—and learned to ignore them. When she had realized that Fear was stalking her, she hadn’t run away from him or demanded that he leave her be. She’d told him to take a leaning position against the nearest horse fence and keep his bloody mouth shut.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t dealing with her fear at the moment. She was facing things utterly beyond her normal challenges with not a spell to hand nor any magic to use.
She refused to think about how far she’d fallen that she was even considering the like.
“Are you—” Her voice cracked and she had to clear her throat. “Are you ever afraid? In truth?”
“Never,” Acair said seriously.
“Not even now?”
He snorted lightly. “This is akin to a bit of bother over having a fine dining establishment reserve the wrong table for me.”
“You are a disgusting man.”
He laughed a little, something she was fairly certain she’d never heard him do before. He sighed and rested his cheek against her hair.
“And so I am. Clever you for seeing it.” He paused. “Would this be an inappropriate place to offer a maudlin sentiment about your own charming self?”
“Completely,” she said. “Besides, you’ll just make an ill-advised comment about the color of my hair, I’ll be forced to blacken your eye for it, and then where will we be?”
“I’ll claim I was in a brawl with a dragon. It will add to my rakish air, I assure you.”
She imagined it would. She sighed deeply, then stood, warm and relatively safe wrapped in both his cloak and his embrace, until she grew too restless to simply stand about any longer. She pulled away and looked at him seriously.
“What will your grandmother do if she catches us?”
“She will embrace me like the long-lost grandson I am and shower me with accolades and kisses.” He paused. “Or she might send minions.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“You wouldn’t like the look of it either, which is why we shall nip in and out without any trace of our having been there.” He reached for her hand. “We’ll try the back entrance. No one ever uses it.”
“Are you going to tell me why?”
He smiled briefly. “The minions are more terrifying there, of course. To me, that makes the success of slipping by their snoring selves all the sweeter.”
“Of course.”
She watched a squirrel scamper up a tree, then turn and chirp at them. It was as he spat out a bit of fire that she realized it was Acair’s horse. Well, he seemed to be settling in for the duration, which she supposed was all she could ask. She looked at him pointedly before she walked away with Acair, hoping it wouldn’t be the last time she saw the damned beast. It wasn’t as if either of them had magic enough to fly off under their own power.
Magic. What a ridiculous business.
She was beginning to see, though, why someone might want a bit of it.
The forest was still and the air so cold she was almost certain she could hear her breath as it fell softly to the ground. What she did know with absolute certainty was that she was having no trouble seeing the spell that lay draped over the trees they walked under. She would have mentioned it to Acair, but she had the feeling he had enough to think about at present. The silence wasn’t helping her keep her fear in check, though, so she cast about for a topic that didn’t involve things she shouldn’t have been able to see.
“Can you tell me about her?” she asked. She looked at him quickly. “Your grandmother, I mean.”
“Of course,” he said easily. “She is Cruihniche of Fàs, that being the name of the land we’re crossing, and I don’t think it much of an exaggeration to say she is one of the more terrifying souls I’ve encountered in my very long life.”
“Is she worse than your mother and your aunt?” she asked.
He looked as if he couldn’t decide if he should laugh or shiver. “My grandmother . . .” He shook his head. “She defies decent description, though I could start by telling you everything she is, then a bit of what she is not.”