He nodded carefully. “Indeed.”
She would have asked what the spell could do, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Either it dealt out death or turned whoever was in the vicinity—including her, she imagined—into mushrooms. With Acair, she just never knew.
He stared off down the path for a moment or two, then looked at her. “You’re sure you won’t remain here and wait for me?”
“How will you collect those flinty bits of yourself you left behind if I’m not there to look?” she asked. “Just so I know, is there some particular piece of mischief you combined here, or was it just general naughtiness and the pinching of doilies you should feel bad about?”
“Well, I didn’t murder anyone,” he muttered.
“What did you do, then?”
He dragged his hand through his hair. “If you must know, I stole one of her spells, then stepped aside when she blamed my older brother Garlach for it.”
She frowned. “That doesn’t sound like anything any other young lad wouldn’t do.”
“I was thirty-five at the time,” he said. “A bit past being young.”
She wasn’t surprised. “Is that all?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “I can’t be certain, but I fear she might have laid a spell on him that causes warts to spring up all over his face every time he sees a beautiful woman.”
“How long did that last?”
“It is ongoing.” He shrugged. “He’s not a pleasant man and this, ah, affliction of his has caused him to lose what little chance he’s ever had with even the most desperate of lassies. I should say that it serves him right given that he is completely lacking in any redeeming character traits, but . . .” He took a deep breath and blew it out. “I have suffered the odd pang of regret now and again for his plight, given that I was responsible for it. Or that might have been indigestion. I never can decide.”
Léirsinn smiled in spite of herself. “Have you thought about just asking her to remove it?”
“And admit my part in it? She would likely take the damned thing off him and put it on me.”
“Couldn’t you take it from him?”
“The better question is, would I? The answer is, now that I think about it, nay.”
“Did you do a good deed yesterday?”
He drew himself up. “I’m sure I did.”
“I’m sure you didn’t. This could count, you know.”
He tugged her along with him down the path. “We’ll need to move forward in silence now. Spells everywhere and all that sort of rot.”
It took her a fair tromp along soft paths before she realized what bothered her the most. It was one thing to walk into his mother’s house where she was fairly sure they wouldn’t die. It was also something to be chased by black mages but trust that Acair would somehow get them to safety.
For some reason, she didn’t care at all for their current errand or the feeling of the forest.
They were being watched and she had the feeling it wasn’t by Mansourah.
“Acair?”
He smiled briefly. “Ah, my name. How it rolls from the tongue of a lovely woman, aye?”
“You’re insufferable.”
“But hard to look away from, I know. You needed something?”
“Does she know we’re coming, do you think?” She paused. “Is she watching us?”
He shot her a look she had no trouble interpreting. She had the feeling he was just as aware of whatever was watching them as she was and that it most likely wasn’t his grandmother.
For all she knew, it would be safer inside a witch’s hall than outside in a forest where a mage prowled about.
She didn’t want to think about why that might be so.
Fourteen
There was nothing like a bit of burgling to raise a man’s spirits.
Acair supposed the whole exercise was made quite a bit easier by two unexpected boons. First was the fact that Léirsinn was proving to be very adept at pointing out spells he was too blind to see himself. Second, and perhaps even more critical to their survival at present, most of his grandmother’s fouler minions were sound asleep at their posts. If he hadn’t known better, he would have suspected there was something foul afoot.
But since that was usually him about his workaday activities, he brushed aside the unease and concentrated on the work before him.
The inability to use his magic wasn’t even a bother at present. He never used it whilst about his current sort of business anyway. Where was the sport in that? With magic, he could have wafted in as an evening breeze, pinched what he wanted, then continued back out the same way, treasure in hand. But to enter a place guarded by spells and retrieve what he needed with naught but his wits and a decent bit of bluster? His life was full of delights, true, but a bit of plunder in the old-fashioned way was an especially delicious pleasure.
It was also safer that way, he had to admit. So many kings and landholders set spells of ward designed to shout out an alarm should anyone with magic creep over their walls uninvited. Suspicious bastards, but, alas, the world was not the paradise of his youth.
He considered the lay of the land, as it were, and the terrible little trolls he knew were guarding, even with just their snores alone, his grandmother’s back door. He could bring to mind several rather unpleasant encounters with them, but perhaps he deserved nothing less. He had accepted invitations to his grandmother’s house countless times, but he imagined she had kept a tally of the number of times he’d wandered uninvited into her private chambers to salivate over things behind glass and sturdy spells. If he’d found those to be the most interesting items in a grand house full of truly appalling things, who could blame him? His curiosity, as his mother would have said, was likely going to be the last thing he indulged.
But as he had no intention of skipping off into the eternal sunset anytime soon, he would simply take care, be quickly about his business, and get himself and the woman he lo—er, liked quite well back over the walls and away from the enormous manor house before his gran was the wiser. When he was at his leisure in a few months, he would take the trouble to make a proper investigation into things about that same grandmother that had puzzled him. There was ample history there for the studying.
For the moment, though, what he wanted was that book his mother had advised him to filch. With any luck, it might contain a list of crotchety old bastards who might have sent a tenacious, cranky spell of death after him to vex him. The sooner he solved that problem, the better off they would all be. Happening upon any stray bits of himself along the way would only be a boon. Indeed, he had the feeling he was going to need all the aid he could muster to finish the quest he’d so reluctantly started.