He wasn’t sure if that ice-cold hand that had taken hold of his innards was fear or the coldest of angers.
He settled for the latter, because the former was just too terrible to contemplate.
“Get out of my sight,” he said with a haughtiness that he feared wasn’t nearly chilly enough for present circumstances. “Sending me off to do your dirty work? Disgusting.”
“I think you’ve seen the spell before,” Soilléir said quietly.
“Bah, what absolute rot,” Acair said dismissively.
“I believe you threw it into a fire quite a few years ago.”
Léirsinn squeaked. Acair understood and he wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t made the same sort of noise right along with her. He rose unsteadily and paced, because that seemed like the most intelligent thing he’d done all day. He finally stopped behind Léirsinn and put his hands on her shoulders. To steady her, of course, not himself.
“How do you know that?” Acair wheezed. “Ye gads, man, do you have any idea what you’re saying?”
Soilléir only looked at him steadily. “Aye, I do, and the answer to the first is that I did some investigating.”
“Have you been spying on me my entire life?” Acair asked, thoroughly appalled by the notion.
“You were such trouble from the start that I likely should have,” Soilléir said with a faint smile, “but nay, I haven’t. If you must know, there was something surrounding that moment all those many years ago that drew my attention in a way few things have. You know I don’t like to interfere—”
“Bollocks!” Acair shouted. He took a deep breath. “I honestly don’t know how you live inside yourself.”
“Centuries of practice,” Soilléir said with a shrug.
Acair swore, because it seemed preferable to shouting. “Who stole that spell from your grandfather?”
“We’re not certain.”
Acair supposed he might hazard a decent guess. He considered the mage sitting across from him and decided there was no use in not asking a few questions whilst he had the chance.
“Have you ever heard the name Sladaiche?”
Soilléir looked as if he’d just been clouted in the nose. He pulled back, then looked at Acair with something that on another’s face might have been called surprise.
“I haven’t heard that name in years,” he said carefully.
“But you’ve heard it before,” Acair pressed.
Soilléir considered. “It cannot be the same man. That one was . . . nay, it can’t be the same mage.”
Acair crawled over the fallen tree and sat next to Léirsinn. “Perhaps you should let me decide that.”
Soilléir shook his head. “I’m not sure I can bring to mind—well, actually you know I can but I don’t wish to—from whence he hailed, but the country bordered Bruadair. Take that for what it’s worth.”
Acair wasn’t unhappy to have Léirsinn put her arm around his shoulders, even if it was likely to keep herself upright. It was damned chilly and that in spite of the fire in front of them.
“He was exiled from his country hundreds of years ago for misuse of power,” Soilléir said slowly. “Rumor has it he died a beggar.”
“I’m suspecting that is wishful thinking,” Acair said sourly.
Soilléir studied him for far longer than Acair was comfortable with. “If Sladaiche and this theft are linked in any way, I would be extremely careful—”
“I have no magic!”
The words hung in the air, there over the fire, where they crackled and popped as if they’d been a terribly dry branch full of sap. He looked at them until they faded, studiously avoided looking at Léirsinn, then fixed his glance on Soilléir.
“I have no magic,” he repeated quietly.
“But you do have a quest,” Soilléir said.
“I already had a quest!”
“This is an extending of that goodly work,” Soilléir said mercilessly. “Your task is to find out where that spell has gone. I would suggest you pinch the original book for the companion spells, but that’s only a thought.” He paused. “I have the feeling that when you find that spell, you’ll also solve several other mysteries that are keeping you awake at night.”
“You should have told me that months ago!”
Soilléir only looked at him steadily.
“If you tell me you’ve been waiting for me to be ready for this new, unusual, and very unwelcome addition to something I was already doing under extreme protest,” Acair said coldly, “I will stab you.”
“You won’t manage it.”
“Oh, I will,” Acair promised. “When you least expect it, you will find me standing over you, spell in hand, and you’ll be powerless to stop me from sending you off to hell.”
“Well, if anyone has the courage to try, it would certainly be you.”
Acair wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or an insult, then decided he might not want to think about it too much. “Why don’t you steal the damned book yourself?”
“It wouldn’t do—”
Acair was sure he hadn’t howled, because a gentleman never howled except discreetly when the port he was sipping wasn’t quite the thing, but whatever noise he’d made had come damned close to something that felt as if it had come straight from his soul.
What was left of that soul, apparently.
“You know,” Soilléir said carefully, “it’s an interesting spell that’s missing.”
“It’s a terrible spell that’s missing,” Acair shouted. “How could you possibly let something like that slip out of your own damned library?”
Soilléir looked a bit more helpless than Acair was comfortable with.
“My grandfather can be somewhat absentminded.”
Acair found that there were simply no words left in what was left of his mind to use in describing his disbelief over what he was hearing.
He was also desperately regretting his lack of magic at the moment given what he thought might be a fortuitous breach in the bulwark around those Cothromaichian treasures, but he used a firm hand and all the terrible things all those months of do-gooding had caused to fester inside him to push himself away from that profoundly tempting thought.
It was a thought he would, of course, revisit at his earliest opportunity.
“Odd what those spots of shadow do, isn’t it?”
A sharp verbal riposte was halfway out of his mouth before he realized it hadn’t been Soilléir to speak, it had been Léirsinn. He looked at her in astonishment.
“What did you say?”
“Those spots of shadow,” she said slowly. “They steal souls, just as that spell supposedly does.”
Acair was happy to be sitting down. He felt Léirsinn’s arm tighten around him, which he had to admit he appreciated for more than just the gesture of affection.
If those two things were connected, if he could find the mage using that spell to create shadows to steal souls . . . well, then the mystery would be solved. Repairing the damage already done would likely be a dodgy business, but perhaps he was more prepared for that than he suspected. His mother had advised him to collect bits of his own lost soul, so perhaps helping others to do the same wouldn’t be all that hard.
Do-gooding. It was becoming a bad habit.