“Acair? Hallo?”
He pulled himself back to the business at hand and looked at Mansourah. “A bit of a stroll first, to warm the blood.”
Mansourah considered. “Interested in seeing what you stirred up this morning?”
Acair bestowed a smile upon the poor lad. “There is hope for you yet.”
“You won’t escape crossing blades with me later.”
“My dearest boy, I would count it a great disappointment to miss such an opportunity. Now, can you possibly be discreet?”
Mansourah shot him a dark look, but Acair expected nothing else. He was happy to list the lad’s flaws at length, but he had toadmit that there had been the odd tale or two circulating about that one there having accomplished the occasional Heroic Deed. Even those lads from Neroche didn’t manage that without some small bit of skill.
He followed his companion out of the inn and prepared to spend at least a pair of hours mingling with the workaday types.
It would be interesting to see what the afternoon might bring hisway.
Three
Léirsinn woke to the sound of metal ringing.
She sat up and looked around herself quickly. She was alone, which was a bit alarming, but at least her chamber wasn’t full of ruffians, which was less alarming. She rubbed her hands over her face and tried to make sense of what she was hearing. If she’d been in her uncle’s barn, she would have assumed that noise was just tack jingling. In her present locale, though, she thought it sounded quite a bit like swords.
She pushed off the blanket someone had obviously draped over her, pausing briefly to appreciate the fact that it wasn’t covered in horse hair, then rose and made her way unsteadily over to a window. The curtain was made of fabric finer than she had ever put her hand to, but perhaps that was nothing more than she should have expected given the luxurious nature of their accommodations.
She pulled back the curtain, surprised to find that it was well into the afternoon but somewhat less surprised to see that a pre-supper duel was in the offing. The mystery of the noises she’d been hearing was solved, as was the location of her companions. The only question that remained was whether or not the two fools going at each other with rapiers down there in the garden would manage to kill each other before she could stop them.
She looked quickly for her cloak, and then left the chamber at a dead run for the ground floor. The innkeeper, a sturdy, sober man of a decent age, only watched her as she skidded to a halt in front of him. She made a manful attempt to gather her dignity back around herself, then looked at him with as much hauteur as she could manage.
“The garden, good sir,” she said. “If you please.”
“Of course, lady,” he said. He nodded to one of his lads, then instructed him to show her the way to the garden.
Léirsinn followed the boy outside, then frowned when he stopped and looked at her pointedly. She would have asked him what he wanted, but he had already glared at her and gone back the way they’d come before she could. It occurred to her then that she likely should have given him a coin for his trouble, but it was too late. It was also too late to ask him if she could escape back inside with him, so she turned to face the madness she had come to stop.
She stood on the edge of a finely laid stone path and wondered how best to make her presence known. It only took a moment or two to decide that even if those swordsmen there might notice her, they wouldn’t dare take the time to acknowledge her. She considered shouting at them, then decided that there was no point. She knew better than to step between two feisty stallions,so she looked for somewhere to sit until they’d gotten out of their system whatever was bothering them.
The nearest bench was already heavily in shadow, but it looked far enough away from the field of battle that perhaps she wouldn’t be caught by a stray sword. She walked over to it and perched on the edge, shivering in spite of herself. She wrapped her cloak more closely around her, looked at the two men in front of her, then wished rather abruptly that she’d just remained upstairs.
Who would have thought that watching two extremely handsome, thoroughly angry men fight with elegant swords would be so overwhelming?
She rolled her eyes and grasped for her last vestiges of good sense. She was a woman of action, not a wide-eyed lord’s daughter who’d never been out of the nursery. If she occasionally found herself a bit weak-kneed over the thought of taking a peerless horse for a sprint across a large pasture with decent footing, who could blame her? That was the absolute limit of any propensity she might or might not have had to swoon.
Hadn’t she easily ignored the lads she had ordered about in her uncle’s barn? Even more quickly dismissed had been the men who had come to buy horses they couldn’t possibly appreciate from her uncle, one of the worst specimens of manhood she had ever encountered. Unpleasant, unchivalrous louts, all of them.
Nothing at all like the lads out there, trampling the last bits of fall’s brittle vegetation.
She considered, chalked most of her breathlessness up to the stress of her journey to Eòlas, then decided it couldn’t hurt to have a look at prince and prince’s bastard son about their noble business. For the sake of scholarly study, of course, which seemed particularly appropriate given her location.
She shifted to look at the man to her left. Mansourah of Neroche could have easily stridden across the pages of a Hero’s tale and captured the heart of any maid with a book in her hands. He was handsome, chivalrous, and he had a very nice nose. If he’d been a horse, she would have immediately paid a premium price for him and considered it an excellent investment. He was obviously skilled in the sort of dangerous swordplay he was currently engaged in and his ability to hurl slurs and curses with equal ease likely came from years of consorting with his brothers as they saw to their royal doings.
All in all, it was understandable that a gel of lesser self-control might feel the need to give him a second look.
She wasn’t at all sure what to say about the man facing him. Whatever Acair of Ceangail’s abilities with a foul spell might have been, if she’d been watching him come at her with that sword in his hand, she would have tossed hers at him, turned, and hoped she could outrun him. She half wondered why he bothered with steel when his terrible reputation alone was likely enough to send his enemies bolting off in the opposite direction.
Then again, perhaps most saw what she saw: a terribly handsome, thoroughly elegant, perfectly fashioned man any woman with any sense at all would want sitting next to her at supper, twirling her about in the patterns of an intricate dance, or hoisting a sword in her defense. He was absolutely worthy of the fluttering of a feminine heart or a very casual fanning of the face.
She shifted on the slab, not because she was uncomfortable with her thoughts, but because it was damned cold. Her thoughts were just the usual ones a body had while looking at a black mage and a prince who could spew out spells as easily as curses.
