“We aren’t really going to visit your tailor, are we?”
“He has things I need.”
“If you tell me we are here for cravats, I will bloody your nose.”
He smiled. “Nothing so pedestrian, actually.”
“Will he be awake?”
“He keeps rather unusual hours,” Acair conceded, “but better still is his uncanny ability to keep an ear to the ground for all sorts of unusual arrivals. I also might have sent a lad with a message to him earlier.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Do you thinkhetold the king you were here?”
“Never,” Acair said confidently. “I likely don’t need to mention that we have a particular understanding.”
“He keeps his mouth shut and you let him live?”
He stopped and looked at her in surprise. “I’m not sure if I should be flattered or alarmed.”
She only smiled briefly. “It was a guess.”
“A good one,” he said frankly, “but in this case, my reputation for dishing out the odd bit of retribution doesn’t serve me. The simple truth is, I aided him many years ago in what for me was a profoundly uncharacteristic display of good will and he’s repaid me with the finest couture in all the Nine Kingdoms ever since. That and he keeps a thing or two for me under very tidy piles of superior neckwear.”
That was ignoring the heart the matter, but the whole truth was something he didn’t want to discuss. Unfortunately, he couldn’t avoid examining it in his own head.
The absolute heart of the matter was that he needed something from Odhran of Eòlas’s back workroom that he had put there for an exigency he had never intended to face. That there was a need driving him to seek out that failsafe was profoundly unnerving. He considered a handful of words as they walked until he hit upon the one that best described the sensation that was continually nipping at his heels, threatening to overcome him if he allowed it to.
Fear.
He could hardly believe he was even acknowledging the same, but things in his life were not as they should have been. He who had never once since reaching his majority faced off with another being and felt even so much as a twinge of unease? He who had walked places that his father would never have dared go? He who had fought duels with spells and sword that would have had any of his brothers—or any number of other pompous, boasting mages—scampering off with tails tucked?
He didn’t like the feeling.
He ducked into another alley with Léirsinn until yet another city guard had passed, then squeezed her hand and continued on. Easier that than standing still and allowing things to rattle about in his empty head. There was a full tally of vapid thoughts endlessly coming from Mansourah of Neroche; he didn’t need to be adding his own to the collective thoughts being considered in the wide, uncivilized world.
Who will keep Léirsinn safe?
The man with magic...
The salient parts of that very brief conversation were what he couldn’t seem to stop hearing, try as he might to pay them no heed. It had galled him almost past reason that such was his lot in life at the moment, partly because his pride had been stungand partly because he had feared that if something dire happened, in truth, he wouldn’t be able to keep Léirsinn safe.
Hence a trip to retrieve something he’d never thought he would ever be in a position to need. He might not have been able to use the power he possessed, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use something that required nothing from him—
“Here?”
He looked at Léirsinn and realized he’d come to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk. Fortunately for them both, the streets were completely empty. Unsurprising given the time of night, but still a little unsettling. He frowned, nodded, then drew her over to the appropriate shop door.
He knocked softly. There was no answer, but that didn’t trouble him. Ofttimes the man was slow to answer simply because he occasionally worked far into the night, toiling over silks and woolens that were truly enough to make a gentleman of substantial means shed a tear in the privacy of his own dressing closet. Perhaps he had paused in his labors, put his head down atop a pile of fine silks, and descended into a comfortable slumber.
The puzzling thing was, though, that Master Odhran knew to expect him.
He put his ear to the wood, but he heard nothing.
“I can see someone just sitting there.” Léirsinn looked at him. “Just inside, there by the hearth. But there’s no fire.”
Acair found himself very rarely startled—he was too calculating for that, he would admit—but her words sent a chill down his spine that was not at all pleasant. To be sure, Odhran was very careful about the delicate balance between keeping his shop warm in the winter and burning the place to the ground thanks to a stray spark, but he couldn’t imagine the man simply sitting in front of a stone cold hearth.
It reminded him sharply of another soul he’d heard tell of, the youngest son of a particular horse breeder who had been reduced to simply sitting and staring. That lad had been rendered thus because of repeated encounters with a certain sort of shadow lying on the ground where shadows shouldn’t have found themselves.
