Mages scrambled to catch it, but they failed. Acair wasn’t prepared to credit his endless amounts of do-gooding for anything, well, good, but he had to admit that perhaps there was something to it. He watched in astonishment as the serving girl plucked the king’s book of spells out of the air as if she’d been using a spell to do the like. She fumbled with it, tossing it up in the air repeatedly as mages fell over themselves in an effort to grasp it.
There was magic afoot. Acair could smell it at twenty paces.
The serving girl seemingly lost control of her juggling and the book went flying into the hands of her master.
“Oh, my lord, don’tstealthat,” she pled.
Mages converged on the man as one, flapping their metaphorical wings like a pack of damned vultures. Acair stood there long enough to see the servant look at him, then point rather pointedly at the gates.
Well, he would be damned.
He would have thanked her, but she looked as if she were capable of unleashing a bit of temper on him, so he made her a quick bow and dashed for the gates, keeping as much to the shadows as he could. He wasn’t one to let something as insignificant as a city wall keep him from the sweet freedom of bucolic countryside, so he scaled the wall, rendered unconscious apair of burly lads with mischief on their minds, then dropped to the other side without breaking any bones.
And with that, the night could quite properly be considered a success.
He had a final look at the city behind him, caught sight of the serving wench slipping past gate guards as if she’d been practiced at the same, and considered going back to ask her if she needed aid. He dithered, something he never did, but there it was again. Too much cozying up to his softer side had definitely done a foul work upon his good sense.
He was still trying to latch onto the cold, calculating, nobler part of himself when he found himself facing a wench who certainly was rather cheeky for her station.
“Are you daft or stupid?” she demanded, shoving her hood back off her hair. “I’ve helped you escape, now go!”
Acair very rarely found himself without a single thing to say, but at the moment all he could do was gape at the woman standing in front of him and wonder how it was that a complete stranger could look so much like Léirsinn of Sàraichte.
“Are you—”
She threw up her hands. “I’m no one! You will be no one as well if you don’t flee.”
She made a very reasonable argument, one he was perfectly happy to concede. He would have thanked her for her aid, but before he could even begin, she had melted into the shadows. Whether or not she simply vanished into the morning mist or climbed a tree to watch whatever mayhem might ensue, he couldn’t have said. What he did know was that she had indeed saved his life and left him with the unhappy burden of needing to do yet another good turn for someone else.
He sighed deeply, then considered the journey that lay infront of him. He could run for a great while—and had numerous times in the past when skirting the odd clutch of enemies—but his mother’s house was on the far side of Ceangail and the country between his current locale and her rather unwelcoming abode was not insignificant. It would take him likely a se’nnight of travel on foot to arrive at her hearth and that was time he didn’t have. The only thing he could hope was that Sianach would decide that returning for his beloved master was more important than making a pig of himself in some stack of hay.
He cursed, then strode off into what remained of the night.
Seven
Being in charge of a shapechanging horse wasn’t for the faint of heart.
Léirsinn considered the truth of that as she struggled to keep her seat on a dragon that was flying quite a bit faster than the average dr—er, well, what shethoughtthe average dragon should be... ah... flying—
She took a figurative step back from the thought, because it was ridiculous. She would have taken a deep breath, but the wind in her face was just short of a gale, even hiding behind Mansourah of Neroche as she was, so she settled for giving herself a hard mental shake and forcing herself to concentrate on what made sense to her.
She spent less than a trio of heartbeats on that path before she gave up there as well. The truth was, she was traveling quite swiftly to a destination she wasn’t sure of, trying to keep her seaton the back of her, ah, conveyance, and all the while holding on to a prince of a royal house so he didn’t pitch off the side into thin air. The fact that it was late afternoon and she could see very well things that should have remained in her nightmares—things such as the ground farther beneath her than should have been possible—was not helping matters any.
The only bit of truth that felt as ordinary as it should have was the realization that she was actually missing Acair of Ceangail and not just for his endless amounts of courage and saucy remarks.
The world was obviously on the verge of ending.
He had told her he would follow on foot, something she hadn’t been in a position to argue with. The man was hardly a child and surely knew the dangers of his situation. All she could do was carry on and try not to think about her future, a future that would likely include first gaining entrance to his mother’s house, then attempting not to wind up in whatever cauldron the woman might be endlessly stirring.
The journey felt interminable, but perhaps that had to do less with the distance than the discomfort her thoughts were causing her. She wished she could have consigned the whole experience to that place where her dreams lived, but it was more difficult than she’d expected. She continued to find herself in places so far out of her realm of experience, she hardly recognized her life any longer.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have agreed so quickly to flee her uncle’s barn so she could save her own sweet neck. She likely shouldn’t have gone with Acair to Beinn òrain where she had then watched her favorite horse sprout wings. She absolutely should have refused to go any farther after she had watched an elven king heal her dying horse in some mysterious way shedidn’t want to think about, then listened to that same monarch and his aides make a list of bad deeds committed by one Acair of Ceangail.
She would have been perfectly happy to chalk everything up to weariness, worry, and more adventure than she had ever thought she might be subjected to. That she had lost count of the days she’d spent being a gawking witness to the utter chaos that was Acair’s normal way of living likely said all that needed to be said about the condition of her wits.
She shifted on Sianach’s back and made certain Mansourah was awake before she allowed herself to continue to let her thoughts wander. Unfortunately, they seemed to continually lead her to the same place: a spot of shadow where shadow shouldn’t have been. Once she started thinking about that particular spot, she couldn’t not think about how whatever blindness she had experienced when it came to magical things had been completely stripped from her eyes.
She was no longer an observer; she was a full participant in the madness.
