“Heinvitedme for supper,” Acair corrected. “He and that meddling half-brother of mine, Rùnach, lured me to a pub where they were very unkind to me, never mind scarce having the manners to pay for my ale.”
“Rùnach chopped wood for me—I believe I mentioned that before—so I’m not inclined to disparage him. Besides, I understand he saved your life in Beul.”
“Unfortunately,” Acair said, rubbing his chest to ease the sudden tingling there. It was as if the damn spell Rùnach had healed him with had heard itself being noticed and was clamoring for more praise. “I took a blade meant for Rùnach’s bride and he restored me with some elvish rubbish instead of mercifully letting me die. I’m still troubled by the aftereffects of it.”
“Fadaire?”
He nodded grimly.
She licked her pencil again and waved him on. “Continue.”
He supposed if anyone would understand the terrible affliction of his straits, it would be his mother, so he obliged her.
“As you’ve obviously heard,” he said, settling in for a decent recounting of his continuing nightmare, “I’ve spent the past many months—I try to forget the exact count in deference to my mental state—going about apologizing to various offended crown-wearers in order to make reparations for a modest piece of business, the particulars of which slip my mind at the moment.”
She only pursed her lips and continued to scribble in her book.
“I had thought my days of prostrating myself before kings, ministers, and their puffed-up ilk were over, but, as you heard, I found myself summoned to supper with both Rùnach and Soilléir.”
“I would have given much to have been eavesdropping on that conversation.”
“No need, for I’ll give you the details freely. There was very little chitchat and no inquiries about my health. I had scarce begun to imbibe a rather undemanding pint of ale when I was put off my drink by their telling me that my days of acting against my nobler nature were not yet over and that there was more for me to do to bring peace and justice to the world.”
“Beginning in Sàraichte,” she said slowly, looking up from her notes. “Or did I mishear that rumor?”
“Nay, you have that aright.”
“Auntie Cailleach told me she’d seen you in the market, trailing after that lass of yours like a lovesick pup.”
He didn’t want to know where that conversation had taken place or what else had been said. “’Tis true, that.”
“Where did you meet your horse miss?”
“That is an interesting wrinkle in this otherwise very dullpiece of cloth,” he said, watching her to see if she might want to make a note of how poetically he was stating things. She snorted, which he supposed was the best he was going to get, so he moved on. “I had encountered Léirsinn because as part of my continuing punishment for, again, I haven’t a clue what, I was informed I would be spending a year in a barn, shoveling horse droppings and waiting for someone to steal my best pair of boots. That, by the way, happened before a single day had passed.”
His mother glanced at his feet, then lifted her eyebrows briefly. “Poor you,” she said unsympathetically. “So, you were in a barn, you met that red-haired beauty, then what?”
He made himself as comfortable as possible on his perch. “I’ve gotten ahead of myself, actually,” he said. “To rid myself of those two profoundly irritating busybodies—you know which ones—I agreed to a year without magic to avoid having to forgo giving the stuff up for a century.”
His mother gasped. “A century?”
“Appalling, isn’t it?” he asked. “’Tis no doubt why Soilléir opened the negotiations with such a span of years. I bargained it down to the aforementioned and equally preposterous year, but you can imagine my thoughts about that. After I left that whoreson and Rùnach trying to come up with funds to pay for their drinks and mine at that truly dire little pub in the middle of nowhere, I trotted off into the gloom, fully intending to duck off the road and scamper away to lie low until they’d forgotten about me.”
“Then to resume your usual business of making glorious mischief?”
“Exactly,” he said, feeling a rush of affection for that terrifying woman there. “Unfortunately, I hadn’t gone but half a league before I realized I was being followed by something vexatious.”
His mother glanced at the spell that was currently curled up in the corner, feigning sleep. It was starting to alarm him a bit more than usual, that thing there. He’d always felt it possessed some sort of shape, but the longer it followed him, the more it began to resemble a shadow of a youth. There were times he suspected it was making rude gestures at him from behind his back, but he knew he shouldn’t have been surprised. Whoever had created it had had a very rudimentary and juvenile sense of jest.
“What does it do?” she asked.
“I understand that its sole purpose is to do damage to my innocent self should I dare breathe out so much as a word of a spell.”
“Shocking,” she said, looking genuinely startled. “And if you, as they say, slip up?”
“That spell will slay me,” he said.
“Why the hell did you agree to such a stupid thing?” she asked in astonishment.
