“Mother, of all the things anyone might call you,daftis not on the list.” He tried to smile, but he feared it had come out as more of a grimace.
She sighed deeply. “Very well, if my memory hasn’t completely failed me, the mage I’m thinking of went by the name of Sladaiche. He was born, if the tales are accurate, in a place that once rivaled Bruadair for beauty. The country, small as it was, doesn’t exist any longer, but you could look for it in an archive perhaps.” She paused, then shook her head. “I think it best to keep the true placename to myself.”
He felt a shiver go down his spine. Even his spellish companion had sunk down on a stool there by the hearth, where it commenced gnawing on its fingernails in fright. Acair shot it a warning look, then turned back to his mother. He supposed it would take a decent amount of digging to find a name for that sort of place, though he wasn’t afraid to look. At the very least, he could bring to mind a pair of locales that might have spewed forth such a lad.
“His name meansthiefin his language,” she said absently, “though he has used different names through the centuries—”
“How do you know so much about him?” Acair asked in astonishment. “And who is he?”
She waved away his question. “I’ve given you his name, you’ll find his place of birth on your own I’m certain, and his purpose was ever to steal souls.”
Acair gave it a decent bit of effort, truly he did, but there were times his mother talked in such circles that he honestly couldn’t make head nor tails of anything she said. He shook his head in frustration.
“I don’t understand why he would bother,” he said finally.
His mother rolled her eyes. “In truth, Acair? Name me a trio—nay, a single reason why you destroy men.”
“I don’t destroy them,” Acair said. “I woo the women, vex the husbands and fathers, and pilfer kingly jewels and priceless art because it gives them all something to talk about. What else has a king to do these days besides stomp about and weep over losing his favorite landscape?”
“You have a point there,” she agreed.
“The acquisition of power I can understand,” Acair said, “but what in blazes would you do with a soul?”
She fingered her pearls which he still wasn’t convinced weren’t more than they seemed.
“Why did your sire spend so much of his life perfecting his spell of Diminishing?” she asked.
“Because he was—still is, in theory—a peerless mage and an arrogant whoreson,” Acair said grimly. “What else washeto do with his days? There is never enough power to be had.”
“That isn’t the point of the question,” she said impatiently. “Why did heneedthat spell?”
“To obtain more power,” Acair said, “something we just discussed.” He looked at her helplessly. “What decent mage doesn’t want that?”
She blew a curl out of her eyes. “I despair, truly I do. Let’slook at this from a different direction. What did Gair leave of those whose power he stole?”
“Lads grateful they merited his notice, no doubt,” Acair said without hesitation, though he supposed he didn’t particularly want to think about that overmuch because he had seen what his father’s tender ministrations could do.
He had felt the shudder in the world when his sire had loosed the power of Ruamharaiche’s well, intending to take it for his own. He had himself managed to arrive too late to stop the madness, but he’d certainly had an eyeful of the aftermath. Actually, he’d closed Sarait of Tòrr Dòrainn’s eyes so even in death she wasn’t forced to look at what her husband had done.
He wasn’t sure he would ever forget that.
He had done what he could for his half-sister Mhorghain, at the very least, then watched from afar, wringing his hands like a fretful alewife until he was certain she would be safely hidden. If others had seen to the rest of Sarait’s children, he hadn’t argued. He’d been simply crushed with invitations to dinner and attempting to carve out the odd hour to make lists of foul deeds to be about as quickly as possible. He hadn’t had time for any of his other step-siblings.
He looked at his mother. “Father left them as shells,” he said flatly.
“Exactly.”
Acair thought of Hearn of Angesand telling him about his son—Tùr, he suspected—who had stepped in a spot of shadow once too often and wound up empty and mad as a result. He thought of Master Odhran, who had been left sitting, a lifeless shell of himself, before a cold hearth.
Was the same mage responsible for both deeds?
Did that mage now possess the spell of distraction he himself had left in Odhran’s back workroom?
He shoved aside the last thought as unimportant. Any mage worth being called such could have fashioned the same. More important was what was being done to those who had apparently simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He looked at his mother. “I don’t like the sound of this.”
“I’m not surethiscares what you like.”
