She felt her mouth fall open a little. “You didn’t.”
“I am a prince of the house of Neroche,” he said haughtily, “and he is a bastard.” He paused, then laughed a little. “There you have my thinking at the time, which I freely admit was outrageous. The folly of youth, I suppose, but I was determined to prove a point. We exited our host’s private solar, took up places in his back garden, and there I was taught a lesson in humility. The only reason I escaped Acair’s elegant and very lethal spells—including a very nasty spell of death—was because his supper companion tempted him with a very fine glass of port, distracting him long enough for me to bolt. He followed me all the way home, of course, and ’tis only thanks to the superior quality of my family’s spells that I managed to get inside the front gates and slam them shut before he slew me.”
“Would he have killed you, do you think?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I’m not worth the effort. Someone else, though?” He shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to speculate. I will say this, though: whoever has sent lads after him has only done sobecause they know Acair has no magic. I can’t think of anyone who would dare otherwise.”
“Will they kill him if they find him unprotected, do you think?”
“Absolutely.”
“Yet you’ve helped him so far.”
“I’ve helpedyou,” he corrected, “though I will admit I haven’t actively hindered him.” He glanced at Acair, then shook his head. “’Tis difficult to change when those around you don’t want you to. Miach offered him a bed inside the walls and my sister-in-law the queen asked me to come after you both and keep watch, which says much about their opinions. I suppose the least I can do is afford him the same chance I would want in his place.”
“And if he never changes his ways?” she asked with a faint smile.
“I’ll wait for an opportunity to put an arrow through his eye,” Mansourah said with a smile, then his smile faded abruptly. “Damnation, I’m caught.”
Léirsinn looked at the back door as it opened and Acair’s cousins spilled out. They had obviously steeled themselves for another round of hunting.
“I’ll go keep those two busy if you’ll do me the very great favor of hurrying your lad along with his labors,” Mansourah said seriously. “I would very much like to escape this place at first light tomorrow, not that any future locales will be any less perilous than this one. At least in some foul lord’s dungeon I won’t find myself fighting off witches eyeing me as a potential husband.”
She supposed that might be preferable, but she also thought she might like to avoid any other dungeons. She’d already passedseveral hours in an elven king’s pit and she had no desire to repeat the experience.
She watched Mansourah walk off to collect his admirers, then leaned against the tree and thought about what he’d told her. A part of her wished she hadn’t heard any of it.
The less cowardly part of her decided that she couldn’t carry on any longer denying the truth.
She had latched on to every reasonable explanation for her recently acquired ability to see otherworldly things, everything from losing her eyesight all the way to losing her wits. Unfortunately, she currently found herself with no choice but to accept the undeniable and quite uncomfortable conclusion that the world around her was not at all what it seemed to be and she had no means of managing that.
She was beginning to have a painfully thorough amount of sympathy for Acair.
She looked at the spell sitting on the witchwoman of Fàs’s roof and contemplated the truly improbable nature of what she was seeing. Very well, so magic existed. It was also true that she could see the bloody stuff in broad daylight everywhere she looked, with the notable exception of not having seen anything in Eòlas. Either the city didn’t have very many spells cluttering up its streets or Acair’s childhood home was simply overrun with them.
She was beginning to think her parents might be responsible for some of her current troubles. With all those tales of magic and Heroes and improbable things that they had taken such pleasure in retelling, it was almost as if they’d had an especial fondness for magic—
She shook her head before she traveled any farther down that path toward madness. Her childhood had been ordinary, short,and thoroughly lacking in anything unusual. Her older brother had been protective, her younger sister ethereal, and she the plain, uninteresting middle child who had survived where they had not—
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She didn’t like to think about her past, mostly because there was nothing she could do to change it. Her parents and siblings were gone, and she was in a witch’s house—or, her yard, rather—thinking that she might want to look for a terrible black mage who had vowed he would try to help her.
She wondered if she might be forgiven for simply setting everything aside for a bit and passing a few minutes helping a man who apparently loved his mother enough to fix her roof for her. She walked back to the house just in time to meet him as he swung down off the roof. She picked up a small bucket of nails and held it for him as he attended to something loose on the side of the house.
“Your mother says you never do any work here,” she remarked.
It was surely a coincidence that his aim went awry and he hit himself instead of the intended nail. He cursed, sucked on his thumb, then glared at her.
“She might have that aright.”
She ignored his grumbles. He was, in the end, no worse than any other surly stallion she’d known.
“She also suggested to me earlier that you’re doing it to impress me,” she added.
“I’m doing it so she doesn’t poison my tea.” He drove another nail home, took the bucket from her, and set everything down on the ground. “Somehow, I think my terrible reputation is more than enough to impress you.”
She smiled. “Your cousins say you are a rogue of the first water.”
“Flattering, of course, but I’m unable to admit to anything.”
