“Well,” Acair said, turning back to the matter at hand, “better undone than knocked off a ladder by a child, wouldn’t you agree?”
“You didn’t knock me off!” Sladaiche shouted. “There was a flaw in the wood that gave way inopportunely.”
“And you waited all this time to tell me that,” Acair said with a disbelieving laugh. “How droll.”
“I waited all this time to repay you for stealing that spell,” Sladaiche snarled.
“I didn’t steal anything,” Acair said, shrugging carelessly, “I threw it in the fire. Why would I steal something worth so little?”
Sladaiche drew himself up. “I worked on that for centuries.”
“Well done you, then,” Acair said, clapping slowly, then he stopped suddenly and put on an exaggerated frown. “Wait. I heard you didn’t create it yourself at all, but rather that you stole—”
“A filthy lie!” Sladaiche shouted.
Acair lifted his eyebrows briefly. “As you say, I suppose. It still needs a bit of finishing, though, wouldn’t you say?”
Sladaiche pointed the crossbow at Léirsinn. “She has what I need. That is why she’s still alive, but you…”
Acair very rarely found himself frozen in place, but he genuinely wasn’t sure if he should leap in front of Léirsinn, pull her down behind the edge of the fountain out of sight with him, or take his chances with the spell next to him and go ahead and use his own magic.
Léirsinn pulled coins out of her pockets, but her hands were shaking so badly that a pair of them fell. Acair didn’t stop her from bending to look for them in the dark. Better that she be out of sight when Sladaiche fired his bolt, which he did.
Not at Léirsinn, nor even at he himself.
Sladaiche fired the bolt through that damned spell of death that had first made an appearance not very far from where he stood at present, that same spell that had collected pieces of his soul and tried to kill him—
The spell shrieked and vanished with a keening that was so like the mages Léirsinn had slain in the barn that Acair staggered.
Or that might have been because he felt as ifhehad been the one shot through the heart. He patted his chest on the off chance that was the case, but found he was still safe and whole.
Or perhaps not whole. In truth, he felt a little…unwell.
Léirsinn caught him around the waist. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” he said, forcing himself to straighten. “I’m fine.”
And he was, for it occurred to him quite suddenly that there was now nothing preventing him from using his magic. He leaned closer to Léirsinn.
“We cannot risk another of those bolts.”
“Distraction?”
“That seems fitting.”
He watched that rather shiny coin he’d made for her leave her hand and had several things occur to him in such rapid succession that he wished desperately for time to slow that he might consider them all and sort them into their proper order.
First was that Sladaiche, for all his apparent lingering at the supper trough, was not an unskilled mage. He batted away the spell full of shadows Léirsinn threw at him and sent rats and snakes scattering away from him. Acair destroyed them with a word, but that cost him more than it should have, which led him to his second realization.
In destroying it, I destroy myself. He’d said those ridiculous words to Mochriadhemiach of Neroche as they’d been discussing that accursed minder spell that had been so determined to slay him for the slightest dip of his toes into magical waters. He hadn’t meant them, of course, but that had apparently been a glorious miscalculation on his part.
For the first time in his life, he was afraid he didn’t have enough of himself to work any serious magic.
Lastly, he wasn’t exactly certain what he was going to do with Sladaiche’s soul if he managed to drag it out of the man’s body. He wasn’t his father in more ways than one, apparently.
But it wasn’t his life that hung in the balance and that made his decision far easier than it might have been otherwise.
He looked at his foe and spat out the spell Léirsinn had given him from her tale only to have Sladaiche laugh.
