“You hid them in your grandfather’s library,” Acair said pointedly, “until you foisted one off on me thanks to whom—Ochadius of Riamh?”
“I need to be more careful about my messengers,” Soilléir murmured.
“More afraid, rather, of what I’ll do to you when I discover how extensively you’ve meddled, but go on. Where is the third one? You obviously don’t know or you would be crowing about it.”
“I don’t,” Soilléir agreed. “It has gone missing, but finding it is not my task.”
Acair almost groaned aloud. If he had to listen to one more recitation of that one’s vaunted code, he thought he just might lie down and bawl like a bairn.
“Let’s press on,” he said, hopping over the steaming pile of virtue his companion had tried to deposit there in front of him. “How did you know to rescue those children?”
Soilléir shrugged lightly. “I didn’t.”
Acair decided he would retrieve his jaw from where it had fallen to the earth later, when he also had a free moment to find the breath he’d just lost.
“How do you sleep at night?” he asked incredulously. “Lying like that.”
“Let’s say it was an educated guess.”
“Let’s not,” Acair returned, “and instead you tell me the truth.”
Soilléir looked slightly uncomfortable. “Perhaps we should look for somewhere to sit.”
“That would be perfect,” Acair said crisply, “for it would save me the effort of chasing you down to turnyouinto a birdbath. I have a pair of cousins who I can guarantee would plop you in their garden without a second thought.”
Soilléir only smiled, which left Acair torn between admiration that he could so casually know there wasn’t a damned soul in the whole of the Nine Kingdoms who could do anything at all to him and fury that he’d been used so thoroughly without so much as the slightest hesitance.
He revisited the thought that if Soilléir hadn’t had his fingers in every pie from Tosan to Riamh, he never would have encountered Léirsinn of Sàraichte…
“I wouldn’t say that.”
He glared at him. “Stop that.”
“You’re gasping aloud and looking very green.” Soilléir shrugged with a smile. “Another very good guess. As for other things, I knew Sladaiche—”
“Which you shamelessly lied about in that glade,” Acair said bitterly. “Why didn’t you slay him the moment he looked askance at the first horse in his charge? Nay, never mind. If I must listen to you blather on about your noble doings, I will cut off my own ears.” He waved the man on to further details with a hand that was far less steady than he would have liked, but it had been that sort of morning so far. “You knew Sladaiche, allowed him to live, and then what?”
“I knew him,” Soilléir repeated, “but there is always the possibility of redemption.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Very well, with some there is no hope, I’ll admit. But it isn’t my place to decide who lives or dies.”
“If there were no evil, what would there be for good men to do, or whatever the rot is you sick up onto everyone you meet,” Acair said, wondering if he might be soon indulging. Supper from the night before, what he’d managed of it, was definitely still lingering in a very unwholesome way in his tum.
“At this point you know most all of what you’d ever want to about him,” Soilléir continued. “I have details about other things, though, that you might find interesting.”
“Another turn in your granddaddy’s solar is what I would find interesting.”
“Library.”
“There, too, but go on. Bludgeon me with the minutiae.”
Soilléir, damn him to hell, only smiled and looked as relaxed as if he might soon be settling in for a pint or two at the local pub.
“What you likely would have discovered soon enough, but I’ll tell you just the same,” he continued, “is that the author of those wee books of faery tales is none other than Tosdach, Léirsinn’s grandfather.”
Acair knew he should have been surprised, but somehow he wasn’t. “If you tell me that he’s a powerful mage…”
