Dreamspinner (31 page)

“She spun water.”

Nicholas looked at him as if he hadn’t heard him.

“Water,” Rùnach clarified. “Just as she touched air and set that wheel to spinning in that poor, terrified granny’s house days ago. She stood over a pool of seawater, drew it up as if it had been a thread, then set it to spinning.”

Nicholas frowned thoughtfully. “That is interesting.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

Nicholas merely waited. Rùnach waited as well until he couldn’t simply stand there and not speak.

“Well?” he demanded.

“Well, what?” Nicholas asked politely.

“What do you think?”

“I think that your idea of teaching her to use a bow is a very good one.”

“I don’t believe I said anything about teaching her how to shoot.”

“You mutter under your breath. Your sister curses under her breath, so perhaps you are an improvement.”

“Did she ever curse you?” Rùnach asked crisply.

Nicholas leaned back and looked at him tranquilly. “Only when I pushed her too far, but what are uncles for if not to push you in directions you don’t particularly want to go?”

Rùnach bent his head, rubbed the back of his neck, then looked at the former king of Diarmailt. “Forgive me,” he said quietly. “You have been nothing but gracious—”

“And vexing,” Nicholas said with a smile. “Rùnach, my lad, I don’t take anything personally any longer. I’ve forced you to consider directions in which you didn’t want to go, shown you things you didn’t want to see, pried into your privacy with shameless abandon. I deserve everything I have in return—ah, Aisling, my dear, you’ve returned. Come and sit. There’s a very fine cider here that Rùnach could pour for you.”

Rùnach hadn’t heard her knock, though Nicholas obviously had or he wouldn’t be standing there by the door, welcoming her inside his solar. He led her over to his sofa. Rùnach poured her something to drink, realizing with a start that he should have been more grateful for the ability to do that. It had been difficult for him for longer than he wanted to think about.

He was beginning to think he should have been grateful for quite a few things he hadn’t been able to do before.

“This is a rather thin volume,” Nicholas said, taking the book from Aisling and smiling at her, “but contains interesting things. I understand that you’re particularly fascinated by myths.”

She looked terribly uncomfortable. “A foolish thing, isn’t it, for a woman of my age.”

“My dear, there is no limit to a body’s desire for a good tale full of things that fire the imagination,” Nicholas said easily. “I myself enjoy that sort of thing, even now that I’m in my dotage.” He reached over and handed her the book. “You keep that, Aisling my dear. I think you might be the only other person in all the Nine Kingdoms who could possibly appreciate it as I have all these years.”

She looked at him in shock. “But Master Dominicus told me it was the most rare and valuable book in the library below.”

Nicholas smiled at her. “I have the feeling that you might be just the gel to be the keeper of such a rare and valuable tome. Wouldn’t you agree?” He looked at Rùnach. “I had the armorer select a bow for her, and one for you if you care to brush up on your skills. It is waiting for you in the lists. I imagine it will still be there if you care to have breakfast before you begin your labors.”

Aisling looked as if she might soon weep. “That is too generous, Lord Nicholas.”

“My dear, if an old man cannot do now and again for those who pass through his gates, of what use is he? These are simple gifts that hopefully will serve you well.” He looked at Rùnach. “Perhaps you would care to escort this lovely gel to breakfast.”

“Happily,” Rùnach said. Perhaps if he managed to get himself out of his uncle’s solar, he would manage to get himself away from that damned spell and stop seeing things he didn’t particularly care to.

He sighed. It wasn’t that he didn’t care to see. It was that he knew what it would feel like to lose that sight if the spell didn’t hold—or if the undoing of it actually did what it should have.

Nicholas walked Aisling to the door, chatting pleasantly with her. Rùnach found his cloak and drew it around his shoulders. Unfortunately, the motion didn’t dislodge anything he’d recently acquired, such as the ability to see with perfect clarity the runes engraved on the backs of his hands.

“How are you, Rùnach?” Nicholas asked politely, standing back so Rùnach could reach the door.

“Clarified.”

Nicholas looked at him. “It won’t fade, you know. That clarity.”

Rùnach put his hand on the heavy wooden door and looked at his uncle. “Why?”

Nicholas smiled very faintly. “Of what use is an old man,” he said very quietly, “if he cannot give simple gifts every now and again to those who pass through his home?”

Rùnach closed his eyes briefly. “I didn’t expect this.”

“I know, my boy.” He put his hand on Rùnach’s shoulder. “I know.”

Rùnach took a deep breath, nodded to his uncle in what he hoped Nicholas would understand was thanks he couldn’t voice, then left the solar and pulled the door shut behind him. He found Aisling standing there, looking down at the book in her hands. He almost asked her for a peek at it, then thought better of it. It was her gift, not his. He smiled at her when she looked at him.

“Food, then archery?”

She nodded. He offered her his arm, then walked with her to the buttery. He could only hope the only thing magical he was able to see there was the results of whatever Nicholas’s cook had had on the fire.

He was, he reminded himself, looking merely for an ordinary life. A useful garrison. Good ale in the evenings. Work to do that he could actually do. It would be, he reminded himself further, a welcome change from all the years he’d spent living in a moldering old castle surrounded by all kinds of wild, student-created magic he hadn’t been able to see.

“Dragons,” Aisling murmured, shaking her head. “I think there is quite a bit in here about dragons.”

Rùnach imagined there was.

She looked at him. “Do you think there will be tales of elves as well?”

He nodded. He imagined there would be. He could only hope that would be the only place she would find them for the foreseeable future.

He wasn’t quite sure what she would do when she found out he was not exactly what he’d told her he was.

A
isling stretched the great bow, sighted the bull’s-eye on the target, then released the arrow as she’d been taught.

Her arrow split Rùnach’s right down the center.

She looked at him and lifted one of her eyebrows. “Ha,” she said.

“I taught you that,” he pointed out.

“And I’m the one who learned it.”

He laughed a little. “And you’ve learned a great deal in a very short amount of time. Shall I fetch our arrows and we have another go?”

She started to say
aye
, then found that she couldn’t ignore the obvious, which was that she had been at Lismòr too long. She thought it might have been nine days, but she wasn’t entirely sure. It was perhaps double that if she were to count the days she’d simply slept after Rùnach had carried her there.

She found Rùnach was watching her seriously, which she found slightly alarming.

“What?” she asked.

He didn’t move. “I have been thinking that perhaps we should consider our plans. I’m not sure we would want to stay here forever.”

She had to disagree with him there. She had relished every moment of every day she had spent at Lismòr because she had, for the first time in her life, felt that her life was almost her own. She had trained with the bow in the mornings, walked along the shore in the afternoons, then joined Nicholas’s lads for rousing tales in the evening. Just last night, he had told one about an obscure girl who found a sword and a king to wed whilst looking for other things entirely. It had contained less magic than the tale the night before, so she had approved, though she had been somewhat unsurprised to listen to a dragon make an appearance.

She paused. She too had seen a dragon, so she supposed she couldn’t condemn Lord Nicholas for telling tales about them.

She had also enjoyed decadently hot fires and the best meals she had ever eaten in the whole of her life. If that had been everything, that would have been enough to leave her looking back on her days at Lismòr with wonder, but there had been more in the person of Rùnach of somewhere in the mountains he would not name. She looked up at him and wondered how it was that only a handful of days could leave her feeling so at ease with him.

And leave her with so many questions about him.

He seemed perfectly comfortable with the lord of Lismòr, as if he were accustomed to chatting easily with men of power and significance, though he had seemed equally as comfortable with the rabble in Gobhann. And it didn’t seem to trouble him to spend his mornings with her, teaching her how to use a weapon she had never touched before in her life.

“Who are you?” she asked suddenly.

He blinked, then smiled faintly. “No one of consequence.”

She waved an arrow at him. “I like a good mystery as well, just so you know.”

“I think I should be afraid.”

She pursed her lips. “You don’t seem to be afraid of anything.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he said quietly. “I’m afraid of quite a few things.”

“Prying questions?”

He laughed a little. “Aye, those to be sure.” He started to speak, then shook his head. “The other things aren’t worth speaking of.” He slung his bow over his shoulder. “Where shall we go now?”

“Right now?”

“Nay, when we leave Lismòr.”

She looked at him in surprise. “Are you asking me?”

“I am asking you.”

She looked at him quickly, just to see if he was preparing to burst into gales of laughter for having put her on, but he was only watching her steadily. And gravely.

“Ah, I was originally feeling a fair bit of haste,” she began slowly. “For particular reasons I’m not at liberty to divulge.”

“And now?”

She hardly knew where to begin. She had walked inside Gobhann’s gates, sure that the only path to freedom lay through an agreement forged with Scrymgeour Weger. But now she had seen that people lived, ate, passed the time in their glorious libraries full of books, all without answering to anyone or fearing a curse that hung endlessly over their heads should they simply step across an arbitrary line in the dirt.

It made her wonder about those who had held sway over her over the years, if they knew any better or were simply parroting lines they had learned themselves. The Guildmistress had warned her to never touch spinning wheels, but had that been a lie or simply something the woman had believed for so long that she had never thought to question it? And the things she’d been told at the pub by Euan and Quinn and the rest of their mates, rumors of the fierceness of the curse attached to the borders, could those have been simply things repeated until they had passed into legend?

She could hardly bear to think that her entire life had been covered and hedged about and smothered by lies told to…what? Keep her where she was? Keep her from asking questions? Keep her from thinking for herself?

And then there was the peddler who had sent her on a quest, thrown her into a world she had no idea how to manage, forced her halfway across the world—

Well out of the way of the reach of anyone from Bruadair, as it happened.

She looked up at the sky, feeling a faint mist full of the smell of the sea fall upon her skin. It was, she had to admit, glorious, so glorious that she wasn’t sure what she would do without feeling it again.

“There is the sea touching other places, you know.”

She looked at Rùnach. “Is there?”

“Aye,” he said with a small smile. “There is coastline along all Neroche’s eastern edge, actually. Shall I draw you a map?”

She shook her head. “I’ve seen one.” Though she had to admit now that she wasn’t at all sure that that map had been accurate. Nothing else had been. She looked at Rùnach. “Perhaps you should, but perhaps not now.” She paused. “Should we take our leave—well, I should take my leave.” She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. “I’m not sure what your plans are.”

She looked at him in time to see him draw his hand over his brow and rub the spot over his eye where Weger had attempted to brand him like a prized milch cow—and failed.

“I was thinking,” he began slowly, “that perhaps I would make a journey to Chagailt.” He looked at her and for a change his green eyes were rather pale. “There is, as you know, a rather lovely library there.”

“Have you ever been there?” she asked.

“Chagailt?” he echoed. “It is the summer palace of the kings of Neroche, which makes it a rather exclusive locale. Scholars and seekers of truth are, however, allowed into the library without hesitation.” He rested his bow against his shoulder, the other end of it resting on the ground. “You might find answers there.”

She realized he hadn’t answered her question, but she suspected he had done that on purpose. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know why. “Am I looking for answers?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Are you?”