Surely.
She almost walked into the long table set near the windows before she realized what she was doing or that Soilléir was standing behind one of the chairs there. He pulled it out and inclined his head slightly.
“Breakfast, my dear?”
She was not at her best. That was the only reason she couldn’t latch onto a decent excuse for why she wasn’t hungry. She sat, because she couldn’t think of a good reason not to, and accepted the plate that Soilléir prepared for her, because she apparently didn’t have an independent thought in her head. She smiled uncomfortably, then set to her meal as single-mindedly as possible.
She was tempted, once she’d finished, to push her plate away and bolt, but again, there was the problem of not knowing exactly how she would get herself free of Buidseachd. She wasn’t quite sure how to go about asking that, so she put off the necessity of it by sipping a very lovely tea for several minutes before she realized her doom was simply sitting across from her, waiting for her to finish procrastinating. She set the cup down, sighed, then looked at her host.
He was only watching her with a small smile.
“I appreciate the meal,” she said politely.
“You’re welcome, Sarah.”
She shifted uncomfortably. Good manners perhaps demanded that she at least make a bit of polite conversation before she thanked the man for his hospitality and fled for safer locales. She wondered if mages made polite conversation, or if they could sense discomfort, or if she could simply think her thoughts very hard and hope Soilléir could read them without her having to say anything. She honestly didn’t doubt the last was possible. Soilléir had a way of looking at her that made her feel as if he were looking
through
her. It was extremely unnerving.
“Who are you?” she managed.
“Just a man,” Soilléir said dismissively.
“Liar,” Ruith muttered.
Sarah pursed her lips and looked at Soilléir. “I suppose His Highness would recognize that sort of thing,” she said, “given how many of them he’s indulged in recently.”
There, that made her feel a bit more herself. She was drawing battle lines in the sand. Ruith might have been kind to her recently and he had certainly dredged up a decent apology, but he had also lied to her endlessly and without remorse for far longer than he should have.
Soilléir laughed a little. “Good heavens, gel, but you are hard on him.”
Sarah looked over her shoulder at Ruith, but he was only continuing to sharpen an arrow. She frowned, then realized there was not one, but two bows leaning against the rock. And the arrows he was currently working on weren’t as long as the ones they’d left behind with an obliging farmer. Perhaps he intended to take someone else along on his quest, which should have left her feeling quite content.
But somehow it didn’t.
“Who are you making those for?” she asked in surprise.
He looked up. “You. I promised you I would.”
She closed her eyes and turned away, then opened them to find Soilléir watching her. She took a deep breath. “I’m considering forgiving him,” she said, finally. “I’m not sure I’ll ever trust him again, though.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t,” Soilléir said with a grave smile, “though you know as well as I that he had good reason for what he did.”
Sarah would have preferred to ignore that last bit, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t look at Ruith that she didn’t think on the daggers he’d given her, the attempts he’d made to keep her safe, her quest that he’d taken on initially simply to aid her. She also owed him for the magnificent dress she wore thanks to the generosity of a man she never would have met without Ruith’s having brought her to his solar.
And in Ruith’s defense, he had tried to leave her behind during the more perilous parts of their quest, and he hadn’t actually told her a flat-out lie. Then again, she’d never asked him if he happened to be related to the most evil black mage in the history of the Nine Kingdoms.
“Have you read many histories of the Nine Kingdoms, Sarah?” Soilléir asked mildly.
She dragged her attentions back to Soilléir. “I haven’t, actually,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
“Just making conversation,” Soilléir said with a shrug. “Do you know many tales of black mages?”
“I don’t,” she said uncomfortably, “and I don’t want to.”
Soilléir smiled. “I imagine you don’t, my dear.”
She feared that he did. She was very afraid, now that she’d had five minutes of conversation with the man, that her entire life was laid before him, for him to look over. The nights she had spent in the barn of her own volition, the many more she had sought refuge there because she’d been barred from her mother’s house. The overwhelming desire to belong somewhere, to have a home where she had a place that was her own—
“So, was Ruith’s floor clean, or was it littered with manuscripts?”
She was grateful to be pulled from her thoughts before they overwhelmed her. “Clean enough, though I didn’t have much time to look at it very closely before he shoved me out his front door.”
“His mother would have been disappointed in him,” Soilléir said, clucking his tongue. “I wooed his mother, you know.”
Ruith threw an arrow. It whizzed past Soilléir’s ear to stick quite firmly in the wood of the window frame behind him.
“Very well,” Soilléir conceded, “I
wanted
to woo his mother. I was terribly fond of her, but once I realized she couldn’t stand the sight of me—”
“Lying,” Ruith said. “Again.”
Soilléir smiled. “So, because I couldn’t help myself, I sent Ruith his first gift, which was, if I may say so, a marvelously fashioned rattle that whispered
Soilléir is the one
each time he shook it. Sarait sent it back, I’m afraid.”
Sarah smiled in spite of herself. “You didn’t.”
“Oh, I did,” Soilléir assured her. “And she did send it back. But she also brought him along every time she came here, just to soothe my tender feelings. Well,” he added slowly, “except once.”
“Did she come over the walls?” Ruith asked.
“Aye, and it wasn’t my solar she was interested in.”
Sarah started to ask which chamber she
had
been interested in, but she suspected she could answer that question without aid. If Ruith’s father had been as entangled with Olc as Ruith had hinted at, then perhaps the fair Sarait had been looking for things of that nature.
From that horrible mage, Droch.
“Why don’t you tell me of yourself, Sarah,” Soilléir said, leaning back and smiling, “and how it was you came to brave the trek up the side of the mountain to knock on Ruith’s door.”
Sarah was happy to think on something else besides Droch, which said much about her aversion to him if speaking of her brother’s evil was preferable. “I needed aid,” she began, “to stop my brother from nefarious deeds. I thought Ruith to be the ancient, curmudgeon of a mage who had lived in that house for centuries. His manners certainly denoted as much. At first, I should say. He followed me on my way to Bruaih and was good enough to share his bread with me, burned as it was.”
“Then all those years perfecting your recipe weren’t wasted, eh, Ruith?”
Another arrow whizzed by Soilléir and terminated in his window frame.
Sarah almost smiled. “I was grateful for it—and even more grateful that he didn’t hold against me my knocking him upon his, ah—”
“Arse,” Ruith supplied.
“Aye, that,” Sarah agreed. “He ignored the indignity of it, thankfully, and continued to help me along a path I soon found I couldn’t walk alone.”
Soilléir studied her for a moment or two. “How did you find your first views of the land beyond Shettlestoune?” he asked.
Sarah thought it an odd question, but she answered him just the same. She continued to recount her journey, but he seemed to be most interested in what she had seen. And not just seen, but
seen
. Then again, he was a mage, and they were no doubt interested in all sorts of things she wouldn’t have cared to examine too closely.
She did understand an invitation for chess, however, which she happily accepted, grateful beyond measure to concentrate on something that didn’t involve spells or magic or things beyond her ken.
“Who taught you to play?” Soilléir asked as he held out a chair for her at the board.
“The alemaster, Franciscus,” she said, “though now I believe he’s less alemaster and more mage.” She looked at Ruith, who was watching her in silence. “You didn’t see him after the castle collapsed, did you?”
He shook his head. “I was in a tearing hurry to take up your trail. I suppose given how many of Gair’s bastards escaped we can safely assume Franciscus escaped as well.” He shrugged. “I thought to do a bit of looking for him amongst lists of notable mages I’m sure will be found in the library downstairs. Just to pass the time, of course.”
“Why don’t you pass that time quickly,” Soilléir said wryly, “before you eat through my larder—nay, no more arrows my way, Ruith.” He smiled at Sarah. “Tell me he’s behaved better than this on your way here. His mother did try to instill manners in him, you know.”
Sarah didn’t dare look at Ruith. She would have happily trotted out all manner of terrible stories about him, but she couldn’t. She considered for a few minutes, then looked at Soilléir seriously.
“He was a perfect gentleman,” she said honestly. “He protected me, tried his best to leave me behind when there was danger ahead, then he lied to keep me safe when we were in the great hall of Ceangail.”
“Was he polite about that last bit?” Soilléir asked, politely.
“Not at all.”
Soilléir smiled. “Very sensible of him. And what did you think when you found out who he was?”
“I wanted to kill him.”
“Yet you rescued him instead.” Soilléir finished laying the pieces out on the board. “How did you do that, exactly? Given, as it were, your ... ah ...”
“Lack of magic?” she finished for him. She found, to her surprise, that admitting as much to Soilléir wasn’t as painful as she might otherwise have thought it would be. She shrugged. “I could see the strands of the spells woven around him.”
“Could you indeed?” he asked, sitting forward. “How did you break them?”
She reached down to pull one of her knives from her boot to realize she wasn’t wearing boots, she was wearing soft shoes. “I slit them with a knife Ruith bought me,” she said. “I’ll fetch the pair of them.”
She found them on the chest where she’d found clothes, then brought them back and handed them to Soilléir.
He froze.
She started to ask him what was amiss, but before she could find her tongue, he had taken the knives and was looking at them as if he noted nothing especial about them.
“Interesting,” he said with absolutely no inflection to his voice.
“Can you make out the runes?” Ruith asked, looking up from his whittling.
Soilléir set them down next to the chessboard. “I think there might be a book in the library below that would be useful in translating them. I’ll see if I can’t remember the title of it.” He looked at Sarah and smiled easily. “You say you slit the spell binding Ruith with one of them?”
“Aye,” she said, sinking down into her chair. “It was easily done, once I realized it was wrapped around him like thread around a spindle.”
“Intriguing,” Soilléir said. He gestured toward the board. “Your move, Sarah, my dear.”
Intriguing was what she’d just seen—or, rather,
not
seen—in Soilléir’s reaction. There had been something about the knives that had given him pause. She couldn’t imagine what that had been, but what did she know of any of it? He was a mage, and mages were prone to bouts of capriciousness, as her mother would have said.
She turned her attention to the chessboard, happy to concentrate on something besides talk of spells and knives and things she fully intended to have nothing to do with as soon as possible.
“A spell is an interesting thing,” Soilléir said, studying the board thoughtfully.
“Is it?” she asked, trying to sound as uninterested as possible. She was certainly indebted to him for his many kindnesses to her so far, but that didn’t mean she had to do anything past listen politely. “Do you use them often?”
He moved a pawn to a more advantageous place. “Actually, I don’t. I prefer to simply watch events unfold and not tamper with them. I’ve found that people generally make the decisions they’re going to make without any magical sort of help from me and that things work out as they should.”
She noted the trap he was laying for her on the board and moved to counter it. “Even if those people are black mages?”
He shrugged slightly. “Am I to turn them all into toads? We then wouldn’t be able to sleep for the noise.”
Ruith snorted, but said nothing.
“But they cause so much pain,” she said.
He looked up at her. “They do, my dear, but if that is their choice, who am I to take it away from them? Not all suffering is needless and not all evil is final. If there were no evil, what would there be to fight against?”
“Nothing,” Ruith said with a snort, “which would leave us all warming our toes quite comfortably against our fires.”
Soilléir looked at Ruith with a smile. “I think I’ve had this same conversation quite recently with someone else, but I can’t call to mind whom. I’ll think on it and tell you later.”
“Your memory is failing you quite regularly this afternoon,” Ruith said dryly.
“’Tis all about timing, my lad,” Soilléir said, “as your lady knows now that she’s distracted me from the game and I am in peril. Sarah, tell me of your plans whilst I think on a way out of this trap you’ve laid.”
“I had no plans for a specific place,” she admitted. “It was initially enough just to be free of Shettlestoune. I can earn my way by weaving, so perhaps there is some remote village somewhere in need of my particular skills.” She paused. “Somewhere where I can simply be ... well, not involved in magic any longer.” She wanted to give him an entire list of reasons she loathed magic and its practitioners, but that was a little difficult when she was sitting with a man who held so much power in his hand, yet seemed so ordinary.