Spellweaver (15 page)

In time as she managed to take another pair of steps across the marble pavers, the smell became less troubling than intoxicating. She took another deep breath, then another step forward.

She studied the flagstones beneath her feet, wondering why it was they were alternating blocks of grey and black, then realized she wasn’t alone. She looked up to find a man now standing behind the bench, all strength and terrible beauty. He was smiling pleasantly, holding his hands open, as if he invited her to come enjoy the coolness of the contents of the pitcher on the delicate table, the shelter of the tree, and the comfort of a place to sit and be safe.

Safe
.

The very thought of it was such a profound relief, she started to walk forward—

Only to find herself distracted by something she couldn’t quite hear. It bothered her, that sound, interrupting the music and buzzing against her ear. She swatted it away in annoyance and tried to concentrate on what was in front of her. The buzzing didn’t abate; it increased. It took several minutes, but she finally realized that it wasn’t a fly or a bee troubling her, it was a voice coming from behind her.

Sarah
.

She looked over her shoulder. Soilléir was standing there, quite a ways away, as it happened, surrounded by a rather ordinary light that seemed dull when compared to the glorious sparkle of what she’d been walking toward. She realized it was his voice she was hearing, cutting across the music and fraying it at the edges. She wondered why he’d followed her, then found herself growing increasingly annoyed at him that he’d interrupted the first moment of true pleasure she’d had since Ruith had dragged her into a place she hadn’t wanted to go. She frowned at him, then turned away, back to what was so much more appealing.

“Sarah, is it?” the dark-haired, exceptionally handsome man in front of her said, still smiling. “What a lovely name. And how fortunate that you are here in time for luncheon.”

Sarah couldn’t have agreed more. She wasn’t sure she’d eaten in Soilléir’s chamber. She’d been weaving, true, and trying to ignore Soilléir’s servant, who had simply stood in his accustomed place near the window, swathed in robe and cowl, no doubt keeping watch over her that she didn’t poach any of his master’s more valuable texts. If he hadn’t gone on his self-appointed mission to fetch her something to eat, she never would have managed to escape Soilléir’s chamber, she was certain of that—

“Sarah!”

Sarah paused in mid-step and frowned a bit more. That wasn’t Soilléir. When Soilléir said her name, his voice washed across her mind in a particularly magelike way. This new voice was nothing more than some fool standing behind her and shouting.

She turned back over her shoulder to see a man standing next to Soilléir, someone who wasn’t covered in light, however garish. She realized, with a start, that it was Ruith. He and Soilléir began to argue, which somehow annoyed her more than their calling her had. Their voices grated on her and made her feel very out of sorts.

Not like the man in front of her. The more she looked at him, the more at peace she felt. Best of all, he didn’t look like he would use a spell unless the welcoming smile on his face could be called magic. She happily turned her back on Ruith and Soilléir both, ignored Soilléir’s repeated calling of her name, then took another step forward.

She paused, because it suddenly felt to her as if the world held its breath for something truly unprecedented. She couldn’t believe that could be for her sake, so she took another step forward—

And the world rent in twain.

Or, more precisely, she did.

It was the most horrendous, terrifying,
unbearable
thing that had ever happened to her. If having Gair’s spell attack her arm had been painful, this was agony. She dropped to her knees, feeling as if her body had been torn from her, leaving her kneeling there on the hard, wet marble in her soul alone.

And then she opened her eyes.

And she saw.

She wasn’t standing in the middle of a garden; she was standing in the middle of death. The flowers should have been flowers, but they were actually thorns pretending to be flowers. The moss wasn’t a soft carpet beneath her feet, it was the putrid leavings of spells that had been cast aside like refuse. The bench was a cage built to trap and hold those foolish enough to wander under a sky that wasn’t overcast, it was full of dank, rotted spells of Olc. She could see them writhing and twisting in a wind of their own making, reaching out for her.

She looked at the master of Olc—and she now knew him for who he was—and didn’t manage to even open her mouth to cry out before his spell slammed into her, stealing her breath. The only reason it didn’t steal her life was because of what Soilléir had thrown over her the split second before Droch had cast his spell. As it was, Droch’s spell sent her sprawling back along the marble. She crawled to her feet, then looked down in horror at what she was standing on.

It was a chessboard.

She knew without being told that Droch had intended her to be one of the pieces.

Soilléir stepped in front of her suddenly and faced Droch. Sarah would have warned him to be careful, but she supposed he knew that already. That, and she feared that if she opened her mouth, sounds would come out that would terrify them all.

She was pulled backward. She knew it was Ruith even though she had closed her eyes to the terrible battle going on in front of her. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to help, as she could see it just the same.

Droch and Soilléir were fighting with spells. Droch’s were easily identified for what they were. Soilléir’s, though, were not. They sounded familiar—or at least the language did—but she couldn’t place it. Then again, her education was perhaps not what it should have been in order to find herself moving comfortably in such a high and lofty place as the schools of wizardry.

She realized she was babbling—in her own head, no less—but she found she couldn’t stop. To say she was terrified was to completely understate the chill that enveloped her. To think how close she had come to walking willingly into not death but something far worse ...

“Let’s go,” Ruith said hoarsely.

She couldn’t move. Ruith must have realized that as well when he almost wrenched her arm from her shoulder.

“I can’t get my feet free,” she said, feeling terribly alarmed. Actually,
alarmed
didn’t describe it. She was completely panicked. She looked at Ruith, who was now standing in front of her. “Help me—nay, you cannot. Soilléir must—”

He cursed, then looked about himself, presumably for something to use in getting her feet free of spells she could see had already wrapped themselves over her toes and were now beginning to crawl up to her ankles. She pulled one of her knives out of the back of the belt of her dress, bent, and slit the spells, leaving them waving frantically, just as the ones she’d cut in Ceangail had done.

The smell of them was so vile, she almost lost her breakfast right there in the midst of more spells that sprang up out of nothing and reached for her.

Ruith swung her up in his arms and carried her out of the garden.

“What of Soilléir?”

“He’ll manage.”

“Can’t you help—” she began, then she shut her mouth. Of course he couldn’t help. Well, he perhaps
could
have, but she knew he wouldn’t.

Though after what she’d seen, she could understand why he was so adverse to magic in general and Olc in particular. She felt a rush of sympathy for his poor mother, having had to endure all those years in Ceangail with its halls slathered in vile spells. She wondered how often Sarait had been there, if she’d managed to shield herself and her children from the brunt of that horrible magic, if Gair had ever been anything but darkness.

She wondered what horrors Ruith had been subjected to, having spent even a part of his youth in that terrible place.

All of which reminded her that since she didn’t want anything to do with magic and mages, she couldn’t have anything to do with Ruith.

“I can walk,” she said, trying to crawl out of his arms.

He let her down reluctantly, but put his arm around her shoulders. She would have told him she didn’t need any help, but she wasn’t entirely sure she could manage any sort of escape on her own. It was all she could do to resheath her knife.

She stumbled along a stone-floored corridor worn smooth by the passage of countless boots over the centuries, then finally had to close her eyes against the sight of the trails left behind by those feet, shadows she certainly hadn’t been able to see earlier but now could for some reason.

Simple. Unmagical. Very far away from anything to do with mages. Aye, that was the life for her. She finally gathered enough strength from that thought to push away from Ruith—

Only to step forward, then fall flat on her face. She realized at that moment that she was so ill, she wasn’t entirely certain she wouldn’t sick up her breakfast on the first thing that moved in front of her eyes. She had never drunk anything stronger than Master Franciscus’s mildest ale—and that sparingly—but she had once smelled something her mother had brewed which had made her almost as ill as she felt now, as if she couldn’t scrub the smell or its terrible after-effects out of her skull.

Ruith’s hand was suddenly against her forehead, smoothing her hair back from her face.

“I can’t move,” she whispered.

“’Tis the spells.”

“I’m going to be ill.”

“Well, we’re in front of Droch’s door,” Ruith said quietly. “It might be fitting.”

She would have heaved herself to her feet and bolted, but she found she could only rest her cheek against the cold stone passageway floor and keep her eyes closed. Ruith continued to stroke her hair, as if he sought to comfort her.

And then suddenly, he was pulling her up and into his arms. “Hold on.”

Sarah felt the world spin wildly, but she’d heard the shouting as well and had no desire to find herself sprawled in the passageway in front of Droch’s door whilst Droch was trying to get inside his chamber to put his feet up in front of the fire and grumble about conquests unmade. She clapped her hand over her mouth and kept her gorge down where it belonged through sheer willpower alone.

Ruith stopped eventually and used his foot to bang on a door. The door opened, then a man gasped. Ruith pushed into a chamber, sending that someone stumbling backward. Sarah didn’t protest as Ruith carried her a bit longer, then set her down in a chair. She leaned her head back against the wood and kept her eyes closed, trying not to tremble.

She failed miserably. She shook so hard, her teeth chattered. She wasn’t sure what had been worse, being so beguiled by Olc that she had come within a heartbeat of casting herself into its depths or finding herself suddenly aware of just what she had thought so beautiful.

She wondered if Gair had ever been in that place, or if he had realized all along what he was doing, chasing after the illusion that was Olc.

She opened her eyes and looked at Ruith, who was sitting on a low stool in front of her, watching her closely. The worry in his eyes was difficult to look at. Worry, and something else, actually.

Shame.

She would have told him that wasn’t necessary, but she found she couldn’t speak. And that was because she was suddenly seeing things she had never seen before in her life, things she’d never dreamed existed.

The man sitting in front of her was Ruith, true, but he was suddenly somehow much more than that. He was his house in the mountains, built from rock that had sent down taproots deep into the earth, immovable, stark, implacably resolute. Yet beside that house, around it, under it, were springs that should have bubbled up and flowed down to form a mighty, rushing river full of magic. She could see the place where the river should have been running through his soul, where the magic would laugh with delight as it tumbled over rock and falls, always pure and full of the birthright of generations of his ancestors who had been full of magic themselves. Aye, there was Olc as well, but it wasn’t part of him. It had fixed itself to the windows of his house, crowding out the light, making things seem other than they were.

But it wasn’t part of him.

She heard the door slam behind her and flinched at the riotously colored spell of protection that sprang up all along the ceiling, draped immediately down all the walls, spread out instantly over the entire floor. It was lovely, true, yet hard as steel and just as impervious.

“Damn him to hell,” Soilléir snarled as he strode over to the fire-place. “I vow one day ...” He swore a bit more, then cast himself down into a chair by the fire and let out his breath slowly. He put his fingers over his eyes. “Hate is unhealthy.”

Ruith only pursed his lips.

Sarah found she couldn’t look at Soilléir with any more ease than she’d looked at Ruith. Whereas Ruith was relatively spartan when it came to who he was and how he’d allowed himself to grow, Soilléir was a towering thunderstorm full of power and might and magic that she couldn’t begin to fathom. She blinked and found that he had suddenly changed, becoming as gentle as sunlight filtering down through spring leaves in a small, intimate glade. She supposed he was somehow, incomprehensibly, both.

She pulled herself back into herself to find him watching her with a faint smile.

“Forgive me, Sarah, my dear,” he said quietly. “I could have done that better.”

“Done what better?” Ruith asked sharply.

“Opened her eyes,” Soilléir said. “I was, unfortunately, in a good deal of haste.”

“What,” Sarah croaked, “did you do?”

Soilléir rubbed his hands together as if they pained him, much as Ruith had done that first night when they’d been talking about ... well, she couldn’t remember what they’d been talking about. She just remembered how Ruith had looked, as if his hands had wrought something that had distressed him somehow.