The White Spell (Nine Kingdoms #10)(10)
He could only muster up a lackluster amount of enthusiasm over the thought of murdering them both, which would have alarmed him if he’d had the wherewithal to examine his own appalling condition. He wasn’t sure he could state it often enough: do-gooding had done him a terrible disservice. Gone, at least temporarily, were the days when he’d looked forward with glee to a well-planned and flawlessly executed piece of mischief. But a fond memory were the long afternoons when he had sat in this exclusive salon or that high-brow inn, ignored his hosts, and made with a languid hand lists of vulnerable mages and monarchs. All that was left was the shell of a man who couldn’t put up a decent argument as to why he shouldn’t spend the next year shoveling horse manure.
Damnation, he was a ruthless, remorseless seeker of power and a damned good conversationalist at dinner. That he’d had to remind himself of that more than once on his journey south was simply beyond the pale.
He rubbed his chest absently. That damned Fadairian spell of healing Rùnach had used on him the year before had somehow taken root inside him. He wasn’t sure quite how to remove it short of either cutting his own chest open or making a polite social call to his half-brother and threatening him with something dire if he didn’t undo what he’d done. There was the question of whether or not either would kill him, so perhaps that was something that could be put off for a bit longer.
The truth was, he was doomed to endure that damned spell for at least another year until he could remedy the situation himself. All that was left for him to do at present was soldier on as best he could and make note of slights that would need to be repaid.
Breakfast. He latched onto that idea with a fair bit of enthusiasm and in spite of his doubts about the quality of victuals he would find in a place that smelled so strongly of rotting fish. Food was food and he hadn’t had anything to eat since the disgusting fare he’d choked down the night before.
He shook his head wearily. Ah, for the days when he had enjoyed fine meals wrapped in elegant evenings spent in exquisite surroundings. He had enjoyed many of the same and, better still, he wasn’t too stupid to understand why. Eligible—and not-so-eligible—maidens wanted him within reach because he was dangerous, their mothers wanted him in their salons because he knew which fork to use when, and husbands and fathers wanted him contained in their halls where they could keep an eye on him.
He had never bothered to inform those fathers and husbands that they would have been completely unable to stop him if he decided to do something vile. If they couldn’t have seen that for themselves, he hadn’t had the patience to enlighten them.
The women, though, now there was something he would miss. Sweet perfume, witty repartee, lovely gowns, decent entertainments . . . in short, he’d had all the benefits of being Gair’s bastard son without any of the true dirty work of being black mage.
He paused, wrestled briefly with his damnable and quite inescapable propensity to always tell the truth, then relented. The truth was, he had walked in places that would have given his father nightmares, all in search of the elusive and unattainable. Those places had been very dark indeed.
Of course, he had balanced that out quite nicely by poaching spells and vexing other mages as often as his social schedule permitted, always taking time out to make life as much a hell on earth as possible for Sarait’s children and those other bastards his father has sired, including his own brothers, but what else could he have done? A man needed things to do.
There was something to be said for settling down, he supposed, but his father had been much older than he when he’d had his first serious liaison, something that had resulted in Acair’s eldest bastard half-brother, a dashing if not completely stupid man named Glamoach. The others, a motley collection of perhaps a dozen lads—it was impossible to get an accurate count—who seemed to have managed to escape their mothers’ wombs without having had anything heavy fall on them immediately afterward, were of varying ages but sharing the same unpleasant personalities and bitter feelings toward their sire.
Acair didn’t share those feelings. He had learned over the years to be simply indifferent to Gair. He had watched his own brothers angst over winning their father’s approbation, watched his other half-brothers spend their very long lives trying to match him, and watched his half-brothers by that elven princess do everything they could to stop him from doing what he damned well pleased. He had determined that, for himself, he would stay out of the fray, use his father’s reputation to gain entrance where useful, and distance himself from the man everywhere else.
He had envisioned his life stretching out in front of him in a long series of glittering parties, his post endlessly containing large stacks of invitations to other things, and perhaps even another stab at draining the world of all its magic. His quiver, as it were, was full of useful skills and he had a code of honor that even one of those lads from Neroche might envy.
Added to all that magnificence had been the poaching of many terrible spells, the humiliating of many annoying mages, and an endless amount of the good-natured ribbing that went on amongst gentlemen of his class. If his peers had been less-than-pleased about his nicking their art, priceless treasures, and the occasional wife or daughter, what could he say? Some people just didn’t have a sense of sport.
It had been a very good life indeed.
But it was obviously a life that was out of his reach for the foreseeable future. He glanced over his shoulder to find that damned spell standing a handful of paces behind him, peering at Sàraichte just as he was. If he hadn’t known better, he would have suspected it shared his thoughts about the truly dismal appearance of the place.