The White Spell (Nine Kingdoms #10)(19)

He looked down at his boots, then back at the bird. Damn him if the beast didn’t laugh at him and flap away. Acair stared at his boots and supposed pigeon leavings were no worse than horse droppings. Since at least one of the two seemed to be his lot in life for the foreseeable future, no sense in getting himself in a snit over it.

He listened to the thoughts running through what was left of his mind and could only shake his head over them. He who had never once appeared in a salon with a hair out of place, reduced to a stable lad with droppings on his boots. A sorry state of affairs, truly.

He attempted to work out an unfortunately large collection of knots in his neck only to realize that the collection extended down the middle of his back where he couldn’t reach. No wonder those horses rolled about in the dirt, scratching things they couldn’t reach either. He understood.

He shifted so he could lean back against a wall—something that took absolutely no effort given the straitness of the space he occupied—and decided to take a moment or two to re-examine how he had come to be wallowing in the misery that had become his life. He knew he would soon be called upon to once again take up his sword, as it were, and see to the evening’s dirty business so ’twas best to seize the peace for thinking when he found it.

There he had been a few years earlier, going about his daily affairs as usual, spending his energies plotting and scheming in his accustomed fashion, when things had begun to go slightly awry. Just little things: a missed opportunity to do someone an ill turn; a scheme foiled by the slightest hesitation before dropping a well-deserved spell of death; a heartbeat too many spent looking at a potential victim and wondering how it might feel to be stalked by someone as evil as he himself was. Little things, true, but unsettling nonetheless.

It had been almost enough to leave him wondering if perhaps he hadn’t been at the business of black magery just a bit too long.

Knowing that that couldn’t possibly be the case, he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and set to his most brilliant piece of business to date with renewed purpose and enthusiasm. A theft of the world’s magic had seemed like a fitting way to spend the previous fall, though he’d certainly been laying the spells necessary for such a feat for far longer than that. Indeed, if he were to be entirely honest, the thought had occurred to him several years earlier when he’d decided that draining his sire of all his magic just wasn’t going to be enough to repay the stingy old bastard for an endless list of abuses. What he’d wanted was to hold the world’s magic in his hand and mock his father for not having had the imagination to do the same.

The notion had been rendered substantially more appealing by his half-brother Ruithneadh’s having done him the favor of leaving Gair trapped in the most uninspired and magickless country in all the Nine Kingdoms. No magic, no traveling about from glittering salon to gilded audience chamber, no cellar of fine wines to accompany sumptuous suppers. That had been a fair punishment, true, but to have done what his sire had never thought to do?

The idea had been irresistible.

He would have managed it if it hadn’t been for that damned Rùnach and his dreamspinning bride, which was a tale better told after a substantial amount of ale. All he knew was that he’d been left with merely dreams of the world’s magic, a spot in his chest that ached from time to time with a truly alarming sort of tingling, and the prospect of a year without a single spell at his fingertips stretching in front of him as if it had been a long, dusty, straight road through country that, unsurprisingly, resembled exactly where he found himself currently loitering.

It could have been worse, he had to concede. He could have been fleeing all over Durial at present in an effort to dodge the spells of that cranky bastard who knew far more dark magic than he ever let on in polite company. Then again, Uachdaran of Léige spent his time digging deep into the mountains. Who knew what he found there?

Well, Acair had a fairly good idea, having done his own bit of digging in an effort to use Durial as a means of siphoning off magic from other places, but he would be the first to admit that dwarvish magic was very odd. He supposed he could spend a century trying to unravel it and still not have all its secrets. Not that he intended to spend any time at it anytime soon.

That Cothromaichian twinkling was something else entirely. Now that he was being shadowed by something created by that damned Soilléir of Cothromaiche, he thought it might be not unthinkable to give as good as he got. The moment he had his power back to hand—not that it wasn’t at present, of course; he was just not stupid enough to use it—he would turn his sights back to that very enticing prize.

“You’re free to take the afternoon off, if you like.”

Acair could scarce believe he was allowing someone else, a stable hand of all people, to enter his chamber without permission, much less tell him when he could move about freely.

Well, again, chamber was too lofty a term for his bit of passageway strewn with what he hardly dared hope was decently clean straw, but he supposed he couldn’t ask for anything more. Perhaps not complaining loudly and at length about the conditions to anyone who would listen could be counted as his good deed for the day.

Doghail tossed him a handful of copper coins. “Your pay. Thought you might want it early.”

Acair looked at the coins he’d caught. “For an entire se’nnight,” he managed.

“You agreed.”