The White Spell (Nine Kingdoms #10)(93)

Hearn laughed. “I thought so too.”

“I can’t ride that monster,” Acair said. “He’ll kill me!”

“Or just do great amounts of damage to you,” Hearn said. “If that happens, I suppose Mistress Léirsinn will just have to tie you to her saddle and drag you along wherever she goes.”

“I don’t like this,” Acair said faintly.

“I would imagine many of your victims have said the same thing over the years.”

“I made certain to render them mute before I did anything to them,” Acair said without thinking.

“You might want to keep that sort of thing to yourself,” Hearn suggested, “before you give that horse any ideas.” He shrugged. “Take him or leave him behind. It’s all the same to me.”

Acair looked at the stallion, who looked as if his fondest wish was to kick the life out of him, then looked at Léirsinn. “What do you think?” he asked. “And pray let it be along the lines of, this beast is not ridable.”

“I would say he is a challenge,” she said, charitably.

“Which means he frightens you.”

She looked at him from clear green eyes. “Nothing frightens me.”

He could only hope that would always be so. He didn’t want to begin to think of all the ways she might be inspired to revisit that declaration.

She turned to Hearn. “Was he mistreated?” she asked.

“Perhaps less mistreated than simply ignored. He was rescued by someone who thought I might want to rehabilitate him.”

“Can he do anything?” Acair asked in a last-ditch effort to perhaps hear something that would allow him to be very grateful for the offer of a horse but unfortunately forced to politely decline that same offer. “Do anything besides look at my arse as if he might like to take a piece out of it, that is. And what’s his name again, if I’m allowed to ask.”

“Sianach,” Hearn said mildly. “Means terror in horsey speak. Or screaming, which is what everyone who rides him seems to do.” He shrugged. “I forget which it is.”

Acair imagined Hearn hadn’t forgotten anything. “Did he name himself, then?”

“Your lady might ask him that after she’s seen what he can do.”

Acair would have said that his lady, who was assuredly not interested in being the like even if he had been—but was absolutely not—interested in a red-haired horse miss who ruined his sleep, was absolutely not going to get anywhere near that beast who had obviously just stepped from someone’s worst nightmare, but he realized he wasn’t going to have a chance to offer his opinion. Léirsinn was already tucking her hair up under a cap she had apparently borrowed from someone. The cap looked rather fresh, so perhaps Hearn had a selection of them for just such an exigency. Acair supposed he might not want to ask.

He also refrained from commenting on how Léirsinn led that damned horse away without trouble, but that might have been because he was preoccupied with not making an ass of himself by wringing his hands. She was a grown woman who knew her business very well. She didn’t need his aid.

He had to remind himself of that several times.

Sianach followed her happily and seemed to be just as fascinated by a bit of her hair that had escaped her cap as any other lad with two good eyes. She stopped, turned, and gave him a look that had him backing up a pace. She tucked that snuffled lock under her cap, then clicked for the horse to follow her. He ducked his head and walked docilely behind her.

“And all is as it should be,” Hearn murmured.

Acair shot him a look full of as much irritation as he dared use, then turned back to look at exactly what he was apparently about to saddle himself with. Léirsinn put a rope around the horse’s neck and started to run him around her in the usual circles. Acair watched for a moment or two, then realized things were not going to go exactly as they usually did.

The pony reared, roared, then came back to earth as a dragon. He shot Acair a pointed look, snorted out a bit of fire in the same direction, then folded his wings up and trotted—well, waddled, actually—in that same circle around Léirsinn.

She only took a deep breath, then snapped a whip against the dirt behind his long, scaly tail.

From there, the shapes only became more outlandish and substantially more terrifying. Dragons, things that slithered, nightmares on four feet. Acair was actually fairly impressed—and a little unnerved, frankly—by what he was seeing.

“Ah, watch how she manages him,” Hearn said, sounding pleased.

Acair shot him a dark look. “Don’t suggest she’s planning the same thing with me.”

“Lad, I don’t think she’s planning anything with you, something which you would be mourning if you had the good sense the gods gave a cockroach.”

“I think I should be offended.”

“The truth can be painful.”

Acair studied him, then nodded knowingly. “I see where you’re going with this. I’ve heard you’re a terrible matchmaker.”

“Nay, I’m a very good matchmaker.”

“My father would say I should wed a princess.”

“Then why haven’t you?”

Acair shrugged. “I have an unsavory past. Your average crown-wearing papa doesn’t care for that sort of thing.”