the seven who proudly had their names inscribed on the front gates combined.
He shoved aside his unproductive thoughts. They would reach Soilléir’s solar without incident, then he would beg for a bed large enough where he might pull Sarah down next to him and throw a leg over her so she didn’t escape before he could begin his apology. Indeed, keeping her captive might be the only thing that allowed him to spew it out.
Then he would turn his mind to the true reason he’d come to Beinn òrain, something he’d scarce been able to look at on that interminable journey across the plains of Ailean. Something that felt a great deal like Fate. Again. Pushing him along a path he hadn’t wanted to take, a path that had seemingly been laid out under his feet for a score of years, simply waiting for him to find it.
He could only hope to face that path without his soul shattering.
Four
Sarah slipped her hands up her sleeves and walked alongside Ruith with as much energy as she could manage—which wasn’t much. She didn’t dare lose her way, though. If her first views of Buidseachd had left her with little liking for the hulking keep sitting atop its bluff, scowling down on the poor inhabitants of Beinn òrain, a closer acquaintance with it had only worsened her opinion. She’d seen the spells draped over the walls and falling to the bulwark like heavy drapes, though she would admit, reluctantly, that most of those spells hadn’t been anything out of the ordinary. She hadn’t wanted to look any closer on the off chance that she might see something she didn’t like.
She put her shoulders back as best she could and marched on doggedly. She wouldn’t know what other sorts of echoes of cast spells filled the place because she had no intention of being there long enough to find out. Her mother, surprisingly, would likely have agreed. Seleg hadn’t done anything but disparage the university every chance she had, without giving any specifics as to why she might have disliked it so. Sarah had assumed that had been because Daniel had been so keen to attend it, which her mother had no doubt considered a slight to her own magical tutelage. For herself, Sarah could hardly face the irony of her situation. Her recently made vow to have nothing to do with mages was still fresh in her mind, yet now she found herself surrounded by no doubt the largest nest of them in all the Nine Kingdoms.
She turned a jaundiced eye on the blond man walking but a pace or two in front of them. He had, she could say with absolute certainty, simply stepped out of thin air and stopped that other agitated mage from asking all sorts of questions she’d been sure Ruith wouldn’t want to answer. It wasn’t possible that he was a master of anything but the most rudimentary of spells given that he didn’t look any older than Ruith. Perhaps he was an apprentice, or an underling sent by someone to fetch Ruith, or had just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
She squinted upward, just to help herself feel as if she were still in the world and not lost in some terrible dream full of spells and mages and things she couldn’t begin to understand. The sky was already dark with heavy clouds, but she found that the morning had grown even darker, as if a strange and unpleasant fog had suddenly sprung up.
She realized she had wandered away from Ruith and their guide only after she found herself standing at a convergence of passageways. She had lost all the light she’d had, lost Ruith, lost everything but an overwhelming desire to find a place to sit down and rest. There was a cool, not unpleasant breath of air coming from the passageway on her right. She turned toward it and started to walk only to have someone catch her and jerk her backward. She spun around, curses halfway out of her mouth, only to find Ruith standing there with the mage at his side. They were looking at her with no small bit of alarm.
“I’m tired,” she said crossly, because it was all she could manage. She pulled her arm away from Ruith’s hand. “I wasn’t lost.”
Apparently he didn’t believe her. He took her again by the arm and the pain was so intense, she thought she just might faint.