Ruith actually considered it, even though the little stinging things Amitán had tossed at him whilst he’d been captive in Ceangail’s great hall were still quite fresh in his mind. Unfortunately, he possessed nothing—or, rather, nothing he would use—to counter what had taken his half brother in its painful embrace.
“I think you’ll need a mage for what ails you.”
Amitán looked at him with naked hatred on his face. “I’ll find you ... and kill you.”
“I imagine you’ll try,” Ruith agreed.
Amitán struggled against the spell that seemed to be wrapping itself ever more tightly around him. Ruith wasn’t above seeing a black mage come to his own bad end, but he wasn’t one to enjoy overmuch the watching of that journey there. He started to walk away, then paused. He turned back to Amitán.
“There appears to be one end of the spell near your left boot,” he conceded. “I think if you could reach it, you might be able to unravel the whole thing.”
Amitán wasted a goodly amount of energy condemning Ruith to a score of different deaths, each more painful than the last, before he apparently decided he would be better off saving his breath. Ruith left him to it.
He left the camp in a southerly direction, following the tracks of a handful of horses. He hadn’t gone twenty paces before what had struck him as odd before presented itself as slightly more than odd.
Someone had made a rent in that spell of protection. He was willing to bet his knives that the maker of the spell and the maker of the rent were not the same mage simply because it made no sense to weave a spell then slice it in half. But if that was the case, who had cut through that spell, and why?
He leaned down absently to adjust one of the knives stuck down the side of his boots and found the answer.
The pages from his father’s book of spells that he had rolled up and stuck down his boots were gone.
He turned immediately and strode back to the camp. It cost him precious time, but he forced himself to methodically look through everything his guardsmen had left behind. He ignored the continuing shrieks of his bastard brother as he rifled through packs and searched all about the tree where he’d been bound. The spells were gone. He started to curse, then felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
Someone was watching him from the shadows.
He straightened his knives, furiously considering the facts he was now faced with. Sarah was captured and carried off to points unknown, he was being stalked by an unnamed mage—either the maker of the spell of protection or the mage who’d broken through it to take the spells Ruith had been carrying—and his magic was buried, which left him unable to address either problem easily. But if he released his magic and someone took it, he would be unquestionably powerless, which would leave Sarah alone, unprotected, unable to fight what he was quite sure would be hunting her.
Then again, perhaps the fact that he was still breathing said something about who was following him. Apparently he was worth more to that mage alive than dead, which led him to wonder if perhaps his unexpected benefactor intended to follow him and take his magic at a later time.
That left him with only one choice. He would find Sarah, then remain as attractive a prize as possible until he could get both himself and Sarah somewhere safe. He didn’t dare hope the mage standing motionless under the trees behind where he’d been captive would simply give up and go home.
He left Amitán trying to bring his foot up toward his face where he could presumably take hold of the end of the spell with his teeth and pull, then walked off toward the south, looking for tracks. There were two sets: one made by horsemen and the other made by a single soul.
That single set of tracks would eventually lead him all the way back to his own house where he could shut his door on things he didn’t care to look at anymore. It was the road he had taken as a lad of ten winters when he’d been seeking refuge from the storm. But he was no longer a lad of ten winters, and he had taken on a quest willingly, knowing that it would lead him into a darkness he