the fray.
Ruith didn’t imagine he would enjoy that same sort of restraint.
Which was one of the reasons he’d escaped to the bowels of Buidseachd before sunrise that morning—after another night spent on the floor, if anyone had been curious—and trusted that Sarah would be safe inside Soilléir’s solar with its bastion of spells of defense to keep her thus.
Now, he was contentedly doing a good work in looking for ... something. He was most definitely not hiding, nor allowing others to protect him where he should have been willing to protect himself, nor avoiding thinking about his plans for the future.
He was certainly not doing the last.
He sighed deeply and put the book back in its place. As much as he would have preferred to think otherwise, the truth was that whilst he’d been pretending to be what he wasn’t, the world had turned and evil had multiplied.
The question was, what was he willing to do about it?
He would have happily turned his back ... nay, that wasn’t true. He wasn’t sure when it had happened, but he found he couldn’t turn his back happily on anything any longer. Not on Sarah, nor his past, nor his father’s spells. The truth was, he had the power to do something to make up for what his father had done, to contain what his sire had loosed. To not use that power was now almost unthinkable.
He rubbed his hands over his face. He was tired, more tired than he should have been after a life of austerity and not sleeping to avoid his dreams. There were things that troubled him deeply, things he was positive wouldn’t be dealt with easily. Or without magic.
Bad enough that his bastard brothers now knew he was alive. He might have believed they would stay and hover over Ceangail like vultures, waiting for Díolain to die, but he’d seen three of them outside the keep. He’d been unsurprised to see Amitán following him—he supposed he might have insulted the man once too often in his own youth for there to have been no revenge sought—but he’d been quite alarmed to find Táir and Mosach following Sarah.
She sees, you fool, Táir had snarled at him as he’d tied the ends of their spells together in an excellent example of a weaver’s knot, proving yet again that his time in Shettlestoune had been well spent. And we’ll find her and use her for our own purposes.
Ruith hadn’t said as much to Sarah, but he’d spent more than enough time thinking on just what sorts of purposes they might have for her. He would have preferred to believe his half brothers had been reeling from the battle up at the keep and imagined things about her that couldn’t possibly serve them, but he couldn’t. She was just as much in their sights as he was, something that unsettled him greatly. For all he knew, they wanted her to find spells they couldn’t see.
He was resigned to the fact that the rest of his tangle centered around his father’s spells. The trolls he could leave for later. They were obviously made from the evil of his father’s well and whilst he certainly would have preferred they cease to exist, he wasn’t going to waste time chasing them. Not when his father’s spells were out in the world, ready and willing to be used apparently by whomever found them first—which he had to concede would include that mage who had pilfered the trio of them from the depths of his boot.
It was puzzling, that spell of Olc that had protected him. It had been, as he had reluctantly noted before, imminently suitable and very powerful. He supposed wondering who had laid it over him so carefully would take up quite some time. Determining who had managed to slit through it and take Gair’s spells was even less pleasant an activity. Who would have had the power? How had that soul known he had pages from his father’s book stuffed down his boots?
More unsettling still, what did that mage intend to do with what he’d found?
He turned away from that unpleasant thought to face perhaps the worst one of all which was what in the hell he was going to do in those few moments after Sarah had walked out of his life. He could easily speculate on how miserable those moments might be. If he’d had any inkling just how miserable, he never would have opened the door to her that first