knew all too well.
Only now that quest included a woman who had relied on him for protection and been repaid with harm.
He turned away from a path he wouldn’t have seriously considered and started quickly down the other because the truth was, the quest was no longer just about finding Sarah’s ridiculous brother and stopping him from trying to make magic far beyond his capabilities. He had himself loosed things in Ceangail’s keep that would need to be contained, he had lost spells that could wreak untold damage on the world, and he had failed to hold on to a woman whose only error in judgement had been desiring to do good.
And to trust him.
He would give her no reason to regret that trust in the future. Once she was found, he would seek out the closest safe haven for them both where they could hide until she was rested and he had unraveled a mystery or two. Perhaps by then he would have had the time to consider just who might have protected him with magic whose main purpose was to destroy.
He wasn’t sure he would care for the answer.
But have it he would, then he would leave Sarah safely behind and follow the trail of his father’s spells himself. There was naught but darkness in front of him and darkness following, and he would be damned if she would have any more of it.
He pushed aside his absolute dread that he would find her too late and concentrated on the tracks before him.
He could do nothing else.
Two
Sarah of Doìre was finished with mages.
She had, she would readily admit, entertained that thought more than once over the course of her life. Being the daughter of the witchwoman Seleg had given her ample opportunity to watch magic and its practitioners at close range. Her brother Daniel, whose ultimate goal was to destroy the world with his self-proclaimed mighty magic, had laid yet more twigs upon the fire of her aversion.
But the last score of hours had turned aversion into full-blown loathing.
She leaned her pounding head back against the tree she’d been propped up against and tried to think clearly. It was possible that her ill feelings toward those of a more magical inclination might have been exacerbated by her recent journey made with her own poor self cast over a horse’s withers where her head had apparently bounced quite enthusiastically against its shoulder. She hadn’t blamed her very unmagical captors for setting her rather ungently against a tree, nor had she faulted them for tying her wrists and ankles together. How else could they have kept her where she was meant to stay? But there were others she could most certainly blame for the events leading up to her sitting where she was, freezing, and blame them she would.
Better that than the alternative of giving in to the fear that threatened to steal her breath. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could bear the darkness, and the things that lurked in the darkness—
She let out her breath slowly and tried to think about something else, anything else. Unfortunately, there was little else on which to fix her thoughts, given that the twisting path that had led her to where she was at present had begun with darkness.
There she’d been, innocently planning to shake Doìre’s dust off the hem of her cloak, when she’d become embroiled in a bit of do-gooding she’d thought she could manage. It was only as she’d stood in the great hall of the keep at Ceangail that she’d learned how unyielding and merciless the world of magic could be, how awful mages with terrible spells could become, and just how far out of her depth she was.
If that had been all, she supposed she would have been justified in her loathing of all things magical, but there had been more. The final blow had been discovering that a man she had unbent enough to actually have a few fond feelings for had not been a simple swordsman as he’d led her to believe, but instead Ruithneadh of Ceangail, youngest son of one of the most vile black mages in the history of the Nine Kingdoms.
She didn’t trust easily, but there had been moments over the past month where she had actually looked at Ruith and felt herself lower her sword, as it were. It had been poorly done. She would tell him that just as soon as she could get close enough to him to