He will know if I perish. He won’t leave you here alone.”
The last galled him to say out loud, but more galling would have been the thought that he’d left Sarah unprotected.
Which, he supposed, was why he was willingly trying to find the place where his soul would shatter and doing so by presenting himself to a place that judged mercilessly, just to see if it would reject him.
Sarah said nothing. She merely squeezed his hand again and waited.
Ruith took a deep breath, then reached out with a trembling hand and opened the latch of the gate.
He didn’t feel anything amiss, and he still drew breath. It was promising, but not overly. His grandfather, it could be said, was nothing if not imaginative whilst about the happy business of tormenting miscreants.
Ruith walked inside, drawing Sarah behind him. He shut the gate and felt his grandfather’s glamour drape down behind him and seal itself with a click. Sarah shivered, but he supposed that came more from the twilight mist rather than the spell.
“Still breathing,” he said, a little more breathlessly than he would have liked. He looked at the path beneath his feet, trying not to think about the last time he’d walked up it. It had been with his mother, Rùnach, and Gille. In fact he could almost see them hurrying up the way in front of him, laughing, heedless of the magic that protected them as only lads who’d enjoyed its benefits for the whole of their lives could be. The path had been lit, of course, because of his mother and his brothers.
“What now?” Sarah asked.
“We carry on.” He nodded toward the path. “That leads upward to a bower. A lovely place, truly. Happily secluded and undeniably safe.” He hesitated. “I would make light—”
“We’ll manage without it.”
He supposed they’d both managed over the years with less light than they would have liked. He promised himself a decent bit of werelight at the top of the hill, but until then ... well, until then, he would just make do.
A bit like he’d been doing for the past score of years.
He squeezed Sarah’s hand, then started up the path. He felt as if he were walking into a battle, just waiting for the first blow to fall, the first arrow to find home in his chest, the first sound of a knife slicing through the—
Sarah gasped.
He looked up, then froze.
Lights had begun to appear in the trees, faintly where he stood, but more brightly as the path wound upward. The flowers on either side of the path began to glow as well, as if they were, well, pleased at something. Ruith struggled to breathe normally.
“They’re doing it for you,” he managed.
“Don’t be daft,” she said without hesitation. “They’re doing it for you.”
He wanted to curse, but he thought that might be inappropriate in his current location. He supposed Sarah had seen him at his worst—or very near to it—so there was no shame in a very minor display of emotion. Unfortunately, by the time they reached the top of the hill, he feared he’d wept more than a stray tear or two. He dragged his sleeve across his eyes and looked around himself.
The trees were singing a song of Fadaire in which his name was whispered over and over again, as if they not only recognized him, but had longed to see him and wondered why he had been away. The lights sparkled, clear and warm, casting a beautiful light over the bower. He turned around in a circle, stunned at what he was seeing, then looked at Sarah.
“I can’t believe this,” he whispered. He started to say more, but he couldn’t. All the years he’d spent with his back turned on himself, denying himself the pleasure of family, the beauty of his mother’s magic ... all years apparently wasted. He looked at Sarah helplessly.
“Regret is a terrible thing,” she said very quietly.
“Are you reading my thoughts now as well?” he managed.
“Your face, rather.”
He dragged his sleeve across that face, then attempted a smile. “Well, at least we have light. What do you say to a game of cards?”
“Ruith, surely not—”
“Please,” he interrupted. “I’ll weep in truth if I must think on this any longer. Please let’s discuss food, or steel, or the many and varied flaws of a certain master of Buidseachd who talks too much about some things and not enough about others.”
“I would join you in that,” she said, dabbing at her own cheeks with the hem