would somehow corrupt us.”
“Did it?”
“Nay,” he said simply, because he couldn’t blame her for asking. “Keir insisted that if we wanted it, we would have to have it for ourselves and watch with our own eyes what it could do. We all then made it a point to overhear my father using it, though we certainly never would have used it ourselves.”
“You were never tempted?” she asked casually.
He pursed his lips. “Never, you heartless disciple of Soilléir of Cothromaiche. Not even when my father was opening that damned well, though perhaps I should have been.” He sighed. “I’d never heard him spew out so many spells in such a short time. First he used his spell of Diminishing on my brothers, then, with their power in hand, he opened the well. He then turned his favorite spell on the well itself only to realize that he was sadly out of his depth. By the time the evil had raced up into the sky and was headed back down toward him, he was frantically trying spells of containment and closing. ’Twas too late for that, I fear.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “’Tis in the past, fortunately. I feel somewhat better about it, knowing that I’m doing something to stop his evil from spreading instead of merely sitting in the mountains, fretting over it.”
She fell silent. He wasn’t sure if she contemplated all his years hiding away in the mountains or wondered if he now had the power to protect her. Perhaps, in the end, it was just better not to know.
“Ruith?”
“Hmmm?”
She leaned her head back against his shoulder and turned toward him slightly. He had a difficult time concentrating on what she was saying. If he’d been a less gentlemanly sort of man—or one with more sense, perhaps—he would have kissed her right then, professed his undying love, then begged her to wed with him. But that might have caused both of them to fall off, so perhaps that was better left for another, less perilous perch.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Trying to.”
“Try harder.”
“The wind is fairly loud,” he said. “And you, if I may say so, are extremely distracting.”
She elbowed him firmly in the gut. He grunted, then wrenched his thoughts away from where they would have lingered quite pleasantly.
“What?” he asked.
“I was wondering,” she said loudly, “given that your father was so interested in taking the magic of others, if he ever worried about someone taking his?”
“Never,” Ruith said automatically, but then he found he couldn’t say anything else.
In truth, he’d honestly never considered it. His father had always seemed all-powerful, a towering figure full of arrogance and strength. The thought of anyone being able to do anything to Gair of Ceangail instead of running from him had certainly never crossed his mind as a child.
But now that he didn’t have his mother and brothers to protect him and he was exposed to the full brunt of whatever black mages wanted to throw at him, he certainly thought about his own mortality more often than he cared to. Surely his sire must have at least considered in passing the same sort of thing.
He tightened his arms around Sarah briefly. “Nay, he never would have, but I’ll think on it just the same, if you like.”
“At least it will keep you awake.”
He smiled. “I won’t fall asleep.”
“I know I certainly won’t,” she said with a shiver.
He wrapped his arms more securely around her, then rested his chin on her shoulder and gave some thought to things he hadn’t considered before. His father, who had spent more time than he would have admitted to looking over his shoulder, wouldn’t have left himself unprotected, in spite of his belief in his own invincibility. Surely.
What if he had created a spell to counter Lothar’s spell of Taking and Droch’s attempt at the like?
Or what if he had suffered a spontaneous and quite unwholesome bout of altruism and created a spell to restore what had been taken with his own spell of Diminishing?
The thought was intriguing, but Ruith wasn’t certain it was worth thinking on too seriously. His father never would have let his magic be taken, so he had likely never thought seriously about needing to find a way to have it restored. He certainly wouldn’t have given such a spell to anyone else. As for using it himself, on himself, he wouldn’t have had the magic to use it had all his own power been taken.
Then again, perhaps even if another mage managed