rest of my life convincing you that I l—er, I mean like you very much indeed and would be honored to spend equal amounts of time making sure your life was full of whatever you loved most that I could provide.” He paused and smiled briefly. “Put simply, that is.”
She took a step backward because it was either that or throw herself into his arms, which she most certainly couldn’t do. She held out her hand in her most manly fashion. “Thank you.”
He looked at her hand, looked at her, then took her hand and shook it slowly. “You’re welcome.”
“You should go now,” she said, pulling her hand away and tucking it and her other one under her arms so they didn’t do anything untoward. “You know, to do those manly unpleasant things you need to do.”
He nodded, then opened the door. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be.”
“I’ll wait.”
He smiled briefly, then slipped out the door. Sarah locked it, then heard his spell lock as well, much as the spell had done in his grandfather’s garden. She stood there with her hand on the door, tangled in the spell he’d wrought, and thought about the magic she’d seen in that garden. Poor Sarait, who had lived no doubt for centuries in that sort of loveliness, then found herself in Ceangail. Sarah wondered if she had known ahead of time just what Gair was, or if he had simply presented her with what he thought she would want to see. She pitied Ruith and his siblings for what they had seen and Ruith for what she feared he might see in the future.
She couldn’t say she was looking forward to seeing any of it herself.
She looked at the magic in front of her and trailed her fingers through the strands of Fadaire she could see, strands that were woven with the faint sound of snow as it fell through bitterly cold air and the soft fall of rain as it fell in the spring. Ruith had done that, she was sure, for no other reason than to please her.
And she had insisted he chat up ten princesses before he looked at her.
She was daft as a duck.
She was also weary beyond belief. She left the spell whispering softly behind her and walked over to the fire where she could dig in her pack and see what Rùnach—another very lovely son Sarait had no doubt been very proud of—had packed for her.
She didn’t go far, simply because she didn’t have the energy to. Fortunately a polite foray into the pack produced a child’s primer, written in what she assumed was Soilléir’s native tongue, a set of knitting needles, and several particularly lovely skeins of yarn packed tightly into the side of her pack. She fingered the yarn for a moment or two, then set it aside and opened the book.
She couldn’t say with any confidence that she was pronouncing correctly what she was attempting to sound out, but she continued on in spite of that. She had to pause after a few pages because there was something about the sound of that tongue against her ear that tugged at her in a way she couldn’t identify. She couldn’t say it made her uneasy, for it didn’t. There was something attached to the words, though, something that tinged them with a sadness she couldn’t shake off.
She attempted another handful of pages, then had to shut the book because she thought she just might weep. She put her hand over the worn cover, then stared into the fire for a moment or two.
It occurred to her, with a start, that she had recognized a few of the words, not because she had seen them before, nor because she had heard them in Soilléir’s poetry.
She had heard them somewhere else.
She frowned. There was a mystery there that only became deeper the more she looked at it. It would have been so much easier for Soilléir to have simply translated the runes on her knives for her, especially since it was obvious he had recognized them as ones coming from his native land, but he had chosen not to. Why hadn’t he just told her what she needed to know instead of sending her off on a journey with books in hand and no one to help her?
Well, he was a mage, and they were unpredictable. Perhaps he’d foreseen the fact that Ruith would disappear for hours at a time and leave her without something