“I’ll try.” She stepped forward, then suddenly made a noise of disgust. “I’m through,” she said. She sounded as if she were trying to wipe the remains off her sleeves.
Miach put his hand on Keir’s shoulder. “Let me hide your essence. I think the spell was, as you say, created specifically for you. Hiding who you are should be enough.”
“You can try,” Keir said, sighing deeply.
Miach supposed he could have been gentler, but he also supposed Keir would survive. He drew what little power—and it was a very little, indeed—Keir still had into the center of his being, then ruthlessly buried it along with any bits of himself that spoke too loudly of who he was. Keir gasped, then cursed Miach thoroughly.
“Try now,” Miach suggested.
Keir walked through the spell. Miach followed along behind without hesitation. Keir stood next to Morgan, shivering.
“I wish I could repay you for that,” he said grimly.
“You’re welcome,” Miach said with a smile.
Keir grunted. “I’ll thank you when I think I won’t be ill. For now, let’s run. Straight ahead for a quarter league and hope to heaven no one’s blocked the exit.”
Miach shared that hope. He supposed he might be able to manufacture a trio of shovels, but that wasn’t an appealing alternative to just finding the passageway open. He put his hands on Morgan’s shoulders and put her in front of him.
He had no idea how long it took them to keep up a stumbling run along a floor clogged with things he didn’t want to identify. Bones, rocks, filth: it could have been anything, or nothing at all. He didn’t dare make any light. He merely ran behind Morgan, who was following Keir, and divided his time between trying not to trip over her when she stumbled and listening for things tripping over themselves behind him.
They burst out of the tunnel’s end into a crisp, beautiful twilight. Miach placed a spell of un-noticing over their exit at Keir’s request, then watched as Keir stood there, hunched over with his hands on his thighs, for far longer than was required to simply catch his breath. He straightened eventually, then dragged his sleeve across his eyes. Morgan embraced him before he could say anything, then continued to hold on to him for several minutes in silence. Miach met Keir’s eyes over Morgan’s head.
“Thank you, Miach,” Keir said quietly.
“You would have done the same for me.”
“Perhaps with a bit more finesse,” Keir said with a faint snort. “I feel as if I’ve just had a sledgehammer dropped on my head.”
Miach smiled. “I was in haste.”
“Which we should be,” Morgan said, pulling away from her brother. “I don’t like the feeling here.”
“We’re near the house of the witchwoman of Fàs,” Keir said. “You have it aright, Mhorghain. ’Tis not a place to linger.” He looked at Miach. “Where now?”
“Durial.”
Keir took a deep breath, blew it out, then nodded. “We’ll have to run.”
Miach agreed. They weren’t safe until they were behind King Uachdaran’s very substantial walls and the journey was going to be longer than any of them would care for.
They had no other choice.
Two days later, Miach walked into a chamber full of souls he would have greeted pleasantly at another time. At the moment, he wished so desperately for a bed, he thought he might weep.
As awful as the passageway had been, the subsequent journey had been worse. They’d run for hours at a stretch and rested uneasily when they hadn’t been able to run any longer. Finally, Miach had changed Keir’s shape for him in a very businesslike and brisk manner to save his pride, and they’d flown the rest of the way under cover of spell. He’d helped Keir resume his proper form just outside palace walls and accepted his thanks and threat of retribution at some future date with a smile.
In truth, he wasn’t sure he would have borne it so well himself if the roles had been reversed.
They’d been allowed in the gates of Léige, the palace of the king of Durial, thanks to some sort of miracle wrought by Sìle the day before. Miach supposed he would have the energy to listen to the tale at some point, but at the moment, it was all he could do to force himself to stay awake long enough to see Sìle’s face when he caught sight of Keir walking into the chamber behind him.
It was worth the effort.
Sìle gaped for a moment or two, then strode forward and threw his arms around his grandson. He made many, many gruff noises that Miach was sure were substitutes for expressions of grief. Sosar clapped his nephew on the shoulder, then came to stand next to Miach.
“I sense a tale here,” he said with a smile.
“I’ll give it to you tomorrow,” Miach said with a yawn, “or you can try your niece tonight. I don’t think I could possibly do it justice right now.”
“I’ll tell you in a minute or two,” Morgan said, taking Miach’s hand. “Miach, look, there are the lads.”
Miach looked blearily across the chamber to see Morgan’s mercenary companions huddled there in a group, looking slightly overwhelmed. He allowed her to pull him across to the hearth where chairs had been set up along with, blessedly, a handful of cots.
He greeted Paien, the eldest of Morgan’s companions, and Camid, a dwarf who looked particularly happy to be where he was, but he couldn’t manage up any energy for the last two. Glines of Balfour would no doubt suggest a game of chance, which Miach would lose badly, and young Fletcher of Harding wouldn’t do aught besides watch with wide eyes as Miach was robbed blind. He managed to acknowledge them both with a nod, but no more. Paien shoved a chair out of the way and pulled a cot over closer to the fire.
“Lay yourself down, Miach my lad, before you fall there.”
Miach did, stretching out with a sigh of pure pleasure. He didn’t protest when Morgan sat down with her back against his bed, though he was certain she would have been more comfortable in a chair. He kissed her cheek happily, then realized he didn’t need to close his eyes because they were already closed.
He forced himself to at least check on his spells of defense. Tonight, again, things didn’t seem as bad as they had been over the past several months.
He yawned hugely in spite of himself, then surrendered to weariness. His defenses were as secure as they had been the night before and he could do nothing else to strengthen them. A handful of hours spent sleeping wouldn’t do any harm. He turned toward Morgan and put his arm around her shoulders.
He listened to her laugh at Paien and Camid’s tales of foes vanquished along the way, marvel at the weight of Glines’s purse and wonder at the percentage of it that might be credited to ill-gotten gains, and then quiz Fletcher about his improvement with the sword.
“My lady,” Fletcher said in hushed tones, “I heard tell that yon archmage of Neroche entered Gobhann, but I can’t believe ’tis true.”
“Why not?” she asked. “Think you he is unequal to its horrors?”
Fletcher made a noise of distress. “He is powerful, surely, but, my lady Morgan, ’tis Weger’s tower. No one gets out once they’ve gone in.”
“You would be surprised,” Morgan said dryly.
“I also heard,” Fletcher continued, sounding awed, “that he went in to fetch something. It must have been something powerfully important to him to brave such a thing, don’t you think?”
Miach felt Morgan squeeze his arm, then reach back to touch his face gently.
“I daresay, Fletcher, that it was,” she said quietly.
Miach couldn’t have agreed more. He caught Morgan’s hand, kissed her palm, then remembered no more.
Fifteen
M
organ opened her eyes and looked up. Firelight flickered against an intricately carved ceiling high above her head, and the faint echo of song whispered across her mind. For a moment, panic assailed her. She’d woken in a strange place before with an unknown song ringing in her ears, but that chamber had been in the palace of Tor Neroche and the song had been one sung by the ring on her hand and the knife in her boot.
That day hadn’t ended particularly well.
She wasn’t at Tor Neroche now. She let out her breath slowly and peered into the darkness above her. She realized with a start that it wasn’t wood that was so elaborately carved, it was stone. The song that marched through that stone was pleasing in a precise, stately sort of way, as if a clan of warriors from the north had bid their piper play something not quite a battle dirge, but surely not a love song.
She remembered then that she was in Léige, home of the dwarvish kings of Durial. She had watched her grandfather the night before as he’d fallen upon Keir’s neck and wept. She had lost very badly in a quick game of cards with Glines as her other mercenary companions had told her of their journey there, bragging expansively about marvelously dangerous exploits that they would add to their already full tally of such accomplishments. She remembered taking Miach’s boots off him as he lay where he’d fallen in front of the fire and doing him the favor of covering him with a blanket before she too had succumbed to slumber.
She sighed deeply, then turned to see who, if anyone, had been left behind to tend her whilst she slept.
Miach was sitting on the floor a handful of paces away from her, leaning back against a sturdy-looking sofa, resting his elbows on his bent knees, watching her.
He was, as she had often pointed out to herself, remarkably handsome with his dark hair falling across his forehead and his very pale blue eyes full of good humor. She wasn’t sure if Master Soilléir had secretly gifted her a bit of his sight or she had just come to know Miach better, but she thought she could see something else around him, some layer of elvish glamour that he hadn’t had before.
Or that could have been merely because he looked so clean. His hair was damp, as if he’d just come from a bath, and his boots were shined. All she knew was that she was quite thoroughly happy to see him first thing in the morning. On the floor next to him were all the blades she’d left behind in Tor Neroche. She suspected her companions had brought them for her, but she was quite certain Miach had laid them out in her preferred order.
She met his eyes. “I love you.”
“I must have done something particularly pleasing to have earned that,” he said with a smile.
She propped her head up on her hand. “Am I so stingy with my expressions of affection?”
“No indeed,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “I was just teasing you and enjoying the fact that I’m at liberty to do so in a place that’s safe.”
She felt her smile fade and couldn’t stop it. “Are we safe, then?”
“Aye,” he said quietly. “King Uachdaran’s walls wouldn’t protect us indefinitely, but they are very strong and he is very powerful. We’re safe enough for the moment.”
“It was kind of him to offer us a refuge.”
Miach smiled. “He has a long-standing affinity for lads and lasses from Neroche. My father made a point of sending him bolts of the finest Neroche’s weavers can produce, a tradition my brother Cathar has kept up behind Adhémar’s back. I daresay we’re benefiting from that diligence.”
“The dwarves aren’t weavers, then?”
“Carvers of stone, miners of gems, and makers of very fine swords,” Miach said. “But nay, they aren’t much for weaving.” He rubbed his hands together, then blew on them. “They aren’t much for hot fires, either.”
“You could come sit closer to me,” she said casually. “Just to be closer to the fire, of course.”
“Why, I think I just might.”
She watched him walk over to her on his knees, then reached up and put her hand around the back of his head to pull it down where she could kiss him. She smiled up into his eyes.
“Is this one of those moments when the darkness recedes and we take a bit of peace for our own?”
He sat down next to her and smoothed her hair back from her face. “Please,” he said with feeling. “Please let us have as many of those moments as possible today.”
“Is that why you stayed with me?”
“Aye,” he said quietly. “That, and I just wanted to watch you sleep. You’re very beautiful, you know. And you looked very peaceful.”
She felt neither beautiful nor peaceful; she felt ragged and drawn out, as if she’d been in a siege that had lasted far too long. But if Miach wanted to compliment her in ways she didn’t deserve, she wasn’t going to stop him. “Well, at least I don’t dream anymore.”
“A fact for which I am most grateful.”
She smiled and reached out to brush his hair out of his eyes. “Did we miss breakfast?”
“Aye, but I imagine I can find the kitchens if you’re hungry. You’ve been promised a bath as well, if you like. Servants await your pleasure outside in the passageway. I think we can hide out for another hour or two, then we’ll most likely need to make an appearance. There are those in the palace who would like to see you.”
“I hesitate to ask who.”
“I’ll tell you after you eat, when you’ve the stomach for it. They’re mostly my relatives, which I’m sure eases your mind greatly. They have all pointed out to me that I’m very fortunate to have caught your eye at all, so perhaps your mind should be eased in truth.”