The White Spell Read Free Page A

can . . .” He paused and frowned. It was going to be a bit difficult to feed himself if he couldn’t pluck the odd piece of Nerochian gold out of thin air now and again. “I’ll need magic to conjure up funds from time to time.”
    â€œUse it and become a conversation piece for a faery,” Rùnach said. “Isn’t that right, my lord Soilléir?”
    â€œThat did seem to be our bargain.”
    Acair wriggled his jaw to loosen it. There had been no bargain; there had simply been a chess game that he’d played very badly.But Sàraichte? Could there be a place in the whole of the Nine Kingdoms less appealing?
    Well, he supposed there could be and he could name several of them without effort, so perhaps he would be better off to simply keep his mouth shut and carry on as if he were bested yet again. He looked at his companions coolly.
    â€œVery well, I’ll go,” he said with as much politeness as he could muster. “I don’t suppose that as a courtesy you two would spot me a sovereign or two to help me on my way, would you?”
    Meager funds were produced and pushed across the table. Acair collected them—he was a pragmatist, after all—and pocketed them. Obviously, he would be sleeping under the stars more than he cared to, but he couldn’t see how anything could be done about that at present. But later? Aye, there would be retribution. He stood up and pulled his cloak around his shoulders.
    â€œDon’t make this any worse for yourselves,” he warned. “And you know exactly what I mean by that.”
    Rùnach lifted his cup up in salute. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
    â€œOh,” Soilléir said, holding up his hand, “one more thing. You are forbidden to reveal your identity to anyone who doesn’t already know you.”
    Of course. Acair glared at Soilléir. “Anything else?”
    â€œIf I think of anything, I’ll let you know.”
    Acair snarled a curse at him, sent his half-brother a look of promise, then stomped out of the pub and into the twilight. He might have enjoyed the rustic view, but he had the feeling he was going to be seeing far too much of that kind of thing in the future, more particularly from his vantage point on the ground. The pleasures of flying along as a terrible wind were obviously lost to him for the moment.
    But damnation, what choice had he had? The past half year had truly been an unsettling one, full of unpleasant experiences he would have preferred to forget, and all because of a rather innocent piece of magic he’d decided to attempt after a rather tedious anduninteresting decade. The idea had come to him as he’d been wandering about a library in a locale he didn’t care to visit again and he’d stumbled upon a book of—
    Well, perhaps it didn’t matter what the book had contained given that it was now safely tucked behind an impenetrable wall of his own spells, spells apparently he couldn’t unlock for at least a year. He would have pointed out that fact to Rùnach—it was Rùnach’s book, after all—but he’d been too damn distracted to.
    A year without magic. Absolutely preposterous.
    And all because he’d simply attempted a rather substantial theft of the world’s magic and failed spectacularly. If that hadn’t been enough, he’d taken a blade to the chest and almost lost his life. Rùnach had been the one to heal him with some damned elvish rot that Acair was convinced had left something untoward behind where the wound had been. He’d been suffering ever since from foul dreams and the like. Add that to the sad truth that Soilléir had been stalking him for the past several months, threatening him—still—with life as an inanimate object if he didn’t grovel before a lengthy list of offended busybodies . . . well, as he’d reluctantly admitted before, those lads