Dreamspinner (27 page)

He left his uncle’s solar rather more confused than when he’d entered it. His life had been so simple at Buidseachd. Selfish, he supposed, but simple. Now he was being pulled into something that smelled rather strongly of a quest, by a woman whose only fault was that she’d been sent off into the wilds of the Nine Kingdoms to find someone to do for her village what they could not do for themselves.

He walked without haste to Aisling’s bedchamber. He knocked
softly, then was slightly surprised to have her open the door herself. She looked weary but otherwise quite sound.

And rather less plain than she should have in order to properly masquerade as a lad.

“Will you come in?” she asked.

He leaned against the doorframe and smiled faintly. “I only came to fetch my gear, if it pleases you. I daresay you are well enough to dispense with my nursemaiding services.”

She only held on to the door. “I appreciate your efforts on my behalf.”

“It was my very great pleasure.”

She looked at him solemnly. “Aren’t we polite today.”

“I could ask you questions that make you uncomfortable, if you’d rather.”

She pushed the door open fully. “Fetch your gear and begone, foul blight.”

He smiled. “How cheeky you’ve become. Feeling comfortable, are you?”

She sobered immediately. “I shouldn’t—”

He pushed away from the doorframe and eased past her. “Of course you should. I’ll get out from underfoot, then you’ll have a lovely night’s rest.” His pack he had left in the bedchamber next to hers, so his fetching was limited to books and his scribblings. He gathered those up, then retreated to the door. He turned and looked at her. “You should feel comfortable here. Lord Nicholas has insisted.”

“Has he?” she asked quietly.

He took her words, considered them very briefly, then shook his head slowly. “You and I, Mistress Aisling, should have speech together some day when nothing but frankness rules the day. I think you would feel much happier were you to unburden yourself to a trusted confidant.”

She looked up at him. “Are you that trusted confidant?”

He hesitated only slightly. “I could be, if you willed it.”

She looked at the books in his arms. “Do you think Lord Nicholas might allow me to have a careful look in his library?”

“Without a doubt,” he assured her. “Shall I escort you there in the morning?”

“You would come with me? Willingly?”

“Of course,” he said, surprised. “Why wouldn’t—” He paused, then sighed. “Very well, I can see why you might think differently, but aye, I will come with you willingly. Quite happily, even.”

She looked at him seriously. “I don’t mind being alone, but company might be a pleasant change. If you’ve nothing else to do.”

The unknowing was killing him. He could feel his mother standing behind him, leaning up to whisper in his ear,
you know what curiosity killed, don’t you, my son?
His courageous, beautiful, brilliant mother who had been beguiled by Gair of Ceangail, then paid the ultimate price for trying to free her children from his evil. He couldn’t begin to express how much he had loved her. She had been curious, understood what had driven him, dropped unsolvable riddles into casual conversation because she knew the solving of those riddles gave him pleasure.

Unmanly as it might have sounded, there were times he missed her desperately.

He pulled himself back to the conversation at hand, then smiled at Aisling. “I should likely drag whatever swordsman I can find in this bastion of scholars out to the garden in the morning and keep myself from turning to fat, but I’ll seek you out afterward and see what you’ve found—and make sure you’ve been fed.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly. She looked up at him. “You needn’t be kind to me, you know. I have my quest and all, which I should be seeing to fairly soon.”

Perhaps he had behaved more boorishly at Gobhann—and all points leading up to those miserable few days in Gobhann—than he’d feared. He would have reached out and tucked hair behind her ear or touched her elbow or taken her hand but his hands were full of tools he fully intended to use to figure out exactly who she was, something she obviously didn’t want him to know.

He was tempted to simply turn and bang his head against the wall until good sense returned.

She looked at him seriously for another brief moment, then she shut the door in his face.

He stood there for several minutes, wondering when it was he’d last had a door shut in his face. At least she had shut it quietly instead of slamming it.

And hard on the heels of that bit of dangerous curiosity came the thought that he had no time for a woman in his life at present, particularly one who didn’t behave in ways he could understand. She wasn’t elegant, didn’t engage in delicate flirtations, and remained unimpressed by whatever rusty manners he had attempted to trot out for her inspection. She refused to divulge important details about her quest, fully believed heroic tales were naught but myths, and could set spinning wheels to flying without touching them.

And if he didn’t get her out in the sunlight at least once and determine the exact color of her eyes, he was going to lose his wits.

He turned and walked away whilst he still could. He set his burdens down in the bedchamber he’d been provided, considered, then turned and walked back the way he had come, continuing on until he reached the courtyard. He ran bodily into his uncle, then caught the man by the arm and steadied them both.

“My apologies,” Rùnach said grimly.

“And where are you off to in such a rush?”

“I need a run.” Rùnach pursed his lips. “I don’t suppose you have anything as pedestrian as lists here, do you?”

“I suppose we do.” Nicholas pointed across the courtyard. “Follow that passageway past my solar and continue on. You’ll find them easily enough, I imagine.”

“Thank you.” He started to walk away, then looked at his host. “No prying questions?”

“Rùnach, you wound me,” Nicholas said, putting his hand to his heart. “And you have obviously spent too much time with young Soilléir. He has no sense of grace or propriety. I, on the other hand, have it in abundance.”

“Thank you. Again.”

“That, and I don’t need to pry,” Nicholas said easily. “I can see everything written right there on your face.”

Rùnach would have cursed him, but as he’d said before, his mother had taught him to be kind to old men. So, instead, he made his uncle a bow, then turned and strode off before he had to hear another affectionate chuckle or think too long on a woman who left him scratching his head.

It was far safer that way, he was sure.

A
isling wandered through the racks of books in Lismòr’s library, trying not to look as overwhelmed as she felt. She had never in her life seen so many books, nor imagined that so many could exist in the same place. The keeper of the books, Master Dominicus, had sternly warned her not to touch anything, a condition of entrance to which she had agreed without hesitation. He had then demanded to know what she was looking for, but in that, at least, she had held her ground and refused to speak.

Because she was looking for the truth.

She had eaten a very lovely breakfast by herself, brought by Lord Nicholas’s page William, which had shored her up for the day’s activities but also left her feeling rather more irritated than she would have suspected. Who knew that such food existed and in such abundance? She wondered how she had lived twenty-seven years of her life on beggar’s rations.

She was beginning to wonder quite a few things.

William had told her that she was free to wander about the
university, and he had been good enough to show her to the library. She had walked inside, then come to an ungainly halt.

She had stood at the door for several minutes, trying without success to shut her mouth. The sight that had greeted her eyes had been so overwhelming, she hadn’t known even where to begin to look for what she needed. Not that she’d even had a clear idea of what that thing might be. She had considered earlier that morning trying to find out about the nature of curses and how to get out from under them, but the more she’d thought about it, the sillier the idea had seemed. Who would write a book about such a thing?

She had then decided perhaps she should seek out books about Bruadair, but it had taken her even less time to dismiss that idea. Given the secretive nature of her country, who would dare pen such a tome? No native would for fear of dying and no stranger would know enough to say anything useful. Even she, who had lived inside Bruadair’s borders for the whole of her life, couldn’t speak of anything but the Guild.

What she wanted was to find everything in a neat, tidy little tome that would tell her without mincing words that everything she had believed up until that moment had been true, that she could count on curses, that she had never once over the course of her twenty-seven years been lied to, and that the preceding two fortnights had been nothing but an aberration.

She wasn’t quite sure what she would do if she found out that it had all been an elaborately staged lie.

After William had introduced her to Master Dominicus, then departed for safer ground, she had done her best to look trustworthy, which had perhaps worked in her favor. Master Dominicus, after delivering his warning to her, had gone back to his work of scolding students who were whispering loudly behind their hands.

Now, even after an hour of wandering about, not touching anything, she stood in the middle of the rows and rows of books and still had no idea where to even begin.

“Need help?”

She jumped a foot, she was sure of it, pulling three books off a shelf as she whirled around. The only reason she wasn’t thrown
from the library, she supposed, was that Rùnach caught those books and put them back where they belonged before Master Dominicus was the wiser. He propped his elbow on a shelf and looked at her.

“Searching for something in particular?”

She almost blurted it all out, right there in the section devoted to the science of insects. After all, he was a simple soldier, wasn’t he? He had no reason to be interested in the political complexities of Bruadair, did he? He would listen to her tale, nod wisely, then…

He would think her mad, that’s what he would think her. She would tell him of the curses laid upon those who dared leave or speak or spin and he would think her absolutely daft. And perhaps she was, daft to believe that she could come and go across the border as she pleased and not pay a price.

It was one thing to touch a wheel and survive. Perhaps the Guildmistress had feared she would lose her control of her weavers if they looked further afield for more interesting things to do with their hands, so she had invented a curse to keep them fearfully obedient. But crossing the border, now, that was a different thing entirely. Those were tales she had heard from more sources than just the Guildmistress. Even Mistress Muinear had told her that the secrets of Bruadair had to be protected, even if those secrets were kept by slaying those who dared cross the border without permission.

Perhaps she had been protected because she’d had a trader’s license, or because the peddler had bargained for her life by some means she couldn’t divine, or because she still had her errand to see accomplished—

“Aisling?”

She focused on Rùnach, then blinked at the sight. He was simply appalling to look at. More shocking still was that she hardly noticed his scars any longer. She wondered, absently, how it was he’d managed to avoid any entanglements to this point. Surely women threw themselves at him wherever he went, scars or no scars.

“Are you unwell?” he asked.

“Daft, rather,” she said, putting her hand to her forehead. “Or at least I think I’m daft.”

He smiled. She wanted to close her eyes when he smiled. She looked down at the floor, though Weger wouldn’t have approved of that. He’d shouted at her scores of times—in a single day, no less—to keep her eyes up and focused on what was in front of her. A very difficult lesson for one who had spent the whole of her life with her gaze fixed to the ground so as not to draw attention to herself.

“Are you looking for something in particular?”

She started to blurt out
I can’t say
, but something stopped her. It was odd, wasn’t it, how outside the borders of her land there were countless others who went about their lives and business without living under the shadow of a terrible curse. She took a deep breath, because something was beginning to stir in her, something that felt quite a bit like the beginnings of rebellion. She had learned to control those feelings at the Guild, because she had watched what rebellion had cost others who had allowed it to grow and flower, but now…

Well, there was no one there to punish her for it, was there?

She looked at Rùnach, because Weger had taught her to keep her eyes up. She lifted her chin for good measure.

“I
am
looking for something,” she said firmly.

Rùnach lifted an eyebrow. “Are you going to do damage to this thing when you find it?”

She looked at him narrowly. “Are you mocking me?”