Nine Kingdoms: Dreamer's Daughter Part 29

"Not even with a change of essence?" Rnach asked carefully.

"Impenetrable," Muinear repeated. "We've tested it a thousand ways with every spell possible." She looked at him seriously. "Even with a spell or two of your father's, if you're curious. And don't tell Uachdaran or Sle that their collection is a little less secure than they might want to believe."

Aisling would have smiled but she was too busy trying to simply breathe. There was no worse h.e.l.l than the Guild . . .

"I can't let Aisling go back inside," Rnach said quietly. "Lady Muinear, there are simply things you cannot expect me to do."

"I'm not sure, Rnach my lad, that you have any choice."

He looked ashen. Aisling wasn't entirely sure she didn't look the same way. She took a deep breath and pushed aside thoughts she didn't want to entertain.

"Let's say we could find a way inside the Guild," she said, "what then? If we stop the leak, we stop any more magic from leaving, but that doesn't solve getting back what's already gone."

Rnach turned to sit on the edge of the table. "True enough. For all I know, there's no way to get it back."

"But it has weakened Bruadair," she said quietly. "I can feel that."

"But if we stop the flow-"

She shook her head. "It will take centuries to rebuild what has been lost, if it could even be rebuilt." She took a deep breath. "We'll have to call it back."

He grasped the edge of the table and looked at her. He looked paler than he had, if such a thing were possible.

"I don't think I have a spell for that," he admitted slowly. "Well, save my father's spell of Diminishing."

"And what does that do?"

"It's what he used to drain mages of their power," he said grimly. "It was what Acair tried to use on me in front of my father's bolt-hole."

"It wasn't very well done," she said.

"One could hope Acair hasn't refined it since then," Rnach said seriously, "though I wouldn't be surprised to learn he had." He considered, then shook his head. "I don't know, Aisling. I think I could perhaps draw all the rivers of magic back into Bruadair, but what do I do with them then? I know my father's spell, but I can't guarantee what it will do here and I'm honestly not sure I dare use it."

"I wouldn't suggest it," Uabhann said. "Very nasty things come with that spell, if you don't mind my saying so." He shook his head. "The dreams your father has." He shivered. "Unpleasant."

Aisling was tempted to smile. "And do you help them along?"

"Well," he said modestly, "that is what I do. But in Gair's case, unless I'm feeling particularly cheeky, I just leave him to his own devices. He frightens me."

Rnach patted the table next to him. Aisling was happy to lean for a bit, even happier to have his arm around her.

"I have been thinking about the magic that's already gone," he offered. "What's been unraveled, if we can call it that."

"Unraveled," she echoed. "What a thought."

"It is," he agreed. He paused, then looked at her. "It occurred to me that perhaps there is a way to call it home."

She knew what he was getting at before he even said the words. "You think I can spin it back here."

"It seems logical," he said, "though I can't believe I'm saying as much. The thought is not so much ridiculous as it is terrifying."

"It might be difficult to contain something that's been loosed," she said, finding it hard to speak for the sudden dryness in her mouth.

He shot her a wry look. "Well, we could make a journey to Shettlestoune, I suppose, and ask my father how that goes, but I think I might have enough experience with it to agree with you." He looked off into the distance for several minutes in silence, then looked at her. "It would be interesting, though, wouldn't it, if you could draw it all back here to Bruadair."

"That would be a fairly large bobbin, I imagine."

"I daresay." He continued to look at her. "It might be good to have help."

"Can you spin?"

He smiled, pained. "You know I can't. But I imagine you could think of a few spinners, couldn't you?"

She wrapped her arms around herself. "This is becoming a very uncomfortable conversation."

"Your brother's lady wife, Princess Sarah," Muinear put in carefully. "She's a spinner, isn't she?"

Aisling watched Rnach look at Muinear for a moment or two in silence, then let out his breath slowly.

"She is."

"Are you thinking to have her come here?" Aisling asked in surprise.

Rnach shook his head. "Sarah spun my father's power when it was hanging in the air between him and someone else, which is what I think your great-grandmother is getting at. But that was just a single person's power and all she had was a spindle." He paused. "I don't think she has the power to create a wheel of sunlight, which you do. That might be enough to do what's needful."

"Soilleir will frown at me if I do that again."

"But Bruadair won't," Rnach said.

"There is something else you might want to consider," Muinear said, "not to throw a pole between the spokes of your tidy wheel or anything."

Rnach smiled faintly. "My lady?"

"If you discovered this, Rnach my dear, don't you think it's possible others might have discovered the same thing? Or have known about it long before now?"

Rnach dragged his hand through his hair. "The thought has occurred to me."

"What about the thought that there might be those looking for you to attempt to slip over the Guild's walls?"

He sighed. "What else am I to do?"

"We," Aisling said, though it was the last thing she wanted to say. "What else are we to do."

Muinear looked for the first time slightly weary. "I think, children," she said with a sigh, "that you'll need to go to Beul, but I'm not sure you can go as you are."

"More patina?" Rnach asked grimly.

Muinear smiled briefly. "I noticed that Soilleir had applied a bit, which didn't surprise me. But nay. You'll need to do something a bit more drastic, I think."

"More drastic than a change of essence?" Rnach asked in surprise. "Is there such a thing?"

"Well," Muinear said slowly, "if you were the Guildmistress and you were expecting someone, let's leave aside who for the moment, to attempt to come into your domain, what's the last thing you would expect?"

Aisling felt Rnach go very still.

"I would never expect someone to simply walk in," he said. His expression was very grim. "Shall I give myself up to the Guildmistress and allow her to chain me to a loom?"

"Nay," Muinear said softly. "I think that perhaps Aisling should."

Aisling had no idea if the conversation continued past that point, because she did the most reasonable and useful thing she'd done in at least a score and seven years.

She fainted.

Eighteen.

It could be said that there were occasions when reminding oneself of all the miserable places one had been and terrible situations one had survived was quite useful. It gave a certain perspective to the dire straits currently being contemplated. Unfortunately, there were just some situations that couldn't be made any less horrifying, no matter what one tried.

Rnach looked at the Guild in front of him and wondered if he were equal to thinking of anything miserable and terrible enough to possibly mitigate the horrors he fully expected his current locale to offer.

And not to him.

"I don't like this," he murmured, not for the first time.

"I don't see any other possibility," Bristeadh said very quietly, perhaps for the fourth or fifth time.

Rnach had lost count.

"Let's raze the d.a.m.ned place and see what's in the cellar," Rnach suggested.

"I won't dignify that with a response."

Rnach would have looked at his love's father, but he'd been having the same conversation with the man for hours. He'd seen the absolutely haunted look in Bristeadh's eye. He didn't suppose seeing it once again would solve anything. He also imagined that allowing the man to see the same look in his own eye wasn't going to do anything useful.

He looked at Aisling who was standing a pace or two away, as still as if she'd been a statue. He couldn't begin to imagine what was going through her head. She'd fainted at the thought of going back into the Guild, though she'd claimed that had been because she'd been overwhelmed by lack of food and too much excitement over spinning and, well, other things she hadn't been able to articulate with any success.

Rnach suspected she'd been lying through her teeth.

He shook his head, something he'd been doing for hours. He looked at Bristeadh and shook his head again.

"I can't do this," he said. "I can't let her go back inside there. Not like this."

Bristeadh looked at him for several minutes in silence, then sighed. "All I can say, son, is that I understand exactly what you're feeling."

Rnach closed his eyes briefly. "My sympathy for you is complete. I'm not sure how you managed this."

"There was no other alternative, Rnach," Bristeadh said, then he cleared his throat as quietly as possible. "Better the Guild's horrors where she would be anonymous than out in the world where I had no means of protecting her. We didn't dare even leave her in Ciaradh given what had happened to my mother-in-law. At least Iochdmhor had no idea who she was at the time, so she was relatively safe. Miserable, but safe."

"And now?"

"I don't know what Iochdmhor knows. She was obviously at my house recently, but whether or not she connects that place to me, I can't say." He lifted one shoulder in the slightest of shrugs. "I don't think any of us are safe, but I imagine we never expected we would be."

"And if she connects you with Aisling?"

"Then she'll slay me on the spot," Bristeadh said, "though I don't think she will. Far better to make me pay dearly for not returning with her prize as quickly as I should have."

Rnach suppressed the urge to shake his head again. Their plan was to have Bristeadh drag Aisling into the Guild and present her as a trophy, Rnach hard on his heels with a sorry tale about wanting to collect the bounty on her head given that her parents had refused to pay him what they owed him. There were more variables with the plan than he cared for, mostly concerning Aisling's foster parents. There was no way of knowing whether or not they'd talked to the Guildmistress after he and Aisling had visited.

He didn't like uncertainty. He and Keir had gone over every possible scenario before going to Ruamharaiche's well, endlessly and behind their mother's back. She had done the same thing with Keir, but Rnach had never been included in the conversations. His brother was older than he was by several years, so he'd known that Sarait was trying to spare him any distress. Of course Keir had divulged everything she'd said just the same and they'd factored it into their plans and into the plans they had made with their mother. Every d.a.m.ned possibility had been accounted for.

Well, save the one that Gair would slay his three middle sons whilst taking their power with a single word.

Rnach had no desire to make that same mistake again, but there were simply too many variables to account for them all. The Guildmistress, Sglaimir, Acair, and the magic sink itself: all things he couldn't predict and couldn't control. And he with magic that wasn't what he wanted it to be, Aisling with her essence as hidden as she and Muinear could hide it, and Bristeadh without any magic at all.

What he wouldn't have given for a contingent of powerful relatives, though he supposed if his grandfather arrived on wing he would simply attempt to order things about to his satisfaction and make an unholy mess of it all.

He looked at Bristeadh. "I don't like this."

"What other choice do we have?"

"None," Rnach said, resigned. "But I don't like it."

Bristeadh put his hand on Rnach's shoulder briefly. "There is no one else to do this, Rnach."

"What of the other dreamspinners?" Rnach asked wearily. "What of her b.l.o.o.d.y steward? Has he no magic?"

"Don't you think that if there were any other way, I would take it?"

"You, without magic?" Rnach said, perhaps a bit more sharply than he'd intended.

"I would be fighting to the death to keep her from that accursed place if it took all my strength to my last breath," Bristeadh said evenly. "As I believe you would do. Unfortunately, Aisling is the only one who can do this. She is the First."

"Then sell me instead," Rnach said. The words came out of his mouth and he realized they were completely daft, but once they were hanging in the air in front of him, they made perfect sense. "We'll use a spell of essence changing and you can return me in her place and I'll see to things." He looked around himself. "Where is that d.a.m.ned Soilleir when you need him?"

A throat cleared itself from behind him. "Here."

Rnach wasn't at all certain that was a welcome voice. He looked over his shoulder to find standing behind him none other than Soilleir of Cothromaiche himself, dressed as a fop. He frowned.

"How did you get here?"

"The usual way."