Free The White Spell by Lynn Kurland Page A

left of his mind and could only shake his head over them. He who had never once appeared in a salon with a hair out of place, reduced to a stable lad with droppings on his boots. A sorry state of affairs, truly.
    He attempted to work out an unfortunately large collection of knots in his neck only to realize that the collection extended down the middle of his back where he couldn’t reach. No wonder those horses rolled about in the dirt, scratching things they couldn’t reach either. He understood.
    He shifted so he could lean back against a wall—something that took absolutely no effort given the straitness of the space he occupied—and decided to take a moment or two to re-examine how he had come to be wallowing in the misery that had become his life. He knew he would soon be called upon to once again take up his sword, as it were, and see to the evening’s dirty business so ’twas best to seize the peace for thinking when he found it.
    There he had been a few years earlier, going about his daily affairs as usual, spending his energies plotting and scheming in his accustomed fashion, when things had begun to go slightly awry. Just little things: a missed opportunity to do someone an ill turn; a scheme foiled by the slightest hesitation before dropping a well-deserved spell of death; a heartbeat too many spent looking at a potential victim and wondering how it might feel to be stalked by someone as evil as he himself was. Little things, true, but unsettling nonetheless.
    It had been almost enough to leave him wondering if perhaps he hadn’t been at the business of black magery just a bit too long.
    Knowing that that couldn’t possibly be the case, he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and set to his most brilliant piece of business to date with renewed purpose and enthusiasm. A theft of the world’s magic had seemed like a fitting way to spend the previous fall, though he’d certainly been laying the spells necessary for such a feat for far longer than that. Indeed, if he were to be entirely honest, the thought had occurred to him several years earlier when he’d decided that draining his sire of all his magic just wasn’t going to be enough to repay the stingy old bastard for an endless list of abuses. What he’d wanted was to hold the world’s magic in his hand and mock his father for not having had the imagination to do the same.
    The notion had been rendered substantially more appealing by his half-brother Ruithneadh’s having done him the favor of leaving Gair trapped in the most uninspired and magickless country in all the Nine Kingdoms. No magic, no traveling about from glitteringsalon to gilded audience chamber, no cellar of fine wines to accompany sumptuous suppers. That had been a fair punishment, true, but to have done what his sire had never thought to do?
    The idea had been irresistible.
    He would have managed it if it hadn’t been for that damned Rùnach and his dreamspinning bride, which was a tale better told after a substantial amount of ale. All he knew was that he’d been left with merely dreams of the world’s magic, a spot in his chest that ached from time to time with a truly alarming sort of tingling, and the prospect of a year without a single spell at his fingertips stretching in front of him as if it had been a long, dusty, straight road through country that, unsurprisingly, resembled exactly where he found himself currently loitering.
    It could have been worse, he had to concede. He could have been fleeing all over Durial at present in an effort to dodge the spells of that cranky bastard who knew far more dark magic than he ever let on in polite company. Then again, Uachdaran of Léige spent his time digging deep into the mountains. Who knew what he found there?
    Well, Acair had a fairly good idea, having done his own bit of digging in an effort to use Durial as a means of siphoning off magic from other places, but he