Holder of Lightning (19 page)

“Aye, the very cloch you hold now.

“They managed to steal away at night, taking a small currach that belonged to my mam’s family. Though the moon was out when they started, my mam said, they chose the wrong night, for a quick storm came thundering out of the west and south after they passed the last island and were nearly across to Tuath Infochla. A currach is fine in a calm sea; in the storm, in the huge wind-driven waves, only a very lucky and very experienced sailor could have kept the tiny craft afloat and neither Niall nor Kerys were experienced or lucky. The currach foundered just off the coast. Both Niall and Kerys went over—Mam, at least, could swim well, and she knew to rid herself of her wet clothes before they dragged her down. She said she never knew what happened to Niall. She heard him call once, but in the storm and night, she never saw him again. She called for him, called many times, but only the thunder and the hissing of rain answered her. She was certain she would die, too.

“But she did not. When Mam told the tale, she always said that a pair of large blue seals came to her, and kept her above water, her arms around their bodies as they swam toward shore. I don’t know if that’s true at all; in the midst of the storm and the terror, who knows if what you remember is true. What is true is that, gasping and choking on the cold salt water, she found herself on the rocky shore, naked and shivering.

“Around her neck, somehow, the necklace Niall had given her was still there.

“Mam saw a light high on the hill behind her, and she walked to a cabin. The shepherd family there took her in, set her by the fire, and gave her clothing and blankets. If the storm hadn’t thrown Kerys ashore at that place, where there was a sparse shingle of beach and a house close by, she would have died anyway, of cold and exposure. She always wondered whether some faint power still lurked in the stone, that it brought the seals and found the beach and saved her so it would not be lost. Again, I don’t know if that’s true or not. Certainly the stone never did anything else for her . . . or for me. But I get ahead of my tale.

“The next day, the shepherd, his wife, their two children, and my mam went back down to the beach. They found shattered pieces of the currach, but nothing else. Niall’s body wasn’t ever found; he drowned, most likely, and his body was dragged to the bottom by the weight of what he wore, or tossed to the shore at the foot of one of the wild cliffs nearby and never seen.

“Kerys stayed with the shepherd family, whose name was Hagan, and I was born that winter. I don’t know what tale she gave the Hagans regarding that night—for all I know, it may have been simply the truth. The Hagans kept to themselves, rarely going into the nearest village, and Mam said they told the villagers that she was a cousin who had come to stay with them. When the shepherd’s wife died the next spring in childbirth, my mam remained, and eventually married Conn Hagan, my stepfather. They had two other children of their own. I can say little but good about Conn Hagan—he treated me as well as he treated his own children. If it was a hard life, it was no harder for me than for his own.

“There’s not much more to tell. When I was sixteen, I felt the need to see more of Talamh an Ghlas than the few acres of our farm. When I left, Mam gave me the cloch and told me the tale about her and Niall. I set off north and came to Falcarragh, and sailed from there over to Inish Thuaidh, and lived on the island for a few years. I even visited Inishfeirm, though I didn’t tell anyone who I was. I visited the Order, and they told me about the Before and the clochs na thintrí and Lámh Shábhála, the Stone of Safekeeping.

“I played the stranger with them, saying that I’d heard the Lámh Shábhála was also there at the cloisters, but they said ‘no.’ Many years ago, they told me, a cloch had been stolen from the cloisters, and though some had claimed that the stone was Lámh Shábhála, the Máister was unconcerned about the loss because the claims regarding the cloch were almost certainly false. If the stone was a cloch na thintrí at all (and the Máister doubted it) it had been no more than a clochmion, a minor stone. No one knew where Lámh Shábhála was, they told me. That cloch was lost.

“But I learned a lot about the clochs na thintrí from the Order of Inishfeirm and from other places, and I always wondered. Many of those I talked to spoke of the Return, the Filleadh, for they believed that the mage-lights would return soon, maybe within my lifetime. I thought that if this cloch was truly Lámh Shábhála, then I would be the First Holder. I would hold the renewed stone. I wandered more, leaving Inish Thuaidh and traveling the High Road south until I came to Ballintubber.

“And I found a new and more enduring type of enchantment in Maeve, and I stayed. . . .”

“What happened to the cloch, Da?” Jenna asked. “How did you lose it on Knobtop?” The phantom of her father glanced up from his chair, where he seemed to have fallen into a reverie after his tale. He shrugged.

“I lost it, or it lost me,” he said. “I don’t know which. I wore the necklace all the time. I walked often on Knobtop while in Ballintubber—I seemed to be drawn to the mountain, or perhaps it was the cloch that drew me there. After I married your mam, I’d take the flock up there nearly every day. One night, not a month after we married, I returned from grazing them there, and when I took off my shirt that night, I saw that the silver cage that had held the stone was empty. The wires holding the stone had moved apart enough for it to fall through. I looked for the stone for the next year, almost every day, combing the ground while the sheep grazed. I never found it. But I know if I’d seen the mage-lights over Knobtop, I’d have come running. But from what you’ve said, it seems I never had the chance.” He seemed distraught and upset. “I wonder,” he said finally. “I wonder if the cloch did it all: brought itself to Knobtop because it knew that the mage-lights would come there, pulled itself away from me so it could stay there. Or maybe that was just all coincidence. Maybe the mage-lights would have found the cloch wherever it was. I don’t know.”

As her da talked, Jenna became aware of light moving against the walls, colorful, swirling bands. She glanced at the balcony door; outside, the night sky was alive with the mage-lights, sheets of brilliance flowing as if in some unseen wind, dancing above her. “Da!” she cried. “There! Can you see them? Da?” She looked behind; he was gone. The wraith had vanished.

The cloch called to her, still in her hand from when she had shown it to her father’s spirit. Jenna went out onto the balcony, into the chill night, into the blazing shower of hues and shades. She lifted the cloch to the sky, and the mage lights coalesced like iron filings drawn by a lodestone. She could hear people in the streets below, shouting and calling and pointing to the sky and to the tower on which she stood, and behind her, her mam and Mac Ard hurried into her room.

“Jenna!” Maeve called, but Jenna didn’t turn.

The first whirling tendril of the mage-lights had closed around her hand and the cloch, and the freezing touch seeped into the patterns etched in the flesh of her arm: as Maeve and Mac Ard rushed toward her and stopped at the balcony doors; as the people below exclaimed and gestured toward her; as the mage-lights enveloped her, encased her in color as energy poured from the sky into Lámh Sháb hála; as Jenna screamed with pain but also with a sense of relief and satisfaction, as if the filling of the cloch’s reservoirs of power also fulfilled a need in herself she hadn’t known existed. She clenched her fist tight around the stone while billows of light fell from the sky and swept through and into her, as she and Lámh Shábhála shouted affirmation back to them.

Then, abruptly, it was over. The sky went dark; Jenna fell to her knees, gasping, holding the stone against her breast. Lámh Shábhála was open in her mind, a sparkling matrix of lattices, the reservoir of power at its core stronger now, though not yet nearly full. That would come, she knew. Soon. Very soon.

“Jenna!” Her mam sank to the balcony floor in front of her, hands clutching Jenna’s shoulders. “Jenna, are you all right?” Jenna looked up, seeing her through the matrix of the stone. She shook her head, trying to clear her vision. She blinked, and Lámh Shábhála receded in her sight. The full agony of the mage-lights was beginning now, but she would not lose consciousness this time.

She was stronger. She could bear this.

“Help me up,” she said, and felt Maeve and Mac Ard lift her to her feet. She stood, cradling her right arm to her. She shrugged the hands away, and took a few wobbling steps back into her room, with the tiarna and her mam close beside her. She sat on the edge of her bed, as her mam bustled about, shouting to the servant to bring boiling water and the andúilleaf paste. Mac Ard knelt in front of her, reaching out as if to touch her arm. Jenna drew back, scowling.

“It wanted me, not you,” she told him. “It’s mine now, and I won’t let you have it. I won’t ever let you have it.”

She wasn’t sure what she saw in his eyes then. “I’m sorry, Padraic,” she said. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just the pain.”

He stared at her for long seconds, then he nodded. “I’m not a danger to you, Jenna,” he said, his voice low enough so that only Jenna could hear him. “But there are others who will be. You’ll find that out soon enough.” He stood then.

“I leave her to you, Maeve,” he said, more loudly. “I’ll send for the healer. But I doubt that he has anything that will help her now.”

PART TWO

FILLEADH

16

Lár Bhaile

I
F Áth Iseal felt large and crowded to Jenna, Lár Bhaile was immense beyond comprehension. The city spread along the southeastern arm of Lough Lár, filling the hollows of the hills and rising on the green flanks of Goat Fell, a large, steep-sloped mountain that marked the end of the lough. Along the summit of Goat Fell ran the stone ram parts of the Rí’s Keep, twin walls a hundred yards apart, opening into a wide courtyard where the keep itself stood, towering high above the city. Behind those walls lived Rí Gabair, whose birth name was Torin Mallaghan, in his court with the Riocha of Tuath Gabair gathered around him.

Jenna could well imagine how Tiarna Mac Ard could have seen the mage-lights over Ballintubber from those heights, flickering off the night-clad waters of the lough.

She looked up those heights now from the market in what was called Low Town along the lake’s shore, and they seemed impossibly high, a distant aerie of cut granite and limestone. Jenna judged that it had taken her at least a candle stripe and a half to ride down from the heights in Tiarna Mac Ard’s carriage; it would take two or more to wend their way back up the narrow road that wound over the face of Goat Fell.

But that was for later. Now was the time for business.

Jenna glanced at the trio of burly soldiers who accompanied her. Neither the Rí nor Tiarna Mac Ard would allow her to leave the keep alone. At first, she hadn’t minded, not after the escape from Ballintubber. But in the intervening two months, the initial feeling of safety had been replaced by a sense of stifling confinement. She was never alone, not even in the rooms the Rí had arranged for her at the keep—there were always gardai stationed outside the door and servants waiting just out of sight for a summons. The cage in which she found herself was jeweled and golden, plush and comfortable, but it was nonetheless a cage.