Holder of Lightning (5 page)

She wanted to shout denial, but couldn’t, not with her mam there. “Aye,” she started to say, but the admission was more squeak than word. She cleared her throat. “I was there.”

“And what did you see?”

“Lights, Tiarna Mac Ard. Beautiful lights, rippling and swaying.” She could not stop the awe the memory placed in her voice.

“And nothing more?”

“They flashed at the end, brighter than anything I’d ever seen. Then they were . . .” Her shoulder lifted. “Gone,” she finished. “I told Kesh to bring the sheep along, and we came back here.”

Mac Ard ruffled Kesh’s head and fed him a piece of the mutton. “Strange,” he said. “And nothing else happened? Nothing else . . . unusual?” His eyes held her. Jenna found herself thinking of the stone hidden in the wall in their bedroom, not six strides away from Mac Ard, and of the cold lightning that flared from it and the red-haired man. She could feel her cheeks getting hot, and her mouth opened as if she wanted to speak, but she forced herself to remain silent as Mac Ard continued to stare. She thought that he could see through her, could sense the lie of omission that lay in her gut, burning, all the worse because now she was lying to a Riocha, one of the nobility of the land. Mac Ard’s nostrils flared on his thin nose and he almost seemed to nod. Then he blinked and looked away, and the terror in her heart receded.

“How odd,” Mac Ard said, “that the mage-lights would choose to reappear here.”

“I’m sure neither of us know why, Tiarna,” Maeve told him.

He pursed his lips. He glanced back once at Jenna before turning his attention to her mam. “I’m sure you don’t. Tell me this, Widow Aoire, did you know your husband’s family well?”

Maeve shook her head. “I was born and raised here. The truth, Tiarna, is that I know very little about them, and never at all met any of them. The farthest I’ve ever been from Ballintubber is Bácathair, a few months after my husband’s death. I went there to see if the gardai could help me find out more about how he died, and who the murderers were.”

“And did the gardai help you?”

Jenna saw Maeve’s head move softly from side to side. “No. They had nothing more to tell me than I already knew, nor did they care much about the death of ‘some Inishlander.’ ”

Mac Ard nodded slowly, contemplatively. “I’ve taken enough of your time and hospitality,” he said. “Let me repay you. I understand that there’s a young man with an excellent voice who sings at the inn where I’m staying tonight. Come back there with me; be my guests for the evening, both of you. We can talk more there, about whatever you’d like.”

Jenna had to stop herself from grinning, both from relief that the tiarna’s interrogation seemed to be over, and at the suggestion to go to Tara’s. Coelin had promised her a song, and she hadn’t wanted to ask, with the awful weather. But if the tiarna insisted . . .

“Oh, no, Tiarna,” Maeve started to say automatically, then glanced back at Jenna. He smiled at her and nodded, as if they shared a secret.

“Your daughter wants you to accept,” Mac Ard said. “And I would be honored.”

“I don’t—” Maeve began. Jenna tightened her arms around her mother’s shoulders, and felt her sigh. “I suppose we’d also be honored,” she said.

The rain had subsided to a bare, cold drizzle. Mac Ard brought his stallion out from the barn. “You want to ride him?” he asked Jenna. She nodded, mutely. He picked her up, hands around her waist, and placed her sideways astride the saddle, handing her the reins. He patted the muscular neck, glossy and as rich a brown as new-turned earth. “Be have yourself, Conhal,” he told the horse, who snorted and shook his head, bridle jingling. “That’s a special young woman you hold.”

For a moment, Jenna wondered at that, but then Mac Ard clucked once at Conhal, and the horse started walking, startling Jenna. They moved up the lane to Tara’s, Mac Ard and Maeve walking alongside. The tiarna seemed to be paying most of his attention to Maeve, Jenna noticed. His head inclined toward her, and they talked in soft voices that Jenna couldn’t quite overhear, and he smiled and, once, he touched Maeve’s arm. Her mam smiled in return and laughed, but Jenna noticed that Maeve also moved slightly away from the tiarna after the touch.

Jenna frowned. Her mam had never paid much attention to the other men in Ballintubber, though enough of them had certainly indicated their interest. She’d always rebuffed them—some gently, some not, but all of them firmly. But this dark man, this Mac Ard . . . He seemed to like Maeve, and he was Riocha, after all. Maeve had always told her how Niall, her da, was strong and protective and loving, and she could imagine that this Mac Ard might be the same way. . . .

The conversation inside Tara’s stopped dead when Tiarna Mac Ard pushed open the door of the tavern so that Maeve and Jenna could enter, then, as quickly, the chatter resumed again as everyone pretended not to notice that the tiarna had brought company with him. Tara came out from behind the bar, and shooed away old man Buckles from one of the tables. “What will you have, Tiarna Mac Ard?” she asked with an eyebrows-raised glance at Maeve. Mac Ard tilted his head toward Jenna’s mam.

“What do you recommend?” he asked.

“Tara’s brown ale is excellent,” Maeve said. She was smiling at Mac Ard, and if she remained a careful step away from him, she also kept her gaze on him.

“The brown ale, then,” Mac Ard said. Tara nodded her head and bustled off. Maeve sat across the table from Mac Ard; Jenna went over to where Coelin was tuning his gio tár. Ellia was there also, her arm around Coelin. He glanced up, smiling, as Jenna approached; Ellia just stared.

“So the tiarna found you, eh?” he said. “He came up right after you left and asked where you lived.” Coelin glanced over at the table, where Mac Ard’s dark head inclined toward Maeve. Coelin lifted an eyebrow at Jenna. “Seems he likes what he found.” Ellia grinned at that, and Jenna frowned.

“I don’t find that funny, Coelin Singer,” she said. She lifted her chin and turned to walk away.

Coelin strummed a minor chord. “Jenna,” he said to her back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.” She looked over her shoulder at him, and he continued. “So what did he ask you? ‘She’s the one who was up there,’ he said to me. ‘I know this. I can
feel
it.’ That’s what he told me, before he even knew who you were.”

“What did the tiarna mean by that?” Jenna asked.

Coelin shrugged. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know. What did he say to you? What did he ask?”

“He only asked whether I saw the lights, that’s all. I told him that I had, and described them for him.”

“We
all
saw them,” Ellia said. “That’s nothing special. I could describe the lights for him just as easily, if that’s all he wants to know.” She tightened her arm around Coelin. Jenna looked at her, at Coelin. She tried to find a hint in his bright, grass-green eyes that he wanted her to stay, that her presence was special to him. Maybe if he’d spoken then, maybe if he’d moved away from Ellia, if he’d given her any small sign. . . .

But he didn’t. He sat there, looking as handsome and charming as ever, with his long hair and his dancing eyes and his agile, long-fingered hands. Content. He smiled, but he smiled at Ellia, too.
And he’d let either of us lift our skirts for him, too, with that same smile, that same contentment.
The thought struck her with the force of truth, the way Aldwoman Pearce’s proclamations sometimes did when she scattered the prophecy bones from the bag she’d made from the skin of a bog body. There was the same sense of finality that Jenna heard in the rattling of the ivory twigs.
You’re no more to him than any other comely young thing. His interest in you is mostly for the reflection he sees of himself in your eyes. He flirts with you because it is what he does. It means no more than that.

“I’ll be going back to my table,” she said.

“Stay,” he said. “I’ll be singing in a minute.”

“And I’ll hear you just as fine from there,” Jenna answered. “Besides, you have Ellia to listen to you.”

A trace of irritation deepened the fine lines around his eyes for a breath, then they smoothed again. His fingers flicked over the strings of his giotár discordantly. Ellia pulled him back toward her, and he laughed, turning his head away from Jenna.

She went back to the table. Mac Ard was leaning toward Maeve, his arms on the table, his hands curled around a mug of the ale, and her mam was talking. “. . . Niall would go walking on Knobtop or the hills just to the east, or follow the Duán down to Lough Lár, or go wandering in the forests between here and Keelballi. But he always came back, was never away for more than a week, maybe two at the most. There was a wanderlust in him. Some people never seem satisfied where they are, and he was one. I never worried about it, or thought he was traipsing off with some lass. Once or twice a year, I’d find him filling a sack with bread and a few potatoes, and I’d know he would be going. Jenna—” Maeve glanced up as Jenna approached, and she smiled softly, “—she has some of that restlessness in her blood. Always wanting to go farther, see more. I don’t know what Niall was searching for, nor whether he ever found it. I doubt it, for he was wandering up to the end.”

Mac Ard took a sip of the ale. “Did you ever ask him?”

Maeve nodded. “That I did. Once. He told me . . .” She looked away, as if she could see Jenna’s da through the haze of pipe and peat smoke in the tavern. Jenna wondered what face she was seeing. “He told me that he came here because a voice had told him that his life’s dream might be here.” Meave’s eyes shimmered in the candlelight, and she blinked hard. “He said it must have been my voice he heard.”

Coelin’s giotár sounded, a clear, high chord that cut through the low murmur of conversation in the bar. He’d moved over near the fire, Ellia sitting close to him and a mug of stout within reach. “What would you hear first?” he called out to the patrons.

On any other night, half a dozen voices might have answered Coelin, but tonight there was silence. No one actually glanced back to Tiarna Mac Ard, but everyone waited to see if he would speak first.

Mac Ard had turned in his chair to watch Coelin, and Jenna could see something akin to disgust, or maybe it was simply irritation, flicker across his face. Then he called out to Coelin. “I’m told your teacher was a Songmaster. He must have given you the ‘Song of Máel Armagh.’ ”

“Aye, he did, Tiarna,” Coelin answered. “But it’s a long tale and sad, and I’ve not sung it since Songmaster Curragh was alive.”

“All the more reason to sing it now, before you lose it.”

There was some laughter at that. Coelin gave a shrug and a sigh. “Give me a moment, then, to bring it back to mind . . .” Coelin closed his eyes. His fingers moved soundlessly over the strings for a few moments; his mouth moved with unheard words. Then he opened his eyes and exhaled loudly. “Here we go then,” he said, and began to sing.

Coelin’s strong baritone filled the room, sweet and melodious, a voice as smooth and rich as new-churned butter. Coelin had a true gift, Jenna knew—the gods had lent him their own tongue. Songmaster Curragh had heard the gift, unpolished and raw, in the scared boy he’d purchased from the Taisteal; now, honed and sharpened, the young man’s talent was apparent to all. Mac Ard, after hearing the first few notes, sat back in his chair with an audible cough of surprise and admiration, shaking his head and stroking his beard. “No wonder the boy has half the lasses here in his thrall,” Jenna heard him whisper to Maeve. “His throat must be lined with gold. Too bad he’s all too well aware of it.”

Coelin sang, his voice taking them into a misty past where fierce Máel Armagh, king of Tuath Infochla four hundred years before, drove his ships of war from Falcarragh to Inish Thuaidh, where the mage-lights had first shone in the Eldest Time and where they glowed brightest. The verses of the ancient lay told how the cloudmages of the island called up the wild storms of the Ice Sea, threatening to smash the invading fleet on the island’s high cliffs; Máel Armagh screaming defiance and finally landing safely; the sun gleaming from the armor and weapons of Máel Armagh’s army as they swarmed ashore; the Battle of Dun Kiil, where Máel Armagh won his first and only victory; Sage Roshia’s prophecy that the king would die “not from Inish hands” if he pursued the fleeing Inishlanders to seal his victory. Yet Máel Armagh ordered the pursuit into the mountain fastnesses of the island and there met his fate, his armies scattered and trapped, the Inishlanders surrounding him on all sides and the mage-lights flickering in the dark sky above. The last verses were filled with the folly, the courage, and the sorrow of the Battle of Sliabh Míchinniúint: the Inish cloudmages raining fire down on the huddled troops; the futile, suicidal charge by Máel Armagh in an attempt to win through the pass to the Lowlands; the death of the doomed king at the hands of his own men, who presented Máel Armagh’s body to Severii O’Coulghan, the Inishlander’s chief cloudmage, to buy their safe passage back to their ships. And the final verse, as Máel Armagh’s ship
Cinniúint,
now his funeral pyre, sailed away from the island to the south never to be seen again, the flames of the pyre painting the bottom of the gray clouds with angry red.

The clock-candle on Tara’s bar had burned down a stripe before Coelin finished the song, and Mac Ard’s hands started the applause afterward as Coelin eased his parched throat with long swallows of stout. “Excellent,” Mac Ard said. “I’ve not heard better. You should come to Lár Bhaile, and sing for us there. I’ll wager that in another year, you would be at the court in Dun Laoghaire, singing to the Rí Ard himself.”

Coelin’s face flushed visibly as he grinned, and Jenna saw Ellia’s eyes first widen, then narrow, as if she were already seeing Coelin leaving Ballintubber. “I’ll do that, Tiarna. Maybe I’ll follow you back.”

“Do that,” Mac Ard answered, “and I’ll make sure you have a roof over your head, and you’ll pay for your keep with songs.”

The patrons laughed and applauded (all but Ellia, Jenna noticed), and someone called out for another song, and Coelin started a reel: “The Cow Who Married the Pig,” everyone clapping along and laughing at the nonsensical lyrics. Mac Ard inclined his head to Maeve, nodding once in Jenna’s direction. “Those were her ancestors the boy sang of,” he said. “And your husband’s. A fierce and proud people, the Inishlanders. They never bowed to any king but their own, and they still don’t.” He sat back, then leaned forward again. “They also knew the mage-lights. Knew how to draw them down, knew how to store their power. Even then, in the last days of the Before, in the final flickering of the power and the cloud-mages. They say it’s in their blood. They say that if the mage-lights come again, when it’s time for the Filleadh, the mage-lights will first appear to someone of Inish Thuaidh.”