Holder of Lightning (6 page)

Jenna saw Maeve glance toward her. She wondered if her mam had felt the same shiver that had just crept down her spine. “And are you thinking that my daughter and I had anything to do with this, Tiarna Mac Ard?” Maeve asked him.

Mac Ard shrugged. “I don’t even know for certain that what we saw were mage-lights. They may have just been some accident of the sky, the moon reflecting from ice in the clouds, perhaps. But . . .” He paused, listening to Coelin’s singing before turning back to Maeve and Jenna. “I told you that when I saw them, I wanted to come here. And I . . . I have a touch of the Inish blood in me.”

4

The Fire Returns

J
ENNA left before the clock-candle reached the next stripe: as Coelin sang a reel, then a love song; as Mac Ard related to Maeve the long story of his great-great-mam from Inish Thuaidh (who, Jenna learned, fell in love with a tiarna from Dathúil in Tuath Airgialla, who would become Mac Ard’s great-great-da. There was more, but Jenna became lost in the blizzard of names.) Maeve seemed strangely interested in the intricacies of the Mac Ard genealogy and asked several questions, but Jenna was bored. “I’m going back home, Mam,” she said. “You stay if you like. I’ll check on Kesh and the sheep.”

Her mam looked concerned for a moment, then she glanced at Ellia, who was leaning as close to Coelin as she could without actually touching him. She smiled gently at Jenna. “Go on, then,” she told Jenna. “I’ll be along soon.”

It was no longer raining at all, and the clouds had mostly cleared away, though the ground was still wet and muddy. Her boots were caked and heavy by the time she reached the cottage. Kesh came barking up to her as she approached. Jenna took off her boots, picked up a few cuttings of peat from the bucket inside the door, and coaxed the banked fire back into life until the chill left the room. Kesh padded after her as she went from the main room to their tiny bedroom and sat on the edge of the straw-filled mattress. She stared at the mud-daubed hole where the stone lay hidden.
“They say it’s in their blood,”
Tiarna Mac Ard had said.
“When I saw them, I wanted to go there. . .”

Jenna dropped to her knees in front of the hole. She picked at the dried mud with her fingernails until she could see the stone. Carefully, she pried it loose and held it in her open palm. So oddly plain, it was, yet . . .

It was cold again. As cold as the night she’d held it in her hand on Knobtop. Jenna gasped, thrust the stone into the pocket of her skirt, and left the bedroom.

She sat in front of the peat fire for a few minutes, her arms around herself. Kesh lay at her feet, looking up at her quizzically from time to time, as if he sensed that Jenna’s thoughts were in turmoil. She wondered whether she should go back to Tara’s and show the stone to Mac Ard, tell him everything that had happened on Knobtop. It would feel good to tell the truth—she knew that; she could feel the lie boiling inside, festering and begging for the lance of her words. Mam certainly seemed to trust the tiarna, and Jenna liked the way he spoke to her mam, and the way he treated the two of them. She could trust him, she felt. And yet . . .

He might be angry to find that she’d lied. So might her mam. Jenna swore—an oath she’d once heard Thomas the Miller utter when he’d dropped a sack of flour on his foot.

The ram, in the outbuilding, bleated a call of alarm. A few of the ewes also gave voice as Kesh’s ears went up and he ran barking to the door. Jenna followed, pulling the muddy boots back over her feet, guessing that a wolf or a pack of the wild pigs was prowling nearby, or that Old Stubborn had simply got himself stuck somewhere again. “What’s the matter with—” she began as she walked toward the pens.

She stopped, looking toward Knobtop.

Something sparked in the air above the peak: a flicker, a whisper of light. Then it was gone. But she’d seen true. She could still see the ghost of the light on the back of her eyes.

“Kesh, come on,” she said.

She started toward Knobtop, her boots sloshing through the muck.

By the time she started walking up the mountain’s steep flanks, the sky flickered again with flowing streams and billows of colors, tossing multiple shadows behind her over the heather and rocks. Kesh barked at the mage-lights, lifting his snout up to the sky. They were brightening now, fuller and even more dazzling than they’d been the last time. By now, Jenna knew, someone in Ballintubber would have seen them. They’d be tumbling out of Tara’s, all of them, gawking. And Tiarna Mac Ard . . .

She imagined him, running to the stable behind Tara’s, leaping on his brown steed and riding hard toward Knobtop . . .

She frowned. Now that the lights had appeared again, she didn’t want to share them with him. They were hers. They had given her the stone; they had shown her the red-haired man.

The stone . . .
She could feel its smooth weight now, cold and pulsing in the woolen pocket. She pulled the stone out: the pebble glowed, shimmering with an echo of the sky above, the colors tinting her fingers as she held it. The mage-lights seemed to bend in the atmosphere directly above her, swirling like water, as if they sensed her presence below. Jenna lifted her hand, and the mage-lights coalesced, forming a funnel of sparkling hues above that danced and wriggled, lengthening and elongating. Jenna started to pull her hand away, but the funnel of mage-light had wrapped itself around her hand now, like a thread attached to the maelstrom in the sky above her. As she moved her hand, it stretched and swayed, a ball of glowing light attached to her wrist. She could feel the mage-lights, not hot but very, very cold, the chill creeping from wrist to elbow, to shoulder. Jenna tried to pull away, desperately this time, but they held her like another hand, gripping her shoulders, the cold seeping into her chest and covering her head.

She swam in light. She closed her eyes, screaming in the bright silence, and she could still see the colors, melding and shifting.

Ethereal voices called to her.

A flash.

A deafening peal of thunder.

Blackness.

Kesh was licking her face.

Jenna rolled her head away, and the movement sent pain coursing through her neck and temples. Kesh whined as she shoved him away. “Get off,” she told him. “I’m fine.” She sat up, grimacing. “I hope so, anyway.”

She was still on Knobtop, but the sky above was simply the sky, starlit between shreds of clouds slowly moving from the west. She looked down; she was holding the stone, and it throbbed like the blood in her head, pulsing cold but no longer shining. She was suddenly afraid of the pebble, and she started to throw it away, drawing her hand back.

Stopping.

The mage-lights came to you. They came to
you,
and the stone . . .

She brought her hand back down to her lap.

Kesh whined again, coming up to rub against her, then his head lifted, the ears going straight, his tail lifting and a low growl coming from his throat. “What is it?” Jenna asked, then she heard it herself: the sound of shod hooves striking rock within the copse of elm and oak trees down the slope of Knobtop. Jenna stood. Whoever it was, she didn’t want to be seen here. She put the stone in her pocket and lifted the hem of her skirts. “Come, Kesh,” she whispered, and ran. There was a small stand of trees fifty strides away, and she made for the darkness there. She stopped once she was under their shade, looking back through the tree trunks to the field. She saw the horse and rider emerge from under the trees: Tiarna Mac Ard, astride Conhal. The tiarna made his way slowly up the hillside, looking at the ground, glancing up at the sky. Kesh started to run out to them, and Jenna held the dog back. “Hush,” she whispered. Mac Ard wouldn’t be finding the mage-lights tonight, and she didn’t want him to find her, either, or to have to explain why she was here. “Come,” she said to Kesh, and slipped deeper into the shelter of the woods, making her way down the slope toward home.

Her mam looked up from the fire as Jenna opened the door. “Your boots are muddy,” she said.

“I know,” Jenna said. Sitting on the stool at the door, she took them off.

“I was worried when you weren’t here.”

“I went walking with Kesh.”

“On Knobtop.” The way Maeve said it, Jenna understood it was not a question. She nodded.

“Aye, Mam. On Knobtop.”

Maeve nodded, worry crinkling her forehead and the corners of her eyes. “That’s where he said you’d be.” She didn’t need to mention who “he” was; they both knew. “You look cold and pale,” Maeve continued. “There’s tea in the kettle over the fire. Why don’t you pour yourself a mug?”

Wondering at her mam’s strange calmness, Jenna poured herself tea sweetened with honey. Maeve said nothing more, though Jenna could feel her mam’s gaze on her back. By the time she’d finished, Kesh barked and they heard the sound of Mac Ard’s horse approaching. The tiarna knocked, then opened the door, standing there in his clóca of green and brown. Maeve nodded to the man, as if answering an unspoken question, and he turned to Jenna. He seemed too big and too dark in the cottage, and she could not decipher the expression on his face. He stroked his beard with one hand.

“You saw them,” he said. “You were there.” When she didn’t answer, he glanced again at Maeve. “I saw your boot prints, and the dog’s. I know you were there.” His voice was gentle—not an accusation, just a sympathetic statement of fact.

“Aye, Tiarna,” Jenna answered quietly.

“You saw the lights?”

A nod. Jenna hung her head, not daring to look at his face.

Mac Ard let out a long sigh. “By the Mother-Creator, Jenna, I’m not going to
eat
you. I just want to
know.
I want to help if I can. Did you see the lights first, or did you go there and call them?”

Jenna shook her head, slowly at first then more vigorously. “I didn’t call them,” she said hurriedly. “I was here, and I heard Old Stubborn making a commotion and went outside to check and . . . I thought I saw something. So I went. Then, after I was there, they came.” She stopped. Mac Ard let the silence linger, and Jenna forced herself to stay quiet, though she could see him waiting for her to elaborate. “Did
you
see them, Tiarna?” she asked finally.

“From the tavern, aye, and as I was riding toward the hill. They went out by the time I reached the road and started up Knobtop. I saw the flash and heard the thunder when the lights vanished.” He held his right arm straight out, and ran his left hand over it. “I could feel my hair standing on end: here, and on the back of my neck. I rode up to where the flash seemed to have come from. That’s where I saw the marks of your boots.” He let his hand drop. His clóca rustled. His voice was as soft and warm as the blanket on her bed. “Tell me the truth, Jenna. I swear I mean you and your mam no harm. I swear it.”

He waited, looking at Jenna, and she could feel her hand trembling around the wooden mug. She set it down on the table, staring down at the steaming brew without really seeing it. She was trembling, her hands shaking as they rested on the rough oaken tabletop.

“I was there,” she said to the mug. “The lights, they were so . . . bright and the colors were so deep, all around me . . .” She lifted her head, looking from Mac Ard to her mam, shimmering in the salt water that suddenly filled her eyes. “I don’t understand why this is happening,” she said, sniffing and trying to keep back the tears. “I don’t know why it keeps happening to me. I don’t want it, didn’t ask for it. I don’t know
anything.
” The stone burned cold against her thigh through the woolen fabric. “I . . .” She started to tell them the rest, how the mage-lights had glowed in the stone, how the power had arced from it, how the pebble had seemed to draw the mage-lights tonight, all of it. But she saw the eagerness in Mac Ard’s face, the way he leaned forward intently as she spoke of the lights, and she stopped herself.
You don’t know him, not really. The stone was
your
gift, not his.
The voice in her head almost seemed to be someone else’s. “There isn’t anything else to tell you, Tiarna,” she said, sniffing. “I’m sorry.”

Disappointment etched itself in the set of his mouth, and she realized that the man was genuinely puzzled. He shook his head. “Then we wait, and we watch,” he said. He turned to Maeve. “I’ll stay at Tara’s for another day, at least, and we’ll see. The mage-lights may come again tomorrow night. If they do, if they call Jenna, I’ll go up there with her. If that’s acceptable to you, Widow Aoire.”

Maeve lifted her chin. “She’s my daughter. I’ll be with her, too, Tiarna Mac Ard.”

He might have smiled. Maeve might have smiled back.

Mac Ard brushed at his clóca, adjusting the silver brooch at the right shoulder. “Good night to you both, then,” he said. He gave a swift bow to Maeve, and left.

5

Attack on the Village

T
HE night sky stayed dark the next night. Tiarna Mac Ard remained at Tara’s, coming to Jenna’s house that evening and escorting the two of them back to the tavern, where they listened to Coelin with an eye on the window that showed Knobtop above the trees.