Mage of Clouds (The Cloudmages #2) (28 page)

Owaine was alone in this world. He’d never in his life been off the few square miles of Inishfeirm, had never even been as far as Inish Thuaidh, and now he stood on Talamh an Ghlas, unfathomably far from anything familiar.

A bit to his left, away from the edge of the oak forest, Owaine glimpsed a barely-discernible footpath, a pale tan in the wash of emerald and yellow. Near where the path cut through the dunes of the shore rise, there was a dark circle in the heather. Curious, he went toward it, discovering a ring of field stones and the white-tipped ends of burned logs: the remains of a campfire. He could imagine the scene: a beacon fire burning on the shore, guiding in the ship. In his imagination, Meriel was seated in the vessel between grim tiarna with her hands bound. He reached down to touch the ashes—they were cold and dead, but the heather around the end of the path was torn and marked by the ruts of wagon wheels and the horses’ hooves, as well as the boots of several people, including—if the size of the footprints were any indication—children. Whoever they were, there had been several people here to meet the ship when normally there were rarely any people here at all. They had to have come here to meet with those who had taken Meriel. And there was only one way they could have gone, unless they were all changelings. Owaine could almost see it all.

“Maybe I can do this after all. How hard can it be?” He tried to say it confidently, but his voice sounded thin and uncertain in the wind off the sea, and only gulls answered him, mockingly.

Owaine turned his back to the water once more and followed the trail eastward, his head down—at least if he looked at his feet things were almost in focus and he might not miss too much. The footpath itself curved off toward the forest and vanished, but the wagons had stayed on an eastward course. The marks of the wheels took no skill to follow—the wagons had been heavy enough to crush the grass into the wet earth. But . . . from the edge of the deep forest to his right—a blur of green so dark it seemed brown, with hollows of purple verging on black—Owaine thought he could feel eyes watching. As he turned to look, pressing his eyelids together in a futile attempt to focus, a flock of black crows took flight, mocking him with their calls. The crows circled around him once, their shadows running cold over him, then they vanished into the green smear of the forest. The sense of being observed remained even in their absence. Owaine shivered, forcing himself to ignore the feeling and concentrate on the tracks at his feet, crouching down to look at them again. Aye, there was a boot print caught in mud, and the toes pointed eastward, away from the water.

He wondered how much of a head start they had on him, how many miles from here they might be.

“ ’Tis only one way to find out,” he said aloud, more just to break the oppressive quiet of wind and rustling leaves than for anything else. But again his voice sounded dead and dull in this place and he shut his mouth firmly as he lengthened his stride, following the trail and hoping that if the wagons turned away from the path it would be obvious enough he’d see it.

Hoping that he wasn’t simply following the trail of some family who’d had a picnic on the beach and knew nothing of Meriel at all. No . . . he couldn’t let himself think that. He wouldn’t.

A few more half-used trails, all from the hills to the north, came down and merged with the one Owaine followed, and the route gradually shifted from being nothing more than crushed heather and grass to an erratic path of bare dirt to—as the sun climbed in the sky—a twin-rutted lane, traveled often enough that the grass grew only fitfully where the wagon wheels passed along it. By that time, Owaine was no longer following any markings he could recognize. There were the rutted signs of wagons, but they could have been any wagons, from any time. Owaine began to wonder—even more than he had before—about his wisdom in coming here.

The road, at least, was easy to follow, even for a nearsighted fool. He continued to follow along the indistinct edge of the forest to the south. Occasionally an arm of trees would sweep across the road and Owaine would be traveling through lightly-forested hills; at other times, the wood was only a dim dark line well off in the distance as he strode through what might once have been plowed fields now long gone fallow. Once he passed a line of old barrows and he turned his face away as he hurried past the dark gaping mouths of the graves.

The road was well-used enough that Owaine expected to meet others. Dressed in the colors of the Order, he knew he should hide, but he also knew that it was far more likely that anyone he encountered on the road would see Owaine before his poor eyes glimpsed them unless he was lucky enough to hear them first. He wondered what tale he could give them, and whether he might find out from them whether the wagons he hoped he was following had passed this way—if they didn’t kill him outright. But as the stripes went by and the sun began to fall, no one came walking the other way or passed him riding from behind. Once, well ahead of him, he saw a rider turn onto the road from out of the northern hills and canter away, the sound of the horse’s hooves coming belatedly back to him. Owaine could make out no details from that distance—the rider was a vaguely man-shaped blur on top of a horse-shaped blur in the midst of a landscape blur. The rider could have been man or woman, tiarna or tuathánach, in plain clothing or rich. If whoever it was saw Owaine, he or she made no sign and vanished in a few minutes around the next turn.

By evening, despite the signs of more frequent travel along the road, he’d yet to come across any other human habitation. Though he’d slaked his thirst in a few streams, Owaine was desperately hungry and beginning to realize just how horribly unprepared he was for this trek. He’d left Inishfeirm with nothing but the clochmion around his neck, and the clothes on his back, his purse holding a few coppers without even a lone mórceint. He had nothing else. “You are a stupid jackass,” he muttered, cursing himself. “You’re going to do Meriel a hell of a lot of good when you die out here. Won’t the Banrion be impressed with that? Won’t Máister Kirwan love the fact that some Tuathian will get my clochmion?”

He trudged on, his belly growling and his legs aching, any optimism he might have felt at the start of the day long ago replaced by a dull realization that he was going to fail. The sun eased itself below the horizon behind him, throwing a long shadow angling ahead. As the sky turned purple-black and the Seed-Daughter’s Star shimmered into existence on the western horizon, Owaine noticed a rocky outcropping extending from the margins of the forest. There were no signs of fire anywhere that Owaine’s eyes could see, not even a cultivated field that might have promised some nearby farmhouse where he might have begged shelter. The folds of stone at least promised a shallow cave or some outcropping that might give him shelter during the night, and he moved off the road toward it. Walking along the flank of stone, he found a low shelf of limestone arching over darkness and he crept into the recesses of the overhang, dragging with him a few branches to serve as blanket and bed.

He was exhausted enough by his long hours of walking that sleep found him almost immediately despite the protests of his stomach.

He didn’t know how long he slept, or what it was that woke him: some crack of branch or leafy rustling or the sound of distant singing. He opened his eyes to darkness alleviated only slightly by starlight. There
was
singing, a compelling susurration like the chant of a thousand deep voices, far off in the darkness under the trees. The sound seemed to call to him and he lifted his head in response. Something small skittered away from him, chattering as it scampered out toward the forest; startled, Owaine rolled back farther into the recess. He squinted out to the lighter patch of world past the overhang. He thought . . . he thought he saw something darker there, like a round boulder set atop another larger one. He rose up on an elbow, peering out with a frown.

The mysterious singing swelled as a wind shook the trees.

“Now here’s a curiosity, Léimard: a Bráthair of the Order of Inishfeirm out here all alone.” The voice—deep and male—came from the dark shape, startling Owaine. As he gasped, the shadow moved, and he saw that it was a person, crouched at the lip of the overhang and looking in at him, two arm’s lengths away. A smaller shadow leaped from the ground to his shoulder: a squirrel. “At least he had the good sense not to light a fire here so close to the Old Ones.”

The words were strangely accented, and as the figure pulled back slightly from the overhang Owaine could faintly discern the face in the wan starlight: a man of middle age, the features flat, with eyes sunken deep below the ridges of eyebrows, and the hair starting low on the brow, the lips thick under a dark beard. He was wearing furs and leather, his feet wrapped in skins.
By the Mother, that’s a Bunús Muintir . . .
Owaine realized with a start. Owaine was staring at one of the Old People, the ones who Owaine’s own tribe, the Daoine, had defeated and had driven into the depths of the ancient forests.

Owaine shivered, as much from the cold of the night as seeing the apparition in front of him. “Go away!” Owaine grated out. “I warn you; I have a sword and I’ll use it.”

The Bunús seemed to hiss; it might have been quiet laughter. “Since when does a Bráthair prefer iron to a cloch? You’ve nothing with you to frighten me, but if you’re at all intelligent, you should be scared . . . Do you hear the singing of the trees, Bráthair Lost? Maybe you’d like to go closer to it so you can listen to the Old Ones and sleep forever at their feet.” The Bunús took a step back from the overhang, gesturing toward the trees. The chant, with strange long syllables woven into it, pulled at Owaine.

A hand touched his chest, and Owaine realized that unknowingly he’d crawled out from the shelter, that he was standing and walking toward the sound, that if the Bunús Muintir hadn’t stopped him, he would have found himself deep among the trees. He blinked, startled, as the song wrapped around him and tugged at his will.

“Should I let you go, or not?” the Bunús said, almost musingly, as if talking to himself. “A difficult decision . . .” He spoke another few words, his hand still on Owaine’s chest, then let his hand drop.

Suddenly, there was no song at all, only the formless sound of harmless wind in the treetops. Wide-eyed, Owaine scrambled back away from the man, crouching under the lip of rock.

“Here . . .” The Bunus reached into a large leather pouch strung over one shoulder. He held out something in Owaine’s direction. “I suspect you need this.” He placed a leaf-wrapped packet on the ground between them, then sat back. The squirrel chattered on his shoulder and the man stroked the animal with one hand.

Owaine hesitated, then leaned forward and took the packet. The smell hit him first: the fragrant, smoky perfume of cured meat sprinkled with aromatic spices. The odor filled his mouth with saliva and made his stomach growl. “Eat,” the Bunús said. “It’s not poisoned. If I wanted you dead, I’d have let you go with the Old One’s song.” Watching the Bunús suspiciously, Owaine took a bite and sighed helplessly with pleasure. He chewed the leathery meat, swallowing quickly and tearing off another chunk.

He realized that the man was watching him. “Thank you,” Owaine said.

The Bunús’ face split with a smile. The squirrel hopped from shoulder to ground again, taking a few hesitant steps toward Owaine. “My name is Cataigh,” the man said. “And that is Léimard, my friend and companion. And this . . .” He gestured with one hand toward the tangle of oaks behind him. “Foraois Coill is my charge to protect and nurture.”

“I’m Owaine Geraghty,” Owaine answered, “Bráthair of the Order of Inishfeirm, as you realize. So this is Foraois Coill . . .” He remembered the forest from the maps in the library of the White Keep, one of the remnants of the ancient oak-dominated forests that had once covered Talamh an Ghlas in the times of legend. He remembered some of the other tales he’d heard about the ancient woods, and he shuddered.
The singing of the trees . . .

Cataigh seemed amused. “You don’t know where you’re walking and you wear the léine and clóca that identify you as one of the Order—clothing that marks you as an enemy in this land.” His eyes closed momentarily, and Owaine felt a tingle at his breast, as if a feathery hand had brushed the stone there. “
Without
a sword, too, despite your bluster, and that’s but a clochmion around your neck, not a Cloch Mór. No horse, no pack, no food, no companions, though the smell of the sea lingers around you. There must be an interesting tale here. Are you shipwrecked, Bráthair Geraghty, or are you simply a madman?”

“How did you know—” Owaine began, then shut his mouth.

“Ah, so you remember your history,” Cataigh chuckled. “Aye, we Bunús Muintir are better with the slow magics than you Daoine, and we have our own ways of knowing things. Come, Léimard, there’s no danger to the forest with our Bráthair Geraghty.” Cataigh clucked his tongue and the squirrel hopped onto his arm, climbing rapidly to the man’s shoulders as he rose. “Stay here tonight if you wish. Perhaps we’ll talk again,” the Bunús said, and began walking away into the darkness.

“Wait!” Owaine called, but by the time he scrambled out from his shelter he could no longer see the man at all. The forest was an impenetrable wall with inky darkness pooled under the canopy of the trees, and there were sounds and calls from within it that made the hair on his arms rise. He was afraid the trees would begin singing again, and that he might go to them . . . .

This was not a place in which to go wandering at night. “Cataigh!” Owaine called, but the sound of his voice sent the forest silent for a moment as if it were annoyed at his interruption, and Owaine shivered again. Wrapping his clóca around him, he crawled back beneath the overhang. For a long time, he lay there with his eyes open.

He thought he wouldn’t be able to sleep, but he drifted somehow into dreams of oak trees whose limbs were like thin, grasping hands and he was running through bramble that tugged at his clóca, pursued by wolves with bright, glowing eyes that laughed at him. Overhead, a dragon flapped leathery wings as it circled, searching for him. The dragon belched fire and stooped with an awful cry, and its talons reached for Owaine. . . .