Mage of Clouds (The Cloudmages #2) (33 page)

“Aye,” Jenna answered sharply, glaring at the changeling. “ ’Tis.”

“Then look at me again with Lámh Shábhála.”

In her cloch-vision, she saw a new mind-place open up within him. Tentatively, she pushed the energy toward Dhegli once more and this time she saw Owaine, standing on a beach in Talamh an Ghlas. She heard their conversation, saw Owaine as Dhegli had seen him.

“So that’s where the boy went.” Jenna sighed. “Poor gentle Owaine . . . May the Mother keep him safe.”

“Aye,” Dhegli answered. “Yet I think the WaterMother has a role for him to play in this. And you, First Holder? Will you open yourself to me as I have to you?” When Jenna didn’t respond, Dhegli spread his arms wide as if offering himself. “Who does it help if we don’t trust each other, First Holder? It certainly doesn’t help Meriel.”

Jenna still didn’t respond and Dhegli started to turn away from her toward the sea, and she knew that he couldn’t stay much longer in human form. “Wait,” she said at last. “Do you love her?”

A nod. “Aye. I do.”

Jenna closed her eyes, seeing only with the cloch-vision. She lowered the mind-barriers and the blue fire that was Dhegli slid toward her and into her, mingling with the green-gold fire of Lámh Shábhála. She pushed memories to him: Mundy’s reading of Doyle’s ultimatum ; her last meeting with him back at Dún Kiil, and—much farther back—the difficult choice she made once before, back on the terrible day when Ennis had died.

When the blue fire receded and she opened her eyes again, Dhegli was no longer in human form. Instead, it was a bull seal who looked at her. He lifted his whiskered snout and grunted, and Dhegli’s voice sounded again in her head.

“So that’s the way it was and that’s what you face,” he said. The chocolate eyes of the seal held her, full of sympathy. The wind threw curtains of rain over them, but Jenna didn’t feel them. “You needn’t face it alone, First Holder. Not this time.”

A
SULLEN rain followed the Taisteal caravan all that day and the next, well into the morning of the following day. The weather matched Meriel’s mood quite well.

The wagons of the Dranaghi Clan traveled slowly down the muddy road, the iron-shod wheels and the hooves of their horses tearing new ruts in the grass. If someone emerged as they passed a house they might stop and trade, perhaps bartering a pot for a chicken or mending a pot or bucket in exchange for bread. They camped where they were when it became too dark to travel, unless they came across one of the far-flung villages in the afternoon or late evening. Then Nico would meet with the Ald and arrange to stay for the night.

It was in the villages that the sad ones—the halt, the lame, the sick, the ones with broken bones, the ones with addled minds, the one with lesions and sores and wounds oozing pus—would come around because they’d heard the whispers spreading slowly through the Tuatha abut the Taisteal healer with the true touch. Some of these Nico and Sevei diverted to the potions and herbs that their wagons carried; most of the others were told that Cailin was simply “too exhausted” to see them, or that the Mother-Creator’s presence was weak that evening. A few of them—a select few—they passed on to Meriel.

Luckily, the mage-lights appeared regularly each night and she could renew the clochmion. There was, in each of the villages, a healing made possible by the cloch; there were others healed simply because they believed. A few of the false healings amazed even Meriel—such as the man in a village called Glenmill who (his daughter swore) had been unable to walk more than a few steps without pausing from exhaustion. The moment Meriel touched him, before she could even feel what he was feeling and hear his thoughts, he sprang up and capered about like a boy as Meriel blinked, wondering if perhaps she’d unknowingly used the cloch.

“There is the magic of the sky,” Sevei said to Meriel afterward, “and then there is magic that exists only in here.” She touched her forehead, grinning.

The country through which the Taisteal moved was ancient. They passed the occasional bog where peat was being cut in black rows, but many other bogs lay wet and forever untouched; they passed plowed and planted fields undulating with obvious barrow-graves, where unguessed kings of the Bunús Muintir or the earliest Daoines lay buried. They saw the stone rings, the ruined foundations of stone forts that had once guarded these lands and were now gentled and conquered by weather, by grass and heather. Standing stones with incised lines and patterns leaned atop hilltops or ringed a meadow, half of them now fallen and broken. Once, the road wound alongside the squared foundations of some ancient temple with the weather-blurred and tumbled images of old gods set in the grass, whose names must once have been feared or adored and were now forgotten unless the few Bunús Muintir who remained still remembered and worshiped them.

Near the villages, the land was tamed, the trees cut down for fields and the rocks pulled from the soil to make fences that lined the road for a time. But large areas of the land lay unpopulated by Daoine, looking as it must have looked for centuries: covered with thin forests of beech and elm, yew and sycamore, maple and pine that were airier and less grimly and defiantly dark than the oldest woods. Yet there were swaths of land where the trees were gone that might once have been cultivated land or perhaps were the sites of ancient battles that had soaked the fields in blood and torn bodies. There were roofless stone houses and abandoned settlements. There were places where people had once been born, raised their children, and died, and then those children or their children’s children had gone elsewhere, leaving the land to return to itself.

Ancient things were awake in the land. Twice, herds of the storm deer crossed their path, thundering madly as they flowed like a russet tidal wave over the earth. Dire wolves howled and muttered in their own language in the evening shadows; wind sprites glittered and chattered in the dusk. Once, they passed a quartet of tumbled rocks that slumped in a field like human forms and Meriel wondered if they might not be sleeping Créneach, the clay-beings her mam had found in Inish Thuaidh and who had come to her aid in the battle of Dún Kiil—and one of whom, Treoraí, was the source of the cloch around her neck. There were glimpses of strange forms in the trees, calls and cries that Meriel had never heard before; when the Taisteal heard them, they muttered and made arcane warding motions in the direction of the apparitions.

The third morning, as they departed just before dawn from another village, a heavy mist came rolling out from the marsh across the road, seemingly moving against the wind. The fog was heavy and strangely cold and so thick around them that for a moment, Meriel was tempted to jump from the wagon into it and run, certain that no one could find her in the fallen cloud. But Sevei stirred next to her and Meriel felt the woman’s hand on her arm.

“You don’t want to do that, Cailin,” she said. “That’s a sióg mist. Can’t you feel the chill, and didn’t you notice that it’s not damp like a normal fog? See the way it moves and how it muffles some sounds and yet you hear other things clearly? Wander into
that
and when it clears, you’ll be in
their
world, never to find your way back here.”

Meriel believed none of it, thinking that Sevei was simply trying to stop her from running. She could pull away from the woman, still.
A simple jump from the wagon’s seat and start running as soon as you touch the ground . . .
She leaned away, and Sevei’s fingers tightened around her arm. “Let me go!”

“I can’t. Not when it puts you in danger.”

Meriel scoffed at that. “You don’t care about
me,
just what Nico might do if I got away.”

“You can believe that if you want.” There was an undertone to Sevei’s words, and a hurt in her eyes as she held Meriel’s gaze. Then the sióg mist swept over them. For a moment Meriel could see nothing, not even Sevei’s face alongside her. The only connection to Sevei was the clenching of her fingers on Meriel’s arm, the hand seeming to appear disembodied from the fog. The horses nickered; the wagon lurched once as Sevei used her other hand to pull up the reins so they wouldn’t run into Nico’s wagon ahead. Meriel thought she could hear laughter in the mist and the plucking of spectral fingers in her hair and clothes. Voices seemed to call her, tantalizingly.
“Come with us . . . Come. . . .”
and then that sensation, too, faded as the fog slid off to the north.

There was only the normal morning haze in front of them, a gray, thin curtain. Sevei still gazed at her with that strange concern. The wagon lurched forward as the horses started moving down the road again. Sevei’s hand loosened on Meriel’s arm. The sióg mist, if that’s what it was, had passed, and with it any opportunity to escape. If she leaped down from the wagon now, Sevei would only jump after her, probably followed by some of the clan from the third wagon behind. A dull anger pressed her mouth into a scowl.

“How would you know about a sióg mist or anything?” Meriel sniffed. “You don’t even come from Talamh an Ghlas. This isn’t your land.”

Sevei shrugged again and clucked at the horses, flicking the reins as Nico’s wagon, just ahead of them, started forward again.

“I know these things because my people have come to this land since before the Daoine,” Sevei answered. “We have tales as old as those of the Bunús Muintir. As for me—I was here once before. Before you were born, I spent several years in this land as a child when my mam wandered here and I have been here again with Nico for three years in the Tuatha. I’ve seen the changes with my own eyes and heard your people talking with my own ears. We Taisteal
know
this land and know its tales and those creatures that walk and swim and fly in it, far better than most of you Daoine who cower frightened on the same piece of land for all your lives and never see what’s beyond the horizon.”

The scolding tone of her voice dampened Meriel’s anger. “Sevei, I’m sorry,” Meriel said. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know you didn’t,” Sevei said quickly, her voice gentler. “You don’t know how it is with the Taisteal. We wander—it’s in our blood and our souls. We stay nowhere for too long. Our home is our family and the wagons in which we ride, not the soil and rock under our feet. It’s been seven years now since I last saw Thall Mór-roinn and it will be another two before we return there for the Klaastanak, the meeting of the clans. Many of our children were born here or in Céile Mhór as we came north; they’ll be seeing Thall Mór-roinn for the first time.” She stared straight ahead at the rear of Nico’s wagon, but her gaze seemed to be focused somewhere beyond it. “I wonder if they’ll see the same place I remember.”

“The world’s changed that much?”

Sevei laughed. “The world’s
still
changing. The change has just begun, really. One of our lives is just a moment to the world; it is still just waking to the Filleadh. We’re seeing the quickening of the earth, when it returns to the time of legends—when you’ve slept for seven centuries and more, it takes time to wake up. It’ll be several generations yet before everything is the way it once was.” Sevei glanced over at Meriel. “You’re part of it,” she said. “Whether you like that or not. You’re part of the change.”

“Are you playing fortune-teller again? Should I go get your cards?” Meriel tried to gentle the sarcasm with a smile, but Sevei’s face was solemn.

“Are you mad at me, or at yourself for listening to me a few minutes ago?” she said finally. “You could have jumped; you didn’t and I’m glad. I won’t let you hurt yourself, Cailin, and—”

“That’s not my name,” Meriel interrupted harshly. “You don’t
know
me.”

A shrug. “—and I won’t let anyone hurt you, not even Nico. You can believe that or not. While I’m with you I’ll keep you safe. If I think it’s
not
safe for you to be here, then I’ll help you leave myself.”

Meriel snorted her derision for that and moved as far away as she could on the wagon’s seat. She stayed there for the rest of the day, silent, wishing she could believe Sevei and knowing she couldn’t.

Toward the end of the fourth day, Meriel began to catch glimpses of a large lake through the trees and between the hills. The lough stretched out long and dark under the slate sky, covered with a froth of choppy waves pushed by a steady wind: Lough Méar, Sevei told her, a name Meriel remembered seeing on the maps at Inishfeirm. Meriel gazed at the water longingly. If she could reach the water’s shore, even for just a few moments . . . Lough Méar grew closer as their road descended out of the hills toward a village set at the end of the lake. This place was somewhat larger than the villages they’d passed through: a few dozen buildings and a small stone temple of its own, with fishing boats pulled up on a stony shingle.

As they came toward the village gate, Nico pulled his cart over and let Sevei come alongside. He leaned over toward Meriel. “You wouldn’t be thinking of running for the lough, would you, Cailin? Mind you, I remember what the tiarna said about you and the water. We’ll be watching you, all of us.”