Mage of Clouds (The Cloudmages #2) (37 page)

“Aye,” Edana said. “Please let them in, Toscaire Rhusvak.”

The Toscaire left the room, opening the doors wide as he did so. As the Riocha started to file into the chamber, Edana pressed Doyle’s hand and leaned toward him. “You
will
have Lámh Shábhála, won’t you, love? If we have that behind us, the Ríthe—and all the Riocha—will have no choice when they come together for the Óenach.”

“I’ll have it,” he told her. “On Festival Day. Jenna will come to Inishduán. She will.”

He hoped he was right. He closed his right hand in the air as if he were already grasping Lámh Shábhála.

The
Uaigneas
rolled in the heavy waves coming in from the west as it left Inishfeirm Harbor for Dún Kiil. Jenna stood at the railing of the deck shifting her weight easily with the movements of the ship, her hand closed around Lámh Shábhála as the head and shoulders of a young woman rotated slowly in front of her, suspended in the air and glowing with the energy of the cloch.

“That’s Meriel,” Mundy said behind her. “A good likeness, too. So you’ve discovered how Severii O’Coulghan used Lámh Shábhála to make the statues in the White Keep.”

“It was Severii who told me,” she answered. “I just rarely listened to his voice before. I used to think Severii wasted the mage-light’s energy with his sculptures and architecture, but now I wonder if he didn’t use Lámh Shábhála better than the rest of us.”

Jenna brought the bust down until it came to rest in Mundy’s hands. She released Lámh Shábhála and the glow around the figure faded, leaving Mundy holding an image of Meriel that seemed achingly lifelike, even to the color of her flesh and hair and the open and gleaming eyes. Jenna reached forward to touch the image. The stone felt warm and yielding under her hands, almost as if she were actually touching her daughter. Her breath caught in her throat; she blinked heavily. Her arm and head ached with the pain of using Lámh Shábhála. “I . . . I was afraid I’d forgotten what Meriel looked like. I needed to see her again.”

Mundy’s voice growled, gentle. “You don’t need to be afraid of that, Jenna.”

“I am, Mundy. I’m afraid I’ll never see her again. I’m afraid that I’m doing the wrong thing.” She laughed scornfully. “You know, I was angry with my own mam for years and years because of the way she acted toward me after she fell in love with Padraic Mac Ard. I never forgave her for that betrayal—which is how I thought of it, then—and I never had the chance to reconcile . . . no, I’ll be fair; I never made a real effort to reconcile with her before she died. Now I wonder if I haven’t treated Meriel far worse than I ever treated my mam.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“I do. Mundy, I can remember a thousand times when I was too busy to listen to her or play with her because some clan leader needed something or there was a conflict or the Comhairle was in session or I was in pain from Lámh Shábhála or . . .” She stopped. “Now she’s gone and I may never see her again. She’s gone, and I’m not willing to give up Lámh Shábhála to get her back. I’m about to do the one thing that Doyle warned me would result in her death.”

Mundy handed Jenna the sculpture; she hugged it to herself. She was afraid to look into the eyes, afraid that they might stare back accusingly.

“You’re doing the one thing that will allow you to have both of them,” she heard Mundy say. She looked out at the waves, turning her back to him. Well out from the ship, she could see a seal break the water and dive again.

“I hope so, Mundy.” She kissed the top of the statue’s head as she might Meriel’s. “By the Mother-Creator, I hope so.”

N
OT LONG after leaving Ballycraigh, Owaine was regretting his decision to continue his journey. He seemed to have lost Léimard; the squirrel hadn’t returned to him as he rode away. The rain was persistent and steady, never a raging downpour but hard enough that it dripped constantly from every surface and discovered every halfway dry patch of clothing on his body. He’d bought a small clay pot in the village and filled it with some herbs, and spent most of the first stripe of his ride recalling the witchfire spell, finally managing to get the pot alight. He wasn’t sure it helped. Aye, it illuminated the road a bit, but it turned the rain into silver streaks all around him, it glared in his eyes when he held it up so that the darkness was even more profound, and it sent shadows to swaying so that it seemed the night was alive around him.

Which it was.

The witchfire pot might not have helped his already poor sight much (though he hoped it aided the horse), but there was nothing wrong with his ears. Even through the persistent drumming of the rain and the patient
clop
of hooves, he could hear the sounds of movement around him. The road had curved back toward the edges of Foraois Coill once more, which made him wonder if Léimard hadn’t returned to Cataigh. The trees around him didn’t seem to be oaks, however, and the road 364 turned and twisted through the valleys between high, wooded hills. Wolves—normal ones—howled in the distance, and he heard the barking of what might have been feral dogs. Once, not long after he’d lit the witchfire pot, there came from startlingly close by the muttering growl of a dire wolf speaking its own language, though Owaine saw nothing and—thankfully—the creature didn’t attack. He heard the warbling cry of red deer and the hooting of an owl, the low grunting of some animal scrabbling in the brush and a high warble as branches above him shook heavy drops down on him. A thousand insects trilled and rasped in the thickets. Up on the hill to his right, as the rain subsided for a few minutes, he saw a snaking line of blurred but bright lights like a flowing river of cold blue-and-green fire: wind sprites, he guessed.

People might sleep in the night. The world did not. It seemed more awake than asleep.

Owaine shifted his sore rear in the leather cup of the saddle; he swung the witchfire pot, hung on the end of a stick, from the right to the left. As he did so, he heard a coughing roar and what sounded like great wings beating. A stand of young maple saplings at the edge of the road just ahead suddenly collapsed as something huge and dark moved out onto the road. Owaine’s horse reared backward and he barely managed to stay on, dropping the witchfire pot in the road and spilling the glowing herbs. In their wan illumination, baleful red eyes glared at him from the wrinkled folds of a leathery, snouted face. The mouth of the thing opened, showing white, daggered teeth, and it stood on its hind legs, spreading batlike wings with jutting, clawed fingerlikespines.

Owaine had seen something like this only once before, a hideous creature drawn in one of the books in the Order’s library, a book depicting the near-mythical beasts of the Before. Under the illustration had been a single word.

Dragon.

The horse reared again, but less urgently this time as it backed up. The apparition did the same, hissing like a boiling teakettle as it dropped down again and scuttled away a step. Grounded, it moved like a bat, the wings its hands; as the witchfire sputtered and threw fitful light over glinting, reddish scales, Owaine realized that it wasn’t as big as his fright had made it—no larger than one of the brown bears he’d glimpsed in the forests on Inishfeirm. The book in the Order’s library had spoken of dragons as big as houses, creatures that could perch on a keep’s tower as if it were a tree stump.

If this
was
a dragon anything like the dragons of the Before, it was also a very young or a very scrawny one. But young or scrawny, it looked big and powerful enough to make a snack of Owaine and a meal of the horse.

“Shoo!” Owaine shouted, as if he were scolding one of the Order’s cats. He waved his hands in the creature’s direction. “Go away!”

The dragon snarled, a low gurgling deep in its throat. Its head reared back on its long neck and the scales at its neck rose like a collar of hard petals. Its wings flapped, the wind showering drops from the branches above them. Gray smoke jetted from its nostrils.

“Shite!” Owaine cursed.

It spat fire.

The attack wasn’t the great gout of searing, awful flame that the ancient books had depicted. Rather, the dragon disgorged a ball of phlegm the size of Owaine’s head that hissed and fumed and dripped burning gelatinous globs. The largest mass of it hit the road a few feet shy of Owaine, sizzling as it struck the mud of the road and spread out as if it were made of soft pitch. The mess burned there like a soggy bonfire.

His horse reared up again at the same time, wide-eyed and frightened, and this time Owaine went down. He hit the road in a splash of mud and water. The dragon lurched forward, crawling awkwardly on its winged front legs. It hissed again, the massive jaws opening and snapping shut again. As Owaine frantically tried to regain his feet and his horse went galloping back the way they’d come, the dragon took a half-hop, half-flight with a beat of its wings and landed a few feet from him. Its head snapped back; Owaine grabbed the witchfire pot from the road, flinging it as hard as he could at the dragon with a shout. The pot hit the beast directly on the snout, the fired clay shattering as if it had hit a stone. The dragon roared and lifted up on its hind legs again.

Owaine waited to die.

Sounding vastly annoyed, the dragon’s great wings battered the air and its muscular hind legs pushed at the ground. The dragon crashed through tree limbs and into the night sky, showering Owaine with bits of leaves and small branches. Well above him, the creature roared again and wheeled away to the west.

Owaine sat on the road for several long breaths, gazing up through the broken limbs where the dragon had gone and feeling the rain on his face. He squinted back down the road: his horse was standing there a dozen paces away, already grazing contentedly at the grass on the side of the roadway as if nothing had happened. Léimard had returned as well, sitting on the horse’s rump with a nut between its paws and chewing contentedly as if nothing at all had happened. In the middle of the road, dragonfire fumed and hissed in the drizzle.

“I think,” he said to Léimard and the horse, “that the Mother is trying to tell us to camp here and get a fresh start in the morning.”

Meriel healed a man with a mangled leg in Kenleelagh, a woman with a deformed spine in Garventon, a child with lackbreath in Elphin. There were some who seemingly healed themselves at her touch, and unfortunate others who were turned away or found that the magic of Cailin of the Healing Touch failed to work. The villages were more numerous now and closer together, and the Taisteal spent one night in each with an early departure the next day. Always moving, always just ahead of someone who might be disappointed in the Taisteal wares and promises, though the rumor of the True Healer who traveled with them seemed to keep pace with their movements.

They moved on from Elphin, following the road southward. The wagon Sevei drove rocked and bounced along the rough lane.

“Do you ever get tired of the traveling?” Meriel asked Sevei, who shook her head.

“Not really. Sometimes, aye, of course it all seems too much the same, but then we’ll pass mountains or some deep hidden lough, or see something that none of us have ever glimpsed before. Those with the Taisteal blood would be bored being in one place and seeing the same faces every day. We want new landscapes, new people.”

“And new pockets to empty.”

Sevei grinned. “Aye, and that. There’s more than one reason we—” She stopped, a frown furrowing her brow as she rose up in the wagon’s seat, peering forward along the curve of the road. “Hey, Nico!” she called to the wagon in front. “Look to the east.”

Meriel followed Sevei’s gaze, leaning over toward the woman. Approaching from a hill just off the road were several riders. The sunlight glinted on ring mail and helmets, and the horses they rode were armored as well. A green-and-brown banner fluttered from a pole held by one of the riders. They came down the slope and stopped in the middle of the road ahead of them. They heard Nico call to the horses and bring his wagon to a halt several paces from them. Behind, Meriel and the others did the same.