Mage of Clouds (The Cloudmages #2) (56 page)

“Jenna . . .” Kyle scanned the small sheet of parchment again. He glanced at the sill, Jenna following his gaze—the crow was gone. “My heart just took the same leap yours did, and, aye, I look at this and I see Meriel’s handwriting. But . . .” He handed the note back to her. She stroked the parchment with a fingertip, feeling the ridges of dried ink. “We have to at least consider that this isn’t from Meriel at all, or that she might have written this under duress. What if this is just another of Doyle’s traps? Using Lámh Shábhála to go to Inishduán is one thing; using it to go all the way to Ballintubber is another; you’ll have drained much of the energy from the stone. In two days, there’s no way to get any support for you in place, and you’ll be inland where the Saimhóir can’t help even if you could find them and they were willing. If Doyle is waiting for you again . . .”

He must have seen her gaze, fierce and determined, for he stopped. “What would you do in my place, Kyle?” she asked. She held up the paper in front of his face. “Tell me what you’d do.”

He didn’t look at the paper. Instead, he did something he’d rarely done over the years. His hand reached past the note to stroke her cheek. His fingers were soft and warm and when his hand dropped away after a moment, she found herself missing the touch.

“I’d do the same thing you’re going to do,” he said.

“A
NY CHANGE?” Doyle asked Aghy, but the look on the younger tiarna’s face had already given him the answer. “Where is she?” he asked before Aghy could answer.

“In a room in the back off the courtyard. I have two gardai outside.” Aghy glanced at the riders with Doyle, at the bright Clochs Mór around their necks, and his eyebrows raised a bit: Doyle could see what he was thinking—four Clochs Mór here, five if Demon-Caller around Edana’s neck was included: Snapdragon, as always with Doyle; GodFist, held by the glowering and angry Nyle O’Murchadha; Sharpcut and Weaver, in the hands of the new cloudmages Shéra and Alaina. The tiny village was awash, all unaware, in great magic. The Riocha dismounted and gave the reins of their steeds to two wide-eyed stablehands. “I’ve told the innkeeper that we’ll be using all his rooms tonight. He seemed happy enough once a few mórceints crossed his palm.”

The inn was a ramshackle affair, the village small and ugly. Doyle and his companions had ridden north from Lár Bhaile to Áth Iseal and across the Duán to meet Edana’s caravan. “How was the journey down?” Doyle asked Aghy as they brushed the dust of the road from their clóca.

Aghy shrugged. “Mostly uneventful. The story you concocted worked perfectly.” Doyle had told Aghy to tell those who asked that the bantiarna with the large escort was ill and disfigured and preferred to stay in her room with her trusted servants. “I did the same thing here when we arrived yesterday evening. The proprietor—name’s Eliath; he’s the man over there yelling at the stable boys and looking nervous—says he’s the son of the ‘Tara’ the inn had been named after. The place looks like it hasn’t been cleaned since his mam died, I’m afraid, but the ale’s good.”

“That’s for me, then,” O’Murchadha said. “I need to clear the damned dirt out of my throat.” He limped heavily toward the tavern door, leaning on a cane, with Shéra and Alaina following. The proprietor, seeing them start toward the tavern, wiped his hands quickly on his apron and scurried inside.

“I’ll take you to Edana, Tiarna,” Aghy said. “How’re are things in Dun Laoghaire?” he asked as they walked toward the side entrance of the inn.

“It’s better not to ask,” Doyle told him. “Enean—Tiarna O Liathain—is now the Rí Dún Laoghaire.”

“Oh,” Aghy said, and the falling tone of the word said it all. “And Rí Mallaghan?”

Doyle managed a small laugh as Aghy opened the door and gestured for Doyle to enter. “Suffice it to say that if I fail here, you should look for another patron because mentioning my name would no longer be beneficial for you.”

“It’s that serious?”

“It’s worse,” Doyle told him. “But it’s my problem, not yours, Cousin.” They climbed the stairs to the inn’s second floor in silence.

“Shabby accommodations,” Aghy told Doyle as they walked down a dingy and badly-lit corridor. At the end of the hall, two gardai straightened as they saw Doyle and Aghy approach. “Still, they’re the best to be had in this sty of a town outside of commandeering one of the houses—which frankly aren’t any better. Unfortunately, the villagers are already gossiping; you should have seen the tavern last night—it was packed, and as close to Doire Coill as we are, I was worried.”

Doyle clapped Aghy on the back. “You’ve done perfectly fine,” he told the young man. “I’m in your debt. Why don’t you go join the others in the tavern? I’ll be down soon.”

Doyle embraced Aghy, clasping the youth to him. He knocked on the door. One of the maids let him in.

It was indeed a shabby room, with whitewash peeling from the stones of the outside walls and bedraggled, dusty tapestries covering the others. A large bed dominated the room with torn and patched linen draped over it. Doyle pushed it aside; Edana lay there.

She looked as if she were sleeping. Doyle bent over and kissed her, half-hoping that this time she’d open her eyes and gift him with her soft smile. But she didn’t. Her chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm. Behind her closed eyelids, he could see the flutter of movement, the ghost of the dream she inhabited. “Sometimes she smiles a bit, Tiarna, and I know she’s thinking of you,” the maid said.

Doyle nodded to her—a woman who reminded him of his mam in the last few years before she died: thick-waisted with graying white hair, and the memory of old beauty held in a lined and weary face. “She’s never woken?”

A solemn shake of the head. “Once, the first day we left Falcarragh, I touched her hand and she pressed my fingers. I thought she was going to open her eyes, but she didn’t. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s like she’s been enchanted, Tiarna, and you need the right charm to bring her back.”

Doyle chuckled grimly. He took one of Edana’s hands, half-hoping he’d feel the returning pressure of her fingers, but she didn’t respond at all. “I think you’re exactly right,” he told the maid. “And I intend to take that charm. Tonight.”

Dhegli could feel the pattern in the air. He lifted his snout, looking north. “No,” Challa said, alongside him.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“You saw something and no, you shouldn’t go.” Her dark eyes looked at him imploringly. “I can feel it, too, in the throbbing of Bradán an Chumhacht’s fingerling that’s inside me. The great sky-stone is coming and you want to go there. And I’m telling you to stay.”

“Challa, Bradán an Chumhacht has given me a foretelling. Jenna may need my help again.”

“Aye, and what did you achieve for the Saimhóir the last time you helped her, other than nearly die yourself?”

“She’s Meriel’s mam.”

“And Meriel hasn’t come here in two days now and may never again. In the meantime, you ignore the needs of the Saimhóir for a stone-walker. How will you get there, Dhegli—walk on the stones like one of them, naked and vulnerable and lost? Dhegli . . .” Challa nudged her head against his thick, warm neck. “I know how you feel for her. I understand that. But I also know that this isn’t our concern. Bradán an Chumhacht’s domain is the sea and the Saimhóir, not the hard earth and the stone-walkers. I love you, Dhegli, and I’ll follow you, but listen to me first. I can’t fill the part of you that Meriel fills; I’m glad that she can and I share your joy with her. But as long as you have Bradán an Chumhacht, you have a greater duty. We should be back at the Nesting Land now, not surrounded by stones in sweet water and all alone.”

Dhegli’s body shivered, blue-black fur rippling in starlight. He smelled the coming rain on the wind. “Saimhóir have followed stone-walkers before. We have a debt to the great sky-stone for bringing Bradán an Chumhacht back to us.”

“Aye, and that debt’s already been paid—and more, in my opinion—by Thraisha and Garrentha. And by you with what you’ve done. If anything, the stone-walkers now owe
us
, but do they worry about the things of the WaterMother? No.” He heard her voice go frightened, as if a Biter was swimming close by. “You weren’t in the foretelling you just had, were you?”

“No . . . Though if I had been, at least then I’d know what I needed to do.” He sighed, lifting his snout and letting his voice call out over the still dark water toward the hidden trees. He could feel the pattern of the great sky-stone approaching, but it would arrive far from the lough, where a Saimhóir couldn’t walk. The day star would come before he could reach that place and he couldn’t hold the stone-walker form for that long. . . .

Dhegli moaned as another flash of premonition came to him: if he went, he would be too late. This was, as Challa had said, an affair of the stone-walkers. “I hear you, Challa,” he told her sadly. “We’ll stay here. And if Meriel doesn’t come to me tomorrow, we’ll go home to where we belong.”

“You’re certain Mam will come here?” Meriel asked Keira. She tried to keep her misgivings and uncertainty out of her voice and knew she didn’t quite succeed. The older woman raised an eyebrow and lifted one shoulder under her skins.

“We told her mid-moon night. She knows this place and Lámh Shabhála has the power to bring her here. We’ll just have to wait.”

Meriel shivered in the darkness and moved closer to Owaine and Keira. So far there had been no mage-lights even though the sun had gone down over two stripes ago. The night air was chilled and wet in the valley to which Keira had led them; the moon snatched shreds of fast high clouds to veil itself and the stars to the west were obscured by a wall of looming black clouds that promised rain. Keira had stopped Owaine when he pulled flint and steel to start a fire. “Not here,” she said gruffly. “You don’t want to wake some of the ones sleeping here.”

They sat alongside a dolmen erected in the center of a ring of barrow graves. Keira had named the Bunús Muintir kings buried around them, though Meriel had recognized only one of the names: Riata, who had figured in some of her mam’s tales about Lámh Shábhála. Riata had once supposedly held Lámh Shábhála as well and Jenna had met his ghost. Just thinking about that made the fine hair rise on the back of Meriel’s neck and along her arms, and she kept looking at the dark and open entrance to his barrow-grave as if an apparition might appear there at any moment. Every touch of the freshening wind made Meriel think that the ghosts of long-dead kings were walking close by and the clouds that raced past the moon sent spectral shadows slipping over the valley. The trees rimming the small bowl of land swayed and dipped, as if dancing to an unheard reel. Dire wolves howled in the distance; she could hear the flutter of wings and the hooting of great owls, and a pair of eyes seemed to gleam in the blackness under the dolmen.

No—eyes
did
gleam there, caught in a spectral outline of a face. Even as Meriel started to open her mouth to scream, Keira stood and bowed her head in its direction. “Riata,” she said. “You honor us.”

A thin, breathy laugh came from the darkness below the eyes. “You wait for Lámh Shábhála and the First Holder,” he said. His regard seemed to drift over them, one by one, at once frigid and searing. “And you,” he said to Meriel in those same breathy tones that might have been mistaken for the soughing of the wind. “You’re her child, perhaps even the next Holder.”

“Aye,” Meriel answered. “I’m her child. But I don’t want Lámh Shábhála.”

“Neither did your mam,” Riata told her with another eerie laugh. “But the cloch didn’t care. It only worries about itself.” The form drifted out from under the dolmen, the misty outline of an old man dressed much as Keira was with a torc around his neck. Through him, as if through a cloud of pipe weed smoke, Meriel could see the landscape behind. His head lifted as he glanced up at the moon; his long hair rippled in a wind they could not feel. “There will be no mage-lights tonight,” he said. “The Holder will be disappointed.” He looked back at them. “You’re waiting here, but this is the wrong place. She isn’t coming here.”