Mage of Clouds (The Cloudmages #2) (9 page)

I miss you so much, Lucan. Sometimes I try to imagine your face and your touch and the sound of your voice, try to fix it all in my mind so I can’t forget it. Usually I can, but the last time I saw you seems so impossibly long ago, and I want so much for my inner vision to be real and for the words I hear in my head to really be your voice, calling to me. . . .

My Love:

I had such a strange, strange dream last night. At least I think it was a dream. I awoke because I heard the sound of seals—not the normal browns that one hears all the time around Inishfeirm, which by the way is positively infested with the creatures—but the mournful moans of the blues. I got out of my bed in the darkness, trying not to wake Faoil, and went to the window, pushing it a little farther open so I could hear better. The Saimhóir were making an enormous, sad racket. The sky was bright with the nearly full moon, though the ground was misty from the rain earlier in the day. I saw movement below, close by the wall of the White Keep. When I looked, I thought I saw a young man, perhaps twenty and one—staring up at me as I gazed down at him. He was entirely naked even though the night was cold. I gasped in surprise and blinked hard to rid myself of the last bit of sleep, and he was gone when I looked again. Yet . . . the bushes near the base of the keep were swaying, as if someone had just moved through them.

I thought of mentioning this to Siúr O’hAllmhurain, who is in charge of our floor, but decided not to do so since it was probably only a dream. Perhaps my thoughts of you were too much on my mind. . . .

I
have
made something of a friend, though I’m half afraid to tell you about it for fear you’ll misunderstand. His name (aye,
his
) is Thady MacCoughlin. He’s a third-year. His da and mam are MacCoughlins from An Cnocan; you may have seen his parents in Dún Kiil last year for the Festival of Méitha. Thady says they were there and were introduced to me at one of the dances, though I don’t remember them specifically—I end up meeting too many people to possibly remember them all. Thady’s already told me several things about Inishfeirm and the White Keep I didn’t know. He’s promised to show me a particular outside door that’s warded. He says half the acolytes know the ward-word to the door and use it to sneak out when they want to do so. I wonder if that doesn’t explain the person I saw outside last night (though not his nakedness—though perhaps one of the first-years was tossed out that way as a prank by some of the fifth-years, who are insufferably superior). Anyway, he’s very kind and helpful and I’ve told him about you, just to make sure that he understands. He’s just a friend, Lucan, and from such a minor name at that. That’s probably why he’s been so helpful to me, hoping I’ll say something complimentary about him to Mam or Da and gain favor for his family. . . .

Dear One:

Thady told me the ward-word yesterday and tonight I used it. I heard the seals again, the blues, so loud they woke me. You know how I love the Saimhóir, and there was, well, something . . . I don’t know . . .
compelling
about the sound. Maybe some of what’s been said about my mam is true. I do know that listening to them made me want to get near them, the same way I felt every time I heard them in Dún Kiil.

I slipped on my clóca and overcoat and put on my sandals, leaving Faoil sleeping in her bed. I tiptoed down the corridor, half expecting Máister Kirwan or that squinting Bráthair Geraghty to be waiting for me around the corner, or Siúr O’hAllmhurain to be standing in the door to her room at the end of the Women’s Corridor. But I could hear Siúr O’hAllmhurain snoring almost as loudly as the seals were calling, and so I went out of the wing and down the central hall to the Low Stairs in the back that we’re not supposed to use. At the bottom of Low Tower was the door: a tiny opening half-hidden in an alcove. I spoke the word and it clicked open, just as Thady said it would. I went out.

The seals were still grunting and moaning. I hurried away from the keep (expecting that someone would call out an alarm as I did so) toward the trail head that leads down to the beach at the foot of the mountain. I started down.

It was stupid, I know—the moon hidden behind clouds, the ground slick from the rain, a mist all around. But I managed to get down, maybe half a stripe later, without killing myself in the process. I could hear the water slapping against rocks and the sound of the blues was almost deafening.

They were there, the gorgeous creatures, out on the rocks near the shore: a dozen of the Saimhóir, as big and beautiful as I remembered from Little Head. There was a bull and four cows, the rest juveniles and pups. They saw me, too; they lifted their snouts in my direction and called out to me, wailing and crying like keening sochraideach at a funeral. I took a step toward them. And another. It was like they had cast an enchantment on me, and I think I might have walked right out to them . . . but the water was so cold that when it touched my foot I cried out.

I was shivering, and a wave came and soaked me to the knees. I looked back up the mountain, realizing that it was going to take me a stripe or more to walk all the way back up there, and that I was going to be exhausted from lack of sleep for my morning chores. The seals called me, but I turned my back on them and started climbing back up the trail. . . .

Sweetest:

I had hoped to receive a letter or letters from you by now. Whenever I hear that a ship has come into Inishfeirm Harbor, I wait for the Order’s carriage to bring back the mail and supplies that have come, but so far there’s been nothing from you. I hope my letters have been reaching you, and that the next ship will bring me your words.

I saw the naked young man again last night. Again it was the racket of seals that woke me, and I went to the window and saw him. I was awake this time: person or wight or ghost, he was real and not my imagination. He seemed to be coming from the Low Tower and the door there—the ward-locked one. He moved quickly across the grass toward the head of the trail, glancing back over his shoulder once or twice at the keep, though I don’t think he saw me watching as I leaned back into the shadows. I could see his face clearly—black-haired, black-bearded, and thin—and it was none of the acolytes or Bráthairs here. That much I know. He ran strangely, as if he were drunk or slightly dizzy, but quickly disappeared into the heather near the beach trail.

I thought that I might follow him (I know; I can hear you saying it now: that was foolish and dangerous, but somehow he didn’t seem frightening at all) and went to the door of my room. When I opened it, I stopped. In the moonlight that came through the corridor windows, I could see wet footprints on the stone flags: not boot prints, but the prints of a bare foot. They were drying quickly, even as I stared at them.

Whoever he was,
whatever
he was (and I’m beginning to suspect I know) he had come down this hall. He’d been there, just on the other side of my door. Somehow, that changed everything.

I shut the door. For a long time, I lay awake in my bed.

There are a dozen or more ghosts reputedly haunting the White Keep, if you believe the tales I’ve heard from the acolytes and mages. I asked Thady if any of them involved a young man wandering about at night (I didn’t mention his lack of clothing). The only ghost on the grounds is supposedly an old Bunús Muintir who stays near the stand of old oak trees on the eastern flanks of the mountain.

And I wonder . . .

Would a ghost would leave footprints? Especially wet ones?

I probably should tell Máister Kirwan about this, but somehow I don’t want to. Whoever it is, he doesn’t seem dangerous to me . . .

Dearest Lucan:

I hate this place. I hate the endless lectures, the interminable classes. Hate the other acolytes, half of whom (like Faoil) are so infatuated with the process of becoming cloudmages that they can’t think of anything else, and the other half of which are bored Riocha here because their families either can’t marry them off or put them in the service of their Rí. (And half of those ask me constantly if I can somehow intercede with my mam to get them a position in the court of Dún Kiil or an introduction to one of the Comhairle or a commission within the gardai.)

I hate the boredom: first-years aren’t permitted to leave the White Keep at all until the Festival of Láfuacht, and even then we must stay on the island. The Mother knows that a Festival on this miserable island will be nothing at all like the grand fun we had back in Dun Kiil during Láfuacht. Even the sheep here look bored.

I hate the petty intrigues: all the talk about who is important and who isn’t, the unspoken hierarchy based on who your family is, and who might betray whom or who is allied with someone else. Oh, I know you enjoy listening to that kind of talk, but I don’t. Everyone’s speculating on who might be the next Rí Ard since Rí Ard O Liathain’s health is failing and he still hasn’t named a Tanaise Ríg. There’s constant talk of the friction between the Tuatha and Inish Thuaidh, and they seem to think that I should know all about it since Mam is the Banrion.

I, for one, don’t much care.

I heard the Saimhóir again last night, and started to sneak out of the room to go see them. But I nearly tripped over one of the stone flags and stubbed my big toe, and that woke Faoil and she came running out of her bedroom. She asked me what I was doing and I made an excuse about needing to use the midden, but I’m sure she didn’t believe me. I went back to bed, and a while later the blues stopped making their racket. I once asked my mam about the Saimhóir because I’ve always heard about how they came and helped during the battle of Dún Kiil, and everyone always says that Mam is one of the changelings, that we have Saimhóir blood. “Not everything people say is always true,” she told me. That’s all she’d say. I asked my da, too. He said that he didn’t know for certain. “If you believed what people say, then the entire population of Inishfeirm and half of those here on Inish Thuaidh can swim with the blues,” he said. “But your mam . . .” He smiled at me. “Your mam has done more than I ever believed she could do. And your twice great-mam
was
an Inishlander.”