Holder of Lightning

"On Cooper Street. He has a room in a widow’s house. Her name is Murrin. I’ve seen him a couple times now. Do you want me to do some-thing with him? There are people I know in Low Town…"

"No," Jenna answered. "I will take care of O’Deoradhain myself."

Coelin’s head went back at the ferocity of her words. "You’re certain? He could be dangerous, and I-"

"I will take care of the man," Jenna said decisively. "Don’t worry about him."

Coelin nodded reluctantly. "I should go, then," he said. He looked uncertain, an odd, strained smile on his lips, and he shifted his weight from one leg to the other, as if he wanted to say more. "I’ve been asked to play for the Ri again, next week. And the Tanaise Rig said he would talk to his father about me."

The mention of O Liathain’s title brought the coldness back, and Jenna reached for the mug of brew, taking a long swallow and grimacing. "That’s… good," she told Coelin. "When you come here again, we’ll make plans."

He nodded. Turned.

Coelin," she said. She could not keep the desperation from her voice. Tell me that you love

He smiled, looking back over his shoulder. "I love you, Jenna. I always have."

And he left.

Chapter 24: The Traitor

THE Banrion seemed concerned when Jenna came to her requesting half a dozen trusted gardai, but to her credit, Cianna did not ask Jenna why but only nodded in agreement. "Certainly, Holder. Let me call for Labras; he's a good man, and he can choose five others… "

Jenna lifted her hand. "No, Banrion. Not today. After the Tanaise Rig leaves. Tomorrow morning. I need to go into Low Town then."

"Ah," Cianna had said. Just the one sound, then silence. "I'll make arrangements for them to be at Keep Gate at first bell tomorrow, then."

The Banrion started to move away, as if in dismissal, but Jenna cleared her throat. "Banrion, I would like to tell you why. It needs to be a secret between the two of us, though. You're the only person who has given me help, unasked for. Now I would ask it."

Cianna smiled softly. "Jenna, I will know anyway, whether you tell me now or not. The gardai will inform me where you take them, and why. The ones I would send with you aren't as blindly stupid as those you've borrowed before from my husband or Mac Ard. They won't let the Holder roam unaccompanied through Low Town, no matter what she says."

Jenna laughed with the Banrion. "I know. And that's why I came to you."

She told the Banrion about O'Deoradhain, how he had lied to them about himself on their way to Ath Iseal, how he had reacted during the attack by the Connachtans, that she'd glimpsed him in Low Town (though she said nothing about du Val), and how she now suspected the man had been responsible for the assassin.

Gianna’s face was grim when Jenna finished. "Tell me where this man and I will have him fetched here for you," she said. "There’s no need for you to expose yourself to danger, Jenna-and the Tanaise Rig will be upset if you are injured while you remain with us."

Jenna shook her head. "Banrion, I will have Lamh Shabhala to protect me Your gardai will be there only as a precaution. I want to do this myself- I want to see his face and hear his voice."

"Jenna-"

"Please, Banrion. I don’t know any longer who I can trust. I can only trust myself."

Jenna saw Cianna gather herself for another argument, but the Banrion finally dropped her shoulders. She coughed softly a few times, rising from her chair. Servants appeared as if summoned by the rustling of fabric, and the Banrion waved them away. "Come, then," she said. "We should give our farewell to your future husband, and pretend that none of us is plot-ting anything."

"I need four to stay out here and make certain that no one leaves until I’m finished." Jenna gestured to Labras, a tall, burly man with hair so red it almost seemed to burn and eyes as gray as storm clouds. She wasn’t sure she liked the man at all; he seemed to radiate violence, and the abundant scars on his face spoke to his familiarity with it. Yet if the Banrion trusted him… or maybe her reaction to him was only the haze of the anduilleaf. She’d taken two mugs of the brew before they’d left the Keep, knowing she might well be using the cloch, and the herb was like a fog over her mind that wouldn’t quite clear. "Labras, bring someone with you and follow me."

She touched Lamh Shabhala once as the three of them strode toward the door of the small, two-story house. She could feel O’Deoradhain, could feel the pattern of his energy motionless on the second floor. She could sense no fear or apprehension in him.

She decided that would soon change.

An elderly woman came scurrying from the kitchen as they opened the door, stopping suddenly and gaping with an open, toothless mouth at Jenna and the armed men behind her. There were two elderly men in the front parlor, huddled over a

ficheall board and staring with frightened yes at the intruders: Labras with a drawn sword, his companion holding a nocked and ready crossbow. "You have nothing to fear if you stay where you are," Jenna told them. "Widow Murrin, you have a man here named Ennis O'Deoradhain."

"First door to the left at the top of the stairs," the woman said hurriedly pointing, then hopping back as Jenna and the gardai pushed past her and up the stairs. Jenna heard the click of a door shutting as she reached the landing; in the expanded awareness of the cloch, she could feel O'Deoradhain's presence: still and quiet, even though she knew he must have heard the commotion below, the pounding of feet on the stairs and the jingling of the mail over the gardai's tunics. She could sense no danger in him, though, as she had with the assassin. He seemed to be waiting, calm. She started toward the door, but Labras shook his head. "He may have a bow or sword, ready to strike the first person through," he whis-pered. "Let me go in first." He seemed almost eager to do so.

"You needn't worry," Jenna said firmly. "He has a dagger, and it is in its sheath."

"How-?" Labras began, then saw her white-patterned hand touch the stone around her neck. An eyebrow interrupted by the pale line of a scar lifted and fell again. "So he has a dagger. You can see with that?"

"Aye," she told him. She pushed the door open. O'Deoradhain was leaning against a table on the far side of the room, arms folded across his chest.

"I was wondering how long it would take you to find me," he said. His gaze went past Jenna to the two gardai crowding the doorway. "You don't need them."

"No?" Jenna answered. "Strange. I expected you to be running like a frightened rabbit again, as you did the last time I saw you."

"If I were a 'frightened rabbit,' I wouldn't have come to Lar Bhaile at all," O'Deoradhain responded easily. "I wouldn't have made certain you saw me at du Val's. I wouldn't have made it so easy for that handsome, stupid boy with the golden throat to track me down."

His remark caused anger to flare in Jenna. She

grasped Lamh Shabhala, opening it slightly with her mind so that the cold, blue-white power filled her hand. "You knew where I was," she spat. "If you wanted to speak to me, you didn’t need this charade."

O’Deoradhain snorted. He took a step toward her, his hands down at his sides. She saw the well-worn leather of the scabbard there, and heard the gardai shift uneasily behind her. But the man stopped two strides from her. "Oh, aye. I could have walked right up to the gate-and Mac Ard would have had me killed immediately, or the RI Gabair would have bound me in irons to be tortured until I gave them the answers they wanted, or the Tanaise Rig might have had me dragged behind his carriage as he left for Dun Laoghaire, just for the pleasure it would give him. But I could never have gotten to you, Jenna Aoire. They might call me their enemy and be right, but I’m not your enemy."

Aye That’s why you sent the assassin, she wanted to tell him, mockingly. But she saw him through the eyes of Lamh Shabhala, not just her own, and though she could sense that he desired the power she held, there was no malice in him toward her, only jealousy and envy and sadness. The certainty in her failed. "Who’s your master, then?" she asked. "Who sends you? The RI Connachta?"

He laughed and glanced at the gardai. He gestured at Labras with his chin his hands not moving. "I would rather not talk here. In front of them."

"You’ll talk here, or you’ll talk back at the keep. I’ll ask you again, and I’ll know the truth of what you say: are you with Tuath Connachta?"

Again, a laugh. "I gave you the truth when we met. I’m of Inish blood. As to who sent me… I’m a Brathair of the Order of Inishfeirm and the Moister there gave me this task."

Despite herself, Jenna found her interest suddenly piqued at the men-tion of Inishfeirm and the Order. She remembered her da Mall’s tale, and her great-mam’s and great-da’s escape from that island. "And what task was that?"

"To bring you back to Inishfeirm so you could be taught the ways of the cloudmage."

Jenna bristled. The anduilleaf rang in her ears, Lamh Shabhala pulsed in her grasp. "What makes

you think that I need your instruc-" In the fog of the anduilleaf, she nearly missed it: a sudden sense of danger, of attack-not from the man in front of her, but from behind. .

"Jenna!" O'Deoradhain shouted at the same time. He flung himself for-ward as Jenna turned to look.

She caught a glimpse of Labras, no longer holding a sword but with a long dagger in his hand, his gray eyes not on O'Deoradhain but on Jenna and the dagger already beginning to make a sweeping cut that would have found her neck. O'Deoradhain hit Jenna in that same instant; as she fell she glimpsed O'Deoradhain parrying Labras' attack with his own weapon, the clash of blade against blade loud. Then she saw nothing as she struck the floor with a grunt and a cry, trying to roll away. As she tumbled, she heard a shout and a horrible, wet strangling sound: Jenna, on her knees, saw Labras fall, a new, second mouth on his neck gaping wide and frothing blood. The crossbow twanged, the bolt hissing, and O'Deoradhain staggered backward. The remaining gardai tossed the now useless crossbow aside and drew his sword. He moved-toward Jenna, not the wounded O'Deoradhain.

A shout of rage, the tendons standing out like ropes in her neck: Jenna let the power surge from the cloch. A torrent of agony rushed from the cloch, through her arm and into her body, and she threw that torment outward with a scream as light flared from her hand. The searing bolt lifted the garda from his feet and slammed him backward into the wall, lightning crackling madly about his frame. The wood cracked and shat-tered beneath the force of the blow, mingling with the cracking of bones; the body dropped to the floor like a rag doll, neck and spine broken, the wall blackened and smoldering behind him.

The echo of thunder rumbled in Jenna's ears and faded. In the sudden quiet, she could hear O'Deoradhain groan as he pushed himself to his feet, Jenna was breathing heavily, her body shaking. She stared at the garda's mangled body. The eyes were still open; they gazed at her as if in accusation. "I'm sorry…" she whispered to the corpse.

" That is what makes me think you still need to learn how to use your cloch, Holder," O'Deoradhain said. That near-contempt in his voice snapped her head around. His left arm dangled uselessly, the quarrel from the crossbow protruding from his

shoulder and dark blood staining the arm. His right hand still held his dagger, dripping red. He went to the corpse of Labras and wiped the blade on the garda’s clothing. He turned to Jenna, sheathing the dagger. "Your other men are coming," he contin-ued, "and I don’t have time to talk." He was right; she could feel them rushing toward the house from their stations. "I’m not your enemy. They may be."

Jenna shook her head; she could feel nothing in the others but concern and fear for their own well-being if she’d been hurt. She wished she’d taken the same precaution with Labras and his friend. "No," she told him. "They’re loyal."

"To you, perhaps. Me, they’ll kill."

"Stay, O’Deoradhain. You’re right. We need to talk."

They could hear the first of the gardai rush into the house. O’Deoradhain went to the window and glanced down. He put a leg over the sill. "Then come with me."

There were footsteps pounding the stairs. "O’Deoradhain!" Jenna called. "Wait."

His shook his head. "Meet me below Ri’s Market at Deer Creek-third bell, two days from now." She could have stopped him. She could have reached out with Lamh Shabhala and held him with the cloch’s energy-or crushed him like you did the garda. . Jenna lifted her hand but rather than reaching out with the power, she pushed it back, closing Lamh Shabhala. O’Deoradhain slid over the windowsill, grimacing as he tried to maneuver with one hand. He lowered himself slowly down, until all Jenna could see was his right hand, holding the sill. Then he let go, and she heard him land on the soft ground outside, the sound followed by his running footsteps.

"Holder!" someone shouted, and Jenna turned from the window to see the gardai, swords out, staring horrified at the carnage in front of them. She could feel the fear in them as they glanced toward her, untouched in the midst of the butchery. And perhaps because she could sense that dread, perhaps because she needed to convince herself that she had only done what she’d needed to do, she lifted her chin and glared back at them.

"This is what happens to those who betray me," she said.

In her voice, she heard an imperious tone that had never been there before, and she wondered at it.

Chapter 25: Preparations

JENNA had wondered whether Cianna would believe her. She shouldn't have worried. The Banrion uttered a gasp of horror when Jenna started to relate how Labras had attacked her, and she immediately sent away the servants, going to the door of her chamber and closing it firmly. "My child," she said, enfolding Jenna in her arms. Then she released her, a quivering hand going to the torc about her neck, gold braided with bright silver. "I can hardly breathe," she said.

"Let me call the healer," Jenna said, but Cianna shook her head.

"No." Cianna took a long, wheezing breath. "No. It will pass. I put you in terrible danger, however unintentional. I was certain Labras was one of those

I could trust, but…" She bit at her lip.". . he was evidently in someone else's pay. How can you ever forgive me for making such a mis-take? Had you been hurt, or the cloch taken from you. . Jenna, I put you in such danger."

Jenna hurried to reassure the distraught woman. "You couldn't have known, Banrion."

A flush burned high on Cianna's cheeks. "No, Jenna. I absolutely should have known. For my own survival, as well as yours. Now I have to wonder who else around me is in the employ of another, who of those others I trust implicitly…" Cianna turned away, hunching over as a fit of cough-ing took her. "Damn this sickness in my lungs, and damn the healer for his own lies." Slowly, she straightened again, still turned away from Jenna. "What about the man you went to capture? Was he part of this, too?"

"He escaped, Banrion. When I used the cloch."

Cianna turned, touching a handkerchief to her mouth. There were clumps of clotted blood on the cloth. "My guess is that Labras was being paid in this O'Deoradhain's coin. To think that I was an unwitting accomplice — oh, this would have played so well for him-had you not been alert, Lamh Shabhala would have been his."

Jenna didn't bother to correct Cianna' s perception. It would be a good lie for the time being,

until she learned whose hand was actually behind the scenes. And she would find out.

The anger burned in her, alloyed with fear.

"I will have the rest of the gardai who went with you interrogated to see if there are others whose loyalty has been turned, but now I don’t know if I can trust the results I would hear," Cianna continued. "I can’t discount the possibility that my husband arranged for this, or the Tanaise Rig, or even Padraic Mac Ard or one of the other tiarna here-maybe Aheron from Infochla; he seemed awfully fond of you the other night." She stopped, and touched Jenna’s cheek. "You can trust no one, Jenna." A bitter smile creased her face. "Evidently not even me."

Jenna put her own hand, stiff and marked with the curling scars of the cloch, on top of Cianna’s. She took the Banrion’s hand and kissed it once. "It wasn’t your fault, Banrion," she told the woman. "We both need to be more careful, that’s all. And I’ve learned something from this: I can use Lamh Shabhala to look inside a person and see what’s in their heart." Jenna frowned. "I won’t be surprised this way again," she declared.

Cianna, pale and grim, nodded.

The Holder Aoire," the page announced, and closed the door behind Jenna. The three men in the room were huddled together over a table, and they turned to look at her as one: Ri Mallaghan, Tiarna Mac Ard; and a man whom Jenna didn’t recognize. She lowered her head and gave them a brief curtsy.

Ah, Jenna," the Ri said. He was smiling, but there was a grimness in his smile. "Thank you for coming so quickly. Here, you should see this…" He beckoned to her, and she came over to the table. She nodded Mac Ard, then glanced curiously at the other man. "Ah, you’ve yet to be introduced to our Field Commander," the Ri said, noting the direction of her gaze. "Holder, this is Tiarna Damhlaic Gairbith, who has been away to the west watching the Connachtans."

The man inclined his head to her. He wore his cloca uncomfortably, as if he were unused to the long folds of fabric. His face was hardened and fissured from exposure to wind and sun, his cheeks and forehead marred with the white lines of scars, his gray-flecked beard thin over patches of mottled

flesh. His hands were on the table, holding down a large piece of unrolled parchment; Jenna saw that the left hand had but two fingers and a thumb.

Through Lamh Shabhala, Tiarna Gairbith radiated violence. This was a man at whose hands hundreds had died and who would most likely be responsible for the death of hundreds more if he lived. There was no visceral enjoyment of death in him, though Jenna sensed a deep satisfac-tion within him at the results of his campaigns, and he carried no remorse or guilt at all in his soul. She knew that if the Ri ordered it, he would slay her with the same pragmatic lack of passion. But she could sense no direct threat in him at all: to him, she was simply a piece in the game and he would use her or not as the strategies of the game dictated.

The emotional matrix around Mac Ard and the Ri were more compli-cated. There were strange colors and hues in their shapes, nothing that was overtly threatening, but she knew both of them wanted what she held and would take it if the opportunity arose. With Mac Ard especially there were tendrils of black secrets that snaked outward toward Jenna, vestiges of hidden plots that involved her. She wondered-more strongly this time-if Mac Ard were at the heart of the attacks against her, if his involvement with her mam weren't simply a subterfuge to allow him ac-cess to her and Lamh Shabhala.

The Ri's emotions were simpler and yet more deeply hidden. He was wrapped in plottings and deceptions. Under it all was the burning orange-red of ambition: the Ri Gabair would be Ri Ard, if he had the chance. . and it took little imagination on Jenna's part to believe that the Ri might feel Lamh Shabhala would give him that chance.

The Ri moved aside to let Jenna stand next to the table. Lines were drawn on the parchment, and placed atop it were small triangular flags, some green and brown, others blue and gold. "This is Tuath Gabair," the Ri explained to Jenna. "There, see that blue area? That's Lough Lar. Here-" his stubby index finger stabbed at the map. "That is Lar Bhaile, where we are now. Up here-" his finger moved up past Lough Lar to where a line of blue meandered, occasionally met by other, smaller branches. "That's the River Duan and the Mill Creek feeding into it, and Knobtop and Ballintubber." His finger touched the map again and again in concert with his words. Jenna nodded, but

in truth the map meant little to her. How could marks on paper be Ballintubber or Knobtop?

"The flags," the RI continued, "are where our troops and the troops of Tuath Connachta are currently located. Do you see here, southwest of Ballintubber, where the Connachta flags have bunched? That’s where their main army is camped, right on the border. That’s where they’ll make the first push toward us."

As the Ri spoke, images came to Jenna. It was as if she were a bird, hovering far above Tuath Gabair and looking down. There was the lough, and just past it… "Doire Coill is in their way," Jenna said. "They can’t go through that forest with troops."

Tiarna Gairbith snorted through his long nostrils: a laugh. "I thought you said the Holder knew nothing of war, my Ri," he said. The fingers remaining on his mutilated left hand traced one arc on the map, then another. "They will split their forces as soon as they reach the border of Doire Coill," he said. "One arm, the larger and slower, will go north to secure the ford of the Duan at Ath Iseal, then attack Lar Bhaile from the north. The other, smaller and swifter, will cross the Duan at the southern ford and come up to Lar Bhaile from the south. ’The Horns of the Bull,’ they call it; the Connachtans have used the tactic more than once. They hope to split our forces to deal with the twin attacks; if one horn fails, the other might still impale us."

"But your troops won’t let that happen," Jenna said, looking at the men. "If you know where they’ll strike, you will have made plans against that. You have the advantage of knowing the land and deciding where to make your battle where you can use the ground to your benefit."

Again, the laugh. "I like this Holder," Gairbith said to the Ri. "No talk from her of negotiation, of somehow avoiding the conflict. Instead, she sees that the battle will come and prepares to meet it." He bowed to Jenna, approvingly, and she wondered whether the smile was genuine or if the man was simply mocking her. "Aye, we will do just as the Holder sug-gests," Gairbith answered, "but many will die doing that, and after we push them back to their own borders, we will be too weak to do more than watch them leave. Unless…" His voice trailed off. He looked at Mac Ard, who stood with arms crossed, lips in a tight frown, his eyes almost angry.

Unless what?" Jenna asked, and Nevan O Liathain's words echoed in her memory: ". . the Rl no doubt hopes for Lamh Shabhala to be part of that battle. . he would love to see the lightnings of the cloch smash the enemy and send them fleeing for their lives. ."

Rl Mallaghan saw the realization on her face. "Lamh Shabhala has been countless battles over the centuries, Jenna," he said, "many of them here in what is now Tuath Gabair. And while Lamh Shabhala is the only cloch na thintri that is awake. ."He spread his hands wide. "There is only one reason the Connachta are mounting their armies: they know

Lamh Shabhala is here and they think to strike before you learn to wield the cloch as the cloudmages have in the past and my army comes to invade their land-because if they had the cloch, they would use it to strike us. They believe the only reason we haven't yet struck is because the cloch or the Holder is still weak. But you've learned so much already Jenna. I ask you, how many lives will it cost if Lamh Shabhala does not enter the battlefield? All we request of you is that you help us defend you as the Holder."

The Ri's words were spoken in a voice like sweet butter, thick and freighted with an unconscious arrogance that spoke of his expectation that he would be heard and obeyed. His eyes, behind their enclosing folds of pale flesh, stared at her unblinking. When Jenna opened her mouth to begin a protest, she saw those eyes narrow. Through the cloch, she felt a sudden surge of malice directed toward her from the Ri, and she knew that if she refused, he would use that answer to justify other actions against her. As Cianna had told her with O Liathain, "no" was not an answer she could give him.

Is he the one, then? Has the Ri been stepping carefully only because the Tanaise Rig was here also?

"Jenna hasn't fully learned to use Lamh Shabhala, my Ri," Mac Ard interjected before Jenna could decide what to say. "Not in the way of the legends of the Before. Not in the way the cloudmages of song used them. Your majesty knows the pain involved for Jenna when the mage-lights come. You also know that Lamh Shabhala’s task right now is to unlock the other clochs na thintri and that is what

Lamh Shabhala has been teaching the First Holder-not the art of war. You ask too much of her too soon and place her in danger. You must remember, my RI, that the Tanaise Rig has expressed an interest in Jenna. He would not want her injured. Worse, what if the Connachtans should win the battle when Lamh Shabhala is involved? What if Ri Connachta were suddenly to pos-sess the cloch? Do you think the Ri Ard or any of the other Tuatha would come to your aid, or would they sit and watch and wait and let the Con-nachtan vultures feed on the bodies of Lar Bhaile?"

Through Mac Ard’s speech, the Ri’s face had grown progressively more ruddy. "So it’s Tiarna Mac Ard’s counsel that I throw my armies against Connachta and ignore the weapon that could easily turn the battle? You would take the sword from my hand and have me do battle with a butter knife."

"I say better a duel with butter knives than risk giving your enemy your sword, that’s all," Mac Ard answered.

"I have no plans to give the enemy this particular sword," Tiarna Gairhith interjected. "I will cleave the enemy’s head from its shoulders with it and I will keep Lamh Shabhala safe-that’s my pledge."

The Ri laughed at that. "There, you see, Padraic? My Commander has made his promise."

"I think," Jenna said loudly, and all three men turned their heads to her "that everyone is talking as if I were incapable of making a decision for myself." Mac Ard glowered, Gairbith gave a quick, shocked laugh, and the Ri sucked his breath in with an audible hiss. For a moment, Jenna thought she’d gone too far, but then the Ri applauded her, three slow claps of his hands. His eyes were still narrowed and dangerous, but his voice was soft.

"The Holder seems to have no lack of courage in speaking her mind," he said. "That is good-a ruler should know the true feelings of those under him. I assume the Holder realizes that when the Ri asks for an opinion, she may give it. And when he issues a command, she will obey it. Without any question at all."

The malice she felt in him increased, a dark arm swirling around her in cloch-vision. She knew he wanted submission now. He wanted her to drop her head, perhaps even to fall to her knees to beg forgiveness for her audacity in questioning him. Instead, she touched Lamh Shabhala, letting a trace of its cold energy seep into her to fill her voice. "Is the Ri giving me a command, then?" she asked, and the words were edged like a blade, filled with a warning and menace. "Does he believe the Holder to be like a ficheall piece that he can move about the board? If so, I would remind him that the Holder is the most powerful of all his pieces and that it might even strike the hand that tries to move it to the wrong square."

Jenna could see the Ri scowl at the words, saw him blink and take a step backward while the fury brought color to his cheeks. Tiarna Gairbith put a hand to the hilt of his sword; she knew that if the Ri ordered it, that blade would flash out toward her. Mac Ard's hand was also on his weapon and in the cloch-vision his own emotions were chaotic and ambivalent: Jenna couldn't tell what he might do. Jenna clutched Lamh Shabhala, and all three men watched her fingers close around the brightening stone.

Mac Ard stepped out between Jenna and the Ri. "Jenna, the Ri is an excellent ficheall master, both in the game and in war. You need to trust his hand, for he wouldn't put a piece as important as you in needless jeopardy. Believe me in this. I have been with him all my life and my Parents served him also. He won't ask more of you than you can give. All We are doing here is looking at the alternatives available to us for this threat. Nothing more. Ri Connachta has yet to make an irrevocable move. There is still some hope they will not."

Behind the Ri, Gairbith laughed again at that assessment.

In the cloch-vision, the Ri was a thunderhead ready to spew lightning and wind and hail. Jenna knew that she had just pushed the man as far as he could be pushed-the Ri was accustomed to obedience and defer-ence, at least on the surface.

He had known nothing else; he would toler-ate nothing else. Whether she would do his bidding or not when the time came, she couldn't defy him now without using the cloch. And afterward. . even if she walked out of this room still the Holder, what then? She would be a fugitive, a dangerous animal to be hunted down and killed.

Jenna's fingers loosened around the stone. They watched her hand drop back to her waist, watched her cradle the stiff, aching flesh to her abdomen.

"I'm sorry, my Rl," she said, lowering her gaze so that she stared at the man's fat, sandal-clad feet below his cloca and hoping that her words sounded sufficiently apologetic. "I spoke too harshly. I… I'm still frightened by what happened yesterday, the attack by the Banrion's gardai."

"Ah, that. ." The Ri nodded; his stance relaxed and his voice was now gentle. "An unfortunate occurrence, to be certain, but one that shows me that you are learning to use the cloch, eh?"

She nodded. "Aye, my Ri."

"Good," he said. She thought that he might pat her with a fatherly hand. The malice in her cloch-vision hadn't diminished, though; this was a man who would take her without a thought if he believed it to be to his advantage. There was no affection for her in his tone; only the satisfaction that came from watching her submit to his will. "Then we'll make our plans appropriately. Tiarna Gairbith will be in contact with you regarding the plans and I know Tiarna Mac Ard-" the Ri's gaze flicked over to Padraic and at the same time, Jenna saw the two of them in the cloch-vision, entangled in mutual webs of ambition and deceit "-will be help-ing us as well. I hope you understand, Holder Jenna, that we hold you in the highest esteem, and that everything we do here is for your benefit."

He said the words with compassion gleaming in his voice and decep-tion in his heart.

Jenna smiled at him and nodded.

The mage-lights swirled in the night sky over the keep, and Jenna went to them. The bright communion was at once painful and joyous, and afterward Jenna staggered back into her room from the balcony, clutching her arm to herself, and half-fell into Maeve's arms. Her mam helped her back to her bed, where she sat, eyes closed, feeling only the power surging through her. "Anduilleaf," she managed to croak out. "Quickly."

The water was already boiling, the leaf already crushed in the bottom of the mug. Jenna heard her mam pour the water and smelled the aroma of the leaf wafting through the cold air. "Here," Maeve said, and Jenna felt a warmth pressed against her left hand. She took the mug and lifted it to her lips, sipping noisily against the heat of the brew.

"How many times more, Jenna?" There was a weary concern in her mam’s voice.

"Is that what he wanted you to ask me?" Jenna answered. "Is he getting impatient to be a cloch Holder himself? You can tell him that it will be soon: two more appearances. Three, at most."

Maeve ignored Jenna’s scornful tone. "And what then?"

"I don’t know" Jenna answered heatedly. "If I did, I’d tell everyone so they’d stop asking these stupid questions of me."

She glanced up to see her mam bite her lower lip, looking away with hurt in her eyes. "I ask because 1 hate to see you in pain, Jenna," Maeve answered, her voice trembling with the sob she held back.

"I’ve been hoping that once the other clochs were open, you wouldn’t be… in so much. ." Maeve couldn’t finish. She covered her mouth with a hand, tears spilling over her eyes. Jenna wanted to go to her, to comfort her mam as she had comforted Jenna a thousand times over the years, but she couldn’t make herself move. She hid herself behind the mug of leaf-brew, sipping and inhaling the steam as she watched her mam sniff and blot her tears with the sleeve of her leine.

Jenna could see the swelling curve of her mam’s belly. She could feel the life inside, glowing like a banked fire in a hearth.

"Maybe," Maeve said, "Padraic should be the Holder." She wouldn’t look at Jenna. "Maybe that’s what should have happened."

"Is that what Da would have wanted?" Jenna retorted. "Or have you already forgotten him and the fact that Lamh Shabhala was once his?"

Maeve turned, her cloca flaring outward with the sharp motion. "I will "ever forget Niall. Never. And

I can’t believe that you’d be cruel enough to even suggest that."

Guilt made Jenna momentarily forget the throbbing coldness in her arm. "Mam, I’m sorry…"

There was a tentative knock at the door and one of the servants stuck her head in. "Pardon, m’ladies, but Coelin Singer is here asking to see the Holder."

Maeve was still glaring at Jenna. "Tell him he may

come in," Jenna said. "In here, Holder?" the servant asked.

"Do you not have ears?" Jenna snapped. "Aye, here. If the Tanaise Rig doesn’t like it, then he should have left his own people to stand guard."

The servant looked at Maeve, who shrugged. "The Holder obviously doesn’t care to have anyone else suggest what she should do or question her commands."

The servant fled.

"Mam-" Jenna began, but then the door opened again and Coelin entered. His face was full of concern and question, but he seemed startled when he saw Maeve.

"Oh, Widow Aoire," he said, nodding to Maeve and glancing once at Jenna questioningly. "I don’t mean to disturb…" He gestured at the door. "I can wait in the outer room."

"Stay. Maybe you can talk some sense into the girl," Maeve said to Coelin. "I obviously can’t tell my daughter anything. She would rather learn from her own mistakes, I suppose. Just see that you’re not another one, Coelin Singer." Maeve didn’t turn back to look at Jenna, but walked out of the room. The sound of the door closing was loud in the apartment.

"What was that about?" Coelin asked. "Jenna? I saw the lights, and thought that you might-"

Jenna shook her head. "Don’t talk," she said. "Just. . come here. Please. Hold me."

Coelin, with a glance back at the door, went to the bed in two long strides. He took Jenna up in his arms.

"Kiss me," she said. "Make me forget about all this for a little bit. ."

And, for a time, she did.

Chapter 26: A World Changed

DEER Creek ran at the bottom of a steep ravine. Above, to the north, was the city of Lar Bhaile; south rose the steep and stony flanks of Goat Fell with the Ri's Keep perched on top. Not far beyond the bridge that linked Low Town to Goat Fell and the ramparts of the keep, the creek widened and fanned out into a marsh-clogged mouth before flowing into Lough Lar. To Jenna's mind, Deer Creek was more river than creek, nearly twice as wide as the Mill Creek that ran past Ballintubber, deeper and faster.

And Deer Creek had seals; one, at least: on a flat slab thrusting out of the rushing water, a dark, shiny-furred head watched as Jenna made her way down the path from the Ri's Market Square. Getting away from the keep had been easier than Jenna had expected. After the incident with the gardai, no one voiced an objection when she left the keep unescorted except by two chambermaids. Jenna noticed that another carriage de-parted the keep immediately after they left, and that the square seemed particularly well-populated with gardai. Jenna had opened the cloch slightly, letting its energy spread out over the square-there were at least a half dozen tendrils of attention leading to her, none of them overtly dangerous but all watching.

And down in the hawthorn-choked ravine, another: O'Deoradhain.

The chambermaids were easy: she gave each of them a morceint and told them to go buy whatever they liked. It took time to lose the gardai, but she eventually managed to lose all the watchers and sneak away to the wooden stairs leading down to Deer Creek and a small patch of meadow there where a few people sat fishing despite the cold. Jenna. stayed under the trees, moving east along the creek and away from the meadow, where someone glancing down from the market above wouldn't easily spot her. She saw movement out in the creek-the seal rose from the cold water and clambered onto one of the flat rocks in the middle of the stream.

She could sense O'Deoradhain in the tangle of woods huddled against the steep bank. Jenna shivered and wrapped herself tighter in her cloca, one hand grasping the stone on its chain, ready to

open it fully and strike the man down at need. "You could have at least picked a warm place to meet," she called out to where he hid.

There was a rustle of dry brush and leaves, and O’Deoradhain stepped out. One arm was in a sling, but there was a knife at his belt, and Jenna watched his free hand carefully, knowing how quickly he could move with that weapon. She stayed ready to strike if his fingers strayed near the hilt. "If it were summer, the midges would be out. Would you rather be cold or bitten to death?"

The seal out in the water gave a coughing roar, and Jenna glanced again at the creature. It was a large bull, its head up and alert and staring back at them. Its coat was coal-black, yet deep blue highlights gleamed within it, like sparks struck from a flint and steel. O’Deoradhain looked toward the seal as well. "There aren’t usually seals in Lough Lar," he said. "Some-times in Lough Dubh, aye, but they don’t usually come up the Duan this far."

"For an Inishlander, you know a lot about Tuath Gabair."

"I’ve been here a long time now," O’Deoradhain answered, turning away from the seal and looking back at Jenna. "Ever since the Order decided that Lamh Shabhala might be in Gabair. Almost two years now."

Jenna cocked her head at that. "And how did you know that Lamh Shabhala was here before the mage-lights came?"

O’Deoradhain shrugged, grimacing as his bandaged shoulder moved. "Some in the Order know the magics of earth and water, the slow eternal spells. I know a bit of them myself. Ordinarily, that means little, but as the Filleadh approached and the mage-lights started to strengthen even though none of us could see them yet, those with the skill could feel the resonance through their own spells. They knew and they started to search, and they realized that Lamh Shabhala had once been on Inishfeirm and that they had lost the cloch. It wasn’t hard, then, to know who had taken it-your great-da. What took time was discovering where he had gone and what had happened to him."

"So they sent you? Alone?" Jenna scoffed. "Why didn’t they send every-one? Why isn’t Gabair filled with people from the Order?"

O'Deoradhain gazed back placidly into her mocking stance. "If all of Inishfeirm suddenly came here, then everyone would suspect why and everyone would have been searching for the cloch. And there are only a few who are capable of being the Holder of Lamh Shabhala."

The way he said it lifted the hairs on Jenna's arms with a sudden chill that was not the cold air. "A few like you?" she asked.

O'Deoradhain nodded. "That's what I was trained to do." Jenna took a step back from him. "Jenna," he said. "Use the stone. Look at me. I'm not a threat to you. I'd take the stone from you if you gave it to me, aye. If you'd died the other day in my room, I'd have taken it then, too. But I won't harm you to become the Holder."

That might have been true; she could feel no danger to herself emanat-ing from him. Yet… "I don't know that," she said. "Even with the cloch."

O'Deoradhain smiled, which softened his rugged face. "You're right. You don't know that, and I'll tell you that there are ways to hide yourself from a cloch na thintri, even Lamh Shabhala."

"And you know them."

"I do."

"Then I can't trust you."

"Perhaps not," he answered. "But you can't survive alone. Not for long, and not with what you hold."

"I have those I can trust," Jenna replied with some heat, and- strangely-O'Deoradhain chuckled at that.

"Who? Mac Ard? The Ri and Banrion? That self-centered boy from your old village?"

"He's not-" Jenna began heatedly, then stopped, clenching her jaw as O'Deoradhain studied her, as the seal out in the river gave another moan-ing wail as if calling for a mate. "What did you want of me, O'Deoradhain?"

"Only what I told you: to bring you to Inishfeirm, so you can learn to use the power you hold."

"I have learned," she retorted. "I wouldn't be talking to you now if I hadn't. Three times someone

has tried to kill me and three times I've killed them instead. I can see with the cloch, see what people are feeling toward me. I can tell whether a person holds a true cloch or a worthless stone. I can draw the mage-lights down to me and fill the stone with their energy."

"And did you need to kill them or even want to? Do you know that you see truth through the cloch? Do you know all Lamh Shabhala wants to do with that power or all it can do? Do you know how to deal with the pain Jenna?" She must have shown something in her face, unwillingly, for he nodded. "Aye, that we can help you learn. But you must come with me back to Inishfeirm."

"I don't trust you," Jenna said again.

"I know you don't. But you're trusting the wrong people now."

"You don't know that."

"Unfortunately, I do," he answered calmly. "But I also know that you must learn things yourself to believe them. Let me start you on that path. I've done some investigation myself. Go to Night Mist Alley, just off Cal-laghan Street. Walk down to the third door on the left, the red one, and knock. And after you've been there and returned to the keep, use the cloch. Look at the ones you haven't bothered to examine yet because you trust them. And when you're done, if you think you might begin to believe me, then come to du Val again. He can tell you where to find me."

O'Deoradhain started to walk away; as if startled by his movement, the seal out in the river roared a last time and dove into the water with a soft splash. "O'Deoradhain, wait."

"No, Holder. There's nothing more to say. Go and see things for your-self and ask the questions you need to ask. When you need me again, I'll find you." He smiled at her. "I wanted to be the Holder, aye," he said. "But I think Lamh Shabhala has chosen wisely on its own." With a wave, he slid back into the undergrowth again, and she heard the sound of his retreat.

Out in the water, a dark shape slid away toward the lough.

Night Mist Alley was a dirt lane in the Low Town area. Even in the sun-light, it was dim, with the

houses staring at each other across a muddy strip down which two people could barely walk abreast. Children were screeching and chasing each other through the puddles, filthy and snot-faced, and the adults Jenna saw stared at the sight of an obvious Riocha and her two chambermaids out where the royalty rarely walked.

The third door on the left was indeed red though the paint was scratched and peeling, and the door itself appeared to have been kicked, the lower panel cracked and bowed in. Jenna motioned to the maids to remain in the alley as she went to the door and knocked. There was no immediate answer. She knocked again. "Just a moment. ."a woman’s voice answered, and a few seconds later, the door opened. A woman blinked into the sunlight. "By the Mother-Jenna?"

Ellia Tara’s daughter, stood there. Jenna nearly didn’t recognize her. She was heavy with child, one hand under the rounded bulk of her belly, face and fingers swollen. After her initial surprise, she smiled at Jenna.

"By the Mother-Creator, look at you," she said. "Don’t you look wonderful! Oh Jenna, it’s so good to see you! Everyone thought you’d died when those horrible soldiers came. And to think you came here, like us."

"Us?" A feeling of dread was filling Jenna. She wanted to rage, wanted to take Lamh Shabhala and bring a storm of lightning down on this house and this town and leave everything in flames.

"Aye." A possessive, triumphant smile lifted Ellia’s lips. She turned slightly to call back into the darkness of the room. "Darling, come and see who’s come to visit us. You’re not going to believe this."

A sleepy grunt came from the interior. Jenna heard the sound of shuf-fling feet, then a man’s form showed behind Ellia as she opened the door wider. The man took a step into the light. She knew who it was before she saw him, knew from the leaden stone that filled her stomach, knew because of the blackness that threatened to take her vision. Her world was suddenly shattered, crashing in crystalline shards around her.

Coelin.

Ellia’s arm snaked possessively around Coelin’s

waist as he gaped at Jenna. "Look, love-it's Jenna! Back from the dead! Jenna, did you know that Coelin has sung for the Rl himself. .?"

Ellia must have continued to speak, but Jenna heard none of it. She stared at Coelin. He stared back, slack-jawed, rubbing at his eyes as if trying to rid them of a sudden nightmare. "Jenna, I…" he stammered, but Jenna shouted back at him in fury.

"You bastard! You damned lying bastard!" Jenna turned and ran from the alleyway, her maids hurrying after her with wide-eyed glances behind.

"Jenna!" she heard Coelin shouting behind her, and Ellia's now-shrill voice asking him what was happening. Jenna fled, helpless tears hot on her cheeks, unheeding of the people around her, staring. She only wanted to be away before the temptation to use the cloch grew too strong, before she gave in to the temptation to get revenge for this awful deception. It's your own fault! she railed inside. You're so stupid. So naive and stupid. .

“Jenna!" A hand touched her shoulder and she whirled around with a cry, her right hand going to the stone around her neck, the radiance of Lamh Shabhala between her fingers already brighter than the sun. Coelin, Panting, took a step backward from Jenna, his eyes wide. He was shoeless and half-dressed, his feet muddy, his legs bare under his tunic. His breath was a white cloud around him in the cold air. He spread his hands wide, as if to ward off a blow. "Jenna, listen to me. ."

Her chambermaids flanking her, Jenna chopped at the air with her left hand. "You have nothing to say to me!" she shouted back at him. "Nothing! You disgust me, Coelin Singer. And I'm ashamed of myself for letting you. ." She couldn't say the words. Fury obliterated them.

"Jenna, let me explain!"

"Explain what? Is that your child Ellia's carrying? Tell me now-is it?" Coelin started to shake his head, started to speak, and Jenna lifted the cloch. "Don't you dare lie to me again, Coelin, or I swear it's the last words you'll ever speak."

Coelin gulped and hung his head. "Aye," he said, his voice a whisper. "Tis mine." Then his head came up, and his green eyes gazed at her imploringly. "But, Jenna, I love you. ."

"Shut up!" Jenna screamed at him. Light flared from her fisted hand, and shadows moved over the buildings around them. Someone shouted in alarm, and the curious crowd that had begun to gather around the encounter suddenly vanished. "No!

Don’t you dare say it. Who arranged this, Coelin? None of this was an accident, was it? Who made certain I’d find you, who told you to seduce me?" When Coelin said nothing, Jenna stamped her foot, the light flaring yet brighter. "Tell me!"

"Tiarna Mac Ard," Coelin sputtered. "He… he sent word that I should come here, said that you needed someone familiar, that I could help him help you. ." He stopped. His hands lifted toward Jenna, then went to his sides. "Jenna, I didn’t mean. ."

She wanted to kill him. She wanted to hear Coelin scream in agony as the lightnings tore him apart.

She wanted him to feel the pain and hurt that was coursing through her now. Her hand trembled around Lamh Shabhala but she held back the energy that wanted to surge outward. "Did you marry her?" she asked.

A nod. "Aye. When Tara realized that Ellia was with child, she came to me. What else was I to do, Jenna? At that time, I thought you were dead, and your mam and Tiarna Mac Ard, too."

"Do you tell Ellia you love her, too? Did you come to her after you’d been with me and snuggle down alongside her and give her the same words you give me?"

"Jenna-"

She spat at his feet. "I never want to see you again," she told him. "If I do, I swear to you that I’ll use Lamh Shabhala to strike you down. Stand before me again, and I will leave Ellia a widow and your child fatherless. Go, Coelin. Go and find some way to tell Ellia about this. Maybe she’ll keep you; maybe she’ll even find the love in her to forgive you." She lifted her chin, her eyes narrowing. "But I won’t," she told him. "I never will, and I am your enemy from this moment. Do you understand me, Coelin?"

He nodded, mute. He looked as if he were about to speak again, but Jenna tightened her fist around the cloch, and-wide-eyed-he turned and fled, walking then running back the way he’d come. Her breath fast and painful in her chest, Jenna relaxed her grip

on Lamh Shabhala, and the stone's brilliance faded.

The street around them was empty and silent except for the ragged sound of her breath. "Come," she told the maids. "It's time we returned to the keep." They started down the lane toward where the carriage waited. As they walked, a man stepped out from between two houses and stood in the narrow street, barring their way. One of the chambermaids screamed at the sudden confrontation, but the man ignored her. One arm was in a sling, and he no longer seemed quite as dangerous. He looked at Jenna.

"Now you know," he said. "I'm sorry, Jenna."

"You could have told me, O'Deoradhain. Or did you get a perverse pleasure out of knowing I'd be humiliated?"

His head moved slowly in denial. "I took no pleasure in it, Holder. I would have preferred to tell you myself, but you wouldn't have believed me," he answered. "You know that, if you look inside."

She wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of a response. Her head was pounding, her arm ached, and there was a fury inside burning to be unleashed. "Fine. Now get out of my way. I'm going back to the keep."

"Holder. ." He held out his hands, as if in supplication. "This isn't the way. You're angry, and you have reason to be. But you don't know the cloch well enough yet. There are too many people there, too many to confront."

Jenna coughed a single, bitter chuckle. "I thought you told me to go back and use the cloch."

"Not the way you're thinking of using it right now." He gestured to the tower of the keep, which could be seen rising above the rooftops. "I wanted you to know that the Riocha up there can't be trusted, that's all. I wanted you to use the cloch to see the truth in them."

"And you can teach me how to do that."

Aye." He said it firmly. "1 can. Come with me. Come with me now."

Her pulse pounded against the sides of her skull like a hammer; her arm seemed to be sculpted from ice. She couldn't think. She needed to get home.

Needed to get anduilleaf. Needed to think. Needed to find a way to vent this rage before it consumed her entirely.

Get out of my way, O’Deoradhain." Jenna started walking toward him.

She intended to push him out of the way, not caring about his size or the knife at his belt, ready to blast him dead with the cloch if she needed to do so. But as she reached him, he stood aside and let her pass, the two maids scrambling quickly after her.

"Holder, this is madness!" he called after her. "Please don’t do this. Jenna, I can be your ally in this if you’ll let me."

She didn’t answer.

Chapter 27: Bridges Burned

HER fury had gone cold and flintlike before the carriage reached the keep. Through the headache, through the agony in her hand and arm, the events of the last few months kept roiling in her mind and she could make no sense of it. They were all trying to use her; they were all lying to her: the Ri Gabair, the Tainise Rig, Mac Ard, the Connachtans, Tiarna Aheron, even O’Deoradhain by his own admission.

They all had their agendas. She could understand that, yet it left unan-swered the question of who was actively trying to kill her. Why would Mac Ard try to assassinate her and at the same time send Coelin to her? In any case, he could have taken the cloch easily before she knew what she possessed. What would the Tanaise Rig gain by her death when he believed he could have Lamh Shabhala for his use by marrying her? Would Ri Gabair be willing to risk the enmity of the Ri Ard and those of the other tuatha by killing her?

I’d take the stone from you if you gave it to me, aye. If you’d died the other day in my room, I’d have taken it then, too. In that, certainly, O’Deoradhain was no different. Mac Ard might not strike against her, but Jenna had no doubt that her mam’s lover would race to pluck Lamh Shabhala from her neck if she fell. Or the Ri or the Tanaise Rig or Aheron or any of the tiarna.

Yet both assassination attempts required that someone know the keep, that they know the details of the society behind the massive walls, that they know Jenna's movements. Who had known her and the keep that well? Who would have had the connections and the money to hire an assassin, to buy the loyalty of the gardai?

Jenna's next breath was a gasp as the carriage wheels struck the cobbled surface of Deer Creek Bridge. A suspicion started to grow, one that left her feeling breathless and sick. By the time Jenna stepped down at the High Gates with an admonition to her chambermaids (that she knew would be useless) to say nothing about what they had witnessed, she had already made a decision. And after you've been there and returned to the keep, use the cloch, O'Deoradhain had told her.

She would do that, then. She would do exactly that.

She hurried to her rooms.

"Jenna, what's the mat-" her mam asked as she rushed into the apart-ment, but Jenna hurried to her bedroom and slammed the door shut. She locked it, then went to the door leading to the servants' hall and locked that one as well.

Her mam knocked and called, but Jenna ignored her. She set water to boiling for the anduilleaf and dug under the clothes in her chest until she found the torc of Sinna. She placed it around her neck and let Lamh Shabhala open…

. . and there Sinna was again, the old woman with the plait of gray hair, dressed in her leine and cloca, the fireplace blazing with a remem-bered fire, the walls of the room overlaid with its older structure. Sinna turned as if surprised and Jenna opened her mind to her, letting her see what Jenna wished her to see. "Ah, Jenna," Sinna said, her voice quavering with age, "so I've met you before." A sad smile. "But of course I don't remember. I'm just a ghost."

"I need your help," Jenna told the old woman.

"Of course you do. Isn't that why we Holders always call back our predecessors? The dead can't rest when the living desire an answer." She sighed. "But your time will come, when your spirit won't be allowed its peace, either. How can I help you, Jenna First Holder?"

"I have been told that Lamh Shabhala can see the truth in someone. Can that be done?"

Sinna's gray head nodded. "Aye. With Lamh Shabhala that's possible, though not with the other clochs na thintri. If you know how to listen through the cloch, you can hear truth, though a person who holds another cloch can still hide truth from you. It's better if you learn to trust your own judgments. There are all sorts of truths, and not all of them are worth knowing."

"Show me."

Sinna smiled sadly. "Listen to me first. Sometimes it’s not good to see the truth, Jenna. I can see anger and hurt and confusion in you already Your thinking is clouded by that and by the potions you’re taking. Jenna, sometimes you will find that you’d rather not know all the things that could be revealed to you." She gave a mocking, self-deprecating laugh. "1 discovered that, too late." "Show me," Jenna insisted.

"And what do you do when you discover the truth, Jenna?" "If you want peace, if you want me to let you rest, you’ll show me." Another nod, accompanied by a sigh. "All right, then," she said. "This

is how I was taught to truth-see…"

"Banrion!"

Cianna turned as Jenna strode through the door to her chamber, two of the Banrion’s attendants skittering nervously alongside her. Cianna waved the maids away. "Jenna," she said soothingly. "I’m glad to see you. There are rumors simply darting through the keep right now."

Jenna ignored that. The anduilleaf made her want to sleep and the walls around her seemed slightly hazy, as if she walked in a mist. Her hand closed around the cloch, the sleeve of her leine falling down to show the scars of her arm. She forced herself to focus. "I need to ask you this, Banrion-do you know who sent the first assassin?" she asked. "Do you know who told Labras that he was to kill me?"

Cianna coughed. Her eyes widened as if she were shocked by the ques-tions, and her gaze was on Jenna’s hand. "Of course not, Jenna. If I’d discovered that, I would have told you."

The words sounded sincere and almost sad. But even through the anduilleaf fog, Jenna could hear the broken, hidden tones, the umber notes that Sinna had shown her to be the signature of a lie. Jenna struggled to control her own face, to keep her voice calm even though she wanted to cry out her anger. She hadn’t wanted her suspicions confirmed; she’d continued to hope that the certainty that had

settled in the pit of her stomach since she'd spoken with O'Deoradhain was a sham-for if it was not, then she could no longer trust her own judgment. "Why would you ask, Jenna?" the Banrion continued. "You know that I would keep nothing like that from you. Who have you been talking with that filled your head with such notions?"

Jenna shrugged. Focus… "I overheard a most distressing conversation between two tiarna, and one of them was insisting that you were the one who hired the assassin."

Jenna watched the Banrion's face carefully as she gave her the fabrication. Cianna's face took on an expression of shocked disbelief. Her hand went to the torc around her neck and she coughed in quick spasms. "Surely you don't believe that, Jenna," she gasped. "I would never have. . No, my dear, that's simply not true."

Yet it was. Jenna could hear it. She knew it.

It was Cianna who would kill her to hold Lamh Shabhala.

"Who are these tiarna? I will have them brought here this instant to answer to me," Cianna fumed. She rose from her chair, steadying herself as another coughing fit took her.

"No, you won't," Jenna told her.

For a moment, Cianna glared at Jenna. "You cannot take that tone with me-" she began, then seemed to catch herself. She smiled. "Jenna, I can see that you're upset. Let me call for some refreshments…" She lifted her hand, reaching for the bell rope near her chair.

"No," Jenna said again as she took Lamh Shabhala in her hand, allow-ing more of its energy to surge forth. Cianna started to cry out in alarm, but Jenna squeezed her right hand around the cloch, imagining the cloch's energy closing itself around Cianna's throat at the same time. The Banrion gave a choking gasp, her hands going to her neck as if to tear away invisi-ble fingers. Her face went dark red, her mouth opened as she tried to draw in air.

"There can be no more lies between us, Banrion," Jenna told her. "Lamh Shabhala can hear the truth, and I know who sent* the first assassin-when you knew that I would be in my room, when you thought I might be weak or distracted by trying to

speak with the ghost of Sinna. After that attempt failed, after you came so close to being discovered, you were too frightened to try again until I stupidly played right into your hands by asking for your gardai. I can imagine you thought that incredibly convenient-kill me, kill O’Deoradhain, then blame my death on him while Labras brings you back your prize before anyone else has the chance to claim it. I can’t believe that I was so naive as to believe you afterward."

Cianna’s face had gone purple. Through the anger and the haze of anduilleaf, Jenna realized that the woman was near unconsciousness and death. She relaxed her grip on the stone, and Cianna took a deep, rattling gasp of a breath. "Why did you want the cloch so badly, Banrion?" Jenna asked. "What made it so valuable to you that it was worth my life? Answer me, and I might let you live."

"Kill me," Cianna managed to grate out, her voice a harsh croak. "Go ahead. You’re no better than any of the rest of them. I’ve heard them, all along. ’Poor Cianna. Such a weak, pathetic creature. She’s given the Ri all she could, and now she’s useless. It’s a shame she doesn’t die, so he could _ marry again.’ And you-do you think I couldn’t see the pity and disgust in your face? ’Poor Cianna. .’ Well, with the cloch, no one would be saying that."

"I never-" Jenna began.

"You want more of this truth, Holder?" Cianna spat out, interrupting. "Well here’s more: The Ri and Damhlaic Gairbith have planned more than just the defense of Gabair. When the Connachtans attack, the Ri will take you with him, let you use the cloch, then-when you’re weak and hurt and exhausted and the cloch is empty of power-you will be unfor-tunately ’killed in the battle.’ You’ll receive all the plaudits and honors you desire, but you’ll be dead and the Ri will be wearing Lamh Shabhala.

You see, he’s no different than me. And as to Nevan

O Liathain, do you really think the Tanaise Rig would have an interest in someone as common and plain as you if you weren’t the Holder? Do you honestly believe he doesn’t have his own plans to take Lamh Shabhala from you? You’re a stupid, common child, and you don’t deserve what you possess."

The rage was flooding Jenna’s mind, a foaming, wild flood that swept away reason before it. She shouted back at Cianna, a wordless, guttural scream lost in the din of the fury. She lifted the cloch on its chain, her hand a trembling fist, and Cianna began a cry that suddenly choked into silence. Jenna's fist tightened. There was a sense of unreality to her action, as if it were someone else moving her hand, and it was not only Cianna's image that she choked-she imagined doing the same to Coelin, Mac Ard, the Ri Gabair, and the Tanaise Rig and Tiarna Aheron and everyone who stared at her and whispered against her.

But they were not here. Cianna was.

Jenna felt something break inside the woman. A bloody froth bubbled on the Banrion's lips and she fell as Jenna turned away, stalking out of the room. The maids shrank back against the wall as the doors slammed against their stops with Jenna's thrust, and she strode across the anteroom and out into the corridors of the Keep.

Behind her there was a scream and a cry of alarm.

Jenna paid it no attention. She stalked through the wing toward her own rooms, pushing open the doors. "Jenna!" Maeve called as she en-tered. "What's happened?"

Silent, Jenna pushed past her into her bedroom. She grabbed the pouch of anduilleaf, placed the torc of Sinna Mac Ard around her neck. She pulled her traveling pack from its shelf, and stuffed some clothing in it.

She put on her old coat, the one she'd worn in Ballintubber. She turned to leave.

Her mam was standing in the doorway, one hand at her swelling belly, the other on the thick, polished wood of the doorframe. There were tears in her eyes. "Jenna, talk to me," she said. "Darling, you look so. ." She stopped.

"Get out of my way, Mam," Jenna said. "I'm leaving."

"You can't."

"I have to. I just murdered the Banrion."

Maeve gave a cry that was half-sob. She swayed, the hand on the door-frame going to her chest and Jenna pushed past her. As she started across the parlor, the door opened and Mac Ard entered, his dark face grim. He saw Jenna and his hand went to

his sword. For a moment, Jenna blinked, seeing him.

"Don't do it," Jenna told him. It sounded like someone else's voice. "Show me a hint of steel, and I'll kill you where you stand, even if you are the father of my mam's child."

"Jenna," he said. "Listen to yourself. Look at yourself. If Lamh Shabhala or the anduilleaf has driven you mad-"

"Then you'll gladly take the cloch," Jenna finished for him. "So kind of you, Tiarna. Why don't you tell my mam all of your kindness, like the way you arranged for Coelin to come here to be my lover when you knew he was married to Ellia and she was with child. Tell her about that. Now move out of the way."

"I can't let you go, Jenna. I can't. I love you as my own daughter, but I also have my duty and my word."

"Move!" Jenna shouted at the man. The word tore at her vocal cords, a shriek.

"I can't," Mac Ard repeated.

Jenna screamed again. Her vision had gone dim, a red haze over every-thing, and she could see only what stood in front of her: Mac Ard. She lifted Lamh Shabhala, and it flared in her hand as her mam shouted be-hind her. Lightning crackled, wrapping around Mac Ard and lifting him. Jenna gestured and the man was flung across the room, his body slam-ming against the wall. He collapsed with a groan. Maeve ran to him, crouching down alongside him and cradling his head in her lap. He was moaning as blood poured from a cut along his forehead. Maeve wept, tears sliding down her face. "Jenna! Stop this. . Please, darling, you must!"

Jenna spoke with a strange calmness in the midst of the red fury. "I can't stop it, Mam. I can't. It's too late for that. I'm sorry. ." She tore her gaze away from Maeve, went to the door, and left the room.

She could hear footsteps pounding up the stairs. She sent lightning crack-down the long hall toward the sound and flames sprang up where bright fingers touched. She ran the other way, to the back stairs the keep's help used. She ran down winding stone steps, scattering the few servants who were on them, and emerged into the courtyard. A tiarna was

nearby, dismounting from his horse as two stable hands held the beast.

"Holder " he started to say in greeting. Jenna gave him no chance to go further she let a pulse of energy flow from the cloch, smashing him in the chest. The horse reared and Jenna snatched the reins from the boy who was holding them, his face a frozen mask of terror.

She leaped onto the horse, not caring that her cloca rode up leaving her legs bare to the cold. "Holder, stop!" the boy shouted, but she kicked the horse into motion. Gardai were pouring out from the keep and an arrow hissed past her ear. Jenna crouched low on her steed’s back, urging him into a gallop toward the gates.

There were men there, she saw, and the gates were closed. She reined up the horse, lifting Lamh Shabhala as the squad of men hesitated. She cried aloud, her hand alight with the power, the scars on her arm glowing. The squad scattered; brighter than the sun, a fist like that of a god arced out from the cloch and smashed into the gate. Metal screeched and wailed; stone cracked and fell.

"Now!" Jenna shouted to the horse, kicking him again with her heels. She moved him carefully through the rubble and dust as more arrows shattered on the stones around her, then she was through onto the winding path leading down the steep slope of Goat Fell toward the town. Over the pounding of her mount’s hooves, she could hear the commotion behind her. As she traversed the first of the switch-back turns, she glanced back at the keep. Black smoke was pouring from the windows of the main tower, and a cloud of dust hung over the main gates, but a dozen mailed gardai on warhorses were already in pursuit.

Jenna kicked the horse again, and the stallion’s nostrils snorted twin white clouds into the cold air as his hooves tossed clods of half-frozen mud in the air. She would make the bridge, she knew, but already her head threatened to explode and her arm felt as if it was made of frozen granite. Her vision had contracted so that she could see only what was directly in front of her, and that poorly. She clutched the horse’s reins with her left hand, the right hanging limp, her knees trying desperately to keep a grip on the saddle. She heard more than saw the horse reach the bridge and begin to gallop across, the hooves loud on the wooden planking. She halted the stallion on the other side, pulling him

around so that she faced the bridge. Wearily, she reached for Lamh Shabhala with a hand that felt as heavy as the stones that formed the bridge's arches. She could barely see. She squinted into her dimming sight, trying to see her pursuers, ready to open Lamh Shabhala again and take them and the bridge down. She swayed in the saddle, and forced herself erect again.

"Holder!"

Jenna grimaced, her fingers fumbling around the cloch. She could hear the riders approaching, but couldn't see them in the dusk of her sight.

"Holder! Jenna!" the voice shouted again, behind her and to the left, it sounded familiar, and she turned her head slowly, her eyes narrowing.

"O'Deoradhain. . You bastard…" She lifted Lamh Shabhala, ready to strike the man down. He ran toward her awkwardly, hampered by his sling-bound arm, as she wobbled in the saddle, nearly falling.

"Can you ride?" He seemed to be shouting in her ear. "Holder, listen to me! Can you ride?"

She nodded. It took all the effort she had.

"Then ride. Go to du Val's. The Apothecary. Go, and I'll meet you there."

"The men. ."Jenna muttered. "From the keep.

!!

"I will deal with them. Go!"

"It's too late," Jenna said. Her voice sounded nonchalant, almost amused. Strangely, she wanted to laugh. She couldn't lift her hand to point, but nodded toward the bridge. The riders from the keep were gal-loping around the final bend in the mountain road. Sighting Jenna on the other side of the bridge, they shouted and urged their horses forward. Jenna reached for the cloch again, wondering if she could open it in time, wondering if she had the strength to stay conscious if she did.

Something moved in front of her: O'Deoradhain, stepping to the end of the bridge as if he were about to hold back the on-rushing gardai him-self, one-handed. As Jenna watched, the man bent down and took a stone from the ground in his free hand. He held it in front of him, as if he were offering it to

the riders. She heard his voice call aloud: "Obair don dean-nach!" He threw the stone to the ground, and it seemed to shatter and dissolve. The gardai’s horses pounded onto the bridge, and at the same time, the bridge groaned like a live thing, a wail of wood and stone. The bridge decking writhed as if a giant had struck it from below as the tall stone arches to either side collapsed and fell away. Blocks of carved stone rained; support timbers bent and cracked like saplings in a storm.

The bridge fell, with the first of the riders on it. Horses and men screamed as they pinwheeled in air to the bottom of the ravine and crashed against the stones of Deer Creek.

There was a stunning silence. A gout of dust rose from the deep cleft-a gaped. The gardai trapped on the far side stared down at the broken bodies of their companions.

O’Deoradhain alone was free of the stasis. Jenna saw him move, heard groan with effort and pain as he pulled himself with his one good m onto her horse, even as Jenna swayed and nearly fell. His arms went round her, taking the reins. He slapped them against the stallion’s neck, kicked at its massive chest. "Go!" he shouted, wheeling the horse around.

Even as the first arrows arced toward them from across the ravine, they were galloping away toward the town, the onlookers staring in terror and fright. They fled.

Chapter 28: A Return

JENNA remembered little of the flight from Lar Bhaile, where O’Deoradhain took her or how they came to leave. There were flashes of images:

. . du Val, his face peering down at her concernedly. His mouth moved, but she heard nothing of what he said. There was another face behind the ugly dwarfs-O’Deoradhain? — and Jenna tried to struggle up, but hands held her firmly. .

. . the pain as she was lifted. She could see nothing, but she could feel herself moving. There

were voices: "We can't stay here. They'll be scouring the town in an hour. Not only the keep's gardai, but the Rl Ard's garrison as well" Another voice spoke. "A carriage, then? She can't ride, certainly." The first voice answered. "No, they'll be watching the High Road. If we could get across the lough… "

… a gentle rocking motion, the creaking of wood, the splashing of water and the smell of damp and fish. She looked up and saw stars above her, swaying softly…

There were still stars, and the smell of the lough and the sound of canvas rippling in a wind. Jenna sat up. She was in a small boat, a single small sail billowing in the cold night breeze. She was wrapped in blankets and she hugged them around her against the frigid air. O'Deoradhain was seated in the stern of the boat, the tiller in his hand, his left arm still bandaged tightly against his chest. Ahead, the shore was no more than a quarter mile distant. "Where?" was all she could manage to say. Her throat was raw and burning; the headache still pounded with every beat of her heart, and she wasn't certain she could move her right arm; it seemed dead- She touched her neck with her other hand: Lamh Shabhala was still there on its chain-that, at least, gave momentary relief. O'Deoradhain hadn't taken it from her.

"Nearly on the western shore of Lough Lar," O'Deoradhain answered. "And a bit north of Lar Bhaile as well. I've been looking for a good, low shingle where we can land."

"Anduilleaf… I need it…"

O'Deoradhain shook his head. "Don't have it. Du Val took it."

Jenna shivered at that. Anger burned, and she started to lift her hand to the cloch, but weariness overcame her. She sank back. "I'll die," she whispered. "I hurt so much."

"You might wish you died, but you won't. Not from the pain of Lamh Shabhala or withdrawal from the leaf. Perhaps from the Ri's soldiers, if they find us."

She remembered, suddenly, O'Deoradhain standing before the bridge, and it falling. . "The bridge," she said. "You said you knew other magics, but you also said they were slow and weaker. That was neither slow nor weak."

If Jenna’s praise pleased him, he didn’t show it.

His face was grim and sad. "Aye, much slower and weaker they are. But that spell was set earlier, before we met in the ravine and once the keystones were gone on the arches, the bridge itself did the rest. I thought that if we were to need to flee from the keep, that we would also need a way to slow up the pursuit. The spell took several at least a candle stripe or two of preparation, but then it was already done and set-all I had to do was speak the words."

He lifted his head to scan the shore, turning the tiller and adjusting the sail. "There, that’s as good a spot as we’re likely to find." A few minutes later, the keel grated on a tiny, pebbled beach along a small cove. Starlight dappled the tops of the trees on the shore while they held impenetrable darkness underneath, but across the lough and to the south, Jenna could see the yellow light of Lar Bhaile. O’Deoradhain leaped from the boat into the shallow water. Extending his good hand, he helped Jenna from the craft.

"I can’t walk far," she told him.

"I know, but come dawn we’d be all too visible on the lough’s shore." ’They’ll see the boat anyway and know where we landed." O’Deoradhain shook his head. "No," he said simply. He helped her up the bank to dew-wet grass. Then he went back down to the beach and shoved the prow of the boat away from shore. Jenna heard the bottom of the craft grinding against the bed of the lough, yet the boat continued to move outward. She saw two dark forms, blacker than the night, break the water’s surface alongside the hull. Blue light shimmered from their bodies Water splashed, the foam white, and the boat moved out into deeper water, floating free. The bow turned and faced south and east and it began to move away from them. O’Deoradhain came back to her and stood watching until they could no longer see the boat past the bend of the shore. He said nothing; Jenna decided she would not, either, though she wondered: Were those seals? O’Deoradhain held out his hand to her. "We need to go as far as we can tonight," he said. "They’ll find the boat tomor-row just south of Lar Bhaile, on the eastern side. If the Mother-Creator smiles on us, it will be a few days before they start looking on the western shore."

"And where are we going?"

O'Deoradhain shrugged. "North. To Inish Thuaidh."

"No," Jenna said.

"No?" In the darkness, it was difficult to see his face, but Jenna could hear his scowl and sigh of exasperation. "Holder, in the morning, all of Gabair will be out looking for you. When word reaches Dun Laoghaire, the Rl Ard will have his troops sent searching as well, and Tuath Con-nachta might very well consider this a wonderful opportunity to come look for you themselves. The other tuatha may do the same. Your only safety is to be gone from here as quickly as we can, and Inish Thuaidh is where you can best learn to use the power you have."

"No," Jenna repeated. She looked up, to where the wind tousled the heads of the trees. She could see nothing but the night sky and stars above them, but she could feel the first shy touch of mage-lights at the zenith. She knew that they would appear soon, no more than two stripes from now, and she was tired. So tired. No! she wanted to scream to them. Not tonight. I can't. .

She struggled to her feet, staring into the darkness of the trees. She remembered other trees, the dark twisted oaks that stretched close to the shore of the lough, Seancoim's tenderness and aid… "I'm going to Doire Coill."

O'Deoradhain loosed a scoffing breath. "I didn't snatch you from the Ri's gardai to have you die under the haunted oaks."

Jenna shrugged. She took a halting step-it took more effort than she thought. "I've been through those oaks once before. I think I'm safer there than on the road. If you don't want to come with me, then I'll thank you for your rescue, Ennis O'Deoradhain, and may the path to your home be easy." Another step. She forced herself to stay upright. She turned toward the trees and forced her legs to keep moving. Suddenly she felt O'Deoradhain beside her, his hand under her arm, supporting her. When she glanced at him, he was shaking his head.

"Is it true, what they say of Doire Coill?" he asked.

Jenna nodded. "Aye. And yet no. The forest is old and alive in a way that other woods are not, and things live there that are dangerous. But Doire Coill is also beautiful, and none of the tales that I heard ever spoke of that. I have a friend there…" She closed her eyes, the weariness coming over her again. She looked back across the lake to the town, as if she could see the commotion and upset there. She had thought she had a friend there as well and she had left behind the one person whom she knew loved her unconditionally. Mam, I’m so sorry. 1 hope I will see you again. . "At least I think he’s a friend," she finished.

O’Deoradhain took a long breath. Let it out again. "Then I suppose it would be a shame for me to miss seeing the forest while I’m so close."

Two stripes and more passed while they walked to the west at as fast a pace as Jenna could manage. They crossed the High Road a half mile from the lough, moving across the stone fences into a field dotted with small trees that must have once been farmland but was now long abandoned. A line of darkness loomed at the ridge of the hills just beyond the field, and as they approached, they saw the twisted, tall forms of oaks against the starlit sky. "Doire Coill?" O’Deoradhain asked, and Jenna nodded.

"Seancoim said it came close to the lough at places. We’re lucky."

"Or not." O’Deoradhain scowled at the forest. "It feels like the trees are watching us."

"They are," Jenna answered. She glanced at the sky and thought she could see wisps of color curling above. "Hurry," she said. "I won’t be able to go much farther." O’Deoradhain glanced at the sky also, though he said nothing. His arm went around her waist, and he helped her forward over the rough ground.

The hill was steeper and taller than it had appeared from the High Road. As they climbed, resting often, the two could look back over the ground they’d covered and see Lough Lar glimmering beyond the trees and, faintly on the horizon, the hills where the city lay. There were trees now as they neared the ridge, still widely spaced but undeniably the off-spring of the ancient oaks of Doire Coill. As they started down into the valley beyond, the trees came suddenly closer together, and they had to walk carefully to avoid tripping over roots or being smacked in the head by

low-hanging branches. At the bottom of the hill, they came across a small stream meandering through the wood, and Jenna sank to the ground. "No more," she said. "I'm too tired."

"Jenna, we're two miles from the lough. Maybe less. We should move on."

Jenna shook her head. "It doesn't matter. They'll know where I am soon enough." She pointed to the sky overhead through the winter-dry leaves and netted branches. Light burned there, brightening even as they watched. As the mage-lights grew, Jenna felt the desire in her to take their energy grow as well, overwhelming the exhaustion. She struggled to her feet again and took the cloch's chain from around her neck. She placed the stone in her right hand, forcing the fingers to close around it.

The mage-lights seemed to feel Lamh Shabhala’s presence; they swelled, flashing like blue and green lightnings directly above her. She 1 heard O'Deoradhain gasp. The power of the mage-lights crackled and hissed in her ears, and it seemed she could almost hear words in the din, speaking a language so old that it awakened ancestral memories in her blood. The scars on her arm seemed to glow, echoing the patterns in the sky above, and she lifted her hand, watching the colors converge and fuse over her. A funnel, a tongue slipped down from the display, bending and 1 twisting until it touched her hand, engulfing it.

Jenna cried out in mingled] pain and relief as the power of the mage-lights poured into Lamh Shabhala. She didn't know how long the connection lasted: forever, or a stripe of the candle, or only a few breaths. She could see the force or the magic, brilliant as it surged into the niches within the cloch, as it filled the well inside the stone nearly to overflowing.

Once more. . Jenna realized. The next time the mage-lights come, Lamh Shabhala will be able to hold no more. .

But Jenna could hold no more herself. The primordial cold of the mage-lights burned her, and she could no longer bear it. She cried out, as the mage-lights danced above and waves of tints and hues fluttered in the sky. She pulled her hand away from the grasp of the lights, and there was a pulse of fury and thunder.

As Jenna fell away into darkness, she thought she

Chapter 29: Awakening

SOMEONE’S head swam in her vision, and she could smell a scent of spices. Jenna blinked, squinting to make the features come into focus. She seemed to be in a cave. Torches guttered against the walls, and she lay on a bed of straw matting.

The air was warm and fragrant with the smell of a peat fire. If O’Deoradhain was there, she couldn’t see him. "Seancoim," she whispered. "Is that you?"

"Aye," a familiar voice answered. "I’m here."

"Lamh Shabhala," Jenna said, suddenly panicked. She remembered holding it, her fingers opening. .

"It’s around your neck," Seancoim answered. She felt his fingers take her left hand and guide it to her throat. She felt the familiar shape of the cloch in its silver cage. The relief lasted only a moment.

"Anduilleaf," she croaked. "I need… the leaf potion. You must have some. Give it to me."

"No," he answered, his voice gentle yet firm.

’Please. ." She was crying now: from the pain, from the refusal. Seancoim, it hurts. . You don’t know how it hurts. ."

His blind eyes seemed to stare at her. Callused fingers brushed her cheek. On his shoulder, she could see Denmark, the bird’s black eyes giving back twin, tiny reflections of her face. "Jenna, what’s hurting you most right now is the lack of the anduilleaf and not the sky-magic. should never have given the herb to you in the first place. Some people

I can t stop once they take it, and eventually the craving becomes so intense that it drives you mad. You will have to get through this without it."

"I can’t," she wept. She huddled in a fetal position, cradling her right arm against herself, but nothing would warm its cold flesh. Nothing would ever make it normal again. The chill seemed to have crept all the way to her shoulder, and she shivered. She couldn’t see Seancoim any-more; her vision was

narrowing again, as it had in the keep, all her periph-eral vision gone until there was nothing there but what was directly in front of her. The headache raged in her skull, and she was afraid that if she moved, her head would burst. "Seancoim. ." she wailed.

"I'm here," his voice answered, and she heard his staff clattering against stone as he moved. "I'll stay with you. Here, drink this."

He pressed a bowl to her lips. She sipped the warm liquid, hoping irrationally that despite his words it was anduilleaf. It was not: sweet mint tea, with a hint of something else. She swallowed, more eagerly than she expected, for the taste made her realize how hungry and thirsty she was. He gently laid her head back again. "Seancoim, just this once. The mage-lights… it hurts…"

"I know it does," he told her. "But you can bear it."

"I can't" she answered, but the words were hard to speak. She was sleepy; she could feel the weariness spreading through her, radiating out from her belly. "Where's O'Deoradhain?" she asked.

"He'll tell you what's happened…"

"He's here. Just outside." Seancoim's face was receding, as if she were falling away from him. "And he's told me everything."

"It hurts," Jenna said again.

"I know," he answered, but his face was so tiny and his voice so soft and it was easier to close her eyes and give in to the urge to sleep.

"Seancoim?"

A hand brushed lank hair away from her face.

"No, it's Ennis," O'Deoradhain's voice answered. "Seancoim's gone for a bit. Should I go look for him?"

Her head felt huge and heavy, and the headache still pounded. Her right arm was a log of ice cradled against her stomach. She tried to lift it and couldn't. She couldn't feel her fingers at all. Her body was trembling and despite the chill air, she could feel sweat breaking out on her fore-head. A soft cloth brushed it away. Jenna licked dry, cracked lips. "Thank you," she husked.

"Feeling better?"

Her left hand felt for the cloch around her neck. When she felt the she clasped it with a sigh. "Worse,

I think. I'm not sure." "Here then. He left this; said to have you drink it when you woke up." The bowl touched her lips again and she drank the sweet brew. Afterward, she lay back. O'Deoradhain looked down at her worriedly. There was a across his forehead: a line of dried blood with black thread sewn through it to hold the gaping edges shut, and both his eyes were swollen nearly closed and blackened.

"What happened to you?" Jenna asked. "Did the Ri's gardai. .?" O'Deoradhain shook his head. He touched the wound, his mouth twisting ruefully.

"No. After you took in the mage-lights, you collapsed, and this crow came flying past me and an ancient Bunus Muintir appeared right behind me. I thought he was about to attack or cast a spell. I drew my dagger, and all of a sudden the old bastard cracked me on the head with his damned staff, a lot faster and harder than an old blind man had any right to move. ."

Despite the pain, Jenna found herself chuckling at the image of Seancoim rapping O'Deoradhain over the head with his staff. O'Deoradhain frowned at first, then finally smiled back at her. "I'm glad you find that funny. I assure you I didn't at the time."

"If you wouldn't go pointing your weapon at people, it wouldn't have happened at all,"

Seancoim's voice answered from behind O'Deoradhain. A moment later, Denmark fluttered past O'Deoradhain to land at Jenna's left side. She lifted her hand to stroke the glossy black feathers, and the crow cawed back at her. "He was rather insistent about protecting you," Seancoim told her. "Even when he'd been knocked on the skull. Doesn't listen well, either. I had to hit him twice more. I nearly left him there, but I decided that if he brought you this far, he deserved better." Seancoim shooed O'Deoradhain aside. He crouched down next to Jenna's pallet. His gray-bearded, flat face was solemn. The cataract-whitened eyes gleamed in a nest of wrinkled brown flesh. "It's time to get up," he told her. Jenna shook her head. "No. Let me lie here. I couldn't. ." His gnarled, thick-knuckled hand reached down and took her arm. His grip surprised her with its strength as he pulled her up to a sitting position. Her head whirled with the movement, and for a moment she thought she would be sick. "Breathe," he told her. "Slow breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth. That’s it."

She could feel his hand on one side, O’Deoradhain’s on the other, lifting and she shook her head again.

"It hurts. I don’t want to. ."

"You will," Seancoim answered. "You are stronger than you think. And there is something you must see." Suddenly she was standing on weak, wobbly legs. The room, she saw for the first time, was less a cave than deep, sheltered hollow below an overhanging limestone cliff. Ahead of her down a grassy embankment was a creek, and beyond that the dark tangle of oaks and brush of the forest.

They helped her walk down the embankment and out past the vine-fringed cliff wall into sunshine. Jenna squinted, but the heat on her shoulders felt good. The day was warm for the season; she could not even see her breath before her. "Sit here," Seancoim said, and Jenna was happy to do so, sinking down into the blanket of grass. "Look. . Straight across the stream, near the tallest oak."

Jenna saw it then, in a shifting of shadows as it moved. At first she thought it was simply a stag deer, but then it came out from under the trees, and Jenna gasped as she realized that the animal was huge, taller than O’Deoradhain at the shoulders, with a rack of massive antlers that echoed the great branches of the oaks. Its coat was a brilliant russet with a white, powerful breast, and the black, gleaming hooves were larger than Jenna’s hands. The creature was magnificent, almost regal, as it walked slowly down to the stream’s edge and lowered its crowned head to drink for a moment. Then the head lifted again to gaze across the river to the three people with eyes that seemed calm and intelligent.

"That’s a fia stoirm," Seancoim said quietly, answering Jenna’s unasked question. "The storm deer. In the Bunus Muintir histories, they speak of herds of them, their hooves so loud pounding against the earth that it sounded like thunder.

When the sky-magic died, so did they."

"Our stories are the same," O’Deoradhain said.

"From the Before, cen-turies ago. But if they all died

!!

"Not all," Seancoim answered. "A few survived, hiding in the oldest places. When I was young, I

once glimpsed a storm deer deep in Doire Coill. But in the past year, I have seen dozens, and not in the depths of the forest but here near the edge. I have seen other things, too, that were once legend and are not as beautiful and gentle as these: dire wolves, who have a language of their own; boars with long tusks as sharp as knives, and whose bristles are gold; snakes with white scales and red eyes, as long as any of us are tall. From my brothers to the west,

I have learned that a dragon's scream was heard on one of the islands in the Duan Mouth. And from another, that blue seals were gathering along the northern coast. Jenna remembered the seals she'd seen in Lough Lar, the way their satin fur had gleamed. She glanced at O'Deoradhain, but he would not look at her. "The myths are awakening again," Seancoim continued. "Things walk the land that have not been seen in many generations. Even the trees of Doire Coill are more awake now than I have ever felt them."

Almost as if in response to Seancoim's words, the wind rose slightly and shook the branches of the oaks. The stag's nostrils widened as it sniffed the breeze. The creature took a last look at them before bounding away, its great hooves thudding audibly on the ground as it departed.

"This is what you are caught in, Jenna," Seancoim said. "Part great beauty, part great danger. As the mage-lights are awakening the old crea-tures, so you are ready to awaken the other clochs na thintri. You will make a new world."

"I can't," Jenna said. The pain inside her, forgotten for a moment with the sighting of the storm deer, returned. "I don't know how. I'm scared, Seancoim. I'm so. ." She couldn't finish the sentence. The tears came again in racking, terrified sobs, and she wanted more than anything else for her mam to be here, to comfort her as she had so many times. She had thought of herself as a woman now, an adult and self-sufficient, but she suddenly felt like a child again.

It was O'Deoradhain who came to her. "I can help you, Jenna," he told her, crouching down in front of her. "I can't do it for you because Lamh Shabhala has chosen you, but I can help you. If you'll let me."

His arms went around her, and for a breath she stiffened, ready to pull away. He started to release her, to back away, but she laid her head on his shoulder. She let herself fall into the embrace,

allowing herself to believe that she was safe in her mam’s arms again, imagining that she was home again and that none of this had ever happened.

But it wasn’t an illusion that could last.

"There’s another who will help you as well," she heard Seancoim say. "Or at least, I hope so. We’ll go to him tomorrow."

Chapter 30: Release

SHE remembered the valley. The sight of the central dolmen, carved with the pattern of the scars on her arm and surrounded by the passage graves of the Bunus Muintir chieftains, still made her shiver. The day was gray and sullen with rain misting from lowering clouds, the water dripping heavily from the cap-stone of the dolmen as they stood under it. Only Denmark seemed un-bothered by the rain-the crow was perched above the entrance to Riata’s grave, mouth open to the sky and occasionally shaking droplets from his feathers.

Jenna’s mood matched the weather. Her stomach roiled and she’d thrown up nearly everything that Seancoim had put into her. The head-ache refused to leave, so that at times she could barely walk, and her right arm hung useless at her side. She’d leaned heavily on O’Deoradhain as they’d made the two-day journey to the valley. She remembered little of the time: it was a blur of pain and fatigue. She’d begged Seancoim for anduilleaf off and on, sometimes weeping, sometimes in a fury, once with a threat to use the cloch; he refused each time, though never with anger.

Jenna sank down with her back against one of the standing stones, not caring that the ground was soaked and muddy. "Now what?" she asked.

"We wait," Seancoim answered.

"Here?" Jenna spat.

"Here, or in Riata’s cairn."

"Here," O’Deoradhain said. He cast a look at the blackness beyond the stones where Denmark

roosted, and shivered. "Graves aren't for the living."

"Riata isn't quite dead," Seancoim told him.

"Then that's even worse."

"Can we at least have a fire?" Jenna asked. "I'm cold through."

O'Deoradhain gathered together what kindling he could find and pulled his tinderbox from his pack, but the spark wouldn't catch despite repeated efforts. "It's too damp," he said finally. Jenna nodded miserably, and Seancoim hunkered down in front of the nest of kindling O'Deoradhain had built. He rubbed his hands together several times, chanting words that Jenna could not understand. He picked up O'Deoradhain's flint and struck it. A blue flame shot out, startling Jenna, and the kindling began to crackle. O'Deoradhain chuckled. "I'm beginning to think that I was lucky you only hit me on the head," he said to Seancoim.

Seancoim's grizzled, ancient face grinned back at him as he warmed his hands over the flames. "That you were, young man."

They stayed there under the dolmen as the sun lowered itself beyond the lip of the valley and the valley grew darker under the overcast sky. The rain stopped before sunset; as night fell they began to glimpse stars between the thinning clouds.

Seancoim and O'Deoradhain talked as they waited, but Jenna said little, sitting on the ground with her knees drawn up and her right arm cradled against her. She stroked Lamh Shabhala from time to time. The cloch seemed almost restless, its image throbbing in her head, filling her vision with bright sparks. There was a tension in the air itself like the drone of some sepulchral pipe, so low that she couldn't quite hear it but only feel the sound, rumbling just below the threshold of perception.

A finger of light appeared above them, blue outlined in gold, wavering and brightening so that they saw the shadow of the dolmen sway on the ground in response. Jenna rose to her feet.

"So it is to be tonight… "

The voice spoke in her head, not in her ears: a resonant, warm baritone. The others looked up as well, as if they'd also heard. "Riata?" Jenna glanced toward the entrance to his tomb. There was a wavering in the dimness, a mist that formed itself

into a man’s shape as she watched. "Do you remember me?"

She felt the now-familiar touch of another Holder’s mind on her own, this one more powerful than most, strong enough so that she could not shut him out as he prowled her thoughts and her memories. The spectral figure of the ancient Bunus Holder drifted toward her. Jenna was vaguely aware of the others watching, Seancoim placidly silent, O’Deoradhain with shocked apprehension. "Ahh," Riata sighed. "Jenna. You are the First who came to me once before." More mage-lights had appeared in the sky, brighter and more brilliantly colored than Jenna had seen in previous displays. The largest manifestation was directly overhead, but the mage-lights flickered all the way to the horizon. The entire valley was illumi-nated, as if a thousand fires burned above. Riata’s indistinct face glanced up to them. "Aye," he said. "Tonight."

Jenna clutched the cloch na thintri. The fingers of her right hand, as if warmed by the glare of the mage-lights, moved easily now and closed around the stone. Lamh Shabhala was frigid in her palm, glowing in re-sponse to the swaying, dancing power above it. Jenna could sense the cloch yearning like a live thing, wanting her to open it, to fill it. The feeling was so urgent and compulsive that it frightened Jenna.

"Lamh Shabhala craves the power as you crave the anduilleaf," Riata murmured in her head. "You must control Lamh Shabhala as you must control yourself, or it will destroy you utterly when it consumes the mage-lights this night and sets free the other clochs na thintri."

Riata’s words filled Jenna with dread. Her breath came fast and shallow; she could feel her heart racing. "I can’t do it," she gasped.

"You can. I will help you."

"As will I," O’Deoradhain said. He was beside her now. His hand touched Jenna’s shoulder, and she shrugged it away.

"You want me to fail," she spat at him. "Then you’ll take Lamh Shabhala."

"Aye, I would if that happened," he told her. His pale emerald eyes regarded her calmly. "But your failure isn’t what I want. Not any longer. You can

believe me or not, Jenna, but I will help you. I can help you. This is what I was trained to do."

"Listen to him," Riata husked. "Use the cloch. See the truth even if you want to deny it."

"You swear that?" Jenna asked O'Deoradhain, and she let the barest hint of the cloch's strength waft outward. Shaping it to her task was like holding one of the piglets back in their farm in Ballintubber: it wriggled, it squirmed to be away, and she could control it only with difficulty.

"I do swear it," O'Deoradhain answered, and the truth in the words reverberated like the sound of a bronze bell.

"Then what do I do?" Jenna asked.

"Start as you always have. Open the cloch to the lights."

Jenna let the image of Lamh Shabhala fill her mind: the crystalline interstices; the jeweled valleys and hills; the interior landscape of spar-kling energy. Above, the sky responded, a surge of pure white light that was born directly above Jenna and rippled outward in bright spectral rings. The mage-lights flamed, the clouds were driven away as if by hurri-cane winds.

Lamh Shabhala pulled at the sky-magic, sucking in the power like a ravenous beast. "No!" O'Deoradhain and Riata shouted as one. "You must direct the cloch this time, Jenna," O'Deoradhain continued, his voice shouting in her ear but almost lost in the internal din of the mage-lights as they crackled and seethed around her. "You must go up to the mage-lights, not let Lamh Shabhala bring them down to you."

"How?" Jenna raged at him. "Do you think I can fly?" This was nothing she had experienced before with the cloch. She seemed to be in the mid-dle of a coruscating storm, flailing and trying to hold her ground, nearly blind and deaf in its brilliance and roar. Riata's voice answered her, calm and soft as always, cutting through the bedlam.

"Think it," he said, "and it will be."

Her arm burned, the scars as bright as lightning. She lifted the cloch toward the sky and imagined rising into the maelstrom above. Her per-ception shifted: she was outside herself. She could see her

body on the ground, arm lifted, and yet she was also above with the mage-lights run-ning through and around and with her, the land spread like a tapestry below. She was Lamh Shabhala; she was the power within it. Voices and shapes surrounded her in the dazzling space and she knew them: all the ones who had held an active Lamh Shabhala before her: Severii O’Coulghan, who like Riata had been Last Holder; Tadhg O’Coulghan, his father who had held it before Severii; Rowan Beirne, Bryth and Sinna Mac Ard; Eilis MacGairbhith, the Lady of the Falls, and Aodhfin O Liathain, the lover who had betrayed and killed her to take the cloch; Caenneth Mac Noll, also a First, and the first Daoine to hold an active Lamh Shabhala. The Bunus Muintir Holders were there too-Riata, Davali, Oengus. There were hundreds of them: Daoine, Bunus Muintir, and peoples unknown to her, stretching back thousands of years. And they spoke, a babble of voices that rivaled the sound of the mage-lights.

". So young, this one."

’… She’s too young. Too weak. Lamh Shabhala will consume her."

"… I was a First and I died the night I opened the clochs, as will she. ."

"… let her undergo the Scrudu, too. Now, before this happens, and if she lives. .

’Now is not the time for the Scrudu. She must wait for that test until later, as I did. Lamh Shabhala chose her, and sent her to me." That was Riata, calm. "There is a reason it was her… " "What must I do?" Jenna asked them. Her voice was phosphorescence and glow. A hundred voices answered, a jumble of contradiction. Some were amused, some were hostile, some were sympathetic.

". . die!"

". . give up the clock while you can…"

". . hold onto yourself… "

She ignored them and listened for Riata’s voice. "Feel the presence of the other clocks…"

"I do." She could sense them all, scattered over the land yet tied to Lamh Shabhala with streamers of green-white energy. The channels led to the well within the cloch.

"Fill the cloch now," Riata told her, though other voices wailed laughter or warning. "Open it. ."

"You are the cloch," said another voice, fainter and paler: O'Deoradhain.

She imagined Lamh Shabhala transparent and without boundaries. Nothing happened. She drifted above the valley, snared in lambent splen-dor, but there was no change. She looked at her arm, saw light reflecting from it. A beam curled around her, and she willed it to enter her. Blue-green rays crawled the whorls of scars, and she gasped as the radiance entered in her and through her, surging into the cloch she held. Like a dam bursting under the pressure of a flood, the mage-lights suddenly whirled about her, following the path she had made, more and more of the energy filling her as she screamed in ecstasy and fear. Unrelenting, it poured inward. Lamh Shabhala was utterly full, too bright to gaze upon, shuddering and quivering in her hand as if it might break apart. And the pain came with the power: white, stabbing needles of it, driving deep into her flesh and her soul, a torment beyond anything she'd endured before.

The mage-lights were a thunderous cacophony into which she shouted uselessly. In a moment, she would be lost, swept away in currents that she could not control. She ached to release it, to simply let it pass through her, to end this.

"Hold onto the magic, Jenna!" The voice was Riata's or O'Deoradhain's or both. "You must hold onto it!" they shouted again, and she screamed back at them.

"I can't!"

"Jenna, Lamh Shabhala will open the way for the other clocks through you. It is too late now for anything else. The only choice to be made is whether you will use Lamh Shabhala or it you."

". . too young. . too weak. . she will die. ."

". . you see, even if she did this task, she would never have passed the Scrudu later. Best she die now…"

She couldn't hold the energy. No one could hold it. It clawed at her mind with talons of lightning, it roared and flailed and smashed against her. It bellowed and shrilled to be loosed. a moment longer… "

Her hand wanted to open and she knew that if she let go of the stone the force would fly outward with the motion, uncontrolled and explosive. Lamh Shabhala burned in her palm; she could feel its cold fury flaying the skin from muscles, the muscles from bone. It would tear her hand from her arm. She closed her left hand around the right.

". . Good! Turn it inward. Inward…"

Jenna squeezed the cloch tighter, screaming against the resistance and the torture. She closed her eyes, crushing fingers together and shouting a wordless cry.

The sky went dark. The mage-lights vanished.

For a moment, Jenna gaped upward, back in her body again. Light flooded around her cupped, raised hands as if she were grasping the sun itself.

"Now," O'Deoradhain said, his voice loud in the sudden silence. "Let it

Jenna opened her hands.

A fountain of multicolored light erupted: from the cloch, from the scarred flesh of her arm, from her open mouth and eyes. It blossomed high above the valley, gathering like an impossible star for several breaths. Then it shattered, bursting apart into meteors that jetted outward along the energy lines of the other clochs na thintri, the star fading as the mete-ors flared and faded themselves, arcing into the distance and away.

There was the sound of peal upon peal of thunder, then their echoes rebounded from the hills and died in silence.

The valley was dark under a starlit sky, and the sparks lifting from their fire under the dolmen stone seemed pallid and cold. Jenna lifted the cloch that had fallen back around her neck-it burned cold, but it was dark. She marveled at her hands, that they were somehow whole and unblood-ied. The pain hit her then. She fell to her knees, crying out, and O'Deoradhain and Seancoim laid her down gently. "Riata?" she called out.

'He's gone," O'Deoradhain told her. "At least I think so."

"It hurts," Jenna said simply.

I know. I'm sorry. But it's done. It's done, Jenna.

She nodded. Her right arm was stiffening now, the fingers curling into a useless fist, sharp twinges like tiny knives cutting through her chest. She cried, lying there, and let O’Deoradhain place his arm around her for the little comfort it brought her. A familiar smell cut through the smell of wood smoke: Seancoim crouched down by her, a bowl in his hand.

"Anduilleaf," he said. "This one time."

Jenna started to reach for it. Her fingers grazed the edge of the bowl and then stopped. She shook her head. "No," she told the old man. "I can bear this."

What might have been a smile touched his lips beneath the tangle of gray beard. His blind eyes were flecked with firelight; Denmark flapped in from the night and landed on his shoulder. Seancoim dumped the contents of the bowl on the ground and scuffed at the dirt with his feet.

"You have indeed grown tonight, Jenna," he said.

PART THREE: The Mad Holder

(Map: Inish Thuaidh)

Chapter 31: Taking Leave

A DIRE wolf howled its worship to the moon goddess from the next hill. A white owl with a wingspan as wide as a person's outstretched arms swooped down from a nearby branch and lifted again with a rabbit clutched in its talons. The wind brought the enchanting song of the trees at the heart of the forest. Mage-lights snarled the stars.

"I have to go," Jenna said.

Seancoim nodded. Denmark ruffled his wings on the old man's shoulder as Seancoim's pale eyes plucked moonlight from the air. "I know," he said.

"Do you know why?"

He sniffed, almost a laugh. "Well, let me see if I can fathom it… Because Lamh Shabhala aches to be used. Because Jenna herself is tired of hiding and sitting. Because you know that to the north are the people who are your father's fathers, and there also lies the knowledge that you lack as Holder. Because even though I tell you you're wrong, you're afraid that if you hide here too long, your enemies will come in too great a force for even Doire Coill to resist and you don't want harm to come to me or

the forest. Because the winter's chill is gone and the land calls you. Be-cause you see the magic at work here and want to see what it's done elsewhere. Because a blind old man is poor company for a young woman. Are those your reasons?"

Jenna laughed. "All but the last, aye. And more." And you'll be traveling with Ennis O'Deoradhain." It was more statement than question, and he was still smiling. "So that's the way it is, 'tis it? You've come to like the man."

"No!" The denial came quickly and automatically.

"Not at all. But he’s Inish, and knows some of the cloudmage ways and will help me get to the island. Do I trust him? I suppose I do to a point-he could have taken Lamh Shabhala from me easily when we were in Lar Bhaile and he didn’t but the man still has his own agenda and if I get in the way of that…" She shrugged. "And I don’t like the man, Seancoim. Not that way." And after Coelin’s betrayal, I’m not sure I’ll ever love anyone again that way, she wanted to add, but pressed her lips shut.

Jenna and O’Deoradhain had wintered in Doire Coill. Seancoim had scoffed at Jenna’s concerns that RI Gabair and Tiarna Mac Ard-or the RI Ard and Tanaise Rig themselves-might try to invade the forest. "The forest will take care of itself, as I told Tiarna Mac Ard when you first came here," he answered. "Now the magic is unleashed again, and the forest is more awake than ever. They bring their own death if they wander here."

And yet they had come. The mage-lights of the Filleadh had told those in Lar Bhaile where Jenna had gone after she fled the city. In the days immediately following her escape, troops were dispatched to search for her on the west side of Lough Lar and some even ventured into Doire Coill. As Seancoim had predicted, few of those who entered the oak forest returned. But strangely, after the initial fortnight, no one came searching at all.

Jenna had wondered about that at first. Then she realized. .

Nearly every night now, the mage-lights flickered in the sky, no longer only above the locus of Lamh Shabhala but from horizon to horizon, and the newly-released clochs na thintri fed on them. The Riocha were scrambling for possession of the stones-and learning to control them- which created such turmoil and contention that finding Lamh Shabhala and Jenna was temporarily a secondary concern. The night of the Filleadh, Jenna had opened three double hands of the major clochs (the Clochs Mor, O’Deoradhain had said they were called) and a hand of the minor stones-or clochmions-for each of the Clochs Mor: almost two hundred clochs na thintri all told were now active.

Nearly every night, too, Jenna yearned for the anduilleaf and the solace it would bring against the continuing pain of holding Lamh Shabhala. But Seancoim would not offer it to her again, and she

remembered too well the fog it had cast over her mind.

Little news reached Doire Coill from outside, but O'Deoradhain would sometimes go to search out a traveler alone on the High Road. He would bring back their tales to Jenna and Seancoim. Twice during their stay, other Bunus Muintir came to visit Seancoim-from Foraois Coill in Tuath Infochla, and the great island of Inishcoill off Tuath Airgialla-and they brought news of their own. Jenna knew from those contacts that word had been sent from Dun Laoghaire to all the tuatha that the Holder of Lamh Shabhala had been driven insane, that she had murdered a score of Riocha in Lar Bhaile including the Banrion Cianna herself. A hefty blood rice had been placed on her head, and it appeared that the Tanaise Rig no longer had any interest in his marriage proposal.

Jenna was now the Mad Holder, to be killed upon sight.

Two months ago, near the time of the Festival of Fomhar, the three of them had watched from the western fringes of Doire Coill as an army approached from the west and another marched out from Lar Bhaille to meet it. They had seen in the distance the smoke and dust of battle, and Jenna felt the surge of power from several clochs na thintri wielded as terrible weapons. From the travelers, they learned that other armies had been seen battling south and east, as well.

The tuatha were fighting among themselves, and the clochs na thintri were among their implements of war.

Eventually, Jenna knew, someone would come searching for Lamh Shabhala, someone with an army or a few of the Clochs Mor or both at their backs, and they would stop at nothing to find her. Jenna had learned much about handling the cloch in the last months, but she didn't want to see Doire Coill at the center of a battle, even a victorious one.

And Seancoim was right. She was tired of hiding.

"When do you go?" Seancoim asked, his voice bringing her out of reverie. She shivered, then smiled at him.

"Tomorrow."

"Then 1 will enjoy tonight." Seancoim turned

solemn, twirling a finger in his beard before he spoke. "You must realize that I’m not the only one who can guess which way Lamh Shabhala would travel."

"I know that. We’ll be careful."

"Careful may not be enough."

She smiled at him and kissed his forehead. "Then come with us. I’d like that. Have you ever seen the Westering Sea, Seancoim? O’Deoradhain says that you look out, and see nothing but water and sky, all the way to the end of the world."

He shook his head sadly. "No. But this is where my destiny and my home are. I’m an old man, and I have my apprentice to train."

"Apprentice? Since when do you have an apprentice?" You’ve not met her. She stays on her own most of the time inside the forest. She’s learned most of what I have to teach her but not all. No, Jenna, thanks for your offer, but I’ll stay here and make certain that you have a place to which you can return one day."

They were standing at the northern edge of Doire Coill, near where Mac Ard, her mam, and she had first entered the forest-less than a year ago, though it seemed that everything had changed in that time. The High Road was less than a quarter mile away, turning here in a great sweeping curve to the north, where a day’s walk away waited Knobtop and Ballintubber. Jenna wondered about her home, wondered what they said about her and her mam when they gathered in Tara ’s Tavern of an evening. Perhaps there were already tales of the Mad Holder, and One Hand Bailey or Chamis Redface regaled anyone who would listen with fanciful tales of Jenna as a child.

"Even back then it was obvious that she was fey and dangerous. Why, once Matron Kelly scolded her, and Jenna made a motion like this, and Matron Kelly’s cows gave no milk for an entire week. Tom Mullin once caught her stealing apples from his orchard and chased her off his land, and the very next day as he rode to Aldwoman Pearce’s house, may the Mother-Creator rest her soul, his horse threw him for no reason at all and he broke his leg. He’s walked with a limp since that day. I tell you, we were all careful what we said and did around the Aoires… "

"You don't get to choose how you're remembered," Seancoim said, as if he sensed what she were thinking. "That's up to those who are left behind." He touched her right arm. "Come with me," he said.

He turned and walked back into the forest, Denmark flapping heavily ahead of them. He turned away from the faint path they'd followed, slip-ping into the darkness under the trees. "I can't see," Jenna said, hesitating.

"Then take my arm. ."

Holding onto the elbow of a blind man, she moved into the night landscape of the forest. They walked for nearly a stripe, it seemed, Jenna stumbling and occasionally pushing away a stray branch, while Seancoim was sure-footed and easy with Dunmharu’s guidance.

They skirted a fen, and Jenna realized that the sound of the forest had changed at some point. She could no longer hear the animals: the grunt of the deer, the occasional howl of a wolf, the rustlings and chirps of the night birds. Here, there were other sounds: leafy rustlings, the groan of shifting wood, the sibilant breath of leaves that sounded almost like words. The moon came out from behind a cloud, and she could see that she and Seancoim were surrounded by gigantic old oaks with gnarled, twisted branches and great trunks that it would take three men to encircle. They loomed over the two, and Denmark stayed on Seancoim's shoulder rather than roosting in any of these branches.

The trees spoke to each other. Jenna could hear them, could feel them. They were aware; they knew she was there. Branches moved and swayed though there was no wind, one limb sweeping down to wrap about Jenna's right arm. She resisted the temptation to brush away the woody fin-gers, the leafy touch, and a few moments later it uncurled and swept away. "Can you talk to them, Seancoim?" she asked, her voice a hushed whisper. It seemed sacrilegious to speak loudly here.

"No," he answered, his voice as quiet as hers. "They're the Seanoir, the Eldest, and their language is older than even the Bunus Muintir, nor do they experience life as we do. But this place is one of the many hearts of Doire Coill. These trees were planted by the Seed-Daughter herself when she gave life to the land, and they have been here since

the beginning, thousands and thousands of years. Here, feel. ." Seancoim took Jenna’s hand and placed it on the veined, craggy surface of the nearest trunk. She felt nothing for a moment, then there was a throb like the pulsing of blood; a few breaths later, another followed. "That’s the heartbeat of the land itself," Seancoim said. "Slow and mighty and eternal, moving through their limbs."

Jenna kept her hand there, feeling the long, unhurried beats, her own breath slowing and calming with the touch. "Seancoim, I never. ." She wanted to stay here forever, feeling this. There was a sorcery to the trees, an insistent lethargy, and she remembered. "When I was here before. ."

"Aye, it was their call you heard," Seancoim told her. "And if the Old Ones here wished it, you would remain snared in their spell until your body died of thirst and hunger. Look around you, Jenna. Look around you with your eyes open."

"My eyes are open…" she started to say, then blinked. For the first time, she noticed that there were gleams of moonlit white in the grassy earth of the grove. She bent down to look and straightened with a stifled cry: a skull leered back at her, stalks of grass climbing through vacant eye sockets, the jaw detached and nearly lost alongside. There were dozens of skeletons in and around the tree trunks, she saw now: some human, some animal.

"The sun feeds their leaves, the rain slakes their thirst, and those who come here and are trapped by their songs nourish the earth in which their roots dig," Seancoim said. "This is where, when it’s time, I’ll come, too, on my own and by my own choice." Jenna continued to stare. She could smell the death now: the ripe pungency of rotting flesh. Some of the bodies were new, and the clothes they wore were dyed green and brown.

She should have been horrified. But she felt the throbbing of the trees and the earth and realized that this was as it should be, that the Seanoir fed on life in the same way Jenna fed on life. She ate the meat of animals that had once been alive, and soaked up their juices with bread from the wheat that had waved in fields under the sun a month before. This was simply another part of the greater cycle in which they were all caught There was no horror here. No malevolence, no evil. The trees simply did as their nature demanded. If they killed,

it was not out of hatred, but because their view of the world was far longer and broader than that of the races whose lives were impossibly fleeting.

A branch came down; it lifted the cloch at Jenna's neck and let it drop again. "They know Lamh Shabhala," Seancoim said. "It is nearly as old as they are. They know it lives again." He went up to the largest of the trees and lifted his hand. A branch above wriggled, and a large acorn dropped into his palm. "Here," he told Jenna. He folded the nut in her left hand, closing her fingers around the acorn and putting his own leathery hands over hers. "For the Seanoir, the mage-lights signal a time of growing. Even the seasons themselves are too fast for them. The lights are the manifesta-tion of a burgeoning centuries-long spring and summer for them, and this is their seed. Take this with you when you go, and plant this where you find your new home. Then you will always have part of Doire Coill with you. Make a new place for them."

Moonlight shimmered through moving branches, and the leaves spoke their words. Jenna nodded to the Seanoir, the ancient oaks of Doire Coill.

"I will," she said. "And I'll always remember."

They left that morning before the sun rose, their faces toward the constel-lation of the Badger, whose snout always points north. They said little besides idle talk of the weather, and if O'Deoradhain noticed that Jenna paralleled the High Road and that Knobtop crept slowly closer to them as the sun rose behind a wall of gray clouds, he said nothing. By evening, they were close to Ballintubber, with Knobtop rising high on their right hand, its bare stony summit still in sunlight even though the marshes on either side of the road were wrapped in shadow. As they approached the Bog Bridge, O'Deoradhain placed his hand on Jenna's arm. "Are you sure?" he asked.

"I need to see this."

He looked as if he were about to argue, but he swallowed the words and shrugged. "Then let's hurry, before we're walking in the dark."

A few hundred strides beyond the bridge, they came to the lane which led to Jenna's home. The lane was overgrown, the grass high where once the sheep had kept it cropped close and the hay wagon had worn ruts in the earth. Jenna turned into the

lane, hurrying now down the familiar path around the bend she recalled so well. She wasn’t certain what she expected to see: perhaps the house as it had once been, with her mam at the door and Kesh barking as he ran out toward her, and smoke curling from the chimney.

Instead, there was ruin. The house had mostly returned to earth. Only a roofless corner remained, overgrown with vines and brush. Where the barn had been there was only a mound. She walked forward with a stum-bling gait: there was the door stone, worn down in the center from boots and rain, but it sat in the midst of weeds, the door itself only a few blackened boards half-buried in sod and grass. The chimney had col-lapsed, but the hearth was still there, blackened from the fire that had destroyed the house, and her mam’s cooking pot, rusted and broken, lay on its side nearby.

Here was where she had slept and laughed and lived, but it was only a ghost now. The bones of a dead existence. The silence here was the silence of a grave.

"I’m sorry," O’Deoradhain said. Jenna started at the sound of his voice; lost in reverie, she hadn’t heard his approach. "I can imagine it looked beautiful, once."

She nodded. "Mam always had flowers on the windowsill, red and blue and yellow, and I knew every stone and crack in the walls. ."A sob shook her shoulders, and she felt O’Deoradhain’s arms go around her. His touch dried the tears, searing them with anger. She shrugged his embrace away, her hands flailing. "Get off me!" she shouted at him, and he backed away, hands wide and open.

"I’m sorry, Holder," he said.

Jenna’s right hand went automatically to Lamh Shabhala, touching the stone. A faint glimmer of light shone between her fingers, turning them blood-red. "You don’t ever touch me. Do you understand?"

He nodded. His face was solemn, but there was something in his pale green eyes she could not read, a wounding caused by her words. He turned away and dropped his pack from his shoulders as Jenna slowly relaxed.

She let go of the cloch and its light faded. Her arm

ached, as if in memory of how Lamh Shabhala had awakened here, and she wished again-fleetingly-that Seancoim had put anduilleaf in her pack. "We might as well camp here tonight," she said, trying to sound as if the confrontation had never happened and knowing she fooled neither of them. "It's obvious no one's come here since… " She stopped, and genuine wonder filled her voice. "Shh! What's that?"

What?" O'Deoradhain glanced in the direction Jenna was pointing.

Well off in the field where Old Stubborn and his herd used to graze, there was movement: pairs of pale green lights gleaming in the twilight, like glowing eyes. There seemed to be hundreds of them, just above the level of the tall grass, shifting and moving about, blinking occasionally. And they spoke like a crowd of people gathered together: a low, murmuring conversation that raised goose bumps on Jenna's arms. There were words in their discussion, she was certain, then-distinctly-a horn blew a shrill glissando. The lights went out as one, and a wind rose from the field and swept past them and up the lane. In the twilight, Jenna could glimpse half-seen shapes and feel ghostly hands brushing against her. The horn sounded again: fainter and more distant, heading in the direction of Knob top. The wind died as a few glowing eyes stared back at them from near the bend in the lane and disappeared again.

The horde had passed.

"Wind sprites," O'Deoradhain said. His voice was hushed and awed, as if he were standing in one of the Mother-Creator's chapels. Jenna looked at him in puzzlement. "My great-mam used to tell me tales at night, and she spoke of eyes in the dark, and horns, and the wind as they rushed by in their hunts. I thought the stories she told me were all legends and myths."

He shook his head. "Now I think the legends were only sleeping."

Chapter 32: Ballintubber Changed

THE next morning, they walked up the High Road to the village. The morning was a drizzle of mist and fog that beaded on their clocas and hair, and the spring’s warmth seemed to have fled. As they approached, Jenna began to sense that something was wrong. It was the silence that bothered her. A Ballintubber morning should have been alive with sound: the lowing of milch cows in their barns; the steely clatter of a hammer on hot iron or bronze from the smithy; the creak and rumble of produce carts going out to the fields; the shouts and hollers of children; laughter, conversations, greetings. .

There was nothing. She could see the buildings up the rise, but no sound wafted down from them to challenge the birdcalls or their footsteps on the muddy road. O’Deoradhain noticed it as well; he swept back his cloca and placed his hand on the hilt of his knife. "Perhaps they all de-cided to sleep late this morning," he said, and gave a bitter laugh at his own jest.

Not likely," Jenna answered. Grimacing, she placed her right hand around the cloch. She opened the stone and let its energy flow outward, her own awareness drifting with it. O’Deoradhain had offered to teach her some of the craft of the cloudmage during their months in Doire Coill, and she had-grudgingly-accepted his tutelage. She wasn’t sure how good a pupil she’d been, suspicious of her teacher’s intentions and instruction, but she had learned a few skills. She could sense life in the way the power flowed, and that told her there were people nearby, though only a few.

And there was something else, at the edge of what she could detect: a pull and bending in her consciousness, as if another cloch were out there as well. She brought up the walls that O’Deoradhain had taught her to create around the cloch, but at that moment, the hint of another presence vanished. She put her attention there, to the south and east, but it was gone. Perhaps it had never been there at all.

She opened her hand and her eyes. A shiver of

discomfort traveled from wrist to shoulder, and she groaned. "Jenna?"

"I'm fine," she told O'Deoradhain sharply. "Come on; there's no one there we need to be concerned with." She began walking rapidly toward the cluster of buildings.

Things had changed. The High Road was marked with stone flags through the village, but grass grew high between the flat rocks. Dogs would usually have come running to greet newcomers, but the only dog Jenna glimpsed-black and white and painfully reminiscent of Kesh- was bedraggled and thin, skulking away with lowered tail and ears as soon as it caught a glimpse of them. The Mullin house, near the outskirts of the village, hadn't been whitewashed this spring as Tom and his sons usually did, and the thatch roof sagged badly just over the doorway. The door hung on one hinge, half-opened and leading into a dark interior. "Hello," Jenna called as they passed, but no one came out.

"Not the place you remember, is it?" O'Deoradhain ventured. "You're certain there are people here?"

"Aye," Jenna answered grimly. "Near the tavern,

I think."

"I'd be drinking if I lived here."

Jenna gave him an irritated glance; he stared blandly back at her. Turn-ing her back on the man, she walked quickly to Tara's Tavern. The village square was overgrown and shabby, but peat smoke curled from the chim-ney of the inn and she could smell bacon frying. The stone steps leading up to the door were achingly familiar, and she pushed open the door and entered.

"By the Mother-Jenna?" Tara's voice cut through the dimness inside, and the woman set down a tray of glasses with a clatter and a crash, and she came running from behind the bar. She stopped an arm's length away from Jenna and looked her up and down, her mouth open. "Would you look at you-all dressed up in a Riocha's clothes, and that silver chain around your neck." Tara's gaze snagged on Tara's scarred right arm, and the mouth closed. Behind her, O'Deoradhain entered, and Tara took a step back. "You've. . you've not changed a bit," Tara finished, and Jenna smiled wanly at the obvious lie. "Sit down, sit down. You and your..

companion take that table over there, or any you want. It's not like we're going to have a crowd, though once people hear that you've come back, I expect we'll see as good a one as I've had all year. I have bacon going in the pan, and good eggs, and biscuits I just made this morning. I'll get me tea for you… Sit.. " Tara turned and scurried into the kitchen;

Jenna shrugged at O'Deoradhain.

"It's a better breakfast than we're likely to have for a while," she told him. "If it's not our last."

Jenna sniffed. "I know these people,

O'Deoradhain. They're my friends."

"They were once, aye. But friendship can be as hard to hold onto as a salmon in a stream." He didn't say more, but slid behind the table nearest the door. She noticed that O'Deoradhain sat with his back to the wall where he could see both the door and the rest of the room, and his hand stayed on the hilt of his dagger. She took a chair across from him.

They weren't alone. There were two other tables occupied, one by Erin the Healer, who lived to the north of the village. He nodded to Jenna as if seeing her was no more unusual than seeing any of the rest of Ballintubber's residents. At the other table were two men she didn't recognize; travelers, evidently, since they had packs sitting next to their chairs. A head poked out from the kitchen: Tara's son Eliath. He was a few inches taller than Jenna remembered, and a new, puckered scar meandered from his forehead to the base of his jaw. "Hey Jenna! Mam said you were out here."

"Eliath! It's good to see you. ."

He grinned and came over to the table. He glanced at O'Deoradhain, and the grin faded to a careful smile before he turned back to Jenna. 'Good to see you, too. Everyone thought you and your mam were dead, when the Troubles started. Is your mam. .

?"

"She's fine. She's in Lar Bhaile."

The grin returned. "Lar Bhaile? That's where Ellia went. She married Coelin Singer, did you know that?"

"I know," Jenna said, forcing a smile. "I saw her, big with child."

Tara had come up with a tray loaded with steaming mugs of tea and platters of food. She set them down on the table. "You saw my Ellia?" she asked. "Did she look well? Did she ask after us? We didn’t. ." Tara blushed. "I’m afraid we didn’t part on the best of terms, and I haven’t heard from her since."

She looked lovely and wonderful and happy, and they’re living in a fine house in the town," Jenna responded, giving them the lie she knew Tara wanted desperately to hear. "She’ll be a mam soon, probably already is by now, since I saw her last a few months ago. Coelin’s even sung for the RI, and for the Tanaise Rig when he visited there. She told me to give you her love when I came back to Ballintubber and to say that she missed you."

"Truly?" Tara sighed. "I should go there," she said. "The Mother-Creator knows there’s not much here. Not since the Troubles and all the death. I should go and see her and the babe. And your mam, too. Maybe this summer, once the spring rains have stopped."

She wouldn’t go, Jenna knew. Like the rest of them, she would never leave Ballintubber. "I’m certain they’d love that. Both of them."

Tara nodded. "You know, Jenna, I thought you were sweet on that Coelin yourself. The boy had half the young women of the village hanging on him, and my Ellia no different."

"I didn’t have a chance with him," Jenna answered. The smile was difficult to maintain. "Not with Ellia."

Another sigh. Then Tara stirred. "But here I am prattling on about things and your food’s getting cold. Eat, and drink that tea before it turns to ice-it’s a cold day for the season, ’tis." Despite the words, Tara seemed content to stay there, standing before the table. "Are you back home? Will you be building a new place on your mam’s land?" she asked, and her gaze drifted significantly to O’Deoradhain.

"No," Jenna said. "This is Ennis O’Deoradhain, Tara-he’s a friend, a traveling companion. We’re going north-"

O’Deoradhain cleared his throat. When she glanced at him, he smiled, though his eyes glittered warningly. "-and east," she finished. "Along the High Road up to Ballymote, then on to Glenkille and maybe even across the Finger to Ceile Mhor."

Tara 's eyebrows raised at the names. "So far? Child, I haven't been farther than a stone's throw from Ballintubber all my life, and you're going all the way to Ceile Mhor? It's not safe traveling. Not any more. Not with the fighting and the lights in the sky, and the strange creatures that have been seen.

Why, only the other night, Matron Kelly saw wolves with red eyes and as tall as horses on the hill near her house. A pair of them, howling and snarling and frightening her so that she was afraid to go out of her house for days. Killed four of her sheep-tore their throats out and picked them up in their mouths as if they weighed nothing at all. No, I wouldn't be traveling. Not me."

The two strangers had risen from their chairs. They passed by the table as they left without a word. Jenna saw O'Deoradhain's gaze following them as they opened the door and went out.

"I see you still have people stopping at the inn," Jenna said to Tara, nodding toward the door.

"Them? They're the first in a week. Came up from the south, they say, from Ath Iseal. The High Road's not as well traveled these days. And not

much business of a night, either." She shook her head, wiping her hands nervously on her apron.

"Not since. . well, you know. That was a bad time when those Connachtans came raiding. Killed Aldwoman Pearce, and cut down Tom Mullins and all four of his sons not a dozen steps from here when they tried to help. And poor Eli; one of them opened up my boy's face just because he didn't move fast enough when they told him to curry their horses. It was awful. They burned half the houses, and some of the women they…" Her voice trailed off. Remembered horrors drained the color from her face.

"Aye. I understand," Jenna told her.

"We thought you and your mam and that tiarna were all dead, too. We saw your house burning like the rest, and those that went to look said there was no one there alive, though there were dead Connachtans and your poor dog. We thought you'd been burned with the house."

Jenna shook her head. She found she didn’t want to talk about it. The days when the Connachtans had swept through in pursuit of the mage-lights and Lamh Shabhala had damaged Ballintubber but not truly changed the place. Ballintubber remained sleepy and forgotten; if it was lucky, it might stay so. For the first time, Jenna saw just how much she’d been altered by the events of the last several months. She was no longer the person who had lived here. This was no longer "home."

"We managed to sneak away, my mam and I and the tiarna," she told Tara. "It didn’t seem safe to go back."

"So you went to Lar Bhaile," Tara finished for her. From the expression on her face, she seemed to find it alternately amusing and unbelievable that someone from Ballintubber would have made that choice. "And now you’re. . traveling." She said the word as if it were something mildly distasteful.

And we’ll be needing horses," O’Deoradhain broke in, leaning for-ward. "Would you have two good steeds in your stable, or can someone in the village sell us the mounts? We’ll pay in hard coin."

Tara shrugged, but Eli spoke up. "We have one, sir-a roan mare that’s a good twelve hands high and strong," he said. "And One Hand Bailey has another he’s been talking of selling, a big brown gelding, past its prime but still healthy. He was asking half a morceint, and not getting it. He’d take less now, I’d wager."

"He can have his half a morceint," O’Deoradhain told him. "And a morceint to you and your mam for the roan and livery for the two.

Here. ." O’Deoradhain opened his purse and took out two of the coins, flipping them to Eli. "Go fetch the gelding and get them both ready for us, and you can have the other half morceint yourself." Eli grinned; Tara’s eyebrows went up again.

"Aye!" Eli almost shouted. "Give me a stripe; no, half a stripe," he said and he was gone, running. Tara, after a few more minutes of conversation excused herself to go back into the kitchen. Erin the Healer left with another silent nod to Jenna. O’Deoradhain sipped his tea and leaned back in his chair. He whistled tunelessly.

"Horses?" Jenna asked.

"I didn't like the way those two strangers stared at us, like they were memorizing our faces," O'Deoradhain answered. "I didn't like the fact that they came up the High Road from the south, either. If they've been travel-ing through Gabair, then who knows what they've heard and what they realize? I want to get as far away from here as fast as possible."

"So you're the little Rl here, eh?" She lowered her head in mocking subservience, then glared at him. "And I must follow your orders."

"I would point out that you made the decision to come here. I'm just making the decision as to how to leave. That seems fair enough." He gave her that strange, lopsided smile of his. "You know, I get the sense that you still don't like or trust me much."

"I don't," she told him. "Either one. I want to go to Inish Thuaidh; you do also. Our paths just happen to lie together at the moment."

"And when they don't?"

"When that happens, or if I decide I can't trust you, then we part."

O'Deoradhain nodded. He took a hunk of bread and gnawed it thoughtfully. "That seems fair enough, too," he said.

Chapter 33: A Battle of Stones

THEY were three days out of Ballintubber, and it still seemed strange to both of them that they'd encountered very few people. Though the land at the northern borders of Tuath Gabair was sparsely populated and they were traveling overland rather than on the road, the area seemed oddly empty. Fields that should have been plowed by now were fallow, with weeds and grass growing up among the straggling clumps of wheat and barley. The day before, they'd passed near one village, and though they heard the sounds of children playing and saw several women work-ing the fields nearby, the only men they noticed were the old. O'Deoradhain turned grim at the sight.

"They’ve been sweeping the land, then, and pressing men into service. The Ris are strengthening their armies," he’d said, and Jenna hadn’t wanted to believe him.

Now the proof lay before her.

They were walking through a wooded valley between two tall ridge lines. The trees thinned, and they came out into an open field where the hills swept wide apart in great curving arms.

A mound of raw new earth cut across their path, and the banner of Tuath Gabair flapped on a pole planted in the dirt. Jenna glanced at O’Deoradhain; his face was grim, and he pulled on the reins of his horse to Pass to the left of the mound.

He quickly brought his horse to a stop. "By the Mother," he breathed. Jenna came up alongside him. "Gods," she said. Her stomach jumped, and she tasted bile in her mouth.

They were on a slight rise. The full expanse of the field lay spread out before them: trampled, torn, and bloodied. Black flocks of carrion crows fought and scrabbled over the bodies of soldiers; feral dogs lifted their heads from gory feasts to glare suspiciously at them. Flies buzzed and whined through the air. The bodies, Jenna noted, all wore the blue and gold of Tuath Connachta. There were two more mounds on the field, and on each Gabair’s banner flew.

A few heads had been mounted on broken lances as a warning. O’Deoradhain rode his horse up to one of the trophies, the horse shying away from the smell of rotting meat and the crow-emptied eye sockets, and a cloud of flies rising from the face as O’Deoradhain leaned over from his saddle to peer at it. The jaw hung upon, the head gaping in eternal amaze-ment. "A boy," he said. "No more than fifteen, I’ll wager, and a pressman in his Ri’s army. I’ll bet he told his mam he’d be back a hero."

Jenna’s stomach turned again, and she leaned over, vomiting quickly. She hung onto the horse.

The wind shifted slightly, and the smell came to them: rotting, ripe flesh. The sweet sickly smell of death.

"Victory," O’Deoradhain said mockingly. " Tis a wonderful sight, don’t you think?"

Jenna wiped her mouth and nudged her horse

carefully forward. The horse nickered, its eyes wide and nervous. She looked down at a body to her right. The soldier sprawled awkwardly on his back, a broken sword still clutched in his hand. The rings of bronze and iron sewn on his boiled leather vest were ripped and broken over his abdomen, and a horrible wound had nearly split him in two. Scavengers had been at the body-the eyes and tongue were gone, his entrails pulled out and scattered, the flesh gnawed upon. White maggots crawled in and around his open mouth, in the sockets of his eyes. Jenna's stomach lurched again, and she forced the gorge back down.

O'Deoradhain was riding slowly around the field, occasionally looking down at the earth. Jenna stayed where she was, not wanting to go out into the carnage. "What was left of the Connachtan force retreated west," he said when he returned. "They weren't pursued-from the looks of the mounds, the Gabairan troops lost a good many men also, and their com-mander decided to stay here and bury their dead. They moved off to the east, through that pass there." He glanced down at the body of the soldier by Jenna. "The battle took place no more than two days ago, from the signs." Jenna nodded; she was still staring at the body. "Jenna?"

She wondered how young he'd been, how he'd looked in life, whether he'd had a wife and family. She imagined the body alive again, as if she could turn back time.

"Jenna?"

She lifted her head to find O'Deoradhain staring at her. "There were lochs here, too," he said. "There are several places where the earth is scorched as if by lightning strikes. Boulders were flung about that had crushed men underneath, and trees ripped whole from the ground and tossed. Since the Clochs Mor, unlike Lamh Shabhala, have only one ability each, I would guess there were two or possibly three of the stones here."

Jenna touched Lamh Shabhala. She could feel nothing here now, but a sense of dread hung over her that she had not felt since they'd left Doire Coill. For the first time, she realized just how much the Filleadh had changed the world. You caused this, she thought, her gaze on the field of destruction ahead of her. This is all because of the cloch you hold, and there will be more of it. Much more.

"It’s my fault," Jenna said.

O’Deoradhain nudged his horse alongside Jenna’s, though he didn’t touch her. "No," he said firmly, though quietly. "This isn’t your fault. This is the fault of greed and callousness and stupidity. You didn’t force any of the Rithe into conflict; they were just waiting for the opportunity, and Lamh Shabhala provided a convenient excuse."

The corpse leered up at her, a mockery in the bright spring grass. "All these people dead. ."

"Aye," O’Deoradhain said, "and yet more will die. That I can guarantee. But their souls won’t come wailing to you when they cry out for justice."

She still stared down, realizing that beyond this body another one lay, and another and another…

"I can hear them now," she told him. "They already call to me…" She was trembling, unable to stop the movement of her hands.

"Jenna, you’ve seen a dead body before." His mouth snapped shut, and she could imagine the rest of what he might have said: You were responsible for their deaths, too.

She looked at O’Deoradhain, her head shaking violently from side to side. "Not this many," she said. "Not like this, just. ." She had to stop ’or a moment, her breath gone. Her heart was pounding in her chest…. just scattered everywhere. Torn apart, half-eaten, discarded and unmourned " She tasted vomit at the back of her throat again, and swal-lowed hard. This is your legacy. This is your fate, too. Some day it will be you sprawled lifelessly there. . The land was starting to whirl around her, at the center the grotesque face of the dead soldier.

Jenna." O’Deoradhain brought her back as she was about to fall. Harsh and unsympathetic, his voice struck like a slap. She took a breath, and the world settled again. "This isn’t the last you’ll see of this. You’ll see more and worse, because you’ll be part of it. You don’t have a choice, not unless you want to give up Lamh Shabhala."

"Lamh Shabhala is mine," Jenna answered heatedly. Her hand went to the cloch, closing around it.

"Then look around you and get used to the sight, because you’ll need to have a clear head and mind

when a battle's raging around you, or someone will be taking Lamh Shabhala from your corpse." Then his voice softened; he started to reach for her, then let his hand drop back to his side. "The dead can't hurt you, Jenna. Only the living can do that. We can't stay here, and we can't go back. The war will follow us-my bet is that the Ri Ard is already stepping in to end these battles between the tuatha. They'll unite to find Lamh Shabhala; we can only hope to stay ahead of them, and maybe, maybe on Inish Thuaidh we can leave them behind. But we have to go now, before someone finds us. And before night falls, because this place will be haunted." He tilted his head toward her inquiringly. "Holder? Are you listening to me?"

"I thought you said that the dead couldn't hurt you." His grin was sheepish. "They can't. That doesn't mean they won't try." She said nothing to that. Instead, she flicked the reins of her horse and touched her heels to the mare's sides, urging the horse forward-not around the field of battle, but through it. She would not look down, but she saw the bodies as they passed, and each of them seemed to call to her accusingly.

O'Deoradhain slept under his blankets on the other side of the fire. The flickering yellow light illuminated the undersides of the leaves above them and plucked the white trunks of the sycamores from the night in a circle about them. She could hear him snoring softly, the loudest sound in the stillness.

Jenna reached into her pack and laid the relics out in front of her: the wooden seal her da had carved; the ring of Eilis MacGairbhith, the Lady of the Falls; the golden torc of Sinna Mac Ard. Of Riata she had nothing; the ghost of the ancient Holder had made it clear to her that he did not want to be awakened again unless she returned to Doire Coill and the valley of cairns.

She stared at them, a fingertip brushing each and feeling the spark within. Da? But he had never held the active Lamh Shabhala, and the times she had called him up, he had seemed more frightened and con-fused than she was, and she had ended by comforting him. Eilis? Jenna had called the Lady of the Falls only one other time after that day in her burial chamber behind the Doan’s waters, and the ghost had been as angry and fey as during their first encounter; though Jenna knew that the ghost couldn't touch or harm her, she would call that Holder forth only in great need.

Jenna picked up Sinna’s torc. She started to place it around her neck..

"You’ll just have to explain to her again who you are because she won’t remember you. She’s not your friend. She doesn’t care about you-to her, you’re as much a ghost as she is to you."

Across the fire, O’Deoradhain was watching from his blankets, up on one elbow. "Her time wasn’t like our time, and she isn’t like you. At all. You need to find your own path, not tread along someone else’s," he finished.

"Which is the path you want me to take, no doubt." She hated the disdain in her voice. She thought of offering an apology-He’s done noth-ing but help you, and yet you keep pushing him away-but then it seemed that she’d waited too long. The muscles along his jaw clenched, and he blinked. She pretended to look away from him, to be absorbed in the torc.

"I’m not forcing you to go anywhere, Holder," he said. "Remember when I said earlier today that the dead can’t hurt you? Well, they also can’t help you."

’"Only the living can do that.’ Is that how that ends? Meaning I’m supposed to trust you?"

O’Deoradhain took a long breath. His eyes held hers, and she saw the hurt in them. "You do what you think you need to do, Holder, and believe what you must." He lay back down and snapped the blankets around him, turning his back to the fire and her.

Jenna held the torc in her hands for several minutes, watching the fire shimmering in its burnished surface. Finally, she placed it back in her pack. "I’m sorry," she whispered to the night, not sure to whom she was speaking.

The spring sun beat down on the bright carpet of silverweed, primrose, and heather in which Lough Crithlaigh rested; the sky was cloudless and deep. Yellow siskins, song thrushes, and warblers darted among the wild-flowers. Mountains lifted gorse-feathered heads to the west beyond the hills, and they could see deer grazing near a foaming rill winding toward the lough. The day was pastoral; even their horses seemed affected, neigh-ing and lowering their heads as if they wanted to linger here forever.

"Those are storm deer, not the normal red," O'Deoradhain commented then glanced back at Jenna. "You're frowning."

Jenna turned in her saddle. She tried to give the man a smile and failed. "I'm sorry," she said. "It's just. ." She stopped; he lifted an eyebrow."… a feeling."

O'Deoradhain pulled back the reins of his mount, his gaze searching the terrain.

They'd debated whether they should go through this expansive but open valley, or take the much longer and difficult path through the hills. She wondered now if they'd made a mistake. She touched the cloch, let-ting tendrils of energy spread outward. In that invisible cloud, there was a twin disturbance. She could sense it in the pattern of Lamh Shabhala’s sphere, like a wave disturbed by the presence of unseen rocks just below the surface. "There are two other clochs na thintri close By," Jenna said. She could feel a cold apprehension spreading out from her stomach. "Powerful ones: Clochs Mor. I can feel them."

O'Deoradhain rose up in his saddle again.

"Where?" he asked. "In what direction?"

"I'm not certain," Jenna said. "To the south, I think. They're trying to keep themselves hidden, but one of the Holders isn't particularly good at keeping his wall up and so I can sense them both."

"By the Mother-Creator," O'Deoradhain cursed. His hands clenched into fists around the reins, the knuckles going white with pressure. "I was afraid this would happen. Well, we don't have a choice. All we can do is ride on, and see if they show themselves."

"O'Deoradhain, what should I do? What happens if they attack with the clochs, or if they're part of the army the Ri has raised. .?" Jenna remembered the battlefield and saw herself as one of the corpses. Her breath was coming fast, and panic roared in her ears.

"You'll do what you can," O'Deoradhain told her.

"I will do what I can, also, but if the clochs enter the battle, you must deal with them." Then his voice gentled, and his eyes held hers. "You're the Holder of Lamh Shabhala, and it's stronger than the other clochs na thintri. Remember that."

She did. She also remembered the words of the Lady of the Falls: ". . even the strongest can be overpowered by numbers, or make a fatal mistake…" "I don’t know what to do."

"You will, if it comes to that," O’Deoradhain told her. "And if we’re lucky, they won’t see us. If we can reach the hills beyond the lough. .’

They moved through the field toward the lough, the land sloping gently downhill to the water. There were beeches and sycamores lining the banks, and without speaking both of them urged their horses into a gallop to head for their cover. The storm deer glanced up; the dominant tag of the herd lifted an antlered head and gave a ululating cry, and the herd moved off at a canter to the east, their hooves trembling the ground with a low rumble. Jenna and O’Deoradhain reached the line of trees and moved just inside, then pulled up their mounts and turned. "Can you still feel them?" O’Deoradhain asked.

Jenna closed her eyes, touching the cloch with stiff and cold fingers. "Aye," she said. She looked at him, worried. "Closer now. There." She pointed up the slope they’d just traveled to the low ridge lined with trees.

A few breaths later, a half dozen riders appeared, emerging slowly from under the trees, perhaps half a mile away. All were dressed in green and brown, mail glinting under their colors. One of the group, even from that distance, seemed familiar to Jenna.

Jenna’s heart jumped. "The man in front-with no helm. That’s Mac Ard, I think."

O’Deoradhain cursed again. "Aye. You could be right." As they watched, a rider dismounted and walked carefully along the ridge. He stopped and pointed-it seemed to Jenna that his finger was aimed di-rectly at her. "Damn, they’ve seen our trail," O’Deoradhain spat. "There’s nothing for it, Jenna. They’ll track us now, and once we leave the cover of the trees, they’ll see us." Jenna only stared at him, as if by her gaze she could change his words. "There are six of them, Jenna. I can’t deal with that many, even without the clochs na thintri they have."

She knew what he was saying, though her head was shaking in denial. "I can’t… "

It was eventually going to come to this, Jenna, no

matter what. We both knew it. You can either use the cloch now, while they're not certain now close they are to us, or later when they know who we are and where. Strike first, and you have the advantage."

"I don't know how to fight cloch against cloch."

And probably neither do they, yet," O'Deoradhain persisted. "I suspect Lamh Shabhala will show you the way."

He was right; she knew it, could feel it in the very marrow of her bones and yet she resisted. The riders gathered again as the scout remounted, and they started down the slope toward where they were hidden, following the unmistakable path their horses had made through the tall grass.

She watched the tall rider with the dark hair, certain that it was Mac Ard even though she couldn't see his face clearly. He will have one of the clochs, It will be him you strike against, your mam's lover. .

She brought her right hand up, looking at the mottled skin. She opened her fingers with an effort, then closed them again around Lamh Shabhala

She opened her mind fully to the cloch.

Lamh Shabhala was full with the power of the mage-lights, its crystal-line interstices crackling and surging with the energy. The vision of it seemed to expand and spread out before her, rushing like a tidal wave over the land; when it struck the riders, the force broke and shattered on twin rocks, shimmering white. Jenna saw the world in doubled vision now: through her eyes and through Lamh Shabhala. With her eyes, she saw Mac Ard and one of the other riders suddenly pull up and stop while the other four continued on; through the cloch, two presences suddenly appeared, one as ruddy as heated coals, the other more the color of a cold sea, both throbbing and pulsing inside the horizon of Lamh Shabhala.

She knew what she had to do and yet she hesitated-in that hesitation, she could feel the other two clochs searching for her in the landscape of Lamh Shabhala. There was no doubt as to their intentions; she could feel the hostility, especially from the sea-colored stone. For the moment, though, she ignored them. She looked instead for the four riders and she released more of the stored energy within her cloch, gathering it in her mind and shaping it, then releasing it with a savage mental thrust.

With her eyes, she saw lightnings arc from her scarred right arm, flash-ing outward in jagged white-hot streaks toward the riders. Two of the riders were torn from their saddles and their mounts killed as bolts shot through them: shredding flesh, shattering bones, and boiling their blood. Thunder boomed and crackled. Jenna heard the screams of both men and horses, short and cut off as the force of the cloch ripped the life from them. She felt them die.

But in that same instant, the remaining two bolts were turned aside before they struck their targets: one meeting a similar bolt from the red cloch; the other shoved aside as if by an invisible hand from the other stone. The two colliding bolts exploded in a ball of blinding fireworks between the two groups; the one shoved aside gouged a crater from the earth just to the left of its intended target, whose horse reared and bucked. She saw O'Deoradhain break from cover with a cry, kicking his horse into a gallop and charging back up the slope toward the remaining riders. The one who had nearly been struck broke and fled; the other pulled his sword from its sheath and came for O'Deoradhain.

The two cloch Holders ignored O'Deoradhain and instead turned their attention to Jenna and Lamh Shabhala. Their clochs were now open; in mental view, she could see them, twin expanding ripples in the white of Lamh Shabhala. The sea-foam color of one moved more rapidly, urging for the center that was Jenna. "Don't let it reach you. Go toward " The voice spoke in her head: Riata, she realized, come to her on his own. The other voices were there as well, the voices of all the Holders, a babble of contradictory advice: one telling her to flee, another to make the first strike now, yet another insisting that it was too late already. . She ignored them and found Riata's voice again. She moved toward it, not physi-cally but with the cloch…" She let her awareness slide forward. .

The impact nearly stunned her. She was surrounded by howling winds and a hand that seemed to grasp at her, squeezing the very breath from her lungs. Jenna gasped and struggled. She could feel more and more energy pouring from the attacking cloch, then-in support-lightning arced

from its partner. Jenna screamed with the pain, the electricity arcing through her, her body convulsing as all her muscles contracted and the burning spear coursed through her. The aqua light continued to pummel her like a gigantic fist as she felt the other cloch gathering itself again.

Yet she could also sense that with each attack, the clochs, including Lamh Shabhala, grew weaker, that there was less force left for them to use. "You are stronger. . You can hold more of the mage-light’s power than they can…" She thrust back at the blue-green constriction that had wrapped about her, unwrapping it like a sticky rope laced around her body. She could feel energy draining from Lamh Shabhala as she fought back, but the crushing pressure was easing. She pushed, and the cloch fell back. She lifted an ethereal arm and slammed it down; waves of pain and alarm radiated from the center of the cloch’s influence. The red cloch released another bolt of lightning; shifting her attention, she sent her own to intercept it and a momentary sun flared between them. The aqua cloch was pushing back now, the two of them grappling mentally like wrestlers searching for a hold. The ruddy one held back, and Jenna realized that Mac Ard was waiting, deliberately allowing the other cloch to drain as much of Lamh Shabhala’s power as it could.

He s planning to wait until I weaken myself dealing with the other cloch, then strike… I wonder. . She sent her awareness racing to the center of the other cloch: she could see a face, strained and hurting as it fought her: Damhlaic Gairbith, the Ris commander. He tried to push her away; she would not let him. She shouted at him, feeling her throat go raw with the near-scream. "Mac Ard’s using you, Gairbith! He intends to let you die fighting

Gairbith didn’t reply-couldn’t reply, she knew, for handling the cloch was taking all his concentration. But his eyes went wide with fear and suspicion, and he looked away toward where the other cloch pulsed blood red, watching and waiting.

The truth was enough. Jenna felt Gairbith’s focus shift and with that the defenses he’d set around himself weakened. Jenna cried out, releasing a new flood of energy from Lamh Shabhala. It raged forward, overwhelm-ing Gairbith. The mental connection between himself and his cloch snapped. Through her true eyes, she saw one of the men sway in his saddle and fall. In the middle of the field,

O'Deoradhain and another man were fighting, steel clashing as a sword rang against the Inishlander's long dagger.

Jenna nearly fell with Gairbith. The sudden release of pressure made her gasp and Lamh Shabhala was nearly drained. Weary, she turned her attention to Mac Ard.

"We don't have to do this, Jenna." She heard Mac Ard's voice as if he whispered in her ear. "I don't want to hurt you. Give up the cloch. Let me take it and I'll let you go or take you back to your mam. Whatever you want. I swear it."

The thought of losing the cloch was worse than contemplating death. "No," she answered. "Lamh Shabhala is mine. It stays mine."

She heard no more words, but she felt his sadness.

Jenna could feel Mac Ard's cloch opening and knew he was readying a strike. She didn't wait for it; she grasped at the dregs of power within Lamh Shabhala and flung them at him. The energy shattered against his cloch, absorbing the lightning he hurled toward her. As it crackled around him, she could feel Lamh Shabhala sucking the rest of the life from his cloch until there was nothing left. She saw Mac Ard's face go suddenly wide-eyed with fear.

Mac Ard's horse reared up as he yanked at the reins. Faintly, she heard his cry of pain and frustration as he fled, galloping into the trees and over the rise. Within Lamh Shabhala, there was still power left, enough that she could feel Mac Ard's cloch moving away until she could no longer sense it at all.

She let go of the cloch. It was a mistake, she realized immediately, for it was only the residual energy within Lamh Shabhala that was keeping her upright. With the release of contact, a doubled wave of severe pain and exhaustion swept over her. She could still see O'Deoradhain fighting close by, but the edges of her vision had gone black, the scene before her shrinking and condensing until it was only a pinpoint. Thunder roared in her ears, and the drumbeat of her blood. Her right arm felt as if it were on fire. She tried to lift it, tried to call out, but the darkness closed in around her and she felt herself falling.

She didn’t feel the impact of the ground at all.

Chapter 34: The Gifting

"YOU see, she’s weak and stupid. She doesn’t deserve to be Holder…" I "You can’t be seriously thinking she could survive the Scrudu…"

"Next time they come after her, she’ll die. The only thing that saved her was the inexperience of the others, and they’ll learn… "

"She doesn’t have the discipline… "

"Lamh Shabhala has chosen poorly this time…"

"Be quiet, all of you. She will learn, she may take the Scrudu in time, and she is stronger than you think… "

"Riata?" With the word, the voices faded. She could see nothing. Her eyes refused to focus though there was a whiteness all around her, and she was being jostled. She tried to move her hands or her legs and could not-something held her. She remembered the last thing she’d seen:

O’Deoradhain and the other man fighting. If O’Deoradhain had lost. . had she been captured? Had Lamh Shabhala been taken from her? She closed her eyes, gathering her strength.

This time, she could see. The whiteness was a cloth draped over a wooden framework above her face, the sun shining through it. She could lift her head, and saw that she was reclining on a crude carrier-canvas stretched and tied between two saplings. She could hear the slow clopping of two horses’ hooves and smell their ripeness-the carrier she was in was being dragged along behind one of the animals, the saplings evidently tied to the saddle, and the jostling was the device bumping and lurching over the broken ground. Someone had tied her into the frame as well.

Her body felt as if it had been bruised and battered and she could easily have slipped back into unconsciousness. Her right arm throbbed as if someone were rhythmically pounding it with a hammer of ice. She wanted to scream for someone to bring her anduilleaf, the old yearning for the drug rising from the suffering. She gritted her teeth to stop from crying out, forcing herself to take long, slow breaths, sending her aware-ness deeper. She

did cry out then, in relief rather than pain.

Lamh Shabhala was still around her neck. She could feel the cloch, as drained as she was, but alive and with her. It will always be part of you now. . The last of the voices whispered to her… to lose your cloch is like losing your child. You can't imagine that pain. . "O'Deoradhain?" she called. Her throat felt as if someone had scrubbed it with a steel file.

The horse came to a sudden halt. She heard someone dismount, then footsteps. The cloth was pulled away from the frame, and Jenna was blinking up into a bright sky as a dark face eclipsed the sun.

"You're finally awake." The voice was familiar and deep.

"Finally?"

"It's been nearly two days," he told her.

"Two days?" She repeated the words wonderingly. "So long?"

"You learn to bear using the cloch against others as it happens more. At least that's what I was taught. We can hope that Tiarna Mac Ard suf-fered the same fate, though I suspect he's had more practice than you." He crouched down in front of her. "Can you stand? Here, let me loosen these ropes…" He unlashed her, and helped her out of the contraption. Her knees were wobbly but they supported her; O'Deoradhain, after help-ing her to rise, let her go as she took a few tentative steps. She recognized none of the landscape around her: tall, grassy peaks with steep rocky outcroppings, and limestone-boned ground underfoot. There was an odor in the air that she couldn't identify, a fresh, briny scent. "Where are we?"

"In Tuath Connachta above Keelballi, near the northern border with Tuath Infochla. We're perhaps five or six miles from the sea. I'm hoping to reach a fishing village where we can find someone who'll take us to Inish."

"Mac Ard? The others?"

"I don't know what happened to Mac Ard or the other one who fled. The rest… are dead."

Jenna touched the cloch. O'Deoradhain's eyes followed the gesture. "The cloch Gairbith had. .?"

"Was that the man’s name?" O’Deoradhain shrugged, then reached into a pocket under his cloca. "Here. . It’s yours now." He took her left hand, turning it palm up and placing in it a gold chain. At the end of the chain was a turquoise gem, faceted and gleaming and far larger than Lamh Shabhala. "There’s his cloch na thintri. I took it from the body after. ." He stopped.

Memory of the battle was coming back now. Jenna remembered Gair-bith’s cloch going silent, and the man falling from his horse. "He wasn’t dead " she said. "The cloch was drained, but Gairbith wasn’t dead."

"He is now." O’Deoradhain’s lips pressed together.

She stared at him; his eyes, nearly the color of the gem in her hand, returned the gaze, as if daring her to object. "You could have let him go," she said. "Taken the cloch from him, aye, and his horse-"

"Jenna…"

". . but you didn’t have to kill him. Without the cloch, he wasn’t-"

"Jenna!" he said sharply, and Jenna blinked angrily, closing her mouth. "I don’t expect the person who murdered the Banrion to lecture me about the choices 1 made. We aren’t children playing a game, Holder. What do you think this Gairbith would have done with you, had the positions been reversed? Do you believe the Banrion’s assassin was only going to threaten you? Do you think the Connachtans who came to Ballintubber would have left you alive after they plucked Lamh Shabhala from your neck? Frankly, from what I’ve been taught, a cloudmage would prefer to be killed rather than have his or her cloch taken."

He snorted derisively, his hand slashing air in front of her. "You did the right thing with the Banrion, because if you’d left her alive she might have been the one to kill you later, or more likely, to have ordered your death. Now she can’t. And as for Gairbith-he doesn’t have to bear the pain of having his Cloch Mor ripped away from him, and he won’t be able to seek revenge."

Jenna looked at the gold links pooled in her hand. She closed her fist around them. "I’m sorry for you, O’Deoradhain. I’m sorry that you live in such a

harsh, self-centered world. There is a time for mercy."

"I've learned that mercy and forgiveness will usually get you killed, Holder. I notice that you 'murdered' the riders with Mac Ard without worrying overmuch about that action."

The lightning striking them down… "I did what I had to do. The differ-ence is that I regret that action, even if it was necessary."

"I also do what's necessary to keep me-and you-alive, and I don't regret that. I don't intend to die because I was too busy worrying about whether I should defend myself."

Jenna lifted her head. "We all die, O'Deoradhain, when the gods say it's our time." Gairbith's cloch na thintri was heavy in her hand. She looked down at the stone: beautiful and clear all the way down into its emerald depths, captured in a finely-wrought cage of silver and gold.

Unlike Lamh Shabhala, this gem would be precious even if it couldn't draw the power of the mage-lights from the sky. She looked back at O'Deoradhain. "Why did you give me this?"

"It's yours. I didn't win that battle. You did."

Her fingers closed around it again. "Can I… can I use it?"

"No," he told her. "A Holder can use only one stone, and you have Lamh Shabhala-why would you take a lesser stone? But while you keep this one, no one else can use it against you. It's one of the Cloch Mor; better you have it than your enemies."

Her gaze went back to him, and she suddenly felt ashamed of her doubt and suspicion of the man.

He's done nothing but tell you the truth: about Coelin, about Mac Ard, about everything. He helped you even when it put him in danger, and he could have taken Lamh Shabhala from you several times now. He could have taken this cloch na thintri just as easily, and yet he hands it to you. . "O'Deoradhain, I'm sorry if it seems I don't trust you. I certainly-"

He wouldn't let her finish, shaking his head into her words. "You should be careful with your trust, Holder. You haven't exactly made good choices in the past."

"Give me your hand," she told him. His eyes narrowed and his lips tightened again. He held out his right hand, and she took it in her own. She placed Gairbith's cloch in his palm and closed his fingers around it. "Tonight when the mage-lights come," she told him, "take this and fill it as I fill Lamh Shabhala. Become its Holder."

Her hand stayed on his, and he didn't move it away. His gaze searched her face, and she felt herself blushing under the scrutiny. You like this man more than you want to admit, and the realization brought more heat to her cheeks. What she felt wasn't what she had once felt for Coelin; the heat inside her was different. With Coelin, the attraction had come from his flattery of her and his handsome face, and she knew now how false and shallow that had been. What she was feeling now came at her from all directions, and she found herself looking at O'Deoradhain with new eyes, and wondering if he were feeling what she was.

"This isn't the cloch I want to possess," he said gruffly. "You know that."

"Aye," she answered. "I know. I also know that if you take the one you want, it will be because I can no longer use it. And I also know that will be due to some other person's deed, not yours." She pressed his fingers more tightly around the stone, and smiled at him. "I think I'm making a good choice, this time."

Slowly, he nodded. His hand slid from her grasp and he put the cloch a thintri’s chain around his neck. The jewel gleamed on his chest for a moment before he placed it under his tunic.

"If you can ride," he said, "we should be moving. I'd like to make the coast by tomorrow evening. He won't let us rest." O'Deoradhain didn't need to tell Jenna who "he" was-she knew. "He'll follow us, as soon as he's able, and the next time he attacks he'll be more careful."

"I know he will," she agreed. "But we'll be stronger."

Chapter 35: O'Deoradhain's Tale

THEY stopped to eat and rest near a narrow and long lough cradled between close green hills. The sun was high and peeked out occasion-ally between the clouds sweeping across the sky. Cloud shadows raced over the slopes, and the smell of the sea was in the wind from the west. Well out toward the western end of the lake, two fishing boats bobbed on the waves where the lough curved north and away toward the endless water of the ocean. Dark fingers of smoke smeared across the sky around the hills behind them, and underneath was a cluster of white dots.

"People," Jenna said. "I’m not sure I remember how to react around them anymore."

"If we’re lucky, we won’t meet too many of them," O’Deoradhain an-swered. "We’ll make for that village. Maybe there’s an inn where we can stay and clean up, and if we’re lucky, find someone to take us up the coast. But they’ll be asking questions of strangers." He nodded at Jenna’s right arm and the swirl of scars. "You’ll need to cover that arm of yours, and we’ll need to devise a story to give them. And we can’t show the clochs. Ever. Not here."

"I agree. But let’s rest here for a bit. Tis beautiful, this."

"Aye. If you’d like to look about, go on. I’ll take care of the horses and our food."

Jenna walked down to the shore of the lough as O’Deoradhain hobbled the horses. The lough’s waters were fairly clear, not peat-stained like the waters of Lough Lar, and the water shifted from green to deep blue as the bottom fell away quickly. She sat on a rock that protruded out a bit into the water, taking off her boots and leggings and letting her feet splash in the cold water. She stroked the smooth surface of Lamh Shabhala: she had renewed its reservoirs with the mage-lights the night before, and O’Deoradhain had done the same with his cloch. She opened Lamh Shabhala slightly, letting its aura spread out over the lough, feeling for the presence of other clochs na thintri. She could sense O’Deoradhain close by and feel the powerful emanations of his cloch even through the wall he had tried to erect around it; she could perceive the fisherfolk in their boats, their thoughts altering the pattern of faint energy she placed around them; and at the very edge of Lamh Shabhala’s range, the

clustering of many people in the village. But there was no one else. No one with inten-tions toward her.

Except…

There was something. Rising toward her, drawn to her, its attention steady on her.

Rising from below. .

Fingers gripped Jenna's ankles, still dangling in the water. They pulled, hard and sudden.

Jenna had no time to cry out. Instinctively, she turned her body, trying to cling to the rock even as she was dragged down into the lough. Frigid water hammered at her lungs; she took a gulping breath as her head went under, her hands still scrabbling for purchase. Invisible, frigid hands pulled at her legs, her waist, her breasts, and finally closed around the chain of Lamh Shabhala. Her desperate fingers found a knob of rock, and she pulled herself up even as the hands tried to hold her down and rip away the cloch from around her neck. Gasping, Jenna's head broke the surface as she flailed for a higher handhold, pulling herself up. She screamed, letting go with her left hand and striking at her assailant.

She saw her attacker now, and shock nearly stole the breath from her. The creature's torso had risen from the water with her, its arms around her-the face nearly featureless, its body the blue-black of the depths as if it were made of the water itself. A finned row of spines ran from its smooth-featured crown down the back of its sinuous body, and the hands that encircled Jenna and snagged the cloch's chain were webbed, long-hungered, and wide. The eyes were dead black and shining-emotionless, cold shark eyes-and thin fanged teeth glistened in a gaping round mouth. Jenna tried to scream once more but the creature folded its arms around her and with a powerful wriggle of its body and a splash, yanked her away from the rock and back under the water. Lamh Shabhala’s chain broke and tore away; she grabbed for the cloch, but it vanished, drifting down.

Eyes open in terror, Jenna struggled, trying to strike at the creature though the water softened and slowed her blows. She pulled at the thing's hands, and felt it bite at her shoulder and neck. It bore her down to the bottom, turning her under its body. She felt rocks and mud on her back and she

knew that she had only seconds, that the first breath she took would be her last. She saw another dark form speed toward them, churn-ing white foam on the dappled surface, and she despaired. Yet at the same moment she was about to give up and take the breath that would mean her death, the form above dove and struck her assailant hard. The creature shrilled in pain, releasing Jenna to respond to this new attack. Jenna pushed herself up from the rocky bottom, surging toward the rippling promise of sunlight above. Her head broke the surface and she took a desperate breath, her arms slapping at the waves. She could feel herself going under again, the weight of her clothing dragging her down. She gulped water. .

A hand caught hers and pulled her up: O’Deoradhain. She choked and gasped, bleeding and coughing up water, as he helped her onto the shore. "Lamh Shabhala," she managed to say. "They took it. ." She started to plunge back into the lough, but he held her back, grasping her from behind. She struggled in his arms now, trying to get loose, screaming and crying as she fought to dive back in and find the cloch, but he was too strong.

"Jenna, you can’t go back in there. ." he was saying to her, his lips close to her ear as he hugged her to him. "You can’t. ."

She continued to try to break free, but exhaustion took hold and she hung limp in his arms, struggling to catch her breath. The surface of the lough showed nothing, then a silken head surged up through the small wind-driven waves several yards out: a seal. It roared at them once and dove again, surfacing closer to the shore. Bright blue highlights glinted in its ebon fur where the sunlight touched it. Metal glinted in the animal’s mouth and Jenna cried out wordlessly. She pushed out of O’Deoradhain’s grasp and floundered into the water toward the seal. It waited for her; wading in waist-deep, Jenna snatched at the broken chain with the silver-caged stone. Her hand closed around Lamh Shabhala; the seal opened its mouth and released the necklace at the same moment. Sobbing, Jenna clutched the stone in her hand. The seal stared at her with its bulbous chocolate eyes, its whiskered snout wriggling as if it were sniffing the air. "Thank you," Jenna told the seal, tightening her right hand around the cloch.

She would have sworn that the seal nodded. Its head lifted, the mouth opening, and a series of wails

and coughs emerged: like words but in no language Jenna understood. Then, with a flash of shimmering lapis, the seal turned and dove back into the water.

"It said that the Holder should be more careful, and warned you that not only humans want to possess a cloch na thintri, especially Lamh Shabhala."

Jenna turned. O'Deoradhain stood on the bank, his hand extended to her. "Come out of the water," he said. "I'll start a fire, and we can get you warm and dry."

She didn't move. Waves lapped at her waist. "You understood it?"

"Her, not it. And aye, I understood her." He stretched out his hand again. "Trust me, Holder. I will explain."

She ignored the hand. "I thought I knew you," she said.

His mouth twitched under the beard. "Not all. Come out of the water, Holder; I don't know if that creature will be back."

She took a breath, shivering. Then she reached for his hand. "Then tell me," she said as he helped her from the lough. "Tell me why the seals come to you."

He nodded.

I was perhaps four or five when I realized that my mam was. . strange. I woke up one night in the bed I shared with my younger brother. I don't know what it was that woke me-maybe the sound of a footstep or the creaking of the door. I managed to get out of the bed without waking my brother. Our house was small: my sister-the youngest of us at the time-slept in her crib in the same room, beside my parents' bed. I could hear my da snoring. The moon was out and the sky was clear; in the silver light, I could see that where my ma should have been, the blankets were flung back. I called out for her softly so I wouldn't wake the others, but she didn't answer. I went out into the other room, but she wasn't there, either. The door to our cottage, though, was ajar.

My da was a fisherman, and we lived just above a rocky shingle of beach on the southern coast of Inish Thuaidh not far from the island of Inishfeirm where

your family lived, in the townland of Maoil na nDreas. Sometimes, when the day was clear, we could even see Inishfeirm like a gray hump on the horizon to the south. But that has nothing to do with this story. .

I walked out of the cottage. I could see my father’s boat pulled up on the beach and hear the waves pounding against the shore. I thought I heard another sound as well, and I padded down toward the water. The wind was brisk, and the breakers were shattering on the walls of our little cove, splashing high on the cliff walls that rose out like arms on either side. In the bright moonlight, I could see seals out there on the rocks several big ones, and they were calling loudly to each other, occasionally diving awkwardly into the surf and pulling themselves back up with their flippers.

These seals, I noticed, were different than the small harbor seals that I usually saw. They shimmered in the moonlight, their fur sparkling with blue highlights. I watched them for a while, listening to what sounded like a loud conversation. One of the bulls noticed me, for I saw him turn his snout toward the beach and bellow. A few of the other seals looked toward me too, then, and one lurched from the rock into the sea and I lost sight of it. I watched the others, though, especially that old bull, who kept roaring and staring at me.

"Ennis. .?" 1 heard my mam call my name, and she came from around da’s boat to where I was sitting on the beach. She was soaking wet and naked, and water dripped from her hair as she crouched down by me, smiling. Her eyes were as dark and bright as a seal’s. "What are you doing out here, young man?"

"I woke up and you weren’t there, Mam," I told her. "And I came out and saw the seals and I was watching them." I pointed at the old bull and the seals gathered around him on the rock. I laughed. "They sound like they’re talking to each other, Mam."

"They are talking," she said, laughing with me.

She had a voice like purest crystal, and she seemed entirely comfortable in her nudity, which made me comfortable with it also. "You just have to know their language."

"Do you know the language?" I asked her wonderingly, and she nod-ded, laughing again.

"I do. Would you like me to teach you sometime?"

"Aye, Mam, I would," I told her, wide-eyed.

"Then I will. Now, let's get you inside and back into bed. It's cold out here." She lifted me up, but I struggled to stay.

"I'm not cold at all. Mam, what were you doing out here?" I asked her, staring up at her face, her hair all stringy and still dripping water from the ends, a bit of seaweed stuck near her ear. "Aren't you cold?"

"No, Ennis. I was. . swimming."

"With the seals?"

She nodded. "With the seals. Maybe, someday, you can swim with them, too, if. ." She stopped then, and a smile curled her lip. She rubbed my hair. "Come now. Back to bed." She led me back to the cottage door and stopped there. "Go on in," she said. "I'm going to swim a bit more. ."

She kept her promise. She taught me how to understand the language of the blue seals. And, once or twice a year, she would leave our house late at night to "go swimming with the seals." I don't think my siblings ever noticed, but I did. I would see her slip out of bed and follow her. I think she probably knew that I was watching her, but she didn't seem to care and never paid any attention to me at all.

She would stand at the water's edge and take off her night robe, standing naked under the moon with the seals all wailing and moaning and calling to her.

She'd run toward the water, diving into the surf. Somehow, though I looked, I never saw my mam after that-she would vanish among the bodies of the seals and emerge hours later as light began to touch the sky, dripping wet but some-how not cold. If I were still there asleep on the beach, she would wake me and take me back to the cottage with her.

I asked her, the first time, why I never could see her after she went into the water and she told me I might understand one day. She also told me about the blue seals-that there was but one small group of them left in all the world here at Inish Thuaidh, but that soon a time would come when they would return in greater numbers, and that she hoped I would be part of those days…

Aye, my da knew. He seemed troubled by his wife's occasional forays into the ocean, but did

nothing about them, or perhaps it was just that he'd learned over the years that this was simply part of her-he didn't speak to her about the seals, or her 'swimming' at night, or mention any of it to us.

"Your mam must do what she must," was all he would say the one time I dared to bring up the subject with him. "And if you're lucky, you won't share her curse and find yourself out there swimming in the moonlight." Then he turned his back to me as he mended his fishing net.

I didn't think of my mam as cursed, though. I saw the joy in her face as she came from the water. I saw the cavorting of the seals and the way they flew through the water and thought that it must be wonderful to be able to do that. I listened to their talk and sometimes tried to speak with them, though our throats aren't made to speak their words, and they would laugh at my poor attempts and answer.

And, one day after my body had started to grow hair and my voice had gone deeper, I did swim with them…

You're…?" Jenna breathed, and O'Deoradhain nodded solemnly. "I thought… I mean I've heard of changelings and such, but I'd always believed they were only tales."

"Not only tales. And not only me. Wasn't your grandmother mysteriously rescued by seals? — or maybe she unconsciously, under the stress of nearly drowning, tapped a part of herself she didn't know was there."

The fire O'Deoradhain had built while he told his tale crackled, and Jenna snuggled close to the flames, letting the welcome heat sink into her still-damp clothes. She glanced back at the waters of the lough half-expecting to see the seal again, but it was gone. "Are all the blue seals. .?"

O'Deoradhain shrugged. "Some of them are changelings, aye, but not all and almost none can change at will. Most of those who can change are water-snared, nearly always a seal but changing for a few short hours a year into human shape. Somewhere, back in my family's past, a many times great-mam must have met a bull in his human form and loved him, and that blood manifested itself in my mam-she said that her sisters and brothers weren't that way, just as my siblings also weren't affected. But the blood occasionally shows to create the few Earth-snared ones like me or my mam, who feel the call of the water-part of us only rarely."