Holder of Lightning (37 page)

“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 cloch while you can . . .”

“. . . hold onto yourself . . .”

She ignored them and listened for Riata’s voice.
“Feel the presence of the other clochs . . .”

“I do.” She could sense them all, scattered over the land yet tied to Lámh Shábhála 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’Deoradháin.

She imagined Lámh Shábhála transparent and without boundaries. Nothing happened. She drifted above the valley, snared in lambent splendor, 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. Lámh Shábhála 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’Deoradháin’s or both.
“You must hold onto it!”
they shouted again, and she screamed back at them.

“I can’t!”

“Jenna, Lámh Shábhála will open the way for the other clochs through you. It is too late now for anything else. The only choice to be made is whether you will use Lámh Shábhála or it you.”

“. . . too young . . . too weak . . . she will die . . .”

“. . . you see, even if she did this task, she would never have passed the Scrúdú 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. Lámh Shábhála 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’Deoradháin said, his voice loud in the sudden silence. “Let it go—”

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 thintrí, the star fading as the meteors 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 unbloodied. The pain hit her then. She fell to her knees, crying out, and O’Deoradháin and Seancoim laid her down gently. “Riata?” she called out.

“He’s gone,” O’Deoradháin 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. You’ve opened the way for the Filleadh.”

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’Deoradháin place his arm around her for the little comfort it brought her. A familiar smell cut through the smell of woodsmoke: Seancoim crouched down by her, a bowl in his hand.

“Andúilleaf,” 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 . . . 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; Dúnmharú 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

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. Dúnmharú 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 Lámh Shábhála 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. Because 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 Lámh Sháb hála from me easily when we were in Lár 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’Deoradháin had wintered in Doire Coill. Seancoim had scoffed at Jenna’s concerns that Rí Gabair and Tiarna Mac Ard—or the Rí Ard and Tanaise Ríg 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 Lár 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 Lár 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 Lámh Shábhála but from horizon to horizon, and the newly-released clochs na thintrí 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 Lámh Shábhála and Jenna was temporarily a secondary concern. The night of the Filleadh, Jenna had opened three double hands of the major clochs (the Clochs Mór, O’Deoradháin had said they were called) and a hand of the minor stones—or clochmions—for each of the Clochs Mór: almost two hundred clochs na thintrí all told were now active.

Nearly every night, too, Jenna yearned for the andúilleaf and the solace it would bring against the continuing pain of holding Lámh Shábhála. 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’Deoradháin 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 Bunús 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 Lámh Sháb hála had been driven insane, that she had murdered a score of Riocha in Lár Bhaile including the Banrion Cianna herself. A hefty blood price had been placed on her head, and it appeared that the Tanaise Ríg 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 Fómhar, 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 thintrí 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 thintrí were among their implements of war.

Eventually, Jenna knew, someone would come searching for Lámh Shábhála, someone with an army or a few of the Clochs Mór 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 I 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 Lámh Shábhála 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’Deoradháin says that you look out, and see nothing but water and sky, all the way to the end of the world.”