Holder of Lightning (38 page)

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, Dúnmharú flapping heavily ahead of them. He turned away from the faint path they’d followed, slipping 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 Dúnmharú’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 Dúnmharú 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 fingers, 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 Seanóir, the Eldest, and their language is older than even the Bunús 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 Seanóir 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 Lámh Shábhála,” 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 Seanóir, the mage-lights signal a time of growing. Even the seasons themselves are too fast for them. The lights are the manifestation 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 Seanóir, 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 constellation of the Badger, whose snout always points north. They said little besides idle talk of the weather, and if O’Deoradháin 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’Deoradháin 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 stumbling 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 collapsed, 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’Deoradháin 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’Deoradháin’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 Lámh Shábhála, 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 Lámh Shábhála had awakened here, and she wished again—fleetingly—that Seancoim had put andúilleaf 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’Deoradháin 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 Knobtop. 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’Deoradháin 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.”

32

Ballintubber Changed

T
HE next morning, they walked up the High Road to the village. The morning was a drizzle of mist and fog that beaded on their clócas 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’Deorad háin noticed it as well; he swept back his clóca and placed his hand on the hilt of his knife. “Perhaps they all decided 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’Deoradháin 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’Deoradháin 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?”