Holder of Lightning (10 page)

“Then tell me,” Mac Ard said. “Enlighten us.” Jenna found that she disliked the mocking tone in the man’s voice. For the first time, she started to wonder, seeing the way he treated Seancoim. She remembered what Seancoim had said last night:
“He’s also a man with his own ambitions.

Seancoim shook his head. “You’re not ready to hear that tale yet. You’re not ready to understand or believe it. You’re not even capable of seeing who is your real enemy.”

The crow cawed and fluttered away to a nearby branch. Seancoim glared at Mac Ard with his dead eyes, his staff clenched tightly in his hand as he pulled his bowed back more erect. Mac Ard glowered back, and Jenna thought for a moment that he would draw his sword or shout a challenge. But the anger in the Mac Ard’s eyes slowly faded, and at last he bowed to Seancoim: a swift, passing inclination of his head. “I apologize,” he said. “I shouldn’t offend someone who offered aid when we were in need.”

Seancoim tilted his head toward Mac Ard. “You’re still in need,” he said. There was no acknowledgment of Mac Ard’s apology in his voice, but the corners of his mouth turned up.

The irritation flashed again in the tiarna’s eyes, and Jenna stepped close to Seancoim, putting her hand on his arm. “Aye, we
are
still in need,” she said, looking pleadingly at her mam. “We understand that.”

“Aye,” Maeve echoed. “We do.”

Seancoim seemed somewhat mollified. His posture re laxed, and Dúnmharú returned to his roost on the old man’s right shoulder. He sniffed again. “And I will help you,” he said. “I will do what I can.”

“These men who are looking for us,” Mac Ard said. “If they realize we’re in Doire Coill, or if they suspect that we’re here, they will come after us. This isn’t simply a walk in the woods.”

Seancoim coughed, Dúnmharú cackled with open beak. “The forest takes care of itself,” he said to Mac Ard. “A few men? They’re no threat to Doire Coill, not even if they all carry axes and fire.”

Mac Ard looked dubious at that statement, but Jenna remembered the singing of the trees. Seancoim glanced up at the sky, as if he could see the fog-shrouded sun. “If you don’t wish to follow me through the forest, you could stay here in my cave. I have business to the east, but I can come back here and lead you to the High Road in a few days.”

Jenna watched her mam glance at Mac Ard and shake her head slightly. “We’ll go with you,” Mac Ard said. “The sooner we reach the Rí’s city, the sooner we’ll be safe.”

“Sometimes there is no such thing as safety, wherever you go,” Seancoim answered. “But we’ll leave as soon as you’re ready.”

8

The Cairn of Riata

E
VEN by day, the forest was dim. They moved through valleys of fog-shrouded trees, pacing alongside fast-moving brooks whose foam made the dark water seem almost black by contrast. They caught rare glimpses of sky, blue now that the high mist had burned off, and every so often walked through columns of gold-green light, their boots crushing a thousand tiny images of the sun on the forest floor.

Jenna had often walked through the woods near Ballintubber, but they felt different: lighter, airier, with the trees spaced farther apart and well-worn paths meandering among them. They were old, too, those woods, but Jenna had never felt that the forest itself watched her, judging her and deciding whether it would allow her to stay.

She felt a Presence here. Here, there were musty vapors rising from the ground, and red-crowned, sinister mushrooms peering from between piles of decaying leaves decades old, screens of mistletoe and bramble that tugged at her with thorny fingers, vine-wrapped hollows between close-set oaks in which night nestled eternal. There were trails that Seancoim followed: thin, narrow paths that might have been made by deer or other animals, twisting through the underbrush and vanishing suddenly. Doire Coill was a maze where they found themselves walking the bottom of a hollow with sides too steep to climb, all white fog ahead and behind, so that they moved between walls of brown and green until Seancoim turned into a hidden break that Jenna knew she would have missed, a narrow pass through to another fold of land bending in a slightly different direction, all of them leading to some unseen destination. And if she had found herself suddenly alone and lost, it would do no good to cry for help. The forest swallowed sound, muffling it, making words indistinct and small. Jenna was certain that she would call only whatever fey creatures Doire Coill held within its confines.

By the time the sun had reached its height and started to decline, Jenna knew that if Seancoim were to vanish into the fog around them, they would never find their way back. She said nothing, but the scowl that lurked on Mac Ard’s face and the frown twisting Maeve’s lips told her that the other two realized it as well.

As evening approached, the hillsides spread out slightly to either side of them before curving back in to each other, so that they walked in the center of a bowl several hundred strides across, the trees all around them with open sky directly above. In the center of the bowl, gray with the persistent fog, a dolmen loomed, a pair of massive, carved standing stones two people high with another block laid over the top, large enough that several people could walk between them abreast as if through a door. Arrayed around the central stones in a circle were six cairns covered with earth and grass, the narrow entrances of the passage graves arranged so that each looked out onto the central stones. Seancoim continued to walk between the graves toward the dolmen as Dúnmharú flew away to land on the capstone, but the others stopped at the entrance to the valley of tombs. Jenna stared at the dolmen, at the notches carved in them that were Bunús Muintir writing, wondering what was inscribed there.

“Who is buried in this place?” Mac Ard asked. “These must be the graves of kings and heroes, yet I’ve never heard anyone speak of this valley.”

“You’re not supposed to know it,” Seancoim answered, “though a few Daoines have been here and seen the graves. We’ve kept it hidden, in our own ways, because the last chieftains of the Bunús Muintir rest here.” He nodded in the direction of one of the mounds. “Maybe you would know this one. In there is Ruaidhri, who fought the Daoine at Lough Dubh and was wounded, and died weeks later.”

“Died from the wounds from Crenel Dahgnon’s sword,” Mac Ard said. To Jenna, the name seemed to draw echoes from the hills around them, like clouds running before a storm, and she thought she heard the angry whispers from the mouths of the passage graves, or perhaps it was only the wind blowing across the entrances.

Seancoim shook his head, while Dúnmharú flapped his black wings angrily. “That’s not a name one should speak here, but aye, that’s the Daoine Rí whose blows shattered Ruaidhri’s shield and killed him, and Lough Dubh would be the last time any of the Bunús Muintir chieftains would put an army on the field.” Seancoim pointed to the largest grave, aligned directly with the dolmen at the far end of the valley. “There is Riata. Do you know of him?”

Jenna shook her head, as did Maeve, but Mac Ard took in a breath that caused Seancoim to laugh. “Ah,” he said, “so you
have
listened to some of our old tales. Riata—he was the last, and perhaps the most powerful, of the Bunús cloudmages. The mage-lights vanished for us a scant three generations before you Daoine came. If they hadn’t, if we had our mages wielding the clochs na thintrí when the Daoine came, then perhaps all that would be left of
your
people would be a few haunted barrows. Or perhaps if we hadn’t become so dependent on that magic, we would not have been so easily displaced when you came.” He lifted his hands and let them fall again like wounded birds. “Only the gods can see down those paths.”

“Do we have to stay here?” Jenna asked. “It’s getting late.” The entire valley was in deep shadow now, and Jenna felt cold, though the sky above was still bright.

“It’s late,” Seancoim agreed, “and it’s not safe to travel here at night. We’ll stay there.” Seancoim pointed to the ridge beyond the valley.

Mac Ard grimaced. “That’s a long climb, and close to this place.”

“They say restless ghosts walk here, and Ruaidhri is among them,” Seancoim answered. He cocked his head at Mac Ard. “If I were Daoine, I might be afraid of that.”

“I’m not afraid of a spirit,” Mac Ard said, scowling. “Fine, old man. We’ll stay here.”

“Aye, we will,” Seancoim told him, “unless you want to go back on your own.” He turned away, calling Dúnmharú back to him, then walking on through the dolmen. After a moment, Jenna and the others followed, though Jenna walked carefully around the dolmen rather than going under its capstone, and didn’t look into the cold archways of the barrow graves at all.

Jenna had thought that it would be impossible to sleep that night, unprotected under the oaks and so near the Bunúis tombs. Exhaustion proved stronger than fear, and she was asleep not long after she lay down near their tiny fire, only to be awakened sometime later by a persistent throbbing near her leg and in her head. She opened her eyes, disoriented. The fire had died to embers. Her mam and Mac Ard were asleep, sleeping close to each other and not far from her; Seancoim and Dúnmharú were nowhere to be seen. Jenna blinked, closing her eyes against the throbbing and touching her leg—as she did so, her hand closed on the stone under the cloth. It was pulsing in time with the pain in her temples. As she lay there, she thought she heard her name called: a soft, breathy whisper wending its way between the trunks of the trees.
“Jenna . . .”
it came, then again:
“Jenna . . .”

Jenna sat up in her blankets.

There was light shifting through the leaves: a rippling, dancing, familiar shining high in the sky and very near. She thought of calling to her mam, then stopped, knowing Mac Ard would awaken with Maeve. Part of her didn’t want Mac Ard to see the lights, didn’t want his interference. Jenna rose to her feet and followed the elusive glimmering.

A few minutes later, she stood at the rim of the valley of Bunús tombs, looking out down the steep, treeless slope to the circles of graves and the dolmen at its center. She could see them very clearly, for directly above the valley the mage-lights were shimmering. Their golden light washed over the mounds of earth and rock in waves, as if she were watching the surface of a restless, wind-touched lake. The valley was alive with the light.

“Jenna . . .”
She heard the call again, more distinctly this time, still airy but now laden with deeper undertones: a man’s voice. It came from below.

“No,” she whispered back to it, afraid, clutching her hands together tightly. The stone pulsed against her hip, cold fire.

“Jenna, come to me . . .”

“No,” she said again, but a branch from the nearest tree touched her on the back as if blown by a sudden wind, pushing her a step forward. She stopped, planting her feet.

“Jenna . . .”

The lights flared above, sparks bursting like a log thrown on a bonfire, and a tree limb crashed to the ground just behind her. Jenna jumped at the sound, and her foot slid from under her. She took another step, trying to recover her balance, only now the ground was tilted sharply down, and she half ran, half fell down the long, grassy slope to the valley floor, landing on her knees and hands an arm’s length from the rear of one of the barrows.

“Come to me . . .”

The mage-lights splashed bright light on the dolmen, sending black shadows from the standing stones twisting wildly over the mounds. Jenna could feel the stone throbbing madly in response, and she took it in her hand. The pebble glowed with interior illumination, bright enough that she could see the radiance between her fingers as she held the stone in her fist. Having the stone in her hand seemed to lend her courage, and she walked slowly between the graves toward the dolmen, though she could feel every muscle in her body twitching with a readiness to flee.

As she stepped into the open circle around the dolmen, she saw the apparition.

It stood before the barrow of Riata: a man’s shape, long- haired and stocky, clad in a flowing clóca of a strange design which left one shoulder bare. The form shifted, wavering, as if it were formed of clear crystal and it was only the reflection of the mage-lights on its polished surface that rendered it visible. But it moved, for one hand lifted as Jenna recoiled a step, her back pressed up against the carved surface of the standing stone. There were eyes watching her in the spectral face. It spoke, and its voice was the one that had called to her. The words sounded in her head, as if the voice was inside her.

“You hold the cloch na thintrí,” it said, and there was a wistful yearning in its voice. Its face lifted and looked up at the mage-lights, and she could see the glow playing over the transparent features. “They have returned,” it said, its voice mournful and pleased all at once. “I wondered if I would see them again. So beautiful, so cold and powerful, so tempting . . .” The face regarded Jenna again. “You are not of my people,” it said. “You are too fair, too tall.”

“My people are called the Daoine,” Jenna answered. “And how is it you know our language?”

“The dead do not use words. We lack mouth and tongue and lungs to move the air. I speak with you mind to mind, taking from you the form of the words I use. But I feel the strangeness of your language. Daoine . . .” It said the word slowly, rolling the syllables. “I knew no Daoines when I was alive . . . There were other tribes, we knew, in other lands, but here there were only the Bunús Muintir. My people.”

“You’re Riata?” Jenna asked. She was intrigued now. The ghost, if that’s what it was, had made no threatening moves toward her, and she leaned forward, trying to see it more clearly. The ghosts and spirits of the tales she’d heard in Ballintubber were always bloody, decaying corpses or white vapors, and they cursed and terrified the living. This, though . . . the play of light over its shifting, elusive form was almost beautiful, and its voice held no threat.

“I was called that once,” the specter said, sounding pleased and sad at the same time. “So that name is still known? I’m not forgotten in the time of the Daoine?”