Mage of Clouds (The Cloudmages #2) (60 page)

“How’s your mam?” Owaine asked as Meriel emerged from the cave mouth. He was standing a little farther up the slope, gazing back over the treetops of Doire Coill to the north. It was nearing dusk and most of the forest was already in shadow. Blaze lay heavy in a pocket of her clóca; she could almost feel its yearning to be filled again after long years of emptiness.

“She’s awake and resting,” Meriel told Owaine. “Keira gave her a potion that seems to have helped some.”

“That’s good. I’m glad to hear that. After all I was taught about the old Holders, I’m worried about her. If we could get her back to Máister Kirwan, perhaps . . .” He shrugged.

Meriel had heard nothing of what he’d said; it had been just a babble of sound. “I’m going down to the lough,” Meriel told him, and Owaine stirred himself, coming down the slope toward her.

“I’ll go with you.” Her face must have shown her emotions, for he lifted his hands. “Just as far as the High Road,” he added. “In these woods, it’s better for two than one, and it’s getting near dark.”

“I’ll be fine,” she told him. “I don’t really want company.”

“I’ll follow you anyway.”

His face was so serious that she had to smile at that. “You already followed me from Inishfeirm, and look at where that’s got you.”

Slowly, he returned the smile.

They walked through the deepening gloom, following the path and landmarks that Keira had shown them:
“There’s no absolutely safe path through Doire Coill, but don’t stray and you should be fine.”
Where the oaks thinned and the softwoods and firs began, they paused and surveyed the road, a hundred strides away. Two riders were approaching, heading north toward Ath Iseal; they watched them pass. When the last sound of the hooves had faded, Owaine nudged Meriel. “Go on,” he said. “I’ll stay here and watch for a bit.”

Meriel started to protest, then stopped herself. She nodded to Owaine and slipped over the fences and through the brush and willows to the shore of the lough.

She wasn’t certain what she wanted or what she wanted to say to Dhegli. She only knew that she wanted to see him again, that she needed to talk with him about what had happened last night, to look into his black, sympathetic eyes and hear his deep voice singing in her head.

She kicked away her sandals and let the cold waves lap over her feet. She could feel the urge of the change dancing in her blood, but . . . There was an emptiness out in the water. She looked out over the wide expanse reddened with sunset and saw nothing. The ripples of russet and flame-orange were mesmerizing, and she found herself staring at them with the certainty that there would be nothing out there for her, that Dhegli was no longer here. The scale of Bradán an Chumhacht still burned in her head, but the pulse of it was distant now and growing more distant with each moment.

The water was icy around her toes and she no longer wanted to let the change happen. She stepped back away from the lough, sitting down hard on the grass and mud there. She clasped her knees to her chest.

She waited, hoping she was wrong and knowing she was not.

“Meriel?”

The sound of her name startled her, coming from behind without warning. She hurtled to her feet with a cry, thrown roughly out of reverie. Belatedly, she recognized the person who had materialized in the moonlight and the throbbing of her pulse in her temples started to slow. She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting at the lough’s shore. Somehow the landscape had gone dark without her knowing and the stars of the Badger twinkled high above, holding the half-moon.

“By the Mother, Owaine, I thought you were a Black Haunt calling for my soul.”

Buttery light dappled his cheeks. “Sorry, Meriel.” His gaze went past her to the lough, and she answered the question he didn’t ask.

“He didn’t come. I’ve just been sitting here, thinking.”

“The mage-lights are coming,” Owaine said. He pointed to the zenith, where Meriel could see the first tendrils of blue-green and pale yellow beginning to curl above. Noticing them, she felt the insistent yearning of Treoraí’s Heart and was surprised that she hadn’t noticed it before. She also felt the hunger of Blaze, still in her pocket.

Take it and make it your own,
her mam had said. Yet now she wasn’t so certain. To take Blaze would mean she would lose Treoraí’s Heart and its healing abilities. Aye, Máister Kirwan had thought it just a clochmion, not one of the terrible and powerful Clochs Mór, yet . . . she could see the scarring on her arm, and she found she had little interest in the destructive powers of the clochs. She remembered Siúr Meagher and the joy and wonder that had filled her face when Meriel had taken away the pain in her hands; remembered little Áine, the girl she’d cured of the lung sickness in Ballycraigh, Owaine’s wonder and surprise at being able to see clearly. She could recall the faces all of those she’d healed over the past few months.

In recalling them, it was Sevei’s face that came to her the strongest.
You have to feel your choice inside and know it’s the right one,
Sevei had said to her.

Meriel remembered her choice on Knobtop to leave Doyle alive.
The right choice
. . . “I’m not like my mam. I’m not like the others.”

“What?”

Meriel shivered, not realizing that she’d spoken aloud. “Nothing. It’s nothing.” The mage-lights were brightening, beginning to spread over the rest of the night sky. Soon, they’d be in their full glory, radiant curtains and dazzling swirls as bright as a dozen moons. She wondered if her mam could see them and she imagined the redoubled pain that they must cause her, knowing that on any other night she would be standing under this sky, filling Lámh Shábhála as all the other clochs na thintrí fed on the energy with her. Knowing that somewhere not too far away, Tiarna Ó Riain would be holding Lámh Shábhála and claiming it as his own.

Owaine dug under the collar of his léine and brought out his clochmion. He started to close his hand around the stone and open it. She saw the mage-lights reflecting on his upturned face.

His face
. . . In the moonlight, it was as if she saw him for the first time, as if it had been her eyes that had been clouded and dim all along, not his. “Wait,” she told him, putting her hand over his. “Not yet.”

He looked at her questioningly. Meriel reached into her pocket and brought out Blaze. She put it in his palm. “Take this one.”

He stared down at the jewel in his hand. He took a breath. “Meriel . . .” His head was shaking. “I can’t . . . Where’d you get this?”

“It was given to me. Now I’m giving it to you.”

“Why? Meriel, this is something even most Riocha don’t have; you can’t give this to me.”

“Why not?” she told him. “From what I’ve seen, you’re a better person than most of them, and as skilled a cloudmage.”

“
You
should have this. A Cloch Mór instead of that clochmion . . .”

He tried to hand the stone back to her; she pushed it away. “I don’t
want
it.” She said it more forcefully than she intended, and softened the next words. “Owaine, I only want Treoraí’s Heart. Nothing else.”

“This is too much of a gift for me to take.” He stared at the blood-red stone, black in the night.

“It’s not a gift,” she told him. “It’s a burden. Because it’s a Cloch Mór, everyone who sees it will covet it. Because you’re not Riocha, those who are of the blood will think that you don’t deserve to hold a Cloch Mór and will believe they have the right to take it from you with impunity. If they succeed, then you’ll suffer like Doyle Mac Ard or my mam. That’s the ‘gift’ I’m giving you.”

He was still shaking his head, still staring. “I know this one from the scrolls at Inishfeirm: Blaze. It hasn’t been seen since just after the Filleadh. How did you come to have it?”

She closed Owaine’s fingers around the stone; this time he didn’t resist. “How doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it’s mine to take or to give away. And now it’s yours if you want it.” She nodded to the sky. “The mage-lights are full,” she said. Multicolored shadows slid over and around them; they could see the colors of the stones in their light. Owaine lifted the chain of his clochmion from around his neck.

“The last thing I did with this was to find you,” he said. “Since it was given to me by your mam, it seems fitting to let you find someone else to give it to.” He dropped the clochmion into her hand; as he did so, he hunched over, his forehead creasing with deep lines as he sucked in his breath with a cry. “It hurts, more than I thought,” he said, almost with surprise. “It’s like I just cut off my own arm.” He tightened his hand around the Cloch Mór and Meriel saw the lines in his forehead slowly ease as he straightened. “That’s better,” he said. He lifted his hand to the sky and the mage-lights began to dance and swirl above him.

Meriel slipped Owaine’s clochmion into her pocket and took up Treoraí’s Heart, opening the cloch as she lifted it to the lights. The gem sucked hungrily at the power, filling the glittering hollows within her cloch-vision and sending a deep, icy satisfaction through herself.

For the moment, that was enough.

T
WIN DEMONS tore at his soul with filthy talons, gibbering with the faces of his mam and da as he half walked, half dragged himself down the hill toward the river. “You failed us!” they roared as one. “You failed us!” He sobbed like a child at their accusations.

“I’m sorry,” he wept. “Please, just take me. Kill me. Don’t make me suffer this way . . .” But Maeve and Padraic only laughed, tearing strips of Doyle’s living flesh away from bone but leaving him miserably alive. He reached the fens and they vanished in a hot wind that scoured his raw, bleeding skin with desert sand. He looked up with bloodshot, ruined eyes at the bridge. He forced himself to move toward it even as light glinted from a massive, winged body rising alongside.

Dragonfire erupted from a yellow scaled snout and the flames played over his body as he pulled himself over the bridge leading to the village. He screamed, his flesh turning black with boils and the odor of his own charred flesh filling his nostrils as he staggered toward the tavern where Edana lay. Dark shapes came running toward him, wearing the faces of the dead, rotting flesh falling away from white skulls; he pushed at the apparitions even as they took him, wailing. The sound of his distress ripped the tapestry of the world and he fell away into the void beyond. His da was there, immense and gigantic, and he took Doyle in one huge fist, his fingers crushing Doyle’s chest. His eyes were moons, his mouth a yawning crevasse, and his breath a hurricane. “So this is the son I never knew,” Padraic said. The disappointment in his voice was honed to a razor’s edge, and each word was the stroke of a dagger through Doyle’s heart. “You’re nothing but a shadow of me, a poor sad imitation. Doyle . . .”

“Da, I only tried to get what was yours.”

The eyes shut, a furious, fast eclipse. The face seemed to recede, falling away from him. “Doyle . . .”

“Da, I’m sorry . . .” But his da was gone and Doyle opened his eyes, blinking at the pain of the light.

“Doyle . . .”

“Shay?” Tiarna O Blaca was leaning over him. Doyle was lying in a bed in a room he didn’t recognize, and someone else bustled about in one corner fiddling with vials arrayed on a small table. “Where . . . ?”

“You’re in some foul inn in Ballintubber,” O Blaca told him. “And safe as you can be for the moment. I brought in the local healer, not that I think his potions did any good.” O Blaca scowled at the man behind the table, who gathered up his bottles, plunged them clinking into a leather pouch, and scurried out of the room. The sound of the door shutting made Doyle wince.

“Edana?”

“She’s here also, and the same as she was.” O Blaca went to the door, opened it and peered left and right, then closed it again. When he returned to sit on a stool by the bed, his voice was hushed. “Doyle, what happened up there? I saw the lights flashing on the horizon all the way in Lár Bhaile, but Quickship was empty and the mage-lights didn’t come, and so I had to ride here. What happened?”

Haltingly, pausing frequently for water and rest, Doyle told O Blaca the tale. “I
had
Lámh Shábhála,” he said finally. “I had it in my very hands, Shay. But Ó Riain and that damned Toscaire . . .” He stopped, licking dry and cracked lips, feeling the sense of loss weighing on him. The grief was worse than when his mam had died; the inner torment was real and palpable, and he found himself weeping. “They took Snapdragon, too. By the Mother, Shay, the pain . . . It’s worse than I believed it could be . . .”

“I’m sorry,” O Blaca said, but there was a reserve in his voice, an aloofness that made Doyle’s eyebrows lower over his eyes.

“What is it?” he asked. “What else is wrong?”

“Godfist, Weaver, and Sharpcut are gone, too; Nyle, Alaina, and Shéfra are dead, so is your cousin Aghy—we found them on the mountain.” Shay pressed his lips together, frowning. “That’s not even the worst of it,” he continued. “I spoke with the Rí Mallaghan before I left. He gave me two messages to give you, depending on what I found here. I won’t need to tell you the first, since you don’t have Lámh Shábhála. And the second . . .”