Mage of Clouds (The Cloudmages #2) (82 page)

“Edana . . .” She saw his face soften and the dragon paused . . .

. . . but it was already too late. The strange new power, the one of the sea, hurled itself at the dragon in defense of Jenna. Doyle’s face went white, his eyes wide, and he groaned in pain and shock; he staggered, moaning, and Edana saw wounds open on his chest and arms. Rí Mallaghan and Rí Mas Sithig shouted to the other mages, and even as the dragon turned to meet its new foe, the other Clochs Mór also struck back. As one, a half dozen or more of the Tuathian cloudmages struck at the Saimhóir and it could not hold them all back.

Edana saw, in her cloch-vision, the great blue form fall as dragonfire flickered, as ethereal wolves leaped at it, as lightning flared and flights of glowing spears arced, as a black tornado writhed around the power and a wave of sea-green slammed into it and an army of gibbering demons charged. Edana could see Owaine’s and Mundy’s clochs rushing to help, but they were too few and too late.

There was a shriek, full of torment and loss. . . .

The walls around Meriel and Jenna shuddered with an explosion: white-hot air flared and the pain spread out from its center in writhing tentacles of orange-red. Meriel and Jenna cried out together. Faintly, from outside the wall, she heard voices calling in triumph. Inside, the voices of the old Holders laughed.

Suddenly, Meriel felt a terrifying sense of loss, a feeling of dread and grief that threatened to drown her.
Owaine . . . Dhegli . . .
Something had happened outside, and she was lost inside her mam . . .

“Don’t listen to them,” Meriel told Jenna, trying to shut it all out.
You can’t affect anything outside; you can only do something here.
She crouched alongside the frail figure of her mam. She knew what she had to do, and it terrified her nearly as much as the fear she had for the others. Meriel thought again of fleeing, of leaving here, afraid now that if she chose to use the power of the Heart here, she would have nothing left if Owaine or Dhegli or any of the others needed its power.

Meriel closed her mouth, sucked in a deep breath through her nostrils. She tightened her grip on Treoraí’s Heart as she touched her mam. “Let me take the pain for you,” she said. “Let me . . .”

Her mam’s face turned toward her in sorrow and hope.

Then Meriel could say nothing at all. She could only wail in terror.

The horror came at her in a great, rushing mud-brown wave that broke, foaming, above her. Meriel fought against it, but it overwhelmed her, drowning her. She was inundated with Jenna’s memories, losing hold of herself entirely. She was no longer Meriel—only Jenna. Here . . .

. . . here was the pain of using Lámh Shábhála; here was the hurt and fear as Padraic Mac Ard became her great-mam’s lover; the first, deceptive taste of andúilleaf; Jenna’s murderous rage at Lár Bhaile. Here was the horror of seeing Ennis killed in front of her; the black torture of the Scrúdú. Here was the Battle of Dún Kiil and its death; here Maeve’s rejection of Jenna. Here was the pain of Meriel’s birth; the years of difficult decisions as Banrion, decisions that inevitably led to suffering for some even as it helped others. Here was Meriel herself and the guilt of Jenna’s neglect, of not being the parent she wanted to be. Here was Doyle and the distress of losing Meriel, and the battle on Inishduán . . .

The misery and anguish consumed Meriel as it rushed outward from her mam. Image after image pounded at her as all the bile poured out. Someone was screaming in torment, and she didn’t know whose voice it was.

The flood was more than she could hold. It bore her under. As she succumbed, flailing, she saw the wall of Lámh Shábhála shatter. Outside, the storm of the Clochs Mór was raging, and then it, too, swept over them.

Her last memory was of her mam’s wail.

I
T was as if a hand had wiped her eyes clean of cataracts. One moment, the world had been dark and muddied and strange, and the next it was bright and familiar once more. The cry she made was less of pain than of long-confined grief and relief. Jenna felt light and unburdened, as if the last few decades had suddenly been removed from her, as if she’d been returned to the time before the Filleadh, before andúilleaf, before all the death and strife.

Jenna took a shuddering breath, and it sluiced through her clean and cold. She blinked. “Meriel . . .”

With her true eyes, she saw her daughter crumpled on the broken ground next to her. Farther down the hill a Saimhóir lay, torn and bloody, its sides heaving in distress. Mundy and Owaine gaped up at her; Mahon—spattered with blood and his sword edge chipped and notched, paused. In the cloch-sight, the wall of Lámh Shábhála fell and the clochs rushed at her. She saw death.

Unless . . .

The mage-lights burned like a new sun above her and she pulled at them, not caring that the frigid sky-power burned at her like real fire, tearing open her newly-healed wounds. Jenna screamed with pain and rage and frustration even as she continued to let the energy pour into her, to fill Lámh Shábhála as it had once been filled before at the time of the Filleadh. The cloch was nearly bursting, radiating with a cold so intense that it seemed Jenna’s fingers were frozen around the stone. The pattern of scars on her arm shot out rays of mage-light while above there were only stars and the ragged darkness of clouds.

Jenna shone: a sun come to earth. The radiance of the Clochs Mór about her was lost. Sharp, black shadows streaked outward from the center where she stood and she saw the Riocha on the walls above her shading their eyes against the glare.
“Stop!”
she said.

The word boomed like thunder over Falcarragh.

They obeyed, if only from the shock. Even the red-gold dragon held back, though its tail lashed the ground and it growled. Its claws raked grooves in the stone flags of the roadway. “Ríthe!” Jenna called out. “I call for a truce.”

She could see them milling above her, figures wrapped in their bright clóca: uncertain. “How can there be a truce, Banrion?” Rí Mallaghan called down to her, his hand shielding his eyes from her appearance. “You brought war here.”

“And you would have brought it to Inish Thuaidh if I had waited,” Jenna answered. “But we can both end it now.” The energy she was holding was ice and fire, and radiance streamed out of her, white and blinding. “I can’t hold this power much longer, Rí—all the energy within the mage-lights tonight is with me, and I will let it go—I have no choice. It’s your choice whether I release it back to where it came from or if I reduce Falcarragh to ash and ruin.” Her body shook; she trembled. “Choose quickly.
Quickly!
”

She could see the Ríthe consulting with each other. Edana was there, too, and Doyle, and she wondered what they were saying. It was Edana who answered.

“You have your truce, Banrion.”

“Swear it,” Jenna grated out. “Swear it by the Mother. Swear that you will let me and those with me leave freely.”

“We swear it,” Edana answered, and she saw the Ríthe with her nod agreement. “By the Mother-Creator, we swear it.”

Jenna gave a sigh, and the energy within her boiled out again, tearing at her as it left. She howled like a wild beast, her voice lost in the great rushing sound it made. The mage-lights erupted from her, fountaining high and bright above her, streaking in a great, radiant column to the zenith. High above, they spread, fading slowly like the embers of a sullen fire.

The sky went dark, leaving afterimages dancing in her eyes.

“Meriel!”

The name was wrong. She wasn’t Meriel; she was Jenna. But she knew the person holding her: Owaine. She could feel his arms, his hand brushing her hair back from her face. Her eyes didn’t want to open. She lifted her hand to them and found her fingers sticky with blood. She blinked, her vision smeared red. For a moment she tensed, waiting to feel the horrible pain. But it was gone.

“Meriel!” Owaine said again, urgently. Aye, she knew that name. She knew . . . Her daughter . . .

There was pain in her forehead and she winced, touching it. An ember burned there, and it called a name in a deep, strangely familiar voice:
“Meriel . . .”
She shook her head, but the ember still burned, and with it came the smell of the sea.
“Meriel . . .”
and now it was followed by images and memories, things that seemed to be hers but yet not: swimming with a Saimhóir, a naked man with sea-wet hair and a smile and black, black eyes. A kiss. A feeling of love and longing and lust.
“Meriel . . .”
and she felt the call resonate within her.

Her name. Hers. She closed her eyes, feeling the new presence assert itself, breaking through Jenna like a butterfly from its cocoon.

The ember went cold in her head, suddenly. Treoraí’s Heart was heavy on her chest. “Mam?” she asked, the word a bare growl from her tattered, raw throat. “Where’s Mam?”

“The Máister’s with her. It’s over. I think.”

Meriel blinked again and her vision cleared a bit. The last residue of Jenna fell from her. She could see Jenna sitting on a boulder from the Old Wall, Máister Kirwan crouching alongside her and Mahon, his sword still unsheathed, standing in front of her glaring outward at the nearby gardai and Riocha.

She saw one more thing: a seal’s body, its fur dark and matted with blood and lying very still—
too
still—on the hillside.
The ember cold in her head . . .
“Dhegli!” she shouted and started to get up, but Owaine held her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do for him, Meriel. Not anymore.”

She wouldn’t listen. She pushed herself to her feet as Owaine released her, stumbling over to where Dhegli lay. She fell to her knees next to him. “Dhegli . . .” she whispered. There would never be an answer, she knew, even before she looked at his face: the open mouth, the blindly-staring eyes. She knew because the scale of Bradán an Chumhacht was dead inside her. Where his presence had once been, warm and comforting, there was nothing.
Why did you come here?
she wanted to ask him.
You must have seen this in your visions. . . .

She knew that answer also.

A drop of salt water fell from her face to the seal’s fur. She cradled his head in her lap, not caring about the blood that smeared her clothing. She tried to lift him, and suddenly Owaine was there with her. “He has to go back to the water,” she told him, sobbing. “He has to go back now.”

Owaine said nothing. He left, and Meriel wondered if he’d abandoned her, but he returned a moment later with a board. “We’ll put him on this,” he said.

“I’ll help,” It was Jenna’s voice. The Banrion knelt down next to Meriel. She stroked Dhegli’s fur, her fingers crackling with static electricity as she brushed the pelt. “I’m sorry, Meriel. If he hadn’t come, I would have been dead and you wouldn’t have had the chance to bring me back from madness. I’m so sorry; I think I know what he meant to you.”

Meriel looked at her mam, at the tears that streaked her own grimy face. The woman leaned over and kissed Meriel on the forehead. “You stopped me from destroying myself and far too many others,” Jenna said. “You came and found me when I was lost.” She was fumbling with the chain that held Lámh Shábhála. “I came so close here to destroying everything.”

Meriel glanced up at her and continued to stroke Dhegli’s fur. Jenna didn’t seem to be able to hold her gaze, her head turning aside to look around at the carnage. “I destroyed too much as it was. The guilt for this is all mine.” She licked her bloodied, cut lips. “Meriel . . .”

“Aye, Mam?”

Jenna knelt beside her. “A Holder
can
pass Lámh Shábhála on voluntarily, when they’re at the end of their time and tired of carrying the burden. I’d give it to you, now. I can’t think of anyone who deserves to hold it more.”