Holder of Lightning tc-1 Read online

  "Here," he said. "One day, you will need this."

  "What is it?" Jenna asked, sniffing.

  "Brew it as a tea, and drink it, and you will forget

  what is most painful to you," Seancoim told her. "There are some things that no one should remember, be it in song or tale or memory. When that time comes for you, you'll know."

  Jenna glanced again at her mam and Mac Ard. "I don't think I want to remember today," she said, and the tears started again. Seancoim let the lid of the box close, sat on it, then drew her to him again. They sat, and Jenna stayed with him, crying for Kesh and her home, for her innocence and for her mam, letting Seancoim rock her until sleep finally came.

  In the morning, Jenna found herself curled up on a pile of straw and old cloth close to the fire, which had dwindled to glowing coals. Seancoim's small leather bag was still clutched in her hand. No one else was in the cavern, and pale light filtered in through the entrance. Jenna got up, put the bag in her skirt with the stone, wrapped her coat around her, and padded outside.

  Below her, the forest was wrapped in white mist and fog, the sun a hazy brightness just at the horizon. Seancoim was nowhere to be seen, but Mac Ard and Maeve were standing a few feet down the slope, talking with their heads close together. She started to go back inside, not wanting to interrupt them, but the rock under her foot tilted and fell back with a stony clunk. Maeve turned. "Jenna! Good morning, darling."

  '"Morning, Mam. Where's Seancoim?"

  "We're not certain," Maeve answered. "He was gone when we woke. He refilled the water bucket, though, and left some fresh berries on the shelf."

  We're not certain. . Jenna nodded and found herself smiling a bit, hearing the plural. Mac Ard was smiling at her as well, teeth flashing behind the black beard, the smile slightly crooked on his face. She wanted to know what he was thinking, wanted to know that her mam would be safe with him, wanted to know that they could, perhaps, be a family.

  But she knew there could be no answer to those questions. Her bladder ached in her belly. Jenna shrugged, turned, and left them. Later, having relieved herself behind a convenient screen of boulders, she came back to find that Seancoim had returned with Denmark on his shoulder.

  ". . riders on the High Road," he was saying to Mac Ard and Maeve. "They were tiarna-had to be, with those great war steeds, the heavy swords at their sides, and that fine clothing-but they weren’t showing colors on their cloca."

  "Which way were they riding?" Mac Ard asked.

  "That way," Seancoim answered, pointing south, away from where Knobtop would have been, had they been able to see it through the fog.

  Mac Ard nodded, the lines of his face deepening and a scowl touching his lips. Jenna saw his right hand tighten around the hilt of his sword. "The Connachtans are looking for us well away from Ballintubber, then, and the High Road’s not safe. I’d hoped. ." His voice trailed off.

  "There are other ways," Seancoim said.

  "Other ways?"

  Seancoim shrugged. The crow flapped its wings to keep its balance. "The forest you call Doire Coill goes away east and south from here, until it meets the tip of Lough Lar. A loop of the High Road passes close by again, as well, and it’s not far from there to Ath Iseal and the ford of the Duan-a few miles. No more. I can lead you there in a day and a half."

  "You would do that for us?" Maeve asked.

  "I would do it for her" Seancoim answered. He pointed to Jenna, his blank white eyes looking in her direction.

  "Why me?" Jenna asked.

  Seancoim gave Jenna his broken smile. "Because the Bunus Muintir have our songs and tales also."

  "What is that supposed to mean?" Mac Ard said.

  "It means what it means," Seancoim answered. The smile vanished as he looked at Mac Ard.

  "That’s all."

  "I’m suspicious of those who hide their intentions in riddles," Mac Ard retorted. "I’m especially suspicious when that person’s a Bunus Muintir."

  Seancoim snorted. "If I wanted you dead, Tiarna Mac Ard, you would already be dead."

  Mac Ard scowled. "Are you threatening us?"

  "It's no threat at all. Only the truth. All I had to do was leave you where you were in the forest-that would have been enough on a night when the trees were singing. If I wanted to be more certain, I could have led

  Chapter 8: The Cairn of Riata

  EVEN 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 direc-tion, 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 Denmark 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 Bunus 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 Bunus 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 Denmark flapped his black wings

  angrily. "That’s not a name one should speak here, but aye, that’s the

  Daoine R1 whose blows shattered Ruaidhri’s shield and killed him, and

  Hugh Dubh would be the last time any of the Bunus 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 Bunus 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 thintri 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 Denmark 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, unpro-tected under the oaks and so near the Bunus 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 throb-bing 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 Denmark 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 Bunus 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, land-ing 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

  and. 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 cloca 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 thintri," 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 Bunus 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?"

  "No, not forgotten," Jenna answered, thinking that it might be best to mollify the spirit. After all,

  Tiarna Mac Ard had known of him.

  "Ahh. ." it sighed. A hand stretched out toward

  Jenna, and she forced herself to stand still. She

  could feel the chill of its touch, like ice on her

  forehead and cheek, then t
he hand cupped hers and

  Jenna let her fingers relax. In her palm, the stone

  shot light back to the glowing sky. "So young you

  are, to be holding a cloch na thintri, especially this

  one. But I was young, as well, the first time I held it!!

  "This one?" Jenna asked. "How. .?"

  "Follow me," it said. Its hand beckoned, and from fingertips to elbow the arm seemed to reflect the intricate curls and flourishes of the lights above, as if the patterns had been carved into the limb. The phantom glided backward into Riata’s tomb, its cold

  touch fading.

  "I can't," Jenna responded, holding back from the yawning mouth of the barrow. She glanced up at the lights playing over the valley, at the stone in her hand.

  "You must," Riata replied. "The mage-lights will wait for you." Then the presence was gone, and nothing stood in front of the passage. "Come. ." whispered the voice faintly, from nowhere and everywhere.

  Jenna took a step toward the barrow, then another. She put her hand on the stone lintels of the opening: they were carved with swirls and eddies not unlike the display in the sky above and on Riata's arm, along with lozenges and circles and other carved symbols. She traced them with her fingers, then walked into the passage itself.

  Darkness surrounded her immediately and Jenna almost fled back outside, but as her eyes slowly adjusted, she could see in the illumination of the mage-lights and the answering glow from the cloch na thintri that the walls were drystone, covered with plaster that was now broken and shattered, the stones piled to just above the height of her head and capped with flat rocks. The passage into the burial chamber was short but claustrophobic. The walls leaned in, so that while two people could have knelt side by side at the bottom, only one standing person could walk down the corridor at a time.