by S L Farrell
“That’s a fia stoirm,” Seancoim said quietly, answering Jenna’s unasked question. “The storm deer. In the Bunús Muintir histories, they speak of herds of them, their hooves so loud pounding against the earth that it sounded like thunder. When the sky-magic died, so did they.”
“Our stories are the same,” O’Deoradháin said. “From the Before, centuries ago. But if they all died . . .”
“Not all,” Seancoim answered. “A few survived, hiding in the oldest places. When I was young, I once glimpsed a storm deer deep in Doire Coill. But in the past year, I have seen dozens, and not in the depths of the forest but here near the edge. I have seen other things, too, that were once legend and are not as beautiful and gentle as these: dire wolves, who have a language of their own; boars with long tusks as sharp as knives, and whose bristles are gold; snakes with white scales and red eyes, as long as any of us are tall. From my brothers to the west, I have learned that a dragon’s scream was heard on one of the islands in the Duán Mouth. And from another, that blue seals were gathering along the northern coast.” Jenna remembered the seals she’d seen in Lough Lár, the way their satin fur had gleamed. She glanced at O’Deoradháin, but he would not look at her. “The myths are awakening again,” Seancoim continued. “Things walk the land that have not been seen in many generations. Even the trees of Doire Coill are more awake now than I have ever felt them.”
Almost as if in response to Seancoim’s words, the wind rose slightly and shook the branches of the oaks. The stag’s nostrils widened as it sniffed the breeze. The creature took a last look at them before bounding away, its great hooves thudding audibly on the ground as it departed.
“This is what you are caught in, Jenna,” Seancoim said. “Part great beauty, part great danger. As the mage-lights are awakening the old creatures, so you are ready to awaken the other clochs na thintrí. You will make a new world.”
“I can’t,” Jenna said. The pain inside her, forgotten for a moment with the sighting of the storm deer, returned. “I don’t know how. I’m scared, Seancoim. I’m so . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence. The tears came again in racking, terrified sobs, and she wanted more than anything else for her mam to be here, to comfort her as she had so many times. She had thought of herself as a woman now, an adult and self-sufficient, but she suddenly felt like a child again.
It was O’Deoradháin who came to her. “I can help you, Jenna,” he told her, crouching down in front of her. “I can’t do it for you because Lámh Shábhála has chosen you, but I can help you. If you’ll let me.”
His arms went around her, and for a breath she stiffened, ready to pull away. He started to release her, to back away, but she laid her head on his shoulder. She let herself fall into the embrace, allowing herself to believe that she was safe in her mam’s arms again, imagining that she was home again and that none of this had ever happened.
But it wasn’t an illusion that could last.
“There’s another who will help you as well,” she heard Seancoim say. “Or at least, I hope so. We’ll go to him tomorrow.”
30
Release
SHE remembered the valley.
The sight of the central dolmen, carved with the pattern of the scars on her arm and surrounded by the passage graves of the Bunús Muintir chieftains, still made her shiver. The day was gray and sullen with rain misting from lowering clouds, the water dripping heavily from the cap stone of the dolmen as they stood under it. Only Dúnmharú seemed unbothered by the rain—the crow was perched above the entrance to Riata’s grave, mouth open to the sky and occasionally shaking droplets from his feathers.
Jenna’s mood matched the weather. Her stomach roiled and she’d thrown up nearly everything that Seancoim had put into her. The headache refused to leave, so that at times she could barely walk, and her right arm hung useless at her side. She’d leaned heavily on O’Deoradháin as they’d made the two-day journey to the valley. She remembered little of the time: it was a blur of pain and fatigue. She’d begged Seancoim for andúilleaf off and on, sometimes weeping, sometimes in a fury, once with a threat to use the cloch; he refused each time, though never with anger.
Jenna sank down with her back against one of the standing stones, not caring that the ground was soaked and muddy. “Now what?” she asked.
“We wait,” Seancoim answered.
“Here?” Jenna spat.
“Here, or in Riata’s cairn.”
“Here,” O’Deoradháin said. He cast a look at the black ness beyond the stones where Dúnmharú roosted, and shivered. “Graves aren’t for the living.”
“Riata isn’t quite dead,” Seancoim told him.
“Then that’s even worse.”
“Can we at least have a fire?” Jenna asked. “I’m cold through.”
O’Deoradháin gathered together what kindling he could find and pulled his tinderbox from his pack, but the spark wouldn’t catch despite repeated efforts. “It’s too damp,” he said finally. Jenna nodded miserably, and Seancoim hun kered down in front of the nest of kindling O’Deoradháin had built. He rubbed his hands together several times, chanting words that Jenna could not understand. He picked up O’Deoradháin’s flint and struck it. A blue flame shot out, startling Jenna, and the kindling began to crackle. O’Deoradháin chuckled. “I’m beginning to think that I was lucky you only hit me on the head,” he said to Seancoim.
Seancoim’s grizzled, ancient face grinned back at him as he warmed his hands over the flames. “That you were, young man.”
They stayed there under the dolmen as the sun lowered itself beyond the lip of the valley and the valley grew darker under the overcast sky. The rain stopped before sunset; as night fell they began to glimpse stars between the thinning clouds. Seancoim and O’Deoradháin talked as they waited, but Jenna said little, sitting on the ground with her knees drawn up and her right arm cradled against her. She stroked Lámh Shábhála from time to time. The cloch seemed almost restless, its image throbbing in her head, filling her vision with bright sparks. There was a tension in the air itself like the drone of some sepulchral pipe, so low that she couldn’t quite hear it but only feel the sound, rumbling just below the threshold of perception.
A finger of light appeared above them, blue outlined in gold, wavering and brightening so that they saw the shadow of the dolmen sway on the ground in response. Jenna rose to her feet.
“So it is to be tonight . . .”
The voice spoke in her head, not in her ears: a resonant, warm baritone. The others looked up as well, as if they’d also heard. “Riata?” Jenna glanced toward the entrance to his tomb. There was a wavering in the dimness, a mist that formed itself into a man’s shape as she watched. “Do you remember me?”
She felt the now-familiar touch of another Holder’s mind on her own, this one more powerful than most, strong enough so that she could not shut him out as he prowled her thoughts and her memories. The spectral figure of the ancient Bunús Holder drifted toward her. Jenna was vaguely aware of the others watching, Seancoim placidly silent, O’Deoradháin with shocked apprehension. “Ahh,” Riata sighed. “Jenna. You are the First who came to me once before.” More mage-lights had appeared in the sky, brighter and more brilliantly colored than Jenna had seen in previous displays. The largest manifestation was directly overhead, but the mage-lights flickered all the way to the horizon. The entire valley was illuminated, as if a thousand fires burned above. Riata’s indistinct face glanced up to them. “Aye,” he said. “Tonight.”
Jenna clutched the cloch na thintrí. The fingers of her right hand, as if warmed by the glare of the mage-lights, moved easily now and closed around the stone. Lámh Sháb hála was frigid in her palm, glowing in response to the swaying, dancing power above it. Jenna could sense the cloch yearning like a live thing, wanting her to open it, to fill it. The feeling was so urgent and compulsive that it frightened Jenna.
“Lámh Shábhála craves the power as you crave the andúilleaf,” Riata murmured in he
r head. “You must control Lámh Shábhála as you must control yourself, or it will destroy you utterly when it consumes the mage-lights this night and sets free the other clochs na thintrí.”
Riata’s words filled Jenna with dread. Her breath came fast and shallow; she could feel her heart racing. “I can’t do it,” she gasped.
“You can. I will help you.”
“As will I,” O’Deoradháin said. He was beside her now. His hand touched Jenna’s shoulder, and she shrugged it away.
“You want me to fail,” she spat at him. “Then you’ll take Lámh Shábhála.”
“Aye, I would if that happened,” he told her. His pale emerald eyes regarded her calmly. “But your failure isn’t what I want. Not any longer. You can believe me or not, Jenna, but I will help you. I can help you. This is what I was trained to do.”
“Listen to him,” Riata husked. “Use the cloch. See the truth even if you want to deny it.”
“You swear that?” Jenna asked O’Deoradháin, and she let the barest hint of the cloch’s strength waft outward. Shaping it to her task was like holding one of the piglets back in their farm in Ballintubber: it wriggled, it squirmed to be away, and she could control it only with difficulty.
“I do swear it,” O’Deoradháin answered, and the truth in the words reverberated like the sound of a bronze bell.
“Then what do I do?” Jenna asked.
“Start as you always have. Open the cloch to the lights.”
Jenna let the image of Lámh Shábhála fill her mind: the crystalline interstices; the jeweled valleys and hills; the interior landscape of sparkling energy. Above, the sky responded, a surge of pure white light that was born directly above Jenna and rippled outward in bright spectral rings. The mage-lights flamed, the clouds were driven away as if by hurricane winds.
Lámh Shábhála pulled at the sky-magic, sucking in the power like a ravenous beast. “No!” O’Deoradháin and Riata shouted as one. “You must direct the cloch this time, Jenna,” O’Deoradháin continued, his voice shouting in her ear but almost lost in the internal din of the mage-lights as they crackled and seethed around her. “You must go up to the mage-lights, not let Lámh Shábhála bring them down to you.”
“How?” Jenna raged at him. “Do you think I can fly?” This was nothing she had experienced before with the cloch. She seemed to be in the middle of a coruscating storm, flailing and trying to hold her ground, nearly blind and deaf in its brilliance and roar. Riata’s voice answered her, calm and soft as always, cutting through the bedlam.
“Think it,” he said, “and it will be.”
Her arm burned, the scars as bright as lightning. She lifted the cloch toward the sky and imagined rising into the maelstrom above. Her perception shifted: she was outside herself. She could see her body on the ground, arm lifted, and yet she was also above with the mage-lights running through and around and with her, the land spread like a tapestry below. She was Lámh Shábhála; she was the power within it. Voices and shapes surrounded her in the dazzling space and she knew them: all the ones who had held an active Lámh Shábhála before her: Severii O’Coulghan, who like Riata had been Last Holder; Tadhg O’Coulghan, his father who had held it before Severii; Rowan Beirne, Bryth and Sinna Mac Ard; Eilís MacGairbhith, the Lady of the Falls, and Aodhfin Ó Liathain, the lover who had betrayed and killed her to take the cloch; Caenneth Mac Noll, also a First, and the first Daoine to hold an active Lámh Sháb hála. The Bunús Muintir Holders were there too—Riata, Dávali, Óengus. There were hundreds of them: Daoine, Bunús Muintir, and peoples unknown to her, stretching back thousands of years. And they spoke, a babble of voices that rivaled the sound of the mage-lights.
“. . . So young, this one.”
“. . . She’s too young. Too weak. Lámh Shábhála will consume her.”
“. . . I was a First and I died the night I opened the clochs, as will she . . .”
“. . . let her undergo the Scrúdú, too. Now, before this happens, and if she lives . . .
“Now is not the time for the Scrúdú. She must wait for that test until later, as I did. Lámh Shábhála chose her, and sent her to me.” That was Riata, calm. “There is a reason it was her . . .”
“What must I do?” Jenna asked them. Her voice was phosphorescence and glow. A hundred voices answered, a jumble of contradiction. Some were amused, some were hostile, some were sympathetic.
“. . . die!”
“. . . give up the cloch while you can . . .”
“. . . hold onto yourself . . .”
She ignored them and listened for Riata’s voice. “Feel the presence of the other clochs . . .”
“I do.” She could sense them all, scattered over the land yet tied to Lámh Shábhála with streamers of green-white energy. The channels led to the well within the cloch.
“Fill the cloch now,” Riata told her, though other voices wailed laughter or warning. “Open it . . .”
“You are the cloch,” said another voice, fainter and paler: O’Deoradháin.
She imagined Lámh Shábhála transparent and without boundaries. Nothing happened. She drifted above the valley, snared in lambent splendor, but there was no change. She looked at her arm, saw light reflecting from it. A beam curled around her, and she willed it to enter her. Blue-green rays crawled the whorls of scars, and she gasped as the radiance entered in her and through her, surging into the cloch she held. Like a dam bursting under the pressure of a flood, the mage-lights suddenly whirled about her, following the path she had made, more and more of the energy filling her as she screamed in ecstasy and fear. Unrelenting, it poured inward. Lámh Shábhála was utterly full, too bright to gaze upon, shuddering and quivering in her hand as if it might break apart. And the pain came with the power: white, stabbing needles of it, driving deep into her flesh and her soul, a torment beyond anything she’d endured before.
The mage-lights were a thunderous cacophony into which she shouted uselessly. In a moment, she would be lost, swept away in currents that she could not control. She ached to release it, to simply let it pass through her, to end this.
“Hold onto the magic, Jenna!” The voice was Riata’s or O’Deoradháin’s or both. “You must hold onto it!” they shouted again, and she screamed back at them.
“I can’t!”
“Jenna, Lámh Shábhála will open the way for the other clochs through you. It is too late now for anything else. The only choice to be made is whether you will use Lámh Shábhála or it you.”
“. . . too young . . . too weak . . . she will die . . .”
“. . . you see, even if she did this task, she would never have passed the Scrúdú later. Best she die now . . .”
She couldn’t hold the energy. No one could hold it. It clawed at her mind with talons of lightning, it roared and flailed and smashed against her. It bellowed and shrilled to be loosed.
“. . . a moment longer . . .”
Her hand wanted to open and she knew that if she let go of the stone the force would fly outward with the motion, uncontrolled and explosive. Lámh Shábhála burned in her palm; she could feel its cold fury flaying the skin from muscles, the muscles from bone. It would tear her hand from her arm. She closed her left hand around the right.
“. . . Good! Turn it inward. Inward . . .”
Jenna squeezed the cloch tighter, screaming against the resistance and the torture. She closed her eyes, crushing fingers together and shouting a wordless cry.
The sky went dark. The mage-lights vanished. For a moment, Jenna gaped upward, back in her body again. Light flooded around her cupped, raised hands as if she were grasping the sun itself.
“Now,” O’Deoradháin said, his voice loud in the sudden silence. “Let it go—”
Jenna opened her hands.
A fountain of multicolored light erupted: from the cloch, from the scarred flesh of her arm, from her open mouth and eyes. It blossomed high above the valley, gathering like an impossible star for several breaths. Then it shattered, bur
sting apart into meteors that jetted outward along the energy lines of the other clochs na thintrí, the star fading as the meteors flared and faded themselves, arcing into the distance and away.
There was the sound of peal upon peal of thunder, then their echoes rebounded from the hills and died in silence.
The valley was dark under a starlit sky, and the sparks lifting from their fire under the dolmen stone seemed pallid and cold. Jenna lifted the cloch that had fallen back around her neck—it burned cold, but it was dark. She marveled at her hands, that they were somehow whole and unbloodied. The pain hit her then. She fell to her knees, crying out, and O’Deoradháin and Seancoim laid her down gently. “Riata?” she called out.
“He’s gone,” O’Deoradháin told her. “At least I think so.”
“It hurts,” Jenna said simply.
“I know. I’m sorry. But it’s done. It’s done, Jenna. You’ve opened the way for the Filleadh.”
She nodded. Her right arm was stiffening now, the fingers curling into a useless fist, sharp twinges like tiny knives cutting through her chest. She cried, lying there, and let
O’Deoradháin place his arm around her for the little comfort it brought her. A familiar smell cut through the smell of woodsmoke: Seancoim crouched down by her, a bowl in his hand.
“Andúilleaf,” he said. “This one time.”
Jenna started to reach for it. Her fingers grazed the edge of the bowl and then stopped. She shook her head. “No,” she told the old man. “I . . . I can bear this.”
What might have been a smile touched his lips beneath the tangle of gray beard. His blind eyes were flecked with firelight; Dúnmharú flapped in from the night and landed on his shoulder. Seancoim dumped the contents of the bowl on the ground and scuffed at the dirt with his feet.
