Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3)

by S L Farrell

  His gaze bored into Doyle’s eyes. The burning in Doyle’s throat touched the back of his tongue and he swallowed the sourness back down. “I understand you, my Rí.”

  “Good.” The smile widened and Torin took a step back. “Then let’s talk about the declaration you’ll make tomorrow concerning your dear niece Meriel. . . .”

  Laird Liam O’Blathmhaic might have been willing to give Kayne the two days, however grudgingly, but Rí Mac Baoill evidently was not. The word came in the late evening, not long before the mage-lights would begin sliding between the stars, as Kayne and Séarlait were preparing to fill their clochs outside their tent. There was a movement in the moonlight, and they heard a garda hail Harik. A few breaths later, the Hand appeared, nodding in Kayne’s direction though his gaze never moved over to Séarlait at all. “The army’s advancing toward the Narrows again, Tiarna,” Harik said. Kayne could read nothing in the man’s battle-scarred and weathered face, but he knew that his own face had to show his disappointment at the news. He scowled, his lips pressing together and he spat on the ground.

  “Why would they do that after all their losses? I was certain they’d wait.” You needed them to wait. Two days, Sevei had said. And if she has Lámh Shábhála . . .

  “I’m surprised as well, Tiarna,” Harik said, though Kayne thought he looked more pleased than disappointed. “I wouldn’t have thought they’d risk the High Road in darkness, but the moon’s bright enough tonight. Evidently their intention is to be close enough to come through the pass tomorrow and engage us by midafternoon.”

  “How many? Do we have a good count yet?”

  “The scouts say they have five thousand or more, but that there are no mages from the Order of Gabair with them at all and nearly all the troops are from Airgialla. They’ll have two or three Clochs Mór, at most.” Harik gestured with his head toward the cleft of the pass, a darkness against the fabric of the star-speckled night. “You can see from the High Road . . .”

  Kayne and Séarlait followed Harik out of the encampment and up to where the High Road lifted over the ridge of the last mountain and began its gradual descent toward Lough Tory. Laird O’Blathmhaic and Rodhlann were there with several of the Fingerlander Hands, O’Blathmhaic huddled in a sheepskin pelt against the cold wind that raked the stones. Seárlait’s great-da pointed silently as they approached. Far below, the lights were moving in the darkness, a line of them snaking up the winding road. “We won’t be waiting much longer, Tiarna,” O’Blathmhaic said as Kayne stared down at the approaching army. “Tomorrow we’ll fight rather than sitting here forever in the cold while our houses are warm behind us.” The old Fingerlander sounded rather pleased with the prospect.

  Kayne sighed. “We need to fall back, then,” he said. “We can harry them from the hills after they come through the pass, but we can move our main force back down the High Road. Maybe to the high coast near Ballilow . . .”

  O’Blathmhaic was already shaking his gray head, the strands of his beard waggling. “Have you gone daft and soft, man? Have you forgotten everything we said? We came here for battle, and first you ask us to wait. That was bad enough, but now they bring the battle to us, and you want us to turn like beaten cowards and show them our arses as we flee?” O’Blathmhaic glared at Kayne, then looked to Séarlait. “An’ you, girl? Would you say the same as your husband here?”

  Kayne looked at Séarlait. He could see the hesitation and uncertainty in her face. Her gaze flickered over to him, almost as if she were pleading, but she nodded firmly and emphatically. O’Blathmhaic spat on the ground, aiming carefully away from them. “And this Hand of yours? Harik?”

  Harik shrugged. “I have no say at all in this, Laird,” he said. “Tiarna Geraghty knows my thinking. I know my men and what they’re capable of doing, but the decision isn’t mine. My duty and my loyalty involves carrying out Tiarna Geraghty’s commands to the best of my ability. And that’s what I’ll do.” The words were correct, but they could all hear the unspoken criticism in them. O’Blathmhaic snorted, Rodhlann grinned.

  “Well spoken,” he said. “Well, I know the Fingerlanders. I know that once we’ve determined to do something, we do it. I know that there’s already grumbling about the waiting we do up here when we can see our enemy below. I know that when I sent word to the other clan-lairds that we would wait here, they didn’t like the thought of it and it took all that I could do to keep them here. I told them what you’d said, Tiarna: about your sister and Lámh Shábhála, and I don’t know if they truly believed me or not. Most didn’t, I’m sure, but I managed to convince them. I won’t be able to do that again, not if you’re telling them we’re going to turn our tails without even drawing swords.” He spat again, and this time the globule landed at Kayne’s feet. Kayne stared at it for a moment.

  “Laird,” Kayne said slowly, trying not to match O’Blath mhaic’s growing anger. “I ask this only because that will give us the time we need to see what my sister can do.”

  “And what is it she can do?”

  Kayne had to shrug. “I don’t know.” O’Blathmhaic sniffed at that. The lines around Harik’s eyes tightened. “I don’t know,” Kayne repeated, “but she asked me to wait. She has Lámh Shábhála. I know it.”

  “You say that, but you don’t know,” Rodhlann interjected. His hand stroked the hilt of the sword at his belt as if impatient to use it. “What if the person holding the cloch is trying to fool you, Tiarna Geraghty? Can you say that’s not possible? Can you tell me that someone with Lámh Shábhála couldn’t make you think it was your sister?”

  “Aye . . .” Kayne started to say automatically. Stopped. “No,” he admitted. “But I feel her. I’d know. I don’t think someone would be able to fool me about that.”

  “Fine,” O’Blathmhaic said. “I’ll grant you that it may be your sister. But if it is, how soon can she be here? She’s with the Inishlanders, and Inish Thuaidh is far from here.”

  “My gram could use Lámh Shábhála as Tiarna O Blaca uses Quickship,” Kayne answered. “Distance isn’t an issue.” He decided not to mention that, like O Blaca, Gram could only take herself to places she’d personally been to and could envision in her mind, and Sevei had never been to the Narrows.

  “So we’re to wait for this person who may be your sister, who may be wielding Lámh Shábhála, and who may get here sometime.” O’Blathmhaic’s scorn rode the words like a garda on his horse. “It’s obvious how little you know the Fingerlanders, Tiarna, even if you’re now married to one. We’ve managed to get the clans into fighting mood, and that’s what they want to do. To fight. Now. Here.” He jabbed a thick forefinger at the earth between them. “They—and I—don’t care about odds. We’ll take them ten to one if we must. We’ll come at them from the hills and the rocks; we’ll be demons they can’t see until our swords pluck their heads from their shoulders like apples from the trees. We’ll come down on them in a great roaring horde and the land—this land, our land—will roar with us and deafen them. We’ll water the stones with their blood. And if, if they still defeat us, then we’ll fight until the last one of us is no longer standing, and our children and our children’s children will remember and tell the glorious story and one day they will rise up and finish what we could not.” O’Blathmhaic took in a great breath though his nose.

  Rodhlann hurried into the break. “Laird O’Blathmhaic is right. Send us back and the moment is gone, Tiarna Geraghty. Send us back and the clan-lairds will argue and disagree and finally take their people back to their homes, saying ‘this is not the time’ and how we must have been addled to become involved in a squabble among the Riocha.”

  Laird O’Blathmhaic grunted, lifting his chin. “Send us back, and I’ll forever wonder what I saw in a cowardly tiarna from Dún Laoghaire that I would let him marry the great-daughter who I love best among all.”

  Kayne had no answer. Or rather, there was only one answer he knew he could give. He remembered standing with Da on a hill back in Céile Mhór, nearly a
year ago, as a bright and glorious dawn shimmered from the dark scales of the Arruk horde before them and their war drums pounded the air. Da was alongside Aeric MagWolfagdh the Third, and he was counseling the Thane to pull their forces back to find better ground. The Thane shook his head into Owaine’s argument. “No, we fight here,” he insisted. “You’re not from Céile Mhór, Tiarna. You can’t understand what it means to see your lands overrun by these creatures. We fight them here. We must.”

  Back then, Kayne had found himself nodding in agreement with the Thane, eager for the battle to begin. He’d been as fervent as any of those from Céile Mhór. This was to be the largest battle yet; the others had been skirmishes and though Kayne had seen that the Arruk would fight fearlessly to the death, though he’d witnessed his own people struck down by the beasts’ weapons and their slow magics, they’d eventually won the battles and Kayne was certain this would be no different. That it could be no different. Kayne’s body trembled, his blood singing in his ear with the prebattle energy, and the sound of the Arruk drums, his fist closing again and again around his sword hilt in time to their beating, and it was all he could do not to speak up against his da. His cheeks burned with embarrassment that his own da would want to retreat when they could fight. Even more upsetting, Owaine continued to press the Thane, suggesting other fields of battle that he felt would be more advantageous, but the Thane had shaken his head to every suggestion.

  Finally, Owaine had bowed to the Thane. “Then we fight here,” he’d said. “But let me take my troops there; to that hill on the left flank.” He’d pointed to a wooded mound well to the east of the advancing Arruk army, far from where the initial fighting would take place—not at the front of the battle but to the side. Kayne had been shamed at that, but the Thane had agreed. Kayne had argued with Da from the time they’d left the Thane to the time he gave his orders to Harik. All his protests had done no good: when the first roaring blows of the battle had been struck, the army of Talamh An Ghlas had been in a copse of trees to the left of the main force. The battle had not gone well in the first stripe of the candle, the Arruk pushing back the Thane’s forces until Owaine’s troops were actually somewhat behind the front lines. Kayne had been nearly bouncing in his saddle in his yearning to join the fray, but finally Blaze had opened and Harik gave the order for the riders to charge and they slammed into the Arruk in surprise from behind their unguarded flank, cutting their forces in half. In the confusion, they’d managed to reach the Arruk command—the Kralj—in the center of the force behind his wall of Arruk mages and field lieutenants and slay him. Kayne himself had struck that blow—and from that point, leaderless, the Arruk forces had dissolved into a chaos of isolated bands. Though the Arruk still fought viciously and defiantly to the death, the battle had quickly become a bloody and vicious rout for the Daoine forces.

  Kayne remembered what Harik had said to him afterward, when Kayne had scornfully noted how Owaine had wanted to retreat from this victory. “Your da saved this battle,” Harik had told him. “He was correct to criticize the Thane’s plan—there’d be hundreds of men still alive this day if the Thane had listened to your da and delayed the battle until we were properly placed. But your da also knows when he can’t change the decision, and he knows how to make the best of a bad situation. If we hadn’t taken the flank, we would have lost this battle and if you were still alive you’d be slinking back to Concordia with the remnants, defeated. You should be thanking your da, young Tiarna. . . .”

  Kayne hadn’t understood then. Even a few months ago, he hadn’t realized it.

  He did now.

  Kayne bowed to O’Blathmhaic, as he might have to his mam as Banrion Ard during one of the ceremonies back in Dún Laoghaire. “I’m sorry, Laird O’Blathmhaic,” he said, and turned to the Fingerlander commander. “Rodhlann, if their Clochs Mór were gone or useless when their army reached the Narrows, what then?”

  Rodhlann sniffed. “Then I think that we have enough good men here to prevail, especially with the Clochs Mór. We hold the pass and the heights around it and they have to come through the neck, which won’t give them room to maneuver.”

  Kayne nodded. He stared down at the torches of the army coming toward them. “I agree. The mage-lights should come soon. And afterward . . . well, then afterward we’ll make certain that their mages have used up what’s in their clochs.”

  He felt them all staring: Séarlait, Harik, Rodhlann, Laird O’Blathmhaic. “They won’t use their clochs except against another cloch,” O’Blathmhaic said. “And neither you nor my great-daughter have held a cloch for more than a few days, nor have you been trained as they will have been. I would say that if you try that gambit, you won’t return, and they’ll have gained two Clochs Mór.”

  Kayne touched the stone around his neck and felt the surge of power that came from it: wild and grim and aching to be used. This was the way he’d felt himself until that awful day when his da had been killed: that he was invincible, that he couldn’t be hurt or killed. That was the way the cloch made him feel now, yet it was a feeling that he could no longer believe.

  “You’re right, Laird,” Kayne agreed. “We don’t have the resources here to take out their clochs. At least, not if we follow the rules of war that they expect. You’ve already shown me how it could work once, and those people never returned to tell about it. So the same gambit may work again . . .”

  Back in their tent, Séarlait pulled him around to face her. Silent, she regarded him, then pulled his head down to hers to kiss him. Here, alone with him, she allowed herself to cry, and he reached out to touch the salty drops on her cheeks. “Séarlait . . .”

  She looked at him with a question in her eyes.

  Kayne took a breath—it was a question he didn’t know if he could answer. Everything was so tangled. “I have to do this,” he began. “Your greada . . . my da . . . Everything that’s happened . . .”

  She put her finger on his lips, shaking her head. She pointed to the sky, and he saw then the colors that touched her face through the cloth of the tent. She took his hand to lead him outside. A finger of aquamarine curled around the moon, swelling and lengthening and spreading out like a writhing vine, sprouting new glowing roots and branches. Séarlait kissed Kayne again, insistently, uncaring that the Fingerlanders around them could see, her body pressing against him as she hugged him fiercely, and he heard her sob once. Then she sighed and released him. Still looking at him, she took the gem called Winter in her hand.

  He took Blaze. The taste of her still in his mouth, he opened the cloch to the mage-lights.

  He could feel the other Clochs Mór opening, too, and the smaller, fainter pinpricks of the clochsmion. So far distant that he wondered at it, he felt Treorái’s Heart—in the hands of someone who cloaked himself or herself. Then, like a flash of emerald lightning in the interior landscape of the clochs na thintrí, Lámh Shábhála appeared. He could feel the great stone pulling hungrily at the energy above. As before, he could see the Holder behind Lámh Shábhála: the white hair and midnight eyes, the face scarred and changed with the marks of the mage-lights. He also heard the whispered name that ran through the snarled spider-web that connected the clochs na thintrí to the power in the sky, the name they’d given to the new Holder: Bán Cailleach—the Pale Witch. “Sevei . . .” he thought toward her, “we can’t wait. I’m sorry . . .” but though he had a sense that she was aware of him, this time she didn’t open herself to him; rather, there was a sense that she was using the mage-lights even as they flowed into her—there was a sense of movement, the hint of the cold wind of a passage, and then she was gone entirely as the mage-lights died.

  He felt a sense of loss and hopelessness as she departed.

  Sevei followed the trail of energy down from the mage-lights, and let their glow bring her back to reality. She took in a breath of cool night air. The voices in her head yammered at her and she bid all of them to be quiet so she could concentrate.

  “Good evening, Greada Kyle,�
�� she said.

  Her great-da had his back to her. He was dressed in a rumpled clóca, his hair mussed as if from sleep as he stood on a balcony of Dún Kiil Keep. His arm was lifted to the night sky and the last fading tendrils of the mage-lights were sparking and fuming as they lifted away from Firerock, the Cloch Mór clutched in his hand. She could see the faint scars glowing on his wrist, a poor and pale imitation of the ones on her body. Kyle started visibly at the sound of her voice, and his eyes widened almost comically when he turned to look at her. He tried to keep his voice calm, but she could hear the shock in its faint trembling.

  “How . . . No one realized who . . . Sevei? Sevei, is that you . . . ?”

  “Aye, Greada. I’m Sevei.”

  He gaped. “Oh, by the Mother,” he breathed. “Did Lámh Shábhála do that to you?”

  “Aye,” she told him, “and no.” She knew what he saw: the scars that covered her entire body glowing softly in the night with the remnants of the energy she’d just taken in; her hair white and flowing, her eyes twin pits of utter darkness, a tiny emerald sun alight under her breast. She must look to be an apparition to him, a Black Haunt come to steal his soul. She was naked: when the mage-lights came and she took them in, even the softest touch of cloth to the scars was an agony, and so she had abandoned modesty. She took in a deep breath, letting the ice-cold of her mage passage from Thall Coill to Dún Kiil slowly fade from her body.

  She was Lámh Shábhála now—it was open and alive in her all the time. When the mage-lights had come, she felt the great mesh of power as each of the Clochs Mór and the clochsmion connected themselves to that reservoir of mage-energy above them, and she realized that she could touch each of them, and follow any of them back to the source. The voices in Lámh Shábhála had whispered to her—especially that of Gram, telling her how to use the cloch—and Sevei had touched the connection that was Greada and thought of him . . .