Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3)

by S L Farrell

  The Bán Cailleach nodded. “So am I,” she said. “For the friendship we once had, I’d spare you.”

  “Padraic, do as she asks,” Doyle grunted, twisting in Lámh Shábhála’s grip, feeling the cold emptiness of the fall beneath him. “Please, there’s no need for this; Snarl alone can’t stand against her. Go on.”

  “Would you leave, Da, if it were me or Mam that she wanted?” Padraic shook his head. He seemed to be looking past the Bán Cailleach at something else, and Doyle saw the movement in the Ard’s chamber at the same time as a new voice intruded.

  “If you intend to kill Doyle, it will be three clochs you face, and more.” The voice came from behind Sevei, from the interior entrance to the Ard’s bedchamber. Sevei spun about; beyond her, Doyle saw Edana and Alastríona as well as several gardai of the keep push into the room. “I felt the Bán Cailleach move with the mage-lights, and then I felt her here,” Edana said. “I came as quickly as I could . . .” Doyle saw Edana stare at the naked apparition, saw her search the young woman’s scarred face. Edana’s voice softened then and became almost gentle. If there was any revulsion within Edana as she looked at the Bán Cailleach, Doyle could not see it. “Sevei . . . Oh, Sevei, I’m so sorry. For everything. I wish I’d known what was going to happen. I tried to warn your mam . . .”

  Edana came forward toward Sevei, and the firelight of the bedchamber glistened in her eyes. She reached out a hand toward the Bán Cailleach as if Sevei were a Riocha coming to her for an audience, but Sevei extended a hand, palm outward, in warning. Edana stopped an arm’s length from Sevei. “I don’t expect you to believe this, but I loved your mam as much as I love any of my own sisters. She was my confidante, my best friend, my support.” Edana’s gaze flicked over Sevei’s shoulder to Doyle and hardened. “Meriel didn’t deserve to die. Of any of us here, the Healer Ard should have had a long life.”

  “She didn’t.” Sevei nearly spat the words, and Doyle felt Lámh Shábhála bend him farther backward as he clutched harder at the stone rail. “Mam died, and Gram, and my brothers and sisters. But not me. And not Kayne.” She gave a grim smile as she turned away from Edana to look at Doyle again. Doyle felt his facial muscles tighten at the news. Kayne is alive, also? “The army you sent out from Airgialla to the Finger has been sent running back home, Rí Ard.” The title was a mockery on her lips. “Did you know that? Here, look . . .”

  She released him; gasping for breath, Doyle scrambled away from the railing, but Sevei pointed out into the night, and he looked.

  In the darkness beyond the balcony, the air shimmered as if a wind were stroking the surface of a still lake, the mage-lights sliding down at Sevei’s gesture. A landscape wrought in perfect miniature and glowing as if illuminated by the sun appeared just beyond the rail, so close that Doyle could have reached out to touch it, though he dared not. He stared: it was as if he were a bird, circling high above the world. He saw the sharp spines of mountains and gleaming lakes and the winding silver threads of rivers. And there, on a lonely, desolate ribbon of a road, he saw the antlike specks of an army with its cavalry, the massive ranks of foot soldiers and the supply vans in the rear. The banners of the army were those of Tuath Airgialla. The mountains, he realized, were the jagged buttresses of the Finger, and the army was moving away from them toward the waters of Lough Tory.

  “It’s not real,” Doyle said. “Just an enchantment. Why should I believe this?” But he knew, looking at it, he knew he was wrong. Sevei blinked, hiding her dark orbs for a moment, and the mage-landscape vanished with them.

  “You may believe it or not, Uncle,” she told him. “It doesn’t matter.” She waved an arm, and the scars on her flesh sent light sliding over the stones of the keep.

  “Sevei,” Edana said, and the Bán Cailleach’s head turned sharply toward her. “I won’t let you do this, Sevei,” Edana said. “I can’t.” Doyle saw Edana came out onto the balcony, though Alastríona hung back with the gardai in the bedchamber. Edana placed herself, Doyle noted, between the Bán Cailleach and Padraic—a mam’s instinctive, protective movement. “I can’t just stand here and let you kill him. Doyle is my husband and my children’s da, and I loved him once. If you strike at him . . .” Her lips pursed. “I will defend him, if only for what he once meant to me.”

  “He deserves death,” Sevei interrupted. “Don’t you believe I deserve my revenge, Aunt? For Gram, for Mam, for Da, for Ennis and Tara and Ionhar.”

  “Aye, you deserve it, Sevei,” Edana replied, and Doyle glanced at her sharply. “Many of us deserve better than we receive,” Edana continued, “but the Mother-Creator and the webs of fate are fickle. Most of us have to endure what we’re given. In death, Sevei, your mam has become one of the Mionbandia. People worship her: the tuathánach especially, but even some of the céili giallnai and the Riocha. I go and I pray at her barrow every day to ask her forgiveness, and I see more supplicants there with me each morning. They still ask her to cure their ailments and afflictions, as they did when she was alive, and every day someone walks away with her favor. I believe Meriel will be greater in death than she was in life. I know that’s no comfort to you, and I’d rather have your mam here with me than anything else I can imagine, because I had no better friend in life. But I couldn’t stop what happened, and so she’s gone.”

  “Why do you tell me this, Aunt?”

  “Because I want you to know that the Ríthe are finding that they made a mistake in murdering your mam and the rest of your family. They failed to gain anything they’d hoped to gain. I don’t want you to make the same mistake, Sevei. Death can’t be undone, not even by Lámh Shábhála.”

  Doyle saw the Bán Cailleach smile at that. “I’ve learned a lot about death recently, Aunt,” she said. “I’ve witnessed it. I’ve caused it. I’ve had the Black Haunts circling around me and waiting. Please don’t lecture me about death and its consequences. You have no idea what Lámh Shábhála is capable of doing; I’m not certain even I know yet.”

  “Then I’m sorry, Sevei. For both of us.” Edana’s hand went to Demon-Caller, her Cloch Mór, but Sevei’s hand was already touching where Lámh Shábhála glowed under her skin.

  “Stop!” Sevei’s voice boomed and Edana’s hand flew away from her cloch as if struck. Doyle had reached for Snapdragon in the same instant, and he cried out as green lightning arced between his hand and Sevei. The gardai in the chamber dropped their weapons with shouts of alarm and the clattering of steel on wood. Alastríona wailed, terrified.

  The Bán Cailleach was no longer Sevei at all, but some larger being, a jewel inscribed in the curls and eddies of the mage-lights and encased in darkness. Doyle could see himself in the dark mirrors of her eyes. Her voice seemed to come from the sky. “I ache for my revenge,” the Bán Cailleach declared. “The old Holders call within me, Jenna among them, and that’s what their voices tell me. They—I—want a death for a death and blood for blood.” . . . blood for blood . . . blood for blood . . . Doyle could hear the words echoing from the keep walls, from the hillsides that cradled it, from the rooftops of the city below. He heard the alarm bells tolling at the keep gates; heard the clatter of gardai being roused.

  Then the glow faded, and the Bán Cailleach was only Sevei again, scarred and fragile and naked. Her black eyes found Doyle and held him. “Blood for blood is what they tell me I should take. I came here to do exactly that, but . . .” Her voice was barely a whisper and Doyle saw that she was in pain, shivering and vulnerable. “I can’t. I can’t kill you in front of Padraic and Alastríona, Uncle Doyle. I can’t when I might injure Aunt Edana. I can’t when I see there’s still love within her for you despite all that you’ve done.”

  Something golden flashed in front of Doyle: the torc of the Ard. The sculpted end of the torc pulled apart and came around his neck, cold and relentless. Doyle felt the blisters on his neck break as the torc pressed against his neck, spilling clear fluid onto the collar of his clóca. His skin burned and the torc tightened around his throat, closing
until it threatened to choke off his breath. He fought it with his hands, but it continued to close. “I have other uses for you first, Uncle,” Sevei continued. “They made you Ard, so you will be my Ard. You will be my mouth with the Ríthe, and my hand among the Tuatha. You will be my dog, not the Ríthe’s, and you will give me your loyalty. Tell me you’ll do that, Uncle. Tell me that, and I’ll let you live.”

  He was dying. He tried to pull in a breath and could not. The edges of his vision sparked with lights that were not the mage-lights and all he could see was the Bán Cailleach’s face, Sevei’s disfigured and horrible visage, before him, He clawed at the torc, digging his own fingers into his skin, but it continued to tighten like a relentless garrote. He opened his mouth, trying to speak, but there was no air for words. “You have two choices, Uncle. You’ll do what I ask you to do, or I’ll show you the true end of the path you’ve chosen.” The torc tightened again, closing against the sides of his neck. He felt himself losing consciousness. He wanted to cry out to Edana, to Padraic, to tell them to open their clochs and attack this creature before them, but they either would not or could not.

  “Choose,” the Bán Cailleach crooned. “Choose now.”

  Desperate, Doyle nodded his head. The torc loosened slightly, and he took in a shuddering gasp of air that burned his throat with its delicious coolness. “Tell me,” the Ban Cailleach told him. “Tell me now that you’ll do it.”

  “Aye,” Doyle managed to husk out. “I will. Aye.”

  Suddenly, the torc was nothing more than a loose weight around his neck, cold and dead. “Good,” Sevei said. “Then here’s what I need you to do . . .”

  “I won’t kill him. . . . I promise . . .”

  Sevei sent a tendril of Lámh Shábhála’s power toward Edana, toward Padraic and Alastríona even as she slowly tightened the noose of the Ard’s torc around Doyle’s neck. She watched him scrabble desperately at the ring of metal; she watched his face go red and then pale, watched the eyes widen and bulge and the tongue begin to protrude from his mouth. “I won’t kill him, no matter what he says . . . I promise it on my mam’s name . . . No matter how he answers . . .”

  She wondered herself if it was true.

  Both Edana and Padraic put their hands on their Clochs Mór. Both opened the stones so that Sevei’s mage-sight saw them bloom into sudden light, but neither did more than that. Sevei sighed inwardly with relief: had they attacked, she would have had to make the choice between destroying them or retreating—there would have been no time for subtlety, no space for finesse. Already the old Holders, including Jenna and Carrohkai Treemaster, were clamoring in her head, shouting contradictory warnings and imprecations.

  “ . . . make no promises in my name, girl. As far as I’m concerned, he can die for what he’s done to me and mine . . .”

  “. . . you can’t ever trust him, even if he says ‘aye’ . . .”

  “. . . kill him . . . He’ll only betray you later. Kill him and then kill the others . . .”

  “. . . take their clochs and give them to those you trust. You could make the Order of Inishfeirm all it was intended to be . . .”

  Her body screamed with the power she had expended already this night. The scars seared her skin as if someone were pressing loops of red-hot metal to her. “Tell me,” Sevei said to Doyle, hoping desperately that he would answer as she hoped he would, as he must if they were to avoid plunging the Tuatha into a hopeless war. “Tell me that you’ll do it.”

  “Aye,” Doyle managed to husk out. “I will. Aye.”

  Gratefully, Sevei pulled back the energy from Lámh Shábhála. The voices howled at her inside, nearly all of them angry. “Good,” Sevei said. “Then here’s what I need you to do . . .”

  Trying not to show the agony within her, she leaned forward and spoke into his ear, watching his eyes widen. Then, before he could protest or complain, she took the power of Lámh Shábhála within herself, opening the cloch fully. She looked out across the night landscape of Dún Laoghaire, at the hills she remembered so well, at Cnocareilig where her mam lay in her barrow. “Good-bye, Aunt Edana, Padraic, Alastríona. I wish . . . I wish things could have been different. For all of us.”

  She wrapped herself in the clóca of the mage-lights and left.

  40

  On the Cnocareilig

  THE SUPPLICANTS USUALLY began arriving in the early morning light, so Áine Martain usually arose before the dawn and walked up from the city toward Cnocareilig and the Healer Ard’s barrow as the first light touched the cold waters of the bay. Today was no different. When she had been the Hand of the Heart and Meriel had still been alive, she had kept the same routine, though then she’d always awakened in her own comfortable chambers in the Ard’s Keep and not in this tiny hovel just inside the city walls. Habit woke her in the predawn darkness, and Áine pushed herself from the bed, shivering in the cold. She went to the hearth and uncovered the coals, placing a brick of peat on them and blowing on the coals gently until the aromatic smoke began curling up and blue flames began to feed at the bottom of the peat. She placed water in the kettle and put it on the crane to boil, then took her chamber pot outside and emptied it into the street’s central gutter. She fixed herself a cup of tea and nibbled at the berry muffins and potato stirabout that had been left as offerings to the Healer Ard yesterday. There was a light rain, and droplets pattered from the leak in the crown of the thatched roof. She placed a bucket under the leak, put on the clóca and léine of the Hand, pulled up the cowl against the damp, and left the cottage.

  A gray dawn was just brightening a dull sky. The city was starting to awaken around her. She passed the market square near South Gate, where the sellers were just opening their stalls and shop owners were sweeping out the floors of their shops. Many of them called out to her, smiling.

  “Maidin maith, Hand Áine!”

  “It’s a fair day that starts gray, aye?”

  “The favor of the Healer Ard be with you!”

  She smiled back to them, nodding, walking through South Gate and up the steep slope that led past the twin keeps of the Ard and the Banrion. She scowled up at the tower of the Ard as she passed it and the balcony she knew led to the Ard’s bedchamber, though she smiled at the gardai at their stations and received quick smiles in return.

  Cnocareilig lay across a valley, then up and around several long bends, the approach to the Healer Ard’s barrow hidden behind the folded slopes. Áine walked with her head down, still not yet fully awake. She turned the final curve in the path as the drizzle stopped and the clouds parted enough to let the sun peek out. A long morning shadow that shouldn’t have been there touched her.

  She stopped. She felt her mouth fall open.

  The Healer Ard gazed down at her, backlit in the dawn.

  It took a moment for Áine to realize what she was seeing. It was Meriel: her features, her hair, her coloring, clad in the clóca of the Ard with the torc around her neck and not that of the traitorous Mac Ard. Treoraí’s Heart lay on its chain on her breast. Meriel was smiling and her hand was lifted as if she were about to speak. Then the scale of this vision struck Áine: the Healer Ard stood a good five men tall in front of her barrow, perfectly formed but gigantic and still—not Meriel herself but an image of her that dwarfed her own barrow and those of the dead Ards around her. Áine thought she saw the vision—if that’s what it was—move slightly, but she blinked and stared and no, the image was as unmoving as stone. If it was a statue, it was like nothing that Áine had ever seen, far more realistic and convincing even in its enormous scale than the carvings by the famous artisan MacBreanhg that adorned the Dún Laoghaire’s Sunstone Ring. Holding her breath and gazing up at Meriel’s distant face, Áine slowly approached. The eyes seemed to follow her. She knelt down before the statue and touched the sandaled feet.

  Áine drew her hand back with a cry. The skin was warm and yielding to the touch: not stone at all, but amazingly like flesh. The surface didn’t appear to be painted, and the sandal
s looked not carved but genuine, as if Áine could remove them from the Healer Ard’s feet, and the leather of those sandals pressed into the earth without a base, just as if the Healer Ard were standing there. She could see the pores of the skin and the hairs set there . . . “Healer Ard,” she whispered, gazing up at Meriel’s face. “Speak to me. Speak to your Hand of the Heart. Tell me what you want me to do.” But there was no answer, and Meriel gazed serenely off to the west, unmoving.

  Áine stood, her head at a level with Meriel’s knees. She half expected to see the stone-sealed barrow opened, but the great stones were still there and still sealed with pitch, the sigils of the Draíodóiri unbroken.

  This . . . this was a gift of the Mother-Creator, a sign that Meriel was indeed a Miondia and favored by the Mother-Creator, a sign that Áine’s role as Hand of the Heart was indeed not over, that she had done the right thing continuing to serve the Healer Ard even in death. “Thank you,” she whispered: to the Mother-Creator, to Meriel herself. She touched the statue again, marveling at its warmth and its feel, the clóca seeming to ripple slowly and yield under her touch.

  She heard a gasp and a wail from the path. The first of the day’s supplicants had arrived, an entourage carrying a litter on which an old woman rested. They had stopped, the litter on the ground as they all stared—half in fright, half in awe—at the apparition of the Healer Ard. Áine hurried forward, gesturing to them.

  “Don’t be afraid. Please, come forward. I’m the Hand of the Heart, and the Healer Ard is here to listen to you and perhaps to help. . . .”

  41

  Triple Hearts and Broken Walls

  SOMEONE WAS CRYING in the darkness, an inconsolable, hopeless sobbing that welled up from the very center of the pain to touch every fiber of his existence.