Holder of Lightning

by S L Farrell

  “Your daughter wants you to accept,” Mac Ard said. “And I would be honored.”

  “I don’t—” Maeve began. Jenna tightened her arms around her mother’s shoulders, and felt her sigh. “I suppose we’d also be honored,” she said.

  The rain had subsided to a bare, cold drizzle. Mac Ard brought his stallion out from the barn. “You want to ride him?” he asked Jenna. She nodded, mutely. He picked her up, hands around her waist, and placed her sideways astride the saddle, handing her the reins. He patted the muscular neck, glossy and as rich a brown as new-turned earth. “Be have yourself, Conhal,” he told the horse, who snorted and shook his head, bridle jingling. “That’s a special young woman you hold.”

  For a moment, Jenna wondered at that, but then Mac Ard clucked once at Conhal, and the horse started walking, startling Jenna. They moved up the lane to Tara’s, Mac Ard and Maeve walking alongside. The tiarna seemed to be paying most of his attention to Maeve, Jenna noticed. His head inclined toward her, and they talked in soft voices that Jenna couldn’t quite overhear, and he smiled and, once, he touched Maeve’s arm. Her mam smiled in return and laughed, but Jenna noticed that Maeve also moved slightly away from the tiarna after the touch.

  Jenna frowned. Her mam had never paid much attention to the other men in Ballintubber, though enough of them had certainly indicated their interest. She’d always rebuffed them—some gently, some not, but all of them firmly. But this dark man, this Mac Ard . . . He seemed to like Maeve, and he was Riocha, after all. Maeve had always told her how Niall, her da, was strong and protective and loving, and she could imagine that this Mac Ard might be the same way. . . .

  The conversation inside Tara’s stopped dead when Tiarna Mac Ard pushed open the door of the tavern so that Maeve and Jenna could enter, then, as quickly, the chatter resumed again as everyone pretended not to notice that the tiarna had brought company with him. Tara came out from behind the bar, and shooed away old man Buckles from one of the tables. “What will you have, Tiarna Mac Ard?” she asked with an eyebrows-raised glance at Maeve. Mac Ard tilted his head toward Jenna’s mam.

  “What do you recommend?” he asked.

  “Tara’s brown ale is excellent,” Maeve said. She was smiling at Mac Ard, and if she remained a careful step away from him, she also kept her gaze on him.

  “The brown ale, then,” Mac Ard said. Tara nodded her head and bustled off. Maeve sat across the table from Mac Ard; Jenna went over to where Coelin was tuning his gio tár. Ellia was there also, her arm around Coelin. He glanced up, smiling, as Jenna approached; Ellia just stared.

  “So the tiarna found you, eh?” he said. “He came up right after you left and asked where you lived.” Coelin glanced over at the table, where Mac Ard’s dark head inclined toward Maeve. Coelin lifted an eyebrow at Jenna. “Seems he likes what he found.” Ellia grinned at that, and Jenna frowned.

  “I don’t find that funny, Coelin Singer,” she said. She lifted her chin and turned to walk away.

  Coelin strummed a minor chord. “Jenna,” he said to her back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.” She looked over her shoulder at him, and he continued. “So what did he ask you? ‘She’s the one who was up there,’ he said to me. ‘I know this. I can feel it.’ That’s what he told me, before he even knew who you were.”

  “What did the tiarna mean by that?” Jenna asked.

  Coelin shrugged. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know. What did he say to you? What did he ask?”

  “He only asked whether I saw the lights, that’s all. I told him that I had, and described them for him.”

  “We all saw them,” Ellia said. “That’s nothing special. I could describe the lights for him just as easily, if that’s all he wants to know.” She tightened her arm around Coelin. Jenna looked at her, at Coelin. She tried to find a hint in his bright, grass-green eyes that he wanted her to stay, that her presence was special to him. Maybe if he’d spoken then, maybe if he’d moved away from Ellia, if he’d given her any small sign. . . .

  But he didn’t. He sat there, looking as handsome and charming as ever, with his long hair and his dancing eyes and his agile, long-fingered hands. Content. He smiled, but he smiled at Ellia, too. And he’d let either of us lift our skirts for him, too, with that same smile, that same contentment. The thought struck her with the force of truth, the way Aldwoman Pearce’s proclamations sometimes did when she scattered the prophecy bones from the bag she’d made from the skin of a bog body. There was the same sense of finality that Jenna heard in the rattling of the ivory twigs. You’re no more to him than any other comely young thing. His interest in you is mostly for the reflection he sees of himself in your eyes. He flirts with you because it is what he does. It means no more than that.

  “I’ll be going back to my table,” she said.

  “Stay,” he said. “I’ll be singing in a minute.”

  “And I’ll hear you just as fine from there,” Jenna answered. “Besides, you have Ellia to listen to you.”

  A trace of irritation deepened the fine lines around his eyes for a breath, then they smoothed again. His fingers flicked over the strings of his giotár discordantly. Ellia pulled him back toward her, and he laughed, turning his head away from Jenna.

  She went back to the table. Mac Ard was leaning toward Maeve, his arms on the table, his hands curled around a mug of the ale, and her mam was talking. “. . . Niall would go walking on Knobtop or the hills just to the east, or follow the Duán down to Lough Lár, or go wandering in the forests between here and Keelballi. But he always came back, was never away for more than a week, maybe two at the most. There was a wanderlust in him. Some people never seem satisfied where they are, and he was one. I never worried about it, or thought he was traipsing off with some lass. Once or twice a year, I’d find him filling a sack with bread and a few potatoes, and I’d know he would be going. Jenna—” Maeve glanced up as Jenna approached, and she smiled softly, “—she has some of that restlessness in her blood. Always wanting to go farther, see more. I don’t know what Niall was searching for, nor whether he ever found it. I doubt it, for he was wandering up to the end.”

  Mac Ard took a sip of the ale. “Did you ever ask him?”

  Maeve nodded. “That I did. Once. He told me . . .” She looked away, as if she could see Jenna’s da through the haze of pipe and peat smoke in the tavern. Jenna wondered what face she was seeing. “He told me that he came here because a voice had told him that his life’s dream might be here.” Meave’s eyes shimmered in the candlelight, and she blinked hard. “He said it must have been my voice he heard.”

  Coelin’s giotár sounded, a clear, high chord that cut through the low murmur of conversation in the bar. He’d moved over near the fire, Ellia sitting close to him and a mug of stout within reach. “What would you hear first?” he called out to the patrons.

  On any other night, half a dozen voices might have answered Coelin, but tonight there was silence. No one actually glanced back to Tiarna Mac Ard, but everyone waited to see if he would speak first.

  Mac Ard had turned in his chair to watch Coelin, and Jenna could see something akin to disgust, or maybe it was simply irritation, flicker across his face. Then he called out to Coelin. “I’m told your teacher was a Songmaster. He must have given you the ‘Song of Máel Armagh.’ ”

  “Aye, he did, Tiarna,” Coelin answered. “But it’s a long tale and sad, and I’ve not sung it since Songmaster Curragh was alive.”

  “All the more reason to sing it now, before you lose it.”

  There was some laughter at that. Coelin gave a shrug and a sigh. “Give me a moment, then, to bring it back to mind . . .” Coelin closed his eyes. His fingers moved soundlessly over the strings for a few moments; his mouth moved with unheard words. Then he opened his eyes and exhaled loudly. “Here we go then,” he said, and began to sing.

  Coelin’s strong baritone filled the room, sweet and melodious, a voice as smooth and rich as new-churned butter. Coelin had a true gift, Jenna
knew—the gods had lent him their own tongue. Songmaster Curragh had heard the gift, unpolished and raw, in the scared boy he’d purchased from the Taisteal; now, honed and sharpened, the young man’s talent was apparent to all. Mac Ard, after hearing the first few notes, sat back in his chair with an audible cough of surprise and admiration, shaking his head and stroking his beard. “No wonder the boy has half the lasses here in his thrall,” Jenna heard him whisper to Maeve. “His throat must be lined with gold. Too bad he’s all too well aware of it.”

  Coelin sang, his voice taking them into a misty past where fierce Máel Armagh, king of Tuath Infochla four hundred years before, drove his ships of war from Falcarragh to Inish Thuaidh, where the mage-lights had first shone in the Eldest Time and where they glowed brightest. The verses of the ancient lay told how the cloudmages of the island called up the wild storms of the Ice Sea, threatening to smash the invading fleet on the island’s high cliffs; Máel Armagh screaming defiance and finally landing safely; the sun gleaming from the armor and weapons of Máel Armagh’s army as they swarmed ashore; the Battle of Dun Kiil, where Máel Armagh won his first and only victory; Sage Roshia’s prophecy that the king would die “not from Inish hands” if he pursued the fleeing Inishlanders to seal his victory. Yet Máel Armagh ordered the pursuit into the mountain fastnesses of the island and there met his fate, his armies scattered and trapped, the Inishlanders surrounding him on all sides and the mage-lights flickering in the dark sky above. The last verses were filled with the folly, the courage, and the sorrow of the Battle of Sliabh Míchinniúint: the Inish cloudmages raining fire down on the huddled troops; the futile, suicidal charge by Máel Armagh in an attempt to win through the pass to the Lowlands; the death of the doomed king at the hands of his own men, who presented Máel Armagh’s body to Severii O’Coulghan, the Inishlander’s chief cloudmage, to buy their safe passage back to their ships. And the final verse, as Máel Armagh’s ship Cinniúint, now his funeral pyre, sailed away from the island to the south never to be seen again, the flames of the pyre painting the bottom of the gray clouds with angry red.

  The clock-candle on Tara’s bar had burned down a stripe before Coelin finished the song, and Mac Ard’s hands started the applause afterward as Coelin eased his parched throat with long swallows of stout. “Excellent,” Mac Ard said. “I’ve not heard better. You should come to Lár Bhaile, and sing for us there. I’ll wager that in another year, you would be at the court in Dun Laoghaire, singing to the Rí Ard himself.”

  Coelin’s face flushed visibly as he grinned, and Jenna saw Ellia’s eyes first widen, then narrow, as if she were already seeing Coelin leaving Ballintubber. “I’ll do that, Tiarna. Maybe I’ll follow you back.”

  “Do that,” Mac Ard answered, “and I’ll make sure you have a roof over your head, and you’ll pay for your keep with songs.”

  The patrons laughed and applauded (all but Ellia, Jenna noticed), and someone called out for another song, and Coelin started a reel: “The Cow Who Married the Pig,” everyone clapping along and laughing at the nonsensical lyrics. Mac Ard inclined his head to Maeve, nodding once in Jenna’s direction. “Those were her ancestors the boy sang of,” he said. “And your husband’s. A fierce and proud people, the Inishlanders. They never bowed to any king but their own, and they still don’t.” He sat back, then leaned forward again. “They also knew the mage-lights. Knew how to draw them down, knew how to store their power. Even then, in the last days of the Before, in the final flickering of the power and the cloud-mages. They say it’s in their blood. They say that if the mage-lights come again, when it’s time for the Filleadh, the mage-lights will first appear to someone of Inish Thuaidh.”

  Jenna saw Maeve glance toward her. She wondered if her mam had felt the same shiver that had just crept down her spine. “And are you thinking that my daughter and I had anything to do with this, Tiarna Mac Ard?” Maeve asked him.

  Mac Ard shrugged. “I don’t even know for certain that what we saw were mage-lights. They may have just been some accident of the sky, the moon reflecting from ice in the clouds, perhaps. But . . .” He paused, listening to Coelin’s singing before turning back to Maeve and Jenna. “I told you that when I saw them, I wanted to come here. And I . . . I have a touch of the Inish blood in me.”

  4

  The Fire Returns

  JENNA left before the clock-candle reached the next stripe: as Coelin sang a reel, then a love song; as Mac Ard related to Maeve the long story of his great-great-mam from Inish Thuaidh (who, Jenna learned, fell in love with a tiarna from Dathúil in Tuath Airgialla, who would become Mac Ard’s great-great-da. There was more, but Jenna became lost in the blizzard of names.) Maeve seemed strangely interested in the intricacies of the Mac Ard genealogy and asked several questions, but Jenna was bored. “I’m going back home, Mam,” she said. “You stay if you like. I’ll check on Kesh and the sheep.”

  Her mam looked concerned for a moment, then she glanced at Ellia, who was leaning as close to Coelin as she could without actually touching him. She smiled gently at Jenna. “Go on, then,” she told Jenna. “I’ll be along soon.”

  It was no longer raining at all, and the clouds had mostly cleared away, though the ground was still wet and muddy. Her boots were caked and heavy by the time she reached the cottage. Kesh came barking up to her as she approached. Jenna took off her boots, picked up a few cuttings of peat from the bucket inside the door, and coaxed the banked fire back into life until the chill left the room. Kesh padded after her as she went from the main room to their tiny bedroom and sat on the edge of the straw-filled mattress. She stared at the mud-daubed hole where the stone lay hidden. “They say it’s in their blood,” Tiarna Mac Ard had said. “When I saw them, I wanted to go there. . .”

  Jenna dropped to her knees in front of the hole. She picked at the dried mud with her fingernails until she could see the stone. Carefully, she pried it loose and held it in her open palm. So oddly plain, it was, yet . . .

  It was cold again. As cold as the night she’d held it in her hand on Knobtop. Jenna gasped, thrust the stone into the pocket of her skirt, and left the bedroom.

  She sat in front of the peat fire for a few minutes, her arms around herself. Kesh lay at her feet, looking up at her quizzically from time to time, as if he sensed that Jenna’s thoughts were in turmoil. She wondered whether she should go back to Tara’s and show the stone to Mac Ard, tell him everything that had happened on Knobtop. It would feel good to tell the truth—she knew that; she could feel the lie boiling inside, festering and begging for the lance of her words. Mam certainly seemed to trust the tiarna, and Jenna liked the way he spoke to her mam, and the way he treated the two of them. She could trust him, she felt. And yet . . .

  He might be angry to find that she’d lied. So might her mam. Jenna swore—an oath she’d once heard Thomas the Miller utter when he’d dropped a sack of flour on his foot.

  The ram, in the outbuilding, bleated a call of alarm. A few of the ewes also gave voice as Kesh’s ears went up and he ran barking to the door. Jenna followed, pulling the muddy boots back over her feet, guessing that a wolf or a pack of the wild pigs was prowling nearby, or that Old Stubborn had simply got himself stuck somewhere again. “What’s the matter with—” she began as she walked toward the pens.

  She stopped, looking toward Knobtop.

  Something sparked in the air above the peak: a flicker, a whisper of light. Then it was gone. But she’d seen true. She could still see the ghost of the light on the back of her eyes.

  “Kesh, come on,” she said.

  She started toward Knobtop, her boots sloshing through the muck.

  By the time she started walking up the mountain’s steep flanks, the sky flickered again with flowing streams and billows of colors, tossing multiple shadows behind her over the heather and rocks. Kesh barked at the mage-lights, lifting his snout up to the sky. They were brightening now, fuller and even more dazzling than they’d been the last time. By now, Jenna knew, someone in Ballintub
ber would have seen them. They’d be tumbling out of Tara’s, all of them, gawking. And Tiarna Mac Ard . . .

  She imagined him, running to the stable behind Tara’s, leaping on his brown steed and riding hard toward Knobtop . . .

  She frowned. Now that the lights had appeared again, she didn’t want to share them with him. They were hers. They had given her the stone; they had shown her the red-haired man.

  The stone . . . She could feel its smooth weight now, cold and pulsing in the woolen pocket. She pulled the stone out: the pebble glowed, shimmering with an echo of the sky above, the colors tinting her fingers as she held it. The mage-lights seemed to bend in the atmosphere directly above her, swirling like water, as if they sensed her presence below. Jenna lifted her hand, and the mage-lights coalesced, forming a funnel of sparkling hues above that danced and wriggled, lengthening and elongating. Jenna started to pull her hand away, but the funnel of mage-light had wrapped itself around her hand now, like a thread attached to the maelstrom in the sky above her. As she moved her hand, it stretched and swayed, a ball of glowing light attached to her wrist. She could feel the mage-lights, not hot but very, very cold, the chill creeping from wrist to elbow, to shoulder. Jenna tried to pull away, desperately this time, but they held her like another hand, gripping her shoulders, the cold seeping into her chest and covering her head.

  She swam in light. She closed her eyes, screaming in the bright silence, and she could still see the colors, melding and shifting.

  Ethereal voices called to her.

  A flash.

  A deafening peal of thunder.

  Blackness.

  Kesh was licking her face.

  Jenna rolled her head away, and the movement sent pain coursing through her neck and temples. Kesh whined as she shoved him away. “Get off,” she told him. “I’m fine.” She sat up, grimacing. “I hope so, anyway.”

  She was still on Knobtop, but the sky above was simply the sky, starlit between shreds of clouds slowly moving from the west. She looked down; she was holding the stone, and it throbbed like the blood in her head, pulsing cold but no longer shining. She was suddenly afraid of the pebble, and she started to throw it away, drawing her hand back.