Holder of Lightning

by S L Farrell

  Stopping.

  The mage-lights came to you. They came to you, and the stone . . .

  She brought her hand back down to her lap.

  Kesh whined again, coming up to rub against her, then his head lifted, the ears going straight, his tail lifting and a low growl coming from his throat. “What is it?” Jenna asked, then she heard it herself: the sound of shod hooves striking rock within the copse of elm and oak trees down the slope of Knobtop. Jenna stood. Whoever it was, she didn’t want to be seen here. She put the stone in her pocket and lifted the hem of her skirts. “Come, Kesh,” she whispered, and ran. There was a small stand of trees fifty strides away, and she made for the darkness there. She stopped once she was under their shade, looking back through the tree trunks to the field. She saw the horse and rider emerge from under the trees: Tiarna Mac Ard, astride Conhal. The tiarna made his way slowly up the hillside, looking at the ground, glancing up at the sky. Kesh started to run out to them, and Jenna held the dog back. “Hush,” she whispered. Mac Ard wouldn’t be finding the mage-lights tonight, and she didn’t want him to find her, either, or to have to explain why she was here. “Come,” she said to Kesh, and slipped deeper into the shelter of the woods, making her way down the slope toward home.

  Her mam looked up from the fire as Jenna opened the door. “Your boots are muddy,” she said.

  “I know,” Jenna said. Sitting on the stool at the door, she took them off.

  “I was worried when you weren’t here.”

  “I went walking with Kesh.”

  “On Knobtop.” The way Maeve said it, Jenna understood it was not a question. She nodded.

  “Aye, Mam. On Knobtop.”

  Maeve nodded, worry crinkling her forehead and the corners of her eyes. “That’s where he said you’d be.” She didn’t need to mention who “he” was; they both knew. “You look cold and pale,” Maeve continued. “There’s tea in the kettle over the fire. Why don’t you pour yourself a mug?”

  Wondering at her mam’s strange calmness, Jenna poured herself tea sweetened with honey. Maeve said nothing more, though Jenna could feel her mam’s gaze on her back. By the time she’d finished, Kesh barked and they heard the sound of Mac Ard’s horse approaching. The tiarna knocked, then opened the door, standing there in his clóca of green and brown. Maeve nodded to the man, as if answering an unspoken question, and he turned to Jenna. He seemed too big and too dark in the cottage, and she could not decipher the expression on his face. He stroked his beard with one hand.

  “You saw them,” he said. “You were there.” When she didn’t answer, he glanced again at Maeve. “I saw your boot prints, and the dog’s. I know you were there.” His voice was gentle—not an accusation, just a sympathetic statement of fact.

  “Aye, Tiarna,” Jenna answered quietly.

  “You saw the lights?”

  A nod. Jenna hung her head, not daring to look at his face.

  Mac Ard let out a long sigh. “By the Mother-Creator, Jenna, I’m not going to eat you. I just want to know. I want to help if I can. Did you see the lights first, or did you go there and call them?”

  Jenna shook her head, slowly at first then more vigorously. “I didn’t call them,” she said hurriedly. “I was here, and I heard Old Stubborn making a commotion and went outside to check and . . . I thought I saw something. So I went. Then, after I was there, they came.” She stopped. Mac Ard let the silence linger, and Jenna forced herself to stay quiet, though she could see him waiting for her to elaborate. “Did you see them, Tiarna?” she asked finally.

  “From the tavern, aye, and as I was riding toward the hill. They went out by the time I reached the road and started up Knobtop. I saw the flash and heard the thunder when the lights vanished.” He held his right arm straight out, and ran his left hand over it. “I could feel my hair standing on end: here, and on the back of my neck. I rode up to where the flash seemed to have come from. That’s where I saw the marks of your boots.” He let his hand drop. His clóca rustled. His voice was as soft and warm as the blanket on her bed. “Tell me the truth, Jenna. I swear I mean you and your mam no harm. I swear it.”

  He waited, looking at Jenna, and she could feel her hand trembling around the wooden mug. She set it down on the table, staring down at the steaming brew without really seeing it. She was trembling, her hands shaking as they rested on the rough oaken tabletop.

  “I was there,” she said to the mug. “The lights, they were so . . . bright and the colors were so deep, all around me . . .” She lifted her head, looking from Mac Ard to her mam, shimmering in the salt water that suddenly filled her eyes. “I don’t understand why this is happening,” she said, sniffing and trying to keep back the tears. “I don’t know why it keeps happening to me. I don’t want it, didn’t ask for it. I don’t know anything.” The stone burned cold against her thigh through the woolen fabric. “I . . .” She started to tell them the rest, how the mage-lights had glowed in the stone, how the power had arced from it, how the pebble had seemed to draw the mage-lights tonight, all of it. But she saw the eagerness in Mac Ard’s face, the way he leaned forward intently as she spoke of the lights, and she stopped herself. You don’t know him, not really. The stone was your gift, not his. The voice in her head almost seemed to be someone else’s. “There isn’t anything else to tell you, Tiarna,” she said, sniffing. “I’m sorry.”

  Disappointment etched itself in the set of his mouth, and she realized that the man was genuinely puzzled. He shook his head. “Then we wait, and we watch,” he said. He turned to Maeve. “I’ll stay at Tara’s for another day, at least, and we’ll see. The mage-lights may come again tomorrow night. If they do, if they call Jenna, I’ll go up there with her. If that’s acceptable to you, Widow Aoire.”

  Maeve lifted her chin. “She’s my daughter. I’ll be with her, too, Tiarna Mac Ard.”

  He might have smiled. Maeve might have smiled back.

  Mac Ard brushed at his clóca, adjusting the silver brooch at the right shoulder. “Good night to you both, then,” he said. He gave a swift bow to Maeve, and left.

  5

  Attack on the Village

  THE night sky stayed dark the next night. Tiarna Mac Ard remained at Tara’s, coming to Jenna’s house that evening and escorting the two of them back to the tavern, where they listened to Coelin with an eye on the window that showed Knobtop above the trees.

  But it remained simply night outside. Nothing more.

  The next day broke with a heavy mist rolling in from the west, a gray wall that hid sun and sky and laid a sheen of moisture over the village. The mist beaded on the wool of the sheep as Jenna and Kesh herded them to the field behind the cottage. Kesh was acting strangely; he kept lifting his head and barking at something unseen, but finally they got the last straggler through. Jenna walked the field perimeter once, checking the stone fence her father had built, then calling Kesh—still barking at nothing—and closing the gate.

  She smelled it then in the air, over the distinctive tang of smoldering peat from their own fire and those in the village: the odor of woodsmoke and burning thatch. Jenna frowned, surveying the landscape. There was a smear of darker gray beyond the trees lining the field, and under it, a tinge of glowing red. “Mam!” she called. “I think there’s a fire in the village.”

  Maeve came from the cottage, wrapping a shawl over her head. “Look,” Jenna said, pointing. Her mam squinted into the damp air, into the gray, dim distance.

  “Come on,” she said. “They may need help . . .”

  They didn’t get as far as the High Road. They heard the sound of a galloping horse racing toward them down the rutted dirt lane, and Tiarna Mac Ard came hurtling around the bend, his hair blowing and his clóca billowing behind him. He pulled Conhal to a mud-tossing halt in front of them, dismounting in a sudden leap.

  “Tiarna Mac Ard—” Maeve began, but then the man cut off her words with a slash of his arm.

  “No time,” he said. “We need to get you and your daughter out
of here. Into the bogs, maybe, or over—” He stopped, whirling around at the sound of pounding hooves, as Kesh ran barking and snarling toward the quartet of onrushing horses.

  White fog blew from the nostrils of the steeds and the mouths of the riders.

  “Kesh, no!” Jenna shouted at the dog. Kesh stopped, looked back at Jenna.

  They could have gone around him. There was easily room.

  They ran the dog down. Jenna screamed as she saw the hooves of the lead horse strike Kesh. He yelped and rolled and tried to escape, but the horse’s muscular rear legs struck his side and Kesh went down under the three behind, lost in the blur of motion and clods of flying dirt. “Kesh!” Jenna screamed again, starting to run toward the bloody, still form in the dirt, but Maeve’s arms went around her as Mac Ard stepped between them and the horsemen. “Kesh!”

  The lead rider pulled his party to a stop before Mac Ard. The man threw his clóca back, and Jenna, sobbing for Kesh, saw a sword on his belt. “Where’s your blue and gold, Fiacra De Derga?” Mac Ard called to the rider. “Or are those of Connachta too cowardly to show their colors when they go plundering in Gabair?”

  The rider smiled. His hair was flaming red—a deeper red than that of the man in Jenna’s vision—and his eyes were cold blue. “Padraic Mac Ard, what a surprise. I haven’t seen you since our cousin’s wedding feast a year ago last summer.” Pale eyes swept over Maeve and Jenna. Jenna wanted to leap at the man, but Maeve’s arms held her tightly, and Jenna clutched at her skirts in frustration and anger. In the folds caught in her left fist, she felt a small, cold hardness beneath the wool. “And what interesting company you keep. Is this the Aoire family the village Ald told me about before she died, the Inishlander’s wife and daughter?”

  “These people are formally under Rí Mallaghan of Tuath Gabair’s protection. That’s all you need to know.”

  De Derga smiled. He lifted himself in his saddle with a creak of leather and looked about ostentatiously. “And where is Rí Mallaghan? I don’t seem to see him at the moment, or any royal decree in your hand.” His gaze came back to Mac Ard. “I only see you, Padraic. If I’d known that, I’d have left my companions with the rest of my men.” The three men behind De Derga laughed as he tsked. “One lone tiarna is all Rí Gabair sends when mage-lights fill the sky? I find that incredibly foolish. When word came to Rí Connachta that people on our eastern borders had seen mage-lights, he sent out over two dozen to follow them. And last night . . . well, you saw them better than us, didn’t you, up on that hilltop?”

  Jenna let her hand slip into the pocket of her skirt. The stone pulsed against her fingertips, as frigid as glacial ice.

  “You would always rather talk a man to death than use your sword, Fiacra.”

  De Derga spread his hands. “It’s my gift. Now, step aside, as I’ll be taking the women back to Thiar.”

  Mac Ard unsheathed his sword, the iron ringing. Jenna heard her mam’s intake of breath. “Be careful, Tiarna,” she said, one hand extended to Mac Ard, the other still around Jenna’s shoulders. Jenna slipped from her mam’s grasp, a step away; she took her hand from her pocket, her hand fisted. De Derga laughed.

  “ ‘Be careful,’ ” he repeated, mocking Maeve’s tone. He shook his head at Mac Ard. “Your taste was always common, Padraic.”

  “Get off your horse, Fiacra, so I can separate your babbling head from your shoulders.”

  De Derga sat easily as his mount stamped a foot and shook its head at the smell of the weapon. “No. I think not.”

  “You have no honor, De Derga. And I’m shamed that you’d let your men see that.”

  (Throbbing against her skin . . . Searing cold rising up her arm, filling her . . .)

  “My men have seen me fight often enough, cousin, and they know that I could take you as easily as this woman you’re shielding. They also know that I won’t be goaded into doing something foolish when the battle’s already won.” De Derga waved a hand, and Jenna noticed that the trio behind had drawn bows. “So, Padraic, the choice is yours: sheathe that weapon and return to Lár Bhaile, or we’ll simply cut you down where you stand.”

  This time it was Mac Ard who laughed. “Let’s not lie to each other, Fiacra. You can’t let me go back and tell my Rí that you were here in his land.”

  A muscle twitched in De Derga’s mouth. “No,” he said. “I suppose I can’t.” He waved a hand to his men as Mac Ard let out a scream of rage and charged toward De Derga, his sword swinging in a great arc. Bowstrings sang death.

  “No!” Jenna screamed, and the fury seemed to burst through her skin, ripping and tearing through her soul, spilling from her open mouth.

  She lifted her hand.

  In one blinding instant, arrows flared and went to ash in mid-flight. The horses screamed and reared, and four jagged bolts of pure white erupted from Jenna’s hand, the lightnings snapping and crackling as they impaled the riders, striking them from their saddles and arcing as they slammed the bodies to the ground. The discharge from the stone was blinding, overloading Jenna’s eyes even as she saw the riders fall; the sound deafened her, a sinister crackling like the snapping of dry bones. Someone screamed in agony and terror, and Jenna screamed in sympathy, her voice lost in the chaos, her mind awhirl with the cold power until, swirling, it bore her down into oblivion and silence.

  6

  Bog And Forest

  SHE awoke with a start and a cry, and Maeve’s hand brushed her forehead soothingly. “Hush, darling,” she said, but her eyes were full of worry.

  “Where are we?” Jenna asked. She sat up—they were sitting in the midst of bracken, and Tiarna Mac Ard was crouched a few feet away, his back to them. Jenna could smell the earthy, wet musk of bog, and water trickled brightly somewhere nearby. Two saddle packs were on the ground near them, and a bow with arrows fletched like those of the men who had attacked them. The memory came back to her then, awful and fierce: Kesh lying dead on the ground, the men from Connachta threatening them, the cold, terrible lightning from the stone. “The riders . . .” she breathed with a sob. “The man you called De Derga, your cousin . . .”

  “Dead.” Mac Ard said the word gruffly, his voice low. “All dead. And by now their companions know it as well, and are hunting us.” He glanced back at Jenna, and his expression was guarded. “They’ll also know that it wasn’t a sword that cut them down.”

  “I . . .” Jenna gulped. Her stomach lurched and she bent over, vomiting acid bile on the ground. She could feel her mam stroking her back as the spasms shook her, as her stomach heaved. When the sickness had passed, Jenna wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her coat. “I’m sorry,” she said. “They’re—” She couldn’t say the word. Mac Ard nodded, watching her as she leaned into the comforting arms of Maeve, as if she were a little child again.

  “Jenna, the first time someone fell to my sword, I did the same thing you just did,” he said. “I’ve seen men hacked to death during a battle, or crushed under their horses. Eventually, it bothers you less.” He leaned over, as if he were going to stroke her hair as Maeve did, but pulled his hand back. He pursed his lips under the dark beard. “I’d be more worried about you if it didn’t bother you. But I have to tell you that what you did . . . I’ve never seen the like.”

  The stone, cold in her hand . . . Jenna felt in her skin pocket, then glanced frantically around her on the damp ground.

  “Would you be looking for this?” The stone glistened between Mac Ard’s forefinger and thumb. He turned it carefully in front of them. “Not much to look at it, is it? Something you might miss entirely, if it was just lying there.”

  “That’s mine,” Jenna said loudly. “I found it.”

  “Jenna—” Maeve began, but Mac Ard snorted as if amused.

  “A cloch na thinti, it’s called,” he said. “A lightning stone. And you had it all along. When I asked you about the mage-lights, you must have forgotten to tell me about the cloch you found.” He could have sounded angry. He didn’t; he seemed more disappoi
nted.

  Jenna looked at the ground rather than at him.

  “Your da would have known the term,” Mac Ard continued. “I’ll wager he brought the stone here himself, or knew that this one lay there on Knobtop, waiting for the mage lights to return. And, aye, Jenna, now it’s yours.” He stretched out his hand, and dropped it in Jenna’s palm. It was warm, an ordinary stone. “Keep it,” he said. “It gave itself to you, not to me.”

  Jenna put it back in her skirt, feeling Mac Ard’s eyes on her. “How . . . ?” she started to say, but Mac Ard lifted a finger to his lips. “Later, you’ll know all you want to know, and more.”

  Jenna stared at the tiarna, trying to see past his dark gaze. He seemed calm enough, and not angry with her. After a few breaths, she looked away. “Mam, where are we?” she asked once more.

  “In the bog on the other side of the bridge,” Maeve said. “Tiarna Mac Ard carried you here when you collapsed, after—” Her mam stopped.

  “Mam, what’s happened? Why did those men come here?”

  It was Mac Ard who answered. “They came for the same reason I came—because they saw the mage-lights. I didn’t think Rí Connachta would be so foolhardy as to send his people here. I was the one who told Rí Mallaghan of Gabair that we didn’t need to concern ourselves with the other Tuatha.” He scoffed angrily. “I was a damned fool, and damned lucky to be alive. Tara’s son Eliath came running into the tavern this morning, said that the Ald’s cottage was afire and that there were a dozen men on horseback there. I left the tavern then, and rode for your home. De Darga saw me as I brought Conhal out of the stable, and followed. The rest you know.”

  “Where’s Conhal?”